The girls were breathing quietly behind me. "Why did you want to come out here, anyway?" Katy asked. "Can we go soon?"
There was no wind, no movement, no sounds out here except our breathing. I didn't want to leave—not yet.
I could feel an energy here that I couldn't exactly verbalize. I was good at pegging the energy of one person at a time, but this was something more intense. Maybe it was nature's energy, or fried nature's energy ... I could only compare it to what the energy of a thousand souls, with moods and unsung statements all diving through each other, might feel like. I could see how Justin could believe in quantum thought just from spending time out here. I had trained myself to think positively, to have a mental advantage on whatever trials and tribulations I met up with throughout the day. It was pure psychology. From what I read of quantum thought, the authors felt that thought energy could reach out into the universe and actually alter the course of your 64 life in huge ways. I was no quantum physicist and had never given any ideas to my energy reaching out any higher than the ceiling of my dorm room. But out here, it was as if a roof had been lifted off of what I decided was believable and what I thought wasn't.
I lay my hand on the trunk and breathed deeply three times, trying to conjure Justin Creed's presence to this place via blasts of confidence. According to quantum thought, I could bring Justin here if my belief was powerful enough ... or I could at least get him to think of the place, wherever he was. As I was a skeptic, I decided with a smirk that any quantum energy I possessed would probably bring him here two months from now, and then we could all say it was a coincidence.
I did this deep breathing/conjuring without saying anything. It's fine to be insane as long as you keep it to yourself.
"My mother will kill me for being out here," Katy tried again.
"Tell her you went with a couple professionals," I said with as much calm as I could muster, despite Lanz's sticking his nose in my hand and whining.
"Do you feel anything ... weird out here?" I asked the girls.
"Definitely ... yes ... definitely," Katy said, and Chan whispered in an equally breathy whisper, "It's bad ... it's dark. Something evil."
"What's your vote, RayAnn?"
She came silently close to me. I could smell her shampoo. "Would I sound really squeamish if I said ... I feel that we are not alone?"
I dropped my hand and turned, and then I felt it, too. Someone was watching us. As my heart sped up, Lanz growled, and I couldn't decide if he was sensing my fear or hearing something.
My hearing has improved almost daily since I lost my vision. Now I heard breathing ... far off to my left. I pointed without opening my eyes. Trying to look at things could be a distraction to me. "There's somebody over there."
None of them moved. I suddenly wondered at the enormity of my stupidity, bringing three girls out here. I had seen a corpse earlier tonight, and the concept behind our coming to Steepleton was that the corpse had been there for years. It didn't occur to me otherwise until I saw an undergarment pulled up intact. It could be a recent murder, and if so, no one knew where that murderer was, or what the motive was. I had never won a fight in my life, and I had no clue how I would win one now, but I made a mental note to sign up for Tai Kwon Do when I got back to school.
I reached for Lanz's harness handle and he moved forward with me, growling louder and louder.
"Who's there?" I called.
SIX
I HEARD MORE WHISPERING. A lunatic talking to the moon? Then there were two sets of whispers.
Suddenly, peals of laughter broke out at the place where I'd pointed. Not nice laughter. I thought of my high school cafeteria and tuna hoagies. A form jumped up, then another. The sound of the voices put them about ten feet away.
"Oh my God, it's a dog!" one girl said, startled.
"It's five dogs," another said, laughing. "Wait ... it's that guy from where the cops were. Is that a Seeing Eye dog? I thought you said you weren't blind!"
"I kind of lied," I said, taking two steps toward them and stopping, thinking the better of it.
A form bobbed up close, waving a hand up and down in front of my eyes as Lanz whined over and over. He'd been trained not to bite. If he ever bit, I had to give him back. But I didn't know what he'd do in a situation like this.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" A shot of wild, laughing eyes flashed, a set of teeth. I felt my neck snap and I stumbled backwards dizzily to the tune of "Have a nice trip."
