A Led Zeppelin song was playing on the radio when my shovel hit something solid. I wasn’t surprised. So far, we had unearthed about a million rocks of various shapes and sizes, an old toy truck, a rusted-out lid from a Speed Racer lunch box, and a few tangles of copper wire that my father said was probably left over from when the house was first built. I had even found a keychain in the shape of a miniature horseshoe with an old key still attached to it. I’d stashed that in my pocket to show my friends later. Maybe it opened a treasure chest somewhere.
I looked down and saw something small and pale in the dirt. Then, I saw another one. Maybe three inches long.
I lifted my shovel for a closer look — and my breath caught in my throat. I’d never seen one before in real life, but I had seen plenty enough on television to know what I was looking at.
They were bones.
“Umm, hey, dad.”
The volume on the radio was loud, so I called again, “Dad, I think you should take a look at this.”
This time he heard me and came right over. “What’s up, Kev?”
I raised the shovel to give him a better look. He squinted in the morning sun, then reached down and picked up one of the bones. “Huh. Probably the previous owner’s dog or cat.”
He dropped the bone back onto the shovel and hopped down into the hole next to me. “Where’d you find it?”
I pointed out the spot with the tip of my shoe.
He carefully dug a wide circle around it. “I saw this on a National Geographic special about dinosaurs.” He dropped to a knee and started sifting through the dirt with his hands.
“Jurassic Park on Golden Elm Lane,” I laughed.
“Bingo,” my father said, holding up another bone for me to see.
“Kinda gross, don’t you think?”
“Just part of nature, son. You’re the horror movie freak, how can you think…” He didn’t finish his thought. He knelt there, perfectly still, his shoulders suddenly rigid.
“What’s wrong?”
He leaned closer to the dirt.
I tried to see around him. “What’d you find?”
My father stood and turned to me, a strange expression on his face. “Let’s take a break and go inside and cool off.”
I moved to the left to try to see around him. He moved and blocked me. “Kevin—”
“What is it, Dad?”
He let out a long sigh. “Put your shovel down. Carefully. I’ll tell you in the house.”
“Tell me now,” I begged, laying down the shovel on the grass and peeking behind my father into the hole.
Several slender, pale bones lay atop the pile of dirt.
June sunlight glinted off something shiny encircling one of the bones.
It was a dirty gold ring.
****
By dinnertime, there were three police cruisers parked in front of the house and a police van parked across the street. The back yard was swarming with officers and detectives. Some of them investigating the hole and bagging evidence, others just standing around, talking.
I sat on the patio and watched everything. All of my friends had stopped by at one point or another, but my mother had shooed them away with the promise that I would call them later that night. Most of them spent the evening texting me and watching from across the street, their bikes parked on the sidewalk.
A police detective had interviewed my father and me, first in the living room, and then again as we showed him what we’d found in the back yard. He’d asked us a lot of the same questions two or three times, almost like he didn’t believe us. When the other cops showed up, he quickly finished with us and got to work with the others.
Both my mom and dad must’ve asked me at least a dozen times throughout the day if I was all right. Each time I reassured them I was fine. The truth was I was more than just fine. I was excited and anxious to find out even more about what was going on.
I eavesdropped on every conversation I could. I offered policemen drinks and made other excuses to talk to them. I even used the zoom on my phone camera to try to get a glimpse of what was going on over by the hole.
Finally, around the time it started getting dark and two policemen started setting up portable lights, I climbed the weeping willow and perched myself inside my tree house. I couldn’t see much from up there, there were too many branches in the way, but I was comfortable enough and could hear a lot better.
Around nine o’clock, I heard a cellphone ring somewhere below me.
“Sharretts,” a voice answered, and then there was a long pause. “Make sure you check with Henderson first. He left here fifteen minutes ago.”
I recognized the voice now. It was the detective who had interviewed my father and me earlier in the day. He obviously didn’t realize I was in the tree above him, listening. I knew this because of what he said next.
“That all depends on what Cap says. I think they’re gonna GPR the whole damn back yard in the morning.”
Another pause.
“Three skeletal right hands so far.”
I realized I was holding my breath.
“That’s right. No other remains. Just the hands.”
I could hear his footsteps moving away from the tree.
“Someone’s checking on that right now. Okay, talk soon,” and then there was just the muffled chatter of the policemen below and the soft whisper of a breeze in the weeping willow.
A short time later, I crept down from the tree and went inside. I hurried to the bathroom to pee — I’d been holding it for what felt like forever — and realized that I still had the horseshoe keychain in my pants pocket. I knew I should probably go back outside and give it to the police. It could be important evidence.
Instead, I went to the kitchen and ate a snack and used my phone to look up what GPR stood for: Ground Penetrating Radar.
They were going to x-ray the back yard tomorrow. They were looking for bodies.
****
I was too tired to call my friends back that night, so I called first thing the next morning. I started with Jimmy.
