When she’d shooed Voss up the stairs to his room, I asked about her earlier statement, the kids in the neighborhood who’d been calling Martin names. “What was that about?”
Jeanine looked troubled. “Kitty is so strange. The house was a difficult place to be in, so the kids wouldn’t go there, not even for Martin’s birthdays. Len tried a few times—he went around the neighborhood and invited everyone personally. No one showed up, except the little Gluckman girl, but she was even more desperate for friends than Martin.
“Of course, everyone knew some garbled version of Judy Binder’s life, so the kids would say things, especially because when he was in kindergarten, Kitty used to send Martin to school in some of Len’s old clothes, cut down, but still very much not children’s clothes. We talked seriously to Toby about not joining in the taunting, but it wasn’t until the rockets that he and Martin spent any time together.”
She broke off to offer me the coffeepot. “Anyway,” she continued when I’d hastily declined, “I suppose Martin took refuge in his experiments and computers to avoid thinking about his loneliness. In high school he turned out to be quite a good cross-country runner, and a computer whiz, so the kids laid off him, but I don’t think he had real friends. Although I have to say, the senior project Toby did with Martin is probably what got him into Rochester—his math SATs weren’t anywhere near as good as Martin’s.”
“Since Martin’s were perfect they couldn’t have been,” Zachary put in. “That was a surprise to everyone, probably to Martin himself, since he was an odd man out in high school. Kitty thought he had a future as a bookkeeper. The only time she’s ever talked to me, I mean sought me out to talk to me, was to see if I could get Martin a job at my firm.”
“Did you try?” I asked.
“If Martin had been interested I might have gone through the motions, but a computer whiz and an oddball loner to boot—I’d be more afraid he’d hack into client accounts.”
That opened up a different line of thought: Martin had been hacking and the FBI was on his trail.
“Do you think he was a hacker? Would Toby know that?” I asked.
Jeanine made a face. “I don’t think Toby and Martin saw each other more than twice all summer. If Martin started doing something illegal—I don’t know. Toby’s days of running after Martin to be close to his rockets are long gone. It’s hard to know what a boy like Martin might do, though. It’s too bad Kitty wouldn’t let him go to college. She kept saying blue-collar work was the foundation of a good society, and that her father and her husband were wonderful examples of that. She said if Martin went off to college, he’d turn into a scientist, turn arrogant.”
“What’s that about?” I asked. “Is she a fundamentalist, or did a scientist let her down?”
Zachary gave a crack of unkind laughter. “Can you imagine a guy getting close enough to her to let her down?”
Jeanine shook her head reprovingly. “We only knew her when she was already old. We’ve lived here since Toby was two, but we don’t know anything about her. I think it was something that happened in the war, World War Two, I mean. We have a lot of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, or used to: they’re getting old, they’re dying. Kitty’s odd behavior—it doesn’t seem impossible that it’s connected with the war.”
“She grew up in Vienna,” I said, “but she went to London with the Kindertransport when she was about nine.”
Jeanine nodded. “If she lost everyone she’d left behind, if one of those people was a scientist, she might translate that into a feeling of betrayal by science. She isn’t a fundamentalist, but she still grumbles if there’s something about climate change, or even medical research, on the news. She’ll go out of her way to make sure that everyone around her knows that scientists make things up just to make the people around them feel uncertain about the future.”
“I wondered if her childhood in Vienna explains why she was so insistent about my not talking to the police about Martin.”
“That’s because of Judy,” Zachary said. “We weren’t here in those days, but the Lustics and other families have told us what that used to be like—cops on the block every night, Judy coming home coked to the gills, Judy arrested for dealing drugs on the high school grounds. If Kitty doesn’t want you going to the cops it’s because she knows Martin is with Judy.”
“That’s possible,” Jeanine conceded. “But that doesn’t mean Martin’s in a safe place. He might have thought he could handle his mother and her associates and gotten in over his head.”
Someone outside the room sneezed. I went to the doorway and found Voss hovering on the stairwell. Jeanine joined me in the hallway.
“You are a pest, aren’t you?” I said before his mother could scold him. “What did Martin say when he rode off?”
“First he said, ‘Hasta la próxima.’ That’s because when I was little he used to play Mexican bandits with me.”