Chapter Twenty-One

In the evening, when Alice Van de Veer opens her front door to find me standing there, I wonder how much she knows about her husband's job at the Hawthorne Institute. Is she aware of everything that went on there? Or would she be as surprised as I was when my mother, after much coaxing, finally uttered the name Fritz Van de Veer.

My shock stemmed from Fritz's appearance more than anything else. I assumed he was a banker or a used-car salesman. I'd always sensed a slight slipperiness lurking just beneath his affable exterior. Now I intend to find out just how slippery he truly is.

"Well, hello, Ethan," Alice says, beaming. "What a pleasant surprise!"

A surprise? Maybe. But my being here is anything but pleasant. In fact, the Van de Veer house is the last place I want to be.

"Is Fritz home?" I say. "I need to talk to him."

"He is." Alice disappears into the house, her voice echoing within its depths. "Fritz? Ethan Marsh is here. Come say hi!"

Mr. Van de Veer soon appears, dressed as if for a corporate picnic. Tommy Bahama shirt, chinos, and penny loafers, which I didn't even know they made anymore. The clothes and the beige blandness of his hair and skin make him eerily inconspicuous. I suspect that's the reason I missed him in those photos hanging inside the Hawthorne Institute. After ending the call with my parents, I looked through them again, finding Fritz in ones dating back to the early eighties, just another face blending in with all the others.

Seeing him now, I need all the willpower I have not to punch him square in the jaw and then start kicking him the moment he hits the floor. Both my hands have curled into fists on their own accord. I stuff them into my pockets to keep them from swinging.

If my hunch is correct, then he took Billy, possibly because he thought it was me. And while I don't think Fritz did the actual kidnapping, I do suspect he's the one who set it all in motion.

"Ethan, hey," he says. "I was just going to treat myself to a scotch. You want one?"

"What I want," I say, "is for you to tell me if Billy Barringer was your intended target or if it was me."

Fritz freezes. The only noticeable motion comes from his eyes, which ping-pong with fear, and his mouth, which collapses into a frown.

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about, son," he says.

"Yeah, you do. Just like you knew all this time that Billy's body was on the grounds of the Hawthorne Institute."

All the color leaves Fritz's face. "It was?"

If his surprise is an act, it's a very convincing one. I almost believe he really didn't know.

"Maybe you should tell me everything—and I mean literally everything—you know about the night Billy Barringer vanished."

"Not here," Fritz says, sneaking a glance into the house. "Your place. I'll tell Alice I'm going for a walk."

Ten minutes later, he's cutting across the cul-de-sac. I watch his approach from the bedroom window, his face blurred by the encroaching dusk but the rest of him perfectly clear. He's adjusted his wardrobe since I left his house, wearing a gray windbreaker over his gaudily printed shirt and swapping the loafers for a pair of sneakers. They flash white in the deepening gloom as he steps purposefully into the yard.

"They found Billy at the institute?" he says when I meet him at the front door.

"Yes. In the lake."

I open the door wider, signaling for him to enter. Fritz shakes his head and says, "Can we stay outside? I think I still need some fresh air."

"The backyard then," I say, certain he also doesn't want to have this conversation in full view of the rest of Hemlock Circle.

Fritz follows me as I walk stiffly through the foyer, past the dining room, and into the kitchen. There, I open the patio door and we step into the backyard. It's dark here, the only light a rectangle of brightness spilling through the glass of the patio door. Fritz edges away from it, stopping in a shadowy patch of grass, his hands shoved into the pockets of his windbreaker. Whether he's aware of it or not, he's chosen to stand on the exact spot where my tent was located the night Billy was taken.

I join him there, my senses sharpened by nervousness. I feel the grass sinking beneath my sneakers, smell the aftershave Fritz splashed onto his cheeks this morning.

"I assume your mother told you she once worked at the institute," he says.

"She did. She also told me what she saw—and that you fired her because of it."

"She shouldn't have done that," Fritz says. "There's no expiration date on that document she signed, so it's still binding. But since old Ezra's been dead for more than twenty-five years, I guess it doesn't matter anymore."

"Sounds like Mr. Hawthorne had a lot of secrets. Big ones. Big enough to maybe kill to keep hidden."

Fritz jolts, possibly from confusion, probably from surprise. "That's a mighty big accusation, Ethan. Irresponsible, too."

