Silence fell over the group. It ran deep and carved ravines between the kids until each became an island amid a sea of silence. They felt disparate, alienated, increasingly self-conscious of their bond’s tenuousness, which hurt, because they loved being a group. Didn’t they? The question echoed over the distance they felt. The reply was a shared shame, seemingly all that remained to bind them. The kids looked across the circle at each other for some explanation of why the victory hadn’t united them. To everyone’s relief, Tiffany and Greg’s breakup became obvious.
Over the last two weeks, Tiffany and the boy had been inseparable. Greg had pulled her into his lap whenever possible or greedily slung his arm around shoulders. They sat apart now with Josué between them, who balanced Rocky’s knife flat across his thighs with his legs sprawled out and touching the pit. Tiffany was perched at the very edge of her log, too stiffly to be in good spirits. She’d tilted to keep Greg out of her field of vision. Greg rubbed his eyes and alternated between crunching them as if about to cry and huffing through his nose as if ready to yell at somebody. Whatever they’d meant to each other, it hadn’t worked out. Their conclusion brought Doug wicked and delicious pleasure, and allowed Alex and E. to rationalize that other issues were contributing to the group’s unhappiness.
“I was wrong not to include you—all of you,” E. said. “I hope you understand how personal and painful … how badly I wanted him here.”
“He’s hurt all of us,” Greg said, not letting up.
“He did. Of course. You’re right. We all deserve that he answer us.”
“Sure,” Greg said. “But I didn’t ask for that. I wanted him to stop, yeah. But this …”
“He has to pay for what he did. What he did to us.”
“Well, here he is—knocked out, beyond unconscious.”
The hooded boy whimpered.
The group hushed. Their mouths hung open, anticipating remarks to come roiling out of their rival. His head lifted shallowly. It fell and bobbed. Rocky went still again, soundless.
“He’s injured?” Josué asked with as much concern as if curious whether it would rain.
“He has to be fucking with us,” Tiffany said.
“It is possible,” Alex said.
“Right,” E. said and ordered Josué to rouse him.
He put the long knife through his belt. It slapped goofily at his side as he went to the boy. Josué stood over Rocky, one hand against the Big Tree. He stooped with the nonchalance and open-heartedness of a man confessing everyday sins.
“Wake him?” he asked before proceeding.
“Yes,” E. said.
Rocky’s roped torso absorbed Josué’s thrashing kicks. His body didn’t tense against the blows, merely jolted on impact, then slumped same as before. “Hey. You awake?” Josué said. A groan sounded from inside the boy, thin and brief.
Alex stood, hands clasped in anticipation. “If I remove the gag, maybe we can begin interrogation.”
“Let him eat it,” Tiffany said. “I say we kick the hell out of him, instead.”
“I don’t disagree with you … in sentiment.”
The captive twitched. Alex and Josué jumped. Minor spasms coursed the cloaked boy’s body. His head rolled back. From beneath the folds of cloth jutted his chin and mouth. The muscles of his jaws tensed with an athletic springiness as his cheeks strained against the gag for air. His chest convulsed against the ropes, and the group wouldn’t have been surprised if Alex’s calculated work tore away like string cheese. As in the case of John Walker, they weren’t certain of all that Rocky was capable of.
Doug looked to the Dead Man, expected him to rise and convince the group to silence their captive—before he could say too much about John’s complicity. The boy averted his eyes. He didn’t want to see it.
Rocky didn’t have strength enough to struggle for more than a few seconds. The hood fell back as his head leveled, and unveiled his face. Both cheeks were reddened, one bruised. Dried blood plugged one nostril and crusted his duct-taped mouth. The other nostril wheezed a hard, straw-blow exhale and sucked a desperate and wet inhale.
“Speak of devil,” Josué said.
“It appears he’s experiencing difficulty breathing,” Alex noted.
“That’s what he wants us to think.” Tiffany gazed at their captive skeptically. “Choke on what you did. I’d like to see it.”
“I need to hear him confess,” E. said.
