Greely's Cove (17 page)

“There’s no need to worry about that,” said the boy with a distinctly British accent, though Mitch had said nothing aloud; he’d been too terrified to speak. “You’ve done rather well, actually. I’m impressed; I really am.”

With a little nod of his head Jeremy turned to leave, but he paused at the door to look back at Mitch, who stood frozen, except for his open jaw that quivered like a new leaf in a spring breeze.

“I meant what I said. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Then Jeremy was gone, leaving only the sound of creaking stairs behind him.

At noon Carl Trosper’s former mother-in-law talked him into eating something, if only a small salad and a bowl of soup. A light meal usually helps a hangover, she declared, and he clearly needed help. Though four Excedrin and three cups of black coffee had dampened his gnawing headache, and a near-scalding shower had sweated out most of the evil humors he’d imbibed the previous night, he was far from a hundred percent yet. He suspected that his eyes looked like a pair of piss-holes in the snow. Maybe something to eat
would
help, he allowed, so Nora bustled off to the kitchen, eager to serve.

The three of them—Carl, Lindsay, and Nora—had spent several remarkably civil hours together in the living room of the little house at 116 Second Avenue, coffee-ing and conversing like mature adults about Lorna and Jeremy, reliving past joys and hardships, venturing hope for the future. To Carl’s amazement and relief, Lindsay had lost her combativeness, having apparently given up her idea of challenging him for custody of his son. Though far from gushy in her endorsement of Carl’s intentions concerning the future, she was nonetheless coolly conciliatory.

After Nora went into the kitchen, Lindsay offered to help Carl get control of the yard around the place, and he remembered that her hobby was gardening and landscaping. Lorna had always coveted her sister’s way with green things.

“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed,” Lindsay said, “but the shrubbery is almost all dead—which is a little strange, since all the neighbors’ yards are in good shape. I doubt we can save any of it.”

Indeed, Carl had noticed the yellowing junipers and ragged spirea, once so lush and beautiful—special joys to Lorna. Even allowing for winter nakedness, the spirea looked withered and brittle, as did the lilacs that grew along the property lines.

“I’d appreciate your help,” he said. “My thumb has never been very green. In fact, it’s burnt umber.”

“By the way, Carl,” Nora called from the kitchen, “that son of yours is certainly getting his ration of sleep, isn’t he?”

Carl glanced at his watch and decided it wouldn’t hurt to check on the boy. He came back from Jeremy’s room, looking unsteady.

“What’s wrong?” asked Lindsay, “He’s gone,” said Carl. “His bed is made—like it wasn’t even slept in.”

“I saw him go to bed last night,” said Lindsay. “I even tucked him in.”

“He obviously made the bed when he got up,” said Nora, “though I’ll admit it seems a little out of character for a thirteen-year-old boy.”

“But when did he get up?” Carl asked, chewing on a thumbnail.

“Apparently very early,”said Nora.

Just then the front door opened and Jeremy walked in, looking freshly scrubbed and well groomed, dressed as he had been the previous day in a Nike T-shirt and sweatpants. The only addition was a gray hooded rain parka of lightweight Gore-Tex. After hanging his parka in the entry way closet, he sat down in an armchair and crossed his legs.

“I hope I didn’t worry anybody,” he said with a trace of accent that Carl found strange. “I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went for a walk.”

“You mean you’ve been walking all this time?” asked Carl incredulously. “Something like five hours?”

“A little more than that, I should think,” answered the boy, sounding very adult despite his smooth, childlike voice. “I was thinking about Mom, you see. She meant so very much to me, and walking just seemed like a good thing to do.”

There it was, thought Carl: the evidence of pain he had yearned to see in his son. It would have comforted him had it not been delivered with such polished maturity, had it not seemed contrived. There was not a glitter of tears in the boy’s hazel eyes, nor a hint of sorrow in his handsome face.

“Jeremy,” he said, “I think you and I should have a little talk. Why don’t we go to your room?”

Fifteen minutes later Carl returned to the living room alone, having closed Jeremy’s door behind him. Nora brought him his soup and salad on a TV tray.

“Well, what did you talk about?” asked Lindsay.

