Night of Fear

by Peg Kehret

  The police questioned him about Brody and T.J. tried to remember as many details as possible. When he described Brody’s earring, one of the officers exclaimed, “I’ve seen him! He was at a fire a few days ago. I even talked to him when we suspected arson, but I decided he was just a spark.”

  “A what?” T.J. asked.

  “A spark. That’s what we call people who like to hang around and watch fires whenever they can. They’re usually harmless—just fans who like to see the action.”

  “Fans?” T.J. said. “You mean, like basketball fans?”

  “You got it. Some sparks even listen to the police radio in order to know when there’s a fire to chase. It’s a hobby with them.”

  What a weird hobby, T.J. thought.

  The officer shook his head. “Usually I can tell a genuine spark,” he said, “but that one had me fooled. He kept talking about his old man being proud of him; I thought his father used to be a fire fighter.”

  The officers asked more questions. When T.J. told about Brody’s revenge, the police looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

  “Great,” one of them said. “Just what we need, a pyromaniac who thinks more fires will make up for his own loss.”

  “Part of the time, he seemed perfectly normal,” T.J. said. “He only got weird when he was talking about his fires.”

  “Grief does strange things to people. So does anger. Or maybe he’s always only had one oar in the water.”

  “I saw one other case,” another officer said, “where it turned out the guy had a chemical imbalance. Half the time he was as sane as I am and then, other times, it was like he stepped over some invisible line and became a whole different person.”

  “Let’s get a bulletin out on him,” the other officer replied. “He can’t be too far away.”

  The officers had CB radios and cellular phones in their patrol cars. After a brief telephone conversation, one of the officers, Sergeant Donnell, told T.J. that he would drive him home. “Your parents can’t come to get you because they’re helping the sheriff organize a search for your grandmother,” Sergeant Donnell said, “but I’ll have you home in less than half an hour.”

  T.J.’s fatigue vanished. That was definitely the best news he’d heard all night.

  During the ride home, T.J. told the sergeant every detail of his time with Brody. When he got to the part about the pony, Sergeant Donnell said, “You’re a brave kid.”

  “Me?” T.J. said. “I’m not brave at all. I was scared silly but I couldn’t let the pony burn to death.”

  “That’s what being brave is,” Sergeant Donnell replied. “It’s acting on your convictions. People always think police officers are brave; they think we aren’t afraid of anything. Well, the truth is, we get just as scared as the next guy but we’re willing to act on our convictions. I’ll take a risk in order to prevent a crime. You took a risk in order to save the pony.”

  That’s true, T.J. thought. Maybe I am brave, when there is something worth taking a risk for. Maybe I’m not such a wimp as Craig Ackerley thinks I am.

  Just then, the police radio announced, “This is Car Eighteen. We’ve spotted an old blue pickup heading west on I-90 near Issaquah. The driver appears to be alone.”

  “That’s him,” T.J. said. “That’s Brody.”

  The radio gave a location and a second voice broke in to say that Car Twenty would be there in two minutes, for backup.

  Less than five minutes later, T.J. heard the report: “Suspect is in custody. He appears mentally unstable. He admits setting the fire and keeps saying his old man would be proud of him. We’re taking him in for a psychiatric evaluation.”

  “It seems Brody lost more than his store,” Sergeant Donnell said. “He also lost his mental competence. His twisted mind now justifies arson, the same crime that caused his troubles.”

  The patrol car left the freeway. “Many people face terrible tragedies,” Sergeant Donnell continued, “but they emerge stronger and more determined to make something good of their lives. While Brody had a valid reason for being angry and sad, he allowed the fire and the loss of his father’s store to destroy the rest of his own life, too. What a waste.”

  When they arrived at T.J.’s house, Sergeant Donnell had to park half a block away. There were two police cars in the Stensons’ driveway, and half a dozen other cars were parked along the street.

  The yard lights blazed and every light in the house seemed to be on. Through the living room window, T.J. saw a group of about thirty people. The babble of voices carried across the lawn.

