Waylon Ferris’s body was found on February 10, 1973, at Finley’s Crossing, hog-tied backward—something I had a hard time visualizing—with a wooden stake hammered through his chest straight into the ground. A piece of paper with a stickman on it was attached to the stake. I decided I didn’t want to imagine that, so I pushed it from my mind and quickly went past all the photographs in the file.
I’d been below the tracks at Finley’s Crossing before—me and Dewey rode there a few times on our bikes. It was dark down there even in the daytime, on account of all the trees sort of snarled and tangled up around where it had been dug into. The sun never shined down there. I can only imagine how black it was that cold night in February at ten-thirty at night. That’s when, according to the reports, the police found Ferris.
The whole thing put a “twist in my tummy,” as my mother used to say when I was younger. It seemed so senseless, like the Stickman did it for no reason other than to just be able to say he killed someone. And then I realized he couldn’t even tell nobody on account of they would go to the police, so it made even less sense then. Ever since the time I saw the hollowness of Mary Ann Dailey’s eyes, the way the life had been sucked out of ’em as though they’d been replaced with the black button eyes of a rag doll.
It made me wonder about people. I guess I wasn’t old enough to really understand, because even if I hated someone, I couldn’t take all that away from them. And I knew that a lot of the killings my mother had investigated were done by folk who never even knew the people they killed, so they couldn’t even have hated them. They just . . . I don’t know. Again, I figured I just wasn’t old enough to understand.
Part of me hoped I never would be.
From what I could tell from the file, the only evidence found at that first crime scene that police thought might be important were the tire tracks of a vehicle parked nearby. There were photos of the tread marks, along with measurements. The notes said the imprints were likely made by a truck with a 132.9-inch wheelbase and 16.5-inch tires. Even I realized this wouldn’t really help in finding the killer. There were a lot of trucks in Alvin, and I bet a lot of them had the same wheelbase and tire size. Not only that, there didn’t seem to be any proof the truck was there when Waylon Ferris was put there. Those tracks could’ve been made near on any time before that.
I moved on to the file for the Stickman’s second victim.
Veda Gamble was a thirty-eight-year-old white woman who worked as a waitress at Camponi’s Italian Restaurant on Main Street, yet another place I’d never heard of. I was starting to realize how much things changed over time. Made me wonder if things might be always changing and you don’t really notice until you look back. I decided to pack that one away and think on it when I had nothing else to do. Right now I wanted to keep going through these Stickman files. It wasn’t so often I found myself alone enough to chance reading them.
Around seven o’clock in the evening on March 22, 1973, according to a statement written by my grandpa Joe, Veda Gamble’s body was found deep in the woods in Cherry Park Forest. She had gone missing the day before around noon when she had gone out by herself to meet a friend by the name of Veronica Stetson for a coffee at—and I was starting to think this was like an episode of The Twilight Zone—another place in Alvin I never recalled having seen in my life, some place called Beans & Co. on Main Street. According to her friend, Veda Gamble never showed up.
That was pretty much everything I read that was really important. There were pictures, of course, and sketches of the crime scene, but no mention of any solid evidence or anything like that. I found it sad that she didn’t have more stuff in her file. It was like her life just ended, and that was all there was to it. She deserved at least to have a story.
Victim number three’s body showed up around noon in one of the fields way up along First Road. My school bus took that way to get out of Alvin on our way to Satsuma every single day, so I knew that area pretty well. Of course, all them fields looked exactly the same, and they went on for miles before you finally came to forests again. I wondered where exactly in those fields the victim had turned up, but I wasn’t good with addresses. Besides, it was only an estimated guess, as the report said the land he was found on belonged to the county. There were no buildings on it, just witchgrass and dirt.
His name was Lafayette Eagan, and he had been white. I wondered why the reports always had to say what color of skin the victim had. Seemed strange to me, as my mother always told me I shouldn’t even look at skin color, I should be looking at the color of the heart beating underneath all that skin and whether or not that heart was made from steel or flesh. I realized there wasn’t anybody with a real steel heart; she was using the term “metaphorically,” something we just learned about in English class right before summer break started in May.
Mr. Eagan was thirty-nine and it had been April 30, 1973, when my grandpa and someone named Officer Peter Strident found him in the field. There were tire marks found in the soft earth running between First Road and a very broken fence from what I could tell in the file’s pictures. They didn’t look like great tire impressions, at least not from what I knew about them based on Understanding Forensics. According to the report, though, police were able to discern they were made by a vehicle with a 132.9-inch wheelbase and 16.5-inch wheels. Someone had made a check mark beside these two facts and written the initials H.S.? I wondered if that was my grandpa’s writing I was looking at. And what did H.S. mean? My guess was Harry Stork.
I thought those numbers seemed familiar, so I quickly went through the stuff I’d already read and, sure enough, in the reports about the first victim, Waylon Ferris, police found these exact same tire prints. I looked at the two photos but couldn’t tell whether the tread was the same or not. The Polaroid from this new file didn’t show near on enough details. I squinted best I could, and from what I could tell, the actual marks on the tire weren’t the same. But it seemed awfully suspicious that the numbers were. At least to me, but then, I’m naturally suspicious. At least that’s what my mother says.
