“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.
The lookout.
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.”
“Knock if off,” she said. “We have to decide how we’re going to handle this before he comes out.”
“I’ve already decided.”
“Gregory—”
“I’m going to beat some sense into him. Like I should have done a long time ago.”
“You are not.” Her voice was deadly serious and filled with a conviction he had not really heard from her before. “You are not going to lay a hand on that boy.”
He had not been entirely serious about his stated course of action, had said it more to irritate her than because he had any intention of doing it, and he found himself backing down in the face of her determined opposition. “We’ll ground him,” he conceded. “And we’ll give him a lecture and make sure he understands what he’s done.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
Behind them, the woman’s crying grew louder as the desk sergeant talked to her, and another couple walked into the station, an Indian man and a white woman, obviously the third boy’s parents.
Before them, the metal door opened, and a uniformed officer ushered a sick-looking Adam out into the lobby. The boy stared at the floor and would not meet his father’s eyes. Something about his son’s cowed, guilty passivity irked Gregory. Next to him, Julia started crying again. Adam seemed to shrink even further into himself.