“We negotiated a little agreement,” answered Carl, talking around a bite of lettuce. “He’s free to come and go as he pleases—during the daylight hours, that is—if he tells me where he’s going. And if he has a change of plans after leaving the house, he’s to call and let me know. We were both very reasonable, and he seems to accept the fact that I’m in charge.” Carl looked pleased with himself, and he shoveled more salad into his mouth.

“Isn’t that a lot of freedom for a child who’s undergoing therapy?” remarked Lindsay. “Don’t you think a tighter rein might be advisable?”

“Not until he demonstrates that he needs it. I keep trying to remember what I was like at his age, and I’ve got to admit that Jeremy seems a hell of a lot more sophisticated and mature than I was. My parents let me come and go pretty much as I wanted, so it seems only logical that—”

“But you were undoubtedly a perfectly healthy, normal child,” protested Lindsay, “and you had both parents to look after you. That’s a major difference.”

“Good point,” said Carl. “I should probably get Dr. Craslowe’s advice on this thing, shouldn’t I?”

“It certainly wouldn’t hurt,” said Lindsay. “You’ll have your chance in an hour. Our appointment with him is at one-thirty.”

The three of them chatted awhile longer, each glancing now and again down the short hallway at Jeremy’s closed door. Carl caught himself doing it after noticing the others.

“He was reading when I left him,” he volunteered, hoping to satisfy Nora’s and Lindsay’s curiosity about what Jeremy might be doing in there. “He says he’s become quite a bookworm since he learned to read. Judging from the mountain of books in his room, I’d say that’s an understatement. I wonder where he got them all.”

“It’s truly remarkable,” said Nora. “You may have a prodigy on your hands, Carl. I just hope—” A shadow of apprehension darkened her face, and she left her thought unsaid.

At 1:15, Nora announced that Lindsay and Carl should leave for their appointment with Dr. Craslowe at Whiteleather Place, and Lindsay volunteered to drive them in her Saab. After buckling herself into the driver’s seat, she lamented the gathering clouds in the northwestern sky. The first tentative drops of rain were falling by the time they turned off Second Avenue onto Frontage Street.

“You must have had quite a blowout last night with your buddy, the police chief,” said Lindsay as they headed south down the main drag, parallel to the shore. “Has the piper been fully paid?”

Carl smiled at this reference to his hangover. “We had a lot of catching up to do, and I’ll admit that we caught damn near all of it.”

Lindsay turned west on Sockeye Drive, and the village of Greely’s Cove started to recede in favor of dense woods. A glance at Carl’s disturbed face aroused her curiosity.

“You were saying?”

Carl felt an itch to share the things Stu had told him, if only to vent his own wild, inexact apprehensions and to check Lindsay’s reaction against his own. How would she react, he wondered, if she heard that several of the missing citizens of Greely’s Cove had paid visits in the dead of night to people they had left behind?

Like old Elvira Cashmore, for example, the aged widow whose lawn Carl tended as a boy. Scarcely two weeks after her disappearance, Sig Knutson, longtime Little League coach and Elvira’s occasional escort to movies and picnics, called the police station at three in the morning, his voice quaking with fright. Elvira had just
visited
him, he croaked over the phone. She’d somehow managed to climb onto the roof of his garage, which offered access to his second-story bedroom window, and had thumped on the glass to wake him. Later, in an interview with Stu, the old boy said that Elvira had beckoned him to follow her, wanting him to join in what Sig thought was a “feast.” Too, she had spoken of “dreaming”—at least that’s what Sig
thought
she’d said, because he’d been too frightened to open the window in order to hear her clearly. He’d fetched a flashlight and beamed it against her face. Much of Elvira’s cheek and neck were gone—-bloody bones showing through scabby holes in the flesh; naked stems of arteries and veins, twitching with her heartbeats. And in her eyes, an unhealthy gleam that seemed
hungry.
Sig’s hysterical screaming had driven her away.

Like Peggy Birch, the schoolteacher who disappeared in November and allegedly visited her husband, George, several weeks later in the blackest part of the night. The particulars of this visit were indistinct, since George had not called the police to file a report but had confided in a couple of friends the following day. Something about Peggy’s visit had been extraordinary, although that was hardly the right word. The sight of his wife had turned George into a raving, jittering maniac. The following night he had loaded his old Remington shotgun, rammed the muzzle between his teeth, and tripped the trigger with his big toe, blowing most of his head off.

