Applewood (Book 1)

by Brendan P. Myers

  * * *

  He returned home about a half hour before dawn and decided to get that cup of coffee. As he walked slowly up the dark street, he stopped for a moment outside Andy’s house. Through the empty windows, he saw that some of the interior walls had begun to crumble. He noticed that the right side of her roof listed perilously before he turned away. Continuing his journey up the street, he went past the old Colonial where Jimmy used to live. He stopped for a longer moment outside what used to be Larry’s house.

  He had to walk sideways to get through the thicket that yesterday had threatened to swallow his whole car, and that soon would choke off all access to the street. Managing to get through it, he turned the corner and climbed over the gate, then walked up to the gas station. When he saw Duane’s truck, he smiled. His smile broadened as he remembered that tonight he and his old friends were all getting together. When he walked into the convenience store, he beamed at the counter and then stopped in surprise. “Where’s Duane?”

  The new clerk was a fat older gentleman, and he wore a yellow short sleeved shirt despite the harsh weather. It isn’t even a Mobil shirt, Dugan thought strangely. There was no Pegasus logo. The man looked grim when he answered.

  “Tell you what, buddy. You find your friend Duane and tell me where he is so I can go kick him in the ass.”

  Dugan still wore the half smile on his face as it began to burn red. He could understand why the guy thought he and Duane were friends, though. He was more surprised to feel defensive about Duane. “But his truck’s out there…”

  He stopped suddenly, after the clerk’s look told him he had no time for any friend of Duane. Dugan had a feeling where this was going anyway, so he turned around and left the store, deciding against the coffee.

  As he walked home again beneath the brightening sky, Dugan was saddened to think that even though they had only met each other the one time, some part of him was still going to miss Duane.

  3

  Michael Harris Returns

  The vandalism of the cemetery was big news, the biggest news to hit Grantham in as long as anyone could remember. The Boston television stations all sent reporters out to cover the story, as did a couple of Providence stations. For a few days after that, their white news vans could be spotted all over town as celebrity reporters did live stand-ups underneath bright white lights at the cemetery, downtown, or in front of the police station for their 6:00 and 11:00 p.m. newscasts.

  While all this was very interesting to the student body of Grantham Junior High, some of whom bragged to their friends about being interviewed for this station or seeing themselves on that station, the subject of much greater interest to most was their missing classmates.

  It became clear early on that neither the town authorities nor the police would make any comment or speculation on who might have done it or why. But when the Harris brothers, Cotter and Walsh stopped showing up for class, the whole school buzzed about it, because every one of them knew who might have done it, if not why.

  Larry called Dugan that first Sunday afternoon to ask if he’d heard about it. Dugan answered that he had. There was silence until Dugan answered his friend’s unspoken question: his mother’s grave was undisturbed. Jimmy called him next. The two had pretty much the same conversation.

  Dugan hadn’t told either one of them about the strange events of that Sunday morning. He was still struggling to work all that out in his own mind. He had left the article on the kitchen table for his father to find, writing in the margin, “she’s all right.” The two had achieved a kind of silent detente after the incident in the kitchen, but things had gone no further than that.

  Speculation and rumor abounded those first few days about exactly what the police had found at the scene, or more specifically, what they had not found. Not long after the incident, Jimmy overheard his father telling somebody on the phone that the floors and walls of the old tomb had been splattered with blood. Even stranger, he heard his father whisper that the dude who’d been buried in the tomb was missing. Larry’s theory was that Walshie probably took him to bang him.

  When the next Friday night rolled around, the four went to the movies and then downtown afterwards for pizza. While they ate, Dugan noticed a Grantham cop being interviewed on the TV set over the bar. But it was noisy and he couldn’t hear and by then nobody really cared anymore. After another week had gone by, and the news vans had all left, and the buzz around town began to dissipate, Dugan noticed that the atmosphere around school began to brighten considerably, like the sky after weeks of rain. People were being nicer to each other. He was certain of that.

  Classmates who weeks earlier would have ignored him now smiled when they saw him. He smiled back and said hello. He thought that maybe it was just a temporary thing brought on by their recent collective brush with fame, but Dugan sometimes felt it went deeper than that. There were still a few lowlifes around to be sure, but Dugan figured they were keeping a low profile now that their leaders had all disappeared.

  Dugan even surprised himself when he started thinking about going out for an extracurricular activity or two—maybe become a DJ at the school radio station or try out for the track team. He told himself cynically that he only wanted to do those things to keep himself the hell away from his house, but there was more to it than that. Only weeks earlier, he’d wanted to spend as little time at school as possible. When he was there, he just wanted to blend in and become invisible so he wouldn’t be a target. He was tired of getting his books tipped out of his hands every goddamn day. Once, he’d returned to his locker and found only the charred remains of his notebooks, about a year’s worth of his writing. One time in the locker room Stephen Harris spat in his face and called him a fag.

  Dugan wondered how it was possible that the removal of just a handful of lowlifes could make his own life so much better. He was not at all ashamed or embarrassed to admit that he hoped all four of them were dead. More than that, he hoped that their deaths had been agonizingly painful. He just didn’t want his friends getting pissed on anymore.

