Impulse (21 page)

Chapter Forty-two

The judge’s official-looking order had the desired effect. At eight o’clock the next morning, eleven people gathered at the school’s main gate. Felix Darnell looked irritated and kept brushing his thinning hair out of his eyes. Too early to mousse, Frank thought. Dexter Light seemed a little the worse for wear, but Frank couldn’t decide if that was the result of a night of booze or several days without it. Stark had brought his wife with him, or perhaps it was the other way around. Elizabeth Roulx looked sleepy but interested. Mrs. Sands looked around anxiously. Her ex-husband had refused to come with her. Rosemary’s friend, the ex-policeman, and two active duty cops rounded out the group.

“This way, please,” he said and led them into the woods. They moved easily along a bridle path until they came to the stream. He then sent them on through the underbrush. Judith Stark, for reasons that made sense only to her, had worn high heels and had a hard time of it. Finally she removed her shoes, sacrificing a pair of new pantyhose in the process. They stepped carefully through generations of leaves and branches. Since the order to appear at a time and place said nothing about where they would have to go, only Frank and Rosemary were appropriately shod. Darnell looked at his Gucci loafers, now scratched and muddy, and cursed under his breath. The cops seemed perfectly content with the circumstances. They were accustomed to shoe disasters. The trees were in early bud. The maples had leafed out but the birches and oaks seemed to lag behind as if they wanted to see if the maples were going to make it first. Here and there, Frank saw a wild azalea with pale pink blossoms and unkempt forsythia making bright yellow splashes against the green and purples of the brush and trees.

When they reached the beech tree, Frank stopped them. He formed them in a circle and carefully studied each of their faces.

“One of you,” he said quietly, “could tell this story far better than I. Before I start, I would like to give that person the opportunity.” He waited. No one stirred.

“Very well. Over there—” He pointed to the X in the tree—“is where my brother Jack and I marked this spot. If you look over there—” He pointed to a slight V-shaped notch in the embankment— “this is where my brother Jack and I once dug a cave. It wasn’t much of a cave, but we were proud of it. We had bought Army surplus entrenching tools and needed a project. After the war—that would be the Second World War for those of you too young to remember. After that war, surplus military supplies were everywhere. Jack and I bought those entrenching tools and a parachute at Sunny’s Surplus in Pikesville, I think. We spent a great deal of time in the woods back then, Jack and I. I guess there isn’t a square foot of this and all the woods and fields around here we didn’t explore at one time or another. It was a wonderful time. A great time to be young….” He paused and cleared his throat. He could do this. He felt Rosemary’s hand squeeze his arm.

“The strange thing is, in the five decades since I last walked these woods, everything has changed. It took me nearly an hour to get my bearings. I had to find a small copse Jack and I created before I could make my way here—I should say,
our
way here. Mrs. Mitchell and I came this way yesterday. Well, at any rate, the stream bank along here rose to something like eight feet then. It doesn’t look like it now, but fifty years ago it did. We dug our cave straight into the bank, there.

“It turned out to be a fine place to hide. We brought cigar boxes with the things we didn’t want our parents to know we had, and hid them in the cave. I don’t know for sure, but I think the roof would have been at least three feet thick then. The soil here is dense but sandy. Pre-sandstone, I would call it. Boys do stupid things and we were no exception. We climbed in and out of the cave for months. The idea that to do so might be dangerous never occurred to us. We’d made a number of forts and hideouts in the woods. Some of them were discovered by other kids years later. The hollow in the honeysuckle north of here, for example, has been used by a lot of people over the years. Even recently, if I’m not mistaken, but Mr. Light would know more about that than I.”

Light shifted his feet, looked startled, and then directed his gaze back up the streambed in the direction of the copse. He nodded.

“Now, here’s the situation as I see it. Those of you who lived it may jump in at any time and correct me if you wish. I am, of necessity, only speculating what happened. But, then, I write stories. Those of us who write fiction succeed or fail in our ability to visualize things that are plausible, and make them seem real to our readers. We get pretty good at it and sometimes surprise ourselves by how real we can be.

“Take today’s story, for example. It actually begins sooner than we’ve been led to believe. At one-thirty, or thereabout, on that Saturday afternoon, five boys entered the woods somewhere around here.”

“Four boys, and it was nearer to two,” Stark interrupted. The ex-cop nodded.

“No, that’s the first error. Nobody checked the time because it didn’t seem important then. Mrs. Parker said two, definitely, and so two it was, even though Sam Littlefield, who’d timed his run in and out of the city for years, said one-thirty. Who’s going to take the word of an African-American bus driver over a faculty member? It was one-thirty, wasn’t it, Mr. Light?” Everyone swiveled around to look at Dexter.

Dexter Light looked to his right and left and nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“You went along with Mrs. Parker’s version because the two of you thought you could cover your affair. If the disappearance occurred at two, you were covered and so was Mrs. Parker, who could not have been with you in the woods. So one-thirty it was. That means you, Stark, have to account for your behavior at the time as well. You were with the other four, and that makes five boys.”

