AHMM, October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The first time this was apparent to me was when I sat on the broken picnic bench outside the “alternative school” where I'd been sent six months ago. There'd been other kids there, talking, sharing cigarettes, laughing, and looking at me. That day I had wondered whether I was a participant, or merely a spectator. All the sudden I was living with the abandoned and neglected, the abused, troubled, and forgotten—but was I really one of them?

  Because that twelve-year-old boy, that Herbert J. Sawyer who had tumbled down a marshy bank to check his bait traps and found the body did not belong in that place. That boy had been so young and yet so sure, so sharp, so unencumbered by pretense or lie, feint or design.

  That boy, staring at his image in the mirror of this bathroom, would not have looked like this. His eyes would have been clear and focused, not these dark-ringed eyes I see staring back at me.

  And even at twelve, that boy would have been appalled and outraged, demanding answers. Why is it this way, and how can it be changed? What can I do, he'd have asked. Yes, he'd have run to the first adult in his path—parent, friend, teacher, police officer—and asked for advice, help, answers. That boy had had conviction; he'd had compassion, and maybe courage. But sadly, I am not that boy anymore. I am someone...

  No, I am something else.

  I looked at the foil packets in my pocket, carefully counting them out. Six remaining. At least six more hidden in my room at the Wenlows'. I looked back in the mirror at my face, my eyes in particular. Windows to the soul? If so, then the soul I was staring into was dark indeed.

  I carefully tucked the pills back into my pocket, drank two cupfuls of water, then went out into Jake's office. He wasn't there, so I let myself out.

  * * * *

  I stood for a moment, staring at the house with the FOR SALE sign out front. Manamesset Real Estate, it read, shown by appointment only. I looked up and down the street, then with one yank I uprooted the sign and threw it into the marsh across the street. Then I turned around and looked at the house.

  Our house, my mother's and mine until depression and mental illness had taken her away. Still, it was our house and I didn't care if a neighbor called the cops on me. I just walked up the front steps to the door and, cupping my hands against the glass, looked inside at the front porch.

  No curtains in the windows, no rugs on the floor, no furniture in the rooms. When I turned the doorknob, I found myself locked out. My Aunt Clem had changed the locks. Well, I didn't have my old key anyway.

  I turned around, wiping the back of my hand across my eyes and forehead. Late afternoon on a damp spring day and I had another headache. I wasn't sure what day it was either. Sunday? No, still Saturday, the start of April school vacation.

  I went around to the back door, through dead brown grass and the tattered remains of my mother's flower garden. It was growing colder and the wind cut through my jacket like a razor. I tried the back door and found it locked as well, then I remembered a window into the rear bathroom and a screen, which I was supposed to have repaired. I jumped down from the steps and around to the back, looked up, and saw the screen was still torn. A simple matter to climb up and into my own house.

  The kitchen, with our rickety kitchen table and two chairs, was emptied of every appliance, utensil, and dish, except the bright yellow shelf paper I had helped my mother lay three years ago. The pantry was empty, not even a can of soup, or a bit of sugar or flour in the bent metal canisters. The living room was a huge hole in the center of the house, a great, big blank space. My bedroom was also stripped clean, only one dresser left standing. I pulled the drawers open. Empty, empty, empty.

  In my mother's room, her bed remained and a pair of curtains were still hanging in a side window. I turned suddenly just as the sun started to sink into the sea to the west and the natural light through the living room windows washed over everything with an ethereal grayness.

  I pulled the headphones up from under my collar. Listening to the vague dead sounds of an obscure German band, their voices like echoes in a deep underground cave, I went out into the living room.

  Time is quite a fluid thing: It can move forward with surprising speed sometimes. When I lifted my head from my knees from the spot on the living room floor where I had been sitting, it was totally dark. It felt strange to look out the windows and see the stars. I had no way to gauge the time, no clock, no radio, no sense of whether it was seven or nine or midnight.

  But neither did I care. I went into my mother's bedroom and ripped the curtains from the window. Then, lying down on the bare mattress, I wrapped myself in them and listened to my German bands until the battery in the MP3 player went dead and I fell asleep.

