“And how’s that working out for you?”
“Terrible,” she sighed.
“You feel like grabbing a little breakfast? Not often I come across someone who hates this town as much as me. I feel like we’re already kindred spirits.”
Melanie did. She wasn’t especially hungry, and the prospect of greasy diner food was more repelling than comforting, but here was someone willing to talk. Someone who grew up here. She had to know something.
They trotted out into the rain and walked toward the diner. Melanie was getting a sinking feeling from seeing Ennis again so soon, and was desperate to fill the uncomfortable silence. “I just realized I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Trish,” she said. “I think you know my husband. Chief of police? Real stickler for the rules?”
Melanie stammered and wound up nodding. She only just met Trish, but it was hard to believe that Brady was married to—this. It wasn’t fair to judge, but she was at least thirty years old and her alternative Goth-chic style felt more appropriate for high school than real life. No wonder she worked so closely with Forest Grove’s teenagers, she obviously considered herself one.
How are you doing on that whole ‘not judging’ thing?
Okay, it wasn’t fair to make assessments, but Trish’s black eye liner and matching fingernails fit a rebellious coffee barista more than it did a married woman living in a small town.
They stepped into the diner and Ennis scowled while glancing between them. It was hard to tell which of them he wanted to see less, but that made her trust the chief’s wife more.
They took a booth right up front. Melanie ordered a glass of orange juice and an egg white omelet. Trish ate like she dressed—in defiance. You’d have to be a rebel to order a side of bacon with a plate of sausage and hash topped with eggs. It was enough sodium to give the entire town gout. Then again, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on this little thing, so maybe she knew exactly what she was doing.
The waitress took their order without a smile. She hurried off and Trish slapped a palm down. “Thing I hate most about this place is the judging. I feel eyes on the back of my neck when I’m at the convenience store buying milk. Like people are wishing me away—as if this is such a nice place to live.”
“It’s not?”
“I don’t think so, do you? People get cross when you let your grass grow too long. I like leaving it long…hoping it’ll bring ticks to the neighborhood.”
Melanie liked this one for sure. “How is the signature collection going?”
“Oh, it’s all over the place. Some folks are happy to sign…probably those who’ve got kids in high school. Can you imagine what a nightmare it is having to explain to them why they don’t have dances like every other town in America?”
Melanie was at least partially responsible for that. It was the one thing she had in common with Forest Grove—she, and it, was scarred by what Cyrus Hoyt had done. Only there was no solidarity between them.
“Some of them look at me like I’m trying to host an orgy for the kids. They tell me to hit the bricks. One woman, I don’t know if you’ve met Mrs. Maxwell yet, but she took me by the arm and asked how I could betray my hometown like this. Hopefully, they don’t find out that I’ll be buying them a keg as another act of disobedience.”
“Your husband okay with that?”
“Define okay,” she said. “He’s supportive. I’m hoping he doesn’t read my newfound activism as a betrayal. I’m not a culture warrior or any shit like that, but if I gotta live here, then it has to be a place I’m comfortable with.”
Melanie knew what betrayal felt like. Dennis Morton wasn’t exactly a friend, but their relationship had been pleasantly professional from the beginning. He trusted her and refused to micromanage. That counted for a lot in this day and age, and was partly why she never saw the blindside coming.
“Okay, enough about my shit.” Trish took a mouthful of bacon but kept talking. “What’s going on with you? You look as unhappy as I am.”
Melanie laughed out loud and couldn’t remember the last time that happened. “These people hate me. They think I’m out for a scandal, but I’ve really just reached a point in my life where I need to get my story out.”
That was her official motivation. No one needed to know that she had become work’s whipping post, and was doing this for equal parts spite and catharsis.
“Doesn’t take much to get these bumpkins on edge.”
“I don’t think this place has moved on any more than I have.”
“That shit left scars. Take it from a native. In junior high, you couldn’t go into the backyard of your friend’s house for a little necking without hearing nervous chatter about Cyrus Hoyt. He became the celibacy boogeyman. ‘Don’t fuck, kids, or Cyrus Hoyt will kill you.’ The PTA thought they could stomp out teenage promiscuity by propagating that myth. Opportunistic pricks.”
They talked around the topic of Hoyt for a while. Melanie tried getting Trish’s thoughts on the possibility that he was alive without asking, but it became clear that Mrs. Brady wouldn’t be coerced into volunteering her thoughts. So she asked again about the impact of Hoyt’s killing spree, thinking she could at least use it in the book.
“It got worse as I went through high school. And I don’t mean any disrespect, but everyone talked about Hoyt the same way they do Santa Claus. It wasn’t real anymore, but a cheap ploy used by teachers and community leaders to keep us puritanical…I shit you not. In our rebellion, we laughed about it. We’re not supposed to do drugs, great. Pass that joint. Sex is the devil’s tool, and Hoyt is his instrument of punishment? Cool, I think I’ll go all the way tonight.”
It was hard to hear her own trauma marginalized, but it was expected.
“It’s not like we lived in a den of debauchery. We were just kids. Drinking and mischief.” She took a swig of coffee and winked. “And a drop of promiscuity for good measure. What Hoyt means to you is very different than what he was to us.”
