Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children (2 page)

“You’ll see in a moment.”

I shook my head and almost lost my balance as Rusty helped me up. “I didn’t see anything. It was dark and I was exhausted. But like I told you, I heard a girl scream and I heard someone moving through the brush.” I studied the woods, worried that whoever was out there might be watching. A stupid fear, but you never knew what other people would do. I rubbed my face and winced. “I’m not going to be able to start work today, am I?”

The Coroner put a hand under my elbow and motioned for Pat to come over and help him. The sheriff lit a cigar and stomped over, smoke billowing around his face. Pat’s thick fingers dug into my left arm. “You’re not in any shape to start today. Besides, we have a conundrum on our hands here.”

I was about to ask him what conundrum, when I heard all the flies. A wall of black swarmed the air twenty feet to our left. I remembered pale shapes in the dark, the stink last night, before the scream, before someone had left me out here, probably thinking they’d killed me. Anger rose inside me, numbing the pain that kept sloshing around inside like blood in a bucket. I looked at Pat, the pain in my head subsiding to a dull throb.

How’d you find me, sheriff?

Rusty said, “This is tragic.”

I glanced over at him. “What?”

Pat grunted and let my arm go. I caught myself, but it sent a flame of fire up my side. “This.” He walked into the cloud of flies and waved his arms around. Through the haze in my head, it looked like a dark curtain had parted. My stomach twitched and I puked up the water I’d drank. Rusty said, “Is Catherine working today?”

I shook my head, but I wasn’t even sure what day it was. Monday? My eyes locked on the forest floor as Pat scraped a chunk of greenish-gray gunk off his black shoe with his pocket knife. At first I thought dead gray branches littered the floor. But my eyes cleared, and I coughed, burying my face in the crook of my elbow. Four girls’ heads sat on the ground, all of them facing each other, forming a square twenty feet in diameter that looked in on a bunch of broken limbs. It took me a second to focus, to understand the rest of what I was seeing. Someone had cut the teenagers into pieces. Their severed limbs spelled out a word—
Repent
—in grayish-red clumps of torn flesh. Blood had soaked into the dead leaves and glowed in sharp contrast, speckled by shafts of sunlight. Torsos leaned against four trees, forming the points of a square around the square of heads around the message. Wind caught their hair and blew it across their faces, sent the buzzing flies swarming from their eyes and mouths into the air. I swallowed, wondered why I didn’t feel more empathy for them, more than just the disgust swirling through me.

A raven eyed me and the others with black orbs full of hate, perched high in a tree. It opened its mouth and rustled its feathers. I didn’t know if it was there to carry the dead’s souls into the afterlife, or if it only waited to tear strips of flesh free and gobble them down, driven by desire, hunger, survival. The raven and I studied each other a moment longer. And then it whispered a nursery rhyme:

A wise old owl lived in an oak

The more he saw the less he spoke

The less he spoke the more he heard.

Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?

I shook my head, blinked, looked back up at the branch, expecting the raven to keep repeating it, chanting, like a broken record. The bird was gone, the branch stirred in the breeze.

It’s all the shit going on. Just more hallucinations.

Frustrated, I clung to the facts. It was the same when I was working on a book, letting my imagination run free, but beneath it all there is structure and truth, even if it hurts to look it full on in the face.

You roll with what you know, it keeps you safe.

I was so naïve.

I cleared my throat. “I think I can stand on my own, Rusty. I’m just a bit dizzy.” Rusty let me go and took a swig from his flask, ran a hand down his pant leg, his eyes on the madness. I sighed, staring at these chopped up teens, part of my heart breaking for them, the other part trying to create distance, deal with the shock. “Who would do something like this?”

Pat threw his cigar on the ground. A trail of smoke climbed and curled around his knees. He didn’t even bother to stomp it out. Pat grinned at me for a second, like he wanted him to say something about it. It said a lot about him when there were these ruined lives right in front of us and he had to try and make me angry. “Show him what you found, Rusty.”

Rusty rubbed his left arm and looked at his hands like they were stained and he didn’t know how to get the sickness off.

