Kate hits the Record button. She waves, and whispers, “In case you wake up and I’m gone. I’ll be back. I promise.” She wonders if Tommy was as confident that he would be coming back on the night that he and the boys snuck out to Borderland.
Kate is a little surprised that no one is outside waiting for her, although she isn’t sure who it would be. She gathers her bike from out back and pedals down her street. Everyone is asleep. Nothing is awake. The quiet and stillness of the world at this time of night is both disconcerting and thrilling, like she’s finally seeing the truth of things, of how they really are.
The night air is cool and dry, and despite the constant pedaling, goose bumps raise on her arms and legs. She should’ve brought a sweatshirt. Kate rides down Massapoag Avenue. Much of the road serves as a western border to Borderland. The woods to her right are dark, and there are marked and unmarked openings to trails, those minimouths into the forest, those invitations to come in, explore, and perhaps find someone waiting for her.
Kate keeps to the road and turns onto Josh’s street. There’s a police cruiser parked in front of Josh’s house, silently flashing its blue lights. Kate jumps a curb, ditches into their neighbor’s front yard, and takes cover behind a little grove of trees and shrubs at the edge of the two properties. She doesn’t see any police waiting by the car, inside the car, or on the front doorstep. They must be in the house. Kate worms herself and her bike through the trees and bushes, forging a path that isn’t there. Head down, the dried leaves and branches stick in her hair, scratch her arms and legs, grab at the handlebars, pluck the tire spokes. She makes too much noise but keeps going anyway. Once through, she runs with her bike across a small patch of grass to the side of the Griffins’ house, out of view of the police car and underneath Josh’s bedroom window. Kate balances the bike on her back hip and wipes madly at her face, arms, and legs as she passes through spiderwebs somewhere along the way.
There’s a light on in Josh’s room. She’s not quite tall enough to look inside his window. Even up on her tiptoes she’d need at least another half foot. She can reach the window frame, but there’s nothing really substantial to grab on to to pull herself up. Nothing to stand on, either. She briefly considers leaning her bike against the house and standing on it, but that would end in disaster.
She texts Josh: I’m here. Outside. Out your window. We need to talk.
No response. Maybe he’s not in his room. Maybe he’s in the kitchen or somewhere else with his parents and the police. She didn’t think the police would already be here. She doesn’t want to think about what they will do if they find her skulking in the Griffins’ side yard. Her plan was that Josh’s parents would be asleep like her mom, and Josh would be lying awake or pacing his bedroom.
Kate is at the house, because talking to him on the phone would no longer cut it. She needs to see and watch and feel Josh say whatever it is he’s going to say to her. It’s that important. Only then will she know if he’s lying.
She sends him a second swarm of texts, one separate text for each word of the message: Josh. I. Am. Here. Open. Bedroom. Window. Now.
He texts back: ????
Kate: Look outside.
He carries his cell phone to the window; the glowing screen jostles like a fat and drunken firefly until he puts it down on the sill. He opens the window and whisper-hisses, “What are you doing here?”
“Come outside. Quick. We need to talk.”
“There’s two police in the kitchen, right now. I can’t. Go home.”
“Sneak out. Or I’ll ring the doorbell.” An empty threat. There’s no way he’ll try to sneak outside, but staying at the window and talking to her won’t seem as ridiculous by comparison.
“Go ahead. Ring it.” He starts to shut the window.
“No wait. Please. Josh. Stop.”
“What.”
“Just tell me one thing.”
“You shouldn’t be out here. It’s not safe.” Josh presses his forehead against the screen looking out, and left and right, as though he can see his front yard. He looks behind him, anywhere but Kate’s face.
“What do you mean?” She says it fast, like it’s all one word.
“Arnold. He comes here at night and stares into my window. I find tramped down grass out here every morning.”
Kate looks down. The grass is wet; the sprinklers must’ve been on recently. She squirms her toes around inside her sneakers, as though searching for new footprints to step into. She can’t tell if Josh is lying about seeing Arnold. He’s agitated and twitchy but he’s behind a screen, backlit, so she can’t really see his face. And all of a sudden her coming here doesn’t seem like such a great idea.
“I still don’t understand why—”
“Go home, Kate. We’re going to both get in real trouble, I can’t—”
“Tell me why.” Kate feels the cold again and starts feeling heavy, like it’s all too much, and she wants to lie down on the grass, let things keep on growing around her. “Why’d you sneak out to Borderland?”
“It was Tommy’s idea.” Josh stops talking, holds up a stop hand against the screen, and looks behind him. He turns back and says, “I can’t do this now. I have to go.”
Kate considers threatening him again, telling him that she’ll start yelling if he doesn’t give her more. She says, “Wait. Don’t go. Just tell me quick.”
Josh whispers the next bit impossibly fast and Kate has a hard time processing what he says. “We screwed up so bad we know we did and Tommy said we had to fix it we had to protect you guys and everybody we didn’t know what to do and Tommy said we had to make it right had to make it right.”
“Josh—”
“We didn’t say anything because when we lost Tommy—” He sputters out at the end of the nonsentence.
