Disappearance at Devil's Rock (7 page)

His bed is made, which is just wrong. It makes Tommy's room look like a hotel room or a movie set. Mom must've come in and made it this morning before Kate got up. Tommy's bed is never made. It isn't that Tommy is a total slob; far from it. His room is always more clean and tidy than Kate's disaster area. Tommy never dumps his clothes (clean or dirty) on the floor. All of his books and comics are neatly stacked in the big bookcase along the wall and in the smaller one built into his bed frame. His desk is clear of clutter. His pens, pencils, and markers sit like floral arrangements in plastic cups of various colors, the color scheme hinting to some design and reason. Even his posters (Iron Man, the Avengers, a Minecraft Creeper, and a life-sized wall decal of the Legend of Zelda hero Link) are positioned in an orderly fashion; one on each wall, each hung from the same height. So Tommy isn't opposed to keeping his room neat; he only thought that making his bed was unnecessary. As he once eloquently explained to Kate and an annoyed Mom, making the bed was purely cosmetic. What was the point if no one was going into his room to see his bed anyway, and if he was going to turn down and sleep in the same blanket and sheets again? Kate agrees in principle, and she's adopted a more extreme version of Tommy's philosophy with her own room.

Kate turns off her music and listens for footsteps coming down the hall. There are none. She can't even hear Mom and Nana talking anymore. It's dark in Tommy's room. She doesn't turn on a light. Instead, she pulls up the blinds on the two windows on either side of his bed and inwardly braces at the thought of finding someone (a dark shape,
the
dark shape, Tommy?) staring back through the glass. There's no one there. His windows are east-facing and look out into the green, rectangular backyard. It's sunny out, but the sun has already begun its descent on the other side of the house.

Tommy's desk is a sturdy hunk of lacquered wood that is probably older than their house. Mom picked it up at a yard sale a few years ago, and it took the three of them to lug it past the front door and then drag it (with towels underneath the desk legs) into Tommy's room. Tommy refers to his desk as Stonehenge, and it's as clean and kept as it was on the day they brought it into the house. It has none of the graffiti or gouge marks that splotch Kate's tiny, elementary-school-reject desk.

Kate sits at his desk, willing herself to not dwell on what Mom said about believing Tommy was dead and the shadow image of Tommy's ghost and how it oddly dovetailed with what kids were saying online. Of course not not-thinking about something like that is impossible, and she imagines his ghost all scrunched up below her, reaching out for her feet. She takes multiple quick looks under the desk and around the room, trying but not hoping to see Tommy.

The desk chair is hard molded plastic and is cold on the backs of her thighs. Adrift on the vast expanse of the desktop is his laptop. It's closed and unplugged. Stickers of cartoon characters are all over it, and the mostly ironic characters (like SpongeBob and Finn, Jake, and Lumpy Space Princess from
Adventure Time
) have mustaches and other black Sharpie alterations. There is one little square of duct tape in the middle, covering up the laptop's brand symbol, with a Tommy sketch: a puffy monster-cloud with angry eyebrows and a big, open mouth with two sharp fangs ready to devour a small flock of panicked birds. The sketch isn't very detailed and the birds aren't really more than rounded off Vs, yet the scene is clear and vivid, and funny as hell. Kate smirks at it, like it's too clever for its own good. She can hear Mom saying to Tommy,
No one likes a wise ass
, in a way that clearly means the opposite.

Kate opens the laptop and turns it on, but the log-in screen is password protected. She gives up guessing at the password after four tries,
even though she thinks she's close. She doesn't want to guess wrong again and have the computer locked up. She closes the laptop and again looks at the monster-cloud sketch, which looks a bit more sinister with repeated viewings.

On the floor and adjacent to the desk is a milk crate neatly filled with his many sketchbooks and notebooks. Tommy has been doodling and drawing ever since he could hold a crayon, and he's always been amazing at it. Tommy's attitude toward his talent oscillates between bouts of painful modesty and cocky showmanship. Kate pulls out a sketchbook from the middle. It's green and is filled with drawings of Minecraft characters, maps of houses and areas he's created, and brief scripts for his YouTube videos where he's describing the game play and his designs.

She takes out another notebook, one with a yellow cover. This one has outlines of giant waves braking over and around a jagged rock formation. A drenched boy about to be swept away clings to the rocks. His long bangs cover one eye, and the other looks up at Kate, pleading with her for help. Inside the cover, on the first page, in heartbreakingly small, careful script is the sentence “School is like drowning.”