  If Grandma Ruth did find her way home, T.J. thought, she would be too intimidated by all the people and noise to go inside. They couldn’t even take her to a shopping mall anymore. Crowds of chattering people made her fearful, probably because she didn’t understand who they were or what they were saying.

  Sergeant Donnell followed T.J. to the door. When the people inside saw T.J., everyone cheered. Flashbulbs popped; a reporter started asking questions.

  Mrs. Stenson ran to him and hugged him. Her eyes were red and her makeup was streaked. “Thank goodness you’re safe,” she said. She turned to Sergeant Donnell. “Thank you for bringing him home,” she said.

  “Have you found Grandma Ruth?” T.J. asked.

  Mrs. Stenson shook her head. Tears spilled onto her cheeks and she wiped them with the back of one hand. “The searchers are getting ready to leave now. Dad and a sheriff’s deputy are already out looking for her.” She waved her hand at the crowd of people. “These folks have offered to search, too.”

  T.J. looked quickly at the people in the room. He recognized four of his neighbors and a man who worked with his dad. Dane and his family were there and three other boys from his basketball team, standing near a tall officer who was giving instructions.

  T.J. went over to them. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Thanks for being here. How did you know about this?”

  “It was on TV,” Dane said.

  “I heard it, too,” one of the others said, “and I called Jason and Mike. First, we thought we’d be looking for you. Now, we’re going to help find your grandma.”

  “Thanks,” T.J. said again.

  Dane put his arm around T.J.’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find her. She’ll be OK.”

  “My son has such wonderful friends,” Mrs. Stenson said, to no one in particular. “We all do. Such wonderful friends and neighbors. Look at all these people. Even perfect strangers want to help. A woman who works in a gas station called the police because a boy T.J.’s age had been there earlier, arguing with his father, and when she heard on the news that T.J. was missing, she thought it might have been him.” She blew her nose. “Isn’t that wonderful, T.J.?” she said. “Someone who has never even seen you was trying to help.” She looked around the room and started to cry again.

  The tall officer explained that the searchers would work in pairs. “We’ll divide this group in half and go both directions on Ridge Road,” he said. “At the first cross street, a pair should go in each direction. At the next cross street, another pair goes in each direction. Continue to split up that way and cover as many of the side roads as you can.”

  The officer emphasized that Grandma Ruth was sick and that whoever found her should immediately report to an officer. “Don’t try to move her or make her go with you if she doesn’t want to,” he said. “She’s probably scared already and that might make it worse. If you contact one of us, we can take a family member with us to pick her up and bring her home. Patrol cars will be driving regularly throughout the area so you’ll have no trouble finding one of us. When you talk to her, stay calm. Reassure her that she’ll soon be home. And remember she is an elderly woman who moves slowly. She’s certain to be found within a mile or two.”

  “What if she’s injured?” someone asked.

  “What if someone in a car already picked her up?” someone else said.

  “What if she runs away when she sees us?”

&nbs
p; T.J. cringed. He couldn’t stand to listen to all this. He wanted to get on with the search. He left the group and went into the kitchen.

  Leaning against the kitchen counter, he drank a glass of water and tried to imagine what Grandma Ruth would have done when she walked away from the Crowleys’ barn. Almost certainly, she intended either to come home or to look for David. She would probably not have chosen to walk along a street. More likely, she tried to come back across the field, the way T.J. had taken her to the barn, and then she became mixed up and went off in the wrong direction.

  T.J. looked back into the living room. His mother was on the far side of the room, showing a picture of Grandma Ruth to one of the groups of searchers. Her voice sounded too high, as if she might lose control at any moment.

  If I tell her what I want to do, T.J. thought, she’ll probably say no. She’ll panic at the idea of me going out alone now, even on our own property.

  But he had to go. He couldn’t stand around waiting while the authorities gave endless instructions—instructions which did not include searching in the most logical places of all: the field behind the Stensons’ house and the Crowleys’ pasture.

