by Vic Kerry
“I do, but it’s late and my ability to show it is declining. Let’s go to bed. I’m too tired to filter my thoughts right now.”
She disappeared down the hallway that led to their bedroom. He followed. They both fell into the bed without much production. Diane wrapped herself up in the covers. Alan slid his bare feet beneath the linen and stared at the ceiling. A sliver of light from the streetlamp at the end of their driveway sneaked in past the dark, heavy curtains. It gave him enough light to look for patterns in the textured ceiling tiles. Alan often did this when he was not able to sleep. It sometimes helped to make him drowsy, much better than counting sheep; but tonight, his mind chased invisible rabbits.
After he had heard the crash, he’d turned around in the street and headed back to the school. The old car that had barreled up the street had slammed into Corey’s Jeep. Somehow the old school Detroit beast had nearly split the vehicle in two. Corey had lain on the pavement several yards from the burning hulk of his Jeep. Alan couldn’t believe the distance and had even paced it off. Corey’s body hadn’t been thrown that far by the impact; the other car had dragged him as it kept going and disappeared into the night. There was no way that car could have done that kind of damage—but he’d seen it with his own eyes, so it had happened, despite all that his rationality told him.
The people who lived around the school had called the police before he’d gotten to the scene, and they had arrived quickly. The first officer to arrive was McDonald, whom Alan recognized as the one who came with the drug-sniffing dog and swept the school twice a year. It was McDonald who caught Alan vomiting into the storm drain. He was also the officer who took his statement. Alan told him what he knew. The car had driven past quickly, so he could only tell some vague things about it like its color— blue—and that it was from the 1950s.
Staring at the ceiling, reliving the carnage and feeling nauseous again, Alan belatedly recognized the car. It was a 1954 Mercury Monterey two-door coupe. The interior was in near mint condition, oiled and cleaned frequently since the late 1950s, and very rarely driven. The car ought to be sitting in his Aunt Charlotte’s garage.
Alan waited a few more minutes until his wife breathed deeply enough that moving wouldn’t disturb her sleep. He got up and left the house. For some reason, he couldn’t drive his own car, so he took Josh’s. The radio station played the weird late-night music that his sons’ generation listened to. It was dark and twisty. Alan changed the station to Soft Rock 94.5. Elton John sang about laughing like children and living like lovers. It settled Alan’s nerves enough that he backed the car onto the street without scraping the tail pipe.
The drive to his aunt’s house didn’t take very long. No one drove at that time of night. Even the police rarely patrolled, and tonight they certainly wouldn’t be doing too much of that except to look for a hit-and-run driver. He pulled into Charlotte’s driveway. The garage door was down, and from his car, the front door appeared closed.
Alan got out of the car and walked to the garage. He and his sons had installed a keypad on the outside that would activate the automatic door opener with a code number. He flipped the cover off the keypad. The rubber keys illuminated with a green light. He punched in 5700 and hit enter. The motor of the opener hummed, and the door started to lift.
He squatted and walked under the still-moving door, impatient to get a look at his aunt’s car. The dim light given off by the door opener proved his deepest fear. The garage was empty. Only a dried oil stain marked where the Mercury Monterey should have been. Alan sighed. For a long moment, he stood in the pale light in the middle of the old stain with his hands cupped over his mouth to keep him from screaming in frustration.
The light clicked off. Alan made his way across the pitch-dark garage until his leg hit the edge of the steps into the house. He fumbled with his keys until he felt the rubber cap that he kept on Charlotte’s house key. With this key protruded out, he walked up the steps and fumbled with the doorknob until he got it unlocked. The air that rushed out into the garage smelled like Aunt Charlotte’s house always did. Despite all the other things she had wrong with her, she kept a clean house and always had it smelling of eucalyptus.
