by Vivian Barz
“I’m going to stop so we can get a better listen,” Eric said.
As he made a move to pull over, the screaming ceased. Like a switch that had suddenly been flipped.
Then they saw it: the police barricade near the end of the road. As they approached, an officer stepped out and stopped them. He shined his flashlight into the vehicle and then waved them through. A few more official-looking individuals were walking a grid in the field, speaking into walkie-talkies, waving metal detectors. Something big was going down.
“Well, that ’s weird,” Jake said. “I wonder what the hell’s going on?”
“Way weird. Looks like they’re searching for something. But the screaming, I wasn’t sure if . . .”
“Sure if?”
Eric bit his lip and then blurted, “I hear things sometimes because I’m, um, a little . . . schizophrenic.”
Eric wasn’t sure why he’d revealed his dark secret, but he found that he did not regret having done it. If he was truly forming a friendship with Jake, he figured he might as well go in whole hog.
Eric braced himself for what would surely follow, exclamations of Yeah, right! or Are you joking? (because having schizophrenia is hil-a-rious ) or, the crowd favorite, Are you dangerous?
Jake surprised Eric with his reaction. “That sucks, man; I’m really sorry” was the extent of it, but Jake said it with such solemn sincerity that it nearly made Eric burst into tears. He couldn’t recall a time, ever, when somebody he hardly knew had given such a reaction. He was touched.
Eric said, “I’ve had it for years now, so it really doesn’t bother me so much anymore. But listen, nobody at the school knows, and I’d really like to keep it that way since—”
“Hey, your secret is safe with me.” Jake made a zipping motion over his lips with his index finger and thumb. “We freaks need to stick together.”
“Freaks till the end!” Eric exclaimed, though he didn’t know exactly what he meant and felt more than a little corny after saying it.
Jake understood perfectly.
CHAPTER 14
Eric dropped Jake off and arrived home twenty minutes later. He would have made it in ten had he not taken the long way around, but he’d wanted to avoid driving by the field again, with its screaming-kid noises and officer waiting on the side of the road to shine a flashlight in his face.
He parked inside the garage, humming an Augustine Grifters ballad he’d learned during rehearsal. He was in a happy, humming mood—really, he was just happy to be happy.
Inside the house, however, his joy wavered.
Immediately, he sensed something wasn’t right. It was the feeling of otherness .
He was not alone.
Or he’d had uninvited company while he was away at band practice. He went very still and listened, the feeling that someone had been there lurking around his home but had only recently left intensifying.
Stomach brick heavy, he quickly groped his way to the hallway light, holding his breath as he flipped it on, expecting to find that Doris’s cheap television and his expensive turntables (the only big-ticket items he’d brought from Philly) had been liberated from the living room.
He was shocked to find everything still in its place.
But there was a scent . A scent so unmistakable that half the Western world could probably identify it in less than three seconds flat. Bread baking.
Eric’s initial concern was that he’d left the oven on, which was absurd, since the last time he’d baked up a loaf of bread was never. The only time he ever operated the oven was to heat a frozen pizza, and he hadn’t had one of those in over a week.
Still, he checked.
Off.
He shrugged. Maybe the scent was coming from a neighbor’s place, though it had to be some serious sourdough if it could be detected clear across the yard.
Eric discovered the spilled sugar as he rounded the center island in the kitchen. He felt an immediate pang of violation, the same as if he’d pulled open the blinds and discovered a Peeping Tom goggling back at him. He wrenched a butcher’s knife from the block on the counter and searched the house room by room.
It didn’t take long. The place was empty.
He now stood in the kitchen looking down at the mess on the floor, realizing with some wonder that he was feeling rather tranquil about the incident. And why not? Whoever had broken in hadn’t taken anything—not that there was much to take, other than a few minor possessions and Doris’s bizarre bric-a-brac out in the garage. It wasn’t exactly a death threat, was it? It wasn’t even an implied threat, only a single name squiggly scrawled in sugar: MILTON .