Just like in Waylon Ferris’s file, this report said the wheelbase and tire width was indicative—a word I had to sound out and still didn’t know what it meant; my dictionary was in my room, and I didn’t feel like fetching it—of a truck, in particular a four-by-four half ton. Once again, it occurred to me that there were a whole mess of trucks in Alvin. That really didn’t narrow things down too well.
Lafayette Eagan was last seen at—and you’re not going to believe this—another place I’d never heard of, called the Just Around the Corner Mercantile. It was on Hunter Road, just like Mr. Harrison’s Five-and-Dime. My mother sometimes referred to Mr. Harrison’s as “the mercantile.” Made me wonder if this place used to be where Mr. Harrison is now.
Anyway, the clerk at the mercantile, a man named Joseph Connelly, was showed a photo of Lafayette Eagan by my grandpa, and the clerk remembered him. Said he came in for a pack of cigarettes and had mentioned he was walking—not driving—and that he was on his way home. That made me wonder where he lived. I lived within walking distance of Mr. Harrison. Lafayette Eagan might’ve been my neighbor if the Stickman hadn’t got him.
That thought made me sad.
Then I heard something that made my heart slam against the inside of my ribs, and it kept slamming again and again like a manic jackhammer somebody lost control of. It was the sound of my mother’s car door closing. She was home. Panic welled up inside me. I quickly looked at the sketch I’d made of how the file folders had been before I started, and in a flurry of paper, I tried my best to put it all back as it was. The pen she always set on top of the stack went flying off behind me in the process. I was just about to start crawling around the floor in search of it when I heard something else. Something I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed before.
Dan was snoring in the living room. Only, it wasn’t the normal freight-train snores he made; this was just a soft and easy snore. My eyes were wide and I fel
t sweat collecting on my head and under my arms. The whole time I’d been in the kitchen going through my mother’s notes and files, Dan had been just two rooms away. He could’ve easily come in and found me. I was so stupid.
My brain was spinning like the back wheels of a Formula One race car trying to get out of a sandpit. I still had the chair at the counter. I quickly pulled it across the floor, banging it against the tiles twice with two very loud thuds! I froze, halfway to the table, listening to see if I’d woken Dan up.
I didn’t hear anything. Not even his quiet snores. I quickly slid the chair the rest of its way back to its spot at the table where it was when I came in the kitchen. I had just squatted down to get on my hands and knees and search for the pen when the back door opened. My mother came right through the dining room and into the kitchen without even taking her boots off.
She smiled at me. “Well, how are you?” she asked.
I stood there, feeling shaky, my eyes glued halfway between the floor and hers. I didn’t know what to do. Without moving, I let my eyes rove around the kitchen floor looking for that pen.
“What’s . . .” she started, trailing off. “What are you doin’?”
“Nothin’!” I said, a mite too loud.
She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being so weird?”
“I’m not. I’m normal. Just . . . doin’ normal things. It’s a normal day.”
“Where’s Dan?”
I just stood there, not knowing what to say. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pen! It was right in front of the fridge.
“Is Dan here?” she asked.
I still didn’t answer, just started trying to sidestep slowly toward the pen. So slowly she wouldn’t notice I was moving.
“Abe,” my mother said. “I asked you a question. Is Dan here? His car’s outside.”
“He’s in there,” I managed to say, nodding my head toward the living room on the other side of the kitchen wall.
“He’s not still asleep, is he?”
Continuing to move sideways so slow I couldn’t be seen by human eyes, I just shrugged.
My mother let out a big breath, shaking her head. “I’ll handle this,” she said and stomped into the living room. Her voice rose and snapped as she accused Dan of sleeping the entire day away, adding something about a hangover. I tried not to listen.
Quickly, I took the opportunity to dive for the pen, coming down on my knees before my hands got in front of me. My leg hit the pen and I desperately grasped for it as it rolled forward, my fingers a fraction of a second too late to stop it from going under the fridge.
I swallowed hard. Sweat clung to the inside of my T-shirt. There was nothing left to do. My fate was sealed.
I was doomed.
CHAPTER 27
Holding hands, Carry and Jonathon walked down Hunter Road toward Main Street. They had no real destination; Main Street was just somewhere they could go where Carry could window-shop. In reality, she just liked walking with Jonathon, holding his hand.
It was somewhere around one in the afternoon, and the rain still fell, although not near on as hard as it had some of the past days. The sky remained gray, but it was a solid shade of gray, without the thunderheads from a few days ago. The color was a lot closer to white than black and it glowed bright, almost like the sun wanted you to know it still lived somewhere behind the thin layer of stratus. This was a definite improvement as, for the past two weeks, it was as though the sun had come down with chemical depression and given up completely, deciding to spend the entire day in bed feeling sorry for itself.
They strolled beneath the boughs of a series of red maples, the trees’ buds gleaming even in this dreary light. Soon they would be in full bloom. The trees were on the other side of a white cedar fence, but their branches spread out past the edge of the sidewalk. The lawn along the underside of the fence was in need of trimming. Rain-soaked tufts of grass burst from the bottom of the fence posts like green hedgehogs out for blood.