"But is it wrong?"

At first, Fritz says nothing, his sudden plunge into silence a stark contrast with the noise coming from the woods. The symphonic chirp of crickets and the droning chorus of cicadas. I wonder if Billy is with them there now. Blending in with the shadows. Quietly watching. Waiting for justice.

"What's your goal here, son?" Fritz finally says.

"The truth."

"In my experience, men who say they want the truth end up wishing they had settled for the lie."

I'm not one of them. Thirty years of knowing nothing about what happened to Billy has me primed for the facts, no matter how brutal they may be.

"Let's start with the Hawthorne Institute," I say. "What went on there?"

Fritz straightens his spine and clears his throat. "The institute was devoted to the study of parapsychology. Are you familiar with the field?"

I am, slightly. A week ago, I would have dismissed what I've heard as pseudoscience. Now, having experienced some of it myself, I'm less doubtful.

"Give me your definition," I say.

Fritz pulls a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of his windbreaker. After tapping one out and lighting up, he says, "Parapsychology is the belief that there are forces at work beyond the easily proven ones we encounter every day. Extrasensory perception, telepathy, clairvoyance. I'm sure you've occasionally been hit with a sudden sense of déjà vu. Have you ever wondered why?"

"Can't say I have."

"Well, Ezra Hawthorne did," Fritz says, exhaling a stream of smoke that hovers in the still, humid air. "From a very young age, he wondered about many such things. He didn't think the way most people do. He was more attuned to what's beyond the things we see and know to be fact. He told me once it was because he emerged from the womb stillborn. For a full minute, there was no life in his infant body until, suddenly, there was. Because of that, he said, a piece of him always remained tethered to the afterlife."

I give him a look. "That sounds like bullshit."

"It might have been," Fritz admits. "But he believed in things like that. Because he was blessed with both money and an estate with plenty of privacy, he created a place where people could study unexplained phenomena without mockery or skepticism. That was the purpose of the institute. To provide room, board, and research space for those trying to explain the unexplainable. Why can some people sense things more than others? How can someone seemingly read minds, predict futures, move things without laying a finger on them?"

My mind's eye returns to the photograph of the men in robes and what my mother said she saw.

"And occult rituals? Where do those come in?"

"Occult." Fritz makes a disapproving sound. "Mr. Hawthorne despised that word. He said it was simply a label people put on practices they either feared or failed to understand. After all, something called occult by one person could have deep, religious meaning to someone else. It's all in how you perceive it."

"What did my mother perceive the night you fired her?"

Fritz looks past me to the forest at the edge of the yard, almost as if he can see the two miles to the Hawthorne Institute, where Ezra Hawthorne and his robed cohorts continue to circle a fire.

"That was unfortunate," he says. "Your mother was mistaken about what she saw. I suppose that was to be expected. It looked far more sinister than it really was. The institute had a policy in place for such situations, which was instant termination and a nondisclosure agreement. It avoided a lot of explaining on our part and a lot of unwanted scrutiny from the outside world. As a result, your mother has held a grudge against me for the past thirty years."

"I don't think it's a grudge," I say. "I think she was scared of you—and that place."

"She had no reason to be."

"She witnessed a satanic ritual."

"Satanic?" Fritz does an incredulous headshake, as if he can't believe I'm so dumb. "That was a ritual practiced by a small sect of Druids in the fourth century BC. It was an offering to the earth, expressing gratitude for what it provides."

"By ‘offering,' you mean sacrifice."

"No," Fritz says, the tip of his cigarette flaring orange as he takes a drag. "I mean a pig's heart I procured from a butcher right before the ceremony began. Ezra Hawthorne had many eccentricities, like requiring all men at the institute to wear a black suit like he did, but he abhorred violence. He never would have ordered me to harm a child, which is what you've been insinuating. Nor would I ever have resorted to such a thing."

"So he was a pacifist."

"Yes. Ezra was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to religion, master of none. If he had any deep-seated spiritual beliefs, he never shared them with me. But I do know he kept an open mind about all of them. He attended Catholic Mass, studied the Quran and the Torah, spent a month living with Buddhist monks in Tibet, and, yes, conducted ancient Druid rituals. All in an attempt to expand his understanding of the universe."

"And what was your role in all of this?" I say. "How did you end up at the institute?"

