by Tony Abbott
“Dad, no!” Matt wriggles away and trembles like the yellow leaves drifting over the rails. “Your father’s here. Our grandfather. Joseph Egan. He murdered Denis! He’s the killer.”
Now that I finally know who it is, the word killer bites in my mind with an even icier sharpness. GeeGee’s words shoot back to me like an arrow in the chest. I repeat them to Matt.
“GeeGee said, he was wrong, he was sorry. I think she meant that Joseph had changed—”
“Matt, come on,” Mom gasps. “Joseph Egan is buried a few miles from here. We can show you—”
“That grave is empty. It has to be! Dad, your father came to GeeGee’s house when you were in Valdosta. He was watching us. Watching over us. GeeGee helped him run away after the bus accident. He changed after the girl was killed. Whatever he did, we think he went away and finally hid here, to be close to the graves of his mother and brother.”
“Matt, you’re not making any sense,” Dad says, and two of the police officers step forward. “That was some random stalker,” he adds, glancing at Mom. “Your mother told me. I know that now.”
“He’s right, Mr. and Mrs. Egan, about it all,” Trey says firmly. “Denis is here, really. I can almost see him.” And Trey points to exactly where I stand. Matt tries, but sees only snow. “I’ve worked on this with Matt, and Denis too, all of it, backward from Gettysburg to here.”
Shaking his head, Dad wipes the heavy wet flakes from his cheeks. “This is over. We’re going home. Everyone.”
“Wait,” says Mom. Sucking in a great big breath to swear or scream in frustration, she simply holds it, holds it, and lets it out. “I want to hear. Tell me, Matt. Tell us. Right now.”
It’s amazing that the police are saying nothing, but simply wait for this to end, like Matt’s good teacher waited. Snow is slashing hard at the buildings now. I hear each flake slice like a knife blade. I feel every heartbeat. The air is alive with motion and sound and smell and touch.
“Our grandfather wasn’t killed by the bus,” Matt says, getting control of himself. “He lost his leg, yeah. Dad, you think he died because GeeGee—your grandmother—told you he did. But he must have changed in the hospital. Maybe because the girl died. Anyway, GeeGee let him get away. She forgave him, but you never would. Denis told me she visited you and tried to tell you. Last year. Ghosts can do that. They can visit you.”
Dad stands, head lowered, eyes closed, listening.
“So he goes underground,” says Trey. “Off the grid. Everybody loses track of him. He has no one, anymore, so he just disappears.”
Matt nods repeatedly. “It’s so easy, it’s so easy, to drift away, and that’s what he did. He hides here. We saw him, Dad. We saw him just now. Plus look what we found in that building.”
Matt hands Dad the newspaper. He takes it in his quivering hands. “What about it?”
“He had this. He knew Denis was missing. And, Mom, when we were at GeeGee’s house, he was watching. He saw it wasn’t right. No lights. Denis crying. The phone ringing off the hook. That’s why he broke in.”
Mom listens to him, the police listen. One of the officers says it’s fantastic, a nightmare. Another calls the local station. I hear the words, “Check this out.”
“You came up with all of this?” Dad says.
Matt looks at Trey, then at him. “We all did.”
“But why did he . . . Why would your grandfather hurt Denis?” Mom asks. “Why leave clues for someone to solve the murder he committed? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Because it wasn’t murder!”
I yell this, but Matt can’t hear. More police cars roar up the road to the mine. More sirens sound from behind the buildings. They are surrounding the mine complex.
“The reason he killed Denis,” Matt adds, “must go back years. Denis is always on about threads connecting things. Maybe it’s something from long ago. Denis doesn’t get it, either.”
He looks for me, not where I am.
“Matt, can you hear me?” I ask. He can’t, not a word.
“Matt, I’m sorry. I really can’t believe any of this . . . ,” Mom says, but in a whisper. She’s confused, and shedding angry sparks like at the Silver Lake Lodge that day.
From inside the building comes a sound of clanking.
Dad jerks around. “What on earth?”
Joseph came back? Why would he come back? He’d fled into the woods. Vanished. Gone again. Why return? Have the police encircled the mine, trapping him? Did he come back because we’re here? His family? Does he even know who is here?
