The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (39 page)

R
HONDA, IT’S PETER.”
She hadn’t spoken to him since the night she sent the police to his door searching for Ernie. She didn’t know how to begin to apologize. And she still had so many questions—like who was he with at the Inn and Out Motel and why had he lied about it?

“I’ve been meaning to call,” she said. “I’m so sorry for everything, and I…”

“Ronnie,” he interrupted, “last night the police found a body.”

Rhonda closed her eyes. At last, it was over. The police had been searching the woods around Nickel Lake for Ernie’s body since Warren and Pat were taken into custody. Rhonda had studiously avoided the news stories about the botched kidnapping. She didn’t want to hear the pile of charges being heaped against Pat and Warren. The one piece of news she’d heard had haunted her. When the police searched Pat’s office, they found a little girl’s
sneaker soaked in blood, decades old. Pat had kept Birdie’s shoe with her all these years, a gruesome reminder of her loss.

Rhonda heard Peter breathing into the phone.

“Where?” she asked. “Where did they find it?”

Rhonda hated herself the minute she said the words, turning Ernie from a
her
into an
it
.

“In our woods, Ronnie. Under the old stage.”

There was a long pause. Rhonda drew in a breath. She heard a strange crackle on the phone line. She felt a pain in her head and reached up instinctively and ran her finger over the scar. Rhonda had this crazy idea then. She thought maybe they’d just dug up that old bogeyman. He’d decomposed to the point where they looked at him and thought he’d once been a person. Maybe that was the body they’d found—their childhood fears given form, weighted down by stones, as if such a weight could hold them down forever.

“That can’t be,” Rhonda found herself saying, more of a gasp than a sentence.

“I want you to get in your car right now and come straight over here, Ronnie. Get here as soon as you can. We have to talk before you see anyone else, especially the police, okay?”

“The police?”

“Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you.”

“But I don’t understand,” Rhonda said, her voice sounding squeaky and strange; it was her eleven-year-old voice.

“I know you don’t. That’s why you need to come see me. Promise me you’re on your way.”

“I promise,” she said, the words tumbling easily out of Rhonda’s tight, dry mouth.

RHONDA HUNG UP
with Peter and met Crowley coming up the steps to her apartment as soon as she opened the front door.

“Has something happened to Warren?” she asked. The last time she’d seen Crowley was at Warren’s bedside a week ago.

“Warren? No. He’s fine. He’s out of the hospital and a guest of the department of corrections. Pat too. They kept her in the hospital awhile because she hasn’t said a word since you hit her. The docs say there’s nothing wrong physically—just won’t talk.”

Rhonda nodded.
Elective mutism
, she thought. Jingled the keys in her hands.

“Got a minute, Miss Farr?” he asked.

“I was just on my way out.”

“This won’t take long. Can we go inside?”

She offered him a cup of coffee from the pot she’d just turned off and they sat together at her table, stirring milk and sugar into lukewarm coffee.

“Tell me about the summer of 1993. The August Daniel Shale disappeared. You did a play then—
Peter Pan
, right?”

Rhonda was taken aback by the question.

“Uh, right. I was Wendy.”

Crowley sat across from Rhonda, taking notes as they spoke, referring to his black book as he questioned her. But the questions he asked made no sense.

“I’m not sure what this has to do with…”

“Just answer the questions, Miss Farr,” Crowley cut her off.

“Now, if you would please, take me back to that summer. Tell me about the play. About the last time you saw Daniel Shale.”

“Daniel? Um, the last time I remember seeing him was the evening of the play.”

“Right,” he said, thumbing through his book, “the play ended, to the best of everyone’s recollection, around seven thirty, then you had a cookout. Now can you remember anything unusual about that evening? About him?”

Rhonda strained to remember. She thought of the photographs
in Clem’s album, which showed all of them after the play. Lizzy up on Daniel’s shoulders. Daniel sword fighting with Peter.

“He was clean shaven. He’d always had this thick walrus kind of mustache but sometime that summer he shaved. There are pictures in my father’s album of him that night.”

