Following Christopher Creed (2 page)

That's not something he would have confessed to a
New York Times
reporter.

I heard yelling behind me. It was a woman's voice—loud, unhappy, unintelligible, and voracious. It sent chills down my back, dark memories of my own little hells.

"Speak of the devil," he groaned.

"Think she's drunk?" I asked. Some local college dude posted last year that Sylvia Creed had turned into a drunk in the four-plus years since her son had disappeared. Adams posted that he feels sorry for her. Sometimes.

"Why don't you go interview her and find out?" the officer asked. He'd grown tired of me. He was unburying a corpse. I could understand. But I would rather interview him, and this is one thing most people don't understand: The interview starts when the reporter identifies himself, not when the reporter shoves a pad or recorder in your face.

"Do
you
think this body is Chris Creed?" I asked.

He took a moment, leading me to think he had nothing to say, until, "I would love to think so. This town has an open wound. It just keeps bleeding."

That was a Quote of the Decade.

"But you really have no opinion," I urged him on.

He laughed uncomfortably. "There have been a couple copycat disappearances in the years since Chris left town. This could be one of them."

Dumbfounded anger jolted me. The police I interviewed never mentioned copycat disappearances. My inexperience was frustrating.
Have I ever
asked
if there had been copycat disappearances? Has Torey Adams ever
printed
such on his website? No, and no.

I tried to think through my anger how such a fantastic news item would not have been posted on
ChristopherCreed.com
. First of all, Adams hadn't updated 10 it much in the last couple years. In the last entry he posted five months back, he said he probably wouldn't be updating anymore, as he wanted to get on with his life and he felt that almost five years is enough to give to a missing kid he had never actually hurt, beyond punching him in the face once in sixth grade. Adams had never allowed me to interview him, even though I sold all six of my iPods to go see his band play a concert in Anaheim last year. The manager was letting some press backstage, but I made the mistake of saying why I was there. Adams sent word out that he had nothing further to say about his website or Chris Creed, and I never got backstage. Adams's band had a debut album coming out. Heaven is a great distraction from hell, I guessed. I couldn't blame him.

I reached down, feeling for the recorder in my backpack. I hit Record and made sure the officer could see it. That's journalism ethics, but I didn't make a big deal of it.

"How many copycat disappearances are there?" I asked.

"Two. Only one of them showed up again, two weeks later. So if this is not Chris, it could be the other copycat."

"Okay ... who's the other copycat?"

He didn't answer right away. A band of fabric that I couldn't make out rolled across one rib, which the FBI diggers/sweepers were pulling out of the ground. The agent sweeping was female—speaking unintelligibly to the agent behind her.

I kept smiling, trying to distract from my uncomfortable shuffling. The officer finally softened to it.

"The one who showed up two weeks later was a Renee Bowen."

I knew that name well enough to do a double take. "The teenage girl who was known to be kind of mean to Chris Creed?" I asked. "She was a gossip hag in Adams's web tale..."

He nodded. "She's not a teenager anymore. She's twenty-one. Has a recent history of drug use and run-ins with the law. She left a note very similar to Chris Creed's about wanting to 'be gone. Therefore, I AM.'"

Chris Creed's letter scrolled slowly on the opening page of the website. I knew it by heart. Renee had been somewhere close to the front, a pretty-faced antagonist. Adams had made me dislike the girl, and on top of that, plagiarism guns my hate engine.

"There was a lot of press, a lot of local stink, until someone found Renee sleeping at a friend's house. So much for that one."

I nodded, trying to conceive of Renee Bowen using all her strength to be Chris Creed. Problem: He'd been missing for nearly five years, and she couldn't even make it out of town.

"Guess her family was relieved," I said. "And who's the other copycat?"

"Justin Creed. Chris's younger brother."

I let this one sink in without moving, though I felt like I was falling. All I said was "Wow." I might lie by omission about my ability to see things, but I'm not such a prick that I couldn't understand how Mrs. Creed might turn into a drunken wasteland.

