"Five years ago," I remembered from Mary Ellen's telling me.
"I remember that," Adams said. "I mean, I was avoiding everyone and writing my blog, but my mom told me about it. The spring after Chris Creed disappeared."
"Right," Tiny said. His laugh was even twitchier. "I don't think the two bear any relationship to each other, but lots of people like to keep their beliefs fun."
"I like fun as much as the next guy," I said with a grin as I took the article back, "but not at the expense of others. This article says that certain rocks and rock cavities are conducive to storing lightning charges."
He looked over my shoulder, intrigued. "Yeah."
"And one of those types of rock is limestone."
"Correct," he said.
I nudged Adams and said with due sarcasm, "And Torey. What do we know about limestone?"
He groaned. "Let's just say there's lots of it around here. There are lots of limestone caves, er, cavities."
"Exactly," Tiny said. "This might explain why that happens. Maybe I should call over to Stockton sometime this week. The geologists might be interested, might know how to detonate one—if that's what it is."
"Maybe you should do it sooner and with some urgency," I decided, pointing to a cutline under a picture: The charge can be dangerous if it's stepped on, still containing enough voltage to stop a human heart.
"Has there been something like this recently?" he asked.
"A lot of us saw something bizarre out by the north side of the Lightning Field," I said, "including me and my girlfriend, RayAnn, who has never done a drug in her life. But I think some people out there saw it, maybe a month or so ago, and twisted it into an image of one dead Chris Creed..." I laughed, fumbling for words because I didn't want to bust anyone. That wasn't my terrain. "And there have been a few other sightings."
"The north side?"
"There's a place that looks to be an entrance from an old path. It's got two trees on the right and one on the left, with smaller trees in the background. You know..."
I was fumbling, but he picked right up.
"That's not actually a path. It's the foundation, or what's left of it, of where some say the Jersey Devil was born. Mother Leeds had this thirteenth kid, and all the Quaker ladies heard her utter the g-word when she found out she was pregnant. They said she cursed the baby and it was born with a forked tongue and other, uh, menacing traits."
"Probably a Down's syndrome baby," Adams put in. I laid my palm out for him to skin. That's what I'd always thought too.
"You guys are ruining local lore. But yeah," Hughes said.
"And regardless of who that foundation originally belonged to, you might actually have a natural lightning reservoir near it. And with those kids watching for spooks every five seconds..." I didn't mention Justin's name in particular, but Hughes was watching me, concerned. I finished, "I can't say how long or soon it will be before a group of them goes to investigate."
Torey added, "I don't know much more than what's written here. Except I remember my mom telling me something that she might have gotten from the Stockton geologists. The lightning traps start 'puking' lightning when they're getting ready to die. You'll see lightning daily rather than weekly or monthly. That's a sign, but they generally die by explosion. It's a small explosion, she said, but I wouldn't want to be standing within fifty feet, and sometimes they start fires..."
Hughes stood up. "I'll search my Rolodex and call somebody today. I got a couple of the Stockton geologists on hand ... had them ever since Bob Haines's body was found."
He moved quickly down the hall, and I held out a hand again for Adams to skin. "Glad you were here."
He skinned me. "Let's be glad when the thing is found and neutralized. What should we do now?"
I asked him to lead me to an ATM so I could have some cash on hand and so I could leave him some gas money, even if his mom had filled the tank. It seemed only right if he was going to drive me around for an afternoon.
"I see a bank a block away," he said once we got outside with Lanz. "Place has changed a bit. Bet there's an ATM there. You want me to get the car?"
"Nah, let's walk it," I said, not sure where I was going yet or what I'd be doing next. I just didn't want to lose his good company now that I'd lucked into it. I would maybe draw the afternoon out.
"Lightning Field," he said as we walked along. "That's another big change around here, I guess. I'd heard of kids hanging out down by the back bay. But we never went down there. It was mostly all boons back when we were freshmen."
"Bo gave us the lowdown on that," I said. "It's changed shape and the scenery's different, but it's still full of water moccasins, dead water, and, obviously ... charges of lightning that the loadies are thinking is one Christopher Creed."
