The people of Jury prayed like wealthy zealots for the safe return of lost local boy Whit. He was one of their own.
After eight days they gave up and constructed a memorial bench in his honour with a shiny metal plaque in the centre. The plaque contained an etched profile with a hooked nose, intended to depict the missing youth, the boy’s full name — Whitaker Henry Alma — and his birthdate.
The charity that organized the fundraiser to build the bench always intended to add Whit’s return date to the plaque but the attentions of club members were drawn to a preschool that needed a new boot room.
It was April 6, one year ago today that Whit Alma returned to the world.
According to the police report, baker Rupert McBride was gazing out at the morning light through the big front window of Big Heart Bakery when he spotted a dirty bundle of cast-off clothes lying next to the curb. When he saw the pile move, he set down his tray of rolls, took off his apron and went out to investigate.
A boy huddled on the side of the street, curled up like a crescent roll. It was a large boy, a teenager wearing loose-fitting jeans and a dirty T-shirt.
Residue from a bush party, McBride thought, and approached the kid to wake him with boot service. But as he drew close, he saw it wasn’t just any boy. Everyone around the town of Jury and beyond had seen the grainy printed images of the square face and long black hair. This was THE boy, the vanishing boy the entire country had been chattering about for a month.
Local boy Whit Alma, only child to parents Wanda and Mathew Alma, left Victoria Secondary School travelling in a north-easterly direction toward Alma Family Orchards on the outskirts of Jury, and was never seen again; until now.
Police organized searches, citizens organized more searches, podcasters, videographers and a steady drip of internet posers fuelled manhunts. Two innocent families left town under shrouds of suspicion. Lacking alibis and burdened with criminal records, they were run off by the same well-meaning townsfolk who would later sponsor a bench in the boy’s name.
Then, as suddenly as he vanished, Whit reappeared, reincarnated as a heap of discarded laundry.
That was a year ago.
Whit remembered that moment, being prodded awake by Mr. McBride, but little else. He’d been missing for a month and knew nothing of it. He remembered before and he remembered being reawakened, but his month away was an impenetrable cloud.
He sat across from Dr. Petra Kappens, his therapist for once a week counselling sessions, which his parents forced him to attend. They were unrelenting, no matter how sick he was of it or how much he complained about it.
He sat in his usual spot; the plush, red armchair. The doctor sat on the couch and placed a digital recorder on the table between them, after asking permission.
The big, green glass ashtray on the table caught his attention again and he stared at it, as he did during every visit, while Dr. Kappens talked.
Whit once asked her why she kept the ashtray around, since she didn’t smoke and didn’t let others smoke in her office. “It’s useless.”
“It’s satisfying,” she replied. “I love the rich, deep green of it. It’s just nice. It doesn’t need to have a purpose.”
Whit nodded. “I guess.”
“How are you feeling today Whit?” Dr. Kappens asked.
“OK.” Whit wished he had more substance to kick off the conversation. Sometimes, if Dr. Kappens felt they went deep with meaningful conversation, she’d end the session sooner.
“How is school going?”
“OK.”
“Tell me about what happened at your home this week.”
“What do you mean? I slept. I woke up. I watched TV. That’s about it.”
“How are things with Lucy? She’s been at your home for, what, a couple weeks now?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. She’s good.”
“You understand you have a say in what happens with Lucy and her continued stay at your home? I talked with your parents and they agree, that you’re the priority here. Your health is the most important thing. We can make other arrangements for Lucy if it’s causing you stress or makes you uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s fine though.”
“We understand it’s an adjustment and it might be a difficult time for you, but I’m here for you to talk to, and your mom and dad are always at home for you to discuss any concerns. Anything at all.”
“It’s fine.” Whit’s curt reply sounded angrier than he intended, but for Christ’s sake how many times did he have to answer the same questions?
“Good.” If Dr. Kappens noticed Whit’s irritation, she showed no indication. “And I also want to be sure, I know I have asked you before, but I want to make absolutely sure, that if you have any problem with Lucy coming to see me for counselling that you speak up. You and her share the same house, so I want to be sure you are comfortable with it. Everything you and I discuss is completely confidential, let’s be very clear about that. The same goes for Lucy. Anything she and I talk about is kept strictly between the two of us.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Do you and Lucy get along?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean I don’t really know her, but she doesn’t seem as crazy as people say.”