Having dwelled in metropolises for most of his adult life, Eric was no newbie to home invasion. He’d rented some seriously dodgy apartments as a broke grad student in DC, the sort of low-rent lodgings where robbery might as well have been included in the lease. One place was so sketchy that he’d been robbed twice in the same day: his apartment burgled in the morning while he was at school and then his vehicle hit later at night while he was in bed. What had bothered Eric most about the double theft was the senselessness behind the crimes: they’d taken a dump in his bathtub after discovering that he was out of toilet paper (and boy, you should have seen the shower curtain) and busted the $200 driver’s side window in his seven-year-old Nissan to steal a pack of gum and $30 worth of CDs.
The sugar mess was clearly the work of kids and not hardened criminals, and a scrawled name was certainly a hell of a lot politer than feces in the bathtub. Probably a bunch of drunken guys out raising hell on their friend Milton’s twenty-first. But surely there were better ways to celebrate reaching drinking age than breaking into a random house and vandalizing the kitchen? That was behavior more indicative of teenagers—young teenagers at that.
Then again, it wasn’t like Eric was still living in Philly. Maybe townie kids were strapped for boozy venues . . . no, that wasn’t right either. He’d seen a few decent-looking bars down near the town center—bars like the one he’d be playing with Augustine Grifters. Maybe it was some kind of fraternity hazing: break into a professor’s home and make the kitchen floor sticky? But did his community college even have fraternities? Maybe it was just a group of bored neighborhood children looking to rebel.
Maybe it was the sugar bandits , he thought and then barked out a demented laugh, though he couldn’t figure out why this was supposed to be funny.
He thought about it some more and then laughed again, picturing a group of nervous, pimply-faced preteens standing around his kitchen, brandishing skateboards and plotting their sabotage: Right, first we’re going to toss a bunch of sugar on the floor. Then Milton’s going to write his name in it. Asshole won’t even know what hit ’im!
The sugar bandits hadn’t even broken a window or jimmied a lock—that was what Eric found peculiar. The house was still locked up tight, so how had they gotten in? And even if he had forgotten to lock up, would the sort of kids who’d toss a whole bag of sugar on the kitchen tiles be so courteous as to secure the house when leaving?
Maybe he should stop playing gumshoe and call the cops already. Yeah, and here’s what he’d say: Quick, send help! I’ve been victimized by a nefarious posse of sugar bandits! And y’all might want to send for backup—I think they might be diabetic! Surely Perrick PD had bigger cases to attend to.
(How can you be so sure it was a break-in?)
“Because it was.”
(If it wasn’t a break-in, then what else could it—)
“No way,” said Eric with a shake of the head. Just what, exactly, was being suggested—that he’d vandalized his own house?
“No way,” Eric repeated, though not quite as firmly as the first time around. “I don’t believe it.”
But . . . he had heard kids screaming out of the vents in the car, hadn’t he?
(And don’t forget about the rotting dead kid in the classroom.)
“No.” Eric folded his arms across his chest. “No. I’m fine. Just fine. Happy, eve
n.”
Eventually, his impatience won out. No matter what had happened, he couldn’t very well stand there in the kitchen all night, arguing with himself over a mound of sugar.
What he did next was snap a few photos with his phone. Proof, just in case. Say cheese, Milton. He then swept up the mess; it was almost like it had never happened. He added sugar to the grocery list he kept taped to the fridge and then called it a night.
He’d had such a nice evening up until that point that he saw no reason to spoil it by getting worked up over nothing.
CHAPTER 15
Susan was already five steps into the break room before she noticed Special Agent in Charge Denton Howell and one of his FBI cronies congregating by the area reserved for making coffee. They, too, had noticed her in return, or else she would have quietly backed out the way she’d come in.
