by Lis Wiehl
It was dark when Tommy reached the Gardener farm. A light shone in an upstairs window, the only indication that the house wasn’t abandoned. Weeds grew in front of the porch nearly as high as the railings. A chest of drawers sat next to the front door with the top drawer half open, where Tommy saw three grease-stained plastic quart containers of motor oil. The mailbox held two leather work gloves and a pair of hedge clippers. A cat’s litter box at the far end of the porch divided a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes from bundles of old newspapers tied with twine. There were two lantern-style porch lights to either side of the door, but neither of them contained a lightbulb.
The doorbell appeared to be out of order as well.
He knocked.
Nothing.
He waited, then knocked again.
Nothing.
He knocked a third time and waited another minute before concluding that either no one was home or he wasn’t welcome. In anticipation of either event, he’d written a note that said, I’m Tommy Gunderson. We spoke at the hardware store about chickens. I was hoping to have a word with you. Please call me. And enjoy the eggs—they’re fresh. He’d included the numbers for both his cell phone and his landline, as well as his e-mail address, though the chances that George Gardener was online were slim. He left the eggs in front of the door, where George was sure to see them, then thought better and moved them to the mailbox, where George wouldn’t step on them.
As Tommy walked back down the long gravel drive to his car, a distance of perhaps a quarter mile, he became aware of a presence. He was certain that someone was watching him. He turned to look back toward the house. He saw nothing moving, no window curtains pulled aside, no window shades lifted higher than they’d been before. Whoever—or whatever—was watching him was not in the house.
He kept walking without changing his pace, glancing about in the darkness but trying not to let on that he knew someone was there.
Then he saw it, the dark silhouette of a man at the edge of the field to his right, moving parallel along the tree line. Tommy slowed as he considered his options. He calculated that if someone were stalking him, the person probably believed he had the advantage. The last thing he’d expect would be for Tommy to turn and attack, which meant it was probably both the smartest thing he could do and the stupidest.
He bolted, leaping over the stone wall at the edge of the field and running at top speed, sprinting to the rise midway across the field and veering left where he saw the figure disappear into the woods.
He picked up his pace. The highlight reel of his career, compiled by his former coach in hopes of persuading Tommy to return to the team, showed Tommy catching speedy wide receivers from behind on a regular basis. Sports Illustrated called him “the fastest white man in the game.”
Whoever he was chasing into the woods was faster.
Tommy penetrated the tree line, veered toward the road, then stopped running. Whoever it was had gotten away, perhaps more by stealth than by speed, but there was no one to chase.
He sat on a rock to catch his breath.
Driving home, Tommy wondered who’d been watching him from the edge of the woods, whether he’d try again, and how he’d found him in the first place. He’d told no one where he was going. He hadn’t been followed. Tommy could think of only one person who knew he was there—George Gardener himself, though it clearly wasn’t George running through the woods. Was someone else living on the farm?
As he drove, he smelled something burning. He first thought someone was burning leaves, but at this hour? Then he detected an electrical smell, like the pungent odor that came from the transformer of the model railroad his father used to set up under the tree each Christmas. He looked at the temperature gauge on the dash. The needle was buried past the red.
Then flames shot from the air scoop.
Tommy slammed on the brakes, the car pivoting 180 degrees before it screeched to a stop in the middle of the road. He opened the door and ran from the car, jumped a stockade fence in a bound, and kept running up a hill until he felt he was far enough away to stop and catch his breath.
He turned.
His car was burning, smoke pouring from under the hood.
He felt foolish for running.
Then it exploded, a colossal fireball rising to scorch the limbs and leaves of the overhanging trees.
He no longer felt foolish for running.
He used his cell phone to call the fire department. A few minutes later a police car arrived, and soon a fire truck and an ambulance. While the hook and ladder company put out what was left of the fire, Tommy sat in the back of the ambulance and allowed himself to be examined. The EMT bandaged a cut Tommy had received on his left calf, apparently when he’d jumped the fence, though he hadn’t noticed the cut or felt any pain.
