Dead Scared

by Ivan Blake

  He leafed through the contents for the umpteenth time to satisfy himself he’d overlooked nothing troublesome. Boucher could foresee no problems with the affidavits and transcripts of interviews, the photos of the fire scene, the fire marshal’s report, or the pathologist’s reports on Dr. Meath and his wife. Okay, so the kid’s hospital admission record from the night of his arrest was a little weird. Chandler’s injuries had been bad, real bad, but at his trial the prosecutor had argued they’d probably been self-inflicted to garner sympathy, and the judge had bought it. Boucher had heard from a buddy at South Portland the boy was still hurting himself and folks there were concerned for him. In the Chief’s opinion, the kid deserved all the pain he got.

  The reading material they’d removed from the kid’s bedroom at the Willard place was just plain creepy: photocopied pages from some book entitled Knights of the Night: a History of the Mortsafemen, with sections underlined about the dead feeling pain in Paradise; scribbled notes about grave robberies in Scotland; and a magazine article on funeral practices in Asia somewhere, with pictures of a corpse and some fucked-up villagers. The prosecutor had used the weird crap to show the boy had an unnatural obsession with death. As for the articles Boucher’s officers had found beneath Chandler’s bed on Dr. Meath’s early career in England, the material was proof, the prosecutor argued, the accused had been obsessed with old man Meath. All this crap added up to one thing in Gabe’s mind: the Chandler boy had been planning to plead some kind of mental defect in the hopes of getting a cushy stay in hospital. It hadn’t worked, no goddamned way.

  He also didn’t think there was anything problematic in the stuff the judge had requested during the sentencing phase of the trial: the affidavits from the boy’s teachers describing him as “secretive, nasty, with a bizarre sense of humor and strange fascinations”, or the school counselor’s statement on Chandler’s state of mind in which she’d described him as “malicious with morbid and unnatural interests.” She’d also said he knew right from wrong so couldn’t claim to be mentally ill.

  “Chief?” Pike said, poking his head in the door. “Something the reporter asked. He was wondering if we have anything not in the public record, like background stuff, stuff that didn’t get used at trial. I said he had to talk to you.”

  “Huh,” grunted the Chief. What’s Koyman up to? “Maybe I better have a look at the Chandler box from the Evidence Room.”

  “Sure, Chief,” Pike said, and left the office.

  Okay, so they’d gathered other material during their investigation they hadn’t told the DA or anyone else about, but so the hell what? Police always collect shit during an investigation that turns out to be worthless. Not like they’d withheld evidence. None of the crap they’d found would have helped the kid’s defense, not one bit. It would only have confused matters.

  Ricky Pike returned a few minutes later with a cardboard carton, taped shut, and labelled, Chief’s Eyes Only. “Going to let the reporter see this?” Pike asked as he put the box on the Chief’s desk.

  “Not sure,” Boucher said. “Close the door behind you.” Pike got the message and left.

  He ripped off the tape and started picking through the contents. Okay, this stuff was a little more troublesome.

  First, more stuff from the kid’s room. A map of Bemishstock Cemetery with several graves circled in red and a list of names scribbled down the side; Boucher had done some checking and discovered all the folks on the list had been buried in the four months prior to the fire. Then a sketch of a headdress or helmet called The Activator. And an envelope labelled Meath’s pellets for testing, with goat feed inside. All garbage, for sure. Even so, it had probably been just as well no one had seen any of it because god knows how Chandler’s lawyer might have spun the stuff.

  Next, the note from the Dahlman girl, the note that had made things in Bemishstock get really intense in the days before the fire. It hadn’t been introduced at trial because the girl’s death had had nothing directly to do with Chandler’s case. Boucher had put the note in this box only because the Dahlman girl had sent it to Chandler, and it was kind of interesting background. No way was he going to let Koyman see it, however, and exploit the girl’s memory. As Boucher reread the heart-wrenching plea, he felt so goddamned proud he and his men had won at least some justice for the poor girl.

