Jim Moarse, medium height, lanky, sandy hair, uneven home-cut look, bad teeth, empty gray eyes. He was in the special ed. class with the kids who had emotional problems. Known for uncontrolled rage, getting suspended from school, and problems with the sheriff.
Liked breaking windows. I remember him dancing on the glass that had been popped out of a classroom door, grinding the shattered pieces into finer shards with his heavy black construction boots, the steel heel-plates pounding the bits against the terrazzo surface.
Major player in the assault, roughly grabbing my breasts after Sabotny tore my shirt open. Moarse said something about my having a tight ass. Sabotny said it wouldn’t be tight when he got through with me. Everyone else would have to settle for seconds.
Local address available online. No phone listing. Arrests for domestic violence, DUI, and assault listed in local paper archives.
Chris Brewler, medium height and stocky. Brown hair, chipped teeth in lower jaw, scar across his forehead that separated his right eyebrow. His nose was off center, pushed over to the left at midpoint. The facial injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. Chris also sported several tattoos—crudely done artwork and lettering. He bragged that his uncle had learned to do tats while in Jackson.
Chris was in Terry’s graduation class, but he was older, held back once or twice. He had been in several of my classes, usually a disruptive element on the infrequent occasions he showed up for school. He was on our bus route. Always talking about sex, hitting on girls in the crudest terms. More than once he said to me, “My uncle says your mother is the best piece of ass in the county. Bet you’re a chip off the old block.”
The day of the assault he was cheering Sabotny on. Made an attempt to pull off my jeans before Terry fought them off, giving me a chance to escape.
No local or regional phone number. No listing in Classmates, Facebook, Twitter. No hits on Google. No listing for anyone in the region with the last name of Brewler.
Mackenzie opened a new file and keyed a title at the top of the document: What Happened at the River:
It was a spring day, one of the first warm days. Terry and I had ridden our bikes down to the river a few miles east of Sandville. We had taken some lines and hooks. Terry collected some crawlers and crickets near the river, and was showing me how to hand cast, how to toss the lead weight and baited hook into the stream without getting entangled with the hook.
She stopped suddenly, pulled her hands from the keyboard. I need to see the place again, she thought. I need to go there, shoot pictures, and record everything that I remember, then come back and write it down.
29
Mackenzie dressed in her bird-watching costume: baggy jeans, hiking boots, a flannel shirt, and Carhartt vest. She strapped a holster to her left ankle, slipped the Rohrbaugh R9 in place, pulled her hair under a stocking cap, and slipped a pair of compact binoculars into her vest pocket—something she would later drape around her neck as part of the costume. She also packed a notepad and a small camera, nothing expensive looking, nothing that would attract attention.
Reviewing the area on Google Earth, Mackenzie considered the probable route from Sandville to the part of the river where she and Terry had confronted Sabotny and the other boys. Her memory was that just north of the village they had biked down two-tracks and the bed of a deserted railroad. Then they got back on a two-track again. She scanned the area on her computer display, trying to determine the possible site.
There was an old bridge built from timbers just wide enough for a car that she remembered too—no side rails, just a deck. Upstream from the bridge was a low dam with a spillway in the middle and a pool behind it.
Twenty years before, she and Terry had been fishing below the dam, letting their bait swirl in the eddies at the side of the stream. But looking at the map, she couldn’t see a widening in the stream or anything that looked like a dam. She found what she thought was the bridge and the road that ran across it. It now appeared to be more than the trail of her memory, still dirt, but wider. The bridge also looked more substantial.
She scaled back the map until Sandville was in the lower right corner and plotted distances and directions in her head. When she got to Sandville, she would use the map function on her iPhone if she needed any assistance finding the location.
She was surprised by how quickly she found the place, even though her estimates of distance and time were way off. The big curve on the river was only about two miles north of the village. She remembered it as being much farther—a long slog or a hot dusty bike ride. Parking in a small lot at the side of the dirt road, she walked out onto the bridge. It was a new structure two lanes wide with steel rails bolted to concrete pillars. Looking upriver, Mackenzie searched in vain for the dam, but nothing remained of the structure or the wide pond. Crossing to the south side of the bridge, she peered down at the stream, much narrower and shallower than she remembered it. The only sound was the wind and the gurgling of the river as it snaked around and disappeared in the low shrubs on the flood plain. There were no humans or their machines. She snapped several pictures.
Returning to her car, Mackenzie noticed a trail running from the parking lot toward the stream. She followed it, concrete at the beginning, turning to sand as it wound through the brush and small trees near the water’s edge. Small patches of grass bordering the track were beginning to shed winter’s hues, green replacing brown. The willow buds, turgid with new growth, were on the edge of opening and the reeds in the wetlands approaching the water were taking on a summer’s green.
A small wooden dock was secured at the trail’s end, a launching point for canoes and kayaks. She stood on the platform and slowly surveyed the scene, looking upstream first, and then following the flow of rushing water to the south. She focused on sound—the gentle gurgle of the water dominating the wind moving through leafless trees. The air was heavy with decay. The leaves and dead plants emerging from winter’s cover were beginning to degrade under the hot sun, making way for a new season’s growth.
She gazed at the pallet of hues of the early spring landscape, earth tones mostly, a range of browns and dull greens. The water, lit at an acute angle by the early spring sun, was stained by the decaying oak leaves to the shade of weak coffee. Scanning the trees and bushes, Mackenzie could find no birds flittering about, no chirping, no cries of alarm or passion. She thought briefly about how silly her bird watching costume would look in this location to anyone who knew about such things. So much for disguises.
She scanned the air and water. Insect life seemed to be limited to a few water striders, their long legs floating on the smooth surface of the slow-moving eddies at the edge of the stream. In her memory the air was always filled with mosquitoes. She knew they would quickly emerge in the sudden surge of warm air. She took several more stills, and then switched to movie mode, sweeping from right to left.
Mackenzie slowly swept the scene a final time, her eyes taking it all in, recording the images, meshing this moment with the old memory, resizing and revising her knowledge of the area. Then she retreated up the path, awash with emotions, lost in the past. She was standing next to her car, still deep in thought, keys in her hand, when she was startled by the roar of an engine. A rusty Jeep came rolling down the sandy road, slowing and turning in to park. Four boys climbed out, dressed in cutoffs and t-shirts, one in flip-flops, the others sockless in battered running shoes. Each boy held a blue and red beer can. They all seemed focused on her, not in a menacing way, just as something out of place in an environment with which they were familiar.