by Ninie Hammon
“You don’t get out much, do you, Carpenter? Do you even own a television set?”
“What for? When one of those read-a-teleprompter talking heads describes a ‘situation,’ it’s like they didn’t even go to the same crime scene I did.”
“Well, you might want to give this story a look-see before the press gets hold of your address and turn up at your house.”
“Why would the press come to my house?”
“They showed the video on the six o’clock news,” Crock said.
The pictures—they were screen shots from a security camera video.
“It was the top story, and the media sharks and anti-hug-a-policeman puppets have already started crawling out from under rocks.”
“I haven’t seen the video,” Jack said and his own voice sounded strangely tinny in his ear. “Just…screen grabs. Still photographs.” He really didn’t want to ask the rest of it, but he had to, of course. “What does the video show?”
“Oh, they hedged their bets. Threw around ‘allegedly’ like tossing feed to chickens, pointed out that security camera footage does not constitute proof of wrongdoing. But I figure the story in tomorrow’s Inquirer will read something like ‘The local hero cop who singlehandedly stopped a psycho from massacring a room full of helpless children three months ago allegedly set a fire that massacred a nursing home full of helpless old people when he was a kid.’”
The Twin Oaks fire.
Flames all around him. Harsh heat and red light. Screams of agony.
There’s a figure in the flames. Jack can only see him from behind. The flames back up from the figure, move out of his way as if shoved by an invisible hand. Then the figure turns slowly to face Jack.
“Jack?” Crock spoke his name in the tone of voice you use when you’ve already said something several times and gotten no response. “Are you all right?”
All Jack’s spit had dried up so suddenly that pulling his tongue off the roof of his mouth to speak felt like disengaging two strips of Velcro. “Not really.”
“So you were there at the fire? What were you doing with a—”
“I don’t know. I…don’t remember. Any of it. That whole summer. It was wiped out of my mind.”
Crock paused to let that soak in. “You do realize, don’t you, that it won’t be long before it’s not just the press asking questions about that fire.”
“Goody,” was all Jack could manage.
“I was thinking of more colorful descriptions, but goody will do for now.” Crock paused again, and when he continued, there was urgency in his voice. “That fire, you and Theresa—all of it—eventually, you’re going to have to tell me what’s really going on here.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Try me.”
“The longer you can live your life without knowing what I know, the better off you’ll be.”
The major let it go for the time being but he was a kid looking for the prize in the bottom of a Happy Meal. He’d keep digging until he found it.
Then Crocker shifted gears. “There’s one more thing.”
“Anybody ever tell you the story about straws and camels’ backs?”
“Relax. This is random info. You just got a hit on an alert you sent out a couple of months ago. The sheriff’s department in Hendersonville, Indiana—that’s between Columbus and Bloomington, I think—has locked up somebody you were looking for. Her name’s Becca Hawkins.”
Crock hung, up but Jack stood for half a minute with his cell phone still pressed to his ear, listening to the nothing. There used to be a dial tone that told you the line had gone dead. On cell phones there was…nothing. He hadn’t realized until now how much he missed the dial tone.
Jack’s mind filled up the void of no-dial-tone nothingness in his head with a single word—it lit up across the expanse of his whole consciousness like it’d been written on the night sky by the flaming tail of a comet.
Becca.
When snippets of memory from that lost summer had begun to return, Jack had recalled that he had been desperately in love with Becca Hawkins when he was twelve years old. So was Daniel Burke.
CHAPTER 8
1985
As the two twelve-year-olds walked together through the woods, Jack was listening in what he hoped looked like rapt attention to what Daniel was telling him: details of Daniel’s grand plan to do what nobody had ever done—draw a map of the hundreds, no, probably thousands of miles of interconnected caves beneath Caverna County. Daniel was always coming up with one harebrained idea or another.
Daniel was tall for his age, taller than Jack but not as strong. Jack thought he looked like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice--just needed a sports coat over a T-shirt and enough facial hair for beard stubble to complete the image. Daniel's was a square-jawed all-American face, and you could read there whatever he was feeling as clearly as if it’d been written in green ink on his forehead.
