“And when would you like to conduct this little interview of yours?”
She reached into her satchel and pulled out a bulky tape recorder. “How about right now?”
3
I’d just finished hosing off the lawn mower and was pushing it into the sun so it could dry when a grizzled voice called out, “Hey there, Richard. Come on over here for a minute.”
I looked up and Mr. Gentile was standing on his front porch looking over at me. He hooked a bony, arthritic finger in my direction and gestured for me to hurry up.
Bernard Gentile—when we were kids, he insisted we call him Mr. Bernie—was in his late eighties and looked every day of it. His face was tanned year-round and deeply creviced. Slight in stature, he stood no more than five foot six, and walked with a badly hunched back that made him appear even shorter. Some of the neighborhood kids called him the Hunchback of Notre Dame when he wasn’t around, but I never liked that and told them so. To my adolescent mind, Mr. Gentile was the spitting image of the irascible Mister Magoo, but I never shared that thought with anyone other than my parents. It felt disrespectful. A distinguished navy veteran of two wars (and boy, did he have the medals to prove it), Mr. Gentile was a gentle soul and a first-rate storyteller. When we were young, he regaled us regularly with tales ranging from the Great Depression and the Second World War to old-time jazz clubs and the night he met Elvis Presley. He once summoned Jimmy Cava-naugh and me to his porch and spent the better part of an hour explaining in painstaking detail the reasons why we both would’ve made excellent Pony Express riders in the Old West. “Tall and skinny,” he told us over and over again. “You boys sure fit the mold.” The rest of that summer, every time he saw us out in the yard or ran into me at church, he’d repeat those same words with a big smile on his wrinkled face: “There they are! Tall and skinny!”
As I made my way to the porch, I patted the life-sized ceramic donkey that guarded the Gentiles’ front lawn on the head for good luck. That donkey had been sitting there in that same spot for pretty much forever. Somewhere in the house, my folks had a black-and-white photograph of me as a toddler, straddling the donkey’s back, my dangling legs too short to reach the ground.
“How are you, Mr. Gentile?”
“Right as rain,” he croaked, sitting down now. “Right as rain.” He waved a liver-spotted hand at a pair of leafy plants hanging from hooks on the porch ceiling. “Do me a favor and haul those down for me, will ya?”
I walked over and got up on my tiptoes and took the plants down one at a time, almost dropping the last one. Those suckers were heavier than they looked.
“Just leave ’em right there,” he said, pointing at the far corner of the porch. “I’ll haul ’em around back later in the wagon. Norma says they aren’t getting enough sun out here.”
“I can take them around back for you, no problem.”
He put a hand up, stopping me in my tracks. “I’m not crippled, son. Just couldn’t reach ’em, and Norma won’t let me anywhere near a ladder these days. Not since I gave myself stitches in my head trying to trim that stupid tree.” He pointed an elbow at the empty chair next to him. “Have a seat for a few. Want to tell you something.”
I took a seat. He stared off into the distance like he was trying to remember something important.
“With everything that’s going on, I thought you might find it interesting.” Then he looked at me. “It happened back in the sixties, before you and your folks moved next door. I imagine your father was still stationed in Texas back then or maybe even overseas.”
I nodded, even though I had no idea.
“You have to understand, Edgewood looked a lot different back then. Route 40 didn’t exist and neither did most of 24. Not many of the stores or restaurants around those parts, either.
“It was Nina’s sweet sixteen summer; I remember that because Norma threw her one heckuva party.” Nina was the Gentiles’ only daughter. They also had two sons. All three children much older than me and long ago moved away.
“A young boy who lived in military housing over by Cedar Drive went missing one summer day. He’d been off playing at a nearby creek with his friends. After a while, they’d gone home for lunch and he’d stayed by himself, looking for minnows, his friends said later. Only I guess he hadn’t been by himself after all, because when the other kids returned to the creek a half hour or so later, all they found was one of their friend’s shoes on the creek bank.” He looked at me then. “Sound familiar?”
“Just like Kacey Robinson,” I said.
“The boy’s parents and friends looked everywhere for him. When they couldn’t find him, they called the MPs and the MPs called in the sheriff’s department. They searched day and night for over a week before they called it off.
“Anyway, the summer wore on, and except for the boy’s family and friends, the incident was pushed pretty much into the background. Life works like that. Something else—good, bad, indifferent—always comes along and helps us on our way.
“But then, sometime in late August, just before the kids put away their bathing suits and baseball mitts and dusted off their schoolbooks, it happened again. Another child went missing. This time, a little Black girl. She’d been playing in her front yard under the supervision of her mother. The phone rang inside the house, and the mom went in for no longer than a minute, she later told police, and when she came out again, the girl was gone. No shoe left behind this time. Not even one of the pretty pink hair ribbons she’d been wearing that day.
“After that, it was pretty much an exact repeat of the first time around. The police were called. Search parties were organized and conducted and eventually called off. And the little girl was never seen or heard from again.
