The Body of Christopher Creed (22 page)

I muttered, "We saw a psychic tonight."

She shut her eyes slowly, and when she reopened them, they were glaring right at me with what my friends always called
the look.
It could boil you. She always told me that you made your own future, and that psychics could make you "fatalistic." Not only that, but a fake could really mess you up.

"We didn't mean to see her, we just sort of fell into it," I blabbered under her gaze. "We went to visit this girl Chris used to know. She took us. At any rate, the psychic said Chris is dead in the woods. She says he shot himself."

She rolled her eyes off to the side in a way that read complete disgust. Finally, she sighed. "Well, I'm not psychic, but I'm your mother. Do I rank in there somehow?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Chris Creed is not dead in the woods. I can take my paycheck to the bank on that one."

I stared at her tired face. "What makes you so sure?"

"Because I've lived here my whole life, and I know the people here pretty well. Glen Ames told me you had a conversation with Sylvia Creed yesterday. She may have been relentless, Torey, but what that boils down to is survival. People will do and think whatever it is they have to in order to survive. I feel that Chris probably learned his bad social skills from Sylvia. But he also learned from her to be a survivor," she muttered in a soft but firm way. "When he disappeared, I just knew in my gut, like I know this town, like I know the Creeds. Sylvia Creed is far from perfect, but her life didn't kill her. Digger Haines's life didn't kill him. I'm not a psychic, but I know people pretty well. And my feeling is, Chris Creed is alive."

"I sure hope you're right," Ali said.

"He could still show up tomorrow," my mom put in, though it seemed not likely to me. Creed was becoming like a vapor. A myth or a legend or something.

I kept waking up all night over these weird dreams. I think the psychic caused it all. I kept seeing myself walking up on those three rocks in the Indian burial ground and seeing Creed's dead body. I must have dreamed it six times. Each time something different was gross about the body. Once his eyeballs were missing. Once his feet were missing. Once, I turned the body over and it wasn't Creed—it was Alex. Around five o'clock I just decided that being asleep was too much of a pain in the ass, and I sat up and watched some infomercial for slimming down your buns.

By the time Ali got up, I had a headache and thought my eyelids weighed five pounds each. I was trying to eat oatmeal at the table, but it tasted like paste.

Ali said to me, "You're having a normal response. I would have dreamed the same kinds of things if the psychic told me I would find him when I was alone. But don't forget, your mom says he's alive." She smiled.

"I'd like to believe that. I think my mom can be totally smart about people. It's just hard when she's giving me her gut feeling and that stupid psychic is giving me everything but the weather."

"
You will find him shot through the head on a primitive grave. There are other graves around, but this one is marked with three large rocks.
" The psychic's voice shot through my head. I'd been hearing it all night long.

"Maybe we should just go down and look," I told her. Her eyebrows arched up, and I guess she was remembering how stubborn I had been the night before about
not
going. "I don't feel like I have much choice, Ali. Not if I ever want to sleep again. I can just see myself having these dreams over and over until I see with my own eyes."

"I'll go with you. You know that." She squirmed. "But,
urn...
"

I finished for her. "What about the part where I would be alone when I found him?"

"Yeah." She gazed at me uncomfortably.

I knew I wasn't going down there by myself. "Dead bodies don't get up and walk, I don't care what she says. Didn't she say she never claims to be ... what? A hundred-percent accurate?"

Ali nodded. "Something like that. I'll go. Maybe when you see there's nothing there, you can come home and take a nice, long nap."

That sounded like reason enough to go.

The path to the burial ground had tall trees on either side that threw shadows, despite the sun. I wasn't nervous. I think I was too exhausted.

The clearing was up ahead. I slowed down. About twenty feet from the edge of the path, I stopped entirely. Something came over me. A bad feeling, almost like a wave.

"Let's not," I whispered.

Ali just stood there, staring straight into the clearing. The rocks were off to the left, where you couldn't see them.

"D'you ever hear about this place, Ali? You know how the pine trees grow like wildfire? Well, they don't grow in that clearing. Nobody's ever been able to figure out why not."

