“I see.”
All three of them were staring at me like I was supposed to know the secret handshake.
“I guess…” For the second time in as many minutes, I grasped for something profound. Still no go. “When you get the chance, I don’t know… just tell her you’re sorry.”
They looked vaguely disappointed. Billy compensated by stroking his sideburns. “That’s it?” he said.
“Hell, I don’t know….I guess, maybe…try and figure out when she needs company and when she needs to be left alone, when she wants to talk about Shaun and when she wants people to shut up about it.”
“Tricky,” Dorrie said, and the other two nodded. Then she picked up her corn and took a bite.
I left them there like that, nibbling on their dinner and contemplating the proper etiquette for dealing with your dead friend’s mother. And what they didn’t know at the time was this: Inside of twelve hours, two of them would still be pondering the same question.
But only two of them.
CHAPTER6
To this day, I cannot possibly comprehend why he did it, not really. Some people say he was trying to play chicken with the universe, others that he actually believed the tarantula story (though, frankly, I think that’s absurd). The most popular theory was that he was so freaked out about his friend, he desperately needed solace—and being a kid, he didn’t contemplate the consequences. If you ask me, that last one is the only explanation that comes anywhere close to making sense.
But whatever the reason, at some time past twelve on Friday night, Billy Halpern sat on the highest tier of the Melting Rock and dropped the same acid that had killed his friend the night before.
And by two A.M., he was just as dead.
He was found by a couple who wanted to perform certain intimate acts at the top of the rock—one of the festival’s lesser-known traditions—and decided the spot was wasted on the sleeping Billy. They tried to wake him, and when he didn’t respond, the girl shook him harder than she’d meant to. He went tumbling down from tier to tier until he landed on the hard ground, where he lay so still it was obvious he wasn’t going to move again, ever.
Then she started screaming.
Her cries drew the Jaspersburg cop who had been stationed there overnight by Chief Stilwell, in defiance of both the town council and the overtime budget. The guy was the force’s rookie—a kid barely eight weeks out of the state academy who, when I met him the following morning, didn’t seem entirely clear on how to button his uniform shirt.
That this was the first dead body he’d ever seen went without saying; that he threw up would be both a hoary stereotype and the honest-to-God truth.
Since I was so exhausted after two nights of crummy sleep, it took more than shouting to wake me up; it took the piercing shriek of an ambulance. Still, I tried very hard to pretend I couldn’t hear it—and when that didn’t work, I tried equally hard to convince myself I was dreaming. Flunking there as well, I hauled myself up and out of the tent. In what felt like déjà vu all over again, I fumbled for my glasses and made my way toward the source of the commotion, stomach knotted and notebook in hand.
After what had happened to Shaun Kirtz, I have to say I half expected to find exactly what I found—a crowd gathered around the prostrate body of a teenager. That being said, I’ll admit to being intensely surprised that, for the second time in two days, it was someone I knew.
Unlike with Shaun, I recognized him instantly; chalk it up to the oversize sideburns that had been Billy’s defining feature. Even though his face was obscured by the paramedic who was trying to revive him, the sight of one of those bushy parentheses told me exactly who it was.
There’s not much lighting at the Jaspersburg Fairgrounds, and the scene was being illuminated by a combination of headlights, flashlights, and torches that an enterprising few had brought over from the campgrounds. It added up to create a surreal mood, with some places as bright as Fenway Park while others were pitch black, the spots in between flickering in and out of focus according to the whim of the flames and the motion of people’s wrists.
I stood there gaping at the body, one hand over my mouth and the other clamped around my notebook. I knew I should snap out of it, that I should act like a reporter and do some reporting. But for the life of me, I couldn’t move. For some reason, why I couldn’t tell you, it struck me that between them Shaun and Billy had been on the planet a grand total of thirty-five years—roughly the age of most of my drinking buddies. I hadn’t particularly liked either one of them, mostly because I have a low tolerance for clueless teenage boys. And now neither one of them would ever be anything else.
AS SOON AS THE FIRST orange strips of daylight hit the horizon, I called Cody. Being the virtuous sort who actually exercises before work (we don’t have this in common), he was already awake. I told him about all the fun I’d been having at Melting Rock, and the first thing he wanted to know was just why the hell I hadn’t called him sooner. I mumbled something about being busy filing stories, which was only marginally accurate. The truth was that although I’d been dying for some boyfriendly sympathy, I was also sick of blubbering to him every time I ran into something nasty.
“So you actually talked to these kids?” he was saying. “You mean both of them?”
“Yeah, in that story on their bunch of friends I did for the Thursday paper.”
“You want to tell me what you saw?”
“I already told you,” I said. “Two dead kids. Consecutively.”
“Yeah, but you and I both know there are bodies and there are bodies.”
“True.”
“And?”
“And…”I thought about it for a minute. “All things considered, I guess this wasn’t so bad.”
“Then tell me.”
“First kid was worse. Eyes were still open and everything. This girl was with him—she was completely freaked out. Seeing her was almost worse than seeing him, if you can believe it.”