Lanz barked and lunged, not helping my dizzy routine, but I held on to his harness. The girl I spoke most to at the crime scene had been Taylor, and this one was—
"Mary Ellen, is Justin with you?" I asked, trying to pretend that this whole thing wasn't happening. My Ghost of School Days Past told me any threats I made would egg them on.
"I told you, he's gone!" Mary Ellen said, but I could hardly hear it because Chan and Katy were screaming. "Who the hell is with you?"
I sensed there were two people with Mary Ellen, and suddenly RayAnn was beside me, saying, "Get back from us. Do you like getting bitten by dogs with teeth six inches long?"
I liked the authority-sarcasm combo. I hadn't known she had it in her.
"Who are you?" Mary Ellen repeated.
"I'm with Mike. We asked these two to bring us out here."
"And who are they?"
"What, do you pay the taxes around here?" RayAnn snapped. "Last I heard, if you own the land, you can ask the questions."
Three voices laughed at her, but nobody came forward again. A male voice cut in. "It's just that we like to know who's coming out here. Ya know ... cops and all."
Ah, a level-voiced male. I sensed the females evening out, but with disappointment. They could have sucked energy off Katy and Chan's fear and eaten us alive.
"We're the bouncers, me and Helene," Mary Ellen said. "If we don't want somebody at the party, they get bounced."
"Oh, get a job," RayAnn shot back, but I could feel her hands shaking as they clung to my arm. "Can't you flip burgers somewhere? Do something constructive with yourself?"
"Whoa!" I mumbled to her. I wanted our heads to remain on our necks. Frankly, I wanted an interview, too.
"Look, everybody, calm down," I jumped in again. "Nobody is going to touch anybody. We're here looking for Justin. If he's not here, we'd like to ask some questions. If you don't want to answer, that's fine. We'll just leave."
"What kind of questions?" Mary Ellen asked. "Justin left town. I told you before."
"Just about Steepleton, about Chris Creed, that's all. Our interest is Chris, not Justin, except what Justin might have to say as a brother."
They agreed to talk, but it was a jig getting comfortable. Katy and Chan insisted on going back to the car, but we didn't want to give them the flashlight, so I told RayAnn to take them. She refused, probably defensive about leaving me with volatile people. Mary Ellen's Igor, Helene, said she would lead them back in the dark, that she knew the way. She recognized Katy and Chan, called them by name, and I detected a note of embarrassment in her voice, maybe over Mary Ellen's attack on me. They left with her, which put me and RayAnn with Mary Ellen and the guy. He introduced himself as Kobe, and I assumed he was the infamous Kobe Lydee referenced by Katy and Chan. He was a ghost chaser, they had said, whatever that means.
All four of us ended up lying on this tarp, the three of them staring at the stars as I pretended to. I could enjoy the full moon if I kept my vision turned just the right way.
"What happened to Taylor?" I asked Mary Ellen.
"Grounded. She sneaked out to the crime scene but only stayed half an hour or so. Her dad's off tonight. He's a troll."
"Mind if I tape us?" I asked, pulling my recorder from my pocket and flipping it on.
"Can you write?" she asked curiously. She'd been lying to my left, and I sensed her roll over so that she was looking at me.
"Sure."
"How?"
"Neatly. I can see some things. Taping is easier."
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"Were you born that way? Why'd you lie earlier?"
"I had a head injury three years ago, and it damaged my optic nerve center," I answered. "I should have been straight with you. Sorry, I'm learning. Journalists need to be the invisible people who don't get thrust into the middle of the story, if that makes sense. If I said I was blind, I would have had a lot of heads turning to look at me, and it would have invaded the mood."
"A head injury? What happened?" She kept it up.
"I got hit in the head with a baseball my first week at college."
"Yeah? On purpose?" The girl had a way of homing in on your weaknesses, and I wondered if it was habit or unintentional.
"It happened. There's no undoing it, and I'm here on business. Cool?"
She flopped back down again. Lanz was sitting at my feet, but he refused to lie down.
"What are we doing here?" I started. "Why were you back here, lying on a tarp and staring at the moon?"
