by Glenn Rolfe
“So,” John said as he pressed a warm washcloth to the shoulder wound, “let’s hear it.”
“I went to Alvin Caswell’s place,” Pat said. “I went to see if he’d be willing to part with one of the cemeteries he takes care of and—”
John stopped and looked at him. “He did this to you?”
“No, I dumped my bike, like I said, but I was rushing down his driveway and hit a divot or something.”
“You’d tell me if something happened, right?”
“Of course,” Pat said.
John went back to the wound.
“So, my mom, well, she got me all creeped out about this guy.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I had an uncomfortable moment with him the other day myself.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, I was out there, at the cemetery – it’s on my running route – and he sort of appeared out of nowhere and started talking to me. Creepy-ass grin and just weird as hell, if you ask me.”
“Yeah,” Pat said. “I got that impression, too.”
“There’s more to your story,” John said. “Hold this on here.” He handed Pat a piece of gauze to put on his shoulder. “What else happened?”
“I don’t know,” Pat said. “He was just talking to me one minute, then I asked about helping take one of the graveyards off his hands and he just changed. He got super pissed and acted, I don’t know, like some kind of monster. I mean, that’s what it felt like.”
“Move your hand,” John said. Pat did and John placed a couple strips of medical tape to hold the gauze in place. He handed Pat a clean t-shirt. “You can borrow this. I figure the less blood your mom sees the better. Let’s get a look at that wrist. Can you bend it, like this?” John made a fist and gesticulated up and down.
Pat copied the move. “Hurts a little,” he said.
John took the wrist in his hands and applied slight pressure in a few different spots.
“Not bad,” Pat said.
“Good,” John said. “It’s not broken and I think you’re going to be okay.” With that, he dabbed at the marked flesh with the washcloth and grabbed some Band-Aids from one of the drawers under the bathroom counter. “Something’s not right about that Caswell guy. I’d stay away from him.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve had my fill of him.”
“There, almost good as new,” John said.
“Thanks. Say, um, where’s Sarah?”
John’s gaze fell to the floor. Tight-lipped, he leaned back against the bathroom sink and sighed.
“Sorry,” Pat said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s….”
“Really, Johnny, you don’t have to say anything.”
Pat had never seen John and Sarah upset with each other. The very concept seemed alien to him.
“I….” The pain was clear on John’s face. “I fucked up. Major.”
Pat didn’t know what to think.
“I don’t—” Pat began, but John interrupted.
“I got drunk last night. Sarah was upset and left and went to her mom’s, and I went out, got wasted and….” He pounded his fist on the counter. Pat saw the tears fill his eyes. Shaking his head, John dropped a bomb. “I got drunk and let someone I shouldn’t take me home.”
Pat was pretty mature for a fifteen-year-old, but he was still only fifteen. After watching his mother go through all that she’d gone through, he was exposed to more than the average teen, but this – infidelity – was over his head.
“Shit, man,” Pat managed.
“Yeah. I don’t know what to do about it. And fuck, Pat, I shouldn’t be burdening you with this. It’s not something for you to have to deal with.”
“John, dude,” Pat said. “After all you’ve done for me, don’t even think twice, man. You’re not perfect. So what?” Pat bit his lip. John looked guilt-ridden.
“I…” John began.
Pat went to him and put an arm around the man. He didn’t know all that much about John’s life outside of their personal dynamic. Did he have friends? People outside of his wife to confide in? Co-workers? Maybe not.
Pat wasn’t about to let him go through this alone. Whatever it was.
“I’ve never been that guy,” John said. “Even when I’ve had opportunities, it just never crossed my mind. And all this because Sarah wants a baby.”
“I thought you said you guys decided not to have kids, didn’t you?” Pat said.
“Yeah, well, somewhere between decided and can’t seems to be where the problems come in.”
“Oh,” Pat said. He’d never been privy to that part of the conversation. “Couldn’t you guys, like, adopt? I mean if you wanted to have kids.”
“That’s the thing, we had wanted to have our own, tried, tried again, and again, and it just breaks her heart every time. I think we talked about possibly adopting once, but it didn’t sink in and kind of slipped off the table. That’s when we decided to stop trying and decided we’re good just the two of us. But I know deep down, she still holds out hope that we can make it happen. I just don’t want to see the disappointment and heartbreak anymore.” John got up and grabbed a beer from the fridge. “And now I’ve delivered something worse.”
“Do you have to tell her?” Pat asked, walking out to the kitchen. “You’re not going to see this girl again, right?”
John shook his head. “That could be a problem – it’s someone I work with. But I don’t know if I can keep something like this from Sarah. Even if I thought I could, I can only imagine what it would do to my dreams.”
“Your dreams?”
He swigged half the beer and nodded. “Yeah, my shrink tells me guilt sometimes manifests itself in your dreams. And mine have been weird before this.”
Pat thought of his own creepy dream the other night. He couldn’t remember it, but knew it was something to do with the van he’d seen around town.
