Into the Dark

by Peter Abrahams

  “Ever been this far?” Joey said.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. But I think one of these comes out near the falls.”

  “Yeah?” Ingrid said.

  “Didn’t Mr. Porterhouse say something about it?”

  Mr. Porterhouse was the gym and health teacher at Ferrand Middle. Just about anything came up in his class, a whole stream of tidbits flowing by, few snagging in Ingrid’s mind.

  Joey’s nose was running, two tiny streams, clear and shiny. “But which one?” he said.

  Ingrid took off her mitten.

  “What’s that?” Joey said, coming closer.

  “Compass ring,” Ingrid said, at that moment realizing she’d received two presents, compass ring and snowshoes; kind of a red-letter weekend.

  “Hey,” said Joey.

  “The river’s west, right?” Ingrid said.

  Joey gazed up at the sky, flat gray through the network of dark branches. “If the sun was out…,” he began. Ingrid checked the compass ring and pointed to the unbroken path.

  The path led up and up: much harder going now, the two of them making first tracks, huffing and puffing. First Joey was in the lead, but all at once Ingrid got her second wind—a great feeling of energy flowing through her, actually making her stronger and fresher than before they’d even started, her breathing back to normal, and she surged ahead, Joey glancing sideways in surprise.

  They went around two sharp bends, came to a huge evergreen of the Christmas tree type. Spruce? Pine? Snow lay thick on all the branches. Ingrid felt a faint breeze on her face. Joey started to say something. She held up her hand. They listened. A sound came through the trees.

  Shhh.

  The sound of the falls, very faint. Ingrid almost said “Pioneers rule” but stopped herself. Talk like that might spoil things, this sensation that had been growing in her, of going back in time.

  The trail took them past another tree, almost as big, then sloped down. After a minute or two they stepped into a clearing, and viola! The falls came suddenly into view, a few hundred yards away. The clearing stood level with the top of the falls, so they could see the river, frozen over upstream, black and roiling near the drop, and then the whole slow-motion creamy deluge into the wild whirlpools down below. And the best part: This was one of those spots where you could hear the strange double echo that had inspired the name Echo Falls, like a big loud voice shushing a small stubborn one that kept shushing it right back.

  So much to look at: Ingrid didn’t notice right away that there were two people in the picnic area down on the near bank, a popular spot in summer but not now. They sat on a bench near the safety railing, huddled close together, perhaps a man and a woman, too far away to tell. Ingrid and Joey crossed the clearing, back into the woods, following the path down switchbacks, the double shhh growing louder. It rose almost to a roar as they walked through the last trees and into the picnic area; like Lewis and Clark, Ingrid thought.

  There was only one person on the bench now, a woman in a long black coat, pretty fashionable for a winter visit to the falls. As Ingrid and Joey moved toward the railing, she turned to them. Her eyes were red—from crying? Were those tears on her cheeks? And then Ingrid realized who it was.

  “Mrs. McGreevy?” she said.

  Mrs. McGreevy, mother of Mia, one of Ingrid’s best friends, looked startled. Her face paled, going almost as white as the snow. “Ingrid?” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Ingrid. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Mrs. McGreevy said, her hand, for a moment, covering her heart. “I…” She gestured at the falls. “I was taking a look. In winter, I mean. It’s so…so beautiful. Beautiful and scary.”

  “Yeah,” said Ingrid. Beautiful and scary: Mom had said the exact same thing, more than once.

  Mrs. McGreevy’s gaze went from Ingrid to Joey, back to Ingrid. She licked her lips. “Mia’s at the library,” she said. She and Mia had moved to Echo Falls from New York the year before, after Mrs. McGreevy’s divorce.

  “At the library?” Ingrid said.

  “Working on a paper,” said Mrs. McGreevy. “The Whiskey Rebellion? Something like that.”

  Uh-oh. Whiskey Rebellion—when was that due?

  “In fact,” said Mrs. McGreevy, “I should probably go pick her up.” She glanced at her car, a green hatchback; from here you could see the parking lot and the entrance to River Road, invisible from the clearing above. “Can I give you kids a ride?” She took out her keys, dropped them, picked them up.

  “We’re on snowshoes,” Joey said.

  Mrs. McGreevy blinked, as though he’d spoken in a foreign language.

