what if the best of all possible outcomes is that he becomes what I am?"
Chapter Thirty-One
THE STORY EXPLODED on the morning news, not because the Man Wolf had had the temerity to go to the northern city of Santa Rosa and shred four vicious killers, but because the surviving victim was already famous.
As the juvenile victim of a near-fatal attack, his identity was protected, but by 5:00 a.m. he had called the press from his hospital bed, and given his version of the story out to several reporters.
His name was Stuart McIntyre, a sixteen-year-old high school graduate who six months before had made international headlines by insisting on taking a male date to his senior prom at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Academy in Santa Rosa. The school had not only said no to Stuart,s request, but stripped him of the title of valedictorian, thereby denying him the right to make the key speech on graduation night, and Stuart had taken his case to the media, granting interviews by phone and e-mail to anybody and everybody who was interested.
This had not been the first gay activist cause of which Stuart was a champion. But his greatest claim to fame before the prom crisis had been his success as a high school actor, persuading Blessed Sacrament to put on a full-scale production of Cyrano de Bergerac, just so that he could ably play the lead in it, which he had, to good reviews.
As soon as Reuben saw Stuart on the news he recognized him. Stuart had a square face, a sprinkling of freckles across his broad nose and cheeks, and a huge mop of unruly blond hair that suggested a halo. His eyes were blue and his habitual smile was a bit mischievous. It was actually a grin. His was a likable and at times pretty face. The camera loved him.
Reuben had just begun reporting for the Observer when Stuart became a local celebrity, and Reuben had never paid much attention to the story, except to be amused that this plucky kid thought he could convince a Catholic high school to let him take his boyfriend to the prom.
The "boyfriend," Antonio Lopez, had been the unfortunate kid murdered last night by the four gay bashers, who had, by the way, expressed their intent, to the boys and to others, to mutilate both victims postmortem.
By noon, the story was huge, again, not only because the seeming "invincible" Man Wolf had intervened, saving Stuart,s life, but because the person behind the gay bashing was rumored to be Stuart,s stepfather, a golf instructor named Herman Buckler. Two of the killers had been brothers-in-law of the dead boy, Antonio, and other members of their family spilled the story fingering the stepfather as the man who had masterminded the attack to get rid of his stepson. Stuart also told police that his stepfather had set up the attack, and that the young men who had tried to kill him had told him as much.
There was more. Stuart,s mother, a bottle-blond named Buffy Longstreet, had been a teen actress in a short-lived sitcom for a few years, and Stuart,s father had been a computer tech genius who made a killing in Silicon Valley before the dot-com crash, leaving Stuart well off and the mother moderately comfortable when he died of an infection in Salvador da Bahia while on a dream trip to the Amazon. The stepfather,s crime had been for the money all right and because he devoutly hated Stuart. He was denying everything, and threatened to sue Stuart.
Stuart was now a student at the University of San Francisco, living alone in his own Haight-Ashbury apartment three blocks from the school, and had been back in Santa Rosa for a visit with his boyfriend, Antonio, at the time of the gay bashing. Stuart,s whole goal in life, or so he repeatedly told the press, was to become a lawyer and work for human rights. He was a frequent guest on radio talk shows by call-in, and he was the first survivor of a Man Wolf encounter willing to talk to the press directly since Susan Larson had spoken to Reuben at the offices of the San Francisco Observer.
Reuben was processing all this as rapidly as he could when he was interrupted by two officers from the Mendocino sheriff,s department who wanted again to talk to him about the Man Wolf, and whether or not he had remembered anything more about that terrible night when Marchent had died. Did