Following Christopher Creed (19 page)

I nodded dejectedly. None of that would do us any good right now.

I picked her iPhone up off the dash for the fourth time and clicked again through the series of frames she'd taken. RayAnn and her sisters were rife with whatever electronic toys would help them study, but her iPhone amazed me. The special camera add-on she had could take fifteen frames in a second. Numbers seven and eight of the strange lightning images made me pause yet again. The way the lightning flash twisted around itself, you could possibly believe you were looking at a skeleton. But lightning flashes so fast that your mind can't process it in real time. So the effect is a "
What
did I just see?" almost while it's still happening. Strange, very strange.

"It's very understandable, Mike," she said, dropping her sandwich and staring into the dashboard. "But we're two levelheaded people. Justin is out of hand. You saw a skeleton; he obviously saw his brother. I'm wondering if it was a horrible idea for him to leave rehab."

I knew that I was doing the right thing to ignore my worries about Justin, but it was ripping my chest open nonetheless. I tossed my hoagie down on the sandwich paper and I laid my head back and shut my eyes.

RayAnn dropped her hand in mine and squeezed. "Mike, you are the most courageous person I know. Whatever it is you're thinking, don't torture yourself."

All I could think to say was "You're not too bad yourself."

She was actually pretty close to perfect in my mind. I tried switching tracks, focusing my thoughts on finding any bad behavior from RayAnn today, and the only thing I could come up with was speaking French in front of Justin. It had sounded arrogant. I joked, "You were being kind of a snob today."

She laughed immediately, as if I had hit into her thoughts. "I was being rotten, but not snobbish. Reality check: I'm three days past sixteen, and I go to school with a bunch of very smart people who are tons older than I am. I am low man on the totem pole. Where would I find room in my life to have snobby thoughts?"

Good point.

"Just for the record," she said, "if you hear me speaking French? It means I'm scared. I'm blurting in a panic because I don't know what else to do. And I didn't want Justin to know what I was saying."

Learn something new every day. I opened my eyes and found hers. They were laughing now, but her face was red—and young. She looked vulnerable.

"You were scared of Justin?" I asked, reaching over and picking up a strand of her rusty hair. I was used to thinking of RayAnn as being
my
age, but she was
his
age. "He's a ball of energy right now, but I don't think violence is his MO either. I'm just going on instinct, but I'm not the least bit afraid of him—"

"It's not just him ... it's this whole place." She leaned her head on my hand, soaking up my sympathies. "You're always talking about energy. It's like the energy of all these depressed people hangs around out there, gets caught up with the ... the remnants of the lightning charges, or something. Steepleton really does seem like it's under bad frequency ... if there is such a thing. So much has gone wrong here. I know there's good kids everywhere and there's mean kids everywhere. I'm not naive. I wish I could find the right words for Justin and his friends. They're just a little ... edgier?"

"Eat," I said. "You need sustenance. You're running on zero fuel and only slightly more sleep."

She reached past Lanz in the back seat and struggled until she had her laptop. "I can look up those articles now on the cancer rates and the car accidents."

She put her feet in my lap and sat sideways so she could fit the computer in her lap without it banging the steering wheel. She surfed with one hand and ate with the other.

"Here's the one about the cancer," she finally said. "The nature of the article is that North Jersey has all the New York City suburb populations, but they should not suffer health insurance rate increases that South Jersey gets to sidestep. More people doesn't mean more problems in this case."

She read, "'The state's highest cancer rate is Steepleton, a mainland suburb of Atlantic City, nearly eighty miles south of Exit 125 on the Parkway.' I take it that Exit 125 is some sort of a landmark separating the north from the south of the state," she finished.

I ate slowly, feeling slightly off balance in connecting this straight-on, news-diction report with the twisting bramble of legend evolving out of these woods.

