“Meet me after?”
“There’s no way they’ll let me out.”
“Sneak out, dummy. Meet me in front of Trinity Church.”
Trinity Church was located at the end of the block on the street where Warren lived, or had lived, she really didn’t know.
Sid sighed, but agreed. “Okay, but we can’t stay out long. My parents will probably check on me ten times tonight.”
Ashley flipped the channels, but there wasn’t any news on until eight p.m., another half hour to wait. She walked down her driveway and glanced up and down the street. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but the quiet surprised her.
No police cars with sirens flashing drove down the road. No sirens wailed in the distance. People weren’t gathered on street corners talking in fearful whispers.
“Because they don’t know,” Ashley thought out loud.
Sid’s uncle was a cop, which meant Sid’s dad knew before anyone else. Sid often gave Ashley the scoop hours before it hit the news. Technically, Sid wasn’t supposed to know either. Despite his parent’s best efforts to keep him in the dark, he excelled at eavesdropping. He and Ashley had fashioned a range of contraptions for just that purpose, though the best continued to be the old glass against the wall trick.
Ashley half considered waiting for the news, but curiosity got the better of her. She grabbed her old bike from the garage and pedaled down the street, hanging a left on Parkdale Avenue in the quickest route to the woods flanking Queen Street.
It took ten minutes of furiously riding, but soon she saw the pulsing of red and blue lights through the backyards one street away from Queen Street. Now she spotted the commotion she’d expected to see outside her front door.
Five police cars were parked along the soccer field that butted up to the woods. Yellow tape had been strewn along the curb and drawn back to the woods, blocking the entire field and the woods beyond. People who lived on the street stood in the road, watching the police, talking and pointing.
An ambulance was parked on the grass, and as Ashley watched, two men carrying a stretcher departed from the trees. She stood high on her pedals, squinting. A white sheet lay over the stretcher, a lumpy form beneath it.
Along the street, several people gasped, and Ashley saw one woman fall to her knees. The man beside her tried to pick her up, but she shoved him away, letting out a wail that turned the heads of everyone on the block.
It was Warren’s mom. Ashley had never seen the woman, and yet deep in her guts, she knew. Ashley slowly sat on the seat of her bike. The men loaded the stretcher in the back of the ambulance and pulled away from the curb. Their lights continued flashing, but the siren didn’t sound. Ashley knew what that meant. It wasn’t an emergency. They weren’t rushing someone to the hospital. Whoever they’d pulled from the woods was dead.
Ashley spotted Sid’s dad at the edge of the trees. Though she couldn’t make out his face, she saw the hunch in his shoulders.
Warren’s dad eventually coaxed his wife from the ground and half carried her to a pickup truck parked haphazardly on the curb. As they drove past, Ashley and Warren’s mother’s eyes met. The woman’s mouth stretched wide and, for an instant, Ashley heard the screams filling the truck, but then they passed, and the sound faded.
33
Max stared at the reading list for the coming year, but struggled to concentrate.
The day before, Warren Leach’s body had been discovered in the woods. Like Simon, he appeared to have been killed by an animal.
Forgetting his lesson plan, he wrote their names: Vern, Simon, Warren, and Melanie. Beneath that he wrote the names of the other kids who’d gone missing: Chris and Nicholas.
“And who else?” he asked the still room.
Poster boards of the kids’ final projects still hung on the wall. Melanie Dunlop had chosen a book called The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. Her pink poster was covered in drawings of angry black cats.
The intercom on the wall released a burst of static.
He waited, expecting to hear Assistant Principal Lundt’s voice come through.
When she didn’t, he walked to the intercom. Before Max could press the call button, a gravelly, child’s voice came through the speaker.
“Help…,” the voice croaked. “Help her.”
Max froze, hand halfway to the button, his abdomen cramping as if he’d eaten bad Chinese food and his body might spit it out all at once.
He stared at the intercom, transfixed by the voice of Melanie Dunlop.