Jack’s face was unreadable—some would say stern—a good-looking boy, though his features were too strong and blunt to be handsome. He was compact and well-muscled, but he radiated a kind of rugged toughness that made him seem bigger than he was.
Jack was black; Daniel was white.
“Of course, it’d take a lot of rope,” Daniel said, “but you could go out to the end of a piece of rope, draw a map of how you got there, then move the rope—”
“It’s like a honeycomb,” Jack said. “Layers and layers going down nobody knows how far.”
“We’d start with the top level and then—”
“And then fall through to the next level or the next, break a leg and get stuck down there. That rock’s unstable. The water’s still dissolving the limestone.”
“Yeah, but—”
“How can you draw a map of something that’s constantly changing? One minute, there’s a cavern and a wall. And the next time you go in, the wall’s gone and it’s two caves. You don’t see a long line of spelunkers itching to crawl around in the caverns, Danno, and there’s a reason for that.”
“So you think it’s a dumb idea?”
“Well…” It was really hard to lie to Daniel. Even if you were a good liar, he could spot it. Jack suspected that was because Daniel probably hadn’t told half a dozen lies in his whole life, and that included the ones you had to tell about the knitted scarf your aunt sent you for Christmas or when some lady in a store wanted to know if a dress made her look fat. “Not dumb, exactly, just—”
“Shhhh,” Daniel said. “Listen.”
Jack heard the sound of a dog barking on the other side of the hill. Dougal Dog after a squirrel. He was surprised that Becca was so close by. The three had split up after Bishop let them out, but later he’d happened upon Daniel in the woods. Dougal Dog appeared at the crest of the hill and came down it so fast that you’d think his tail was on fire, barking machine-gun fire all the way. The dog slid to a stop in front of them, panting, and never stopped barking. This was the most sound Jack had ever heard come out of the animal’s mouth. He looked up at the crest of the hill, expecting to see Becca. She wasn’t there.
The dog turned and ran a few yards back the way it had come, stopped and barked. Then did the same thing again.
“I think he wants us to follow him,” Daniel said.
Jack burst out laughing so abruptly that he almost spit in Daniel’s face. It was a baritone rumble now that Jack’s voice had started changing. He roared. Couldn’t stop, dropped the picka-nick basket he was holding, leaned over and grabbed his belly. He wanted to share the humor with Daniel but couldn’t get his own mirth under control enough to talk.
Between bleats of laughter, he finally managed to say, “You sound like…on Saturday mornings…” He spoke in a high-pitched falsetto. “I think Lassie wants us to follow her. Maybe Timmy’s in trouble.” Which sent Jack into another peal of hysterics.
Daniel smiled, but didn’t see as much humor in the remark as Jack did. The dog kept barking, running a few steps and barking some more.
; “Maybe Becca is in trouble,” Daniel said.
Jack would have laughed at that, too, if not for Daniel’s sober attitude. And if there was something wrong with Becca… Suddenly, none of it was funny at all anymore.
“Has she taught him that?” Jack asked. “To go get people?”
“Dogs do all kinds of things nobody trained them to do.” Daniel was already turning to run after the dog as he said it. Jack stopped only long enough to grab the picka-nick basket. He and Daniel had built it in shop class before school let out, making the top part into a lid with hinges and a catch, lining the inside with pale yellow felt—Becca’s favorite color—and polishing the outside until it sparkled. They’d given it to her for her birthday, a replacement for the two yellow wicker picnic baskets that had fallen off the back of Jack’s bike and exploded, firing sandwiches and fruit like shrapnel all over the street. You could drop the picka-nick basket off a building, and it would still hold on to your sandwiches. But it was heavy, and loaded as it was now with lunch for the three of them, it banged painfully against Jack’s leg so he had trouble keeping up with Daniel and the dog. But DD always paused to wait for them when they fell behind.
