SCOUT Read online

  My mom does not recognise that I am her daughter. She does not remember that I am part of her life at all. It is the single most hurtful thing, and I prefer not to be reminded of it at every moment.

  What would you do if your mom did not know who you were?

  Chapter 2

  The next morning a police cruiser pulled up outside as I was getting Eileen settled into her favourite chair. Flash 105.5FM was playing back-to-back hits from the ’80s, and Mom was as happy and relaxed as anyone who had half a mind could be. Last night I’d bathed her, washing the mud from her feet, and in the morning had found a pair of slippers to warm her toes. She wore her second favourite bathrobe, a fluffy number with ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ on the back. I told her that the pink one was in the wash, when in fact it was so ripped and stained that I had put it in the trash.

  When I looked up, a female police sergeant was walking up the path.

  Here comes trouble.

  I met her at the door. She was a short woman, in her forties, a few strands of grey in her neat bob. Her name was Molly Maguire.

  “Are you Lauren?” she asked. “Lauren Mann?”

  I wrinkled my nose at mention of my real name.

  “Scout. Everyone calls me Scout.”

  “Sure – Scout. Can I come in?”

  “What is it you want?” I asked, knowing that it wasn’t good news to have a police sergeant standing on my doorstep at nine o’clock in the morning.

  “Please, Scout, it’ll be easier inside.”

  We stepped in to see Eileen dancing, ’80s style, to Duran Duran. Flash FM being Mom’s favourite station, I had gathered an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music from the last two decades of the twentieth century. If the radio was not on, then I would select something from the CD shelf. Anything by Dire Straits, Depeche Mode or The Cure would keep her happy. She preferred British music to American, but it all sounded the same to me.

  “Eileen?” asked Molly, softly.

  Mom didn’t register her at all, keeping the beat with Simon Le Bon and the other Durans.

  “Can she hear me?” she asked.

  “She’s not deaf.”

  “Eileen!” Molly called again, moving into her eyeline. Mom looked up, briefly, but nothing registered on her face.

  “It’s me, Molly Maguire,” said the copper. Eileen nodded, and went back to watching her footwork. Molly’s face creased with a sad smile. It was regret rather than pity.

  It was a look I’d seen many times before.

  *

  “You off to work?” she asked.

  We stood in the kitchen. I made her coffee, dressed in The Bean Counter’s green and brown uniform.

  “Late shift,” I explained.

  “Uh-huh,” nodded Molly, blowing across her mug. Something by The Human League blasted from next door.

  “Who looks after Mom when you’re gone?” she asked.

  “She’s fine for a few hours.”

  “Except for yesterday.”

  “I have people look in from time to time. Neighbours. It’s never happened before.”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you tell me what this is about?” I asked.

  “It’s not what you think, Scout. I’m not here to make a judgement. It’s just that I hadn’t seen your mom for such a long time. I was in the station last night.”

  “Ah,” I nodded, as if that explained everything.

  “I knew her as Eileen Wartzbeck. She always wanted to ditch the name. We lost contact after high school, and I didn’t know her married name. Didn’t even know she got married, so I thought that maybe she had left town.”

  “You were at school together?”

  “Oh yeah. Good friends, back when this music was all the rage. We used to like the Brit stuff – with the big hair and the big make-up. It was called ‘New Wave’, though I guess it looks pretty old hat now. Your mom, she was something to behold, hair crimped to one side, and a ra-ra skirt. Dressed like that we could stop the traffic dead on Main Street.”

  “You’ve seen her now. She don’t remember.”

  “I’m sorry, Scout. I found her too late. The thing is, your mom was really something special, and I think you are too.”

  I leant back against the counter, arms clamped tight. This conversation was getting weird.

  “Your mom was a ‘tracker’,” said Molly. “You know what that is?”

  “No. Haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Tracking was a special ability she had,” explained Molly. “She could find things that people had lost, and she could find missing people. She kept it hidden most of the time because it scared her. It was a second sight, something magical maybe, or a part of her brain that none of us knew how to use. She spoke to no one about it, but I was her best friend. She told me.”

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “Still doesn’t ring a bell. Is this Eileen you’re talking about?”

  “Lauren, your nickname’s ‘Scout’. That’s not a coincidence, is it? I think you know what I’m talking about, and I think that you have the same talent.”

  *

  “It was real hot. One of those bakin’ summers…”

  I was desperate for the copper to leave, but she had settled into a kitchen chair and was telling me about a summer thirty years ago.

  “We sat up all night,” Molly told me. “Windows open to the bugs and the stink of the factory, watching TV from London, England. It was ‘Live Aid’ – you’ve heard of that?”

  “Of course. It’s one of Eileen’s favourite CDs.”

  “I’ll bet. Big charity concert, all the biggest stars. We were sixteen, Scout, can you believe it? ‘Bout your age. I was a little thinner then, but your mom was just as beautiful,” said Molly.

  “That was the night the boy disappeared,” she told me. “Kids were playing out late, finding it impossible to sleep. I know it’s a cliché, but no one bothered locking doors in those days. Kids just raced up and down these streets on their bikes and skateboards, swinging on old tyres and jumping in the ford to cool off.