“I’ve seen the photographs. Your parents said you have a video of the play?”

“Yeah, I borrowed it a couple weeks ago.”

“Would you mind if I took it for a few days?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Rhonda said. She got up and walked into the living room, where she found it on the shelf below the television—where she left it the morning she and Warren watched it together, cuddling on the couch. She shrugged the memory off, grabbed the tape, and headed back to Crowley. When she returned to the kitchen, Crowley was up, snooping through papers on the counter—old grocery lists and receipts.

“Can you remember anything else unusual about that night?”

“Not really. We had kind of a party after the play. Families from the cottages down on the lake came because their kids were in the show. We were all in our yard eating hot dogs and burgers. Aggie, Peter and Lizzy’s mom, got a little tipsy and accidentally set the picnic table on fire. I guess that’s the most unusual thing that happened.”

“And things broke up shortly after dark. People went home. What did you do, Miss Farr?”

“I…um, went into the woods with some of the kids from the play.”

Crowley flipped through his book.

“Hospital records show you and Peter Shale being seen in the emergency room for stitches around ten o’clock that same evening. Everyone I’ve talked to says that at some point during or shortly after the party in the yard, you, Peter Shale, Lizzy Shale,
and Greta Clark went into the woods and tore down the stage. Was there something particular that prompted this?”

Rhonda’s head spun. She went over what few memories she had of tearing down the stage, but they were just a blur in her mind. It didn’t feel like a true memory anymore. It was just a story she had told and retold so many times that it had long ago left any feel of reality behind. When she told the story, it was like recalling a dream. The dream where she and Peter ended up with matching scars.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “We all somehow knew it was our last play. Everything changed that summer. Peter and Tock got together. Lizzy was drifting away from us. I guess tearing apart the stage was kind of a symbolic thing.”

“Were Daniel and your father fighting that night? About money? Because Daniel had asked your father for another loan?”

Rhonda remembered a time before, on Peter’s birthday, when Daniel asked Clem for a loan. He said it was to buy tools, but Clem hadn’t believed him—had made some mention of gambling. She and Peter had heard the whole thing from inside their closed coffins.

“That’s pretty much the story Clem, Aggie, and Justine tell,” Crowley continued after listening to her recollections from earlier that summer.

“You’ve talked to Aggie?” Rhonda asked.

Crowley nodded. “A detective in Maryland met with her last night.” Crowley ran a hand through his short hair, glanced down at his notebook, then continued. “Daniel was in trouble with some gambling debts and your father felt he’d bailed him out enough. It sounds like your father did an awful lot for Daniel. Is that the way you remember it?”

“I’m not sure. I guess so. I mean, Daniel had bad luck. He was always coming up with these schemes, but none of them ever
panned out. And it seemed like he always owed money to someone. That’s the impression I got anyway, but I was just a kid.”

She thought again of the wings Daniel made, of Peter standing on the shed roof, determined to prove they would work.

“Who took you to the emergency room?” Crowley asked.

“My father and Aggie.”

“Your mother didn’t go?”

“I don’t remember her going. I think she stayed home with Lizzy.”

“And Daniel, where was he when you had your stitches?”

“I have no idea. He wasn’t at the hospital, I don’t think. He must have stayed back with my mother and Lizzy.”

Rhonda reached up and touched her scar. She thought of Peter’s matching scar. Of the way the blood poured down her face, how frightened she was. There was so much blood on both of them. On Lizzy too, because she was there, trying to help them. She took off her pirate jacket and wrapped it around Rhonda’s head. They were all crying so hard. Rhonda didn’t even remember how they got back to her house, or the ride to the hospital. She just remembered being in the same room with Peter and how the doctor pulled the curtain to do the stitches.

“Thank you, Miss Farr, you’ve been helpful.” Crowley was closing his notebook, getting up to go. “One more thing, if you don’t mind,” he added, fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for a small bag that he withdrew and held out for her inspection.

