"Yeah."
"What did you do when you weren’t in school?"
"I don’t know. Mona used to take me to the park when I was little, and then later sometimes I’d go with my friends. She would sit in the car and wait for me."
Ambrose paused and seemed to be thinking for a long time, but then Judge Kramer recognized the sound of someone whispering. After a second exchange it sounded angry. He knew it was Nina Coffey. The lawyer Schoenfeld said, "I must point out that this is not an adversarial proceeding, and this part of the story adds no new information to any of the investigations in progress. Miss Coffey has consented to this questioning because she was assured its purpose was for the safety and future welfare of the child. She has a right to withdraw the consent of the Department of Children’s Services if she feels this is unnecessarily traumatic. The child has been over this ground several times with the psychologist and the juvenile officers already. Perhaps we could depart from our regular habits of thoroughness and skip to the recent past."
Ambrose sounded defensive. "Then would one of you care to help us in that regard to make the record comprehensible?"
Nina Coffey said, "Timmy, tell me if anything I say isn’t true."
"Okay."
"Timmy was raised from the time of his earliest recollections until the age of six by Raymond and Emily Decker. They hired Miss Mona Turley as a nanny when they came to Washington, D.C. He has no direct knowledge of earlier events. He was told he was Timmy Decker. From every assessment, he had a normal early childhood. It was a loving home. Miss Turley was a British citizen and a trained nanny, a legal resident alien. There are no signs of physical or psychological abuse, or of developmental difficulties that would indicate deprivation of any kind." She said pointedly, "This is all covered in the caseworker’s report, so it already is part of the record."
Judge Kramer felt like applauding. His finger had been hovering over the FAST FWD button, but he knew that he wouldn’t have let it strike. Either you listened to all of it or you were just another politician in a costume.
Ambrose went on. "All right. Now, Timmy, we have to talk about some unpleasant things, and I’ll try to keep it short. What happened on the afternoon of July twenty-third two years ago?"
"I don’t know."
Schoenfeld prompted. "That was the day when they died."
"Oh," said Timmy. "Mona and I went to the shoe store after school. Usually we came home at three, but that day we didn’t. After we bought the shoes we walked in and everything had changed. I remember Mona opened the door, and then she stopped and went, ’Uh!’ Like that. Then she made me wait outside while she went in alone. She was inside a long time. I thought it was a surprise, and she was telling my parents I was there so they could hide. So I went around to the side of the house and looked in the window. And I saw them." His voice cracked, and the judge could hear that he was trying to keep the sob from coming out of his throat in front of all these strange adults, so it just stayed there, with the muscles clamping it in place. Judge Kramer had heard a lot of testimony that had to be forced out through that kind of throat, so he had become expert.
"They were covered with blood. I never knew so much blood came out of a person. It was everywhere. The walls, the floor. I could see Mona was in the next room on the telephone. Then she hung up and walked into my bedroom. I ran around to that window, and it was broken. All my stuff was gone."
"What do you mean ’stuff’?"
"My toys, my clothes, my books, everything. They stole my stuff. She kept looking around my room and frowning."
"What then?"
"She looked up and saw me. She ran out of the house and grabbed me. She took me to the car and we drove away."
"What did she say about it?"
"She started to say that my parents were called away, but I told her I saw them."
"What did she say then?"
"She said that awful things sometimes happen, and a bunch of stuff about how they wanted me to be safe more than anything. I didn’t hear a lot of it because I was crying and wasn’t really listening."
"Where did she take you?"
"She had a friend. A man. He used to come to the house to pick her up sometimes. She said he was a lawyer. She took me to his house."
"For the record, do you know his name?"
"Dennis."
"Was his last name Morgan?"
"Yes."
"Do you know the name of the street?"
"No. It wasn’t anyplace I ever was before. We drove a long time on a big road, and then at the end there were a lot of turns. By then it was night."
"What happened there?"
"She put me to sleep on the couch, but I could hear them talking in the kitchen."
"What did they say?"
"She told him about my parents. She said it looked like an abuttar."
Abattoir, the judge translated. No wonder Nina Coffey was all over Ambrose. This kid had looked in his own window and seen his parents—or the ones he knew as parents—lying on the floor butchered, and Ambrose was asking him about spankings and dental hygiene. The man was a dangerous idiot.
"What did he say?"
"He said she did the right thing to call the police, and the wrong thing to leave. Then she said a lot of things. She said it looked as though whoever came in wasn’t even looking for them. They were looking for me."
"What made her say that?"
"They broke into my room at a time when I was usually home and my parents weren’t. She said it looked like they tried to make my parents tell them something. And then the only things they took were my stuff, and all the pictures."
"What pictures were those?"
"My father used to take a lot of pictures. Like when we were at the beach ..." Here it comes, thought the judge. The sob forced its way out, and there was a squealing sound, and then the tears came in volume.
"Come on, Timmy," said Nina Coffey. "Let’s go take a break."
Amid the sounds of chairs scraping and feet hitting the floor, Ambrose said redundantly, "Let the record show that we recessed at this point."
There was another click, and the recording began again. "We will continue now. It is six minutes after eleven," said the stenographer.
Ambrose said, "Timmy, I’m sorry to ask so many sad questions."
"It’s okay," said the little voice. There was no conviction behind it.
"You were at the lawyer’s house. They didn’t agree, right?"
"He told her to go to the police. Mona said they would just make me stay in a place where I wouldn’t be safe. They talked for a long time, and I fell asleep."
"What happened when you woke up?"
"The lawyer—Dennis—he was talking on the telephone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. When he hung up, he and Mona talked some more. He gave her some money. He had a lot of money inside of books on the bookshelf, and some in his pocket. He gave her that too."
"Then what?"
"The phone rang and Dennis answered it, and talked to somebody else. Then we all got in the car and Dennis drove. This time we drove all night and all the next day, almost. Then we got to Jane’s house."
"What is Jane’s full name?"
"I don’t know."
"Where does she live?"
"I don’t know."
"Tell me about her."
"We went to her house. She put us in a room upstairs, and we went to sleep. When I woke up, she made us breakfast. Mona was already awake."
"I mean about Jane. What was she like?"
"I was afraid of her at first."
"Why?"
"She was tall and skinny and had long black hair, and she seemed to listen to people with her eyes."
Ambrose paused. "I see. What did she do?"
"She and Mona talked for a long time. Then I heard her say she would make us disappear."
"Is that why you thought she was scary?"
"No ... maybe."