The Homecoming Read online

  “You never read The Frog Prince?”

  Stella shook her head.

  “It’s a story about a witch who casts a spell on a prince and transforms him into a frog. And the witch says the spell can only be broken if a princess kisses the frog.”

  The boy who’d originally impeded her way raised his frog up to her lip level and said, “Pucker up.”

  At that moment Dr. Rommel stepped into the classroom. His eyes swept across the classroom; all the talking stopped; all the frogs were suddenly returned to their trays.

  “I will offer you my first and last warning,” he said. “The frogs are a learning tool, and will be treated as such. If I catch anyone using them for any other purpose than their dissection, you will fail this course. Now everyone sit down.”

  The class did as he instructed, including Stella. As she sat, she was confronted by the eyes of the lifeless frog staring at her.

  Dr. Rommel took a seat at the front of the class. While wiping clean his thick glasses, he said, “On your tray you will find a scalpel, scissors, and forceps. These instruments are not toys. They can cut, and they can hurt. They are only to be used for the dissection of the frog, and must be handled with caution. Failure to do so will result in your being sent to the assistant principal, as well as failing this class. Is that understood?”

  He finished cleaning his glasses, put them on, and stared around the classroom. “Entendido?” he asked a Hispanic boy.

  “Like I don’t speak English,” the young man muttered, but then in a loud, sarcastic voice, he said, “Sí, señor.”

  “Everyone will be expected to make precise laboratory notes,” said Rommel. “I will be grading those notes. I will also be grading the precision with which you do your dissection. I do not expect you to be cutting willy-nilly. I want to see careful, well-thought-out incisions. I want to see a complete frog heart, and that includes its three chambers, which means there had better be two atria and a single ventricle. There is a list of body parts identified on your work sheet. I suggest you carefully study all the diagrams before you begin your scalpel work. Remember: a stitch in time saves nine. And for your edification, I am not referring to sewing, but the notion of wisely expending time on properly dealing with a present problem so as to spare you from being beset by future problems. The first on-the-job rule an apprentice carpenter learns is to measure twice, so as to only have to cut once. You will spend two laboratory days doing this dissection, and at its conclusion, I don’t want your frog to look as if you’ve put it through a blender. Does everyone understand?”

  Heads nodded.

  The teacher turned to an Asian girl. “Wakarimasu ka?” he asked.

  “Whatever language that is,” she said, “I don’t speak it.”

  Rommel continued to look at her.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she said.

  The teacher looked around the class. “Any questions?” he asked.

  His tone and body language were meant to discourage any questions, but that didn’t stop Stella from slowly raising her arm.

  “What?” he asked.

  “May I be excused from this assignment?”

  “For what reason?”

  Stella considered how to answer before saying, “I would prefer not to.”

  Rommel’s pasty face changed colors, turning a purplish red. “I didn’t know we had in our presence Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

  Stella didn’t know how to respond; Rommel didn’t give her a chance to say anything anyway.

  “I would prefer not to,” he said mockingly. “I would prefer not having to teach indulged rich kids. I would prefer not having to drive a ten-year-old Dodge when half of you in this class have new Beemers. I would prefer not having children take issue with my curriculum. And I would prefer not to respect your wishes.

  “Do you have any idea how important it is to have a working knowledge of anatomy? Do you want to be operated on by a doctor devoid of flesh-and-blood experience? This exercise is designed as an introduction to anatomy. The same things that make a frog tick make us tick.”

  Rommel stared at Stella. Normally students didn’t meet his eyes, but Stella did. He tried to wait her out. Students invariably squirmed and turned away when he stared them down, but she didn’t. Normally his glasses acted as a shield, pushing back all gapers, but not this time. Something about her calm manner got to him.

  “If you don’t want to be here,” he said, “by all means get out. Maybe the bleeding hearts in administration will let you get away with doing a virtual dissection, despite my objections that it’s a pale imitation of the real thing. You and your ilk want to avoid real life by leading a virtual life, in a virtual world, in a virtual universe. That’s the problem with this generation.”

  He waved his hand in her direction. “Go,” he said, “go.”

  As Stella gathered up her belongings, Dr. Rommel said, “The leopard frogs we are dissecting are not endangered amphibians. They were bred in laboratories for this purpose, not hustled away from an idyllic setting of lily pads.”

  One of the male students called out, “Ribbit,” and eyes turned away from Rommel and Stella to the frog impressionist. No one saw Stella take her index finger and press it to her lips; no one was witness to her placing that same finger on the mouth of her frog.

  She got up from her seat and walked toward the door.

  “And no one has ever accused frogs of being very bright. If you put a frog in a pot and heat up the water gradually, he’ll happily stay put until he’s boiled alive.”

  As Stella stepped through the door, Mr. Rommel said, “Bye-bye.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “She must have a frog in her throat.”

  The class began laughing. It was the purple-haired girl who happened to glance over to Stella’s empty desk, or what should have been an empty desk. She opened her mouth and screamed.

  That’s when everyone saw the frog. But this frog wasn’t dead. It was sitting up in the middle of the tray. Its eyes were open; it didn’t have to move its head from side to side to see. It was a frog, after all.