  Then, Dr. Meath’s notebook, its cover melted, and its pages charred and dirty and full of medical crap. Boucher himself had found the ring binder—what remained of it—in the ashes of the barn under a metal table where it had escaped the worst of the blaze. He’d never bothered to examine the binder closely before because the soot and the handwritten scrawl made its pages almost illegible, and from a quick look now, it was only about heads and necks and muscles and garbage like that. Boucher had concluded at the time of the trial the binder contained only patient notes from Meath’s practice. Hell, Boucher himself had gone to see old man Meath once or twice for his bad back so his own name was probably in the binder somewhere. During the investigation, the binder had been set aside because no one had time to waste on shit having nothing at all to do with the fire. Weird, though, about the Willard girl; she’d come to the station right after she got out of hospital asking if anyone had found a binder in the ashes of Meath’s barn. There’d been something a little troubling in that, so as a precaution, he’d visited the mother and warned her to stop her daughter from poking around in police business or he’d have to re-examine the girl’s role in the death of Doctor Meath.

  Finally, from the bottom of the box where he’d buried it, Boucher pulled out the pathologist’s report; not the official one on the doctor and his wife, but the other one, the one dealing with the unidentified bones found in the ashes. “Human...but from neither of the two known victims,” it read in part. Now a claim like that really could have screwed things up. The existence of the report did make the Chief uneasy. Fortunately, he’d had the good sense to lock the report away before it could do any real damage. That’s why the police chief got paid the big bucks, to make hard choices, and that’s what Boucher had done.

  The report had arrived in his office sometime after the trial. He’d known the moment he looked at it that the pathologist was full of shit. Boucher could think of a dozen explanations why a few human remains might be found in the ashes of the barn. Maybe Meath and his wife had some retarded kid hidden away. Boucher had seen such things before. Three people from the Meath family had died in the blaze and not two, so what? Or maybe the bones had been there for decades, Indian bones even. Maybe they weren’t human remains at all. The notoriously incompetent pathologist in Portland had probably mistaken goat bones for human. He was a raging drunk, and he’d made similar mistakes before. Or maybe the kid himself had brought bones to the doctor’s place just to confuse matters. Well, it hadn’t worked, and justice had been served.

  Nope, no one knew of the goddamned report except him and the pathologist, and the pathologist was retiring in a month. Forced out, everyone said. The presence of other human remains at the scene of the fire hadn’t come up at trial, not really, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to come up now. The case was closed; and a good thing too.

  Boucher called Pike. “Ricky, I’ll talk to those reporters when they get back.”

  Pike stuck his head in the door. “So, you letting them see the stuff?”

  “We’re not going to mention any of it.” Boucher closed the box, got up, and carried it to the metal locker in the corner of his office. “Koyman asks if we have anything else on the kid,” he said as he shoved the box in among the crumpled papers and dirty laundry and slammed the door. “We say we gave everything to the boy’s parents, and they probably threw it out when they left town.”

  That was the one good thing to have come out of this mess. Allied Paper Products of Wisconsin had been forced to pull the kid’s father from the plant and the town had been given a brief reprieve. No one expected it to last. Another hatchet man would eventually be sent to close their pla
nt, but every month the town could delay its inevitable death was another nickel in his pension fund. And that, as some bitch on a cooking show always said, is a good thing.

  They both heard the front door open.

  “They’re back, Chief.”

  “Then let’s get this over with,” Boucher said.

  Chapter Two

  1985

  The blighted little town of Bemishstock, Maine—Industrial Heartland of the North Central Coast proclaimed the weather-beaten billboard out on Route One—had never been a fishing port, so it had none of the historic charm of some New England towns. From its founding, Bemishstock had been a mill town—but not anymore. Like many other small towns in New England, Bemishstock had become a relic of America`s industrial decay.

  Bemishstock had been built near the mouth of the Roan River by business partners, Roland Bemish and Andrew Stock, to take advantage of a narrow gorge through which the river acquired an uncharacteristic fury just before tumbling into Adinack Bay. Its hydroelectric dam had a century ago made the town a magnet for small manufacturers of forged tools and work clothes and cordage and timber products. Now only the carton plant owned by Allied Paper Products of Wisconsin remained, and Chris Chandler’s father had been sent by Allied to close that.

