His sarcasm was lost on the cat who continued to chase the fruit loop beneath the table.
Max grabbed his broom, swept the cereal into the dustpan, and threw it out the back door. He could have deposited it in the trash can. It was right there, but when he started to lift the lid something in him squeezed, and without thought, he opened the door and tossed it into the yard. The colored hoops disappeared into the grass.
He brewed his coffee and gazed around the kitchen. The microwave sat on the counter. A jar of quarters sat on his kitchen table. If a burglar had broken in, one who left Fruit Loops in his wake no less, wouldn’t he have taken those items?
He wandered out of the kitchen and into the living room, noting the television and VCR. Again, nothing appeared amiss, except a single book laying face down in the center of the carpeted room, just as one had the night before.
But he’d picked it up and returned it to the shelf. Hadn’t he?
He knelt and grabbed the book, flipping it over.
Heart of Darkness he read out loud, by Joseph Conrad.
He’d taught the book the previous fall to the seventh grade students, a class that Melanie Dunlop had been in.
He set it on the coffee table and then picked it back up, returning it to his bookshelf, making sure it was held snugly within the other books. He pushed against the side of the bookcase. It didn’t budge. He hadn’t expected it to. The bookcase was an antique made from solid oak and heavy.
When he sat down at his table with the newspaper, he was disappointed to see no mention of missing kids.
Melanie Dunlop’s disappearance had shifted to page two.
21
Max drove slow through town, watching the early morning travelers walking to jobs. Mrs. Kenmore, who owned Minnie’s Flower Shop, heaved a large potted flower out her door. When she saw max, she grinned and titled her head in a wave. He lifted a hand to wave back.
The town felt emptier than usual with the school buses absent from stoplights and no groups of kids piling at street corners as they waited for the crossing guard to wave them by.
He generally met the summer with mingled exhilaration and sadness. He missed the kids over summer break, missed the routine of his day-to-day life and the students’ boisterous energy.
Throughout the summer, he’d return to the school a few days a week as he started preparation for the upcoming year, but during the first days of his break he often felt an odd purposelessness, a questioning of not only his big life choices, but also the little ones, like what will I do today?
Instead of that niggling self-doubt, Max found himself fixated on the voice of Melanie Dunlop and thoughts of the other kids: Vern Ripley, Simon Frank, and Warren Leach. Three still missing and one dead.
He slowed and directed his motorcycle to the curb, climbing off and leaving his helmet on the seat of his bike.
Baby Love, a boutique store specializing in all things baby, looked empty on the early Saturday morning, but thankfully the little open sign glowed red.
He’d received an early morning call that Matthew Herman Wolfenstein had arrived into the world at four a.m. Max’s parents were already at the hospital. Max had promised his mother he’d pick up a gift and meet them there.
As he approached the store, he gazed through the window at the display. A crib draped in satiny blankets spotted with little yellow ducks sat on a matching duck rug. A glider chair held a pile of plush blue and pink ducks.
One child had left the world the week before, and now another had come into it. Hundreds, no thousands more had been born and died in the interim.
As Max gazed through the window, a reflection appeared in the glass beside his own. He looked toward it, expecting another patron hurrying into the store for their own early morning gift. Instead, Melanie Dunlop gazed at him in the glass. Her eyes looked dark and hollow; her lips parted as if she was about to speak.
Worst of all was the red gash across Melanie’s throat.
Shocked, he spun to face her, but the sidewalk stretched on before him, empty.
* * *
“Mom, can I talk to you about something?”
Maria Wolfenstein stood back to survey her handiwork. She’d spent the morning cooking and baking for Jake and Eleanor and had stocked their refrigerator and freezer with food.
“Casserole on the second shelf?” she asked him absently. “Yes,” she agreed before he could answer. “Knowing your brother, he’ll only see what’s at eye level and poor Eleanor will spend the next week eating sauerkraut.”
