Sacrifice (10 page)

YOU ARE DRIVING FROM PAUL HAMPTON’S HOUSE TO THE VILLAGE GREEN INN WHERE YOU HAVE A ROOM RESERVED.

BOB’S FUNERAL IS TOMMORROW.

YOU WERE ONCE MARRIED TO PAMELA ANDERSON.

Two truths and a lie, Ken thought. The memory book is always two truths and a lie. Gotta keep a sense of humor about this crap. Throughout each day, he would jot down a note about what was going on in the memory book. In the event he was disoriented, he could flip open the book and basically re-read the last chapter of his life. This was the third book he’d been through since his diagnosis months ago. But he’d burned through the last book in a week.

Even with the memory prod, Ken could not lock in where he was. Where was the Village Green Inn? The evening was so fuzzy. Instead he reached back farther. Summer of 1975. He and Paul were near the Village Green Inn—behind it actually—down by the harbor. They’d ridden their bikes there from Paul’s house. He could remember that, clear as day, clearer than he had in a while.

The morning rain had passed, and the sun set the damp roads steaming. They left Paul’s house and Paul almost got hit by a moving van. Empire Movers. 615-555-6607 was the phone number on the side of the truck. (Where did that little detail come from?) They turned down Sagebrook Road, single file, Paul riding first. Something had bloomed and the air had a sweet tinge to it.

In his mind, he retraced the route down Sagebrook Road. He could feel every pump of his bicycle pedals. He remembered passing certain houses and side streets. Then his memory caught up with the present, to the very spot where his BMW idled. He sighed in relief. He tossed the car into gear and pulled back onto the road. He followed his memory’s mental preview, past signs and homes remembered from the perspective of a bicycle seat.

He crested a hill and there was the village green. The inn stood at the far end. Spotlights lit the Victorian façade, and he praised God that it hadn’t changed in thirty years. He pulled into a parking space and shut off the car.

No one knew about his illness yet. He’d worked hard to cover himself, kept doing research and avoiding any personal closings. But it couldn’t last forever. He couldn’t keep enough notebooks. When that happened, he was screwed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you did need a brain to be a Realtor.

The irony was too much. His gift of total recall was on the way to being totally recalled. Sometimes he wondered if people were born with a full tank of memory, and using his at twice normal strength had depleted his allotment early.

He pulled out his Memory Book and a pen. On a fresh page he wrote the date and 1:10 a.m. Then he wrote:

YOU ARE STAYING AT THE VILLAGE GREEN INN IN SAGEBROOK.

YOUR FRIENDS FROM HIGH SCHOOL ARE IN OTHER ROOMS HERE.

IN 1986 YOU CLIMBED MOUNT EVEREST NAKED.

“Gotta have a sense of humor,” he said to himself.

Chapter Twenty-Two

False dawn lit the horizon the next morning. A runabout putted past the Sagebrook harbor dock on the way to catch flounder in the Sound. A few terns rose into the air with raucous squawks. The earthy smell of the salt marsh filled the air. Jeff sat on the edge of the dock. The soles of his shoes skimmed the water.

Three hours of sleep had apparently been plenty. Jeff had been awake since four thirty a.m. The dining room didn’t open until eight, so he had walked the village shops in the dark and been disappointed. All the buildings were the same with no additions and no new color schemes. But the tenants were different. The butcher, the bakery and the barber his mother used to drag him to were all gone. Instead there was Express, The Gap, The Limited. The village shops were just a shopping mall with all exterior doors. The homes along the west side of the green now housed lawyers, doctors and accountants. The villagers had abandoned their mom-and-pop shops and their small town principles and succumbed to the power of Walmart. But as Jeff sat on the edge of the dock and looked out across the water, he didn’t have to take in all that change. This view was the one he remembered.

Footsteps echoes on the dock behind him. Ken stopped and leaned against one of the pilings.

“You see that Arnie’s Deli back there turned into a candle shop?” Ken said.