  All the Company’s talk about searching for options and new ideas fooled no one. The townspeople knew nothing they could do or say would make any difference. The decision to kill Bemishstock had already been taken by faceless bastards half a continent away with no thought whatsoever to their fate. Richard Chandler was like death or the plague come to Maine. He was there to oversee the inevitable. From the moment the Chandler family arrived in Bemishstock, folks knew their fate was sealed; they were become like the walking dead.

  The Chandler family had been living in Maine since early September. The first few weeks had been tolerable. For a while, even Chris’s mother, who rarely spoke and always seemed so sad, had actually managed an occasional smile. The hills had been bathed in glorious color and the sea had sparkled in the golden autumn light. Not now; six weeks on, the landscape, sky, and sea had all turned gray, the color of ash. And ash was the color of Bemishstock; all gray stone and unpainted, weathered wood.

  Most of the shops on Main Street were already empty. In a desperate attempt to create the illusion of business activity, the Chamber of Commerce had once tried to fill vacant shop windows with displays of clothing or handicrafts or furniture, but the Chamber had long since given up and the displays were now dust-covered and depressing. Like the dark blotches beneath the skin of a dying man, the few remaining businesses in Bemishstock were pawn shops and second hand stores and tattoo parlors, and from what Chris had seen elsewhere across America when such shops arrive in a town, death is not far behind. Maybe in the mind of some god sitting on a cloud somewhere it made a twisted kind of sense that Chris Chandler should be fated to discover his calling as a defender of the recently departed in a town itself so near to death.

  Wednesday, November 13, evening

  “They’re all such idiots,” Chris said to himself. “But you knew that, so get the hell over it!” At school that afternoon, somebody had smeared blood all over his locker—third time in as many weeks—pig’s blood, but blood all the same. “Besides, it’s all crap anyway, the school, the town,” he said, then shouted as loud as he could at the seabirds that swooped and cried in the darkening sky, “It’s all crap! Crap, crap, crap!” As if to oblige, a gull chose that moment to crap on the ground in front of him.

  Chris was perched on a rusted, wrought iron fence enclosing two old graves. The tiny cemetery belonged to the Willard family and was a long way back of their farm house, where Chris’s family rented rooms. Down at the bottom of an apple orchard, and a stone’s throw from the rocky shore of Adinack Bay, to get to the cemetery, you had to climb over an embankment and an abandoned rail line that crossed the Willard’s property and snaked down the coast all the way to Portland. The cemetery stood in the middle of a strip of scrub land between the beach and the tracks, in a tangle of dead weeds and tall yellow grass, and was practically invisible.

  He’d been coming to the Willard family graveyard every day after school for more than a month. It had become a ritual. He would sit there, curse at the seagulls and stare at the two tiny gravestones, worn almost smooth by a century of Maine weather. And he’d do it for hours on end, until the dark swallowed the dregs of each terrible day.

  Edna and Abner Willard had been married for fifty years, and both had died in 1873. Beloved Edna had passed away first and then, within a month, her Dearest Abner. On Edna Willard’s stone, beneath a winged skull was inscribed, Death is not the worst evil, rather when we wish to die and cannot. And right beside her, on husband Abner’s stone was carved, O Death the Healer...Pain lays not its touch upon a corpse. Chris hadn’t a clue what either inscription meant. Had Edna ever really felt Beloved? She hadn't chosen the words on her stone; Edna had been dead when they were inscribed. She might have wanted something different on her headstone; maybe, Thank Heaven that’s over, or Keep that bastard away from me. The dead don't often get to choose their words of remembrance. Chris suspected a lot of gravestones lied.

  He’d never thought much about death before his family moved to Maine, and he sure as hell had never spent any time staring at gravestones. What kind of sane person ever would? But this town, this hellish town, it brought out the darkest part of him. Sitting by these graves had come to seem like a natural thing to do. Besides, what else was there? Basketball? Dates with girls? Yeah right. Living in this god-forsaken town, he felt dead already. And his family had only been in Bemishstock for two months. Jeez, what would he be like in another six, a goddamned zombie?

