He’d glanced at the patch of woods that offered a direct path to his backyard. He walked in the woods all the time. He’d found his salamander, Captain, named after Captain Kangaroo, though he kept that part to himself, under a fallen maple tree.
The problem was he rarely went in the woods at night unless he was with Ashley. She wouldn’t hesitate to stride into the trees and cut three minutes off her time, but Sid had paused, gasping for breath and studying the outline of the dark leafy branches.
Lily-liver. His brother’s voice had taunted from within his mind.
“Am not,” he’d muttered out loud before he’d turned into the woods.
The near-dark became full dark as soon as he’d stepped into the dense forest.
His sneakers had crunched over branches, and he’d squinted toward the path beneath him. It had become almost impossible to see in the overgrown ferns. He’d taken his glasses off, blown a halo of breath onto each lens, and then wiped them on his t-shirt. When he’d put them back on his face, the path hadn’t looked any clearer.
Sid had then stumbled over a root and balked when he fell full-face into a wall of cobwebs. Clamping his lips closed, he had swiped and pulled at the fine gossamer webbing. He’d wanted to scream, but he’d bit back the bellow of surprise for fear a huge hairy spider would crawl right into his mouth.
He’d continued walking, pulling the web from his eyebrows and hair, half considering returning to the street. The lamps had already come on. The sidewalks would’ve been washed with warm yellow light. He’d have been able to see the blue glow of televisions from peoples’ living rooms. It had seemed like a world away from where he stood in the black forest, his face a mask of gauzy strands.
The Six Million Dollar Man wouldn’t have been afraid in the woods. Sid had imagined the man striding and leaping with his great bionic legs. He’d picked up speed then, dodging around a tree and laughing as he’d spun away from it, suddenly feeling graceful and fast.
He’d leapt over a pile of sticks, likely gathered by some kids attempting to build a fort that hadn’t come to pass. He had landed smoothly with a thwack and crunch and had reached low, grabbing a stick and swiping at the air in front of him like a samurai. He had whipped the stick against the tree and crouched, slicing it back through the air as if it were a silver blade sharp enough to cut glass. Realizing he’d slowed, he’d thrown the stick aside and again picked up his pace.
Behind him a twig had snapped, and Sid had stopped walking. He glanced back, and already the beat of his heart had quickened. The throbbing had pulsed out to his fingers and down to his toes.
He’d turned in a slow circle, squinted into the darkness, and searched for movement. He’d seen nothing, but the shadows were dark and deep. A man or worse, a monster, could’ve been standing five feet away and Sid would’ve been none the wiser.
Sid had turned back to the invisible path and forged on. He’d gone only a few feet when another twig snapped, and leaves crunched underfoot.
He’d started to run, and his lungs had screamed in instant protest. His breath had whistled out, and he’d put his hands in front of him to bat away the branches that blocked his path.
He’d twisted around, needing to see what chased him, but only the thick impenetrable darkness had unfolded behind him.
When his foot had hit the log, he’d had only a second to flail and panic before his upper body had heaved forward and he’d sprawled onto the forest floor. The sleeve of his shirt had gotten caught on a sharp branch jutting from a tree. He’d felt the branch jab into his shoulder and heard the sharp tear of fabric as his shirt ripped. He hadn’t even thought of his mother’s exasperated sigh when she saw the shirt. His only thought had been to run, get back up and run, run or whatever was in the woods would drag him back into the darkness.
He’d pressed his hands down and felt the sharp prick of a thorn in the flesh of his palm.
Suddenly a hand had clamped onto his ankle.
Sid had screamed and tried to wrench his leg away, but he’d only managed to fall forward on his face. He’d sputtered in the grass, jerked his leg, and rolled onto his back.
The creature behind him had leered from a face as pale as the moon. Dark sunken eyes had glared out from its hideous face.
Sid had kicked out, and his sneaker caught the thing in the chest, sending it sprawling backward.