  T.J. scribbled a quick note and left it on the kitchen table. Mom: I’m looking for Grandma Ruth in our back field.

  He opened the kitchen cupboard and removed the flashlight that his parents kept in case the power went out.

  He glanced at his mother one more time before he slipped unnoticed out the back door.

  Chapter Twelve

  T.J. started across the field, toward the stand of trees that separated the Stensons’ property from the Crowleys’. Walking slowly and looking all around, he retraced the path that he and Grandma Ruth had taken early that evening.

  With a pang, he remembered how impatient he had been, how he had resented her dawdling. Why had he thought that watching Top Gun was more important than keeping Grandma Ruth happy? If anything has happened to her, he would never forgive himself for being so short-tempered.

  “Grandma Ruth?” he called. “Are you here?”

  He heard the rumbling of voices behind him as the group of volunteer searchers began to leave the house and head for their assigned areas.

  “Grandma Ruth?” T.J. called, louder this time. “Grandma Ruth!” There was no answer.

  When he reached the gate that led to the Crowleys’ property, he turned back and walked to the opposite corner of the field, in case Grandma Ruth had gone that direction by mistake. He aimed his light back and forth across the ground as he walked. The possibility that she had fallen worried him and he wasn’t sure she would respond, even if she heard him call. By now, she might be too frightened and confused to answer. He checked thoroughly all along the strip of shrubs that grew across the Stensons’ back fence.

  There was no sign of any person in the field so he again walked across the way he and Grandma Ruth had gone earlier. This time, when he reached the gate, he pushed the metal handle to force it open, and entered the Crowleys’ pasture.

  Salt and Pepper barked loudly as he approached their pen. “Hey, guys, it’s me,” T.J. called, and the barks turned to excited yips. “Good dogs,” T.J. said, as he went by, but he didn’t take time to pet them.

  T.J. looked in the barn, just to be sure that Grandma Ruth was not asleep somewhere, overlooked by his parents. When he slid open the door, a shiver of fear streaked down the back of his neck. It would be a long, long time before T.J. could step into the Crowleys’ barn without remembering how he felt when he first saw Brody.

  He wondered what had gone wrong with Brody’s mind. Would he be punished for his crimes or sent to a mental hospital?

  Sergeant Donnell had said Brody was a victim of society’s ills but he could still have helped himself. “Lots of people have setbacks,” Sergeant Donnell said. “Life isn’t always fair but why waste your time trying to get revenge?”

  T.J. turned on the barn lights. Two sleepy kittens stretched lazily.

  “Grandma Ruth? Are you in here?”

  Quickly, he checked the old horse stalls and what used to be the tack room. Except for the kittens, which rubbed against T.J.’s ankles, mewing hungrily, the barn was empty.

  “Sorry this is so late,” he said as he poured cat food into the bowl. The kittens munched eagerly.

  As he slid the barn door closed, he tried to imagine what Grandma Ruth would have done but it was hard to know. She wasn’t in the field, which meant she had either gone down the lane and out onto the street, or she had gone into the woods.

  The police and volunteer searchers were looking along all the roads, assuming that Grandma Ruth would walk where it was easy to move, rather than struggling through the woods. T.J. wasn’t so sure. Grandma Ruth had always loved to hike in the woods, especially if there was a deer trail to follow. It seemed likely to him that she would avoid the paved roads, if she could. In her confused state of mind, the woods might have seemed the most logical place to go.

  T.J. started into the woods.

  There had been reports of teenagers in the woods at night, drinking or doing drugs and generally creating a disturbance. People in the Forest View Estates houses on the far side of the woods had complained to the sheriff, who responded by saying it was impossible to patrol every remote section of the county every hour of every night.

