The Occupied Read online

  Eventually I did a few smart things. I decided to get an actual job to keep me busy, so I left my seat at the barstool and started to wait tables at Howard’s.

  Then I started going to a little church called Port-of-Peace. The pastor, Banks Trumbly, was a part-timer who walked with a limp and had a day job on one of the commercial fishing boats.

  For a while, even before visiting Port-of-Peace, I had been taking Elijah White’s advice about reading the Bible. The book of Ecclesiastes struck a chord with me. A sort of low bass note. In one place it read, “Like fish caught in a treacherous net and birds trapped in a snare, so the sons of men are ensnared at an evil time when it suddenly falls on them.” I thought about the evil times that were behind me, and my escape from New York City. Since coming to the island, I hadn’t bumped into any of the dark forces. But then, it was just a matter of percentages, wasn’t it? New York City has a population of well over eight million. The odds are much more likely that at any one time there might be a possessed soul or two in the mix. I didn’t know the population of Ocracoke Island, but even at the height of the tourist season, it was minuscule.

  From time to time I did wonder about future encounters. And about the other part in Ecclesiastes that makes an obvious point when it says a man “cannot dispute with him who is stronger than he is.” Those supernatural ghouls were stronger, and I knew that. Yet I knew that God was stronger still. I was banking on that.

  On the occupational side of things, I also gave some thought to what Patty had said to me at the real estate closing. One day I called her up. After asking how they were enjoying my former condo, I dove right into the reason for the call.

  “Patty, remember when you talked about my doing some writing?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m thinking about it. Any advice?”

  She told me that she knew someone, a friend of hers, who was looking for a reporter for a true-crime magazine, and would I be interested? She said it wouldn’t get me rich, which was not my goal by then, so I said sure, I’d give it a try.

  I had a six-week deadline. They needed fifteen hundred words. So I jumped onto the Internet to gobble up as much information as I could about writing like a journalist. The editor at American Crime Digest liked it and put me on as a regular contributor, specializing in reports about bizarre murder cases. A little later, a monthly legal magazine started shooting me some assignments to report on oddball lawsuits and out-of-the-ordinary courtroom stories. With my articles on all things weird, I was beginning to feel a little like the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! But it paid the bills, and I found some pleasure in my modest career as a legal reporter.

  I was starting to feel just about settled into my new island life when I got a text from Dan Hoover. I hadn’t heard from him in over a year. He said that he had connected with Bobby Budleigh and learned that Bobby was heading back to Manitou, and maybe all of us could rendezvous there in a few weeks. Dan explained that he was cutting a record and then would be doing a one-night event in Chicago, which was only a few hours’ drive from Manitou. Maybe, he said, we could all join up after that. He was still looking for Augie Bedders and wondered if I had any leads.

  I told him no, regarding Augie’s whereabouts, but absolutely, yes, I was hyped over the idea of our getting together. I asked him to keep me in the loop.

  Suddenly, all of the old memories about our life as teens in Manitou came down on me like a rain shower. I didn’t realize that the past had a long reach and was not over yet. Not by a long shot.

  A week later, Dick Valentine called me. He said that the Sid Castor prosecution was finally resolved and he was free to talk to me about it. Castor’s attorney had cut a deal with the DA for thirty years in prison in return for a guilty plea to one of the homicides and dismissal of the others. The forensic evidence was thin, and the circumstantial links were even thinner. Valentine said he was disappointed at first, because in his considered opinion he thought Castor deserved “a dirt nap.” But then he added, “He ended up getting one anyway.”

  I asked what he meant and he explained that during his lockup, Sid Castor had been knifed to death by another prisoner who had used a homemade shiv. It happened shortly after Castor had started his prison sentence.

  He asked me a little about how things were going, and I brought him up to speed. Then he told me something that I hadn’t heard before. It was in response to my asking him if Castor had ever mentioned me during the case, before he was sentenced and shipped off to prison.

  Valentine said, “Yeah, he did.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “After the plea deal, Castor’s lawyer let me talk to him. Castor said he was surprised that he hadn’t finished you off when he was choking you in the alley. I told him no, that he didn’t finish you. That you were just fine. Which was odd, because obviously Castor should have known that if he had killed you, he would have been charged with that too. Which he wasn’t. Then Castor said something else to me.”

  I replied, “I’m waiting.”

  Valentine spoke slow at that point, like he knew it might be important. “Castor had this weird grin when he talked about you, Trevor. He said, and I quote—‘I thought he was dead already.’ Those were his exact words. Then he said, ‘Be sure and tell Trevor Black what I just said,’ and laughed.”

  I told Valentine that I was glad he told me. But inside I felt an electric shiver. When I left New York, I had assumed all of that was behind me, but it was only wishful thinking. I had been wrong about it, and not just about that. But also in failing to realize, until it was too late, how my hometown in Wisconsin, and the events of my life there, had everything to do with everything.

