The Devil Crept In Page 5

  And yet, in these last three days—after Jude had become a ghost—his mother had been different. Aunt Amanda had come over only once since then. She was otherwise locked away in the crumbling house next door. But that visit had been the only time Stevie’s mom had seemed like her strong, unflappable self. She had put on a brave face, pulled her mouth into her best effort of a smile, and plied her sister with chocolate truffles and tea. Throughout all of those other endless hours, she wiped at her eyes and looked as though she had a stomachache. Her comfort started and stopped with Aunt Amanda. It was as if she’d forgotten that Jude was Stevie’s best friend and that Stevie was just as afraid as anyone.

  Then there were the cops. They hadn’t bothered to ask him anything. There was the search team, yukking it up in the forest as though there wasn’t a chance in hell of stumbling across a kid tucked against the trunk of a tree or drowned in a creek. There were the reporters, spreading lies of Jude’s decampment, judging him not based on who he was, but on what strangers thought of him. There was Terry, who simply didn’t give a damn that his step-nephew was missing. Hell, even Dunk didn’t seem to care, going off to the movies to feel up his girlfriend while Jude was out there somewhere. Alone. Scared. If he could still be either of those things at all.

  Stevie’s mom continued to cry at the sink, but rather than stepping into the kitchen and giving her a hug, he backed into the hall. Suddenly, his need to be close to her was replaced by anger. Because nobody was doing anything. They were all just waiting for another funeral. All of them. Even him.

  Wandering back to his room, he went over the facts in his mind. Jude understood Stevie’s passion for investigation. Every time they didn’t have school but it was too rainy to go outside, Stevie forced his cousin to sit with him and watch all the shows about cops and missing people. CSI. Bones. NCIS. As well as true crime stuff; shows that got actors to pretend they were the people who had disappeared or gotten killed, reenacting the crimes with fake blood and everything. Those were Jude’s favorites.

  But Stevie’s heart belonged to Unsolved Mysteries. Once, during a particularly miserable winter break, they had marathoned old episodes his birth dad had recorded on VHS, videotapes he’d left behind when he had taken off. They were the few shreds of evidence Stevie had that Dennis Clark had actually existed. Funny, then, that most of Stevie’s favorite episodes featured people who just up and disappeared.

  Max Larsen had turned up dead, but he’d been six or seven years old. Definitely not as clever as Jude. Not nearly as smart or as tough. Could it have been all that impossible that Jude—suddenly reminded that Stevie was a crime show fanatic—had dropped his sweatshirt as a clue for Stevie to find? Was it that far-fetched to think?

  “Oh man.” The words left his throat in a whisper. “Oh man.” That’s what Jude had been doing. The sweatshirt was a goddamn clue.

  Stevie’s grief blinked off like a light, replaced by blinding inspiration. All at once, he was sure that Jude was relying on him to figure this whole thing out, just sure of it, and he was determined to not let his best friend down.

  Abandoning his room, Stevie ran down the hall and skidded into the kitchen, startling his mom. She was drying the dishes, her eyes red-rimmed, fresh out of hope.

  “Hi, sweetheart.” Her greeting warbled with emotion. A second later, her face was twisting up as though she was about to bawl again, and he knew why. The cops had announced what the search party had found. What she didn’t know was that Stevie had been there. He had watched those guys swarm around Jude’s sweatshirt like wasps around melting ice cream, greedy for a closer look at the talisman that spelled inevitable doom.

  He looked away from his mother and to the shaft of sunlight at her feet. He didn’t want to see her expression crack. Her helplessness put a bad taste in his mouth. Hesitating only for a moment, he finally got his legs to move, marched past her, and launched himself onto the counter before she could insist he stop. His feet banged against the crummy bottom cabinet beside the refrigerator, its paneling scratched up and hanging crooked on its hinges—yet another item on an endless honey-do list of household renovations Terry would never start, let alone complete.

  “Stevie!” she yelled as he hefted himself up, the sound of her displeasure only making him scramble faster. Atop the counter, he rose to his feet, suddenly eight feet tall and towering over the kitchen. He slapped his hand against the top of the fridge. His palm hit the spiral binding of his little notebook, and the mechanical pencil his mother had confiscated rolled across the fridge’s enamel top, then tumbled onto the kitchen floor. Stevie watched it bounce against the cracked linoleum before he jumped to the ground.

  “Damn it!” The exclamation came out as more of a shout than he intended, but if there was a time for yelling, it was now. His mom fluttered her eyes, as though she’d never heard such foul language in all her life. Like anyone would have believed that. Terry swore like a Tourette’s-riddled parrot. Squawk! Fucking hell. Squawk! Your ass is fucking grass. “N-now all the lead is gonna be b-busted up!”

  “Stevie, honey . . .”

  He spun away from her, both his notebook and pencil tight in his hands. He had to write down what he knew about Jude’s disappearance before he forgot the details. Most times, it was the smallest facts that cracked a case wide open. He couldn’t afford to lose a single bit of information. If his mom started blabbering, he was destined to forget something imperative . . . omit the one thing that could end up bringing Jude home.