"He hasn't shown up?" I asked numbly.

"He just left two weeks ago."

I glanced down at the bones being uncovered in front of me and let my gaze bounce up again immediately. "So ... this couldn't be Justin."

"Not unless he was burned. There was a brush fire out here last week. The jogger who noticed the protruding portion of the skull this morning said she thought she smelled kerosene. Can't smell anything now. Not in the rain."

I forced my mind on to stupid details.
How would a burned body have gotten into a shirt? Or is the fabric around the body a blanket?
I decided not to ask. I realized I'd been swaying when the officer's hand came down on my shoulder.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "Maybe you should stand back from the corpse. If you're not used to seeing them—"

I moved slightly to snap out of my sudden desire to get away from the corpse. "I'm fine. I'd just ... been hoping to get an interview with Justin Creed when I came out. It's been at the top of my list, and it had never occurred to me he wouldn't, you know, be here."

I dived into the memory of having tried before, back when RayAnn and I first met and I was testing her commitment after she'd asked to assist me on bigger stories. I had her call the house either to get Justin on the phone or get his cell phone number, but the Mother Creed answered and told her to cram it when she identified herself. The woman said we could talk to her, but not her child, then proceeded to question RayAnn for five minutes instead of the other way around. RayAnn finally hung up and took two aspirins. It was nuts.

I looked again at the neon bones and this muddied blotch of fabric the agent with the broom kept fishing for. She finally brought it up.

She held it up for the cops.

"Bra," she said. "I suppose that means we've got a female. What the hell, Rye. Do you have any missing females?"

"No missing females, Jenna. Not at the moment," he boomed, then cleared his throat.

The officer made some remark about hoping I wasn't too disappointed, but this would probably not be a career-making story on finding the body of Christopher Creed.

"Walking into the corpse of Chris Creed would be a gold mine for any reporter," I confessed. "But I can live with the situation, no matter who it is. It'll write, either way."

That caused him to stare. He probably thought like Claudia Winston, who was expecting me to show up on Mon
day with the Corpse of the Hour angle or there was no story at all. I had the start of a great story—complete with two winning Quotes of the Decade, the second one being "No missing females, Jenna.
Not at the moment
." It's as if this town of Steepleton had descended into Stepford-wife numbness and people were responding to death-in-the-woods in the same easy way you'd respond to that No Smoking sign on your cigarette break.

"So then, what exactly brought you here?" he asked.

The corpse, obviously. But I'd just said I didn't need the corpse. I could understand his confusion. I was slightly confused—but also at peace with my choices.

"Gut instincts?" I took a stab at wording. "I don't know if being blind has anything to do with it, but I have very good gut instincts. I fall into stories that write themselves all the time."

"And a dead body didn't hurt anything, I suppose." He finally laughed a little, probably at my seemingly compulsive ways of spending my time and money. But he worked more with corpses than concepts, being a cop instead of a writer. I let him laugh.

Steepleton had been my interest, my story brewing for months—the people of a small town like this, people who are left when the dorkiest kid in town takes off and nobody can find a trace of him. There are no remains. The people
who remain
become
the remains
... I figured I'd have to play with that line, but the point was in it. Adams had left enough hints on his website for me to gather that the people had become withdrawn, bitter, distrustful gossips with little weird streaks. Adams wrote that after Chris disappeared, his weirdnesses started coming out in others. I think it was that line that hooked me to his story, to the idea that I wanted to come here if the moment ever was ripe.

It's always about the people. It's never about the facts.
I forget which of my success gurus wrote that, but I've never forgotten hearing it. Hence, any great story on Chris Creed's disappearance would always be about Steepleton. This corpse was a nice sidebar—if you can forgive my sounding callous—one that would provide the impetus for showing how weird people can be. I wished the officer well in finding an identity, recorded his name as Tom "Tiny" Hughes, and walked back to see if I could hear what the Mother Creed was saying about this.