  25

  After a few months with no further contact from Dick Valentine, I was hunched over my laptop at the desk in my bungalow on Ocracoke Island, working on a magazine piece. This one was on the plight of young runaways and their involvement in street crime. By then, Ocracoke Island was my home. But the memory of Heather, the young victim in New York who died at the hand of my client, still hovered over me as I worked on the assignment. I liked to think that other Heathers out there could still be rescued.

  By eleven thirty that morning, having interviewed two authorities on juvenile delinquency by phone and finished a few pages, I decided to call it quits. I needed a break.

  I phoned my friend Roy Dance and asked if he wanted to go fishing. His wife, Elaine, had respiratory problems and always needed to keep a tank of oxygen close to her, so Roy was careful to schedule his time out of the house. But he said his daughter happened to be visiting just then, and she could keep an eye on his wife, so he was free to hang out with me. Something stirred in me as I thought about the children Courtney and I never had the chance to raise, and I thought to myself, What a blessing it is to have a daughter. I hope Roy feels that way too.

  When Roy arrived, we drove to my slip at the harbor and launched off the island on my fishing boat, heading for the Gulf Stream. I had struggled for a while to name the boat. I finally painted the single word Unnamed on the stern. People who read it remarked how I must have given up trying to decide on the right name. But that really wasn’t it. It was the fact that certain mysterious things—some bad, some good—come to us without names attached.

  Two hours later we were motoring into the deep waters looking for yellowfin tuna.

  Roy had brought a cooler full of beer and a bottle of Scotch. I told him no thanks, that I was making an effort to dry out my brain and renew my soul, but maybe I’d help myself to a single beer once we had settled on a trolling spot. Roy said he wasn’t up to fishing and offered to hang on to the wheel while I strapped myself into the fighting chair.

  We baited my hook for tuna, but we didn’t get any. Forty-five minutes later I hooked something better. It was a blue marlin that must have been three hundred pounds and that let us know he was there before I even felt him on my line, because we saw a big swirling dent in the water when he went after the bai
t.

  Then the fight. He broke out of the water, showed his white belly, and tossed his long saber of a bill, then dove down deep. Oh no, I thought, he’s going to go down and down forever, and I’m going to lose him. “Roy!” I yelled. “Slow the boat down and come about. Stay close to the line.” In the water, the marlin was stronger than me, and I knew it; if this monster fish had a mind to, he could have worn me out.

  But for some reason, as I was trying to just hang on, the monster gave up and started surfacing. I fought him for a while. My arms were tired, but though I still had the strength to keep going, I didn’t have to, because in less than an hour we had him up and into the boat.

  We knew that we would throw him back. But first I gave Roy my iPhone to snap some pictures with me crouching next to the big fish.

  There was plenty of blood flowing from his mouth, and it pooled on the deck and mixed with the seawater, forming a pink pond at my feet and soaking my deck shoes.

  After the photos, we unhooked him and rolled him back into the dark blue of the Atlantic to see him streak off. I was still standing in the pool of seawater and blood when my iPhone rang. Roy handed me my cell. The area code was from New Jersey. Dan Hoover was calling.

  I picked up with a hearty hello, because it was good to hear from him, and I was wondering about his plans to have all the band members of The Assault assemble back in Manitou in a week or two for a reunion.

  But Dan cut me off suddenly. His voice was troubled. “Hey. Listen. This is terrible, man. Rotten news. I feel like I got kicked in the stomach. You will too.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about Bobby.”

  “Bobby Budleigh? What about him?”

  “Something terrible.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He’s dead, man. He’s gone.”

  A silent tornado. Mental debris and confusion. I had to take a few seconds to collect my head. “What happened? How . . . ?”

  “I don’t know the details,” Dan admitted. “But it sounds bad. I tried to call his cell because I knew he should have arrived back in Manitou doing some kind of science thing for his consulting company. That’s what his wife, Vicky, told me before, almost a month ago when I called his house in Colorado. But when I tried to call him yesterday, no answer. So I called Vicky again in Colorado. Vicky’s sister picked up. I explained who I was. She told me that Bobby had been killed.”

  The boat was rocking slowly and the riggings were creaking as I stood there trying to process the shock and looking down at the deck where I was standing in the blood and the water from the big blue marlin.

  I didn’t say anything at first.

  Dan broke the silence. “I’m trying to get more information.”

  “Where did he die?”

  “In Manitou.”

  “You really don’t know anything else?”

  Dan said, “No, man. That’s everything.”

  There was silence for a while.

  Then Dan said, “Look, I know you’re a lawyer . . .”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Well, yeah. Okay. But weren’t you some kind of private investigator for a while too?”

  “Used to be. Left that. I write for legal magazines now.” I was still numb.

  “I know that you can get information. Right? You know how to do that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know how to do that.”