There were actually three articles about the car accidents—one for each accident. RayAnn couldn't find any article that tied them together in some sort of weird, ethereal relationship. But one car had smashed into a telephone poll on Leeds Point Road. Two others were overturned—one in a ditch and one in a creek that ran close to the sides of back roads leading through the woods down to the bay. In all cases, all parties died. That made seven fatalities in three years, and yes, that is a really high mortality rate for any small jurisdiction. I didn't think Randolph had more than two auto-related deaths in the past ten years.

"The only weird thing in my mind is that there's no mention of what caused the accidents. They all just say people died. Was it ice?" I asked.

She jumped from screen to screen. "One was in May, two years ago. Others might have been."

She shook her head slightly while sipping Diet Coke. "Obviously, we're not presuming that the Jersey Devil jumped out into the middle of the road, spooking drivers to amuse himself."

"I think not."

"Nor is Chris Creed doing that."

I meant to sigh, but it came out as a long moan. I was clueless as to a next viable step. Hence, we sat for almost another half-hour, going through notes and writing leads in our heads, until a car came down the road and turned in to the Adamses' driveway. It was totally dark by now, so we stepped out of the car and pulled back some bramble to get a view of the person.

A tall guy with short brown hair stepped out into the house's floodlights, slamming the door of an old Buick.

"My God," I said. "That's Bo Richardson."

He went to the door, and before he could buzz the bell, it opened. I got a glimpse of Adams wrapping his arms around the guy's shoulders and slapping him affectionately on the back before they both stepped inside and closed themselves away from us again.

"Dang, but to have that Ring of Power Justin mentioned last night," I whispered, in awe.

"You want to risk getting near an open window?" RayAnn asked.

I admired her spunk, but a lack of training had prompted the question. "If they were suicide bombers, the public's right to know might merit eavesdropping.
This
would amount to tabloid gossip-mongering."

We got back in the car. I felt so restless, I could have clawed the ceiling, but my instincts told me that Richard
son, being part of the grieving family, wouldn't stay here all night.

RayAnn reopened her laptop, if just to have some light, and put her feet back on me. She scratched one foot with the other until I reached down and rubbed the arches of her feet through her socks.

"Tired?" I asked her. "We've been chasing around quite a bit, what with three trips to the Lightning Field."

"Nah, I'm good," she said. "I love moments like this."

"Like what?"

"When I feel like I have you all to myself."

I grinned at her, a little perplexed. But then, it did seem that when we were together it was often in a clutter of either people or paperwork—half-written stories and half-finished papers for classes, Claudia hanging over our shoulders, other reporters banging around in the office.

"We spend a lot of time in my dorm room," I noted, then quickly added, "when Stedman isn't there."

"I don't mind Stedman," she said. "He's sincere and likable."

If I'd had any sort of judgmental or selfish roommate when I had my accident, I might not be in college right now. I had to agree, though I noticed a click in her voice.

"I'm sorry," I said, awkwardly. "I feel like I'm always tied up, distracted."

She said nothing, only continued to watch me, and I knew that "tied up" and "distracted" were choices—like everything else in my life. RayAnn's presence simply hadn't changed those choices. A good part of me wanted to go full-throttle ahead into this relationship, but I was poised at the edge of a cliff and couldn't fall into that dive to the water far below. I simply couldn't relax.
Right person ... wrong time?
How could I make it the right time?
Aren't I in charge of my own destiny?
If I couldn't get it right with RayAnn, could I expect to fare any better with the
New York Times
in two years?

"I have dragons to slay," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, it's like you're the fairy princess and I have to slay the dragons before I can truly have you."

In the light of her laptop, I could see her head falling and rising, like she understood me.

"Well. If I'm in it, it has to be a modern-day fairy tale. In other words, the princess gets to fight the dragons, too."

She took my fingers in hers, brought them to her lips, and kissed them. Her devotion wafted up my arm and into my neck, giving me flash images of boa constrictors. I reached my hand into her hair again, trying to ignore this latest scary imagery, but feeling sad.

I said, "But the dragons aren't after the princess."

A bit of shifting light from the Adamses' house revealed the front door opening, and Richardson came through it. Adams remained in the doorway, though they exchanged words as Bo walked backwards to his car. I rolled down the window quickly. We were more than a stone's throw away, but the driveway was far from the house, too. For once, we got a little lucky.

