Shadow of the Past (20 page)

“Mark, just tell me.
Please.”

“I . . . I can’t, okay. You just have
to trust me, but I’m trying to take care of things.”

“What things? Will you stop with the
cryptic shit and just say something?”

“I’m just . . . I’m just trying to
figure out who could’ve killed them. I’ve been wracking my brain,
trying to figure it out, but I can’t.”

“Mark,” she smiled, no doubt relaxed
and comforted by the realization that this was just him being a
gigantic fucking spaz. “You can’t do this to yourself. This whole
thing is probably just some kind of coincidence, and there’s
nothing that you can do that the police can’t do. They even said on
the news that they had some leads that they were
investigating.”

“I know, but it’s just not right. They
deserved better, and I wish I could do something about
it.”

“There’s nothing you can do, Mark.” She
leaned in and kissed him, and after a few seconds she pulled away.
“You really don’t know anything about it, right? What’s going on, I
mean.”

You better lie, kiddo. Make
her believe it.

“No, there’s nothing to know. I’m just
kind of freaked out.”

“I can only imagine,” she said, leaning
back into him. “Are you still having those dreams that Ms. Kennedy
asked about?”

He paused again, and figured he’d
better try to sprinkle some truth in to make his lies come out a
little easier. “Bad dreams, but I think it’s just stress and being
freaked out.”

“Well,” she said, kissing him. “That’s
what we’re here for. Getting rid of stress.”

“Lookit ‘em go,” Eric
whistled.

“Shut up,” Jack snarled.

“Hey, I’m not the one who thought it’d
be fun to play peeping tom, okay?” Eric shifted uncomfortably in
the driver’s seat. “Y’know, I can understand you being pissed at
this little cocksucker, but this is just kinda . . .” he trailed
off when he felt Jack’s gaze on him. He cleared his throat and
tried again.

“I’m just trying to say that, as much I
want to kick this loser’s ass, why do we have to follow him around?
I mean, can’t we just wait for a day when all of us have some free
time, follow him and just jump the shit out of him
then?”

Jack just kept staring at
him.

“Right. Stupid of me to ask,” he
murmured. Jack turned back to watching the couple, and Eric started
tapping the steering wheel impatiently.

A few more minutes passed, and finally
Eric tried again. “Look, I told Becky I’d help her with her math
homework, and if we get that done fast enough she might even blow
me before her parents get home, so really, unless you think they’re
gonna fuck right here in the park I gotta pull rank as the driver
and say we’re leaving, okay?”

Jack just kept staring at him. “Man,
will you quit that crazy eyes shit? I mean, that little fucker
almost broke my nose, okay? Trust me, I will be holding him down
when you go ape-shit on him, but right now, for me, it’s dick
sucking time. We’re leaving.”

Not waiting for an answer, Eric started
the car.

“I knew it,” Jack said, his voice
flat.

“What?”

“That you’re a fucking
queer.”

“What?” Eric said, finally looking over
at him. Jack’s face had lost the blank stare that had become more
and more common place over the past few weeks, and there was a
glimmer of the Jack that he actually wanted to be
around.

“It’s dick sucking time?” Jack said. “I
knew you were a fucking queer.”

Eric broke out into a grin of his own,
more from relief than anything else. “You are so goddamn juvenile,
you know that?”

“Just drive the car, pussy,” Jack
said.

“I have to get going,” she
said.

“Really?” Mark said, not letting
go.

“I know the timing is lousy, but I’m
totally swamped with work and crap.” She kissed his cheek and
disengaged with practiced ease.

He got to his feet with her. “I just
was hoping we’d be able to get some more time together.”

“I did too. It’s just that I’m still on
something resembling probation, and I want to be on my best
behavior so my parents forget about all this negative shit that
been going on.”

“Your folks still freaked out about the
thing, huh?” Mark asked, picking his backpack with a resigned
sigh.

“Oh yeah. But don’t worry I’ve been
working my charms on them. You’re not the first guy I’ve had to
work to get them to like.”

“Really? Don’t I feel
special.”

Oh, don’t be surprised. This
chick is a pro. Just be happy you have her while you do, until she
gets bored of your handholding and moves on to a guy that actually
knows what he’s doing.

“Don’t worry,” she said, linking her
arm in his as they walked towards the edge of the park. “Once my
parents are done with their overprotective freakout, I’m sure
they’ll be more than happy that we’re together. They really seemed
to like you at first.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “If it wasn’t for
all this stuff I’m sure my mother would have had you over for
Sunday dinner by now. She loves it. I think it gives her a chance
to show off the nice china or something.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll keep my fingers
crossed.”

“Hey,” she said, tugging on his jacket.
“It’s gonna work out. I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, faking a
smile.

After dropping Christine off with a
kiss and a promise to call him that night, he drove back towards
Briarcliff Avenue. He didn’t go up the seemingly harmless street,
but from where he stopped the scooter he could see the top of the
house peeking up to remind him that it was still there waiting for
him.

When he wasn’t trying to catch up on
homework or trying to sleep he’d spent his two trying to figure
what he was going to do next. It was only a matter of time before
the Shadow Man came for him. Or Steve. Or Christine.

All that he could put together was that
if what he’d been dreaming about had actually happened, there’d be
a record of it. If he could find out how it all ended then maybe
he’d be able to point Detective Prescott at someone that had a
connection to it, or at least give him a place to start
looking.

Mark turned the V back on and drove
away. The computer that Clara had handed down to him could
theoretically have helped him but Joe was too cheap to actually get
any kind of Internet service. Any web surfing Mark did was at
Steve’s house, and he wasn’t about to look this stuff up there,
which meant his only choice was to go to the library.

