The Summer of Winters

by Mark Allan Gunnells

  Apparently Paige had not harbored the same suspicion as me, because she screamed shrilly and ran back up the hill, dropping down to her hands and knees behind a marble marker with a little bit of poetry carved into it—Remember me as you walk by. As you are now so once was I. As I am now so you must be. So go prepare to follow me. I could hear Paige throwing up.

  I stood as if frozen, staring down at nine-year-old Sarah Winters.

  She was on her back, her eyes wide open and staring up at the sky. Only they weren’t seeing anything, even I could tell that. I’d never seen a corpse before in my life except in movies, and those weren’t real, but I knew right away that she was dead. Her skin was the color of cottage cheese, her tongue lolling out fat and bloated. Her throat sported a ghastly necklace of purple-and-black bruises. Even worse was what lay below her waist. Her dress had been hiked up over her hips, and if she’d worn any underwear they had been torn away. I had never seen what was between a girl’s legs before, and I hoped that this bloody, ripped mess wasn’t a good representation.

  Yet none of this was what really drew my attention. I mainly had eyes for her hair. One side was disheveled and tangled, fanned out around her head; the other side was pulled neatly into a pigtail.

  A pigtail held in place by a pink plastic hairclip shaped like a horse.

  ***

  The next few hours passed in a blur. I was in shock, moving in a daze. When I would look back on the events later, it seemed like I was watching something on TV, not something I’d actually lived through.

  After finding the body, I wanted to get back home and tell my mother so she could call the police, but I couldn’t get Paige to move. She sat on the ground, knees drawn up to her chest, rocking back and forth and crying. My attempts to get her to her feet were met not with resistance but with…nothing. She was just dead weight and trying to move her was like trying to move one of the tombstones.

  I was tempted to just jump on my bike and go for help, but I didn’t want to leave Paige alone with the body. So I did the only thing I could think to do, which was stand in the middle of the graveyard screaming for help.

  It seemed I stood there screaming for hours, but it was probably more like minutes. It was the jogger we’d run off the sidewalk earlier that came to our aid. I found myself unable to speak, just broke into hysterical tears and motioned back toward the body. When the jogger saw Sarah, she began panting as if hyperventilating and ushered me away. Paige was still withdrawn into herself, so the woman lifted her into her arms and took us to her house, which was only a block down College Drive.

  We sat in her living room while she called the police, then she told us her name was Maggie and asked for ours. I answered for both of us. I gave her my number, but I didn’t know Paige’s. Maggie gave us some Chips Ahoy and milk; Paige didn’t touch hers, and much as I thought I’d never see the day, I didn’t have much appetite for cookies myself.

  My mother arrived before the police, and she’d brought Mrs. Moore along. At the sight of her mother, Paige seemed to snap out of her catatonia and ran into her arms, babbling through her tears about what we’d found. I turned to my own mother and apologized for making her come out when she had a headache. It was an absurd thing to say, but my brain felt as if it had been scrambled like a couple of eggs.

  When the police arrived, Maggie left with a couple of officers to show them where the body was, and a young officer with a buzz-cut stayed behind to question Paige and me. Not that there was much to tell. We went to the graveyard to ride bikes and found the body. Simple as that.

  Or was it? I didn’t tell the officer about the hairclip, the same kind I’d seen in Brody’s possession earlier in the day. I wasn’t sure why I held back that information, probably because I couldn’t believe that someone I knew, someone who lived right next door, someone who’d taken me to a movie and bought me popcorn, could be capable of such an act.

  And what proof did I have, really? A hairclip? I was sure that hairclip wasn’t unique, probably lots of girls had them. The one Brody had could very well have belonged to his little sister. Didn’t mean he’d snatched it off a dead girl’s head after doing…horrible things to her.

  But I kept remembering that strand of hair stuck to it. Not Paige’s curly blonde hair. Straight and brown…just like the hair of Sarah Winters.