“What can you tell me about this?”

The pink plastic was cracked and grimy, but she recognized it immediately. It had once clung to the roof of her mouth.

“My retainer!” she said at last.

Crowley nodded. “We found it down in the hole with the body.”

Rhonda was quiet a moment while she considered this, remembering the day she and Peter had sat in the hole together and
he asked her to take it out. She shivered as she imagined it there beside little Ernie Florucci.

“I used to change costumes down there,” Rhonda explained. “I probably left it in the hole the night of the play. I wouldn’t have worn it on stage. I probably left it down there for safekeeping. God, I thought it was gone forever.”

“Thank you for your time.” He snapped the book closed.

“You’ve been quite helpful.”

“But I don’t understand,” Rhonda said. “What does any of this have to do with Ernie Florucci?”

“Ernie?”

“Yeah, with the body you found in the woods?” Crowley looked perplexed, and Rhonda went on, a bit irritated. “It was Ernie, right? You found her.”

“We didn’t find Ernestine’s body in the woods. Not yet anyway, we’re still looking. There’s a lot of woods around the lake to cover and, unfortunately, Warren hasn’t given us many details to go on.”

“So, what’s this about?”

Rhonda thought again of that old bogeyman, stuffed full of rags and pillows. Of their fears scribbled on slips of paper, folded again and again and dropped into the hole like ruined paper cranes. What had she written on her paper? What did Lizzy and Peter write?

“The body we found has been identified as Daniel Shale. Initial findings are consistent with his being killed around the time he disappeared. Possibly the night of the play. The remnants of his clothes match those shown in the photographs from that day.”

Rhonda felt a peculiar rushing sensation around her head, as though all the air had been suddenly sucked off the porch.

“Killed? How?”

“Yes,” Crowley said. “The preliminary reports say blunt trauma to the head.”

P
ETER HAD TOCK’S
gun out and was practicing his aim, shooting cans off the stone wall at the edge of the yard. Clem gave him pointers, set up the targets, and even let Peter fire his Civil War replica musket a few times.

Rhonda didn’t know how to talk to Peter about what had happened to his parents. It didn’t seem right to bring it up, nor did it seem right not to. She carried her homework out to the picnic table and glanced up often to see Peter shooting cans, Clem patting him on the back, saying,
Good shot, son
.

Rhonda thought of things to say, how to comfort him, to tell him that everything would be all right—Aggie would get well, Daniel would come home. But every time she opened her mouth to speak, to say the words she practiced in her head, the weight of their inadequacy, their sheer stupidity, kept them in the back of her throat. Her words got stuck there like some vile frog, thick
and useless, and when she finally gathered the courage to walk up to him and say something, the only thing that came out was, “Want a Coke?”—to which he just shook his head.

That night, Lizzy didn’t wet the bed, but she didn’t stay silent either. She moaned, howled, spoke in gibberish. She called out for something or someone—the word a blur that sounded, to Rhonda, an awful lot like
Peter
.

Rhonda shook Lizzy awake.

“He’s outside,” Rhonda told her, trying to comfort Lizzy, whose eyes were wide with panic. Lizzy grabbed hold of Rhonda, dug her nails into Rhonda’s arm. “Peter’s just outside in the tent,” Rhonda told her. Lizzy put her head back down on the pillow and drifted off to sleep.

Rhonda got up and looked out her window to see Peter standing with Tock’s gun. She watched him walk the perimeter of the yard, then return to his tent. From her bedroom window, she studied him, positioned in front of his tent like he was standing guard—holding the gun tight in his hands, gazing off into the distance, looking not brave but somehow resigned, as he stood waiting for some imagined enemy.

W
HEN RHONDA PULLED
into Peter and Tock’s driveway, the first thing she noticed was the two girls playing in the yard. There was Suzy, her heavy silver
EPILEPTIC
bracelet glinting in the sun, her hair nearly white blond. She had a red toy shovel and bucket in her hand. The other girl was smaller, all knees and elbows, with dark hair held back in pigtails. As Rhonda watched, the dark-haired girl dropped something into a hole. Suzy shoveled sand over it, covering it up. The other little girl leaned down and whispered something in Suzy’s ear.

