Dead Man's Song pd-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  (3)

  Newton looked at Val and then swiveled his head toward Crow. “What do you mean about it not being over?”

  “I’ll get to that in a sec.” Crow said. “So, with Billy dead, the people in town started to really get up in arms. Drifters getting hacked up they could more or less accept—you’re a drifter, shit happens—but a popular town kid like Billy getting killed, well that was something different. Cops and men from town started scouring the brush, checking the forest, poking in every swamp and hollow around town. I don’t think they had any kind of a clear idea what they were looking for—they were just looking. They needed to find something, and in a way it brought the town together. Instead of fighting each other, they were unified in searching out what had done this thing to Billy.

  “Two days later I was in my backyard, just sitting on a swing and thinking about Billy. It was just around sundown, and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere out of sight of the house, of course, but I couldn’t stand to be inside. I guess if my dad had actually cared about me he’d have had me inside with every door and window locked shut, but he was too busy drinking and he figured if I was in the yard what could happen? Ah well. Anyway, I was sitting there and trying to wrap my head around the idea that Boppin’ Billy was dead. I was still all screwed up by the deaths of my friends, but that was from sickness, and I could half-assed understand sickness leading to death, but to die by violence, that was something totally outside of my experience, and it was hurting me. I felt lost and stupid, and somehow I even felt as if I was to blame. No, don’t ask me how, it was just the sort of stupid thing a confused kid feels. Something about feeling like I was being punished for being a brat by having Billy taken away. Stupid shit.

  “So, I just sat there and watched the sun go down, trying to understand the enormity of the fact that Billy was dead and was going to be dead forever, and that I would never, ever see him again. I kept wanting to, you understand. I think I even wished on the first star that came out just to be able to see him one more time. Maybe I was half asleep, or maybe I was so wrapped up in thinking about it that I had sort of hypnotized myself. Either way, just as the sun was dipping down over the treeline I heard something crunch down on a branch behind me. I actually believed it was Billy. Boppin’ Billy come back to be with me, smiling that cocky smile of his. I remember that I was actually smiling when I turned my swing around to face him, grinning the way I always did when Billy came home from school. I swung myself around and I think I even said his name.

  “But…it wasn’t Billy, of course. That was stupid. It was—someone else. He grabs me by the front of my shirt and throws me—actually throws me—across the yard. I go flying, screaming, terrified, and crash right into a big azalea bush, land upside down, still screaming, hurt, confused…nothing making sense. I can hear whomever it is running at me, grunting and wheezing with effort. Sounds like a bear with all the noise he’s making. I get only one brief glance at the man’s face, and even then it isn’t a good clear look. I have leaves and stuff in my face and fireworks going off in my head. When he grabs me again I try to hold onto the branches, try to keep from being picked up again. I never made the connection that this might be the same guy who killed Billy, dumb as that sounds. For a minute there I actually thought it was…my father.”

  “Your father?”

  “Sure. He was always kicking the shit out of me. Sometimes it was as bad as what was happening that night in the yard. Sometimes he’d beat me so bad I’d be out of school for a week, two weeks.”

  “Jesus…”

  “And you can leave that part out of the article, too.”

  “Uh, sure, man. Don’t worry. “

  “Good,” Crow said firmly. “Anyway…the guy starts grabbing at me and I’m thrashing around, trying to hold onto the bush, trying to kick him, and this time I get a real good look at his face, which is when I really start screaming my head off. He suddenly lets go, and I fall and whack my head against the trunk of a pine tree. I’m lying there, stars in my eyes, and I hear the sounds of a scuffle and some screams and even something that sounds like a roar. The next thing I know, someone is grabbing at me again, but this time it’s different, gentler. I stop fighting back and let myself be picked up. Once the fireworks in my head settle down I can see that the man holding me is Oren Morse, and the other guy—the real attacker—is running away down the alley.”

  “Damn,” Newton said, scribbling furiously in his notebook.

