Max remembered stepping off those soft groaning stairs into a dark hallway. There were doors open and hanging off their hinges. Through the first door, he saw the embalming room, the tiled floor littered with leaves and dirt. The walls were peeling and the ceiling was a mass of water damage. As he’d shone his flashlight into the room, he’d spotted a huge spiderweb in one corner, and his light lit up a spider who seemed to cast a thousand glowing eyes on him.
“There was a metal table in the embalming room. A tile floor with a drain all clogged with leaves. Spiderwebs everywhere. I saw a sink in the corner filled with a dark liquid-like goo. I don’t know what it was. It was probably just water and dirt, but…” Max closed his eyes. “It scared the crap out of me. I left that room and went into the next one. The coffin room.”
Now he stopped, realizing his ice cream had begun to melt down his hand and drip onto his shoes.
“Oops.” He licked the ice cream off his hand and grabbed a pile of napkins to wipe it from his shoes, before standing and throwing his ice cream in the trash. His appetite for sweets had disappeared.
“There were maybe five coffins. A couple had their lids open. I could see the satin lining inside all spotted with mold. I didn’t want to walk around in there, but I did. I kept thinking I’m down here, and Jake’s gonna ask how many coffins? What color were they? It was absurd, but I couldn’t help it.
“I walked deeper into the room. The carpet was gross, but in one spot, it was black. A long black mark, like a coffin had been there and left a burn mark or… or something, had leaked out of it.”
He’d pictured Blane Crawford then, seen him so clearly decaying in that coffin, huge maggots on his face that he’d turned and fled. Max had sprinted full speed into a coffin. The coffin hadn’t tipped over, but it had rocked hard on its base, and the impact had hurled Max backward. He’d landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. His flashlight had skidded across the room.
“It took me a minute to stand up,” he continued. “I was seeing stars, and the next day I had a bruise the size of Texas on my chest.” He winced, remembering the purple black bruise that had throbbed for days.
“And then?” Ashley asked, her hands gripping the bench beneath her.
Sid, too, sat on the edge of his seat as if poised for flight.
“And then I got the hell out of there,” Max said. “I grabbed my flashlight and ran upstairs and out the door.”
The flash of disappointment in Ashley’s face was undeniable, but Sid grinned, as if relieved there were no more horrors to reveal.
“What?” Max asked Ashley.
“You left something out,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
A little flutter of fear lit in Max’s belly. He grinned and looked away.
“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
“Come on. We’ve seen scary stuff too. If you tell us, we’ll tell you,” Ashley said.
Sid’s mouth dropped open. “Ash, you said-,” he started, but Ashley cut him off.
“I know what I said.”
Max looked back and forth between them. He didn’t want to share the story, largely because, in the fourteen years since he’d walked into The Crawford House, he’d learned to dismiss what he’d seen. He didn’t want to remember it. He preferred to believe his brain had been so high on fear and then shock after running into the coffin that he’d simply imagined the next part.
“Tell us,” Ashley insisted.
Max chewed his tongue. He shouldn’t tell them. Teachers were role models. They reminded kids the boogeyman wasn’t real, that monsters didn’t exist. He was supposed to say, Stop doodling werewolves in your notebook. Those aren’t real.
Instead, he opened his mouth and spoke. “After I fell, I had to lay there for a few minutes. It felt like an hour, but it might have been only five seconds. Finally, I rolled over and started to get up. I was looking at the flashlight. It illuminated the floor beneath one of the coffins.
“Suddenly, I heard this horrible creak, like when you push open a door and the hinge is so rusted it screeches like an angry cat. I was on one knee by then, and I froze. I mean froze like my blood turned to ice. I didn’t take a breath. I realized it wasn’t a door I’d heard but a coffin. In the beam of that light, I saw a foot step down as if someone were climbing out of the coffin above it. And then the other foot came down. The skin on the feet and legs looked rotten, blackened, and kind of curdling.”
Sid shook his head from side to side, and Max half expected him to clamp his hands over his ears and start crying. Ashley looked equally horrified, yet strangely unafraid.
“The feet turned as if the thing above them had spotted me across that room. And it had. It was pitch black except the little halo of light from my flashlight. The only thing I could see were those feet, but it could see me. I felt it watching me. I bolted. I jumped up and ran for my life. I still remember running up those stairs.”
Max’s arms broke out in goosebumps.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that adrenaline rush since. I could have outrun the fastest kid in the school right then. But I also felt… heavy. As if something were pulling me back. Not touching me, but pulling me just the same.”
He stopped and let out a shuddering breath. “The guys laughed when they saw me come out. I barely acknowledged them. I sprinted home without looking back.”
Sid put his hands to his mouth, eyes still wide.
Ashley nodded as if Max had shared something she already knew. “It was real,” she said.
Max laughed an uncomfortable, humorless laugh.
“I accept there are mysteries in the world. Was it real? In my mind it was, and what’s more real than that, you know?” He murmured, wishing away the panicky quiver in his stomach. “Why are you guys interested in The Crawford House?”
Ashley pressed her lips into a thin line and then glanced at Sid.
