Otherwood

by Pete Hautman

“Did your great-grandpa kill mine?” Elly’s voice sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well.

  “No!” He kept looking at his hands. “I mean, nobody knows what happened. Grandpa Zach said he thought they hated each other so bad they just sort of hated each other right out of existence.”

  Elly didn’t say anything — all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  Elly’s eyes were huge and her mouth was open and she was clutching her hands over her chest. Her mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. She looked weirdly pale, even her clothes.

  “Elly?”

  She held out her hands. As she was about to touch him, her fingers became foggy tendrils. He could see right through her, as if she had turned to mist.

  “Elly?” he said.

  He reached out for her, but she was gone.

  When Stuey got home his mom was in the kitchen talking on the phone.

  “No, she’s not here, Hiram,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since Maddy brought her over a few weeks ago.” She looked up when Stuey came in. “Have you seen Elly Frankel, honey?”

  Stuey did not know what to say, but she saw something in his face.

  “Hiram, can I call you right back?” She hung up the phone, took Stuey by the arm, and sat him down at the table.

  “Stuey, is there something you want to tell me?”

  Stuey told her everything. He told her about the deadfall, and how it was his and Elly Rose’s secret place.

  “Was Elly there with you today?”

  Stuey nodded.

  “Is she there now?”

  “I don’t know. We were talking and she just disappeared. First she got fuzzy, and I was talking to her, and then I could see right through her, and then she was gone.”

  She gave him a long, careful look. “Stuey . . .”

  “It’s true, Mom. I yelled for her and looked everywhere. I ran all the way across the woods to her house but nobody was home. Then I went back to the deadfall but she wasn’t there either. I thought she must have gone over to Jenny Garner’s — that’s where she told her mom she was — but I didn’t know where Jenny lived.”

  His mom called the Frankels back. Half an hour later, Mr. Frankel arrived with two policemen. Stuey led them through the woods, telling them again what had happened.

  At first, the policemen were nice, and acted as if they believed him. But they kept asking him the same questions over and over, and every time he told them what happened it sounded crazier. By the time they reached the deadfall the words coming from his mouth all sounded like lies.

  The smaller policeman crawled inside. It was a tight fit.

  “It’s like some sort of playhouse in here,” he yelled from inside, shining his flashlight around. “Nobody here. Bunch of weird animal drawings hanging up. Looks like somebody was eating something.”

  “Elly brought cherry pie,” Stuey said.

  “My wife made cherry pie last night,” Mr. Frankel said.

  “Got something here,” the policeman said. He crawled out butt first and held up a camera.

  “That’s my mom’s camera,” Stuey said.

  The policeman scrolled through the photos. He paused, then showed one of the images to Stuey.

  “Who is this?”

  Stuey looked at the picture.

  “That’s the Mushroom Man,” he said.

  Police and volunteers tromped through the underbrush, covering every square foot of the forest. Men in chest-high waders slogged through the marsh. Dogs on long leashes ranged back and forth, scaring up rabbits and other small creatures. Everyone who lived within half a mile of Westdale Wood was questioned.

  The governor sent a dozen National Guard troops. They spent the next several days combing Westdale Wood, widening their search to walk the ditches, roadsides, wooded areas, and fields in the surrounding areas. Posters with Elly Rose’s picture were taped to every store window and stapled to utility poles on every block. Elly was on the front page of the newspaper and on the evening news.

  The phone rang a lot — calls from reporters who wanted to talk to Stuey. His mom wouldn’t let them. She wouldn’t let Stuey leave the house. But she couldn’t keep the police away.

  The lead investigator was Detective Roode, a dour, hunch-shouldered man in a gray suit. The first time he visited, they sat down in the living room and he asked Stuey to tell him about the last time he’d seen Elly Rose.

  “We were at our secret place,” Stuey said. “It’s like I told the other police.”

  “That deadfall. Yes. Did you two go there often?”

  Stuey nodded.

