The aftermath

[robertod]

The investigators return to Boston, without encountering any inconvenience along the way back. The child's stays in his almost autistic mutism.

Gilbert welcomes the group to his villa. He does not believe his eyes when he sees the child safe and sound. He is visibly excited, even if he still struggles to exchange a gesture of affection with the child. Timothy is led to his room by the housekeeper, while Gilbert remains with the investigators. The police commissioner is also there. Gilbert called him in the hope that the group could give some indication of the kidnappers. Obviously, the investigators need to aswear a lot of questions. Where did you find the boy? Who were the kidnappers? What did they want? How did you manage to rescue him?

[Mr. Handy]

"The kidnapping was orchestrated by a very wicked woman in Greyton named Darcy Mooney," says Kathryn, ready with a explanation. "She had a lot of influence there, and judging by what she wrote, she was quite mad. One of the cruel things she did was to select women, pretend to befriend them, slip something into their drinks to put them to sleep, and then give them over to be violated. This happened to Alyssa when she was in Greyton. I'm afraid Timothy may be the product of that. Darcy had been keeping him in the basement of her house, beneath a trapdoor. She had been killed with a machete, apparently by a priest named Father Colby. A child's clothes, presumably Timothy's, were in a bag in her basement. We also found the clothes the kidnapper had worn when snatching him in the basement, along with a map with the route from Greyton to here marked. Father Colby had himself been killed, perhaps in retaliation. There was no other sign of Timothy, so we had to go to Coney Island to track him down. That's where the Anderson family, which controls Greyton, resides. We went to an old abandoned mansion where they had used to live, and that's where we found everything we needed to crack the case, including these letters that Darcy wrote and other documentation." She shows the letters and documents that they found. "She apparently believed that Timothy was very special due to the circumstances of his conception and birth, and she intended to use him for some foul purpose. Though she is dead, there is still deep corruption in Greyton and on Coney Island, and something will need to be done about it. I think we'll need to get the Bureau of Investigation involved. Since there's bootlegging going on there too, it shouldn't be too hard to convince them."

[robertod]

The police commissioner and Gilbert look at each other in a confused way.
The policeman stops writing in his notebook and turns to Kathryn with perplexity.

"Wait ... wait ... I'm not following you ... you're telling me that this Darcy ... kidnapped women for having them raped, and then she kidnapped her children. Well.. looks like an unusual way to run a trafficking of children... and who these rapists would be? Men of Greyton? What´s their deal out of this?"

The policeman then looks at his colleague Michael, changing his expression on expectation, as if the latter is obviously more likely to provide a more current version of facts.

[Mr. Handy]

"I don't know the names of the men," says Kathryn, "but I presume they live in the area. Something needs to be done about Greyton, and fast. We need to bring in the State Police and the Bureau of Investigation."

[VictoriaSilverwolf]

Michael briefly wonders how much he should say about the demons, the Martians, the monsters, whatever the heck they were, but doesn't want to wind up in the loony bin. He's still not completely sure he didn't hallucinate the whole thing anyway. Maybe some of the bootleggers slipped him a Mickey Finn or something.

"The lady 'tec here has the stright dope, all right. Some kind of nutty cult's mixed up in it, too, so the Feds might hear some crazy stuff out there. They should go out loaded for bear. It ain't no picnic, that's for sure. Meanwhile, the kid is gonna need a lot of special care, poor guy."

[robertod]

Despite the police's lack of conviction, Mr. Gilbert´s influence pressure the federal authorities to open an investigation in Greyton. Not much new is discovered.

The feds confirm that Darcy was the likely kidnapper, although the local population denies her involvement. Colby attempted to rescue Timothy from her and for this reason he was probably killed by an accomplice of Darcy. They investigators don´t find anything else strange in Greyton. Just a small coastal town that has experienced a bad case of crime news, now finally solved.

Rather, the Feds find that Coney Island was a cheap whyskey production center. The locals used the island to smuggle alchool into Greyton. Eventually, this becomes the main interest that captures the investigations of the Feds.

Michael, Ivy, Emma and Kathryn will no longer hear about Timothy and Gilbert for a while.

Many years later, however, they read a piece of news makes them shiver and cause them nightmares for several months.
At about thirty years of age, Timothy disappears again. As the piece of news rise the interest, further research reveals something about how he grew up through all these years. Timothy left Portland and studied at Harvard, where he was recognized as a genius. He got two degrees. Mathematics and philosophy. Who knew him, says he spent all his time reading one book after another, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. His cattitude is described and remembered as deeply unsocial. This was considered understandable considering that with puberty, nature had given him an increasingly less attractive and, someone says, even repugnant appearance.

Timothy Gilbert disappears during a cruise in the middle of the Atlantic. He was travelling alone. A witness says he saw him jumping off the ship voluntarily. By the time the crew threw the life saver, he had already disappeared under the waters.