  “A boy went missing in the city. They thought he might be in the lake, so they sent the divers in. My dad was a cop, so I knew all about it. The clock was ticking and still they couldn’t find the lad. It’s my fault that your mom got involved.”

  “What happened?”

  She’d suckered me now. I uncrossed my arms and joined Molly at the table.

  “I asked your mom to help find him.”

  “You did what?”

  “I knew she had the talent. We used to joke about it, me and her. I was always the scatty one, believe it or not. Put something down and – bang! – it would be gone. Curlers, eyeliner – all gone.”

  She stopped suddenly and cocked her head.

  “Why’re you looking at me like that?” she asked.

  “Just the thought of curlers, that’s all,” I said.

  “It was the mid-‘80s. We all had the hair. Get over it.”

  I laughed, thinking of the old photographs in the drawer. Crimped hair for the girls, shaved into mullets for the boys. Faces sweaty under the disco lights. I guess if I looked hard enough, I would find Molly in amongst them, disguised in pan make-up and green eyeshadow.

  “Eileen said she’d help,” continued Molly. “We all wanted to help, it being a downer after ‘Live Aid’ that a boy had been abducted. It was brave of Eileen to speak to my dad. He was old school. I can still see him, hand resting on his belt, listening to her story. There was a line of sweat round his neck, there being no air conditioning. He was kind enough. He knew we wanted to help, he just didn’t believe us. He suggested that we form a ‘Yellow Ribbon’ club to raise money for the little boy’s family. Eileen was furious. My God, she spat a curse or two when we got out of the precinct. She was so mad she said ‘Let’s find him oursel
ves’. I never seen her so worked up, so full of passion.”

  “And did you find him?” I asked. “Did you find the boy?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t take Eileen long. She started in the playground where he’d last been seen. She took her shoes off, told me that she could feel the vibrations better that way.”

  A tremor of recognition flitted across my face.

  “She ever tell you that?” Molly asked.

  “Nope,” I replied, shaking my head.

  “Barefoot she seemed to pick up his signal easily enough. Like tuning in to FM. The cops’d been looking in the wrong direction. He wasn’t in the lake; he’d been taken the other way. Eileen followed the trail, and I followed her. It was tough, you know? As she was doing it I could see that she was crying. I asked ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ trying to cheer her up, telling her that we would find the boy alive. But she shook her head, the tears streaming down her face. ‘But he’s so scared, Molly’. That’s what she said to me.”

  Molly looked up at me, her eyes glistening.

  “‘He’s so scared’. She was living the young boy’s emotion, feeling the same terror that he felt. You see, Scout, I didn’t realise until then that that was how she did it. I thought she saw clues, like fingerprints or something. But now I understood that Eileen read traces of emotion. Touching the ground helped. The stronger the emotion the more powerful the trail. ‘He’s so scared’ – her voice haunts me still because she was sharing the fear. I told you Eileen was brave, Scout, but that was the bravest thing I have ever seen, and I’ve been in uniform twenty-five years.”

  “Was he alive?”

  Molly shook her head.

  “He looked asleep. Curled up in the bottom of a storm drain. I remember thinking ‘Thank God it’s hot’, because he hadn’t a stitch of clothing on him. The bastard had left him there, naked.”

  *

  Molly had opened a door to 1985 that I wished she’d kept locked. In that distant summer, Eileen had a waterfall of curly hair, a narrow waist, and she was scared of nothing.

  What she did not expect was for the police to turn on her.

  They could not believe that a sixteen-year-old girl had scouted out the child where divers and dogs had failed. They thought that she was involved in the crime, and that she had duped Molly into believing in some kind of supernatural power.

  Molly stood by her friend, but Eileen refused to give them proof. She had a strong will - I knew that from our daily battle in the bathroom. That must be the part of her cerebrum that had yet to be visited by the Grim Reaper.

  Eileen told the cops to believe her, or screw it. They couldn’t charge her with anything, so eventually they had to let her go. But she never trusted the cops after that, and they never thought of her as anything but a charlatan.

  “But I know what she did, Scout,” said Molly, washing her coffee mug in the sink. “I believed in her. After that, she turned her back on her talent, refusing to talk about it. It was not the horror of what we had found that kept her quiet, it was the derision. The humiliation of being suspected of a terrible crime. A talent like hers is a two-edged sword. It can do wonderful things, but it scares people. And scared people strike out. It’s easier to accuse than it is to believe.

  “I can see what the illness has done to your mom’s mind, so I know that there’ll never be a way to prove what she was capable of. But her talent hasn’t been lost.”

  “How d’you know that? She can’t even find her way to the bathroom.”

  “But she’s got a daughter. You. The Scout. You find things, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. It’s just a nickname I’ve had since elementary school.”

  “But you followed your mom to the PD?”

  “It was a sensible enough deduction. She was wandering around in a pink bathrobe, so it’d only be a matter of time ‘til your guys picked her up.”