Kate, unlike her brother, has always got along with her elementary school teachers, and getting top grades has been easy. But the prospect of going to the middle school has left Kate utterly terrified. She thinks she can handle the workload; it's more the stories she's heard about what goes on in the lunchroom and hallways and bathrooms that has her anxiety level red-lining. Stories about girls getting their bra straps snapped or girls goosed in the hallways, and this year she heard there were some seventh-grade boys caught taking up-skirt pictures and sharing them online, and then there's all the stuff about the older girls beating up the sixth-grade girls in the bathrooms and making them do gross stuff. Nothing like that happens at the elementary school, and she doesn't understand what happened to everyone to make them so
mean and awful. Her and Sam have been talking about nothing else this summer and doing their best to dismiss the stories as not true, as the older kids trying to scare them. But she doesn't know for sure, and there's no way she can go to middle school without Tommy being there. She's counting on him to look out for her.

Kate flips quickly past “School is like drowning.” The subjects of the notebook's early pages are scattershot and seemingly unrelated: a giant, intricately detailed foot in the middle of a busy intersection; a cartoonish bear that's simultaneously cuddly and menacing wearing a wristwatch; a jagged cliff that has a sad-faced boulder sitting on top; open fields and rivers as viewed from up in the clouds, the view framed between two hands, a broken string looped between the right hand's finger and thumb.

She skips ahead and toward the middle of the book is a page full of cartoonish naked people, their eyes bulging and tongues wagging as they point and leer at each other. From there are pages and pages of huge breasts and asses, giant erect penises and scrotums, and dark triangular patches of hair, and all manner and derivation of frenzied coupling. Kate's face fills with blood and heat. She shuts the notebook and quickly throws it at the milk crate. She misses and it whooshes and claps against the floor. She looks around the room, wishing that Tommy would walk in and catch her, and yell at her, and she'd make fun of the pervy pictures and threaten to tell Mom. She waits, her breathing so heavy, but he doesn't walk into his room. She picks up the notebook and looks at the naked pictures again, quickly, before filing the yellow notebook in its Tommy-designated place.

Kate leaves his desk and walks over to his bureau. Even though she wants to, going through his drawers feels like she'd really be crossing a line that can't be uncrossed. And given the pictures in his notebook, she's a little afraid of what she might find, though she can't say what it is exactly she's afraid of finding. The top of his bureau is fair game,
though, as it's all out in the open. One corner is stacked with baseball hats, in the middle is an assortment of superhero figurines and mini-Minecraft axes and swords, and there's a circular metal tin that once held holiday tea bags that's a catch-all for pocket-sized stuff; movie stubs he's saved (who knows why), key chains he's never used, a compass with the needle stuck in one place, loose change, small bills. She sifts through the tin and finds a plastic sandwich bag. Inside the sealed bag are two coins.

Tommy went through a coin collecting phase. One summer Mom had inexplicably given both of them a shoebox full of old coins their father had collected. The two of them reverently picked through the box and made a ledger detailing coin types together. Kate lost interest soon after the initial, found-buried-treasure rush. Tommy kept it going and added to the collection on his own, but Kate could've sworn he'd stopped collecting a few years ago, certainly before he went to middle school.

Kate opens the bag and slides the coins out onto her palm. One is a penny that's old (1956) but isn't a wheat back. What makes the penny remarkable is a large crack in Lincoln's head that runs horizontally; starting above his eyebrow and going clean through the back of his head. Or maybe it's a matter of perspective and the crack starts in the back of his head and runs through to the front, and it's a weird penny version of the Lincoln getting shot in the head (Kate learned about his assassination in third grade). She runs her thumb over the crack and doesn't feel any raised edges.

The second coin is the size of a nickel, and its tails side features Jefferson's stately Monticello. There's no Thomas Jefferson profile on the heads side of the coin. Instead, there's a blank profile, a silhouette of a face: no features, everything perfectly smoothed over except the profile's outline. Hovering above this profile is a single eye, like the
one on the back of a dollar bill. Kate digs through Tommy's tin for a regular nickel and compares the two. “In God We Trust” and “Liberty” and the year the nickel was pressed is gone, wiped away. The profile of the man on the coin is different from Jefferson as well; it's not just Jefferson's face with the details removed. It's someone else's silhouetted profile. The sharp nose and chin has been replaced with rounder versions and his long ponytail swapped out for a short, tight haircut. It's definitely a profile of someone more modern. She imagines Tommy using the coin as a joke and trying to convince people that the new nickel features Justin Timberlake or someone equally random. Kate thinks she should know to whom this mysterious profile belongs. Whoever it is, the floating eye above makes it weird and creepy, and she doesn't like looking at the coin or holding it.