  “This is Joey,” Ingrid said. “Mrs. McGreevy.”

  “Hello.”

  “Um. Hi.”

  “Well, then.” Mrs. McGreevy started moving away. “I’ll be going. Nice running into—nice seeing you.” She walked to the parking lot, got into her car—the only one in the lot—and drove off.

  “What’s with her?” Joey said. “Like she never heard of snowshoes?”

  “She’s a city person,” Ingrid said.

  “Yeah,” said Joey. “But still.”

  The falls went shhh shhh.

  four

  THE HISTORY TEACHER didn’t show up Wednesday morning, which meant, one: a sub, in this case Mr. Porterhouse, gym and health teacher, and two: an automatic extension on the Whiskey Rebellion paper, a lucky break for Ingrid, who’d forgotten all about it once, remembered in the picnic area at the falls, and then somehow forgotten again.

  “What,” said Mr. Porterhouse, reading from a note card, “is the significance of the Boston Tea Party?”

  No hands went up.

  “C’mon, you sports,” said Mr. Porterhouse; he called everyone “sport.” “The Boston Tea Party—dawn’s early light, rockets’ red glare, big big big.”

  Ingrid, who thought she’d had a pretty good grip on the Boston Tea Party until that moment, now wasn’t sure.

  Still no hands. Mr. Porterhouse fingered the whistle that always hung around his neck. Was he going to blow it? “Know what they say about them that—those that forget history?”

  No hands.

  “They’re totally—” Mr. Porterhouse stopped whatever he was going to say, backed up. “They’re in the cra—in the toilet, is what.” He paused to let that sink in. “So, Boston Tea Party, significance of.”

  Brucie raised his hand. Mr. Porterhouse didn’t see him. Brucie waved his hand around like a red-carpet celebrity. He was invisible to Mr. Porterhouse.

  “’Kay,” said Mr. Porterhouse. “Baby steps. Where did it happen?”

  Where did the Boston Tea Party happen? Was that what he was asking? Ingrid sat up; this was starting to get interesting.

  Mr. Porterhouse suddenly whirled and pointed straight at Dustin Dratch, sitting beside his twin brother, Dwayne; easy to tell them apart—Dustin had the cauliflower ear. They were the biggest kids at Ferrand Middle by far, partly because they were fifteen, having been held back twice despite the social promotion rule in Echo Falls schools.

  “Tell the people, Dustin,” said Mr. Porterhouse.

  “What people?” asked Dustin.

  Dwayne made a snorting noise, its meaning unclear.

  “These people, Dustin,” said Mr. Porterhouse. “Your fellow scholars.”

  Dustin looked around the room, squinting a bit, as though trying to spot something cleverly hidden. “Tell ’em what, again?” he said.

  “Whereabouts of the Boston Tea Party,” said Mr. Porterhouse.

  From where Ingrid sat, she could see Dwayne nudge Dustin under desk level, and maybe whisper something quickly too, although they might have just relied on twin telepathy. Whatever the message, Dustin passed it on to the class. “They had it in a restaurant,” he said. “Like, where else?”

  “Think they’ll be held back again?” said Mia at recess. They sat on the swings in the farthest corner of the yard at Ferrand Middle, not swinging, just dangling in the cold: Ingri
d, Ingrid’s best friend, Stacy Rubino, and Mia.

  “No way,” Stacy said. “Next year they’ll be sixteen. You can drop out of school at sixteen.”

  “Yeah?” said Ingrid.

  “And then what?” Mia said.

  Stacy gave her a quick glance. Ingrid was starting to recognize that Stacy and Mia didn’t have much in common, mostly just the fact that they were both her friends. “Then what?” Stacy said. “Get a job, of course.”

  “With an eighth-grade education?” Mia said. “What kind of a life is that?”

  Stacy’s face reddened. “Good enough for lots of people,” she said.

  Mia shrank back into her puffy pink jacket. She was tiny, with fine bones and features. Stacy was big and strong, hardest kicker by far on last fall’s U-13 girls’ soccer team—a team that had gone all the way to the regional final, losing 2–1, their lone goal coming from Ingrid late in the game, first ball she’d ever headed in.

  They dangled in silence—not one of those comfortable silences—Ingrid dragging the toes of her boots in arcing patterns in the snow. After a while Stacy said, “My dad dropped out at sixteen.”

