"Are you okay?" he asked. "Maybe you should stand back from the corpse. If you're not used to seeing them—"
I moved slightly to snap out of my sudden desire to get away from the corpse. "I'm fine. I'd just ... been hoping to get an interview with Justin Creed when I came out. It's been at the top of my list, and it had never occurred to me he wouldn't, you know, be here."
I dived into the memory of having tried before, back when RayAnn and I first met and I was testing her commitment after she'd asked to assist me on bigger stories. I had her call the house either to get Justin on the phone or get his cell phone number, but the Mother Creed answered and told her to cram it when she identified herself. The woman said we could talk to her, but not her child, then proceeded to question RayAnn for five minutes instead of the other way around. RayAnn finally hung up and took two aspirins. It was nuts.
I looked again at the neon bones and this muddied blotch of fabric the agent with the broom kept fishing for. She finally brought it up.
She held it up for the cops.
"Bra," she said. "I suppose that means we've got a female. What the hell, Rye. Do you have any missing females?"
"No missing females, Jenna. Not at the moment," he boomed, then cleared his throat.
The officer made some remark about hoping I wasn't too disappointed, but this would probably not be a career-making story on finding the body of Christopher Creed.
"Walking into the corpse of Chris Creed would be a gold mine for any reporter," I confessed. "But I can live with the situation, no matter who it is. It'll write, either way."
That caused him to stare. He probably thought like Claudia Winston, who was expecting me to show up on Mon day with the Corpse of the Hour angle or there was no story at all. I had the start of a great story—complete with two winning Quotes of the Decade, the second one being "No missing females, Jenna. Not at the moment." It's as if this town of Steepleton had descended into Stepford-wife numbness and people were responding to death-in-the-woods in the same easy way you'd respond to that No Smoking sign on your cigarette break.
"So then, what exactly brought you here?" he asked.
The corpse, obviously. But I'd just said I didn't need the corpse. I could understand his confusion. I was slightly confused—but also at peace with my choices.
"Gut instincts?" I took a stab at wording. "I don't know if being blind has anything to do with it, but I have very good gut instincts. I fall into stories that write themselves all the time."
"And a dead body didn't hurt anything, I suppose." He finally laughed a little, probably at my seemingly compulsive ways of spending my time and money. But he worked more with corpses than concepts, being a cop instead of a writer. I let him laugh.
Steepleton had been my interest, my story brewing for months—the people of a small town like this, people who are left when the dorkiest kid in town takes off and nobody can find a trace of him. There are no remains. The people who remain become the remains... I figured I'd have to play with that line, but the point was in it. Adams had left enough hints on his website for me to gather that the people had become withdrawn, bitter, distrustful gossips with little weird streaks. Adams wrote that after Chris disappeared, his weirdnesses started coming out in others. I think it was that line that hooked me to his story, to the idea that I wanted to come here if the moment ever was ripe.
It's always about the people. It's never about the facts. I forget which of my success gurus wrote that, but I've never forgotten hearing it. Hence, any great story on Chris Creed's disappearance would always be about Steepleton. This corpse was a nice sidebar—if you can forgive my sounding callous—one that would provide the impetus for showing how weird people can be. I wished the officer well in finding an identity, recorded his name as Tom "Tiny" Hughes, and walked back to see if I could hear what the Mother Creed was saying about this.
I stuck the recorder in my pants pocket under my poncho and sucked in air silently. I wanted to hear this woman babble without approaching her, without seeing the torture in her eyes. All my college material reads that serious journalists should not try to interview a drunk. It seems like a chance to get some really good intrigue, but there's no telling whether it's the truth. Drunken quotes are almost taboo among reporters, and I was glad of it at the moment. I just wanted to see what it was like to stand fifteen feet from the Mother Creed. A legend to me. A firestarter. An enigma. I wasn't certain I shared Torey Adams's belief that the woman deserved some compassion, though I admired him for it. I moved toward her voice, but in a staggering, dizzy way.
