“So what do you want to know?” he asked. “I get people through here now and again: students, doctors. You can’t ask me anything I ain’t already been asked a hundred times before.”
“I’d like to know what you discussed with Daniel Clay.”
“I talked about Gilead,” he said. “That’s all I ever talk about. They used to test me, show me pictures and stuff, but they don’t do that no more. I guess they think they know all that they need to know about me.”
“And do they?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. I could hear the sound that it made deep in his throat. He regarded me for a time, then seemed to come to some decision.
“No, they don’t,” he said. “They got as much as they’re going to get. Don’t think you’re going to get anything more than they did.”
“What was Clay’s interest in Gilead?” I asked. I didn’t want to alienate Dubus. He might have been drowsy and medicated, but he was still sharp.
“He wanted to know about what happened. I told him. I didn’t leave nothing out. I don’t have nothing to hide. I’m not ashamed of what we did together. It was all”-he screwed up his face in distaste-“misunderstood, misinterpreted. They made it out to be something it wasn’t.”
“What we did together,” as though it was a mutual decision reached between the adults and the children, as natural as fishing, or picking berries in summer.
“Children died, Mr. Dubus.”
He nodded. “That was bad. That shouldn’t have happened. They was babies, though, and times were hard up there. Might almost have been a blessing, what happened to them.”
“As I understand it, one was stabbed to death with a knitting needle. That’s a peculiar definition of a ‘blessing.’”
“You judging me, sir?” He squinted at me, the trembling of his hands giving the impression that he was struggling, yet failing, to control great anger.
“It’s not for me to do.”
“That’s right. That was why I got on with Dr. Clay. He didn’t judge me.”
“Did Daniel Clay ever talk about the children in his care?”
“No.” Something unpleasant animated his features for an instant. “I tried, though. He didn’t bite.” Dubus snickered.
“How many times did he come here?”
“Two or three, far as I can remember. He visited me in jail, too, but that was just once.”
“And it was all very businesslike. He interviewed you, and you talked.”
“That’s right.”
“And yet he gave you one of his paintings. I hear he was very careful about those to whom he gave his paintings. Very selective.”
Dubus shifted in his chair. That Adam’s apple began bobbing again, and I was reminded of Andy Kellog worrying at his loose tooth. Both were indicators of stress.
“Maybe I was helpful to him. Maybe he didn’t view me as no monster. I could see it in your friend’s face out there, and I could see it in yours when I opened the door. You tried to hide it with politeness and good manners, but I knew what you were thinking. And then you came in here, and you saw the pictures on my wall, and how clean and neat everything was. I wasn’t wallowing in my own filth. I wasn’t stinking, or dressed in filthy, tattered clothes. You think I want the outside of my place to look the way it does? You don’t think I want to paint it, to fix it up some? Well, I can’t. I do what I can around here, but there ain’t nobody going to help a man like me to keep his house in order. I paid for what they said I done, paid with years of my life, and they’re going to make me keep paying until I die, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of being ground down. You want monsters, you look elsewhere.”
“Was Daniel Clay a monster?”
The question seemed to shock him into silence, then, for a second time, I saw the intelligence at work behind the withered façade, that creeping, nasty, corrupted thing that had allowed him to do what he had done and to justify it to himself. I thought it might even have been what the children of Gilead had glimpsed as he moved upon them, his hand clasped across their mouths to stifle their cries.
“You got your suspicions of him, like the rest,” said Dubus. “You want me to tell you if they’re true, because if we shared something like that, if we both had the same tastes, then maybe I’d have known, or he’d have opened himself up to me. Well, if you think that, you’re a fool, Mr. Parker. You’re a fool, and someday you’ll die for your foolishness. I got no time to talk to foolish men. Why don’t you head off now? Drive on up the road there, because I know where you’re going. Could be you’ll find the answer in Gilead. That’s where Daniel Clay found the answer to his questions. Oh yes, he found what he was looking for up there, but he didn’t come back from that place. You best step carefully, or else you won’t come back neither. It gets inside your soul, old Gilead.”
He was smiling broadly now, the keeper of the truth of Gilead.
“Did you ever meet a man called Jim Poole, Mr. Dubus?”
He pantomimed deep thought.
“You know, I think I did. He was a fool, just like you.”
“He disappeared.”
“He got lost. Gilead took him.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I know it. Doesn’t matter where he is, or if he’s alive or dead, he’s a prisoner of Gilead. You set foot in Gilead, and you’re lost.” His gaze turned inward. His eyes stopped blinking. “They said that we brought evil to that place, but it was there already,” he said, and there was a touch of wonder to his voice. “I felt it as soon as I set foot there. Old Lumley picked a bad spot for his city of refuge. The ground was poisoned, and we were poisoned too. When we left, the forest, or something under it, took it back.”
He gave a small, sick laugh. “Too much time to myself,” he said. “Too much time to dwell on things.”
“What was the Project, Mr. Dubus?”
He laugh faded away. “The Project. The Hobby. The Game. They all mean the same thing.”
“The abuse of children.”
He shook his head. “You may call it that, but that’s because you don’t understand. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s what I try to explain to those who come here, but they don’t listen. They don’t want to know.”
“Did Daniel Clay listen?”
“He was different. He understood.”
“Understood how?”
But Dubus did not reply.
“Do you know where Daniel Clay is?” I asked.
Dubus leaned forward. “Who knows where dead men go?” he said. “You head north, and maybe you’ll find out. It’s time for my show.”
He hit the remote again, adjusting the volume as he did so, and the TV blared into life. He turned in his chair, no longer facing toward me. I let myself out.
And as we drove away, I saw the drapes move at Dubus’s window. A hand was raised in farewell, and I felt sure that, in his clean, neat house, the old man was laughing at me.
In the days that followed, the police would attempt to piece together the chain of events, to connect body to body, contacts to killings. During the final hours of his life, Dubus made two telephone calls, both to the same number. After his death, the cell phone would be found beside his body. He had hidden it under a loose plank beneath his bed, and to discourage any of those entrusted with monitoring him from discovering it, he kept a half-filled chamber pot above it, its stink enough to ensure that no fastidious parole officer would dare to venture there, although it might have struck a careful searcher that, in his otherwise pristine house, it was the only place where Dubus’s orderliness appeared to have lapsed. The phone was prepaid, and had been bought for cash at a bigbox store one month previously. It was not, the police guessed, the first time that Dubus had circumvented the restrictions on his telephone use in this way.