Chapter 37
HE WAS A SENSITIVE CHILD,” the old woman said, with a fond sigh of remembrance.
“Oh, he liked to play, the way any young boy did—especially back then, when all the bleeding hearts weren’t so afraid of cap guns and plastic bowie knives—but his favorite activities were reading. And drawing. Oh, how he loved to draw.”
Chambers took a sip of weak lemonade—his third—and tried to pay attention.
The old woman, who’d been Wickman’s nanny when he was young, had a lot of colorful stories about the young man, but he’d heard them all twice now and it seemed she was starting in on the third rotation.
But Pendergast kept encouraging her—perhaps trying to get his psychological theories to bear fruit by sheer force of will.
They were in the town of Winter Park, Florida, where Wickman’s parents had owned a large house.
The town was a surprise to Chambers—it wasn’t full of date palms and shotgun bungalows, but closer to what he imagined an Ivy League community would be, with avenues of stately trees and old, well-manicured houses of the kind they built up north.
“What kind of things did he draw?” Pendergast asked.
The old lady thought again. “Not the usual things boys drew—cowboys and Indians or battleships. They were boats. Or rather, plans for boats. They didn’t make a passel of sense, but you could tell he was trying to do a little boy’s version of his father’s work.”
Wickman’s father had been a nautical engineer, designing hulls for big shipbuilders.
At some point he’d gone into business for himself and begun crafting what was then a unique design: small vessels with inline jet drive engines fabricated into the stern, driven by impellers, allowing for not only very shallow draft but also power and convenience.
It was an inspired idea, and it allowed the budding family of three to purchase a large house here in Winter Park.
“What were your last memories of the boy after—after the accident?” Chambers said, trying to forestall the third go-round.
But it seemed the old lady had focused only on the word “accident,” and started in again.
“It was sad. The saddest thing you could imagine. Dr. Wickman might have been a brilliant engineer, but he didn’t have a nose for character.
That Randall Fortnum he hired as a bookkeeper was a slippery one, all smiles and doff-your-hat-for-you-ma’am, always eager to put in a few extra hours of work—but it was all a bunch of hooey.
That piece of trash really went to work.
By the time Wickman realized the truth, Fortnum had already stolen or sold off everything but the silverware.
And then it was too late. The man had had plenty of time to mess with the books, sell off assets—he even sold the company’s industrial secrets to competitors before Dr. Wickman could apply for patents, which would have set the family up for good. ”
“Did he have Fortnum arrested?” Pendergast asked.
“He lit out a day or two before Dr. Wickman called the authorities.” The old lady shook her head.
“And was he never caught?”
She shook her head again. “Never. For all I know, he’s sitting on a beach in Panama somewhere this very minute.”
“What happened next?”
“The couple were devastated, of course. They’d have to start all over again.
But Dr. Wickman seemed to take it pretty well.
His wife was a doctor, you know, and had a good practice.
Anyway, he and the missus decided to take a weekend down to Key West to plan their next move, leaving the boy with me.
” She paused. “Of course, you know what happened next.”
Chambers knew. The small Cessna pontoon plane Wickman’s father owned had crashed into the Gulf of Mexico about thirty miles off the Dry Tortugas.
“And then,” the woman said, her voice rising, “all that talk—that he’d done it for the insurance.
There was no insurance—Fortnum had made sure of that.
And a man like Dr. Wickman would never have taken his life and his wife’s, leaving behind a young boy—an orphan.
” And she wiped away a tear. In the momentary silence, Chambers could hear the buzzing of flies outside the half-open windows, and the curtains fluttered listlessly in a humid breeze.
“He was a good man,” she said, her gaze going past the two agents. “He deeded this house to me. That was something even Fortnum couldn’t take away.”
Then she seemed to brighten up. “May I freshen your lemonades, gentlemen?”
The White Kitchen Preparatory School was located on a low bluff near the Louisiana line.
It appeared to have once been surrounded by stands of live oaks, but as they pulled in Chambers could see that the entire area had been recently clear-cut.
There were only two cars in the parking lot.
It gave Chambers the impression the school was strapped for funds and selling off what property it could.
James Aiken, high school English teacher at White Kitchen, received them in his cramped, messy classroom at the appointed time of three thirty. He’d jovially shaken their hands, offered them cups of coffee, then arranged three school desks in a semicircle so they could talk.
“So!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “What do you think of our educational institution?”
“It is most picturesque,” Pendergast said, as if he hadn’t noticed all the stumps in the fields outside.
This clearly pleased Aiken, who seemed proud of the tiny facility.
“I’ve always thought so! You know, given the—ah—financial demographics in this neck of the woods, not to mention the declining population, White Kitchen functions as not only a high school but a middle school as well—for a number of the surrounding communities: Tammany, Honey Island, half a dozen others.
