But I couldn’t help noticing that it was just the right size to hold a body.
“The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me. It had skeleton fingers.”
I ought to go, I told myself. I ought to get out of here, get some help. I ought to call the police.
But what would I tell the police if I called them? There’s an empty barn with a box in it? There’s a schizophrenic girl who says something terrible is going to happen? And I had a dream? And there are dreams in the Bible?
No. It would sound ridiculous. In spite of all my fears—in spite of my horror-movie imagination—nothing had really happened. Nothing terrible. Nothing at all.
The problem was, I still felt I couldn’t leave here before I was sure everything was all right.
So I stepped into the barn.
The daylight disappeared behind me. The barn’s shadows closed over me. The place was big and empty and the shadows were dark. I could vaguely make out piles of garbage—farm tools, lumber, auto parts, crates—lying against the wall. I couldn’t help feeling that there were things moving unseen amid those weirdly shaped piles—but I told myself it was just my imagination.
I stepped closer to the box in the center of the dirt floor.
“The thing in the coffin was dead. And then it reached for me.”
I shook my head rapidly, hoping to get rid of Jennifer’s words.
But now, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw something else. Something on the walls. Writing. Slashed symbols. I turned and saw a picture of a grinning skull. A picture of a grinning devil. The word DEATH splashed in huge letters.
“The demons come out of the lake and they gather there. They write evil symbols on the walls.”
My breath caught and a sound came out of me—a sound I didn’t like to hear—a frightened whine that made me sound like a little boy scared of the monster under my bed, trying not to call for my mommy.
What was this place? What was that box? What was happening?
I really wanted to run. I wanted to run so badly it was almost like my legs were going to start moving without me. But I kept thinking of what Jennifer had said—had repeated over and over:
“Something terrible is going to happen. Sunday.”
Today. Now.
Do right! I screamed at myself in my mind. Do right and fear nothing, Sam!
If something terrible was going to happen—and if I was the only one who knew—and if I could do something to stop it—then I had to find out what was going on and do whatever I could.
I took another step toward the box.
And something inside it started to move.
I stopped dead-still. My mouth hung open. I thought I must be imagining things. But there was no way. No way I was imagining this. Clearly, from inside the box, came the sound of thumping. I even thought I saw the box tremble a little—as if something was twisting around in there.
And then . . . another noise . . . I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Then I was. It was a voice. Muffled. Straining to speak. A human voice.
This was no demon. Someone was in there! Someone was trapped in that box. Struggling to get out. Calling for help.
Do right!
I had forgotten all about the bruises and sore spots on my body now. I rushed forward. The box had a lid on top of it. The lid was just boards hammered together. There were ropes running through the spaces between the boards and the spaces in the crate. The ropes were knotted to hold the lid in place.
I knelt in front of the box and began to try to untie the knots as fast as I could. It wasn’t easy. My hands were shaking like crazy. I felt the shadows of the barn moving all around me. I felt the symbols on the wall watching me: the grinning death’s head, the grinning devil, the strange symbols, the slashed words . . . DEATH . . . I felt sure something was hiding behind the piles of garbage on the walls, watching me . . .
And all the while, from inside the box, the thumping noise continued, growing more rapid—more desperate, I thought. The muffled voice tried to call out, cracking in its strain. It sounded panicky and fearful.
I pulled frantically at the rope—and finally, finally, the knot came loose. I grabbed hold of the lid and shoved it off the box.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness now. I could see clearly what was inside—who was inside the box.
It was Harry Mac. Jeff Winger’s muscleman crony. The guy who had chased me onto the railroad bridge. The guy who had helped Jeff beat me silly down by the road. He was tied up with ropes. He was gagged with an old bandanna. His eyes were white with terror. His face was streaked with blood.
Struggling against the ropes that tied him, he cried out to me frantically from behind the gag. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew he was trying to scream for help.
I reached forward to pull down the gag, but before I could, I heard a noise behind me.
I turned and saw a silhouetted figure charging at me out of the shadows.
And suddenly, the wind rose. The barn door blew shut. Darkness.
The next second, something struck me—hard—on the side of the head, and I toppled over into a deeper darkness still.
16
Something Even Worse
I don’t know how long I was unconscious. It didn’t feel like very long at all. At first, when I woke up, I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember where I was or what I had been doing. I could hardly think about anything except the pain throbbing in my forehead.
I was aware that it was dark. I was aware that I was uncomfortable, my face pressed into the cold, rough dirt. I was aware that, somewhere, the wind was blowing—roaring all around me. There was another sound too—a high-pitched wail far away—almost hidden inside the wind. What was it?
But before I could figure it out, I became aware of a louder noise: the door rattling, banging on its hinges . . .
Then it came back to me. Where I was. What had happened. The tree. The lake. The barn. The coffin. The figure charging through the shadows . . .
Harry Mac!
I started to sit up quickly—but the minute I did, the throbbing pain above my eyes became a lancing knife of agony. I cried out, clutching my head. Stars and purple blotches flashed in front of me. I sat there on the barn floor, half-upright, holding the bruised place, my body wavering back and forth as I fought down nausea.
