Disappearance at Devil's Rock (25 page)

Tommy passed the coin between his fingers, and said, “Let's talk about something else,” and he went back to talking Minecraft. He wanted to make a Borderland server, and the main trails and area over by the estate was the overworld, plenty of space for creepers and zombies and endermen to roam. No one objected to the reset in conversation topic. Luis suggested that Devil's Rock would be in Nether, and the rock and the tree would be made out of obsidian (blocks you couldn't break), and wither skeletons would spawn from the split. Tommy disagreed and wanted the rock in the overworld to use as his zombie fighting base, of course.

They left when the beer was gone. Luis and Josh climbed down the rock first. Josh's backpack was a maraca filled with empties. He asked where he was going to get rid of them. Luis suggested the pond, but he wasn't serious. Neither noticed that Tommy and Arnold weren't with them. They had stayed behind on top of the rock, standing with the tree between them. Tommy had the seer coin in the palm of his hand, and Arnold pointed at it and they talked. Josh couldn't hear what they were saying. Luis said something under his breath, then shouted up at them.

“Let's go, suckbags!”

Josh wasn't a seer. He wasn't good at making connections and feared that would always be the case. But this was what he knew for certain: He knew that while Luis idolized Arnold, it was fleeting, like rooting for an underdog team that wasn't your team, or a first crush. What Luis felt about Arnold ran too hot and too cold. He'd turn on and abandon Arnold eventually, and likely over a perceived slight. It was different with Tommy, though. Watching the two of them climb down the rock, Josh knew that Tommy would follow Arnold to the ends of the overworld.

I
t's 7
P.M
. There's a pizza box on the stove. Five slices of sausage and mushroom left. Kate walks in the back door, goes straight to the kitchen, and takes a soda can out of the fridge. She says, “I'm not hungry. I ate at Sam's.”

“I know that.” Elizabeth leans against the sink and has her arms crossed, hoping that she can communicate how furious she is without going temporarily insane. Elizabeth doesn't want to start a fight again less than twenty-four hours after the atomic meltdown in Kate's room. “I talked to both Nancy and Josh's mother. If I'm going to let you leave the house by yourself, you can't lie about where you're going.”

“I didn't lie. I went to Sam's house. I just didn't go there first.” Kate says it without conviction and turns away from Elizabeth, an admittance that she knows she's wrong.

“Kate. You can't go off on your own without telling me. Especially not now.”

“I know. I'm sorry, Mom.”

“Thank you. What did Josh have to say?”

“Not a lot.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Why'd you go?”

“I wanted to shoot hoops.”

“And what else?”

“And I wanted to talk to him.” Kate turns back around and brushes the bangs that have fallen out of her ponytail away from her eyes. “Oh, yeah, Josh did tell me that Arnold made that weird nickel and gave him and Tommy those coins.”

“Did Josh tell the police that?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm guessing he didn't. Allison didn't seem to know anything about the coins this morning. Why wouldn't he tell her about something like that?”

“Dunno. Maybe he didn't think it was a big deal.”

Elizabeth fires off a quick e-mail to Allison on her phone. She asks, “Any more ‘oh, yeahs' for me?”

“What?”

“Is there anything else Josh said I need to know?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“Okay. Do you want to know what Allison and I found when you left?”

“Yeah. What'd you find?” Kate stands with her back against the fridge, ramrod straight.

“We didn't find anything.”

“Nothing? No more diary pages?”

“No.”

“Maybe he chucked them. He talked about burning up his first diary, right?”

“Yeah. He did.” Sounds more than reasonable, but she can't tell if
Kate is truly surprised that they didn't find anything more, or relieved, or if she knew all along they'd never find it because she hid them. After giving up the diary and confessing to leaving out the pages, Elizabeth thought for sure Kate wouldn't keep anything else from her. But now Elizabeth has doubts about Kate and the missing diary pages. Maybe Kate has managed to concoct another not-quite-a-lie scenario, like today and her going to Josh's house before going to Sam's house. Either way, she's finding out the truth tonight as she's going to pull an all-nighter.

Kate: “Hey, what did Allison say about that surveillance video after I left? You showed it to her, right?”

“Yeah, but she didn't say much. Didn't really see anything other than the pages on the floor.” Elizabeth has continued to watch the video in private moments, hoping and not hoping to again see the shadow that she saw there on the first viewing. Hoping and not hoping to see the face that's in Tommy's diary somewhere else.

