Rag Doll Bones: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  When they pulled onto the road, Ashley’s mother glanced at her, grimacing. It was the blood. Ashley had seen a similar reaction out of every person who’d laid eyes on her since she departed the woods an hour earlier.

  She reached a hand to Ashley’s knee and squeezed.

  “Want to talk about it, honey?”

  Ashley swallowed; her mouth dry. She coughed and swished her tongue around, searching for a drop of saliva. She found nothing and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the seat.

  She didn’t want to talk.

  She’d spent the previous hour talking, explaining the events in the forest to Mr. Freeman and then to one policeman and a few minutes later to another and then to a group of kids who’d surrounded her when the cops had made the mistake of leaving her alone for half a second.

  Sid had undergone something similar, though she’d seen him crying, his hands shaking as he tried to describe finding Krista after he heard her scream.

  No, she hadn’t seen what had attacked Krista. No, the girl hadn’t spoken. No, she didn’t see an animal. No, she didn’t see any suspicious persons. Yes, she knew Krista, but only barely. The bandanas were hers, Shane’s, and Sid’s. Her mother had taught her to staunch a wound. No, she hadn’t moved Krista.

  Her mother didn’t press, but when they pulled into the driveway, Rebecca did not immediately jump from the car.

  “This is my fault, Ash. I should have been there with the other parents. I might not have been able to prevent what happened, but I could have comforted you. Sid’s mother was there, his father too.”

  “It’s not your fault, Mom,” Ashley croaked. “I need a drink of water.”

  She jumped from the car and ran into the house, aware she’d forgotten to lock the front door when she’d left that evening. She was equally aware something could have crept in while they were away, something that could’ve been concealed by the shadows.

  Ashley grabbed a glass and filled it to the brim.

  She gulped the water as her mother entered the kitchen and flipped on the light.

  Dark eyes gazed at Ashley through the window over the sink, and she jumped, dropping the glass. It shattered, causing her mother to cry out.

  It was only her reflection.

  But the relief was short lived.

  Her stomach rolled, the water somehow not agreeing with the stone her stomach had been clenched into since seeing Krista’s bloody throat.

  She lurched into the bathroom, yanked up the lid on the toilet and vomited.

  31

  Max pulled open the door to a stony-faced Jake.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Max asked, half closing the door as he stepped onto the porch.

  “I’ve been trying to call you since seven am. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  Max frowned and looked toward the phone in his living room. “Must have been sleeping hard.”

  “Well, did you hear what happened at the Summer Shindig?”

  Max’s heart sank. “I was at the Summer Shindig. What are you talking about?”

  “Eleanor’s sister, Jan, called this morning. Krista Maynard was attacked last night. Something ripped her throat half open. They rushed her to the hospital in Grayling. She’s lucky to be alive.”

  Max’s mouth dropped open.

  Jake shifted his weight and narrowed his eyes into Max’s house.

  Max turned and saw Kim, wearing only his t-shirt, freeze on her way to the kitchen.

  “Oh,” she looked up, startled, pulled the shirt lower, and backtracked toward the stairs.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jake grumbled.

  Max didn’t bother with an explanation. The truth was obvious enough.

  “Who attacked her? What did she say?”

  “Ripped her throat out,” Jake repeated enunciating each word as if Max had regressed to the ignorant little brother with a penchant for asking why… why… why until Jake was forced to stuff a pillow over his head and run from the room. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t in a state to talk.”

  “Did any of the other kids see anyone?” Max demanded.

  “Anyone? Max, we’re talking about an animal here. A rabid cougar or something. Krista’s dad and some other men went into the woods with shotguns this morning. Whatever it is, its hours are numbered.”

  Behind Max, something crashed. He jumped, and Jake took a step back.

  Max stepped into the living room, Jake on his heels. All the books on his bookshelf lay on the floor. The bookcase itself had not moved, and the pictures of him and his family didn’t tremble. Max also knew he’d screwed the bloody thing tight to the wall. Not even an earthquake could have rocked it free.

