by Greg Walker
"Here," he said, and Mary slowed and then stopped. She blew out a held breath, and Eric reached over and squeezed her hand. She managed a weak smile and nodded.
"Do you want to hide the truck? We could maybe drive up to the gravel pit and put it behind one of the piles of dirt. Mountains. Remember that? We called them mountains as kids."
"Yes, I remember. I think we'll be fine. No one's going to come back here."
They got out, and Eric tied his bootlaces tight. They both had on jeans. Eric wore a flannel coat and had a backpack hung by one strap over his shoulder containing a garden trowel and some water. He had almost gone to the hardware store in Drake City for a spade, but from JT's description, digging should be minimal or even unnecessary. And the image of himself holding the long shovel appeared in his vision as an accomplice of death - a grave robber or grave digger - a role he wanted no part in playing.
The morning was cold, in the low forties, and their breath plumed like unfilled captions from their mouths. A horror graphic novel, maybe, he thought. Mary briskly rubbed her arms through the yellow windbreaker she wore, her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Even facing this grim task, he couldn't help but think how lovely she was.
He pulled the crude map from his pocket and looked it over. Should be simple enough. "You ready?"
"Yes, let's go."
They strode through the stumps of the corn plants with a resolve Eric didn't feel, the soil hardened by the cold but still spongy under their feet. The first maples had turned, and smatterings of red and yellow broke up the monotony of the green tree line ahead. Reaching the Big Woods, Eric turned around and scanned the field behind, and the dirt track in either direction as far as he could see. No one around.
They followed the stream for a while, as the map indicated. There were no regular trails here, but for much of the way their course followed a deer path. Several times they stumbled over fallen branches sunk down into last years leaf litter, and Eric fell hard on his wrist after tripping on a rock. The sharp pain at first led him to believe he'd sprained it, but after a few minutes it receded to a dull throb, and he tested it to confirm a full range of motion. They walked more carefully after that. Neither one wanted to break a leg or otherwise injure themselves. Eric thought he might be able to carry her out if it happened, but doubted she could reciprocate.
Two miles, JT had said, and Eric discovered how hard it was to gauge that distance without an odometer or mile markers on a highway. If they walked three miles per hour, he figured, it would take them about forty minutes. But add in the stepping over or going around obstacles, and two rock hopping trips into the stream to work around impassable fallen trees - the hillsides too steep to pass above - and Eric didn't know how far they'd come. He looked at his watch, and an hour and ten minutes had passed.
"How much further?" Mary asked. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail, and mud spattered her boots and jeans. There was a smeared handprint on the side of her windbreaker where she'd absently wiped her hands after stumbling. She stood facing him with hands on her hips, and blew some hair away that had settled over her eye.
"Should reach the rocks at anytime now."
"What I want to know is, with JT's leg like it is, how exactly did he get up here? I'm not ready to run a marathon anytime soon, but this is kicking my butt."
"I don't know. He was walking everyday then, and said he had to sit down and rest a lot. But probably just because he was determined to do it. He was searching for his limits, I think, from what he told me. I think he knew something about working through pain already." In more ways than one. Eric was glad for the rest her questions provided, even if he was only trying to convince himself with the answer. He didn't want her to know that the hike was kicking his butt too.
She nodded her head in agreement, but then said, "That, or he never came up here in the first place. You ready to go, or do you need another few minutes to catch your breath?"
He smiled at her ease at which she read him, and she smiled back. They pushed on another hundred yards. A large grouping of rocks came into view, and Eric knew they were the ones on the map; erratics, large boulders left by glaciers in retreat from the last Ice Age. They lay like God's cast-offs from creation all throughout the woods in all manner of sizes and angles, amongst the maples, pines, and oaks. But here a single rock as big as a house rested in the center of some smaller specimens, smaller meaning the size of a Volkswagon mini-bus. Moss and lichen clung to their sides in beautiful patterns and ferns waved from the summit.
"Here," said Eric, elated at finding the landmark, the feeling rapidly cooling as remembrance for what the landmark stood for returned. They both took a break, leaning against the giant rock and gulping warm water from the bottles in Eric's backpack. Sweat soaked his back and underarms, and he wished he'd worn something lighter than the flannel coat. He'd unbuttoned it and at first felt relief as the heat rolled out. Now that they'd stopped moving, the air seeped in to chill his damp flesh. Mary looked more comfortable in the windbreaker, it also open but the fabric more breathable even when zipped. She did have to take off her glasses and wipe off condensation forming on the insides of the lenses.
"Okay, Kane. Let's get going. I don't want to get comfortable and start enjoying myself out here. At least not until I know whether there's anything to this."
"Yeah, okay," Eric answered, looking into the woods where the map directed them. The thought occurred to him that they could just turn around, go back to Mary's truck and leave. If the bones were that old, assuming there were bones, then whoever did it could be dead or long gone. It didn't necessarily mean that whoever did this killed Adam, either.
