Following Christopher Creed (18 page)

"I know I can find my brother this way. I can use quantum thought to bring Chris back."

Hearing that made me draw a line in the sand. I believed in the power of my own thoughts to bring me good results. He believed—

"I touch this tree, and I focus, and a lot of the time I can get an image in my head of where my brother is. I have gotten his attention. I have made him think of me. I'm drawing him back to me."

"What is he doing?" whispered RayAnn, close to me.

I scowled at the sky, which was now dark with cloud cover, making it seem more like sundown than three-something. It didn't feel like rain, but I suddenly felt nervous and a little foolish. I settled on sarcasm. "I think he's being a loadie."

T
HE ONE THING
I
DIDN'T DOUBT,
due to personal experience, was that if I got too close to Justin, he would sense my skepticism. A part of me related—this place could make you believe weird things were true—but he was carried away, and I was afraid the results could be devastating to him.

But he didn't sense my negative energy. In fact, he beckoned me closer. I didn't move, and he didn't seem to notice that either.

"I'm not always good at this," he confessed, shutting his eyes tighter while clutching the trunk. "You've had your personality tests, and I've had mine. Getting diagnosed as bipolar started with a symptom that kept getting me in trouble in school. When my mind races, I can't slow down and observe things like other people do. I can't tell when I'm hurting people's feelings and when I'm being inappropriate. They say most people learn that just from watching others' responses to them. I ... don't watch. So, the fact that this has even worked for me a few times—that I can see details of a person I'm not even looking at—is utterly amazing."

"Okay..." I said, though "utterly fictional" seemed more reasonable. "What exactly have you done?"

"I
saw
him. It was
not
my imagination. I had never seen this place before, had no reason to throw it into my own head. It was just a big, dark room filled with guys. Looked like an army barracks. Lots of guys' voices..."

"Looked like an army barracks," I parroted. It kind of reminded me of psychics always saying things like "You'll find the missing person in a watery grave." Pacific, Atlantic, Lake Superior always seemed to be missing among the details.

"What did he look like?" I settled on.

"I don't know. It's more like ... I was
in him.
I was seeing the place through his wet eyes. He was crying about something. I think his soul reaches out when he's upset. Because this other time I saw him, he was also crying. This is why I don't tell my friends much. They'd think he was some sort of a ghost if they heard this one. But one time I felt like I was seeing though his eyes, he was passing through a cemetery. He was reading all the names on the tombstones."

I felt a little weird. Memories charged through me—of seeing the trees under the glow of a white moon last night, of Kobe Lydee calling upon the dead, of RayAnn seeing lightning come from the ground, of my mother manifesting in a terribly abusive dream...

I found myself framing out the edges of the field, far off, and into the darkened woods, looking for—

Stop,
my generally stable mind shouted to me.
Stop and find common sense here.

"Justin. Stop obsessing and talk to me."

"About what?" He opened his red eyes and watched me. Skepticism must have been written all over my face, because he said, "What? You think I'm being a loadie, right? You can think what you want. But two weeks after I did this last time, I got two e-mails from my brother, and I hadn't heard from him in five years."

I so wanted to get a look at them, but that was for later. "I'm not trying to put a damper on this, Justin. But let's stop ignoring the elephant in the living room. What drugs were you on?"

"Listen," he said defensively, "the laws of quantum thought will work for anyone. It's like falling out of an airplane. Whether you're a good person or a bad person, drunk, sober, or anything else, you will hit the ground. When you have a strong wish—"

"Were you all drugged out?" I repeated.

"No..." he countered with a halfhearted stab at patience, and he surprised me: "I'm a little drugged out
now.
That night was before my rampage started. In fact, that night
brought on
my drug rampage, because I was desperate to get it back ... get those visions back. Get more e-mails..."

