by J. S. Volpe
“What about me?”
“You said you’d tell us about yourself and what it was you used to investigate.”
“Ah.” Mr. May grabbed his cane and pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. “It’s best if I show you rather than tell you. Come along.” He hobbled toward the door.
“Show us what?” Calvin said as he and Cynthia got up off the couch to follow him.
Mr. May glanced back at them with a smile.
“Things you’ve never even dreamed of.”
Chapter 12
Blackwater
1
Roger Grey stood at the top of the basement stairs, his heart pounding as he stared at the poorly lit, concrete-floored corridor stretching away at the bottom of the stairwell. From this angle he could see only the bottoms of the two doors that faced each other halfway down the corridor. The door on the left led to the laundry room. The one on the right led to the workroom where the chest freezer was.
Where Emily was.
The dead one, at least. He wasn’t sure about the other one, the one he saw or thought he saw last night. After smiling that devilish smile and telling him he’d gone and done it this time she had vanished right before his eyes, one moment there, the next gone. And the next moment Roger had been gone, too, scrambling out of the basement as if it were on fire. He didn’t remember switching off the light on his mad dash out of the room, but apparently he had, for only darkness showed through the gap under the workroom door.
The other Emily hadn’t reappeared, but that hadn’t made it any easier for Roger to get to sleep. He had lain in bed for nearly an hour before he felt comfortable enough to switch off the bedside lamp. He had always been a rational man who scoffed at the supernatural. Ghosts, magic, astrology—it was the province of witless peasants. But the only conceivable non-supernatural explanation to last night’s events was that he had been suffering from bizarre and incredibly realistic hallucinations. He wasn’t sure if he liked that explanation any better than a supernatural one.
Despite his anxieties he eventually managed to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep, and when he awoke this morning with golden sunlight filtering in through his blinds, he felt better, refreshed. He snickered and shook his head at his fears. Yes, he had had a few minor hallucinations, no doubt induced by the abnormal amount of stress he had been under. But it was over now. Now he could dump the body as he had been planning to do before his little…episode.
The twelve o’clock news underscored his need to dispose of the evidence posthaste. During an update about the hunt for Emily, a spokesman for the FBI told reporters that the authorities were making excellent progress in tracking down anyone who had been in the park on Thursday afternoon.
“We’ve gotten some good, specific information from several park-goers,” the spokesman said. “We’ve already managed to identify most of the people who were seen there, and we are in the process of interviewing them.”
After hearing this, Roger had wolfed down some lunch, then grabbed the trash bag that contained Thursday night’s clothes and slung it into the trunk of his car.
That left the contents of the freezer.
He had made it this far, the top of the basement stairs, and then stopped, his heart suddenly hammering, his legs rooted to the landing, all his gung-ho, can-do determination forgotten.
“God damn it,” he muttered through clenched teeth. He told himself he was being irrational, giving in to childish fears. He was letting a brief mental misfire get the better of him.
His feet refused to budge. His eyes were wide as he stared at the bottom of the workroom door, as if he expected it to swing open and a pair of small feet—one in a white sneaker, one in a green sock—to shuffle out.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” he growled to himself.
His anger overrode his fear. His left foot rose from the landing and swung out over the first step.
From somewhere in the basement came a faint high-pitched trill, like the giggle of a little girl. Roger’s foot zipped back onto the landing and he stumbled backward until his butt thumped against the wall.
Then he got control of himself and shook his head. No. The sound had been the chest freezer. He had heard it do that before. It was a loose belt or something. He didn’t know exactly what. He wasn’t a mechanical-minded person. But that was all it had been. Just a bland, quotidian thing. Nothing more. Not a ghost. Not a ghoul. Not even a hallucination.
Nevertheless, he decided to dispose only of the clothes right now and deal with the body tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. Clearly he was still too jumpy. If he tried to transport the body in his current state of mind, he would probably wind up wrapped around a tree. Better wait a little longer, then. Let more time pass. Let the weirdness become a cold and distant memory.
It was the rational thing to do.
2
A twenty-minute drive south on Route 7 brought Roger to Riddle, a tiny town in the most sparsely populated corner of Bard County. He wasn’t even sure “town” was the right word. The place consisted of a single intersection surrounded by a cluster of stores and run-down houses, which in turn were surrounded on three sides by weary-looking farms and overgrown wastes. On the fourth side, the south, was Blackwater Swamp.
Riddle was a rustic, reclusive place, untouched by fast food restaurants and strip malls, and it seemed destined to remain that way. Years ago a half-hearted effort had been made to attract tourists with a small museum that displayed Indian artifacts found in the swamp. But few people knew of the museum and fewer visited it. Roger’s mother had taken him there once when he was eleven. The museum had been small and dimly lit and definitely not worth the fifty-cent admission fee. Cobwebs and dust had shrouded the display cases, and the artifacts themselves had been broken and dirty, looking as if they had been thrust into the cases mere moments after they had been plucked from the mud. Young Roger had hated the trip. The whole town had felt diseased in some way, as though tainted by the fetor of the neighboring swamp. He had been relieved when they headed home.
