Blue Stew (Second Edition)

by Woodland, Nathaniel

  “Oh.” Walter would not have sounded more deflated if his favorite football team had lost the Super Bowl in overtime. “So . . . then . . . you’ve identified all the victims?”

  “Most of them.”

  “And they all fit some kind of suicidal profile?”

  “Well,” Officer Corey paused. “It’s not like they had a history of suicide attempts. But you usually don’t see that, I don’t think. None of them had crystal-clear records, however.”

  “So their friends and families weren’t too shocked when you told them?”

  “Of course they were,” Officer Corey appeared flustered by the question. “Why do you want to keep thinking about this, Walter? It’s over. Be glad.”

  “I’m just curious,” muttered Walter. He went on defiantly, “And what about the man that I saw floating down the river?”

  “No, we haven’t found the body yet. We’ve still got people walking the river. We’ve identified the owner of the one remaining car, so we know who we’re looking for now. Just a simple matter of time.”

  All of Walter’s lines of questioning and speculation were colliding against a brick wall. Above all, Officer Corey wanted to bring closure to a case that had been tormenting his department and his community, and he was good at his job. A familiar feeling of depression now started creeping over Walter, making his insides go cold.

  Or, maybe that was the icy outdoor air.

  “We know what we’re doing, Walter. Now get back inside so you don’t freeze to death, and please put your mind at ease. There’s no reason for you to dwell on this anymore.”

  Walter nodded silently and turned around.

  He was intercepted halfway up the stairs by a small crowd of people coming down. Nigel, Jamie, Henry, and Vanessa were among them.

  Nigel responded to Walter’s quizzical look, “Some people were laughing at Chelsea. She kind of snapped and started telling people to leave. Maddie’s up there trying to placate the situation . . . but, the crowd really needed to thin anyways, so we thought we’d take our leave.”

  “Oh.” Walter looked upstairs, thinking of Maddie. “I should grab my coat. It’s gotten cold as fuck out.”

  Henry held out Walter’s navy-blue coat.

  “Oh . . . thanks.”

  Nigel saw Walter shoot another fleeting look up the stairs.

  He muttered to Walter as he pulled on his coat and turned with the crowd, “Just call her later, bud. No big deal. Shit happens.”

  For the second time in what had been a grim minute for his mental state, Walter nodded silently. He was falling fast into a familiar dark place, a place where “later” was as distant and insignificant as a drop of water a thousand miles away. He needed something to fight off the dark, pressing pain in his chest. But, the thrill and the mystery of the terrible night were evaporating, and he was now leaving behind the one other thing he could think of that could consume his mind: Maddie Wendell.

  Well . . . there were other things . . .

  He didn’t speak a word to anyone as he followed Nigel and Jamie into Nigel’s car—not even to say bye to Henry.

  “Are you feeling alright, Walter?” Nigel, as he pulled out of his parking spot, glanced through his rearview mirror at Walter, seated in back.

  “Can you take me home, please.”

  Walter’s monotone voice tripped an alarm in Nigel’s head.

  “Um . . . why—why don’t you just spend the night? Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “But . . . it’s much easier for Henry to take you to work from my place. And it’s easier for me right now, too,” he chuckled nervously.

  “I don’t care.”

  Again Nigel glanced into his overhead mirror: he couldn’t see more of Walter than a dark outline against the well-lit street that they were leaving behind. It scared Nigel, how he couldn’t make proper eye contact with his friend.

  “So what did you talk to Tom Corey about?”

  “Nothing. I had a stupid idea about the investigation.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  No response. It wasn’t enough to just imply the question.

  “What was the idea?”

  “That Timothy Glass, because he also had scars on his face, must’ve had some part in the suicide cult.”

  Nigel laughed another nervous laugh, “Yeah . . . that is a bit of a leap of logic. I talked to Timothy a few days after it happened . . . gotta be careful when tinkering with old lawnmowers, huh?”