“You ever make any calls accompanied by a tattooed doctor who wears chains and a jean jacket?” Tommy asked the paramedic.
“Nope,” the younger man said, “but I’m new on the job.”
When the paramedic pronounced him good to go, Tommy jumped down to the ground and answered questions for the responding officer, a state trooper he didn’t recognize.
“You said you saw somebody in the woods as you were leaving the Gardener house?” the cop asked.
“Just a shape,” Tommy said. “Like a human.”
“Like a human, or human?” the cop asked. “Sasquatch is like a human.”
“Too dark to tell,” Tommy said.
“Maybe it was George,” the cop said, folding his notebook. “You see the No Trespassing signs he’s got all over the place? He don’t like unexpected guests.”
“Has he ever called you to report them?” Tommy asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” the cop said. “Given how spooked this town is, George might be the only resident who hasn’t called us. Phone’s ringing off the hook. One woman said she had a suspicious car in her driveway. It was her husband. Same car he’d been driving for ten years.”
The trooper finished making notes just as the tow truck arrived. The driver was Raymond DeGidio, Frank’s brother. Ray had worked on the car for Tommy and helped restore it. He knew the engine inside out, literally, Tommy thought.
“I read a service report that said sometimes a float in the carburetor gets stuck in the old Mustangs,” Ray said. “Fuel overflows and ignites when it hits the manifold.”
“Any way to be sure?” Tommy asked. “Like an autopsy or something?”
“On a car? You want me to comb through the pieces?”
“Don’t bother.”
“She was a beauty,” Ray said.
“She was,” Tommy agreed. “Why do they call cars she?”
“Because they blow up?” Ray guessed. “Not that I would personally know anything about that.”
“Sorry to hear you’re having problems at home, Ray,” Tommy said.
“I’d rather not talk about it,” Ray said. “You know your marriage is in trouble when you realize the best way to get the love you need is to fake a stroke. You need a ride?”
Before Tommy could answer he heard a sound in the distance, deep in the woods and muffled but nevertheless piercing, shrill and metallic, like a steel saw blade grinding hard against a cast iron frying pan. It lasted five seconds and then stopped, but the aftertones seemed to reverberate in the darkness.
Ray DeGidio heard it too. The two men looked at each other.
“Did you hear that?” Tommy asked.
Ray nodded.
“Wolf sanctuary?”
“That’s six miles from here,” Ray said. “Maybe a wolf could hear another wolf from six miles, but I don’t think we could. I’ve heard female foxes make a sound like that when they’re in season.”
“That’s probably what it was,” Tommy said.
“Yeah. Probably.”
When he got home, still a bit rattled and shaken, Tommy logged onto the Internet and navigated to the East Salem High online yearbook, clicking on the sports links, then the t
rack team. His hunch was correct. Logan Gansevoort was on the track team. He was a sprinter. He’d run the 400-meter race in 49.53 seconds. Not bad, Tommy thought, clicking down to the all-time school records where he found his own name, clocking in at 47.01. In a moment of vanity he was happy to see he still held the school records for the 100-and the 200-meter sprints as well.
Yet whoever he’d chased was faster.
“Have I lost that much speed?” he said out loud.
All the same, he couldn’t believe Logan Gansevoort could have out-sprinted him.
He returned to his search engine. When Old Whitney, his scoutmaster, had told scary stories around the campfire about monsters in the woods, he’d described one that had a piercing scream, sounding like nothing else. He tried several possible spellings before successfully finding what he was looking for:
Paykak (pakàk in the Algonquin language), also Baykok (or pau’guk, paguk, baguck; bakaak in Ojibwe) a demon described in the Anishinaabe aadizookaan (“Death” in The Song of Hiawatha); an emaciated skeleton-like figure with thin translucent skin and glowing red eyes like coals, said to fly though the forests to prey on warriors using invisible arrows or beating its prey to death with a club. After paralyzing or killing its prey, the Paykak then rips open the victim’s chest, splintering the bones, and devours the liver.
