Half-opening one eye, he was startled to see that someone was sitting in the chair he kept by his bed, silhouetted by the light coming in from the hallway through the crack in his now half-open bedroom door. Dugan opened both eyes and snuck an involuntary glance toward the alarm clock. It was 2:30 in the morning.
He caught a whiff of his father’s unfiltered, saw the glow brighten after his father moved the cigarette up to his mouth to take a long drag. Dugan watched the smoke waft up and backwards, toward a draft coming from somewhere in the old house. He lay back down again and sniffled, before clearing his throat to say, “Dad?”
Getting no response, he asked, “Is everything all right?” He began to sit upright before his father stopped him.
“Everything’s all right. Go back to sleep.” Dugan pushed his pillow halfway up the headboard, then lay back down, and watched his father silently smoke for a few minutes more.
“Do you remember when we used to shoot off them rockets?” his father asked suddenly.
Dugan blinked and nodded his head. When he was a kid, he and his father used to go up to the field across from the Korner and launch homemade rockets into the sky.
“That was fun,” his father said after a while. Dugan nodded again, and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
“Dad. Are you sure everything’s all right?”
His father took one last long drag off his butt and then reached over to extinguish it in an ashtray Dugan kept on his nightstand. Standing up from his chair, his father reached over and attempted a clumsy tuck of Dugan’s bedclothes, before turning around and walking slowly toward the bedroom door.
He stood at the door a moment with his back to the room. He didn’t turn around when he asked Dugan, “You shave yet?” Dugan thought his voice sounded funny and he was a little embarrassed by the question. Even so, he couldn’t help but smile when he answered.
“Don’t worry about it, Dad. I got it under control.”
He watched his father nod once before he left the bedroom.
Dugan lay awake for a while after that before he fell back to sleep.
9
The Library
Harris was in a big hurry to get started, but by then Dugan couldn’t really complain. Mr. Betancourt had given them both an A plus for Harris’ solo effort, which was twenty-five percent of the total grade for the entire course. The week before February vacation, the two agreed to meet up on Saturday morning at the new library to get started. Dugan told Harris he planned to bring his girlfriend along. Harris said that was fine. Dugan hadn’t seen enough of Andy in the past few months.
Both of them were busy with school, and because he got up so early, Dugan was usually asleep every night by 9:00. They talked on the phone whenever they could, though Dugan mostly just listened. Andy had thrown herself into lots of school activities and was even a cheerleader for the basketball team. Dugan was stunned when he learned he was dating a cheerleader. It was just his luck she went to another school, and a Catholic school at that.
Mrs. Rourke drove them downtown to the new library and promised to pick them up by 3:00 that afternoon. Harris was there when they arrived, and he was polite and even a bit charming when Dugan introduced him to Andy. Dugan thought he looked a little better now, too. His face was clearing up and the bags under his eyes were in full retreat.
There was already a pile of reference books on the table, and Dugan noticed that Harris had been there long enough to bookmark some of the pages. After sitting down, he picked up one of them at random. It was a thick encyclopedia, and Dugan turned to one of the marked pages and began reading its brief entry on Alexander Pope.
Born to a wealthy Grantham family in 1801, Pope was a Harvard graduate and lawyer. Elected Lieutenant Governor of the state, he resigned that office to take part in the Mexican war, where he served honorably and ultimately achieved the rank of Colonel. He came out of retirement in 1861 to lead a volunteer regiment from Grantham into the Civil War. The unit saw action at second Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg. Pope died in Grantham in 1865 from lingering wounds received in battle.
Dugan glanced through some of the other marked entries, most providing only the same sketchy biographical material. He picked up one of the smaller books. It was a thin black volume with the gold lettered title, Grantham: A History of Pride, written by someone named Dr. Jules Remlinger. There was another, thicker book on the table that still had a tattered dust jacket. It too was written by Remlinger and titled simply, Portrait of a Small Town. Dugan picked it up and turned it over to see a photograph of the author.
The picture was a black and white profile shot of a young man with a hooked nose who seemed to have the unlit pipe in his hand in a failed effort to look older than he was. Underneath the photo was a brief biography of the author stating only that he had been both an associate professor of history at Harvard and a lifelong Grantham resident. Dugan looked at the copyright date and noted that the book was published in 1942.
Harris had disappeared somewhere, giving Dugan a chance to put the book down and just sit back to watch Andy for a while. Her head was down and her face was all scrunched up with concentration as she wrote feverishly in her notebook. He watched her until she must have felt his gaze, because she stopped writing to look up and then slowly turned to Dugan. She smiled and made a funny face, then began to vigorously shake some blood back into her pencil hand before putting her head back down. Dugan knew that her paper was due on Monday. Harris came back a moment later with three or four more books, all of them looking very similar to what they already had.
At lunchtime, Dugan suggested they all go grab something to eat. Harris wanted to continue working, so he and Andy walked to the sub shop downtown and ate lunch before heading back to the library. On the way back, Andy tried to goad Dugan into jealousy.