Some kids need to be bussed as far as thirty miles to get here—but we pride ourselves on making sure every youngster in our district gets a good education.
” He paused. “But you gentleman—I do apologize but I need to ask: may I see your badges?”
This seemed a spontaneous question born of curiosity, and both complied.
“Thank you! As I was saying, you gentlemen must have a lot on your plate, and I don’t want to keep you here while I jawbone.”
“You were very kind to agree to meet with us on a Sunday.”
“Not at all, happy to help. You said you had some questions about one of my students?”
“Parker Wickman,” Chambers said. They had not previously provided a name.
Aiken’s eyes visibly went slightly glassy as he thought back. “Parker Wickman… there’s a name I haven’t heard in years.”
You will, Chambers thought grimly, very soon.
“If you could tell us what you recall of him,” Pendergast said. “How he came to the school, what he was like, any anecdotes that come to mind—it would be most helpful.”
Aiken’s eyes sharpened again. “Of course. He came here in—oh, it must have been ’75 or thereabouts.
Some tragedy had taken his parents, and he came to live at Pearl View Estates, which was being run by his grandmother at the time.
Esther Wickman. A kinder lady you’ll never meet—though she was rather strict in her religious views. ”
Chambers noticed he’d pronounced the name Wishman. That corresponded to the spelling of Wichman he’d seen on the older maps.
“Pearl View Estates,” Pendergast repeated.
Aiken nodded. “The family had always been pretty well off, even after that hurricane in 1921. But wealth, like everything else, has a tendency to pass away, and she began taking in elderly boarders, converting the mansion into a rest home. She’d been a nurse, and living alone in a place like that—it was still quite grand back then, I understand—she could afford to charge substantial fees for care.
The fact it was so remote made it even more attractive to some…
” Chambers thought the man was about to say of their younger relations, but he ended the observation there.
“How was Wickman?” Pendergast asked. “As a student, I mean—and as a person?”
“He wasn’t in my class his first two years here, so I can’t really say a great deal about how he acclimated himself. But by the time he was in my ninth-grade English class, the tragedy seemed to have left no visible scars.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“He was intelligent and well adjusted. He didn’t get into trouble—I recall his eighth-grade biology teacher, Mrs. Beecher, particularly doted on him.
It was obvious that he was well loved and cared for at home—even if that home was rather unusual, it probably gave his active imagination free rein.
The other children liked him, as well. They even had a nickname for him, I believe.
Let’s see, there were so many…” Another pause, another glassing of the eyes. “Ah, yes. Atlas.”
“Atlas?” the two agents said in unison.
Aiken nodded. “Apparently—this was before my time, when he first came to the school—he was small for his age and a bit shy. That, perhaps combined with his intellect, made him an obvious target for some minor bullying. But after a growth spurt in high school, he cut a formidable figure—if he hadn’t been so gentle and kind by nature, of course.
Do you know, violence distressed him so much that he couldn’t bear to see animals teased or hurt? Even insects.”
Chambers saw out of the corner of his eye a mystifying look pass over Pendergast’s usually neutral face. “Not even insects?”
“He was a little Buddhist, that one,” said Aiken with a laugh.
“You said his grandmother had strict religious views. Could you elaborate on that?”
Aiken shrugged. “I don’t know much. She’d built a chapel at the rest home, and Parker had to attend services every morning. It was all he could do to catch the bus in time for school.”
Hearing this, Chambers flashed back on an image—of a V-shaped candelabra in the burning mansion, set before rows of benches, aglow with fire.
“Anything else of importance?” he asked. “Habits, anecdotes, anything?”
Aiken shook his head. “You know how some kids go through dramatic changes in adolescence? Not Parker. He was the same thoughtful, intellectually curious, sensitive person on the day he graduated as he was when he first entered my class. He went to Tulane on a full scholarship, you know.”
As they drove away from the school, Chambers felt secretly vindicated.
Pendergast clearly had been hunting up an abused, twisted childhood for Wickman and was puzzled at finding none.
Chambers, too, was surprised, but in his mind it only reinforced his assertion that looking into Wickman’s childhood was a waste of time.
Perhaps this experience was teaching his junior partner an important lesson.
These mundane, almost bucolic stories gave the lie to any hint that Wickman might have had a troubled childhood.
He stretched, then glanced at Pendergast. The man had schooled him so many times over the last week, he felt a little good-humored maliciousness might be in order.
“So, Agent Pendergast,” he said. “I’m curious about where your theory will take us next. It’s not too late to hunt up the school janitor, you know.”
Instead of responding, Pendergast merely tightened his lips—but whether he was deliberating or stewing in his own juices, Chambers had no way of knowing.