“I’ve been having these recurring dreams,” John said. “I’m a kid, a little younger than you, and I’m in these graveyards that never seem to end. There are two other kids my age, I guess, well, there are more kids but they never say anything. It’s just me, One Eye and August.”
“You remember their names?”
“Yeah, Sarah thought that was something, too,” John continued. “There’s things….” He started looking around. “Hold on, I’ve been writing them down.”
Pat waited and John returned with the black notebook.
He looked like a mad scientist skimming through the pages.
“Sarah had a book that says the thing with their eyes…One Eye having one eye and August not having any, that maybe there’s something I’m trying not to see. Something I blocked out or….” He suddenly looked lost in thought.
“What is it?” Pat asked.
“I just remembered something that Alvin Caswell said to me in the graveyard. He told me a kid from the neighborhood was kidnapped and murdered and that his mother committed suicide shortly after.”
Pat pictured Caswell’s gross grin upon his face as he spoke of such a tragedy.
“The kid was a friend of mine, well, sort of. He’d only been in Spears Corner for a few months or something. We weren’t best friends, but I don’t remember when he left and I certainly don’t recall him getting murdered.”
“Huh, you’d think something like that would stick with you,” Pat added.
John’s cell phone rang.
He picked it up from the counter.
“It’s Sarah,” he said. “I’ve got to take this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Pat said. “I gotta get home anyway.”
“And Pat,” John said.
“Yeah?”
“Just tell your mom what happened. It’s better than coming up with a lie.”
“I’d tell you the same,” Pat said, “but I’m not sure that�
�d be true. Good luck, Johnny.”
“I told you not to call me that,” he said.
Pat grinned and made his way out the door.
* * *
On his way home, Pat couldn’t stop thinking about what other creepy things must go through Caswell’s head. Talking to a stranger in a graveyard of all places about murders, suicides, and kidnappings, it probably got the weirdo off. He should probably consider himself lucky that he didn’t get attacked today and dragged down to the guy’s basement.
He shuddered at the thought.
And how come he’d never heard of this local murder? How did John not remember? It had been someone he knew. Being the true crime junkie he was, Pat’s need to know more took precedence.
Suddenly he was in no rush to get home and explain his injuries to his mom. Instead he headed downtown. If there was a place that would shed light on this local crime, it would be the Spears Corner Public Library.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Anne Davis, the main librarian, met him at the counter.
“Hi, Patrick,” she said.
He was a regular here and all the librarians knew him by name. He loved the smell of old books and dust. The dust sometimes made him sneeze, but like the quiet here, it was part of the ambiance. He could traverse the aisles running his fingers over the old spines and imagining how many adventures, how many mysteries, how many broken hearts and minds lay in wait. Over the last year and a half, since he’d checked out his first true crime, one on the Manson Family he couldn’t remember the name of, he and Ms. Davis had become quite close. She shared his love for the true crime genre and they regularly discussed new books and new podcasts – she loved My Favorite Murder; he preferred Murder Squad.
“What happened to you?” she asked, her brow scrunching over her blue eyes.
“Dumped it pretty hard on my bike earlier, but I’ll be fine,” Pat said.
She cocked an eye at him, but if she had any further questions about his appearance, she kept them to herself.
“Well, you boys and your bikes.” She paused and held up a finger. “Wait, I just got something in that I think you’ll like.”
She dipped out of sight beneath the counter and came up with a book called American Predator.
“Now, this is one I could not put down,” she said. “It’s about this guy out of Alaska, Israel Keyes—”
“Ms. Davis.”
“Oh, sorry, Patrick, I get carried away. What is it?”
“Maybe I’ll take that one on my way out. I actually came to do a little local research.”
She slid the book to the side of the register. “Oh? What about?”
“Well,” Pat said. “My friend John mentioned something today about a kid that got kidnapped around here…I think he said it was in the nineties.”
Ms. Davis leaned back against the shelf behind her, crossing one arm over her stomach and bringing her fist up to her chin. “Hmm,” she said. “I know something like that happened when I lived in California, I think.”
“Does the library have, like, a section of old newspapers, or one of those micro fitch machines?”
“You mean microfiche,” she corrected him. She stepped through the little swing door behind the counter and motioned for him to follow her. “While we don’t have one of those, I believe we do have all the old Hanson Union Journals.”
She led him out the door and to a set of stairs he’d never been down. The children’s section of the library was to the right and up a separate set of stairs; the section she led him to was normally roped off. He’d always assumed it was a basement for storage of discarded shelves, broken book carts, fans…that sort of thing.
She flicked a light switch, and said, “Be careful.”
The scent of dust and mildew filled his nose.
“How old is this library?” he asked, swatting at a cobweb beneath the low, dull yellow lights.
“It was built in eighteen eighty-one, designed by Henry Richards. We’ve had a number of renovations and additions over the years, but it’s a classic, for sure.”