I stuck the recorder in my pants pocket under my poncho and sucked in air silently. I wanted to hear this woman babble without approaching her, without seeing the torture in her eyes. All my college material reads that serious journalists should not try to interview a drunk. It seems like a chance to get some really good intrigue, but there's no telling whether it's the truth. Drunken quotes are almost taboo among reporters, and I was glad of it at the moment. I just wanted to see what it was like to stand fifteen feet from the Mother Creed. A legend to me. A firestarter. An enigma. I wasn't certain I shared Torey Adams's belief that the woman deserved some compassion, though I admired him for it. I moved toward her voice, but in a staggering, dizzy way.

O
N
CHRISTOPHERCREED.COM
, T
OREY
A
DAMS
responded once to a horribly mean "domineering mothers" post. He wrote, "People like Mrs. Creed, who overenunciate every sentence, are usually very unsure of themselves on the inside. They're not speaking with conviction; they're speaking with abject terror that nobody will listen to them." I like Adams's little twists of wisdom, most of which he credits to his mom, and I tried to remember that as I heard the Mother Creed spitting her cacophony of syllables to the little crowd surrounding her.

"...good to have the
FBI
finally take notice of our
little
existences. It's a
shame
we have to
wait
until
five o'clock in the afternoon
for them to get with the program. Are they
asleep
up there or just dozing?"

I made a sharp right, down toward a group of people hovering behind the other end of the crime tape, remembering Adams's tale from five years back. The Mother Creed had tried to implicate one of Adams's newer friends when Chris disappeared, a backwoods guy named Bo Richardson. But it hadn't worked out for her—less to do with Richardson's only half-strong alibi than with her lack of credibility, I think.

It was hard to focus on her lack of clout when she kept blasting remarks. I found myself haunted instead by Adams's memory of hearing her voice on the other end of the phone the night he and Richardson cooked up this scheme to get her and her husband out of the house so Richardson could search it for Creed's secret diary. They thought something written in there might lead to him. The Mother Creed's voice alone had made Adams piss his pants.

I sympathized, as my pisser muscle was retracting strongly just by my getting within ten feet of her. I wondered if she would ask who I was, and that thought made me think of the warmth of the car and the easiness of RayAnn, who was as naive and unscathed as Tinkerbell. But it turned out the woman was too busy discrediting law enforcement to realize that I had come up.

I flipped on my tape recorder again. Good backdrop noise for my story.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and someone had lit a cigarette and said to her with plaster of Paris vocal cords, "If it's Chris, Sylvia, then you can lie him to rest in peace."

Miss Cigarette was dead wrong, but I just kept staring at the blackness above the tarp. Mrs. Creed went on and on about how her lousy ex-husband had told her that she had no class, but actually
he
had no class or he would be down here bothering with the rain. She went on about how he and his new wife
read novels
to each other, and hearing her voice was like having your ear right up to a train track when a steaming locomotive breaks. I figured I was up to my nostrils in this story and my nausea was a personal reaction, but a girl behind me seemed equally moved.

"Will somebody just kill that swamp creature? Why can't it be her body lying out there?"

Ah, teenagers to interview. A distraction. I turned and gave two girls my credits.

"Why are you here," I asked, "on this dark and stormy night?"

One of them glanced over her shoulder at the Mother Creed, then said to me softly, "Because we feel bad for Justin. We're his friends. Despite that he's got a drug problem. I mean ... he was a druggie when he left here, said he wanted to straighten out his life and all, but he felt like he had to start out fresh."

"Like Chris did?" I asked.

"Sort of. Only it's not the same. Chris didn't have any friends. He had no one to rely on, so he left without telling anyone."

"So ... Justin told you that he was leaving?"

"Yeah. That's not his body. It's gotta be some ... stranger's." She was staring at my dark glasses. This thing about people telling you more if you're blind—it's generally true, but this was my first run-in with high school girls.

"Can I ask ... why you're wearing shades?" She giggled. "It's, like, totally dark out here."