Mom calls out Kate's name. Kate doesn't want to yell back from inside her brother's room. Mom hasn't come out and said she shouldn't be in here but the made bed might as well be a K
EEP
O
UT
sign.

Kate reseals the coin bag and places it back in the tin. She walks on her toes toward the door and the hallway. To her right is Tommy's closet, and that white door is open a crack. She allows herself to imagine Tommy—the real one, not ghost or shadow-Tommy—simply hiding in his closet, and when she opens the door he shrugs and says, “Sorry,” and then he pulls the door shut.

Kate stares at the thin, dark opening between the door and the frame, and then she opens the closet enough to see two lonely button-down shirts hanging on a rack that's mostly empty hangers and belts he never wears. At the bottom of the closet are his dirty clothes piled up in the hamper. The dank, sweaty, stale smell is overpowering and seems somehow amplified. Does his closet always smell this bad? Is this the same smell that Mom claimed she smelled last night?

Kate believes in ghosts. She believes ghosts are everywhere and
anywhere. They are always watching and they are always coming for you. They can be in any room, in any closet, under any bed or desk, behind the door, in any dark corner, more dark or less dark it doesn't really matter.

But Tommy isn't a ghost. He can't be, because right now Tommy is the opposite of a ghost. He is nowhere.

Kate leaves the closet door open a crack. Just in case.

T
he next morning Elizabeth is up and awake before Kate and Janice. Outside the sun peers over the backyard but it's still dark in the house. She checks her phone for a morning-update email from Detective Allison. There is one.

The search has expanded beyond the neighborhoods surrounding the park, and today they'll canvass convenience stores, local malls, and other places that are local teen hangouts. They are monitoring local transit stations and bus stops. They are working their way through the list of acquaintances the other two boys and Elizabeth provided. They continue to monitor Tommy's cell phone number and records, and they are monitoring various social media platforms for messages about and/or directed at Tommy. Overnight they received calls from three different residents whose properties abut Borderland, complaining of a person who cut through their yards and then into the state park. The Ames police responded and just after 10
P.M.
, they found a group of high-school-aged teens gathered at Split Rock. (Ill-advised vigil or mind-numbingly tasteless party, Allison didn't spec
ify). The S
PLIT
R
OCK
sign was vandalized to read ‘Devils Rock.' The teens were escorted out of the park, questioned about Tommy, and were released to their parents.

Elizabeth responds with a thanks, I'll call soon, and a question: Have you ever heard of Devil's Rock before?

Elizabeth leaves her bedroom and doesn't turn on any lights on her way into the kitchen. She intently stares under the kitchen table and into dark corners and nooks. Last night, she didn't sleep much and spent most of the evening exploring dark spaces, looking under her bed and in her closet and staring at the emptiness between the chair and end table, desperate to see what she saw the previous night. Desperate to see Tommy again.

She pours herself a glass of orange juice instead of making coffee, and she slowly shuffles out into the living room, still with the lights off, looking nowhere and everywhere at once. She slumps to the couch with her glass huddled against her and finds the TV remote wedged between the back of the couch and the cushion to her left. She'll be careful to not tune the TV to any of the local news stations, most of which have been calling the house asking for statements and interviews. To any news source looking for information or a comment, she's given one, and she's e-mailed digital copies of Tommy's seventh-grade school photo and a cropped candid of him taken at the Griffins' Memorial Day barbeque. Tommy has on a red Iron Man T-shirt and baggy black shorts that hang down below his knees, and he's almost smiling.

She points the remote at the TV, and she notices something on the floor. In the middle of the throw rug, like a small pile of leaves, are pages torn from a magazine or book.

Elizabeth leans to her right, reaches over the arm of the couch and sets down her glass hard on the end table, sending juice as sticky as tree sap spilling over the rim. She then fumbles to turn on the lamp.

The pages are yellowish and covered in black scribble, covered in
handwriting, not the neat type of something that was printed by a machine. She falls forward and to the floor, to the pages, and there are three of them. She flips the pages front to back and back to front. She sees the words without really reading them at first, registering that this is something that belongs to Tommy, this is something that he wrote. Her eyes fill with tears and she blinks madly to clear them.

