The Loveliest Dead (13 page)

Neither of them said anything for a while. Jenna wondered if she and David were thinking about the same thing—about the fact that they had planned to pick up a golden retriever puppy the week Josh died. After that, the idea had faded away until Miles brought it up again.
 

David said, “Well, let’s see where this job is going to go before we start—” He pulled his arm from under her and sat up in bed, back stiff. He cocked his head toward the large rectangular window above their headboard. The window looked out over the backyard. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.
 

“Hear what? I didn’t—”

“Shh!”

Jenna sat up and listened. It was a still night. She heard the screech of the chains on the swing set outside. But there was no wind. And something else—a delicate sound that seemed to move around in the night outside: a child’s laughter.
 

“That’s coming from outside,” David said as he got out of bed. He went to the closet and put on a pair of sweatpants. After slipping into a sweatshirt, he put on an old pair of running shoes and headed out of the room.
 

“Where are you going?” Jenna asked.

“Out to the backyard.”

For a moment, she wondered if David had finally heard Josh. She was certain she’d heard, for just an instant, the laughter of a child, and apparently, so had David.
 

After he was gone, Jenna listened closely again. She heard nothing. She got on her knees facing the window over the bed. As she stared out the black rectangle of night, she made a mental note to find some curtains and start putting them up in the windows that had none, like this one. Naked, she leaned over the headboard and tried to look through her reflection, down at the backyard.
 

Several seconds later, the bulb over the back porch came on and light oozed through the fog. Five small figures stood by the swing set and slide. Jenna could tell instinctively, by the way they stood, that they were all boys. They were little more than shadows in the mist, but it appeared that each boy stood with his head tilted back, looking up, directly at Jenna.
 

She gasped and pulled away from the window. She scrambled off the bed, grabbed David’s gray robe, and put it on as she hurried barefoot down the hall.
 

Downstairs, David hurried past the living room, through the dining room to the kitchen, turning on lights as he went—he did not yet feel familiar enough with the house to rush through it in the dark.
 

There was a window in the top half of the back door with old, threadbare curtains on it, white with blue trim. David tugged a curtain aside with one hand as he flipped on the outside light with the other. He saw them standing there in the fog. Just standing there. None of them could have been any bigger than Miles. They stood motionless beyond the porch light’s glow. Goose-flesh passed over the back of his neck. He bent down, grabbed the flashlight, and opened the door.
 

The light over the back porch went out with a pop and a hail of sparks. David ducked reflexively and heard something from the fog—the whispers of terrified boys.
 

“He’s coming.”

“Go! Run!”

“He’s
coming
!”
 

“I saw them!” Jenna hissed as she hurried into the kitchen behind him.

David quickly turned on the flashlight and went out on the concrete porch. It had old wooden railings on two sides, and four steps leading down to the left of the back door. He skipped the porch steps and hit the ground running. The flashlight beam softened to an amorphous glow in the fog, crept over the weeds that whispered under his feet. David stopped suddenly and swept the yard with the light, listened for the sound of the boys running. Five boys that age could not possibly run away silently. But he did not hear a sound, and they were not in the backyard.
 

Running along the side of the house, David listened beyond the sound of his own footfalls. He heard nothing. He passed the light all around but saw no sign of them. The front gate was closed, and he had not heard it open. He went to the fence and aimed the light out toward the woods that surrounded their house.
 

Although he had not heard them, the boys had somehow gotten out of the yard, which meant they were out there somewhere. There was a house a couple miles south of them on Starfish, although David and Jenna did not know the residents. He considered driving down there now and waking them up to ask if they had any kids. But he quickly rejected that idea for another.
 

He turned and hurried back along the side of the house to the back door and into the kitchen. He picked up the telephone.

“Who are you calling?” Jenna asked.

“The police. Your mother wasn’t seeing things.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Monday, 1:41 A.M.

Rosalind Hooper and Michael Caruso, deputies of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, showed up forty-five minutes after David called. They were both tall with dark hair, and looked almost as if they could be brother and sister.
 

Deputy Hooper said, “We would’ve gotten here sooner, but there have been a lot of traffic accidents tonight. The fog is pretty thick.”
 

Deputy Caruso said, “It’s thicker than—”

Deputy Hooper jabbed her elbow into his ribs while stifling a laugh. “Don’t start now, okay? Just... not now.” She turned to David and Jenna again and said, “You called about some kids in your yard?”
 

Jenna listened while David told them what he had seen. She interrupted him to describe the figures she’d seen through the window.
 

“They heard me coming and ran off,” David said. “I heard them talking. You know, saying, ‘Run, let’s get outta here, he’s coming,’ that kind of thing. They were fast. I mean, they were just gone, they left the yard. Which means they’re out there in the woods somewhere. They looked, at most, between five and maybe ten years old.”
 

“And this is the second time they’ve been out here,” Jenna said. “My mother saw them a few days ago.”

“Are you positive they were the same kids?” Deputy Hooper said.

“No, not positive. But you could talk to her,” Jenna said.

“Is that necessary right now?” David said. “I think the important thing is to find those kids.”

Deputy Caruso said, “Did you recognize them? Were they neighbor kids?”

“No,” David said. “We haven’t met our neighbors yet.”

“Did you see which direction they went?” Deputy Hooper asked.