"We're hoping to get a look at Chris Creed," Kobe said. "The ghost of ...in other words. There have been a lot of sightings lately. Now we have this corpse."
"You're thinking it's him?" I asked, no longer sure about the body being female, having heard theories from Katy and Chan.
"It's not him. I think, maybe, he did it."
Okay ...My eyes rolled, with a smile that made me thankful for darkness. I'm a polite guy. "He won't show up in a T-shirt that said I DID IT by any chance?"
"Very funny. A lot of people have seen him. Some people are just seeing lights in the woods—weird lights where there should only be darkness. But this one night, this group of, maybe, five kids, saw him. Most of us were at a basketball game. But not a single one has changed their story yet."
"I think I heard about that from other people," I said. "They were tripping?"
"What difference does it make? They all saw him. Blond hair, gangly, JCPenney polo shirt, Keds ... but all lit up in a white light."
Mary Ellen added, "There's only one person around here who wore JCPenney polo shirts to school every day ... only one kid whose mother was still dressing him in high school."
"You're saying what those kids saw was Chris ... because the person was wearing a JCPenney polo shirt? And how did they notice the sneakers?" I didn't want to burst their bubble, but it was my job to shovel through the horse droppings.
Mary Ellen said, "No, they thought it was Chris because he was surrounded by white light. As in, he was dead. A spirit. You could see through him. He looked just like he did when he left. The polo shirt was secondary."
A see-through Chris Creed. Witnesses: five. Did he do a cartwheel or something? Is that how they noticed theKeds?
I felt like I was tipping into something I would have referred to back at school as a "sewer moment." Last month I covered that'séance in Windsor Hall—just for a fun write-up—one of the dorms that a few goth residents swore was haunted by the spook of one Billy Hamilton, who'd killed himself several years back. The fact that Billy committed suicide at home in Kentucky, in his own garage, made no difference. He had been a Windsor dormie, and now he stood over people's beds on the second and third floors and they awoke to find him staring at them and then exiting through a wall.
As a person who is well trained to wake up happy, call daily problems "opportunities," and meditate on future successes, I decided I would never, ever again join hands with people calling up the dark. My mood had seeped sewage for a couple days, which is my best description for battling the feeling that someone was constantly lurking behind me, staring and smiling hungrily. If you're blind, it's an even more unpleasant sensation.
What did you expect? I asked myself. I had known I would run into some of this out here. I had invited it. "So, like, why do you want to see the ghost of Chris Creed? Do you ... want to communicate with him?"
I was trying not to deliver it in a caustic tone, but I didn't quite succeed.
"You believe he's alive," Kobe said, a note of disappointment in his voice.
"That's what Torey Adams believes. I follow his train of logic, not to derail your train. At the moment, I'm a journalist, so let's say I'm neutral."
"Well, we've got our reasons," Kobe said, and I waited for them, but Mary Ellen broke in.
"If we believe Chris Creed is dead, it's not because it's weird. It's because it's logical. Tell me how a kid leaves almost five years ago and manages to stay away," she demanded.
"I think one decent theory was on Adams's website," I pointed out. "Chris stayed with relatives in Texas who couldn't stand his mother, believed she could mess up a kid, and helped him hide."
"What about Justin and Matt?" she asked. "How could Chris go off and leave his brothers? Don't you think he would miss them?"
I had to agree about that. "Leaving your siblings behind and never getting in contact seems extremely heartless." Matt would now be a high school freshman. Adams had written even less about him than about Justin.
"So, how does Chris do that?" Mary Ellen persisted.
"I wrote a research paper on people who are successful at starting over. There's been studies on some people in the Witness Protection Program and some who ran away from home and never went back. A lot of those successful at 'starting over' have been able to shift their focus, view their old life as if it were somebody else's life. You become a new person."
"Wish I could become a new person sometimes," she griped. I sympathized.
"I suppose in cases like Chris's, that 'new person' thing helps people lose any false sense of responsibility for family members who, truthfully, need to learn to look after themselves anyway. Big brothers can't be at school, watching your back, and they don't exactly want to live at home while going to college. They want to get the hell out."
