Security

Stephen Amidon

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781843549031
• eBook ISBN: 9781786490063
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Everything is neat and peaceful in Stoneleigh. Bad things don't often happen, and when they do, the residents trust the forces of law and order to deal with them efficiently and with minimum fuss. But appearances can be misleading. It takes just one crime - a disturbing allegation of sexual assault - to blast through the veneer of mutual trust, to expose a hotbed of suspicion and paranoia. Suddenly politicians, businessmen, mothers, students and gossips all seem to care less about the truth, than they do about the illusion of personal and public security. Security is a tense, penetrating and brilliantly observed novel about actual and imagined safety - about public and private life today.

WEDNESDAY

5

It was just after seven in the morning and already it felt like noon. Yet again, Edward had been awake since three. After being jolted irrevocably from his sleep in the house where he was staying, he’d leafed through books and flipped channels; he’d eaten a bowl of cereal and downed two mugs of mint tea. When dawn finally arrived he drove to his own house, careful not to wake Meg or the girls. Although he’d disturbed them constantly in the early days of his insomnia, he was now practiced at silent entrances. He’d studied the topography of his wood floors, every groaning slat and poorly bolstered step; he’d rigged the alarm pad not to whistle and sprayed every shrill hinge with WD-40. Just to be safe, he still planned his arrivals for a few minutes before the girls got up. That way, even if they heard him, they would simply assume that he was the first to rise. As far as they were concerned, their father still spent his nights in the master bedroom at the end of the hall.

Once in the kitchen, he sliced fruit and sizzled bacon and cracked eggs as the coffee machine sputtered. As he worked he found himself thinking about the one thing that had been on his mind constantly for the last two days: whether or not he should call Kathryn. They had swapped messages on Monday. She phoned in the morning to thank him for bringing Conor home and Edward returned her call that afternoon, though she must have been in class. Which should have been the end of it. And yet, the temptation to speak with her had stayed with him, a tune he couldn’t get out of his head. It had been so good just to talk, instead of exchanging brief hellos on Pleasant, or repeating that strangulated conversation while trapped in a movie line.

Rachel and Emily soon arrived in the kitchen, yawning as they stared dubiously at the feast he’d prepared. Meg followed. She gave him a chilly peck on the cheek, making it clear that she was still unhappy that he was spending nights away from home. She was dressed in her selectman’s costume, navy blue skirt and jacket, Hermès scarf tied tight around her long neck.

“Busy day?”

“Meetings with lawyers and bankers,” she said as she picked up the Morning Call. “Doyle wants to get a memorandum of sale in place before the party.”

Edward realized he still hadn’t told her about his dead-of-the-night visit to Cutler’s house.

“Look at this,” she said before he could speak.

He looked over her shoulder. She was pointing to an entry in the court record. He leaned forward so he could read.

Steckl, Walter Stanislaus, 51. Pleaded innocent to illegal loitering, disorderly conduct and public intoxication.

She looked up at him and their eyes held for a moment. Edward didn’t say anything: Meg wouldn’t want to talk about Steckl in front of the girls. As he served breakfast Edward thought how strange it was that the man could still cause tension between them. It had been six years now. Rachel had been six, Emily not quite four. A midsummer morning, a Monday. Meg had taken the girls to shop for a last-minute gift for a birthday party. They’d chosen an educational contraption from the Learned Child on Pleasant Street, something with marbles. Their route back to the car took them past three stone benches on the library lawn that had long been colonized by local drunks. Although many people, Meg included, complained about having such a raucous crowd right in the middle of town, Edward had always figured that they were harmless. The police generally ignored them; rare arrests led to a night in jail.

Meg and the girls had just passed the benches when Rachel dropped the box and spilled the marbles into the gutter. Meg did not think twice before she released Emily’s hand to collect them. This would only take a few seconds. But then Rachel, who should have known better, wandered out to get one of the marbles from the street. There was a brief screech of rubber as a car braked hard. As Meg went to pull her daughter back to the curb she saw that she knew the driver. They exchanged relieved smiles and a few sentences. Someone honked, the woman rolled on. Meg scolded Rachel, then turned back to the sidewalk and saw that her younger daughter had vanished.