“My mom says you can maybe come over tonight, but just you, not the rest of the guys.”
“Awesome. My mom said she saw the story on the news last night. They had pictures of your house and everything. Golden Elm Lane is famous!”
I’d watched the same news story this morning during breakfast. It felt weird seeing my house like that. Not a good weird either. It was almost like they were trespassing or something.
“What are they doing now?” Jimmy asked. “They find any more skeletons?”
I walked over to the window and looked outside. “A couple vans showed up a little while ago…”
I told Jimmy what I’d overheard the night before about GPR and how there was a guy in regular street clothes pushing something that looked like one of those portable golf caddies with three wheels back and forth across my yard. A cop in uniform walked alongside him, carrying a clipboard and a fistful of little red flags attached to wire stakes. Every once in a while, they would stop and the cop would take a knee and plant one of the little red flags in the grass, and then they would move on again.
Jimmy was fascinated — “it’s just like a freaking movie, man!” — and made me promise to text him a photo from my phone. I told him I would. I didn’t say a word about the other thing I’d overheard while sitting in the tree house: about the police finding three right hands. Just like with the keychain, I hadn’t even shared that information with my parents yet. I didn’t know why, but I’d kept that to myself.
****
First thing in the morning, the police had asked my parents to make sure everyone stayed clear of the back yard, so I was forced to watch from my bedroom window. I pulled my desk chair close and cracked the window a few inches, but I still couldn’t hear much. To make matters worse, the
weeping willow blocked a good portion of my view. I was flying blind today.
I sent Jimmy a blurry picture of the cops operating the GPR machine and did my best to keep up with my other friends’ text messages. I ate a ham and cheese sandwich and Doritos for lunch and skimmed a couple articles in the new issue of Gamer’s Monthly. I almost fell asleep twice after lunch and took the fastest bathroom break known to man for fear of missing something important. I counted four red flags sticking out of the ground. No telling how many more there were behind the tree and around the hole we’d dug.
The hours dragged on. I started thinking about sneaking outside for a closer look. I even considered sneaking up into the tree house again. What were they going to do, arrest me?
I had just about convinced myself to go for it, when there was a knock on the door behind me. I turned and both my mom and dad were standing there.
“Hey, Kev,” my dad said. “Got a minute?”
They walked into the room and sat on my bed.
“Did they find something else? Did they—”
My dad put his hands out. “Whoa, slow down.” He glanced at my mom and continued, “We just finished speaking with one of the detectives, and we thought we’d share with you what he said.”
“If anything we say upsets you,” my mom said, “just say so and we’ll stop.”
I looked from my dad to my mom and back to my dad again. “Just tell me!”
“This stays inside the house, Kevin. It’s family talk, not for your friends. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said, nodding and sitting on the edge of my seat.
“According to the detective, they’ve found skeletal remains from at least three different people in the back yard.”
No duh, I wanted to say.
“They’ve also marked some additional areas they plan to search later this afternoon. The detective told us the lab ran some tests on the bones we found and they came back as more than twenty years old, so fortunately they know we had nothing to do with this.”
I hadn’t even thought of that. “Wow, we could have been suspects!” I blurted, putting an immediate frown on my mom’s face. Wait until Jimmy heard about that.
“They also pulled property records and discovered that the sole owner before us of 149 Golden Elm Lane was a man by the name of Walter Jenkins. By all accounts, he was a friendly, well-liked man with no complaints against him and no arrest record. He was retired from the Navy and worked at the hardware store in Dayton. He was widowed when he was in his sixties and moved to a nursing home about ten years later. That’s when we bought the house and moved in.”
“Is he still alive?” I asked, my mind working.
My dad shook his head. “Died six years ago. Didn’t have any children and no living relatives nearby.”
“So, if he didn’t do it…who did?”
“That’s what the detectives are trying to figure out, Kev. Detective Sharretts said they might have a few more questions for us in the days to come, but mostly they’ll be looking around for folks who knew Mr. Jenkins back when he lived here.”
“You know some of the world’s most famous serial killers were normal and friendly on the outside, right?” I asked, remembering some of the books I’d read. “They weren’t all weirdos like Dahmer and Gacy and—”
“You hush now,” my mom interrupted, getting up from the bed. “No more talk about serial killers. Get yourself washed up and help us prepare dinner.”
“But, Mom…” I whined, looking at my dad for help.
He stood up from the bed. “You heard your mother, Kev. Let’s go.”
So much for help. I groaned and followed them downstairs.
****
That night, I dreamed Walter Jenkins was chasing me.
The house was dark, and Jenkins was old and wrinkled, but incredibly fast and strong. No matter where I ran or hid, he kept finding me. He had a hideous grin and an evil laugh and a long, wicked-looking knife. He wanted my right hand.
Terrified and cornered, I crept into the basement.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he called in a gravely, sing-song voice.
