PETER SHOWED UP at Rhonda’s door, breathless.
“I need Clem,” he panted, shoving his way past Rhonda. Clem came out into the living room.
“What is it, Peter?”
“You’ve gotta come quick. It’s Mom. She’s in the bathtub. She used a razor. There’s blood all over!”
Clem ran out of the house with Peter. Rhonda started to join them, but her father stopped her. “Stay here!” he ordered.
Rhonda’s heart thudded in her ears. She went to find her mother to tell her what had happened.
“There’s nothing we can do to help right now,” Justine said.
“Let’s do our best to keep busy.”
So Rhonda sliced vegetables for stew, listening to sirens draw near.
Forty-five minutes later, Clem returned with Peter and Lizzy. Lizzy had a suitcase. Peter carried a knapsack, a sleeping bag, and his old army pup tent, which he went to work setting up in the yard.
“You’ll freeze in there,” Justine warned, handing over a pile of thick blankets from the linen closet.
“Can’t you make him come inside?” Rhonda whined to her parents, who just shook their heads and told her to leave Peter alone for now.
Lizzy went straight to Rhonda’s room, set up her suitcase in the corner, and began doing homework at Rhonda’s desk.
“Want to talk?” Rhonda asked her. Lizzy didn’t even look up.
“Oh that’s right, you don’t talk anymore. I forgot.”
Rhonda stomped out of her room and down the hall, where she caught sight of her parents in the kitchen. Clem was just hanging up from his call to the hospital. Rhonda ducked into the shadowy bathroom to eavesdrop.
“She’s going to pull through,” Clem reported.
“Thank God,” Justine said. “Did they say how long she’ll be there?”
Rhonda heard Clem light a match, take a drag of his cigarette, then exhale. “No idea.”
“I’d think they’d keep her awhile after something like this. And when she does get out, I wonder what shape she’ll be in. Looking after the kids might be too much for her,” Justine said.
“Fucking Daniel,” Clem hissed. “I can’t believe he’s done this. Where the hell is he?”
“Like you said, he’s probably off on a bender. Hiding out from people he owes money to,” Justine said.
“These aren’t the kinds of guys you mess around with,” Rhonda heard her father say to her mother.
“I just wish we could get in touch with him,” Justine said.
“Maybe it’s time to call the police. File a missing person’s report or something. With Aggie in the hospital, someone’s gotta drag his ass out of hiding,” Clem said.
RHONDA HAD A good view of Peter’s tent through her bedroom window and spent most of the afternoon and evening staring at the green canvas door, hoping Peter would emerge, like a caterpillar from a cocoon, beautiful and changed. When he refused to come in for dinner, Justine brought him a plate.
“Let me take it to him,” Rhonda begged.
“Not tonight, sweetie,” Justine said.
At nine o’clock that night, Rhonda was watching through her window when she saw Tock arrive, wearing her red hat and carrying her BB gun. Peter held back the front flap of his tent to invite her in. When Tock left the tent an hour later, the gun was not with her.
“She gave him her gun,” Rhonda said to Lizzy, who was lying in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep. Rhonda could tell she was faking.
“Can you believe it? She gave him her gun!”
Lizzy just moaned and rolled over.
RHONDA WOKE UP in the night to find the mattress and bottom sheet soaked. She shook Lizzy awake.
“Did you piss in the bed?” Rhonda asked, dumbfounded. But there was no other explanation for the warm, stinking urine that soaked them both.
Lizzy said nothing. She didn’t look ashamed or embarrassed. She wore a vacant look, like a sleepwalker.
“I can’t believe this,” Rhonda muttered, flipping on the light.
“Well, let’s get it cleaned up.”
Lizzy stood frozen in a corner and watched Rhonda strip the bed.
“Take off your nightgown,” she instructed. Lizzy didn’t move.
“What is wrong with you?” Rhonda yelled. “Take off the nightgown!” She threw a clean one of her own at Lizzy, who stood, frozen.