"...can't get away until eleven, probably," Richardson was saying. Then I heard the words "Ali" and "ten" and "right now ... find Justin."

That was it. I didn't bother asking if RayAnn heard something more. My ears had gotten ten times more acute since my accident, and sure enough, as Richardson jumped back into his car, she asked, "Did you get any of that?"

"Ali's arriving in town about ten, but he can't break away from his family until around eleven. Right now he's going to find Justin," I said.

She whistled long, impressed. "He's going to Justin's house?"

We watched as his car came out of the drive. Steepleton would be to his left. The Lightning Field would be a right. He made a right.

A
S WE PULLED UP TO THE TRAIL
leading to the Lightning Field, RayAnn confirmed that Bo Richardson's car wasn't parked anywhere around.

"Damn. Maybe he decided to go home," I said, frustrated. "Obviously Justin comes first, but I thought I could talk to him, get him to influence Adams..."

"What do you want to do?" RayAnn asked.

Going to either the Richardson or the Burden household was above my level of expertise as a journalist, and I couldn't even fathom it. I thought of calling Claudia for a fast lesson, but I felt too restless.

"We're here. Might as well go see if the boy is back at his home away from home."

There were no cars parked where RayAnn left ours, but as we walked the trail for the fourth time in twenty- four hours, I noticed shiny bits of metal in the little scenes I could take in. There were about ten bikes stashed in the bushes along the way. Word must have gotten out that Justin had come back.

The moon was so bright that I didn't need to hold on to RayAnn's arm, though we had left Lanz in the car. My instincts were telling me to leave him in case somebody else pushed me tonight and he decided to play guard dog and bite. RayAnn didn't appear nervous this time, and I guessed she was getting used to the place.

It took us a long time to navigate the field, but we heard laughter and music coming from down by the water, and near the rock pile we saw fire. Someone had brought two of those flame torches you can buy for summer barbecues, and they were lit on either side, throwing an orange glow onto a couple of faces I could spot. There also appeared to be a bonfire going on closer to the water.

"There's thirteen that I can count," RayAnn told me.

"You see Justin?" I heaved a sigh of relief as I suddenly heard him singing along with music coming from a boom box.
Not bitten by a snake ... not super depressed.

We found Justin in the same place we'd left him, but now he was surrounded by six or seven girls. I spotted Taylor Hammond, but not Mary Ellen right off. It was smoky. Cigarettes and marijuana. I didn't let myself cough this time.

"It's the journalism jocks!" Justin said cheerily as we came around the rock and into his view, all signs of his earlier hate for me gone.

"Are you all right?" I asked immediately, finding his face. He was smiling as if the whole thing this afternoon had never happened, but he put a finger to his grin in a secretive way. I gathered he didn't want to hear a load of grief over how he'd interpreted the strange bursts of light, though I had no idea whether he still thought he'd seen his brother. He looked stabilized, which made me wonder if he'd taken his medication or something in lieu of it.

"Meet..." He said maybe six names, and other kids were laughing and talking behind us, down by the bonfire.

"This is my harem," he concluded, with a healthy sweep of his arm.

I heard some
eff-yous
and sensed some sign language flipped at him, but none of these girls seemed to be moving away. He did look a little like a modern King Solomon, plopped in the middle of this group.

"You guys want chips?" he asked. "We got chips. You want a beer?"

I shook my head and don't know what RayAnn did. This impromptu party was certainly no eye-opener compared to living in a dorm, but I could tell she was uncomfortable.

"Do you want lawn chairs? We have lawn chairs." Justin jumped up and sprang over the rock pile, and we heard him calling, "Kobe! Give up those lawn chairs."

"Why?"

"Because I said to. We have out-of-town guests. Get the fuck up."

"Oh! Are those reporters back?" Mary Ellen's voice rang out. I spotted her shooting up out of a lawn chair that Justin was all but jerking out from under her. She and Kobe followed him as he dragged back two chairs.