Sacrifice

by James, Russell

  “We’ll work it out,” Jeff said.

  “Let’s get going,” Ken said. “Those who see the Woodsman with those who don’t. Paul and Jeff in one car. Marc and me in another.”

  “Ken,” Marc said, “drop me at the library instead. I want to check if Josie was the first ‘accident’ a kid has met up with.”

  And with an optimism fueled by youth, two-thirds of the Half Dozen went out to find a needle in a haystack.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Katy sat scrunched in the far corner of the Vista Cruiser’s front seat. She had a lock of her hair wound tight around two fingers. She stared out the side window. Thoughts of killing Jeff flitted through her mind. She was going to call her best friend Olivia as soon as she got home. Liv wouldn’t believe this. Or maybe she would. She wasn’t much of a Jeff fan.

  “You OK?” Dave offered as he piloted the car between the strip malls on Route 25.

  “Yeah. Fine.” She kept staring past the passing businesses.

  A few minutes of silence.

  “Jeff has a lot going on,” Dave said.

  Katy cut him off with a raised hand. “I know you’ll all stick up for each other. You’re an annoyingly tight little group. Don’t defend him.”

  “I wasn’t about to,” Dave said. “I was going to add 'But he doesn’t prioritize the right things.’”

  Katy looked over at Dave, as if seeing him for the first time. The little time she had spent with him had been in the company of the Half Dozen. She hadn’t heard a sentence from him that hadn’t dripped with sarcasm before. “Really?”

  “Yeah, I mean we’re nearly done with Whitman High,” Dave said. “There are only two things that matter between now and then. Graduation and prom.”

  Katy’s jaw dropped. “Didn’t I hear you describe the prom as ‘hanging out in the gym and listening to a shitty band’?”

  “Actually it was ‘hanging out in the gym wearing rented clothes and listening to a shitty band.’ But that’s what it is to me. I don’t have someone worth taking.”

  From the profile view, Katy could see behind Dave’s glasses. His eyelashes were long, with a graceful upper arc. His face seemed softer without the omnipresent smirk that accompanied his verbal barbs. Sunlight danced off his blond hair as the car passed through the shadows of overhanging trees.

  She thought this outburst of sensitivity had to be a joke, but second-guessed herself. This was the guy who was going to go to forestry college to protect the environment and save Bambi from wild fires. A jackass wouldn’t want to do that as a job.

  Dave spun the wheel and entered the parking lot of the Venetian, the restaurant Katy’s family owned. Her family lived on the second floor. She was the third generation to do so. Katy grew up in the Venetian. One week after her birth, Mom was back at work while Katy dozed in a crib in the office. Her father ran the kitchen, and he and his wife had ensured that Katy was rarely alone. Pre-kindergarten play time was rolling silverware into cloth napkins. The customers thought it was cute when she took it upon herself to wait tables at the tender age of nine. At sixteen she had a timecard. The lot was empty though the neon sign in the window burned OPEN. He pulled up to the entrance.

  “And why is it you don’t have someone to take to prom?” Katy asked.

  Dave shrugged. “All I’m saying," he said, still looking straight out the windshield, “is that if I was Jeff, I’d appreciate you a lot more.”

  A strange feeling swept over Katy, like she realized she had walked inadvertently to the edge of an emotional cliff, jagged rocks staring up at her a hundred feet below. She popped open the door and slid out.

  “Thanks for the lift,” she said.

  “No charge,” Dave said. He flashed the familiar smirk at her. “Try not to poison anyone tonight.” The Vista Cruiser rumbled out to Route 25.

  Was that some kind of pass from Dave? It sure seemed like it. Of course whoever that was didn’t seem like Dave until she got out of the car and broke whatever spell he was under.

  The indomitable Irene Traina peered out from the Venetian’s bright red front door. She had a face wide as her signature pies and a figure that said she regularly sampled the same. She wore the white oxford shirt and shiny black rayon pants she favored when managing the evening dining room. Her black hair, the only physical attribute her daughter had inherited, was pulled back in a ponytail.

