Denis Ever After

by Tony Abbott

  “Macy Tibbs. Yes, a veteran. Two-thousand-ten.” She points toward the far side of the yard. “Row seven, halfway on your left. His son, too, about five years ago.”

  Matt glances at me. “Which makes sense, with what we know.”

  Before he can ask anything else, the man butts in, reminding me of someone I used to know. “Tibbs? No one comes to see him anymore, except the other son. Once or twice a year. Not like the fella who visits those other graves. He’s here all the time.”

  “Oh, him.” His wife sniffs sharply. “I don’t like the look of him.”

  “He’s all right,” the man says. “I talk to him now and then.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Matt asks. “What other graves?”

  “With the flowers, down there.” He points. “His name’s Egan. Private First Class, Gary Egan. He’s been coming for years. He was here this morning. Always comes on Tuesday.”

  If a ghost can faint, I’m doing it. “Dad? Is he talking about Dad?”

  Matt swings around to me. “Dad wasn’t here this morning. It can’t possibly—”

  “Can be and is. Egan. He showed me his dog tag once. Kind of old to be your dad—”

  It takes more time than we’d like for this to click into whatever it’s going to click into. We try to work it through, thought after thought, while the man stares at Matt and his wife at me. Then it comes. Matt reaches at my shoulders to shake me.

  “It’s him!” he says. “Denis, it’s the guy who stole your tag! The guy who killed you and laid you at Gettysburg! It’s got to be! Excuse me, what graves does he go to?”

  But the wife gives out a shriek. “Gettysburg? You’re the boy? The poor little boy! Oh, how horrible to die the way you did. Everyone was heartbroken. And your poor dear brother . . .”

  It’s the first stranger who has spoken of my death, and it stuns me. “Matt . . . this is what people said to you . . . I’m . . . sorry . . .”

  “Not now.” He waves me off. “Where are the graves?”

  “There!” The old man points. “Down a bit from the Tibbs’s stones. It’s a family plot.”

  “Thank you,” Matt says. Together we stalk down the long rows of stones.

  We soon find the markers of Macy and Melrose Tibbs, both etched with veteran symbols.

  A little farther down, three small cremation stones are set in the cropped grass. We stare at the names and dates. It takes us a moment to realize what we’re seeing.

  VIRGINIA AGNES MUNRO

  MOTHER

  OCT 7 1927–DEC 22 2008

  RICHARD BYATT MUNRO

  SON

  SEPT 5 1951–JAN 12 1970

  JOSEPH CHESTER EGAN

  SON

  SEPT 5 1951–NOV 14 2005

  I’m breathless and almost choke on the words. “GeeGee. And her twin sons.”

  “She lived in Zelienople for years,” says Matt. “Dad told me she buried his father’s ashes here. They’re all here together.”

  “GeeGee said Richard used her maiden name. She used it too. To honor him, I think.”

  There is a veteran insignia cut into each son’s stone, and sprays of fresh-cut flowers lying aside GeeGee’s and Richard’s graves, but none at Joseph’s.

  A sharp icy wind sweeps west over the cemetery. I think of the snow that day five years ago.

  Matt draws the cold into his lungs. “So here it is. The missing link between your kidnapping and death, between Maywell Tibbs and your killer, whoever he was. Maybe even that stranger.”

  I throw that in among my other racing thoughts. “Are we saying that Maywell was at his father’s grave, then let me go at the exact moment some guy visited our family’s graves? Who in the world was he? And was it just dumb luck that they were both here together exactly then?”

  “No, not dumb,” Matt says. “Or if it was dumb, it was those dumb threads you keep harping about, crossing again and again and weaving together, or some other mumbo jumbo, but here’s the thing”—he fixes his eyes on me—“here’s the thing, Denis. It was early Tuesday. Maywell was talking to his dead father, and some guy was talking to our people. They both loved people who had died. They loved them. And right in the middle of that . . . is you.”

  It stuns me to hear Matt say this. “Seriously? Love will bring us together? I’m a song!”

  Matt looks at me in the cold sunlight. “Except that’s what those threads are. However these two guys came together, it was because of what they felt. Now there’s just one more thread to follow. This thing is coming together so fast—”

  His eyes are suddenly fixed over my shoulder.