“We think The Crawford House is haunted too,” Ashley said.
“Did you see something out there?” Max asked.
Ashley shook her head. “Just heard some weird stuff.”
Max recognized the lie. Whatever they thought about The Crawford House it went beyond strange noises, but he sensed their unwillingness to open up.
“We’ve got to go,” Ashley said, grabbing Sid by the shirt and tugging him up. “We’ll see you around, Mr. Wolf.”
They walked to Sid’s bike, Ashley climbing on the knobs of the back tire, and rode away.
18
After the ice cream shop, Max’s entire body seemed tense, as if the muscle memory of that long ago night in The Crawford house had as much to say as the mental one.
He needed a long ride to clear his head, and pulled into a gas station on his way out of town to fuel up.
“What’s this country coming to?” The man who stood in front of Max, waiting to pay for gas, demanded. He folded his newspaper with a huff and slapped it on the counter.
The cashier, a petite girl no older than twenty-one widened her eyes.
“Sorry, Miss,” the man said, half turning to Max and gesturing at the paper. “A little girl missing from the woods just down from her street. It’s a crying shame what people are up to. You hear this good,” the man continued, turning back to the cashier and directing his words at her. “Stay away from strangers. STAY AWAY! Don’t ride with ‘em. Don’t even walk up to their car if they're asking directions. My sister’s son disappeared walking to a park not two blocks from his house. Two blocks!”
The girl glanced at Max, and the cautious expression vanished from her face. She flashed him a brilliant smile.
“Oh, I’m careful,” the girl stated, ringing up the man’s newspaper and Styrofoam cup of coffee. “After those girls went missing a few years back, our school did a whole assembly on safety and self-defense.” She poked two pink fingernails in a jab at the men. “Go for the eyes,” she said.
“Good, good. That’s the ticket,” the man agreed.
; “A dollar-fifteen please,” she told him.
He set the money on the counter, and as she made change, Max focused on the man.
“Where’d you say that was?”
“Over in Lake City. I grew up there. Back in my day, you could stay out all night playing without a care in the world. Course my ma strapped us if we ever did that, but it wasn’t over no boogeyman. It was because we skipped out on our chores. These days you got weirdos pluckin’ kids out of their own neighborhoods. Men murderin’ women and burning them in the woods. That’s what that lunatic up north was doing. Had some old kiln on his property according to the paper.”
“Yeah, I remember hearing about that guy. What was his name again?”
“Spencer Crow,” the girl piped up. “I heard he was very handsome.” Her eyes lingered on Max as she said the word.
“I’ll take ten in gas on pump four,” he told her.
She rang him up, brushing her fingers over his palm when she handed his change back.
“That’s your bike?” she asked, looking out the window at his motorcycle.
“Yeah, she’s mine.”
“I love motorcycles,” she offered, leaning forward on the counter. Her long dark hair brushed her suddenly more visible cleavage.
The man gave Max a significant look and smiled.
“You should get one,” Max told her. “Not enough women ride bikes.”
He hurried to catch up with the man as he left the gas station.
“I think that young lady was hoping for a date,” the man told him.
“A date is the last thing I need,” Max laughed, though he could almost hear his mother disagreeing with him. “Listen, I’m a teacher at Winterberry Middle School, and the girl who just disappeared was in my class. There have been other kids who have gone missing too.”
“There have?” the man looked surprised. “I haven’t read anything about it, and I get this paper every single day. I read the whole thing too. Even the obituaries. My wife says it’s morbid, but at least once a month, we know someone listed in there. How are we to pay our respects if we don’t even know when someone has passed?”
“Very true,” Max agreed. “Do you know if any other kids have disappeared from your sister’s town?”
The man shook his head. “Not that we’ve heard of, and we’ve been pounding the pavement over there, hanging up fliers and trying to question people ourselves. She’s got a detective on the case now, but they gave her the cold shoulder when she first reported the boy missing.”
He opened his car door but made no move to get inside.
“See, part of the problem is my sister is poorer than a church mouse. She lives in this shabby apartment building full of down-on-their luck families, some of ‘em with five, six kids running the streets all hours of the day and night. But Chris wasn’t that way. He wandered, sure, what kid doesn’t, but he was home for supper every night at six sharp when his mama got home from work. She knew the minute he didn’t show up, something bad had gone on.”
“Do you think she’d be willing to talk to me?” Max asked.
“Oh sure, yes, sir, she would. She’s desperate to get people talking about her son.”
The man wrote his sister’s phone number on the back of his gas station receipt.
“I’ll tell her to expect a call.”
* * *
“Hello?” Max heard the woman’s searching voice on the line, and knew he’d reached the mother of the missing boy. Her voice teemed with hope and fear, the fear slightly outrunning the hope.
“Hi, Ms. Rowe?”
“Yes, this is her.” Her voice rose another octave.
“My name is Max Wolfenstein. I ran into your brother yesterday, and he told me your son is missing.”
The woman paused on the line, and Max wondered if she’d hung up.
“Yes, he mentioned you.”
“I’m a teacher here in Roscommon, and we’ve had several disappearances as well.”
