by Ronald Malfi
By mid-March, we met in the woods by early morning on the weekends. On the days we had school, we walked to the woods after classes and hung out at Echo Base until the sky darkened and we had to depart for our homes.
We continued to hunt for clues, alternating our locations throughout the woods, forging our way through all the far places where human feet rarely—if ever—traversed. Per my suggestion, we searched the length of the culvert on the opposite side of Counterpoint Lane, too, since that was where Adrian had found the locket. We didn’t limit ourselves to that specific area, either, but instead we went all the way down to Point Lane (where the culvert became a muddy swamp) and all the way up to Solomon’s Bend Road (where the culvert was eventually paved over and elevated as part of the walkway that flanked the overpass above Solomon’s Field).
Several times I caught Adrian staring at the open mouth of the drainage tunnel that ran under Counterpoint Lane, a disquieting look of detachment on his face. Once, I nudged him on the shoulder and asked if he was okay. He turned and smiled at me, but there was no feeling behind that smile. I thought I could see the gears and wheels and cogs moving about inside his head.
All this searching, yet we still hadn’t found any clues. The treasures we uncovered included an old Star Trek lunch box, scores of hubcaps, heaps of busted bottles and beer cans crushed like accordions, the maggot-riddled corpse of a house cat with a name tag that read Dillinger, a single gold hoop earring, an outboard motor for a johnboat, plenty of moss-slickened sneakers, the deflated wind socks of used condoms, and even a discarded toilet.
We found countless articles of clothing, too—mostly moldy and in tattered ribbons, which we supposed could have belonged to any of the missing teenagers, but most likely had been dumped in the woods by vandals or homeless people. Nonetheless, Adrian didn’t want to uniformly dismiss these bits of clothing, so he stowed the clothes in garbage bags for later inspection, if it ever came to that. We stored the garbage bags at Echo Base, among the statues.
Peter managed to steal his sister’s Little Mermaid walkie-talkies. There were two of them, plus a headset that worked just as well, so now we had five radios—one for each of us. The headset remained at Echo Base, and the radios were divvied up between the four doing the searching. We rotated the radios, so the same people didn’t always get stuck with the embarrassing Little Mermaid ones.
Somewhere along the line, Scott, Peter, Michael, and I lost interest in searching for clues that were not there—clues to a murder that had happened over five months ago. Hours spent peeking beneath bushes, under rocks, or digging through the softening muck that flanked the creek dwindled. As spring marched on, we spent most of our time sprawled out in the statue-laden clearing listening to music, reading horror novels and comic books, climbing trees, telling stories. Sometimes we slipped out onto the brownish lawn of December Park and tossed a football around.
But Adrian’s dedication to the cause did not falter. He continued exploring the surrounding woods. Throughout the day he returned to Echo Base, sweating through his clothes and looking grim, to chart his progress on Michael’s map. If it was around lunchtime, we passed out cheeseburgers from the McDonald’s on Second Avenue, and Adrian ate and laughed along with us, his obsession seemingly in remission for the time being. Yet as soon as he finished eating, he shouldered his backpack, tightened his shoelaces, and stomped through the foliage. Never in my life had I witnessed such determination. It would have been admirable if it hadn’t been so unsettling.
Adrian didn’t become irritated by our lack of commitment to the search because, for the most part, we all continued doing the jobs he’d assigned to us.
Scott showed up one Saturday morning with dulled and rusted switchblades he’d gotten at a discount from Toddy Surplus. They weren’t as cool or fearsome as his butterfly knife, and mine often jammed when the release lever was depressed, but there was an undeniable ceremonial air that overtook us when, among the headless statues in the clearing, Scott distributed them to us.
Michael took to his job with the zeal of a religious fanatic. He stopped sitting with us in the school cafeteria so he could make the rounds at various other tables, intent on overhearing poignant tidbits of information that might reveal the identity of the Piper. Like a beat reporter, he kept the small notepad Adrian had given him in the breast pocket of his shirt. I often caught him jotting down notes in it while in class, and he was reprimanded by Mr. Johnson several times for not paying attention.
