"A whole schmear of events actually followed it, if you want to talk about bad frequency." I shuddered but kept my grin. "My dad died maybe a month after that. We farmed corn. He fell off the tractor somehow, got caught under the wheel."
"Wow," she said.
"And ... drumroll ... between the bombing and my dad dying, my mother found out she was pregnant with my sister, Merilee."
"Ohh..."
I hoped she'd leave it alone, but she was the inquisitive sort.
"So, what did she do besides drink, if she didn't beat you?"
I just kind of threw it out there, fixating on getting them to bring Justin to me. "It was weird ... sort of like we were married. I don't mean anything sexual by that—she never, like, tried to jump in my bed or anything. My dad died when I was in second grade, and by fifth grade, some kids had cell phones. Kids would always talk on their cells at school with friends. I was always talking with my mother. She knew exactly when the bells would ring. There I'd be, on my cell, talking about the bills or taxes or my little brother and sister. She didn't want me to have friends. She was really possessive, controlling, and if I asked to go anywhere, she would say, 'We've got all this work to do.' We've, we've, we've ...It was never her, never me, always us."
"So, you ran away?" Mary Ellen digested this. I guess it didn't seem like enough. She hadn't lived through it.
"My senior year, I got a girlfriend. Finally. For about a week. That was the last straw. You should have seen my mother carrying on. She said Sydney wasn't a nice girl, she was from a bad family, all this stuff, but the truth was, it could have been any girl. Sorry it's not any juicier than that."
"You felt strangulated." She finally got it.
"Exactly. I could see the rest of my life unfolding ... I would take care of her until I was seventy and she was ninety-five, and she'd still be dishing out orders in her 'once a cop, always a cop' tone. So, in my case, I didn't mind leaving my brother and sister. She never had that sort of relationship with them. Besides, they were scrappy and feisty. I didn't have that nature. I was a peaceful guy. Better to just ... make like a tree and leaf, before she chopped me down like that... Giving Tree story." I was stumbling. I hadn't exactly tried this aloud too often.
"And she has no idea where you are?" she asked.
"Nope. But she's still trying. She got my cell phone number once." I chuckled.
"How do you know? Did you talk to her?"
"No. It was last fall. I was walking to campus one morning and my cell rang. I looked down, and there was my old phone number. I jumped nine feet in the air."
"You didn't pick up?"
"It was all gut instinct. Over in a flash. I connected the call so she wouldn't hear my voice on voice mail, and I was walking past this duck pond. I heaved the phone straight into the pond. I cut class, zipped on over to Verizon Wireless, and had a new phone, new number, and a hacker friend destroying the history of my file, all within half an hour."
RayAnn cracked up. She had heard this part of the story. She went on, "A lot of people were walking to campus and saw him throw the phone into the pond. We had just met. They thought it was me, and that I was hot for Mike, which I was. But they thought I was, like, stalking him or something."
I tossed an arm over her shoulder as they laughed.
"Do you have an assumed name?" Mary Ellen asked.
"Mike is really mine. The Mavic I picked up in Tijuana, Mexico, for two hundred bucks, along with a fake driver's license, fake Social."
"Mavic is really not your last name?" RayAnn asked incredulously.
"How could I keep my real last name with an ex-cop for a mom?"
They sat quietly, absorbing all of this, I guess. "So, are you going to get Justin for me?"
"I'll really try, honestly," Kobe said, though I sensed strongly that their inability to get him right now, right in front of me, was bull. I hoped at least they would start punching a cell number as soon as we left.
Mary Ellen shuddered. She noted accurately, "I was such a jerk when you first came out here."
RayAnn laced her fingers through mine.
I supposed that was a Steepleton version of an apology. "That's okay," I said cheerfully. "It's not like I'm inexperienced. Do you mind if I ask... Why do you act like that?"
"I don't know." Her head disappeared as she lay flat again with a sigh. "I'm the only girl in a family of four older brothers. I get picked on too."
"But somehow that doesn't make you sympathetic," I said in what I hoped was a journalistically neutral way.