Ernie?

“Hey, Suz,” Rhonda said, jumping out of her car. “What’re ya up to?” Rhonda studied the dark-haired girl: freckles, brown eyes. She looked an awful lot like the girl in the
MISSING
poster; the girl Warren said had fallen out of Laura Lee’s car.

“Nothing,” Suzy said.

Rhonda nodded. “Your dad inside?”

“Yep,” she said.

Rhonda went up the steps and knocked. Tock answered. Rhonda instinctively took a step back, remembering the other woman’s rage when they’d last met.

“Rhonda,” she said, stone-faced. “We were starting to think you weren’t coming.” Rhonda couldn’t tell from Tock’s expression if she was grateful or disappointed.

“I got held up,” Rhonda said. She heard voices in the living room. Peter and a woman.

“The girl playing in the yard with Suzy,” Rhonda said, “who is she?”

“Come in,” Tock invited, placing a hand gently on Rhonda’s back. Rhonda flinched. No, not a knife. Just a hand. Tock was guiding her toward the living room, pushing her almost. Rhonda half-expected the room to be full of people who would jump out and yell
Surprise!
People who would tell her that the past weeks had all just been a trick, a game. Warren would be there in the rabbit suit and say something like,
See, Rhonda, things are never what they seem.
Even Crowley would be there, peeking out from behind the drapes to give her a we-sure-fooled-you-didn’t-we? wink.

Rhonda looked in and felt all the air drain from her, like an abruptly punctured balloon. There was no party. Just Peter talking with a woman she recognized at once.

“Ronnie,” the woman said. “My God, Ronnie.”

“Lizzy?” Rhonda managed to whisper. The name came out like a question, but there was no doubt. Rhonda stood and walked over to her.

Lizzy wore her hair long still, but had it back in a braid. She had dark eyeliner on and was dressed in faded jeans, black cowboy boots, a white T-shirt.

Rhonda took Lizzy in her arms and clung to her. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

“I have so much to tell you, Ronnie,” Lizzy said.

“You’re talking,” Rhonda pulled back and studied the face of her long lost friend.

“Not just talking,” Peter said. “She’s a singer. Tell her, Lizzy.”

Lizzy nodded. “I have a band in Seattle. Amazing Grace and the Disciples. We’ve put out a couple albums.”

“Seattle?”

“That’s where I finally landed.”

There was so much to say, so much to ask. Little by little, they sketched out their lives for one another in broad strokes. Tock brought out fruit, bread, and cheese. Peter opened some wine.

“When did you start singing?” Rhonda asked.

“Now
there’s
a story,” Lizzy said. “See after I left home, I hitchhiked. Ended up in Boston for a while. Lived on the streets and in a couple of shelters.”

“Wait,” Rhonda interrupted. “Shelters? But I thought you were with Daniel.”

Lizzy shook her head, looked away.

“But that’s what you said in your postcards,” Rhonda explained.

“That’s what I wanted everyone to believe. Maybe, on some level, I wanted to believe it too,” Lizzy said. “The truth is, I was on my own. No one knew who I was or where I’d come from. I still wasn’t talking. I didn’t talk until I was sixteen. Five years of silence. I was in San Francisco then, pregnant with Kimberly, living in this home for pregnant girls. This gal Trish, she asked me if I wanted to be in her band. They needed a guitarist. So one day, I just sat down with them, picked up the guitar, and the next thing I knew, I was singing. I don’t know if it was music or Kimberly that gave me my voice back, but the way I look at it, it must have been the combination, ’cause that’s been what’s kept my life afloat ever since. Kimmy and the music. The centers of my little universe.”

“That’s Kimberly in the yard with Suzy?”

Lizzy smiled and nodded.

AFTER A WHILE,
Peter patted the cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Ronnie, come have a smoke with me,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you smoke,” Lizzy said.

