Following Christopher Creed

  "Looked like an army barracks," I parroted. It kind of reminded me of psychics always saying things like "You'll find the missing person in a watery grave." Pacific, Atlantic, Lake Superior always seemed to be missing among the details.

  "What did he look like?" I settled on.

  "I don't know. It's more like ... I was in him. I was seeing the place through his wet eyes. He was crying about something. I think his soul reaches out when he's upset. Because this other time I saw him, he was also crying. This is why I don't tell my friends much. They'd think he was some sort of a ghost if they heard this one. But one time I felt like I was seeing though his eyes, he was passing through a cemetery. He was reading all the names on the tombstones."

  I felt a little weird. Memories charged through me—of seeing the trees under the glow of a white moon last night, of Kobe Lydee calling upon the dead, of RayAnn seeing lightning come from the ground, of my mother manifesting in a terribly abusive dream...

  I found myself framing out the edges of the field, far off, and into the darkened woods, looking for—

  Stop, my generally stable mind shouted to me. Stop and find common sense here.

  "Justin. Stop obsessing and talk to me."

  "About what?" He opened his red eyes and watched me. Skepticism must have been written all over my face, because he said, "What? You think I'm being a loadie, right? You can think what you want. But two weeks after I did this last time, I got two e-mails from my brother, and I hadn't heard from him in five years."

  I so wanted to get a look at them, but that was for later. "I'm not trying to put a damper on this, Justin. But let's stop ignoring the elephant in the living room. What drugs were you on?"

  "Listen," he said defensively, "the laws of quantum thought will work for anyone. It's like falling out of an airplane. Whether you're a good person or a bad person, drunk, sober, or anything else, you will hit the ground. When you have a strong wish—"

  "Were you all drugged out?" I repeated.

  "No..." he countered with a halfhearted stab at patience, and he surprised me: "I'm a little drugged out now. That night was before my rampage started. In fact, that night brought on my drug rampage, because I was desperate to get it back ... get those visions back. Get more e-mails..."

  Okay ...I rolled my eyes, which he couldn't see due to my glasses, but he couldn't have missed the sigh. I figured a little disappointment now might help prevent a deluge of it in the future. I tried to keep my voice even. "Here's my biggest problem with what you're saying. I believe I can manage myself better with positive thinking, which is natural and normal. What you're saying is that you can manage others. The problem is that others have desires, too."

  "You think ... I imagined this because I was getting manic," he suggested, which also was a possibility, but it hadn't been my thought. He just didn't get it.

  "No, I think you're being a Creed. Whether it was your mom out here today, or your brother disappearing, or you feeling like you're going to get your brother back no matter what ... It's always about that person's needs. To hell with everyone else. Your brother needed to disappear. Didn't you get that from Adams's story? From your own life? It might serve your needs to get him to come out of hiding, but what about his needs? Your mom feels one thing, that she's going to find out where you are and seize control of the situation, Justin. The fact that you're probably better off without her while you're trying to get a grip is utterly lost on her. What about your needs? Honest to God, I've never seen a family more likely to self-destruct."

  "We're selfish," he breathed, his eyes darting from side to side.

  "You just don't think, that's all. I highly doubt Chris was thinking about the reverb his disappearance would cause all over this town. As for you, look at yourself, knocking on our motel room door in the middle of the night."

  "What about it?" His eyes burned through me defensively. "Would you have preferred I slept out here when I heard thunder?"

  "No. But what were you thinking when you did it? Were you thinking of the jolt that would go through two travelers, hearing that pounding at four a.m., in something akin to the Bates Motel?"

  He shook his head slowly, and I could see his mind working, trying to make sense of this.

  "Well?"

  "I ... thought it was funny," he said, his eyes twinkling once before fading out. "Make a grand entrance..."

  "Do you see what I'm saying? You were thinking about Justin. Justin is not the center of the universe."

  "Well, neither is my brother!" he yelled, and banged on the tree with his fist.

