“I’d like to hear about the day Vern went missing, if you’ve got a few minutes to chat,” Max said.
Goldie had stepped back to the door as if a sixth sense told her, her daughter was preparing to burst through it. Sure enough, the child barreled out, the large gray cat clutched in her skinny arms.
“Put that cat down. Good lord, Lacy. One of these days you’re going to get your eyes clawed out of your head.”
Lacy dropped the cat, and he ambled into a patch of sunlight, flopping on his side.
Goldie caught her daughter by the shoulder as she started toward the stairs.
“You stay in the yard. I don’t want to see you go past the swing set.”
Goldie gestured at the swing set that included a metal slide on one end. An old tractor tire turned sandbox rested beside it.
“But I want to play in Vern’s fort!” The girl gestured to a tree near the road.
About fifteen feet in the air, Max spotted a piece of plywood positioned on two large branches. A black tarp hung over the platform, holey and flapping in the warm breeze. It looked abandoned, forlorn, sinister even, and Max jerked his eyes from the eerie treehouse.
“You’re not to go near that fort. You hear me?” Goldie grabbed her daughter’s arm.
The girl cried out and jerked away. She jumped off the porch, skipping down three steps before running to the swings.
She stuck her tongue out at Max as she passed.
Goldie shook her head as if eternally perplexed by the child. She sat down on the top step of the porch and gestured to the space beside her.
“You’re welcome to sit.”
Max walked to the bottom of the stairs, but he didn’t sit down.
“Vern left on January fourth,” Goldie explained. “We had one of those winter storms and got about two feet of snow overnight. They called school off, which Darwin was all pissy about because Joe brings his three kids into the garage and they run like wild animals. Vern and Lacy slept in.
Vern came down around nine and said he was going sledding. I told him to take his mittens because his gloves are the thin kind that get all wet. He didn’t take them. I know because I saw them lying in his bedroom later that day.
Lacey and I,” she paused and gestured at her daughter. “That’s my daughter, Lacy. We baked most of the day. Joe’s Autobody was having their Christmas Party that next weekend. He does it in January every year, and I’d offered to bring Christmas cookies. We baked until about two o’clock. I thought it strange Vern hadn’t come home, but he’d been sulking since Christmas. He wanted one of those handheld video game thingies all the kids have. Well, we just couldn’t afford it. Last year wasn’t a great year for us, and we were lucky to get food on the table let alone little video games you can carry in your backpack.”
Goldie finished her cigarette and stubbed it on the porch, tucking the butt in the pocket of her overalls.
“If I’d have known it meant so much to him, I would have found a way,” she said, lifting a hand to study her fingernails.
Max noticed the same color paint he’d seen on Lacy’s shirt in the cuticles of Goldie’s nails.
“By the time Darwin got home with the truck, I was worried sick. Night comes early in January, and by five pm, there was nothing but dark out there.” She gestured at the dense forest edging their property.
“We loaded up Lacy and drove for hours. We went all over town, stopped at his friends’ houses. Nothing, not a peep. We called the police the next morning and filed a report, but Darwin found a note in Vern’s room. It didn’t look like a note to me, just the scribblings of a kid, but the police seemed to consider it proof he’d run away.”
“What did the note say?” Max asked, his eye flitting involuntarily back to the treehouse and the black tarp above it.
He’d drawn a picture of a boy flying in the clouds, just a little sketch. Vern had written flying south for the winter underneath the figure of the boy. He loved to draw and was good at it too.”
Max alerted to Goldie’s use of the past tense and considered mentioning it, but swallowed the words.
“The police considered a kid’s drawing a note?”
Detective Welch’s smug face rose in Max’s mind, and he flexed his fists unconsciously.
Goldie nodded, took out her cigarettes, and opened the top. She counted the cigarettes, touching each one before sighing and putting the box back in her pocket.
“That’s it. Not a peep out of the police since then and nothing from Vern, not even a phone call.”
11
Ashley almost told Shane about the raccoons, but changed her mind at the last moment.
Shane had stashed his skateboard in a pile of brush near the woods. He grabbed it and they headed for town.
“Want to go to the skate park?” he asked Ashley. “I’ve been trying to grind on the rail over there.”
She shrugged. She didn’t have anything else to do, and she could always feed the raccoons on her own later.
“Sure.”
Shane pushed along beside Ashley, one foot planted on the board, the other pushing off the road.
Ashley crossed her fingers and let out a sigh of relief when she saw the skate park was empty. She’d thought the Thrashers might be there, at which point she would have abruptly turned and walked home.
Shane pushed off hard and jumped his board onto a long metal rail a foot off the ground. He hit the side, his board skidding, but only made it a few feet when he jumped off and let the board clatter to the pavement. He tried a second time.
“So, why’s your dad a dick?” Ashley asked, as Shane rode his board up the curve of a ramp.
“Huh?” he asked, glancing at her.
“The other day you said your dad was a dick,” she explained. She didn’t know why she asked the question, to fill the silence maybe.
Shane tucked his hair behind his ears and bit his lip as he tipped the skateboard over the edge of the ramp and cruised gracefully down, bending his legs and jumping up before landing back on the board with both feet and drifting to a stop.
He put one foot down and kicked back to where Ashley stood.
“I guess he wasn’t when I was little. It’s hard to remember now, but I think he was decent for a while.”
“And then what?”
“And then my sister killed herself.”
Ashley’s mouth fell open.
“Catching flies?” he asked.
She closed her mouth.
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
Shane shrugged, pushed off hard on his board and sailed away, curving around in a circle and coming back.
“Most people don’t. She died before we moved here. We lived in Saginaw until I was seven. My sister had ten years on me. She was born before my parents graduated from high school. It was a big scandal my mom said. My mom’s family had money, my dad’s didn’t. Typical bullshit.”
“What was her name?”
“Annabelle. Everyone called her Belle. I called her Belly. Not in a mean way,” he added hastily. “Like in a kid way, you know?”
Ashley nodded.
“I was crazy about her,” he laughed and squinted at the pavement. “But it’s getting harder to see her in my mind. Every year she fades a little more. But my mom keeps an album in her closet and we pull it out a few times a year when dad’s gone. He won’t talk about her. If we talk about her, he gets all pissy and stomps out the door.”
“Why?”
“Beats me. My mom says he never learned to process his feelings - whatever that means.”
“Why did she do it?”
Shane walked up to the highest ramp, dropped his board and set one foot in the center. He kicked off and sped down the drop, curving up and catching air. He flipped the board and again landed easily in the center, not even a wobble in his knees.