Imaginary Friend (ARC) Page 15

  Except that little girl with the painted nails.

  He’d never forget her.

  But why was he thinking about her so much this week?

  That he couldn’t explain.

  Nor could he explain the voice inside him. Something that just said this case was important. That’s what people didn’t understand about police work. They see a crime committed on television and truly believe there are enough man-hours to throw ten full-time detectives at a single homicide. In the real world, choices were made. Resources allocated. The sheriff was good at that. Sometimes too good. But this time, something in him said to bet the farm. So, once the skeleton was discovered, the sheriff called in a favor.

  His old friend Carl was as good at forensics as he was bad at physical exercise. And since they were investigating a child, the sheriff asked Carl to come to the crime scene immediately even though it was on a Sunday. Double time be damned. He wanted to know everything he could about this skeleton. If anyone could tell him, Carl could. The Feds at Langley had tried to poach him several times over the years, but Carl’s wife was a lot scarier than the FBI.

  “The government can go screw itself, Carl. I’m not leaving my mum in Homestead!”

  Case closed.

  When Carl arrived at the scene, the two walked around and compared notes. Both of them thought it was a child of about seven or eight judging from the missing front teeth. And both of them thought the body had been buried a long time.

  How else could you explain the tree roots wrapped around the body like a snake?

  By the end of the evening, Carl and his team took the body away to do as much of an autopsy as they could. Carl said he had a full plate around the holidays, especially with his mother-in-law needing to be driven to mass three times a week, but he would try to squeeze in the work and get back to the sheriff by Friday.

  The sheriff spent the rest of the week dealing with fallout. In the city, people don’t stop when they hear news of a dead body. But this was a small town. And in a small town, people get scared.

  Scared like the girl with the painted nails.

  The sheriff shook off the thought and looked up ahead on the trail. There was a deer eating some grass near a little bridge that looked like the Billy Goats Gruff. God, he hadn’t thought of that in years. He was so scared of that troll when he was little. Scared like Hansel and Gretel.

  Scared like the girl with the painted—

  “Stop it. Focus,” he said to himself out loud.

  The sheriff didn’t know what he was looking for exactly. After all, he and his men had walked almost every inch of these woods that week, despite Mr. Collins’ rage. They didn’t find much. No carvings. No strange symbols. Nothing to indicate that these woods were home to some cult or a ritual killer.

  Just a bunch of trees.

  And some deer.

  And a bunch of beer cans.

  Of course, he had expected that. Once the news began to spread about the skeleton, the morbidly curious (aka teenagers) started using the woods to drink beer and fool around. Rubberneckers, he thought. They left cans everywhere. He told his men to start collecting them to make up for the double time in the budget. They laughed when he said that. And when he didn’t laugh back, they started collecting the cans.

  The sheriff reached the clearing.

  He looked up at the clouds drifting in the sky. Such a pleasant evening for November. It was amazing to think that Christmas was less than a month away. He stared at the tree in the middle of the clearing. It looked like a hand stretching to the sky. Some of its branches were strong. Others twisted like fingers crippled by arthritis.

  The sheriff walked up to Christopher’s tree house. He still couldn’t believe how sophisticated it was for a seven-year-old. The ladder. The foundation. The framing. Kate Reese’s son was a genius. It was like a real house.

  But this time, the tree house looked different.

  As if someone had been working on it all week.

  But when he looked down, he saw no footprints.

  No evidence.

  Just a white plastic bag drifting from a low-hanging branch.

  The sheriff touched the tree. The bark was cool and rough to the touch. Like the trees he climbed when he went to elementary school. He had his first kiss under a tree like this. Justine Cobb had braces and a summer dress and beautiful blond hair.

  Just like the girl with the painted nails.

  Daddy.

  The sheriff took his hand off the tree. He shook off the cobwebs and tried to get back to center. He picked up the white plastic bag, fully intending to put it in his pocket and throw it away like litter. But for some reason, he found himself moving the bag in his hand like a kid trying to break in a new leather baseball glove. Over and over and over and

  Crack.