When they passed through the murky lighting, the path began to shrink as old paintings and random stacks of books crowded in on them.
“Okay, this is what we’re looking for,” she said, stopping before a shelf of neatly labeled yellow boxes. “The newspaper was a bit bigger in the nineties, so we have a few boxes for each year. Did your friend happen to mention the year the kidnapping took place? I was in Riverside in, oh, I suppose it would have been ninety-two to late ninety-five. I know it falls in there somewhere.”
“I think he said it was in nineteen ninety-four.”
“Okay then, that’s what we’ll grab.” She reached for the boxes labeled with that year. After sliding them free of their dust-laden crypts, she handed him two of the boxes, which were a bit heftier than he thought they’d be, and she carried the other two.
“Go on,” she said, nodding for him to head back the way they’d come in.
He reached the stairs and glanced over his shoulder.
“Go on up,” she said. “We’ll take them to the James Spears room. You can use the large oak table in there.”
He loved everything about the library except for the James Spears wing. It was stuffy and seemed to him like a sort of ghost room. He never went in if he could help it. While the rest of the library and its wings were welcoming and had a calming effect on him, the James Spears Room intimidated him. The rumors he read of Spears, the founder of the town, and his sketchy past – Native slaves, KKK alliance, murders of blacks, and his downright frightening speeches to justify his actions – it was the man’s ghostly presence Pat sensed whenever he neared the room.
“Right over there,” Ms. Davis said, as she stepped beside him. Together they walked to the large oak table and set the boxes down.
Jefferson Schulz peeked his head in the doorway. “Anne?”
“Yes?” she said.
“Could I get your help on something? Hi, Patrick,” he said.
“Hey, Jefferson,” Pat called back.
“Well, it’s all yours,” Ms. Davis said. “Just come find me when you’re finished up.”
“Thank you. I will.”
Pat stared up at the oil painting of General Spears. He wished he could ask to have it covered while he was in here, but instead dug his earbuds out of his pockets, put on some Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros and started with the box marked ‘January’. He slowly rifled through each front page and local section, careful not to rip or tear the fragile pages. He saw something about a massacre in Rwanda, a civil war with millions killed, Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, and the one that stood out for him, the suicide of Nirvana front man/songwriter Kurt Cobain. His punk rock roots had drawn him to the early nineties phenomenon in sixth grade. He’d listened to each of their albums until he felt them soak into his very being. They were soft when Pat needed them to be, and loud and abrasive when he felt like screaming at the world. They were like the next generation’s Beatles. The music they created was timeless.
Scouring past the end of winter and through the spring and the first few weeks of summer, Pat found what he was looking for in August.
Missing Spears Corner Youth Believed to Be Kidnapped.
On early Wednesday morning, August 6th, Edna Wilson of Spears Corner reported her son, Ethan, 14, had yet to return home. The youth went out for a bike ride Tuesday morning and never returned. Spears Corner Police are asking anyone with any knowledge of the child or his whereabouts to call the station….
The headline three days later struck like a bullet to the heart.
Body of Missing Youth Found in Litchfield Pond.
According to the report, the victim, Ethan Ripley, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered prior to being discarded in the body of water.
No clues, no suspects, no answers fo
r the boy’s mother or the Spears Corner police.
Pat’s stomach curdled at the awfulness.
This was in his hometown.
He thought of the green van and suddenly wished he were at home.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
John was sitting on the front steps when Sarah pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the car. He’d asked her to come home to talk to him when she called earlier, but he didn’t tell her what it was about. It wasn’t something you told someone over the phone. He exhaled the smoke from his lungs, tossed the butt to the ground, and stamped the coffin nail. Being caught smoking was far from the worst thing he had coming his way. Infidelity felt so foreign. He heard it all the time back in the nineties on Dr. Phil or Sally Jesse Raphael, but it was daytime drama. The act of the deplorable and the inept. Not a sin good-hearted people who’d pulled through years of bullshit and loneliness committed.
Dr. Soctomah may have enlightened him about the weight of something deep and heavy on his mind, but cheating like a no-good son of a bitch made him sick. He’d never be able to live with the sin. As he met her at the car, he bowed his head and couldn’t stop the tears that began to fall.
“What is it?” she asked.
He held a trembling smoke-scented hand to his lips. Ripping the Band-Aid off was the only way he’d escape the monster devouring his insides.
“John, please,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”
“Sarah, I…I need to tell you something and you’re going to think I’m a fucking asshole.”
Her brow scrunched over her watery eyes.
God, this is going to destroy her.
Don’t tell her.
But he had to.
“The other night, I went to The Tap Room. I got drunk.”
From the look on her face, and the way she stepped back, he knew she already knew what he was telling her.
“I ran into someone, and I was fucked up….”
“John…John, what did you do?”
“I slept with someone else. I don’t even remember doing it….” He realized how lame any shitty excuse sounded. He fell silent and let the poisonous ghost between them settle.