“Don’t just stand there!” Rhonda yelled. “Do something! Say something! Just open your mouth and talk!”
There was a knock on the bedroom door and Justine stuck her head in. “What’s going on?”
“Lizzy pissed the bed and won’t change!”
Justine surveyed the mattress and wet sheets on the floor, then went to Lizzy and put an arm around her.
“Come on, dear. Let’s get you into a hot bath.” She led Lizzy down the hall and into the bathroom. Rhonda heard the water running and the soft murmur of her mother’s voice.
Justine returned, carrying Lizzy’s wet nightgown, and grabbed the sheets and Rhonda’s pajamas from the floor.
“What’s the matter with Lizzy?” Rhonda asked.
“You need to be a little gentler with her, Ronnie.”
“It’s one thing to not talk, but to just stand there like a freaking statue…”
“Rhonda, Lizzy was the one who found Aggie today.”
“Oh.” The word felt small and round coming from Rhonda’s lips.
“She’s been through a lot,” Justine said. “A lot more than anyone knows, I think.”
Rhonda bit her lip. “Is she ever going to talk again?”
Justine nodded. “I’m sure she will. When she’s ready. Pestering her, making a fuss, that never helps anything. We just need to be patient.”
JUNE 25, 2006
RHONDA, IT’S PETER.” She hadn’t spoken to him since the night she sent the police to his door searching for Ernie. She didn’t know how to begin to apologize. And she still had so many questions—like who was he with at the Inn and Out Motel and why had he lied about it?
“I’ve been meaning to call,” she said. “I’m so sorry for everything, and I…”
“Ronnie,” he interrupted, “last night the police found a body.”
Rhonda closed her eyes. At last, it was over. The police had been searching the woods around Nickel Lake for Ernie’s body since Warren and Pat were taken into custody. Rhonda had studiously avoided the news stories about the botched kidnapping. She didn’t want to hear the pile of charges being heaped against Pat and Warren. The one piece of news she’d heard had haunted her. When the police searched Pat’s office, they found a little girl’s sneaker soaked in blood, decades old. Pat had kept Birdie’s shoe with her all these years, a gruesome reminder of her loss.
Rhonda heard Peter breathing into the phone.
“Where?” she asked. “Where did they find it?”
Rhonda hated herself the minute she said the words, turning Ernie from a her into an it.
“In our woods, Ronnie. Under the old stage.”
There was a long pause. Rhonda drew in a breath. She heard a strange crackle on the phone line. She felt a pain in her head and reached up instinctively and ran her finger over the scar. Rhonda had this crazy idea then. She thought maybe they’d just dug up that old bogeyman. He’d decomposed to the point where they looked at him and thought he’d once been a person. Maybe that was the body they’d found—their childhood fears given form, weighted down by stones, as if such a weight could hold them down forever.
“That can’t be,” Rhonda found herself saying, more of a gasp than a sentence.
“I want you to get in your car right now and come straight over here, Ronnie. Get here as soon as you can. We have to talk before you see anyone else, especially the police, okay?”
“The police?”
“Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you.”
“But I don’t understand,” Rhonda said, her voice sounding squeaky and strange; it was her eleven-year-old voi
ce.
“I know you don’t. That’s why you need to come see me. Promise me you’re on your way.”
“I promise,” she said, the words tumbling easily out of Rhonda’s tight, dry mouth.
RHONDA HUNG UP with Peter and met Crowley coming up the steps to her apartment as soon as she opened the front door.
“Has something happened to Warren?” she asked. The last time she’d seen Crowley was at Warren’s bedside a week ago.
“Warren? No. He’s fine. He’s out of the hospital and a guest of the department of corrections. Pat too. They kept her in the hospital awhile because she hasn’t said a word since you hit her. The docs say there’s nothing wrong physically—just won’t talk.”
Rhonda nodded. Elective mutism, she thought. Jingled the keys in her hands.
“Got a minute, Miss Farr?” he asked.
“I was just on my way out.”
“This won’t take long. Can we go inside?”