“Once in a while,” Rhonda admitted.

“Once in a while won’t hurt,” Peter said. “Me, I wish I could give the damn things up.”

“You’ve always got a choice,” said Rhonda, thinking back to how she used to obsess over the choices others had made. The choice to leave, which she thought Daniel and Lizzy had made. Now it turned out Daniel hadn’t left after all. He’d been buried in the woods the whole time—right next to the bogeyman.

“Peter, I’m so sorry,” Rhonda said once they were alone on the front steps, where a tangled hedge of rugosa roses was encroaching on the left side, scratching Rhonda’s leg on the way down. Once settled on the step, Rhonda looked up—at the peak of the A-frame was a huge paper wasp nest, a startlingly large layer of gray combs buzzing with activity.

“For what?”

“For thinking you could have had anything to do with what happened to Ernie.”

Rhonda looked out into the yard, where, at the edge, Suzy and Kimberly were digging little holes, burying things.

“You were just following the evidence, Ronnie. And it’s not like I was very forthcoming with you.”

“It was Lizzy and Kimberly you were with that day at the motel, wasn’t it?”

Peter nodded. “I actually tracked her down just after Suzy was born. We talked a few times, then she moved again and we lost touch. She called me last year, totally out of the blue.
I begged her to come home, meet Suzy, let me meet Kimberly. She finally broke down at the end of May, said she had some shows to play in New York and Boston, and that she and Kimmy would stop by after. She was really skittish about it and made me swear not to tell. She got in late Sunday night and left the next day before supper to catch her plane. We only went out once to get sandwiches and she made me drive clear down to Wells River for them. I never even got a chance to introduce her to Suzy.”

“But why didn’t she want anyone else to know she was back?”

Peter shrugged. “I guess she needed to do things at her own pace—take baby steps. It had been such a long time—so much had happened. Coming home was overwhelming.”

“God, I was such an idiot!” Rhonda exclaimed. “I thought you two had kidnapped Ernie. And later, when I saw you with that rope…”

“It was for moving furniture,” Peter explained.

“And the little red shoes?”

“Suzy’s. She’d been hanging out there with me most afternoons while I fixed the place up. She brought toys, clothes. Left her stuff all over. Ronnie, I’m sorry, too. Sorry I wasn’t honest. And sorry that things turned out the way they did. I don’t know what was going on with you and Warren, but finding out he was involved, and everything that happened there in the garage that night…it must have been tough.”

Rhonda nodded. “I trusted him, Peter. I thought he was the only honest person in my life these last weeks. I really cared about him. I haven’t felt that way about anyone since…” Rhonda hesitated. “Since you.”

Peter took a drag of his cigarette. Exhaled smoke. “Are you gonna go visit him?”

“I just can’t. It’s not even so much what he did. I admit, it was horrible, but I don’t see him as this evil criminal. Just a guy
who made some lousy choices. It’s that he lied. He lied for so long. And he seemed so genuine. That’s what hurts the most. And how can I ever trust someone like that again?” Rhonda looked at Peter. It felt good to be talking to him, saying something honest. To be able to go to him with her problems, as she had when they were growing up.

“Sometimes,” Peter said, “it doesn’t seem like there’s any choice but to lie.”

Rhonda shook her head. “He should have come forward, told everyone what happened. That it was an accident.”

“He kidnapped the girl, Ronnie. He wasn’t going to get off scot-free. Even if it was all Pat’s plan.”

“Pat! I still can’t believe that I never even suspected Pat,” Rhonda said. “It all makes perfect sense now, in some twisted way. It’s all just so—sad. So very sad.”

Peter nodded.

“Crowley came by as I was on my way out,” Rhonda said.

“So you know what they found in the woods?”

“When you told me about the body under the stage, I thought you meant Ernie.”

“Yeah, they wouldn’t have stumbled across him if they hadn’t been looking for her. I’m sure her body will be next. And I’m sorry Rhonda. Sorry I didn’t tell you on the phone. I wanted you to hear it from me not some asshole cop.”

