by R.J. Ellory
“You ever see flowers at the side of the road?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You know what they’re there for?”
“Some damn fool got drunk and ran his car into a tree and died, I reckon.”
Reilly nodded. “Mourning should last as long as the flowers, and then it’s done. Life goes on. Truth? I’ll tell you some truth. More talk of the war these days. Used to be talk of the Depression. Whichever way it goes there’s people dying every minute of every day. Don’t matter if it’s hunger or cold or sickness, or Ay-dolf Hitler’s bullets. Dead is dead whichever way it lays down to rest or comes up for air. Times like these is when people get busy in their beds. New people is made almost as fast as the old ones can die. New people are made with greater ease and less fuss than making chokecherry pancakes. Seems nature’s way of cleansing the past and arranging the future. You understand me, Joseph?”
I nodded.
“So let the past be what it was, the present what it is, the future the best it can be. There’s the Devil in angel’s clothing if ever you wanted to see him.”
I smiled. I didn’t really understand what he meant, but by then it didn’t matter. I’d already decided I would go home that day.
My bitterness, my sense of betrayal, was as transient as the narrow twists of dry flowers at the side of the highway, flowers for someone drunk, or someone hurrying, or someone merely absentminded; someone who lost their life and all that went with it in a heartbeat. Nature’s way of pruning back the weak, the sickly, the fragile. Maybe not. Maybe just the Devil in angel’s vestments: white on the outside, black within.
My mother and I never spoke of the episode with Gunther Kruger. What could I have said? What could she have said in return?
Things naturally gravitated toward routine and normalcy. I did not resist the gravitation. Only once did my mother say anything which seemed relevant. That Sunday night, leaning over me, kissing my forehead as I turned my face into the pillow, she whispered, “Pray for me too, eh, Joseph . . . pray for me too.”
I smiled, I said I would, I held her hand and, for a moment, her gaze.
I felt her relax, as if by acknowledging her request I had also granted absolution. I possessed no such authority, but then recognized that the authority considered by self was nothing compared to the authority bestowed by others. My mother gave me as much as she needed me to have, and then accepted my unspoken blessing.
I had decided never to see Gunther Kruger again, nor his deceived wife, but I felt for Elena. I could not let her go. I would watch her in class, and I would think of the girls that had died, and then I would think of her father and my mother and how I had found them. Perhaps I decided to believe something else, that I had been mistaken, that I had not witnessed any such incident. I pushed the shadow to the back of my mind, and there it stayed, growing ever more weak and feeble, craving sunlight, craving attention, receiving nothing.
Some days after I returned home, I walked with Elena to the end of the road. Here she turned and started toward her house, but I reached out and touched her arm. She hesitated, uncertain of why I stopped her, and even though I smiled as sincerely as I could, she seemed nervous.
“Slow up a minute,” I said.
She frowned.
“You in some kinda hurry?”
She shook her head. “No. Why d’you ask?”
I looked down at my shoes. I felt awkward for a moment. “I just wanted to—” I looked at her. She seemed so fragile.
“What, Joseph? Wanted to what?”
I shook my head. “I just wanted . . . I wanted you to know that I will always be here if you need anything.”
Elena didn’t say a word in response. Her expression barely changed. She turned and looked away toward her house. She seemed distant for quite some time, and then she looked back at me and smiled. “I know,” she said, her voice so quiet I barely heard her. “I know, Joseph.” She reached out and touched my arm. “Thank you,” she whispered, and before the words had left her lips she was walking away, running almost. I watched her go. I had said what I wanted to say. I hoped it would be enough.
Years later, after all the terrible things seemed to have ended, I believed that that was the point at which the darkness began. A shroud, a weight, a veil, the shadow in the back of my mind having found nourishment sufficient to grow.
I did not know, and perhaps never would.
I went on writing—wrote my hand sore and my heart out. But writing did not exorcise my fear, my anger, my sense of responsibility for what had happened. It was then that I decided to do something. It was then that I resolved to do all I could to ensure that no other little girls would die.
