The boys rolled downtown to a workwear store called Pound’s that they’d often skateboarded behind that summer, which, judging by its mustiness, dated signage, and general disrepair, had been open since well before Will’s mother last breathed fresh air.
“Yup, used to sell those,” said the aged, squinty clerk when Will showed him the photo of the boot print, forgetting all the times he’d shooed the boys from his parking lot. “Not anymore, though. Used to assemble them right here in Thunder Bay. But I sold my last pair years ago.”
“Any idea who wore them?” asked Will.
“Workers mostly,” he said. “A popular choice. Lots of fellas wear them. Miners, boilermakers, grain trimmers, loggers—you name it.”
“Right,” said Jonah once they were back Outside. “So we’re looking for someone who’s insane, can’t breathe, collects garden hoses, has poor grammar, and wears old boots nobody sells anymore. Awesome.”
“Every clue counts, Jonah,” said Will. “But that last word of the note really does seem like something the Wheezing Man might write.”
A week later, while doing laundry in Toronto, Will pinched a pelt of dryer lint from the trap and tossed it in the trash. Remembering that his mother had asked him to fetch her old Bolex for her, he stood on an overturned bucket and retrieved the camera’s dusty case from back near the wall where he’d stashed Marcus’s bloodied shirt. When Will was younger, she’d taught him how to use the Bolex to make a short Claymation movie of a volcano erupting and engulfing a village. Will realized now that he and Jonah could make their own skateboarding movie, like the Californian skateboard videos they worshipped, and resolved to do it once they found Marcus and everything went back to normal. Will yanked aside a box, crashing masterpieces to the floor, and something caught his eye.
“Where did these come from?” he said, setting the pair of work boots down on his mother’s comforter, boots that had sat unremarkably in Toronto for as long as Will could remember, the exact hexagonal pattern he’d been searching for embedded in the tread.
“Oh, those,” she said absentmindedly while writing in a notebook. “They were your grandfather’s.”
“Why do we have his boots?”
“Will, what’s wrong?” she said, putting down her pen, her eyebrows knitted. “Why do you look so worried?”
“I asked a question.”
“And I answered it,” she said. “They were your grandfather Theodore’s. We got them when he died. They were all that was left of him.”
Will was about to let the whole thing drop when he noticed a chalky substance had flaked from the soles onto his mother’s navy bedspread and everything clicked. “Did you write it?” Will said. “Have you been wearing these, Mom? Outside?”
“Will, what’s wrong with you?” she said plaintively, with a snap of her elastic. “Please lower your voice.”
“Well, have you?” he said, picturing her sneaking secretly around the back walk to paste the note to the window, exactly as he’d done when he first met Marcus what seemed like eons ago. And just like her to write a guilt-inducing please on something that was supposed to be threatening.
“You must be kidding,” she said.
“Then why are they dirty?”
“That’s grain dust, Will. Both your grandfather and your uncle worked at the elevators. It coated everything they owned: their clothes, their hair. Your uncle hung his work clothes outside the door and showered before dinner, it was so bad. Want me to show you the hook? It’s still there.”
Will was heartsick with all her lying and acting and faking, and at that moment some part of him turned inside out: all the pity and compassion and responsibility he’d once felt for her had finally compacted into a molten core of disgust. She’d already squandered her own life, and now she wasn’t brave enough to let him live his own. He’d conquered his fears by forcing himself Outside and going to school and skateboarding and making a friend while she cowered in her bed and lied about everything that mattered to him most. The truth was, she could leave anytime she wanted, except she didn’t care to, because she was selfish—and for this more than anything he loathed her.
In a red haze Will dug into his pocket and held up the note he’d found. “Look familiar?” he said. Her eyes flicked over the crudely arranged words—the strange please, the odd turmoil, the contentious period and barely scary TV cliché threat—and her jaw dropped open like a glove compartment. He watched as something in her tipped over and terror flooded in to replace it. Then she shuddered in panic and exploded with a million questions. “Forget it, it was only a prank,” Will said. “Some hockey players at school.” Before fleeing to New York, where he locked his door and yanked on headphones, setting Public Enemy to a teeth-numbing volume.
She might have questions, but he was drowning in them. Questions like how Charlie really died, and where Marcus was hiding, and what the Butler’s wolves would do to him when they finally picked up his scent. Maybe she didn’t write the note. Maybe she hadn’t been wearing the boots. But at least now he had proof. Proof of what, Will couldn’t exactly say. But their investigation must be on the right track.
He and Jonah had somebody worried. Somebody other than his mother, for once.
Relaxation Time
It had been a reckless mistake to spout her life history into this reel-to-reel and to watch her anxiety-stricken films and go tromping around willy-nilly in her past with such abandon. Something had come unstuck—some psychic retaining wall, if there were such a thing. After Will had shown her that note he’d found (had he made it himself to scare her?), her memory became impossible to corral, turning again and again toward the past like a crippled airliner spiraling to the ground.
Before the images overwhelmed her, Diane removed her goggles and found she had been struck blind. Panic clamped her chest. She ground her fists into her eyes but still they failed her. It wasn’t until she saw some sunlight leaking from behind her thick bedroom curtain that she knew the lightbulb had died. She fished around in her drawer for a flashlight and snapped it on.
Will had claimed that note was a prank, but why would he have accused her of writing it with such outrage? And there was something more troublesome about it. Turmoil. Such a strange word to choose. The kind of overwrought word Charlie would copy down from his dictionary to use after their great escape from Thunder Bay. Also, the printing itself had reminded her of the cryptic instructions Whalen would slip into the vents of her locker to schedule their secret meetings.
She went downstairs and found that Will had left. She made tea and took up her guitar to calm herself, but it lay dead in her arms. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t sustain any fingerpicking pattern for more than a few bars, so she put it down.
The house had seen better days: plants choking of thirst in their pots, underwear she’d washed in the tub dangling from the pothanger in the kitchen to dry. With most of the lightbulbs on the main floor out, too, and no Will around to change them, she’d been moving lamps from room to room, plugging them in with dish gloves on. The house had assumed the particular disheveled sadness she’d always associated with closed amusement parks.
This house. What would Arthur think of it? Unremarkable, she could already hear him say. Though she never told him, she hated architecture. Of course she didn’t hate buildings—how could you, especially if you’re a shut-in—it was more that she hated the everywhereness of architecture. That, like a labyrinth, it could never be escaped. That she must sleep and eat and raise her child within it. The very definition of oppressive.