The First Time I Died

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Down, Domino. Sit!” Colby’s father said.

  “Any news?” I asked, rubbing the spotted dog behind the ears.

  Mr. Beaumont shook his head. His eyes were red and puffy.

  “Why hasn’t the search started yet?” I was impatient to get going.

  “We’re waiting for instructions from Chief Turner,” he said. “Roger thinks we should search the woods north of town.”

  “Why there?” I asked.

  “Get me a cup of coffee, will you, Garnet?” my father said.

  A refreshments table had been set up in the bandstand and was being manned by Jessica’s mother and father. Mrs. Armstrong, wearing skintight jeans, high-heeled boots and a determined smile, was serving the volunteers hot drinks. Beside her, Doc Armstrong handed out donuts.

  “Thank you for your community spirit,” she said to me, as she said to everyone. “Coffee or hot chocolate?”

  “Two coffees, please.” I stirred three sugars into mine and left my dad’s plain.

  “Give her a donut, Alan,” she told her husband.

  From the smell of Doc Armstrong’s breath, he’d already added a shot of something stronger than half-and-half to his morning coffee.

  “We’ll have chicken soup and rolls by noon,” Mrs. Armstrong assured me. “That should warm you all up.”

  I had no intention of eating lunch at the bandstand. By midday, if not sooner, Colby would be wrapped in a blanket, sitting beside me in the back of his father’s BMW or maybe an ambulance, on his way to the hospital for a checkup. He’d be holding my hand tightly and wearing a smile on his chapped lips as he told me all about how he’d ridden out the monster storm — perhaps in a garden shed, while eating turnips and sleeping under old dog blankets. I’d kiss the tip of his cold nose and promise never to let a mad word escape my lips again, and he’d fall asleep with his head on my shoulder. At the hospital, the doctors would pat him on the shoulder, tell him he was a lucky man, and declare him free of any lasting damage. We’d go home together and lie on his bed with him curled around the back of me, his lips against my neck. That was what would happen today.

  “We’ll have found Colby by then,” I told Mrs. Armstrong.

  She hesitated, then said, “Of course, dear.”

  “Is Jessica around?”

  “With the school group, over there.” She pointed to a gang of teens behind the bandstand.

  As I strode over to my father to give him his coffee, Police Chief Frank Turner gave the horn on a megaphone a quick blast to get everyone’s attention. Standing on the top step of the bandstand, he laid out plans for the search.

  “We don’t want any more kids going missing, so I’m going to ask that anyone eighteen or under stays in town and searches the streets and yards, sticking together in groups. Mrs. … Mrs. …” He gestured in the direction of Jessica’s mother.

  “Armstrong,” she said, looking peeved that he hadn’t remembered her name.

  “Yeah, Mrs. Armstrong has a pile of missing-person posters for you to attach to lampposts.”

  Mrs. Armstrong switched on her practiced smile and held up the posters with Colby’s photograph. A squeeze of fear tightened my insides. I looked away from the picture, studying my feet, focusing on the patterned footprints crisscrossing each other in the snow all around where I stood.

  “Roger and Philip Beaumont will be searching the woods north of town.”

  “I’ll go with them,” my father told me.

  I thought this was a stupid idea and told him so. “Colby didn’t set out for a hike through the woods at night!”

  “Officer Ryan Jackson will lead the search down at the pond, walking the strip between the Tuppenny Tavern, where Colby was last seen, and here, then searching the perimeter of the pond wherever access is possible,” Chief Turner continued.

  My father shook his head at this. “Waste of time. Why would he be at the pond?”

  “Why would he be in the woods?” I retorted.

  Why would he be anywhere except at home, texting me happily about school being closed because of the snow?

  The chief explained that he’d be keeping an eye on proceedings, while patrolling the highways leading in and out of town, searching for signs of an accident or any indication that Colby had hitchhiked out of Pitchford. You didn’t have to be a genius to know that he was just too lazy to join the search on foot. Probably the only time he’d get out of his cozy cruiser would be to top up on coffee and donuts at the bandstand.