“I can believe a lot of things.”
“Name’s Cindy. Youngest in the bunch.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Not so good. She ended up in the hospital on sedation.”
Deep sigh. “Goddamn self-destructive idiots.”
“The follies of youth, I guess.”
“Hey, you and I were both teenagers once, and we managed not to take drugs and die.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like they deserved what they got. Being young and stupid isn’t a capital crime.”
“For them it was.”
I thought about it for a while. “True enough.”
“Listen, baby, you want to get the hell out of there? Because if you want, the dogs and I can come get you in twenty minutes.”
“That’s extremely sweet, and completely not necessary. I’m fine, really. And anyway, I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Good.”
“Listen,” I said, “do you know this guy Steve Stilwell?”
“The J-burg chief? Sure.”
“Nice guy?”
“Yeah. Solid. Why?”
“I just met him today…I mean yesterday. His daughter was tight with the guys who died.”
“Rough.”
“Anyway, she was telling me what a fascist her dad is, but when he showed up, she went running for him. It was kind of sweet, actually.”
“Teenagers are an up-and-down proposition.”
“How would you know?”
“I arrest a lot of them.”
“Oh. So, do you like Chief Stilwell? Is he, you know, a buddy of yours?”
“Not like I’d go out for a beer with the guy, but I’ve met him a few times.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Not much. Seems like a decent sort. Can’t say what kind of cop he is. Wife died a while back—about five or six years ago, I think. Did a hitch in the army, then served in the Gulf as a reservist. We talked about that a while.”
“The Gulf War?”
“Yeah.”
“What about it?”
“Just comparing notes.”
“You mean you were there?”
“Um…yeah.”
“Jesus. How come you never told me?”
“You never asked.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Why is that, anyway?”
“I…Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
“You asked me once if I ever killed anybody.”
“That’s true.”
“And I told you I did. In the navy and on the force.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, where did you think I did it? Basic training?”
“Fine. Have you been in any other wars you’d like to mention?”
“Nothing you would’ve seen on CNN.”
“Christ, Cody, this is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had.”
“No offense, baby,” he said, “but I kind of doubt that.”
BY TEN O’CLOCK the word had come down. The Melting Rock Music Festival was over—not forever, mind you, but definitely for this year. By order of the Jaspersburg police, the bands were to pack up their instruments, the campers to unstake their tents, and the vendors to empty their fryers. The resulting atmosphere was how I’d imagine a retreating army would look, picking up and moving away without an ounce of joy, and an overarching sense that they’d been robbed.
The festival’s organizers seemed to take it fairly well; when I interviewed Jo Mingle about the situation, she seemed much more worried about the deaths of two teenagers than the loss of one day of Melting Rock.
“This is totally out of control,” she said, looking so haggard and drawn as to be in danger of premature labor. “This place has gotten so goddamn far out of control…. Melting Rock just isn’t what it used to be.”
“What did it used to be?”
“Something else.”
She turned her back on me and resumed packing up more crates of unsold merchandise—bright green T-shirts with dissolving musical notes on the front, compilation CDs of festival regulars entitled Melting Rock Mojo.
I was about to walk away, then changed my mind. “No, really,” I said, coming around to her spherical front. “I want to know. What was it like?”
She took a deep breath, exhaled, and put down the stack of T-shirts. The back turned out to say MELTING ROCK—LUCKY #13.
“You never came before? Back in the day?”
“Just once, five years ago, and not for very long.”
“Then I’m not sure I can explain it right,” she said. “The first year it was, like, maybe a hundred people. Somebody brought an Airstream and the bands set up in front of it and that was the stage. The food was free, just this guy who baked a ton of bread and gave it all away. It was like… Man, it was like heaven. I know you’re gonna think that’s a bunch of crap, but it’s true. Everybody was just so mellow, you know? People just wanted to hear music and have a good time.”
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe it was inevitable, right? Every year more and more people showed up, and since it got bigger and bigger, it had to get really organized—parking permits and vending licenses and liability insurance and sales tax, all that junk. Past couple of years, it hasn’t really seemed like Melting Rock anymore. I mean, it’s still better than most festivals—way better than those goddamn rip-off Woodstocks they did—but I know a bunch of people from the old days who won’t even come anymore.”
“Because it got too big and… what? Establishment?”
“Yeah, that, and…” She reoriented her attention somewhere over my shoulder, her face breaking into a wide smile. “Hey, babe.”
I turned around, and there was the drummer from Stumpy the Salamander. Up close, he looked even taller and scrawnier than he had onstage—a great, tattooed arachnid of a person with an air of such studied casualness, I wondered if he had a B.A. in nonchalance.
The guy came over and gave Jo a sloppy whopper of a kiss, their bodies at an odd angle because of her protruding belly. When they came up for air, she said, “Babe, this is Alex from the newspaper. Alex, this is Trike Ford, my life partner. He’s the drummer for Stumpy.”