Even though both boys were in good shape, Jack was beginning to feel a painful stitch in his side when the dog quit barking like you’d turned off a water faucet, then stood panting at the top of a gentle rise that fell away to a gash-cut valley beyond. When the boys joined him, they saw why he had stopped barking. About sixty yards down the trail, walking away from them, was a group of boys—with Becca in the middle of them.
Jack’s gut turned to concrete.
“Aren’t those the guys from Brewster Academy?” Daniel asked.
It was them alright. Couldn't miss the red-headed kid with the Mohawk--Carl or Cody something, maybe--and the one trying to look like Eddie Van Halen with long, poofy brown hair. They’d only met the other members of the Bradford’s Ridge All-Star baseball team once at the cookout the day after the team roster was announced. And it hadn’t gone well.
“How would she know those guys?” Daniel continued.
“She wouldn’t.”
Jack felt sick. Everything about what he was seeing was wrong. Not only strange but somehow…sinister. One small blonde girl walking in the middle of a group of six boys. He didn’t have to say any of that to Daniel.
“What do we do?” Daniel asked.
“We act like this is the most normal thing in the world, that’s what we do…and go get Becca.”
Jack draped a smile between the corners of his mouth like hanging a sheet on a clothesline and started down the slope.
“Hey, hold up a minute,” he called out cheerily.
The boys all snapped around in surprise. Jack had never before seen anybody move that fast. He’d never seen the kind of naked malice and aggression he saw in their faces and body language, either. If they’d been animals, they’d have been snarling. Maybe they were snarling. But that wasn’t what made it suddenly impossible for him to catch his breath. He’d never seen anybody look as scared as Becca looked. He felt Daniel tense beside him and knew he’d read it all, too.
With Dougal Dog at their side, he and Daniel trotted down to where the others stood. The Eddie Van Halen wannabe spotted DD and started toward him, his hands balled into fists, his face a picture of rage. Jack noticed then that the boy had a wound on his right arm above his wrist. Not bandaged, it was dripping blood. It looked like a dog bite.
The tallest boy, the redhead with the Mohawk, grabbed the other boy and yanked him back a step. They exchanged a look, and then the first boy stayed where he was. Jack noticed that several of the boys had black stains on their jeans that could have been—what? Blood?
“Hi, Becs,” Jack said casually as he set the picka-nick basket down on the ground. Jack had never called her that. He’d never heard anybody call her that, so he hoped the foreignness of it would alert Becca that he and Daniel understood something was terribly wrong. “What are you guys doing out here in the woods? If you’re after ginseng, looks like you came up as empty-handed as we did.”
The other boys were silent, glaring at Jack and Daniel. Up close, they didn’t look right. Jack couldn’t quite put his finger on why not. They were strangely unkempt, stank like they hadn’t had a bath in a month. It was a…wild smell. Something about their eyes, too, like the reflective shine in an animal's eyes at night. Or the defiant set of their faces—faces that seemed harder and older than they had only a couple of days ago at Bishop and Theresa’s cookout when they’d mocked Daniel and Jack for refusing go out drinking with them. They’d been cocky and rebellious then, too, angling for a fight. If Bishop hadn’t stepped in and separated them, they might even have come to blows—bloody noses all around. Those weren’t the stakes now, though. The boys they’d faced in Bishop’s backyard weren’t dangerous. These boys were. Jack hadn’t been afraid of those guys. He was unreasonably and inexplicably terrified of these.
“Mind if we tag along with you?” Jack tried to look chagrined. “Truth is, we got lost. I hope you know how to get out of here.”
“Yeah, we mind,” the redheaded boy said.
Cole. His name was Cole Stuart.
“Find your own way out.”
Daniel spoke for the first time. “Aw, Jack, we can see Burnt Stump from here.” He pointed to the black sentinel on the mountain to the south. “We’ll be all right; let’s stay.” He turned his eyes on Becca. “You want to stay with us, Becs? Help us look for ginseng?”
“She’s going with us,” Cole said.