I spoke to Daniel McRae, to Hans Kruger; I spoke in hushed tones with other boys from the class—Ronald Duggan, Michael Wiltsey, Maurice Fricker. Six of us in all. I was seven months shy of fifteen years old, and there was less than a year between us. We agreed to meet after class, down amongst the trees at the end of the broken-fence field, and for an hour before school ended my palms sweated.
I ran home and collected the newspaper clippings from the box beneath my bed. Alice, Laverna, Ellen May and Catherine. We gathered down there, the six of us huddled together, and I held out the shreds of paper, turned at the corners like yellowed fall leaves.
I watched Daniel as he saw his sister’s name there in newsprint before him. Felt him flinch, like his soul had touched an electric fence. Glanced down at his shoes for some reason; small hole in the toe, skin so dirty beneath you’d never have noticed until you looked hard and long. Maybe his folks—too submerged in grief—hadn’t seen that hole either. Said everything that needed saying. Looked like he was set to cry, but the muscles twitched along his jawline, and I could feel him holding himself together.
No one said a word. Tension like a held breath.
“So . . . so what’re we gonna do?” Ronald Duggan said eventually. Stood there, bangs in his eyes, a head shorter than me, the pallor of his skin like someone raised on leftovers, thin varnish of sweat shining up his forehead. He looked nervous. Hell, they all looked nervous, but I sensed the spirit, the fellow feeling that came when I stood alongside one, two, three of them and knew that they wanted to do something to help.
“Something,” Hans Kruger said. “We gotta do something.”
“Seems to me we should let Sheriff Dearing do what he’s paid to do,” Maurice Fricker said.
“But he’s not doing nothing,” Hans said.
“Anything,” Daniel said. “He’s not doing anything.”
“It’s that cuckoo clan,” Michael Wiltsey said. “It’s them that’s doing these things. Can’t think of anyone else wrong enough to do such things to little girls.”
“Ku Klux Klan,” I said. “They’re called the Ku Klux Klan, and they’re not interested in white girls, Michael. All they’re interested in is black folks. They just hate black folks for no simple reason.”
“So who is it?” Daniel asked. “If you’re so darn smart then you tell us who’s doing these things.”
I shook my head. I wondered if it was a mistake to be discussing this, as if by talking about it we were bringing the nightmare ever closer. “I don’t know who’s doing it, Daniel, and neither does Sheriff Dearing, nor Ford Ruby. That’s the problem here. Something’s happening and no one knows why, and no one knows what to do about it.”
“And you figure we can do something about it?” Michael asked.
“Hell, Michael, I think we should at least try.” I held out the newspaper clippings again, in such a way as they could all clearly see. “I don’t want to read these things about people we know. Look at Daniel—”
They all looked up one by one, slowly, tentatively—almost as if they were afraid to see.
Daniel McRae stood motionless. He looked like he’d backed up out of his head and left his body standing right where it was.
“Daniel’s lost his sister. You have any idea what that must be like?”
D
aniel looked like he was ready to break up. Tears filled his eyes. “Don’t . . . don’t want to—” he started, but I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. He bowed his head, and from the depths of his chest I could hear the small hitches as he suppressed his sobbing.
“We have to do something,” I said. “Something is always a darn deal more than nothing. We’re old enough to keep an eye out for these children, aren’t we?”
“So that’s what we’re going to do?” Hans asked. “We’re going to . . . we’re going to watch out for the girls?”
“We’re going to be guardians,” I said.
“Like a secret club,” Ronald Duggan piped up. “We can call ourselves that. We can call ourselves the Guardians.”
“Name don’t mean a thing,” Daniel said. His voice cracked mid-sentence. “Don’t matter what you’re called. Matters what you do . . . that’s all.”
“The Guardians,” Michael said. “That’s what we are . . . and we should take an oath. We should do that thing where you . . . where you . . . you know that thing?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Maurice asked. He frowned and scowled simultaneously; looked like someone had sewn his eyebrows together across the bridge of his nose.