  A boy extended his hand toward the frog. It was no illusion, no trick of lighting; the frog was alive. The creature leaped, vaulting over the human head in front of it. Screaming and shouting and bedlam broke out.

  The frog hopped right, then left. Most of the students shrank away, afraid of contact. Maybe they believed they’d contract warts. Maybe they were just scared. A few of the students tried to rein in the frog. Their efforts failed. The frog jumped out an open window.

  The purple-haired girl found her voice. “It had on lipstick!” she said. “Did anyone else see that?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Cheever approached Mary Beth Carey’s cubicle, keeping something hidden behind his back. Even though she couldn’t see what he was holding, Mary Beth sniffed the air and asked, “Is that my favorite perfume I smell?”

  “The nose knows,” he said. “This morning I stopped at VG’s just as they were bringing out doughnuts from the oven. It was just me and the surfers waiting in line.”

  “You didn’t bring me a surfer as well?” she asked.

  “I didn’t want to distract you from work.”

  “Beware of cops who bring gifts,” she said.

  “Isn’t that the truth? By the way, I brought you your two favorites: a maple bar and a raised glaze.”

  “So much for my diet,” she said. “Now who is it you want me to kill?”

  “The maple bar is for all the work you’ve done on Salton Sea, and for your continuing help in finding out what happened to Dickie Rath.”

  “And the raised glaze?”

  “That’s my bribe for getting your help in a new search,” he said. “To quote John Keats, I need you to find someone whose name was writ in water.”

  “I’ll say this for you: you’ve managed to pique my interest and my appetite.”

  “I’m not giving you much to go on,” said Cheever. “Stella Pierce told me she wasn’t alone in spac
e. According to her, there were about a dozen other kids, a UN of schoolchildren who were around her age.”

  “Space school,” said Mary Beth, lifting her right hand up and pretending she was reading from a title. “That sounds like a bad Hollywood plot. Was their spaceship painted yellow, and did it have flashing lights?”

  “Since when did you get so cynical?”

  “Since I started working here,” she said. “You might remember that I was with you seven years ago at the beginning of this case. You had me help Eleanor Pierce input Stella into every missing-child registry in this country. After that we set up pages for her on every social media site so that we could get Stella’s face and story out there. Of course at the time I didn’t know she’d gone off with aliens.”

  “You saw yesterday’s news?”

  Mary Beth nodded. “And this morning I was flipping through the radio channels and hearing all the shock jocks making their jokes about it.”

  “Forget what you saw and heard,” said Cheever. “In person Stella comes across as an innocent, while at the same time wise beyond her years.”

  “Maybe Yoda was one of her teachers,” she said.

  “Comedian you are,” said Cheever, doing a Yoda imitation. “Anyway, it’s not a teacher I’m interested in; it’s a student. Stella said one of her fellow voyagers was an American. She described him as dark-skinned, about her height and age, but heavier. Early on this kid talked about missing his home on the water. Unfortunately, Stella couldn’t narrow down where he lived, but she seemed to remember his surname was water related.”

  “Plummer?” Mary Beth suggested.

  “No cracks,” Cheever said. “And I don’t mean water related as in a septic system. Stella thought his last name was related to a physical body of water.”

  Mary Beth jotted down the information. “Did she specify whether this kid was black or Hispanic or another ethnicity?”

  “She wasn’t sure.”

  “Needle in a haystack,” she said with a sigh.

  “It wouldn’t be a challenge for you otherwise.”

  “You don’t really think Water Boy is anything other than a figment of Stella’s imagination, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I bet he’s real,” Cheever said. “My take is that she crossed paths with him. Maybe he was part of some child-abduction ring. Maybe they were transported together. Right now I’ll take any piece in the puzzle of Stella’s past, and that includes your taking another run at Dickie Rath.”

  Rath was the mystery man from the Salton Sea area that Beto Diaz claimed had identified himself as Stella’s uncle. So far Mary Beth hadn’t been able to find a person by that name in the system.

  “I’m thinking Rath might have shortened his surname, so today I’ll be inputting such possibilities as Rathbone, Rathburn, and Rather. He also could have lost the first syllable, and been born Konrath or Kornrath or Conrath. Or maybe it’s a variation of a name, like Rathke or Raith.”

  “Happy hunting,” said Cheever, “and happy eating.”

  “You never told me what you thought of Alberto Diaz,” she said.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t want to prejudice you beforehand.”

  “Everything he told you has checked out,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You still don’t sound convinced.”

  “Maybe it’s a vocational failing from being a cop for too long,” he said, “but I couldn’t help but think that everything he said was convenient. It even sounded rehearsed. You ever hear of George Van Tassel or the Integratron?”

  Mary Beth thought about it, then shook her head.

  “Van Tassel was an aeronautical engineer,” Cheever said. “By all accounts a brilliant guy. For the last twenty years of his life, he lived in Joshua Tree, and spent much of his time constructing this incredible building. He said it was based on Moses’s Tabernacle. Van Tassel was also busy building an electrostatic generator. He claimed to have had help with these projects from Nikola Tesla, as well as extraterrestrials. Van Tassel believed he was channeling their thoughts. And, yes, he claimed he visited the mother ship and talked to the aliens. Van Tassel was convinced his generator could rejuvenate human beings, as well as work as a time-travel machine.”