Torey was quiet for a couple moments, and then he started to laugh. "Some things never change. Do they?"
The ATM distracted me, and I didn't think an answer was necessary. I decided to withdraw a couple hundred dollars ... gut instincts. I just felt like I might need it.
As we turned, a guy on a mountain bike pulled up beside us. I recognized the jerk that had tossed RayAnn's cell phone in the door and took off, laughing and burning rubber.
"S'up?" He smiled, watching Lanz, who made me a landmark.
I lit like a torch, amazed at how kids can do shit and then act like it was nothing the next day. I supposed, to them, it was nothing.
"Thanks for the phone," I said, my sarcasm cutting through.
"You're welcome." He bowed his head, kind of proud of himself, though his face turned red with heat.
"Anything else you want to say?" Like "I'm sorry"?
He stared at my counterpart. His voice sounded surprised this time. "Whoa. Are you Torey Adams?"
Torey reached slowly past me and shook the guy's hand, who said his name was Steve.
"Oh my God." He studied him with an astonished grin. "It's the legend himself."
I sensed Torey stiffen as he elbowed me slightly. "Um, I think Chris Creed is the legend. I'm just the tale teller."
"No, I mean your music and all. Did you know there's a huge display case with posters of you in Steepleton High School?"
Adams cleared his throat before saying, "Yeah, my mom mentioned that to me. That's, um, nice."
I felt it was very nice considering he'd never graduated from there. He'd been all but run out of town when people suspected him of being an accomplice in Chris's disappearance.
"And the newspaper has a column in it called This Day with Torey Adams. Did she tell you that, too?"
He didn't answer this time, and Steve kept going. "Honest to God. They got a picture of you playing some huge concert, and every week they run it and they call your publicist, and he tells them whether you were in the studio, or who you were jamming with, or where you ate. It is very cool. They did it, supposedly, so that us kids in school would read the newspaper."
"Yeah ... I hope ... it helps—" He stammered, sensing my anxiety, I was certain.
"D'you do autographs? Come on. My friends will die when—"
"I'm here for a funeral, so I'm not doing autographs, and what is it you have to say?" Definitely he sensed my anxiety.
The guy laughed sarcastically. "You don't have to get snippy. Jeezus."
"What's this about a phone and last night?" Torey confronted him, jumping to my defense so quickly, it left me stunned. He looked quickly from the guy to me and back again.
I wasn't above grinning acridly and saying, "He could probably tell you better, being that I left him and his friends to look after my girlfriend ... I wasn't there."
"Look. We didn't hurt her." Steve's voice was loud, and he held up his hands defensively.
"She's got a fat lip and a handprint across her neck," I replied.
"That was Kobe, that wasn't me. I'm the one who brought her fancy cell phone back. I could have sold it," he said.
I lowered my head and stared at Adams's waist, laughing in disbelief. "Does
any kid in this town know how to say 'I'm sorry'?"
"It's a long-standing problem," Adams replied.
I could only chuckle, which egged him on.
"Do you know what I mean?" Adams persisted.
"I know. My girlfriend is fine, but she left last night, kind of unglued. I'd be unglued, too, if someone threatened me with rape and murder after boosting my car." I wanted to see what the kid would do with that one.
"Kobe and Justin, man," this Steve went on with a red face. "They're kind of the center of things around here and they're on each other's nerves. Kobe's been losing it by looking for too many spooks, and Justin's losing it just because."
So this was Kobe's and Justin's fault.
He went on, "If you really wanted to keep your girlfriend safe, you shouldn't have left her with Kobe after spending a whole day with Justin."
"Oh. So it was Mike's fault." Adams jerked his thumb at me, so much on my wavelength that I skipped right over the intended moment of guilt and cracked up again. He was chuckling incredulously, too.
"Gee! I think I'll take a crash course in high school politics," I said without losing my glee. "I'll be such a wise person after that."