  Remembering these reports made T.J. even more anxious. He considered going back and asking Dane to come with him but by now, the volunteers were already dispersed along the roads. If Grandma Ruth had gone into the woods, he didn’t think she would be able to go very far; she wasn’t strong enough. She moved slowly these days, even indoors, as if she wasn’t sure where she was going. It had taken her forever to walk across the field, even with him urging her on, and the woods were much harder to walk in than the field was.

  T.J. pushed his way through a thicket of huckleberry bushes. A deep mulch of leaves cushioned his steps. He frequently had to step over fallen branches or work his way around clumps of scrub alder that grew too close together to pass between. He tripped, caught himself, and aimed his flashlight on the ground to see what had tripped him.

  It was a blackberry vine, the kind that grows low to the ground and has small, sweet berries. Every summer, until she got sick, T.J. and Grandma Ruth would take a bucket and spend half a morning searching for enough of these berries to make jam.

  Where was she?

  She used to know the woods well. When her brain still worked right, she taught T.J. to recognize the various trees and showed him how the fern seeds grow on the bottom side of the fronds. She taught him the difference between berries that are safe to eat and berries that are not.

  More memories flooded T.J.’s mind. He used to watch Grandma Ruth practice the routines from her tap dancing class on the back patio and then she would teach the routines to T.J. until they both collapsed in giggles. He remembered standing on the curb with his mother during a July 4th parade and clapping wildly when Grandma Ruth marched down the street carrying a Humane Society sign that showed a box of kittens and the words THERE’S MORE THAN ONE LITTER PROBLEM.

  When she was a school board member, Grandma Ruth sometimes got her picture in the newspaper. T.J. used to clip out the pictures and take them to school. “That’s my grandmother,” he would brag. The other kids were impressed because his grandmother was important and interesting.

  His favorite memories, though, were their picnics in The World’s Greatest Outdoor Restaurant. He missed those picnics, although they would have quit going to the willow tree even if Grandma Ruth wasn’t sick. When the Forest View Estates housing development was built across the swamp, it made the willow tree easily accessible from that side. It wasn’t the same to peer through the circle of branches and see houses in the distance.

  A cedar branch brushed across T.J.’s cheek, bringing his thoughts back to the present and the reality of the search for Grandma Ruth.

  He stopped. In her illness, Grandma Ruth kept trying to go back to earlier times, to recap
ture experiences that had made her happy. T.J. had happy memories of the willow tree; maybe Grandma Ruth did, too. Was it possible that, once she found herself in the woods, she would somehow think about The World’s Greatest Outdoor Restaurant and make her way there?

  He hesitated. In his note, he had told his mother he was searching in their own field. He had already left that and the Crowley property behind. He knew he shouldn’t go farther without telling someone where he was going but he was already near the beginning of the swamp. He could hear the frogs, not far ahead.

  T.J. decided to take a chance. He knew it was only a hunch but somehow it fit the way Grandma Ruth’s mind worked lately. He headed for the swamp. He would check out the willow tree, just in case.

  Chapter Thirteen

  T.J. walked faster, now that he had a destination, ignoring the branches that scratched his face. He lifted his feet high with each step, trying not to get tangled in the undergrowth. His legs ached from the effort. His right leg was still sore from when he kicked in the telephone booth and his left ankle throbbed where he had twisted it, running away from Brody. By tomorrow, he would be too stiff to play basketball but the game against Lincoln no longer seemed important.

  The ground grew wetter as T.J. approached the swamp. His shoes made a squishing sound and the mud pulled downward as he lifted his feet, slowing his progress. He moved his flashlight back and forth until he spotted the fallen trees that served as a path.

  He walked across as quickly as he could without losing his balance, keeping his light pointed downward toward the logs. As he approached the far side of the swamp, he heard voices ahead.

  T.J. switched off his flashlight. If there was a gang of some kind ahead, partying on the dead end street at the other side of the swamp, he did not want them to notice him. He moved more slowly in the dark but he kept going. He couldn’t turn back; what if Grandma Ruth was in this vicinity?

  When the log path turned left, he looked up and saw light glowing through the thick branches of the willow tree.