Pat said, “We don’t have all day, we need to get these girls in the ground. Show him.”

Rusty’s shoulders drooped. He exhaled. “This looks bad for you, John.”

“What? Show me already.” I resisted the urge to look at the girls again, at
Repent!
, thinking that maybe someone had been on the river the day Mark drowned. Maybe someone had watched it happen, or taken pictures. Maybe someone was trying to send me a message. I blocked out the image of the ghost in the cemetery last night as it tried to force its way to the front of my mind.

A chipmunk scorned us from a fallen log just outside the path. Its chitters faded, everything did, as Rusty pulled the onyx skeleton key from a front pocket of the red backpack. The older man frowned. “We all know whose this was, right? I’ve never seen another one like it.”

Pat lit another cigar and pulled his thick leather belt up, hand near his pistol. “Explain, John. Tell us what you know and we can deal with this situation before things get out of hand.”

I stared at the skeleton key, my stomach clenching, knowing that it couldn’t be the same one.
Get out of hand? Things are already out of hand.

Rusty held the key out and nodded. “Take it. Have a look.”

I closed my fingers over the key, the stone rough and cold. “It can’t be Mark’s.”

Rusty and Pat exchanged a look. The sheriff said, “Our eyes aren’t lying.”

Not everything is always as it seems though.
Uncle Red used to always tell me that. I pinched the key between thumb and forefinger until my knuckles ached. I couldn’t break it. I never could, even though I wanted to because for some reason it’d always meant so much to my brother. “It was in his hand at the wake.
In
the coffin with him. I saw it.”

“Could be. So why’s it here?”

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t help you if you don’t tell us the truth,” Pat said. He smiled. I felt like hitting him.

“What are you saying?”

Rusty put a hand up. “These bodies, John. They’ve been dead a while. Over a week, since before Mark died.”

My brain kept scrambling for connections but the quick beating I’d taken the night before had made me slower than normal, the struggle I felt inside kept me on edge because I didn’t know that I could trust any of them when I didn’t even trust myself anymore. I looked at the blood drying on the leaves. “There’s no way they’ve been dead that long, their blood wouldn’t still be wet.”

Pat ran a hand over his stomach. “You an expert?”

I shook my head and looked at Rusty. “You think Mark killed them?”

Rusty shrugged and shifted his feet. Birds flew from the branches as a plane flew by overhead, a splash of quick white peeked through the tree tops. “I’m not a detective, John. But I know dead bodies. And you’re holding something that belonged to your brother, found here.”

“Where did you find it?”

Pat knelt next to the closest torso. He opened the girls left breast as if it were a door on a hinge. Darkness stared back out at us. “Her heart was taken. But someone left the key in there.”

He stood and left the door to the missing heart open. The ground shifted beneath me and I feared I’d fall straight through the soil, all the way to the burning lakes heating the planet from inside. “Mark didn’t do this.”

Rusty played with the top of his flask. “Have you been sleep walking? You used to do it quite frequently when you were a pre-adolescent. I remember your dad—”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

What are you getting at, Rusty?

Pat stood next to me, put a hand on my shoulder and pressed down a bit. “Your family has a good name here, like mine, Rusty’s, the Johnston’s. Our families built this town. We look out for one another…” his voice dropped, his eyes a fire of gray smoldering ash. “These girls mighta been runaways, nobodies, right? Maybe they don’t matter in the big scheme of things. But you have to tell us what happened.”

I slapped his hand off my shoulder. “I don’t know what happened. And they
do
matter.”

“Things don’t look good,” Rusty said. “No one is going to believe that you went for a walk out here in the middle of the night and stumbled across someone dropping these girls.”

“Do you believe me?”

“What I believe doesn’t matter. I think Pat’s right. We need to—”

They turned their heads as Herb Miller, Division’s mayor, called out, “Jesus, this crap is going to ruin my suit.” He breathed heavy and sweat dripped from his nose as he came into the clearing. He looked from us to the dead girl’s under the trees. “Jesus.” He pulled a blue handkerchief from his suit pocket and held it over his nose. His voice came across slightly muffled. “This isn’t good.” He met Pat’s eyes. “I thought you’d have them buried by now.”