  Detective Roode looked at Stuey’s mom. “Did you know about this?”

  She shook her head. “He plays in the woods almost every day. I didn’t know Elly Rose was out there too. The Frankels . . . well, they didn’t want them playing together.”

  “And why was that?”

  “It’s nothing.” She shook her head. “Nothing to do with the kids. Family history.”

  Detective Roode waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. He jotted something in his small black notebook.

  “The last time you saw Elly Rose . . . what were you doing?” he asked Stuey.

  “Nothing. Just talking. I was telling her about how my mom’s grandpa built the golf course that used to be here.”

  “Is that true?” He looked at Stuey’s mom. “Stuart Ford was your grandfather?”

  She nodded. The detective made another note.

  “Tell me everything that happened,” he said to Stuey.

  Stuey told him the truth, but he had told the story too many times. The words came out flat and wooden, as if he was reading them off a script. He could tell the detective didn’t believe him. He stared down at the rug as he told the last part of the story.

  “Had you ever seen this ‘mushroom man’ before?”

  “Once,” Stuey said. “Elly saw him a bunch of times.”

  “Did either of you ever talk to him?”

  Stuey shook his head.

  “Do you think he might have taken Elly?”

  Stuey shrugged. He had already told the detective everything.

  “You don’t seem very upset,” Detective Roode said. “Aren’t you worried about your friend?”

  Stuey’s mom jumped in to defend him. “He’s tired. He’s had to tell what happened a dozen times.”

  “I understand,” said Roode, although it was clear he didn’t understand at all.

  Stuey hadn’t let himself think that anything bad had happened to Elly. He hadn’t let himself think at all. So much had been happening, so many questions being asked, he hadn’t had time to miss her.

  Detective Roode brought a woman with him on his second visit. Stuey watched from his window as the two of them got out of a dark-blue sedan. A minute later his mom called him downstairs.

  “Stuey, this is Ms. Johnson.”

  “You can call me Dana.” The woman held out her hand.

  Dana Johnson was a short, heavy black woman with a wide, toothy smile. Her long braided hair was gathered at the back of her neck, held in place with a complicated-looking clasp. She had on a long, rust-colored skirt and a matching jacket.

  Stuey shook her hand. There were rings on most of her fingers. The gold bands on her wrist clinked.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Stuey,” she said. “I’m sorry about your friend going missing. I imagine this has been a difficult few days.”

  “Kind of.” He looked at Detective Roode standing behind her, then back at Dana. “You don’t look like a policeman.”

  She laughed. “Thank you!”

  Stuey was confused, but he could tell by the way she smiled that she wasn’t making fun of him.

  “I’m not a policeman — or a policewoman — but I do work for the county. Sometimes I help the police with cases involving young people.”

  Stuey liked her. He liked the small gap between her
front teeth that he could see only when she smiled directly at him. He liked that she talked to him like a grown-up.

  “Do you mind if Stuey and I have a little chat?” she asked Stuey’s mom.

  “I would like to be present.”

  “Of course.” She turned to Detective Roode. “Would you mind waiting outside, detective?”

  Detective Roode frowned, nodded sharply, and left them. That made Stuey like Dana even more. She could make Roode go away.

  They went into the living room. Dana sat on the antique comb-back chair that he wasn’t supposed to touch because it was a hundred years old and not very sturdy. His mom perched nearby on the sofa arm, ready to catch her if the chair collapsed. Oblivious of her precarious situation, Dana smiled and crossed her legs. She was wearing metallic gold sandals with high heels — the opposite of his mom’s clunky clogs.

  Stuey sat down on the other end of the sofa from his mom.

  “So, Stuey . . .” Dana laced her fingers and rested her hands on her lap. “I hear you have a secret place.”

  “The Castle Rose,” Stuey said. “Elly named it.”

  Dana smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  Stuey told her. He told her how he’d found it earlier that summer, and how it was his secret place he would go to, and how Elly had a secret place too, and then they found out it was the same place.