  Walter, his thoughts elsewhere, didn’t identify the disparity right away—Kall told him it had been a new line-cutter, not an old lawnmower—so he didn’t have a mind to correct Nigel. Nor did he have a mind to stir up any desperate intrigue with an unlikely alternative: that Timothy’s story had, at some point, been altered.

  “Did you know the guy has a doctorate in biochem from Harvard? Fucking smart—bigger nerd than me . . .”

  Walter didn’t care, and he made this clear through his silence.

  They drove on wordlessly for five or so minutes.

  When, after two of these minutes, they reached the Sutherland town line, the street lights abandoned the sides of the road and the pavement instantly became rougher and patchier.

  Sutherland had never been the brightest town when it came to budget management. Some years back a chunk of money had been siphoned from the road crew to pay for a new town hall: The idea had been that they could use the public space as a forum in which local issues—including budgeting issues—could be tackled more effectively and openly. However, someone had underestimated the construction costs, and for the past year the town hall had been left incomplete and inoperable.

  Nigel found the nerve to speak again after three more minutes, and as there were no lights beyond his headlights, he couldn’t even see an outline of the person he was addressing. This left him with an odd feeling, like he was speaking to the dark.

  “So . . . Walter, I’m really tired. We all are. It just makes more sense for you to crash at my place for one more night.”

  The dark remained silent for what seemed like a very long time.

  It then muttered darkly, “Christ, it’s only like five fucking minutes . . .”

  “Walter, I’m not taking you to your place.”

  “Fucking why?”

  “I just told you why.”

  Walter managed barely enough foresight to realize that pressing for the real reason why would get him nowhere.

  “Whatever. I’ll just walk.”

  Nigel shook his head. Jamie, listening silently in the front passenger seat—having immediately guessed at the reason for Nigel’s unwillingness to take Walter home—also shook her head.

  “Dude, get a hold of yourself,” Nigel now said. “You have the coping skills of a damn baby.”

  Walter was silent for the remainder of the drive.

  Chapter 7 – The Light in the Night

  Nigel seemed to decide that his best tactic would be to just ignore Walter’s last stated intention, as though it hadn’t been anything more than an outrageous, empty threat.

  He parked his car in its usual spot, mumbled delicately—as if saying it too loud might provoke Walter—“Here we are.”

  He got out. So did Jamie.

  Walter sat for a pensive moment. The last thing Nigel said had been fluttering through his head like an unwelcome moth since its utterance, and simply would not settle until it had slipped past his wall of denial, at least some small distance. He was handling all this like a baby, there was no denying that.

  However, the thought of going on a long moonlight stroll had grown to be unexpectedly appealing after he’d said it. Walter was falling back into his usual rut, so it made sense that anything that far outside of his usual patterns of activity would be tempting.

  He exited the car when Nigel and Jamie, walking a bit slower than a pair of snails, were halfway to the house’s side door. He caught up easily.

  “Nigel, can I borrow a flashlight?
” Walter asked, with noticeable trepidation.

  Nigel sighed heavily before he turned around.

  “No, Walter. You’re staying here tonight. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “No, man, no. I swear it’s not what you think . . . not anymore . . .” Walter went red at this unplanned admission. “. . . I . . . I just really like the idea of going on a walk right now. Clear the head, you know?”

  Nigel gave Walter a long, scrutinizing look. Having known him for most of his life, Nigel could sense that Walter’s frame of mind had changed from minutes before.

  “I don’t want you going to your place—that’s still a stupid idea. Here, what if you went up the road and looped onto Ireland Street and then back down and around?”

  Walter closed his lips and nodded. “Yeah, something like that. Then I’ll come back here. Can’t be much later than eleven right now, can it?”

  “I don’t know. Come in. I’m gonna grab you a hat, too. It’s effing cold out.”

  They went inside. Walter retrieved the flashlight from the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen while Nigel found him a heavy, black winter hat.