Since they were now both giving her a quick tip of the head as a way of greeting, she figured she’d better commit to that cup of coffee she’d planned on making. It was that or stand there in the middle of the break room gaping at them like a simpleton, empty handed.
They scooted off to the side so that she’d have access to the immense variety of coffee trimmings—creamers, raw sugar packets, honey sticks, syrups—the station now had on offer. There was also a fancy machine that made coffee from prefilled pods, and not just run-of-the-mill french roast, either. These were blends with jazzy names like Bright Eye Bold, Smooth Italian, and Vanilla Bean Cream. Susan had no doubt that the FBI visitors had something to do with the upgrade, as the selection at the station prior to their stay had been Folgers, plain powdered creamer, and take it or leave it. She was impressed, though she tried hard not to show it. Who were they to turn their noses up at Perrick PD’s humble coffee?
She selected Vanilla Bean Cream, which she flavored with hazelnut syrup and a dash of cinnamon. She put it in one of the handy to-go cups that were also now available.
As Susan capped her cup, she did a quick once-over of the break room. She’d always known that it wasn’t the most elegant of places, but now, with the FBI in their tailored suits standing off in the corner, it felt especially shabby. The walls, last updated when lava lamps were fashionable, were desperate for a lick of paint. The veneer of the only table in the room was chipped in numerous places. The artwork . . . what artwork? Unless a vintage McGruff the Crime Dog poster—TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME ! —qualified as art.
She picked up a newspaper from the counter and took a seat at the table. She hunkered down close to the page and peered at the title of the first major article she came across—something about a 4-H event happening at the county fair over the weekend—pretending not to listen to the conversation Howell and the other agent were having. They were all business—no chitchat about wives and kids and weekend plans for these guys—discussing the body count at Gerald’s place, which had now risen to thirteen. No identifications of any of the victims had been made as of yet, they said, and the majority of the bodies had been found near the house. All of them, in fact, but one.
Overalls Boy.
“It’s weird,” the agent said to Howell. “That one body is about a football field’s distance from all the others.”
Howell asked, “Any theories?”
The agent shook his head. He did not seem entirely relaxed in Howell’s presence. He seemed eager to impress, to offer up at least something that was better than I don’t know . “Got a couple profilers down at the scene now. They think that maybe the kill was special in some way, maybe his first.”
Howell’s expression didn’t break from the unchanging mask of austerity that Susan had seen him wearing around the station. “Maybe.”
“I might have an idea about Gerald,” Susan offered before she had a chance to think better of it. Slowly, she lifted her eyes from the paper—she hadn’t actually verbalized that thought, had she?
The agents were frowning in her direction.
Okay, so she had opened her big mouth. Fantastic.
“Gerald?” The agent whose name she did not know smirked.
“Gerald Nichol . Sorry, I should have clarified,” she said pleasantly. “We tend to use first names around here, if the guy’s notorious enough around town, which he is.”
“Right.” The agent gazed at her with a look that bordered on incredulity. Why are you, piddling Small-Town Officer, speaking to us? Because if a team of highly trained FBI agents can’t come up with a theory, I’m sure you’ll solve the case now with all your infinite wisdom of traffic stops and emergency house calls over stolen apples.
Denton Howell was harder to read. His eyebrow raised a millimeter. Maybe a millimeter. “What’s this theory of yours?”
Now Susan wasn’t so sure of herself. Or her theory. “Well, it could be nothing, but I interviewed a witness a few days back, Mary Nichol. She’s Gerald’s mother—”
“At Emerald Meadows, right?” the smirking agent said.
Susan swallowed. “That’s right.”
“We tried her already,” he said dismissively. “Got nothing from her that made any kind of sense. She’s senile, thinks the year is 1955.”
Susan frowned, the back of her neck feeling hot enough to fry an egg. Senile? No, that wasn’t right. Mary was sharp as a tack—sharper than half the so-called witnesses who’d come forward with “tips” about Gerald. Seemed Mary had put on a little show for the FBI. “Well, no, actually—”
“Hello, agents. What are we discussing?” Ed asked as he came striding into the room, all smiles and false cheer.