“Message for you,” Mrs. Lundt announced, popping her head into Max’s classroom.
Max gasped, and stumbled back into the desk behind him. He almost fell right over it.
Mrs. Lundt rushed in, grabbing his arm and helping to right him.
“Heavens to betsy,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Wolf. We called on the speaker, but you must have stepped out.”
Max took the sheet of paper, unable to still his trembling hand.
She patted his back.
“It’s devastating,” she said. “Little Simon Frank and now Warren too. We’re all rather skittish.”
Max glanced at the intercom and then forced his eyes down to the note Mrs. Lundt had given him.
Please call Kim - urgent, he read.
“Thanks, Mrs. Lundt,” he told her.
“Okay, then. If you need me…” She gestured at the speaker, and Max shuddered.
What had she said? Help? Help me. It had sounded like help her, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
He barked a hysterical laugh at the thought of making sense of haunted messages through a school intercom.
Two days before, Jake had implied he was losing it. Max wondered if he was right.
He offered the speaker a final, weary glance and then returned to his desk.
“Reading list for seventh grade and I’m done,” he promised the empty room.
The reading list for seventh turned into the reading list for eighth, and by the time he left the school, the sun had shifted into the western part of the sky. It would still be light out for hours, but the afternoon stillness had settled over the town.
As he drove to pick up Kim, he remembered her note. “Shoot,” he mumbled.
He had intended to call her before he sat down to finish the reading lists, but he had completely forgotten.
As Max turned onto Sycamore Road, he saw flashing red and blue lights. A police car, parked at an angle, blocked motorists. A line of cars sat along the road.
As his eyes adjusted to the scene, Max realized more cars filled the parking lot at Safe Haven, the vet clinic where Kim worked. Six cop cars and an ambulance crowded the lot. People stood outside.
On the dark concrete, a white sheet concealed something bulky.
He climbed from his bike, forgetting the kickstand and allowing it to crash to the pavement. He barely noticed, moving from a walk to a run as he sprinted past the parked cars and onlookers.
His shoe caught on the curb and he sprawled forward on his hands and knees. He felt the asphalt scrape the skin through his jeans. Beside him a muted voice, screaming, met his ears. He turned and there, in the back of a police car, was Denny Watts. Denny’s mouth was twisted in a furious scowl. He howled and leaned back in the seat, kicking the plastic barrier separating him from the front of the police car.
“Stop now, or I’m going to use force,” an officer told him, pulling open the back door of the car.
Denny lunged sideways, landing half out of the car, his face less than three feet from Max’s own as he stood frozen.
His gaze swiveled away from the bellowing man back to the white sheet, and he saw it was not entirely white. One part of the sheet was bright red, as if soaked in…
“Blood,” Max rasped.
No one was providing aid to the person beneath it.
Max searched for Kim’s face in the small crowd huddled by the door. He saw the veterinarian, Dr. Patterson. Two other women stood near him, b
oth wearing cheery green Safe Haven t-shirts.
One of the women was crying, black rivulets of mascara streaking down her cheeks. The other woman looked as pale as a sack of flour. Her made up eyes and lips were clown colors against her stricken face.
Max managed to stand, but the world had gone silent. He saw Denny’s mouth stretched wide. He saw the officer’s mouths opening and closing. They were talking, yelling, barking orders. As he pushed through a stream of yellow caution tape, an officer grabbed him by the shoulder. The man’s lips moved but still no sound.
“Kim,” Max croaked, but he couldn’t hear his own voice.
He shoved the cop out of the way and ran, reaching the sheet and snatching the corner.
The officer caught up to him and grabbed him from behind. As he jerked him back, the sheet pulled away.
Kim lay crumpled on the pavement in the fetal position. Though her hands were near her head, they had not been able to block the bullet that took off the right side of her skull. A mass of gray and red leaked through her auburn hair.
Max fell to his knees.
