Death Falls (28 page)

“I need to ask you something,” he said. “Do you really think my mother was crazy?”

“I think she was hurting. Both before your brother disappeared and especially after. And I’m truly sorry I didn’t try to help her in any way.”

Eric appreciated the sentiment, even if it was too late to do anything about it. Besides, it wasn’t Becky Santangelo’s place to intervene. The one person who could have helped his mother the most was now asleep in her old bed.

He didn’t know why Ken had abandoned his mother. Eric assumed it was the same reason that he, too, had left—he just couldn’t live like that anymore. But he had never known about the problems before Charlie disappeared. His father, on the other hand, did. And the fact that he left so quickly and never came back seemed like the greater betrayal.

“You told me you often heard my parents fighting. Did you ever hear what it was about?”

“I wish I could tell you,” Becky said. “I only knew that they were fighting. That’s when your brother would stop by. Or else he’d go to the Clark place. Whenever he crossed the street, we knew something was going on with your parents.”

Eric thought back to the previous day, during a far different conversation he had with his neighbor. “You said before that it didn’t start until I was born.”

Becky Santangelo looked away, ashamed. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“But is it true?”

“From my limited viewpoint, it was. They seemed happy until you were born. But I’m not saying that had anything to do with it.”

She didn’t need to. Eric could draw his own conclusions. What he didn’t understand was why his birth had caused such a rift between his parents. Since he had gone a lifetime not being offered an answer, Eric knew the only way he’d get one was if he asked for it.

He looked to his house across the street. Ken was still asleep inside. If not, then he was certainly experiencing one hell of a hangover. While he had vowed to wait until his father woke to start in with his questions, Eric realized he had waited long enough. Forty-two years, in fact.

Saying good-bye to Becky, he crossed the street quickly. Once inside, he headed up the stairs and into his mother’s old bedroom. Ken was still asleep, curled up on his side. A thin stream of drool hung between his mouth and the pillow.

“Dad.” Eric nudged his father’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

Ken rolled over, the line of drool now stretching across his cheek, and opened his eyes. He seemed surprised to be there. From the way his gaze darted around the room, Eric assumed he had no recollection of the night before.

“Where am I?”

“Home,” Eric said. “And you’re going to tell me what really happened between you and Mom.”

Burt Hammond gained consciousness with a can of Mountain Dew and a few slaps to the cheek. The soda came from a vending machine down the hall. Kat provided the slaps. It was the least she could do.

Soon the mayor was back in his chair. He still looked pretty rough, but the color was coming back to his face and the soda was greasing up his vocal cords.

“What do you want?” he asked Kat. “Is this about the police budget? If so, I can do something to get you those patrol cars.”

Kat instantly wanted to slap him again. “Is that what you think this is about? Blackmail?”

“You’ve got the upper hand.”

“I want to know what you saw that night. I don’t give a damn about anything else.”

“And you’re not going to tell anyone else about this?” Burt asked.

Kat shook her head. “Not if you’re honest with me.”

“Fine.” The mayor took a lengthy swig of soda. “I used to mow Lee Santangelo’s lawn. That’s how it started. I became friendly with him. He’d invite me in for a glass of lemonade or let me use their swimming pool to cool down. One day, while I was going for a dip, Lee joined me.”

“How long did it take to get from the pool to the bedroom?” Kat asked.

“Not long,” Burt said.

The ashen shade had returned to his face, and Kat worried that he was going to pass out again. Instead, Burt began to weep, which wasn’t much better. At least she got to slap him when he fainted. With the tears, all she could do was offer him a tissue.

Burt accepted it and wiped his red-ringed eyes. “This is so humiliating.”

“You can skip ahead to the night of the movie,” Kat said. “I don’t need all the details.”

Nor did she want them. She just needed to know what, if anything, Burt Hammond saw on his way to and from the Santangelo residence.

“We set a date,” he said. “The night of the moon landing. I knew about Lee’s past. I figured he’d want to watch it. He said he didn’t care and neither did I.”

“What time did you get there?”