  I wasn’t thinking clearly, I knew that much. I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut about the hairclip until I’d had time to really mull the situation over.

  Maybe then I could figure out the right thing to do.

  Chapter Seven

  I didn’t see Paige for the next three days. My mother didn’t even want Ray and me going out of the house. On Tuesday I begged Julie to let me go to the library and check out some new books, and while she wouldn’t let me go on my own, she finally agreed to take Ray and me herself as long as I waited until after her soap was over.

  The trip was brief—and Ray whined the whole time about how boring the library was—but it was enough to give me an idea of how the people of Gaffney were reacting to the news of the Sarah Winters murder. Fear, paranoia, and suspicion.

  I could see it in the face of Miss Kennedy, the old librarian. In her eyes, the way she seemed to look at everyone as a potential madman. Even me and Ray. Over by the newspapers I heard two men talking about how they wouldn’t let their children or their wives out after dark. I saw a mother taking her five year son around the library, keeping a death grip on his forearm the whole time, as if she thought he’d be snatched away from her if she loosened her hold even for a second. If the people I saw in the library were any indication, Gaffney was a town in the grips of a panic.

  Those three days I paid very close attention to the local news, and actually read through the Monday and Wednesday editions of The Gaffney Ledger, something I rarely did. It seemed the police had no leads. No one had seen Sarah since she left the Capri by herself Saturday night. No witnesses had come forward saying they saw her getting into a strange van or talking to a man in a trench coat offering her candy or anything of the sort.

  There were plenty of editorials mourning the town’s loss of innocence, wondering what kind of inhuman monster could be capable of such an act, decrying this modern age where no one was safe. I also read more than a few Letters to the Editor urging the citizens of Gaffney to arm themselves and defend their families against the demon in our midst. The phrase “shoot first, ask questions later” was used more than once.

  I also spent those days thinking about Brody, and the hairclip he’d had in his pocket. About what that might mean, and what I should do about it. Several times I came close to mentioning it to my mother, but what if I was wrong? And I was sure I must be. I would be certain to end the bourgeoning friendship between Paige and myself by accusing her brother of something so vile that most people couldn’t talk about it without making a face like they were having stomach cramps.

  I needed to be sure.

  But how could I?

  ***

  Wednesday night I dreamt about Brody again. I was at Thompson Park on the merry-go-round once more, only this time it was Brody who was spinning me around while he laughed loud and raucous. I begged him to stop, but he either couldn’t hear me or didn’t care. As before, I lost my grip and flew off the merry-go-round, landing in a bruised heap on the ground.

  I looked up to see Brody approaching me with a smile on his face. But it wasn’t a pleasant smile. There were too many teeth in it, and they seemed to be sharpened to points. I tried to crab-walk away, but then the older boy became distracted, pausing and staring off at something behind me.

  I turned and saw Sarah Winters standing by the picnic tables, her neck horribly bruised and her skin the color of curdled milk. Brody started toward her. I called for him to stop, for Sarah to run, but my voice seemed not to carry to them, and my legs no longer wanted to work.

  Brody swept the girl into his arms, and it was only then that I realized that I was too late, she was already dead. H
er eyes were glassy and empty, her head lolling bonelessly on her neck like that of a rag doll with half its stuffing pulled out of it, blood thick as syrup oozing down her mottled thighs.

  I woke up with moisture on my face, and it took several seconds for my muddled brain to realize I’d been crying in my sleep.

  ***

  Paige came to the house on Thursday.

  I was in the bedroom playing with Ray. We had divided up his little green plastic army men and were having them wage war against one another. I heard the knock at the door and wondered who it might be. The police had told the media Sarah’s body had been discovered by two local youths but hadn’t divulged my or Paige’s name due to our being minors. I knew my mother was afraid that the information would be leaked and reporters would start hounding the house.

