“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss C.” In answer, she slid a photocopied news clipping across the desk. He took one glance and felt his face blanch. It was from The Baltimore Sun:
ONE YOUTH IN CRITICAL CONDITION AFTER CRASH OF STOLEN CAR: FOUR YOUTHS IN CUSTODY.
Who knew about it? he thought. And, more important: Why are they doing this to me?
Miss Cornwallis said, “You moved here from Baltimore. Didn’t you?”
Noah swallowed. “Yes, ma’am,” he whispered.
“There are no names mentioned in this article. But there was a note attached, suggesting I talk to you about this.” She looked straight at him. “This is about you, isn’t it?”
“Who sent it?”
“That’s not important right now.”
“It’s one of those reporters.” His chin suddenly jutted up in anger. “They’ve been following me around, asking questions. Now they’re trying to get back at me!”
“For what?”
“For not talking to them.”
She sighed. “Noah, three teachers had their cars broken into yesterday. Do you know anything about it?”
“You’re looking for someone to blame. Aren’t you?”
“I’m just asking if you know anything about the cars.”
He stared her straight in the eye. “No,” he said, and stood up. “Now can I go?”
She didn’t believe him; he could see it in her face. But there was nothing more she could say.
She nodded. “Go back to class.”
He walked out of her office, past the snoopy school secretary, and stormed into the hallway. Instead of returning to band class, he fled outside and sat down, shaking, on the front steps. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, but he scarcely noticed the cold; he was fighting too hard not to cry.
I can’t live here any more, either, he thought. I can’t live anywhere. No matter where I go, someone will find out about me. About what I did. He hugged his knees and rocked back and forth, wanting desperately to go home, now, but it was too far to walk, and his mom couldn’t come and get him.
He heard the gym door slam shut, and he turned to see a woman with wild blond hair walk out of the building. He recognized her; it was that reporter, Damaris Horne. She crossed the street and climbed into a car. A dark green car.
She’s the one.
He ran across the street. ‘Hey!” he yelled, and slapped her door in fury. “You stay the hell away from me!”
She rolled down her window and looked at him with almost predatory interest. “Hello, Noah. You want to talk about something?”
“I just want you to stop trying to ruin my life!”
“How am I ruining your life?”
“Following me around! Telling people about Baltimore!”
“What does Baltimore have to do with anything?”
He stared at her, suddenly realizing she had no idea what he was talking about. He backed away. “Forget about it.”
“Noah, I haven’t been following you around.”
“Yes you have. I’ve seen your car. You drove past my house yesterday. And the day before.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You were tailing my mom and me in town!”
“Okay, that time I just happened to be behind you. So what? Do you know how many reporters are in town right now? How many green cars are cruising around?”
He backed away some more. “Just stay away from me.”
“Why don’t we talk? You can tell me what’s really going on in the school. What all the fights are about. Noah? Noah!”
He turned and fled into the building.
Two pit bulls growled and barked at Claire’s car, their claws scraping at her door. She stayed safely shut inside and stared across the front yard, at the ramshackle farmhouse. In the front yard, years of junk had accumulated. She saw a trailer propped up on bricks and three broken-down cars, in various states of being cannibalized. A cat peered fearfully through the open door of a rusting clothes dryer. In the land of Yankee thrift, it was not unusual to find front yards like this. Families who have known poverty hoard their junk like treasure.
She honked, then rolled down her window a few inches and called out through the crack: “Hello? Is anyone home?”
A tattered curtain flicked aside in the window, and a moment later, the door opened and a blond man of about forty stepped out. He crossed the yard and regarded her with unsmiling eyes as the dogs barked and jumped at his feet. Everything about him seemed thin—his face, his receding hair, his pencil-sketch mustache. Thin and resentful.
“I’m Dr. Elliot,” she said. “Are you Mr. Reid?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like to talk to your sons, if I may. It’s about Scotty Braxton.”
“What about him?”
“He’s in the hospital. I’m hoping your sons can tell me what’s wrong with him.”
“You’re the doctor. Don’t you know?”
“I believe it’s a drug psychosis, Mr. Reid. I think he and Taylor Darnell both took the same drug. Mrs. Darnell said Scotty and Taylor spent a lot of time with your sons. If I can talk to them—”
“They can’t help you,” said Jack Reid, and he stepped away from her car.
“They may all have been experimenting with the same drug.”
“My boys know better than that.” He turned back to the house, his contempt for her apparent in the angry set of his shoulders.
“I don’t want to get your sons in trouble, Mr. Reid!” she called out. “I’m just trying to get information!”
A woman stepped out onto the porch. She cast a worried look at Claire, then said something to Reid. In reply, he shoved her back into the house. The dogs trotted away from Claire now, and were watching the porch, attracted by the promise of new conflict.
Claire rolled down her window and stuck her head out. “If I can’t talk to your sons, I’ll call the police to do it for me. Would you prefer to speak to Chief Kelly?”
He turned to look at her, his face tight with anger. Now the woman cautiously poked her head out and stared at Claire as well.
“This will be strictly confidential,” said Claire. “Let me talk to them, and I’ll keep the police out of it.”
