Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #5
Francine had come forward in early 2001 to confess to her part in the Cady Lewis killing.
Cady had been snatched years before she and Zeke got into the foster parent game.
At the time of Cady’s abduction, the Trouts were living in Pensacola, not ten miles from the McBride house.
Zeke was a television technician who did house calls, and Francine often accompanied him in his black van.
They had gone out on a house call, but Zeke had written the wrong address down, wound up miles from where he was supposed to be.
They had stopped to look at a map, and while they were parked, Zeke had seen two girls playing in the sprinkler in their front yard.
He lured one of them over to the van. Francine knew her duty, and when the girl came around to the passenger side, she smashed the child’s head against the open door and dragged the stunned girl inside.
Ezekiel found an empty gravel lot at the end of a dirt road and raped Cady Lewis in the back of his van.
Francine held Cady down while he strangled her.
Francine had traded this story (and others), for a transfer to Black Cricket Women’s House of Correction in Vermont. Her (much)
younger sister lived in Vermont, and it would be easier for them to visit with one another. It was also an upgrade from the
supermax in which Francine had been held before. In Black Cricket, a prisoner could work with horses; she could earn field
trips; there was a chorus club, a knitting group, a club for doing puzzles. Her transfer was granted because some of Francine’s
stories had been true. Some of Francine’s other tales, though, were . . . well, not lies, but perhaps fantasies. Francine
claimed Zeke had been in Aspen, Colorado, to perpetrate the well-known rape-murder of a pair of college students in 1975.
Only it was impossible: Ezekiel Trout had been in the South Pacific at the time, had spent all of 1975 employed on a container
ship. It was true Zeke and Francine had lived in Pensacola the year Cady Lewis had been abducted. But records from the Bureau
of Motor Vehicles revealed that Ezekiel hadn’t bought his black van until the following year. In 1978 he was driving a Pinto
cruising wagon.
As one poster on Have-A-Cold-One pointed out, Do you know how many people have confessed to killing Cady Lewis? FOURTEEN. Fourteen known CONFESSIONS. How crowded was it in
that fucking van? Shit . . . just imagine if ALL of them were telling the truth. They wouldn’t have been driving a van when
they snatched her, they would have been driving a fucking SCHOOL BUS.
The sad, stomach-churning story of Francine and Ezekiel Trout absorbed Gwen fully.
It was hard to stop scrolling through the thread.
The internet did that to you, a thing she had just begun to discover.
It was as compelling as the hypnotist’s watch and just as hard to tear one’s gaze away.
Colin viewed this as a feature, but Gwen was quite sure it was a bug.
When she blinked her sore, tired eyes, she discovered with a little frisson of terror that it was after one in the morning.
Easter. The hour of the dragon had come and gone.
Gwen feared that Francine Trout had come and gone with it.
But as it turned out, it was much worse than that.
8.
When she put on the TV she thought, for a few bleary, half-awake moments, that it was video from 9/11. Some great building
had been smashed to rubble. She saw the scorched yellow stone remains of a wall. The structure behind it had fallen in on
itself. It was an acre of toxic smoke and blackened ruin, sown with a thousand chunks of broken glass.
But, of course, it wasn’t New York and it wasn’t September. It was Easter morning, and that was the Black Cricket prison.
The chyron read: gas explosion at women’s penitentiary—hundreds feared dead. The phone rang before she could turn up the volume.
“You seeing this?” Tana Nighswander asked.
“Your mother—” Gwen said.
Tana said, “Bad news: she’s still alive. They transferred her out of Black Cricket dog’s years ago. She was so badly behaved,
they sent her to a supermax down south. Figures. She’s too evil to die. Think about it, though. If she wasn’t such a savage
bitch, she woulda been there to burn with the rest. She woulda wound up just like Jayne!”
“Just like Jayne,” Gwen repeated, numbly.
“Jesus, look at it,” Tana said, as if they were both in Gwen’s living room, watching the TV together. “If I didn’t know better,
I’d think something came down out of the sky to attack this country all over again.”
They said goodbye, but the phone rang again, almost the moment Gwen set it back in the cradle. It was Julius Roth, her wheelman.
“You still sore about missing out on New York?” Julius asked.