She offered him a cup of coffee from the pot she’d just turned off and they sat together at her table, stirring milk and sugar into lukewarm coffee.
“Tell me about the summer of 1993. The August Daniel Shale disappeared. You did a play then—Peter Pan, right?”
Rhonda was taken aback by the question.
“Uh, right. I was Wendy.”
Crowley sat across from Rhonda, taking notes as they spoke, referring to his black book as he questioned her. But the questions he asked made no sense.
“I’m not sure what this has to do with…”
“Just answer the questions, Miss Farr,” Crowley cut her off.
“Now, if you would please, take me back to that summer. Tell me about the play. About the last time you saw Daniel Shale.”
“Daniel? Um, the last time I remember seeing him was the evening of the play.”
“Right,” he said, thumbing through his book, “the play ended, to the best of everyone’s recollection, around seven thirty, then you had a cookout. Now can you remember anything unusual about that evening? About him?”
Rhonda strained to remember. She thought of the photographs in Clem’s album, which showed all of them after the play. Lizzy up on Daniel’s shoulders. Daniel sword fighting with Peter.
“He was clean shaven. He’d always had this thick walrus kind of mustache but sometime that summer he shaved. There are pictures in my father’s album of him that night.”
“I’ve seen the photographs. Your parents said you have a video of the play?”
“Yeah, I borrowed it a couple weeks ago.”
“Would you mind if I took it for a few days?” he asked.
“Not at all,” Rhonda said. She got up and walked into the living room, where she found it on the shelf below the television—where she left it the morning she and Warren watched it together, cuddling on the couch. She shrugged the memory off, grabbed the tape, and headed back to Crowley. When she returned to the kitchen, Crowley was up, snooping through papers on the counter—old grocery lists and receipts.
“Can you remember anything else unusual about that night?”
“Not really. We had kind of a party after the play. Families from the cottages down on the lake came because their kids were in the show. We were all in our yard eating hot dogs and burgers. Aggie, Peter and Lizzy’s mom, got a little tipsy and accidentally set the picnic table on fire. I guess that’s the most unusual thing that happened.”
“And things broke up shortly after dark. People went home. What did you do, Miss Farr?”
“I…um, went into the woods with some of the kids from the play.”
Crowley flipped through his book.
“Hospital records show you and Peter Shale being seen in the emergency room for stitches around ten o’clock that same evening. Everyone I’ve talked to says that at some point during or shortly after the party in the yard, you, Peter Shale, Lizzy Shale, and Greta Clark went into the woods and tore down the stage. Was there something particular that prompted this?”
Rhonda’s head spun. She went over what few memories she had of tearing down the stage, but they were just a blur in her mind. It didn’t feel like a true memory anymore. It was just a story she had told and retold so many times that it had long ago left any feel of reality behind. When she told the story, it was like recalling a dream. The dream where she and Peter ended up with matching scars.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “We all somehow knew it was our last play. Everything changed that summer. Peter and Tock got together. Lizzy was drifting away from us. I guess tearing apart the stage was kind of a symbolic thing.”
“Were Daniel and your father fighting that night? About money? Because Daniel had asked your father for another loan?”
Rhonda remembered a time before, on Peter’s birthday, when Daniel asked Clem for a loan. He said it was to buy tools, but Clem hadn’t believed him—had made some mention of gambling. She and Peter had heard the whole thing from inside their closed coffins.
“That’s pretty much the story Clem, Aggie, and Justine tell,” Crowley continued after listening to her recollections from earlier that summer.
“You’ve talked to Aggie?” Rhonda asked.
Crowley nodded. “A detective in Maryland met with her last night.” Crowley ran a hand through his short hair, glanced down at his notebook, then continued. “Daniel was in trouble with some gambling debts and your father felt he’d bailed him out enough. It sounds like your father did an awful lot for Daniel. Is that the way you remember it?”