The officer held him for another moment and then released him.
The scene unfolded in slow motion. The humid breeze ruffled her hair. Dark blood oozed into the cracks of the pavement. The neckline of her green shirt was black with blood.
“Max, Max,” a voice somehow broke through the silence, and Max looked up to see Detective Welch, the man he’d argued with weeks before. He held out his hand.
Max shifted back to Kim. A paramedic had begun to replace the sheet over her.
The sheet blotted out her green Safe Haven shirt, her pale neck where he knew the three hearts intertwined lay against her unmoving chest. The sheet drew up over her neck and then over her chin, the eye that was still left in her face, and finally her head.
The detective took ahold of Max’s hands, and he pulled him to his feet.
Max tried to make his mouth work, but managed only to open and close it a few times.
The detective walked him to an unmarked car. He opened the passenger door.
“You’re in shock, Max. I’ll send one of the paramedics over.”
Max sat heavily on the seat, legs splayed on the pavement.
The world of sound had returned, and it filled his head like a swarm of bees: sirens, people shouting, the low throbbing of someone’s sobs.
Beneath it all, he heard Denny’s voice muffled by the car, but not silenced.
“She asked for it,” he screamed.
Max put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes.
He didn’t know when Detective Welch returned to the car, but suddenly he was there, lifting Max’s legs into the car as if he were paralyzed, and he was.
The detective climbed behind the wheel and pulled away from the curb.
“I spoke with your father, Max. He knows we’re coming.”
* * *
Max had never been a big drinker. Something to do with the lack of control he’d experienced the handful of times in college when his buddies had talked him into getting inebriated. Not to mention the humiliation of worshiping the porcelain god at some frat house while guys traipsed in and peed in the bathtub or the sink and snickered from above.
As he sipped his bourbon, he tried to remember those days. They weren’t fond memories, but anything was better than the white sheet with the patch of red soaking through. He swallowed the last of the drink and made eye contact with the bartender, holding up a finger to signal ‘one more.’ Though he doubted one more would do the trick. Five more maybe, and then he’d stumble the five blocks home and collapse on the couch.
Maria and Herman Wolfenstein had tried to make him stay. He could sleep in his old room, they insisted.
But no, he couldn’t. He couldn’t get sloppy drunk at his parents’ house. He needed strangers for that.
On the news, a reporter spoke of the attack at the Summer Shindig.
A man two barstools to Max’s left huffed.
“I told the police. The guy in the black van is behind those dead kids. He’s an escaped mental patient from the Northern Michigan Asylum. You ask me, that’s what we’ve got running around in the woods. Some looney toon who’s better off in a straight-jacket.”
Max stared into his glass, tilted halfway to his lips. The amber liquid swirled and released its noxious aroma.
A moment later, the man’s words registered. He’d said, “the man in the black van.”
Max turned and blinked at him.
The man wore a blue and yellow Hawaiian shirt over cut off jean shorts. He was entirely bald, and his head was smooth, as if he’d shaved it. He drank from a tall glass of beer.
Max stood, still steady on his feet, and walked to the stool next to the man.
“Do you mind?” Max asked, gesturing at the seat.
“No, I do not. I like company myself. My ex-wife never did. About shit a cat if I told her my parents were coming for a visit. But that’s why she’s the ex now, isn’t it?”
Max offered the obligatory laugh and gestured at the TV. “I heard you say something about a black van.”
The man nodded, opened his mouth, and then narrowed his eyes at Max. “You don’t own a black van, do ya?”
Max shook his head. “Just a motorcycle and a Toyota I drive in the winter.”
“A Toyota?” The man scoffed, eyes big and watery. “You trust those foreigners to build your car? Might need to be in the looney bin yourself.”
The man took another drink and eyed Max’s glass.
“Smells mighty potent, what you’re drinking there. If my hair hadn’t already fallen out, I’d be worried that stuff would do the trick. You grievin’ or celebratin’?”