  “Do not search in groups of less than three. Do not wander off alone. Do not stay out after dark.” Turner sucked on his teeth for a few moments. “Mrs. Armstrong has the missing-person posters.”

  “He’s repeating himself,” I grumbled under my breath. “We’re wasting time. We need to get going.”

  “Call me if you find anything,” Turner ordered. “Check in with Officer Jackson every hour and meet back here by three-thirty. The forecast predicts clear conditions, but if the weather turns, get back here immediately. Good luck, people. Let’s end with a prayer.”

  While Turner prayed for God’s help in locating Colby, I finished my coffee and looked around at the bowed heads. I had no time for prayers. If God existed and cared enough to help find Colby, why hadn’t He stopped him getting lost in the first place? We should already be out there, searching.

  “Where’s Mrs. Beaumont?” I asked my father, not bothering to keep my voice down.

  “She’s at home. Apparently, Cassie’s not well and can’t come out in the cold,” he whispered back.

  I noticed Colby’s older sister, Vanessa, had joined the small group of searchers by Ryan Jackson. Clearly, she also thought the woods were a waste of time.

  “Amen,” Turner finally concluded, and the volunteers split into their groups and splintered off in all directions.

  I found Jessica, and we followed a group of seniors toward the part of town where Colby and I lived, while the guys from Colby’s swim team opted to search Main Street. Nothing would have kept me from searching the woods or around the pond if I thought Colby might be there. But I knew he was most likely to be near his house or mine because I’d texted him on Sunday night begging him to come see me, so we could talk. He’d ignored my message, so I’d sent more, getting madder and madder, telling him it was urgent and not to be a jerk. But he’d never replied, and he’d never arrived.

  The last time I’d seen him had been on Friday at school. He’d seemed as distracted and worried as I’d been, but it couldn’t have been about the same thing, could it? As I trudged up the hill, scanning the streets for any sign of him, the thought occurred to me that maybe he’d noticed something, put two and two together, and developed a strong desire to avoid me. An instant later, I felt guilty for doubting him.

  Colby being Colby, it was much more likely that he had set out to come visit me, so we could talk, and when the storm suddenly hit, he’d taken shelter somewhere. Or perhaps fallen into a ditch, or been knocked over in a hit and run. It didn’t seem very likely; things like that didn’t happen in Pitchford. But then again, disappearances didn’t happen in Pitchford.

  7

  THEN

  Wednesday December 19, 2007

  “Colby! Col-by!” I yelled.

  A group of guys — including Pete Dillon and his sidekicks Dave and Brandon, and most of the football team — walked ahead of us along Algonquian Street, bitching loudly about the cold and doing a poor job of hanging the posters on the street lights. Jessica and I went after them; she maneuvered the posters higher up on the poles, and I tightened the strings even though I had to take off my gloves to do so. Pete and his fellow asshats kept their gloves on, and their laughs and shouts echoed above the dull silence of the snow-covered streets, making me angrier by the second. When they all cracked up at some joke Pete made, I stormed up to them and shoved him in the back, sending him stumbling.

  “Stop screwing around!” I said.

  Brandon made a mocking oooh sound, and Dave said, “Chil
l, McGee,” but Pete gave me an unreadable look and then nodded.

  “Let’s go check Pequot Street,” he told his crew, and they jogged off down the road in the opposite direction.

  I marched on, sweeping my gaze left and right, squinting against the glare reflecting off the snow.

  “You okay?” Jess asked me.

  “No.”

  I grabbed a long stick from a downed tree limb and gently poked it into snow drifts, testing for the resistance of human flesh.

  “Are you … I mean, have you started your period yet?”

  “No.”

  I tramped around the side of the Ingram house, where they had a tool shed. A bank of snow was piled up against the door, resisting my attempts to yank it open. Under my rough treatment, a daggerlike icicle dislodged from the eaves and plummeted down, narrowly missing my foot.

  “Watch it!” Jessica said. “Here, let me.”

  She was taller than me, and stronger, and she managed to work the door open a few inches. I peered inside. Lawnmower, axe, gas can, saw, rake, snow shovel. No Colby.