  * * * *

  I awoke in a sort of dream, realizing I had been cold, had slept very cold for hours perhaps, but now I was warm. And then knowing this, I awoke with a jolt, sitting upright, throwing a heavy, green plaid blanket off me.

  "Damn,” I muttered, then immediately I felt for my headphones, but they were still there, though pushed back from my ears. I reached in the jacket, found the music player in the inner pocket, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then I smelled coffee.

  * * * *

  "Breaking and entering,” Jake was saying, sitting at the small kitchen table. The lights were on and the room was warm. In fact, the whole house was warm. “Trespassing.” He looked up at me, tapping a pencil against the side of his face. “Destruction of personal property."

  "Personal property?"

  "You pulled down those curtains, tore them."

  "They were crap anyhow,” I said bitterly, dragging out a chair to sit down next to him at my table in my house. “I guess Aunt Clem figured she couldn't sell them at a yard sale."

  "Your Aunt Clem is selling this house for you,” Jake reminded me, pushing a cup of hot coffee and a chocolate donut toward me. “And you broke in, forced entry. I saw where you cut the screen."

  "The screen was ripped,” I snarled, kicking back in the chair. “And this is my house."

  "Your aunt inventoried everything in this house down to the last light bulb. I was here and I helped her do it. She sold what she could, put the rest in storage, and is trying to get the best price she can for the house. You do know your mother was six months in arrears on most of her bills? She hadn't paid the mortgage in—"

  I cut him off, “Screw all that and screw my aunt. She's nothing but a greedy—” I didn't say it, but he heard it anyhow.

  "If there was any soap in the house, I'd wash your mouth out with it."

  "Might be some left in the bathroom,” I quipped.

  He ignored that, and leaning over a pad of paper on the table, wrote something, saying as he did, “Add to that runaway. You didn't go home last night and the Wenlows have reported you a possible runaway.” He raised his cool blue eyes to me. “I also think you took some pills. I found this out on Long Jetty.” He dug around inside his corduroy jacket and pulled out a torn foil packet, showed it briefly to me, then put it back. “I also suspect that player you guard so carefully is stolen.... Isn't it?"

  "To hell with this ... inquisition,” I barked, getting up. “And to hell with you, Jake.” The next words were right there, on the tip of my tongue, the words I wanted to say, but something in his look silenced them.

  He said, with greatly strained patience, “Good thing I like you, boy, or you'd be flat on the floor by now. Sit down.” He was so calm, too calm, and I knew I'd dodged a bullet.

  So I swallowed deeply, trying to remember the last time I'd eaten anything. I sat back down and Jake shoved the manila envelope at me.

  "Look at this."

  "Look at what?” I said, picking up and shoving half the donut in my mouth.

  "It's the autopsy report on that little girl you found. Well, preliminary, not all the tests are in, but—"

  "No!” I said, risking his anger again, but I had a point. “This isn't my job!” I pushed the envelope back. I took a huge swig of coffee, nearly burning my mouth. />
  "We're getting a lot of zeroes on this one,” he said to me. “It's going to hit the news today and we have no idea who she is or where she came from."

  "It was just a local kid, who fell off a boat or something. Check missing children. Check the local schools."

  "No children missing from the area fit her description."

  "One day and you say you're getting zeroes?” I snapped. “Do your job, damn it, and leave me...” The donut was starting to make me sick and I pushed the rest of it away. “Listen, I've got to go. I gotta...” I felt sort of dizzy.

  "Female, brown hair, brown eyes, approximately thirty-two pounds, three years old. Dressed in a child's white cotton slip. Scrapes on both palms and the right knee, but no other signs of trauma to the body. She'd been in the water at least twenty-four hours, preliminary results indicate death by drowning..."

  I had pulled up the headphones, tried to turn on the player, and swore when I remembered the battery was gone. If only I could get some music in my head, then maybe I could start to think more clearly.