"You sound like one of those experts on Chris," Mary Ellen said. "They post on Torey Adams's website and leave endless descriptions of all the rotten things that mean kids did to them in school. Are you one of them?"
I caught a click in her voice, like maybe she was trying to be nice but wasn't much good at it. I could have given her a breeze-through of my catalogue of school hells, but I took it up a notch, not wanting her to get on the wavelength again that I was some target.
"Some people post on ChristopherCreed.com because they have been abused terribly by classmates. Others post there because they're runaways. I'm one of the few who have the dubious distinction of being both."
"You ran away?" she asked, studying me with more respect.
"I call it 'leaving home,'" I said. "I was almost eighteen."
"Tell us about it," she said with an excited little hop on her butt. "Where are you from?"
I laughed, feeling defensive. I understood that people were curious as soon as I said I was a runaway. But they didn't understand the caution you need to take. I said, "Are you going to post it on ChristopherCreed.com? 'There was this guy, Mike Mavic, out here who ran away, too, and now he's a reporter at Randolph State!' I've got a mother a lot like Mrs. Creed—only worse. She used to be a cop, an investigator, in Oklahoma City. She was one of the first officers on-site at the Oklahoma City bombing. But she's still resourceful. I've often imagined her scouring ChristopherCreed.com and other sites frequented by runaways, reading the posts, trying to figure out if one of them's me."
"Well ... what was she like? What did she do that made you run away?"
I felt RayAnn perk up. Her family was much more fun to talk about than mine—we hadn't actually gotten to this question yet. I leaned way forward with a groan, putting my elbows on the tarp and drumming my fingers. This wasn't exactly the way I had wanted this conversation to go. Not only was it about me instead of them, but it was a difficult question to answer. I probably would have avoided it if Mary Ellen hadn't found my hot button with her next thought.
"It's just that you seem so ... calm, so ... together. You're blind, you left your family..."
"Yeah, I call that bad frequency," I shared with a laugh. "I was on it for years."
"B
ut look at you. You're in a really smart college, and you're a reporter, and all this cool stuff that a lot of normal kids would not even be. Just tell us how it came about. And I won't bust you on ChristopherCreed.com or anywhere. We've kept Justin under wraps, haven't we?"
I knew my life could be a testimonial that would help others. I was one of those "if I can make it, you can too" types of people who could make a living giving motivational speeches, probably. I was becoming a Zig Ziglar, a Napoleon Hill, I told myself every day. But I had a long way to go.
"Tell ya what," I tried. "I'll answer any questions you want about my past—given you won't bust me—if you tell me where Justin is so I can interview him."
There was a long silence, and one of them swallowed. "We can't. He'll kill us," Mary Ellen said. "But if he contacts us, we can promise to tell him about you, give him your cell number."
"We're leaving Sunday morning," I said. "I really wanted to do a little better than a phone interview from my desk in Indiana with my deadline five minutes away."
"I can pretty much ... guarantee he will call you by tomorrow" was all Kobe would promise, taking out his cell. "You could say Justin and I are tense toward each other, especially since my secret fave project happens to be his brother and certain people have big mouths. But I'll do him this one and tell him you're looking for him. Give me your number."
As I spat out the last digit, Mary Ellen continued, as if the deal were sealed, "So, what happened at your house?"
I drummed on the tarp some more. This was why I don't tell many people I took off. It's very, very hard to describe. I sighed. "I wish I could say I was beaten, molested, and thrown down into a fruit cellar where the cockroaches could have at it. It was nothing so dramatic."
"She didn't beat you?" Mary Ellen asked.
"Occasionally when she was drinking she would do something violent, but mostly she drank, I think, to drown out the memories of the Oklahoma bombing. She was one of the police who ended up pulling dead kids out of that daycare center."
"My uncle's a fireman, and he pulled dead bodies out of the Trade Center just after 9/11, and he didn't turn into a drunk over it," Mary Ellen pointed out.