Where the Broken Lie (12 page)

Mom and Mrs. Cooper exchanged glances.

“Tucker, do you know where Katie is?” my mother asked with that 
tell the truth and stand up straight while you’re doing it
 tone of hers.

“She might be at the playground. She likes going on the swings. Have you looked up there?”

“Yes, Tucker. There’s nobody up at the playground.”

I looked down at my feet and scrubbed my chin thoughtfully. “Hmm.”

“Tucker,” my mother said. “What is it you’re not telling us?”

“Nothing,” I said with mustered sincerity.

“Tucker?”

“Well, it’s just that …”

“Yes?”

My mother grabbed me hard by the ear and twisted.

“Tucker Merrill Gaines! You stop fiddling around right now and you tell us if you saw Katie with that lowlife.”

I came up for air. And the truth. I told them about our encounter that afternoon at the basketball court with Andrew Dales and Son Settles. How I had run away without looking back, leaving her there. I also mentioned how I passed Slim Jim on my way home. And as I told them the story, my right hand wandered to my back pocket where it flicked at the corners of the poem I had written for Katie. A poem that she would never read.

I went looking for Katie myself and ran into Charlie down at Moose Thornton’s place, sitting on the front steps with Moose, Edie, and Son. Bob and Woody James were there, too—a couple of hyena brothers whose only purpose in life was to laugh at Moose Thornton’s jokes. As I approached, they were already laughing in their usual up-to-no-good sort of way.

Hey, look! Here comes Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes!” Moose had probably said.

Yeah, Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes! Good one, Moose!” 
Bobby and Woody had probably said in back-alley accents like the backup muscle in old tough-guy movies. And then the cackles and howls, laughing open-mouthed and staring wide-eyed at each other and competing to see who could laugh the loudest.

“Well hello again, Sassafras,” Edie said. He was flicking dried paint chips off the porch steps with a jackknife and didn’t bother to look up at me.

I ignored him and turned to Charlie, who smiled at me through cheeks swollen with tobacco. He gave me a truth-or-dare stare as he lifted a can of RC Cola and oozed thick, brown tobacco spit into it, squeezing it through tightly pursed lips. Still, somewhere inside his look I saw a hint of uncertainty. Like he hadn’t entirely settled upon becoming this new Charlie, but was trying him on for size.

“Hey.” I said.

He spit again into the RC can, looking more like Son Settles than I ever would have believed possible.

“Hey yourself,” he tossed back.

“Have you seen Katie?”

Again it was Edie who spoke up, lifting his eyes to look at me this time. “Oh, we seen her, Sassafras. You know that. You were there.” Then with a long serpentine lick of his lips, he asked, “Why? She looking for me?”

I turned to Charlie.

“How about you?” It came out like an accusation.

He kept his eyes on me as he spit into the can again and in that moment he seemed miles and years away from me. I felt like I was witnessing a new birth and that my once best friend was fading into the background of this new Charlie.

“It’s just that her mom can’t find her. I thought maybe you might know where she was.”

Charlie smirked and said, “Nope. Sorry, dude. I don’t know where your little girlfriend ran off to.”

The hyenas laughed. Son and Edie went inside, and Charlie followed.

I wish that the visual imprint of Charlie that lasted in memory is of him and his dad bike riding past my house the first day I met him. Or of his giggling face shining above a flashlight inside a tent during one of our backyard sleepovers. But the image that goes with my Charlie memories is the one of him that day on Moose’s steps. His menacing face all full of smile and spit.

And nothing at all innocent about him.

… he often thought back on that unfortunate day. He hadn’t known who would find Katie or when she would be found, but he had known where. He didn’t feed their hopes with comments like, Oh, I’m sure she’s fine or Of course we’ll find her, and this brought him some solace. He just quietly went about searching with everyone else in town that night. He felt as much shame in looking for Katie as anything else he did that day, and realizing this confounded him. Is it better to be a killer with a conscience or without one? Which is more evil?

The lights atop Sheriff Buck’s black-and-white flashed as he trolled the streets of Willow Grove, a robotic and repetitive message coming from a loudspeaker atop the car.

“Citizens of Willow Grove, Katie Cooper is missing. She’s wearing blue jeans and a yellow t-shirt. If you have seen her please contact the Coopers or the Sheriff’s Office immediately.”

Mom made me stay home while she joined the rest of the town in the search. She said that Katie might come looking for me, and that I should be here if she did. She didn’t say it, but I also knew that she was afraid to let me go out again into the night. Into this new kind of dark night for Willow Grove.

Grandma Gaines came over to stay with us while Grandpa joined the searching crowd. As he walked out the door, I thought about that day when Grandpa had chased Slim Jim off of our porch and how strong he had seemed to me then. Tall and imposing enough to scare off the likes of Slim Jim.

“Grandpa,” I called. He turned around and wondered a look at me. Furrowed brow, mouth turned down sharply, eyes somewhere else altogether. His nose twitched like some hard-sniffing animal preparing to attack. It was a wolf that I saw in him.

“Grandpa, they’re going to find her, right? I mean, you’ll find her?”

Everything about the man sank and he suddenly seemed old. Too old for this kind of world. He opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. He tapped the bottom of his flashlight a couple times, flicked it on, and walked out the door. I ran to the window and watched him march out toward the street where he pulled something from his back pocket. He lifted it to his mouth and threw his head back. I knew what it was. I had seen him do this many times before. He put it back in his pocket, pulled down the bill of his cap and headed to the street.

Minutes rolled up into an hour, one hour became two, two became three. And still the streets and sidewalks twinkled like stars in the night sky with flashlights and lanterns. The chorus of calls for Katie echoed from every corner.

When one child dies a little bit of all youth dies with them. And a little bit of innocence. And a little bit of hope. And a little bit of faith in mankind. All things pure and good become a little tainted and a little tarnished. There are things inside me once that are gone forever now, replaced by something harder. It started the day Katie Cooper disappeared. That was the day I started to die.

When Mom told me how they had found Katie’s body by the railroad tracks, I couldn’t stop thinking about that first afternoon in the Garden of Eden and how it seemed as far away as Genesis itself.

I pictured Katie’s sparkling green eyes and imagined them opened wide and frozen. Empty eyes staring into emptiness. Her soft body contorted across jagged rock.

That was the moment I learned of the depths of sadness. That sadness can make you scream.

“The police are looking for that hobo Jim,” Mom told me. “Somebody saw him walking down the railroad tracks with Katie.”