Okay
...I rolled my eyes, which he couldn't see due to my glasses, but he couldn't have missed the sigh. I figured a little disappointment now might help prevent a deluge of it in the future. I tried to keep my voice even. "Here's my
biggest
problem with what you're saying. I believe I can manage
myself
better with positive thinking, which is natural and normal. What you're saying is that you can manage
others.
The problem is that others have desires, too."

"You think ... I imagined this because I was getting manic," he suggested, which also was a possibility, but it hadn't been my thought. He just didn't get it.

"No, I think you're being a Creed. Whether it was your mom out here today, or your brother disappearing, or you feeling like you're going to get your brother back no matter what ... It's always about
that person's
needs. To hell with everyone else. Your brother
needed
to disappear. Didn't you get that from Adams's story? From your own life? It might serve
your
needs to get him to come out of hiding, but what about
his
needs? Your mom feels one thing, that she's going to find out where you are and seize control of the situation, Justin. The fact that you're probably better off without her while you're trying to get a grip is utterly lost on her. What about
your
needs? Honest to God, I've never seen a family more likely to self-destruct."

"We're selfish," he breathed, his eyes darting from side to side.

"You just don't think, that's all. I highly doubt Chris was thinking about the reverb his disappearance would cause all over this town. As for you, look at yourself, knocking on our motel room door in the middle of the night."

"What about it?" His eyes burned through me defensively. "Would you have preferred I slept out here when I heard thunder?"

"No. But what were you thinking when you did it? Were you thinking of the jolt that would go through two travelers, hearing that pounding at four a.m., in something akin to the Bates Motel?"

He shook his head slowly, and I could see his mind working, trying to make sense of this.

"Well?"

"I ... thought it was funny," he said, his eyes twinkling once before fading out. "Make a grand entrance..."

"Do you see what I'm saying? You were thinking about
Justin. Justin
is not the center of the universe."

"Well, neither is my brother!" he yelled, and banged on the tree with his fist.

"No, he's not," I agreed. "But who in your family is going to be the first to break the I-I-me-me cycle before it continues to spread all over town? Who's the strongest?"

I'd sensed since he'd approached the tree that his racing mind was defeating the effects of the dulling weed. He went on almost too quickly to think of something this clever: "Do you mean between the drunken, bipolar mom, the druggie, bipolar kid, the autistic man incapable of getting emotionally involved in anything, or the whips-and-chains punk?"

My grin returned. "And don't forget the brother who's a vacuum ... with the suspected hint of autism."

"How could I forget
him?
" His eyes filled up, which I wasn't sure was such a bad thing.

I was hoping Justin might find moderation, quit going for the energy-charged manipulation tricks, and maybe give his brother's return up to the Higher Power.

But Justin hadn't been in rehab very long. He should not have signed himself out, I suddenly became aware of again, as his determination slipped behind some blackened, pent-up rage that maybe I should have been more prepared to see. Bipolars can jump to outrage quickly, ac
cording to some website I'd scanned for class. He screamed loud enough to draw RayAnn up to me again, both hands on my shoulders, all but propping me up.

"It's
not
going to be me this time! It's
always
me! I'm the one stuck doing
everything!
You have no idea what I have been through, you dumb-ass! I hate you!" He popped me in the chest with all ten fingers, but I was too numb to feel it. "I don't know why I wanted to come home to help you!"

"Justin—" I watched helplessly as he turned and ran off toward the path.

"Chase him—" I said to RayAnn, then held on to her hand in case she tried to. He might accidentally hurt her.

But RayAnn's fingers were dug into my shoulders, and I sensed she was looking in another direction.

"We've got other problems," she murmured.

Justin turned back and shouted, "It's
me
people ought to be writing about! Not my stupid, runner brother, you stupid—"

Suddenly he froze, too, looking past my shoulder, where I sensed RayAnn was looking. I turned, somewhere in my mind hearing her cell phone camera clicking away.

It was like lightning coming up from the ground, as if a bolt of lightning were buried and trying to make its way out.