A walkie-talkie crackles, and the officers with us spring into action, flanking the open door, while I fly straight through.
“Stand back!” an officer commands, but Matt jumps inside after me.
“Matt, get out of there!” Trey yells from outside.
Guns drawn, two officers move into the doorway when a metal pipe flies down the corridor. One officer ducks, the other falls back on her heels outside the door. The door is kicked shut. Joseph whirls around, stumbles past me, half slides down the metal stairs to the workshop below.
“Joseph, stop!” I cry, but he doesn’t stop. He can’t hear me, either.
The door flies open, and Dad is there. Four cops push in ahead.
Trey calls, “Matt, get back here!”
But Matt has run after the man. Footsteps thunder across the empty room below. As I fly down to it, metal squeals horribly. There’s a rush of cold. Joseph has run back outside. I don’t see Matt anywhere. I rush outside too, chasing a whirl of snowflakes from the rear of the building through the frozen leaves. The officers all have their weapons out, shouting.
44
The Ashes of Joseph Egan
The old man lurches among the abandoned structures, the rusted rails. I hear his footsteps, thumping awkwardly over the wooden ties through the tall weeds. I follow.
“Granddad, wait!”
Does he sense me? I have to think he does. Like you “see” the heat signatures of living things in a nighttime scope. But his weave of emotions and thoughts is so heavy and intricate. This is the revelation he knew would come, the capture he must have feared.
Matt scurries behind the coal crusher, Trey screaming at him to stop, both of them outpacing Mom and Dad. Snow falls heavily as Joseph arcs through the trees fringing the buildings, drawing the cops into the woods after him. But he cuts sharply back to an alley of railcars behind the blackened chimney. He’s rounding the chimney like some kind of totem, then bolts away between the buildings. And there is Matt.
Suddenly, it’s five years ago as Joseph wheels around in the gathering snow. I’m reliving that day and today. Joseph and Matt move the way Joseph and I did. Time repeats itself.
Matt races down an opening between high-walled windowless buildings under the conveyor. I fly after him—“Matt, no!”—but I’m sluggish, heavy. The police number eight or ten now, but are surrounding the wrong structures. I’m stupidly helpless, unable to call to them. Matt barrels out of the alley into a honeycomb of corrugated sheds. Nothing I do is fast enough. I have no more power than a breath.
“Matt, stop running!” I yell, but he doesn’t, instead tears blindly past the coal silos, the tanks. Thinking fast, thinking wrong, he follows the rails toward the mine shafts.
Joseph is suddenly there. He grabs Matt by the arm, twists him around, and in that instant is shocked to see my face in Matt’s. Dad’s other tag hangs around Matt’s neck, and he knows now what we know. He cries a word that may not even be a word.
Matt struggles in his grasp. “You killed my brother! Your own grandson! Police! Over here!” He wriggles away and stumbles toward a rusted door.
“No! No!” the old man grunts.
I remember that door. It leads to a shaft. I fly through before Matt reaches it. I look down into the abyss. In his panic, Matt cannot light up his phone.
“Matt, stop. There’s a mine shaft here!”
He still can’t hear me, as I can’t help remembering that day five y
ears ago.
I stumbled through that door, terrified of the monster chasing me. I tripped into the darkness of the chamber, hurt, confused, soaked. His face was suddenly there, the face I didn’t know then, leaning over me, black eyes drilling into me, the toothless mouth grunting.
“I’m your grggg— I’m your grrr—”
He tried to say he knew me. I would not hear, like Matt can’t hear now. I ran from him. Stupidly I ran. I ran from my grandfather. He lurched after me, calling what only now I understand. “Not there!”
He threw himself at me, howling, and clamped his hand on my foot to hold me fast. I wriggled away, losing my shoe. I snatched it up and ran on cinders, cutting my foot. As I ran then, Matt runs now. I tripped. I fell. Matt trips and falls. I screamed. Matt screams.
I pulled away from the old man’s grasping hands. His pants were in shreds, from his shoe to his thigh, a construction of rods and hinges, his prosthetic leg.
There is silver.