  “I thought you were coming home later?” Somehow her concern always sounded like an accusation.

  “I got done early.”

  “That’s good because we’re behind,” Irene said. “Carrie is late again and the dining room isn’t close to set up. Grab your apron and clock in.”

  Her mother didn’t wait for a response and reentered the Venetian. Katy expected nothing more. The restaurant was passed down through her mother’s side of the family. Blood might be thicker than water, but in the Traina familia it wasn’t thicker than marinara. Business didn’t actually come before family; business just kind of swallowed it.

  Katy glanced up at the neon script “Venetian” sign over the doorway. She hoped when she was her mother’s age she no longer lived above it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  While the others searched the town for signs of the Woodsman, Marc dove into research. He planted himself in the periodicals section of the county library. He pulled the last six months of the Sagebrook Standard, the weekly town paper. He dropped them in a reading cubicle with a thud and earned a sharp stare from the librarian. He flipped open a notebook and wrote yesterday’s date on the top of the page. Next to that he wrote the name of Josie Molfetta and “village green” as the location. Then he started with the most recent edition of the paper, and worked backwards.

  He was looking for deaths, or even accidental injuries, among children. He could skip most of the stories based on the headline since he doubted even a local reporter would bury that kind of lead inside a story about new landscaping at the courthouse.

  As he finished last week’s paper, he thought about why he was here while the others hunted the Woodsman. His first thought was that someone needed to see if this incident was isolated or a trend.

  Why did I volunteer for this? Marc thought. Kenny’s the brain of this operation. Every research paper he turns in gets an A+. He knows the library backwards and forwards. He’d be through all this in half the time.

  The truth? He knew what it was if he could stand to admit it. He was scared of the Woodsman. The Woodsman terrified Marc from the moment he saw him. Not when he saw him outside the violin studio. When he saw him in the harbor. When he was three years old.

  There wasn’t a lot Marc remembered from that year, but he remembered the Woodsman, with that swept-back cap and those buckskin boots. Marc was with his parents on the dock. It was a cold day. They must have been fighting cabin fever one winter and opted for some fresh air. His mother was pregnant with Danny. In Marc’s memory, they were alone on the dock. The sky was solid haze and it was a brisk forty degrees. Marc wore a blue down coat with a hood that he kept pushing off his head.

  Marc remembered thinking about the fish. He could see small fish swimming around the dock pilings. He liked how they sparkled and flashed as they came near the surface. He looked out across the water and there floated a turtle, shell half out of the water like a surfaced submarine. It stretched its head above the water’s light chop. The turtle had a wide grin and bright, happy green eyes.

  It was like nothing Marc had ever seen. The turtle was almost a cartoon, but it was obviously real. The turtle was having such fun floating in the waves. Marc wanted to show his mother.

  Then the turtle’s eyes met Marc’s. The world outside that narrow field of view became irrelevant. All Marc saw were those dazzling green eyes. They drew him in, as if some force from the turtle reached through his eyes and into his brain, masking out everything around him.

  “Come swim with me,” the turtle said with a voice soft as rabbit fur.

  The turtle swam forward to within
yards of the dock. He smiled at Marc. All Marc felt was happiness and…trust.

  “Come join me, Marc,” the turtle said. “You’ll float. It’s fun!”

  At that moment, Marc wanted nothing more. All he could imagine was how amazing it would be to join the turtle and float on top of those little waves. He walked towards the end of the dock. But the waiting was too much. He ran. The turtle nodded some encouragement. Marc hit the edge of the dock and leapt into space.

  Those final hurried steps saved his life. His father heard those pounding little footsteps just in time. He was after his son in a flash. He slid face first at the end of the dock. His arm shot out from the edge of the dock and he grabbed the hood of Marc’s jacket. That cut Marc’s forward leap short. He swung back down under the dock and dangled by his jacket hood.

