A Bad Night for Bullies

by Gary Ghislain

  “He’s probably at the tavern,” I said when there was no answer. As I said it, a loud THUD, like something really heavy falling, came from inside the boat as it started rocking harder on newborn waves.

  “Mr. Donahue!” Frank Goolz insisted. “This is important. It’s about your son.”

  “Maybe he’s passed out,” I said, and we all listened for a while until the thudding thing thudded again.

  “Mr. Donahue?” Frank Goolz called again. “I’m coming on board!”

  “If you brought your revolver, this would be a good time to take it out,” I said. “Helmut Donahue has sent people to the hospital just for looking at him the wrong way.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, stepping down onto the deck of The Donahues’ Pride. Suzie jumped down after him and Ilona stayed with me on the dock.

  Frank Goolz knocked hard on the wooden frame of the cabin, calling for Donahue. He turned to us. “I’m going in.”

  “I don’t have my phone with me,” I said. I hadn’t been home to retrieve it since we left school. I had no way of calling 911 if Mr. Donahue jumped out of the cabin and attacked us with a giant rusty hook.

  I turned hopefully to Ilona.

  “I don’t own a phone,” she said. “Never have.”

  Another thud came from inside.

  “We don’t need phones. If it comes to that, I’ll follow your excellent suggestion about my old friend in here.” Frank Goolz tapped his satchel and winked at me.

  “We’ll wake him up gently,” Suzie said, following her father into the cabin.

  I couldn’t believe he would drag Suzie into this with him. Mum would be so mad to see how reckless he could be with his daughters. I looked up at Ilona. “Did you know he has a gun in that satchel?”

  “Of course,” she said. “These are dangerous days. A gun can come in handy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to channel her coolness.

  “Relax,” she said, so I knew I wasn’t doing such a great job. “He’s used to stuff like this.” She patted my shoulder.

  I felt a little better, mostly because Ilona let her hand linger on my shoulder, and it was nice. And then I realized how long we’d been waiting.

  “Mr. Goolz? Everything good in there?” I called. I looked up at the sky as the first drops of rain began to fall.

  Ilona’s hand left my shoulder. “I should go on board and check on them.”

  “I can’t come with you,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. She was about to step on board when her sister wobbled out of the cabin, looking pale and seasick.

  “Did you find him?” I asked.

  It took Suzie a while to focus on me. “No. Dad wants me out of there.”

  Ilona helped her out of the boat. “Are you all right?”

  “No!” She sat down on the wet edge of the dock. “Far from it.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, sensing I wouldn’t like her answer.

  “There’s blood everywhere,” she said.

  “Blood?” I shouted, grabbing my wheels like that was code for “Let’s get the heck out of here.”

  Suzie was turning from chalk-white to pea-green. “I don’t like looking at blood.”

  “Mr. Goolz!” I shouted. No answer. I turned back to Suzie. “What’s going on in there?”

  “There was a huge barrel rolling around in the blood. That’s what was making all that noise. But Dad fixed it.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Searching.”

  “Searching for what?”

  “Whoever bled like that,” she said weakly, “or whatever’s left of them.”

  “MR. GOOLZ!” I shouted.

  Ilona squatted beside her sister. “Just breathe calmly.”

  “Okay,” Suzie said, but instead, she leaned over and vomited into the water.

  Ilona rubbed her back gently, telling her everything was going to be fine. But nothing was fine. And things were getting worse—suddenly it began to rain, hard. Ilona helped her sister stand up and we retreated toward the barracks.

  “Why is your dad still on the boat?” I asked once we were out of the rain.

  Ilona helped Suzie sit on a crate that was lying against the wall and came to stand by me. We looked back at the boat. There was no sign of Frank Goolz, and the rain and wind made the situation even scarier.

  “I’m going to get him,” Ilona said. This time, she didn’t let me stop her. She ran through the rain to the boat, ignoring me when I called her name.

  “Oh, no,” Suzie said.

  “What? Are you going to be sick again?”

  She lifted her sneaker to show me a shiny red smear of blood on its white sole. I didn’t like the sight of blood either. She leaned sideways and barfed again. I went to her and tried to hold her hair back like her sister had. I rubbed her back with my other hand, but I was pretty sure it didn’t help. I watched the boat through the heavy rain, hoping Ilona and her father would come back soon.

  Suzie looked up at me. “Go get Ilona, please,” she begged. She was breathing heavily and leaning sideways, a couple ticks away from fainting and falling off the crate.

  “I can’t leave you alone. You look really sick.”

  “Harold, please go get her. I need Ilona. Now.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. I started toward the boat, pulling up the hood of my jacket and trying to detach myself from my fear. I stopped at the edge of the barracks. Rain streamed from its roof, creating a waterfall. But that wasn’t what had stopped me. There was a strange noise, like some kind of thick sludge slowly drip-drip-dripping. Then I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye and I knew I was in trouble.

  The door to the barracks was open, blowing back and forth in the wind.

  “What now?” I said, my throat tightening. “A sea monster?”

  I headed for the door to look inside. The closer I got, the more obvious it became that it wasn’t the rain making that horrible noise. It was something inside the barracks. “Hello!” I called. “Anybody in there?”