She switched the dishes out and then smiled, triumphant.
“What would you like to talk about, Maximillian?” she asked, turning to face him.
He started to speak, but she held up a finger. “Did you get the mobile set up?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. We deserve a little break. How about a cup of coffee and cake?”
“Sure, Mom.”
After Maria had sliced them each a hunk of Black Forest cake and poured coffees, she followed Max onto the sunlit porch. They settled into wrought iron deck furniture.
“You used to say Grandma Stein spoke to ghosts,” Max started.
Maria sipped her coffee and regarded him. “Oh yes. My mother had the sight to be sure,” Maria agreed, cutting a forkful of cake and holding it up to her nose. “You can smell the cherries. Have a bite, Maximillian. Don’t insult me with your meager appetite.”
Max laughed and took a bite. “I may be many things, Mother, but a stingy eater isn’t one of them. It’s delicious as always.”
He took a second bite and followed it up with a sip of coffee. “Did you ever see things? Ghosts?”
“Yes, indeed. We live in a haunted world. Every being leaves something behind. That’s what my mother used to say. When I was a girl in Hamburg, we lived during the most dreadful time in the history of Germany. The horrors…” she trailed off, gazing at her cake in woeful astonishment. “I still cannot think of them, not truly. Most of us did not believe in Hitler’s cruelty. My very best friend’s mother was in the National Socialist Women’s League, a major supporter of the Nazi Party. The city was haunted, the whole country, really. Death everywhere you turned. My mother nearly went mad with it.”
Max leaned back in his chair, watching a boy whiz by on a bicycle.
“The ghost I encountered, the one I knew was a ghost, was a little girl. I say little, but back then she was my age. Gitta was her name, and she had lived in the flat beneath ours. Her family was Jewish. They owned a little store that had closed after the boycott. The Nazis had taken her family two years before. I still remember their screams, still to this day. The crying and pleading. Her father offered to pay the Nazi soldiers.”
Maria’s face pinched with the memory.
“I remember the sounds of Gitta and her mother’s footsteps pounding up the stairs and down the hall. The mother beat on our door and begged us to let them in. My father stood at our door, his face like stone. My mother held me and rocked me, tears pouring down her cheeks, and I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. My mind had not yet grown enough to comprehend the evil that exists in this world. My parents did not support the Third Reich, but we were powerless against them.”
Maria paused, the color gone from her face as she gazed into the yard across the street, though Max knew it was not the neighbor’s newly planted flowers she observed.
“A couple years went by and sometimes I wondered what happened to Gitta, but if I brought it up, my mother would shush me and say not to think about her because I would let her in. Well, that only made me think about her more, and one night after I’d said my prayers, I climbed into bed and had only just closed my eyes when she whispered my name. Maria, she said from beneath the bed.”
A chill crept down Max’s spine, and in his mind he heard his name, Mr. Wolf, spoken in his bedroom.
“I thought, my goodness Gitta has escaped,” Maria continued. “And I popped out of bed and looked for her, but she was not there. N
o one was there. A few nights later, she spoke my name again from the crevice beneath my bed, and again, I did not find her. I grew determined to catch her. I lay in my bed with my mother’s hand mirror tilted toward that dark crack. And this time when she spoke my name, I saw her in the mirror. Her face looked like driftwood, gray and gnarled, and her eyes were dark and shining. She looked sunken.”
Maria rotated the gold band on her ring finger as if it were talisman and might protect her from the memory.
“Gitta opened her mouth and a flood of ash poured out. I screamed and dropped the mirror, cracking the glass. My mother and father rushed in. They’d been asleep in bed. They looked almost as terrified as me. I couldn’t even speak to tell them about Gitta and the ashes.”
Max’s skin crawled and he shifted in his chair.
“My mother slept with me that night. In the morning, I told her all about the girl. We cleaned my room that day. Moved the bed to the opposite wall, swept the dust and dirt free. My mother burned candles and said a prayer. I never saw Gitta again.”