Kate takes a sip from her soda can. She reaches over and lifts the cover of the pizza box and makes a face at the pizza.

Elizabeth says, “I thought you said you weren't hungry.”

“I'm not. Just looking.”

“I can make you something if you want. French toast?”

“I'm good.”

“That was nice of Nancy to give you a ride home. I should've gone out and said hi.”

“There are four news vans out front now. Reporters with cameras and everything came running over when we pulled in the driveway. Nancy was like a superhero and cleared a path for me.”

“That article this morning. It's totally blowing everything up. Have you read it yet?”

“I got the gist from tweets and texts when I was at Sam's. We read them together.”

“Like what? What have people been sending you?”

“It's no big deal.”

“No, no, no. You don't get to do that.”

“Mom. It's not that bad, they're just—”

“What, trolling you?”

Kate smiles at her mother's using of the word
trolling
. “Twitter, yeah, some trolling that I block, whatever. And some kids from school, texting, asking if the rumors about Tommy are true.”

“What rumors?”

“That he was doing bad stuff.”

“Drinking?”

“Yeah. And drugs, and some people were asking if he, like, worshipped the devil, or something, when they went out there in the woods.”

“Jesus, where are people getting this shit? Here I was debating whether or not I was going to say anything to you about other online stuff because my saying something will make you go read it.”

“Read what?”

“I was going to tell you to stay away from the Facebook page. There're some real assholes posting ugly, nasty stuff, and it makes me so angry I can't even think.”

“Tell me.”

“I don't even want to say it out loud. Some of it is kind of like what you saw already with the devil worship stuff, I guess, but worse. They go to awful, hateful places, and . . . Never mind. Just don't go. Please. I shouldn't have mentioned it. I don't want you reading it. I'll deal with that page.”

“Mom. We're in this together.”

Kate's general default setting of loyalty and earnestness has always been a shock to her. Elizabeth had been neither when she was Kate's age. She was angry and rebellious and actively searched for reasons to
be so. She stopped wishing long ago that her daughter would be just like her and think just like her. Instead, Elizabeth now hopes that Kate will never lose that earnestness even as she must harden that outer shell that bruises and cracks so easily.

“We are. But I don't think you should see—”

“Let's go to the page together and then I can show you how to screencap the trolls' comments, tweet them out, you know, and totally shame them publicly.”

“We should probably leave them alone. Ignore them. They'll go away. They don't sound like the most well-adjusted people.”

“Mom, they don't go away. That's why they're trolls.” Kate sounds like she talks from experience, and Elizabeth is overwhelmed by a giant wave of sadness with a riptide strong enough to suck all the unmoored out to sea.

“I'm not feeling up to that right now.”

They go quiet and have a standoff in the kitchen. Each afraid to be the first to move. Kate's phone rings.

“It's Sam. I'm gonna take this.”

“Okay, go ahead.” By the time Elizabeth softly adds, “I'll be in the living room if you want to come out later,” Kate has answered the phone and walks into her bedroom.

Elizabeth paces around the couch twice, then retreats to the dining room and the computer desk instead of the couch. As she waits for the computer to wake out of sleep mode, she flips through one of Tommy's sketchbooks that she brought out with her. It was probably his first one, or the oldest one that he saved, and the drawings (mostly robots and dinosaurs) have a hint of blocky-ness and lack proper proportion, but the talent to come is apparent. You can see it. On the inside cover she stuck the little square piece of duct tape that he'd stuck on his laptop cover over the logo, the one with the hungry cloud
monster doodle. She let Allison take the laptop back to the station. Elizabeth kept the duct tape doodle.

Elizabeth doesn't go to the Find Tommy Facebook page and instead checks her e-mail. Twenty e-mails from the top is an e-mail her mother sent her yesterday. She opens it.

Liz. Found this article about ‘felt presences.' I really think you should read it. Maybe it'll help explain a few things. Love. Mom.

She takes her hand off the mouse and presses down a corner of the duct tape square, which is curling up off the cardboard.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket. It's a text from her mother. She says to herself, “Perfect timing as always.”

Janice's text: “
They're talking about Tommy on Fox News. It's horrible. Please don't watch
.”

For the two millionth time since the ordeal started, everything inside Elizabeth turns into a liquid electricity that rises up into her head before bottoming out, leaving her momentarily hollow, and then all the fear, anxiety, and despair rushes back, and refills her.