  “I hate acting like I’m your damn mom, but, dude: don’t stay out there long.”

  “I might catch a cold?”

  “You might catch hypothermia and die.”

  With a dark laugh, Walter left.

  He shut the door behind him and meandered towards the road. He hadn’t loved Nigel’s suggestion. There must be a more interesting path he could walk. Maybe he could stroll through the woods? Though, freezing to death lost in the woods did not sound fun, and there were no marked paths nearby. What about walking along the river?

  Walter came to an abrupt stop.

  There was one final missing link from the night of terrors: the body he had seen rushing away down the river. Officer Corey said that they hadn’t found the body yet. The idea of finding a grotesque corpse in the middle of the woods—in the middle of the night—filled Walter with deep, instinctive fear. It was a type of fear that elicited oddly specific memories of when he would go on camping trips with his dad—maybe twenty years ago now—and wake up in the tent at night to the sounds of wildlife, and, with the unbridled imagination only children are capable of, convince himself that hungry bears were circling the tent.

  It was a dark, distant, nostalgic place of mind. It was utterly irresistible. Walter turned on the spot.

  He slipped through a row of untrimmed bushes that separated Nigel’s front yard from his back yard. He clicked on the flashlight only when it became necessary—when the trail leading down to the river had grown particularly steep and rocky, layered with loose leaves—because he hadn’t wanted to risk Nigel spotting him through a window and trying to protest.

  Contrasted with the night of the storm, when Walter and Henry had come down to walk a short section of the raging river, the river now looked as though it was suffering through a month-long drought. The sharply defined, high bank that’d been carved out by the water that night aided in the effect.

  Walter shined his flashlight into the water. It was slow-going and crystal-clear, and the deepest sections only came up to a few feet. There were no good places for a dead body to hide that night.

  He was about to start along the same route downstream he’d taken with Henry when a thought occurred to him. Upstream, before the bridge, just beyond where he had witnessed the body floating helplessly out of sight, there was a tight bend in the river with an eroded outer bank. It would be an ideal place for any large flotsam to catch on an exposed root and get pinned, and maybe get buried amongst a cluster of driftwood.

  Excited, all but forgetting how frigid the air was, Walter now turned upstream.

  He found his footing over rocks and downed trees with the flashlight, stopping intermittently to scan the denser clusters of dry wood and other debris lining the high water mark from the other night. Twice along the way he spotted sections of bare wood that he thought could’ve been a rotted arm or leg, and he was both disappointed and utterly relieved when, on closer inspection, they proved to be no more than reflections of his dark imagination.

  The farther he journeyed from Nigel’s house, the more the darkness felt as if it was closing in on him. Walter never considered, however, that maybe it actually was: the flashlight’s batteries hadn’t been changed in some time.

  The dry leaves layering the forest floor, being bitten by frost as the cold of night grew, crunched underfoot as Walter plodded forwards. He was discovering some interesting things about his own psychology: that it’s possible to be spontaneous without being completely careless, and, similarly, it’s possible to break from monotony without muddling mood-altering substances into the process.

  In the shallow beam cast by the flashlight, Walter now saw where the river bent and angled up towards the bridge. As he closed in on the turn, he saw what he had anticipated: a dense cluster of sticks and branches and leaves layering the steep, eroded outside bank.

  The inner riverbank of the turn was in predictable contrast to the outer. It was shallow and sandy, and—especially with the water as low as it was that night—it extended down from the forest line like a small moonlit beach.

  Walter stepped out onto the crusty sand and sunk in an inch. He extended the flashlight in front of him. He didn’t immediately see any suspicious shapes tangled into the blankets of driftwood and leaves, but a cursory look was far from sufficient for this wide mess.

  The deep, instinctual fear was mounting, causing physical discomfort in Walter’s stomach. He trudged through the sand right up to the water’s edge, stopping maybe a half-dozen yards from the outer bank, with the flashlight still held up at arm’s length.

