While all this looked familiar, one thing catapulted him back thirty years in an instant. The smell. That rich, sweet, tomato-infused smell that only existed in the Venetian. A mix of garlic and oregano and secret spices from the Old Country that Jeff had never smelled anywhere else. The Traina family secret marinara recipe had been guarded for years with more care than Coca Cola’s. If they had sold the property, the magic spell for red sauce would not have gone with it. Katy had to still be here.
Jeff followed the advice of the sign that said “Please Seat Yourself.” A teen girl with raccoon-like eyeliner came to take his order. He didn’t need a menu.
“Chicken parmigiana,” he said. It had been his favorite for years here, even when his parents had brought the family up here for a rare dinner out. The waitress scribbled the order down on a pad of paper. “I used to live here,” he added. “Do Katy and her family still own this place?”
“Yeah, she’s working tonight,” the girl answered. A silver ball bobbed on her tongue as she spoke.
Jeff’s heart skipped a beat. He pulled out a business card from his wallet and handed it to the girl. “Pass her this and tell her there’s a guy out here who owes her a corsage.”
The girl sighed at the thought of doing messenger duty and didn’t even look at the card.
Jeff was starting on his salad when she arrived. He looked up. Katy was lit to perfection by the candlelight. He might have been pushing fifty, but she didn’t look a day over thirty. Her hair was down to her shoulders and still a shimmering black. The freckles on her cheekbones were still enchanting. She looked down at Jeff, and for a moment he worried that she still held a three-decade-old grudge. Then she smiled a radiant Katy smile. She flicked Jeff’s business card at him.
“How dare you send in your business card like you’re some sales rep for olive oil?” she said. She bent down and kissed his cheek. There was a scent at her neck that smelled like lilac and rose. She sat across from him. “I thought it was a joke until I asked what you ordered. When Kelly said chicken parm, I knew it was you.”
“You look great,” Jeff said. He hoped he didn’t sound as awestruck as he felt.
“Kitchen steam keeps me hydrated,” she said. “You look good, too.”
“Fawning praise won’t help you,” Jeff said. “The waitress gets the tip. So you’re running the place?”
“The folks threw in the towel and retired to Boca Raton,” Katy said. “Dad made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. You seem to have eked out a living as well Mr…” She picked up the business card from the table. “…Chief Executive Officer. You are the most famous member of the Class of ’80. You came home because you couldn’t get decent Italian food in California?”
“Well, I can’t but that wasn’t the reason for the trip,” Jeff said. “The trip ended up being for a funeral. Bob Armstrong died. Cancer.” He opted for the simple lie.
“Oh, God,” Katy said. “We’re not old enough for that, are we?”
“I didn’t think so. The whole Half Dozen came back home.”
“I’m sorry,” Katy said. She reached out and touched Jeff’s hand. It felt like being kissed by the sun. “He really didn’t look good at the thirtieth reunion.”
“You went to the reunion?”
“Well, I live here. It’s not like it was a big deal. I also figured it would be good advertising for the Venetian. I saw a bunch of people I’d completely forgotten about. But of the Half Dozen, only Bob was there.” A sad look crossed her face. “No one talked to him. He wandered around by himself, nursing a soda.”
He was searching to see if any of the Half Dozen were there, Jeff thought. When we weren’t, he called us home himself.
“Those bastards,” Jeff said. “Everyone judging him for something so long ago.”
“Arson is a big thing,” Katy said. “And torching a landmark tends to stick in the collective memory. Anyway, I went and spoke with him for a while. He looked pale and drawn. I guess that was the cancer. He seemed nervous, distracted. He was in a hurry to leave, understandable since no one made him feel welcome.”
The waitress delivered a steaming plate of chicken and pasta. Katy stood to go.
“Eat that before it gets cold,” she said. “You’ll miss half the flavor. I’ve got to get back to work.”
Jeff wasn’t ready to let this moment end. “What are you doing after closing?” he said.