  "No, he's not," I agreed. "But who in your family is going to be the first to break the I-I-me-me cycle before it continues to spread all over town? Who's the strongest?"

  I'd sensed since he'd approached the tree that his racing mind was defeating the effects of the dulling weed. He went on almost too quickly to think of something this clever: "Do you mean between the drunken, bipolar mom, the druggie, bipolar kid, the autistic man incapable of getting emotionally involved in anything, or the whips-and-chains punk?"

  My grin returned. "And don't forget the brother who's a vacuum ... with the suspected hint of autism."

  "How could I forget him?" His eyes filled up, which I wasn't sure was such a bad thing.

  I was hoping Justin might find moderation, quit going for the energy-charged manipulation tricks, and maybe give his brother's return up to the Higher Power.

  But Justin hadn't been in rehab very long. He should not have signed himself out, I suddenly became aware of again, as his determination slipped behind some blackened, pent-up rage that maybe I should have been more prepared to see. Bipolars can jump to outrage quickly, ac cording to some website I'd scanned for class. He screamed loud enough to draw RayAnn up to me again, both hands on my shoulders, all but propping me up.

  "It's not going to be me this time! It's always me! I'm the one stuck doing everything! You have no idea what I have been through, you dumb-ass! I hate you!" He popped me in the chest with all ten fingers, but I was too numb to feel it. "I don't know why I wanted to come home to help you!"

  "Justin—" I watched helplessly as he turned and ran off toward the path.

  "Chase him—" I said to RayAnn, then held on to her hand in case she tried to. He might accidentally hurt her.

  But RayAnn's fingers were dug into my shoulders, and I sensed she was looking in another direction.

  "We've got other problems," she murmured.

  Justin turned back and shouted, "It's me people ought to be writing about! Not my stupid, runner brother, you stupid—"

  Suddenly he froze, too, looking past my shoulder, where I sensed RayAnn was looking. I turned, somewhere in my mind hearing her cell phone camera clicking away.

  It was like lightning coming up from the ground, as if a bolt of lightning were buried and trying to make its way out.

  The corpse I saw last night thrust itself to the front of my brain, and in the flashes of light I saw it across the field, standing straight up, its jaw unhinged, its teeth bared in that forever vacated smile of the dead.

  "Darla—" came out of my mouth, and I fought to keep from swaying as Justin came up behind me again. The light was gone now, almost as if it had fulfilled its purpose and imploded into some mysterious black void. I thought I saw a line of smoke lingering, then decided it was my imagination.

  "Did you see that?" he demanded.

  He ran as far as the swampy area, probably loaded with snakes, and then stopped. His body slumped as he leaned his head in his hands. I forced myself to stay put, to not run to him, and to hear what RayAnn had to say about this.

  "Are you all right?" she asked.

  "I'm great," I said, though my breathing was out of control, like a whizzing firework on the Fourth of July. "What'd you see?"

  "You just said the name Darla," she said with a tone implying that it was crazy. I didn't know how to answer. Hallucination? No, Justin saw it, too, and I'd never dropped acid—

  She st
uck the camera under my face, though it was hard to notice all the details of her fifteen shots while Justin was screaming, "Chris! Chris! I see you, man! Come out!"

  RayAnn's iPhone could take HD images. I watched as she flashed them, illuminating beautiful flashes of lightning, crystal clear in the tiny frame. Jolts, forks, no skeletal remains, and certainly no Chris Creed. She watched as I did.

  "I only saw lightning," she said. "That's it. Same as last night."

  Justin was still screaming, "Chris! Come ba-ack!"

  "What do we have here?" I stumbled. Because I was thinking of Torey Adams's mom saying, "These woods make a body see ... what a body wants to see..."

  SIXTEEN

  JUSTIN CHARGED ACROSS THE SWAMPY PART of the lightning field to get to "his brother," deaf to our screams of warning. Saltwater swamps in Jersey are snake pits, and though he appeared to get all the way across to the woods on the other side, we were not manic enough to try it.