  “Did Diaz bring this up?” asked Mary Beth.

  “No,” said Cheever, “that would have been too obvious. But seeing as my investigation involved extraterrestrials, and Van Tassel’s tabernacle is only thirty miles away from where Stella and Rath were supposedly living, I’m pretty sure Diaz—or whoever set him up—knew I’d connect the two.”

  “What does Diaz have to gain from this?”

  “On the surface, nothing.”

  “So you think someone is pulling his strings and feeding him what to tell you?”

  “I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories. But how many former cons go out of their way to help the police?”

  “Did you press him on that?”

  Cheever nodded. “He claimed that he was covering his ass and getting ahead of the inevitable investigation that would be coming down the pike because of Stella’s being a congressman’s daughter.”

  “Strange,” said Mary Beth.

  “What?”

  “You’re suspicious of an utterly plausible story, and yet you have me doing a search on what sounds like an absolutely unbelievable story.”

  “I’ll tell that to Marvin the Martian,” he said.

  As Cheever began walking away, Mary Beth made sounds approximating the opening theme from “The Twilight Zone.”

  “Cute,” said Cheever.

  “It’s a cookbook!” she shouted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  As mother and daughter got into the car after Stella’s meeting with Dr. Froke, Eleanor asked, “How was your session?”

  “I don’t think it was very fruitful,” said Stella.

  Eleanor offered a knowing nod. “Finally you and Dr. Froke seem to be in agreement on something.”

  After Stella’s session, her mother had met privately with Dr. Froke for half an hour.

  “I make Dr. Froke nervous,” said Stella.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He sweats a lot, especially when I don’t go along with his agenda.”

  “He says you’re still resisting taking medication.”

  Stella nodded. “I am.”

  Eleanor started the car, and measured her words before responding, “What I’d like you to remember is that Dr. Froke is the professional here.”

  “Does that mean we should automatically go along with what he says?”

  “No, but it doesn’t mean we should automatically oppose it either.”

  “I am not schizophrenic, Mom, and I don’t have bipolar disorder, and I’m not psychotic. The medications Dr. Froke wants to prescribe me are for people with those diagnoses, and yet my only symptom is a story he wants me to renounce.”

  “He says you’re exhibiting signs of paranoia.”

  “That’s because I wondered aloud if my treatment was being managed by someone other than him.”

  “That would sound paranoid to me as well.”

  “It’s hard to defend not being paranoid,” said Stella, “without sounding paranoid.”

  Stella knew better than to say anything about her ability to occasionally pick up a thought or a memory. That would only make her parents think she’d lost her hold on reality. It was easier to just be silent. She turned her head and looked out the passenger window. They were passing by one of the wetlands bordering Interstate 5. A large white bird was fishing, completely unmindful of all the traffic going by. Luke had given her a crash course on the shorebirds. She had loved the way the sanderlings ran in and out of the surf, staying just ahead of the waves. There were terns and gulls and willets. And in the estuaries running into the ocean, she’d seen herons and egrets. Snowy egret, she remembered. That was the name of the beautiful white bird that was fishing.

  “Please don’t shut m
e out, Stella,” Eleanor said. “You know I love you, sweetie.”

  Stella turned back toward her mother. “And I love you, Mom.”

  “You know I’m trying to do what’s best for you?”

  “I know.”

  “Dr. Froke said he brought up the subject of electroconvulsive therapy with you, but that you weren’t receptive to the idea of it.”

  “I was more than unreceptive,” Stella said.

  “A few years back, I had it done to me,” Eleanor admitted. “The hope was that it would help me get over my depression.”

  “Did it?” asked Stella.

  Her mother shook her head. “But it might work out better for you. The procedure is considered only mildly invasive.”

  “Having electric currents passing through my brain so as to trigger seizures does not sound mild.”

  “The currents are small, as are the seizures.”

  “Is that supposed to reassure me?”

  “Dr. Froke thinks it might be beneficial for you. He believes it will stimulate the neurons and the chemicals in your brain.”

  “My neurons and chemicals are just fine, thank you. Just because you were depressed for so long doesn’t mean I’m suffering like you were, Mom.”

  Eleanor took a few seconds to respond: “Why is it that you returned when you did?”

  “I felt your pain, Mom. I tried to direct healing thoughts your way, but they didn’t bring you peace. I hoped time would help, but it didn’t. I sensed when things got worse.”

  Eleanor half whistled, half blew out air. Her mouth opened, but the words were slow to come.

  “Detective Cheever said you told him you came back because of me,” she said. “The two of us have never talked about that. I admitted to Detective Cheever that on the day you returned, I was in the process of ending my life. But how could you possibly have known that?”

  “You’re my mother,” Stella said simply.

  As they pulled into the driveway, Stella wished the afternoon shadows weren’t already encroaching. There would only be another hour of sunlight. She had hated being cooped up at Dr. Froke’s office, and had even suggested moving her session outdoors. Dr. Froke had rejected the idea, of course.