The town hadn’t changed one bit. Half the stores were vacant and boarded up. Frowning faces watched from grimy windows as his car passed by. A knot of wrinkled bent old men in overalls stood on a warped porch staring at him expressionlessly. He half expected to see a gape-mouthed Mongoloid kid with a banjo in his lap.
In no time the town was behind him, and Route 7 came to an end at an unnamed dirt road. Roger turned down this road and followed it straight into the swamp.
The sun vanished behind a canopy of thick fleshy green leaves. Gnarled, moss-hung trees bent over dark scummy pools. Birds croaked strange songs from the treetops, while down below unseen shapes rustled through brown weeds three feet high. Entering the swamp was like entering another world, a dark sinister place untrodden by man, though the effect was periodically broken by the sudden appearance of a dilapidated shack sinking into the muck or the rusted remains of a car sitting amid the plants like some forgotten jungle idol.
Here and there dirt paths branched off the main road and extended away along elevations in the soupy landscape. Roger turned down one of these paths and maneuvered the car along it until he was deep in the heart of the swamp. He parked beside a large stagnant pool covered with greenish scum and ringed with thick brush. He got out of the car and looked around. He was completely alone. He might as well have been the only person on the face of the Earth. Perfect.
He took the trash bag from the trunk, stuffed a few rocks into it to make sure it was heavy enough to sink, triple-knotted it shut, and then tossed it underhand toward the center of the pool. It sailed through the air, black plastic flapping, then splashed into the water and was gone.
Roger watched the spreading ripples for a moment, almost hypnotized by the way they separated the surface of the pool into alternating rings of green scum and dark water. He was half afraid the bag would bob back to the surface, buoyed by trapped air or something. But it didn’t, and the water began to return to its previous
stillness.
He turned away and circled around the car to the driver’s side door. As he grabbed the handle to open the door, he glanced over the roof of the car for one last look at the pond.
Emily stood on the surface of the pond. Her white tennis shoes rested motionlessly on the circle of scum-cleared water at the center of the concentric rings, which were still languidly spreading outward. She was smiling at him.
Roger staggered backward, a scream rising in his throat. The scream was cut short when his right foot met air, and he realized he was about to topple right off the roadway and into another pond. He heaved himself forward just as his left foot started to slide over the edge, sending rills of dirt and pebbles slithering into the filthy water. He thudded to the ground, his face only inches from the front tire of his car, so close he could smell the rubber.
From here, he could see straight under the car to the pond where Emily stood. But Emily wasn’t there. The surface of the pond was empty now. The ripples had stopped. The water was still.
He looked all around to make sure she—it—hadn’t moved somewhere else, but there was nothing to see. He was alone again.
He shut his eyes and took a long, deep breath. When his heart rate had returned to something resembling normality, he picked himself up and brushed the dirt from his clothes. He took one more look around. Nothing.
Of course. There had probably never been anything there at all. He was just seeing things. It was the stress.
Of course.
In his hurry to get the hell out of there, he nearly fishtailed right into one of the ponds.
3
He was on Route 7, barely five minutes from home, when he heard Emily’s voice say, “You’ll want to be careful.”
He gasped and looked around. Emily sat in the passenger seat, her hands folded in her lap, her smiling face turned upon him. In his startlement the car veered into the next lane. A horn blared behind him. In his rearview mirror he caught a glimpse of a middle finger waving in front of a sneering face.
Roger somehow managed to get the car back under control and in the correct lane. He felt half sure that once he had done so, the apparition or hallucination or whatever it was would be gone, its job of sowing havoc done, but when he glanced at the passenger seat again, she—it—was still there, hands still folded, mouth still smiling, eyes still upon him.
“Leave me alone,” Roger spat. “You’re not real.”
Her smile widened as her black eyebrows rose.
“Then why are you talking to me?” she asked.
He barked out a laugh, then winced at how cracked and mad the laugh sounded.
“You’re not going crazy,” she told him. “Trust me.”
He wanted to believe her. But of course why would he trust the word of the girl he had murdered? And in any case, the fact that she knew what he had been thinking suggested that she herself was a product of his mind.
The car he had cut off sped past him. The driver, a middle-aged woman with witchy brown hair and a thick blotchy nose, snarled something at him in the process. He couldn’t hear her through two closed windows and ten feet of highway, but he clearly lip-read the word “motherfucker.” Oddly this touch of ugly, banal reality comforted him. It helped balance out the madness that sat smiling at his side.
“I can prove I’m not a figment of your imagination,” Emily said.
“Oh, yeah?” Roger said, striving to adopt a breezy tone to prove he wasn’t too bothered by any of this. He frowned slightly at the highway in front of him as though he needed to focus on that and thus couldn’t spare even a glance at his unwanted traveling companion.
He waited, expecting further comments, expecting the proof. When the silence dragged on, he briefly hoped that she had vanished.
But no: He could still see her out of the corner of his eye. She was waiting for him to ask.
Bitch.
He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, to give her the win. But he had to find out if she was telling the truth. And if she was, then what exactly was she? Not the real Emily, that was for sure. She didn’t talk like Emily. The words and the tone were too mature. And the look in her eyes was too canny for a ten-year-old. No, this wasn’t Emily Crow. More like Emily Faux.