“Let him choke.” Greg sat up, all his grief bared in his reddened under-eyes and curled mouth. “He’s wearing the cloak. He’s got the huge knife. He’s the guy—case closed.”
“We should be one hundred percent certain of his guilt,” Alex said.
“If he’s not the killer, who the hell is he?” Greg went on. “Look at him. Think about it a second. Then dump his body off at the police station with a sign around his neck that says, ‘Hello, I’m the killer,’ and forget him. I just want this all behind us, man. Ya know? Anyone?”
“If he has something to say for his crimes, we deserve to hear it. Before …” E. looked around the circle for support. She appeared small beside the sturdy club she clung to like a wizard’s staff. Her features didn’t crack with emotion this time. She paused at every face around the circle. The girl possessed an enduring strength—the desire to reunify the group through a shared purpose. She’d put a baggy T-shirt on and, having accidentally dropped her pants into the Cal-Sag River, had Doug’s hoodie tied around her waist, her thin and dirty legs exposed. With her hair tousled from the scramble on the train bridge, E. appeared witchy, though she had a stoic, almost queenly bearing. She’d been teased since her sister’s death as a “Sataness,” one of the long-rumored devil worshippers in the woods. Perhaps a vision from her critics’ nightmares, she wasn’t trying to be anything anymore, trusting her feelings to guide her.
“He’s most positively suffocating now,” Alex said.
Rocky’s head was plum-colored. Though shut, his lids squirmed over his eyeballs, which swam back and forth.
E. tightened her grip on her staff and used a different tack. “I’m not afraid of him. Is anyone here afraid anymore?”
“Ugh,” said Tiffany. “Fine. Can we choke him later, though?”
Greg stammered a few poor rebuttals. He found himself unable to think clearly while facing E., who embodied her dead sister’s boldness.
From across the fire, John rose to his feet, slowly, achingly, further delaying Alex’s removal of the gag. Even upright, he seemed shrunken. He clutched his hoodie to his chest as if freezing. He hadn’t said a word since the train bridge. The group had almost forgotten he was among them. The missing force of his leadership during the kidnapping had created a void of influence. The kids had immediately tried to fill the vacancy with their squabbling. Only Doug expected his rival’s return to lull the group into submission. John’s presence grated their minds. Like a parent that interrupts a child’s game, his warning nagged their consciences:
“Watch what moves inside you,” he said. John looked down and away, at no one.
E. nodded to Alex, who cut the tape behind the captive’s ear.
Rocky gasped for breath, choking. Saliva spewed down his chin upon removal of the soaked gag. He hacked until his head drained from violet to crimson and paled again, tipped back against the Big Tree. The group had a clear look at the young man while he caught his breath. The sides of Rocky’s head were buzzed short like Doug’s. A knot of hair topped his head, not long, but askew and disheveled as if chewed by goats. His eyebrows were uncommonly thick, like two brown caterpillars drinking from the corners of his eyes. They hadn’t ever pictured the boy behind the mask, not consciously. Coming from the rich-kid suburb of Palos Heights, they might’ve expected the face of a handsome villain: healthily complexioned, haughty, magnetic in a John Walker way. The boy looked sleepless, raw, years older than he was.
“You’ve been tormenting us for exactly three weeks now,” Alex started, crouched just out of reach.
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Rocky was unresponsive.
“Why has it been important for you to return to the scene of the crime?”
Despite the lack of compliance, Alex didn’t become impatient. The group could see how long Alex had waited for this moment, content to squat there indefinitely, fully focused on the boy, mouth open as if after a subtle gasp, altogether sincerer than ever, believing absolutely in the necessity to prove several well-worked hypotheses about the murder true.
Josué slapped his face. The boy winced.
“P-please,” he murmured.
Alex repeated the question.
“Out … side,” Rocky answered.
“What is?”
The clot in his nostril began to run thinly with blood. “Time … You … returned.”
“You aren’t speaking straight, Rocky. You have to speak straight.”
“Bo-ok,” he said, blowing a spit bubble. The pinkish sphere swirled and gleamed at the corner of his mouth.
