Creepers

POLICE REPORTS.

"Want some reading material?" He gave pages to Rick and Cora, keeping the most recent one for himself.

It was dated August 31, 1968. As the professor had explained, that was the year the hotel stopped receiving guests. Balenger expected that the file would be dominated by reports about thefts, the most common crime in a hotel, but what he read was far more serious.

An inquiry about a missing person. In August, one week after a woman named Iris McKenzie stayed in the Paragon, a police detective arrived, asking questions about her. No one had seen or heard from her after she paid her bill and left the hotel. Someone who worked for the Paragon made detailed handwritten notes about the conversation with the detective.

Iris McKenzie lived in Baltimore, Maryland, Balenger learned. She was thirty-three, single, a copywriter for an advertising firm that collaborated with big agencies in New York. After a summer business trip to Manhattan, she went to Asbury Park and spent a weekend in the Paragon. At least, the phone reservation she made indicated that she intended to stay for a weekend. Arriving Friday evening. Leaving Monday morning. Instead, she checked out on Saturday morning. Balenger had a suspicion that she realized how misinformed she was-that Asbury Park was no longer the place to go for a peaceful weekend getaway.

The person who took notes about the detective's inquiries (the handwriting seemed masculine) indicated that he showed the detective the reservation card and the receipt that Iris McKenzie had signed when she paid her bill and checked out early. The phone charges to her room showed a 9:37 a.m. long-distance call to a number the detective identified as belonging to Iris's sister in Baltimore. The detective indicated that the sister's seventeen-year-old son answered the phone and told Iris that his mother wouldn't be home until di

Awfully talkative detective, Balenger thought. He volunteered way too much information. Ask questions. Don't provide details. Let the person you're talking to provide the details.

The hotel had no idea what might have happened to Iris after she left, the document indicated. It then went on to note that a month later a private investigator arrived from Baltimore, asking the same questions. The hotel representative who summarized the inquiries gave the impression that he was keeping a record in order to make sure everyone understood the hotel wasn't at fault.

Balenger felt his pulse quicken with the sudden thought that perhaps Carlisle himself had written the document. As darkness hovered beyond the balustrade, he concentrated on faded ink that was almost purple. His flashlight's beam went through the brittle yellow paper and cast a shadow of the handwriting onto Balenger's hand. Was there a hint of age in the handwriting, an imprecise quality in the letters that might have been caused by the arthritic fingers of someone in his late eighties?

Vi

"Yes. Why?"

"See if this looks familiar." Balenger handed the report to him.

The harsh lights made Conklin squint through his spectacles. The degree of his concentration was obvious. "Yes. That's Carlisle's handwriting."

"Let me have a look," Vi

"Makes me feel a little closer to him," Rick said. "You told us Carlisle had a… How did you put it? An arresting physical presence because of the steroids and the exercise. But what was his face like? His ma

"In his prime, he was compared to a matinee idol. His eyes were the color of aquamarine. Sparkling. Charismatic. People felt hypnotized by him."

Rick gave the missing-person report back to Balenger and indicated a yellowed page from a newspaper. "I've got one of the murders. The thirteen-year-old boy who took a baseball bat to his father's head while he was sleeping. Hit him twenty-two times, really bashed his brains in. Happened in 1960. The boy's name was Ronald Whitaker. It turns out his mother was dead and his father sexually abused him for years. His teachers and the kids he went to school with described him as quiet and withdrawn. Moody."

"A common description of sex-abuse victims," Balenger said. "They're in shock. Ashamed. Afraid. They don't know who to trust, so they don't dare talk to anybody for fear they might blurt out what's being done to them. The abuser usually threatens to do something awful-kill a pet, cut off a penis or a nipple-if the victim tells anybody what's going on. At the same time, the abuser tries to make the victim believe that what's happening is the most natural thing in the world. Eventually, some victims feel everybody's an abuser in one way or another, that the world's all about manipulating people and they can't rely on anyone."

Rick pointed at the document. "In this case, the father took Ronald to Asbury Park on the Fourth of July weekend. A so-called summer treat. A child psychiatrist tried for several weeks to get Ronald to talk about what happened next. Eventually, the words came out in a torrent, how Ronald's father accepted money for another man to spend an hour alone with the boy. The stranger gave Ronald a ball, bat, and cheap baseball glove as a bribe. After the man left, the father came back to the room drunk and fell asleep. Ronald found a use for the baseball bat."

"Thirteen years old." Cora was sickened. "What happens to someone like him?"

"Because of his youth, he couldn't have been tried in a regular court," Balenger replied. "If he'd been of age, he'd have probably been found i

"But basically, that life was ruined," Cora said.

"There's always hope, I guess," Balenger said. "Always tomorrow."

"You sure know a lot about this." Rick studied him.

Is he questioning me again? Balenger wondered. "I was a reporter on a couple of cases like this."

"This hotel soaked up a lot of pain," Vi

"Edna Bauman," Cora said.

"Yeah, it's the same. Edna Bauman. She committed suicide here."

"What?"

"August 27, 1966. She took a hot bath and slit her wrists."

"Cora, your instincts are finely tuned," the professor said. "Remember you asked Rick to look in the bathtub? You were afraid something might be in there."

Cora shuddered. "Almost forty years earlier.''

"August twenty-seventh," Rick said. "When was the date of the obituary for her ex-husband?"

"August twenty-second," Balenger answered.

"Five days. As soon as the funeral was over, she came back here to where she and her then-husband spent their last vacation the previous summer." Vi

"Yes," Cora said, "this hotel soaked up a lot of pain."