“He’s kind of cute,” she said of Harris. Dugan smiled and refused to take the bait.
“You shouldda seen him a few weeks ago,” he said.
Later in the afternoon, after Andy had gotten up to use the bathroom, Dugan was reading something when he felt eyes upon him. He looked up and saw Harris staring over at him with a smirk on his face. Dugan raised his eyebrows.
“She’s cute!” Harris said.
Dugan snarled and shook his head and went back to his reading. By the time 3:00 came, it seemed to Dugan that they had exhausted the cursory information that the library’s thick encyclopedias had to offer about Pope. They all appeared to contain pretty much the same information about him, as if they were written by the same person or had come from the same source. Although they weren’t allowed to check out any of the reference materials, Dugan and Harris each took home one of the Remlinger books to see what information they might contain.
While waiting for her mother, Andy went over to look at some of the newly arrived fiction the library offered, leaving Harris and Dugan alone for a moment. Dugan stared a while at Harris, whose nose was buried in one of the thicker volumes. It was Harris’ turn to look up after feeling someone’s gaze upon him. After a brief stare-down, Harris asked, “What?”
He said it without humor. Dugan was reminded for a moment just who this guy was. He vividly recalled the strange emotions he felt upon seeing Harris wearing his clothes. With an involuntary shudder, Dugan remembered his missing older brother. He managed to put all those thoughts aside for a moment to ask Harris bluntly, “Just what the hell are we looking for?”
Harris looked away. “Anything we can find.” He seemed genuinely disappointed a few minutes later when Andy’s mother came to take Dugan and Andy home.
10
Dugan skips school
The Remlinger book didn’t contain many new revelations about Pope, but it did provide Dugan with lots of new information about the town where he grew up. He liked the way the book was written, and was surprised to find a kind of subtle humor to it. On a couple of occasions, when he found himself smiling at something, he turned the book over to take another look at the
photo of its serious young author. He wondered just where exactly in Grantham the guy might have grown up.
Dugan learned that the town itself was just a small part of a huge land grant given by King Charles II of England. The land had been carved up over time to form Grantham and the neighboring towns of Dutton and Granger. In 1646, after the Massachusetts legislature passed an “Act for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Indians,” Grantham had been the site of a “Praying Indian” village. After King Philip’s War, all of the Native Americans were forcibly removed from the town and its environs.
He was surprised to learn just how important the apple trade had been early in the town’s history, before the railroad came through and turned the town toward manufacturing. The raw materials for the newly built factories came from mills up north on the Merrimac River. The factories produced the shoes, clothing, and other finished products that would provide Grantham an economic base for the next hundred years, along with granite. Remlinger wrote a lot about granite.
In three lengthy chapters, he took the reader on a long drawn out geological survey that encompassed a million years of history. Dugan mostly skipped it. The book made only passing mention of the Pope family. They had been prominent citizens of the town for a hundred years. Alexander Pope was the lone surviving family member. When he died after the Civil War, the Pope era in town ended. Pope bequeathed all of his books and the old library building to the town. Just as Dugan was about to set the book down on his nightstand and close his eyes for the evening, he read the following:
Not long after the war ended, there were reported in town a series of strange incidents, resulting in the unexplained disappearance of several children and young adults. Before it was over, at least a dozen persons were reported missing, and their whereabouts and reason for departure to this date remain a mystery.
Immediately after this passage, Remlinger segued into the post-Civil War era, which, between the granite and the manufacturing, would prove to be a boom time for the town.
Dugan blinked hard and went back to read the strange passage again in context. He was surprised to discover there wasn’t any. It was as if the author had thrown it in there for no reason at all, other than that the reader might find it interesting. He thought for a while about the spate of recent disappearances here in town, before another nagging thought came to the back of his mind. He tried to conjure it, but when it didn’t come after a while, he put the book up onto his nightstand and went to sleep.
Harris met up with Dugan in the school library when February vacation ended to compare notes and swap Remlingers. When he asked Dugan if he had found anything, Dugan paused a moment before replying that Harris should read it and make up his own mind.
Harris showed Dugan some material he had received from the state archives, including a copy of the Governor’s proclamation after Pope resigned the Lieutenant Governorship. There was a black and white photograph of the gilded sword the Commonwealth had awarded Pope posthumously for his efforts during the Civil War. Even Dugan had to admit their project was going really well.
He had not yet approached Harris on the subject of his brother’s disappearance, despite Jimmy’s relentless requests. He was strangely pleased to see Harris look almost like himself again. Without his brother and the others around, Dugan grudgingly acknowledged that Harris wasn’t such a bad guy. More important than that, Harris was doing most of the work on the project. That was okay with Dugan too.
The second Remlinger volume kicked around Dugan’s house for a few days before he started reading it. It was thinner than the first book and contained much of the same information. Remlinger opted this time to omit the million-year history of granite, and for that at least, Dugan was grateful. An hour into his third day of reading, he sat up, his heart pumping a little bit faster. In the middle of the book, in the section documenting the 1860s, and again without any context at all, he read the following paragraph:
Not long after the war ended, there were reported in town a series of strange incidents resulting in the unexplained disappearance of several children and young adults. Before it was over, at least a dozen persons were reported missing, and their whereabouts and reasons for departure remain a mystery to this date.
