Though in the midst of a sweltering heat wave, Kyle sensed an unmistakable chill coursing through his blood as he entered the peach grove. Goosebumps suddenly speckled his arms, and the short blonde hair stood on end near the back of his neck. He had inherited an apprehension of these trees from afar, but now, while standing beneath their bowed and fractured branches, they appeared helplessly forlorn. Save for the sound of dry earth crumbling under their footsteps, there was no distinguishable noise within the grove. Even the birds’ constant melodies faded into silence. It was as though a poison had spoiled the air; a faint odor of unknown origin lingered between the trees.
A rattling cough disrupted Kyle’s concentration. He pivoted to see the old man hunched upon the barren soil, his head bobbed at the ground as if being manipulated by an unseen hand. A strand of blood and mucous dribbled from his parted lips, before spilling over his silver whiskers. Without a doubt, it was the most appalling and sorrowful scene that Kyle had ever witnessed.
“Are you okay, Ben?” Kyle asked, bending to one knee near the old man’s side. He wanted to pat the man’s shoulder, if only to demonstrate a gesture of reassurance, but he couldn’t pull his hands from his pockets.
Murden gasped for several seconds before spinning away from the puddle of bloody discharge. He wiped his mouth with bare forearm before muttering, “There’s lessons to be learned out here for sure.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Kyle asked him. “I heard you were sick, but I never thought you’d be this ill.”
“Well,” Murden tittered hoarsely, “never let it be uttered that cancer isn’t a force to be reckoned with.” His voice tailed off into a frustrated whisper before he continued. “I suppose it has the best of me now.”
“I’m sorry,” Kyle said, apologetically.
“Don’t think I’m complaining, boy. Every man’s got to discover his own way to die.” Murden’s eyes focused on the decayed peach trees now. His voice sounded increasingly hollow when he said, “It’s only fitting that I rot in the same way that my orchard did.”
Startled by Murden’s confession, Kyle found it difficult to express his sorrow. “I heard a lot of stories about these peach trees,” he said softly, trying to repress his reservations about the topic. “I guess that’s why you brought me here, huh?”
Rather than venture farther into the grove, Murden crawled over to the nearest tree and leaned against its lopsided trunk. He felt the tree’s bark deteriorating against his weight. After he was situated, Murden motioned for Kyle to join him beneath the tree.
“C’mon, boy,” Murden said, slurring his words as if inebriated by the flavor of his own blood. “I won’t bite you—I promise.”
Though still reluctant, Kyle leaned down and squatted next to Murden. He watched in puzzlement as the old man scratched at the soil with his hickory stick. Kyle then realized that he wasn’t perspiring as much as before. “It seems cooler in here,” he remarked, looking around the peach trees to discover virtually no shade from the sun. He then set his palms flat on the soil, feeling for a possible change in the earth’s temperature. The dirt was hot and dry.
Murden displayed a perceptive grin before asking, “Have you ever strolled through a graveyard on a summer afternoon, boy? It’s really quite amazing.”
“What is?”
“For reasons I’ve yet to realize, the air is always cooler among the dead. If you stopped for a spell and maybe paused alongside the tombstones, you’d feel colder. I reckon it’s one of those things in nature that no one has the business trying to understand. Some mysteries shouldn’t be tampered with.”
The rumors from Murden’s past rushed back into Kyle’s head. He remembered that a child had been buried in this peach grove. But she was the only one—one body did not make a graveyard. Was Murden trying to confess to something more? A sense of dread spread through the boy’s features as he considered this possibility.
“I never heard anyone say that about graveyards before,” Kyle shivered.
“I suppose it’s not important,” Murden sighed. “I was merely trying to draw a connection between here and there.”
Kyle shuddered before inquiring, “You mean between this place and a graveyard?” The boy’s words tripped off his tongue as he watched a smirk curve into Murden’s mouth. “Ben, I guess I should tell you that I know what happened to that little girl who was found buried out here.”
“Do you?” Murden simpered, still pressing the stick firmly into the soil, creating a definite indentation. “Well, tell me, Kyle McCann. What happened to her? I’d really like to know how much the truth has been distorted before I say anything more.”
“You already know what happened to her,” Kyle huffed, slightly irritated by the man’s ambiguous tone. “She was found dead in this grove, beneath one of these trees, I think. That’s when all the trouble started with you. They wanted to blame you for her murder, but they couldn’t. There was no proof.”
Murden scuttled closer to Kyle, while picking at his remaining teeth with his thumbnail. “And does this make me an innocent man in your opinion?”
Kyle delayed his response as he stared deeply into the codger’s hollow eyes, probing his conscious for a shred of deceit. “I guess so,” he uttered with a single shrug of his shoulders. “I would’ve never come here today if I thought you killed that girl.”
Murden seemed satisfied with the boy’s sincerity. He had proved to be worthy enough to hear the circumstances as the old man remembered them. “It’s been nearly thirty years now,” he whimpered without shame. “Thirty years of uncertainty and hell. Yet as I sit here now and touch the soil, it seems as though no time at all has passed.”
