THE LAST BOY (32 page)

“I don’t really know. Somewhere in the Danby State Forest. I think off the Comfort Road Extension. You’d really have to talk to Marge. Say, what's this all about, anyhow? I mean the police and—”

“Mind if I hang on to this for a while?” asked Tripoli, moving toward the door. Behind him the man was turning off lights and locking up. He followed Tripoli out.

“By any chance has it got anything to do with that Driscoll boy disappearing?”

Tripoli shrugged, avoiding the question.

“I hear the kid's pretty amazing.”

“I guess so,” said Tripoli finally.“So they say.”

Late that night, as Molly sat alone in the kitchen, the table lit by a narrow cone of light, there was a sudden downpour just as Danny promised. As the rain beat down on the roof, she struggled to focus on the work spread before her, but her mind kept drifting off; nagging thoughts about Danny kept stealing into her consciousness. She recalled the old days, the days before Danny had disappeared, before he had lost his childish innocence.

She went to the shelf, took down the photo album, and began leafing through the forgotten pages. There was Danny a week old, his face still scrunched up. She turned a page and now he was as a toddler in diapers standing with his little, chubby legs stuck into her tall boots, laughing at the silliness of it. Then, Danny at his birthday party, standing on a chair so he could blow out the three candles. His
cheeks were puffed up with air, and there were little faces gathered around him, watching. What happened to the little boy she had known? She continued leafing through the album, the pictures of his early life cascading before her. She lovingly touched the photo of a beaming Danny with his first fish, caressed another of him dog-paddling in the shallows of the lake, splashing to stay afloat. Always that guileless, carefree little boy with no secrets. Danny at the Apple Festival. Danny at…

Molly didn’t realize she was crying until she saw the wet splotches on the snapshots. She dabbed at the spots, trying to blot up her tears and ended up marring the photos, leaving indelible blotches on the shiny surfaces.

Marge Tillson was a busy woman. She had two showings of a new listing, an open house in the afternoon and a late-day closing.

“Like I told your detective,” said Marge when Tripoli called her at home in the morning,“I’d love to help you, but there's no way I can reschedule. Is it life-threatening or could we just do this around dinnertime?”

Tripoli relented and agreed to meet her at dinnertime on the Comfort Road Extension where the dirt road hit the Danby Forest. At the appointed time, he was sitting on the hood of his car sipping from a can of Sprite when Marge pulled up.

She was a big-breasted woman in her late forties, bristling with energy. “I’ve got to warn you that I don’t know how much help I can be.” She sat with the door open, changing out of her heels into a pair of hiking boots. She took off her realtor's jacket and tossed it onto the passenger seat. “In fact, I’m not sure I can even quite remember where…”

They climbed a series of ridges. The horseflies were unbearable, and Tripoli kept crushing them on his neck. They didn’t seem half as interested in Marge.

“I was following a pair of pilleated woodpeckers. They had a nest right down there and…let me see…I was walking.”

“You’re now sure it was this creek?”

“Well, pretty sure…Wait! There. I found it right over there.”

Tripoli went over. The stream was now but a trickle. He could see that someone had moved rocks: there was still a deep hole in the dried silt.

“When I dug it out, I thought it was really old and valuable. That's why I took it over to the Hinkley,” she explained as Tripoli's eyes scanned up the sloping waterway. From the looks of things, it seemed to Tripoli that the pitchfork had washed down while the water was high. Maybe in the late fall or early spring.

“I’m going to follow this stream,” he said turning back to her. “Think you can make it back out on your own?”

“No problem. I’m used to hiking. Hey, do you think this is connected with that missing boy and the old hermit?”

“Who said that?”

“You kidding?” Marge let out a loud guffaw that echoed through the woods. “Everybody is talking about it. It's the biggest thing to happen since that Cessna crashed into that house in Lansing. And that was one of my listings!”

Molly finished work late that day. There wasn’t much time for the usual hike, so she took Danny out to the ornithology lab at nearby Sapsucker Woods. They parked at the entrance near the pond and walked in along the looping trails. Dusk was approaching, and the air was filled with a cacophony of sounds as the waterfowl on the pond chased each other, flapping wings and screeching. Overhead, the tree dwellers busily chirped and fluttered back and forth in the woodland canopy, utilizing the last remnants of daylight for feeding and breeding and nest building.

