The Creeping (28 page)

Mr. Talcott and his police escort reach the top of the stairs, and the beast of the mob cries louder, working itself into a tizzy. Jeanie's dad's shoulders are hunched, and he's being careful not to look anywhere but at his shoes. Someone in the crowd throws a full soda can at him; it thuds loudly between his shoulder blades. Zoey comes out of nowhere, elbowing and kicking to make her way to my side. Her hand slips into mine; her bony fingers make me braver. The crowd writhes and cackles as Mr. Talcott stumbles to regain his balance.

In that faltered step, in the instant I see the yellow and
violet stains on his face from where people—probably neighbors he's shared meals and laughs with—attacked him, it hits me. There's only one thing I can do.

I grab for the blond reporter's microphone, wrenching it from her faux orange grip, and yell at the top of my lungs, “I remember what happened. It wasn't Jeanie's dad. Jeanie's dad is innocent.”

I
t's amazing how quickly the fury drains out of the crowd. One minute the mob is an angry beast, and the next they're sheepish adults looking nervously around like they hope no one will remember that they were here.

Once I scream the lie I look to Zoey, for I don't know what. She inclines her head almost imperceptibly, and I know that I did the only thing I could have, the thing she would have done. The police find us, and we're propelled forward through the now docile crowd. I gulp one last breath of fresh air before being ushered into the courthouse.

Mr. Talcott sits against the far wall, slumped on a wooden bench, red hair sticking to his sweaty forehead, still flanked by cops. The officers turn toward me, mouths twisted as they watch me, noses scrunched like my lie reeks. And then I spot Daniel.

Daniel's dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a button-down shirt, like he's going to homecoming or a funeral. He's nodding, arms crossed against his chest and speaking under his breath to a paunchy
older guy clad in a suit and the kind of spectacles my father wears. A wash of relief and I sink back onto my heels. He's probably already told the police everything Sam told him. They know about the generations of missing redheads, and they've likely sent a patrol car out to Mrs. Griever. She'll give a statement, an official one this time, and Mr. Talcott will be home for dinner.

I step forward, lips forming Daniel's name. But then Shane, who pushes through the crowd of uniforms, comes to rest at Daniel's side, clapping a hand on his shoulder. I hang back uneasily, struck dumb. The thinly veiled distrust that Shane has always had for Daniel—my restraining order against Daniel had even been Shane's idea—is gone. In its place is a fatherly smile, an encouraging bob of his head, and a thumbs-up. Gradually, I recognize the man in the suit as a lawyer with the courthouse, one who prosecutes criminals rather than defends them. But ultimately it's the fact that Mr. Talcott is in shackles and Daniel is getting a pat on the back that sets off a keening siren in my head.

Shane starts toward me. “Stella, what's going on?” he asks tersely. “This is serious,” he adds just in case I'm a total moron and the least observant person on earth.

“I think she gets that,” Zoey says saucily, hands on her hips.

“What is Daniel doing here?” I ask, craning my neck to catch his eye. We're fifteen feet apart, but I can't seem to snag his attention.

“Not here, Stella,” Shane warns.

I look from Shane to Daniel, the earth abruptly tilting under my feet. Shane protecting Daniel from me rather than
me
from Daniel. “I said,
what is Daniel doing here?
” I raise my voice.

Shane frowns down at me. “That's official police business.”

I toss my hair over my shoulders and glare at him until his resolve falters. He lets out a puff of air. “Daniel's giving us a statement. As you can see, his father's been taken into custody, and Daniel's corroborated our evidence.”

Shane's words are like the shriek and hiss of a machine seizing right before it breaks down. I shake my head. “Corroborate? Daniel knows his dad didn't do anything. Daniel went to the police station to tell you guys that, right? To tell you what's really going on.”

Shane crosses his arms in a lousy attempt to look official. “The details of his testimony are confidential.”