  When I heard Julie call my name, I initially tensed, but then I told myself if it was a reporter, Julie would have told him to go do something nasty to himself, which is what I’d heard my mother tell her to say. I left Ray running over some of the army men with a tank and headed into the living room.

  Paige was standing on the front stoop, dressed in a checkered dress that reminded me a little of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Her hair was pulled up to the top of her head with a rubber band, creating a spray that looked a bit like the leafy part of a pineapple.

  She smiled shyly as I came to the door. “My mom’s out in our yard keeping an eye on me, but she said I could come invite you over to our house for lunch and to play some games.”

  “Is Brody there?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Um, no. He took Mom’s car and has gone to apply for some part-time jobs around town. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “So you wanna come over? We have some pretty cool games.”

  “Sure, let me just ask Julie if it’s okay.”

  ***

  At first Julie didn’t want to let me go, even though Mrs. Moore was going to be there the whole time. She finally called Mom at work and got her permission. Lunch was sandwiches made from the meatloaf they’d had for supper the night before. It was pretty tasty. The three of us sat in the living room, on the floor around the coffee table.

  After we ate, we played a round of Operation, which Mrs. Moore won, then Paige insisted we play her favorite board game, Clue. I had never actually played before, and listening to Mrs. Moore explain the instructions, it seemed awfully complicated to me. I’d much rather play something like Sorry where the rules were simple to follow, but I was a guest so I went along.

  The game involved systematically eliminating suspects in a fake murder case, until you could guess which of a list of characters committed the crime, as well as how and where. Honestly, the whole scenario hit a little too close to home, and I found myself feeling a bit sick to my stomach, afraid my lunch was going to come back up on me. And I was sure it wouldn’t taste as good the second time around.

  I had trouble keeping my mind on the game, and more than once I made guesses that had already been made, sometimes by me. Paige ended up winning, correctly deducing Miss Scarlet was the murderess, having offed her victim with a lead pipe in the library.

  Mrs. Moore checked the clock. “If Brody doesn’t get back soon, I’m going to be late for work. I wonder where that boy could be.”

  I wondered the same thing, and a hundred unpleasant possibilities flashed through my mind.

  A timer buzzed from the kitchen, causing me to jump, but it was just the washing machine. Mrs. Moore had started a load of laundry partway through the game, depositing the clothes in the beat-up old washer. They had no dryer, just a clothesline out back stretched between two T shaped poles.

  As Mrs. Moore got up from the floor, she looked down at us with a rather stern expression on her face. “I’m going out back to hang the clothes on the line. I want you two to stay inside. You hear me?”

  Paige nodded, and I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Keep the front door locked, and if anyone knocks, do not answer it. Can I trust you two to stay put and not get into any trouble?”

  Paige rolled her eyes. “God, Mom, we’re not babies.”

  Mrs. Moore ignored her daughter’s sassiness. “Watch some TV or play another game. I’ll be right back.”

  After Mrs. Moore had filled the laundry basket with wet clothes and disappeared out the back door, Paige got up and I was sure she was going to defy her mother and suggest we go outside. Instead, she stood there for a moment, little blossoms of color blooming on her cheeks. “I, um, I have to go to the bathroom. You can go ahead and turn on the TV or get a soda from the kitchen.”

  After I heard the bathroom door close, I got up and headed for the kitchen, but I paused halfway through the dining room that had been converted to a bedroom. Paige had told me that since the house was a two-bedroom, like ours next door, this was where Brody slept. The bed was actually the kind that folded out from a sofa, but from what I’d seen during my two visits, it just always remained out. There was a dresser shoved into the corner, and it was on it that my eyes were fixed.