TWO
ON CHRISTOPHERCREED.COM, TOREY ADAMS responded once to a horribly mean "domineering mothers" post. He wrote, "People like Mrs. Creed, who overenunciate every sentence, are usually very unsure of themselves on the inside. They're not speaking with conviction; they're speaking with abject terror that nobody will listen to them." I like Adams's little twists of wisdom, most of which he credits to his mom, and I tried to remember that as I heard the Mother Creed spitting her cacophony of syllables to the little crowd surrounding her.
"...good to have the FBI finally take notice of our little existences. It's a shame we have to wait until five o'clock in the afternoon for them to get with the program. Are they asleep up there or just dozing?"
I made a sharp right, down toward a group of people hovering behind the other end of the crime tape, remembering Adams's tale from five years back. The Mother Creed had tried to implicate one of Adams's newer friends when Chris disappeared, a backwoods guy named Bo Richardson. But it hadn't worked out for her—less to do with Richardson's only half-strong alibi than with her lack of credibility, I think.
It was hard to focus on her lack of clout when she kept blasting remarks. I found myself haunted instead by Adams's memory of hearing her voice on the other end of the phone the night he and Richardson cooked up this scheme to get her and her husband out of the house so Richardson could search it for Creed's secret diary. They thought something written in there might lead to him. The Mother Creed's voice alone had made Adams piss his pants.
I sympathized, as my pisser muscle was retracting strongly just by my getting within ten feet of her. I wondered if she would ask who I was, and that thought made me think of the warmth of the car and the easiness of RayAnn, who was as naive and unscathed as Tinkerbell. But it turned out the woman was too busy discrediting law enforcement to realize that I had come up.
I flipped on my tape recorder again. Good backdrop noise for my story.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and someone had lit a cigarette and said to her with plaster of Paris vocal cords, "If it's Chris, Sylvia, then you can lie him to rest in peace."
Miss Cigarette was dead wrong, but I just kept staring at the blackness above the tarp. Mrs. Creed went on and on about how her lousy ex-husband had told her that she had no class, but actually he had no class or he would be down here bothering with the rain. She went on about how he and his new wife read novels to each other, and hearing her voice was like having your ear right up to a train track when a steaming locomotive breaks. I figured I was up to my nostrils in this story and my nausea was a personal reaction, but a girl behind me seemed equally moved.
"Will somebody just kill that swamp creature? Why can't it be her body lying out there?"
Ah, teenagers to interview. A distraction. I turned and gave two girls my credits.
"Why are you here," I asked, "on this dark and stormy night?"
One of them glanced over her shoulder at the Mother Creed, then said to me softly, "Because we feel bad for Justin. We're his friends. Despite that he's got a drug problem. I mean ... he was a druggie when he left here, said he wanted to straighten out his life and all, but he felt like he had to start out fresh."
"Like Chris did?" I asked.
"Sort of. Only it's not the same. Chris didn't have any friends. He had no one to rely on, so he left without telling anyone."
"So ... Justin told you that he was leaving?"
/> "Yeah. That's not his body. It's gotta be some ... stranger's." She was staring at my dark glasses. This thing about people telling you more if you're blind—it's generally true, but this was my first run-in with high school girls.
"Can I ask ... why you're wearing shades?" She giggled. "It's, like, totally dark out here."
I went with my gut instincts. "It's a ... temporary injury. I can actually see you."
Everything is temporary. I lifted the glasses and smiled into her pupils. Little twinkles showed up around her eyes, and it was good that I couldn't see her clearly. I sensed I'd see eyes full of mean teenager judgment. My own eyes look normal, unless you're really into pupils—t hen you might notice that mine are flower shaped from scar tissue instead of round.
"Oh. I thought you might be ... you know..."
Blind. I would ignore that.
"What are your names?" I let my shades fall down again.
"I'm Taylor Hammond and she's Mary Ellen Noyes. So ... you came all the way from ... where is it? To write about Chris?"