“The blood brother thing,” Michael replied, “Where you cut your hand and press your palms together, and then you make an oath about what you’re going to do.”
“Nobody’s going to be cutting anybody’s hands,” I said.
“We should,” Daniel said. He spoke quietly, his voice almost lost in the back of his throat. “We should do it because it means something, and because this is important, Joseph. My sister was killed by this . . . this boogeyman.”
“Lord God almighty, you’ve been talking to Hans Kruger,” I said. “It ain’t no boogeyman. There’s no such thing as a darn boogeyman.”
“Just a name,” Daniel replied. “Name don’t mean anything. We call ourselves the Guardians, we call him the boogeyman. Just names, that’s all. Means we know what we’re talking about, nothing more. And we should do something to show we’re all in this together. I think we should do this, and we should make an oath, and then we should work out what we’re going to do so this doesn’t happen again.”
Hans Kruger had a penknife. Blade no more than two inches long, but it was sharp. “Have a stone, and I work it on the stone until it can cut paper longways,” he said. He held out his hand, and when he drew the edge of the blade across the soft pad beneath his thumb, he squealed. Blood followed the line of the knife, and within a few seconds it had crept along the creases of his palm.
I took the knife. I held it for a second. I pressed the blade against my palm, closed my eyes, gritted my teeth. It felt like nothing at first, and then a sharp needle of pain lanced through me. I saw blood, and for a moment felt faint.
Each in turn, one after the other, and then we pressed our palms together.
“Gonna die of blood poisoning,” Maurice Fricker said. “Darn crazy fool kids the lot of you.” But when we held our hands out ahead of us, each of us bleeding, there was a grim determination in his expression that told me he believed in what we were doing.
“We make an oath,” I said “We make an oath to protect the little girls—”
“Elena,” Hans Kruger said.
Michael Duggan looked up. “And Sheralyn Williams . . . and Mary.”
“And my sister,” Ronald Duggan added.
“Your sister?” Daniel said. “Your sister’s nineteen. She rooms in a three-decker and works in the post office in Race Pond.”
“We watch over all of them,” I said. “We the Guardians hereby promise to watch over all of them, and we promise to keep our eyes and ears open at all times, and we promise to stay up late and watch the roads and fields and—”
“And meet every night right here,” Hans said. “And then we go out and patrol the town and make sure that nothing happens—”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What the hell’s gotten into you? These girls weren’t taken from their beds. They were taken in broad daylight, taken from right under our noses and killed where anybody could have seen them.”
“Which means that it must have been someone they knew, right?” Ronald said. “Otherwise they would have run away. They all know well enough to stay away from strangers.”
There was a cool silence. Everyone looked at everyone else in turn. I felt like a ghost had walked right through me.
“No one’s going anywhere alone,” I said. “And we’re making a promise to keep our eyes and ears open, and if we see anything suspicious we tell Sheriff Dearing, okay?”
“That’s what we’re going to do,” Maurice said.
“I agree,” Daniel said.
“We’re done then. The Guardians have been founded. No one speaks of this,” I said. “If this is someone we know then we don’t want everyone blabbing about it. We don’t want to give this . . . this boogeyman any chance to find out we’re watching for him.”
Minutes later I walked away, the newspaper clippings folded and stuffed into my pants pocket. My hand was sore, and before I went into the house I washed it in the rain barrel at the end of the yard.
I felt like a child. Perhaps for the first time I really felt like we were up against something that we could never hope to understand. I was frightened. We all were. Whatever was out there was an awful lot more terrifying than some war in a different country. But there was something else, something small but nevertheless significant. Took a while to get my finger on it, but when I did I looked underneath and found it.
It was the first time I’d ever felt part of something. That was all it was, but it seemed important and special. The first time I’d ever really belonged.
Three days later we met after school and agreed on the location of our first meeting.
“End of Gunther Kruger’s field,” I said. “The furthest one from the road toward the bend in the river.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Daniel McRae said, and for a moment I wondered whether it was simply fear that prompted such a statement. I got the impression he didn’t want to come, that he’d made an oath to do everything he could and now felt afraid.
