The thinner of the two stood and kind of squinted his eyes at me. “You’re that new kid, ain’t you?”
Great. The local police already knew me. Cara’s voice rang in my ears. “Has Spencer made up its mind about you yet?” In answer to her, and to the officer who was speaking to me, I simply said, “Yeah.”
The cop nodded in return. “Yeah, your dad’s ol’ Betty’s boy. His name’s Harvey or Harry or something.”
“Harold. You remember him, Ted. Went to school with us. Scrawny kid, never could catch a ball.” As if demonstrating how talented he himself had been at sports, the officer threw the apple in his hand up in the air about a foot and caught it effortlessly in one hand. Beneath the jowls, I could see the former Johnny Football in him. He was that guy who’d peaked in high school, the one who everybody probably still bowed down to at Friday night JV practice. Or whenever, whatever. I didn’t really know much about sports. But I could tell that he didn’t seem to care much for my dad, just from the way he’d said his name.
“You’re Harold’s kid?” The thinner cop slapped his chubby buddy on the back and chuckled like my dad was the best bad joke he’d ever heard. “Guy was a loser if I ever saw one.”
“Can we please get to why I’m here?” I must have spoken pretty loudly, because both of them stopped chuckling and looked right at me like I was some kind of criminal. But so what if I’d raised my voice? This was important. Far more important than reliving their high school glory days. “I’d like to make a report.”
“So?” Johnny Football took a bite of his apple. When he spoke again, bits of it flew from his open mouth. “Make it.”
I’d never made a police report before, and honestly hadn’t once set foot inside a police station. But I’d learned from watching Judge Judy that police reports were important. I’d also learned that pissing off Judge Judy meant that she would unhinge her jaw and come after you. And possibly your children. I could tell I was nervous, because even my imagination had begun babbling. Shut up, brain.
I looked at the thinner cop, who was shuffling some papers around his desk. He might have actually been organizing them, but my money was on the fact that he was just trying to appear busy so that maybe I’d take the hint and go away. No dice. “Can I do so anonymously? I mean, without anyone finding out that it was me who came here and told you what I’m about to tell you?”
Ted dropped the papers he’d been organizing into a messy pile on the corner of his desk and snorted. “That ain’t how we run things around here, sport. You tell us whatchoo gotta tell us, and we’ll see that it’s handled.”
It was only then that I noticed the wall to the left, which was home to several pieces of paper starring wanted criminals or missing persons . . . and a painting of three enormous, feathered creatures, swooping over a small, quaint-looking town. My throat dried instantly. “What’s that painting about anyway? You guys just like birds around here or what?”
Johnny Football sat forward in his seat and looked at me, half-eaten apple in his hand. As he moved, his chair groaned under his weight. “Ain’t you never heard of the Winged Ones?”
“Brian.” Ted shot him a warning look—one that grabbed my interest with both hands and refused to let go.
“Now, c’mon, Ted. I figure if the boy calls Spencer home now, he should know a little about her history.” When Brian looked back at me, he wiped some apple juice or drool or something from his chin and said, “Local legend says that these things with giant wings have been appearing in Spencer for hundreds of years. They used to cause quite a ruckus, killed a lot of people.”
None of this was news to me. “Why’d they stop?” I quipped.
“Some say people started giving them offerings. Some say people started sacrificing outsiders to the creatures to get them to calm down and leave our town alone.” He stood—no longer Johnny Football, now Brian the Man in Charge in Spencer—and lowered his voice, as if we shared some twisted, dark secret. In a way, we did. “But you got nothing to worry about there, do ya, boy? You’re one of Spencer’s own. Daddy was born and raised in this town. You’re safe as safe can be. Safe as kittens, as they say. Oh . . . but then your daddy moved. So I guess you’re not safe after all.”
When at last I managed to speak, it was a miracle that dust didn’t come out. My throat and tongue were so dry. My words were strangled whispers. “I’d like to make my report now, please.”