  “But it doesn’t take a cop to notice that you both had mud on your feet. And you weren’t wearing any shoes. Who goes out in the rain without shoes? You’d been following her, Scout, hadn’t you? Tracking her.”

  “No. Not at all. This story you’ve told me – it’s just crazy. Eileen’s never spoken about any of it.”

  “It’s all true.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it means nothing to me.”

  Molly took out a business card.

  “You think about what I’ve told you,” she said as she handed me the card. “My number’s on that, or email if you prefer. I came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to reminisce. Fact is I need help. I need someone of your abilities.

  “A child’s gone missing.”

  Chapter 3

  Let’s get something straight. I’m called Scout because of what I do, not because of some pussy character in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  I hate that book.

  In Middle Grade they never stopped yadda yaddaing about it - like Harper Lee changed the way that white people treat black people. From what I understand, black people did an awful lot more to break the bonds of racism and slavery than a white novelist ever did.

  You can shove To Kill a Mockingbird, along with Atticus Finch and the “little baby steps” of reform. Equality, when it came, wasn’t about those small steps, it was about giant leaps.

  Mrs Dolan, who taught English, could never understand why I was so angry. I shared nothing with my fictional namesake – neither a father, nor a cosy life from which I could face down a lynch mob. Right about the time Mrs Dolan was pinning a picture of Harper Lee onto our class ‘Hall of Fame’, the bottom was falling out of my life:

  News came through that my father had died.

  He had fled before I was born, leaving behind nothing except his name. Despite that, he was my biological father, so I felt pretty bleak.

  But when Mom heard, she went crazy.

  “I don’t know any Tony Mann! Who the hell’s that?” she shouted. “It’s a silly name! What kind of man is called ‘Mann’?”

  “He was my dad!” I shouted back. But Mom looked at me with a blank stare. It stopped me cold, because behind those eyes nobody was home. Her eyes weren’t angry, or in denial, they contained nothing.

  That was the moment I realised that Mom was broken.

  Then she skipped off as if the conversation had never happened. And not once did she mention my father again, even when we got a letter assigning us the remnants of his estate – one hundred and forty-eight dollars and thirty-five cents, and a 1997 Honda Goldwing. The shipping costs would have been more than the bike was worth, so I told them to sell it. I did a pretty good forgery of Mom’s signature, which would come in useful in the years ahead.

  I was thirteen when Mom lost her job. They kept her on at the Portland Construction Company as long as they could. Brian Portland came to the house personally to explain, a cheque in his hand.

  “Times are lean,” he said. “What with the closure of the mill, there isn’t so much work.”

  But that wasn’t the reason they let her go.

  Eileen was no longer herself. At one time she had been a safe pair of hands, trusted to run the accounts. Now the numbers would swim on the page in front of her, and she would shake her head, as if trying to decipher Chinese.

  They moved her into the warehouse, but her uneven temper was dangerous in a place where Hyster forklifts shifted pallets of stone. One day she set off the fire alarm, waiting until everyone had gathered in the parking lot to tell them that it had been a joke. The tragedy is that Eileen was known as a joker, the life of an office party. Now her humour was just disturbing.

  Brian spoke to me after Eileen had run off to hide the cheque.

  “I think your mom needs help,” he said. “It might be depression. Same happened with my wife after Stacey was born. This thing with your dad, it might have tipped her over the edge.”

 
If only things had been that simple.

  The doctor prescribed Zoloft. It was a common antidepressant. He told her that she might have trouble sleeping, and might feel a little restless. But I don’t think he meant what happened next. Mom started to wander.

  She would meander about the house as if intent on an important task. She would drift past the sofa, into the kitchen and around the table, and then back again. Sometimes, depending on how the wind was blowing in that empty space that was her mind, she would head upstairs and open the closets in turn. I thought she was looking for something, so I offered to help. But Mom had already lost what she was looking for, and all that remained was the search itself.

  When I found her naked from the shower, standing on the front path, I knew it was time to seek help.

  *

  It was called atypical frontotemporal dementia.

  Believe me, that’s the short name. The kind of disease that Mom’s got is much longer than that, and it’s related to a defective chromosome in her genes.

  Chromosome 9.

  I do not so much hate chromosome 9 as fear it.

  It’s made of nucleotides, arranged in an orderly helix. It’s the code that defines us all. Mom carried a ticking bomb in chromosome 9. A mutation, where the nucleotide sequence ‘GGGGCC’ is repeated too often. Guanine and cytosine. Two fairly simple chemicals. You have them, I have them, even the amoeba has them, and for most of us they work just fine. But one tiny error and it can all go terribly wrong.

  If I had this mutant gene in a police cell, there would be three questions I’d ask as I beat the shit out of it:

  The first is – ‘Why?’ Well, no one knows why. It could be something that is passed on, from one generation to the next. It could be a chance mistake amongst all the billions of duplications that are made in the human body.

  The second question is – ‘How?’ The process is easy enough to understand – tangled proteins screw up the cells. Answer both the first and the second questions, and there’s a chance to stop it happening. Not to reverse it, because Doctor Piper told us that there is atrophy in Eileen’s frontotemporal region, which meant that her brain had shrunk.