"Randolph U, in Indiana. I got addicted to Torey Adams's website a few years back," I admitted.
"Mr. Famous. I heard Torey Adams posted this news about the corpse today. I doubt the corpse will bring him back here. Nothing's brought him back."
"Maybe the local gossip has something to do with that," I suggested. "Wasn't it flying around among the locals that he helped kill Chris? That could hurt a guy's feelings, especially a nice guy like that."
"Only the biggest gossipers in town still like to say that," Taylor said, laughing. "Most of that died down years ago. Now that he's a rising star, the gossip is that he'll say he was born and raised in Oregon or somewhere and we won't get any of his glory."
"It's always something," I noted, and didn't get a laugh.
"I read the whole site once, maybe a year ago. I saw all the posts from people like you ... from all over. That's weird. People from Anchorage and Arizona and Florida posting about a kid from Steepleton. Wow."
"A lot of people relate to Chris," I said, which was the understatement of the year in my case, but it wouldn't work to my advantage to spew my personal horrors from grade school and high school all over my interviewees. "The story is dying away too fast—my humble opinion. It was helping bullied kids."
"I don't see what the big deal is about Chris Creed," Taylor said with cute giggles. "Except that now there's this corpse."
"Except that now there's this corpse," I parroted, leaving aside the police verdict that it wasn't him and my confidence that I didn't need the corpse of Chris Creed to sell the story.
"People still talk about Chris around here," Taylor went on. "Justin thinks he's a legend and tried that disappearing act too, but you know what they say about some middle children and drug addiction. We think he just wanted to go to rehab without having to tote his mother in there, via, up his ass. He'll be back."
"Do you actually have any contact with Justin?" I asked.
Taylor and Mary Ellen looked at each other for a long time before saying no.
"Do you think this is Chris's body?" I jumped off a delicate subject, figuring I'd swing back to it when they trusted me more.
"Hell, no," Mary Ellen said quickly. "Justin knows where he is."
My heart skidded into my throat. "Really? And where is that?"
"He won't ever say," Mary Ellen said.
"If he knew, he would have told us," Taylor argued with her. "He reads like a maniac, finds all these self-help books nobody's ever heard of. Quantum thought. That's his latest rage. He thinks quantum thought will bring his brother back to him."
I had heard of quantum thought. It bordered on my favorite subject—the power of positive thought—but that's been around since forever. My thoughts could control me, could make me successful, but quantum thought was something about being able to control others—and things, and places—with your thoughts. A few guys in my dorm were quantum thought cultists, and I'd listened to them apply theoretical math to positive thinking, but if they'd had any results in the real world, I hadn't heard about them.
"One day, his brother's coming back. The next day, Justin's all drugged out and depressed," Taylor said. "He said none of the stuff he reads will really do anything for him until he quits abusing himself. We just want him to come home normal again. He was a fun guy. As for his brother Chris, well, Justin barely mentioned him until right around Christmas of this year. You wouldn't have known he had an older brother unless you were a Torey Adams web fan. We don't know what came over Justin, but suddenly he was obsessed, wanting to find him, denying that he's dead, and all this stuff."
Mary Ellen nudged her. "My mom—she loves to gossip but doesn't mean any harm in it. She says that Justin hit the age that his brother was when he left and it's given him a psychological twitch. A little obsession. Whatever. For Justin's sake, we'd like to know what's up with Chris—alive, dead, where, when, all of that.
"If you guys happen to hear from Justin, would you tell him this reporter from Randolph is his number one fan and would like to talk to him?"
"What are you going to write about Justin?" Taylor asked.
"Just ... the truth. I feel the world owes him that much." I didn't know if the truth was actually bad or good, but I hadn't lied about what I would write, and the girls took it with pride.
"Definitely. We'll call you. He should call us any day. You got a cell?"