  “Yeah?” Ingrid said.

  “Yeah,” Stacy said.

  “Oh,” said Mia.

  Mr. Rubino was an electrician, and a great one in Ingrid’s opinion. People still talked about how he’d lit the Cheshire Cat’s smile in the Prescott Players’ production of Alice in Wonderland, somehow leaving a big yellow grin in empty black space. Plus he’d built a kick-ass entertainment center in the basement of the Rubinos’ house, a nice house in the Lower Falls neighborhood, not far from Joey’s. Maybe they weren’t rich, but comfortable, right? And kids liked going over to the Rubinos’, a pretty happy place, despite some problems with Stacy’s older brother Sean, recently sent away to a military academy in Tennessee or Oklahoma or somewhere.

  “That’s that,” Ingrid said. “I’m dropping out in two and a half years.”

  Stacy laughed, then Mia. The mood got back to normal.

  Or maybe not quite, because Mia said, almost to herself, “My dad’s got an MBA from Harvard Business School.” The unspoken part—for all the good that did us—was very clear. Mia’s dad lived in New York, and almost a year after the divorce he and Mia’s mom were still fighting—sometimes in e-mails that got copied to Mia, maybe by mistake.

  “We’ll all drop out,” Stacy said. “Start a restaurant in Hawaii.”

  “Surfin’ Fish Burgers,” Mia said.

  More laughter: Stacy had a great laugh, real loud. The bell rang. They hopped off the swings, started back to the building. Stacy remembered something and ran ahead.

  “Did your mom say anything about Joey?” Ingrid said.

  “Joey?” said Mia. “Why would my mom say anything about Joey?”

  “He was with me on Sunday,” Ingrid said. “At the falls.”

  “Huh?” said Mia.

  “We went snowshoeing in the woods,” Ingrid said. “All the way to the falls. Your mom was there. She didn’t mention it?”

  “My mom was at the falls?”

  “In the picnic area,” Ingrid said. “She said you were at the library.”

  “I was,” Mia said. “But she was going to Stop & Shop after she dropped me off.”

  “Maybe she had extra time,” said Ingrid.

  “Are you sure it was her?”

  “We talked. She met Joey.”

  Mia had beautiful eyes, huge and pale blue. Now they seemed to cloud over.

  “Get a move on, you two,” said Ms. Groome, math teacher, waiting at the door, knitting needles sticking out of her coat pocket. Winter light glared off fingerprint smears on her glasses. “Or would you prefer a nice long detention?”

  “Afternoon, petunia,” said Mr. Sidney, the school bus driver, as Ingrid got on board. Girls were always “petunia” to Mr. Sidney, guys “guy,” as in “any more shenanigans and you’re walkin’, guy.”

  “Hi, Mr. Sidney,” said Ingrid, moving toward the back. Stacy was already there, saving a seat for her, but—what was this? A grown-up in one of the front seats? And what was more, a grown-up she knew—Mr. Samuels, editor, publisher, arts and entertainment critic, and chief reporter for the Echo Falls Echo. Oh my God. Was he doing some follow-up on Brucie? “Up Close and Personal with Echo Falls’s New Young Funnyman” or something even more nauseating? She glanced ahead, saw Brucie a few rows behind Stacy, patting his head while rubbing his stomach for maybe the zillionth time. But Mr. Samuels didn’t seem aware of him. He was writing in a notebook, the words tiny and precise, his long nose close to the page.

  “Ah,” he said, looking up. “Hello, Ingrid.”

  “Hi, Mr. Samuels,” Ingrid said.

  “How’s that grandfather of yours?”

  “Pretty good.”

  He laid the notebook on his knee. “Actually, you might be able to do me a favor in that regard. Got a moment?”

  Ingrid exchanged a puzzled look with Stacy, sat beside Mr. Samuels. He was a tiny old guy with alert little eyes and a scrawny neck, knew more about the history of Echo Falls than anyone, a fact that had helped her more than once in the recent past.

  “Right now,” said Mr. Samuels, lowering his voice as the door closed and Mr. Sidney shifted into gear, “you’re wondering what the heck this old coot is doing on the school bus.”

  “Everything but the old coot part,” said Ingrid.