He parked and locked the V in front of
the vaguely Communist Bloc looking building and headed inside. He
picked a computer relatively out of the way so there wouldn’t be
much of a chance of someone walking by and seeing what he was
looking up.

“Okay internet,” he muttered. “You’re
supposed to have all the answers. Let’s see what we can find
out.”

A half hour later Mark realized he’d
have had better luck talking into the mouse and telling it what he
was looking for. Every search item he could think of brought up
thousands of pages about current crimes and kidnappings, or
ridiculous nonsense like the Jersey Devil. Not that a goat-legged
jumping demon was any less plausible than what was happening in his
life.

He resigned himself to the fact that
not only was he a shitty Internet detective but that this was not
going to be the magic bullet that cracked the case. He closed the
browser and stared at the bland institutional wallpaper they had
put on the desktop. It was depressing, but it looked like if he was
going to have any success he’d have to try real books.

He brought up the library’s
computerized card catalog and tried to remember how the damn thing
worked. After a few false starts, he managed to figure out that
there was a local history section down in the basement.

He wandered the stacks for a while
until he found the right section, a single narrow bookcase
conveniently located next to Ancient Indo-China studies and the
restrooms. Three great tastes that tasted great together,
apparently. He leafed through some books that seemed promising but
were about bootleggers and the Revolutionary War until he spotted
one, jammed sideways behind a couple of others.

He pulled it out, and the gold leaf on
the plain brown cover stated “Bizarre Crimes of Northern New
Jersey.” If anything was going to have it, it was going to be this.
He flipped back to the index, scanning for “Cedar Ridge” and
“Briarcliff.” He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath
until he let out a deep exhale upon seeing “Cedar Ridge Slayings,
pgs 78-99.”

There you go, junior
detective. This is the book for us. You still think 21 pages are
going to be all the ammo you need?

“It better be,” he muttered. He looked
up and realized that it was almost 5. While Joe’s speedy return
home wasn’t guaranteed, Mark figured it was best to at least appear
as if he wasn’t trying to get into any more trouble.

He snapped the book shut and went
upstairs to check it out. All he had to do was read the book, solve
the case and put the whole thing behind him. Simple,
easy.

“Bizarre Crimes” dedicated a whole
chapter to what had taken place on that street in the summer of
1951, and the title of the chapter gave the Shadow Man a name:
“Justin Corwin and the Cedar Ridge Slayings.”

Justin Corwin had returned home from
the Second World War and lived with his parents, working various
odd jobs around town. He had apparently been through quite a bit of
trauma during the war and that, coupled with an injury to his knee
that had cut short his military service had made it difficult for
him to hold down a steady job and move out of his parent’s house.
After a couple years, Justin rarely left the house.

The first picture of him in the book
showed a tall, lanky blond boy (probably only a couple of years
older than Mark) in an army uniform, smiling and waving like he was
heading off to camp and not war. The next was after his return,
leaning against porch steps of that house, staring at the camera as
if he were trying to will the photographer to hurry up and be done
with it. Corwin was slumped over, hair disheveled and sporting what
at the time must have been an unacceptable level of
stubble.

The book detailed the disappearances of
the various children from Cedar Ridge and its surrounding towns,
and Mark could easily recognize them from the tiny photos they
reprinted. There’d been no leads in the three weeks since the first
child, Eric Campbell, was taken, and it wasn’t until a group of the
neighborhood children came forward and said that one of the
kidnapped children had been in Corwin’s yard the day of his
disappearance. One of the detectives on the case had been at the
house, trying to ask the Corwins about it when he heard a
disturbance from an old coal chute leading down to the basement.
Once down there, he made the gruesome discovery that Justin Corwin
had not only kidnapped the missing children but murdered his
parents as well.

“Justin Corwin,” the book had said,
“must have experienced a psychotic break after his experiences in
the War, and after killing his own parents, he began to stalk and
kidnap children from the surrounding neighborhoods. His parents’
remains, as well as those of four of the children that he killed,
were found dismembered and burned in the basement furnace of his
home. Corwin’s mental break was so deep and complete that it led
him to believe that there was a presence in the furnace that was
directing him to kill. The extent of his breakdown was never fully
explored, as Corwin took his own life in a prison cell two weeks
after his capture.”

In the final picture, Corwin was being
led out of the police station downtown by a pair of officers. There
was a crowd around them, frozen in their rage, being held back
unenthusiastically by several other policemen. Corwin’s slump was
gone as he pulled away from the crowd. He face was bruised and cut,
and his confusion was as clear as the rage on the crowd’s
faces.

Of the five children taken, only one
survived. They named all four victims (Eric Campbell, Suzie Morris,
Oscar Lukacs and Randal Sims), but there was no mention of Darren.
He was simply “the surviving child.” The book had been written in
1969, and Mark wondered if they had decided against using it or had
been asked not to.

Given that the book seemed to be the
only public record of what had happened in that house Mark was
probably one of the only people alive who knew that Darren Cox had
been the one who’d survived.

Some magic bullet, huh? At
least now you know how it all ends. Don’t you feel
better?

Chapter Twenty

“Hello?” Christine called into the
house after Mark had dropped her off. She hadn’t rally expected her
parents to be home, but given their lack of regard for her privacy
it was better to be sure of their whereabouts.

There was no response, and Christine
started up the stairs. A noise stopped her halfway up the steps.
She cocked her head to see if she could hear it again. When there
wasn’t anything to be heard, she shook her head and chalked it up
to the anxiety coming off of Mark making her a little
paranoid.