  But rather than being allowed to stomp out of the room, she caught him by the arm. “Hey, we need to talk . . .” Yes, about Stevie. About his issues. Not about Jude or the search party or the odds.

  “I don’t want to talk!” Another yell. This one more jarring than the last. He squeezed his eyes shut, shoving the rhymes to the back of his mind. He yanked his arm out of his mom’s grasp, stared defiantly into her face. He could still see faint traces of her black eye from beneath her flesh-toned foundation. Nicole Clark reluctantly pulled her hand away from her youngest son, her expression straining between what looked like compassion and the need to be authoritative.

  “Stevie . . .” She exhaled a sigh of surrender. “I understand you’re upset, sweetheart, I really do.” Except she didn’t understand anything. She was nothing but an idiot. To her, Jude was just a kid. To Stevie, he was everything.

  “Upset?” He backed away from her, nearly laughing at the suggestion. Maybe she was the one who was crazy. Perhaps Terry had finally knocked her so hard into the wall that her brain had come loose. “Don’t you get it? He’s my best friend!”

  Before she could stall his exit with some harebrained comment, Stevie bolted out of the kitchen and back to his room. He’d had it with adults, the cops, that stupid search team that wasn’t even looking, and the news, poisoning Deer Valley with their detrimental hopelessness. What was the point? Jude was surely already dead. Nobody wanted to believe that Jude could be alive, to let Stevie help, to give him a chance? Fine! He’d take a page out of his cousin’s book of conduct instead. Because Jude never asked anyone for permission to do anything, which meant Stevie didn’t have to, either.

  “Fuck it,” he murmured beneath his breath, and then slammed his bedroom door.

  · · ·

  He spent the entire next day pounding the pavement, and while there was no doubt his mother knew exactly what he was up to, she didn’t try to stop him. He went in and out of Deer Valley’s main businesses, asking to speak with owners, interviewing shop regulars, asking whether or not they’d seen or heard anything suspicious around the time Jude had disappeared. And while he tried to ignore the grumbling, he couldn’t go for more than half an hour without hearing someone mutter about how Nicki Clark was an irresponsible parent. Who in their right mind let a ten-year-old kid run around town, harassing people; especially after another kid—a family member—had gone missing?

  Stevie did his best to ignore the whispers. He focused on his little notepad, which was quickly fil
ling up with chicken scratches. He cornered Mrs. Lovejoy outside the hardware store while she picked through small containers of strawberries and herbs, her shopping cart full of gardening stuff. Her dog, the yappy Pekingese, shook and coughed inside the cart beside a bag of potting soil; nothing but a panting, snarly faced ball of fur.

  “I don’t know anything,” she told him, not once looking away from the mint plant she was inspecting. Her voice wavered, but it was with old age rather than compassion. “You kids ask for it, running around that forest like a bunch of heathens. Not like my Lulu.” She cooed at the dog as it sniveled and sneezed, clearly unhappy with how close Stevie was standing next to its master. “Now stop bothering people.” Her tone turned sharp. “Get out of here, go.”

  Inside the general store across the street, Mr. Greenwood scratched at the psoriasis that crusted the top of his balding head. “Suspicious?” he asked. “Not that I can recall.” But something dark and knowing was shadowing his ancient eyes. Mr. G. straightened his crooked back, and Stevie cringed when he heard a succession of pop-pop-pops, like someone dragging a tiny mallet across the spine of a percussion frog. The store owner’s knobby fingers slid across the counter’s scratched glass top. “But I’d stay out of those woods if I were you,” he said. “There’s something out there, and I can tell you it’s not a cougar or any of the nonsense the police keep trying to sell.”

  Stevie stared at Mr. Greenwood for a good five seconds, his notebook in one hand, his mechanical pencil with a chamber of broken lead in the other. And for four of those five beats, he was convinced that old Mr. G. was pulling his leg. Would he do that; especially when he knew that Jude was Stevie’s family? But there wasn’t a single glimmer of amusement in the corners of those wrinkled, crow’s-footed eyes. The man was dead serious. And suddenly, all Stevie wanted to do was cry.

  5

  * * *

  STEVIE WAS MORE scared for Jude than ever after interviewing Mr. G., spooked by what may have been out in those trees. And so, rather than going directly to the forest the way he had initially planned, his hunt for clues was stalled. He instead decided to retrace his steps from the Sunday Jude had disappeared, if only to give himself time to think about the old man’s warning; to hopefully discount it as the ravings of a crank who probably didn’t like kids.

  He started at Cree Meadows Elementary, where he’d graduated from the fourth grade only months before . . . but just barely. Stevie loathed the kids who went there, and in turn, he hated going to school. But the Cree Meadows playground was pretty cool with its updated playground equipment. The grounds were chock-full of crawl tubes and spiral slides, tire swings and whirlwind seats. They even had a thing called a sky runner, which looked like a giant umbrella with its fabric removed. On Sunday, Stevie and Jude had run full-sprint at it, grabbed the bars, and had gone flying around and around like capeless superheroes. That had been only hours before Jude had vanished. Strange how life could turn on a dime.