“About ten thirty, I think. I walked there and I wasn’t wearing a watch.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“Not at first,” Burt replied. “I waited in the yard a little bit, trying to muster the courage to go inside. After about five minutes, I saw a man.”

Kat felt another one of those explosive shocks she had experienced earlier when talking to Norm Harper. Only this time, it was less like a grenade and more like an atomic bomb. The effect was an immediate rush of surprise that left her entire body numb. Someone else was on the cul-de-sac that night. Someone that no one but Burt Hammond knew about.

“Did you recognize him?” she asked.

“No. I knew it wasn’t Ken Olmstead and I knew it wasn’t Mort Clark. He was a stranger.”

“Can you describe him?”

“I didn’t get a good look. It was dark and we were both in the shadows.”

“Was he alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did he see you?”

“No. He just milled around in the yard, like he was thinking about going inside but didn’t have the courage.” Burt coughed out an ironic laugh. “I could relate.”

“And that’s everything you saw?”

“Mostly. At one point, he went up to the door and almost knocked but changed his mind. Then he went back to the yard and stood there a while.”

“What I want to know,” Kat said, “is why you didn’t tell the police about it. You saw a strange man on Charlie Olmstead’s street the night he disappeared, yet you said nothing.”

Burt sniffed and looked to the ceiling. He was crying again. “I didn’t think they were related.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I swear. People were saying what happened to Charlie was an accident. I didn’t think there was anything suspicious going on.”

Kat’s fingers instinctively curled into fists as the raw burn of anger built up inside her. She wanted to punch Burt. Hard. More than anything, she wanted to pummel him with her fists and tell him that while he was crying from humiliation, there were six sets of mothers who cried because their boys had vanished. He could possibly have prevented those tears. He might have been able to spare those women—concerned moms like herself—a lifetime of pain and questions. But Burt Hammond had stayed quiet, and Kat wanted to make him hurt because of it.

“Maybe you didn’t know at first,” she said. “But by the next day you had to have heard that people were looking for Charlie Olmstead.”

Burt shook his head. “I didn’t think they were related. Honest to God.”

In a flash, Kat was in front of the mayor, gripping his tie, and pulling his face close to hers. “Admit it, you son of a bitch. You realized it, yet you said nothing, even though you saw a complete stranger waiting outside the Olmstead house.”

The mayor’s face was turning crimson. His mouth opened and closed rapidly, like a fish that had just been tossed onto land.

“You don’t understand,” he gasped. “He wasn’t at the Olmsteads.”

Kat let go of the tie, its silk slithering across her palm as Mayor Hammond fell back into his chair. “What do you mean?”

“I knew about Charlie,” Burt said, smoothing a hand over his neck. “I knew he went missing that night. But I didn’t think the man I saw had anything to do with it.”

“Why not?”

“Because this guy wasn’t anywhere near the Olmstead house.”

Kat’s entire body stiffened. “You said he was waiting around the yard.”

“Yes,” Burt said, still massaging his neck. “But not the Olmsteads’ yard. He was waiting outside Mort and Ruth Clark’s house.”

“This used to be a nice town,” the woman said. “Until the mine fire.”

The man sitting next to her piped up. “Even after that, it was livable. Then the ground started opening up and everything went to hell.”

They were polar opposites, that man and woman. She was short and rail-thin—a series of sharp angles attached to one another. He was large, both in height and girth. When he walked across the room, the entire house trembled. They had been neighbors for years, friendly but not friends. Then their sons disappeared, their spouses soon followed—hers to divorce, his to lung cancer—and Marcy Pulaski and Bill Mason Sr. found themselves with only each other.

It wasn’t the most romantic story Nick had ever heard, and the couple didn’t try to embellish it. They were both clear-eyed about what their relationship was—two people united by loss, grief, and the thinnest of hopes that they’d see their boys again. Now they lived together in half a house, their two lives squeezed together.

The walls were covered with photographs of both Frankie Pulaski and Bucky Mason, as if they had been part of one big, happy family. The furniture was arranged in a similarly haphazard fashion, with chairs that belonged to one clan clashing with the couch from another. Covering it all was a thin layer of gray Nick had at first assumed was dust. It wasn’t until he swiped a finger over the coffee table that he realized it was something worse—soot.