Alan flipped the light switch, and the laundry room lit up. He reached back into the garage, hit the button that closed the garage door, then made his way through the maze of laundry-room clutter to the kitchen door. The light spilled into the kitchen as he entered it. Everything looked exactly like it had the night he’d sent her to the hospital. If she’d been home at any point, she’d avoided coming in there. Unless she’d escaped from the psych ward that evening, though, she wouldn’t have been able to do that.
He used the light from the laundry room to navigate through the kitchen into the small sitting room between the kitchen and the main entrance hallway. This room was windowless, and the light didn’t fall far enough to illuminate it. As Alan walked through the open door, something brushed across the top of his head. He reached up to swat at it, imaging some kind of giant spider web. Instead of sticky spider silk, his hand entangled in paper. He jerked it down, and a long strand of crepe paper fell. Some of it hit him on the head, and he could tell more of it fell to the floor ahead of him. He shook it off and hurried to the nearest table to turn on a lamp. The lamp clicked on after two turns of the switch. The red shade cast crimson light though the room except for directly above and below.
Streamers scalloped across the ceiling in crimson and a strange purple color. The ends dangled in the two doorways like tentacles. Alan went into the hallway, knocking the streamers away from his head as he did. He flipped on the light. More crepe paper hung in this room along with a tissue paper ball. The paper was its true color, baby blue and gray. Alan ran through the rest of the house turning lights on in every room. Baby blue and gray crepe paper hung from the ceiling, some hanging straight down in small pieces. In other places, scallops of it sagged.
Alan stood in the middle of the living room. The swags of crepe paper dropped low and touched the top of his head. A large punch bowl that he didn’t recognize sat on the coffee table. Paper cups the same colors as the streamers sat beside the bowl. Speaker wires ran from the sides of a turntable sitting on the television, but someone had twisted the crepe paper around them to make them more festive. He walked to the record player and switched it on. The needle was already in the groove, and music blasted out.
The Crew Cuts sang “Sh-Boom.” Alan knocked the needle off the record. A loud scratching sounded out almost like feedback as the needle shot across the vinyl. He started grabbing at the crepe paper, ripping it down. Something primal and fearful built up in him at that moment.
He ran to the door. On a banner above it, written in baby blue and gray poster paint, were the words “Homecoming 1956.”
Alan flung open the front door and slammed it behind him as he stormed across the porch and hurried back to the car. Every light in the house glowed through the windows. In those few rooms that had open curtains, the decorations hung ready for a party. The sight of them infuriated him more and more. He gunned the car too much backing up. The rear end crashed on the street. If Josh had been there, he would have given the teenage boy the lecture of his life, but his son wasn’t there, and Alan wasn’t in the mood anyway. The tires squealed as he shot off down the streets. Neighbors would call the cops, but he didn’t care. The Pinehurst PD was too busy—and would be even busier after he reported this sick break-in, or whatever it was.
It took only a matter of minutes to get to the hospital. Alan had driven far too fast, but he was a man on a mission. The elevator took him to the third floor. Two large steel doors blocked the ward immediately to the left of the elevator. A call button hung of the wall. He punched it and waited.
“Can I help you?” a gruff male voice asked, sounding a bit confused.
“This is Charlotte McAdams’s nephew, Alan McAdams. Her patient number is 2250. I need to speak to someone,” he said back into the box.
“Sir,
it’s 2 a.m. Can’t this wait until morning?”
“It is morning, and no it can’t wait.”
The voice now sounded a bit miffed. “You can’t come on the unit. It’s after visitation time, but I’ll be out there in a minute.”
When one of the metal doors opened, Alan stood with his arms crossed, patting a foot. It took the far too fat nurse far too long to get to the door, at least five minutes. Alan’s face showed his frustration. His skin pulled tight around a grimace.
“Can I help you?” the nurse asked. A big smile came on his ruddy, moon face when he noticed Alan’s look.
“You could have helped me five minutes ago. It’s late,” Alan said. “I need to see my aunt.”
“It’s after visiting hours.”