"I see little pine trees in there," she whispered back.

"Baby ones. But they all seem to keel over and die when they hit, like, two feet high." The Indians used to consider babies next to sacred. One rumor had it their ghosts wouldn't breathe death on the trees until they were no longer baby trees.

"You want me to go by myself?" Her voice shook.

"No." I tried to tell myself I was being superstitious. I took a few more steps, just enough so that I could crane my neck to see the first rock. It leaned against the second two, but I only had a clear view of the first. It gleamed in the sun in the dead silence of the morning.

"Ali, don't leave me, okay?"

"Why would I leave you?"

"I don't know. I don't want to be alone, and then,
boom,
the body drops out of a tree or something."

"There're no trees in there," she reminded me. "But, yeah, I understand."

I still didn't move. I was trying to get up my nerve, but she took a breath and said, "This is for Bo."

She stepped forward, and I was right on her heels, terrified of being left alone. We moved into the clearing and saw all three rocks. They were smooth on top and met in the center. There was no body on top. Slowly we circled around, looking on the sides, looking all around the clearing. The clearing was filled with white sand, almost like beach sand, with little pine trees and clumps of grass. Nothing to hide a body. One rock had a lip, so there was a space under it. It was big enough that a body could fit under it. I squatted down slowly and looked under the lip, then let out a breath as I saw straight through to the back of the rock.

I stood up, looked at Ali, and she looked at me.

I laughed. "That psychic can bite me."

"She did say you would be alone," Ali muttered, but I laughed again.

Some of my brain cells were starting to function for the first time that day. "She was wrong. Come on, think about it. Dead bodies don't move around. If he's not here today, he's not going to be here tomorrow."

"What if ... he's been alive in the woods, and just hasn't died yet?" she mumbled.

I hunted around through my tired brain for reality. "I think we already established that Chris wouldn't know how to survive out here, and he had no friends who would hide him from his own parents. Besides, when I asked that psychic why nobody found him last Saturday, she didn't say he wasn't dead then. She said almost the opposite. She said..." It was something eerie, but I couldn't remember.

"She said, 'The dead didn't want to be seen,'" Ali finished for me. "She said the dead can hide until they are ready to be seen—"

"Yo, reality check," I muttered. "She's full of it. I don't even know what I'm doing here."

To keep up my pretend courage, I jumped on top of the rocks and gazed all around the clearing.

"You could be standing on a grave marker," Ali said, watching me with wide eyes. "Didn't that woman say the rocks marked an Indian grave?"

"Don't be superstitious. If it is a grave, then the occupants are dead." I looked down and lost my grin some. The three rocks met together, but there was a little hole in the center where they didn't fit just right. I watched it wearily and finally got down on my knees slowly. I was afraid to stick my eye right up to it. Something could reach out and fling itself at me. A hand, a finger bone.

"Ali, check this out," I whispered. When she didn't answer, I looked around. She wasn't anywhere in the clearing. My eyes scanned the woods as my heart banged, and I glanced up at the sky for a falling body.

"Ali!" I screamed and shot straight up. "Ali, don't leave!"

I stepped onto the rock with the lip to jump down. I stepped on the lip too hard and the rock faltered, tipping forward. I must have weighed more than when I was a kid. I heard Ali scream. I jumped to the ground and saw her lying under the lip.

"You don't have to squash me," she said. The rock dropped back down to its original place with a thud that gave me its weight to be almost a couple hundred pounds. I could have broken her rib cage.

"Oh my god, are you all right?" I dropped down to my knees, hauling her out from under. "I thought you left me."

"No. I just wanted to ... I don't know, see if I could see anything from under—"

"Don't!" I snapped. "Alex and I never got under there. You know what lives under these rocks? Those giant sandworms you dissect in biology. Look, just ... stand here and don't move."

Now that I knew she hadn't left, my nerve came back again. "There's a hole between the three rocks. I want to look down it."

She crinkled up her face. "There's no way for him to crawl in between these rocks. They fit together almost perfectly."

"Almost," I said. "I just want to do the ... whole thing."