The woman said something to Reid—a plea, by the look of her body language. He gave a snort of disgust and stomped into the house.
The woman crossed to Claire’s car. Like Reid she was blond, her face washed-out and colorless, but there was no hostility in her eyes. Rather, there was a disturbing lack of any emotion, as though she had long ago buried her feelings in some deep, safe place.
“The boys just got home from school,” the woman said.
“Are you Mrs. Reid?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Grace.” She looked at the house. “Those boys’ve been in enough trouble. Chief Kelly said if it happened again …”
“He doesn’t have to know about this. I’m here only because of my patient, Scotty. I need to know what drug he’s taken, and I think your boys can tell me.”
“They’re Jack’s boys, not mine.” She turned to face Claire, as though it was very important that this fact be understood. “I can’t force them to talk to you. But you can come inside. First let me tie up these dogs.”
She grabbed both pit bulls by their collars and pulled them over to the maple tree, where she restrained them. They shot to the ends of their chains, barking wildly as Claire stepped out of the car and followed the woman up to the porch.
Stepping into the house was like entering a warren of caves, low-ceilinged and cluttered.
“I’ll get them,” said Grace, and she disappeared up a narrow stairway, leaving Claire alone in the living room. The TV was on, tuned to the shopper’s channel. On the coffee table, someone had written on a notepad: “Chanel #5, 4 oz., $14.99.” She breathed in the air of that house, with its odors of mildew and cigarettes, and wondered if perfume alone could mask this smell of poverty.
Heavy footsteps thudded on the sta
irs, and two teenage boys slouched into the room. Matching buzz cuts made their blond heads seem unnaturally small. They said nothing, but stood looking at her with incurious blue eyes. The blandness of teenagers.
“This is Eddie and J.D.,” said Grace.
“I’m Dr. Elliot,” said Claire. She looked at Grace, who understood the meaning of that glance, and quietly left the room.
The boys plopped down on the couch, their gazes automatically shifting to the TV. Even when Claire reached for the remote and turned it off, their gazes remained fixed on the blank screen, as though by habit.
“Your friend Scotty Braxton’s in the hospital,” she said. “Did you know that?”
There was a long silence. Then Eddie, the younger boy, perhaps fourteen, said: “We heard he went crazy last night.”
“That’s right. I’m his doctor, Eddie, and I’m trying to find out why. Whatever you tell me, it’s just between us. I need to know what drug he’s taken.”
The boys exchanged a look that Claire didn’t understand.
“I know he took something,” she said. “So did Taylor Darnell. It showed up in both their blood tests.”
“So why’re you asking us?” It was J.D. talking now, his voice deeper than Eddie’s, and vibrating with contempt. “Sounds like you already know.”
“I don’t know what the drug is.”
“Is it a pill?” asked Eddie.
“Not necessarily. I believe it’s some kind of hormone. It could be a pill, a shot, or even a plant of some kind. Hormones are chemicals made by living things. Plants and animals, insects. They affect our bodies in a lot of different ways. This particular hormone makes people violent. It makes them kill. Do you know how he got it?”
Eddie’s gaze dropped, as though he was suddenly afraid to look at her.
In frustration she said, “I just saw Scotty this morning, at the hospital, and he’s tied down like an animal. Oh, it’s bad for him now, but it’s going to be a lot worse when the drug wears off. When he wakes up and remembers what he did to his mother. To his sister.” She paused, hoping her words were penetrating their thick skulls. “His mother is dead. His sister is still recovering from her wounds. For the rest of her life, Kitty will remember her brother as the boy who tried to kill her. This drug has ruined Scotty’s life. And Taylor’s. You have to tell me where they got it.”
Both boys stared down at the coffee table, and she saw only the bristly tops of their heads. In boredom, J.D. picked up the remote and turned on the TV. The shopping channel blared out a sales pitch for a genuine manmade emerald pendant on a fourteen-carat gold chain. High-fashion elegance for only seventy-nine ninety-nine.
Claire snatched the remote from J.D.’s hand and angrily shut off the TV. “Since you two don’t have anything to say to me, I guess you’ll have to talk to Chief Kelly.”
Eddie started to speak, then glanced at his older brother and clammed up again. Only then did Claire notice the essential difference between the two. Eddie was afraid of J.D.
She set her business card down on the coffee table. “If you change your minds, that’s where you can reach me,” she said, her gaze directed at Eddie. Then she walked out of the house.
As she stepped off the porch, the two pit bulls came charging at her, only to be yanked to a stop by their chains. Jack Reid was chopping kindling in the front yard, his ax ringing out against a tree stump. He made no effort to quiet his animals; maybe he enjoyed the spectacle of watching them terrify this unwanted visitor. Claire continued across the yard, past the rusting clothes dryer and a car gutted of engine parts. As she walked past Reid, he stopped swinging his ax and looked at her. Sweat beaded his brow and dampened the pale mustache. He leaned against the ax handle, the blade at rest on the stump, and there was mean satisfaction in his eyes.
“Had nothing to say to you, did they?”
“I think they have plenty to say. It will all come out eventually.”
The dogs were barking with renewed agitation, their chains scraping against the maple tree. She cast a glance their way, then looked back at Reid, whose hands had tightened around the ax handle.
