Feeling sweaty and unclean, she showered quickly, changed her clothes, and went out the front door without saying a word to her mother. Across the street, Dwight was still perched on the curb looking at whatever it was on the ground between his feet.
He looked up at Brandy just as her shadow fell across him. “Hey,” he said. The thing between his feet was a tiny turtle.
“What are you doing?”
Dwight shrugged and looked back down at the turtle. “Just hanging around, I guess.”
She sat down beside him on the curb.
“Is that your turtle?”
“Nah,” said the boy. “It was just here. I ain’t messin’ with him. Just watching where he goes.”
She glanced at the thing tucked beneath Dwight’s arm. It was a plastic bag, though she could not make out its contents. “What’s in there?”
Dwight pulled the bag between his knees and opened it. He took out a rubber vampire mask from which the price tag still hung and seemed to appraise it longingly. Something about the boy’s sullenness resonated with Brandy.
“Picked it up for him this morning, before school,” Dwight said. “You know, before anyone else could grab it. Figure I’ll hold on to it until he comes home.”
The back of Brandy’s throat tightened.
Dwight looked at her. His eyes were moist. “A cop came to our house the other night and asked me questions.”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t know what to tell him.”
She could tell he was frightened. “They just want to find Matthew. You’re not in any trouble.”
“I know that. I just didn’t know anything that could help them find him.”
“It’s okay,” she told him.
“And I don’t want to get Matthew in trouble.”
“In trouble for what?” She leaned closer to him.
Dwight stuffed the mask back into the bag then set the bag down on the curb. Between his feet, the turtle trudged lethargically across the pavement. There were incongruous yellow racing strips along the sides of its neck.
“In trouble for what, Dwight?” she repeated.
“I know he’s not supposed to go out to Route 40 and down to the Narrows,” Dwight began before tapering off.
“Do you know something you didn’t tell the police? It’s okay if you do. You can tell me. Matthew won’t get in trouble. And I won’t tell anyone you told me.”
Dwight sawed an index finger back and forth beneath his nose. “Well, I was thinking…I mean, I don’t know for sure, but maybe he…maybe he went out to that old factory. You know the place I’m talking about?”
For a second, no, she didn’t know what Dwight was talking about. But then an image surfaced in her mind—the squat, stone building on the other side of the Narrows, abandoned and condemned since the fifties, or so she understood. She knew that many residents of Stillwater had once made their living working at the plastics factory before it closed down all those decades ago. According to her father, the closing of that plant had been the precursor to the death of Stillwater. After the plastics factory closed down, many people left town to find new jobs, leaving houses vacant and dark. Soon after, the shops along the main thoroughfares dried up. Ironically, having once been the lifeblood of the rural Maryland hamlet, the plastics factory had also facilitated its ultimate demise.
But why would Matthew go out to the old plastics factory? She asked Dwight as much.
“Promise you won’t tell and get him in trouble,” Dwight said flatly.
“I promise.”
“No,” Dwight said. “You have to swear.”
“I swear.”
“Now spit on the ground.”
“What?”
“You have to do it or else it doesn’t count.” The boy was dead serious.
“Okay, okay.” She spit on the pavement. “See? I swear.”
Dwight stared at the speckle of spit and nodded. This seemed to suffice. “The last time I saw him—the last day we hung out—we went down to the Narrows across from that old factory,” he said. “I wanted to see the dead deer Billy Leary said was down there—and it was, Brandy, we saw it—and I swear I made Matthew go. He didn’t want to go.”
Vaguely, Brandy recalled her mother chastising Matthew about going down there Friday evening while at the dinner table. If she recalled correctly, someone had seen Matthew and Dwight down there while driving along Route 40. She couldn’t remember all the details now, however.
“When we were there, Matthew thought he saw someone up by the factory.” He paused, contemplating his choice of words. Eventually, he said, “He thought he saw your dad, Brandy. He thought…he said he saw him hiding in the trees up by the old factory.”
Brandy simply stared at Dwight, not quite sure what to make of this new information. In fact, she wasn’t immediately sure she had heard him correctly.
“You said…my dad?”
Dwight nodded. “We went up to the factory and looked around but there wasn’t nobody there. We looked in the windows, too, but they were really old and dirty and you couldn’t see anything inside.” Again, his face twisted in contemplation. Quite possibly the memory troubled him, seeing how it was the last time he had been with his best friend. “At least,
I
couldn’t see anything. But I hoisted Matthew up and I think Matthew saw something. He didn’t say it, not exactly, but I think he did. He wanted to go inside.”
“Inside the factory?”
“Yeah. Like, he wanted to go inside really bad.”
“Did he go inside?”
“No. But he would have.” Dwight hitched his meaty shoulders. “I guess I got scared. It’s a creepy place and, anyway, it was getting late. And it just…well…I mean, I don’t know how to say it…”
“Just say it,” she told him.
“Well,” he said, “it’s just that Matthew…see, he’s never really up for doing anything where we might get in trouble or where things might get…I don’t know…dangerous or scary or anything.” He grunted the approximation of a laugh, which summoned a timid smile to Brandy’s face. “He’s a bit of a sissy, is what I mean.”
Brandy nodded, still smiling. “Yeah. He really is.”
“So I thought it was strange that he wanted to go inside so badly. It wasn’t like him. It scared me a little.”
“So what happened?”
“He said he would go in without me if I didn’t come along. But somehow, I managed to talk him into going home, so we left.”
“And you didn’t tell this to the police?”
Dwight hung his head and seemed intent on examining the turtle’s slow progress. He didn’t answer her.
She put a hand on the boy’s sweaty back. His entire body seemed to radiate a tremendous amount of heat.