Max finished his coffee, his arms prickling with goosebumps. As he’d done with his own terrifying childhood tale, he wanted to dismiss her experience as the wild imaginings of a child in wartime.
Instead, he said, “I think I’m being haunted.”
She finished her cake, sliding the fork over the porcelain to get the last of the frosting.
“Have you invited someone in? A spirit?”
“The hell if I know.” He threw up his hands.
“Words, young man,” she scolded him.
“Sorry, Mom. The heck if I know.” He winked at her. “It’s the girl who went missing, Melanie Dunlop. I heard her voice the other night in my room, and then I saw her reflection in a store window.”
Maria frowned and reached a loving hand to Max’s, caressing his fingers. “You are my sensitive child, Max. My heart. I love Jakey like my own two legs, but Jake is a thinker, and you are a feeler. It’s always the feelers they come to, the ghosts. The thinkers simply think them away.”
“It means she’s dead, right? If I’m seeing her ghost, she’s dead?”
“I’ve never met a live one,” Maria murmured. “What a shame, a young girl, hardly more than a baby.” Maria pressed her hands into her cheeks, her eyes filling with tears. “So much suffering in this world.”
“Could it be a hallucination?” he wondered out loud. “Something I’m imagining because I’ve been thinking about her so much?”
Maria tilted her head to the side. “The mind is tricky. That’s true enough, but what does your heart tell you?” She leaned over and placed a hand on his chest.
He closed his eyes. “That she’s dead.”
22
Ashley and Sid fed the raccoons and returned to the street.
“Here,” Sid pulled a dollar out of his pocket.
She didn’t take it, planting her hands on her hips.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
Sid’s parents rarely gave him pocket money, and when they did, he spent it on candy within an hour.
“My dad gave it to me for helping him haul some old furniture down from the attic.”
“Don’t you want to get candy?”
Sid shook his head and waved his t-shirt away from his body as if suddenly hot.
“I’d rather you get your bike a little sooner.”
Ashley smiled and took the money shoving it in the back pocket of her shorts.
“Thanks, Sid,” she said.
“So where to?” he asked. “We could see if Benny McKenzie has his pool open.”
Ashley shook her head. There was only place Ashley had wanted to go since the idea had popped into her head two days earlier.
“The Crawford House,” Ashley said.
Sid paled, slowing his walk.
“Let’s go tomorrow, Ash. It’s too hot today. The bug’s will be terrible.”
“Not any worse than they were back there.” She hiked a thumb at the woods behind her. “Look, you don’t have to go inside. Deal? I just want to poke around there and see if we notice anything.”
Sid sighed, and Ashley noticed how he dragged his feet as they walked out of their neighborhood, skirting the southern end of town.
The woods that ran behind the train tracks buzzed with gnats.
Sid swatted them away. “Ugh, I swallowed one,” he complained.
“Breathe through your nose.”
Ahead of them, Ashley spotted birds circling above the trees. She counted twelve vultures floating in the still sky.
“Sid,” she croaked, grabbing his arm.
“What?” he asked.
She pointed to the birds, and when he saw them, he turned as if to run the other way.
At the end of the street, Ashley saw Shane Savage walking toward the woods, oblivious to the birds circling above.
Ashley didn’t think. She sprinted down the street.
Shane hadn’t noticed her. She darted forward and grabbed his hand, wrenching him back as he stepped onto the grassy embankment edging the trees.
“What are you doing?” he asked, surprised.
“Don’t go in there,” she told him, trying to catch her breath.
Sid lumbered toward them, less than a half a block away, but red-faced and visibly winded.
Ashley looked into the sky where the birds continued to hold vigil over whatever lurked beneath them.
“It’s in there,” she said.
“What? What do you mean?”
She pointed a shaky finger toward the birds.
Shane frowned. “Okay? So, there’s like a dead opossum in there or something.”