Molly clutched Danny's hand as they walked along the path. His
head was tilted back, his eyes searching the high branches. He made an odd noise, “Eeeerk-Eeeerk-Eeeerk,” and the birds actually seemed to be answering him.

By the time they neared the pavilion, the sun was resting just on the lip of the horizon, flooding the landscape in a shower of yellowish-red. Everything glowed with warmth. They stood together on the deck overlooking the water. The evening was soft, and a faint wind was soughing out of the west, singing through the pines and deciduous trees.

“Funny,” said Molly,“I’ve always been so busy doing the laundry and trying to make a living that I never really stopped to see how beautiful all this is.” She felt a chill run up her spine and couldn’t resist kissing Danny. He looked up at her with love brimming in his eyes and squeezed her hand.

They shared a long moment of silence. Molly observed him as he peacefully gazed down into the water, intently watching a dense school of baby fish moving like a cloud below them. Finally Molly broke the silence.“What else did the old man tell you, besides about listening?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He shook his head and then looked up at her.“Stuff like you shouldn’t hurt people or other living things.”

“That sounds nice.”

“He talked about footsteps on the forest floor.”

“Footsteps,” she echoed.

“Yes. How you shouldn’t use things up. Or wear things out. Like the bunny rabbit that leaves footprints in the snow. And then, when the snow melts, it's just like the rabbit wasn’t ever there.”

“That's a beautiful thought,” she said, genuinely touched.

She began to walk on, but Danny remained behind, standing where they had stopped.

“Come on,” she gently urged and noticed how Danny seemed to be staring off into the distance. He seemed fixed on some
memory of pleasure, something that moved him to longing, she thought, with regret.

Upstream, the creek seemed to go on forever. Tripoli struggled to trace its path as it meandered through tangled brush and under-growth. With the light in the dense forest quickly failing, he decided finally to give up. Breaking off branches to mark the trail as he left, he made his way back to his car. Immersed in thought, he slowly drove back down into the valley and then, for no apparent reason, took a detour to Sapsucker Woods.

Molly's old car stood alone in the parking lot and Tripoli pulled up beside it. He got out and waited. A bank of clouds had moved in and a few light drops started to fall. Tripoli felt grungy and tired, and the cool rain felt soothing on his hot, bug-bitten skin.

A few minutes later Molly and Danny came wandering back toward the car.

“Hi, Trip!” exclaimed Danny. He ran up to greet him, wrapping his arms around Tripoli's waist.“Did you see my garden?”

“Yeah, the last time I was there I was really impressed.”

“No, I meant
now.
All the plants. Everything's much bigger!”

“Well, I’m coming over,” He ruffled the boy's hair and glanced over at Molly, who looked surprised to see him.

“How’d you know we were here?”

“Intuition,” he said, though the truth was that he didn’t know, couldn’t have known. It must have been sheer coincidence.

“Boy, you look a mess.” She began pulling burrs and nettles from his sleeve; ran her fingers through his hair, combing out fragments of leaves.“Where on God's earth have you been?”

“Oh, playing in the woods,” said Tripoli. Danny laughed.“And I found something really neat. Take a look.” He popped the trunk of his car.

Danny came around the back of the car, but when he saw the
pitchfork his head jerked sharply, and almost immediately he looked away. His face flushed and he started nervously licking his lips. Tripoli watched him through the corner of his eye. One look and Molly knew where it had come from.

“Pretty nice, isn’t it, Daniel?” Tripoli persisted, hefting it in his hand.

“I suppose so,” Danny said, drifting steadily away from the car.

Molly waited, still staring at the tool.

“So,” she whispered sharply when Danny was finally out of earshot,“you know where he is?”

“Not quite.” He hedged and could see from her expression that she was let down. “But this takes us right to his doorstep.”

He explained how Sisler turned up this lead at the Hinkley Museum, about Marge Tillson finding it, and his own search up the stream in the Danby Forest.

“Don’t you see,” he put his arm around her.“I’m so close I can almost feel the guy's breath. Please,” he said. “Try to trust me. Danny's safe. We’ve still got a guy posted at your place.”