I stared at them, head and heart aching because seeing them act this way brought something else back, some memory from childhood that I wanted desperately to see clearly yet remained murky and dim.

A nightmare. All of it. I’m going to wake up any second.
Or the roar in my ears is the anger of God and He’s sending a river of blood over the mountain to knock down the pines and birch and carry us all away.

The weight of the key pressed against my palm. It brought back too many memories, too many questions.

Herb tapped his foot. “What the hell happened?”

Pat said, “We don’t know.”

Herb frowned at me. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“Your brother did this?”

“No.”

Rusty said, “We better take care of this before someone stumbles across it.”

Pat nodded. “I’ve got a couple shovels in the trunk of the Charger.” He waved Rusty towards the path and I watched them walk away.

Herb bit his lip. He rubbed his hands together. “Our town doesn’t need this kind of trouble. Neither does your family.”

The pain behind my eyes ebbed off to a dull throb. “You’re going to let those guys bury these girls?”

“We’ve got to, John.”

I wanted to say,
Leave me out of it, leave Mark’s key out of it, but tell someone
.
How are their families supposed to move on if they think there’s a chance their kids are still alive?

But a flurry of movement, pale and quick, caught my attention. I looked over Herb’s shoulder. A red-haired girl stood naked, her arms wrapped around a birch tree up by the path leading to the Wright sawmill. She kissed the bark, licked it, turned her head and smiled at me.

Then she ran away towards the busted up building.

“You listening to me, John?”

“What?” I took a step back, unsettled, feeling as if something inside me had snapped without my knowing.

I’m losing my mind, Goddamnit.

Herb turned and looked back at the overgrown trail but the girl was gone. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. “Your brother was trouble, I always knew that. Just like your buddy, Michael. But you, I always thought you were a good kid.”

“Am I supposed to thank you?”

“Don’t be a smart ass. This is serious.”

I watched the building through the bramble, wondering if I’d only imagined the naked redhead, part of me hoping she’d show herself again, approach me and kiss away my sorrow, tell me that anyone else would have done the same thing if they’d lived my life. But Cat’s smiling face flashed through my head and my heart sank. The desire for an illusion to bring me solace almost stronger than the reality I lived with and claimed to love.

You’re a sonofabitch sometimes, man.

“I just want to get home and get cleaned up. Cat’s probably worried sick about me.”

“She thinks you’re working. Pat called her this morning and told her he called you in early.” Herb pointed at my forehead. “You’re going to have to make up a story for the cut on your forehead.”

“Why not tell her the truth?”

“Because, the only ones who know are us, and that’s the way it needs to stay.”

“And the butcher.”

“What?”

“The only ones who know are us. And the one who chopped up these kids.”

“Right.”

I studied him for a minute, saw Pat and Rusty with shovels over their shoulders tramping through the doorway to the clearing. It still bothered me, Pat finding me so easily.

I said, “There’s some stuff you guys aren’t telling me. Why?”

Herb said, “Just keep your mouth shut. This is for the best.”

They didn’t even seem interested in finding out who assaulted me either. A quiet rage blossomed in the dark patch of my heart, the place that had made me into someone I barely knew at times. I was sick of guilt and self disgust.

“How did Pat find me?”

“He didn’t.”

“No?”

Herb flapped the lapels of his coat. An odd gesture. He looked ridiculous trying to hold himself together with death all around us. “Your friend Wylie called him.” The mayor wiped his forehead with the kerchief. “He’s always run with you, your brother and Mike, hasn’t he?”

“Wylie? Yeah. So what?”

Herb looked at the girls. “I guess you’re not in any shape to help dig the graves are you?”

I spat, which only made my mouth dryer. I walked away, left Herb standing there. Rusty put a hand up to stop me as I passed them. “Where are you going, John?”

Pat grinned.

I kept seeing the naked red head.

She danced around the corpses, around the message screaming
Repent
!