  There was no answer.

  “What’s that noise?” Suzie asked. She was back on her feet, but pale as a pill.

  I went through the door and froze.

  “What?” Suzie said. She came in behind me. Then she turned to where I was looking and screamed.

  I screamed, too.

  Ilona and her dad came running from the boat.

  “What’s wrong?” Ilona yelled.

  “We found Donahue,” I said, looking away. At my side, Ilona covered her mouth and hid her face against her father’s chest.

  He was in a large glass tank, underwater, with live crabs crawling all over his body and face, his eyes wide, his mouth open in a silent scream, dead as a fish on a hook.

  18

  A CRY IN THE MARSH

  We finally ended up at Gilmore’s Tavern, where Frank Goolz called the police. There was no police precinct in Bay Harbor, so a few police cars came from Newton and we directed them to what was left of Donahue. Some of the officers stayed on the dock waiting for the coroner and the others drove us to Newton. I was in my own police car and the officer who was driving asked at least once every mile if I was all right. The Goolz traveled together in a separate police car.

  The officer was all sorts of sorry that the precinct wasn’t equipped for someone like me. She had two of her colleagues carry me up the stairs in my chair. Then we went into a meeting room, where I was reunited with the Goolz.

  All of the officers were very nice to us. A younger officer came up and told Frank Goolz he was a big fan; the woman who drove me brought coffee for him and bottled water for the girls and me. She asked me to write down my home number so she could call Mum and tell her where I was.

  “She’s going to lose it when you tell her what happened,” I warned.

  “I’ll make sure she doesn’t worry.” She took the sheet of paper with Mum’s number. “Trust me. I deal with worried parents all the time.”


  “Thank you,” I said, but the officer had no idea what she was in for. Finding the dead body of Helmut Donahue and ending up in the police precinct in Newton was the beginning of the end of my relationship with the Goolz.

  “Let me do all the talking,” Frank Goolz said once we were alone. I wasn’t sure it was the best approach. I thought Ilona would make a much better ambassador for our strange crew.

  “Do you still have your gun in your bag?” I asked.

  He put his finger across his lips and winked at me. “No one needs to know that.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can’t bring a gun into a police station.”

  “It’s an antique,” he said, as if carrying a loaded weapon was all right if it belonged in a museum.

  A short, bulky, bald man in a blue shirt and tie knocked on the open glass door. He was middle-aged, with a funny blond-and-gray moustache.

  “Get some cookies for the kids,” he said over his shoulder as he came in, carrying a cup of coffee in one hand and a blue file in the other.

  He shook hands with Frank Goolz and introduced himself as Bruce Miller. “I’m a big fan. I loved that Curse thing,” he said. “What was it called? The Curse of the Dead, right?”

  “That’s the name of the TV series. The book was called The End of Everything.”

  “You got me there.” Officer Miller laughed and sat down in front of us. He set the file on the table. “I saw it on TV. I don’t read much. But still, I liked it. Scary stuff.”

  He opened the file and made all sorts of noises as he read through it—sighing, grunting, tapping nervously on the table.

  “This is a pretty good horror story, too,” he said, looking up at Frank Goolz. “What were you doing on the docks, anyway?”

  “Researching.”

  “Researching what?”

  “My next book.”

  “Does your next book involve a dead man in a crab tank?”

  “Maybe,” Frank Goolz said thoughtfully. “It’s an exciting scenario for a story, don’t you think?”

  “Helmut Donahue might disagree with you on that one.”

  “I guess he would.”

  The younger officer apparently couldn’t find any cookies. The best he could do was a few tiny bags of chips, which he dropped on the table. But we didn’t touch them. I wasn’t about to eat anything and I didn’t think Suzie and Ilona were either. All I could think about was crabs and dead people.

  “And you, son?” he asked me.

  “Me?”

  I didn’t want to answer any questions. I wanted Frank Goolz to deal with everything, like he’d said he would.

  “Why were you on the docks with Mr. Goolz?”

  “Like he said. Research for his book.”

  He turned back to Frank Goolz. “You always do your research with a bunch of kids?”

  “My daughters are always with me. Harold is new to our outfit.”

  “And you know him from where?”

  “He’s our neighbor. He’s a nice kid.”

  “We didn’t know we would find a dead man,” Suzie said abruptly.

  The officer leaned closer to her. “But you were looking for something,” he pressed.

  “Not a dead man,” she said.

  “What were you looking for?”

  Ilona and I turned to Frank Goolz, hoping he would intercede, but he was watching Suzie with interest.

  “A ghost,” she said.

  “A ghost?” That was clearly not the answer the officer expected.

  “It’s for a story!” Ilona blurted before Suzie could say more. “Obviously.”

  “It’s for my next novel,” Frank Goolz agreed, putting his arm around Suzie and squeezing her into silence. “We needed to talk to Mr. Donahue about a teacher who disappeared years ago. We found him dead. It was a complete accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Officer Miller said. “His boat was the scene of a terrible fight. He must have weighed more than three hundred pounds, and yet someone had the strength to carry his body out of the boat, lift him up, and dump him into a crab tank.”