  So we did the five-minute walk to the car in maybe four, drove into a few cul-de-sacs on Route 9 before getting the right street, and parked on the other side of the lightning field. I took Lanz this time for his good sniffer. There were five trails, and when we finally found the one that backed up to the lightning field, there was no sign of Justin—or anything, for that matter, except woods and a foundation of what appeared to have once been an old farmhouse.

  It was, by then, after four o'clock. I tried not to worry about Justin, but it was hard. I wanted to kick his hairbrained butt—his first and then his mother's for trying to manipulate him home for his much-needed dose of medication.

  Let him go, I told myself. He'd found his way to rehab; he'd found his way home many nights before, sometimes far more loaded than he was now. To search for him any further would be to become part of his family's illness.

  I felt frustrated as RayAnn and I looked down the list of townspeople we'd hoped to contact, including the principal and the mayor. Now it was probably too late. Our flight took off at eleven tomorrow morning, which meant we had to be at the airport at nine, had to leave here by seven to return the car, etc. It was a tough decision: Do we run around trying to get people to talk to us, or do we stake out the Adams residence? I felt pretty sure that Adams might eat dinner with his family, but he would probably go out at some point to visit the Richardson clan, meet Ali, or at least go to CVS for something he forgot to pack. I could approach him nicely and see if I could sweet-talk him into an interview. We decided on the stakeout.

  We got "shorties" from the Wawa, this miraculous hoa gie Adams had written about, for which there was no counterpart in the Midwest. Starved, we sucked the juice of onions, provolone cheese, and maybe four different types of ham while parked at the edge of a patch of woods that separated the Adams house from the road. I couldn't see if his mother had returned from the airport, as they had a garage without windows and were orderly enough to keep the cars behind doors.

  As the sun set, woods loomed before me in all directions.

  "Okay. So what was that?" I asked again as we sat in the car.

  RayAnn stared out over the dashboard. "I surfed for strange lightning occurrences last night until I was cross-eyed. I need my hard drive at home. I need my password vault so I can get into specific databases. National Geographic would be a start, though my family subscribes to maybe twenty different scientific journals."

  I nodded dejectedly. None of that would do us any good right now.

  I picked her iPhone up off the dash for the fourth time and clicked again through the series of frames she'd taken. RayAnn and her sisters were rife with whatever electronic toys would help them study, but her iPhone amazed me. The special camera add-on she had could take fifteen frames in a second. Numbers seven and eight of the strange lightning images made me pause yet again. The way the lightning flash twisted around itself, you could possibly believe you were looking at a skeleton. But lightning flashes so fast that your mind can't process it in real time. So the effect is a "What did I just see?" almost while it's still happening. Strange, very strange.

  "It's very understandable, Mike," she said, dropping her sandwich and staring into the dashboard. "But we're two levelheaded people. Justin is out of hand. You saw a skeleton; he obviously saw his brother. I'm wondering if it was a horrible idea for him to leave rehab."

  I knew that I was doing the right thing to ignore my worries about Justin, but it was ripping my chest open nonetheless. I tossed my hoagie down on the sandwich paper and I laid my head back and shut my eyes.

  RayAnn dropped her hand in mine and squeezed. "Mike, you are the most courageous person I know. Whatever it is you're thinking, don't torture yourself."

  All I could think to say was "You're not too bad yourself."

  She was actually pretty close to perfect in my mind. I tried switching tracks, focusing my thoughts on finding any bad behavior from RayAnn today, and the only thing I could come up with was speaking French in front of Justin. It had sounded arrogant. I joked, "You were being kind of a snob today."

  She laughed immediately, as if I had hit into her thoughts. "I was being rotten, but not snobbish. Reality check: I'm three days past sixteen, and I go to school with a bunch of very smart people who are tons older than I am. I am low man on the totem pole. Where would I find room in my life to have snobby thoughts?"

  Good point.

  "Just for the record," she said, "if you hear me speaking French? It means I'm scared. I'm blurting in a panic because I don't know what else to do. And I didn't want Justin to know what I was saying."