Sid had lunged away, pushing up to his hands and knees, and then finally to his feet.
He had then run faster than he’d ever run in his life. His legs had seemed to be propelled by a force that couldn’t have possibly come from him. The thing his father called the survival instinct, the superhuman power that arrived when death loomed.
Death.
The word had exploded in his mind, and somehow, he’d run even faster. When he’d broken from the trees, the glow of evening had barely registered. His feet had slapped the pavement in loud reverberating thuds.
He hadn’t dared to slow, to turn back, hadn’t even thought of his burning legs and aching lungs. He’d run until his feet hit his driveway, and even then, he’d raced to the door, pulled it open, before crashing into the foyer.
His brother looked up, startled. Headphones had covered his ears, and he’d been rifling through his bookbag.
He’d looked from Sid’s face to his shirt and then back to his face. Without taking off his headphones, he’d shaken his head and laughed. “Mom’s going to freak when she sees your shirt.” He’d traipsed out of the room without another word.
Sid had collapsed onto the rug and pressed his face against the welcome mat.
He’d made it. He’d survived.
A loud rapping sounded on the bathroom door, and Sid sat up, his heart pounding. He’d sunken low into the water, lost in his memory of that terrifying night. The water had grown lukewarm.
“You okay, Sidney?” his mother called.
“I’m good, Mom,” he told her, pulling himself up and stepping out of the bathtub.
His feet and hands had pruned. He stared at the puckered flesh and flashed again to that monster in the woods. Its skin had also looked wrinkled.
He’d told Ashley the story the very next morning on their walk to school. She’d listened, her dark eyes big and believing. That’s what he loved about Ashley. She always believed him.
If he’d told his parents, they would have scolded him for watching scary movies with Ashley and insisted he’d imagined it. His older brother would have laughed and come up with a new degrading nickname like wussy or namby-pamby.
Ashley did none of those things. Instead, she probed for more information. What did the monster look like, smell like, sound like? Were its hands more like claws? Did it seem hungry? Did it have sharp teeth?
That afternoon, they’d even gone back to that stretch of woods and searched for evidence of the creature. They’d found nothing, but Ashley still hadn’t doubted his story.
Sid toweled off and pulled on his brown Chewbacca bathrobe. He hurried down the hall to his room, slipping quietly past Zach’s closed door. Zack loved to pester him about the robe. Sid’s parents had offered to buy him a new, more adult robe, but Sid had refused. They wore itchy looking terrycloth robes that were bor-ing! He liked his bathrobe just fine - thank you very much.
4
“Help ya?” the man who sat behind the reception desk looked up as Max walked into the police station.
“I hope so. I was wondering if I could talk to whoever’s working the case involving the missing kids.”
The man crinkled his brow. “Missing kids?”
“Yeah, Vern Ripley and Simon Frank."
The man scratched at his raw looking chin. He’d likely shaved that morning according to the little red bumps dotting his skin.
He picked up his phone and hit a number.
“Someone here wanting to talk about some missing kids. Yeah, sure. I’ll send him back.”
The man cranked around in his seat and pointed to an open door.
“
Detective Welch has a few minutes.”
Max thanked him and walked toward the open door.
The man behind the desk had a pockmarked face and salt and pepper hair. His large neck sat atop square shoulders. He looked like a jock, an aged high school football player who needed to continue his winning streak off the field.
Though he smiled at Max, it was a cold appraising smile that put Max on edge.
“Name?” the detective asked.
“Max Wolfenstein.”
“You related to Jake and Herman?”
“My brother and father.”
The detective smiled and nodded.
“Good folks. They insure my house. My wife thinks your brother’s a hoot. That baby come along yet?”
“Anytime now.”
“You in the insurance business too?”
Max shook his head.
“I’m a teacher at Winterberry Middle School.”
“Oh, yeah? Well convenient you came in. We were fixin’ to make our way around to the teachers next week. You know Simon Frank?”