I stuck out my hand. “I caught part of your show.”
“Cool,” he said, then kissed Jo again. “Hey, I gotta go help the guys pack up.”
“But…I thought you were gonna take the chicklet,” she said, gesturing toward the infant sitting in a shaded baby seat.
“Sorry, babe,” he said. “Busy.”
With that, he headed off toward the main stage. If Jo was upset, she didn’t show it.
“Um, you were saying before, about the festival getting to be too big…?”
She shook her head, either at Trike or at Melting Rock in general. “Christ, I’m gonna sound like my dad, but these kids that come now…I mean, I was their age when Melting Rock started, but we just had a whole different attitude. We just kind of went with the flow, you know? But these kids, it’s like they’re on a mission or something. Like they gotta do the fest to the nth degree—get no sleep and party till they drop—” She clamped a hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
“It’s okay. I know what you meant.”
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, the beauty of Melting Rock used to be that it was so low-key. People did their own thing, hung out, soaked up the sound, you know? Nobody had anything to prove. Nobody had any kind of agenda. They just wanted to hang out and have a good time and hear good music.”
“And you don’t think it’s like that anymore?”
“For some people it is. But for a lot of them, it’s all about ‘Where did you get to camp? Did you get in Main? How much goddamn jewelry did you sell? How many times did you get fucked up?’ ” She shook her head and settled heavily on a milk crate, which disappeared beneath her maternal bulk. “I probably sound like a grumpy old lady, don’t I? But I’ll tell you, it makes me sad. It really does.”
“How do you think what happened is going to affect next year?”
Heavy sigh. “Next year. Good question. Tell you the truth, I can’t even think about it. And what’s more,” she said, “I can’t even think about thinking about it.”
I left her there packing up official Melting Rock water bottles (five dollars a pop) and went in search of more color for my story on the festival’s premature end. If anybody was happy about it, I couldn’t find them. I interviewed a dejected couple who’d come all the way from Myrtle Beach for the Melting Rock experience, and a homegrown Gabriel band whose festival debut had lasted exactly one set, and a portly potato-pancake vendor who complained bitterly of all the inventory he was going to be stuck with. (“Ya want ’em?” he said, pointing to a mountainous vat of shredded spuds. “They’re yours.”)
Although the assembled masses seemed disinclined to go anywhere fast, the Jaspersburg cops were having none of it. The festival was over, and everyone was expected to get out of Dodge posthaste. A few Yuppie types tried to argue that they’d paid for their campsite through Sunday afternoon and weren’t about to be displaced, whereupon they were directed to the fine print in the program that said there’d be no refunds if the festival were canceled in case of “emergency, inclement weather, or act of God.”
The deaths of Shaun Kirtz and Billy Halpern had also mobilized the Walden County Health Department, not to mention a cadre of other local social-service groups dedicated to saving adolescents from themselves. They wandered the fairgrounds distributing flyers and buttonholing people as they hauled their belongings to their cars, the messages varying according to the agency’s political bent, from “Don’t take drugs” to “Don’t take drugs from people you don’t know real well.”
I was getting quotes from one of the shaggy-haired members of Unitarians for Social Sanity when somebody grabbed me by the elbow. It turned out to be Lauren Potter, and she looked like hell. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her moon-shaped face was stained with tears. When she spoke, she sounded
so manic I thought the Unitarian was going to perform an intervention right then and there.
“Have you seen him?” she asked.
“Seen who?”
“Tom. Have you seen Tom? It’s been days. It’s been two days. I’ve been looking for him for two days. Have you seen him anyplace? Because he isn’t home. I called his folks and they haven’t seen him since he left with us. Since he left to come here. And I’ve been looking for him everywhere….”
She seemed about to walk off, so I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Hold on a sec. Calm down, okay? Try and breathe—”
“But I can’t find him. I’ve been looking since before… since before Shaun. …And now there’s Billy and I still can’t—”
“Wait. Just listen to me for a minute. When’s the last time you saw him?”
Both her eyes went off to the left, like she was trying to access the information from a balky database. “I…Wednesday night.”
“And where was he going then?”
“His tent. Everybody split and he went off by himself, and now I can’t find him anywhere. I’ve been looking and asking around to everybody I could—”
“Is his stuff still in his tent?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“It’s new, and I don’t know what it looks like.”
“Don’t his parents?”
“No, I…They’re not really into outdoor stuff. I asked them, but they weren’t even sure what color it was.”
“But don’t you even know where he was camping?”
“He…” She stopped and stared at the ground. “You’re gonna think it’s stupid.”
“No, I’m—”
“But it’s not stupid. It’s just this thing he likes to do, okay?”
The urge to throttle her was growing, and fast. I tried to ignore it. I also tried to sound soothing. “Okay, Lauren, what does he like to do?”
“He…He has this thing where he likes to move his tent around, crash in a different spot every night if he can find a place. He says it makes for”—her eyes darted left again—“… for a more varied experience. He says it makes it so it’s like a different Melting Rock every night.”
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