Max gazed at the glass. He couldn’t answer. He didn’t want to see the sheet again, and yet there it was, looming in his mind, floating like a ghost.
“Can you tell me about the black van Mr.-?
“Mr. Rice was my father. Call me Tom.”
“Nice to meet you, Tom. I’m Max.”
“Mad Max,” Tom said, smiling. “You must be mad to be drinking that paint thinner.”
“Tom, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve had a terrible day. I don’t want to talk, but I need to hear your story about the black van.”
Tom arched an eyebrow.
Grieving then.” Tom nodded. “Last time I had a drink like that was the day my mother passed. My pops and I drank a bottle of scotch.” Tim grimaced. “Can barely smell the stuff now. Scotch and gardenias. Can’t smell one without the other. Those were her favorite flowers, gardenias.” Tim shuddered.
Max finished his drink and started to lift his finger to signal to the bartender, but Tom stopped him with a look.
“It only makes it worse, Mad Max.” He nodded at the glass. “Take it from someone who knows.”
The bartender paused in front of Max.
“I’ll take a coffee, please,” Max told him.
“Good man,” Tom said. “Anyhoo, I saw that black van about six months back when Vern Ripley went missing.”
Max braced his hands on the edge of the counter. “Here in town?”
Tom nodded. “Cruising the street real slow like. I live not three houses down from Vern and his family. I saw him walk out the door with his sled. I went out to get the mail and then looked off down the street the way he’d been walking. That kid and the van were gone.”
“You think the person in the van abducted him.”
“I sure do, and I told the police as much, but they looked at me like a I was a few crackers short of a full box. Damn coppers. Never have had much luck convincing them of things they ain’t seen with their own eyes.”
“Why did you say it was an asylum patient in the van?”
“Oh, that’s easy. He left a calling card on the side of the road. Or maybe it flew out when he opened a door, hard sayin’. It was blank sheet of paper. Stationary you call it. Printed right on the top was The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane.”
/> 34
“Hi, Linda,” Max said, reaching out and squeezing the woman’s arm.
“Oh, Max,” she murmured. “Oh, Max I’m so sorry. I know you and Joan or Kim had become close. She was such a dear. We absolutely adored her here, and the animals, my goodness they treated her like a regular Dr. Dolittle.”
Max smiled, but his chest constricted at her words. He swallowed and gulped a shuddering breath.
Over the counter he saw Kim’s Polaroid beneath block letters that read STAFF. Kim was sitting, legs splayed with a Burnese mountain dog laying across her legs. The dog had exposed his belly to Kim and gazed at her with soupy adoring eyes.
His throat grew thick, and he blinked away rising tears, looking toward the window, not daring to glance at her photograph a second time.
“Linda, I stopped by because Kim called me yesterday. I wondered if you knew why?”
Linda frowned and swiped her graying hair behind her ears. She turned to a paper calendar that took up half the counter.
“The day is a little blurry now,” Linda admitted. She brushed a hand beneath her eye where Max saw a single tear sliding over her cheekbone. “Mr. Yessif brought in his lab, Punkie. Kitty Jenson stopped by with her new schnauzer pup for shots. Hmmm…”
She tapped an unpainted fingernail on the calendar. “You know what? Joan left for her break that day. She’s never done that before. Usually she sits in the staff room with an old paperback and drinks coffee and reads. She stepped out, and she came back five or ten minutes late.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
Linda shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Max. I don’t. Does this have something to do with the man who killed her? Her ex-husband?”
Max shook his head.
“I don’t think so. I’m just trying to figure something out, I guess.”
Linda nodded as if she understood completely.
“I hope you do, Max.”
Max left the vet and stood in the parking lot.
In the center of the lot, a dark stain stood out from the other pavement. It no longer looked like blood, but he knew it was. It was the blood that had seeped quickly through the cracks, and that no amount of washing could erase.
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