Michael came up with a list of possible suspects, although his rationale for arriving at these outlandish conclusions was more than just questionable. Half the teachers from Stanton School, including Mr. Johnson, Mr. Mattingly, old Nozzle Neck, and even Principal Unglesbee, made the list.
Down in the woods, we passed the list around so we could all view it.
I raised one eyebrow. “Old lady Schubert?” The elderly woman who lived on Shore Acre Road and whose lawn was populated with an entire army of ceramic garden gnomes was certainly a mean old witch, but in no way was she capable of anything more malevolent than shouting at kids from her front windows.
“Is that so impossible?” Michael said.
“She’s like a hundred years old,” I said. “And besides, weren’t you the one who said the killer has to be a man?”
“Hey,” he said, hands up, “that was the old sexist me. I’m new and improved. I’m a modern man now.”
“This is just a list of people you don’t like,” Peter said, leaning over my shoulder to look at the list. “Or people who don’t like you.”
“Explains why it’s so long,” Scott said.
“Why Mr. Mattingly?” I asked. “What has he done to you?”
“Nothing. But he’s new to town. I figured that had to count for something.” When Michael saw that none of us understood his rationale, he said, “Think about it. Do you really believe the killer is someone who’s lived among us for years and just, wham, one day decides to start kidnapping and murdering kids? Highly unlikely. It’s more plausible that the killer is fairly new to town. Maybe he’d been killing where he came from and things got too hot for him, so he had to move on.”
I had to admit, the theory made a lot of sense. However, I couldn’t picture Mr. Mattingly with the cleft in his chin and the clean-shaven face as a murderer of children.
Adrian dropped a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I think you’re onto something. Put little stars next to the names of the people who are new to town.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Peter remarked. Looking at Adrian, he said, “You’re new to town.”
“Yeah,” Michael said, gripping Adrian around the wrist and shaking his thin little arm. “But look at this thing. He couldn’t choke the life out of a teddy bear.”
We laughed.
Since I had been avoiding my own job, I helped Peter with his—namely, coming up with a list of all the possible places a child killer might hide out. On a Thursday afternoon after school, the two of us hopped on our bikes and coasted through the streets of the city. We visited the houses of the missing kids and checked out the general vicinity where each one had last been seen.
Peter stopped to write in his notepad whenever we saw an abandoned house with a For Sale sign in the front yard or a run-down hunting shack that stood haunted and empty along Peninsula Drive. There were some vacant storefronts on Second Avenue, their windows dark and soaped over. Some of them had been that way for years. We made note of all of them.
We marked down the boathouses along the Shallows, and on our way back home, the weathered remnants of the Werewolf House beyond the Butterfield homestead made the list, too.
On a different day, we rode out to the Palisades, with its whitewashed gazebos and manicured lawns, and down to the playground where, when we were just toddlers, Peter and I had played together in the sandboxes. The sandboxes were gone, as were the jungle gyms and tire swings, and the small lake that had once looked so beautiful had greenish scum on the surface t
hrough which sickly looking mallards carved their passage.
We located the Coles’ house, which was only a few blocks from the modern-looking Girls’ Holy Cross High School, and we straddled our bikes outside the quaint cottage-style home with the peach siding and the dark green shutters, wondering what the last horrible moments of Courtney’s life had been like. The house looked dark, and the only thing in the driveway was a large oil stain. I felt some of the adventure seep out of me. This wasn’t a game; this was real.
“What are you kids doing?” a screechy voice called from across the street, startling us both. I turned and saw an elderly woman in curlers and a floral housedress admonishing us from over a white-picket fence. She had a newspaper tucked under one arm, and she pointed an accusatory finger in our direction. “Get away from that house!”