“I get it,” she said quietly. “You didn’t want to get him in trouble. It’s cool. You’re a good friend.”
“You won’t tell on him, will you?”
“No.” Sweat dampened her own brow. “You think he went back out to the factory alone?”
“Maybe.”
“Wouldn’t he take his bike?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You can’t ride your bike across the field and down to the Narrows. It’s too tough and rocky and, anyway, there’s all this garbage lying around that the flood left behind. It’s easier to just walk.”
“Wouldn’t he have asked you to go with him?”
When Dwight looked at her again, she could see that his eyes were threatening tears and that he was doing his damnedest to fight them off. He was a boy who refused to cry in front of some girl.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice cracking. “I wouldn’t have gone, anyway. Maybe he knew it. I would have talked him out of it.”
She shook her head. “Why would he want to go back there so badly?”
“I don’t know. He saw something. He saw his dad, Brandy.” After a time, he could only repeat himself. “He saw his dad.”
3
Under the influence of Valium, her mother fell asleep on the couch again by five o’clock that evening. Careful not to wake her, Brandy took the truck keys from the pegboard by the back door and went out into the yard. Darkness had fallen prematurely, the sun eclipsed by the mountains, and the yard was alive with the sound of restless crickets. As she went to the truck she gave the garage a wide berth; the bats still hung from the eaves, swaying gently in the wind like fruit dangling from tree branches.
Since she had turned sixteen and gotten her license, Brandy had driven the truck less than a half-dozen times, her mother barking instructions at her from the passenger seat. Only once had she driven by herself, and that had just been down to Lomax’s for groceries. Now, she winced as she cranked the key in the ignition. The pickup’s engine roared loudly. She realized she was already standing on the accelerator. Switching her foot to the brake, she dropped the truck into Drive. The truck jerked back and forth, alerting Brandy to put on her seat belt. She expected her mother to come storming out onto the back porch at any second, but that never happened. The poor woman was inside, dead to the world.
The steering wheel turned stubbornly. It was an old truck and didn’t have power steering, so unless she was already in motion, turning the steering wheel was like cranking open the hatch on a submarine. Nevertheless, she managed to turn the wheel and simultaneously ease off the brake. The truck bounded forward, crunching over stones and fallen branches. She drove around to the front of the house and made a sharp right when she hit the road. Gunning the accelerator, she headed in the opposite direction of town.
When she hit Route 40, the damage caused by the recent rash of storms was readily apparent. There were downed trees and muddy corrugations in the earth. As the highway curved around the mountain, she could see the silvery slip of the Narrows below. The water was high and ran with the potency of white-water rapids.
Spinning the wheel with more ease now, she took a gravel access road off Route 40 that eventually became Highland Street. In the truck’s rearview mirror the mountains appeared to surreptitiously rearrange themselves. Brandy suddenly felt very cold.
The land grew darker as she left the highway behind. She fumbled one hand along the dashboard until she located the knob for the headlights. Dull light cleaved through the gloom ahead of her. Skeletal trees shuttled by. When the road graduated toward an incline she pressed down harder on the accelerator. She crested a hill then sped quickly down the other side, loose change vibrating in the cup holder between the seats, and she leaned forward over the steering wheel to see ahead of the headlights into the darkness. Though she wasn’t too familiar with this stretch of road, she knew the Highland Street Bridge was likely to appear directly before her at any moment—
Yet only blackness rushed toward the dashboard.
Then the blackness
moved
and she realized she was heading straight toward the swirling water of Wills Creek.
Shrieking, she spun the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The pickup fishtailed and the reek of burning motor oil stung her nose. Loose change peppered the dashboard like buckshot. A second later, the truck jerked to a stop, the chassis rocking on its undercarriage. Clouds of road dust and bluish exhaust engulfed the vehicle as bits of gravel rained down against the windshield.
For several seconds, she sat straight as a ramrod, unable to move. Both her hands clenched the steering wheel. As the dust cleared outside, she could see the truck’s headlights carving through the gloom to the other side of the creek. Just a few scant yards from the front of the truck, the Narrows roared below.
The bridge was gone. She recalled hearing on the news that the previous flood had weakened the shoreline and sent the pylons crumbling into the water below. The bridge itself was either on the floor of the Narrows or had been carried out to the Potomac.
Her heart still overexerting, she climbed out of the truck and crept to the muddy ridge of the Narrows and peered down. The water looked like liquid mercury and about as cold and inhospitable as the moons of Jupiter. A sickening feeling overtook her as she imagined her little brother losing his footing and sliding down into the rapids below.
Matthew would have taken the footbridge to get to the old factory on the other side of the Narrows,
she rationalized with herself.
The bridge was only for automobiles.
But could she be so sure?
Still trembling, she climbed back inside the truck, turned around, and went home.
Chapter Nine
1
Up until about a week ago, Maggie Quedentock would have had a difficult time identifying the worst thing she had ever done. She had been promiscuous and slept with married men prior to her own marriage to Evan. She had shoplifted small items from Lomax’s as well as some of the big department stores in Cumberland on occasion when she thought she could get away with it. She had even walked out on her tab at Crossroads a few times when the bartender and owner, Alvin Toops, had been too drunk or preoccupied to notice. And now, of course, there was the issue of infidelity with Tom Schuler.
What is the worst thing you have ever done, Maggie?
It wouldn’t have occurred to her to acknowledge the abortion she’d had when she was seventeen.
In fairness, she hadn’t thought about it in many years. Also in fairness, a different type of person might not have termed it a horrible act. However, having been brought up in a strict Catholic household, such things as abortions (or even premarital sex, for that matter) were unacceptable.