Songs of a Peach Tree
By Michael Ciardi
Copyright 2013 Michael Ciardi
In E-book form
Cover by Joleene Naylor
[email protected] Revised Edition
Prologue
Summer: Thirty Years Ago
“Please—wake up,” a voice shivered in the darkness. “You can’t die out here!”
In defiance to the young boy’s plea, a child’s rain-soaked body remained prone on the ground before his feet. The victim: a pretty girl who was not more than twelve summers old. Beneath the crescent Moon of this night, her onyx-black hair shimmered as if each delicate strand was laminated with a layer of silk. This child’s eyes, no doubt once marked with genuine innocence, were now fixated and devoid of expression. Save for a bluish hue that discolored her lips, her skin appeared bloodlessly pale. The wood’s moist dirt lathered her exposed flesh. Her mouth remained agape in a petrified scream, telling a silent tale of fear and confusion in her final seconds of life.
Between the raindrops, a foreign tear trickled a crude path through the mud covering her cheek. A boy hovering over her began to sob. Yet no sorrow, no matter how sincere, awakened this child from her ill-timed fate. The air had been snatched from her tiny lungs, and now she was made to wither in this woodland. How did it all come to this? At first the boy denied the notion that he was to blame, but no one else could be faulted for this crime. Indeed, he alone was the culprit, and he alone would take the necessary steps to conceal the callousness of his deed.
Rain streamed with a deafening impact upon the trees’ leaves, causing a consistent patter to echo between the oaks and sycamores. Hastened by his anxiety, the boy could barely forge his way through the thicket, but he towed his victim along the underbrush by her bare ankles, disregarding the sound of her skull as it scraped across a trail of jagged rocks. Aside from the raindrops, only the boy’s frightened whimpers rebounded through the night’s air. Had the moonlight managed to emerge from the ashen-colored clouds for only a moment to glimpse upon the horror at hand, it would have revealed an unrelenting terror blooming in his eyes.
Soon the boy grew weary from his endeavor. He was a thin, lanky lad who was not truly capable of tugging a significant amount of deadweight for more than two hundred yards across an unbalanced terrain peppered with rocks and steadfast roots. At the end of this distance, he collapsed in a fit of fatigue and frustration. The girl’s face and upper torso were bloodied by the heedless progress. Most of her facial skin had been crudely shredded along the right cheek, and her earlobe had been torn off after being snagged beneath a bed of shallow tree roots.
Despite the boy’s progress, the woods still engulfed him. He knew that he needed to get out before someone had discovered the girl’s absence. She was not the type of child who would go unmissed for too long after nightfall. After a moment of contemplation, he cleared the water from his face and searched for a pathway on the ground, but his eyes could not clearly penetrate the darkness. Had he simply left the girl where she lay, she would have surely been found by sunrise. He required more time than that to separate himself from this murder. Her body needed to be concealed in such a way that no one would easily find her—at least until he managed to pry the guilt from his mind.
While he pondered an avenue of escape, thunder rippled between the distant hills. Then, as he staggered to his feet, a pulse of lightning illuminated the forest’s interior. At last, in sequence to the storm’s well-timed energy, he navigated around the impediments in front of him. Just beyond a slight elevation in the terrain, he discerned a grove of peach trees. He now had a landmark to assess his current position, but more importantly, he knew where to dispose of the body.
Just as before, only now more deliberately, the boy took his victim by her ankles, tucking each of her feet underneath his armpits for leverage. He peered at her face between the bolts of electricity, praying that she might spring up and smear the blood from her eyes. But the blueness of her lips had strayed into her cheeks by now. Blood oozed from the fresh wounds too, but most of it mixed invisibly with the dark mud.
The boy lurched farther into the woods, yanking the limp child across a string of weedy shrubs flanking an incline in the earth. Once at the base of this hill, he entered the grove with a firmer eye on his destination. Aside from the peach trees, the ground within the grove was unimpeded and easy to traverse. Though thoroughly exhausted from his efforts, he managed to drag the body three rows deep between the trees. Once partially camouflaged beneath a canopy of lance-shaped foliage, he took a moment to regain his stamina.
Mercifully, as if some hand of evil had orchestrated itself into this affair, the rain softened the earth tonight. He may have been entirely depleted of his energy, but he still possessed enough strength to shovel at the mud with his hands. It was here in this spot, under the roots of one inconspicuous peach tree, that he dug a makeshift grave.
The boy frantically scooped the mud from the hole, using his shirt as a canvass to heave the excess dirt from the pit’s edge. Despite his drowsiness and hunger, a fiercer impulse consumed his thoughts. He found strength in his arms and back where none had existed before, for he sensed a possible escape from this predicament. Surely, he surmised, no one would find the unfortunate child buried beneath the roots of a peach tree—at least until he was far removed from the scene.
Twenty minutes passed, and during that span he dug a pit three feet deep, just wide enough to conceal the body from all those who might tread over it. The rain had dissipated by now, too, and a division in the storm clouds permitted some pale strands of moonlight to seep into the grove. The boy climbed from the ditch, wearily smearing the mud from his eyes. He was not proud of himself during these seconds, but enough tears had been shed for his victim. It was time to return to the ranks of the living in order to put this shameful moment behind him forever.
With one final burst of adrenaline, the boy nudged the girl’s body into the grave. Using his feet, he positioned her so that her legs were bent double behind her body. Her face splashed into the muddy water pooling into the pit’s bottom.
“I’m sorry,” the boy uttered. “I never meant for this to happen.”
And with those grim words the boy pulled the loose soil over the girl’s body, smothering her remains with an assortment of worms and beetles wriggling between his fingertips. In his haste, he nearly plunged into the grave beside her. He started to sink into the ruptured earth, but managed to correct his position by grabbing hold of one of the peach tree’s hanging branches. With this action, several ripened peaches broke free from their stems and plopped into the grave. After hoisting himself upright, he noticed the fruit shimmering on the wet ground.
Had this been an other time, he might’ve satisfied his appetite by tasting the fruit, but he decided it was more prudent to finish this task and move onward before his detection became inevitable. Within minutes, he finished filling the hole to his satisfaction. He then fell silent beside the tree, almost as if he was paying homage to the victim’s remains. He shivered in the darkness, trying to recollect the events that delivered him to this terrible place.
In the course of such events, even a boy must learn to rationalize the savagery of such actions. After all, her murder was not committed with intent. The boy possessed no apparent propensity to kill before this night. In fact, he felt just as violated as the child who lay buried beneath the peach tree. What purpose would it serve to confess to this deed now? The girl, no matter how unjustly deprived of life, was already dead. No amount of suffering on his part could ever correct this travesty.
Perhaps it was better for him to simply walk away and permit time and fate to determine the punishment, if any, that he deserved. Fo
r now it was summer and he was on the brink of another day—a day that he vowed would not be similar to the one he just left behind.
Chapter 1
Summer: Present Day