The Narrows(68)

“Tetanus city,” he muttered to himself.

Brandy said, “Huh?”

“Never mind.”

At the end of the corridor they arrived at a wall of iron grates, blackened and fire-scarred. Ben assumed medieval prisons probably looked no worse. He went to one of the grates, shone the flashlight into it. The throat of a narrow pipe carried the light to an elbow that bent up into the stonework.

“What is this?” Brandy asked.

“Some sort of kiln.”

“What’s a kiln?”

“Like an oven. Don’t you take pottery classes or something in school?”

Brandy shrugged and peered through the slatted iron bars.

“I think these pipes all go up into one of those smokestacks,” he said.

She pulled away from the bars. “I don’t like this place.”

“I don’t think your brother came in here, Brandy.”

By the expression on her face, he could tell she didn’t think so, either.

She’s trying to hold out hope, he thought. In all likeliness, the kid probably did come out here and fell into the Narrows. I should alert the state police and they should keep an eye on the mouth of the Potomac. Jesus f*cking Christ.

Ben felt sick.

“What’s that stuff?” Brandy asked. She pointed to a series of wooden rafters along one wall. The rafters themselves looked like some sort of scaffolding, yet there was something dripping from them that reminded Ben of spelunking as a child in Shenandoah. Specifically, he was reminded of the stalactites, those calcified horns of stone that hung from the ceilings of caves. Similarly, this stuff had hardened into corkscrews and hung from the scaffolding, a mottled white and black and gray in hue. On the floor beneath the scaffolding, mounds of the stuff rose up. As Ben shone the flashlight on the mass, large blackflies spiraled dizzyingly into the air.

“That’s guano,” Ben said.

“What’s that?”

“Bat shit.” He shot her an apologetic glance. “It’s, uh, bat feces. Like, uh…bowel movements or…”

“You can say shit. I know what shit is.” She stared up at the hanging columns of dried dung, nearly mesmerized. “There’s so much of it.”

“We’ve been having a bat problem lately. I guess this is where they’ve been roosting.”

“But where are they now?” Brandy took a few steps back, her eyes still trained on the rafters. “It’s daylight out there. They should be in here sleeping, right?”

“I don’t really know too much about bats,” Ben said, though he thought, She’s right. Bats are nocturnal. Where are they?

“He’s not in here, is he?”

Ben clicked off his flashlight. “No, hon. I really don’t think so.” He caught another whiff of that antiseptic stink—that burning, medicinal smell that reminded him of doctors’ offices. It made his eyes water. “Let’s get you home, okay?”

Back in the car, with the ribbon of asphalt that was Route 40 curving around the mountain ahead of them, Brandy said, “Thanks for taking me out here and for taking a look around.”

“It’s okay, Brandy. I wish I could be more help.” He glanced at her profile against the passenger window. “We’re doing all we can.”

“I know.” She played with the door lock while she watched the countryside shuttle by. “I still have the shirt, in case you want to take it for evidence or whatever. I didn’t wash it and kept it just like we found it.”

“The shirt?”

“Matthew’s T-shirt,” she said. She looked at him. “You said my mom told you about it, right?”

“Your mom said she found one of his shirts out in the yard. She said it probably blew off the clothesline.”

“Maybe,” Brandy said. “It’s the holes that bother me.”

“What holes?”

“The holes in the back of the shirt.” With an index finger, she dotted the air in a vertical line. “There were these little holes going down the back of his shirt. I do his laundry all the time and never noticed them before.”

Ben’s skin went clammy. “Yeah?” he said, realizing his mouth was suddenly dry. “Holes?”

“Yeah.” Brandy turned back to the window.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you give me that shirt, huh?”

“For evidence?” she said.

“Yeah.” His mind was reeling now. “For evidence.”



2



Ben pulled up outside the Crawly house and Brandy got out of the car. The door still open, she peeked in and said, “I’ll be right back.” Then she took off toward the house, leaving the door ajar.

Unsettled, Ben turned on the goodtime radio, located a classic rock station, and tried to grow comfortable with one of his favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. Yet his mind was on other things.

The unidentified boy’s body had been found by some watermen late in the day. Both Ben and Mike Keller had responded to the scene. What they found was the doughy outline of a young boy, naked and bloated, strewn in the reeds at the mouth of Wills Creek where the creek joined the Potomac River. They had rolled the boy over and found his face a sodden, swollen mess. The boy’s eyes were like jelly in their sockets. There had been a stiffening rigor to half the face, giving the corpse the frozen grimace of a stroke victim. Lord knew how long the boy’s body had been in the water, but it had been long enough to pull body hair out by the roots and turn the skin into glue. Ben had called Deets in from Cumberland, and the fastidious little medical examiner addressed the scene perfunctorily, taking pictures of his own and scribbling in a notebook. Deets called the death and he assisted a pair of medics in loading the corpse into the back of an ambulance.