I move to go around Shane, but he catches my arm. “Daniel,” I shout, struggling against his grasp. Through gritted teeth Shane pleads under his breath for me not to make a scene. Finally, Daniel looks up, features sharp, clean-shaven chin set. “Sam found a picture of all of us in the woods before Jeanie went missing,” I call. “We were out there looking for something.” He keeps his eyes on me. His irises are usually the same tie-dye of green and brown as mine, but today they're darker. He tilts his head. For a brief, half-confused moment I think he's glaring at me. But I'm wrong, because why would he be angry with me? “Griever was right. Your dad has nothing to do with this. There's something bigger going on.”

Daniel takes a step forward. “The only thing going on is that my dad killed my mom and sister,” he says, his voice dead, features slack. But the Daniel I know is a rabid animal: boundlessly suspicious,
quicker to bite than bark, and definitely too feral for the lavender shirt he's wearing and the close shave.

I'm hot-faced as more and more sets of eyes focus on me. “Don't you remember what we were doing in the woods?” I try.

The lawyer with the pillowy middle rests his hand at Daniel's elbow and begins to usher him away, giving me a sideways look of disapproval. “I don't know what she's talking about,” Daniel says, hushed.

Desperate, I yell at his back, “We were hunting monsters. You told Jeanie it could leave the woods, remember?” The gentle hum of conversation in the hall goes quiet. I lunge forward to go after Daniel, but Shane holds me in place.

“Not here,” Shane whispers harshly in my ear. I reluctantly look away from Daniel's retreating figure. “We need to speak in private.”

Shane's hand is replaced by Zoey's arm looped in mine. “Stella isn't giving her statement until her father, her
lawyer
, is here,” she says icily.

Shane's face deepens a few shades, and he opens his mouth—probably to have Zoey arrested. I cut him off. “She's right.” I try hard not to flinch at the hurt obvious in his eyes.

He takes a long breath and says, “You're a minor, so I can't question you without your dad's permission anyway. But we can speak, just me and you, off the record. Anything you say will stay between us.”

Zoey shakes her head adamantly, but I nod. After five minutes
of her protesting, she finally relents and slouches against the wall, dropping to the ground, letting loose a string of curse words that make the nearby police blush.

I follow Shane down a beige corridor, carpets and walls the same drab color, fluorescent lights sighing like they're alive, until we find an empty office.

“Start talking,” he orders after I sit. And I do. I tell him everything—minus my plan to trespass tonight on Old Lady Griever's land—and he listens.

When I'm finished, I fold my hands neatly in my lap and try to look as sane and believable as possible.

He leans forward, elbows resting on knees, blue bags bulging under his eyes. “I understand why you think there's something else going on here. What you've recounted for me are a lot of strange occurrences, and I agree that it seems too much to be coincidence. But Stella, this is me. I know you. If you told this story to any of the department's other detectives, they'd think you were on drugs or a kid looking for attention. They'll call the memories hallucinations from stress or dismiss them as the products of an active imagination.”

“What about Daniel? Whatever he said, he's confused. It's this town. Everyone convinced that his dad did it. It got to him. He's been helping us figure out what happened. He's been searching for Jeanie's body. I know he'll remember hunting in the woods. If you would just talk to him again.”

Shane sits back in his chair and eyes his wristwatch. “Set aside the fact that you lied to me—to the police—about knowing Daniel
was back in town. There's nothing I can do to stop this. Kent Talcott confessed, and he's going before a judge in fifteen minutes.”

“N-no,” I stammer. “Your officers are wrong. He wouldn't have confessed to something he didn't do.”

He tilts forward, sticking his face right in mine. “I'm the one who took his confession.” He thumps his fist to his chest. “Me. Late last night. He pled guilty to all three charges. Jeanie, Bev Talcott, and Jane Doe. He says she was a runaway in the park. We still haven't identified her. But he knew about the finger bone. There are numerous Indian burial grounds in Blackdog. It's something he came across; nothing more than a little misdirection to throw us off his trail.”

I whip my head back and forth. “Don't you get it? I told Daniel about the finger bone. Daniel knows. He must have told his dad. Daniel knows about her scalp, too. He knows everything.”