“I’m not sure. I guess so. I mean, Daniel had bad luck. He was always coming up with these schemes, but none of them ever panned out. And it seemed like he always owed money to someone. That’s the impression I got anyway, but I was just a kid.”
She thought again of the wings Daniel made, of Peter standing on the shed roof, determined to prove they would work.
“Who took you to the emergency room?” Crowley asked.
“My father and Aggie.”
“Your mother didn’t go?”
“I don’t remember her going. I think she stayed home with Lizzy.”
“And Daniel, where was he when you had your stitches?”
“I have no idea. He wasn’t at the hospital, I don’t think. He must have stayed back with my mother and Lizzy.”
Rhonda reached up and touched her scar. She thought of Peter’s matching scar. Of the way the blood poured down her face, how frightened she was. There was so much blood on both of them. On Lizzy too, because she was there, trying to help them. She took off her pirate jacket and wrapped it around Rhonda’s head. They were all crying so hard. Rhonda didn’t even remember how they got back to her house, or the ride to the hospital. She just remembered being in the same room with Peter and how the doctor pulled the curtain to do the stitches.
“Thank you, Miss Farr, you’ve been helpful.” Crowley was closing his notebook, getting up to go. “One more thing, if you don’t mind,” he added, fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for a small bag that he withdrew and held out for her inspection.
“What can you tell me about this?”
The pink plastic was cracked and grimy, but she recognized it immediately. It had once clung to the roof of her mouth.
“My retainer!” she said at last.
Crowley nodded. “We found it down in the hole with the body.”
Rhonda was quiet a moment while she considered this, remembering the day she and Peter had sat in the hole together and he asked her to take it out. She shivered as she imagined it there beside little Ernie Florucci.
“I used to change costumes down there,” Rhonda explained. “I probably left it in the hole the night of the play. I wouldn’t have worn it on stage. I probably left it down there for safekeeping. God, I thought it was gone forever.”
“Thank you for your time.” He snapped the book closed.
“You’ve been quite helpful.”
“But I don’t understand,” Rhonda said. “What does any of this have to do with Ernie F
lorucci?”
“Ernie?”
“Yeah, with the body you found in the woods?” Crowley looked perplexed, and Rhonda went on, a bit irritated. “It was Ernie, right? You found her.”
“We didn’t find Ernestine’s body in the woods. Not yet anyway, we’re still looking. There’s a lot of woods around the lake to cover and, unfortunately, Warren hasn’t given us many details to go on.”
“So, what’s this about?”
Rhonda thought again of that old bogeyman, stuffed full of rags and pillows. Of their fears scribbled on slips of paper, folded again and again and dropped into the hole like ruined paper cranes. What had she written on her paper? What did Lizzy and Peter write?
“The body we found has been identified as Daniel Shale. Initial findings are consistent with his being killed around the time he disappeared. Possibly the night of the play. The remnants of his clothes match those shown in the photographs from that day.”
Rhonda felt a peculiar rushing sensation around her head, as though all the air had been suddenly sucked off the porch.
“Killed? How?”
“Yes,” Crowley said. “The preliminary reports say blunt trauma to the head.”
SEPTEMBER 4, 1993
PETER HAD TOCK’S gun out and was practicing his aim, shooting cans off the stone wall at the edge of the yard. Clem gave him pointers, set up the targets, and even let Peter fire his Civil War replica musket a few times.
Rhonda didn’t know how to talk to Peter about what had happened to his parents. It didn’t seem right to bring it up, nor did it seem right not to. She carried her homework out to the picnic table and glanced up often to see Peter shooting cans, Clem patting him on the back, saying, Good shot, son.
Rhonda thought of things to say, how to comfort him, to tell him that everything would be all right—Aggie would get well, Daniel would come home. But every time she opened her mouth to speak, to say the words she practiced in her head, the weight of their inadequacy, their sheer stupidity, kept them in the back of her throat. Her words got stuck there like some vile frog, thick and useless, and when she finally gathered the courage to walk up to him and say something, the only thing that came out was, “Want a Coke?”—to which he just shook his head.
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