He ruined my life. “Makes sense,” Melanie said.
“But this town feels more uptight than ever.”
“How so?”
“I spent my twenties in New York City, so maybe it’s just me having a hard time acclimating to the ‘burbs. But it just feels…different.”
“No one seems to want to talk much about Hoyt these days.”
“Yeah, they probably saw how well their scare tactics worked on my class and dropped the spiel entirely. But a part of me thinks they’ve got to be more scared than ever, if they’re not even willing to address his existence anymore.”
“Do you know anything about this town that I might not?” Not the most tactful segue, but Trish wasn’t likely to mind.
“Nothing really. By the time I was old enough, Camp Forest Grove was already our own personal urban legend.” She repeated the old campfire rhyme with a twitching grin on her lip that suggested mockery, or at least disbelief. “That’s all I know.”
“One of the old timers at Last Mile Gas told me about some trouble on the lake before Hoyt. Wouldn’t say anything more, though.”
“I’ve heard the same, and don’t know any more than that…even with my father as a career lawman.”
They made small talk through the rest of breakfast. Trish eventually tried recruiting her to collect signatures, but Melanie explained that her involvement would only hinder the cause.
“I don’t care,” Trish said through a grin that could only be described as shit-eating. “Having you involved would ruffle some additional feathers.”
Melanie declined, saying she did not expect to be in town that long, and once she was gone, she wouldn’t be back again.
The rest of the conversation was about trivialities. At some point, the rain stopped and Melanie offered to put the whole bill on her credit card—the least she could do for the background information Trish had supplied.
They stepped outside beneath a sunny sky and it was already too hot to keep her sweatshirt on.
I won’t, Melanie thought, and watched her disappear down the street.
“Are you going to be wanting a ride back to your place now?”
Melanie turned and saw the officer from the hardware store walking toward her. His nameplate read JOHNSON, and his eyes were glued to the chief’s wife, who was now crossing the street and disappearing around the other side of the bookstore.
She was about to decline the offer, but Johnson didn’t give her the chance to say anything.
“You know Mrs. Brady?”
“Just met her, actually.”
“Hope she wasn’t trying to recruit you. Between you and me, the chief isn’t exactly thrilled that his wife has become so…controversial.”
“I’m doing just fine with drumming up controversy on my own. Besides, the whole door-to-door thing isn’t for me. I’m not a violent person, but one time there was a Jehovah’s Witness that would not stop coming to my house…”
“Smart lady. Definitely not the kind of girl you want to go hitchin’ your wagon to. Had a nasty bout with drugs a few years back, and some of us think she’s back at it. A little worried about having to deal with that kind of thing on the streets of the grove. That kind of thing shouldn’t happen here.”
“’I’m sure Chief Brady won’t let that happen,” Melanie said, and tried stepping around the young officer. This conversation had gone as far as she wanted it to go.
But Johnson stepped into her path. “He has a lot to worry about. Just last night some kids got bored and vandalized the hardware store.”
“Then it sounds like Trish has the right idea? Give them something else to focus their energies on?”
“Not for me to decide,” he said. “Now what about that ride?”
“No thanks, Officer Johnson…”
“Alex,” he said.
“No thanks, officer. Now that the rain has cleared, I think I’ll take my time getting back.”
“Suit yourself. You know where to find me if you change your mind.”
“All I need to do is look over my shoulder, right?”
“More or less,” he said, and turned back toward his car.
***
Across town, Brady hit a dead end of his own.
His brow was damp with a mix of sweat and water. “At least the rain stopped,” he mumbled. “Feels like we’ve been out here all day.”
“We have,” Captain Ernie Oviedo of the Connecticut State Police fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket and lit up. “There’s nothing here, chief. Let’s call it.”
Brady had received word from New Haven P.D. this morning. Their missing person, Vincent Robson, was with two other people the night of his disappearance. Turns out all three of them were MIA, and Mayor Cobb was shitting a brick over the idea that they might’ve been killed on the outskirts of Forest Grove.
“This better not go national, Brady.” That was the last thing Cobb had said to him at this morning’s briefing. Captain Oviedo was called in to help coordinate a search on the mayor’s wishes, and he wasn’t subscribing to the theory that these kids were lost any more than Brady did.
“You’re right, captain.” He pulled his foot out from a puddle of mud, suddenly envying his guys who got to answer the hardware store break-in call.
The site around Robson’s car was clean. Too clean. No fingerprints on the door, zero shuffle marks in the dirt around it. As if the whole area had been wiped. They pulled a few hair fibers out of the interior and prayed the follicles were attached—anything that might lead to a suspect.
While waiting for lab analysis, they searched. And searched.
“Two of my men are in Sharon by now,” Oviedo said. “That town ain’t exactly close. I’m pulling them in.”
Brady assumed that their missing persons came out to Camp Forest Grove to party for some ungodly reason. His original assumption, that the kid got himself wounded while trying to find the camp, was preferable to the likelihoods turning over in his mind today.
Someone in your town killed them.