For the first time since they met, Kyle sensed a trace of remorse building in Murden’s tone. It was almost as painstaking to listen to as the cough that singed the old man’s lungs. Kyle remained reposed in silence as Murden recounted that frightful morning in the summer thirty years ago.
“I’d typically awake early with my dog,” Murden started. “Ol’ Zeke liked getting up early to chase rabbits out of the garden. When the weather was agreeable, that mangy mutt and I would go on aimless walks through this peach grove. That hound served me good enough throughout his lifetime, but I feared that he serviced me more than I wanted on one occasion.”
Murden halted his explanation and redirected Kyle’s gaze to a row of peach trees next to the thickening woods. “It was over there,” he gestured with his stick, “right next to where the oaks and evergreens lean against the hillside. Zeke seemed especially eager to explore the grove’s perimeter on that morning. It wasn’t his normal territory, but I had him unleashed and he dashed over there as if lured by the scent of a hot soup bone.”
“He smelled something strange,” Kyle thought aloud.
“Strange enough to cause that dog’s paws to start burrowing at the dirt in a near frenzy,” Murden added. “I tried pulling him away, but Zeke was half bloodhound, and he inherited a snout that could sniff out a crime from miles away.”
“So your dog found the spot—the place where the girl was buried?”
Murden nodded his chin once. By now his voice trembled with a long-concealed agony. His hands shook with uncontrollable spasms, too. “She wasn’t set too deep into the ground,” Murden remembered. “After only a few minutes of digging, Zeke had already exposed the body.”
“She was already dead?”
Tears suddenly pooled in the old man’s eyes. These drops spilled into the crevices of his sunken cheeks, before merging with the redness that framed his lips. “She wasn’t there for more than a day,” he sobbed. “I remember uncovering her—even in death, she looked so fearful, so utterly lost. Her lifeless eyes—they were still peeled open—stared up at me as if they had the intention to sparkle, but there was nothin’ left but darkness at the core. And her mouth—that dear child’s face was frozen in a dreadfully wretched scream.”
Suddenly lost for words, Kyle said the only thing he could. “I’m sorry you had to find her lik
e that, Ben.” He didn’t know how to propose his next question, but it was obvious that Murden needed some coaxing in order to continue. “Did you know the girl at all?” he asked, pausing for the old man’s response.
“Meadowton was a much smaller town back then, boy,” Murden sniffled. “No one was a stranger as far as I was concerned.”
“But did you know her name?”
Murden hesitated again. His eyes then centered on Kyle as he uttered the victim’s name with a sense of dread and regret. “Sylvia Fletcher.”
The little girl who was murdered thirty years ago now had a name, a beautiful name, Kyle thought. Her existence suddenly seemed realer in his mind. He understood why Murden cried for her even after all this time; one with a heart and soul can never fully recover from such a deplorable vision.
“It must’ve been terrible for you to find her like that,” Kyle quivered. “I guess you didn’t know what to do next, huh?”
“I did what I thought was reasonable,” Murden admitted. “After I cleaned the mud from her body, I set her down beside the peach tree. Then I screamed for help. I believe I wailed like I never had or will again. But I lived and worked alone most of the season, you see, and I knew that my cries wouldn’t be heard. I was just too afraid to leave her alone, as if more harm could’ve somehow come to her at that stage.”
“So what did you do?”
“I waited,” Murden confessed shamefully.
“How long?”
Murden shrugged his shoulders, feeling as futile now as he did back then. “A couple of hours, maybe more. I couldn’t move. Maybe I was in shock or something, but I couldn’t find the strength to pull myself away from her.”
“You eventually had to call the sheriff, didn’t you?”
“By then it was already too late for me, boy.”
Kyle turned his head, disconnecting from the penetrating gaze that Murden and he had shared. He took a moment to recollect his thoughts before asking, “So what happened after the sheriff arrived?”
Murden’s voice sounded deliberately evasive now, almost as if he was attempting to keep some of what he remembered undisclosed. “The sheriff had me pegged for a murderer by the time the coroner took the body away. Soon enough, all the folks turned against me, as fiercely as a rabid dog would turn on its own master’s hand. I guess they needed a scapegoat, and I was too dumb to see it comin’.”
“But didn’t you try to tell the sheriff what happened—I mean, how you found the body?”
By the time Kyle finished his question, Murden buckled over beside the tree again, spewing what looked like a rotted portion of his lungs onto the soil. After this spell of agony ceased, he sat upright again. His jaw was lathered in blood and sweat. The old man didn’t even to bother to wipe the remnants of fluid from his chin this time.
“There must’ve been some kind of an investigation,” Kyle assumed, pretending not to notice the man’s nauseating appearance.
“You’re very sharp, aren’t you, boy?” Murden remarked sardonically. You must watch a lot of those cop shows on television, huh?”
“No,” answered Kyle. “There’s always an investigation by the police when someone is murdered, isn’t there?”
