The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(20)

Over the next few days, my parents wouldn’t let me go out into the street to see any of the other kids. I heard later that the gossip was rampant. The story that Mr. Alpine had killed a child once before was circulating like wildfire. Now he’d abducted and murdered another one. Why? He was a madman, a monster, an animal. Greg—or was it Dean?—changed his story and said he had seen Mr. Alpine go into our house. After Mr. Alpine was arrested, he called the police and told them of his new realization. He said that hearing about the man being arrested was a jar to his memory.

The mayor finally spoke out on the six p.m. local news. At first my parents didn’t want me watching it, but I insisted. I can’t recall much of what Carl Alpine said about his brother, only that he would make sure our ex-neighbor received the best legal representation. No protestations of innocence.

Though I wanted to know more about the investigation, I wasn’t allowed to read the newspaper. Years later, when I was an adult, I went to the Limite Public Library and looked up the papers on file for that week. In the edition that came out the day after Mr. Alpine was arrested, there was an “I told you so” interview with Mr. Alpine’s ex-wife, to whom he had been married from April 1958 to March 1959. She was still convinced that he had also killed their baby, also two months old at the time. The incident occurred in October 1958. “He wasn’t much of a husband,” she said. “We had marital problems. He didn’t love me. I didn’t love him. He resented the baby. That’s why he killed my darling little boy. The police and medical examiner were wrong. It wasn’t one of those unexplained infant crib deaths. I know. And Gordon was never charged. I left him right after that.” Something odd struck me about the dates, so I did the math. If the baby was two months old in October, then he had been born in August. Gordon Alpine married his wife in April, which meant she was already pregnant at the time. A forced marriage?

The papers featured a few articles about the investigation, but they left a lot of stuff out—things I learned much later. The most striking headline was published on July 9, when the chief of police announced that they had obtained a confession from Mr. Alpine. The mayor was quoted as being “disappointed and ashamed.”

But Gordon Alpine never had a chance to tell his side of the story in a courtroom. Before dawn on July 10, before being moved to the county jail, the man hung himself in his cell. The police had not taken adequate precautions to prevent it. After all, those kinds of things never happened in Limite. How were they to know the guy was a suicide risk?

His suicide pushed my mother over the edge. We would never know what happened to Michael’s little body. Mr. Alpine may have confessed to abducting and killing Michael, but he had been notoriously silent on where the body was hidden. His secrets died with him. The detectives promised they would keep searching, that they would never give up, and that they would eventually find my brother’s corpse.

They never did.

I didn’t see Eddie again for days. Word on the street from my friends was that the cops had given Eddie a fairly rough time. The police interviewed him that second time at the Newcott house, but apparently Eddie grew upset and became belligerent, so the cops took him to the station with his parents in tow. I heard that Eddie had cried and was defiant all day even as the cops put him through the wringer. It was so cruel—he was only eleven, for Christ’s sake. When Mr. Newcott’s lawyer finally showed up—at eight o’clock at night—the cops freed Eddie with no charges whatsoever. My father and I both felt it had been an unfair thing to do to my best friend. My mother never said anything about it.

When I finally saw him in the park, days later when my mother released me from my forced seclusion at home, he glared at me and growled, “Your mother told the police I hurt your little brother.”

“I’m sorry. I tried to tell them you wouldn’t do that.”

“Why did she have to lie? Why? I loved you, Shelby!” Tears came to his eyes and he walked away. Looking back, I know that his words were those of an upset young boy who was infatuated with the girl across the street. He didn’t know what love was. Not yet, and neither did I. But at the time, what he said cut me to the core. I thought I loved him, too, in my own adolescent way. We were so young, I know, and it sounds silly now, but we both believed it then.

The rest of the summer was truly the worst two months of my life. I was grieving not only for my baby brother but also for the loss of my closeness with Eddie. It was inevitable that I would still see him, simply because we lived across the street from each other. Every now and then in July I’d catch a glimpse of him outside his house. He’d look back at me and I’d gaze at him. Occasionally, we gave each other a little wave. Then he’d turn and go inside or hop on his bike and take off. I stopped seeing him at all toward the end of the month, and it wasn’t until school started in September that I found out he wasn’t living in the house anymore. He had gone to “live with other family members.” I never knew where.

Eddie mysteriously vanished for an entire year.





8


Seventh grade totally sucked, of course. That was true of junior high in general. Something had died in my heart. The atmosphere in our home was subdued, to say the least. Mom didn’t like it when I watched television—the laugh tracks made her cringe—and she’d make me turn it off or turn the volume down so low I could barely hear it. She stayed in her bedroom a lot. I don’t know what she did while I was at school and Dad was at work. The alcohol and pills didn’t start until later, so I imagine she sat in front of the television and watched soap operas. She ceased doing any temp work. She built a wall around herself and stayed inside it for the rest of her short life. I knew that she was going through something terrible, that I was witnessing someone deal with grief. It was best to give her space. She became extremely withdrawn, preferring to be alone, and she would snap at us if we tried to get her to do something she didn’t want to. Dad continued to be his complacent, friendly self, but my mother’s dark mood affected him. They were a damaged couple, and at the time I was too young to contemplate what they were going through.