“I had him in my English class last year.”
“English?” The detective looked at him as if he might be joking.
“Yes. Books?”
The detective offered a humorless chuckle.
“Sure, I’m familiar with books. But all of my English teachers were ladies. You just caught me off guard there.”
Max gritted his teeth and tried not to retort with a quote from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Simon Frank himself had been fond of quoting the year before, Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you, I wouldn’t let on. “Stereotypes rarely serve us,” he replied instead.
The detective laughed as if they’d shared a joke. “Ever hear Simon Frank talk of running off? Did he ever skip class, that sort of thing?”
Max looked at the detective, surprised. “Are you assuming he’s a runaway?”
“Assuming?” The detective leaned back in his chair and surveyed Max with a less friendly eye. “You know what people say about that word. So no, assuming I am not. Simply throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks.”
“I wouldn’t peg Simon as a runaway. What concerns me is he’s not the only kid to go missing. Vern Ripley disappeared in January.”
“Whoa, pull back on the reins there, partner,” the detective told him, sitting forward and planting two large hands on a stack of papers as thick as a brick. “In my business, I’d call what you’re doing right now fishing. Are you a deep sea man, Mr. Wolfenstein? Because you’re clearly trying to hook a sea monster, and I’m here to tell you they don’t exist.”
Max blinked at the man and almost laughed. The absurdity of his comment brought another immediate memory of Simon Frank from the year before, when they’d been reading Moby Dick in second period English. At one point, he’d slapped his book and groaned. “They seriously never catch the whale? This book bites!” The memory sobered him and his smile fell away.
“I don’t think connecting two missing kids is akin to hunting for monsters at all, Detective Welch. They were around the same age and attended the same school. From the little I’ve heard, they disappeared without a trace. That doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a detective, but-”
“Exactly,” Welch punctuated the air with a single meaty index finger. “And I’ve been a detective for twenty years, Mr. Wolfenstein. I’m sure in your line of work, reading all that mumbo-jumbo, flights of fancy are a regular pastime for you. In my line of work, flights of fancy get people killed. Capiche?”
Max left the station feeling like he’d just been reprimanded by the principal. He climbed on his motorcycle and pulled onto the road, needing to put some distance between himself and Detective Welch.
* * *
Ashley hadn’t seen the boys, but Sid had. His feet slowed to a plod until he’d nearly stopped.
They’d set up makeshift ramps in the parking lot that bordered Wildwood Park. Sid watched as the boys bounded across the asphalt on skateboards, their low sneakers slapping the hard surface as they bent low and struck the plywood boards propped on paint cans.
Shane Savage, who Sid hated based on his cool name alone, did a kick-flip, landed on his board, and then rolled to a stop. He glanced up and even from across the field he saw Shane struck dumb as he spotted Ash.
Ashley was still half-turned, watching the park behind them where a guy was getting dragged from tree to tree by his huge Siberian husky. He called out, “Heel, heel, damn you, Fluffy,” but the dog only continued dragging him forward.
Ashley laughed, and when she finally turned forward, Sid had come to a full stop, a deep groove between his eyebrows.
“Ah, shit, the Thrashers,” she groaned.
Sid didn’t know where the gang of boys had gotten their name. Probably their leader, Travis Barron, had coined it and then thumped anyone who called them anything different.
“Let’s go back,” Sid whispered.
Travis had just attempted the same ramp as Shane, but he’d landed with his board wheels up. Sid heard him cursing from across the field.
“Hey, Trav, it’s Butterball Four-Eyes,” one of the other boys called out.
Sid’s eyes, magnified by his owl-eyed spectacles, slid over to Warren Leach, who stood a foot taller than every other boy in the seventh grade. Warren’s size was a two-parter. He was supposed to be in the ninth grade, but he’d been held back twice. He also came from a family of big beefy guys with thick necks and angry red faces.
“No way,” Ashley hissed. “It will take us an extra ten minutes to go the long way. I’m not scared of those ass bags.”