  * * * *

  The talk with Mrs. Harriet Wenlow was a disaster. Twenty minutes of her berating me, warning me that when Mr. Wenlow got home, he would have plenty more to say to me. It took all I had not to tell her what I thought of her, her husband, her home where I got the worst room up over the garage, and the rest of the miserable kids she and her husband so kindly took in. All she cared about was the state check that came in each month for my upkeep and care, none of which I had seen in the six weeks I'd been here. I was wearing the same clothes I had arrived with, the same sneakers, and it took every ounce of will to sit there in her perfect kitchen and not reach up and take a copper pan off the overhead rack and whack her on the head with it.

  Not that I'd ever do anything like that. I just liked to think about it.

  So after she was done and she'd told me to go up to my room and wait for her husband to return, I did just that, and laid out on the bed—a lumpy army store cot with a few ratty blankets on it—and waited for the battery on the MP3 player to recharge.

  * * * *

  "It's perfectly safe. It just makes things better."

  When had she said that? Amy, the girl I had so briefly been friends with at the alternative school. Weeks ago? Months? Still, when I'd looked into her soft blue eyes, I didn't believe she'd lie to me. The pills were perfectly safe, exactly as she said, they just took the edge off things.

  And, yes, made things better.

  Now I stood on the bluffs above Manamesset Bay and Manamesset Beach. An old friend of Mr. Hornton's had given me a ride in his pickup truck, dropped me off at the end of the Briarwood Road. That's basically how I got around now, waiting outside convenience stores for people I knew from Manamesset, people who remembered me as the good boy, little Herbie Sawyer, Sergeant Valari's girlfriend's son, the kid who did odd jobs for Elmer Hornton.

  It was Sunday afternoon and almost twenty-four hours since I had pulled the little body out of the bay. There were gulls in the air and the sun was still fairly high in the western sky. There was music beating against the sides of my neck, but I had no desire to pull up the headphones and push them over my ears. Problem was, I cared, but I didn't want to care. I was irritated, too, in a dozen different ways, but still I wanted to know who she was, how she got in the water, and if she fell. Or did someone push her? Did someone hold her under, or knock her unconscious, and dump her over the side of a boat? Or off the jetty...

  And what about the doll? Why had that girl on the beach told me to get her doll? Who was she? Where was she? That girl and the dead one in the water—were they the same two kids I'd seen on the beach when the woman and man had been arguing? Impossible. I'd seen all that yesterday and the little girl who had drowned had been in the water for at least a day.

  And why was the dead girl dressed in just a slip? What kind of parent lets their child run about in her underwear, outside, in the middle of April?

  "Herbie."

  I turned, startled, on the defense. Who was it now? Jake, following me out there, or the Wenlows, tracking me down, demanding I go back to their house to finish their stupid chores? Or Mr. Hornton, who only lived one street over?

  But it was just Jed Porter, one of Jake's officers, and he was walking toward me with a pad of paper in one hand, a cell phone in the other. He was a tall and lanky sort of fellow with a tangled mess of too-long blond hair that he sometimes pulled back in a ponytail.

  "Hey, you got any ideas on this?” he asked, almost jauntily, almost as though the next words out of his mouth were going to be about the striped bass he'd just snagged out of season. “'Cause we're coming up blank no matter what we do. No one lives year round down there,” he nodded down at the houses along the sea wall, “except a few retired couples, and none of them saw anything. I went door to door, just to make sure no one's using or renting a house over there, but most of those houses aren't winterized. The workers you talked to didn't see anything, and neither did a couple of real estate agents taking pictures of a house on Briarwood that's going up for sale.” He took a breath. “No one was on the beach or in any of the houses fronting the shore at the time you saw those people. Kind of funny, don't you think? And anyhow, they might have had nothing to do with this, right?"

  "I guess,” I said.

  "Well, state forensics says a couple of days, though the medical examiner's office sent us a preliminary, which says—"

  "I know what it says."

  "Yeah, scraped up a bit, but definitely death from drowning. My theory is she tumbled off the rocks on the jetty, tried to catch herself, cutting up her hands and knee. Just wearing a little slip and barefoot. Dressed like that, you can catch your death...” He paused and we stared at each other a long moment, then he added, “I mean, where were the parents?"