I gave the number to them and watched little lights flash as they bleeped it into their cell phones. I knew they had talked to Justin recently, but there was no point in alien ating them by making accusations. I wondered if I should ask them to a local diner or glue myself to them a little better before leaving. I didn't want them to space on calling me. I might be a budding reporter, but high school girls could bring on earth-shattering flashbacks, and I could think of nothing further to say that would make me memorable to them.
I remembered promising RayAnn I would spend more time in town talking to people than studying a corpse. So I left Taylor and Mary Ellen then, drawn back to RayAnn and Lanz like a metal spike to a giant magnet. They were a safe haven while I played crown prince to my own former likenesses—emotionally tormented kids who might also be drawn to Chris Creed, whom I could make understandable to the masses.
That was a second reason I was here, the first being to amuse myself with a great story about Steepleton. I rarely do radical things for one reason only; I'm just too conservative a player. Beyond the great story, my gut instincts were telling me, Now is the time. I didn't understand gut instincts very well—which isn't to say I didn't use them. I used them almost constantly.
THREE
THIS GREASY SPOON DINER lay out on the marshes behind Steepleton, and Adams had talked about its fantastic bacon grease-burgers on his website. It was so small a diner, it didn't even have a name, but all the locals knew of it and I wagered some folks in there loved to talk.
We found it after asking a man walking his dog through the center of town, and he pointed us down a road leading to the back bay.
The diner had only one couple in it, though RayAnn said the place could seat two dozen people at its paltry three tables and three booths. I felt hopeful more would show up, but between ordering and the arrival of our cheeseburgers, I did my usual mental relaxation exercises, which I got from a dozen books and as many websites I subscribed to. If you were legally blind and trying to become a reporter, after obtaining a bachelor's degree from a well-respected university, you would meditate on this stuff, too:
What men can believe, men can achieve. Napoleon Hill.
If the dream is big enough, the facts don't matter. Zig Ziglar.
You're like a teabag ... not worth much until you've been through some hot water. John Mason.
Then, I said one of my daily affirmations loudly in my head:
I am the star of my own show. My life is my own creation and choosing. On this date five years from now I will be ... the youngest executive on the New Yor
k Times and will be taking my vacations in Polynesia, sucking back margaritas on a dock. I will. I will. I will.
As I felt RayAnn's fingers wrap around mine and pull my hands into the middle of the table, I was reminded of how much my daily affirmations had helped me recently. This year, some woman will love me ... okay, like me had recently been dropped from my mantra because it had come true.
She cleared her throat and said, "'The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.' Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
I smiled. "How'd you know I was meditating?"
"For one, you just saw a corpse. Logic by default. Second, your lips move when you're thinking emphatically."
"Where'd you find that quote?"
"John Mason's Nugget of the Day this morning, in my e-mail box. I memorized it for you. Rising to challenge and controversy is the story of your life, Mr. Geeky Dweeb."
"Like attracts like, Ms. Dweeb. You went out with me without a gun to your head, if I remember right."
RayAnn also was considered a dweeb at Randolph, but it had nothing to do with her looks. She has swirly, rusty blond hair to her shoulders and so many freckles that you can't find her nose. She's got a shy, squinty smile and dimples, and if she thinks I'm too fat, she doesn't hold it against me. She is to skinny as I am to fat. We both have one foot on the beyond normal line and the other foot on a banana peel.
"If my dad knew I was actually going out with you, he would be upset." She giggled.
"Tell him I was never fat until college. Dorm food, carbo hell."
"You're not that fat, and you know that's not what I'm talking about."
Correct. This is RayAnn's dweeb issue: her age. She'd turned seventeen just two days ago. Yes, I, at twenty, had been going out with a sixteen-year-old, and I'm not even from the bayou. If I'm a cradle robber, Randolph is a bigger cradle robber: They admitted her. RayAnn acts older, so it's hard to remember her age. She had been homeschooled and all that yada yada that goes with homeschooled kids: Got her GED at age fifteen, started Randolph at sixteen. Her parents are liberals, deep thinkers who enjoy fudging all lines of convention. Except they didn't want her roommates or the campus party animals being her introduction to romance.