"Me? Like almost everyone who found their way there, I was seeking answers."

"Did you find them?"

Fritz shakes his head. "But I've learned to live with the uncertainty. Working for Ezra Hawthorne helped with that, even though, outside of the occasional test or group study, I didn't take part, nor did I want to. I was just an administrator. I kept the place running smoothly so Mr. Hawthorne and the others could focus on their research."

"Who else did research there?"

"Plenty of established scientists and psychologists who wanted to explore a niche interest without fearing ridicule by their colleagues. Don't ask me for specific names. Even though the place closed long ago, I can't give them to you."

"I know one name," I say. "Johnny Chen."

Fritz eyes me through a stream of smoke, surprised. "Yes, there was a year in which he spent a lot of time at the institute."

"But he wasn't a scientist or psychologist. He was just a teenager. Why was he there?"

"Johnny took part in a group study of ESP. While his results showed no promise in that area, he displayed a curiosity about the place and the work we did there. Because of this, Mr. Hawthorne invited him to come back. He thought Johnny had potential."

"To do what?" I say.

"Continue the institute's work. Ezra was always encouraging like-minded people from the next generation. In Johnny, he noticed a sensitivity most teenage boys lack. Unfortunately, those who are the most sensitive are sometimes also the most troubled. Which Johnny was. When he overdosed, it was a shock to all of us."

I turn to the Chens' house next door, the windows visible over the hedge all aglow. "No one at the institute knew he was using drugs?"

"Of course not."

"And no one there had anything to do with his death?"

Fritz takes one last drag before dropping the cigarette and stomping it out on the grass.

"Just so I can keep track, you're now accusing me of two murders?"

"Can you blame me for being suspicious? Two boys from this very cul-de-sac were at the Hawthorne Institute shortly before their deaths. One died of a drug overdose, and the other was abducted and murdered."

"And both were sad coincidences," Fritz says.

"Then why didn't the police search the grounds of the institute after Billy disappeared?"

"Because they never asked." Fritz makes a palms-out gesture of helplessness. "If they had, we certainly would have let them search the property. Especially if we had any inkling that Billy's body was there. He was found in the lake, you say?"

"Yes. The base of the falls."

"Could he have fallen in?"

I recall what Ragesh told me about Billy's injuries and the blanket he'd been wrapped in. It makes me wonder if Fritz's curiosity is genuine or if he's only pretending not to know the details.

"No," I say. "But his disappearance was all over the news. Why didn't you invite the police to take a look around?"

"I suggested it, but Ezra shot me down," Fritz says. "I disagreed, seeing how we had nothing to hide. But privacy was important to him."

"And that was the only reason?" I say. "Privacy?"

"He also knew the authorities would jump to the same conclusions you have if they knew Billy had been at the institute the afternoon before he disappeared."

"You knew about that?"

Fritz nods. "I spoke to him myself."

Yet he has the nerve to act offended that I'm suspicious of him, Ezra Hawthorne, the entire institute. I shuffle on the grass, angry and impatient. Fritz notices and says, "I liked Billy. He and his family were good neighbors for several years. And think about it, son: If I did kill Billy—which I absolutely did not—would it make sense to dispose of his body at the place where I worked? The place I ran?"

I concede that it makes zero sense.

"The same thing applies to Ezra Hawthorne. Who, by the way, was ninety-four at the time. It would have been impossible for him to cut open a tent, kidnap a boy, kill him, and hide his body in the lake."

"Maybe he had help," I say.

"Would it lessen your suspicion if I told you Mr. Hawthorne was also deeply upset by the boy's disappearance?"

"No," I say. "Seeing how they didn't know each other."

"Oh, but they did. They had quite a lengthy conversation."

"About what?" I say, even though, considering Billy's interests, I have a pretty good idea.

"Communicating with the dead."

Fritz's cigarette smoke still hangs in the air, lingering. By now it's drifted all the way to woods—a gray cloud curling through the trees.

"That was Mr. Hawthorne's other main interest, by the way," Fritz says. "And another subject of much research at the institute. I never experienced any of it firsthand. But Mr. Hawthorne and a few others claimed to have made contact with spirits many times, through several different means."

I'm hit with a head-to-toe jolt.

It turns out Billy had been right.

At the Hawthorne Institute, they did indeed talk to ghosts.