  “Uh . . . Denis?”

  I follow his gaze to where the sky is darkest. There’s a ridge of brown hills where the trees have lost their leaves, and then I see it.

  I see it.

  The darker darkness rises.

  After five years, that weird looming presence at the edge of my vision turns real and rises high in the far distance, darker than the surrounding darkness.

  It’s not a tall tree trunk in the hills outside Buckwood. It isn’t the drop tower at Funland Amusement Park. It’s not an old pine tree at Silver Lake. It isn’t the looming granite block of the Georgia State monument at Gettysburg when you kneel beneath it.

  It’s a massive black chimney. The menacing shadow I see in my mind is a giant brick column, rising like an enormous gravestone over where I died.

  And suddenly, I’m running, or not running, but floating among the birches, weightless. I float I drown. I drift on waves—not real waves—but the rhythmic up and down of being carried, cradled even, in the stranger’s arms. The arms of the man who ferries me to my death.

  “What’s there?” I whisper. “Matt, tell me what’s out there?”

  He whips out his phone and finds a map. “Remains of a coal mine. The Blue Creek Coal Mine. Holy crow. Could it be a mine our great-grandfather built? Denis, we need to go there.”

  In my mind I’m already there, frantic and terrified, my living heart bursting inside me, while heavy boots thump the snow-covered ground behind me.

  42

  City of Rust

  The seven miles west to the coal mine are tough going, slow and untraveled. There are hills and rutted, beat-up, sunken roads. The biking is hard, and Matt finds he has to dive into the overgrown roadside weeds whenever I warn him.

  “Car!”

  “Ahhh!”

  In the meantime he doesn’t bother to return the two calls and four texts from Mom but manages to leave a weirdly chipper voice mail—“Love you, Mom. Sorry I didn’t call at lunch. We had pizza! Call you soon”—hoping there are no birds or airplanes in the background.

  The two or three times we pause for him to catch his breath, he reads from his cell phone.

  “Blue Creek was a hundred and thirteen years old when it shut down a decade and a half ago. It closed when the market for bituminous coal collapsed.”

  “I always wondered.”

  “It’s a big complex—steel and concrete and brick, with miles of underground shafts—that nobody can use for anything else. No other industry, I mean. The big brick chimney is part of the original mine. It costs too much to raze the buildings and fill the shafts, so they’ve just bolted it closed and let it die by itself.”

  “Shafts? Does that mean anything to us?”

  “Not to me. To you?”

  I don’t know, but it’s one of a hurricane of things in my brain. “If someone found me in the cemetery, why on earth bring me out here? Who would do that?”

  “The killer. He wanted to kill you.”

  “So kill me and leave me in the graveyard!”

  “He wanted to kill you in private. An abandoned mine is the perfect home for someone who wants to live under the radar. Someone who’s hiding out.”

  Hiding. Yeah. Maybe. Except when he’s putting flowers on graves.

  It’s long past noon by the time we begin to get our first good view of Blue Creek, a sinister, enormous city of stee
l and brick and stone, rotting in a shallow valley. The sky is dark gray in the west. A white flake zigzags the air in front of my face, and I realize snow has begun to fall. We move on foot among the hangar-size structures and silos, iron sheds, flaking wooden barracks, and rust-pitted tanks. There are lifts, octopus chains with massive hooks, overturned shuttle cars, rusting winches, wheels, drums, engines, complex pulleys and cables, conduits, beams, fans, chutes, and mazes of crisscrossing metal stairways strung up to the peaked roofs and highest reaches of the dead city. Towering above this wrecked terrain, visible from every angle, like the old coaster at Funland, the great brick chimney rises, a dead beacon.

  It’s a stage set for the end of the world.

  My throat tightens. My chest sinks. I float I drown. Of course I do. The killer is carrying me through the frozen leaves, over the rail tracks, between the ghostly trunks, while each falling snowflake says this is where I died five years ago.

  A coal mine in a valley west of Zelienople on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

  Am I here now with Matt, or am I five years ago on the day I died?