“You’ve already told me that, but someone has broken into her house and stolen her car.”
“We can tell her that tomorrow. Right now she’s sleeping.”
“She is here?”
“I looked in on her before I came to the door. That is why it took me five minutes.”
“She’s been here the whole night?”
“Of course—those doors are locked. We have to let people in or out.”
His aunt hadn’t put the slip on the zookeepers and gone on a psychotic rampage. This relieved Alan. The fact that someone had stolen her car and done that to her house disturbed him more than the idea that she had caused the wreck.
“Sorry to bother you,” Alan said. “I’ll try to come around to see her tomorrow.”
“Have a good night and a safe drive home. Take extra care; you look a bit stressed.”
Alan nodded and hit the button for the elevator. The doors slid open, and he stepped back onto it. He would have to wait until daylight to notify the police about the break-in. After everything that had happened, he wasn’t sure that he would be coherent enough to give them a sensible-sounding report tonight.
Sim was at his kitchen table, drinking a strong cup of coffee and reading the paper, when his phone rang. He reached up and grabbed it off the wall.
“Hello.”
“Is this Simeon McAdams?” a very serious voice asked on the other end.
“It is.” The person either meant business or was trying to sell him something, because no one ever called him Simeon.
“Sir, this is the Pinehurst Police. We’ve found your car.”
“My car? I don’t have a car. I’ve got a beat-up old pickup truck that I can see through the window,” he said back, a little confused.
“We found a 1954 Mercury Monterey out on Harrington Road. There was a registration in the glove box with your name on it,” the officer said.
Sim stood up. “That’s my sister’s car, but she’s in the hospital.”
“It’s in pretty bad shape, and we think it was involved in a hit-and-run that killed a young man last night. Are you sure your sister is in the hospital?”
“I’m positive. Officer, let me get in my truck, and I’ll be out there in about fifteen minutes.”
“Sir, they’ve got an active investigation going out there, I don’t know if that’s advisable.”
“I don’t care. If my sister might be involved in this, I need to be there.”
Sim hung up the phone. He took the keys from the hanger at the door and headed to his truck. The morning was cool, bordering on cold, and he’d walked out wearing only an old pair of jeans and a white undershirt. His jacket lay in the passenger side as did an old ball cap. He pulled the cap over his mussed hair and slipped into the jacket before getting into the truck.
It took him exactly fifteen minutes to get to the car. The police had both sides of Harrington Road blocked off, which didn’t mean too much, because the only people who lived down that road were the Harringtons. A black police officer stopped him. Sim pulled onto the shoulder and got out of the pickup.
“Sir,” the officer said. “I need you to get back into your truck, and head back toward town. This is an official police investigation. We don’t need any bystanders.”
Sim pushed past the cop, not giving his position any respect. “Don’t worry, boy, I’m not a looky-loo. I’m Simeon McAdams. The car is registered to me.”
“Dispatch got a hold of you, good.” The officer walked with him toward a group of three more officers. When they got there, the black officer took the lead. “Chief, this is the owner of the car.”
The chief nodded his head with complete recognition and put his hand out. “Sim, I had no idea this was your car.”
“What happened?” Sim asked.
“We’ve got no idea. All we know is that a car matching this description cut through a Jeep Wrangler last night like butter and killed the driver, a student at the high school. From the look of the front end of the thing, I believe it is the culprit, but I can’t figure out how it kept driving with that much damage.”
“They made them tough back then,” Sim said.
He looked past the chief to the car. It sat in the middle of the road. The right rear tire was flat. The trunk was popped. Two tow truck guys were changing the tire. Now the black officer who greeted him was bending over into the trunk compartment like he was going to climb inside. Sim flashed back forty years to the night that he, Johnny, and Marshall caught Tobias Abernathy. The car was even in the same spot.
“It belongs to my sister,” he said, “but she’s in the nut ward at the hospital. Somebody must have stolen it.”