Tommy locked his doors, armed his security system, replaced all the 9-volt batteries in his smoke detectors, made sure the gun in his dresser drawer was loaded, and went to bed where, before falling asleep, he recited a psalm from memory, with an emphasis on one line in particular: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me …”
When he awoke in the morning, he recalled an odd dream. In the dream, New York City was being wiped out by a flood. Panicked people were seeking higher ground in white trucks and vans. Other people were jumping from tall buildings into the water. The dream ended when, in the distance, he saw someone racing upstream in a speedboat.
He told himself to remember the dream and tell Dani about it.
TUESDAY,
OCTOBER 19
22.
Dani received a letter, printed on St. Adrian’s Academy stationery.
Dear Dr. Danielle Harris (the psychiatrist),
My name is Amos Kasden, and I am a student here at St. Adrian’s Academy. I have been talking to the headmaster here at the school, Dr. Wharton, and he suggested that I send you a letter to tell you, in my own words, what happened on the night that Julie Leonard was killed. I am so sorry that I was there at the party at Logan Gansevoort’s house that night in question, and for what happened, but I don’t know how I could be of any use to you in your investigation because I left the party about twelve fifteen and walked back to my dorm. I did not want to have anything that people were drinking at the party because I am taking medications for a few things and I am not allowed to mix them with anything else. I was also afraid because of something Logan said to me in an e-mail. I have known Logan since we were in Cub Scouts and did the Pinewood Derby together and we won. I lost touch with him but then when I got on Facebook we became friends again, but then I was not so sure that he was the same person I used to know. I sort of tried not to be such good friends with him, so when he said to me in an e-mail, “This is going to be awesome. No one suspects anything,” it made me scared, even though I did not know what “this” was. That was another reason I left early, because at this school, we are told that boys become men only when they are good men, and I have been trying to be good about many things. I did not see anything or hear anything at the party that might make me think I know who would have hurt Julie or help somebody else hurt her. I had never met her before that night, and the last time I saw her, it looked like she was having fun.
Sincerely,
Amos Kasden
Senior at St. Adrian’s Academy
Dani read the letter, then scanned it into her computer and forwarded copies of it to Detective Casey, Stuart Metz, Irene Scotto, and Tommy.
Tommy emailed her back thirty minutes later:
Dani,
Spoke with Liam this morning, like you asked. Had a good talk. I think he was being quite honest with me. Three things.
1. He says he’s not close friends with Logan, nobody is, but that if you want to be where things are happening (party with the cool kids, etc.), Logan is inevitably there. Liam remembers a time he and Logan took M80 firecrackers and blew up a dead fish. Not sure that counts as cruelty to animals.
2. Told him about how we’d found the exchange of messages on Julie’s Facebook page and how Kara told us Julie had a crush on him and he broke her heart. As for the crush part, he said he didn’t have any idea what Kara was talking about, and I do not believe he was lying. I’m guessing she was throwing herself at him and he was oblivious, and she went home crying.
3. As for the Facebook notes, it’s not what we thought. Liam had a band and Julie wanted to try out to be the singer after she saw a notice he put up on the bulletin board at school. She tried out for the band, and according to Liam, she was terrible. Liam was trying not to hurt Julie’s feelings so he didn’t tell her the reason they picked someone else. That was why she asked him on Facebook, “Why?”
See you later today.
Tommy
p.s. my car blew up.
p.p.s. remind me to tell you something else
“What do you mean, ‘P.S. my car blew up’?” Dani said, trying to keep her voice to a whisper. “You can’t just say to somebody, ‘P.S. my car blew up’! How did your car blow up?”