Sid grabbed for Ashley’s arm, but she’d already begun to stride purposefully toward the parking lot.
“Butterball Putnam and his spic girlfriend. My, what a fine pair you make,” Travis jeered, snapping his foot down on his skateboard so the end kicked up. He caught it in his hand.
Ashley faltered at the term spic. She’d heard it before, Sid knew. He’d been standing beside her on more than one occasion and usually the mouth that uttered it belonged to Travis Barron or one of his bonehead friends.
“I’d rather be a spic than a poser,” Ash retorted. “I’ve seen dogs ride a board better than you.”
Sid had caught up to Ashley and grabbed the back of her t-shirt just as Travis threw his skateboard down.
“I’m going to rearrange your face, bitch,” Travis shouted, red climbing up his neck.
Nothing enraged Travis Barron more than being called a poser. He fancied himself a future skate-pro, but in reality, he could barely ride switch. His daddy’s money got him the clothes and the board and all the skater videos he could watch, but he still sucked.
“Get ‘em,” Travis yelled.
Warren took off first, his big body lumbering with surprising speed. Two other boys followed, but not Shane. Shane watched the scene unfold, his mouth a grim line.
Ashley turned on her heel, grabbing Sid’s hand and yanking him along.
“Go to the hole,” Ashley spat,” shoving Sid toward the pond at the edge of the park.
She could outrun the boys. Sid could not.
He took her advice and raced to the right, panting as he came upon the small patch of woods bordering the pond. He tripped over a root, managed to keep his feet beneath him, and then slid down the hill that edged the pond. The hill dipped inward, creating a little mushy cave blanketed in moss and stinking of wet. They called it the hole.
Sid crawled inside and tucked himself into an awkward little ball, wheezing as he tried to get air into his constricted diaphragm.
The wet grass beneath him soaked through his shorts, and he hoped there weren’t any leaches in the pond.
“Damn you, Ash,” he muttered, listening as one boy called out, “She went that way.”
After that, the park went silent except for the frogs and crickets chattering from the cattails and reeds edging the pond.
Sid stared at his Star Wars watch, counting the minute
s. After more than an hour, he heard a rustling above him. Sid shrank further into the cave, pulling his legs tight to his belly and holding his breath.
A pair of feet hopped down to the grassy bank before him.
5
He recognized Ashley’s tattered blue sneakers with purple laces.
“Hmph.” Sid let out a little groan and a whoosh of breath.
“I thought it was Warren for a minute there,” he grumbled, crawling out on his hands and knees. His feet had fallen asleep and sharp prickles tittered in his feet. “Ouch.”
Ashley offered him a hand, and when he stood, Sid saw scrapes on her arms and leaves in her hair.
“You climbed the English Vermillion?” Sid asked.
“Yep. Warren couldn’t pull his big ass up that tree with a ladder.”
Sid snorted.
The English Vermillion was a huge oak tree on the opposite end of the park. In autumn, the tree turned a dazzling pink-red, which Ashley had commented looked the exact shade as the crayon color named English Vermillion. The name had stuck, and Sid rather liked the way they could whisper the word and know what the other referred to while the rest of the world did not. Their own secret code.
“Sorry,” Ashley told him, as they climbed back up the hill. They stuck to the wooded part of the park as they headed out. “I should have listened to you.”
Sid shrugged.
“They’d already seen us. They would have come after us anyhow. I’m sorry they called you that name.”
Ashley’s face darkened, but she waved his comment away.
“I don’t care what he calls me. Travis is a waste of space.”
Ashley had guts of steel, but Sid knew the insult upset her. Travis was a dirtbag, but he had money, and other kids listened to him. Though he was a year ahead of them, Travis had singled Sid and Ashley out in elementary school. He’d been picking on them both since the third grade. In a way, Travis’s cruelty had brought them together.
Rag Doll Bones: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 3