  The sheriff turned. He saw a deer staring at him. The sheriff looked down at the white plastic bag. He suddenly wanted to get the hell out of these woods. Some voice told him that he had to get out. Right now. The voice wasn’t threatening him.

  It was warning him.

  He put the bag back on the branch and hurried away. He quickly passed through the mine tunnel hiding the clearing from the other side of the woods. He turned on his flashlight and saw initials carved into the metal tracks. Old names spray-painted on the wood frames like hieroglyphics. As he left the mine, he saw something disturbing.

  An abandoned refrigerator.

  He didn’t know how his men could have missed this, and they were going to get a piece of his mind when he got back. A kid could play in this, get trapped, and suffocate.

  The sheriff walked up to the refrigerator. It was big and white and old with rust on the edges like greying temples. Temples like churches. Like Carl’s wife’s mother’s mass. The refrigerator was filled with a nest. He couldn’t tell if it was for a bird or a raccoon. But there was no sign of either. The sheriff walked over and grabbed the refrigerator door to close it.

  That’s when the snake jumped out.

  It was a rattler. Coiled. Hissing. Hissss. Hissss.

  The sheriff backed away. The snake slithered toward him. Hissing like a baby’s rattle. The sheriff stumbled on a log and fell. The rattler came at him. Its fangs out. Ready to strike. The sheriff pulled out his revolver just as the snake jumped for his face.

  Bang.

  The snake’s head exploded with the bullet.

  The sheriff stood and looked at the snake twitching on the ground. Coiled like the tree branches wrapped around the child’s skeleton. After a quick just-in-case shot to the body, the sheriff went to close the refrigerator door. That’s when he looked down into the nest and saw baby rattlers wiggling in their eggshells. He closed the door, locking them in, then checked his neck for anything squirming.

  He quickly moved away, making a mental note to put in a call to pest control to send their team out. He had no idea why there were baby snakes in November. It was a long time since spring. Nothing was born in winter.

  Something was wrong here.

  He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it like his captain’s old dog hearing a whistle. It sounded like the wind. But it wasn’t exactly wind. The sound was more like a snake coiled in the tree branches. Like…like…

  Invisible hissing.

  The sheriff quickly moved down the hill to the construction site. There were stumps everywhere. Carcasses of trees. Giant roots torn out of the frozen earth. Several bulldozers were parked down the road. They each had a COLLINS CONSTRUCTION COMPANY sign on their doors. The bulldozers sat there, lifeless, after the sheriff had shut down the woods for the investigation. Mr. Collins had already gotten his lawyers on the case, and if the sheriff knew anything about power and politics (and he did), construction would resume shortly. Soon enough, Mr. Collins would turn the trees into lumber to build the houses. The sawdust would go to another company to be mixed with flammable glue to make fake fire logs for Christmas. It was as if Mr. Collins were making the Mission Street Woods dig its own
grave. As massive as the woods were, they couldn’t exactly fight back.

  The sheriff walked past the police tape. Past the field of tree stumps, already cut short by Mr. Collins back in September. They looked like little tombstones that eventually, no one would visit.

  Like the girl with the painted nails.

  As he drove back to the station, the sheriff looked at the little drops of rain falling from the clouds onto his windshield. He thought about the lovely time he had with Kate Reese just five days ago. God, it felt like a year. He wanted to see her again, but it was Thanksgiving with her kid. And tomorrow would be their Movie Friday together. So, it would have to wait for Saturday when maybe she’d get a babysitter, and she could erase the nightmare of his week with two hours of her company. She looked so nice last Saturday. With that new dress from the Grove City outlets. And her lipstick.

  Like the girl with the painted nails.

  Daddy.

  When the phone rang, the sheriff almost jumped out of his skin.

  It was Carl.

