The Doll Maker (40 page)

A few weeks after the boy and girl arrived she began to teach the boy to play the piano. He took to it very quickly, and with great enthusiasm. While the other children watched and listened, he often accompanied the record. After a while, Valerie, while listening from another room, could not tell which was the boy, and which was the recording.
 

It was during that summer that Valerie began to make her trips to Fairmount Park, stealing through the shadows of the night, her cargo as heavy as the growing burdens of her heart.
 

Sometimes, she thought, even with the help and company of her friends, it seemed that no amount of care could make the dolls whole again.
 

While Byrne waited for the video feed to be set up, he paced the small room next to the Video Monitoring Unit, attempting to calm himself. He tried to recall a time, any time, when he had been faced with what he was about to do. He could not think of a single instance.

Jessica, along with the other detectives, and the brass, were giving him space, perhaps grateful that the weight of this was not on their shoulders.

Byrne glanced at his watch. He had less than ten minutes.

He was just about to walk into the main room when his phone buzzed. He looked at the screen. It was Dr Meredith Allen. He thought about letting it go to voicemail, but considered that, if ever he could use some advice from a shrink, it was now.

He answered.

‘Dr Allen,’ he said.

‘Hello, detective. Am I catching you at a bad time?’

Byrne had no answer to this. There had never been a time like this. ‘Not at all.’

‘Well, I made a few calls, and was able to persuade an old colleague to visit the archives at what was once Vista House.’

Byrne just listened. She continued.

‘None of these files were digitized, of course, so it took a bit of digging through paper records,’ she said. ‘He did find some information on the two children you saw on the videotape. The boy and the girl.’

Byrne felt his pulse quicken. ‘What do we have?’

‘It’s not the best news. They were at Vista House for twenty-two months, then they were transferred to a group home called New Outlook.’

Byrne remembered the name. ‘That was in West Philly?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But it looks like they were only there for a few weeks.’

‘Why?’

Byrne heard Meredith Allen take a deep breath, exhale. ‘They disappeared.’

‘What do you mean they
disappeared
?’

Byrne instantly realized that he was sounding accusatory, as if Dr Allen’s profession was more culpable for what happened to these children than his own. He didn’t mean it that way.

‘There wasn’t a lot in the file,’ she said. ‘It appears that they went on a group outing at the zoo, and never rejoined the group.’

Byrne knew that this happened far too often. Caseworkers didn’t always file reports when foster children went missing or ran away. The courts and the justice system was overburdened and underfunded. Add to this a lack of communication between law enforcement and coroner’s office – yielding a disconnect between unidentified dead children and those who have slipped through the cracks of the child welfare system – and it was easy to see how there would be a long list of children who are either missing or dead.

‘So they were reported missing as a John and Jane Doe?’ Byrne asked.

‘No, I have their names right here,’ she said. ‘Their names were Martin and Cassandra White.’

Byrne felt the floor drop away.

Martin and Cassandra White were two of the children on the list of twelve missing children that Byrne had, at that moment, in his wallet. Two of the children who disappeared when Valerie Beckert had been hunting. He had not had their DNA tests done because they had lived in foster care.

‘Who gave them these names?’ Byrne asked.

‘It sometimes happens with John and Jane Does, if they are young enough. When they come into the system, and become legal wards of the county, they are sometimes given names. As simplistic as it sounds – and I’m not sure what to think about it, even now – some white children are given the name White, black children Black. The sensitivity of it all is questionable, in my opinion, but it happens.’

‘And there’s no record of what happened to them?’ Byrne asked.

‘That’s more in line with your office than mine, detective. I’m afraid that’s all I have.’

Byrne was just going to ask Dr Allen about how to approach what he was about to do, but Jessica poked her head into the room, and said:

‘It’s time, partner.’

It was just after putting away the groceries in the pantry that late August day that Valerie heard the boy’s voice for the first time.
 

A month earlier she had watched Thomas Rule walk up her street, hand in hand with his mother, a woman so distracted and consumed by her cell phone that it amazed Valerie that she didn’t just leave the boy standing on a street corner.
 

One day Valerie had followed them to the small park on Woodbine Avenue. While there, she observed the boy walking with his slight limp, gamely trying to keep up with the other children. Around and around the edge of the small park the children ran, trying desperately to get a large blue kite airborne. After a few revolutions, the children came up behind little Thomas, already having lapped him once. The boy did not give up.
 

Valerie knew that if ever there was a doll that needed mending, it was Thomas Rule.
 

Then, one day – through no effort of her own – the boy was in her house.
 

Thomas Rule sat in the kitchen, right next to the pantry door.
 

Valerie had gone to the market early that morning, and when she returned home she found the boy and the girl seated around the table with Thomas.
 

‘Who is this?’ Valerie asked. She knew who the boy was, but she’d had the question she’d wanted to ask – what is he doing here? – momentarily stunned out of her.
 

‘This is Thomas,’ the girl said. ‘Thomas Rule. We invited him to tea.’
 

‘Where did you meet him?’
 

The girl looked at the boy, back. ‘We met him at the park. I hope it’s okay that we invited him into our home.’
 

It was unlike the boy and girl to venture out on their own. She had taken them out through the stairwell that was concealed in the garage a number of times. She knew that door was always locked.
 

Had they found her extra keys? Had they learned how to push the buttons on the door to keep it from latching?
 

They must have.
 

When Valerie put down her handbag, she noticed that on the table was a pot of tea. Valerie did not recall making the special tea before leaving, but it appeared that the boy and the girl, from many hours of observation, had learned the recipe, just as Valerie had from secretly observing her father. The thought made her a bit cross at first, but she had by this time found herself reluctant to scold the boy and girl.
 

