The Town (35 page)

Adam took a deep breath, avoided looking at the succulents hanging over the cave entrance. “Ten minutes,” he agreed. He looked at Dan. “It’s a long walk down.”

The Indian boy didn’t say a word, started picking up his own rocks.

“Did you ever take a picture of the bathhouse?” Dan asked a few moments later.

Scott paused for a moment, as if deciding what to say. “Yeah,” he admitted finally.

Adam looked at him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Another pause. “The pictures turned out . . . weird.”

“Weird?”

“There were people in them. Fat old Russians taking a steam bath. The bathhouse looked all new, and . . .” He trailed off. “I think I took pictures of the past, pictures of something that happened before.”

Adam’s mouth was dry again. “What did you do with them? Did you send them off to the
Enquirer
?”

“I threw them away. Destroyed them, actually. In the garbage disposal. They were . . . starting to change.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Dan demanded.

“I don’t know,” Scott admitted.

“That’s it,” Adam announced. “I’m going.”

“You said ten minutes.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Just wait. You don’t want to go down by yourself.”

Adam stopped. He was right.

“Besides, I have the flashlight.”

Adam glared at his friend.

Dan cleared his throat. “Don’t you think there’s been a lot of . . . scary stuff going on lately?”

Scott snorted. “There’s always scary stuff. You know this town.”

“But doesn’t it seem more . . . active?”

The two of them shared a look, and Adam glanced from one to the other. “What’s that about?” he said.

Dan shook his head. “Nothing.”

The look again.

“Tell me.”

Scott moved closer. “There are a lot of people who are saying it’s your fault. Not you personally. I mean your family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think it’s an anti-Molokan thing.” Dan shrugged. “It’s a rumor.”

Adam backed up, his heart leaping into his throat. “You guys brought me up here to kill me! You’re going to push me off the cliff!”

Scott blinked, genuinely startled, then burst out laughing. Dan started laughing, too.

“You’re . . . not?” Adam asked hopefully.

“Hell no!” Scott could barely get the words out. “Where’d you come up with a loony idea like that?”

“It’s not that loony,” he said.

His friends’ laugher trailed off. “No,” Dan said. “I guess it’s not. Not these days.”

Scott punched his shoulder. “Even if you were the cause of it, I wouldn’t rat you out. We’re buds, bud. And any fan of
Spiderman
is a friend of mine.”

“It’s not your fault,” Dan said. “We know that.”

“Then why’s—”

“Who the fuck knows?” Scott shook his head. “Most people are dipshits.”

Adam thought he heard a rustle behind him, and he picked up the flashlight and shone it around the clearing, but there was nothing there. Behind the succulents, he could see the blackness of the cave.

“Did you hear that?”

The other two nodded.

“What do you think it was?”

Dan’s voice was quiet again. “My people call them
Na-ta-whay
. Uninvited guests.”

“Ghosts?”

“Some of them. Demons mostly, though. My father says they’re homeless and they’re looking for a place to stay, and sometimes they invite themselves over to someone’s house or a store or a building.”

Scott walked back over to the edge. “I thought it was the mine that attracted them.”

“That too.”

“You need to get your stories straight.”

Adam shivered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Wait a minute!” Scott was looking over the edge of the sandstone wall. “Cars! Two of them!”

“Places!” Dan said, hurrying over and picking up some rocks.

This was wrong, Adam thought. But it was also cool. And exciting. And he picked up a rock of his own and looked over the edge at the highway below. Off to the right, coming up the road toward the diner, he could see two sets of headlights.

“On my count,” Scott said.

The vehicles drew closer, closer.

“Heave ’em!”

Adam threw his rock, and was filled simultaneously with horror and elation as he saw it tumble into the darkness, heard it hit, heard the shatter of glass, the thunk of metal, and the squealing of tires as the driver of the first car slammed on his brakes and jackknifed into the opposite lane. Behind him, the other driver swerved to miss the first vehicle, and one of the other rocks hit
his
car.

The three of them ducked behind the wall, crouching on the dirt. Scott was giggling, but Dan was silent, and Adam assumed that the other boy already felt guilty about what they’d just done. Adam’s own heart was pounding so loud that even the noises right next to him sounded muffled. He had not expected there to be an accident. He’d known what they were planning to do, of course, but somehow the outcome of it had been softened in his brain. His focus had been on the action rather than the result.

But he had to admit that there was something vaguely gratifying about the sneak attack. His mind told him that it was in the same category as drive-by shootings or other acts of random violence, that he was no better than the vandals who had spray-painted graffiti all over his house. But emotionally it was a kick, and he’d gotten from it the same sort of thrill that he got from a roller-coaster ride, the thrill of the forbidden and dangerous.

Scott ventured a peek over the side, quickly ducked back down. “They’re looking up here,” he said.

Dan’s voice was worried. “Did they see you?”

“No. It’s too dark.”

Adam licked his lips. “I hope they don’t come up here.”

“They’ll never find the path.”

“But how’ll we get down?”

“We’ll wait ’til they’re gone.”

There was a loud sound behind them, and Adam stood, turned—

And a policeman grabbed his arm.

Adam looked up into a cold, hard face, and his heart stopped as he heard a deep, grave voice intone, “You’re under arrest.”

Julia was in the passenger seat next to him, crying, and Gregory wanted to hit her. They were both wearing today’s wrinkled clothes that they’d grabbed from the floor after being awakened by the phone call. He was angry at Adam and annoyed at being roused from sleep, but she was devastated, taking it personally, taking it hard, wailing that it was her fault, that she’d been a poor mother.

Her whining irritated him, and he was tempted to shout out, “Yes! It’s your fault! You
are
a poor mother!” But he gripped the steering wheel tighter, gritted his teeth, and said nothing.

