The Narrows(73)

“You got it, Ben,” Platt said, rising quickly from the sofa. Haggis struggled to get up and join him.

“I’d like to take a look at your son’s room, Mr. Leary,” Ben said.

Leary set his can of beer on the carpet then peeled himself out of his La-Z-Boy. “Follow me,” he said.

Leary led Ben and Eddie down the hall to the last door on the right. It opened up to a tiny room with one window facing a stand of elm trees. There was an unmade bed wedged in one corner and there were toys and clothes all over the place. Posters of horror movie monsters hung on the walls and some classic Aurora monster models had been carefully arranged on a desktop, bookshelves, and the solitary windowsill.

“Don’t know what you expect to find,” Leary said. “Room’s a goddamn pigsty.”

Ben went to the closet, opened it. He dug through a heap of unwashed clothing, board games, and random toys until he found an empty backpack. He held it up so the missing boy’s father could see it. “Is this the one he uses for school?”

Leary lifted one pointed shoulder. “Beats me.”

“School one’s over here, Ben,” Eddie said. He was peering over the small desk that was pushed beneath the single window at another backpack that was unzipped and loaded with textbooks.

“What’s it matter?” Leary asked.

“When kids run away they sometimes pack some stuff in a backpack. It seems Billy’s are accounted for.”

Leary grunted.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Leary?” Ben asked him.

“Why would Billy run away?”

“I’m not saying he did. I’m just looking around.”

“I got a good relationship with my boy, Journell.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Ben said, tossing the backpack back into the closet. “You mind if I check the papers in your son’s schoolbag?”

Leary made a face that suggested he didn’t care one way or another.

Ben emptied the contents of Billy Leary’s schoolbag onto the desk as Eddie came up beside him. Pencils, erasers, a broken ruler, notebooks, and balled-up wads of lined notebook paper spilled out along with a collection of textbooks. There was also a half-eaten sandwich in a Ziploc bag, so old and festooned with mold that the identity of the lunch meat remained suspect.

“How have your son’s grades been?” Ben asked.

“He does okay,” Leary intoned from the doorway.

Eddie sighed audibly.

Ben knew that sometimes kids ran away instead of having to confront their parents with a bad report card or a failed test paper that needed to be signed and turned back in to the teacher. And while there were plenty of poor test scores among the contents of Billy Leary’s schoolwork, Ben did not think the boy would have worried too much about showing them to his father. Abruptly, he felt like he was wasting time.

“Okay,” he said, dumping the boy’s items back into the schoolbag. “I think we’re done here.”

“You figure anything out?” Leary wanted to know.

Ben offered him a wan smile and said, “Not just yet.”

Back outside, Eddie lit a Marlboro while Ben stood surveying the property with his hands on his hips. Bob Leary remained inside, though he occasionally appeared in one of the windows to stare out at them.

“Explain to me how we got two missing kids in one week,” Eddie said, exhaling a column of smoke.

“I have no idea.”

“And then the livestock mutilations? I mean, how f*cking bizarre is all this?”

“Pretty bizarre.”

“It’s all got to be related, right, Ben? It can’t just be a bunch of coincidences, can it? All at once like this?”

Ben had no answer for him. He couldn’t see how they could possibly be connected…though he found the timing of all these seemingly unrelated events more than just troubling.

“And let’s not forget that kid who washed up in Wills Creek,” Eddie added.

“Don’t remind me.”

“Seems to me this whole town is being overrun.”

“Overrun by what?”

“You name it,” Eddie said. “Take your pick. Fuck if I know. But it’s almost like that dead kid who washed up in Wills Creek was the trigger to all this madness.”

This struck Ben as oddly poignant. He looked at Eddie but Eddie was peering casually around at the yard and the rusted vehicles up on blocks around the side of the house, looking infernally bored and exhausted. To Eddie La Pointe, it was nothing more than a passing comment.





Chapter Twelve


1


Amidst a dream of plowing through rich autumn leaves, Brandy Crawly awoke to find it was the middle of the night, the darkness penetrating her bedroom like a sonic shock wave. Her fleeting thoughts still resonated with her peaceful dream—scampering through crunchy, brown leaves in the forest and overturning stones at the edge of Wills Creek to find their undersides fuzzy with moss, horned owls noiselessly circling overhead. The juxtaposition was jarring.

Flipping the sheets off her sweating body, she climbed quickly out of bed and hurried over to one of her bedroom windows. Outside, the road looked like a glowing blue ribbon coursing its way through the valley and up into the foothills of the mountains. She could see the large, black trees crowding the road and the moonlight that dripped from their branches. For whatever reason, she recalled summers spent in her youth when she’d walk up and down that road, searching for toads in muddy puddles after rainstorms. Tonight, the world seemed to close in around her like some constriction, nearly suffocating in all its claustrophobia. In nothing more than her nightshirt and panties, she hurried out of her room, into the upstairs hall, and down the steps that led to the first floor of the creaky old house.