An old memory came to Sim’s mind as he looked at the car and processed the idea that it had killed a boy from the school. A tingle streaked up his arm, and tightness clamped in his chest before everything went black as his head hit the road.
Chapter Fourteen
1956
Six weeks after the Massacre
Charlotte sat in the living room. Her mother had moved a tin TV tray in there with her. A thick ham sandwich with lots of mayonnaise, some potato salad, and a sweating glass of tea sat on the tray. In the middle of the day, nothing much was on television. Charlotte sat staring at an awful soap opera. A knock on the door echoed from the front as she picked up her sandwich and bit into it. Lifting the food was like lifting heavy rocks, but she had done it.
Ever since the day Sim had brought the boys over, Charlotte had kept improving from her near catatonic state, thanks to the barbiturates she now took three times per day. When the doctor visited, he no longer secretly talked to her parents about Bryce Hospital. Instead, they all discussed her progress. Every day, she did something else on her own. Those things progressively got easier. Feeding herself was a priority this week. Last week it was moving her shoulders up and down. All this after the torturous effort of speaking again.
Charlotte shoved the spoon into the pile of potato salad. Mastering the use of utensils still gave her some trouble, but like a little kid, she took the spoon with both hands to retrieve it from the pile. After that, one hand guided it to her mouth.
Someone knocked on the door again.
“Momma,” she yelled, physically forcing the air up to do so. “Someone’s at the door.”
“I’m coming,” her momma yelled toward the door, while hurrying through the living room wiping her hands on her apron. She disappeared into the entryway.
The door opened, but no one stepped inside. The floorboards in front of the door always creaked when someone stepped on them, which made sneaking in extra-hard. There was some soft talking at the door. She strained to hear, but the television interfered.
“I don’t know if you should,” her mother said. “The doctor said we should not cause her anymore stress than necessary.”
The person at the door whispered back. Charlotte couldn’t hear the words. She wished they’d speak up.
“I can’t let you in,” Momma said. “It isn’t proper, and she can’t walk yet. I suppose that’s that. I’m sorry. Thank you for coming by.”
The door closed, and her mother walked back into the room, this time wringing the end of her apron. She looked worried.
&nbs
p; “What’s the matter, Momma?”
“Nothing. Go on and eat your lunch.” Her mother looked at her with more sympathetic eyes. “Are you handling that spoon okay, or do I need to help you with it?”
“Watch.”
Charlotte took the spoon and fed herself from the potato salad. For an added spectacle, she used both hands to take her tea glass and drink from it. Everything went back in place without making a huge mess. Her mother smiled and clapped her hands together like she’d watched some kind of magic trick.
“Thank you, thank you,” Charlotte said as if she had pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
“That’s wonderful. Soon you’ll be up running around,” her mother said.
“I hope so. That way I can change the television to something better.”
“I can do that,” her momma said. “What do you want it on?”
“Turn it off. There’s nothing good on during this time of the day, but a bunch of stupid soap operas.”
Her mother switched off the set and headed back to the kitchen. Charlotte took another bite of her sandwich. The doorbell rang. Her mother looked back to the entryway. Worry lines formed around her eyes and forehead.
“Are you sure everything’s okay?” Charlotte asked with a mouthful of sandwich.
“It’s fine, and don’t talk with your mouth open, or you’ll choke. That’s the last thing I need.”
The bell rang again. Her mother twisted the bottom of her apron. With the third ring from the bell and a heavy rap on the door, she let go of the apron, stood straight and walked into the entryway. The door opened.
“I told you that this wasn’t a good time,” her mother said well before the door was opened all the way. “I’m sorry.”
“I would like to see your daughter, Mrs. McAdams.” Charlotte recognized the slow, drawly female voice. It was pitched higher than most while it lulled out with molasses thickness.
“The doctor said,” her mother protested.
“I’m sure the doctor would not think a visit from me too stressful,” Mrs. Harrington said with an entitled tone. “I know him well.”