She reads the text again and smirks at herself. She'd pulled the same thing with Kate when she'd told her not to go to the Facebook page knowing full well that she would go directly to that page. Janice is telling her not to go watch because she actually wants her to go watch, and then, afterward, she'll have the righteous authority to say
You should've listened. I told you not to watch
.

Elizabeth walks to the couch, on her tiptoes, trying not to be heard moving around again. A practice run for later tonight when Kate is asleep. She turns on the TV and searches the guide for Fox News. It's a standard cable news talk show setup: a middle-aged white guy host with three supposed experts in something, each on their own live feed
from somewhere not in the studio. The experts are two middle-aged white guys and one not-middle-aged blonde woman.

Elizabeth watches them for almost ten minutes. She alternates between writhing in her seat and being statue still, frozen by the horror of the media Medusas as they talk about Tommy's disappearance. They talk about how Tommy comes from a broken home and lament the inexorable disintegration of the traditional family. They quote an anonymous source within the Ames police department saying that Tommy was into “not-so-good stuff” and making terrible decisions. They talk about underage drinking and speculate on drug use and further illegal activities. They talk about the latest report, broken this afternoon by Fox News of course, that cites anonymous classmates of Tommy's who describe him as a loner and obsessed with the zombies and anything related to the occult. They talk about the occult in the context of the rise of atheism. They talk about folklore and Satanism and its potential role in Tommy's disappearance. They talk about the locals seeing a mysterious person or persons walking through their yards and standing in front of their windows at night. They wonder if what's going on in Ames is evidence of a larger satanic cult or conspiracy and they talk about how ‘shadowman' is trending on twitter. They talk about the mysterious man referenced in the
Ames Patch
article. They talk about what kind of relationship Tommy might've had with this person of interest. They call him a person of interest while law enforcement has yet to do so. They talk about pedophilia and other perversions associated with occult activities. They are loud and are almost yelling, sounding like they're arguing with one another, but there is no argument; they're all in agreement. These talking heads do not shy away from further speculation and extrapolation from the facts and nonfacts. It's as though Tommy's disappearance has become a national Rorschach test; they blurt out whatever it is they think they see in the chaotic inkblot. They do not once refer to Tommy as
someone who needs help, and the only descriptors they use are “misguided” and “perhaps deeply troubled.”

Elizabeth shuts off the television. Instead of burrowing under the couch cushions or sprinting out the front door and going house to house smashing TV screens, she writes a text to her mother.

I shouldn't have watched. I'm going to put my fist through the TV screen.

Janice:
I know. It's awful. I'm coming back down tomorrow. Leaving here at noon. Need me to pick anything up?

Elizabeth sends her a list of groceries. As she types
milk 1%
and
diet soda
and
1 lb turkey
and
cheese
and
bread
she wonders how it was she got here, to this particular moment; calmly texting an ordinary grocery list seconds after shutting off a national cable news show discussing the evils of her missing son.

She goes back to the computer. Her e-mail box has twenty new e-mails since she last checked ten minutes ago, most of which are notifications of posts and messages on the Find Tommy Facebook page. She returns to the e-mail her mom sent last night and clicks on the article link.

The article is hosted on a new long-form essay site, the kind that people link to on social media even though they probably have read only the headline and the first paragraph. She wonders if her mother has read the whole thing.

The article is about Third Man Factor or Syndrome; a widely reported phenomenon of a ghost, spirit, or what the author calls a “felt presence” that appears during a traumatic, terrifying, or stressful experience. These presences are often described as formless shadows. The article includes a brief summary of perhaps the most famous Third Man account: that of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. With their boat frozen in the ice, Shackleton and two other men trekked for thirty-six hours across a mountain and glacier-filled South Georgia to
a whaling station. The three men barely survived the harrowing trip, spending weeks convalescing in a hospital afterward. Shackleton and his crewmates reported that a mysterious fourth man had joined them and had walked silently alongside during the latter stages of the trek. The mysterious man never spoke, but his presence was a comfort and helped to keep them moving forward. When Shackleton and his companions finally arrived at the whaling station the mysterious man was gone. Shackleton's experience inspired lines in T. S. Eliot's
The Wasteland
that refer to a “third man” always and mysteriously accompanying two others as they walk down a road. It's the lines in that poem for which Third Man Syndrome is named.