The corpse I saw last night thrust itself to the front of my brain, and in the flashes of light I saw it across the field, standing straight up, its jaw unhinged, its teeth bared in that forever vacated smile of the dead.

"Darla—" came out of my mouth, and I fought to keep from swaying as Justin came up behind me again. The light was gone now, almost as if it had fulfilled its purpose and imploded into some mysterious black void. I thought I saw a line of smoke lingering, then decided it was my imagination.

"Did you
see that?
" he demanded.

He ran as far as the swampy area, probably loaded with snakes, and then stopped. His body slumped as he leaned his head in his hands. I forced myself to stay put, to not run to him, and to hear what RayAnn had to say about this.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I'm great," I said, though my breathing was out of control, like a whizzing firework on the Fourth of July. "What'd you see?"

"You just said the name Darla," she said with a tone implying that it was crazy. I didn't know how to answer. Hallucination? No, Justin saw it, too, and I'd never dropped acid—

She stuck the camera under my face, though it was hard to notice all the details of her fifteen shots while Justin was screaming, "Chris! Chris! I see you, man! Come out!"

RayAnn's iPhone could take HD images. I watched as she flashed them, illuminating beautiful flashes of lightning, crystal clear in the tiny frame. Jolts, forks, no skeletal remains, and certainly no Chris Creed. She watched as I did.

"I only saw lightning," she said. "That's it. Same as last night."

Justin was still screaming, "
Chris! Come ba-ack!
"

"What do we have here?" I stumbled. Because I was thinking of Torey Adams's mom saying, "These woods make a body see ... what a body wants to see..."

J
USTIN CHARGED ACROSS THE SWAMPY PART
of the lightning field to get to "his brother," deaf to our screams of warning. Saltwater swamps in Jersey are snake pits, and though he appeared to get all the way across to the woods on the other side, we were not manic enough to try it.

So we did the five-minute walk to the car in maybe four, drove into a few cul-de-sacs on Route 9 before getting the right street, and parked on the other side of the lightning field. I took Lanz this time for his good sniffer. There were five trails, and when we finally found the one that backed up to the lightning field, there was no sign of Justin—or anything, for that matter, except woods and a foundation of what appeared to have once been an old farmhouse.

It was, by then, after four o'clock. I tried not to worry about Justin, but it was hard. I wanted to kick his hairbrained butt—his first and then his mother's for trying to manipulate him home for his much-needed dose of medication.

Let him go,
I told myself. He'd found his way to rehab; he'd found his way home many nights before, sometimes far more loaded than he was now. To search for him any further would be to become part of his family's illness.

I felt frustrated as RayAnn and I looked down the list of townspeople we'd hoped to contact, including the principal and the mayor. Now it was probably too late. Our flight took off at eleven tomorrow morning, which meant we had to be at the airport at nine, had to leave here by seven to return the car, etc. It was a tough decision: Do we run around trying to get people to talk to us, or do we stake out the Adams residence? I felt pretty sure that Adams might eat dinner with his family, but he would probably go out at some point to visit the Richardson clan, meet Ali, or at least go to CVS for something he forgot to pack. I could approach him nicely and see if I could sweet-talk him into an interview. We decided on the stakeout.

We got "shorties" from the Wawa, this miraculous hoa
gie Adams had written about, for which there was no counterpart in the Midwest. Starved, we sucked the juice of onions, provolone cheese, and maybe four different types of ham while parked at the edge of a patch of woods that separated the Adams house from the road. I couldn't see if his mother had returned from the airport, as they had a garage without windows and were orderly enough to keep the cars behind doors.

As the sun set, woods loomed before me in all directions.

"Okay. So what
was
that?" I asked again as we sat in the car.

RayAnn stared out over the dashboard. "I surfed for strange lightning occurrences last night until I was cross-eyed. I need my hard drive at home. I need my password vault so I can get into specific databases.
National Geographic
would be a start, though my family subscribes to maybe twenty different scientific journals."