  Or am I seeing, being, doing, living both at once?

  “What do you remember?” he whispers.

  Three giant conduits slant up from the mine’s mouths to the buildings where the coal is prepared. The nearest one is angled like a fallen column, its windows smashed like broken teeth.

  “I was so cold and starved, I was probably dying already, hallucinating my brain out.”

  I sense Matt imagining his seven-year-old brother, wounded and lost, being carried into this defunct factory. “This place . . . this place . . . Denis, I’m . . .”

  I get it. We’re both sorry. There are no words.

  If snowflakes collect on black cinders like tiny wet diamonds, everything else is gunmetal gray. A massive slant-roofed structure stands to our left. In it hangs a rusted door. Of all the barred and chained and welded doors in sight, this door alone stands open.

  Matt watches the flakes fill me. “Why is that the only door open?”

  “Because he’s still here,” I whisper. The dark opening, with now and then a white flake crossing to the ground, draws me to it. Matt tries the door gently with both hands. It squeals like the hunger-cry of a hawk. I touch his arm and he stops. “Can you slip inside? I know I can.”

  He draws in a breath. He nods. We enter together.

  It is scarcely warmer inside. Everything is prickled with a fur of frost. It reminds me of the cold iron shed of the razor. As in that painful room, there is a human smell inside these walls.

  I sense Matt’s terror, but also his bravery. He’s my brother, and he’s doing this for real. He’s feeling real iron, real coldness, real fright, real danger. Sure, I have something to lose, but never as much as him, not if there’s a killer here, and there is, I sense it.

  We’re mere minutes from meeting . . . him. I sense that too.

  Matt tugs out his phone, opens the flashlight. “Eighteen percent battery. No service.”

  Some dozen feet along a narrow corridor, we enter an office, perhaps, or a small workshop. A string of inside windows, smeared with soot, looks out over an open area below. A high wooden bench in front is heaped with trash, the remains of food, bowls smudged with the muck of some old meal that reeks.

  “This guy is in for the long haul.” Matt nods with his chin. “Look at all this junk.”

  Stacks of batteries, certainly over a hundred, are piled on the bench next to several sizes of flashlights. There are three portable radios and a rusted camp stove with four canisters of propane. A pile of newspapers stands arched against the wall, almost to the ceiling.

  Lying open facedown on the workbench is a dusty book. Matt picks it up. American Battlefields. Maps are pinned to the wall. Pennsylvania. Georgia. Vietnam.

  “Holy whoa and a half. Look at this.” Underneath the book, Matt finds a brittle newspaper, oil-stained and yellow as mustard. The headline shouts:

  BUCKWOOD BOY MISSING SINCE SUNDAY

  Matt reads the familiar article. “This was published on Monday before they found you. That means he already knew who you were when he saw you in the cemetery!”

  “He knew I was missing. He went to the cemetery like he always did. But that day was different. Maybe he heard Maywell Tibbs screech away in Jenny. However it happened, he found a boy lying in the snow. He ran over, read the dog tag, and knew I was the missing boy.”

  “And because he was nuts or couldn’t let on where he was or whatever, the killer brought you here. Denis, we’ve searched enough. We have evidence. We need to get the police—”

  Killer? Yes, but . . . there’s more. “I need to keep looking, Matt. With or without you.”

  “I sure as heck am not leaving you here.”

  “Need me, don’t you? Admit it.”

  He doesn’t. It’s then that I see the torn clipping pinned to the wall over the workbench, like a cross over an altar. It’s faded and curled, so there’s no reading it, but I see the photo.

  A child’s face. Not mine. My heart stops. “Matt? Holy crow, Matt—”

  Something clanks down the corridor. Footsteps scratch the floor.

  Matt instantly flicks off his light. His eyes glisten in the gray room. A shadow moves jerkily across the door light—just like it did when I was in the crib at GeeGee’s house.

  Matt quickly wedges himself up against the row of steel lockers. He is still clutching the newspaper. I hover beside him. The man enters the room, moving swiftly around the workbench in the dark. He knows where things are, takes up a flashlight, beaming it around the room, where it shines back from the black window, reflecting his face darkly.