  About a week and a half later, Michael Harris returned to school.

  Dugan sensed something was happening as he stopped by his locker before homeroom. The easy laughter that had drifted throughout the hallways and among his classmates over the past few weeks seemed to stop suddenly, replaced by a hushed buzz. Dugan turned and saw that people had begun to point and whisper. Then he saw him, shuffling down the center of the hallway with his head down.

  Dugan slumped against his locker and waited for the other shoe to drop. Where there was one, there would be the others. Older brother should appear any moment now, still wearing his grungy old army jacket. Stephen Harris was a full head taller than any of the rest of the kids at school so at least he was easy to spot. The person that Larry would only refer to as “the bucktoothed freak” would be on one side of him. Stoner Walsh would be on the other. In that way, Dugan would know that his brief respite from this junior high school hell was over.

  But by lunchtime, none of the others had been spotted. Dugan and his friends bunched up a couple of tables and began to talk about it. They looked over and saw Michael Harris sitting all by himself. The tables around him were empty as well.

  “Look at the tough guy now,” Mike said. This was about as good as it got.

  Larry asked Dugan, “He said anything at all?”

  “Not that I know of. He missed a lot of work, so he talks to the teachers for a minute before and after class, but that’s about it.”

  “Whaddya think happened to the others?” Jimmy asked. “I mean it was them that did the cemetery, we all know that. So where’d the rest of ‘em go?”

  The table went quiet as they considered it. They each had their own theories about it, but most of those had been shattered the moment Michael Harris walked back into school, leaving them all back at the drawing board.

  “Here’s what I think happened,” Moon said quietly. His friends around the table leaned closer to listen.<
br />
  “They all go out to the cemetery, see, and then I think things got outta hand. I mean, they didn’t seem to plan it out or nothin’. But then they all get caught up in it, you know what I’m sayin’? Then, after they see what they done, maybe Stephen tells his younger brother to scram, like why should they both go down for it?”

  Dugan had trouble imagining that Stephen Harris cared much about anybody, even his own brother, but didn’t interrupt. Moon looked around for a moment to make sure they were still with him.

  “Or maybe Michael was there too, but either way it wouldn’t matter once he showed up.”

  Dugan was the first to bite. “All right, you got us. Once who showed up?”

  Moon paused a moment before answering. “Sergeant William Cotter of the Grantham Police Department. I think maybe one of them called him afterwards, or maybe they even got caught by him, and afterwards he spirited the three of them away to an uncle’s or a cousin’s or whatever, until things maybe quieted down a little bit.”

  “His father’s a cop?” Dugan was stunned to hear that a delinquent like Cotter might be related to a cop.

  “The apple don’t fall far from the tree my friend,” Moon said.“You of all people should know that.”

  Dugan instantly felt his face flush red and fell back in his chair. He looked daggers over at Moon, stunned by his outrageous comment. Grimacing and shaking his head, he was about to say something crushing about Moon’s mother when he felt a strong hand reach over and squeeze his left shoulder.

  “What street do we live on?” Jimmy asked, leaning close.

  Moon wasn’t at all sure what he might have said to get this rise out of Dugan, but figured it must have been something really bad. When he felt his own large expanse of face turn red, he thought that Sun might have been a better nickname for him than Moon.

  After Jimmy helped him realize his mistake, Dugan began to apologize profusely. “I am so sorry man, I’m just tired is all. I am just so sorry.” He put out his hand. Moon didn’t hesitate to take it. But even as they shook, Dugan feared that from this moment on, Moon would be more careful around him. That one moment of anger may have caused something to change irrevocably between them. He felt real bad about that.

  More subdued, the boys finished eating their lunches, all talk of the Harris gang forgotten. When lunchtime ended, Dugan waited for Moon to walk over and deposit his trash. Following him to the barrel, he placed his hand on Moon’s big shoulder to turn him around.

  “Moon, about what just happened,” he began. Moon raised both hands to stop him, but Dugan would have none of it. He had to do this now.

  “Moon, listen, please, hear me out. Your comment, well, for a second there, I thought you were talking about…somethin’ else is all.”

  Moon stopped him again. “It’s forgotten. Don’t even worry about it.”

  Dugan looked him straight in the eye. “Are you sure?” Moon nodded and smiled, reached out his hand again, and he and Dugan shook.

  As he walked back to class that day, Dugan hoped he’d been able to put things right with Moon. He remembered some advice he’d once gotten about how easy it was for a harsh word or a loose tongue to ruin a friendship.

  4

  Project Planning

  The special curriculum that year was a combination English/ History course created to honor the town’s upcoming two hundred and fiftieth birthday celebration. It was mandatory that all of Grantham’s public school students complete the course, which was viewed as so important to the town it was discussed at school committee meetings that went on late into the night. Variations of the program were tailored to meet the needs of students in all twelve grades.

  The core of Dugan’s ninth grade program consisted of selecting a project that would in some way demonstrate any one of Grantham’s many contributions to the history of the nation. Students were allowed to propose a project of their own choosing, so long as it was related to the long history of Grantham and met with the teacher’s approval. In preparation, Dugan’s division had spent the first few months of that school year learning the fundamentals of the town’s history.

