The Narrows(55)
“They get an ID on that kid?”
“The kid’s gone.” Ben set the folders back down on his desk. He met Eddie’s eyes from across the Batter’s Box.
“What the heck are you talkin’ about, gone?”
“They’re not sure if the body’s just been misplaced or if this is some kind of theft—”
“Who’d steal a body?”
“All I know is they don’t know where the hell the boy’s body is.”
“Maybe it’s a Halloween prank?”
Ben frowned at the ridiculousness of the statement. It reminded him of what old Ted Minsky had said last night, after they’d come in from examining his slaughtered goats—I thought it might’ve been a prank, seein’ how close we are to Halloween. But after I seen my goats this evening…well…I don’t know nobody thinks somethin’ like that’s a prank.
“Where’s the kid’s case file?”
Making a face as if he smelled something foul, Eddie sat forward in his chair and scrounged around the top of his own desk. When he found the slender blue folder, he handed it to Ben. “What’re you gonna do about it?”
“I’m not sure yet. Just seems awfully coincidental that it’s been one thing after another around here for the past two weeks or so, don’t you agree?”
Lethargically, Eddie La Pointe nodded. “It’s the storms.”
“How’s that?”
“Storms like we been havin’ are bad juju.”
“I don’t believe in that stuff.”
Eddie shrugged, obviously disinterested in Ben’s opinion on the matter. “Your whatchamacallit has been chirping its head off in the sally port. I think it’s hungry.”
He’d forgotten about the bat. “So now it’s my whatchamacallit? You guys were the ones who wanted to keep it, remember?”
“Hell,” Eddie drawled, “not me. Bats, they freak me the hell out.”
4
Before leaving for home, Ben stopped off in the sally port with some fresh slices of apple. The bat was upright, clinging to the bars of the birdcage with the fang-like little hooks at the apex of its wings. It sniffed blindly at the air, its tiny pink mouth open.
“You hungry?”
Yet as he approached, he saw a few half-eaten bits of apple still at the bottom of the bat’s cage.
“What’s the matter?” He spoke in a low, soothing baritone. “Are you getting picky all of a sudden? You want some caviar or something instead?”
He squeezed a fresh wedge of apple through the bars of the birdcage.
“What the hell’s going on around here, huh?”
The bat tittered.
Chapter Eight
1
Just as Ben Journell stood outside Hogarth’s Drugstore speaking to the county medical examiner, Brandy Crawly awoke from a fitful sleep. For a moment she remained lying on her back, wondering if her waking hours had somehow become her dreams, while her dreams had somehow become reality. It was Monday, a school day, but she had no intention of going to school; in fact, she had slept through much of the morning.
There was a dull ache at the center of her head. Matthew is gone.
She got out of bed and passed by her beveled mirror without pausing, going straight to the bedroom windows. The windows looked out onto the road that ran along the front of the Crawly house, twisting and curling like a ribbon of asphalt until it disappeared over the nearest hill toward town. On the other side of the road, the sloping green fields yawned all the way out to the tree-studded foothills. Within the shadows of the mountains, heavy darkness still pressed low to the ground out beyond the fields, and the hillsides looked mottled with alternating blackness and spangles of red and white sunlight. What leaves were still in the trees blazed with all the colors of an inferno.
Downstairs, her mother dozed on the couch, still propped up in the approximation of a sitting position. The living room windows were partway open and a cool autumnal wind had dropped the temperature. Brandy unfolded an afghan that hung over the back of one of the wingback chairs and spread it over her mother’s sleeping body. Wendy Crawly did not even stir. Then Brandy clicked off the television, which was tuned to some ancient black-and-white movie, the volume turned down so low it could have been a silent film.
In the kitchen, she dumped five scoops of Maxwell House into the coffee machine then clicked on the red Power button. The machine hissed and burped. There was still some food left out on the counter from the sandwich her mother had made her the previous night—sliced turkey, crusts of bread, an empty jar of mayonnaise, a wilting head of lettuce. There were some open Tupperware containers and ceramic dishes out along the countertop as well, and she assumed her mother had taken these items out of the refrigerator late the previous night after Brandy had gone to bed.
Brandy opened the window over the sink, hoping some fresh air might combat the aggressive odors of the stale food. There were plastic trash bags in the cupboard beneath the sink; she took one out and flapped it like a matador’s cape until it opened. Systematically, she moved down the length of the counter, dumping the Tupperware containers into the trash, whether they were disposable or not. She scraped hunks of pot roast, foul-smelling chicken legs, and congealed, quivering cubes of stew out of the ceramic dishes and into the trash bag. The bag sufficiently weighted down, she hauled it out onto the back porch and, hefting it over the railing, dumped it into one of the Rubbermaid trash bins that were lashed to the porch by bungees. A swarm of flies spiraled up out of the trash bin and dissipated like smoke into the atmosphere.