  Mr. Samuels laughed. “A career in journalism—don’t rule it out,” he said. He angled the notebook so she could see. At the top of the page he’d written WW2. “Planning a special multipart series,” he said, “celebrating all the World War Two vets from Echo Falls. The ones still alive and kicking, that is.”

  Was it Ingrid’s imagination, or did Mr. Sidney floor the pedal, just for a split second, at the words alive and kicking? His Battle of the Coral Sea cap was perched low on his head. Mr. Sidney and Grampy had been at a place called Corregidor together, something Grampy never talked about.

  “What they did then and where are they now—profiles,” said Mr. Samuels. “Today I’m working on Boom Boom Sidney.”

  “Boom Boom?” said Ingrid. “I thought his name was Myron.”

  “Yup,” said Mr. Samuels. “But he had a great slap-shot when he was a kid.”

  Ingrid glanced at Mr. Sidney. His shoulders were so bony. “How many are there?” she said.

  “How many vets left?” said Mr. Samuels. He slapped his bony knee. “There’s a reporter’s question for you. Answer: five, four still living in Echo Falls or close by. Three from the Pacific theater, two European, and so far I’ve got promises of cooperation from all but one.”

  He didn’t have to name the noncooperator.

  “I’ve sent letters,” said Mr. Samuels. “No response. And the phone just rings and rings out there.”

  “No voice mail,” Ingrid said.

  “Be a shame to leave him out of the piece,” said Mr. Samuels. “Probably the only surviving genuine World War Two hero in this part of the state.”

  Grampy a war hero? First she’d heard of it. “What did he do?” Ingrid said.

  “Exactly what I’m trying to nail down,” said Mr. Samuels.

  “Then how do you know he was a war hero?”

  “Lots of good journalism schools, but if I were you, I’d take a shot at Columbia, Ingrid,” said Mr. Samuels. He rose, tightened the knot of his skinny brown tie, already pretty tight. The bus slowed down. “As for how I know, that’s a matter of public record. Aylmer Hill of Echo Falls, Connecticut, was awarded the Medal of Honor in August of 1945.”

  “For what?” Ingrid said.

  “The details are sketchy,” said Mr. Samuels, moving past her. “That’s why I’d like to talk to him.” He handed Ingrid a white envelope. “Maybe you could see that he gets this, even somehow persuade him to actually read it.” The bus stopped. “Thank you, Boomer,” he said, getting off.

  “Anytime, Red,” said Mr. Sidney.

  Mr. Samuels had no hair a
t all. Did these old-timers feel awkward with their childhood names clinging to them? Ingrid had felt awkward with hers from the get-go, partly because of how it sounded, partly because it came from Ingrid Bergman, the impossibly beautiful actress in Casablanca, Mom’s favorite movie. Maybe Ingrid was the kind of name that got better with age. Nothing she could do about it anyway: Her all-out seventh-grade effort to make people call her Griddie had been shot down by everyone, even complete strangers.

  “What was that all about?” said Stacy when Ingrid went back and sat beside her.

  “Not sure,” Ingrid said. “What’s the Medal of Honor?”

  “That video game,” said Stacy. “Sean used to play it all the time.”

  “I’m a level-ten master,” Brucie called out from the back.

  “Zip it, guy,” said Mr. Sidney.

  five

  THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE stood deep in the woods. House, woods, and sky: all dark. Ingrid had no intention of going any closer, was not about to take even one more step. But there was nothing she could do about it. With a sickening shudder, the forest floor was suddenly on the move, like a conveyor belt, taking her faster and faster to the gingerbread house. A pair of yellow eyes appeared behind an upstairs window.

  “Ingrid! Wake up!”

  She opened her eyes. Her room was dark and shadowy. The bedside clock read 6:05, almost an hour before she had to get up for school. Dad stood in the doorway.

  “Where are those minutes?” he said.

  “Minutes?” Her voice was croaky. She cleared her throat, tried to clear her mind of forest-dream remnants. “What—”

  “That Grampy was supposed to sign,” Dad said, his tone sharpening. “Don’t tell me you forgot them.”

  Ingrid rubbed her eyes, all crusty. “I guess I must have, but—”

  “Damn it,” Dad said. “Get up, then. You’re coming with me.”

  “Where?” Ingrid said.

  “The farm,” Dad said. “You can run in and get them. I’ll drop you off at school.”