“The book—good. The one you found.” Alex pushed on when he didn’t answer: “You found the diary here, in the ground. You studied it, you and your group, nightly. The margin notes were in your handwriting, one of several reasons you were desperate to retrieve it. You thought the book contained secrets worth killing for. Which is why you got angry when Erika hid it from you.”
“We …”
“Yes. Others were involved. You and Erika. And others.”
There was a buzz in the air, a sense that Alex was really doing it, nailing the suspect with the firm but suave coercion of a TV show detective, the thrill of danger but also success. Every accusation astounded them, how much Alex had uncovered and deduced. They’d started the investigation together—isn’t that what they’d been doing under John’s leadership? Alex had finished it and, if conscious of doing well, didn’t break focus.
“Where are they now? Are any of them here with us? Or do you see only victims?”
Josué gripped the boy’s plug of hair with the resigned displeasure of taking out a wet trash bag. He turned the head to scan around the fire. Rocky’s busted eye had swollen monstrously, as if a rubber ball were stuffed under the bruised top lid. The other blinked with the ineffectual fluttering of a dying butterfly. Instead of sliding down, the spit bubble had moved up his face onto his cheek.
“No? Maybe later?” Alex said.
Josué released him. The head tipped sideways.
“Erika was in charge of hiding the book from the others. Every night. Digging it up again before your rituals began. Explaining her dirty fingernails. Until she hid the book from you. Or, she was reading it behind your back. Either way, she was done with you and the woods—I don’t know why and don’t need to. I know it made you angry. So you killed her. Is that what happened, Rocky?”
With his head lowered, the bloody bubble slipped to the tip of his nose. It hung there, shuddering under the mild wheeze of the unplugged nostril.
“No.”
“But you were there. You have the murder weapon.” Alex leaned in. “You know who did kill her.”
“Yeah,” he said. The bubble popped.
Alex gave the boy a minute to breathe. In labored increments, his head raised. He looked shakily at the kids around the fire. He would name someone among them as the killer or his accomplice. Whether or not it would be the truth, the moment made them tense and vulnerable, being seen here, unquestionably what they were, by another person, an outsider. He wasn’t one of them and never would be no matter how many nights spent watching, as evil as he was nocturnal. Rocky’s mouth opened. His head again fell back. He swallowed. It was a hard swallow, they saw. His spit-glistened Adam’s apple squirmed uncomfortably in his throat before it bobbed.
“Who did it, Rocky?” Alex prodded.
His face scrunched and trembled as if from a terrible itch.
“Th-the group,” he said with malice.
“Oh, my—fuck you, Rocky.” Tiffany stood and spit in a single motion.
The boy didn’t wince or turn. Her spit clung to his not-swollen eye and that cheek. Rocky’s mouth cracked slightly wider. He licked up what he could reach in laborious strokes with his toady tongue.
“Tiff,” he said. “Bubblegum. S-sweet.”
Greg came around the circle, head tucked like a boxer. Driven by jealousy, knowing it, welcoming hatred, he was ready to smash in the other half of Rocky’s face. Not fully understanding the freak, not needing to, either, he knew the guy was making a smartass comment about Tiffany’s mouth or taste or—
Josué got in Greg’s way with his hands up in little shields. He looked to E. for the final call. Alex rose behind Josué to help block Greg from their captive.
Rocky goaded the group now: “Greg—could you? Kill me?”
His cheeks crinkled, like a child’s the instant before crying. Rocky was smiling, attempting to.
E.’s arm snaked to the top of her staff as she stood. The bark was the same prehistoric gray color of the Big Tree, slim but for a thick knot around which her hand tightened. Seeing it up close, Doug recalled his nightmare—through the blinding smoke, E. slipping in the high boughs, him trying to help, achieving the opposite, the girl clinging to a lone branch, ascending. That was just a dream (wasn’t it?). The entire group was on their feet now and heated, except for Doug, hiding in her shadow.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
Greg huffed. He stepped away from his friends and the campfire to cool down. His retreating footfall cracked sticks in the dark around them.