  “Then there were lights on in all the houses around, people are coming from everywhere. My father comes hustling out of the house carrying a big son of a bitch of a shotgun. Everyone swarms around me and Morse, and my father literally tears me out of the Bone Man’s hands.”

  “Is that when they got the idea he did it?”

  “No, not then. Too many people had looked out of their windows and backdoors and saw him fighting with some other guy—something they all conveniently forgot later when the Bone Man got blamed for everything. Right then they saw some other guy hotfoot it out of there and Morse helping me up.”

  “Morse chased him off, then?”

  “Well, if no one else had showed up, I think both Morse and I would have been killed, but the Bone Man slowed the killer down long enough for the commotion to get the neighborhood up in arms. With all that had been going on in town, everyone was trigger-happy and came running with plenty of artillery. Typical of these things, nobody got a good look at the attacker. At least none of the neighbors, but Morse must have, though, ’cause later he knew where to go looking for the guy. But, I’m getting ahead of the story. I don’t want to tell it out of sequence. Morse was kind of out of it right then. The other guy had smacked him around pretty badly, his nose was bleeding and all.”

  “The attacker got away clean?”

  With a sigh, Crow sipped his Yoo-Hoo and then said, “The guy ran, all right, but he didn’t give up. He went all the way over to the far side of town, the upscale part of Pine Deep. Mind you, at the time, the town was not as rich as it is now. Back then only Corn Hill was ritzy. Well, this sonovabitch went over to Corn Hill and found another yard with another kid. Actually, two kids. He scaled this big wooden security fence and there was a little girl playing in the yard, right in sight of the kitchen window, and her older brother in his tree house reading Fantastic Four comics by the light of a Coleman lantern. He didn’t waste any time throwing her around—he just pounced on her, tore her throat out, and hacked her body up pretty bad. They said it looked like a bear had mauled her.”

  “Good God. What happened to the boy?”

  “No one has ever been able to put that together clearly. The popular version of the story has it that the boy jumped out of the tree to try and save his sister, and the killer gave him a couple of pretty bad slashes across the chest and left him dazed and bleeding. By that time their mother was running out of the house with a .22 caliber rifle. She found the boy sitting on the ground holding his sister’s body. He was in a kind of coma, but he was alive. The little girl, of course, was dead.”

  “Jesus…that’s horrible. It’s so…sad!”

  “Yeah.” Crow wiped his mouth. “The boy was in the hospital for over a month, and when he snapped out of the coma, he couldn’t remember a single thing.”

  “Maybe it’s better for him that way,” suggested Newton.

  “Maybe. Who’s to say?”

  “Did you know those kids? I mean, did you go to school with them or anything?”

  Crow looked at him, eyes steady and glittering. He said, “The little girl’s name was Amanda. The boy is Terrance.”

  Newton made a note in his notebook. “Last name.”

  “Wolfe,” Crow said simply.

  Newton’s pen froze halfway through writing the W. He looked up. “Wolfe? Terrance…Terry Wolfe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then the little girl was—”

  “Amanda Wolfe,” Crow said. “Mandy, to us.”

  “Good God!” Newton chewed his li
p for a long minute, then he gave a flustered series of blinks and looked at his notes. “Okay, now, from what I’ve read about the Massacre there were sixteen murders. Mandy Wolfe was number five.”

  “Right, but after that the killings stopped. Not completely, mind—just for a while. For twenty-eight days, actually. During that time whole town went absolutely crazy. There were carloads of guys with guns riding around, shooting at anything that moved. I think they managed to bag one mangy German shepherd that had escaped the original dog slaughter, three cows, and a guy getting a blow job from his neighbor’s wife in the hedges behind his house.”

  “They kill him?”

  “No, but she got so scared she nearly bit his pecker off.”