  The school bus from Bemishstock Regional Secondary School was supposed to drop him at the top of Willard Lane. Almost every afternoon, however, the driver threw Chris off the bus miles short of his stop. The driver usually made up some excuse, but he really didn’t have to; everyone knew the real reason—Chris’s dad.

  The Willard house was about five miles from town, so the walk home wasn’t too bad, not yet anyway. In another couple of weeks, when the snow began to fly, Chris might have to put up a little more fight. For now, he didn’t mind the walk, so he usually got off without protest.

  Twice when it rained, he’d hitchhiked home. The first time, he’d gotten a ride from a goat farmer who lived a mile or so past Willard Farm. As the dilapidated pickup pulled up alongside him, the old man behind the wheel had simply gestured to the rear where he’d tethered a goat. The ride had been painfully slow, and when Chris got home, he’d been wetter and a lot smellier than if he’d walked. The truck had stopped at Willard Lane without Chris signalling, so apparently the goatman knew who Chris was. As the truck pulled away, he’d read the faded lettering on its door, Doctor Meath, Chiropractor and then on a second line, Quality Goat Cheese, Meat and Milk. Too weird.

  The second time he’d hitchhiked, he’d been picked up by an old lady with thin crisp blue hair, a weathered complexion and bright red lips, wearing a ratty fur coat and driving a maroon 1947 Buick Roadmaster—a sweet old car for all its faded paint and threadbare interior—but the old lady had driven even slower than the goatman, and she’d had the heat cranked so high Chris had nearly died.

  And she’d been very chatty! Chris had soon heard the woman’s entire life story. Her name was Felicity Holcomb—Felix to her friends, she said—and the road to her house was right across from Willard Lane. She lived a couple of miles up a long dirt track that climbed to the top of the hill. As a girl, she’d summered on the coast of Maine with her family, the Harrows of New York City, but against her father’s wishes, she’d fallen in love with and married a local woodcutter named Harold Holcomb. She’d been widowed far too soon, and ever since had eked out a meager living painting landscapes and writing articles on local lore for small New England magazines.

  Chris had learned all this in under four miles, and their drive together had ended with
Felicity inviting him to visit sometime to chat about life on the coast. Chris had rolled his eyes in bemused disgust as he got out of the car at the top of Willard Lane; he couldn’t imagine ever taking such an odd duck up on her invitation.

  From the main road, Chris had to walk down the long gravel lane to the enormous old farmhouse his family shared with the Willards. Willard Farm must have been quite impressive in its day. Now it was almost derelict, with peeling yellow paint, rotted sills, missing roof tiles, broken panes. The building was t-shaped and the Willard family occupied the much larger front section facing the highway, while Chris’s family rented the much smaller back portion pointing down through the orchard toward the bay. They did have a separate entrance and several large windows facing the water, but there were only two bedrooms for the five members of the Chandler family, and the place was tiny, dingy, and cold. Chris slept in a crawl space in the back portion of the attic. You’d have thought his dad’s company could have given their hatchet man a more generous housing allowance. Apparently not. Wherever the Chandlers were sent, they had to live in god-awful accommodations, like the crumbling Willard place.

  Even though their house was falling down, the Willards were nice enough. Of the once prominent Willard clan, there were now just three remaining members: an elderly and infirmed grandfather; his overworked daughter-in-law, now the sole breadwinner for the three of them; and her strange and remote daughter who was almost the same age as Chris. Grandfather Willard rarely made an appearance because of his many infirmities. His back had been broken by falling cider barrels five years before and was now twisted like a pretzel. Old man Willard’s daughter-in-law, who was about the same age as Chris’s mom, bore the burden of keeping the family’s orchard business going and seemed almost crushed by the task. She was nice all the same, and from time to time, gave Chris odd jobs for pocket change. Then there was Gillian.