Like Wendell Greenfield, the fifty-one-year-old service-station operator who disappeared in October and visited his wife, Debra, on a dark November night. During a raging storm, yet. Pounding on the back door, insisting that she follow him somewhere, until she grabbed the family revolver from a kitchen drawer and scared him off. Most of the flesh of his right arm was missing, and his voice seemed to come from inside Debra’s own head. Needless to say, she was frightened out of her ever-loving wits.

How would Lindsay respond to these things? Carl wondered. Would she simply dismiss them as the raving of grief-sick survivors? Or try to reconcile the similarities among the stories by calling them collective hallucinations or dreams? He wanted to know.

So he told her everything Stu had related the night before, quickly and matter-of-factly, omitting the florid adjectives that Stu had used. And he told her about his friend’s creeping worry that something evil had settled in Greely’s Cove, a
darkness
that “sort of hangs in the air like it’s not quite invisible,” a darkness that throws the local life processes out of kilter.

And he told her about Lorna’s suicide note.

Stu had produced it from his jacket pocket shortly before they parted company the night before, just as Liquid Larry was throwing out all the other patrons in order to close for the night. Stu had planned to give the note to Carl all along, he’d said. He was certain that Lorna’s suicide somehow bolstered his theory of an evil presence in Greely’s Cove. Lorna had felt that presence, insisted Stu, and had been sickened by it. In some unimaginable way, it had touched her and had made her life unbearable.

Carl now pulled the note from his corduroy jacket, a rumpled slip of paper with an uneven tear along the top edge. The scrawled handwriting was barely recognizable as Lorna’s. He tried to read it aloud as Lindsay drove with both hands on the wheel, her eyes locked straight ahead, her jaw set.

Tried
to read it aloud. The terror of Lorna’s final moments must have wracked her limbs and set her body to trembling, making writing next to impossible. The script contained a few of her trademark loops and swirls, but other than these it showed little of her artist’s even hand. Mostly tremulous streaks and smears, mere approximations of letters and words.

Ca—l—

Don’t try t- love it. Itl- kill you, l—ke me. Ge—away.

Carl spoke the words that he thought he saw: “Carl: Don’t try to love it. It’ll kill you, like me. Get away.”

Lindsay should have responded predictably:
Something evil, my foot!
Hallucinations and nightmares had obviously plagued the survivors of Greely’s Cove, as any rational, twentieth-century adult could plainly see. The suicide note was the product of a sick and tortured mind, a meaningless jumble of half-formed thoughts and fears. Lorna herself had probably hallucinated all kinds of threats, which is hardly remarkable for someone who’s sick enough to kill herself.

But Lindsay did not react as Carl thought she should. Her face betrayed fresh misery at this small taste of the hell her sister had suffered in the final moments of life.

Carl was slightly taken aback when she asked, “And just what do
you
make of all this?”

He was about to say something, though he didn’t know exactly what, when a break in the undergrowth appeared on the right side of the road. A wooden arrow, wobbly on its ancient post, pointed north into the forest. Traces of white paint applied decades earlier rendered the message:
Whiteleather Place.

They turned into the narrow, twisting lane, and the tires of Lindsay Moreland’s Saab crunched over a damp layer of ash-colored rock chips. A canopy of mature deciduous trees and conifers nearly choked off the daylight, forcing Lindsay to turn on her headlights. The dense overhead network of needles and limbs, already saturated by the winter storm, issued huge droplets of water that splatted noisily now and again on the windshield.

“How much farther?” she asked.

“Just a quarter-mile,” answered Carl, gazing out the rain-streaked window into the woody dusk. “You know, coming out here brings back a lot of memories.”

“Familiar with this area, are you?”

“When I was a kid, my buddies and I used to play here. We built forts in the woods and attacked enemy convoys on this very road.”

“Enemy convoys?”

Little boys’ games, he explained. Guns, cowboys, army. This forest was among their favorite stomping grounds, for it had most everything that kids love: grand trees to climb, little bubbling brooks for wading in, frogs and snakes to capture, myriad clearings to explore, and a zillion hiding places for playing guns.