She’d asked Tommy to meet her for lunch at the Miss Salem Diner, an old-fashioned railroad-style eatery on Main Street at the southwest corner of the town square. While she’d waited for him, Dani noticed a change. Eating at the Miss Salem had always been a special treat when she was little, on the rare occasion when her mother was away or busy and it was up to her father to supply the nourishment. Later, the diner became the teen hangout where she’d meet her girlfriends for burgers and gossip. One summer she’d even worked there as a waitress.
It was ordinarily a place of lively discussion, energy, cheer. Today people looked different. They spoke low so as not to be overheard, glanced nervously whenever someone entered, or fidgeted anxiously, rolling their napkins into balls. There was tension in the air, as unmistakable as the aroma of onions frying on the grill. Dani wondered if her sweet little town would ever get back to normal.
“My mechanic friend thinks it was a stuck float in the carburetor,” Tommy said. “That’s the chance you take when you restore a car with aftermarket parts. It was only a Mustang.”
“The one you drove in high school?” Dani said.
“Not the exact same car, but same year,” Tommy said. “The one I had in high school was a Boss. This was a Mach 1.”
“What happened to the one you had in high school?”
“Senior year I bet Gerry Roebling that I could beat him in a race around Lake Atticus. The loser had to sign over the title to the winner.”
“What?” Dani asked. “There’s no road that goes all the way around Lake Atticus.”
“You don’t need one in January,” he told her. “The lake was frozen. Just not frozen enough.”
“You went through the ice?”
“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. “But at least I wasn’t the owner of a car at the bottom of a lake.”
“Why didn’t he go through the ice?”
“He was on a motorcycle,” Tommy said. “Good thing too, or I wouldn’t have had a ride home. As I was saying about teenage boys doing stupid things … it’s more than a theory. It’s the hormones.”
“No, it’s not,” Dani said. “Boys are just stupid. Don’t argue. I’m a doctor.”
“Anyway,” Tommy continued, “Liam said Blair thought it was Julie who supplied the zombie juice, not Logan. When are we going to get to talk to Logan? Or Amos? By the way—the letter Amos sent you doesn’t sound like him.”
<
br /> “How would you know what he sounds like?”
“I don’t,” Tommy said, “but I thought Amos was supposed to be smart. The letter sounds like a nine-year-old wrote it. You remember Arkady Dimitrikos from East Salem Elementary?”
“The kid who came from Greece?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Didn’t speak a word of English. Everybody thought he was stupid. And you remember how he turned out.”
“He won the Scripps National Spelling Bee,” Dani said.
“He learned English with a vengeance. Plus, Julie was maybe five one or two,” Tommy said. “And in the photograph from Liam’s phone that you showed me, Amos is standing next to her, and he’s about the same height. So say he comes here from Russia without speaking any English, and he’s small, and really smart, and he gets thrown into a public school where kids think he’s stupid because he can’t speak English and they pick on him because he’s smaller than everybody else. How is he not going to learn English? That letter sounds like somebody else wrote it. Or coached him. In my humble opinion.”
Tommy’s humble opinions were worth more than he realized, Dani thought.
“Also,” Tommy added, “Liam said they made audition videos of everybody who tried out for his band, and Julie’s was so bad that one of the guys wanted to post it to YouTube as a joke. Liam deleted it before he could. Just to show you how Liam meant her no harm. And guess who was in the band? Parker Bowen and Terence Walker.”
“Not Logan?”
“Doesn’t play an instrument and can’t sing.”
“That describes half the people on MTV.”
“How was your day?” he asked. “How’s your sister doing with the horses allergic to hay?”
“Oy,” Dani said. “It’s not allergies. Somehow they got infested with botflies. They lay their eggs on the horses’ legs, and then the horses bite their legs where they itch and the larvae get in the horses’ noses and they sneeze.”
She recalled a boy in Africa who’d been horribly infested by Dermatobia hominis, a botfly that used humans, in addition to a variety of other animals, as hosts. The larvae grew under the boy’s skin until it looked like he was covered in boils.