“You have? Of children?”
“Yes. I’m not sure if there’s any connection, but it strikes me as odd. Can you tell me about the day your son disappeared?”
The woman sniffled, and Max stared at his map of northern Michigan, studying the X marks for the hundredth time in search of some similarity his mind was overlooking.
“Chris didn’t come home for dinner. He never missed dinner. It was March 17th, a Thursday. He’s a good boy. He got into trouble now and then. All boys do, I think, but he always made it to dinner.”
“Did he attend school that day?”
“Yes, school let out at two-fifteen, and he rode the bus home. He had plans to meet two other boys from the neighborhood at the basketball court. He never arrived. Somewhere between our apartment and the park, he disappeared.”
“People saw him ride the bus?”
“Yes. The bus driver said he got off the bus at our stop. She didn’t watch him walk into the building, but Nancy Perdy did. She lives in the apartment above us and spotted Chris coming up the sidewalk. He waved to her. She said he looked normal, smiling, kind of in a rush, probably to go play with his friends.”
“Did anyone witness him leaving the building?”
“No,” she sighed, “but the police searched the building and we did too, me and my brother and a few neighbors. His basketball was gone.”
“And no one in the neighborhood found the ball?”
“No.”
* * *
Max turned onto Howard Street, the street where Chris Rowe lived in an apartment with his mother. According to his mom, his father had died when Chris was only a baby, and she’d never remarried.
As he drove down the street, he immediately noticed the state of disrepair. The apartment buildings were not only out of date, they were grubby and unkempt. A crumbling abandoned building stood next to the apartment. Max wondered if anyone had searched that.
The park that Chris had been walking to that day looked equally haggard. Knee-high weeds were the only vegetation in sight. A rusted swing set offered a single swing dangling by two chains. A paved parking lot of spider web cracks and two netless hoops served as the basketball court.
It was a far cry from the picturesque parks Max had played in as a boy.
Several boys played a basketball game. They looked around twelve or thirteen, the same age as Chris, maybe even his friends.
Max parked his motorcycle and watched the kids, gazing at more derelict houses, buildings with faded paint and parking lots. He waited until the boys took a break and then walked over.
“Hey guys,” he said.
They looked at him, but didn’t speak. One of them glanced at his motorcycle and nodded approvingly.
“Sweet ride,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks. Listen, do any of you guys know Chris Rowe?”
Two of the boys frowned. They glanced at each other. The third nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Were you here playing ball the day he went missing?”
“I was out of town,” one boy answered. He was the tallest of the three with hair buzzed close to his head and beady brown eyes.
The second boy, likely awaiting a growth spurt, shook his head.
The third nodded. He stood in between the other two, lanky with shaggy brown hair and so many freckles they nearly obscured the features of his face. Max had to study him to make out his nose and mouth in the sea of freckles.
“I came here to meet him, but he never showed up.”
“Did you see anything that day? Cars you didn’t ordinarily see in the neighborhood? That kind of thing?”
Freckles shrugged and glanced at his buddies. “Nah, not really.”
“Not really?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know, I saw a black van. It seemed normal enough, but later on, after Chris disappeared, kids started calling it the boogeyman van.”
“Why?”
The boy who’d been out of town piped up. “Because the driver offered Ethan Becker some candy
. Ethan’s Jewish, like real Jewish, you know? He only eats Jewish stuff.”
“It’s called kosher, dufus,” the third boy told him, bouncing the basketball at his face.
The boy swatted it away.
“Yeah, that. Anyway, the guy gave him the creeps, and that’s the day Chris went missing.”
“Would Chris have taken the candy?” Max asked, disturbed by the story of a man in a van offering candy.
“Oh yeah, for sure. He ate candy like a fat kid even though he was skinnier than most girls. He’d have definitely taken it,” Freckles admitted.
“Does anyone know if the police spoke with Ethan about the man in the black van?”
“The police didn’t talk to nobody,” the first kid said. “We live in the same building as Chris, and the police never came to our place.”
Freckles nodded.
Max frowned.
“How about Ms. Rowe? Anyone tell her the story?”
Freckles nodded.
“I did. About a week after he went missing. I told her and Chris’s uncle when they were out putting up flyers. Mrs. Rowe and my ma drove me to the police station. The cops left us sittin’ for two hours before they finally wrote down what I said. But I swear the guy wrote it on the back of a menu for that barbecue joint over on ninth street.” He snatched the basketball from his friend and lobbed it at one of the basketball rims. It missed by a good five feet.
“Air ball,” the first boy called.
“Where can I find Ethan Becker?” Max asked.
“He works at his dad’s shoe store after school. Go about three blocks that way. It’s called Becker’s.”
The store was empty when Max arrived.
He spotted a boy, close to the same age as the other boys, standing on the sidewalk, a spray bottle and a rag in his hand, washing the windows.
The kid turned when Max pulled the motorcycle up to the curb.
“Ethan Becker?”
The boy frowned and leaned close to the window as if searching for someone inside the store. He took a step toward the door.
Max held up his hands.
“I’m a teacher. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
Rag Doll Bones: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 11