Without a word, Peter and I pedaled away.
Down at the Cape, we peeked into the grimy windows of the watermen’s shacks along the shore. Not much bigger than outhouses, these sloppy, poorly constructed hovels reeked of rotten fish, urine, and sweat. There were rubber waders in some, dirty calendars pinned to the walls of others, and even a potbellied stove in one of them. We wrote them down in the notepad, although we couldn’t imagine someone willingly hiding out in one of those claustrophobic and foul-smelling little coffins.
Peter motioned to the water and the rank of winter-proofed boats suspended by winches near the docks. “What about those?”
“Do you think someone could live in one of them?”
“Don’t know. Let’s mark ’em down, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s.”
Afterward, we were heading down Magothy Road before I realized we were biking right past the Keener farm. At least a dozen scarecrows had been tied to the fence surrounding the property, some with burlap-sack faces, others wearing dime-store Halloween masks. The house stood a distance away, closer toward the river. It was a ranch with a wraparound porch made of natural logs. Junked cars were lined up along one side of the house, their windshields opaque with grime and webbed with cracks. Big black dogs loped about in a pen in the backyard. I scanned the property for Nathan Keener’s truck but couldn’t spot it.
“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested, and Peter didn’t protest.
We spent an hour cruising the streets of Shipley’s Crossing, where Courtney’s friend Megan Meeks lived. There was an old neighborhood clubhouse that had closed down, its black windows arced with soap, large two-by-fours hammered over the entrances. A number of the boards looked new, and I recalled seeing police walking around the place one afternoon as we came home from school.
“I think the cops may have checked this place out already,” I said.
Nevertheless, Peter marked it down in his notebook.
On another day, we biked all the way out to the industrial park, where the houses stood closer and closer together, separated by barrooms, pawnshops, billiard parlors, and squalid brick tenements that overlooked squat warehouses with bars on the windows. On every street corner we came across the hollowed-out shells of abandoned automobiles. There were literally hundreds of places someone could hide in this part of the city—and where bodies could be hidden, too, and most likely never found.
We biked down North Town Road, crumbling storefronts ticking by like landmarks. At the edge of the neighborhood was a miserable little trailer park set among tall blond weeds and crumbly drifts of white gravel. There were ATVs and satellite dishes in nearly every yard.
“Write this place down,” I suggested. We had paused in a deserted intersection made of disintegrated asphalt. In one of the yards across the street, a piebald pit bull barked at us, ropes of saliva whipping about its snout. I felt eyes spying on us through darkened windows.
“What place, specifically?”
“The whole lousy neighborhood,” I said.
During Mass one Sunday morning, Father Evangeline brought Rebecca Ransom, the parents of Jeffrey Connor, and Courtney Cole’s father and younger sister, Margaret, up to the pulpit where he blessed them. Margaret wept when Father Evangeline pressed his thumb to her forehead and prayed with her.
“There is a scourge that has come to this town,” the priest announced. “It is the devil in human form, and he walks among us. He is the beast who wears the mask of a man while cloaking himself in darkness.”
Rebecca Ransom fell to her knees. Two men in the first pew rushed over and helped her up. Her cries were heart-wrenching.
After Mass, I met up with the guys at Echo Base. As I came through the woods, the four of them were gathered around the statues playing Uno while the dynamo-powered radio crackled out “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains.
Michael noticed me first. He had the Little Mermaid headset cocked jauntily on his head. “Ahoy!” he called, and the others whipped their heads around and looked at me over their shoulders.
“Deal me in,” I said, going over to Scott’s backpack and fishing out a can of Jolt.
My friends all set their cards down. “Tell him,” Peter said.
Scott leaned over and grabbed a can of Jolt from his backpack. “We’ve got a new place to search.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Where’s that?”