  I turned away from Jed, looked down the bluff facing east. The houses up above the narrow sea wall were all dark, windows unlit; in many the shades were drawn. On the wide front porches were overturned rocking chairs and other heavy summer furniture. Empty planters lay against stone foundations, and in some yards boats were tied up and covered in heavy canvas.

  "People will be opening up their houses soon,” I said.

  "Yep, and we're contacting all the owners along the sea wall, asking them if they were having any work done, like painting, carpentry, plumbing. Might have been workers in and out who saw something."

  "Or did something."

  "Yep.” Jed's face dropped. He turned to look down the seawall, across the flat beach, now at low tide, and toward Long Jetty. He frowned and said, “We're talking to all the marina owners, too, and folks at the refueling stations. They might have seen a boat, one with kids on it or something."

  "So it seems like you're pretty much covering all the bases,” I said, amazed that Jed was so obviously matter-of-fact with me. I had assisted Jake with a few similar cases in the past. At sixteen, was I now ... an equal?

  "Well, if you think of anything, any little detail, you let us know, okay?” Jed stuffed a stick of gum in his mouth. He offered me some, but I shook my head. He said, “Most likely it was just a terrible accident, though it's damn odd no one has come forward to report their kid is missing. She'd been in the water at least since Friday. Damn odd.” He gave me a funny salute off the top of his cap, then turned and walked in the direction of the seawall.

  * * * *

  People do all sorts of odd things. They struggle to straighten out their lives, to get their feet on the ground, to establish themselves in a job, a community, a way of life, and then shuck it all when the going gets just a little too rough. They make excuses, invent reasons, when all it boils down to is a lack of will.

  Or was it that simple? Maybe for some people the daily act of waking, moving, eating, breathing, and living is just too much for them to handle, and sometimes they have to abandon, or throw away, the ones they care most about. It's the only way they know to survive.

  I rolled over on the lumpy c
ot, cigarette between my fingers, and studied the short gray roll of ash at its tip. Mrs. Wenlow had a good nose, so I sat up, opened the window, and waved the smoke outside. Then, before I went to sleep, I sat up a while listening to music and thinking about the child who drowned out in Manamesset Bay.

  * * * *

  News about the little girl found floating off Long Jetty in the Briarwood section of town was the headline story for a couple of days, then it eventually shifted to page two. They talked about her almost every night on the local news, though, but on the major news channels out of Boston and Providence the story was reduced to a brief “update” near the end of the nightly newscast. About three years old, she had dark brown hair and eyes and was presumed to be Hispanic. Discovered on Saturday, April eighteenth, she died, it was determined, by drowning, having fallen or been placed in the water on or about Thursday, April sixteenth. She had minor scrapes and cuts on the palms of both hands and her right knee, but otherwise she seemed to have been healthy and well nourished. There were no signs of sexual molestation or other bruising or battery. Every property owner along the beachfront and the adjoining community had been questioned; the adjacent marinas, coves, jetties, and inlets had all been thoroughly searched.

  Local fishermen and workmen who were in the area that week had also been questioned. No one had seen or reported anything suspicious. Since it was early spring, some houses were being cleaned and readied for the first influx of summer residents, so the agencies that supplied cleaning services were also questioned. But every line of inquiry drew nothing but blanks.

  A local church group offered to bury her, and a private donor paid for her casket, but the funeral was put off, pending identification and notification of kin.

  As for me, I got a few jobs through Elmer Hornton. I cleaned out cellars and garages, painted a boat shed, and repaired lobster traps. The days passed slowly, one blending into the other, each indistinguishable from the next. Time felt like some giant cobweb, and I was caught inside of it. I'd work a few hours, think it was time for lunch, find a clock, and see it was only ten A.M. Or the opposite would happen. I'd be painting a corner of a garage wall, yawn, adjust my MP3 player, then realize the whole wall was painted. Monday became Thursday, and I wondered where the week had gone.