Rocky had committed his biggest transgression against E., the group knew, which gave her the biggest stake in parsing justice. E. hadn’t said anything until then, only observed, measuring the character of her sister’s killer—potential killer. His disrespect disgusted her, that a thing such as murder could be joked about here, considering the brutality, considering all that she was worth to so many, considering the vandalism and arson and slander, considering the boy’s situation.
“Careful,” John piped, at the corner of their minds, voice washing to gravel as it rose.
Rocky’s features again tightened into a gruesome smile. He flinched from the pain of contorting his busted face as he looked across the rising smoke at John.
“I know you,” he snickered and coughed up a small cloud of blood and spittle that bathed his own face.
There was challenge in the way he smiled, drunkenly and almost radiantly, unyieldingly gazing at the Dead Man. The group didn’t need to understand Rocky. They saw what he meant. John curled in on himself, wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t strike back in words. Whether in defeat or reflection, the boy appeared crushed under the tormentor’s heckling. Their pride and sense of righteousness felt debased, then, as if fools in the hands of a charlatan, no more than a handful of Erika’s guilt-ridden enemies who’d never known the power of forgiveness, compassion, and honor, no better than Rocky. The group looked to E. to redeem them.
The girl wore hot tears like reflective war paint down her cheeks. Not frailty or sadness, but E.’s determination blazed forth, the desire for closure over the greatest loss of her lifetime. She glared down at the captive. Her disgust alone said she would not allow him to best them. The group imbibed the power they witnessed. Regaining their sense of purpose, they sat or stood a little straighter. They were fighting to honor Erika, for a world threatened by a brutal child killer, for goodness itself. Their individual desires to beat and break him, to spit and curse, or to turn and run bent to E.’s lead, eager for a single act that would bring closure. When at last she spoke, a surge of confidence rekindled their commitment to make the woods right again.
“You killed my sister,” she said.
Rocky didn’t feign ignorance well. A corner of his mouth turned up, entertained by the entrance of a new challenger.
“Who?” he said.
“If you had the arrogance to take Erika’s life, you can own up to it. Or are you that ashamed of what you did?”
“Sh-she wanted … to … be d
ead.”
“Josué,” E. said, ignoring his taunts, “show him the murder weapon. Jog his memory.”
Josué squatted at the bound boy’s side. He turned the knife before Rocky’s face. Its long, serrated blade looked a hundred years old—older, three hundred or more. It hadn’t a color as much as a texture, rough as a flat stone, patchy with rust, though the knife retained a fused and immutable strength from tip to heel. Overall it was dull with the unconquerable blackness of oil, yet the blade flashed as it caught the firelight. Josué patted the side of the blade against the boy’s cheek tauntingly.
“Un-tie. I’ll tell.” Rocky’s humor went flat, his gargled response uncharacteristically frank, joyless.
The group searched each other’s faces, shiny from perspiring around the fire:
What do we do?
Should we?
Don’t listen to him.
But maybe?
End him—now.
He might know something.
Nothing he says can be trusted.
He’s watched us.
What choice have we?
He knows too much.
“Talk. Or we’ll hurt you,” E. said.
Josué raised the blade, edgewise, against their captive’s cheek. Rocky mock-yawned. He blinked with the one eye and looked around as if concerned he’d missed an important turn in the drama while nodding off. Josué smirked, impressed by his enemy’s cockiness and with mild respect for his tenacity—a small admiration bullies had never shown him. He pulled the knife in a slick swipe down Rocky’s cheek. Blood coursed his neck and into his collar. The flow became heavier when the boy clenched his teeth. Josué stumbled back, surprised by the leap of blood. It collected on Rocky’s jaw in drops and spattered onto the front of his cloak.
“Still think it’s fun to hurt people?” E. asked.
Rocky tensed for another mocking smile. The pain was too great.
“Confess,” E. said. “Or we kill you.”
“How would we get rid of the body?” Tiffany asked.
“Burn him.”
Alex’s head shook in disbelief. “No, no. We’d have a ID-able skeleton on our hands.”
Into that Good Night Page 25