Maybe only the author of ChristopherCreed.com and myself as its most avid reader could get why this was so funny. The kid surely didn't get it. Torey pulled his shades up to look at me, and he'd been laughing so hard on the inside that his eyes were wet.
"Are you sure you want to write a story about Steepleton?" he asked. "Are you into self-abuse?"
"No, but I am wondering..." I sniffed and toned down my smile a bit. "Do you feel that Steepleton is worse than other towns, or are things the same all over?"
"I'd say it's worse." He chuckled. "But how much worse?" He moved toward Steve and put a hand on his shoulder, another hand on my shoulder.
"Steve. How long'd you guys boost that car for last night?" he asked, so seriously that I almost cracked up again.
The kid managed to say, "We were back in less than fifteen minutes." We ignored his defensive tone as Adams studied the sidewalk, nodding, calculating with pinched lips.
"In other towns, the kids might have driven across the parking lot. Maybe even around the block," he finally said. "Everyone else in the car would have been saying, 'No, no! Let me out!' Some girl would have been crying—"
"You don't know what went on in that car!" the kid said loudly. "You don't know that some girl wasn't crying. You weren't there."
Yeah, but if something like that had happened, he would have told us.
Torey tired of our half-serious game. He got a little snappish. "Were you looking for us for some reason, or just stopping to shoot the breeze?"
"No, I was looking," Steve said, jerking his head at me. "Justin sent me to look for you. He says he needs to talk to you about something. I don't know, man ... He's acting strange."
"Where is he?" I asked with a sigh.
"At the Lightning Field."
I turned until I found Torey's eyes again. I raised my shades so he could see how I rolled my eyes, not amused. I dropped my glasses onto the bridge of my nose in disgust and muttered under my breath that he'd been a no-show today and I'd walked to town.
"Let me guess," I went on, my gut instincts firing off like crazy. "Is he talking at a hundred miles an hour?"
"Yeah"
"He mention his mom?"
"Yeah. But I couldn't make sense of it."
"What did he say?"
"She ... took drugs off him or something? Says he doesn't need them?"
"Hmm." She took his prescription and won't give it to him. He's manic, been through a stress, lost at least two doses, and...
"He do any other drugs?" I asked.
"Just one line of coke."
Just. "Gee, that'll help slow him down," I said sarcastically.
I glanced at Torey's left hand, thumb stuck in his pocket, million-dollar guitar fingers dangling loosely...
"You don't want to go back there with me," I said. "It could be dangerous. You got a career to think of."
I couldn't see the look in his eyes because of his shades. I just know they didn't move off me.
"I'm not leaving you," he said swiftly.
I wondered if rock star would be good enough terminology for him. I wondered if he wanted to be nominated for sainthood. I just hoped this wouldn't turn out badly. I put Lanz in the back of Torey's mom's car and dropped into the passenger seat beside him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A KID whose eyeballs can look in nine directions faster than most eyes can look in two? I did not know what to make of Justin, since my drug-taking history is only one episode deep. (I smoked pot with Stedman one night last year when the rest of the school was watching the Randolph baseball playoffs. We don't watch baseball on principle.) I can usually tell if someone has done a line or two of coke by the way their eyeballs dance, but this was like watching a fast-forwarded version of a high-speed chase.
Justin was circling a lightning tree, muttering some thing to it, or muttering to Mary Ellen, who was seated inside the hollowed-out stump, hugging her legs to her chest and glaring at us over the top of her knees. I couldn't see anyone else in the field. Lanz stepped forward and in front of me, sort of putting himself between me and Justin.
Adams was silent behind me, taking it all in, I supposed. He was like a calm non-presence. Justin was too wild and distracted to realize who this was, and Mary Ellen didn't seem to know. Adams's charismatic posters didn't reveal the normal-guy element well.
"I hate when he gets like this," she said into her legs. "He got like this a lot just before rehab."
He looked in five directions in two seconds.
"Can you feel anything?" He looked directly at me, but I supposed he was asking Mary Ellen.