  All of that fancy equipment was tucked away, hidden from view by the school itself. The playground butted up against a chain-link fence, which had never brought Stevie any pause until now. Sure, it seemed innocent enough. Little kids were dumb. All it took was a few seconds for an overgrown toddler to waddle his way a little too far into the trees and—bam—Amber Alerts all over the place. But after what Mr. G. had suggested, Stevie couldn’t help but wonder, was the fence there to keep kids in, or to keep something out?

  He squinted at a couple of cats just shy of the chain-link, pulled his notebook out of his back pocket, and scribbled fence behind school onto the pad. He’d go back to the general store and ask Mr. Greenwood about it.

  Jude and Stevie’s next stop had been the backside of Main Street; specifically, the Dumpster behind the hardware store. Every now and again, the workers would toss busted-up wooden pallets out next to the bin. Those boards were perfect for the fort, as long as you could get the nails out without splitting the wood. Jude had become an expert at yanking them, like a dentist pulling rotten teeth from an old bum’s mouth. He’d stashed a hammer he’d found in one of Terry’s shit piles in a bush behind the store for that very job.

  Another cat here. It skittered away as Stevie stepped up to the juniper bushes that lined the gravel delivery truck road. He counted a few shrubs out from a crumbly concrete pylon, then pushed aside the branches of plant number four. The hammer was tucked inside the boughs like a baby bird, just as Jude had left it.

  A pang of disappointment speared Stevie’s heart. Had the hammer not been there, it would have meant that Jude had come back to retrieve it. Either that, or he’d had the hammer with him during the ambush or whatever happened, which meant that Jude was out there, and he was armed. Stevie wanted the comfort of knowing that his cousin had at least a little protection when whatever had happened to him had occurred. Then again, it was a naive hope. If that had been the case, Jude would have swung that hammer without a second thought, lodging it in his assailant’s skull. That image was punctuated by the sorrowful caterwaul of an unseen stray.

  Stevie left the Stanley where it was and moved on to the Mr. Frosty down the street. There, a skinny dog circled an overflowing trash can. After an unsuccessful afternoon of searching for lumber, the boys had stopped in for soft-serve and sat on the curb to watch cars cruise by. Dunk zoomed by them in his Firebird. He hung his head out the window and yelled, “Hey, Nutsack!” while his best friend, Murph, cackled in the passenger’s seat—a hyena hopped up on laughing gas.

  “You know what?” Jude had said between licks of his cone, super casual. “I just figured it out. Dunk is kind of a dick.”

  Stevie drew his tongue across the back of his hand, lapping at a trail of chocolate that had cut across his skin. “Yeah?” he’d asked, taking a giant bite of ice cream that was melting faster than he could eat it. He’d lost track of how many times Jude had called him a whatever-sack, just like Dunk had seconds before, but he wasn’t about to bring that up. Instead, he replied with: “Then I guess you’re kinda a slo-mo, Joe.”

  Jude laughed, but he socked Stevie in the shoulder just the same. And that punch had hurt, maybe because Jude had hit him a little harder than usual, or it could have been that, just as Jude’s knuckles had made contact with Stevie’s shoulder, Stevie’s brain turned into a solid block of ice. He nearly fell over yowling while Jude laughed just like Murph had—wild, crazy, totally unhinged.

  Stevie would have done just about anything to be able to sit down on that curb with a cone right then—to not move on to where he and Jude had visited after their ice cream was done. I’d stay out of those woods if I were you. But Jude’s sweatshirt left no doubt that the forest was the last place he had been.

  There were a million ways to get to the fort from any one place on Main Street, but on Sunday, the boys had ducked into the trees directly behind the ice cream place and marched their way along a barely there route. To accurately retrace their steps, Stevie had to go that way, the long way. Jude’s favorite way, especially after they had discovered that abandoned old house.

  He’d never been afraid of the forest before. But now, standing at the gaping maw of what suddenly felt like a forbidden land, all he could do was coil his arms around himself and stare into the green-glowing gloom. The trees were thick, taller today than they’d been before. The ferns—sometimes dotting the landscape like tiny ships, sometimes growing in massive groups like continents rather than islands—appeared almost bladelike in the way their fronds fanned out from their roots. The moss, growing fuzzy and thick on rocks and tree trunks alike, gleamed like toxic slime. He could swear all of it was moving as though alive, undulating only when he wasn’t looking right at it, hoping for him to trip over a root so it could slither over his body and swallow him up. The boundless bed of last year’s leaves was a blanket beneath his feet. A dense counterpane of decay thick enough to suffocate. A playmate lying prostrate. Too late.

  The path Stevie and Jude had taken was little more than a few inches of exp
osed ground stomped out by years of wandering kids, mostly high schoolers looking for a place to drink cheap booze. Any time Jude found an empty bottle hiding in a thatch of ivy or lying inside the hollow of a tree, he’d take it with him, as though it were treasure rather than trash. At Cedar Creek, he’d shatter them against the stream’s smooth stones, booby-trapping the place. Not that anyone went out there—at least not that far. That part of the creek was so remote, Stevie liked to think that he and Jude were the only ones to have explored it since dinosaurs had roamed the earth. But now, the idea of such detachment wasn’t so appealing. And the thought of it having only been them, not likely.