  Breaths misting the air and noses dripping from the bitter cold, we returned to the street and walked on, checking every yard, combing the hedges and bushes, plowing through the mounds of snow on either side of the road. Calling for Colby.

  When we reached the big stormwater pipe where kids sometime hid to drink and smoke, I hopped down into the gully and burrowed into the slope of snow covering the opening.

  “Garnet?” Jess said, like she strongly suspected I’d entirely lost the plot.

  “Maybe he fell and took shelter here from the storm,” I said, digging and scraping until I broke through the snow and looked inside the pipe. In the dim light, I could just make out the crumpled shape of a body curled in on itself.

  “There!”

  “Is it him?” Jessica demanded.

  “I think so!”

  Heart jumping like a jackrabbit, I crouched down and crawled into the pipe, scrambling toward the dark heap ahead of me. I was within touching distance of the shape when I saw what it was — just a big garbage bag stuffed with trash, spilling empty cans and plastic bottles.

  “He has to be here. He has to,” I said, my voice a rough sob.

  I plunged my hands into the bag and scrabbled around, crying out as a sharp pain burned my left palm.

  “Garnet? What happened?” Jess called from outside.

  I had to find him.

  “Colby,” I cried. “Colby!”

  I pulled out handfuls of potato peelings, a clumped mass of paper towel wet with dark stains, candy wrappers, and soggy newspaper which disintegrated between my fingers, then collapsed and lay sobbing in the bottom of the pipe.

  “I’m calling Chief Turner,” Jessica yelled. A few minutes later she crept into the pipe beside me and hauled me into a sitting position. “It’s okay, shhh, it’s okay. Just hold onto me,” she crooned, holding me against her while I wept.

  “It’s not okay. He isn’t here. He isn’t anywhere, I can feel it. He’s gone, he’s dead, I know it.”

  “Shhh.” She hugged me tight. “You don’t know that. We’ve still got the whole town to search.”

  “He’s gone and died and left me alone.”

  She held me against her, rubbing my back and whispering words of false hope. By the time Chief Turner arrived, I had subsided into hiccups.

  “Garnet McGee, is that you? Come on out.”

  I shook my head and clung to Jessica.

  “She doesn’t want to, Chief.”

  “Look, don’t make me come in and fetch you. I’m not a slight little thing like you girls — I’ll get stuck and they’ll need dynamite to unplug my sorry ass. Come out. We need your help. Don’t you want to help us find Colby?”

  I crept out, shivering and dripping a strand of blood beads onto the snow from the cut on my hand. The small crowd gathered around the pipe gaped at me.

  “Stop staring and go find Colby!” I cried.

  “Jessica, you go on searching with these folks. I’ll have a chat with Garnet and dress that cut on her hand,” Turner said.

  “There’s paper towel with bloodstains on it back there,” I told him, pointing at the pipe.

  “I’ll get it checked out. You come with me, now.”

  At his cruiser, he retrieved a medical kit from the trunk and said, “What say we take care of your wound inside the comfort of the vehicle?”

  He was red-faced and puffing from the exertions of climbing into and out of the gully, and I figured he’d drop dead of a heart attack directly if he had to chase me, so I climbed into the passenger seat. He eased himself inside, sniffed, then started the engine and let it idle with the heater blowing at full blast.

  “Colder than a witch’s tit out there,” he grumbled. “Now, let me see that hand of yours.”

  I stuck my throbbing hand out to the side but stared silently ahead. The windscreen was misting up and the interior getting muggy with the heat and damp. The rotten, decaying smell of the filthy stormwater pipe rose off my muddy clothes.

  Turner examined my hand, asking, “So, Garnet, you’re Colby’s girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.” Obviously.

  “Sure ‘bout that?”

  “If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be creeping around storm water drains where he isn’t.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and sucked his teeth loudly.

  I felt a cool stinging sensation on my hand and a tugging pain as he wiped it with something. “This might need a stitch or three.”

  I rubbed a forearm against my window, clearing a circle through which I could check outside.