“You lost Tommy?” Kate hates him for that phrase. We lost Tommy. Later, she’ll replay Josh saying it in her head and fantasize throwing rocks through his window screen and yelling at him that Tommy wasn’t theirs, he wasn’t theirs to lose.
“No, I didn’t mean that.”
“What did you mean?”
“Kate. I don’t, I mean, I didn’t . . . We thought he was still out in the woods, you know.”
“Yeah, so—”
“We thought he was still out there doing something about Arnold.”
“Doing something?” She says it again, and twice more, each utterance taking on a new, deeper meaning. “Like what?”
Josh is a motionless shadow in his window, looking down at her, or maybe not at her, over her, through her, to somewhere else anywhere else. Maybe he’s crying. It feels like he is, even if she can’t see the tears on his face.
He looks behind him and then back out the window and says, “They’re coming. I’m sorry.” Josh shuts the window and disappears.
She says, “No, wait,” loud. Too loud. The light in Josh’s room doesn’t wink out; its brightness changes, as though dimmed but then redirected at the same time. Do people displace light when they enter a room, like water in a bathtub? Kate thinks she hears canned, muffled voices from inside the house, inside Josh’s room. She jumps on her bike, pumps the pedals once, twice, and veers left, away from the brush, toward the front yard and the street for a faster getaway. She cuts the wheel too hard, her back tire spins out in the higher gear, and the bike fishtails out from beneath her. Kate twists, lands knee first, foot folded up behind her, the various crooks and points of her leg chunking thick divots out of the grass, and then pitches forward onto her hands and elbows, sliding to a stop on her stomach. Wet, mud streaked, and shaking, she refuses to dignify how out in the open she is with any sort of glance back to the house or the police car. Back on the bike, she rides from the lawn toward the street, telling herself that if she can make tire contact with the pavement, she’ll safely follow the blacktop all the way to her house.
When Kate gets home she imagines her dead-of-night excursion is being played in reverse: she stashes her bike, waits on the fron
t stoop for someone who isn’t there or isn’t coming, snakes around the front door, shuts it, locks it, listens for her mother, stands between the couch and the surveillance camera, deletes the video she recorded earlier, turns the camera back on, watches herself walk into the kitchen, drinks warm water from the tap, goes into the hallway, and Mom is in her bed, facedown and snoring, so Kate goes into her room, she studies the empty house on her phone, shuts off the camera, kicks off her socks and sneakers. She walks backward until the backs of her legs knock into the mattress. If only she could keep going in reverse long enough, far enough, to travel all the way back in time, to a week ago, and make Tommy stay home and then keep on going backward to the beginning of the summer and warn him about everything that will happen.
The next morning Kate is up with the sun and stumbles toward the bathroom with her heavy-with-sleep morning feet. There’s dirt and mud on the floor in the hallway. She changes course and follows the dirt into the kitchen. It’s a total mess. Her legs aren’t that dirty so it all must’ve fallen in clumps from her socks and sneakers.
She gathers the broom and dustpan from the utility closet and gets a handful of sweeps in before Mom calls out from her bedroom, “What are you doing now?”
Allison Driving in Brockton with the Boys, He’s Not Feeling Too Good, Three Horrors
Allison fights it, loses, and yawns into the back of her hand.
Officer Kimball asks, “Late night?”
Last night Allison was camped out in her father’s room at the nursing home, sprawled in the recliner. The plan was to crash there. It was easier than going back to the house. She listened to her dad sleeping, his breathing alternating between deep and shallow, with sudden gasps and little moans, those personal night sounds, and Allison was almost finally asleep herself when Elizabeth called. Allison then rushed to the Sanderson house to read and retrieve the newest diary pages. Her hands were tremulous holding them and so was her voice, even when she was attempting to be stern in her interview of Kate. Part of her thought Kate had hidden these pages like the previous ones. The other part of Allison doubted herself; if Elizabeth and Kate were telling the truth about these last diary pages being in that large art book, how did she not find them during the room search? They showed her the book, and she vaguely remembered going through it, but did she go through it page by page and hold the book out so loose pages could fall out? Allison wasn’t so sure, and she hasn’t been back to sleep since Elizabeth’s phone call.
Allison says, “Only every night this week.”
Sergeant Charles Kimball says, “I hear you.” He is a twenty-plus-year veteran of the Brockton Police force and a lifelong resident. He has a detailed map of the city in his head and claims it’s as easily retrievable as his home phone number or his wife’s middle name, which is why he is driving Allison, Josh, and Luis on their search through local neighborhoods. Charles is African American, shorter than Allison, and almost completely bald but for a patch of graying hair on the back of his head. He drives with his left hand on the wheel and the other in constant motion; adjusting the two-way radio, twisting and untwisting the cap of his bottled water in the cup holder, wiping some unseen speck of dust off the dashboard. He has a thick, platinum wedding band on his left hand and a giant class ring on his right.
After an hour of riding through and around the city, Charles is now headed toward Ames.
Allison says, “The neighborhood doesn’t necessarily have to be close to Ames, Sergeant Kimball, remember? Is that correct, boys?” She knows the sergeant remembers but she wants to get the boys talking again. They haven’t said anything in a while.