Ted shifted a few more papers on his desk over to one corner. “Like I said, go ahead. We’re listening.”
I had to force the words out. No matter what anyone might think or say. “I think that the guys I’ve been hanging out with might be planning to kill someone.”
Brian didn’t miss a beat. “Now why on earth would they do that?”
Clutching the hat in my hands, I glanced at Ted before sharing my theory—which I already had a sneaking suspicion would be useless. This was my fight. I was the only one who could stop Devon now. “I think they believe that the Winged Ones are real.”
The air felt heavy. Beads of sweat started to form on my forehead. Then Brian leaned closer and said, “Don’t you?”
I opened my mouth and began to speak, but it took me a moment. “I—”
“Don’t everybody?” It might have been my imagination, but it sounded like Brian had raised his voice. Just enough to let me know that if I wasn’t with them, I was against them.
Ted shook his head. “Shoot, Brian, you’d best be kinder to our guest here. Boy’s just tryin’ to make a report.”
My breathing came a bit easier then, and I nodded my gratitude to him. “Thank you.”
“Besides. Ain’t our business if he gets gobbled up by those beasts. That being said, I’ll be glad to see the bad times taken care of again. Less paperwork that way.” Ted and Brian exchanged looks before bursting into laughter. I wasn’t an informant after all. It turned out I was a punch line.
Brian slapped his knee repeatedly. His face was beet red.
It was my turn to raise my voice. “You don’t understand. Something is happening in this town. Something real. Something dark. You have to help me. You’re the local law enforcement, aren’t you? You have to do something.”
Their laughter stopped. From where he sat, Brian pointed a long, mean finger at me. “We don’t gotta do diddly-squat. Now mind your manners.”
Ted sat on his desk and looked at me, curious. He probably thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. “Tell me, son. Do you actually believe the Winged Ones are real? Tell me true now.”
“I’m trying to explain something to you.” My mind began playing footage of everything that I’d seen since moving to Spencer. The feathers in the cemetery. Devon’s journal. The burnt pieces of rope.
“Do you?”
Markus’s cast. The burning theater. The look on Devon’s face as he gazed up into the night sky. “If you would just listen to me. These guys have killed someone. I think they may kill again.”
“Do you?”
The painting on Devon’s bedroom wall. The hat. The hat. The hat. “I found this guy’s hat in my friend’s room, and if you would just go to the Playground tonight, then maybe—”
“Do you believe in them?”
“I don’t know anymore!” My heart all but seized. I sucked in a breath, and as I exhaled, I noticed that my hands were shaking.
Brian’s voice was hushed—the quietest it had been since I’d entered the building. “Well. Ain’t that somethin’?”
“I . . . I just . . .” I looked around the room. There was no one to help me now. There was nothing more to say. “I have to go.”
Without another word, I turned and got out as fast as I could. The bell jingled as I opened the door and Ted said, “Where you runnin’ to, boy?”
Brian’s voice chased after me as I stepped outside, completely on my own now. “Say hi to Harvey for us!”
“Harold.”
“Whatever.”
It was up to me. Not the cops. Not anyone else. It was u
p to me to stop Devon and the boys from killing again.
I needed to plan my next move, before the boys made their next move first.
chapter 16
I spent the rest of the morning inside—trying to figure out what to do about the possibility that my friend was a murderer. For once, I was glad to have a few mindless chores to keep me distracted. The world outside might be going to hell in a handbasket, but the fresh coat of paint in the kitchen was looking quite nice.
I took the recycling bin out to the end of the driveway, squinting against the brightness of the sun. When I got back to the front door, something small, white, and square caught my attention to the left. A piece of paper had been tucked carefully into the window screen of my bedroom. I wanted not to see it, but it was there, plain as day. As unavoidable as heat in summer. And without even looking, I knew what it was.
Carefully navigating the narrow passageway between shrubbery and the outer wall, I snatched the piece of paper from its place and unfolded it, revealing a note from Devon. I could tell it was from Devon, because the handwriting matched exactly what had been inside of his journal. His note was messy, almost scratched onto the page. The last four words were written boldly, as if he’d gone over them with the pen several times.