“If you’re hunting for trouble,” he said, “best check under your own roof.”
“What?”
He gave her an ugly smile, then raised his ax and brought it down, hard, on a log of firewood.
Claire was in her office later that afternoon when the call came. She heard the phone ringing in the outer office, and then Vera appeared in the doorway.
“She wants to talk to you. She says you were over at her house today.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Amelia Reid.”
At once Claire picked up her extension. “This is Dr. Elliot.”
Amelia’s voice was muffled. “My brother Eddie—he asked me to call you. He’s afraid to do it himself.”
“And what does Eddie want to tell me?”
“He wants you to know—” There was a pause, as though the girl had stopped to listen. Then her voice came back on, so soft it was almost inaudible. “He said to tell you about the mushrooms.”
“What mushrooms?”
“They were all eating them. Taylor and Scotty and my brothers. The little blue mushrooms, in the woods.”
Lincoln Kelly stepped out of his truck and his boot landed on a twig, the snap of dead wood echoing like gunshot across the still lake. It was late afternoon, the sky leaden with rain clouds, the water flat as black glass. “A little late in the year to go hunting for mushrooms, Claire,” he said dryly.
“But a-hunting we will go.” She reached into the back of her pickup and grabbed two leaf rakes, one of which she handed to Lincoln. He took it with obvious reluctance. “They’re supposed to be a hundred yards upstream from the Boulders,” she said. “They’re growing under some oak trees. Little blue mushrooms with narrow stalks.”
She turned to face the woods. They were not at all inviting, the trees bare and absolutely still, the gloom thickening beneath them. She had not wanted to come out here this late in the day, but a storm was predicted. Already a half inch of rain had fallen, and with the temperature expected to plummet tonight, by tomorrow everything would be covered with snow. This was their last chance to comb bare ground.
“This could be the common factor, Lincoln. A natural toxin from plants growing right in these woods.”
“And the kids were eating these mushrooms?”
“They made it some sort of ritual. Eat a mushroom, prove you’re a man.”
They walked along the riverbed, hiking through ankle-deep leaves and thickets of wild raspberry canes. Twigs littered the forest floor, and every step made a sharp explosion of sound. A walk in the woods in late fall is not a silent experience.
The forest opened to a small clearing, where the oak trees had grown to towering heights.
“I think this is the place,” she said.
They began to rake aside the leaves. They worked with quiet urgency as sleet fell, stinging pellets of it mixed with rain, coating everything with a glaze of ice. They uncovered toadstools and white fairy rings and brilliant orange fungi.
It was Lincoln who found the blue one. He spotted the tiny nubbin poking up from a crevice formed by two tree roots. He brushed away the oak leaves and uncovered the cap. Darkness was already falling, and the mushroom’s color was apparent only under the direct beam of his flashlight. They crouched side by side, battered by rain and sleet, both of them too chilled and miserable to feel much sense of triumph as Claire slipped the specimen into a Ziploc bag.
“There’s a wetlands biologist up the road,” she said. “Maybe he’ll know what it is.”
In silence they sloshed back through the mud and emerged from the woods. On the bank of Locust Lake, they both halted in surprise. Half the shoreline was almost completely dark. Where the lights of houses should have glowed, there was only the occasional glimmer of candlelight through a window.
“It’s a bad night to lose power,” said Lincoln. “Temperature
’s going to drop into the twenties.”
“Looks like my end of the lake still has electricity,” she noted with relief.
“Well, keep the firewood handy. There’s probably ice building up on the lines. You could lose yours next.”
She threw the rakes in the back of her truck, and was circling around to the door when something in the lake caught her eye. It was only a faint glimmer, and she might have missed it had it not been for the contrasting blackness of the Boulders jutting into the water.
“Lincoln,” she said. “Lincoln!”
He turned from his cruiser. “What?”
“Look at the lake.” Slowly she walked toward the small tongue of water lapping at the mud.
He followed her.
At first he couldn’t seem to comprehend what he was seeing. It was only a vague shimmer, like moonlight dancing on the surface. But there was no moon out tonight, and the streak of light wavering on the water was a phosphorescent green. They climbed onto one of the rocks and looked across the water. In wonder, they watched the streak undulate like a snake on the surface, its coils a swirl of bright emerald. Not a purposeful movement, but a lazy drifting, its form contracting, then expanding.
Suddenly the clatter of sleet intensified, and needles of ice stippled the lake.
The phosphorescent coils shattered into a thousand bright fragments and disintegrated.
For a long time, neither Claire nor Lincoln spoke. Then he whispered, “What the hell was that?”
“You’ve never seen it before?”
“I’ve lived here all my life, Claire. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The water was dark, now. Invisible. “I have,” she said.
11
“I’m not an expert on mushrooms,” said Max Tutwiler. “But I might recognize a toxic variety if I saw one.”
Claire took the mushroom out of the Ziploc bag and handed it to him. “Can you tell us what this is?”
He slipped on his spectacles, and by the light of a kerosene lamp, studied the specimen. He turned it over, examining every detail of the delicate stalk, the blue-green cap.