“The town was on edge after that. Lots of suspicion. Folks improperly accused. Tensions rose. Tempers flared. And then, just like before, time passed and things began to go back to normal. The holidays came and went. Students returned to school. No more children disappeared. And then, before everyone knew it, it was summer again.” He squinted at me. “You get what I’m telling you?”
I nodded my head, lying. “I think so.”
“I figured you would. You’re a smart young man. Always have been.” Evidently, my intelligence had been greatly overestimated.
A few minutes later, my father called out from the driveway, looking for my help. I jumped at the chance to excuse myself, and as I said goodbye to Mr. Gentile, the overwhelming thought in my head was: I can’t wait to call Carly and tell her the story I just heard.
4
My conversation with Mr. Gentile occurred on the morning of Saturday, July 9. By noon, I’d already phoned Carly and relayed the chilling story of the two missing Edgewood children. Sharing my excitement, she’d immediately promised to scour the Aegis’s back-issue microfiche files to see if she could pull up any additional details.
By early Monday afternoon, Carly and I sat across from each other inside the Edgewood Public Library, an open file folder stuffed with photocopies on the table between us.
I put down the single-page article—dated July 11, 1967—I’d just finished reading and picked up a two-pager stapled in the upper left corner. A child’s photograph was centered beneath the headline: STILL NO SIGN OF MISSING BOY. This was Peter Sheehan, age seven. I quickly read the article, and when I was finished, Carly asked, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.” I used the tip of my finger to slide the next article on the stack across the table. “Other than the shoe that was left behind, there’s not much in common with what’s happening now.”
“That’s what I thought, too. The first victim’s male, the second’s female. One’s White, the other’s African American. And no bodies were ever found. We don’t even know if they were killed, much less strangled.”
“And they were a lot younger than Natasha Gallagher and Kacey Robinson.”
“And not a word about anything number-related left behind at the crime scenes
.” She looked at me. “You disappointed?”
“A little,” I said, suddenly feeling foolish. “I really thought the murders might all be connected somehow… but there isn’t any connection at all, is there?”
She shrugged. “Another hometown human tragedy under mysterious and unsettling circumstances.”
“I guess so.” After scanning the article, I looked up at her. “You’re going to make a fine journalist once they actually let you write something.”
Her face lit up. “Wait until you read what I wrote about you!”
“Please, don’t remind me.”
“You sure I can’t convince you to read it ahead of time? It would make me feel better.”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “Once’ll be enough, and I might as well wait to read it when everyone else does.”
“If you say so.” She picked up the folder, shuffled to the bottom of the pile, and handed me what she found there. “I did find something else kind of interesting,” she said. It was an article dated March 1972. The headline read: TEENAGER KILLED IN EDGEWOOD. I’d been six years old at the time it was published.
I lowered my voice and read aloud:
“ ‘Late Thursday evening, local police discovered the body of missing fifteen-year-old Amber Harrison of Hanson Road, along the muddy shoreline of Winters Run Creek’—that’s a block away from where we’re sitting right now.”
Carly nodded her head.
“ ‘Ms. Harrison, a freshman from nearby Edgewood High School, had been missing for approximately forty-eight hours, after disappearing during a short walk home from a friend’s house located on Cavalry Drive.
“ ‘According to preliminary reports, Ms. Harrison was beaten and strangled—’ ”
I stopped reading and looked at Carly. “Whoa. Any other victims? Did they catch the person who did it?”
“That’s the really interesting part,” she said. “I looked everywhere and I couldn’t find anything else. Not even a single follow-up article.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. The system’s kind of old and lame, so I guess I could’ve missed something. But then I checked the Baltimore Sun and there wasn’t even a single mention of it.”
“That is interesting,” I said, thinking.
“Are your Spidey senses tingling?”
I looked at her, surprised. “You’re a fan?”
She rolled her eyes and began straightening the stack of photocopies. “What, you think only boys read comics?”
5
The next morning, I woke before dawn with my bladder on the verge of exploding, a direct result of washing down a chili dog with a Double Big Gulp of Coke the night before. As I made my way to the bathroom, just a step above sleepwalking, I heard the crinkle of newspaper and the metallic clink of a spoon stirring coffee. I paused at the top of the stairway and peeked downstairs. I could just make out the dark silhouette of my father hunched over the narrow table in the corner of the kitchen. He looked small, somehow, and lonely sitting there by himself. The house was silent and still, and I flashed back in time to hundreds of other early mornings just like this one. Standing there in my pajamas, I thought: This is what you do when you have a family. You get up when it’s still dark outside and you go to work so the people you love can have a better life. Even when you’re sick or tired and don’t want to. I watched him for a while longer, my heart aching in a way I’d never felt before. “Love you, Dad,” I whispered in the darkness, and then I crept to the bathroom and back to bed.