  More silence. Until I decided. “Okay, Dan. I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Find out what happened to Bobby. Then I’ll let you know.”

  Dan thanked me. He said, “Maybe by then I’ll hear back from Augie. I tracked down his aunt, who I knew because she used to work with my mom at the Red Owl in Manitou. I gave her the message to have him call me, wherever he is. When Augie connects, we’ll have to tell him the news, in case he doesn’t know.”

  I struggled to make conversation. I asked Dan how his tour was going.

  “My Chicago thing is coming up. But right now . . . Man, I’m just so totally bummed about Bobby. Can’t stop thinking about it.”

  I had another thought. About somebody else. “Does anybody know where Marilyn Parlow is these days? I lost track of her in college. I think she’d want to know about Bobby.”

  “Yeah, Marilyn. Haven’t thought of her in ages. Don’t have the faintest about her.”

  When we hung up, I asked Roy to start motoring us to shore. Meanwhile, I pulled up Detective Dick Valentine’s number on my contact list and left a message on his voice mail telling him everything I knew about Bobby’s death, which wasn’t much. Maybe Dick could get the Manitou police department to tell him, as one cop shop to another, what had happened to my friend.

  26

  It was nine thirty in the morning the next day, and my usual routine would have had me slurping down coffee in my island cottage. But instead, I was just standing there, staring out beyond the tall sea grass on the little patch of sand that was my front yard and scanning the greenish-gray ocean all the way to the horizon. It was time to sit down at my laptop and get to work, but I couldn’t. I felt cemented to the floor. The death of Bobby Budleigh was sinking in.

  There was misery about it on multiple levels, even though I hadn’t talked to Bobby in twenty years. I’d had the chance to connect with him, but I disregarded several notices over the years from the class reunion committee and had no contact with my high school friends until Dan Hoover started pursuing me.

  So I stood there, holding my Mets cup in my hand, with the coffee growing cold. I heard my ringtone and had to hunt around the place, looking for my cell. When I found it, Dick Valentine’s name was on the screen.

  “Trevor, it’s been a while.”

  “It has.”

  “Saw a crime magazine that had one of your articles in it.”

  “Did you buy a copy?”

  “Naw. I deal with murder all day long. If I’m going to read, it’s going to be something fun.”

  “I’m not fun?”

  “You’re an interesting guy. But fun? That’s a stretch.”

  I laughed. It was good to talk to him. I asked him if he had a chance to check up on Bobby Budleigh’s death. He said he did. “I’ve got some details for you.”

  “That was quick,” I said.

  “Like I said, you’re always dragging interesting stuff behind you.” Then he added, “Like a beagle I used to own as a kid. Always coming into the house with some dead animal in his teeth. So yeah, you drag some interesting stuff to me. But definitely not fun. Not in this case.”

  I cleared my throat. “Tell me.”

  “Your friend Mr. Budleigh was the victim of some really foul play.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Shot in the back of the head.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Out in the sticks, at the municipal fringe of Manitou.”

  “Any suspects? Any motive for this?”

  “Not so far. I spoke to the head honcho in the sheriff’s department. They’re working it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. There’s more.”

  That didn’t sound good. But then, how much worse could it be? Bobby had been murdered. “Okay,” I said. “I want to hear.”

  “They found his body at the spot where they think he was killed. Sounds like they did the usual forensics.”

  “What did they find?”

  “You don’t need to be a pathologist to figure it out.”

  “Meaning?”

  “This is going to sound familiar.”

  I waited.

  Valentine said, “His heart had been sliced out. The incision was in the upper-left quadrant of his chest.”

  I let him finish.

  “And . . . some writing on his body. They wouldn’t tell me what. They don’t want anything to leak out. They’re still tracking suspects.” When Dick was done with the facts, he added, “Really sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You need anything else?”

  “No
t now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  “You got a plan in mind?”

  I had made a promise to Dan Hoover. To find the truth about Bobby’s death. But there was more to it than that. Dick Valentine hinted at it back in New York, maybe even inadvertently. The higher purpose for my special ability. I had often thought back on that. There are no accidents in God’s plan.

  “Yes. I’ve got a plan,” I replied. “Tracking down a monster. The one that killed Bobby. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  27

  At the very end of the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” there’s a line that goes like this: “He’s lost in the wilderness; he’s lost in bitterness.” Bobby’s murder was heavy on my mind.

  The world is a broken place, and I felt as if I was being drawn into the deepest of the broken places.

  It was a week after my talk with Dick Valentine. I had deplaned at the Milwaukee airport, and I pulled my roller bag behind me to the car rental desk. The only thing they had left was a little Fiat, which I took. As I squeezed in, I remembered the James Brown song. The lyrics captured something about the human condition. There was no template for what I was trying to do. No GPS for the dark territories where I was heading. I had only my sense of calling and the “sword of the Spirit” that Elijah White had talked about. It would be one step at a time. Faith walking.