  The violent jerk backwards snapped him out of his trance. All Marc saw was open water in front and below him. Panic lit him up like a torch. He screamed.

  The turtle was gone. In its place stood the Woodsman in buckskins and his swept-back hat. Rage filled its mangled face, and froth dripped from its evil clenched teeth like blood from a butcher’s table. Marc felt black inside, like this horrific creature had reached down his throat and killed everything inside him. Marc closed his eyes and cried.

  It took all the strength of his father, with his mother anchoring his father’s legs, to pull Marc’s flailing body back onto the dock.

  His hysterical mother cried and hugged him, only pausing to berate his father for not watching his son. Marc was in shock and could not begin to explain why he had thrown himself off the end of the dock, not that anyone would have believed him.

  That day left a trail of personality damage like a tornado through a trailer park. For years, he feared every stranger he passed, not knowing if others had that power to compel him into danger. In addition, the water terrified Marc. Growing up on an island, he was the only one of the Half Dozen who never learned to swim.

  But the Woodsman cast the darkest shadow on Marc’s psyche. The understanding that there was something out there that could compel him, make him surrender his free will, hollowed out his self-confidence. He wouldn’t begin to find himself again until high school.

  When he told his friends about his encounter with the Woodsman, waiting for his violin lesson, part of it had been a lie. He hadn’t called out, hadn’t tried to intervene as the Woodsman lured the nursery school boy to whatever grisly end he had planned. Instead, he froze. Marc was so terrified by the arrival of the apparition from his past that it took all his concentration to keep from wetting himself. Even at a distance, even when Marc was on the cusp of manhood, the Woodsman could still hold his courage hostage. There was no way he would share that bit of the experience with his friends.

  There was no guarantee that he’d have any more fortitude in the company of his friends, so here he was at the library, turning pages in search of a pattern. He soon found it.

  Two weeks ago, Caroline Cody, age four, fell out of a tree in her backyard. She broke her neck and died before paramedics arrived. Her distraught mother swore her daughter had never climbed a tree in her life. Marc listed her under Josie Mulfetta.

  Three weeks ago, an infant died in its sleep. The boy usually woke his parents near midnight for a feeding. That night the exhausted parents slept through until morning, when they found the baby lying on its stomach dead. A description of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome followed. Too vague to definitely be the Woodsman’s handiwork. He added the baby to his list with a question mark.

  Two months before that, two six-year-old boys were electrocuted. They were found lying at the base of a power pole. A ladder from one kid’s garage was still propped against the pole. The cop quoted in the article said he never knew what made kids try some of the dangerous things he’d seen them do. Marc had an answer for him.

  Marc went back a few more months, but found nothing else, but that did not assuage him. Could the car accident he read about have been caused by the driver swerving to miss a child induced to dart out into the street? How many unreported near misses, like the daycare boy or Marc’s event on the harbor dock were there? Marc was certain the three deaths he’d found were just the tip of the iceberg.

  Thinking about his near miss at the harbor gave him an idea. He searched for the old bound editions of the Sagebrook Standard. Nothing was on the shelf from before 1975. He asked the librarian for 1966. She handed him several small, rectangular envelopes. To go that far back, he’d have to resort to microfiche.

  On the way back, he took a detour to the main entrance. He pulled a free local map from a “Welcome to Sagebrook” display and brought it back to where he was working.

  Microfiche was the bane of any high school research paper. Newspapers and magazines were copied page by page and shrunk down to a microscopic size on acetate film. The poor sap who needed something on page forty-seven had to put the microfiche between two pieces of glass and slide them into the reader, which projected the magnified pages onto a TV-size screen. Using two wheeled handles, the reader had to scroll up and down to find the right edition and then the right page to find his article. The process was time consuming, and the reward was a fuzzy black-and-white image.

  Marc knew he was three when he tried to start his Olympic diving career in the harbor. He was sure because his mother brought it up any time he asked to do something that would happen outside her field of view. (“Last time I let you out of my sight for a minute you were three, and you nearly drowned.”) It had definitely been winter, so he started searching the newspapers in January.