“That’s not your decision to make, now is it?” Daniel replied, pleasantly enough. “If she wants to stay with us, she stays.”
There it was, then—the gauntlet on the ground. Daniel held his hand out to Becca.
The redheaded kid was all over Jack and Daniel in a heartbeat. Jack only had time to think two words before a fist slammed into his belly. Mad dog.
It was finished almost before it started. You could reasonably expect to lose a fight six against two, but this fight was just one against two. Cole Stuart’s speed and ferocity hammered punches into Jack in such rapid succession that Jack never even had time to make a fist. The next thing he knew, he was up against a tree fifteen feet from the nearest boy with no idea how he’d gotten there. Jack knew how to take a beating. His father had taught him well. But this…
The other boys started to surround Jack where he lay. Even with his heart strumming in his ears muffling sound, he could hear Cole Stuart yelling and Becca screaming.
He only caught snippets, pieces of what Cole said. “…enough …can’t hurt…” Becca’s cries sliced into his heart with a pain far greater than what he felt in his belly.
Then it was quiet, except for the roaring in his ears. There wasn’t even the usual huffing and puffing after a fight. Cole Stuart wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t broken a sweat.
Becca’s voice had been silenced abruptly, cut off. He looked around, found her. One of the boys had his hand over her mouth. His eyes locked with hers for a heartbeat, and the raw terror he saw there gave him the strength to start struggling to his feet.
“Stay where you are,” Cole said. “Mind your own business and stay out of our way, or I’ll let the rest of them have at you.”
Jack kept struggling, scooting upward with his back against the tree until he was upright. He took a wobbly step toward the group of boys. They seemed to inhale at the same time for a group lunge that some part of him was certain he would not survive.
Becca pulled the boy’s hand off her mouth and cried, “Stop it. I…don’t want to stay here and hunt for ginseng. There’s no reason to fight anymore.” Her eyes caught Jack’s again, then cut to Daniel, who lay on the ground an impossible twenty feet away, curled around the blow Cole had landed in his belly. “My mom’s supposed to pick me up at that logging road out on Route 31. You know the place. If you happen to see her there when you leave, would you tell her…that I’m at Jubal’s house. She knows where Ju
bal lives.” Becca looked around at the boys surrounding her. “They’re going to give me a ride there.”
Becca’s mother had died when she was four years old.
The boy who’d had his hand over her mouth, the one with the pouty bottom lip and a skinny rat-tail of blond hair hanging halfway down his back—Jacob something—grabbed her arm and yanked, and she turned to follow him. She must have seen Dougal Dog start to come along, and she made a slight hand motion to the dog, her palm out: stay. That was a command she had taught him, and he obediently sat down, whining softly. After that, she didn’t look back, just continued down the valley with the boys surrounding her on all sides. Jack watched them until they were out of sight, then pushed off from the tree, staggered to Daniel and knelt/fell in the dirt beside him. Daniel had uncurled and was trying to push himself up onto his hands and knees.
“We can’t let them just take her—I’m going to follow them,” Jack said, hearing his own intention for the first time as spoke the words.
He started to rise, but Daniel grabbed his arm. “I know where they’re taking…” he said, with not quite enough air to push out all the words. “Help me up.”
Jack staggered up, grabbed Daniel’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “How do you know?”
“She told us,” Daniel was still gasping. “She said she was going to Jubal’s house.”
That hadn’t made any sense to Jack. Becca didn’t have any girlfriends named Jubal. She didn’t have any friends at all except for him and Daniel.
“Remember in Bible study last week—in Genesis—Jubal was the father of music.” Jack didn’t remember but wasn’t surprised that Becca and Daniel apparently did. “Music…the Melody Creek Rest Area—get it?”
How’d Becca manage to come up with all that on the spur of the moment—scared as she was? Jack’s admiration for her swelled in his chest.
Daniel took in a painful breath and continued. “They must have parked their bikes there.”
“If they did, they walked all the way around the south side of Bear Claw, and it’s going to take them awhile to walk back. We have to get Bishop.”