The wind kept blowing. And that high-pitched keening sound hidden in the wind grew louder, steadier. What was it?
Harry Mac . . .
I fought down the pain. I had to help him. I turned to the box in the center of the room. I could just make it out in the shadows that grew lighter and darker as the door moved in the wind, as it let in sunlight from outside and then blocked it again.
But the box was still there, just as I’d left it. The lid was as I’d left it too, thrown off, leaning against the side.
Flinching at the pain, I moved to the box, took hold of the side, drew myself up over it. I looked down into it.
Harry Mac was still there, still bound, still gagged, still staring up at me with his white eyes. I reached in and grabbed his shoulder.
“Harry Mac, you all right?”
He didn’t answer.
“Harry . . .”
I tried to lift him, but he was limp, too heavy. I leaned forward into the box and tried to get a better grip. And as I did, I saw . . .
“Oh!” I said. The breath rushed out of me.
Harry Mac was still staring at me, but now I realized: His eyes were no longer filled with fear. His eyes were empty. Completely empty.
Harry Mac was dead. A round bullet hole showed darkly in the center of his chest.
I fell back from the box, scrambling away. The images and words on the wall seemed to swirl around me on every side. The grinning skull. The grinning devil. Death.
As I scrambled back, my hand touched cold metal. I saw something lying under my fingers. A pistol.
The door rattled. The wind blew. That high-pitche
d keening sound grew louder and louder, closer and closer.
I knew what it was now. It was a siren.
The police. They were almost here.
17
Prime Suspect Me
Detective Freddy Sims was fat and bald. With his round belly and round head, he looked kind of like a snowman, only with big, bushy gray eyebrows. Also, he had these big unsnowman-like saggy bags under his eyes and thin lips that curled at one corner into a sort of permanent smile, as if he found the whole world kind of stupid and annoying but kind of funny at the same time.
He came into the room where I was sitting. It was a small room in the police station. It was white with soundproofing tiles on the walls and ceiling. There was nothing in it but a long table and chairs and a video camera hanging up high in one corner. I had seen a lot of rooms like this on television police shows. In the shows, police detectives interrogated people in rooms like this until the people burst into tears and confessed to murder. As you might guess, I was not happy to be there.
At least I wasn’t alone. After they arrested me at the barn, the police called my dad. He came straight from the Bolings’ house, still wearing jeans and a checkered flannel shirt. His eyes looked damp and bright as if he were in pain. I guessed he was. First his best friend dies, then his son gets mixed up in a murder? Not a good day for my dad.
Dad and I sat next to each other at the table. I tried not to pick at the bandage that was taped to my head behind my right ear. It covered the place where I’d been slugged, which was still throbbing and aching despite a lot of extra-strength aspirin.
The snowman-shaped Detective Sims sat across from us. There was a black folder on the table in front of him. Along the side of the folder, there was a label that read “Macintyre, H.” Macintyre was Harry Mac’s full last name.
Sims pressed the tips of his pudgy fingers together and looked down at them with that permanent little smile of his—as if he found his hands kind of silly somehow. Then he looked up at me. He went on smiling.
“You’re Sam Hopkins?” he asked—as if that was kind of amusing too.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice shook a little. Even though I hadn’t broken any laws, I was nervous to be talking to the police.
“As I understand it, our officers found you alone in an abandoned barn with the dead body of Harry Macintyre. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Detective Sims held up a fat finger, telling me to be quiet. I was quiet. “They tell me Mr. Macintyre had been shot with a 9mm automatic pistol.”
“I know, but . . .”
“The pistol in question was also in the barn.”
“Yeah, but I never . . .”
“And it had your fingerprints on it.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know . . .”
“Now you and this Mr. Macintyre—they tell me the two of you are known to have had a fight recently, yes?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Detective Sims held up the finger again. “And as I understand it, Mr. Macintyre and his friends beat you up pretty severely.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing . . .”
“You know what the word motive means, don’t you, Sam?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Let me use it in a sentence for you so I’m sure you understand,” said the snowman detective, still smiling away. “Sam Hopkins got beaten up by Harry Macintyre, so Sam’s motive for murdering Harry was revenge.”
There was an explosion of horror inside me. “I didn’t murder Harry Mac!” I nearly shouted the words, the idea was so scary. “I wouldn’t murder anybody.”
“So what exactly were you doing at the barn with a dead body and a gun?” asked the detective.
“I already explained that to the officers who brought me here.”
“Well—now explain it to me.”
So I did. I told him how Jennifer had had a hallucination about demons and then I had had a dream and then the Bible had mentioned dreams and I’d remembered how I’d seen the tree and the lake and I went there because Jennifer said something terrible was going to happen and Harry Mac was in a box there and got killed.
When I finished talking, there was a long, long silence. Detective Sims tapped his fingertips together. He went on smiling. His bushy eyebrows bounced up and down on his round, bald snowman head.
“That’s your story?” he asked me finally.