“Stella, there isn't even going to be a trial by jury, only a sentence agreed to by his defense attorney, the prosecution, and the judge. Daniel came to the station the night before last. He wanted us to know he's been in town and investigating the murders himself. He came back to the station with his dad when Kent turned himself in. Verified that his dad doesn't have an alibi for the window of time our medical examiners say Jane Doe and Bev Talcott were murdered. Do you hear me? Jeanie's father murdered her.”

I close my fingers around the chair legs to brace myself. Here Shane is, with a perfectly gruesome but reasonable explanation, the story of a bad man who preys on children, whose own son believes he's guilty. It's the kind of explanation I need so that I don't have to
believe in what can't possibly exist. I want to pounce on it, swallow it to ease the itch of dread, shove it down Sam's throat so we can both be free from what lurks in the woods. But I can't. My blood sings that it's a lie.

My gaze is level with Shane's. “What about hunting monsters? What about all the missing little girls? Don't you see? It couldn't be one man.” My chin set, I'm aware of the flurry of fear in the back of my head. “You said that kids see monsters everywhere.” I stare steely-eyed at him. “What if there was something to see? What if I saw it?”

His eyes half-lidded with exhaustion, Shane settles back. He rubs the heels of his hands over his eyelids. “I'm sure whatever you saw that day was unspeakable. A sick man hurting his child. Bad enough for your mind to hide the memory away where it couldn't hurt you. But that's all it was.” His whole face crinkles with the pain of saying it. “Kid, there's no magic, no monsters, no mystery, no demons, except for Mr. Talcott's.” Pity softens his eyes, and his words are delicately spoken. I can feel myself becoming someone else—a victim—sitting across from him. Tim Shane has never treated me like I'm glass already veiny with fractures. I want to crawl out of my skin to escape it now. I want to shout and riot until I've broken everything in the room so he can see how strong I am.

“Have I ever told you about my grandmother?” he says.

My mouth purses, and I shake my head once.

“My grandma, my dad's mother, used to scare us kids to bed with stories when she visited us in Florida. She grew up here, in these woods.” He's quiet for a full minute, eyes focused on the space behind
me, head tilted like he's watching phantoms play on the wall. Then he sighs. “How much do you know about Minnesota's history?”

“We studied state history freshman year,” I say, letting my own thoughts stray from this frustrating beige room. I can still feel the warmth of Sam's knees grazing my lower back as he sat behind me in class. I fake smiled at him every time he spoke to me in Mr. Flint's fifth period, but it made something quiver deep in me when his jeans touched the inch of bare skin between my waistband and shirt's hem.

“Okay, so you know that in the seventeenth century fur traders from France came to this territory for a time, and then a couple hundred years later there was an influx of Scandinavian pioneers who settled here.” He pauses, and I nod. “But hundreds of years before, a group of Norse explorers sailed across the Atlantic, navigated the rivers, and settled in this spot. The Norse are descendants of the Vikings.” I search my mind for the story. Something about it tugs at threads here and there, but they fray when I try to follow.

“It started with one of their children waking up with the tip of a finger nibbled off to its knuckle. At first the Norse were certain that a starving rat attacked him. But a few days go by and another wakes screaming, a few of his toes gnawed off.”

I swallow hard.

“The settlement descends into chaos. The Norse think the children have been bewitched by natives living in the hills and that they're hurting themselves. You see, for generations before the Norse landed here, the Chippewa tribe made this land their home. But when the Norse showed up, they ran the Chippewa out of their village. It made
sense to the Norse that the natives would seek revenge. They believed the tribe to have supernatural powers. To stop the magic, they round up the entire tribe and burn them alive. Toss them into a mass grave.”

“Your grandma told you bedtime stories about this?” I press my back against the chair.

“Imagine her stories when she really wanted to frighten us,” he says, the corner of his mouth curving into a smirk that fades as he gets back to the story. “But then a child wakes up screaming from an attack with his nose bitten from his face, and the settlers realize that it wasn't the natives or their magic. There's a creature from the hills that's feasting on the children. A beast.
A monster.
”

Rubbing his thumbs along his jawline, he continues, hushed, “Panic spreads. More and more children wake up noseless, fingerless, toeless. They try to escape the creature and give up on the new land. The Norse return to their longships and set sail for home.”