  Aiming the weak yellow light from side-to-side along the far bank, Walter still saw only waterlogged branches and brown leaves caught in nets of sticks and roots.

  He began moving tentatively along the water’s edge, knowing that a new angle might reveal something. Though, a steadily growing part of him would’ve been very happy to find nothing at that point.

  Walter flipped the flashlight in the direction he was meandering, to check his path. He did not want to trip on a stray rock and stumble into the ice water, especially not there, where the river was the deepest and darkest it would get for miles in either direction.

  When he flipped his light forwards, however, Walter saw something in the sand that he hadn’t expected.

  Nothing dead, nothing creepy—in many ways the reverse, actually: The sandy bank was littered with nearly a dozen pairs of shoeprints. Obviously the search parties that Officer Corey had alluded to had thoroughly covered this hotspot for jetsam.

  “You idiot,” Walter chided himself. How was he going to find anything in the middle of the night that experienced trackers hadn’t found by day? And the trackers—only now did it seem completely predictable—plainly had begun their search at the bridge, the last place Victim Number Two had purportedly been seen.

  Walter stood there, in the growing dark and in the tightening freeze, on an alley of sand between a slow, silent river and a large, watching forest, feeling suddenly void of purpose. A feeling that he’d become way too familiar with lately.

  He considered turning back and going downstream as originally conceived. Except, now seeing this undeniable evidence of the trackers—and seeing how pathetic Nigel’s flashlight was at piercing the night—it suddenly seemed glaringly apparent that that would be little more than an exercise in futility.

  Walter’s motivation had abandoned him as readily as ever.

  He then thought about continuing upstream, getting to the bridge and onto the road. He could make it to his house in about a half-hour. But, this thought was met with unexpected negativity. It quickly cast the original idea of heading downstream as far more palatable, by comparison. Maybe, on some distant rational level, Walter recognized that a non-detrimental exercise in futility was better than an overtly detrimental one.

  When he turned around and began to head back
downstream, Walter must’ve caught a tiny speck of light through the trees from one of Nigel’s windows, because his friend abruptly came to mind. Then, in the usual split-second and arbitrary way that thoughts and memories fling haphazardly through one’s brain, Walter’s testy exchanges with Nigel in the car surfaced to a conscious level. And now—perhaps because he had unconsciously flagged the incongruity at the time, or perhaps for no reason at all—a small piece of their dialogue jumped out at him.

  What was it Nigel had said? That Timothy Glass had been tinkering with an old lawnmower when he sliced up his face? Walter stopped moving. He was certain Kall had told him that it’d been an accident with a new gas powered line-cutter.

  There were two explanations for this disparity. One was very simple, and therefore incredibly likely: that Nigel had either misheard or misremembered details of the story. The other explanation only came to existence in Walter’s mind because it was far more interesting: that Timothy, sometime after he’d talked to Nigel, had changed his story into something somewhat more believable.

  Part of him knew that he was really reaching at this point, but an even larger part of him just didn’t care.

  Once again Walter turned around, this time to resume his trek upstream. The river, maybe two miles ahead, came close to the field that had been the starting point for the supposed suicide cult’s final act. Farther on, it crept along the boundaries of Timothy Glass’s property.

  As he crunched over frost-crusted sand, Walter contemplated the variety of evidence that a TV detective might look for in and around the field . . . maybe a sixth set of shoe prints? He was momentarily energized . . . until he remembered that the cops had surely been all over the scene with their own boots. What else? A scrap of clothes? A hair fiber? Walter laughed, muttering his quip, “I’ll take that right back to my forensics lab . . .”

  Still, he kept walking through the thickening night.

  When he got to the bridge he crossed over before diving back into the woods along the other side of the river, knowing that both the field and Timothy’s house were on that side. Though the river was very low, skipping over potentially icy rocks in order to cross the river, at night, in the middle of the woods when no one knew where he was, was not smart.