But then he thought of a woman out there, decades older than him, waking up every day with a name on her lips to match a face staring out of a photograph by the bedside, at a grin missing some teeth and maybe ears that still needed growing into. Wondering. Everything inside told her that the face never had a chance to grow into the ears and new teeth never filled in the gaps, but she wondered just the same, with varying degrees of pain that had lessened through the years but had never entirely faded. What had happened? Could he possibly be alive? And could this possibly be the day that she called, or knocked on the door? What if Adam had just disappeared? What sort of ghosts would have haunted him then, when the spirit might still be flesh?
"Eric?"
"Sorry, Mary. I was just thinking..."
"No, don't tell me. My mind is already creating a reel of coming attractions, and I don't need a scribe of the macabre to add anything else to them."
They set off through the woods. The walking was easy as JT said. Away from the stream, the forest opened up with little undergrowth to hinder their progress, the mature hardwoods long ago the victors of a silent but merciless battle for sunlight. Squirrels leapt through the woods on food gathering missions, sometimes chasing each other over acorn rights. As they wound their way through the trees, several doe took them by surprise on cresting a small rise, and by the animals' startled reactions the experience was mutual.
They could see the cluster of pines ahead, tightly packed together in contrast to the hardwoods, as though immigrants just arrived in the land, bunched in a mass of solidarity. Mary found a game trail, and they carefully picked their way through a maze of interlocked branches intent on extracting blood as payment for passage. Eric was jabbed in the cheek right below his eyeball. He dabbed at the blood with his hand and whistled, realizing how close he'd been to being "that horror author with a patch over his eye."
"It's like the trees don't want us finding them. Like they're...ouch...protecting...the kids...ow, dammit!" A sharp snap announced that Mary had won the battle of the branch, but not without it first collecting its toll.
"Or they're protecting whoever did it."
A few more minor snaps, then, reproachfully, "I prefer to think of it my way, Eric."
They cleared the pines with a relief that Eric felt and saw reflected on Mary's face.
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br /> He peered down the slope and saw the tree, couldn't miss the massive oak probably hundreds of years old, it's branches thicker than some of the trunks of its offspring growing around it. The cut JT had made stood out as a livid scar. They began shuffling down the slope, a feeling of dread growing in Eric's chest. The marker on the tree was like the blue up ahead on the path by the swamp. It said what he knew it probably said, meant what he knew it probably meant, but for a brief span he could walk in a reality between the past's ignorance and the future's certainty in a dumb refusal and emotional numbness.
Everything was just as JT had indicated. He looked at Mary, and her face had gone pale, so white against the coal black of her hair, more of which had escaped the ponytail. The strands hung limply around her face, but she didn’t blow them away or brush them back. He thought she looked like an apparition, perhaps the mother of these dead children, searching the earth for her lost babies. Stop it, Kane.
He looked at Mary’s hands and they were trembling. "They're here. He wasn't lying," she said.
"How do you know that? We aren't close enough to know that for sure," Eric answered.
"I can feel it. I know, it's crazy, but it feels...different here. Not scary different. Like the land knows and doesn't like it. Like getting sand in your shoe, something that will just keep rubbing and grating until its gone."
Eric didn't know what to say to that. Whatever Mary felt, he didn't share it, but neither did he doubt her. He'd been gone for years, and a couple of weeks in the old house didn't make this his ground again. He felt he'd have to earn that, if it were even possible. She didn't live in Lincoln Corners anymore, but close enough, still attuned to the town and is surroundings. Perhaps there was something to it, people tied to a parcel of land by more than just ancestors buried in it, some link to the very pulse of the earth on which they lived and hunted and worked and loved and died. Didn't the bible speak about all of creation groaning in anticipation of its salvation? And that Abel's blood cried out from the ground to God, fingering Cain for his murder?
In this, he found he envied her, for it seemed to say it was where she belonged, that it chose to speak to her and not to him, or if it did he didn't know how to listen.
"Look, Eric."
She pointed at a bundle of sticks, then knew they weren't sticks but bones. Her hand didn't tremble any longer. The bones were spread out and askew, probably worried by animals. The thought turned his stomach.
Slowly he approached, and knelt down. He saw the skull partially exposed, so small. He looked around and made out the sunken depressions, rectangles going the same way and spaced apart, as though a planned cemetery. And couldn't it have been that, he wondered? He'd read a news story about a graveyard discovered in a state park in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania, graves marked only by an unremarkable field stone at the head and another at the foot of the plot; the resting place of farmers and their families too poor to afford even the simplest engraved marker. He held onto that hope, even knowing it wasn't true. The size of them suggested all children. They were too shallow, not the work of a proper burial but the work of hasty concealment.
He looked at Mary, and she had sat down on a fallen log, her hands stuffed in her pockets. Tears glistened on her cheeks.
"I'm going to look at one more, just to be sure."