“I had DISH, I wasn’t here.”

“Mr. Light had DISH, too, but he was here and so were you. DISH began at two, not one-thirty. You had plenty of time to be in the woods and still make it back to the study hall.”

“I don’t see where this is going,” Felix Darnell grumbled. “I’m at the point of asking these good gentlemen,” he gestured to the policemen, “to put an end to this.”

“Patience, Dr. Darnell. You will be pleased when we are done here, but you will have to wait a little longer. Surely the school can only benefit by bringing this tragedy to a close.” The two officers did not move.

“I take it, then, you dragged us out here to tell us what happened to those boys?”

“That is correct,” Frank said.

Mrs. Sands uttered a barely audible “Oh my God.”

Elizabeth Roulx slipped her camera from its case and began to take pictures.

“Mr. Stark, do you have anything to add so far? You were a witness,” Frank said.

“Don’t say anything,” Judith Stark hissed. “He doesn’t know shit.”

All eyes swung around to stare at her. She stood next to her husband, her long dress mud spattered at the hem and her shoes in her hand.

If Darnell’s eyebrows rose any higher they would have slid down the back of his neck. “I’m not sure I appreciate….” he began, but his voice trailed off. “Screw you, you old letch. You didn’t seem to mind how I talked at the Christmas party.” Her gaze swept the group and she added, “The man’s an octopus.”

Darnell’s face turned a garish shade of red and he started to sputter a response. Then he noticed Elizabeth Roulx’s camera pointed his way, reversed his field, and managed a sickly smile for her benefit.

“Mr. Stark, before your wife decided to entertain us, I asked you a question. You were a witness. Anything to add?”

Stark squeezed his wife’s elbow just as she started to say something.

“Shut up, Judith,” he said through his teeth. Frank waited for more. Stark said nothing. He turned back to Light.

“Okay, five boys enter the woods. Did you know they were here, Mr. Light?”

“I heard their voices, I wondered….”

“Wondered what?”

“If they’d seen me with Mrs. Parker.”

“We did,” Stark muttered.

“She left and I decided to follow the boys and find out what they knew. I couldn’t have them talking to their parents or Daigle.”

“Who’s Daigle?” Darnell wanted to know.

“One of your predecessors,” Rosemary answered.

The retired cop stared at Light. “So you did what to them?”

“Nothing. I followed their voices and then I didn’t hear them anymore. I lost them. I searched and then left for DISH.”

Frank waited. “Mr. Stark, anything?”

Silence.

“It’s been a funny week,” Frank said. “I came here for closure on a part of my life that ended badly. My brother Jack killed himself because some of my classmates thought it would be amusing to embarrass him by reporting he was gay. They didn’t know it would end in his suicide. It turned my father into a bitter old man and broke my mother’s heart. But they couldn’t have known it would end that way. It was just an impulsive and stupid thing to do. Boys, I have come to realize this week, are given to doing stupid things. One of my grandchildren, for example, nearly knocked his brother out with a lacrosse ball. He just took it into his head to fling it. He never considered what might happen if he actually hit him.

“Then I heard on the news that two boys nearly died when some scaffolding they were playing on collapsed. The construction site had been sealed off, but they found a way in and the chance to climb irresistible. They clambered up on scaffolding that was in the process of being dismantled. They didn’t know that, and certainly could not ask. When part of it collapsed, they didn’t have a chance. Then yesterday, a family smashed into a bridge abutment because some idiot threw a stone onto the highway and hit their windshield. A stone thrown at thirty miles an hour hits a windshield moving at sixty miles an hour. They didn’t have a chance either. I don’t suppose we will ever know who threw the stone.

“That brings us to this place. Jack and I dug a cave right over there. We never considered what might happen to us if it were to fall in. More importantly, we never considered what might happen if it fell in on someone else. When we grew older and were not interested in playing fort, we should have collapsed it. But when I left, the last thing on my mind was Old Oak Woods.

“So twenty-five years later, Ned Sparks finds our cave and takes his friends to see it. They all crawl in and talk. What did you talk about, Stark?”

Stark did not answer. He stood barely breathing—as still and as pale as one of the white birch trees at his back.

“I don’t suppose it’s all that important. Now here’s the part I’m not sure about. Stark had to leave. He had DISH. Light is moving this way, but he has DISH, too. Within minutes, they must head up the hill to school. If we knew what happened in that brief moment, we could put an end to this twenty-five year old mystery. Stark? Light?”

Light shifted his feet. “I told you what happened. I walked this way from that copse you talked about. But I lost the voices. I searched back that way and then hurried up the hill. That’s it, I swear.”

“I’m inclined to believe you,” Frank said, “because of what I said before about kids doing impulsive and stupid things. When Jack and I dug the cave, its ceiling would have been nearly three feet thick, but every now and then a chunk of dirt would fall in, and you could tell it would eventually collapse. It’s not something we thought about then. Only now I see its importance. I guess I have to take some responsibility for what happened next. When you and your friends crawled in, how thick do you think the ceiling was, Stark?”

