“How could it have happened?” I asked. “I mean, the scale of it seems, well, almost incredible.”
“It was an isolated, secretive community in a state filled with isolated, secretive communities,” said Christian. “From what we now know, it seems to have been the case that the principal families involved had known each other prior to their arrival at Gilead, and had worked together or maintained contact for a period of some years. In other words, there was already a structure in place that would have facilitated the kind of abuse that went on there. There was certainly a clear division between the four or five core families and those who arrived later: the women didn’t mix with one another, the children didn’t play with one another, and the men kept their distance as much as possible, apart from those occasions when work forced them together. The abusers knew exactly what they were doing, and were possibly even attuned to those who might share their tastes, so there was always new prey for them. It was a nightmare situation, but there was something about Gilead -bad luck, bad timing, bad location, or, hell, let’s call it a touch of evil and have done with it-that exacerbated it.
“You also have to take into account the fact that people weren’t as aware of child abuse issues then as we are now. It wasn’t until 1961 that a doctor named Henry Kempe wrote a paper called ‘The Battered Child Syndrome’ and started a revolution on child abuse, but that paper concentrated principally on physical abuse and, even in the early seventies, when I started my training, sexual abuse was hardly mentioned. Then came feminism, and people began talking to women and children about abuse. In 1978, Kempe published ‘Sexual Abuse: Another Hidden Pediatric Problem,’ and the realization that there was a real issue to be confronted probably stems from about then.
“Unfortunately, it could be said that the pendulum swung too far the other way. It created a climate of constant suspicion, because science hadn’t caught up with the desire to deal with the problem. There was enthusiasm, but not enough skepticism. It led to a backlash, and decreased reporting in the nineties, but now we seem to be approaching some kind of equilibrium, even if we still sometimes concentrate on sexual abuse at the expense of other kinds of abuse. It’s reckoned that twenty percent of children have been sexually abused by the time they reach adulthood, but the consequences of long-term neglect and physical abuse are actually much more severe. For example, a child who has been physically abused and neglected is much more likely to grow up to engage in criminal behavior than a child who has been sexually abused. Meanwhile, from data we know that sexual abusers of children are more likely to have been abused themselves, but most pedophiles have not been sexually abused. There,” he concluded. “You got the lecture. Now why the curiosity about Gilead?”
“Daniel Clay was interested in Gilead too. He created paintings of it. Someone told me that he even interviewed Mason Dubus, and he may have intended to write a book about what happened there. Then there’s the fact that his car was found abandoned in Jackman, and Gilead isn’t far from Jackman. It also appears that one of Clay’s former patients was abused at or near Gilead by men wearing bird masks. All of that strikes me as more than a series of coincidences.”
“Well, it’s probably not surprising that Clay was curious about Gilead,” said Christian. “Most people in our field who work in Maine have at some point examined the available material, and a number of them would have interviewed Dubus, myself included.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t recall any descriptions of Gilead in the case reports relating to Clay, although there were mentions of rural settings. Some of the children caught sight of trees, grass, dirt. There were similarities, too, in their descriptions of the place in which they were abused-bare walls, a mattress on the floor, that sort of thing-although most of the victims were blindfolded for much of the abuse, so we’re talking about snatched glimpses and nothing more.”
“Could these men have been drawn to Gilead because of what happened there in the past?” I asked.
“It’s possible,” said Christian. “I have a friend who works in the area of suicide prevention. He talks of ‘clusters of location,’ places that become sites of choice for suicide, largely because others have successfully committed suicide in those locations. One suicide facilitates another, or provides a stimulus for it. Equally, it might be that a place synonymous with the abuse of children could prove attractive to other abusers, but it would be quite a risk to take.”
“Could the risk have been part of the attraction?”
“Perhaps. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you came to me. It’s an unusual case. It sounds like stranger abuse on a significant scale, which is itself out of the ordinary. Children, unlike adults, are rarely victimized by strangers. Intrafamilial abuse accounts for fifty percent of the acts perpetrated against girls, and ten to twenty percent of those against boys. Generally, too, nonincestuous abusers fall into one of six categories based on their degree of fixation, from those who have frequent nonsexual contact with children to sadistic offenders who rarely have nonsexual contact with them. They’re the kind who will typically view children unknown to them as victims, but the degree of violence inflicted on the children who mentioned the bird masks was minimal. In fact, only one child recalled being seriously physically injured, and she said the man who did it-he began choking her, to the point where she almost blacked out-was instantly rebuked by one of the others. That indicates a significant degree of control. These men weren’t ordinary abusers, not by any means. There was planning, cooperation, and, for want of a better word, restraint. Those elements make what happened particularly disturbing.”
“Are you sure that there have been no similar reports since Clay disappeared?”
“You mean reports of abuse that tally with those descriptions? Well, I’m as certain as I can be, given the information to hand. It was one of the reasons why suspicion fell on Clay, I suppose.”
“Could these men just have stopped abusing?”
“I don’t think so. It’s possible that some of them were jailed for other offenses, which would explain the cessation, but otherwise, no, I don’t believe that they have stopped abusing. These men are predatory pedophiles. Their pattern of abuse might have altered, but their urges will not have gone away.”
“Why would they have altered their pattern?”
“Something could have happened, something that frightened them or caused them to realize that they risked drawing more attention to themselves if they continued to abuse in this way.”
“ Merrick ’s daughter drew pictures of men with the heads of birds,” I said.
“And Merrick ’s daughter is still missing,” said Christian, finishing my thought for me.
“The date of Clay’s disappearance coincided roughly with the period when Lucy Merrick was last seen,” I said. “And you’ve just told me that there were no more reports of children being abused by men in bird masks after that time.”
“None that I know of,” said Christian. “I told you before, though: there’s no easy way to track down those who might have been victims. It could be that such abuse did continue, but we didn’t hear about it.”
But the more I considered it, the more it made sense. There was a connection between Clay’s disappearance and that of Lucy Merrick, and perhaps a connection in turn between her disappearance and the fact that no other children had reported abuse by men masked as birds after that time.
“The death of a child: would that have been enough to frighten them, enough to make them stop what they were doing?” I asked.