6
Two weeks later, on Wednesday, July 27, Carly’s article about me was published in the Aegis. Despite the fact that my parents had a subscription and home delivery, I bought my own copy at the Wawa and read it alone in my car. I only read it once, and quickly, right there in the parking lot, cringing every time I stumbled upon a direct quote. Kara said later that I looked handsome in the photo and came across as enthusiastic and smart. I, however, was almost positive I looked and sounded like a complete and total idiot. I hated every word, but of course I didn’t tell Carly that. Instead I thanked her and told her how proud the article had made my parents, which was undeniably true. Those two were over the moon that their baby boy had made the local paper, and the front page of the People & Places section, at that. Later that evening, Norma and Bernie Gentile stopped by the house and actually asked me to autograph their copy. I thought they were kidding, but they weren’t. My mother couldn’t stop smiling. The next day, my father went right to the library and made a dozen photocopies of Carly’s story, mailing them to relatives all around the world.
There were, however, two pleasant surprises that arose from the article’s publication. The first was a late-night phone call from my old pal Jimmy Cavanaugh. His parents had an out-of-state subscription to the Aegis and had told him all about it. He phoned to congratulate me and let me know that he’d be in town over the weekend for his cousin’s wedding. We ended up chatting for more than an hour and made plans to get together.
The second surprise was a congratulatory call the next morning from Detective Harper. He’d stumbled upon the article—or so he said, going out of his way to sound casual—and really enjoyed it. He just wanted me to know that. Before we hung up, I took a chance and ran an idea by him: “What do you think about me riding along with one of your officers some time? Just to observe and get a feeling of what it’s like to be a police officer in a small town like Edgewood.” I explained to him that I’d already gone on several ride-alongs the previous year with a friend who was a Baltimore City cop. I knew all about the release forms I’d be asked to sign and what was expected of me. He promised to think about it and get back to me. I wasn’t holding my breath.
7
That same Wednesday night, after dinner, my parents walked down the street to visit with Carlos Sr. and Priscilla Vargas. I was all but certain the subject of my newspaper article would come up within the first thirty seconds of conversation.
Meanwhile, Kara and I spent the evening watching a movie in the basement, and then she said an early goodnight and headed home to work on an assignment. Damn. Even two full months after graduation, I still hated school.
Just as I was about to step into the shower, the phone rang. I quickly wrapped a towel around my waist and picked up the receiver in the upstairs hallway.
“Hello?”
“Quick bit of news.” Carly Albright’s voice sounded muffled and faraway.
“Talk to me.”
“A local landscaper, Manny Sawyer, age thirty-one, was taken to the station house this morning at approximately 11:15 a.m. Evidently, he’d worked on a crew that cut down some trees in the Gallaghers’ backyard, and moved some bushes and did some mulching two houses down from the Robinsons.”
“Whoa.”
“I know, right? Last I heard, he was still there being interviewed.”
“Keep me posted, okay?”
“Will do. See ya.”
She hung up. Replacing the receiver, I headed back into the bathroom. I started the shower running, but before I could remove my towel, the phone rang again. Jesus, Carly.
I hustled into the hallway and grabbed it off the hook. “Hey, that was fast—”
“What was fast?” A man’s voice I didn’t recognize.
“Sorry about that, I thought you were someone else.”
The man chuckled. Low and gravelly—not a pleasant sound.
“Who is this?” I asked, hoping I sounded calmer than I felt.
No answer, but I could hear him breathing.
“Why do you keep calling here?”
Click.
And then the dial tone.
I lowered my hand and stared at the telephone for a moment. For the first time, I allowed myself to ask the question: Was that really the Boogeyman? Then I turned off the shower and ran downstairs to make sure the doors were locked.
8
It felt just like the good old days.
Car windows
down. Radio up. Six-pack of Bud Light on the floorboard of the back seat. And Jimmy Cavanaugh riding shotgun.
“That’s wild,” he said. “Like one of those scary stories you used to tell us when we were kids. ‘A Monster Walks Among Us.’ ”
I’d just finished bringing him up to speed on Natasha’s and Kacey’s murders and what Carly Albright had found in that old article in the Aegis. We’d spent the past half hour catching up on each other’s lives and driving around town, revisiting all of our old haunts. It’d been more than three years since Jimmy’s last visit, but not much had changed.
“You know what I miss?” he asked, staring out the window.
“What?”
“The old water tower. Remember when we used to go sledding there?”
“Absolutely.”
“Remember the time it sprung a leak and the entire hill iced over? That old guy flew down it on ice skates and almost killed himself!”
I laughed, remembering. “You know that ‘old guy’ was probably about the same age we are right now?”
“No way,” he said, stunned. “You really think so?”
“I do. We’re getting old, man.”
“And you’re getting married,” he said, grinning.
“Yes, I am. And you’ll be standing right next to me as a groomsman.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” He looked around for cops and took a swig of his beer. Belched. Gesturing out the window as we drove past the Edgewood Diner, he said, “Now that’s one place I don’t miss. Not even a little bit.”
“You and me both,” I said. “Haven’t stepped foot in there since high school.”
“Mel still own it?”
“What do you think?” I said, giving him a look. Mel Fullerton was a grizzly bear of a man—six four, at least two-hundred-and-fifty pounds, ratty beard and mustache, Confederate flag on his baseball cap, pack of Red Man in his jeans pocket. He was also a first-class asshole.
Chasing the Boogeyman Page 11