“Okay, so what if there is? Evidence, just like people, can be buried. The truth is nothin’ more than a matter of perception. If the right kind of folks say something, even if it’s untrue, sometimes that fib starts to sound better than the facts.”
“Are you saying that the sheriff lied? He hid stuff?”
“Not by himself,” Murden clarified. “It usually takes more than one man to conceal the truth. In this case, there were at least three men responsible for the cover-up. I’m sure the sheriff, his deputy, and the coroner all had a hand in it.”
“What evidence did they hide?”
“Well, even to an untrained eye, the facts were blatant. You see, boy, since it had stormed quite heavily on the night of Sylvia’s murder, it should’ve been obvious to the sheriff that footprints would be left at the crime scene. When it rains, the ground gets muddy around the trees’ trunks, especially if the dirt is disturbed. The impressions of my boots, as well as Zeke’s paw prints, were unmistakably noticeable. But there was another set of shoeprints near that peach tree as well. These were much smaller than my own, much smaller than any man’s foot.”
“Couldn’t those prints have belonged to Sylvia?”
“That was my first suspicion, too,” Murden replied. “But after pulling the child from the pit, it occurred to me that she wasn’t wearing any shoes. The child’s feet were bare.”
“And the sheriff never bothered to find out who those other prints belonged to?”
“Like I told you, boy, evidence can be buried. In this instance, it was merely ignored by the sheriff and deputy in charge of the investigation.”
“And what about the coroner, what did he do?”
“His role was much more cleverly conceived. In fact, I didn’t discover the truth regarding the results of his autopsy until years later. Contrary to the coroner’s initial examination, it was determined that Sylvia did not die by suffocation alone. A large quantity of water was found inside the child’s lungs, suggesting that she had almost drowned.”
“Drowned?” Kyle questioned with disbelief. “But how could that be? Her body would’ve had to been moved from one place to another by the killer.”
“Now you’re thinking, boy,” Murden commended, tapping at the side of his head with his index finger. “And I venture to guess that whoever murdered the child did so in haste. The culprit, I suspect, may have not had the presence of mind to consider the possibility that Sylvia might’ve still been alive when he—or she—buried her in my peach grove.”
“But I thought you said she drowned?”
“I said almost drowned, boy. You see, because of the dirt embedded beneath the child’s fingernails, it’s reasonable to presume that she regained consciousness after her premature burial. I believe she tried to scratch her way out of the grave. Can you imagine how terrified and confused she must’ve been in her struggle to free herself?”
Kyle might have questioned the legitimacy of the old man’s account, but his words sounded genuine and even logical. Despite his offensive appearance, Murden didn’t strike Kyle as a man prone to violence. Something was still unclear to Kyle, though. “Ben,” he said softly. “I want to believe what you’re telling me, but I don’t understand why the sheriff and the other people would hide that evidence. Didn’t they want to catch Sylvia’s real murderer?”
“They already had a suspect,” Murden said, poking at his chest with his thumb. “The truth was perhaps too awful for them to accept.”
“The truth?” Kyle repeated in a grave monotone. “Ben, do you know who Sylvia’s real killer was?”
Murden neglected to respond this time. His blood-splintered eyes lifted to the peach trees’ branches above his head. A tangled mass of naked limbs fanned out in front of the azure sky. The old man suddenly appeared to be drained of his memories. His chest heaved as if a heavy stone had been set across his torso. Rather than confront the man with any more questions, Kyle stifled his thoughts and left him rest for now.
As Kyle waited patiently for Murden to replenish his stamina, Robby and Casey had allowed their time limit to elapse. They still remained perched in the thicket, peering at the hillside as if it was laden with hidden explosives.
“I guess we should go and get the sheriff now,” Casey mentioned, glancing at his wristwatch. Robby was surprised that his friend had even bothered to keep track of the time.
“Look,” Robby explained, debating their options as prudently as possible. “Kyle might be playing a joke on us. Maybe we shouldn’t make any quick decisions.”
Casey never recalled Kyle being much of a prankster, especially in such a potentially precarious situation. In truth, Kyle had always been somewhat of a safety net for his reckless counterparts. Prior to this day, he was never known to jeopardize himself or others
. If Robby had been the one to disappear on a similar quest, he might’ve had an easier time accepting this as a lark. Even with that notion rooted in his mind, Casey didn’t feel compelled to abort his commonsense by plunging headlong into a half-witted attempt to rescue his friend.
“Sheriff probably wouldn’t believe us anyhow,” Casey said, rationalizing his procrastination.
“I know one thing,” Robby steamed, “if he does come down from that hillside alive, I’m gonna kill him.”
To complicate matters, a swarm of mosquitoes had assembled around the boys, too. The insects made a feast of them while they waited in the thicket. In the course of a few minutes, Robby counted eight bites on his right forearm.
“Five more minutes,” Robby groaned, squashing a huge insect into a pancake against his arm. “That’s it—five minutes and I’m out of here, with Kyle or without him.”
“Yeah,” Casey agreed. “I’m starting to get a bad feeling about the woods.”
Chapter 9
Songs of a Peach Tree Page 9