Scott pointed across the woods toward the embankment and Counterpoint Lane. “The tunnel that goes under the highway. We’ve looked for clues down here and in the ditches and ravines, but Adrian found the locket right by the opening of that tunnel. It was Adrian’s idea to check it out.”
I looked at Adrian and his swimmy, magnified eyes. I recalled how he had stared at the mouth of that tunnel as if in a trance. How long had he been considering this before saying something?
“Isn’t that like a sewer pipe or something?” I said.
“It’s a drainage tunnel,” Scott said. “It’s there so the highway doesn’t flood during a big storm.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not too crazy about crawling through some underground pipe.”
“It’s wide enough so we won’t have to crawl,” Adrian said, a professorial tone to his voice. Yes, he had been planning on how to approach this for some time. “Maybe just hunch over a little but not crawl.”
“You know what I mean,” I said.
“Well, it’s part of our new theory,” Adrian said.
“What theory is that?”
“That the cops are wrong,” he said.
The others nodded.
“They’ve been looking for clues in December Park, in the woods, and back toward the school. They assume she was abducted and murdered either in the park or in the woods. But that’s because they don’t know about the locket. They don’t know I found it on the other side of the street by the ditch. Which means maybe she was abducted after she walked out of the woods.”
“But the cops don’t know that,” Scott added, still nodding. “They can’t know what we know. We’re ahead of the game.”
“And you guys think we’ll find more clues in that tunnel?” I said.
“It’s worth a shot,” Scott replied.
“That girl was killed in October,” I said. “That’s almost six months ago. Even if there was something in there, it would have washed into the sewers by now.”
They were all looking at me. They wanted to do this, and suddenly I was the one roadblock in their way. How had that happened? Hadn’t I been on board with them from the beginning? In my mind’s eye, I saw Margaret Cole weeping while Father Evangeline prayed with his thumb against her forehead and Aaron Ransom’s mother being led out of the church, her body wracked with sobs.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’m in.”
Scott handed out flashlights to each of us while Adrian passed around plastic shopping bags he’d gotten from the Generous Superstore.
“What are the bags for?” I asked.
“For collecting whatever we find,” Adrian said.
“Let’s leave the backpacks here,” Scott said to Adrian. “I don’t want to get stuck crawling through that tun
nel.”
“Good idea.”
I checked my flashlight and made sure the light came on, which it did, then stuffed the shopping bag into the rear pocket of my jeans.
The five of us crossed through the woods and ascended the embankment toward Counterpoint Lane. We waited for a break in the traffic, and when we got it, we sprinted across. The opening of the tunnel was in the muddy ravine, where we had previously trampled the weeds and imprinted the soles of our sneakers in the mud while searching for clues.
A curtain of ivy hung in front of the mouth of the tunnel. Staring at it, I felt a needle of apprehension at the base of my spine. All too clearly I remembered my nightmare of being sucked down a hole in the Dead Woods and buried underground. I quickly chased the thought away.
“We’ll have to go in single file,” Peter said. “Who goes first?”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “This wasn’t my bright idea.”
“I’ll go.” Adrian climbed down into the ditch. The flashlight Scott had given him was one of those hefty black Maglites, like policemen carry, and it looked ridiculous in Adrian’s small hands. As he approached the mouth of the tunnel, the rest of us slid down the hill to the swampy earth.
It had been colder when we first searched this area, but in the warming weather of spring, the aroma of flowers mingling with the foul-smelling runoff from the pipe was enough to make me light-headed.
Adrian clicked on his flashlight, then swept away the curtain of ivy and vines from the tunnel’s opening. A circular black eyelet, perhaps four feet in diameter, stared back at us.
Stories my grandfather had told me about World War II suddenly flitted through my brain, particularly those of the Japanese soldiers hiding in L-shaped tunnels under the villages to escape the American troops. My grandfather had said they’d shoot the first few Japanese at the opening of the tunnel, and that was all they needed to do to trap the others inside, where they would all eventually die of suffocation, dehydration, or starvation.