In “79 he was sent away to Juniper Hill for raping and blinding a six-year-old boy. This time it was supposed to be for good, but when it comes to politics and state-run institutions-especially state-run mental institutions-I think it’s fair to say that nothing is forever. He was released from Juniper Hill in 1984, once more adjudged “cured'. Brandon feels-and so do I-that this second cure had more to do with cuts in the state’s mental health budget than with any miracle of modern science or psychiatry. At any rate, Joubert returned to Motton to live with his stepmother and her commonlaw, and the state forgot about him… except to issue him a driver’s license, that is. He took a road-test and got a perfectly legal one-in some ways I find this the most amazing fact of all-and at some point in late 1984 or early 1985, he started using it to tour the local cemeteries.
He was a busy boy. In the wintertime he had his crypts and mausoleums; in the fall and the spring he broke into seasonal camps and homes all over western Maine, taking anything that struck his fancy-'my things,” you know. He apparently had a great fondness for framed photographs. They found four trunks of them in the attic of the house on Kingston Road. Brandon says they are still counting, but that the total number will probably be over seven hundred.
It’s impossible to say to what extent” Daddy-Mummy” participated in what was going on before Joubert did away with them. It must have been a lot, because Joubert hadn’t made the slightest effort to hide what he was doing. As for the neighbors, their motto seems to be, “They paid their bills and kept to themselves. Wasn’t nothing to us.” It’s got a gruesome kind of perfection to it, wouldn’t you say? New England Gothic, by way of The Journal of Aberrant Psychiatry.
They found another, bigger, wicker box in the cellar. Brandon got Xeroxes of the police photos documenting this particular find, but he was hesitant about showing them to me at first. Well… that’s actually a little too mild. It was the one and only place where he gave into the temptation all men seem to feel you know the one I mean, to play John Wayne. “Come on, little lady, jest wait until we go by all them dead Injuns and keep lookin” off into the desert. I’ll tell you when we’re past.”
“I’m willing to accept that Joubert was probably in the house with you,” he said. “I’d have to be a goddam ostrich with my head stuck in the sand not to at least entertain the idea; everything fits. But answer me this: why are you going on with it, Jessie? What possible good can it do?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, Ruth, but I did know one thing: there was nothing I could do that would make things any worse than they already were. So I hung tough until Brandon realized the little lady wasn’t going to get back into the stagecoach until she had gotten her look at the dead Injuns. So I saw the pictures. The one I looked at the longest had a little sign saying state police exhibit 217 propped up in the corner. Looking at it was like looking at a videotape someone has somehow made of your worst nightmare. The photo showed a square wicker basket standing open so the photographer could shoot the contents, which happened to be heaps of bones with a wild collection of jewelry mixed in: some trumpery, some valuable, some stolen from summer homes and some doubtless stripped from the cold hands of corpses kept in small-town cold-storage.
I looked at that picture, so glaring and somehow bald, as police evidence photographs always are, and I was back in the lake house again-it happened right away, with no lag whatsoever, Not remembering, do you understand? I’m there, handcuffed and helpless, watching the shadows fly across his grinning face, hearing myself telling him that he is scaring me. And then he bends over to get the box, those feverish eyes never leaving my face, and I see him-I see it-reaching in with its twisted, misshapen hand, I see that hand starting to stir up the bones and jewels, and I hear the sounds they make, like dirty castanets.
And do you know what haunts me most of all? I thought it was my father, that was my Daddy, come back from the dead to do what he’d wanted to do before. “Go ahead,” I told him. “Go ahead, but promise you’ll unlock me and let me out afterward. Just promise me that.”
I think I would have said the same it I’d known who he really was, Ruth. Think? I know I would have said the same. Do you understand? I would have let him put his cock-the cock he stuck down the rotting throats of dead men-into me, if only he would have promised me I didn’t have to die the dog’s death of muscle-cramps and convulsions that was waiting for me. If only he would have promised to set me free.
Jessie stopped for a moment, breathing so hard and fast she was almost panting. She looked at the words on the screen-the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen-and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn’t it. What she didn’t want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn’t delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.
Not until they’re out of your hands, they don’t, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the delete button-stroked it, actually-and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn’t it?
“Yes,” she said in the same muttery voice she’d used so often during her hours of captivity-only at least now it wasn’t Goody or the mind-Ruth she was talking to; she had gotten back to herself without having to go all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to do it. That was maybe progress of a sort. “Yes, it’s the truth, all right.”
And nothing but, so help her God. She wouldn’t use the delete button on the truth, no matter how nasty some people including herself, as a matter of fact-might find that truth to be. She would let it stand. She might decide not to send the letter after all (didn’t know if it was even fair to send it, to burden a woman she hadn’t seen in years with this ration of pain and madness), but she would not delete it. Which meant it would be best to finish now, in a rush, before the last of her courage deserted her and the last of her strength ran out.
Jessie leaned forward and began typing again.
Brandon said, “There’s one thing you’re going to have to remember and accept, Jessie-there’s no empirical proof. Yes, I know your rings are gone, but about them you could have been right the first time-some light-fingered cop could have taken them.”
“What about Exhibit 217?” I asked. “The wicker box?”
He shrugged, and I had one of those sudden bursts of understanding the poets call epiphanies. He was holding onto the possibility that the wicker box had just been a coincidence. That wasn’t easy, but it was easier than having to accept all the rest-most of all the fact that a monster like Joubert could actually touch the life of someone he knew and liked. What I saw in Brandon Milheron’s face that day was perfectly simple: he was going to ignore a whole stack of circumstantial evidence and concentrate on the lack of empirical evidence. He was going to hold onto the idea that the whole thing was simply my imagination, seizing on the Joubert case to explain a particularly vivid hallucination I’d had while I was handcuffed to the bed.
And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one; that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong… but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back not just yours or Punkin’s or Nora Callighan’s but my mother’s and my sister’s and my brother’s and kids I chummed with in high school and people I met for ten minutes in doctors” off ices and God alone knows how many others. I think that most of them would be those scary UFO voices.