Rhonda nodded. “All those years, we just assumed he was out there somewhere, living another life.”

Peter eyed her cautiously, then nodded. “So what else did Crowley ask?”

“He wanted to know what I remembered from that summer. I told him what I could. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help.”

Peter looked at her for a few seconds, then turned away to gaze down the walk and driveway to the road.

“So what do you think happened?” Rhonda asked. Peter
glanced back at her and raised his eyebrows. “I mean to Daniel. Crowley said he owed a lot of money to people.”

“Ronnie, I…” He cut his eyes away from her and then back again, searching her face for something he didn’t seem to find.

“I don’t know,” he said finally, crushing his cigarette butt out on the step, putting the spent butt in the pocket of his shirt. And these words, the way he said them, reminded Rhonda of his usual mantra,
I don’t remember
—the words he used to defend himself, to keep himself distant whenever Rhonda asked him some question about the past, like about how Daniel had once dressed as the Easter Bunny.

“Tell me about the night we tore down the stage,” Rhonda said, a touch of Joe Crowley in her voice.

“You know the story,” Peter replied.

“I used to think I did. Now I wonder if I’m missing something.”

“Tell me what you remember,” Peter said.

“I came out into the clearing and found you, Lizzy, and Tock. Lizzy was crying. You’d all had some kind of fight. And you said I was just in time to help tear down the stage.”

Peter nodded.

“We were angry and sad and going too fast. Lizzy was holding a hammer, smashing boards apart. Tock had a crowbar. You were sawing apart the back wall.” Rhonda was talking quickly now, almost a recitation. “And then, we pulled the back wall down, and you and I, we were under it. The next thing I remember is you dragging me out from under there, pulling off boards, untangling me. There was sheet on top of me—the backdrop from the play, the shoreline from Neverland, and I was twisted up in it. I was crying then, definitely crying. And blood was dripping down my face, down into my eyes, and they burned and I thought maybe I was going blind. And you were bleeding too, cut on the forehead by some rusty nail. We had to get tetanus
shots, remember? And I thought they were like rabies shots. I thought we had to get a whole bunch in the stomach and I cried again in the emergency room when the nurse told us about the shots. I didn’t cry about the stitches. They didn’t hurt at all. And you, I’m sure you didn’t cry. They had us in the same room, but they pulled the curtain to do our stitches, remember? They didn’t want us to see. And we had to stay in bed after, to rest for a few days, and our parents were supposed to wake us up every few hours, just to make sure we were okay, that we hadn’t slipped into a coma or something.”

Peter was silent, staring at Rhonda as he lit his second cigarette. Rhonda leaned over and let herself brush the hair back from his forehead, revealing the thin white line as if she would find her answers there spelled out in a childish cursive:
This is what happened
.

“Am I interrupting?” Lizzy stood in the open doorway, peering down at them on the steps.

“Rhonda was just telling me about the night we tore down the stage.”

Lizzy looked down at Rhonda, smiled, then held out her hand to pull Rhonda up.

“Take a walk with me, Ronnie.” Rhonda stood up and walked with Lizzy down the steps and out across the gravel driveway, past the two girls playing in the overgrown yard, burying an army man in the dirt; they were so like herself and Lizzy that she shivered.

“I have a story to tell you.” Lizzy’s voice was calm and sure of itself. It was a smooth and mellow voice. The voice of lullabies.

Lizzy was leading Rhonda toward the woods, as the rabbit had led her in her dreams. She was still holding Rhonda’s hand, and she turned now and looked at her, to gauge Rhonda’s response.

“I’m going to tell a story and you are not allowed to interrupt.
You have to listen carefully to everything I say. You don’t have to believe it. Right now, I’m just asking you to listen.”

Rhonda nodded, her throat tightening a little.

Lizzy clasped Rhonda’s hand tightly and let out a breath. “Are you ready?” she asked.

Rhonda nodded. Together, they stepped into the forest.