“You know where the road from your house meets the road to school?” Hans Kruger said.
Daniel nodded; there was no way he could deny where that was.
“I’ll meet you there,” Hans said. “Meet you there and I’ll show you the way.”
Daniel’s eyes flashed nervously. He glanced at me. I smiled reassuringly. He did not smile back.
After school we went our separate ways, each of us to our own homes for dinner. My mother had plans to be away most of the evening. She asked what I would be doing.
“Reading some,” I said. “I have some work to do as well.”
“You get hungry there’s milk and corned beef in the cold box.”
She left a little after seven. I waited until eight, nervous in the base of my gut, and then I put on a dark jacket, took a box of matches from the stove, and from beneath my bed I retrieved a four-inch knife with a leather sheath that my father had given to me a year or so before he died.
“You can’t be giving him that,” my mother had said.
“Lord’s sake, Mary, he’s a grown boy. Anyway, the thing’s as sharp as a lettuce leaf. Maybe if he’s lucky he could crease someone to death with it.”
They shared words for a minute more. I had to give the knife back. Later my father took me aside, said he’d hidden it beneath my bed, that I shouldn’t say a word. Our secret.
I tucked the sheath into the waistband of my pants, tugged my shirt down over it. I looked once more at the kitchen, and then I left by the back door and crossed the yard toward the fields.
By the time I reached the end of the road I was joined by Hans and Daniel. They had walked the long way round. We said nothing, took forthright and confident steps as if we were trying to convince ourselves that we knew what we were doing.
&nbs
p; By the time we reached the end of the Krugers’ field everyone was there save Michael Wiltsey. No one said a word. We merely nodded at one another, tried to smile, each of us waiting for someone else to say something of meaning. Ten minutes went by. Maurice Fricker suggested we go look for Michael, but I told them to stay put, that he’d be along soon enough.
By the time he arrived it was gone nine. Ronnie Duggan had brought his father’s pocket watch and a lantern. He suggested we light it. I said that lighting a lantern would be nothing better than an advertisement of who we were and what we were doing. Regardless, he insisted on carrying it with him.
“So where are we going then?” he asked.
“We walk around the edge of this field and start down toward the church,” I said. “Back of the church we turn toward the school, but before we reach the road we cut across behind my house and head toward the Sheriff’s Office—”
“The Sheriff’s Office?” Michael Wiltsey asked.
“We’re not going to the Sheriff’s Office,” I said, “just toward it, just as far as the bend in the road, and then we’re heading back this way.”
“Hell, Joseph, that’s gotta be the better part of two or three miles,” Daniel protested. “That’s most of the way round Augusta Falls . . .”
“Isn’t that the point?” Hans asked. “Isn’t that the point . . . to try and search as much of the town as we can?”
No one said a word, not until Maurice Fricker stepped forward, eyes wide, skin dead-white, and said, “We made an oath. We made a promise we were gonna do this. So let’s do it, huh? Or is any of you chickenin’ out?”
No one chickened out. I started walking. Hans right beside me and the others following in silence.
Less than an hour. The air was chill, the sky a deep midnight blue that made our faces and hands glow almost white. I could see how frightened Daniel McRae was, starting at every sound—the slightest rustle from the hedgerow at the side of the road, the wings of some bird launching itself from a tree. At one point I sensed his fear, and I wondered whether he believed that the killer would find him by his smell, would recognize him as a McRae. Would come to finish the work he’d started with his sister. Wanted to tell him not to worry, that the killer was only after little girls, but I was insufficiently convinced of this to make it sound genuine. I practised the words in my head but they did not work. I said nothing. I watched Daniel, and when we reached the turn in the road and started back the way we’d come I held his gaze for a moment. I knew he wanted to leave. I knew he wanted to run like the Devil all the way home, to bolt the door, to hide in his room, to bury himself beneath the bedcovers and make believe that none of this had ever happened. But he could not ask. He could not break his oath, so I made it easy for him.