  By March he had a list of two children who had died. All were under age eleven. All had been the victims of “accidents” easily attributable to their ages and decision-making skills. He plotted them on the map with dates. The capper came on June 30, 1966.

  Shady Pasture Day Camp, a converted farm a few miles from the village, had only been a few days into its first summer session. A fire broke out in the barn near the end of the day. By the time the counselors were able to react, the dry old box was engulfed in flames. Six children died inside. The town was stunned.

  Maybe it was because he was growing up in the era of Watergate and a mistrust of authority, but Marc thought that story had to be missing something. Six kids in a barn and none get out when it catches fire? Counselors can’t open those big doors when the flames start? This story was all different kinds of fishy.

  He paged through the next two months. There were no follow-up stories. No outrage at the day camp. Not even funeral coverage. The newspaper’s editor either didn’t want to sell papers, or the real story was something he could not tell.

  Marc had gone fishing and caught more than he’d expected. They had feared the Woodsman was on the hunt in Sagebrook. But worse than that, he’d been on the hunt for a while, surfacing to lure scores of children to their deaths every few decades. If this pattern mimicked the one from 1966, the final tragedy would be horrific.

  Chapter Twenty

  Present day.

  There might have been a worse time to fly into La Guardia International than the Friday before Labor Day Weekend, but at the moment, Jeff couldn’t think of it. The terminal was a madhouse. The rental car shuttles were slammed full of people in the generally foul mood that a harried day traveling always fertilizes. The rental agent recognized Jeff, yet the Cadillac he had reserved wasn’t ready. He had to wait for it to return from the car wash. It was short a quarter tank of gas.

  The plan was in flux as soon as he had touched down. He had a text message waiting for him from Paul. They were meeting at Paul’s house instead of Bob’s. The address looked a lot more familiar than Bob’s. He punched it into the in-car nav system. Jeff swore it was the same house Paul had grown up in.

  The last weekend of the summer created a migration out of New York City that made the exodus of the Israelites look like a family stroll. Every highway heading east was clogged with traffic that moved at a tortoise’s pace. Jeff had planned eno
ugh time to check in to the Village Green Inn before heading over to Paul’s. Now it looked like he’d be lucky to get to Paul’s on time.

  Jeff had barely come home after graduation. When his college plan fizzled, he packed up the Pinto and found a job as the assistant engineer at an AM radio station in Texas. The rest of his life was one big game of hopscotch around the country, honing his technical skills first at broadcasting stations and then at equipment manufacturers until he started his solar business in Arizona. His parents had moved to Florida in 1982 so he’d had no reason to return to Sagebrook.

  When he finally got off the LIE, he beat a beeline to Route 347 that would take him home. He flicked off the Caddy’s gabby co-pilot. He’d take it from here. But first he’d drop by the old homestead for a visit.

  He nearly turned the directional pest back on. Thirty years had wrought some changes. In the ‘70s they thought they lived in the epicenter of suburban sprawl. They had no clue. Every open field from the past, every formerly vacant lot now had some sort of building standing on it. Strip malls and convenience stores lined the highways. New stoplights had sprung up at each intersection like dandelions. He nearly missed the entrance to his old subdivision because a suite of doctor’s offices had replaced the outer row of homes.

  The homes here were built by the Leavitt family back in the mid-1960s. There were five models that repeated themselves over and over along the warren of streets, all some version of four bedrooms and two baths. Jeff’s parents were in the second wave of owners, arriving with their kids as the first wave empty nesters alighted. The neighborhood was settled back then, but the place still had the open air of the potato field it had once been.

  That atmosphere was gone. Shrubs had matured into bushes. The spindly trees that had dotted the plots were now mighty oaks that shaded the yards into darkness. Add to that everything seemed so much smaller to Jeff. Streets he’d walked and biked and ran were impossibly short. He slowed the car to a creep.