  It was a week before Christmas by the time Dugan’s class was divided up into pairs of students. The teams were supposed to first discuss their ideas for a project, and then write up a one-page proposal for the teacher to review. Although his classmates had been markedly friendlier to him over the past few months, Dugan still didn’t have any real friends in his class. He’d been dreading the schoolyard pick.

  Therefore, he was surprised and pleased when Mr. Betancourt took his hat out of the closet and placed inside it the names he had cut from a class roster. He then walked around the room, asking random students to reach inside the hat and remove a name. After about half the students in class had been partnered up, he stopped by Dugan’s desk.

  “Okay, Mr. Dugan. Your turn. Can I have a drum roll please?”

  A couple of Dugan’s classmates began thumping on their desks and others made crashing cymbal sounds with their mouths. Dugan reached in and handed the small piece of paper back over to Mr. Betancourt, who unfolded it and announced to the class who Dugan’s partner would be.

  “Mr. Dugan is paired with…Michael Harris!”

  The desk drumming and cymbal crashing noises didn’t so much come to an abrupt halt as slowly peter out. Dugan felt his face begin to redden, but fought the urge to slump backwards in his chair or turn around to look at his new partner. Mr. Betancourt seemed to sense that some mysterious dynamic in class had changed, because he moved on quickly to another desk.

  “Okay, Ricky Leonard…your turn. Can I have another drum roll please?”

  After a moment, Dugan did let himself sag in his seat. He half-turned his head to look back at Harris, who was in his usual position, slumped back in his chair with his head down staring vacantly at his empty desk. It occurred to Dugan that most of the fight and fire had gone out of Michael Harris, who for weeks now had walked around school like a zombie. Dugan now saw that Harris had gotten another one of his funky haircuts.

  Harris typically wore his long black hair down to his shoulders. But at about the same time every year, Harris would come into school one day with his hair lightly trimmed. The next day, his hair would be shorter than it had been the day before. By the third day, his hair would be above his ears. After that third haircut, he’d let it grow out again for the rest of the year. Dugan had watched this strange multi-day haircut ritual for three years straight. He thought, it’s funny the things you notice.

  After everyone was paired up, Mr. Betancourt announced that the library had been reserved for the exclusive use of his class for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday. The newly formed pairs were to meet there quietly, to discuss their ideas for the project, and then work on the proposal. Mr. Betancourt looked down at his watch and declared there was no time like the present. He told everyone to grab their books, and led his class into the hallway and down to the library amid scattered laughter and excited chatter. It sounded to Dugan that at least some of his classmates were pleased with their partnerships. Dugan walked by himself.

  When he entered the library, Dugan walked over to the large stacks at the end of the long room and selected a quiet table away from his classmates. After sitting down, he quickly opened up one of his composition books. A moment later, he heard someone sit down across from him. He looked up and saw it was Harris. Dugan stared at him for a moment, before putting his nose back into his book.

  The two sat in silence for the remainder of that hour. They repeated the same scene two days later. Harris sat zombified while Dugan penned his private thoughts. When Mr. Betancourt occasionally popped his head over to ask if everything was all right, Dugan would look up and nod. The two had until January 10th to have a project proposal drawn up. Dugan didn’t give a crap and couldn’t care less. He planned to let Harris worry about it.

  On the Friday before Christmas, talk at the lunch table among Dugan’s friends drifted toward the project p
lans. Moon and Mike were in an eighth grade class whose teacher had allowed them to pick their own partner so they had partnered up. Moon said that he and Mike planned to focus on the history of the quarry, and the importance to the town of Grantham Granite.

  Jimmy and his partner were talking about doing a project on the town’s once thriving manufacturing and textile industry. The empty factories just outside the town center were the only remaining evidence of the millions of shoes that had been stitched together right here in Grantham to help win the First World War. Larry and his partner were still undecided, but toward the end of lunch, he turned to Dugan.

  “Hey, who you partnered up with, anyway?”

  Dugan told them and put his head back down. He ignored all of their subsequent shouted questions and hoots, and then Jimmy held a hand up to silence them, knowing that Dugan would tell them all about it when he was good and ready.

  5

  Satan’s on my back

  It had been a while since the two cousins talked at all about their three friends who disappeared that night Butch kicked them the hell out of his car. Butchie wasn’t much for talking anyway. When they heard about what happened down at the cemetery, the two drove on out to have a look, but the cops were still there so they didn’t even slow down. Butchie was already on juvenile probation for breaking into a van and he didn’t need the hassle. They saw just enough for Richie to mutter, “Holy shit!” as they drove by.

  Richie was supposed to go with the missing gang that night, too, but it was his little sister’s birthday and his mother had given him a hard time about it. He only hoped that when the three finally did turn up, they wouldn’t be too mad at either him or Butchie for kicking them out of the car. Even Harris would have to admit that Walshie was being kind of a prick that night. Harris had always scared him anyway. Like that time he took a piss on the little nerdy kid. That was way too hardcore for Richie. The truth was, he didn’t miss any of them all that much, though he did miss his access to the white powder. Harris had been Richie’s only connection to Metzger.