  “Resulting in nineteen stitches,” Val said, “and two divorces. But they never bagged the killer, and by the end of those twenty-eight days, everyone had figured that the killer had skipped out and was terrorizing the citizenry of some other town. He’d had a couple of near misses that last night. Seems reasonable that he’d take off before his luck completely ran out, but on the twenty-eighth day the killings began again. Just like the first ones. People were attacked and savagely murdered. One of them was a cop.”

  Crow nodded. “The bastard hit him so fast that he never had the chance to draw his gun. Maybe he knew him, let him get close. Hard to say. Next victim was the cousin of a local farmer. His name was Roger Guthrie.”

  “Guthrie!” Newton looked sharply at Val, who nodded.

  “He was my second cousin. Staying with us while on leave from the Air Force. Rog was strolling through the cornfields out behind the house, smoking a cigar and just relaxing. We all heard him scream and when Dad and his brother, Uncle George, came running up with rifles, Roger was dead.”

  “That’s incredible! Two murders in the same family, thirty years apart.”

  “In the same field, too,” observed Crow hoarsely, “almost the same spot where Henry was gunned down.”

  That fact seemed nailed to the air in front of Newton and he sat there, staring for a while. Then he shook his head and his eyes refocused, and he rifled through his notebook. “How many deaths is that?”

  “Actually Rog was the sixteenth. I skipped some of the others. You can look up the names, but we didn’t know any of them. Just names and pictures in the newspapers. Roger, though, he was the last one killed during the massacre.”

  “But,” Val said significantly, “there were two more killings.”

  Crow nodded. “Oren Morse…and Ubel Griswold. And”—he held up a finger—“this is where I go into the area of conjecture. What I think happened was this—Oren Morse tracked Griswold down, chased him into the woods, and murdered him somewhere out beyond the Guthrie Farm, somewhere in or around Dark Hollow.”

  “So…what? He thought Griswold was the killer because he’d seen him when he attacked you in your yard?”

  “Sure,” Crow said, setting his bottle down. “That has to be it. I mean, I saw Griswold’s face, too, but since I’d only seen him once before in town I didn’t recognize him at first. It wasn’t until things had settled down that night and I was about to go to bed that I realized that I had seen my attacker’s face before. Morse had worked for him, of course, and he knew him very well.”

  “Didn’t he make a police report?”

  Val said, “My dad told me some years later that Morse had told him that he’d tried to make a police report and the officer at the desk had laughed him out of the office. Nobody believed him.”

  “Did your father?”

  “I don’t know, but I think so. I asked him a few times, but he never really answered me. He’d just spread his hands and say something like ‘World’s a funny place, Val…who knows what people will do,’ which is no answer at all.”

  “Even after his nephew was killed?”

  “I think Val’s dad was planning to go after Griswold himself,” Crow said. “He never said as much, and I don’t have anything but a gut feeling about it, but that’s what I believe.”

  Val sipped her coffee, said nothing.

  “So,” Newton said in a summing-up tone of voice, “the Bone Man sees and recognizes the killer as the guy he used to work for, is rebuffed by the local cops when he tried to make a police report, and probably got a noncommittal answer from your dad, Val, when he shared his suspicions with him. Okay, so then what? He goes out as some kind of vigilante? I’m not feeling it. A guy who ran from the draft because he didn’t want to carry a gun? That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? I mean, do people change their character just like that?”

  “Some people do. Sometimes an event can change a person’s entire nature and personality,” Val said, sharing a significant look with Crow. Newton had the impression, though, that she was referring to something else as well, but he let it go.

  He said, “Crow, didn’t you tell your father that you’d seen Griswold’s face, and that you could identify him?”

  Crow’s face darkened a little. “Sure, I told my father. I told him everything I saw, and once I remembered whose face it was I’d seen I told him that, too. He beat the shit out of me for lying. Laid into me so hard I was sick for three days. People just assumed I was shaken up by the attack, but it was because of my father, and he told me to keep my mouth shut, to never say anything about it to anyone. Ever.”