I sat perfectly still in the space between the washer and dryer, afraid to breathe. I had piled several dirty towels on top of me. I couldn’t see a thing.
“I know you’re down here,” he said, and I could hear the shuffle of footsteps getting closer.
“C’mon now, Kev, I’m not going to hurt you.” The footsteps stopped right in front of me. I felt a whisper of cool air as one of the towels was removed from on top of me.
“I promise I won’t hurt you.”
Another towel gone.
“I’m just gonna kill you!” The last towel was snatched away, and I saw that evil grin and long, shiny blade slashing—
—and that’s when I woke up in my dark bedroom, sweaty sheets clenched in one hand, my other hand the only thing stopping the scream from escaping my mouth.
****
“Dude, you’re like a celebrity,” Doug said. “Everyone’s talking about you.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Don’t be a douchebag,” Jimmy said and punched Charlie in the shoulder. “You’re just jealous.”
“The day I’m jealous of gay boy Kevin here is the day you get to bang my sister.”
“Already banged her,” Jimmy said, pushing off on his bike. “And your mom, too.”
Charlie’s chubby face went red. He jumped on his bike and started chasing Jimmy down the trail. “Take it back! Take it back!”
Jimmy just laughed and kept on peddling.
It felt good to be with my friends again, instead of locked up inside the house. The police had left a couple days ago, and even the news crews had stopped coming around.
“So they have no idea how they got there?” Doug asked for at least the fifth time that morning.
I shook my head. “It’s a big mystery.”
“You mean a nightmare,” he said, and then his eyes flashed wide. “A nightmare on Elm Lane!” He hooked his hands into claws and started slashing at me. “Maybe Freddy Krueger did it!”
I laughed and pushed him away.
“My dad says they should check out the folks who own the house in back of you,” Doug said, still giggling.
“Police already did that. The current owners and the previous two owners.”
“And?”
“And nothing, I guess.”
Doug grunted and looked around for Jimmy and Charlie. “It’s hot as piss. Wanna go get a Slurpee?”
“Sure.”
Doug put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Thirty seconds later, we heard a returning whistle from deep in the woods. A few minutes after that, Jimmy and Charlie came racing down the trail, both of them red-faced and sweating. We all set out for 7-Eleven.
****
The four of us sat on the curb outside the store and drank our Slurpees and opened our packs of baseball cards. Charlie and Doug got into an argument about who was a better third baseman, Manny Machado or Kris Bryant, and that turned into a pebble fight until Charlie plunked Doug in the eye. Jimmy and I were content to sit back and watch the spectacle and drink our Slurpees in silence.
A car pulled into a parking spot nearby, but none of us paid it any attention.
“Hey there, boys,” a voice called. “Hot enough for you?”
We all looked up. Mr. Barnett from down the street was leaning out his car window, the stub of a cigar poking from his mouth. It smelled like cat shit.
“Sure is,” Jimmy answered.
Mr. Barnett looked at me. “Kevin, you’re quite the celebrity these days, aren’t you?”
Doug gave Charlie a smug look: I told you so.
“I dunno about that, Mr. Barnett.”
“I saw you a
nd your dad on the news a couple times, walking around in the background. Pretty exciting stuff, huh?”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Mr. Barnett was the first grown-up to use the word exciting to describe everything that had happened. Of course, all us kids thought it was exciting and cool, but the only words I’d heard other grown-ups use were horrible and terrifying and dreadful. But Mr. Barnett was like that. He wasn’t like the other adults I knew. He always drank too much at the neighborhood block parties and shot off too many fireworks on the Fourth of July and my mom was always complaining that he was breaking the speed limit on our street.
“Sooo…the police find anything else that hasn’t made the news or the papers?”
“My parents aren’t really telling me much,” I said. “They’re afraid I’ll have nightmares.”
Mr. Barnett’s face tightened, and I could tell he didn’t believe me. “So they found the remains of three hands, and that’s it?”
I nodded again, worried my voice would betray me.
“You know I asked my father about the guy who used to live in your house,” he continued, “and my father knew him.”
Now he had my attention. “He did?”
“Said he was a nice enough fella but kept to himself. Said he even had a photograph of him somewhere, from an old Veteran’s Day parade.”
I thought about telling Mr. Barnett that he should have his father call the detectives, but I didn’t. I had finished my Slurpee and just wanted to get out of there.
“Well, boys, I better run. Kevin, Jimmy, tell your folks I said hello. Looking forward to the cookout on the Fourth.”
“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said.
I waved as he pulled away.
We all got up, tossed our trash into the can, and mounted our bikes.
“That was weird,” Doug said.
Jimmy shook his head. “He’s weird.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. He pulled up and talked to us and left without even going into the store.”
Jimmy thought about it for a moment and shrugged. I thought about it the whole way home.
****
The Long Way Home Page 11