W.H. Auden

Letter to Lord Byron

“The only reason I stopped shooting was because I ran out of bullets.”

--Bernhard Goetz, in his statement to Concord,

New Hampshire police on December 31, 1984.

Chapter One

Lucy Thompson, feeling the buzz kicking in from the two drinks she’d had before coming here tonight, sat very still among the other members of the grief support group and watched the man who stood at the podium. A detective, he was, First-Class, with the Cedar Hill Police Department. He spoke very well, very clearly, as he explained to them various precautions they could take to make sure their children (the ones you have left remained unspoken but was nevertheless understood by all in the room) would remain safe and informed while at the same time still able to enjoy all the wonders of childhood without believing they had to look over their shoulder every ten seconds.

“Nothing is worse,” he said, “than to let fear infect your children. Now, I’m not saying that you should not make them aware of the dangers out there—far from it—but it’s important that you know when to pull back, when to draw the line. There is such a thing as too much information, especially when you first begin talking to your children about something like this. Let them see your concern, of course, but never let them know your fear.”

Never let them know your fear, Lucy repeated to herself in silence.

Then: But what if that fear could have been the thing that saved them?

“Excuse me?” said the detective, whose name Lucy suddenly couldn’t remember. “Is there a question back there?”

Jesus! Had she actually said that out loud?

She felt her hands ball into fists that she pressed against her legs; she figured that once she heard bones crack she’d stop.

Several people were turning to look at her.

“Sorry,” she managed to get out. “Just thinking out loud to myself.” Please, God, let him buy that and move on.

“But that’s an interesting point, Misses...?”

“Thompson,” she said, the word, slightly slurred, crawling from her throat as if it were afraid of the light. “No Misses, Miss, or Ms. Just Lucy. Lucy Thompson.”

The detective stared at her for a moment, then looked over at the counselor who ran these meetings; she gave a slight nod of her head, and the detective—Bill Emerson, that was his name—said, “Your question—if I heard it correctly—is whether or not instilling fear into a child might help save them?”

She could barely swallow now. “Yes.”

Detective Emerson appeared to think very hard for a few moments before answering. “Look, every last one of you is here because you’ve lost a child. Whether it was from violence or because they suddenly went missing doesn’t matter at this moment; what does matter is that the emptiness and grief has become more than you can handle on your own. But many of you still have other children that you can protect—and I don’t mean to imply or for you to infer that you didn’t protect your lost children. Yes, making them afraid would probably help protect them to some degree…but at the same time, it can also foster paranoia in them. So, again, I have to come back to my original point: infecting them with that degree of fear may make them wary of strangers, it might emphasize the importance of never being alone after dark, and it would probably guarantee that they’ll walk home from school with friends, but where’s the room left for childhood? If they’re so frightened of what might happen to them in the outside world that all they do is stay home and tell themselves at least they’re safe, at least what happened to their brother or sister won’t happen to them, aren’t they then being robbed of a child’s life just like their absent siblings were?”