I pulled away and dropped headlong into the slope shaft, breaking myself, crushing my neck, my eyes recording the last thing I saw, flashing like the surface of the moonlit lake, like five years ago in Port Haven, when I cried out—“Silver leg! Silver leg!”
Joseph gave out an animal cry when I plummeted. Frantic, he must have crawled after me to the bottom. He saw his grandson dead. The sobbing grandson he had soothed five years before. Was he the cause of this child’s death? He’d watched over my brother and me for years, but I had died. Just like the girl had died. This time, he tried to stop it. But I died anyway.
“Mommy!” Matt cries, held by the old man’s hands at the lip of the shaft. Joseph tries to pull Matt clear, but loses his grip. Matt scuffles back, identical to the way I did, to the lip of the shaft.
“Matt, no! Let him help you!”
And without thinking, I leap at Matt myself. I slam him hard and hold him tight, when all at once, our father bursts in, shocked to see his father alive.
Joseph turns his startled face. His dark eyes widen. He teeters on the edge before his living foot gives way. Their hands miss each other. He disappears down the shaft. There is a sickening thump.
“Matt!” Trey cries out, pushing into the opening. “I thought I lost you!” The two wrap themselves in each other’s arms, Matt in Trey’s, and Trey in his, and they are one person.
Three officers burrow into the chamber now, with Mom behind, their flashlights glinting down the shaft. Joseph Egan is twisted impossibly at the bottom. Next to him, half-covered in dust and ash, is my sneaker. Later, I think, if they look hard enough, they’ll find my missing tooth.
Ignoring the officers, Dad struggles down the long slope of the shaft. He heaves his father’s limp body onto his shoulders and climbs it back up. The weight on his back, the heaviness he’s carried for years, is finally real.
Exhausted, Dad lays the body at the mouth of the shaft while Mom holds Matt and Trey together. The suffering man who watched over my brother and me is dead. Mom coughs out sob after sob. The police are everywhere and help Dad carry the body out through the driving snow.
Gazing on that crusty face, a face I’ve never seen before but know so well, I understand for certain what had nagged me, scratched at me for so long. My murder wasn’t murder.
It was never murder.
It was an accident.
But accident or not, Joseph Egan is dead now too.
45
Flights of Angels
After more interrogations than I can count, streams of odd explanations, reports, all the flimsy brutal overwhelming nonsensical wisps of evidence that Matt and Trey—and Mom and Dad—reconstructed, we were home in Buckwood once more.
Not long after, we heard that Momma-May Tibbs passed away. Another sorrow in November. Maywell was soon arrested and confessed to his strange part in my murder.
End of story.
Sort of.
I should have gone back to Port Haven and GeeGee right then, I should have. But I was held here. By a thread, maybe, but a thread nearly impossible to break.
“Can you imagine?” Matt says a few nights later in his room. “A one-legged man—an old and battered one-legged man—making his way all the way to the bottom of a mine shaft to get you. And then to bring you back up? It’s tough on regular people. It was tough on Dad. But with one leg?”
I imagine the scene in that shaft.
Weeping, Joseph hoisted me onto his back; weeping, he hauled me to the top. Weeping, he laid me on the cot in the room where he made his home. He cleaned me up, he stole aboard the train and boosted an old Honda from a parking lot, easy for someone who had foraged for years. He lowered me into its back seat and drove and drove, at first not knowing where to go.
And then he remembers things. Georgia. How our dad studied the Civil War. The portrait of Byatt at GeeGee’s house. The name Byatt on his brother’s gravestone. Who knows how many threads drew him to Gettysburg and the Georgia monument. Once there, he pulled Dad’s tag from my neck when he placed me at the monument. No, that’s not right. He gently slipped the dog tag over my head and placed me at the monument, my cheek resting against the cool stone.
If my dad ever understood the clues, he’d know that what happened to me was an accident. That Joseph was innocent. He was wrong, he was sorry. He was just doing his poor human best.
“He loved our family,” Matt says to me. “He loved the two of us, finally.”
“It’s probably way more complicated than that.”
But even complicated, it all wove together, and made perfect, painful sense.
“The whole Tibbs family means something,” I say. “Without Maywell at his father’s grave, Dad’s father might never have seen me. Without that, we’d never know he was alive.”