“Inventory. End of the month.”
“Need help?”
“Can you still count?”
“Contrary to the evaluation of our tenth-grade trig teacher, yes I can.”
Katy mulled it over and smiled. “Be here at eleven,” she said. “And don’t embarrass yourself by trying to pay for this meal.”
Several hours later Jeff returned to the Venetian. The parking lot was empty. Inside, the table candles were all snuffed. The staff was gone and Katy sat at one of the tables by herself. She smiled as Jeff walked in. For a millisecond he felt seventeen, when the world was fresh and clean and capital funding problems, corporate tax rates and alimony payments weren’t in his dictionary. And there was no Woodsman. He snapped back to the present and sat down.
“No clipboard and calculator?” he asked.
“Slow night,” she said. “Finished inventory before we closed. I thought we’d talk. How are you taking Bob’s death?”
“Where do I start?” Jeff said. Indeed, where? At a friend getting terminal cancer with half a life ahead of him? At an inexplicable suicide? At the possible return of the Woodsman and the impending death of innocent children? He’d stick with item number one. “It’s tough on all of us. I assumed somehow we wouldn’t face mortality.”
“That would have been nice,” Katy said. “How’s everyone else handling it?”
“About the same.”
“How’s Dave doing?”
“Huh?” Dave?
“His leg,” Katy said. “It was so screwed up after his accident.”
“Not too bad,” Jeff said. Katy asking about Dave? “Nice of you to remember.”
“How could I forget after all the nursemaid time I spent with him Senior Summer?” Katy said. “His first steps on it were something to see.”
“You helped him all summer?”
“Well his so-called friends weren’t there,” she said. “I felt sorry for him and it turned out nice for both of us.”
This revelation hit Jeff like a sledgehammer. Dave with Katy? What the hell? He hid his shock at the revelation.
“Your wife didn’t come out with you?” she said.
“That’s upcoming ex-wife,” Jeff said. “No, she had other plans.”
“That’s number three for you, right?”
This whole conversation was going sideways fast.
“I’m impressed you’ve kept track,” Jeff said.
“You were a magazine cover story,” she said. “We all know your sordid past.”
“And yours?”
“I met Jerry at Suffolk County Community College. We’ve been married twenty-eight years. He graduated SUNY Stony Brook and does IT wizardry I can’t begin to understand. I’ve always been a sucker for tech geeks.”
Jeff forced a smile. He hadn’t considered that Katy would be married. But how could she not be?
“We’ve got a set of twins, Jerry Junior and Lindsay. Jerry Junior is an architect in the city and Lindsay is a vet at Sagebrook Animal Hospital with a family of her own.”
“Look at you, the poster family for the American success story,” Jeff said. “With all that, why do you keep slugging it out here in the trenches of the Venetian?”
“Tradition, sense of family, sense of obligation,” Katy said. “I grew up working here. You remember that. It’s a part of me. As long as the place turns a profit, Jerry’s cool with it.”
“He sounds great.”
“He is.”
A leaden silence filled the room. Jeff’s vision of some sort of idyllic Hollywood reunion was long since flushed away. But he did
come here with something to say, so…
“This will sound stupid,” Jeff said. “And I can’t explain it all right now. But I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“For…?”
“For our senior year. For the prom. For disappearing that summer. For being a boyfriend who wasn’t as good as you deserved.”
“Gee, Jeff,” Katy said. “Has that been percolating for a few decades or what?”
Jeff flashed a sheepish smile. “Not exactly. But being home for the first time since then, with the perspective I have now, I just thought it needed to be said.”
“It’s fine,” Katy said. “No girl had a chance breaking into the Half Dozen’s circle. Something bound you guys together tight. And it still does.”
You have no idea, Jeff thought.
“Someday, I’ll fill you in on the details,” Jeff said. He stood. “I’m going to go. It’s great to see you.”
“Same here,” Katy said. She stood and hugged him. Lilacs and roses again, freshly applied. “Tell Dave to drop by.”