It was especially likely when he considered what was happening to Melanie Holden. Someone wanted her gone—or worse—and three college kids were dead.
“I doubt they’re animal chow, but I’d prefer to go with that over what you’re thinking, Brady.”
“I don’t have much choice,” he said. “An abandoned car that still runs and not so much as a footprint out here.” Brady told him how they searched the woods once already. The rain might’ve washed some of the evidence away today, but the trail had been every bit as cold yesterday.
Oviedo took a long drag off his cigarette. “You know about these woods, right?”
Brady nodded. He heard about Cyrus Hoyt more times than he could stand.
“Ron Sleighton didn’t tell you anything?”
We’re not exactly fishing buddies. “I know about Hoyt.”
“I’m sorry that this is in your neck of the woods. Been a blight on the state for as long as I can remember.”
“The woods?”
“The woods. That camp. All of it. It arouses superstition. Been that way ever since I was a trooper. My predecessor, Tom Lawson, takes me aside the night of his retirement party. Guy’s eyes are glossy from a dozen brandy doubles as he leans in and says, ‘It’s your problem now.’ Told me to pray that I never have to deal with Forest Grove. No clue what he was getting at…”
“You asked, I assume?” Brady said.
“Yep, and he wouldn’t say. He didn’t have to. I was out here that night in 1988—a rookie then. They had us combing these woods just like this, pulling dead people—kids mostly—from every bunk. I found a girl hanging upside down all the way out here. Half her head missing and animals lapping her brains like she was a water fountain. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
“Cyrus Hoyt’s dead,” Brady said, impatience for the conversation showing.
“Ain’t sayin’ it’s Hoyt.” The trooper tossed his cigarette to the ground and crushed it out. “But standing here now gives me those same feelings. Miserable feelings. Emptiness. Bad shit happened out here and the ground feels tainted because of it.”
Brady nodded but his brain wandered away from the fantasy of undead killers and lingering ghosts. He thought about the very real and threatening text message sent to Melanie, and wondered who might break into a hardware store. Figured it was all one in the same. Someone in town was doing this and that idea passed through his stomach like spoiled meat.
“I’m starting to think I stumbled across the car while the killer was cleaning up.”
“Cobb isn’t going to want to hear that you’ve gone right to a murder theory.”
“What’s the alternative, captain? Three lost college kids? If that were true, we’d have tracks. Someone cleaned up after that car. Our boy was hiding the bodies when I found it. I interrupted him.”
“If you start suspecting murder, people’s minds are going to wander back to what happened out here.”
“They’re already wandering. I’ve heard it all. Some think Hoyt’s still out in these woods and that he’s even more powerful because the throes of death have released him. My first night on the job, Henny Yurick tells me he saw Hoyt walking through the forest in the frosty dawn light, bloody axe draped over his shoulder like Paul Bunyan. I knew I was inheriting a town with some history when I took this job, but I wasn’t expecting so much delusion to come along with it.”
Oviedo called his men off the hunt and started back toward the cars. “Lawson did have one other thing to say the night of his retirement.”
“What’s that?”
“Said they ought to burn this whole place to the ground, woods and all, and just be done with it.”
***
Last Mile Gas looked like it was on its last mile.
Melanie knew she shouldn’t be back here. Not after what happened yeste
rday. But this morning’s conversation with Trish had her eager for more information. And Jed seemed like the only other person in town who was willing to speak.
She hoped Sam wouldn’t be here. Or that he would be busy. Whatever it took to pry a little more information off the old man’s cantankerous tongue.
It was a little after four, and the place looked done for the day. She had expected to see Officer Johnson’s cruiser in her rearview when she pulled in, but the road behind her was desolate.
Considering what Jed said about his business, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the gas station packed up shop early some days. The garage door was drawn and a CLOSED sign hung in the office window, dangling over old and crusted blinds. The convenience store was locked also. She peered through the glass and saw only darkness.
Melanie walked the building’s perimeter and worried that the old man might’ve fallen. Or worse. A dumpster buzzed with fervent flies as she passed, and the backyard was a minor scrap yard of rusted car parts. Glancing beyond, there was a house—a ranch that looked consumed by the tall grass around it.
The brush jutted past her knees and she envisioned an army of ticks scaling her thighs. She pushed on with determination and wished she’d asked Trish to come along for the company. Knowing that someone in town shared her thoughts, gave her more confidence than expected.
Kindred spirits indeed.
Rickety steps led to a rickety porch and even the railings wobbled as she stepped onto the soft and unstable wood. She called for Jed while knocking. A minute passed and she wrapped again, this time with the back of her hand. She pressed her ear against the door hoping to hear some bustle.
Deafening silence greeted her back.
Concern grew—along with a feeling of missed opportunity. Melanie hated to quantify the situation that way, but Jed knew a lot about this town. And maybe someone didn’t want her to learn anything more about it.
Then again, maybe Sam had taken him out for the day—a doctor’s appointment or a fishing trip, perhaps? She glanced around the neglected property. It looked like Sam didn’t do a lot for his ‘father.’
Under The Blade Page 13