“No, they were gone before I could catch up with them.”

“So they could’ve just walked down to the road, right?” Deputy Hooper said.

Jenna could tell by the expression on David’s face as he glanced at her that he hadn’t considered that. “That’s possible, yes.”
 

“We didn’t see them on the way in, but it took us a while to get over here, and we don’t know which direction they went.”

“Or if they took the road,” David said. “They
could
be out in those woods.”
 

“Don’t worry,” Deputy Caruso said, “we’ll take a look around before we go. Tell me, you don’t grow any corn around here, do you?”
 

David squinted at him. “What? Corn? No, why?”

“Ever see any of them
Children of the Corn
movies?”
 

Laughter exploded from Deputy Hooper, and she bent over a moment, then slapped Deputy Caruso on the shoulder. “Stop it,” she said. “Not
now
.”
 

Deputy Caruso shrugged his large shoulders and said, “Cornfields just give me the creeps, that’s all I’m saying.”

Deputy Hooper forced herself to stop laughing and said, “My partner here does some stand-up down at the Sand Bar.”

Jenna and David looked at each other, then back at the deputies.

Deputy Hooper said, “You know, the place in Old Town? The comedy club?”

“We just moved here,” Jenna said. “We barely know our way around yet.”

“Anyway,” Deputy Hooper said, “he tries his new material out on me. He’s had me in stitches all night.”

Deputy Caruso took his wallet from a back pocket and opened it. He removed two tickets and handed them to David. “Those’re guest tickets. No cover charge and your first two drinks are on the house. Come on a Wednesday night—that’s my night. It’s just, you know, something to do with my days off.”
 

“Thank you,” David said. He put the tickets in the pocket of his sweatpants. “I appreciate that. But these kids—”

“Did they take anything?” Deputy Hooper asked. “Do any damage?”

David said, “I think they threw something at the back-porch light and knocked out the bulb.”

She said, “Can we take a look?”

David nodded. “Sure, come on back.”

Jenna walked beside David as they led the deputies past the stairs and down the short hall. They were entering the kitchen when a high, shrill scream sliced through the house.
 

Deputies Hooper and Caruso froze and tensed.

“It’s our son,” Jenna said as she made her way back toward the stairs. “He’s been having nightmares.”

She hurried up the stairs and found Miles standing in the hallway. He was pressed against the wall across from the bedroom door. He looked terrified.
 

“It’s okay, Miles, I’m here,” she said.

He wasn’t crying, but his lower lip was unsteady. “I heard voices. What’s going on down there?”

She hugged him, then gently led him back into his bedroom, where the overhead light was already on, as well as the lamp on the desk. “There were some kids in the yard, and we called the police. It’s nothing—Dad was just worried about the kids because they were pretty young.”
 

“I saw that man again. He was coming up through the floor like before, wearing some kind of hat. He talked to me again. He keeps calling me a puppy.”
 

“Him again, huh?” She sat on the bed and pulled him down beside her. “That’s just a nightmare, you know.”

Miles sighed quietly but said nothing.

“Okay, you can leave the overhead light on if you just stay up here for now,” Jenna said. “When we’re finished down there, Dad and I will go back to bed, and if you’re still awake, you can sleep on the couch in front of the TV if you want. How does that sound?”
 

“But I can leave the light on now?”

She nodded. “For now, yes.”

“Okay.”

Jenna tucked him back into bed and kissed him. She left the bedroom door wide open and both lights on when she went back downstairs.

David and the deputies were coming out of the kitchen and back down the hall by the time Jenna rejoined them.

David looked at her with a puzzled frown. “The bulb in the back-porch light wasn’t damaged,” he said. “It just blew out, is all.”
 

“Another one?” Jenna said. “I’m calling an electrician tomorrow.”

“Yeah, that’s what my ex-wife said,” Deputy Caruso said. “First it was the electrician, then the cable guy, then the—”

Laughing again, Deputy Hooper elbowed him in the ribs a second time. She looked at Jenna and shook her head. “He just won’t stop.”
 

Jenna did not find it funny and did not smile. Neither did David.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Deputy Hooper said. “We’ll take a look around, see if we can find these kids. But since no crime was committed and you can’t describe them, there’s not a lot we can do.”
 

“I just want you to find them and make sure they’re okay,” David said. “They shouldn’t be out there by themselves.”

“Okay, we’ll see if we can do that,” she said. “In the meantime, if you see them again, call us, then let them know you mean no harm, you just want to know where they’re from, and see if you can keep them here till we arrive.”
 

David and Jenna stood on the front porch as the deputies made their way back to their patrol car. Deputy Caruso said something Jenna couldn’t make out, and Deputy Hooper hooted with laughter.
 

“I called for police and they sent a comedian and his number-one fan,” David said on the way up the stairs. In the hallway, he said, “Why is Miles’s light on?”
 

Jenna explained she had left it on so Miles would stay in his room while the police were there. She leaned into his open doorway. He was asleep in bed, so she turned off the overhead, leaving on the desk lamp. She couldn’t wait to get to bed—she was exhausted.
 

David lay awake beside Jenna for a couple hours after she fell asleep. He’d expected to be worried about starting a new job the next day, but that was not it. He was listening for the laughter of young boys. Each time he started to doze off, something startled him awake, and he listened again, wondering if he’d heard it.