  “Was that okay with you? That she shared your secret place?”

  “It was just funny is all. She thought it was like a castle, and I thought it was more like a ship. We decided it could be both.” He liked how carefully Dana was listening, and that she didn’t take notes.

  “The other day — the time you last saw her — what were you doing?”

  “Just talking. I was talking mostly.”

  “And then what?”

  As Stuey told her what happened her eyes never left his face, and she nodded every time he looked at her. He thought she believed him, even when he got to the part about Elly just fading away to mist.

  “That must have surprised you,” she said.

  “It was kind of weird.”

  “Has anything like that ever happened to you before?”

  “You mean has anybody disappeared?”

  “Or any thing?”

  “No,” Stuey said. “Except for, like, losing a sock or something.”

  Dana laughed. “That happens to me all the time.”

  “Me too.”

  “What did you do after she vanished?”

  “Well . . . I thought maybe I’d fallen asleep or something — that I’d dreamed it. I went to look for her. I went all the way to her house, but nobody was there. I thought she was probably at her friend Jenny’s.”

  “We talked to Jenny. She says Elly never showed up that day.”

  “Elly told her mom she was going to Jenny’s so she could come to Castle Rose.”

  “I see. Tell me more about the man you took a photo of.”

  “We see him in the woods sometimes. He picks mushrooms. Elly was scared of him.”

  “Why?”

  “He had a knife.”

  Dana nodded, thought for a moment, then asked, “Do you have other friends, Stuey? Other kids you play with?”

  “I have friends at school, but they live a long ways away. There aren’t any kids my age around here, not since Jack moved to Iowa a couple years ago. Jack was my best friend.”

  “Is Elly Rose your new best friend?”

  “She . . . I . . .” A pit opened in his stomach, and in that moment he truly knew that Elly Rose was gone, and it was his fault. He should never have told her about their great-grandfathers. He didn’t understand how or why, but somehow it had driven her away, made her disappear.

  Dana leaned forward, a look of concern on her face, and asked him something, but her words were a mishmash of sound.

  “We have the same birthday,” he said. “We’re soul mates.”

  After Dana left, Stuey could not be alone. The void within pulled at his skin, threatening to turn him inside out. His bones ached; his thoughts whirled and spun into an infinitely deep, infinitely empty sinkhole.

  He followed his mom around the house the rest of the day, watching dully as she cleaned the kitchen, hovering behind her as she weeded her garden, standing outside the bathroom door while she used the toilet. She didn’t complain. She seemed to need to be close to him too.

  That night he slept in her bed and dreamed he was in the woods, lost, running, then falling. He woke up and stared at the dark ceiling until he fell back into the same dream, always the same one, again and again.

  The next morning he awoke in a haze, as if the air around him was foggy and dark. His mom kept looking at him, her brow crumpled, her mouth tight. When Dana Johnson came to talk to him again he couldn’t bring himself to form words. The power of speech had left him. He could nod or shake his head, but nothing she said could coax him to respond verbally.

  As Dana was leaving, he overheard her talking to his mom on the front walk. After she left, Stuey found his voice, just enough of it to ask his mom what PTSD meant.

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said after a moment. “Sometimes when bad things happen, our minds and bodies react in strange ways. It might take some time for you to feel . . . normal again.”

  Stuey nodded as if that made sense, but all he understood was that there was a knot of nothingness inside him, and now it had a name.

  The Westdale police chief appeared on a local news station that night.

  “At this time we have no evidence indicating where Elly Rose Frankel might be,” the police chief said. “We don’t know whether she wandered off on her own, or if some other factors were involved, but we are leaving no stone unturned. Our officers, with help from the National Guard, are continuing to comb Westdale and the surrounding areas.”

  “We have reports of an arrest — can you tell us anything about that?” the news anchor asked.