  “What the-?” Jake asked.

  Kim appeared in the doorway, her face white.

  “What was that?” she asked, though her eyes, too, had landed on the books. In the center of the pile of books lay Heart of Darkness.

  Max opened his mouth to offer an explanation, but he blurted something else altogether.

  “I don’t think it’s an animal,” he said.

  Jake turned to him, briefly distracted from the books.

  “Max, don’t go there, brother. I’m telling you. Whatever insane ideas are percolating thanks to your not-so-healthy obsession with spook movies and weird books, they will cost you your job. Get me?” He looked at his watch and muttered under his breath.

  “I’ve got to go. Matthew barely slept last night, which means Eleanor barely slept, which means I’m on diaper and feeding duty. I only came over because you didn’t answer your phone and I started worrying the cougar got you too. Glad your situation isn’t that dire,” he added derisively.

  He slipped out the door.

  “Give Eleanor my love,” Max called, tempted to flick his brother off. It was immature and unkind considering his brother had come over to check on him, but his final comment had been cruel. Max had noticed the color flushing Kim’s face.

  Max closed the door harder than necessary. “I’m sorry,” he said, stepping toward her, but she’d turned and walked into the kitchen.

  “Another child has been attacked?” she asked.

  “They believe it’s an animal.”

  “But you don’t?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m sorry about what Jake said or didn’t say. I’m sorry he was rude.”

  “Why don’t you think it’s an animal?” she asked again.

  He brushed his hands through his dark hair, catching his fingers in a tangle and trying to work it free.

  “Here, let me,” she told him.

  She pushed her slender fingers into his hair, gently pulling the strands apart.

  “I don’t have a reasonable explanation. It’s a sense. I’ve had it since I discovered the first child had gone missing. It hasn’t left.”

  She stepped back and studied him.

  “I’m going to get dressed, and then I’d like to talk.”

  Max made a few calls to get the gist of the previous night’s events from his friend, Randy.

  “Greta’s nervous as hell,” Randy told him. “She’s convinced she and the boys should spend the summer at her mom’s place down in Lansing. As if they’re going to be safer with a bunch of gangbangers.”

  “I don’t think Lansing is known for its gangbangers,” Randy,” Max told him.

  "Well, gangbangers or not, my boys are safer in our woods with a Winchester and a pocket of shells.”

  “We’re going, Randy!” Greta shrieked in the background.

  Randy lowered his voice. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s like we found out there’s a flesh-eating plague spreading through town. Greta’s friends from a block away are coming over to coordinate travel plans. Good riddance,” he said. “But I’m not getting run out of town by a juiced up alley cat.”

  “Did Krista say a big cat attacked her?” Max asked.

  “No, no. That’s just the newest theory. I myself figured some nasty kid out there
hit her with a stick, or worse, pulled a switchblade on her. But apparently, one of the paramedics spread the rumor it was clearly a bite. As if anyone in this town is an expert on wild animal bites.”

  Max managed to wrangle the rest of the story from Randy, though he didn’t know much more than Jake. The kids had been playing capture the flag when Krista had started screaming. The paramedics had carried her from the woods and loaded her in an ambulance. Police had questioned all the children, but no one saw a thing. Max hung up the phone, a vision of Simon Frank thudding against the back of his eyelids.

  He found Kim on the back porch.

  She’d put on her clothes from the night before and stood drinking coffee and leaning heavily against the rail. The intoxication of the night before, the magic, had disappeared with Jake’s news. It was almost as if his brother had seen it lying there between them, stuffed it in his Jeep, and driven it away with him.

  “What happened, Max, with the books?” Kim asked.

  He gazed at her, taken off guard by the question. He’d expected her to continue questioning him about the animal. Oddly, he’d forgotten about the books.

  “Have you ever been haunted?” he asked, stunned as the words left his lips.