Edward knew this part of the story only through his wife’s telling. She looked up and down Pleasant; she scanned the library’s lawn, its broad steps. She stopped a few pedestrians: no, they had not seen a little girl. And then the world froze. For a moment Meg could not move or speak. The people she’d stopped waited, their eyes on her. It was in the air now: Something Was Wrong. And then her mind unlocked and she could speak again. She made herself understood. One of the waiting men went to check the small memorial plaza on the library’s right side, the other would look in the building itself. Meg left Rachel with a woman she knew from Ten Thousand Villages and raced toward the dank alley that ran alongside the library’s left side. All she could think now was that there was a parking lot at the far end of the alley and beyond this was a steep, rocky slope that led to a rush-clotted stream. And beyond that was a patch of unimproved woodland, a few acres of nowhere crossed by narrow ditches and filled with dank standing water.

When she reached the alley’s entrance she finally saw her daughter, standing beside a man in work clothes. It seemed that the man was speaking to Emily, though Meg could not be sure. There would be other things she was not sure about. Whether the man was turning toward Emily or away from her, for instance. Meg didn’t even understand that she knew this man until Edward later told her who it was. The only thing she was certain about was the sight of his penis jutting through his fly. Although she didn’t remember calling out, she must have done so, because someone was almost immediately bolting past her: the man who’d gone to search the memorial park, a UPS deliveryman and former Stoneleigh High linebacker named Wayne Bergeron. He plowed into the man without hesitation; the two of them hit the blacktop hard. Somehow Emily wound up on the pavement as well. She was wailing by the time Meg got there. Her palms and knees were skinned; blood streamed from a split lip. Meg hardly remembered the other people hurrying into the alley, though there were suddenly several more, including a policeman. Meg snatched up Emily and carried her back to the library’s front steps. People brought her things: a handkerchief, a bottle of water, a first aid kit. She realized that she was still clutching a half dozen marbles and tossed them onto the lawn.

Edward was summoned. There was a crowd at the library by the time he got there; police cars and an ambulance. Meg now sat on a folding chair, a perfectly calm Emily perched on her knee. Rachel stood beside her mother. They could have been listening to the Saturday morning story, except for the paramedic checking Emily’s lip. He raised it with his gloved fingers, as gentle as a butterfly collector.

Edward squatted in front of his daughter.

“Looks like somebody’s getting some serious ice cream action tonight,” he said.

She looked at him over the latex hand, her eyes unreadable.

“Well, she probably won’t need stitches,” the paramedic said.

People began telling him what had happened but he couldn’t understand, there were too many versions, too few specifics. So he smiled at his daughter and walked into the alley. Several policemen surrounded a man who sat cross-legged on the ground, his arms pulled tightly behind his back. One of the cops moved aside to allow Edward a better look. It was Walt Steckl. He looked bad. It had been over a year since Edward had last seen him, a short visit just after Agatha died. He’d heard rumors about drinking but he had no idea that the man’s slide had been this extreme. His eyes were moist and red; he’d let his hair grow chaotic. His clothes were filthy; there was a large wet patch along his right inner thigh. He looked up at Edward and there was something like recognition. But then he shook his head and turned away.

Edward went back to his wife and daughters. Meg had already decided that Emily should go to Samaritan. There was no need for an ambulance; the four of them drove in Edward’s car. Nurses put bandages on her cuts while they waited for the psychiatrist and pediatric social worker. They gave her Advil and decided to administer her dip/tet booster a few months early. While they waited, a detective and the town’s police chief, the amiable, bearded Stan Ruggieri, came to talk to Meg. Edward could see in their demeanor that they were already having trouble with her version of events. And then all the right people were there and Rachel went to do puzzles with a nurse and the curtains were drawn. Emily sat quietly on a large bed, her attention focused on a cheap teddy bear they’d given her for being brave. The psychiatrist showed her some different dolls. The first was a girl. Emily shook her head shyly at his questions. Next came the boy. She nodded when the doctor pointed at the stick on its crotch, but shook her head when the psychiatrist put the girl doll’s floppy hand and mouth on the same place. And that was it. She’d done great. The curtains were pulled back; her parents were given pamphlets and numbers to call in the event of nightmares or mood changes or eating problems.

Rachel attended the party as planned. They’d raincheck on the gift: nobody had thought to collect the marbles. Edward stopped at the police station to speak with Ruggieri after dropping her off. Meg was reading to Emily when he got home. He sat with them and listened to the story in silence. Before long Emily was asleep. Her mouth looked clownish with the swelling.

“If I hadn’t gotten there in time . . .” Meg was able to say before her voice caught.

“Meg, hold on. We still don’t know what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“Steckl says he never knew she was there. He just went to pee and the next thing he knew there was shouting and he was on the ground.”

“He took her in there, Ed. Or he followed her. Either way.”

“That’s not what people are saying.”

“What people? Those people on the benches?”

He nodded. She stared at him for a while, then looked at their sleeping daughter.