Her sobs had been reduced to sniffles by the time they reached the police station and got out of the van.

They’d been given no details over the phone, had been told merely that their son had been arrested for malicious mischief, but the sergeant behind the desk who made them sign the release papers said that Adam and two friends had been up at the old lookout above the highway near the diner, throwing rocks at cars. One car had a dented trunk, and another had a cracked front windshield, a shattered rear windshield, and a damaged hood.

The station lobby was empty save for them. There was no sign of the car owners, and obviously the other boys’ parents had not yet arrived.

“It’s pure luck we caught ’em,” the policeman said. “A patron at the diner noticed a flashlight moving up the old lookout trail, and he told Sam Wright, who called us. We intercepted the boys by coming up behind them, off the topside trail. We surprised them at the lookout, but not before they had thrown the rocks and damaged the cars.

“There’ll be no criminal charges pressed,” he concluded. “But Mr. Redfield and Mr. Robson, the drivers of the damaged vehicles, have the option of filing a civil complaint in order to collect damages.”

“Give me their names and numbers,” Gregory said. “I’ll contact them. I’ll make it right.”

The policeman smiled thinly. “You’re the one won the lottery, aren’t you?’

Gregory looked at Julia, nodded.

“Ought to spend a little less time counting your cash, a little more time taking care of your boy, maybe.”

Gregory nodded, not wanting to argue. Next to him, Julia started quietly crying again, and though he still wanted to hit her, he put his arm around her and pretended to be comforting.

“Charlie’ll bring the boy out.” The desk sergeant nodded toward a metal door with a small window of mesh-reinforced safety glass. He wrote down the names and telephone numbers of the victims on the back of a business card, handed it to Gregory. “Here you go.” He smiled. “And good luck. The way those two were talking, you’re going to need it.”

Gregory led Julia away from the desk, over to the door. They stood, waiting for Adam to be brought out.

Behind them, the door to the station opened, and a couple who were obviously the parents of one of the other boys came in, the woman crying, the man angry. Gregory turned away, not wanting to face them, not wanting to talk to them. He didn’t know if this stunt had been Adam’s idea or one of the other kids’, but it didn’t really matter. He intended to concentrate only on his family and let the other parents handle theirs.

He knew exactly where it was, though he had never been there. He was surprised that it was still referred to as “the lookout” after all these years. He was also surprised that the cop was so nonchalant about finding kids up there.

He remembered what had happened at the lookout before.

Gregory shivered as he recalled hearing the news for the first time. It had been his sophomore year in high school. A group of seniors—guys on the football team and a couple of cheerleaders—had gone up there to party after one of the games. According to what he’d heard afterward, things had gotten rough. And crazy. One of the girls had volunteered for a gang bang. The other had refused to put out, and the girl had ended up dead, sacrificed on the sand, her body staked down with miner’s pikes, her head severed and tossed into the shallow cave.

There’d been rumors of drugs, LSD-laced snacks, enhanced beer, but as far as he knew, none of that had ever come up in the trial, and though the trial had taken place up in Phoenix and they’d received only newspaper and television reports, since the kids’ families had all moved away and out of town, coverage had been pretty thorough, and for that year people had talked of little else.

The boys had all received life sentences, and the feeling around town was that they’d been lucky they hadn’t gotten the death penalty.

After that, the town council had voted to seal off the cave, to destroy the path and the little outcropping that was the lookout itself. That hadn’t happened—it would have been too difficult, and the lookout was right above the highway, which could have caused problems—but for Gregory’s remaining years in McGuane, just the memory of that incident had scared everyone away from the spot. He’d assumed that that sort of self-prohibition would last forever, growing into the kind of local myth that tainted a locale in perpetuity, but obviously that had not occurred, and it seemed to him ironic that it was his son who had committed another crime at that location.

Although Adam and his friends probably weren’t the first. The desk sergeant had not seemed especially shocked or angry about the matter, and he hadn’t mentioned anything about it being unusual. Maybe the location’s past had been forgotten.

No. That was too hard to believe.

Maybe the story hadn’t been passed on to the younger generation because it was too brutal, despite its obvious use as a cautionary tale.

That was possible.

But there’d been . . . something else. Something about the incident with the cheerleaders and the football players that had made it seem even stranger and scarier than did the details he could recall. He couldn’t remember what it was, though, and he wondered if Paul or Deanna might. It was on the tip of his brain, nagging at his consciousness, but it would not be made clear, and he found that frustrating. It was like trying to remember the name of a specific song or a character actor in a movie and not being able to fall asleep because of it.

What was it? What was he thinking of?

A statue. That was it. There’d been some sort of statue. They’d been worshiping it, holding some kind of ceremony. It hadn’t just been a party, it had been a ritual, and the cheerleader had been killed not in some drug-induced frenzy but deliberately, purposefully, as part of some twisted religious service.

It all came back to him now. The statue had been of a dwarf. Neither he nor any of his friends had seen the statue before it had been seized as evidence for the trial, but they’d heard about it, and it was the word “dwarf” that had really fired up his imagination, lending the entire business an eerieness that made the situation even more morbidly fascinating than it had been already. He’d imagined the statue in its alcove, in the shallow cave, a small, forbidden god, and just the idea of it had led to nightmares.

He hadn’t remembered any of this when he’d first decided to move back to McGuane. The town had seemed a lot more innocent in his memory than he now knew it to be, and he marveled at how the mind glossed over events from the past, remaking them in a nicer image.

Julia turned toward him. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

He looked at her, annoyed.

“Are we going to talk to him? Ground him?”

Gregory felt his anger rise again. “Oh, I’ll do a lot more than that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard me.”

“We’ve never hit any of the kids.”

“Maybe it’s about time we did.”