“Both of you?” Dr. Mengele jolts into my head along with phrases like muscle biopsy, cardiac development, VO max.
“Uh-huh.”
“Did he test you – like on machines or anything?”
“Nuh-huh.”
“We had contests sometimes, though,” Kai says. “Mostly I beat.”
“Not every time,” Brandon protests.
“We did gymnastics a lot,” Kai says. “You know, somersaults and stuff.”
“And backwards somersaults. Want to see?”
“Alex doesn’t have time for that,” Emma cautions. “Apparently, they did this for hours every single day,” she adds. “Balance beams, vaults. It made me wonder if Doc was some kind of crazed would-be Olympic coach.”
“We climbed up ropes, too,” Kai says, with some animation. “Right to the ceiling. We did that a lot. It was hard. It was for making you strong.”
“What kind of ropes?”
Kai and Brandon look at each other and shrug. “Just ropes,” Kai says. “They were thick and they hung down from hooks in the ceiling.”
“The knotted ones were more easy.”
“Yeah, the plain ones were really hard to climb at first. ’Member, Bran? – we could just about get a couple feet off the floor.”
“We got better.”
“So this was… where, in a gym… in this big house?”
“Yeah – it was in the basement. It was a really, really giant room.”
They nod earnestly. “Yeah. Like the Y or something.”
“How high were these ropes?”
They look at each other. “Real high.”
“As tall as this ceiling, or…?” The rooms in Emma’s apartment might have eight-foot ceilings.
“No,” Brandon protests. “Much higher… like really high.”
“Hunh. So, did this man… did he… do anything to you?”
“Like what do you mean?”
I’m not sure how to put it, and Emma dives in. “No,” she says. “None of that.”
“None of what?” Kai demands.
She hesitates. “You told me he didn’t hurt you.”
Brandon shakes his head. “He didn’t hurt us. He liked us.”
“He liked you. So… was he… friendly?” I ask.
Emma shoots me a look, but lets it go. The boys shake their heads, bored now, beginning to fidget. “Nah,” Kai says, “he was just… he was just…” He looks at his brother, but Brandon shrugs. Neither one of them seems able to characterize their captor’s manner. “He was just kind of regular,” Kai says finally. “Mostly, he left us alone except when we were training.”
“So what made you stop trusting him?” I ask Kai. “At the mall. What made you try to call your mom’s friend?”
“I don’t know,” Kai says, frowning. “He just – I don’t know.” He shakes his head.
“Kai’s very intuitive and a little wary,” Emma says with a wan smile. “Brandon’s more of an optimist.”
“What’s that mean, Mom?” Brandon asks.
“It means you hope for the best, sweetie.”
“Is… tootive good, too?” Kai asks.
“Intuitive. Yes, K-man, it means you’re smart and alert, not to what people say, but to the way things feel to you.” She turns to me: “They’ve been in care a lot, and there’s a lot of BS in the system. It doesn’t exactly foster trust.” She shrugs. “Brandon’s the exception.”
“Ooooooh,” Brandon says. “Mom said BS.”
The fact that their captor didn’t exploit the boys is a huge relief, but I can’t get any kind of fix on his intentions toward them. Did he kidnap… a family? Sons? What kind of a relationship did they have with him? “This guy Doc – did he eat with you?” I ask.
“Nah – we got our own cereal and stuff for breakfast, and for lunch we made our own sandwiches. He made dinner – stuff in plastic boxes that he heated up in the microwave.”
“It was okay,” Kai says. “The food. Healthy stuff. No junk food.”
“And you never saw anyone else?”
Brandon swings his head back and forth. “Nope.”
I’m trying to think of what else to ask when Kai volunteers something. “Sometimes he did tricks for us, remember, Bran? In the beginning?”
“Tricks?” Emma frowns. This seems to be new to her. “What kind of tricks?”
“Yeah, with cards and stuff,” Brandon says. “You know – magic tricks.”
“And coins.”
Coins.
“Did he… line up the coins?” Emma asks.
Brandon makes a face. “Noooooo. He like… pulled them out of the air, made them disappear.”
Kai claps his hands. “Like that.”
Emma taps her watch. The reminder propels me into the kind of question I never ask as a reporter, an open, expansive question that almost always draws a shrug.
“Can you think of anything else… about the house or the man or… I don’t know… anything that happened while you were there?”
“We told the police,” Brandon says, really bored now. “Over and over and over.”
“I know, but if there’s anything that might help me find the man again – could you tell me?”
“He lied,” Kai says. “Mommy never told him to take us. She was just in line getting our food.”
“I know. So if there’s anything-”
Kai heaves a sigh. “Okay. Concentrate, okay, Bran?”
They both shut their eyes and screw up their faces in exaggerated expressions of deep concentration.
Kai opens his eyes and shrugs.
“I think that’s enough,” Emma says.
Brandon opens his eyes and turns to his brother. “Did we ever say about the dogs?”
Kai shrugs.
“Dogs?” I ask.
“Skinny ones,” Brandon says. “You could see the bones. But they weren’t hungry. He said they were supposed to be like that.”
I thank Emma at the door, so profusely that she’s almost embarrassed. “I don’t see how it helped much,” she says. She bites her lower lip. “I hope it helped. I hope you find them.”
I can hear the boys in the room behind us, and the sound of their voices sets off a throb of loss. I can’t seem to move and there’s a kind of awkward silence. Emma clears her throat. Obviously she doesn’t want to close the door in my face, but she’s got homework to do and boys to get to bed. “Well,” she says, “good luck.”
“They’re lucky to have you,” I say at last. “They’re lucky to have you for a mother.”
She scratches an eyebrow with her pinky, then gives me a wry look. “Thanks,” she says, and shifts from foot to foot, “but they were born addicted to smack, you know – so I’ve got some ground to make up.”
“Well, for my money you’ll do it and then some,” I say.
This avuncular platitude seems to make her nervous. She wants me to leave. The truth is I’m having trouble moving because I’m depressed by the prospect of heading back to the Drop Anchor.
“Well,” Emma says. My hesitation on her doorstep is only adding to her second thoughts.
It’s with some effort that I toss a little salute and turn away from her door. Yes, I’ve confirmed my guess that the abductor of the Sandling boys is the same man who took my sons, but where does it get me? Am I any closer to finding them?
CHAPTER 19
Back in D.C., I consult my notebooks and throw myself into the pursuit of my “leads,” such as they are.
The dimes. If Emma’s friend Amalia was correct about the connection with voodoo, I know where to start. One of the producers at the station – Scott – did a piece about voodoo last year. He was somewhere down in Florida, where there’s a significant Haitian population.
“Hey, Alex! Miss you, man. How’s it going?”
“I’m hanging in.”
“If I can do anything, you-”
“Matter of fact, that’s why I called. Remember that piece on voodoo? I have a question and I thought you could tell me where to go with it.”