  “Why? I would have thought he’d have wanted some kind of payback for what happened to his sons.”

  “The matter is a little more complex than that. You see, if I’d named just about anyone else in town as the guy who’d attacked me, then my dad would have rounded up some of his redneck cronies and gone out and killed the guy. No question. But when it came to Griswold all bets were off because dear old dad all but worshipped Griswold. There were a handful of guys who used to hang out at Griswold’s place. Young turks, mostly—high school age all the way to early thirties. My dad would have been the oldest, probably, at thirty-two. Youngest would have been Vic Wingate who works at Shanahan’s. Also around the same age you have Stosh Pulaski, Phil Teague, and then a little bit older was Jim Polk, who’s a local cop now, and our esteemed chief of police, Gus Bernhardt,” Crow said, “who was ten years younger than my dad but already a cop, and maybe one or two others that I didn’t know at the time. All of them were either closet-Klansmen or something like it. Don’t forget, Newt, that we have more KKK members here in Pennsylvania than in any other state.”

  “I’d heard. Something to be proud of.”

  “You Jewish, by the way?” Crow asked.

  “Only my mother’s side, which I guess makes it official.”

  “So you probably have the same opinion of these boneheads as I do. So, then we have Griswold who was very probably of age to have been a soldier in World War Two—and who is German—and you have an interesting little clubhouse out in the woods where these redneck mouth-breathers can drink and raise whatever brand of hell they thought was fun. No way any of them would turn on Griswold, even if they believe he was guilty, which most of them probably did not.”

  Newton was shaking his head. “This must have traumatized you.”

  Val nodded and reached out to touch Crow’s shoulder. “It did.”

  “More than I can express,” Crow agreed. “Every part of that autumn traumatized me, and it took me a long time to get over it. It’s one of several reasons why I had such a long love affair with the bottle. When you drink, you always have something to blame for your nightmares. And the booze hides them.”

  “But you don’t drink anymore,” Newton said, “so what about the nightmares?”

  Crow glanced at Val again, and then shrugged. “They’re back, and I have to face them without the support of my old friends Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. That’s one of the reasons I’m being so candid with you, Newt. I guess it’s a kind of therapy for me. What’s the word? Cathartic?” He shrugged again. “I’m doing it to myself, and, I guess, for myself, I want to get it all out. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. I had come out to the farm
here for the memorial service for Roger Guthrie. Afterward I talked to Morse for a bit, and I told him that I thought the man who had attacked me was my dad’s friend, Mr. Griswold, but the Bone Man told me to just forget I saw anything. He told me to make sure I stayed indoors at night, and made me promise to tell Val the same. Then he smiled, gave me a kind of pat on the head, and took off.” Crow paused. “I never saw him again. Well…not alive anyway.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know the details, you understand, because I wasn’t there, but from what I’ve been able to figure out is that the Bone Man must have gone and confronted Griswold. They must have fought, and I think the Bone Man killed him. How he managed it, I don’t know. Morse really was just a skinny bag of bones, and Griswold was this big tough son of a bitch, but Morse must have done it. Killed him and buried him God only knows where. No trace was ever found of Griswold’s body. Not a single trace.”

  “What about the Bone Man? What happened to him?”

  “They killed him,” Val said simply, and when Newton looked at her she spread her hands in a gesture of disgust. “Beat him to death and then tied him to the scarecrow post that marks the boundary line between my property and the section of state forest over by Dark Hollow Road. Which is another tie-in to the present…events. That was the same spot where those two poor officers were killed.”

  Newton licked his lips. “I’m glad you’re telling me this while it’s bright daylight.”

  Val grunted, then picked up the thread of the story. “Crow and I were the ones who found him next morning. I screamed so loud my dad heard me all the way from the barn and he came pelting out with a pitchfork in his hands and ten of the field hands at his heels. I’ve never seen anyone look so scared and so furious!”