Sid talked high and fast, trying to make a joke out of his mother’s worry.
Ashley sighed, gazing toward the door her mother had walked through at eight that morning. Rebecca didn’t have a choice. No one else would pay their bills, but Ashley had barely slept the night before. Each time she started to drift down into the darkness of sleep, Krista’s pale face above her bloody neck would float into focus and she’d jolt wide awake.
“My mom asked me to stay inside too. I told her, I would, but the house is so quiet. How are you, Sid, really?”
She listened to the pause, the television in the background. It sounded like a cartoon, Wile E. Coyote chasing after Road Runner.
“Creeped out,” he admitted. “I had nightmares last night. I thought it’d come for me, you know? The boy in the woods. I thought he must have seen me last night. I was so close to Krista, so he’d come for me next.”
Ashley sighed and picked up the paperback copy of Hell House. It was the last thing she wanted to read.
“Me too,” she muttered, not adding that Rebecca had crawled into bed next to her.
They’d both been terrified, mother and daughter, but for very different reasons.
“Are you still going to get your bike tomorrow?” Sid asked.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Ash replied, feeling her shoulders relax at the mere mention of the bike. “I’m helping Mrs. Penny clean out her basement for a garage sale in the morning. She offered me ten bucks. That’s all I need.”
“Cool,” Sid said. “I’d come over and all, but even if my mom dropped me off on your doorstep, she’d worry all day. I better stay close to home.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Ashley agreed, not averse to staying tucked safely in the living room for most of the day.
“Ash,” Sid started. “About Thursday. I’m not sure if we should-”
“We have to,” Ashley insisted. “Now more than ever.”
Sid didn’t respond. Ashley wondered what she’d say if he pulled out. Could she and Shane do it alone?
“Okay,” Sid sighed. “I’ll call you later.”
BY THE TIME the phone rang at seven o’clock, Ashley had grown so bored she’d cleaned her bedroom.
She’d organized her books, put the scattering of papers from the previous year’s schoolwork in her desk, and even vacuumed the carpet.
She ran to living room and grabbed the receiver on the second ring.
“Shepherd Residence,” she said on the chance it was her mother calling to check in on her. Rebecca Shepherd hated it when Ash answered the phone with a simple ‘Hello?’
“Another body’s been found,” Sid whispered.
“Wait, what?” Ashley turned off the television and pressed the phone closer to her ear.
“A body,” Sid repeated. “In the woods by Warren’s house. It’s a kid. It’s in bad shape. I heard my dad on the phone.”
“Holy crap,” Ashley blurted. “It’s got to be Warren, right?”
Her heart thudded, and she gazed through the picture window feeling removed as she watched Mrs. Lincoln walking Kermit, who tugged and pulled away, sometimes snapping at the leash behind him.
“What?” Sid yelled.
Ashley heard his mother in the background, but she couldn’t make out her words.
“I’m talking to Ashley,” Sid shouted. “I already washed my hands. Okay, fine. Ash, I’ve got to go. Time for dinner. My mom’s trying to pretend everything’s normal.”
“Meet me after?”
“There’s no way they’ll let me out.”
“Sneak out, dummy. Meet me in front of Trinity Church.”
Trinity Church was located at the end of the block on the street where Warren lived, or had lived, she really didn’t know.
Sid sighed, but agreed. “Okay, but we can’t stay out long. My parents will probably check on me ten times tonight.”
Ashley flipped the channels, but there wasn’t any news on until eight p.m., another half hour to wait. She walked down her driveway and glanced up and down the street. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but the quiet surprised her.
No police cars with sirens flashing drove down the road. No sirens wailed in the distance. People weren’t gathered on street corners talking in fearful whispers.
“Because they don’t know,” Ashley thought out loud.
Sid’s uncle was a cop, which meant Sid’s dad knew before anyone else. Sid often gave Ashley the scoop hours before it hit the news. Technically, Sid wasn’t supposed to know either. Despite his parent’s best efforts to keep him in the dark, he excelled at eavesdropping. He and Ashley had fashioned a range of contraptions for just that purpose, though the best continued to be the old glass against the wall trick.
Ashley half considered waiting for the news, but curiosity got the better of her. She grabbed her old bike from the garage and pedaled down the street, hanging a left on Parkdale Avenue in the quickest route to the woods flanking Queen Street.
It took ten minutes of furiously riding, but soon she saw the pulsing of red and blue lights through the backyards one street away from Queen Street. Now she spotted the commotion she’d expected to see outside her front door.
Five police cars were parked along the soccer field that butted up to the woods. Yellow tape had been strewn along the curb and drawn back to the woods, blocking the entire field and the woods beyond. People who lived on the street stood in the road, watching the police, talking and pointing.
An ambulance was parked on the grass, and as Ashley watched, two men carrying a stretcher departed from the trees. She stood high on her pedals, squinting. A white sheet lay over the stretcher, a lumpy form beneath it.
Along the street, several people gasped, and Ashley saw one woman fall to her knees. The man beside her tried to pick her up, but she shoved him away, letting out a wail that turned the heads of everyone on the block.
It was Warren’s mom. Ashley had never seen the woman, and yet deep in her guts, she knew. Ashley slowly sat on the seat of her bike. The men loaded the stretcher in the back of the ambulance and pulled away from the curb. Their lights continued flashing, but the siren didn’t sound. Ashley knew what that meant. It wasn’t an emergency. They weren’t rushing someone to the hospital. Whoever they’d pulled from the woods was dead.
Ashley spotted Sid’s dad at the edge of the trees. Though she couldn’t make out his face, she saw the hunch in his shoulders.
Warren’s dad eventually coaxed his wife from the ground and half carried her to a pickup truck parked haphazardly on the curb. As they drove past, Ashley and Warren’s mother’s eyes met. The woman’s mouth stretched wide and, for an instant, Ashley heard the screams filling the truck, but then they passed, and the sound faded.
33
Max stared at the reading list for the coming year, but struggled to concentrate.
The day before, Warren Leach’s body had been discovered in the woods. Like Simon, he appeared to have been killed by an animal.
Forgetting his lesson plan, he wrote their names: Vern, Simon, Warren, and Melanie. Beneath that he wrote the names of the other kids who’d gone missing: Chris and Nicholas.
“And who else?” he asked the still room.
Poster boards of the kids’ final projects still hung on the wall. Melanie Dunlop had chosen a book called The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. Her pink poster was covered in drawings of angry black cats.
The intercom on the wall released a burst of static.