He started to pull away, to walk back toward the tree line, but she snatched the back of his shirt in her hand and pulled so hard she almost ripped the fabric.
“It’s not a dead opossum, Shane. There’s…” she looked for Sid. She wanted him there to back her up. If they both told their stories, it wouldn’t seem so nuts. He’d stopped, hands planted on his thighs, as he wheezed for breath.
“He doesn’t look so good,” Shane murmured.
“He’s fine. Come on.” She dragged Shane toward Sid.
“No, I-”
“Just give us five minutes, okay. Five minutes, and if you still want to go in there, whatever. It’s your funeral.”
Shane gave her a funny look, but she didn’t offer more.
When they reached Sid, he’d managed to stand back up straight, but his mouth still hung wide as if trying to suck as much air in as humanly possible.
“Screw running,” he panted.
“I don’t see track in your future, Sid Putnam,” Shane told him.
Sid flipped him the finger and then wandered to the curb, sitting down and stretching his legs out in front of him.
“We’ve got to tell him about the monster, Sid,” Ashley said.
“What monster?” Shane asked, looking back and forth between them.
“You… you go first,” Sid puffed.
Ashley glanced at Shane, noticing his long dark eyelashes and then frowned, exasperated with her own stupid thoughts.
Shane revealed little as he listened first to Ashley’s story of the boy who attacked her in the night followed by Sid’s.
“We think it might be Warren,” she said at the end.
Shane picked up a stone in the gutter and flicked it across the road. It hit the opposite curb before bouncing into the grass.
“You think Warren killed Simon?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Warren went into the woods not far from where Simon’s body was found,” Ashley explained. “Maybe he knows they found the body, so he’s hiding out.”
“The boy you described in the woods doesn’t sound like Warren. Warren is big. He can’t exactly creep around unnoticed,” Shane countered.
“He might be disguising himself,” Ashley insisted. “I didn’t get a good look at him. It was dark and-”
Shane shook his head again.
&nb
sp; “Warren’s mom came over a few nights ago. I heard her talking with my mom. Warren said something odd a few weeks ago to his mom. He told her he thought an animal had been stalking him in the woods when he’d walked home that night. He kept hearing it and thinking something had been watching him. He’d been scared.”
Ashley frowned. “But we heard Travis talking, and he said Warren went missing on purpose.”
“Travis is a jack-ass,” Shane said.
“Here-here,” Sid cheered in agreement.
“So, if it’s not Warren, who is it?”
Shane shrugged. “Beats me, but I’d say if there really is something after kids in the woods, it got Warren too.”
“But Warren’s big,” Sid said, unable to hide the tremor of fear in his voice.
“Which makes him an easier target, right?” Shane asked. “He’s not exactly quiet, and he’s damn easy to see if he’s walking in the woods.”
Sid looked visibly ill. “We can’t go to The Crawford House without weapons, Ash,” he said.
“What’s at The Crawford House?” Shane asked, looking back and forth between them.
“We think it’s hiding there, living there maybe.”
* * *
Max parked his motorcycle in Jake’s driveway and waved at his brother sitting on the front porch.
“Mom asked me to bring you a block of cheese. Don’t ask me why, just take it.”
Jake laughed and took the white cheese, setting it on the glass topped table beside him.
“After all the food Mom crammed in the refrigerator, I can’t imagine where she expects us to put it,” Jake grumbled.
“Feed it to the neighbor’s dog,” Max suggested, sitting next to his brother. “Listen, while I’m here, I wanted to ask you a few questions about one of the missing kids, Vern Ripley.”
“Moonlighting as a sleuth?” Jake asked. “Oh, I forgot, you’re on easy street until September. If you’ve got all this time, maybe you could come pick up the midnight to three a.m. shift at our house. Apparently, that’s Matthew’s most hated time of day. He cries nonstop whether he’s nursing, just got changed, or you run laps around the house and bounce him like a basketball.”
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