Tonight. Midnight. Playground.
We need to talk.
That we did. Because I needed answers. I needed to know if my suspicions, my fears, had any basis in reality, or if this was all just some horrible misunderstanding. I needed answers to my questions, and I needed them quickly.
I crumpled up the note and slipped it inside my front pocket.
Yes. Yes. Yes. My friends would kill me to keep their secret. They would kill me to ensure my silence. They would kill me, period. I still had no choice but to face them. Tonight.
I moved inside the front door, and with a dry throat and a furrowed brow, I picked up the house phone from its cradle on the table in the parlor. I knew the number I was dialing by heart, despite the fact that I’d never succeeded in calling it from Spencer. And I had to call. It was now or never.
When the woman on the other end answered, my heart sank into my shoes. I knew what I had to do. I knew what I had to say. I was reluctant, but determined nonetheless.
“Denver Psychiatric Hospital, inpatient call line. How may I direct your call?”
I’d made calls to the hospital regularly up until the day we’d left Denver. Dad hadn’t had to nudge as often back then, back before I was feeling so bitter about the changes that had been forced into my life. It felt like such a foreign experience calling from Spencer. I was in another world, on another planet, trying desperately to reach through the cosmos and make a much-needed connection with my past. “Hi. Um. I need to reach my mother, Margaret Truax. She’s a patient there. My name is Stephen Truax.”
The sound of typing on a computer keyboard came through the receiver. Then she answered, “Please hold. I’ll patch you in to her floor.”
“Stephen?” I recognized the voice on the other end as one of the nurses we’d regularly interacted with during our all-too-brief visits with my mom. Her name was Sharon, or Sherry, or something like that. I strained my memory, but couldn’t quite grasp it. She didn’t wait for me to respond, only said in a chipper voice, “I’ve got your mom right here. Hold on.”
There was a brief shuffle on the other end, and while it was happening, my eyes found the phone cradle on the table in a moment of doubt. Maybe it would be best if I didn’t talk to her. Maybe some things were better left unsaid. “Hello?”
Her voice sounded so normal, so lovely and lilting. It brought a small smile to my lips. “Hi, Mom. It’s Stephen.”
“Oh, that’s nice. It’s Stephen! Everyone, it’s Stephen. How are you, baby?”
Baby. She always called me baby. I could be seventy years old and the president of a Fortune 500 company, and my mother would still call me baby. This time, I didn’t roll my eyes when she did it. Instead, I secretly reveled in it.
“I’m fine, Mom. Listen . . .” Gripping the phone to my ear, I said, “I need to tell you something, and I’m not sure you’ll understand. But just in case something happens, I need to tell you . . . good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” Her tone dropped, and sadness invaded the air. On both ends of the call.
We were both mourning my death before it even happened. I was, anyway. It was hard to say what was going through my mother’s mind. But I liked to think that on some level, she understood what I was saying. One way or another, Devon and the boys would make sure I never left Spencer.
“Yeah. Look, Mom,” I whispered into the receiver, not wanting anyone to overhear. “I . . . I have something to do, something really important, and I might not be able to call you again. So I wanted—”
She interrupted, her tone dark and disturbing. An alarmed tingle shot up my spine as she spoke. “You’ve got to fight them, Stephen. You’ve got to fight them and kill them. They’ll never stop! They’ll never—”
The nurse broke in then, sounding more than a little bit exasperated. “Hello, Stephen? Sorry about that. She’s due for her medication. Would you care to leave a message for when she’s feeling better?”
Monsters. My mother had been fighting monsters this entire time. And I’d thought nothing of it. Now I had to fight some monsters of my own.
I cleared my throat before responding in a hush. “Just . . . just tell her that I love her, okay?”
“Will do.”
As I returned the phone to its cradle, I noticed my dad standing near the door, his arms folded in front of him, a concerned look on his face. “How much did you hear?”