  He’d never considered himself a hard man of science, not in the least. He’d loved Shakespeare as a boy, by God. Those works were filled with spectral figures and hauntings, but at the end of the day, it was fiction. He’d never had to ponder the legitimacy of Shakespeare’s characters because they’d never appeared in his home and demanded his attention.

  Proof that the paranormal existed, that all the quacks offering to read your palm or chat with your dead grandfather might actually have a toe dipped in the realm of spirits, had only rarely crossed his mind. The closest he’d come to such a contemplation had been his single night in The Crawford House, and he’d managed, rather quickly, to explain that away as a figment of a child’s terrified mind.

  Kim studied him, but she didn’t answer.

  “I believe one of the missing children, Melanie Dunlop, is…” He paused and weighed the words: haunting, visiting, terrorizing me. “I think she’s contacting me.”

  “Contacting? Melanie is the girl who went missing last week?”

  Max nodded and waited for Kim’s disbelieving laugh.

  Instead, she turned back to the yard. Her profile was delicate, the soft slope of her cheekbone down to her chin. He’d kissed her face the night before, so fragile he’d grown furious for an instant, furious her husband had ever hurt her. She had felt small in his arms. Holding her had been like cupping a butterfly in hands.

  “The girl I spoke to last night, out here?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  Max walked inside and retrieved a yearbook from the pile of books on his living room floor. He paused, gazed at his copy of Heart of Darkness, and then grabbed that too.

  He flipped to the page in the yearbook where Melanie smiled out from a black and white photograph. Each child had their own little square. Though immortalized in the glossy pages, some of them, Simon Frank and likely Melanie too, would never share their grade school pictures with their own children. Look, honey, mommy used to bleach her hair.

  He held the book up for Kim, and she looked at the image, the groove between her eyebrows deepening.

  She blinked up at him. “Her hair was lighter, the girl last night, but that looks like her.”

  “She dyed her hair a lot,” Max explained.

  “Maybe she just ran away,” Kim suggested hopefully. “Maybe she’s hiding out in the woods and trying to get your attention.”

  Max closed the book and set it on the patio table. “It’s possible,” he agreed, but if Melanie had run away, why did Max hear her voice in the night? Why did his books keep crashing to the floor?

  Because she’s obviously a ghost, he thought sarcastically, as if a ghost could ever be an obvious explanation.

  “What do you think, Kim? When you really try to dig into that question. Was the girl you spoke to alive?”

  Kim set her coffee on the rail and shook her head. “What else could she be?” her voice rose on the last few words. She clutched the rail as if the world might tilt at any moment and spill her into the sky.

  Max found he couldn’t speak the words out loud. “This book has been appearing on my living room floor since the day after she vanished.”

  Kim took Heart of Darkness and studied it.

  “What’s it about?”

  “A man who travels up the Congo River into an indigenous area of Africa to meet an ivory trader. He becomes fascinated by an ivory trader who appears to have been accepted by the natives It’s a book I teach nearly every year, a way to begin the conversation about ideas of acceptable cruelty relative to perceived cruelty.”

  Kim appeared confused. “I’ve never read classic books. I got my diploma by going to night school, though I always thought it would be interesting to understand why so many people loved the classics. Nicholas said reading Shakespeare was like watching paint dry.”

  Max laughed. “That’s pretty typical. I love the classics, but when I was thirteen, I hated reading anything other than H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King,” he confessed.

  “What would this book have to do with Melanie?”

  “We read it in class first semester. But other than that, I don’t know.”

  Kim flipped through the pages. “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness,” she read out loud. “What is the heart of darkness?” she murmured.

  “The heart of the Congo, but more likely the heart of men,” Max explained.

  Kim’s blue eyes flitted over the pages. She closed the book and set it next to her coffee mug.

  “The heart of men,” she whispered, and she clenched her eyes shut as if a spasm of pain had torn through her.