Matt looks at me sadly. “I guess in a crazy way, those two bad brothers gave us back our family. Dad got his father back, for a few minutes, anyway. They cleared up the secrets. That’s a lot—” His phone bings. He reads the screen and smiles. “Trey’s coming over.”
In Matt’s room are his single bed, new computer, books, everything that he’s gotten because I died, but they’re nothing at all, compared to the real prize.
“I love it when Trey’s around,” I tell him.
“I’m pretty sure it’s mutual.”
Matt once called me lucky. He was right. I’m mainly lucky that he remembered me with so much love. He brought me back. He kept me here and gave me a home again, for a little while.
“I’ll leave you two for a bit,” I tell him. “I have to settle a couple of things up there.”
“It’ll hurt, won’t it?” Matt asks. “Sorry, I know it will. But don’t be long.”
“From you, bro? Never.”
But never is the wrong word. It’s not really one I should use about anything. I’ll come back to Matt, sure, but I know I can’t stay. It’s not right to hang around when others need the space.
Like somebody told me once, holding on to a person might simply be holding him back.
Besides, we’ll all meet again somewhere, sometime, yes?
I return to Port Haven and walk down to the shore to see the big boats coming in. It hurts to be sliced, of course, but whatever. I’d already worked out that today will be a special day. On the beach, I see two baseball-capped men tossing a softball back and forth. Melrose and his father, probably waiting for Momma-May to arrive.
The writer . . . Russell, I remember . . . is sitting on the porch of the beach club with GeeGee, who is quiet but smiling. I guess living at my house agrees with her. The kid with the itchy back is gone. So is the grouchy lady in sunglasses. Their stories are over.
Russell fingers his notebook, but doesn’t focus on it, just lets it move in his hands until it slips away from him and lies closed on the table. His hair is so thin I see his skin beneath the strands.
He smiles a half smile. “I can’t read my own words anymore, D . . .”
“Denis.”
“The words are pulling away from m
e.” He lays his hands one over the other on the tabletop. They remind me of the way hands are placed in a coffin. “But maybe you can make something beautiful. Take it.” He pushes his notebook to me.
“No, Russell. That’s your whole life.”
“There are plenty of blank pages left.” He looks up toward the blue hills to the north. “It’s time for me to go. But I think, I think”—he smiles a smile of such warmth that I myself am torn between smiling or crying—“I think, you’ll be a poet for us, yes? Write the stories I never could. I think that would be wonderful. You learned so much down there. There’s a lot to be said for having been a mingler. Go on. Take it, please.”
GeeGee nods at me, as if she understands what’s happening. I place my hand on Russell’s shoulder, as thin and insubstantial as hers. “Thanks, Russell.”
I open the notebook to the folded page and read his words about me.
It snowed at Silver Lake the day I died.
“May I?” I take his pen and add a second line.
BUT THAT’S NOT WHERE I DIED.
Which seems to end it as well as anything.
All at once I hear a big cheer go up. Feet stomp the boardwalk that leads to the piers. I’ve been waiting for this. I hop down and search the crowd for Pink Hair. I find him waving to the thick crowd of arrivals bending at the railing of a giant ocean liner.
I run down to join him. I nudge his arm. “Hello, Uncle Richard. Well, great-uncle.”
He turns, frowns, then grins. “What do you know? I thought you looked familiar! I guess being a mingler ain’t the end of the world, after all.”
I point to the stern of the ship. “Your brother’s up there. I know what he looks like because of you. See him?”
Uncle Richard scans the railing, and there is his brother, Joseph, smiling down at us, the wiry old man who died saving Matt. The man whose face I saw for the first time at the mine yet knew I’d been seeing for years, on his twin brother. Pink Hair. Richard Byatt Munro.
Joseph raises his hand, gives his brother a sign. Pink Hair blows him a kiss. I wave to my grandfather, too, then watch him search the crowd. Turning, I see Gabby. The girl we call Ellen or Ella, but whose name most likely is Gabriella. The girl who died in the bus accident in Valdosta, the girl whose photo was pinned on Joseph’s wall at the coal mine, the girl who was remembered from the day she died and kept seven years and ten months old all these years.