Seasons of Heaven (26 page)

He walked up the street like the waitress told him to and turned left next to the little school. There was a series of track houses there and after getting turned around on a couple of “cul de sacs”; he found the first street he was looking for.

He was surprised at how nice the homes were here. It was such a small community that he wouldn’t have thought the economy would be that great. The likelihood was that the residents commuted to the city for work. He made his way up a paved driveway that curved up to a quaint looking Tudor-style wooden house with leaded glass front windows. It had a steep wooden shake roof and a prominent stone chimney. His list listed a Gregory Miller as being the owner of a white Ford pick-up and living at this address. He rang the bell and within seconds an elderly woman opened the door.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, I was looking for Gregory Miller.” The smile on the woman’s face melted and she said,

“Gregory was my son. He passed away last month.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Eddie said, “Can I ask how he died?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie took out his credentials and told her, “I’m investigating an accident that happened in New Jersey a few weeks ago. I think someone may have witnessed it and that someone was in a pick-up like the one registered to your son.”

“Oh, well it wasn’t Gregory. He died five weeks ago. His pick-up is in my garage. It hasn’t been driven for almost a year. He had cancer and he was in and out of the hospital the last year.”

Eddie was sure this wasn’t the truck he was looking for. He thanked the woman and went on his way.

The next house was three blocks away and as Eddie approached the front door he could hear the television on inside. A middle-aged woman answered the door and told him that the man he was asking about was her husband, George.

“He’s at work now though. He works in the city, he’s an investment banker.” That explained the nice house and the expensive clothing the woman was wearing, Eddie thought. He told her who he was and why he wanted to talk to her husband.

“He doesn’t ever drive the pick-up into the city,” she said, “It’s expensive on gas. We mostly have it to pull our fifth wheel when we go on vacations. It’s in the garage if you’d like to take a look at it.”

“Sure, thank you,” Eddie followed her to the garage where she opened the door to reveal a white Ford pickup with a double cab. As soon as he saw it, he knew it wasn’t the right one. He thanked her and headed on again.

Eddie was able to talk to four of the seven people on his list that morning. He would see the others the following day if he didn’t get anything from the last one on his list. That was the one the waitress told him was on the “bad side of town.”

Eddie had lunch and then drove out to find the address of the last one. The house stood alone just on the edge of town. It was not in a terrible state from the outside, yet not remarkable well kept by any means. It was probably about thirty or forty years old and it was just a square of brick walls with four windows in front that didn’t add a thing to the aesthetics of the place. There was a small cement porch out front and Eddie saw a woman probably in her late fifties sitting in a folding chair looking down at him as he approached.

He introduced himself and the woman said,

“I’m Elizabeth Lewis,” the woman told him.

“I’m looking for the owner of a white Ford pick-up. He may have witnessed an accident over in New Jersey a few weeks ago.”

“The woman had a strange way about her. She didn’t seem upset or concerned or the least bit suspicious that a New York City detective was here in Little Rock asking questions about an accident that happened in New Jersey. All she said, was,

“I don’t have no truck,” she said.

Eddie looked at the paper in his hand and said, “It says it’s registered to a Frank Lewis at this address.”

“We best talk about this inside,” she said. Her tone was the same, but something about her demeanor had changed.

Eddie cautiously followed the woman inside the house and after taking a quick look around, he took the seat she offered him. Once they both sat down she said, “Frank ain’t been around here for a long time. I’m not sure why he would use this address.”

“And Frank is?”

“My son. He’s…disturbed detective. He’s been in trouble most of his life.” She said that with a matter-of-fact voice. She wasn’t complaining, she was just stating the facts.

“Is Frank here right now?” Eddie asked.

“No, I told you, he doesn’t come here anymore. I’m glad of it. The boy ain’t right in the head.”

“Can you tell me about him? Where does he live? How can I get ahold of him?”

“I don’t know where he’s at and I doubt that he’s working. He don’t keep a job for long.”

“What kind of work does he do?” Eddie asked her.

“Nothing specific. He gets a job here and there…fast food, mechanics…Hell; he was even into taxidermy for a while. Like I said though, I ain’t seen him in a while….”

While the woman was talking, Eddie was taking a better stock of the house around him. It was a dark…depressing little place. There were no school pictures on the walls of a young Frank…no family vacation photos….the windows were covered with dark black curtains and the room was lit with a single naked bulb on a string in the center of the room. The furniture was old and stained and the only wall decoration in the place resembled a pentagram. The whole place gave Eddie the creeps and made him determined to find and talk to this Frank person.

“Does Frank still have a room here?”

“I ain’t touched it since he left. He’s got a temper…I try not to make him angry….” The old woman showed Eddie to Frank’s room and she left him there. Eddie looked around at the walls, from the looks of it, Frank hadn’t been here…or at least updated anything since he was a teenager. There were posters on the wall of teen movies and singers and an old dusty hi-fi system in the corner. There were stacks of clothes that had been in one place for so long they’d gathered dust. He didn’t find anything special there, so he went back out to once again talk to Frank’s mother.

“Mrs. Lewis, I need you to tell me everything you can about Frank, as far back as his childhood.”

“Ain’t much to tell. He’s a “special” man. He grew up here with his Daddy and me. He was always an imaginative child. He used to tell people that we were into satanic cults and that we waited around for the darkness to come nourish itself off of our neighbors. Got some teachers and CPS workers all in an uproar over it once. He even told them I kept him in a closet when he came in from school. It were all nonsense that he made up in his head.”