He shook his head and his face began to change from birch white to beech gray.

“Well, I would guess it was probably no more than a foot at the dome, maybe less.” Frank paused and let the picture of a rough cave form in the minds of his listeners. Rosemary, who’d heard it before, felt a tear slide down her cheek. She dabbed at it with a tissue.

“Stark, I think you crawled out. You said something like, ‘I’ve got DISH, I gotta go.’ And you start to walk away. Then you think, ‘I’ll scare the bejesus out of them,’ and you climb up the bank and stand over them on the surface. ‘I’ll jump up and down and knock some sand down on them. Then they’ll come flying out like bees from a hive.’ It was a stupid, impulsive act. Not intended to hurt anyone. But what happened, Mr. Stark?”

Stark’s eyes raced around the circle of people looking for help. Mrs. Sands moaned, “Oh my God, Bobby….”

Judith Stark folded and sat heavily on the ground. “I told you not to come. Now it’s ruined.”

“It was an accident,” Stark whispered. “I only jumped once. One time, I swear, and the whole roof fell in. It made a sound like, wuff, and then, nothing. I stood there and I knew there wasn’t anything anybody could do. They would be dead before I could get help.”

Mrs. Sands began to sob.

Elizabeth Roulx spoke for the first time. “So you walked away and left four families in perpetual mourning. Never said a word.…How could you?”

“I was just a kid, I didn’t know. I was scared, I didn’t know…and then, later…I guessed it was too late….” Stark dropped to the ground next to his wife and sobbed.

Frank turned to the two police officers. “You can dig here,” he said and pointed to the ground at his feet.

Epilogue

They watched the last of the cars drive away, and finally the two of them were alone. The woods grew quiet. Only the splashing of the stream in the background and a pair of bluejays yammering in the distance broke the silence.

“So what happens now, Frank?”

“Happens? Well, I leave this evening for Phoenix.”

“Is your daughter going with you?”

“No, she said she couldn’t on short notice, although her husband said he could watch the kids, but…she’s still not sure about me…the police and all that.”

She waited.

“Would you…?”

She turned and searched his face. “Would I what?”

“Well, since I lost my traveling companion….”

“Are you suggesting—?”

“There are almost no bugs in the Valley of the Sun.”

“Just scorpions, snakes, and rabbits eating your lantana.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“And coyotes.”

“Yes, and coyotes.” She waited.

“Come with me, Rosemary. I can’t promise you anything. I may be in jail five minutes after we get there and need a bail bond—”

“I’m a very rich woman, Frank. I can raise the bail.”

***

Rosemary had to hurry to keep up with Frank, but she nearly ran him over as they cleared the security area and entered the main lobby of Sky Harbor’s Terminal Four. He stood frozen in place, his gaze directed across the seats set aside for people waiting to greet arrivals.

“Why are we stopping?” she asked, then followed his gaze toward two men who slouched uncomfortably against the wall.

“Wait here.” He walked toward the men. She followed anyway. “Sergeant Ledezma, what a surprise, and you, too, Pastorella. Is this a social call or are you here on official business?”

Rosemary’s heart went to her throat. This is it, she thought. The one she thought must be Ledezma looked at the floor and then at Frank.

“Mr. Smith, we came to offer an apology.”

“A what?” Frank’s expression shifted from anxious to unbelieving.

“Ah, you probably know we found your wife’s body—”

“Yes, I got your call. A little late, I’m afraid. I came back as quickly as I could.”

“Yeah, we, that is to say…since Pastorella here called about that, we’ve been looking at the evidence at the scene, where they found her…remains, and other things we uncovered just recently, indicates your wife was probably killed by
coyotes
. We think she must have witnessed something and they couldn’t let her live. Sorry. We don’t have anybody in custody, but we do have some DNA samples and a possible match. I’m sorry.”

“How did she die?”

Ledezma shook his head. “She never knew what hit her.”

He’s lying, Rosemary thought. He’s lying because he’s feeling stupid about all the time he wasted harassing Frank and not looking for real killers. And he’s lying because she must have died a terrible death and they don’t want him to know, because he’s had enough.

“You can tell me the details later. You’re done with me, right?”

“Yes, sir. This envelope sort of spells it out, there’s the death certificate…and all. We’ve notified the insurance company and told them to release the benefits.” The three men stood staring at each other. Finally, Ledezma shrugged his shoulders.

“So, we’re okay? Sorry.”

She stepped away from Frank as the two policemen walked away. What kind of night would she have now? He would need her eventually, but maybe not right away. She’d wait as long as it took.

You were right, kiddo. Congratulations.

“I won’t need you anymore,” she said, this time very softly, and knew she was done with her voices forever. He turned to her and she took his hand.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I want to show you the desert.”