  “Know of any reason why he might have run away?” Turner asked.

  “He didn’t run away.”

  More sucking of his teeth.

  “His car is still parked at his house, and his mother says none of his clothes are missing,” I added.

  “She told me his phone and his laptop are, though.” Turner rubbed ointment onto the cut. “She also told me it’s all happy families at home, no fights. That right?”

  “He … He maybe mentioned some stuff, but nothing that would make him run away, just like a few arguments with his little sister, disagreements with his parents about what he’ll do when he leaves school. The usual stuff.”

  I felt him stick a bandage over the burning cut.

  “Did he fight with you?”

  “No.” I rubbed at my hand, pressing the edges of the Band-Aid down hard.

  “Uh-huh.” More sucking of his teeth. “No problems between you at all?”

  No way was I going to tell Turner about any problems Colby and I may or may not have had.

  “Look,” I said, “shouldn’t you be out there searching for him, instead of sitting here asking me dumb questions that have nothing to do with his disappearance? Something’s happened to him.”

  Turner’s phone rang just then, startling me with its loud claxon sound.

  I studied his face intently as he took the call, trying to divine whether it was news about Colby.

  “Yeah … Yeah. Is that right? Uh-huh. Hmm. And where exactly? … And it’s definitely his? … I see. I’m on my way.”

  “What? What is it?” I demanded as he slipped the car into gear and we pulled off.

  “That was Richard.”

  “Who’s Richard?”

  “The boy’s uncle.”

  “Roger. His name is Roger.”

  “Of course. It seems that search party north of town found a blue woolen cap belonging to young Colby.”

  “They found his beanie? In the woods?”

  “They found it alongside the highway.” He cut me a sideways glance. “Right where a hitchhiker in a hurry might accidentally drop something on his way out of town.”

  “He didn’t run away,” I repeated.

  “Uh-huh. And was he into drugs?”

  “No. He didn’t even smoke pot.”

  �
�You sure ‘bout that?”

  “I’d know.”

  He sucked his teeth in a way that conveyed extreme skepticism. I was about to explain how Colby felt about drugs, about dealers like Blunt, when the radio on the dashboard crackled.

  “Frank? Ryan here. I’m at the pond, at the little bay about three hundred yards north of the Tavern. You need to come down here, quick as you can.”

  “I’ve got the McGee girl with me. We’re on our way to the boy’s father and uncle. They found his knitted cap beside the highway. I’ll come down to you just as soon as I’ve checked with them.”

  “You need to get here now, Frank. We’ve found … something.”

  8

  NOW

  Saturday December 16, 2017

  I read the headline in the newspaper again.

  Tenth Anniversary of the Disappearance of Colby Beaumont.

  Ten years ago today — could that be right? I’d been bracing myself for the nineteenth. But yes, he’d gone missing on three days before.

  My gaze returned to the photograph. The grainy black-and-white picture didn’t do him justice. Colby Beaumont had been golden. Tall, with fair skin and honey-colored hair, eyes the color of maple syrup in the sunshine, and a wicked grin. He’d shimmered with life and joy.

  The picture blurred. I dashed a quick hand across my eyes and read on.

  Colby Beaumont, eighteen years old at the time, went missing on the evening of Sunday, December sixteenth, 2007, on his walk home from the Tuppenny Tavern in Pitchford, and was never seen alive again.

  A severe snowstorm impeded initial search efforts, and it was only when the weather cleared that Pitchford’s residents could join local police in combing the town and surrounding areas. On December nineteenth, Police Officer Ryan Jackson found Beaumont’s body submerged under a cracked section of thin ice near the shore of Plover Pond.

  The state’s chief medical examiner conducted the autopsy at the Burlington Mortuary and confirmed the cause of death to be drowning, while the manner of death was declared to be undetermined. According to the autopsy report, Beaumont had been assaulted and severely beaten immediately prior to his death. It could not be established whether his attacker willfully drowned him, or whether, disoriented by blows to the head during the savage beating, he had inadvertently staggered into the pond and drowned accidentally.