"You would think. I don't know why I hate on people. I never really thought about it before, but I do it ... because I have to. If I sense weakness in another person, it infuriates me," Mary Ellen confessed.
"Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe I'm like a dog. Do you ever watch that show The Dog Whisperer? Cesar Millan, the dog expert guy, says that dogs bite weak energy. That's why you should never run from them or show fear."
I loved the show. Cesar Millan talked about energy all the time. With him in mind, I actually felt Mary Ellen's energy shift from curiosity to fear.
She finally continued. "Wow. What am I? Some, like, primate?"
Kobe bolted upright. "She's King Kong! She's ... a raptor! A fire-farting Tyrannosaurus rex!"
They banged into my right shoulder with their wrestling match, Kobe laughing and pinning Mary Ellen down. Mary Ellen kept demanding that he shut up. I barely heard RayAnn note, "Did you see what he turned into once she got vulnerable?"
Interesting point. He started "biting."
"Fine, Kobe!" Mary Ellen finally yelled louder than he laughed. "I will never tell you anything again! I would love to have some real convo with my friends sometime that wasn't about ... who's weird, or who's not popular, or who's dead. Why do we try to film spooks out here? Huh? For some reason we love being scared and depressed."
"It's not a downer—it's fun," Kobe said defensively, backing away from her on his butt. "I do think there are Others, capital O, out here, and I think it's exciting. You didn't have to come, ya know. You could have gone over to Taylor's to play 'I'm grounded' games on her PlayStation. You said you wanted to feel it out here. You wanted to know what I was talking about."
"Fine. I'm lying quietly and looking for a white figure in a JCPenney polo shirt obviously bought by his mother," she said blandly.
"Uh ... you were saying you had 'reasons' for wanting to draw the ghost of Chris Creed to you," I put in, turning the subject again.
"I'm not saying he would talk to me," Kobe corrected me. "I'm not a medium or a spiritualist or anything like that. I'm just a guy who lives in this town and wants to know what's going on, that's all. If I see him out here? I'll know."
"Know what?"
"My uncle just died of bone cancer, and he lived on the Creeds' street. I want to know what's up with the cancer rate. And the car accidents. There are these newspaper articles, and last year they were the talk of current events class, until it boiled over and everyone had put the subjects together: cancer, accidents, and Chris."
I said that the Haydens had told me. "So ... what do the car accidents and cancer have to do with Chris Creed?"
It took him a moment to say what I would have guessed, though he acted like it was big news.
"I want to know if Chris is behind it. I want to know if he's come back. I want to know if he's getting revenge on all of us for the way Steepleton treated him."
I realized what bothered me out here tonight was the deadly silence. You would expect trees in forests to rattle and whisper through their leaves, but it was too early in the season. Mid-April meant the trees were budding, and the breeze blew through in silence. Silent woods are unnerving. I cleared my throat.
"Uh... I'm no fan of horror movies, but wouldn't an angry spook, like, impale people on fences? I've never heard of a spook giving a body cancer. That doesn't, um, fit the MO."
"But it's happening. Got any better theories?"
"Maybe y'a
ll should shy away from farm-raised fish and hormone-enhanced poultry?" RayAnn tried. It cracked me up, but I smothered it with a cough, detecting that Kobe was not amused.
"And these car accidents," he said. "Betcha Rye didn't tell you that three of them were total fatalities. Nobody was left alive to say what would cause a car to drive off the road into a ditch in the middle of the night. Just ... the cops driving around in the morning find yet another car turned upside down on the side of some back bay road, a couple of dead people still in their seat belts."
RayAnn had taken out a reporter's pad and was scratching furiously. "Do you have the families' names?"
Kobe was spitting them out to her, giving little details, and I felt myself listening through the quiet, not hearing anything, but turning icy in a hard-to-describe way. It was the same sensation as walking into class and suddenly remembering you have a paper due that you forgot about. Yet nothing had changed here. Even the wind was momentarily still. Power of suggestion.
"I should have brought Tyra out here. She's this goth in school who says she can talk to the dead. I can't stand her probably-tattooed ass, but I don't know anything about that stuff," Kobe continued and turned to me suddenly. "Hey, I saw you touching the trees and breathing deeply when you first came in here, before you knew we were watching. What was up with that?"