“I know what I saw.”

Neither of them slept that night. They took turns sitting in the big chair Edward dragged into her room. But Emily did not wake. She did not cry out in her sleep or jerk spasmodically or show any of the other warning signs. In the morning, she was upset that she’d missed the party, though that was all. They took her back to see the psychiatrist later that day.

“They’re fairly durable creatures, the young,” he said after his conversation with her. “They haven’t learned to be afraid of the truly scary stuff yet.”

Meanwhile, there was the question of what to do about Steckl. He continued to claim that he had simply gone into the alley to empty his bladder and knew nothing about a child. As for the girl’s injuries, it wasn’t clear exactly who’d knocked Emily to the ground. Bergeron admitted that it might have been him. No, Steckl didn’t attack Emily. Edward was certain of it. He didn’t expose himself to her. Edward had spent hundreds of hours working alongside the man. He’d seen him with Agatha and Mary. Meg had seen her little girl in a shocking situation and thought the worst. It was a mistake anyone could have made.

By the end of the week, no one was talking about charging Steckl with molestation and kidnapping. The prosecutors and his lawyer eventually settled for a single count of open and gross lewdness. Six months, suspended in recognition of Steckl’s clean record and good reputation. It wasn’t until after a few days that Edward thought to ask about Mary and learned she had been spending a month with her aunt in Florida. So at least she didn’t have to deal with this mess. Not yet, anyway.

Meg was furious with the deal. Nothing could shake her conviction that Steckl had known what he was doing. It didn’t matter what Edward and the others said. It didn’t matter about the man’s reputation. She’d seen what she’d seen. Being Meg, she had to do something. Her world had been shaken and she had to bring it back to order. It was how she was built. She didn’t leave doors unlocked or seat belts unstrapped. She’d stay on hold for an hour to settle a billing mistake. When bad dogs appeared on their cul-de-sac, she called Animal Control. So she certainly wasn’t about to let her town be a place where the library wall was used as a toilet; where filthy drunken men exposed themselves to little girls without being locked up for it. Since Steckl was beyond her reach, she turned her attention to the people on the benches. She wrote an editorial for the Morning Call; she brought up the topic at dinner parties and school gatherings. Why were drunks and crazies allowed to gather in such a public place? Why wouldn’t the courts punish a man like Steckl more severely? She appeared before the board of selectmen and appealed to them to bring the law on public loitering in line with those on the books in Boston’s more affluent suburbs. The board, most of them friends, gave her a polite hearing, but there was no chance of them enacting this sort of harsh statute. Stoneleigh was a bastion of progressive thinking. It was easy at times to see its population as composed exclusively of university professors, artisans and therapists – a body politic whose representatives occasionally made national headlines for passing sweeping symbolic ordinances. After all, a town that was nuclear-free, dolphin safe and a haven for victims of death squad violence was hardly likely to start throwing schizophrenics and substance abusers in jail for blocking the sidewalk.

But Meg sensed something different out there as she spoke and petitioned: a silent majority who were fed up with the ragged people on the streets, the skateboarders clogging every public space, the wannabe taggers and vandals, the transient families shoehorned into the two-fams over in Cheapside. If things didn’t change, how would they stop the next Steckl, this one with bad intentions that were perfectly clear?

Something else happened as she spoke at meetings and circulated petitions and worked the phones. She discovered she had a knack for this. She decided to run for the board of selectmen. On the campaign trail, she was a revelation, calm and reasonable and utterly implacable. This was no longer about what happened to Emily. This was about the future of the town where their children lived. And she won. To the surprise of just about everyone, she became selectman for the town’s Fourth Ward by a forty-one-vote margin. People who’d put her campaign down to one woman’s overwrought reaction to a terrible incident had no explanation for what happened in the flimsy plastic polling booths in the high school gym. And it was not just Meg who won. Another candidate, a longtime member of the town’s permanent opposition named Hub Smith, pulled off an upset victory in the bland northern neighborhoods after allying himself with her. The 4-1 progressive majority that had ruled Stoneleigh politics for decades was suddenly reversed. Three months later the board enacted a law making it illegal to occupy, sit, squat or lie in any public byway for more than ten minutes, or to refuse any “reasonable” request by a law officer to move along. It was also illegal to be publicly intoxicated on town property. The penalty for noncompliance with either law could be thirty days in the county jail and a fine of not more than one thousand dollars.

One last...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Monday
• Wednesday
• Friday and Saturday
• Monday
• Wednesday
• Friday
• Saturday
• Half-title Page
• Also by Stephen Amidon
• Copyright