Top of my list, Jeff thought.
“And keep an eye on the rest of the Half Dozen,” she said. “I’ll assume they haven’t grown up.”
“Solid assumption,” Jeff said. “See you.”
He walked to his car and tried to rationalize that the betrayal he felt was stupid. Katy had dumped him. He had blown off Dave after his injury. Nobody owed him anything and hell they were all seventeen and it was thirty years ago.
But just like being called “Sparky” hit an old, raw nerve, this little piece of news did the same. So much of the world had turned inside out that last week of school, so much destroyed forever. His romantic vision of Katy, the perfect girl, was about all the nostalgia he’d had left for Sagebrook. Now that had been dashed as well.
He drove off wondering how this trip could get any worse.
Act II:
Rendition
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1980
When the Half Dozen split up in search of the Woodsman, Ken drew Seaman’s Park, the playground complex a few miles west of the green. From his car he watched a dozen small kids scamper around seesaws and swings as they cultivated the instant friendship found among kids of similar ages. Sunlight flashed on bright, white smiles, and the occasional scream rose up in response to some act of derring-do.
The park had a spiral slide, which Ken had thought was the coolest thing in the world when he was in elementary school. The line of kids at its ladder said the sentiment was still widespread. Ken envied their excitement over such simple pleasures. He had already been succumbing to the stress of maintaining his grades and sweating college admission letters all year. Now add in the Woodsman. He felt a lot older than seventeen.
He pondered the futility of the Half Dozen’s efforts. What were the odds that a few kids cruising around town would cross paths with the Woodsman? The operation made panning for gold look like a sure thing. Only Marc had the common sense to start with some research.
By six, the last of the kids went home for dinner and Ken followed their example.
Later that night, Ken had trouble falling asleep, plagued by the memory of the death of Josie Mulfetta. He nodded off near midnight to a vivid, terrifying dream, the first he’d had since the night of the lightning strike two weeks ago.
In it, he stood at a clearing at the top of a hill. The cloudless sky was an unbelievable aquamarine. Forest stretched away forever from the base of the hill. A single oak tree stood in the clearing. It had to be a hundred feet tall, and the branches stretched out half that wide.
The deceptive, idyllic scene could not erase the sense that something awful had been here, something Woodsman-level awful, and it would be back. The tingling hairs on the back of his neck told him it would be soon. He could see half a mile across the hilltop clear cut in all directions, but that gave him no peace. He had a feeling the Woodsman didn’t need to saunter up the hill.
Ken walked around the tree. The branches were filled with dark green leaves and heavy with clusters of brown acorns. Some of the branches came to an abrupt end as if a ragged saw had hacked the end off the limb. The tip of each truncated branch was singed black, and the leaves closest to the cut were brown and withered.
A smell enveloped him, an awful, putrid stench like rotting skunk. The warning tingle in his neck got more intense. He knelt and found that the wretched stink came from the bare earth around the base of the tree. He scraped away the soft earth with his hands, flailing at it like a dog searching for a bone. With each handful, the smell got worse.
He exposed a root. The flat black wood crumbled at his touch. The inside was a spongy decayed honeycomb. Millipedes slithered through the crevices. The smell was so foul he nearly choked.
Ken jolted awake. Sweat soaked his armpits. His heart pounded out a Van Halen beat in his chest. This was just how he’d felt after the dream of the giant squid in the pond, the nightmare after the lightning strike. He breathed a sigh of relief that this time he hadn’t pissed the bed in fright. That first dream had been a warning of the Woodsman’s return. This one had to mean something as well.
He wondered why he was getting the dreams when no one else had. His brain had always been different with that photographic memory thing. What special breaker had the lightning strike tripped in his head?
He needed to do research after school today, but Marc had probably pumped the library well of information dry that afternoon. Ken had a feeling he’d need some details on local lore, and there was only one place to find it.