“When did the fire start?”

“Early sixties,” Bill said through his cough. “No one knows the exact date.”

“How did it start?”

According to Marcy, Centralia had been built above a closed anthracite mine. This being Pennsylvania’s coal country, that wasn’t much of a surprise. What did surprise Nick was hearing how the townsfolk decided to use the vacant mine shafts as a landfill and stuff them with trash for decades.

“One day,” Marcy said, “it ignited.”

She told Nick how the fire hit a vein of anthracite, flaring to epic proportions. “Once that happened, the town was a goner. We just didn’t know it yet.”

“They tried to put it out so many times we lost count,” Bill added. “Nothing worked. The fire was too big to be tamed.”

Nick learned that over the next decade, the residents of Centralia played the hand they had been dealt. Life went on as normal, with school, church, work, and play. They noticed the ground becoming increasingly warmer. In winter, snow never stuck to the roads or sidewalks. Still, they soldiered on the best they knew how.

“The first hole opened up in 1971,” Bill Mason said. “It just appeared overnight. A big pit in someone’s backyard spitting out smoke.”

Marcy closed her eyes and shook her head slowly, as if reliving the bad memory. “Another one happened soon after. And then another.”

As the mine fire grew, it started to erode the ground above it. The oxygen from one crevasse only fueled the flames, which led to another crevasse, which spurred the fire on more. And so it went, a vicious cycle that threatened to consume an entire town.

“People started to clear out real quick after that,” Marcy said. “My husband and I talked about leaving, too. We didn’t know where we were going to go. This town was all we knew. But we were worried about Frankie and his safety.”

She stopped to choke back a sob. When Bill Sr. took her hand and gave it a tiny squeeze, Nick thought it might have been the kindest gesture he had ever seen. The two of them may have come together in grief and desperation, but there was true love there. He could tell.

Marcy collected herself enough to talk again. “He went out to play one day. I told him to stay in the yard, but I knew where he was going. Straight to the sinkholes.”

“Weren’t they covered or cordoned off?”

“Some of them were too big to cover,” Marcy said. “They put up some warning signs and wrapped some fence around it, but that didn’t keep the kids out.”

Bill nodded in agreement. “Each new hole in the ground was like catnip to the boys in town. Bucky went to them, too.”

Nick knew he would have done the same thing at that age. To a young boy, a smoking hole in the ground was something exotic and dangerous that broke up the bleakness of life in a coal town. He imagined a whole cluster of kids surrounding it, tossing rocks into its depths and daring each other to scoot closer to the edge. Maybe Frankie and Bucky had gotten too close and tumbled in, but Nick didn’t think that was the case.

“At what point did you think Frankie fell in?”

“Immediately,” Marcy said. “When he didn’t come home for dinner, my first thought was that something bad had happened. A boy in town had fallen through the ground a couple of weeks before. He managed to grab the roots of a nearby tree and yell for help. He got lucky.”

“And the police?” Nick asked. “They thought the same thing?”

Marcy waved a hand in disgust at the mention of the police. “They didn’t know what to think. The first thing they asked me was if I thought Frankie could have run away from home.”

“And could he?”

“He was a happy boy,” she said. “He might not have been the smartest or the most popular kid, but he was happy. And I loved him.”

When she sobbed again, Nick could tell it was sorrow that couldn’t be controlled with a pause and a deep breath. It was a bubble of sadness that rose from deep within. Marcy put a hand over her mouth to stifle it, but it did no good. The sob gurgled out of her until she fled the room, crying.

“It’s still hard to talk about,” Bill said once she was gone. “I know it was a long time ago, but it still hurts.”

Nick knew the feeling well. Most days were fine. Others weren’t. And then there were those dark times when something trivial—hearing his sister’s favorite song on the radio, seeing her favorite color—would bring on a sudden explosion of grief.

“Was it the same way with Bucky?” he asked. “Did the police think he ran away?”

“By that time, no. It was the same situation. He came home from school, went out to play, never came back. But since it happened with Frankie earlier that year, the cops assumed the same thing had happened to Bucky.”