“The village traded the best ham sandwiches in the world for scented wax,” Jeff said. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“No way. Kept thinking about Bob.”

“We’re too young for death by cancer,” Jeff said. “We’re not even fifty.”

“Yeah, can you believe a disease that wouldn’t respect our youthful vigor?” Ken said. He slumped down against the piling. Jeff swung around to face him.

“Why are we here?” Jeff asked. “I mean, why did Bob reserve rooms at the Inn? There are other hotels nearby, closer to his house.”

“Irony?” Ken offered. “I admit it’s tough to give Bob credit for that kind of depth, no disrespect to the dead. But this was where it all began, and all ended. You, me and the Woodsman right there on the green.” He paused. “Christ, I haven’t said that name out loud in three decades.”

“But do you think about him?” Jeff asked.

“How can you not?” Ken said.

“Did you notice one thing we all have in common?” Jeff said.

Ken smiled. “Hell, yeah. No kids.”

“Consciously or subconsciously, none of us wanted to take the risk.”

“Because even after all we did, none of us trust that the Woodsman’s gone.”

“Horror Movie Rule Number One,” Jeff said. “’It’s never dead.’”

Chapter Twenty-Three

About an hour later, Dave went for a walk. Given the condition of his leg, a daily constitutional had dropped from his schedule thirty years ago. But this morning he felt like he had to gut it out. His leg felt pretty good and he only had to rest lightly on his cane. While he was still alone, he had some places he needed to see, some memories to confront.

After shattering his leg in 1980, he spent weeks in the hospital listening to dismal doctors’ prognoses. He’d always thank his parents for adamantly refusing the recommendations to amputate. He returned home little better than bedridden. But he had finished enough physical therapy by summer’s end to start the fall semester at the University of Massachusetts.

So after high school graduation, all Dave saw of Sagebrook was the hospital and his home until he escaped to U Mass. He hadn’t avoided the Village Green in particular, but standing on it now, he realized he would have. The very smell of the place, the antithetic combination of salt marsh stink and the sweet scent of the recently cut grass, brought a hollow dread to life within him.

He hobbled down south on Main. He paused in front of one of the old Colonial era homes. A large maple’s roots had buckled the sidewalk from below. The tree was several feet around now, much larger than when Dave saw it last. He knelt down and inspected the base of the trunk. A scar ran across the bark about a foot or so up the trunk. The tree cocked off at an odd angle there before continuing its upward journey with a slightly smaller trunk. The scar from the accident, where his bumper gashed the tree. The tree was one resilient plant to survive the impact.

Dave traced the ripple with his left hand. Subconsciously he touched the side of his damaged leg with his right. A moment in time, and all paths change whether it’s a person’s life or a tree’s growth. Plant or animal, we all carry our history with us though life, he thought.

He continued down to the old mill pond. The first settlers had dammed the stream and built a mill for grinding the local corn, wheat and flax they grew. The pond was now home to a troop of Canadian geese that refused to migrate and a battalion of noisy mallard ducks. Dave remembered how he used to punch holes in the bread bags when he was little so they would go stale. Stale bread was the only kind his mother would let him “waste” feeding to the mill-pond ducks.

At the end of the pond loomed the old mill, a two-story little building with a high, peaked roof. The exterior was done in cedar shingles, but they were nowhere near as weathered as the homes in the village. A huge waterwheel protruded out one side of the building, a circular aberration grafted to all the structure’s straight angles. The wheel stood still. The sluice gate that fed it water was closed.

The building made Dave shudder. The tourists who dropped by might think it was quaint and rustic, but they didn’t know the place like Dave did, the intimate way all the Half Dozen did.

Dave forced himself closer. With each step he felt a layer of maturity slough off, like peeling an onion. Years of accumulated strength and self-assurance flaked away, and the closer he got the closer he was to his own inner core. At that core was the seventeen-year-old kid who was terrified the last time he walked down this street, but too naïve and inexperienced to be terrified enough.