"No! I honestly can't! I mean, I can feel that you're scaring me half to death," she snapped. She rolled her eyes toward me. "Back when I was trying to tell him he was bipolar, he wouldn't listen to me. Now he's telling us he's bipolar. My cousin Dwayne is bipolar and gets all twitchy like this. He tells me people talk to him through the walls when his parents are out—"
"Nobody is talking to me through the walls!" Justin insisted. "This is not the same as that! This is quantum thought. How dare you confuse me with a psychosis."
Um, it looked the same.
"Everyone who doesn't want to believe in supernormal powers says the people who experience them are psycho. What the hell kind of a world is this if all magic moments are psychotic? You think I'm crazy? What about the people who believe that?"
He caught sight of me again and proceeded before I could think of what to say.
"Magic grounded in science ... Do you believe in quantum thought, Mike? Do you believe people's thoughts become things?"
I decided to take the high road. It might neutralize him somewhat. "I believe Edison really wanted to create a light bulb."
"And hence, he did." Justin stuck his fingers to the tree, looked at them curiously, and shook them out.
"But we went over this yesterday, buddy," I reminded him. "We decided people ought to think of the other guy. Especially the Creeds—"
"Why is it"—he stuck two fingers up to the crystallized trunk again—"that I can feel a charge coming from this tree? But nobody else can? I can feel it! I am not lying!"
Mary Ellen shook her head, watching me helplessly. "My mom says not to argue with Dwayne. She says he sees what he wants to see, feels what he wants to."
It seemed to me I'd heard something similar from Torey Adams's mom about anyone who hung around out here, and I didn't suppose these woods were helping. Nothing was helping—not his missing doses, not his drug consumption, not his stress levels.
"I am not 'crazy,' thinking my energy can reach my brother. What do you want me to do now that all those lights have been seen? Stand here and shout at him?"
The lights were not helping either.
His words had come out in quick, jerking sentences. H
e turned around and faced the north woods. "Christopher Michael Creed! Come out here, fuckface! I need to see you, man!"
"Maybe you're feeling an energy charge because you did two lines of coke in one hour," Mary Ellen suggested, and she sprang out of the tree trunk finally.
So now we were up to two hits of coke on an overcharged head.
I scratched mine, sensing the time wasn't quite right to make references to trapped lightning. He might stuff me into the lightning tree headfirst.
"If he's out there, he'll come when he's ready," Mary Ellen said, but I sensed her deep turmoil thrown into the stew. As Kobe Lydee's sidekick, she probably was very confused about whether she would see a spook come out of these woods, a live guy, or nothing.
"He has to come out of there before that funeral and I go back to rehab! He's playing with me! And I need him! I need him!" Justin insisted.
Steve came into view from the side. I hadn't noticed him here before. He was out of breath and must have ridden down here at ninety miles an hour. He looked back and forth from Justin to Torey and, I supposed, decided it was better not to distract Justin from what he was doing to say "Open your eyes" or some such thing. Maybe he'd tell Justin later, all, "Guess who was standing right beside you this afternoon?"
Torey stayed silent and still. Steve put three fingers up to the tree, then put his hand in his pocket without saying anything. I took that as a neg from him, too. I didn't bother.
I turned to Mary Ellen, who looked torn between watching Justin and watching me. Her eyes turned to mine, and she said, "Mike. I just want you to know that last night, I tried to get out of the car. I was screaming to get out. But they wouldn't let me."
I wondered aloud this time, "Are the words 'I'm sorry' too much for anyone in this town?"
Adams put his hand on my shoulder and said with dramatic seriousness, "I am sorry, Mike."
We might have laughed if Justin weren't sobbing suddenly and babbling incoherently. The only words I understood were "not fair, he can't just..."
And this Steve guy was all, "This is not Justin. He was a great time until just recently. You important people should know that."
My class notes came jolting to the front of my brain—probably because I needed them. I knew bipolar disorder is often triggered in adolescence. It can be triggered by a traumatic event. What had happened the last time Justin was with Danny Burden? I looked at the menacing clouds rolling in overhead and went with my gut.