Uh-oh , Susan thought. Look what you’ve done now.
“What else?” the agent said in an obnoxiously jokey fashion, as if the answer was obvious. Which, Susan supposed, it was. The Gerald Nichol case was all anyone seemed to be discussing down at the station. And in town, for that matter. A person couldn’t stand in line at the market or run on the treadmill at the gym without overhearing at least one person talking about it. “Officer—” He looked at Susan, his eyebrows raised, and she gave him her name. “Officer Marlan here was just telling us about her witness interview with Mary Nichol.”
Ed snorted. He glanced at the new coffee installation with a look of marked disdain and then poured himself a cup of black coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine that out-aged Susan by about ten years. “Mary? Hell, I’d take anything she has to say with more than a grain of salt.”
The agent nodded as if to say, My thoughts exactly . Howell didn’t really seem to have an opinion on the matter.
On his way back out, Ed stopped in the doorway and said over his shoulder to Susan, “A quick word?”
Susan knew how bad it looked, as if she had gone into the break room with the intent of going over Ed’s head to speak directly with the FBI. She didn’t dare look at the two agents as she left, but she could feel their eyes boring into her back. Well, that was just great; they thought she was an idiot.
Ed shut the door to his office, which was never a good sign. He sat down behind his desk with a long sigh, as if the movement itself was a strain to his bones. “What, exactly, did you think you were doing in there, Officer Marlan? I thought I made it clear to you that you no longer were working the Nichol case.”
He’d addressed her by title. Also not a good sign. Susan spoke fast—a little too fast. “I know it looks bad, but I promise you that I was not trying to be sneaky.” She quickly explained that she hadn’t even known that the agents were in the break room—that she would have, in fact, actually avoided going in there, had she known they were present. She went on to say that she’d inadvertently heard them discussing the case (which wasn’t entirely untrue) and figured that she’d offer up the information that had been provided to her by Mary.
“Which was what?” Ed said, exasperated. Go on—drop on me this load of bullshit , he might as well have said.
“It was what I tried to tell you before, but you didn’t want to listen.”
“I’m all ears now.”
Susan seriously doubted that,
but she continued anyway. “Which part do you want to hear first: Mary’s confession of the Wayne Nichol murder, or the part where she said that her husband or son—or both—probably murdered the kid next door in the sixties, who I believe might be Overalls Boy?”
Ed muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like Jesus Christ . He shook his head in evident frustration. “You shouldn’t be wasting the FBI’s time with this stuff—these ravings from an old woman. And she didn’t kill her husband. It was an accident—bad food or something.”
So you think . Susan did not want to waste time debating the logistics of Wayne’s demise, though she found it odd that Ed could recall specifics about it when he so often claimed ignorance about other cases when he was not in the mood to discuss them. Especially once they’d already been closed, which in Ed’s mind was the equivalent of the crime having never occurred. Selective memory, she imagined. “That’s the thing. They’re not ravings, Ed. A farm kid did disappear. The Nichols’ neighbor , in fact, a boy named Lenny Lincoln, while he was playing hide-and-seek with his brother, Milton—”
“Now that’s enough!” Ed roared, the veins under the skin of his neck bulging. Susan could have sworn that the window rattled in its pane. He sat up very straight in his chair, rubbing his temples with his eyes closed.
Susan froze in place. She could hear the second hand ticking in the clock on the wall, the phones ringing at cubicle desks. She couldn’t find her words. Here was a side to Ed that she’d never seen, a truculent beast that the FBI had unleashed with their presence. Ed was too stuck in his ways, aggravated by intrusions. For the first time that day, Susan was noticing how bloodshot his eyes were. She hadn’t really given it much thought before, but now she realized exactly how much Ed needed to retire. If he stayed on much longer, she feared the stress might kill him.