He stood at the waist-high picket fence that surrounded the mill. His heart ran hard in his chest. His right leg quivered. He gripped the tips of the fence to steady himself. The dew-covered surface felt cold and unwelcoming.

Through the windows Dave could make out the interior of the mill, just as he remembered it. Both the first and second floors had several rooms. The largest was the first-floor milling room. The drive shaft from the waterwheel powered a series of large wooden gears inside that pushed the millstone against the round bed stone in the center of the building.

There was one difference in the building. At the base was a bronze plaque that read:

MILL HOUSE RESTORED IN 1981 THROUGH THE GENEROUS DONATIONS OF SAGEBROOK CITIZENS.

Of course it was, Dave thought. They couldn’t very well have let it sit here in the condition we left it. That would be too painful a reminder of that awful night.

A faded handbill was taped in the corner of a front window. It advertised the Sagebrook Memorial Day Celebration from the start of the summer. Minutemen re-enactors. Sailboat races in the harbor. Toy boat races on the pond. A parade. Local baked goods sale including, for the first time in over one hundred years, fresh-ground local wheat from the old mill itself.

A padlock secured the mill house door. But standing outside was close enough. Restoration or not, it sure felt like the same place he’d been thirty years ago, and he didn’t need to get closer and turn up the volume on that.

Dave pivoted on his cane and started back to the Village Green Inn. Remembering the past had started a throbbing in his leg that was beyond being ignored. This little sojourn was a stupid idea, physically and mentally. What the hell had he been thinking?

Chapter Twenty-Four

St. Andrew’s Episcopal was every inch a New England church. A few blocks from the village green, the old church had been the first one the founding families had raised. Behind it lay the small cemetery where most of them were buried. Some of the gravestones were so old that acid rain had long rinsed all the names from their surfaces.

Inside the church, after over one hundred seventy years of celebrations, the walls were infused with the twin scents of melting wax and smoking incense. The narrow nave hosted two columns of dark wooden pews, each a dozen feet long. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high, a steep peak with exposed beams that looked like the ribs of the ships the harbor used to host. Stained glass windows with the images of apostles lined the walls. The morning sun streamed though them to paint the floor in a pastel mosaic. Behind the carved altar at the end of the sanctuary rose a life-size carving of the crucified Christ, face contorted in agony as he sacrificed himself to save others.

Jeff, Marc and Ken sat on the right side of the church, Dave and Paul on the left. They sat one row back from the front to leave the first rows open for family. They were too optimistic. Only Bob’s older sister Lori came to represent the family. She was sixty with a long, careworn face. She wore black jeans and a black, long-sleeved blouse, as if the dress code had been “funeral casual.”

“That’s it?” Dave whispered to Paul. “Where’s the rest of Bob’s family?”

“Lori may be it,” Paul said. “Bob’s mother died long ago, his father was never heard from after he took off. His other sister Barb lives in Massapequa and I bet she couldn’t care less.”

Bob’s cremated remains were in a wooden box that looked like it could hold a dozen cigars. It sat on a small table at the head of the center aisle between the pews. A framed picture of Bob sat on top of the box. He wore a dark suit, and his hair was temporarily tamed and parted to the right. He beamed. It was his high school yearbook picture.

“She couldn’t find a more recent picture?” Dave said.

“Beats using his mug shot,” Paul said. “After he got out of jail, Bob’s family shunned him. I doubt they have a more recent picture.”

The priest passed by their pew wearing a long white vestment with a red cross embroidered in the center of the back. The old man had a fringe of gray hair and thick glasses in plastic frames. Paul looked back across the sanctuary. One woman in jeans and a summer blouse sat in the back, looking like a tourist who’d stumbled across the funeral.

“Damn,” he said. “We’re the only ones here.”

The priest began with a few prayers and delivered a short homily on Bob. It was ninety percent stock funeral patter, though he did claim to remember Bob from his altar boy days. He spoke about the eternal rewards that await us all and concluded with a prayer. He bowed to the altar and left. The whole event took fifteen minutes.