“So,” Jonathon said, “what did you do for fun before I came along?”
Carry laughed. “Life wasn’t fun before you came along.”
The fence they’d been following ended, and the roadside became sparsely wooded. Pepper trees, black walnut, poplar, and even more maples now lined the side of the road. These maples weren’t of the red variety, though. They didn’t quite have the same effect.
“Oh, come on,” Jonathon replied. “You know that isn’t true. You had Abe and Dewey to entertain you.” A squirrel darted out of the woods carrying some sort of nut, took one look at the two of them, and scurried back the way it came, dropping its nut before leaping off the sidewalk.
Carry laughed again, this time even louder than before. “You find Abe and Dewey entertainin’? I just find ’em as annoying as hell.” She looked back. The squirrel returned to grab its dropped treasure.
“I find them fascinating.”
“Squirrels?” Carry asked.
“No. Abe and Dewey. Especially Dewey.”
“Well, you can find them fascinatin’ on your own time. This is my time, and I’m sick of all of our conversations windin’ up being about my dweeby brother and his dweeby friend.”
“All right then,” Jonathon said. “If you didn’t rely on them for fun, what did you do?”
Carry thought about this. “You know, the regular stuff everyone does. Watched TV, sometimes read a book, wrote poetry, hung out with friends, occasionally went out for dinner—”
“Hold up,” Jonathon said, cutting her off. “You write poetry? Why am I only learnin’ about this now?”
“You never asked before now.”
“Are you a good poet?”
She laughed yet again. “No, I’m a crappy poet. But I am—or at least was—fairly prolific. I used to write two poems a day. One just as I was wakin’ up and another just when I was goin’ to bed.” They passed a bunch of hydrangea bushes. A yellow and black butterfly was flitting around the branches and leaves dodging raindrops.
“You’ll let me read them, right?” Jonathon asked.
“Hell no! You’d just laugh at me.”
“I would never laugh at you.”
“You still aren’t reading my poems, they’re kind of personal. Besides, they’re mostly depressin’.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because my life was depressing before I met you.”
“Have you written anything since meeting me?”
They stopped, and Carry stared into his eyes, feeling the day’s glow glimmering in her own, making her blink. “Honestly?” she asked. “I haven’t. I don’t think. Um . . . No. I really haven’t.” She smiled.
“But you’ll let me read some you wrote before, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, you gotta.”
“Why do I gotta?”
“It’s part of you. I want to know all the parts I can.”
She sniffled as rain dripped off her nose. “Let me think ’bout it, okay?”
“Okay,” Jonathon said. They walked on, continuing their way down Hunter Road, walking past Raven Lee’s Pizzeria before turning onto Main Street.
“How come you never work there anymore?” Carry asked.
“My grandpa’s pizza shop?”
“Yeah.”
“He hasn’t asked me to. I really didn’t ever work there a lot. When we met, I was just helping him out over the Christmas holidays. They’re a busy time for him.”
Carry scrunched up her face, thinking this over. “People eat more pizza at Christmastime than other times?”
Jonathon just nodded.
“Weird,” Carry said. “Why?”
Jonathon shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s festive.”
“I don’t remember Baby Jesus ever eating pizza,” Carry said. “Come to think of it, that’s what one of the wise men should’ve brought. The guy who brought the myrrh. He should’ve brought a pepperoni, bacon, and mushroom sixteen-inch pizza instead.” She smi
led at Jonathon. “You could’ve delivered it. Nobody really likes myrrh.” Main Street looked washed out as Carry stared through the drizzle at the rows of shops growing smaller and smaller toward the horizon’s vanishing point.
“So, is your ma still busy goin’ after that Stickman guy?” Jonathon asked. “Or is that all done now?”
“She’s obsessed with it. I can’t believe you don’t know this and you actually come to my house.”
“Her and Dan are never home. Not when I’m there, anyway.”
Carry watched the sidewalk in front of them. “Still,” she said, “don’t you think you’d have heard if she’d caught him yet?”
Jonathon shrugged. “Two weeks ago it was everywhere, all over the papers, the news, everything. Now it’s like it never happened. Funny how quick people forget stuff like that. Stuff that seemed so important, like, just a breath or two ago, you know?”
“I guess. I’m not like that. Well, I guess I kind of am. My interests change.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I used to collect fairies and dragons. Now I’m not so interested in fairies and dragons.”
She glanced down to her left hand, where a drop of rain had collected on the dark purple stone of her promise ring, making it appear even bigger. She smiled, but kept the smile to herself.
“What do you mean you ‘collected fairies and dragons’?” Jonathon asked.
“Statues. I’ll show you when we get back to my place.”
“How many of them do you have?”
“Actually, now, just one of each. I had a few dragons and five fairies at one point, but I gave them away to my cousin. She just turned thirteen. I thought she’d give them a better home than I could.”
“Why did you keep one of each?”
“They were my favorites. Even when you outgrow things, you still have favorites that you loved the most. It’s like anything. If you loved something and then it’s gone, you don’t stop loving it.” Carry thought over how to explain what she meant, but didn’t come up with much. “You just learn to love the memory of it, I guess.”
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