At least so far, Whit thought. At first, the idea of Lucy Kloot moving into the house where he lived panicked him. Not because the talk around Jury was that Lucy was crazy, Lucy Kook, they called her, but his mind fumbled the basic concepts of how he would even talk to her. What did they have to talk about outside of school? Whit had lived his entire life on a family orchard on the outskirts of an isolated town. Lucy had lived three of his life’s worth, even though they were about the same age.
“Do some people think she is crazy? Why would they think that?” Dr. Kappens asked.
“You know they call her Kloot the Kook, Loopy Lucy, Kooky Lucy.”
“What do you think about those names?”
“I don’t know.”
“It sounds to me like maybe you’ve gotten to know Lucy a titch, and now you feel differently about those names.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“You have your own experiences with that kind of situation; people spreading rumours about you that aren’t true.”
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Well, I mean, maybe you feel you can relate to Lucy, at least in this one small way.”
“Sure, maybe.”
Whit had actually thought about Lucy a lot. It was unavoidable. Lucy was a fucking legend in school and a hot problem to talk about among the town’s fixers and gossipers. He and Lucy were both in Grade 10, although Whit, who considered his student status as adequate, was leagues behind Lucy, who was a bold, screaming headline, on days when she showed up.
Lucy believed in challenging those in control and the more control a person thought they wielded, the more uncomfortable Lucy made them.
“I have better things to do,” Lucy defiantly announced to teachers when she planned to miss the next day, or the following week. After two or three days, if she hadn’t turned up, police would find her sleeping in a park, or a stairwell and return her to the foster home.
A person like Lucy created special problems in a small town like Jury, which lacked the social services architectures possessed by larger communities. Yet the folks of Jury did what they believed was right. With Lucy having no parents to speak of, they saw to her attendance in church, when they could locate her; her adherence to the school schedule on most days, and they petitioned a place for her to live among them in the community.
A few times, when no one in Jury stepped up to offer her a place to live, Lucy was driven way to serve time in group homes in Gold Rush or larger centres further off in Salmon Drop or Nor Loch.
Within weeks, or days however, Lucy would return and somebody in Jury would find her sleeping beneath the bandshell in the park at the ripe age of 10 and an appeal would go out and someone’s heart would thaw and a new home would open up.
Parents, school groups and businesses held fund-raisers for her. She had a permanent Kickstarter page operated by a local book club. At school, students called her the Milk Carton Girl, but only behind her back.
Lucy belonged to Jury and if she caused them a spot of trouble now and again, they would fix it for her. She became a project at a young age, stretching the good will of a small town determined to keep her and Lucy resented them for it.
She was simply a wandering soul, or rather, she wanted to be a wandering soul but people wouldn’t let her. The irony that she returned to Jury after being sent away on several occasions, even as she yearned to escape the town, eluded her.
She actually owned a home, a one-room cabin about a kilometre out of town along a seldom-used road, then another kilometre up and over Cecil’s Rise where the Kloot family garrison overlooked the hillside and the forest that spread out for hundreds of kilometres around them. Technically, the cabin was kept in a trust until Lucy was old enough, but it belonged to Lucy and she planned to sell it off the instant they allowed her to because she couldn’t stand the place. She hadn’t been to see it since her mother died and father vanished.
From inside Petra’s office, Whit heard Lucy’s voice coming through the door from the outer reception area. She was scheduled for the appointment following Whit’s. Whit’s mother always scheduled them together to provide them the chance to walk together after school.
“How is it my fault?” Lucy said. Whit almost laughed at the fake incredulity in her voice. “How was I supposed to know the old lady was running a sex palace?”
“Nobody is saying it was your fault, Lucy. What’s past, is past. What I am saying is that I would appreciate it if you could really, really focus on staying put at the Alma place. If you walk out of there, I don’t know where else we can put you. You have used up this town, Lucy. There is nowhere else for you to go if you screw this up.”
A woman from social services had been waiting at the office when Lucy and Whit arrived, saying she was conducting an informal check to see how Lucy was faring at her new foster home with the Almas.
She conceded Lucy’s previous placement was not ideal. “Yes, what happened at the Vermere house wasn’t your fault, but you went missing two days before the incident even happened.”
“I just went out to stretch my legs a little. Can you blame me? The woman was fucking the help by the pool.”
Lucy’s voice carried into the inner office where Dr. Kappens and Whit couldn’t help but overhear.
“Excuse me a minute Whit.” Dr. Kappens cracked her door open. “Lucy, please, will you keep it down.”