The pages, jagged along the left margins, must have been torn out of one of his sketchbooks. Accompanying the text are strange little drawings and doodles, each ranging from quick scribbles to one intricately detailed drawing of a zombie with both loose flesh and icicles hanging off his arms, nose, and hollowed-out cheeks. Some of the scribbles look like Minecraft characters. She doesn't know their names but knows enough to know that the blocky little beasties belong to that video game universe. There's a skeleton with three heads, a pig-faced human, and this one thing with creepy tentacles dripping off the front of its face. She remains there, on her knees and on the floor, reading the pages. The first page is a title page. It has a 3-D block-lettering title of
MENTAL DROPPINGS 2.0
, made to look as though it was carved from solid rock, and it takes up almost the whole page. Below the title, writ almost indecipherably small:

The notes on the next page are written as bullet points:

The last page doesn't have any drawings and is written in a big block paragraph and the sentences all smooshed together, as though the text is a written equivalent of a whisper.

On the kitchen table the pages are carefully laid out, one next to the other, like tarot cards. Elizabeth sits with her chair pushed back, her hands folded on the table, and her chin resting on top of her hands. At this awkward and extreme angle, the pages are blurry and the text cannot be read. The pages feel safer that way. Maybe if she keeps them all blurry like this, they'll disappear and she'll forget she ever found them or read their messages.

Janice enters the kitchen yawning, and walks directly to the coffeemaker. She says, “Good morning.” She has on a blue, long-sleeved T-shirt with N
ANTUCKET
printed across the chest, though as far as Elizabeth knows, Janice has never been to that island. Certainly not recently.

Elizabeth bolts upright in her chair, like she's a kid again, guilty of hiding something. “'Morning, Mom.” She is about to say something about the pages but doesn't. Maybe she won't say anything until Janice walks over to the kitchen table and discovers them for herself.

Janice says, “Any news? Did the detective call or send a message?”

“I got an e-mail but nothing really new. I'll give her a call at eight if she doesn't call first. But Mom, you need to come look at this.”

Janice says, “What is it? Do I need my glasses?”

“Yes, you do.”

“What is it?” She pats the pockets of her pajama pants and pulls out her pharmacy-bought readers. The frames are rainbow striped and totally not her, but at the same time they are her.

Elizabeth doesn't say anything and rearranges the pages on the table, playing the shell game, until they are in their proper order from left to right. She gets up so Janice can take her seat. She avoids physical contact with her mother as they pass each other. Janice sits and holds up the first page close to her face and her hands tremor a little. Elizabeth turns away and finishes making the cup of coffee her mother started.

“Oh my goodness, where did you get these?”

“When I got up this morning, I found them in the middle of the living room floor.”

“What do you mean in the middle of the floor?”

“They were there.” Elizabeth makes a circular motion with her right hand. “In a pile on the throw rug. No book or anything to go along with them, just these three pages.”

“How did they get there?”

“No idea. I'm guessing you didn't put them there.”

“No, of course not. Why would I do that?”

“I'm not saying you would do anything, Mom. You want your coffee?” Elizabeth places the steaming cup on the kitchen table, then backs away and leans against the kitchen counter.

Janice carefully puts the pages down in a neat stack, safely away from the coffee. She says, “I don't understand.”

“Hi.” Kate pokes her head into the kitchen but leaves the rest of her body out in the hallway like she's ready to bolt, a prairie dog nervously surveying the plains for hawks. She tucks her purple-streaked hair behind her left ear and half-smiles.

Neither Elizabeth nor Janice responds right away. The way Elizabeth feels right now, she would be content to never have to say anything to anyone ever again.

Janice finally says, “Hi, Katie, my dear. Come sit next to me, honey.”

Kate shuffles into the kitchen and looks at Elizabeth with her head slightly turned in a way that silently asks if she's in trouble. She's so easy to read sometimes. Kate says, “What's going on? Oh my God, do you know where Tommy is?” She dashes across the kitchen and sits at the table and leans against her grandmother.

Janice says, “No, dear, no. We haven't heard anything new about Tommy from the police, but we want to share something your mother found this morning. Right, Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth remains at her post, leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded across her chest. She quickly runs through for Kate the what and the how of her finding Tommy's pages this morning.

Kate goes monosyllabic with, “Huh. Wow.”

And sometimes, she isn't so easy to read. Kate looks the pages over and her cheeks turn red right before she swaps the first page for the second. She must've read the “fine print” section that was directed at her.

Janice fidgets, waits for Kate to be done reading, and says, “Have you seen these before? You have been spending a lot of time in Tommy's room.” She enunciates each syllable properly.

Kate says, “I've been in his room, I guess, yeah. No. I've never seen these. Not these ones.”

Elizabeth repeats what Kate says as a question. “Not these ones?”