FIFTY-FOUR
We moved to Cory’s playhouse. Now that I’d gotten their attention-Frisbee and I, actually-they wanted to work out exactly were that shoeprint might have come from. Steve brought the newspaper that lay in his driveway and we all climbed the steps to the wooden fort that served as our meeting room over the years. There wasn’t any real way to get Frisbee up without carrying him so we let him make himself comfortable on Cory’s back lawn. And although the sky was overcast and rumbling like a belly aching to be fed, the day was getting hotter and becoming very humid. We sat on the floor, trying to avoid splinters in our legs as Jason opened up the two sliding, wood windows to let the air circulate.
Cory said, “It don’t mean nothing. It’s just a stupid shoeprint. So what?”
Steve rolled the rubber band down the paper’s inky skin until it snapped off and bounced into a corner.
“Yeah, but who’s footprint is it?” he asked as he began leafing through sections of The Press-Enterprise.
“Ah, gee,” Cory said in his usual smartass tone, “here’s a thought. Maybe it’s Jacob’s.”
Steve shook his head, making his long hair dance away from the scar on his forehead. “Naw. You know my brother doesn’t were anything but those dumb, pointy cowboy boots. He thinks they make him look cool. Make him look like a fag, I say. Besides, that footprint came from a work boot. It might be about the same size as Jacob’s but he doesn’t wear work boots.”
Then I said something that made Steve’s eyes go wide and the paper rattle in his hands. I knew he’d noticed it too.
“It was underneath Jackie’s window. I think who ever I saw last night was looking into her room.” I paused a moment to look at each of them. “I know you guys think it sounds weird but Donald told me that the person I saw really is the Sesame Street Killer. I believed him. I wish you guys would believe me.”
Jason said, “Ricky, it’s not that we don’t want to believe you, it’s just that… well, a ghost? Come on. Maybe you were just dreaming. You know?”
“I wasn’t,” I told him. “When I woke up this morning there was grass in my bed. How do you explain that?”
“Maybe you went to bed with it on your feet,” he countered.
“I took a bath before bed,” I shot back.
Steve tossed aside the first section of the newspaper and moved on to section B: the Local section.
“Okay,” Cory added, “maybe it was the guy that comes to read the gas meter’s footprint. They always wear big boots like those. And the gas meter is by Jackie’s window.”
Again Steve shook his head as he flipped through pages. “Nope. He came about two weeks ago. I had to show him how to open the gate. Besides, I go through that way everyday and I would have noticed a big boot print like that. It wasn’t there yesterday.”
Everyone fell silent, having run out of suggestions to account for the mysterious print. We sat, our shirts sticking to us, waiting to see what it was that Steve was looking for in the paper.
Another crash of thunder reverberated above.
Finally Steve looked up at us. He folded the page in half, tapped it with his finger and tossed it on the floor between us. We craned our necks out to read the headline.
It was simple. It read: Sesame Street Killer Claims third victim!
The article was smaller than the other two that Steve had read us days before, as if the police were ashamed that they hadn’t caught the person responsible for the killings yet so they ran the story smaller, hidden in the section marked: Briefs.
The girl’s name was Kelly Carter. A bag boy had found her body in a dumpster behind the Alpha-Beta grocery store on Joy Street when he went out to have a smoke. They linked the death to the Sesame Street Killer by the chunk of ceramic still wedged in her neck. The piece had once been a part of a large jar that bore resemblance to the character; the Cookie Monster. The article also gave mention of a girl named Amber Nelson that had been missing since Saturday night or early Sunday morning.
“Ricky,” Steve said in a whisper. “Tell us exactly what happened to you last night.”
And so I did. I took it slow and over the course of the next fifteen minutes or so I tried to remember every detail of my night venture.
I started off by telling them about the Dark Dream and the bubbles. About how I had seen Frisbee in the house surrounded in gray-light and even how I had thought I’d dreamt of him before, barking in a field of dead grass and Oscar the Grouch children; them with their burnt, bleeding faces.
I told them that I thought Frisbee had woke me and how I had seen Donald standing in our bedroom and how magnificent he had looked, about him leading me to Frisbee and telling me that Frisbee was sent to find us. I told them how I had gone outside and how Frisbee had been staring toward Steve’s house, unblinking, showing me the shadowy figure on the side of his house. I ended with me back in my bed, that morning, with grass and leaves on my sheets.
“But before I went back inside, Donald told me that the killer would be back tomorrow night. Which is tonight.”
“I still say you were dreaming,” Cory said. “Or sleepwalking.”
I thought back to the previous Tuesday when I had awoke in Cory’s laundry hamper. I had sleepwalked then, but the night before was different. I knew it was real.
“Okay,” Steve said, “let’s just say for the moment that what happened to Ricky last night actually did happen. That means that someone was on my side yard looking into my sister’s bedroom window.”
“And?” Cory asked.
“And, what if it is this Sesame Street Killer? Why not my sister? All the girls that have been killed so far are around her age.”
I could tell he was beginning to get freaked a bit. His eyes were wide and his hands still shook.
“Steve,” Jason said, “we can’t just think the worst. I mean what’s the chances of this killer coming to our street and-“
Steve turned on my brother with ferocity. “I…believe…Ricky,” he stated with a force that made all of us flinch. I also felt relief that someone else thought that I was telling the truth. “From the moment I saw that shoeprint by Jackie’s window I knew that someone had been back there, looking in. And whether you guys want to believe Ricky or not makes no difference to me; because I believe him.” He stopped, panting, sweat leaked from his brow. With a labored breath, he got out, “And I won’t ever let anything happen to my sister again.”
He stared, his chest rising and falling with every shuttered intake of air. His lips quivered and his eyes went wet. We were all silent for a moment but Jason finally found his voice and asked the question we’d all wanted to know since the day Steve had lost it at the Tree.
“What happened to Jackie, Steve? What happened to you sister?”
Steve only stared blankly as if lost in a long tunnel then, finally, took one more hitching breath, looked up and broke down sobbing.
Frisbee Page 62