  “Hey, Carl. You’re a day early. I’m surprised to hear from you on Thanksgiving.”

  “You wouldn’t be if you met my mother-in-law,” he said.

  The sheriff didn’t laugh. That joke was as old as their friendship.

  “What do you got for me?” the sheriff asked.

  Carl went on to spew his trademark technical jargon. The sheriff always wondered why geniuses couldn’t talk like normal people. But maybe that’s what made them geniuses. After wading through biological data and DNA and carbon dating factoids for ten minutes, the sheriff was able to put together the facts about the skeleton.

  The child was about eight years old.

  The child was a boy.

  The child had been in the ground for around fifty years.

  And most impressively, Carl was able to figure out the cause of death.

  The sheriff was stunned when he heard that. Technology had come a long way in the two decades he had been an officer. But still, he had never heard about a cause of death from a fifty-year-old skeleton when there was nothing to test but bones.

  But that’s just it. There was.

  Carl figured there must have been something in the soil. With enough pressure, coal becomes a diamond. So, maybe it had to do with the coal mine. Or the tree roots. Or some temperature regulation he could not understand yet. A medical mystery that someday would be as routine as fingerprints or DNA. Whatever it was, it kept enough of the brain preserved. The autopsy was conclusive.

  The sheriff was ready for anything. A stab wound. A gunshot. He had seen worse. Much worse. But when Carl told him the actual cause of death, the answer was so shocking that the sheriff stopped for a moment. He looked at the phone in his hand.

  “Carl, I think I have a bad reception,” the sheriff said. “Say that again.”

  “The victim was buried alive.”

  Chapter 30

  On the other side of the woods, Christopher sat at the dining room table with his mother for their first Thanksgiving in their new house. It was not the festive evening either of them hoped it would be.

  And it was all his fault.

  Christopher barely ate his dinner. He told his mother that he had no appetite because his head hurt, but the truth was, he didn’t want to get sleepy. So, after he consumed enough apple pie to avoid suspicion, they watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving in silence, and both went up to bed.

  After she tucked him in with a kiss and tried to jump-start a conversation that would not come, she finally went to her room. Christopher listened to his mother’s television turn on. He waited for hours until his mother’s television turned off. And she fell asleep. And it was safe. Then, Christopher got out of bed.

  As he had all week.

  He went to his dresser to get warm clothes. He put them over his PJs, dressing in layers to make sure that he could work in comfort. He put his pillow under his blanket to make it look like he was still there.

  Then, he tiptoed downstairs.

  Once he was clear of the creaky stairs, he slipped on his boots and went outside through the sliding glass door. He looked up at the black sky. A shooting star shot across the clouds. Christopher walked to the far side of the lawn, right up to the edge of the Mission Street Woods. The woods that the sheriff closed down to investigate, which made it impossible for Mr. Collins to keep ripping them up. It would give Christopher the time to finish the tree house before Christmas.

  that’s why i showed you the skeleton

  i wouldn’t have done that otherwise

  i don’t want to scare you, christopher

  Christopher could have helped with the sheriff’s investigation. He knew how he found the skeleton. He knew that the bones had been there for a long time. He even thought he knew the name of the kid who died. But he couldn’t tell the grown-ups that. Because eventually, they would ask him how he knew everything. And he only had one truthful answer.

  “Because my imaginary friend told me.”

  There were moments that Christopher’s faith wavered between fact and fantasy. He was becoming too smart not to understand that either the nice man existed, or he was a crazy kid wandering around the woods alone.

  But Christopher still kept building the tree house.

  He felt like his head would rip apart if he didn’t.

  Sometimes, the headaches were dull. Sometimes sharp. And other times, he could eat Children’s Tylenol all day, and it would do nothing. Christopher’s headaches were now just a part of his life. Like school or Froot Loops or Bad Cat cartoons on Saturday morning. The only thing that made it livable was working on the tree house.