  “There have been no arrests. We interviewed a possible witness, but we do not believe he is connected to Elly Rose Frankel’s disappearance.”

  The reporter thanked the police chief and turned to the camera. “Exclusive information acquired by Action News has confirmed that the person questioned by police was the so-called Mushroom Man, seen here in a photo taken shortly before Elly Rose Frankel went missing.” The photo Stuey had taken appeared on the screen. “Action News has confirmed that the photo is of Gregory Eagen, a Westdale resident. We go now to reporter Andrea Stevens, live from the Eagen residence.”

  The TV showed an old farmhouse, then panned to a thin, bearded man standing at the curb by a mailbox. Stuey recognized him immediately. The Mushroom Man.

  “Mr. Eagen, we understand you turned yourself in to the police this afternoon.”

  The Mushroom Man shook his head. “Not exactly. I saw that you were showing a photograph of me on the news, and so I went in to let them know who I was, and that I had nothing to do with that girl disappearing.”

  “But you were in Westdale Wood that day, were you not?”

  “Quite possibly. I’m a professor of mycology at the university. I study mushrooms and other fungi. I often collect samples in Westdale Wood. I have no idea who took that photo, or when it was taken, but it could very well have been that same day.”

  “Why were you dressed in camouflage?”

  Eagen shrugged. “I often wear hunting clothes in the woods. They’re comfortable.”

  “Did you see Elly Rose Frankel that day?”

  “No. I mean, I’ve seen kids playing in the woods before, but I’ve never so much as spoken to any of them. Look, I’m just as concerned about that child as everyone else. In fact, I’ve been out there with the rest of the volunteers searching. But I had nothing to do with —”

  Stuey’s mom clicked off the TV. “You shouldn’t be watching that.”

  “That was the Mushroom Man,” Stuey said.

  His mom looked at him sharply.

  “He says he didn�
�t do anything,” Stuey said.

  “That may be true. I’m sure the police will find out.”

  Stuey stared at the blank screen.

  One week after Elly Rose disappeared, Stuey returned to the deadfall alone. His mom would have stopped him, but she was resting in her studio and didn’t see him leave.

  He followed his usual path, but it didn’t look the same. The underbrush was trampled, saplings were bent and broken. Westdale Wood looked as if an enormous herd of bison had charged across it. The area around the deadfall was all footprints and mud. One of the branches had been sawed off to enlarge the opening. Everything inside was gone: the blanket, the drawings, the plastic cups.

  Stuey sat on the stone slab, overwhelmed by the feeling of being alone. He wished he hadn’t come. He put his hand on his chest and felt the shape of the compass. He took it out and looked at it. The needle pointed north, as always. He closed his eyes and listened. There was not a breath of wind. All was silent. He waited, listening to the sound of his own breathing. Faintly at first, as if miles away, he heard the music, and the voices. He felt the stone beneath him rise, then rotate.

  He opened his eyes. The compass needle was wobbling.

  “Where did you go?”

  He looked up. Elly was sitting across from him, as real as anything.

  He tried to say her name, but his mouth fell open and nothing came out.

  “Why did you go? Where have you been?” She leaned toward him and stared fiercely into his eyes. “Everybody’s looking for you!”

  “I’m . . .” His heart was pounding and he could hardly find the air to get the words out. “I’m . . . here.”

  “I thought the Mushroom Man took you,” Elly said. “Everybody did. Why did you go? My mom won’t let me in the woods at all anymore. I had to sneak out. Did you run away? Where did you hide?”

  Stuey reached out with his hand; Elly drew back.

  He said, shakily, “I just . . . are . . . are you a ghost?”

  “I’m not a ghost. You were gone.”

  “Me? I wasn’t gone, you were. I saw you go. Everybody thinks you got kidnapped or something.”

  “You too! You were telling me those horrible things about your great-grandfather and it was making me feel all icky and I wanted you to stop but instead you just melted away and I tried to tell everybody what happened but nobody believed me.”