"Nothing related," I said, my chill growing deeper.
"Justin's mad at me right now ... knows I'm among those who think his brother is dead. But I'm cool with his quantum thought theory, which sounds like it could work on the dead, too. Why not? At least, it might work out here... This is a weird place."
Kobe must have heard Justin describing how it works, because he started breathing himself, in and out, in and out. "I believe I am seeing Chris Creed."
I rolled my eyes but couldn't quite stop myself from looking out into the woods. I persevered through a dozen frames of utter blackness before remembering that people who believe in quantum thought state their wishes in the present tense, as if they have them.
"I believe I have the power to draw Chris Creed to me." He breathed in and out. "I believe that the ghost of Chris Creed is coming out of those woods."
Mary Ellen said, "Stop it. Justin says quantum thought is for drawing happy things. What you're doing doesn't seem right."
"Justin said it will work on anything," he replied, "so you have to be careful. I believe I see—"
Lanz growled, so low that I was probably the only one who heard him.
"Mike, we've got those girls back at the car," RayAnn whispered, her nervous energy jutting into me and obviously not pleasing Lanz.
"I believe I see a white light in those woods that is transforming into the ghost of Chris Creed..." Kobe refused to give it up.
"Um, maybe you should study up on quantum thought." I smiled patiently. "You could misfire and bring out some abomination that will fly up your backside and make you howl and sputter—"
"Bring it on," he replied without a laugh. The kid was morbid.
"Fine. You call Chris Creed back from the dead. We're just going to pack it in. Can you be sure to tell him to come to you and not to follow us?"
He ignored me with all his inhaling and exhaling.
I stood up slowly, still feeling the energy darting and shifting around me. I took the woods in frame by frame and saw nothing but pitch darkness. It wasn't until I was standing totally straight that Lanz growled loudly. I realized he had been standing, rooted, not staring out at the dark woods, but behind me.
SEVEN
I JERKED AROUND TOO QUICKLY, and everything went, black. But the feeling of facing a human being was so strong that I dropped down again and put an arm up protectively to shield RayAnn.
Kobe finally stopped that godforsaken deep breathing. Mary Ellen fell half into my lap. "Justin, is that you?"
Slow, clomping footsteps moved closer, as if a person a little ways off was toying with us. Somebody wanted to see us squirm. Lanz growled.
"Shine your flashlight, asshole, whoever you are," Mary Ellen demanded. "Don't make Kobe beat the crap out of you..."
"Tell me what this is, please, RayAnn," I managed.
"It's a policeman," she finally said blandly.
The form stepped up and developed a face. A deep, booming voice answered. "I'm on my way home after a long night, but I figured I'd come out here and clear this place of idiots before hitting the hay."
"Chief, you just blew it!" Kobe said. "Creed was coming to let us know he's behind all our bad luck."
The man yawned and didn't try to cover it. Chief Rye was African American, and the little bits I could take in of his skin glowed deep gold in the moonlight. His grin looked slightly amused as Mary Ellen sputtered some apology for inappropriate name-calling, but she got cut off.
"Chief Rye, I'm RayAnn Spencer. Mike Mavic and I are here from the Randolph Exponent—" A flashlight shone in my face, and I found my legs and stood up again.
"Mike. I see you're finding your way around the area. Sorry I couldn't talk to you earlier." He shined a flashlight around and it stopped on Mary Ellen's face. She had reddish hair. Kind of pretty. "I can't tell the journalists where to be and where not to be, but this is no place for teenagers right now. I don't have to tell you we found a body tonight."
"Right," I said, hearing the tarp being shaken out. "We were just leaving."
"Turns out this corpse is recent. Four months old, tops. Don't forget your camera, Kobe," he said. "Until we figure out what happened, play it safe. It looks like a domestic squabble turned ugly, but until we're sure, do not be out in dark fields. Do you read me?"
Obviously, Rye had a balanced, friend-foe relationship going with these kids.
"Sorry. I thought it was Chris Creed's body at first," Kobe said. "You know ... old news."