  Learn something new every day. I opened my eyes and found hers. They were laughing now, but her face was red—and young. She looked vulnerable.

  "You were scared of Justin?" I asked, reaching over and picking up a strand of her rusty hair. I was used to thinking of RayAnn as being my age, but she was his age. "He's a ball of energy right now, but I don't think violence is his MO either. I'm just going on instinct, but I'm not the least bit afraid of him—"

  "It's not just him ... it's this whole place." She leaned her head on my hand, soaking up my sympathies. "You're always talking about energy. It's like the energy of all these depressed people hangs around out there, gets caught up with the ... the remnants of the lightning charges, or something. Steepleton really does seem like it's under bad frequency ... if there is such a thing. So much has gone wrong here. I know there's good kids everywhere and there's mean kids everywhere. I'm not naive. I wish I could find the right words for Justin and his friends. They're just a little ... edgier?"

  "Eat," I said. "You need sustenance. You're running on zero fuel and only slightly more sleep."

  She reached past Lanz in the back seat and struggled until she had her laptop. "I can look up those articles now on the cancer rates and the car accidents."

  She put her feet in my lap and sat sideways so she could fit the computer in her lap without it banging the steering wheel. She surfed with one hand and ate with the other.

  "Here's the one about the cancer," she finally said. "The nature of the article is that North Jersey has all the New York City suburb populations, but they should not suffer health insurance rate increases that South Jersey gets to sidestep. More people doesn't mean more problems in this case."

  She read, "'The state's highest cancer rate is Steepleton, a mainland suburb of Atlantic City, nearly eighty miles south of Exit 125 on the Parkway.' I take it that Exit 125 is some sort of a landmark separating the north from the south of the state," she finished.

  I ate slowly, feeling slightly off balance in connecting this straight-on, news-diction report with the twisting bramble of legend evolving out of these woods.

  There were actually three articles about the car accidents—one for each accident. RayAnn couldn't find any article that tied them together in some sort of weird, ethereal relationship. But one car had smashed into a telephone poll on Leeds Point Road. Two others were overturned—one in a ditch and one in a creek that ran close to the sides of back
roads leading through the woods down to the bay. In all cases, all parties died. That made seven fatalities in three years, and yes, that is a really high mortality rate for any small jurisdiction. I didn't think Randolph had more than two auto-related deaths in the past ten years.

  "The only weird thing in my mind is that there's no mention of what caused the accidents. They all just say people died. Was it ice?" I asked.

  She jumped from screen to screen. "One was in May, two years ago. Others might have been."

  She shook her head slightly while sipping Diet Coke. "Obviously, we're not presuming that the Jersey Devil jumped out into the middle of the road, spooking drivers to amuse himself."

  "I think not."

  "Nor is Chris Creed doing that."

  I meant to sigh, but it came out as a long moan. I was clueless as to a next viable step. Hence, we sat for almost another half-hour, going through notes and writing leads in our heads, until a car came down the road and turned in to the Adamses' driveway. It was totally dark by now, so we stepped out of the car and pulled back some bramble to get a view of the person.

  A tall guy with short brown hair stepped out into the house's floodlights, slamming the door of an old Buick.

  "My God," I said. "That's Bo Richardson."

  He went to the door, and before he could buzz the bell, it opened. I got a glimpse of Adams wrapping his arms around the guy's shoulders and slapping him affectionately on the back before they both stepped inside and closed themselves away from us again.

  "Dang, but to have that Ring of Power Justin mentioned last night," I whispered, in awe.

  "You want to risk getting near an open window?" RayAnn asked.

  I admired her spunk, but a lack of training had prompted the question. "If they were suicide bombers, the public's right to know might merit eavesdropping. This would amount to tabloid gossip-mongering."

  We got back in the car. I felt so restless, I could have clawed the ceiling, but my instincts told me that Richard son, being part of the grieving family, wouldn't stay here all night.