Luis and Josh are in the back seat of the unmarked sedan. They’re dressed as though prepped for a school photo; just out of the shower, combed hair, brightly colored polo shirts, tan khaki shorts. Josh has his fingers in or near his mouth. Luis fiddles with the shirt collar that curls up at its points. They sit one at each window, scooted over against the doors, turned away from the middle and Officer Barbara. The officer is an impasse, a wall between the boys, comically large by comparison.
Josh says, “Yeah.”
Allison turns around in her seat, looks at Luis, and says, “Anything to add?” Of the two boys, Luis has certainly been more willing to talk, and is more natural, easy with what he says and how he says it, as though he’s relieved that others now know some version of the truth. Josh is more reticent, guarded, afraid of both consequence and the revelations sure to come, which actually makes Allison trust the both of them a little more now.
Luis: “We drove all over the place, for like a long time, before we got there. And then coming back was a blur.”
Sergeant Kimball: “Tell me again how you know the house was in Brockton?”
Josh: “Arnold told us that’s where he lived.”
Luis: “I remember seeing that ‘Entering Brockton’ sign, too, on, uh, what is it, Washington Street? Don’t remember seeing any other entering-town signs.”
First thing earlier this morning Luis and Josh returned to the Ames police station and formally submitted to a new round of interviews and statements. Both boys gave a much more detailed account of why they went to Borderland that night and what happened, and they admitted that everything Tommy wrote about in his diary was true. Initial checks of local hospitals for an elderly man being treated for the injuries described have turned up empty. The boys have not been placed under arrest but they (and their parents) were made fully aware that while the renewed cooperation and forthrightness is appreciated, they would, at a minimum, be processed for their admitted role in the brutal beating and stabbing of the as-of-yet unidentified elderly man.
Sergeant Kimball turns right onto yet another side street crowded with double- and triple-deckers in various states of disrepair. Their outer shells sag under the weight of time and neglect.
Allison leans toward Kimball and says, “Did we drive through here earlier?”
He says, “This was the first place we tried based on their description. I really thought it was the one. Now I’m thinking let’s try coming up the other way.” He points and stabs that impatient hand of his through the air. “Maybe they didn’t recognize any of the houses because we didn’t drive in the direction that they came from the first time.”
Allison knows that even if the boys are being fully cooperative, they’ve only been to the place once, they were admittedly drunk, and there’s no underestimating how trauma warps the lens of memory.
The cracked and potholed pavement has been recently patched and repatched, the street thick with rubbery tar lumps and looping and intersecting black lines, like someone crossed out the street with a giant pen. They roll past houses with chipped paint and bent or missing panels of siding. Rusted chain-linked fencing sags and undulates between properties, more than one barnacled with red, askew BEWARE OF DOG signs.
Luis says, “Hey, this looks kinda familiar.”
He said that once before. They pulled over in a similar neighborhood and they sat for a few minutes, no one getting out of the car. Luis and Josh had a quick grunt and monosyllabic exchange, ultimately deciding they had not found the house.
Luis scoots up to the edge of his seat, hands on the driver’s headrest in front of him. He alternates looking out the windshield and the side window. He says, “Yeah. I think this is—it could be that gray one up ahead. There. Yeah. Right there on the left.”
Allison: “The one with the broken trellis on the side?”
Luis: “What?”
Officer Kimball says, “That stuff on the side of the house that looks like, uh, a wall of picket fencing. A trellis.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s it. Definitely it.”
Officer Kimball slows the car down to a roll. The gray triple-decker grows in height as they get closer.
Luis: “Is it all right—can you roll down my window? For a better look?”
“Yes.”
Luis patiently waits for the glass to disappear. Hot, humid air rushes into the car along
with the sickly sweet smell of the car’s radiator working too hard. Luis sticks his head out the window.
Allison: “Josh. Talk to us. Tell us what you think.”
Josh: “I don’t know. It’s hard to see from back here.” He says that and moves his head around like he’s trying to look around everything instead of directly at it. “I don’t remember the trellis being there. But. Could be it, yeah.”
They go quiet. The radio crackles static and bursts of conversation built in code words and numbers. The car inches forward and is now across the street from the house, parallel to the driveway.
Luis pulls himself up so the upper half of his body is out the window. He yells, “Stop! Stop! That’s his car! That’s his car! See? The brown one? Holy shit! Um, sorry.” Luis drops back inside the car. “Oh, wow.” He isn’t yelling anymore. He lowers into a whisper and crouches in his seat. “That’s the house and the car. It totally is.” He suddenly bounces back away from the car window and knocks into Officer Barbara. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it, I didn’t—”
Allison: “Luis. It’s okay. We know you didn’t mean it. But you need to calm down.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m sorry. Okay.”
Allison turns to Josh, who hasn’t moved, isn’t moving, but is slightly leaned forward, one finger at his lips, looking out the window. “Is that Arnold’s car, Josh?”
Josh. “That’s his car.” He sits up straight, as tall as he can, pressing himself into the seat back, and closes his eyes, squeezing them shut, the lids crushing into asterisks.
Disappearance at Devil's Rock Page 23