  Three rows of drawers, three drawers per row. Nine drawers total…nine drawers of potentially hidden secrets. I looked through the kitchen to the back door then glanced toward the bathroom down a short hallway. I certainly had only a few minutes to myself, and it would be taking one hell of a risk, but that didn’t stop my feet from shuffling me along toward the dresser. If either Paige or Mrs. Moore caught me in the act, I’d say I was looking for a piece of the bubblegum Brody bought at Buford Street Sunday. Not a perfect cover story, but it was better than saying I was looking for evidence that he’d raped and murdered a nine year old girl. But what I was really looking for was evidence that he hadn’t. If I could just find that hairclip, I was sure I’d see that it was more orange than pink, shaped like a giraffe instead of a horse, and what I mistook for a brown strand of hair was just a thread. I just needed to find it and be sure.

  I started with the top drawer on the left side, which contained a bunch of underwear. White briefs, Fruit of the Loom. Rummaging around and finding nothing, I moved to the drawer under it, which contained more underwear, these obviously a little older with tiny holes and stains I tried not to focus on too much. The third drawer down was socks. I had just opened the top drawer of the middle row—T-shirts—when from behind me someone said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I gasped and spun around, backing up quickly and hitting the drawer with my backside, shoving it halfway back in. Brody was standing there, and I thought distractedly that he must be a ninja to have come in so silently that I never even heard the front door open or his footsteps across the living room. He wore an expression that seemed part bafflement and part rage.

  “I said, what are you doing?”

  I opened my mouth to give the excuse I had concocted earlier, but in my shock and fear it had flown out of my brain, just leaving me with my mouth hanging wide open. I wanted to move, but my legs were rooted to the spot, and my bladder was suddenly achingly full. The moment stretched out like silly putty, and neither of us seemed to be breathing.

  Finally Brody walked slowly across the room, and I flinched as he reached past me to close the drawer the rest of the way. He looked down at me and seemed about to speak when we heard the toilet flush and Paige came out of the bathroom.

  “There you are,” she said to her brother as she came down the hall into the dining room/bedroom. “I think Mom’s on the verge of a conniption fit. You must have applied to every fast food joint and grocery store in town.”

  “Uh, yeah, sorry, I stopped off at Thompson Park and did a little people watching.”

  Thompson Park, I thought. Just full of little kids. Kids like Sarah Winters.

  Paige looked from her brother to me then back to her brother. Perhaps she sensed the tension in the room, but if so she didn’t comment on it. “Mom’s out back hanging up the laundry. We’ve been playing board games. Wanna break out Monopoly? I’ll let you be the shoe.”<
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  “I gotta go,” I blurted suddenly, headed for the archway that led into the living room.

  Paige followed me to the front door. “You sure? We don’t have to play Monopoly if you’d rather play something else.”

  “No, really, I gotta get back. I forgot I promised my mother I’d do…some chores before she got home.” I hoped Paige wouldn’t ask me what chores because I was drawing a blank. I was not good under pressure.

  “I’ll walk you,” Brody said, stepping up next to me.

  My stomach cramped like I was about to go to the bathroom. “You don’t have to. It’s just right next door.”

  Brody clamped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, so hard I thought my collar bone might snap. “It’s dangerous out there. You should know that better than anyone else. I’m going to walk you home, no argument.”

  “I’ll come, too,” Paige said.

  “No, you stay here,” Brody said firmly. “You know how Mom feels about you going out right now.”

  “Yeah, but it’ll be okay as long as I’m with you.”

  “I said stay put. I’m just going to make sure Mike here makes it safely inside. I’ll only be a minute.”

  I didn’t want to go with him, but he gripped my arm and hustled me out the door. I looked back toward Paige, but she had already turned away and flipped on the TV. Brody didn’t speak as we walked the short distance to my house, but at the very edge of the property, before actually stepping into the yard, he jerked me to a halt, turned me to face him, and knelt down in front of me. He placed a hand on each shoulder, still squeezing like he was trying to get the last of the toothpaste out of the tube.

  “I gotta go in now,” I said, trying to squirm loose but having no luck. “I got those chores to do.”

  Brody glanced up and down the street then at my house, I guessed to make sure there was no one around to notice us, then said, “I know what you were looking for in my dresser.”