* * *
On a Sunday in late March, Dugan approached the Wilson house to collect for the past week. He noticed that the big Shepherd was again absent from the front of the house. Only then did it dawn on him that for the past three days he had returned home with all of his biscuits. He approached the Wilsons’ door and knocked for a while, but got no answer. As he rode by Larry’s house on the way home, he remembered something else.
Mr. Miller greeted him warmly at the front door before sending him into the living room where Dugan found Larry seated at the piano. He was playing something jazzy, and when he looked up at Dugan he smiled and kept playing.
“What’s up?” he asked. Dugan took a seat on the couch opposite the small baby grand.
“Do you remember we took that picture off the wall up in Maine and found that old Chronicle?”
“Yeah. So what?”
Dugan asked if he remembered anything in it about missing kids. All he got from Larry was a tentative maybe. Dugan called Jimmy as soon as he got home and told him about it. The two agreed to meet up later on over at Jimmy’s house to come up with some kind of a plan.
* * *
Although he’d done it a couple of times before with his friends on a lark or a dare, it was still a strange feeling for Dugan to be skipping school. He completed his route that morning and then went home for a long cup of coffee. His father was asleep upstairs.
As he sat at the table, he told his mother about the day’s news: IRA prisoners were a few weeks into a hunger strike, Reagan was taking charge, and the released Iranian hostages were finally falling out of the headlines. At 7:25, just as he should have been rushing out the door to catch the bus, he leaned back and smiled before taking another sip of coffee.
“Aren’t you going to be late?”
He told her not to worry about it and went upstairs to shower. Afterwards, he put on a decent pair of pants and a sweater he didn’t like and was at the library just after it opened at 9:00 a.m.
Dugan discovered that although the library had a collection of beautiful leather bound copies of the Chronicle, they had them only going back to the 1950s. He decided to approach the librarian, a stout gray haired woman dressed in black. After he got her attention, she looked down her nose at him through a cloud of Jean Naté. Her look alone convicted him of truancy. He preempted her query to explain that he was just getting over the mumps and was due back in school tomorrow. He climaxed the lies by telling her he had a paper due. She warmed up a little but moved away a lot before offering to check and see what might be available on microfilm. A few minutes later, she came back to inform him that the earliest issues they had went back only to the ‘20s.
She must have sensed his disappointment, because as he walked away she said, “You might want to try the Historical Society.”
He perked up immediately and turned around to thank her profusely before bolting outside and running downtown to the old library.
As he walked up the dozen granite steps of the Historical Society and onto the four-pillared portico in front of the building, he couldn’t remember if he’d ever been inside it. He opened the large wooden door and walked in to find himself in a cavernous three story atrium. He looked up at the high ceiling and saw a painted mural of blue skies and light fluffy clouds, the colors muted by the gray light pouring into the open space from two-story windows on three sides. He looked down at the marble floor and saw a design there as well, an official-looking, circular seal of some type embedded in the stone directly below the skylight.
Across from where he stood was a grand staircase draped in purple velvet. Mounted high above the wide stairs and looming over the entire entryway was the centerpiece of the vast space: a larger than life painting of the Colonel. Including the
gilded frame, it was about twelve feet high and six feet wide, showing a man who looked to be in his mid-sixties with a thick mop of white hair and a long white beard. Dugan walked across the marble floor to get a closer look.
“Can I help you?” Dugan jumped and turned around.
A woman had come from somewhere to stand a few feet behind him. He couldn’t begin to guess her age, but she wore her auburn hair in a severe bun and was dressed in period costume, a green satin dress with white frills and puffy sleeves. The wide hoop at the bottom of the dress came close to brushing Dugan’s ankles from five feet away.
“Umm, yeah. I’m doin’ a report on the Colonel and I had a few questions?”
She was all business, clasping her hands together in front before saying, “Well, you’ve come to the right place, young man. Follow me.”
She turned briskly and led him toward a door to their left and down a narrow hallway. They passed rooms on the right that Dugan saw were filled with books and art and upholstered chairs. She turned into the last room on the right, which, to Dugan’s surprise, was a modern office, with a telephone and a typewriter. The woman moved behind the desk and motioned Dugan to take one of the two seats in front of it. He noted how practiced she seemed at sitting down while wearing the hoop.
“So, introductions are in order. You first. What’s your name, young man?”
Dugan noticed she was one of those people who made direct eye contact. They always made Dugan a little nervous, so he tried to focus on a spot just above her nose.
“Dugan…I mean Scott…Scott Dugan.”
“And what grade are you in?”
“The ninth.”
“And why aren’t you in school today?”
His eyes moved to a spot just above her head when he gave her the mumps story, but he knew it wasn’t going over.
Applewood (Book 1) Page 11