  And my heart stops again. “I . . . I . . . I know him!”

  “Watt?”

  The man freezes.

  A low growl roars up inside of him, shaking the room with its rolling thunder. The newspaper is gone. Someone’s been messing with his stuff. He tears an angry look around. Matt is crouched and invisible, but now I see the face clearly. And yes, I know him. I know him, and suddenly, it strikes me like a barrage of gunfire. Every nerve in my body sparks and burns.

  “Matt, it’s Dad’s father! That man is Joseph Egan!”

  I try to whisper this in my head, but it comes out like a scream, and the man jerks backward, as if he heard me speak his name. He staggers from the workshop, tramps quickly through the rooms, one arm flailing high in the air. I fly outside just in time to see the man I know is Dad’s father stumble between the broken buildings, jerking through the jagged yellow leaves and vanishing in the trees.

  Matt runs to me, breathless. “What the heck are you saying? Dad’s father is dead!”

  “Except he isn’t. He couldn’t be. I know that face. It’s him. It has to be.”

  “How do you know his face? Mom destroyed all his pictures—”

  “It all fits! Dad was in the hospital or jail when his father ‘died,’ which he only knew because GeeGee told him. He knew he was buried up here, but that was all.”

  “You’re nuts. You can’t possibly know what he looks like.”

  “I know that face! There’s nothing under his gravestone, there can’t be!”

  Even as our grandfather runs farther and farther away, I read his fear, spitting sparks that slash the air. He was shattered from the bus crash, his leg gone. But even after he’d hurt everyone, GeeGee had pity on her son. She gave him a grave marker and helped him go away.

  “All he wanted was to be no one, living alone,” I say. “And until I blundered into his world, he was alone. Except for when he was watching over us. When Dad was away, his father watched us. He knew something was wrong at GeeGee’s that day. The house was dark, the phone rang and rang unanswered. He was the man who picked me up, the day I cut my eyebrow, the day GeeGee died. Mom didn’t recognize him because she was sure he was dead.”

  Matt’s eyes flick back and forth, trying to understand it. “That’s . . . insane.”

  “He knew when
I was missing. That Tuesday, he was at the cemetery as he always was, visiting GeeGee’s and his brother’s graves. When he saw me, he knew me, and he carried me here, floated me above the ground in his arms.”

  I float I drown.

  Lost and terrified, dying of cold and hunger, I had accidentally mysteriously miraculously been dropped on his doorstep, and he ferried me to his home. Broken in two because of the girl’s death, he might have sensed in me the peace that could be his if only he saved me.

  Snow is falling heavily now. Dad’s father has run away. He will hide again and lose himself one more time. I want to go after him, finish this mystery once and for all, but I’m torn from my thoughts by a sudden crush of leaves.

  The sound comes not from the snowy woods where Joseph is fleeing.

  It comes from behind us.

  43

  Killer

  “Matt! Matt!”

  Our dad shouts over and over as he hurries toward us, Mom at his side, fuming and crying. Trey scrambles behind through the drifting flakes, Trey’s mouth hanging open, Trey’s cheeks red, lips red, eyes red with fright. Four police officers tramp quickly after them, but stand back and fan out as Mom rushes to Matt first.

  “My God, Matt! What in heaven’s name are you doing here? You lied! Forcing Trey to cover for you! How could you do that to us? All alone here? You could have been killed—”

  “Mom, Dad, no, I’m with Denis,” he says, and Trey smiles faintly, trying to find me in the gray light. I love Trey, I love Trey being here.

  Dad grits his teeth. “You’re not with Denis! Stop that—”

  “I am with him, he’s right here, and we’re finding things. We’re close to where Denis died, I know it. Denis knows it! Dad, it’s your father. He’s the killer—”

  “Joseph Egan didn’t kill me,” I say, without knowing why, but Matt can’t seem to hear my words. The noise in his head is too loud and he repeats it.

  “Mom, Dad, he’s the killer and he’s here and he’s alive!”

  Mom is livid, raises her hand, but Dad steps in front of her. “Matt, cut it out! What are you talking about? You know what, never mind. Just come with us—”