He shrugged slightly. “Just the end. Was she ranting?”
“Some.” Enough. It turned out she’d ranted enough.
“That happens whenever I call lately.”
The center of my chest felt hollow and heavy. I could feel my eyes moistening, but fought to keep my tears at bay. “Does she . . . does she ask about me?”
He smiled, his eyes shimmering. “All the time, son. All the time.”
He turned to walk out the front door, but before he could, I said, “Dad? I love you.”
I knew my words had shocked him. Of course they had. I never said those things. Not since I was ten years old. Maybe even earlier. I never said I loved him. I just had always assumed he knew. But not today. Today I needed to make sure I said it and that he heard me, and that he knew I meant every word. Just in case.
“I know. I love you, too.” He turned from the door and tilted his head at me in obvious concern. “Everything okay?”
Shaking my head, I forced a chuckle. “Yeah. Just feeling a little nostalgic, I guess.”
He nodded, but it didn’t really look like he believed me. “Hey. About our conversation yesterday. That was just me trying to control the uncontrollable, okay? I know you’ll make good decisions moving forward. I was just feeling a little left out of your life, that’s all. Are we good?”
“Yeah. We’re good.” And we were. That part, at least, wasn’t a lie. Dad and I were good. At last.
“I’ve gotta run some errands for your grandmother now, but maybe tonight we can go back to the diner for a nice dinner, just the two of us. I can tell you all about the exciting news I just got.”
I raised my eyebrow in a question.
“Well, okay, I’ll spoil it now—I got a job offer! It’s a little bit of a pay cut compared to my last job, but it’s in Saint Louis, right next to a great mental health center. So at least we’d be getting out of Spencer.” A chuckle escaped him as he grabbed the doorknob and pulled. A strangely cool breeze wafted into the house, billowing the parlor curtains. “That means we can move your mom there, closer to us. It’s not perfect, but at least we’ll be together.”
I put on my best fake smile, hoping it would be enough to convince him to leave. “That’s great, Dad. All of it.”
He raised a questioning eyebrow, and I thought he might never go. “Sure you’re okay?” br />
I donned my best lying smile. “Couldn’t be better.”
After he walked out the door, I crossed through the kitchen on my way to my room. Midnight would be here before I knew it and I wanted to have time to gather my thoughts and formulate my plan before it got here. Sitting at the kitchen table was my grandmother, a ball of red yarn in front of her, a metal hook in her right hand. She was in the middle of creating something that looked a lot like a scarf. I almost walked by without saying a word, but at the last moment, I stopped and stood by the table, watching her hands, wishing we had a very different relationship than we did. It might have been nice to have a grandmother. Not this one. But some other grandmother. “Have you been knitting long?”
She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t respond. She’d probably heard every word my dad just said, and now she was going to give me the silent treatment until we were out of her house. But finally, she broke. “It’s crochet. And I’ve been doing it since I could hold yarn.”
“It’s okay that you hate me.” Her expression lit up. Not from offense, but from surprise. As if it were a shocking thing that I knew she hated me. She didn’t deny it, and I was glad for that. If we had anything, it was honesty, my grandmother and I. “I don’t particularly care much for you, either.”
Her fingers moved over the yarn like second nature, as easy as breathing. “I just want the best for my son and his child.”
“Maybe. But you hate him for leaving Spencer.” No more pretenses. Just honesty. That was all that was left, and maybe all that there should have been from the beginning.
“True. I do wish he’d stayed. That boy has never learned how to stay and deal with problems. He just keeps running from them. But that doesn’t mean I’m leading a parade through the town streets and singing Spencer’s praises. This town has its share of faults. Take the Winged Ones, for example.”
“The Winged Ones.” The words left my mouth slowly, almost an afterthought. Filling my head were the etchings from Devon’s journal and a sense of vague surprise that my grandmother had any notion about what was going on in her hometown. She always seemed so disconnected from it.