“That’s what happened!” I insisted.
“A crazy girl had a hallucination about demons and whatnot. Then you had a dream. And it all came true.”
“Well . . . Yeah! Basically. Yeah,” I said. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. Was it really possible the police could think I’d killed Harry Mac?
Detective Sims nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s your story then.” He reached for the black folder and drew it closer to him. He opened it and scanned the top page inside. “Now let me tell you another story,” he went on. “We’ll see which one sounds more plausible. In my story, Jeff Winger and Harry Macintyre and Ed Polanski are a gang of thieves. They steal cars and burgle houses, then deliver the swag to a crew in Albany, who sell it off and give them a piece of the profits. Jeff brings you in and starts giving you lessons on how to be a thief too. But somehow you and Harry Mac have a falling-out, and Harry convinces the others to cut you out of the action. They give you a beating and send you on your way. So you decide to get your revenge on Harry, hoping the others will let you come back into the crew. So this morning at approximately eleven o’clock, you abducted Harry Mac. You took him to the barn. And you shot him dead.”
I opened my mouth to try to answer him, but I couldn’t. It felt like there was something blocking my throat. All I could think about was getting taken off to jail. Charged with murder! Locked up for life! I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.
Finally, my dad spoke for me in his usual quiet, serious, and thoughtful way.
“Detective Sims,” he said, “you can see my son was struck very hard on the back of his head, can’t you?”
“Yes, of course I can, but . . .”
My father did to the detective what the detective had done to me: he held up a silencing finger. “You must know he couldn’t possibly have done that to himself.”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“So that means you know someone else was in the barn with him.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Someone who must’ve abducted Harry Mac because at the time he was abducted, my son was in church, reading in front of the entire congregation.”
Detective Sims shrugged. “Okay. So maybe he had an accomplice who did the actual kidnapping, but . . .”
My father’s serious face creased with a small, quiet smile of his own. “Only you know that’s not true, don’t you, Detective?”
This time the detective didn’t answer at all. He went on smiling as before, but I could tell that, behind his smile, he was annoyed.
I watched almost without breathing. What was Dad talking about? Why was he making the detective mad?
“You knew my son was hanging out with Jeff Winger,” my father went on in the same quiet tone. “You knew Winger and his thugs beat my son up. That’s the sort of thing you might have heard around town. But you also knew Winger gave my son lessons in breaking locks and stealing cars. That’s inside information. I’m guessing you had an informant in Winger’s gang, someone who was talking to you about the whole thieving operation.”
“Reverend Hopkins . . . ,” Detective Sims began.
“I’m guessing that informant was Harry Mac,” my father said.
For the first time, Detective Sims stopped smiling. His cheeks turned red—just slightly, but I could see it. And his eyes got dark too. He still looked like a snowman, but now he looked like a really, really angry snowman.
And I was thinking: What? Harry Mac? An informant? How did my dad figure that out?
“You know what the word motive means, don’t you, Detec
tive?” my dad said then. “Let me use it in a sentence so I’m sure you understand: Harry Mac was informing on Jeff Winger and Ed Polanski, so Winger wanted to shut him up and that was his motive for killing him.”
My dad and Detective Sims sat looking at each other through another long silence.
And now the horror inside me was almost instantly transformed into hope. I realized what had happened, what my dad had done. And I thought, Whoa! Dad! Bring it on! My dad was a better detective than the detective.
Finally, Detective Sims cleared his throat. “I’m not saying your son acted alone. But his fingerprints were on the gun and . . .”
“My son was knocked unconscious, Detective,” my father said. “Anyone could have wrapped his hand around that pistol. In fact, why knock him out in the first place unless you wanted to do exactly that?”
“Wanted to do exactly what?” said Detective Sims.
“Frame my son for murder,” said Dad. “I mean, if my son had fired that gun, wouldn’t there be powder residue on his hands? Blood-spatter stains on his shirt? Did you find anything like that?”
Again, Detective Sims didn’t answer. And again, I thought: Whoa, Dad! Powder residue? Blood-spatter stains? Where’d he learn about that stuff? My dad never even watched cop shows on TV.
And Dad said, “My son couldn’t have been there to abduct Harry Mac—he was in church at the time. And he obviously didn’t fire the gun that killed him. That pretty much leaves my son’s version of events as the only plausible version there is.”
Detective Sims looked at my father across the table and said nothing. There was nothing he could say.
Now my dad turned to me. “Sam, do you have anything else you want to tell the detective?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I told him everything I can think of.”
My father’s chair scraped against the floor as he pushed back from the table and stood up. He was so tall, he looked to me like his head was going to brush the ceiling. He looked down—way down—at Detective Sims.
“Are you going to arrest my son?” he asked.
I held my breath as I waited for Detective Sims to answer. After what seemed to me the longest silence of all, the detective finally said, “No. No, not today. But if he gets in any more trouble—if he even gets in my way—we’re going to take up this issue again. I may not have him on murder—not yet. But I’ve got enough to charge him with being part of Winger’s gang.”