He checked the clock by his bed. Three fifteen a.m. and he was wide awake. It was going to be a long day.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
That morning, the Half Dozen met to compare notes. Paul and Jeff had as productive an afternoon as Ken and saw neither hide nor hair of the Woodsman at several spots around town. There was a tacit agreement that the idea had been pretty stupid.
Ken kept his bizarre dream about the rotten tree to himself.
Marc filled them in on his research and showed them the map of the possible Woodsman incidents he had marked. There was no question they were clustered around the old village.
Current commitments trumped another fruitless Woodsman search anyway. After school, the Half Dozen split in multiple directions. Jeff went with Katy to the florist, Bob to the diner for an eight-hour shift, Paul for a stint in the lifeguard’s chair down at Sagebrook Beach. Ken had to investigate where he thought his dream had directed him.
The Sagebrook Historical Society occupied the restored first schoolhouse in the township. The tiny, one-room building wore layers of gray wood shingles with a steep roof to shed the winter’s heaviest snows. The long white storm shutters were always closed to keep the sun’s destructive rays from the relics within. This also made the museum look consistently closed, which suited the matrons that ran it just fine.
Sagebrook may have annexed more land over the years, but the town’s founding families didn’t recognize the expanded boundaries. For them, the town ended where the town had ended at the turn of the twentieth century, before roads were widened for automobiles and the Long Island Railroad turned the outlying farms into cookie-cutter housing. The ladies of that mindset populated the Sagebrook Historical Society and operated the schoolhouse museum as a tribute to their past more than as a resource for current generations. They had the knowledge to help answer some of Ken’s questions, but would they have the desire?
It took a moment for Ken’s eyes to adjust when he entered the building. The few bulbs running along the exposed rafters offered little light. Two rows of waist-high display cases flanked the room’s center. Each had its own flickering bulb to illuminate the artifacts within. The thick, musty smell scratched at the back of Ken’s throat.
At the far end, in front of a wall of books, was the original schoolhouse teacher’s desk. A woman in her late forties sat enthroned behind it. She wore a Victorian era blouse with a high, ruffled collar and a broach at the neck. He
r black hair, streaked with gray, was tied into a bun tight enough to make a woman of lesser breeding wince. The patrician class in the museum favored period dress. They claimed it added authenticity for the visitors. Since visitors were rare, the townspeople figured the women just liked to dress that way.
Ken smiled at the woman, whose brass badge said “M. Childress”. She returned a disapproving scowl. Ken immediately knew that a direct set of questions wouldn’t be worth a damn. He browsed the displays in the hope that a feigned interest would score some points.
The collection of relics was surprisingly good. Ken focused on the Colonial period section. If the Woodsman’s clothing betrayed his origins, he’d be from the 1700s. There were scrimshawed whalebone pipes from the unreal era when whales swam in Long Island Sound. There were tools and clothing and tarnished silverware with designs too intricate to reproduce today. Each item had a card next to it that read something like:
Silver Tongue Scraper
1750s
On loan from Mrs. Miles Wentworth
Though some artifacts had estimated vintages, there was no doubt about any of the items’ provenances. Each one listed an owner and all were “on loan”. If the museum folded, the village elite weren’t about to sacrifice their keepsakes.
The bottom shelf of one cabinet held an interesting book. It was bound in leather, and the title was hand stamped in gold on the cover and spine:
A Century of Sagebrook History
1690-1790
Cracks crisscrossed the cover, and the edges of the hand-cut pages were uneven as an Escher staircase. The book promised some answers if the grim-faced witch in the back would let Ken read it. The cabinet’s rear sliding door had no lock. Ken would have gone for it if he hadn’t felt Ms. Childress’ eyes burning a hole in his back.
He continued his casual perusal of the museum and ended in front of the matron in charge. She looked up from her copy of the Sagebrook Standard. He flashed a big grin. She grimaced.
“I’m doing some research on Sagebrook’s history,” Ken said.
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