“Why would he tell people things like that?” Eddie asked. His inclination was to believe it. He’d found out since becoming a police officer that in cases where children reported abuse against their parents it was usually true.

“He was just always different. We was poor and I couldn’t afford to take him to no fancy doctors for a diagnosis, but the truth was my family has some schizophrenia in it and I think maybe Frank got a touch of that. He tried to make himself “normal” by inventing his own world. At school he was always getting picked on and beat up for acting crazy. He used to talk to himself…all the time and he was never happy…saddest kid you ever seen. ” The woman actually said that like she thought he’d deserved that kind of treatment. The poor kid probably talked to himself because he didn’t have anyone else to talk to…no one who cared about him anyways. Eddie was feeling sorry for Frank…at least the child version of him. She wasn’t finished yet,

“When he was a teenager, he stopped talking…to everyone real anyways. He talked to someone that no one else could see. He called him “Frank” too. Weird kid, I’m telling you.”

“How old was he when he moved out?”

She shrugged. What kind of mother doesn’t know how old their child is when they move out of the house?

“He got beat up real bad one Thanksgiving. He was out in the woods and I don’t doubt he brought it on, playing with that invisible friend of his. A group of kids jumped on him and beat him senseless. He spent a couple a days in the hospital…or maybe more…anyways, he told me he was in a coma for two days.”

“He told you? You weren’t there?” Eddie didn’t want her to stop giving him information, so he’d been trying to control his tone, but that was too much.

“I didn’t know he was in the hospital until he got home. They should call us or something. He was ranting and raving about people called “The Banished” who needed him in Heaven. I had to laugh at that, Frank in Heaven? That’s a joke right there. Anyways, he packed up a bag and took off that day. He’s come around a time or two since to steal from me. He got even more hateful than ever. He didn’t even bother attending to his daddy’s funeral.”

“I need to know where you think he might be, ma’am…”

“I told you, I ain’t seen him in a long time. Don’t you have enough information from me?”

“No, I don’t. I need you to give me some detail, something that could help me to find him. Was there a place he used to hide himself, where he felt good, maybe a kind of shelter of his? Try to remember!”

She thought about it and then finally said, “There was something like that. When he was young, after the incident with the children from the village who had sent him to the hospital he used to go the old cabin near the treatment plant. I saw him there once.”

“Can you show me on the map where it was?” Eddie said, excited.

She showed him where the treatment plant was on the map and then said,

“It’s up there around the back side of the plant. There ain’t no real road leading to it, just dirt.”

“Mrs. Lewis, what else can you tell me about Frank?”

“Like what do you mean?” she said. Eddie had to wonder if she knew her son at all even before he left.

“How about his appearance, what does he look like?”

She shrugged and said, “He’s plain. He’s got light hair and pale blue eyes. His skin always looks pasty when it ain’t covered in acne…you know, just plain.”

Eddie almost shuddered at the lack of interest this woman showed in her own offspring. “What about photographs? Do you have any pictures of him?”

She looked like she was thinking about it and then she got up and went over to a desk that sat in the corner. She took out an old album and handed it to Eddie. He flipped through it, disappointed to see that they were all school photos and only went up to the third or fourth grade. When he’d finished he looked at her and said,

“You don’t have anything more recent than this?”

She shook her head and said, “You know, he’s just plain. Who wants a picture of that on their wall?”

Eddie left with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Such a lack of feeling for your own child was unimaginable to him. He’d been a cop for a long time and he’d talked to a lot of people. As far as the bad mother award goes, this woman took the cake.

Eddie at least left the Lewis house with directions to the old cabin Frank’s mother said he used to stay at sometimes. The place was several miles outside of town and Eddie drove through torrents of rain and mud to get there. He finally came to a place in the road that was so muddy and slippery he could no longer get enough traction to drive. Worried about getting stuck in the mud, he got out and began to walk the rest of the way.

The air smelled terrible. The smoke coming from the treatment plant filled the air with the smell of human waste. Eddie would have liked to travel quicker and get out of the smell faster, but he was forced to walk slowly both by the weather and the conditions of the dirt path he was walking on. He had his weapon out and in his hand just in case Frank was in the cabin or somewhere in the woods along the way. After the talk with his mother Eddie was convinced that if he wasn’t his guy, he was dangerous at the very least.

He walked through the woods which were marked as a “hunting preserve.” There was no one else around and from the looks of the tangled brush and dead trees; Eddie guessed that it hadn’t been used in a while. There was a gloomy pall that sat over the whole place and just to make it spookier a flock of black ravens flew away into the dark sky just as Eddie came to the end of the path and approached the old cabin.

The cabin was made of wood, but the roof was corrugated sheet metal and the rain made a loud tap-tap noise as it pelted down on top of it. The place was covered with brush and the wood was rotting. It looked deserted.

Eddie tried the door but it was blocked by something. Using his elbow, he broke open the dusty glass window and then using his jacket as a protective barrier he climbed inside. The room was dark and covered in dust and cobwebs Eddie shuddered to think of what kind of vermin might be resting in the corners. The smell outside had been bad, but the one in the cabin was a pungent mix of dust and mold that made Eddie sneeze repeatedly. It seemed as if no one had been there in years.

Eddie took out his little flashlight and ran it across the walls. He stopped it on one wall that was covered in newspaper clippings. Eddie stepped closer where he could see them better. They were news reports about the children who had gone missing in Little Rock all those years ago. There were also multiple Polaroid photos of various children. Most of the pictures didn’t look posed, as if the children had no idea they were being photographed.