He smiled at the thought. Giving her a snide nickname made him feel a little better, a little more in control.
“So how can you prove it?” he said.
“By telling you something you couldn’t possibly know.”
“Yeah? What?”
“That they’re waiting for you at your house,” she said. “The FBI.”
“What?”
“The FBI. They’re waiting for you to come home. They want to talk to you.”
Roger stared out the windshield, his thoughts racing. If she were telling the truth, going home was the last thing he wanted to do. But if he didn’t go home, if he drove past his turnoff and spent the day somewhere else, he wouldn’t know for sure whether or not she was telling the truth and thus whether or not she was real. Of course, he could always drive past his street and see if there were any unfamiliar cars parked anywhere, or—
“You should go home,” Emily Faux said. “You should talk to them.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. And get arrested.”
She shook her head. “No. Not if you answer their questions the right way. I will help you with that. I will be there for you.”
“Why would you want to help me?”
“I have my reasons. I’ll explain later. For now, just go home.”
And with that she vanished again. One moment he was looking right at her, the next he was looking at the empty bucket seat.
He gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead at the highway traffic for a moment. Then he flipped on his blinker to move into the right lane for the upcoming turnoff to May.
4
The moment Roger turned onto his street, he saw an unfamiliar black sedan parked at the curb in front of his house. Two men were inside.
He pulled into his driveway. As he got out of the car, the sedan’s doors opened and the men stepped out. Both of them wore black suits and trench coats. One was a lanky guy in his mid-to-late twenties with a crew cut and a ruddy boyish face. The other was older, probably in his forties, with thinning grey-brown hair and a soft, sad face that reminded Roger of a basset hound’s. The man’s blue eyes, however, were sharp and alert and didn’t look like they missed a thing. Roger realized he had seen the older guy on the news yesterday. He was the agent in charge of the investigation. Roger’s heart began to pound and his palms to sweat. He tried to hide his dread behind a pleasant smile. He had no idea if he was doing a good job or not; he feared the smile was a forced, crazy-looking thing.
“Roger Grey?” the younger agent said as the duo approached.
“That’s me,” Roger said, cocking his head in what he hoped was a good imitation of benign puzzlement. “Can I help you?”
“Maybe so.” The two men stopped in front of him. The younger one thrust out a hand. Roger took it. “We’re with the FBI. I’m Special Agent Schmidt. This is Special Agent Rowan.”
Roger was relieved when Agent Rowan made no move to shake but only gave a small nod. Roger reciprocated.
“Do you have a little time to talk?” Agent Schmidt said. “It shouldn’t take long. Just a few quick questions.”
“Um, yeah, sure.”
“Invite them inside,” Emily Faux said. He looked over. She stood on the front steps. She nodded at the front door and then vanished. He looked back at the FBI agents, wondering if they had seen and heard her, too. But they were only looking at him expectantly.
“Would you like to come in?” he said.
For some reason he expected them to decline the offer—after all, “a few quick questions” didn’t really merit a living room sit-down, did it?—but Agent Rowan spoke up for the first time, saying, “That’d be nice, thanks.”
It was only as he unlocked the front door that Roger thought to won
der if he had left any evidence anywhere in sight. He was fairly sure he hadn’t. But he couldn’t help fearing there was something he had dumbly overlooked, something he had grown so used to seeing that he no longer even registered its presence.
As he ushered them in, he glanced around but saw nothing. Nevertheless he worried that the FBI agents’ training and experience might enable them to spot subtle details no normal person would notice. Maybe they would even realize there was a corpse in the house. Maybe they would smell it or sense it somehow.
But if they noticed anything amiss, they gave no sign of it. They sat down side-by-side on the couch, Agent Schmidt smiling pleasantly, Agent Rowan looking almost bored.
Roger settled into his recliner. When he looked up at the two FBI agents again, he nearly gasped out loud to see that Emily Faux had reappeared. She stood in front of the couch right next to where Agent Rowan was sitting, and she was regarding the two men with a cool, calm expression, her hands clasped behind her back.
Roger looked at the agents to gauge their reactions. Agent Schmidt was glancing around the room, the pleasant smile still fixed on his face. Agent Rowan, however, must have noticed Roger’s brief flash of surprise at the sight of Emily because he had turned to look where he thought Roger had been looking—not at Emily, but out the picture window. Agent Rowan couldn’t see her. Neither of the FBI agents could. Only Roger could.
Emily looked over at him. Her long black hair shone bluishly in the light from the window, just like real hair, just as if she were actually physically present.
“Ask them what they would like to know,” she said.
“So, um, what is it you’d like to know?” Roger asked.
Agent Schmidt leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “As I’m sure you probably know by now, we’re in town to investigate the disappearance of Emily Crow, and we were led to understand that you were in the park on Thursday afternoon.”
“Tell the truth,” Emily said. She was staring at Agent Rowan again, her head cocked a little as though listening to a faint, distant sound.
“Yeah,” Roger said. “That’s right.”