There was no answer that Whit heard, but the outside door creaked and he heard footsteps moving outside onto the porch and the door clicked shut. Lucy and the social services woman must have gone outside.
“Sorry for the interruption.” Dr. Kappens returned and sat down.
It’s fine,” said Whit. “She’s a little embarrassing sometimes.”
“Does she embarrass you, Whit? How so?”
Whit grinned, his discomfort apparent. He was not sure how to phrase it. Lucy is a walking embarrassment. She’s a billboard of inappropriate jokes, always trampling over the line of good taste with her boldness and naked aggression. He’d seen her march into the middle of a snickering girls’ huddle at school and hold a knife to Sandra MacKenzie’s throat.
“She was talking shit about me,” she said later, matter-of-factly.
Lucy believed what she believed and swore in the face of anybody who thought otherwise. The popular crowd called her a slut because she told penis jokes and brazenly stuck her hand down Ian Smith’s pants when he threatened, playfully, to rape her on the picnic table after school.
“Let’s go big boy. Let’s get it on right here,” she said, seizing a handful, as Smith recoiled into the wall behind him and half the school looked on. That was the second day of Grade 10.
Lucy sneered at her schoolmates’ affected lilting speech, their designer sneakers and fashionable outfits. They were assholes and she wasn’t going to let them have free reign.
To Whit, having Lucy in his home was like having an elephant for a friend. No matter where they went, they were always the biggest thing in the room.
He knew the story about Lucy’s previous foster home. Who didn’t? It delivered the perfect script for a gossip-hungry town like Jury.
Lucy had been living at the Vermere house for a few weeks before deciding to take a couple of nights off to roam the hills during the day and sleep on the beach at night. She returned on the third night and not having a key, she jumped the fence into the yard and broke into the pool house.
She fell asleep, she didn’t know for how long, before being abruptly awakened by the sound of glass breaking and screams coming from outside near the pool. She cracked open the door in time to observe a naked man named Hector, she learned later, being clubbed on the head and face by a steel ice bucket wielded by Mr. Vermere, while his wife Nicole, bashed her husband across the back with a lawn chair, pleading for him to stop.
Lucy recognized Hector as the Guatemalan labourer she’d previously seen hanging around the house during the day when Mr. Vermere was at work.
Police came and filed assault charges against Mr. Vermere, which resulted in counselling and probation.
Poor Hector fared worse, bandaged and deported before he could earn one-quarter of the money he’d expected to send back to wife and children in Guatemala. He spent the summer instead doing odd jobs in his home country, while scheming a way to sneak into Mexico so that he might land a service industry job.
Jason Vermere, the son, fared worst of all. He hung himself in the closet after setting the house on fire.
No wonder Lucy is such a fucking wreck, Whit thought.
He turned his attention back to Dr. Kappens.
“No. When I said she’s embarrassing, that’s too strong a word. It’s all good,” he told her. “She’s just, umm, really big, you know?” He spread his arms.
“Agreed.” Dr. Kappens smiled. “She is a big personality.”
Whit tapped at the arm of the chair. He wanted out of this office, to be shed of these sessions for good, but that would never happen until he convinced Dr. Kappens and his mother and father he was not off his head. They pestered him to talk more about his abduction as if they thought he was holding back and forgetting on purpose. He would tell them if he could. Then they might leave him alone, for Christ’s sake. But his brain had recorded nothing from the missing month, so his parents, Dr. Kappens and police continued to pound on him almost every day.
He remembered everything up to the day he disappeared. He remembered leaving school because Mr. Johnson stopped him just as he was heading through the exit and asked if he intended to try out for the track team. Whit told him he’d think about it.
On the way home, Whit left the road to cut through a small copse of trees following a path that led through the woods for about 100 metres before it emerged on the other side on another road. He always took this route, unless gigantic snowfalls made it impassable.
A horse-faced man approached him and asked for directions. Whit told the man to follow the trail to where it came out on the other side by the school, then turn right.
His next memory was of the thick, black mustache of Rupert McBride, the owner of Big Heart Bakery, bending over him, poking him with his shoe.
That was it. A month of his life had been erased and a year later he was no closer to learning what had happened.
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Really interesting start of a story. Well-written, vivid descriptions, solid characters. I'll definitely be reading more.
Fluid prose. Intriguing start. Lucy is quite the character.
I esp. liked this sentence: “It’s satisfying,” she replied. “I love the rich, deep green of it. It’s just nice. It doesn’t need to have a purpose.”