She pulled away.“You going to post someone at work, too? And someone trailing us in the supermarket when I go shopping?”

“If need be.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. And how much longer before they pull your guys off that detail?”

“Then I’ll sleep over.”

“Thanks but no thanks.”

“I don’t get it,” he said looking hurt.“What's come between us?”

“Nothing. Nothing but this guy who sunk his claws in my kid. He may have done Danny some good. I’d have to be completely blind not to see that. But that old bastard stole his innocence. Put all this end-of-the-world crap into his head.” She balled her right hand into a fist. “And for that I really resent him. For what he put me through. And keeps putting me through.”

Tripoli put the pitchfork back into his car as Danny wandered to the other car.

“I just want you to get him,” she said under her breath.“Just get him before he gets Danny.”

On the morning that Mildred Oltz and her husband were killed in a head-on crash, Wally Schuman called Tripoli at his office.

“I heard about the pitchfork,”Wally said.

“You and half the county.” It was a lousy, hot day, and Tripoli was in a foul mood.

“You know it's been almost two months now.”

“So, you’re keeping score, too? We’ll get the old man, don’t worry. It's just a matter of—”

“That's not the only thing that interests us.”

“Us?”

“The paper. We’re thinking of another piece. A feature, really. It's a pretty incredible story.”

Tripoli didn’t like the direction the conversation was going. He was thinking of Danny and Molly. Schuman's article had been full of conjecture and wild speculation. Molly didn’t need more people bugging her about Danny. The last thing she needed was more public attention.“Whatta you say we just leave it alone for a while? Cut the mother and kid some slack.”

“Come on, Lou, we can’t just sit on a story like this. The whole town's buzzing about it. You can’t even go in and get a burger without hearing about it.”

“About
what?
”

“The boy, of course. Danny. I’m telling you, the kid can do all
kinds of amazing things.

“Hey, just hold on!”

“And the old man—”

Tripoli cut him short.“You mean the kidnapper.”

“I talked to Danny myself,” Schuman pushed on.“He's extraordinary. That little boy can read like an adult. And when you speak to him…well, you have the strange sense that he's in touch with life in a way that we never are.”

“I think you’re getting a little carried away.” Absently, Tripoli picked up a cold cup of coffee sitting on his desk; the cream had already gone sour. Not knowing what to do with the mouthful, he ended up swallowing it.

“I heard about that meteor.”

For an instant, Tripoli was stunned into silence. Was Molly foolishly talking about it at work? Or was it Rosie? Yeah, had to be Rosie, who was something of a motor mouth. Damn!

“How’d you know about that?”Tripoli blurted out the question before he realized he was simply confirming the story.

“Oh, we have our sources,” Wally chuckled. “Listen, the main reason I called is…you know that picture Danny drew for the juvie shrink? We heard you’re still holding it in evidence.”

Tripoli thought about the Troopers and Matlin and the slugs working in the Sheriff's office. None of them were any help.“And you want to run it, is that it?”

“Well…yes.”

Tripoli weighed the matter. It was obvious the
Journal
was going to publish their story regardless of what he did or said.

“Okay. Sure.” Well, he thought, if it helps catch the Hermit. “Yeah, why not? The deal is, however, that you stop playing up the business about Danny's gifts—or whatever you want to call them.”

“We’ll just stick to the facts,” said Schuman.

Tripoli wasn’t sure what that really meant.

“By the way,” asked the journalist,“what's the story on the Oltz woman?”

The story was the Oltzes’ car had gone out of its lane and slammed head-on into a pickup. Pellegrino was still out there picking up the pieces. Orson Oltz, the driver, had been drunk, way above the limit, as was the driver of the other vehicle. Mrs. Oltz, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, had been catapulted through the windshield and landed on the crumpled hood of the truck, killed upon impact.

“As far as I’m concerned, it's all pretty straightforward.” Tripoli tossed the remains of his coffee at the garbage can and missed.“Two drunks hit each other. Bad luck. Or good luck, depending on how you figure it. And
please
don’t quote me on that!”

More than a few people in town, however, felt that there was more to the story, much more.