  So he did. Thanksgiving night. And the night after that. And the night after that.

  He never got headaches at the tree house.

  He never got headaches near the nice man.

  For the next week, every night, Christopher waited to hear his mother’s television go silent. Then, he put the pillow under his covers, grabbed his coat and gloves, and ran out to the tree house to get one more nail into the frame or paint one more wall. All the while talking to the white plastic bag. He stayed out until his hands got too numb to paint. Too sore to hammer. Then, at dawn, he’d race back to his house to make sure he was in his bed when his mother got up. The fatigue was so brutal that eventually, he had to take his mother’s makeup and blend it under his eyes, so that she would think he was still sleeping at night.

  But he kept building.

  He didn’t dare stop.

  The fatigue finally caught up to him after Movie Friday. His mother served him a huge spaghetti dinner with meatballs and butter rolls and an ice cream sundae for dessert. By the time he reached the tree house, his eyes were already closing on their own.

  Christopher tried to fight the sleep. He needed to stay awake. He needed to drag the windows up to the tree house. He needed to finish the roof. He needed to…sleep. I can’t. But you’re so tired. No, I’m not. Then, maybe you should just rest your eyes. Yes. That’s all. Just lie here at the tree. Make the headache go away by resting your

  eyezzzzzzzzz.

  When he finally woke up on Saturday morning, he was back in his bed. He didn’t know how he got there. Christopher was upset that he let a whole night get away. But there was nothing to be done about it. His mother would be with him all Saturday. So, he couldn’t sneak off to the woods. He couldn’t talk to the nice man. He would just have to endure the headache until night came.

  So, Christopher walked downstairs. He went to the kitchen cabinet and pulled out his mother’s bottle of Excedrin. He ate four of the aspirin, crunching them in his teeth like Smarties. The chalky taste was horrible. So, he grabbed the box of Froot Loops. It was a new box. No sugar dust. But when Christopher poured the cereal, a special surprise fell out. It was a little plastic Bad Cat figurine. Christopher laid it on the counter and smiled. A rare moment of joy before the headache started knocking on the door again. He got the milk carton, drowned his cereal, and stare
d at the picture of Emily Bertovich. He made a mental note to ask the nice man why her picture seemed to change a little every time they bought a new carton.

  Christopher put the milk back into the refrigerator and sat down for his Saturday morning cartoons. He remembered when he was younger, he used to turn off the TV and think that when he turned it back on, it would be in the same spot he left it. It took him a while to figure out that Bad Cat and the rest of TV kept going without him. It made him feel sad, but his mom cheered him up and said that he did things, too, and the rest of the world would have to catch up to him.

  Christopher turned on the television. It warmed up and started showing his favorite Saturday morning cartoon.

  Bad Cat.

  Christopher was so happy. The Avengers might be his new favorite movies, but Bad Cat would always be his favorite TV show. He was just in time to see the opening credits. A big parade of all the characters marching down Broadway, singing.

  Who’s the one and only-est?

  Who’s the never lonely-est?

  Who’s the meat and bone-iest?

  Bad Cat!

  Who’s the whack and snack-iest?

  Who’s the caddy cattiest?

  The “going to finish that?” iest?

  Bad Cat!

  Bad Cat!

  Bad Cat!

  Then, Bad Cat ran in front of the parade and screamed, “Are you going to finish that song already? I’m trying to eat!”

  Christopher laughed every time because it was simply that funny. He even laughed a little harder this time because the stress of the week needed to let out a little steam like the whistle on his mom’s teakettle.

  The episode began. Christopher was a little disappointed because it was a repeat where Bad Cat steals fish from the butler of a rich lady cat he’s in love with. Christopher had already seen it a dozen times, but it did have one funny part where the butler chases Bad Cat screaming, “Come back here, Gato!” And Bad Cat says, “That’s Mr. Gato to you, Raoul.” So, he sat down to watch the episode anyway.