  Her cries were silent at first, but then grew louder as she shrank down to the porch.

  “I’m sorry, Kim,” he told her, squatting down beside her and putting his arms around her quaking body. She was thinking of Nicholas, of course she was, and if Melanie Dunlop was dead, her Nicholas might be dead too.

  Kim shook her head, wiping the tears from her red cheeks. “I’m not strong enough, Max. I can’t…” she started to cry again.

  Max held her, feeling again as if Kim were a fragile butterfly.

  32

  “I’m on house arrest today,” Sid mumbled into the phone. My mom’s been having a hairy canary over what happened at the Shindig. She even went out and bought us oven pizzas and ice cream for lunch. She’s bribing us to stay inside. She keeps looking at me funny, like maybe one of my ears got bit off and she’s just now noticing it.”

  Sid talked high and fast, trying to make a joke out of his mother’s worry.

  Ashley sighed, gazing toward the door her mother had walked through at eight that morning. Rebecca didn’t have a choice. No one else would pay their bills, but Ashley had barely slept the night before. Each time she started to drift down into the darkness of sleep, Krista’s pale face above her bloody neck would float into focus and she’d jolt wide awake.

  “My mom asked me to stay inside too. I told her, I would, but the house is so quiet. How are you, Sid, really?”

  She listened to the pause, the television in the background. It sounded like a cartoon, Wile E. Coyote chasing after Road Runner.

  “Creeped out,” he admitted. “I had nightmares last night. I thought it’d come for me, you know? The boy in the woods. I thought he must have seen me last night. I was so close to Krista, so he’d come for me next.”

  Ashley sighed and picked up the paperback copy of Hell House. It was the last thing she wanted to read.

  “Me too,” she muttered, not adding that Rebecca had crawled into bed next to her.

  They’d both been terrified, mother and daughter, but for very different reasons.

  “Are you still going to get your bike tomorrow?” Sid asked.

  “Yeah, absolutely,
” Ash replied, feeling her shoulders relax at the mere mention of the bike. “I’m helping Mrs. Penny clean out her basement for a garage sale in the morning. She offered me ten bucks. That’s all I need.”

  “Cool,” Sid said. “I’d come over and all, but even if my mom dropped me off on your doorstep, she’d worry all day. I better stay close to home.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Ashley agreed, not averse to staying tucked safely in the living room for most of the day.

  “Ash,” Sid started. “About Thursday. I’m not sure if we should-”

  “We have to,” Ashley insisted. “Now more than ever.”

  Sid didn’t respond. Ashley wondered what she’d say if he pulled out. Could she and Shane do it alone?

  “Okay,” Sid sighed. “I’ll call you later.”

  * * *

  By the time the phone rang at seven o’clock, Ashley had grown so bored she’d cleaned her bedroom.

  She’d organized her books, put the scattering of papers from the previous year’s schoolwork in her desk, and even vacuumed the carpet.

  She ran to living room and grabbed the receiver on the second ring.

  “Shepherd Residence,” she said on the chance it was her mother calling to check in on her. Rebecca Shepherd hated it when Ash answered the phone with a simple ‘Hello?’

  “Another body’s been found,” Sid whispered.

  “Wait, what?” Ashley turned off the television and pressed the phone closer to her ear.

  “A body,” Sid repeated. “In the woods by Warren’s house. It’s a kid. It’s in bad shape. I heard my dad on the phone.”

  “Holy crap,” Ashley blurted. “It’s got to be Warren, right?”

  Her heart thudded, and she gazed through the picture window feeling removed as she watched Mrs. Lincoln walking Kermit, who tugged and pulled away, sometimes snapping at the leash behind him.

  “What?” Sid yelled.

  Ashley heard his mother in the background, but she couldn’t make out her words.

  “I’m talking to Ashley,” Sid shouted. “I already washed my hands. Okay, fine. Ash, I’ve got to go. Time for dinner. My mom’s trying to pretend everything’s normal.”