Whatever I meant by that. I jumped back up on the rocks, and without giving myself time to think about it, I knelt and looked down. The hole was pitch-black. Ali put her hand on my ankle, and it made me less scared of being dragged under by ye olde hand bone. I reached in.

I could feel the floor of the clearing with the tips of my fingers. It was flat and smooth, like nothing could grow on top of the sand in the darkness there. I felt something rough, about the size of a baseball. I tried telling myself it wasn't a hand bone and got my fingers around it. I pulled it out. Pinecone. I tossed it aside with a sigh and reached back in. I had to reach in up to my shoulder, and I could feel the hole was about two feet wide at the bottom, just big enough to fit my arm in at the top.

"Too small for a body," I told her, to make myself feel better, and then my fingers touched something smooth. It felt like a thin piece of plastic. I pulled, but it seemed to be stuck between the rocks. I pulled some more.

"There's something else," I said, gritting my teeth. "Just this one thing..."

It finally gave way, and I pulled it out. I sat there huffing, wiping the dirt off this piece of paper that had a plasticy feel to it. I saw some scribbling around a bunch of cartoon-type pictures. "It looks like a map, and the handwriting on it seems familiar."

"Yeah, it's familiar," Ali agreed right away. "Like Creed's diary."

I stood there frozen. Seeing this map was like hearing a voice from beyond the grave. It had to be the map Alex tried to tear that time he saw Chris coming out of here back when we were twelve. "You mean he
laminated
his treasure map?" I remembered laughing so hard when I said that. But holding this dirty old thing, it didn't seem so funny. It was a thin sort of lamination, so it still looked like paper. Chris must have shoved it down between the rocks four years ago, so his mother wouldn't find it, and forgot about it or something.

It was too eerie, too odd. We come here looking for the kid's dead body. We don't find a dead body, and yet something that once belonged to him shows up.

The woods had been perfectly silent all morning, but out of nowhere the trees started to rustle. I looked up, and a strong breeze came along that took the map right out of my shaking fingers. It sailed out of my hand, hit the ground, then blew up and around and fell against a pine tree. I dropped down off the rocks and ran to retrieve it. When I got about two feet away, another gust came and whirled it into the forest. I could see it rolling from corner to corner on the forest floor as little gusts took it. I started after it, then stopped. Something was making me scared, something about Indian ghosts. I could feel them. I stood there frozen, scanning the forest, knowing that Indian with the bow and arrow was out there, about to materialize right in my face again. I watched and waited until the breeze died away. I shut my eyes.

You're just tired,
I tried telling myself, but nothing could convince my feet to chase after that map into the forest.

I turned and looked at Ali, and she looked at me.

"Let's get out of here," she said. She must have sensed something unusual, too, because she spun, then we hightailed it back through the shadowy trail so fast that an Indian ghost would have had to run us down to scare us.

I did actually fall asleep when we got home. In the family room, my dad had put on a Notre Dame game, and I saw the opening kickoff. It was daytime, plus a normal thing like a football game was on, and between that and my relief at not finding Creed's body, I just crashed out. Next thing I knew, my mom was shaking me, and it was late afternoon. I sat up and took the cordless she held out to me.

"It's Alex," she said.

I felt all funky—like you feel when you fall dead asleep in the middle of the day and you wake up and don't even know if it's day or night. I took the phone in a daze.

"Hello."

"Hey. You sound like you've been cutting logs."

"Yeah, major," I told him, stretching some. "What time's it?"

"About four-thirty. Torey, listen up. Can you meet me somewhere tonight? And don't bring Ali, okay?"

At that point, I remembered he was supposed to be mad at me. "Fine. But are you going to have Renee with you? I just can't cope with her right now, Alex."

He sighed. "Yeah, she's been a piece of work lately. No, I won't bring her. I just need to talk."

"Yeah, I understand." At least I thought I did. I thought he wanted to patch things up with me and not be so onesided toward his girlfriend. "Where?"

"Well, definitely not my house, because Renee will be showing up here. And definitely not your house, because I don't want people hanging all over us." He sounded upset. "Just meet me in the woods behind your house. We'll go walking."