She nodded, and Eric unzipped his backpack and pulled out the trowel. Digging carefully, he scooped out dirt and laid it to the side of the closest grave. He dug in the middle, not wanting to see the sightless sockets and false grin of another skull. After about two feet, he hit something and reached down to brush away the dirt. He felt fabric, gritty and fragile in his hands, and pressing down felt the hardness of bone. The fabric, blue he noted, tore with the pressure and revealed vertebrae. He'd seen enough. But he wondered why the one grave that JT had seen, and that they'd first fixed on because of the presence of bones above the ground, had been so shallow, more so than the rest. Maybe the killer had become cocky, or had to hurry for some reason. Or maybe the earth had worked it out of the soil, pushing it above to the daylight so that it might be found, the way the body might work a splinter up through the strata of skin.
He put the dirt back in the hole, covering the bones again but knowing they'd all be exhumed soon. He walked up to the log and sat next to Mary.
"Those poor children. Who could have done this, Eric? And who are they? There's no way so many children could disappear around here without people noticing. And if they were brought from somewhere else, why here? Unless whoever did this...lives here. How could that even be possible?"
Eric countered with a question of his own. So many questions without answers. "Do you think it could have been JT? That, like you said, he's trying to confess? We don't know how long these have been here. Was Adam the first, and these came after?"
"If it is, I hope they fry him. God help me but I'd want to sit in the front row when it happened." She trembled again, but with rage, then abruptly stood up. "We need to go to the police, Eric. Right now."
"I don't know if that's the best way to go about this."
She turned, and he flinched at the anger that flashed in her eyes, felt like a man must feel as lightning gathers to strike.
"What the hell are you talking about? What else are we supposed to do? If you don't go, I'll go without you...and after that, Eric, I don't think I'd want to..."
He put up a hand to stop her from saying it, not wanting her to have something to regret. Inside, he admired her conviction, felt drawn to her a little bit more, the gap shrinking by another increment of measurement he still didn't know how to quantify, and also felt a bit like the loathsome creature she'd taken him for.
"No, Mary, listen. I didn't mean we wouldn't tell the police. But I'm thinking we should let someone else tell the police. If JT didn't do it, then I can understand a little bit of how he feels, what the people in Lincoln Corners might think if I come back and the bodies show up."
"So who, then? It's going to get out eventually that you...we found them. And that JT told you about them. There's no way you can protect him. Or yourself." He noted that her face had softened somewhat, seemed to be giving him the benefit of the doubt, but still held a warning that her wrath might still fall, and that right soon.
"Pastor Burroughs. If I tell him, he's bound by law to report it. And I think it might soften the blow, if anything can do that, coming through him than straight from me. I'm just sorry for the people here. What this will do to them."
Mary was silent for a moment, and he braced for the storm. But she nodded her head quickly, said "Screw them. What about these kids? Let's go," and turned without looking at him and began ascending the slope back to the embrace of the hateful evergreens. He almost felt sorry for them, unaware that they were this time overmatched. He hurried to catch up to her, glad to leave this place behind for now.
Chapter 13
They found the Pastor in his study at the church. The doors weren't locked, and they called out as soon as they had entered through a side door that opened onto a foyer. From there, a door to the left led to the sanctuary, and to the right were several hallways that accessed the Sunday School rooms, the restrooms, and the Pastor's private chamber.
The memories triggered by the building were nearly as powerful to Eric as when stepping into his old house. And just as painful, if possible. Here had been planted the seed of faith that had grown up within him to die in the woods, visible if he looked out the window. But he didn't know if that faith were actually gone, didn't believe he'd agonize so much if so. No, he, and not any outward circumstance or experience, would be the final executioner, tearing it once and for all by the roots from his mind and heart. He knew he had not taken that irrevocable step because he feared losing both during the procedure, but instead lived in some twilight area that was neither night nor day.
Now he sat in a chair in the Pastor's office, Mary next to him. Burroughs had greeted them warmly, but Eric could sense him bracing for bad news
, his expression and demeanor changing subtly as he read theirs, wondered if it were a conscious thing or the automatic result of much practice. It bolstered his belief that the right choice had been made to come here.
The office was small and somewhat disheveled. Bibles of different translations, concordances, books on Greek and Hebrew, and study guides filled the bookshelf behind, but also rested in stacks on the floor. A coat of arms with the name "Burroughs" hung on the wall at a slight angle. A framed print of DaVinci's "Last Supper" resided next to it, and it sparked remembrance of the many parodies he'd seen through the wonder of the Internet. A Star Wars version. Sesame Street. The cast from the Sopranos television show. Some in good fun, some not so much, moving beyond parody into clear mocking of the content.
"I don't know how to say this, Pastor, and I'm sorry to have to do it, but I felt you were the best one equipped to handle this."
Burroughs didn't reply or press Eric, just locked eyes with him while wearing an admirable poker face. He leaned back in his swivel chair, his hands resting on his stomach, the fingers steepled. Eric imagined he was used to waiting for someone to get to the point in their own time and own way, not wanting to interfere with the nascent courage that had gotten them this far, a bottle of secrets with only a piece of cork to hold them in; secrets that would change everything, and once told could no longer be rationalized away or justified.