Strangest of all was that when Valerie had entered the room, Thomas did not look up from his drawing. Instead, he had a fistful of crayons in each hand, trying frantically to get all the colors in the rainbow down onto the paper as fast as he could. One by one he would finish a page and cast it to the floor, colors bleeding into one another, shapes morphing from trees, to horses, to people. Drawing after drawing, each one slashed with orange and red and yellow.
 

After a while he slowed down, and his palette began to run to more somber colors – roan, crimson, deep blue.
 

Eventually, exhausted, he slipped from the table, crossed the room, crawled onto the divan, and closed his eyes. Soon he was fast asleep.
 

The boy and girl followed Thomas across the room, and there stood over him, watching in something close to fascination, as if the boy were a specimen in a jar.
 

That evening, when Valerie had finished with the supper dishes, she returned to the parlor. She thought about taking Thomas back over to the park. She had not been prepared to mend another so soon, but now Thomas Rule was in her house.
 

When Valerie went into the basement, on that final day, she knew what had happened.
 

The boy and girl were reading, as usual. They seemed to have grown so much in the past year. The boy especially.
 

She had shopped for them at all the vintage stores, and the boy had taken quite a fancy to fashion. The girl had begun to become proficient with a needle and thread. Each day the boy would put on a fresh white dress shirt and tie. Even though they each had a few pairs of jeans and slacks, the girl always chose to wear a dress, or a smart blouse and skirt set.
 

They had grown so steadily that it was hard to keep up.
 

When darkness fell that night Valerie eased the car from the garage, keeping the lights off until she had reached the corner.
 

Before leaving for Fairmount Park she had taken everything that belonged to the boy – all but a single drawing, a drawing of cows in a field of bright sunshine – and burned it in the fireplace.
 

The State Correctional Institution at Rockview is a medium-security facility located near State College, Pennsylvania, about two hundred miles northeast of Philadelphia.

Opened in 1915, Rockview became the only facility in the Commonwealth at which the death penalty was carried out. While the prison itself is a medium-security facility for men, the death chamber – in the former prison field hospital just outside the main perimeter – was renovated in 1997 to became a maximum-security building.

Between 1915 and 1962, three hundred forty-eight men and two women received the death penalty at Rockview. And while there was no death row at Rockview, prisoners were transferred there just days before the ultimate sentence was to be carried out.

When told of the potential information that could be gleaned from an interview with Valerie Beckert, Marvin Skolnik, her former attorney, made a call to both the district attorney of Philadelphia, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

As a result, the PPD was granted a five-minute interview with the condemned.

Because Rockview was two hundred miles from Philadelphia, the interview would be conducted by video conference.

At the time the video link was established, Valerie Beckert was scheduled to be executed in less than twenty-eight hours.

Byrne sat at the long table in the Video Monitoring Unit, a camera on a tripod in front the of the table.

The image at the far side of the huge room – projected onto the massive monitor – showed a date and time code on a black screen, as well as SCI Rockview in the upper right-hand corner.

To Byrne’s right was a digital timer set at 5:00.

In the room, out of range of the camera, were more than thirty police officers, including Jessica, Josh Bontrager, Maria Caruso, Dana Westbrook, Captain John Ross, as well as lawyers from the District Attorney’s office.

At exactly eight p.m. the onscreen image flickered, then went to color bars.

Another flicker.

Then, they saw her.

Byrne had not set eyes on the woman in ten years. At that time she was a slender, pale young woman of nineteen. When he had interviewed her in the box she had been less than cooperative, never offering more than one- or two-word answers to his questions. Still, she had been polite and respectful, something different from the demeanor most people would ascribe to a person who would strangle a four-year-old boy to death.

Sitting in front of him now was a mature woman of twenty-nine. She had put on a few pounds, but not to excess, which is easy to do with institutional, carb-heavy food. Her hair was much shorter, and the pallor that had at one time made her look sickly was gone. She did not look robust, but she looked healthy.

It was Valerie Beckert’s eyes that struck Byrne. Her eyes all but said she had resigned herself to her fate.

They were the eyes of the condemned.

‘Hello, detective,’ she said.

It suddenly struck Byrne that she could see him, too. He knew this, but was still caught off guard. He wondered how he looked to her.

‘Hello, Valerie.’

‘It’s been ten years,’ she said.

‘Yes, it has.’

Byrne found himself scrambling to find a way to begin a conversation such as this. He’d never
had
a conversation such as this. Normally, you say how good someone looks, ask after their family and job and, when signing off, say something like ‘see you soon,’ or ‘talk to you later.’

Byrne had none of these things available to him. The woman sitting before him would be put to death in less than twenty-eight hours. There
was
no later.

In addition, he had no idea what, if anything, Valerie knew about the murders that had been occurring in Philadelphia over the past few weeks.

Unless, of course, she was behind them.

‘Whenever Papa fired a new doll, I could hear it, of course,’ she said. ‘I could hear it being born.’

Byrne just listened. He wanted to grill her, but she was talking and he didn’t want her to stop. He glanced at the clock. Somehow, almost ninety seconds had passed.

‘Whenever he failed, whenever he made an imperfect Sauveterre, I could hear that, too,’ she added. ‘There was always a red rain when that happened. Oh my, yes there was. There was hell on account.’

‘Valerie, I need to—’

‘But it always meant that I was getting a new friend. All my friends were broken dolls. As was I.’ She looked away for a second, then directly back at Byrne. ‘You are broken too, are you not, detective? I knew it the moment we met in Fairmount Park that day.’

Byrne had no answer for this. Nor the time to create one. He looked at the clock. Two and a half minutes to go. He pushed forward.