Gwen had wanted to go to NYC after the towers fell—they all did. But their employer, Cumberland County Emergency Rescue, spent
days talking with officials, trying to find out what they could do to help . . . and in the end, it turned out the most helpful
thing they could do was stay home. By 9/14, Ground Zero was overwhelmed with rescue teams. Squads had come from Alaska, from
Italy, from Japan. They needed bottled water more than spare bodies. And meanwhile, people in Maine kept having strokes and
car accidents.
“Was I sore?”
“I was,” Julius said. “Kid I went to summer camp with was in one of those fucking towers. How would you feel about a makeup
call? I talked to the office, they already signed off on it. And Vermont is asking for experienced hands to help with the
rescue. What do you say?”
“I say I’m in,” Gwen said. And then, after a moment, added, “But Julius, do you really think there’ll be anyone to rescue?”
Julius didn’t seem to know how to answer that one.
9.
She got there with Ben and Julius in the ambulance just after sundown.
The dusk-light had a weird smoky orange tint to it, as if they stood in the light of some great, glowering, sooty furnace.
The rescue teams had set up floodlights on fifty-foot poles, casting a silvery brilliance across the acres of seething bombed-out wreckage.
A massive five-story chimney remained untouched, a silo of red brick.
The whole face had been sheared off one wing so the prison stood open like a dollhouse.
Each open cell was a charred cubbyhole. Rebar jutted from the concrete between floors, while water spurted from severed pipes, making pools in the wreckage below.
The parking lot—what was left of it—was thick with fire trucks, police cruisers, ambulances, military jeeps, cranes, and loaders.
The Vermont National Guard had set up sprawling tents, strung with bare lightbulbs. One was a bustling headquarters. Tables
had been arranged beneath those pitiless lights, with blueprints of Black Cricket spread across them. Folding chairs had been
arranged in rows before a pair of whiteboards covered in scrawl. Another pavilion served as an open-all-hours cafeteria and
place to sack out if you were too tired to drive to the Best Western a few miles away.
They had enough construction equipment to build the on-ramp for a superhighway, but most of the work was being done by hand.
Squads in hard hats worked in the rubble, shifting bricks and blackened stones. They passed rocks from hand to hand, into
piles at the edge of the ruin. Sometimes someone would pick something up—a child’s drawing in crayon, a singed pair of women’s
pajama bottoms—and carefully store it in a clear plastic bag. The bags were handed out of the wreckage along a different line
of volunteers, to be sorted at a line of folding tables.
Julius parked the ambulance well back from the site, and the three of them walked in through the RVs and pickups together.
They paused at the outer limit of the ruin to take it all in before reporting to the duty tent.
They hadn’t put on their N95s yet, and the hazed air was sharp with the scent of crushed stone and burnt plastics.
Someone had a saw going, Gwen could hear the buzz and whine of the blade cutting into stone.
And there was the pumping hiss of hydraulics, as a man in a bucket was lifted to one of those torn-open cells so he could shine a powerful hand light into the interior.
But hardly anyone spoke, and when they did, they said as little as possible.
Walkie-talkies went off in crackling bursts, then cut out just as abruptly.
The quiet was so somber and widespread that Gwen’s ears soon picked out the only continuous voice. She peered into the gathering
dusk and saw a circle of men taking the knee to pray together. A preacher knelt with them in the robes of her office. Gwen
could not make out her words, but her tone was kind and steady and comforting, the voice of a mother reading a bedtime story
to her brave, tired boys. A few phrases swam out of the darkness:
“Help us to know when we can’t do any more, when we need to accept help instead of offering it . . . Remember everyone you find is someone saved, whether you got them out alive or dead. If we couldn’t save them, know you saved someone from the anguish of not knowing
what happened to someone they loved.”
Gwen knew the voice, although she had not heard Erin Oakes since she presided over Van’s memorial service, in the Rackham
chapel, half a year before. She waited until the men said Amen together and came to their feet. The reverend stood with them and seemed to see Gwen as she rose.
They met each other in the bright strobes of the emergency vehicles, and Erin took Gwen into a mother’s embrace.
“They found any living?” Gwen asked, without preamble.
“Eleven in the first hour. Three more since then. None since two this afternoon.” She drew back but went on holding Gwen’s
arms. “Forty bodies recovered so far. Three hundred and seventy we don’t know about.” And she looked away into the darkness.