  “Dad meant it was an accident that we found him dead with the crabs,” Ilona said.

  Suzie turned pale and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Stop! You’re making me sick!”

  “Sorry, kid.” The officer closed the file and leaned back in his chair to take a good look at us.

  “A famous writer, two missing kids, a dead body, and a ghost.” He crossed his arms and laughed. “Bay Harbor isn’t the quiet little town it used to be.”

  The officer who brought the chips came back in with a digital recorder. The police made Frank Goolz tell them everything that had happened on the docks all over again. He made it sound like an innocent jaunt—nothing more than a fun field trip to help with a novel he was working on. He didn’t mention the Stone of the Dead or our encounters with a real ghost. He carefully left out our search for the missing kids too. I didn’t think they were accusing us of anything. And the mood was pretty friendly.

  Until Mum arrived.

  “YOU!” she yelled, pointing a menacing finger at Frank Goolz as she entered the conference room. I thought for a second that she was going to hit him. Instead, she grabbed my chair and started to drag me away from the Goolz. She was so angry she was shaking and knocking me against chairs so hard that my teeth clattered. I’d never seen her so furious.

  Officer Miller stood up. “Ma’am, you need to calm down.” He started moving chairs out of her way.

  “I am as calm as can be!” she shouted. “And you!” She turned back to Frank Goolz, pointing her finger at him again. “You and your daughters, you stay away from Harold. Stay away from him. Do you hear me?”

  “Mum,” I said as calmly as I could. “It’s all right. They haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “You stay away from him!” she yelled again, and rushed to the door. Officer Miller tried to stop her.

  “Move out of my way,” she said and he did, probably deciding it was better to let the madwoman go. Mum pushed me down the hallway at a sprint. I had expected her to be mad, but I hadn’t expected her to be crazy mad. I kept quiet, even when we came so close to running into a man that he had to jump out of the way.

  Outside, it had stopped raining. There was no moon, no stars, just pure darkness beyond the streetlights. Mum pushed me to the edge of the steep stairs. It would be a real struggle to get me down on her own, and she knew it.

  “Crap!” she yelled.

  “Mum, calm down,” I said. My voice was shaking badly and my own anger was starting to build—partly because she had said I could never see the Goolz again and partly because of the humiliating show she had put on in front of all those people.

  The officer who had driven me to Newton came out with the one who had brought us the chips. They each took a side of my chair, without saying a word. Mum didn’t say a word either; she just followed them down the stairs. They put me down ultra-carefully when we reached the sidewalk.

  “You’ll be all right, Harold,” the female officer said and gently patted my shoulder. “Ma’am,” she added, giving a polite nod to my mother. We watched them climb the stairs and go back into the building. I felt my throat tightening. I wanted to cry for some reason. Mum didn’t even thank them for their help. We didn’t speak as we went to the car. We didn’t speak as I got into the front seat and she loaded my chair into the back. We didn’t speak as we drove away. I had actually decided to never speak to her again. This eternal vow lasted about three minutes.

  She was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that she must have gotten a cramp because she let go with one hand and shook it out.

  “We’re going to go back to how we lived before those crazy people moved next door,” she said.

  We left Newton and took the highway through the Mallow Marsh. I tried to keep quiet. I tried to lose myself in the dark landscape, but it didn’t work. All the anger and frustration that had been building inside me came up like lava from a volcano
.

  “I hated the way we lived before they moved next door!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “I hated our life!”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said, as though she had the right to decide what my true feelings were. And that only made me angrier.

  “Yes, I did. Everybody has treated me like I’m a problem since I fell out of that tree. Everybody! But the Goolz don’t.”

  “Calm down,” she said, suddenly forgetting her own anger. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  “My life sucks! Your life sucks because of me. Look at me!”

  “We are absolutely fine,” she said, keeping her eyes on the small portion of the road that our headlights dragged out of the darkness.

  “I’m trapped forever in this stupid body,” I said, yanking at my jeans.

  “Harold, you stop this right now. You are not trapped.”

  I had never talked like this. I had never complained about the unfairness of what had happened to me just because I wanted to grab a stupid plum out of that stupid tree. And Mum obviously didn’t want me to start now. But the more she resisted it, the more I wanted to dig till it hurt.

  “I wish I died that day,” I said.

  She hit the brakes and jerked the car off the road, nearly driving us into the marsh. Several cars veered around us, blaring their horns and flashing their headlights.

  Mum didn’t care. “You are my everything!” she said. I could see tears running down her face in the dim light of the dashboard.

  Tears started running down my face too. I wiped them away fast.

  “My life with you does not suck. My life with you is the best thing that I ever could hope for, and I’m not going to let a lunatic writer and his two spoiled daughters take that away from me.”

  We sat in silence, staring out at the marsh. There was just enough moonlight to see the high grass moving in the wind. Then Mum spoke.

  “Harold, look at me, now.”

  I did.

  “You are my favorite person in the world.” She put her hand on my face and her touch felt surprisingly nice. “You are never a problem. You are my solution. You got that?”