"No, it's not a Creed ... not either one of them."
My body flooded with relief. No more fears of needing'séances to get my interview with Justin. Kobe and Mary Ellen got their things together and tramped on ahead to the trail. Once they were out of earshot I asked, "Can you say who it is?"
Rye answered in a low voice, "I gave in to the hounding of the Press of Atlantic City, so I guess I can tell you too. It's a girl from the Pinelands, another jurisdiction. We'd heard she was missing, but word was out that she and her boyfriend, Danny, eloped to Vegas for a quick marriage license. The mother hadn't heard from her, but that's nothing new. They fought like cats and dogs. She never even reported her missing. Her mother identified the jewelry, so we woke up a Pinelands dentist to verify it's her teeth. DNA will be a formality."
Not a Creed; it's no big deal, I started to tell myself, to ward off bad feelings for some family out there. I could hear RayAnn scratching in the dark on her reporter's notebook.
"What's the deceased's name?" she asked.
"Darla Richardson."
I gasped, and my shock doubled when Kobe and Mary Ellen mumbled, "Who's that?" as if they'd never heard this name before.
"Darla Richardson?" I repeated loudly. "The wild and crazy thirteen-year-old sister of Bo Richardson from Adams's tale? That Darla Richardson?"
"The same," Rye said. "Only now she's eighteen. Or was. Let's get moving. It's been a long day."
I spun to them in amazement. Richardson was a "boon," short for "boondocks" and the backward people living out there, and had become Adams's friend despite their differences, yada yada, all this stuff from ChristopherCreed.com. I was slowly coming to comprehend that the website meant less to people in this town than it did to the legion of cult followers in faraway places.
One passage came spilling back to me from Torey Adams's story: He, Ali McDermott, and Bo tried to get Chris's diary out of the Creed house, wanting to see if it said anything about where Chris might have gone. Ali knew Chris's secret hiding place. While Bo and Torey stood on the sidewalk between Ali's house and the Creeds', scheming on how to get it, they had a conversation about Bo's wild 92 and crazy sister, Darla. She was already sta
ying out all night with boys in her neighborhood, Bo had said, and he was always trying to stop her from acting out.
"Isn't she an upperclassman in your high school now?" I asked.
Kobe said something about the high school boundaries being redistributed several years ago so that all the boons went to Pinelands Regional now. The boons had played such a major role in Adams's story, it amazed me to see this new generation hardly acknowledging their existence. People forget fast. Boons had been the backhoe kids at Steepleton High, the kids who gave the place an edge.
"Darla Richardson," I repeated to the police chief. It wasn't funny, so I couldn't understand why I sensed him smiling until I grabbed Lanz and we started walking back to the car together. I realized he'd been eavesdropping.
"Sorry if you're disappointed. Lydee tries quantum thought to conjure up one of the Creeds, and you get the chief of police. You're all short-circuiting somewhere," he teased.
"Kids in high school make for strange interviews." I didn't mention that I had just tried the thing myself when I first arrived here. "You know what quantum thought is, obviously?"
"I don't own any books on it," he said. "But I read the Amazon bestseller lists."
"Do you believe in it?"
"You live around here, you don't disbelieve anything. I'd say you're pretty lucky, at any rate. If you're looking to do some updated story to what's on ChristopherCreed.com, your only problem is that you'd have a hell of a hard time chasing down that cast of characters. Bo Richardson is in the military in Kenai, Alaska, Ali McDermott is a senior at Boston U, and Torey Adams we all know about. This particular funeral, sad as it is, is the only thing I can think of that would bring them all back."
EIGHT
I GOT US A ROOM at this little motel called the Twilight Inn, that looked off into the Pine Barrens, but it was close to the bay that separated Steepleton from the barrier islands, and you could smell the salt in the air. Mr. Spencer had given RayAnn hotel money. His stipulation for her going halfway across the country was that he didn't want us camping out in the middle of April when all the mid-Atlantic campgrounds were closed before Memorial Day. I wondered if we were any safer in this dusty old motel that reminded me of the Bates place in Psycho.