"Your parents ought to love me. I'm not exactly Joe Rapist, am I?"
"No," she agreed quickly. "I wouldn't say that... at all."
Her sarcastic giggling noted, I rubbed the bridge of my nose.
"Our relationship is only a month old, RayAnn. You'll get mad at me at some point and then it will all have become 'statutory rape.'"
"If I get mad, we can talk it out."
"I'm not a therapist. And I don't need a statutory rape sentence dirtying up my future glory."
"We'll work on your trust issues."
"I'm going to write this piece, RayAnn. I'm going to be catapulted to fame and fortune via Christopher Creed... Be he alive or be he dead..."
"Freight train running all through my head... Gone, gone, gone in the morning," she sang back at me. It was lyrics from Torey Adams's virgin album, appropriately named Torey Adams. The album wasn't released yet, but I'd gotten a pirated download of "Gone" after hearing a preorder clip on Amazon. I knew it had to do with Chris Creed, though it was the only song on the album that hinted at Adams's distant past.
We held hands across the table, and eventually the couple let on to the waitress how they'd traveled around to the wrong side of the woods, so they never found the cops or the corpse. The woman's talking painted a picture: Their son was a rookie cop, and her job as his mother was to bring the squad homemade cider and brownies if a crime or accident scene kept them somewhere longer than a couple hours.
I could sense the couple watching us, and finally the man asked: "Is that couple praying?"
RayAnn and I withdrew our hands to our laps, and RayAnn giggled. Having come from a small town, I know that's how small-town people get strangers to warm up to them. They make you laugh.
"Hi, we're from Randolph State," RayAnn said in her totally friendly way. "My boyfriend, Mike, and I are journalists there. Mike came out to do some research. I'm helping him."
"I didn't know Randolph had a journalism major," the man said. He was well spoken and would have to be educated to know that. "I thought it was an engineering school. Why not go to Indiana U?" the man asked. "That's the state's writing school."
I smiled and simply said, "I like the road less traveled." The whole truth contained a practical side: I could be a desk editor on Randolph's newspaper in another six weeks—after the next editor joined the eighty students monthly who flunked out of engineering. At Indiana, a thousand writers lie in wait for desk positions—too much competition for a job that is coveted but not difficult. I ended with a joke: "We're newspaper geeks, and I can't remember what my major is. I just know it's not dance."
They laughed and quit glancing at my shades, their suspicions about my impaired vision confirmed. They didn't fire any related questions at me.
"I'm Forrest Hayden," the man said. "This is my wife, Annie."
I reached my hand out and they shook it.
"So, what research are you doing way out here in New Jersey?" Mrs. Hayden asked.
I told them my interest in Creed, generated from Torey Adams's website.
"Well, you picked a great time," Mrs. Hayden said quickly, "with that corpse turning up in the woods. They found one almost five years back, but it wasn't Chris. We rather hope this one is. His mother would rest more easily if she had answers."
"Do you mind if I ask you some questions?" I brought my tape recorder out of the pouch in the poncho and held it in my lap. They didn't object as I turned my chair toward them. We'd already had our small talk, so I cut to the chase.
"How would you say that Steepleton has changed since Chris disappeared?"
A long pause was followed by nails drumming on the table.
"Guilt," Mrs. Hayden finally said. "There's this underlying feeling of guilt. Like we've all done something. We just don't know what. We were a pretty normal town before the kid left and it turned into an unsolved whodunit."
"Guilt. Not a good thing," I agreed.
"But I think underlying is the wrong word, Annie," Mr. Hayden put in. "It's not a sensation that lies under things. It's in the air. It hangs from the trees. It drifts around on the wind. It's a feeling of ... general negative ... something. Negative energy."
I took a shot at accuracy. "Do you mean... bad frequency?"
"You mean as in radio frequency?" Mr. Hayden asked. "That's interesting phraseology."
"It's just the latest term for bad karma," I said with a shrug. I didn't want to put words in their mouth, though bad frequency was a term I used almost constantly to describe my own past. It sort of explains concepts such as how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and trouble breeds trouble. Coming under bad frequency means you've had a stream of bad luck, one bad thing following after another and another, even though those things seem to have no relationship. It's like you get beat up lots in school, which makes you depressed, makes you less careful with yourself, and so you walk out in front of an oncoming car by accident. Your broken back seems not related to getting beat up in school ... but psychologically speaking, it's very related. Bad frequency can go on for years with some people, getting worse and worse if the victim doesn't get turned around. It had for me.
"No, I like that. Bad frequency. Steepleton has gotten on bad frequency. That's accurate," Mr. Hayden mused.
My empathy kept me from bombarding them with another question. I kept a respectful silence during his thoughts on bad frequency.
Mr. Hayden finally went on. "A couple years back the governor was trying to enforce stricter statewide driving laws. An article in the Press of Atlantic City listed the top twenty-five New Jersey towns for auto-related fatalities. Steepleton was number one. It's not like we've got a lot of hills or twisty-turny roads. All we've got is Route 9 and a bunch of side streets. No one can figure out why we rank so high."
Raindrops crackled against the windows. I reached my hand back, patted the table in front of RayAnn, and heard her scribble a note. She would look up the article.
"That statistic in itself bothered us a little," Mrs. Hayden went on. "But then, last year, an entirely different news article came out, one on the cost of health insurance in New Jersey. It provided a list of the highest rates of cancer in the state by city. Steepleton also was at the top of that list."
Steepleton had the state's worst cancer rates and car accident rates. I could feel RayAnn staring at me, waiting for me to dance on the table or something. I shifted around. "Yes. I would say that defines bad frequency!'
When they didn't add anything, I asked, "But this ... couldn't possibly relate to Christopher Creed?"
"Obviously it doesn't." Mrs. Hayden laughed nervously. "However, Steepleton is known for three things. Bad driving, the most cancer per city, and being the place where that kid disappeared and nobody has ever found him."
"There is something wrong here. Nobody can deny that," Mr. Hayden said. "Maybe cancer victims and car accidents are just symptoms. I don't ... exactly know what I'm talking about."
I waited through another silence that finally ended with their meat loaf and our cheeseburgers arriving.
Mrs. Hayden touched my hand. "Eat your food, hon. It will get cold."
I turned and bit into my bacon cheeseburger. The grease ran onto my chin, and I gave a thumbs-up, hoping the waitress saw.
The cowbells rang again, and this time the room was flooded with young voices, laughing and babbling.
"Three girls," RayAnn muttered. "Maybe fifteen or sixteen."
College is a cloister of sorts. It's just you, professors, and other almost-adults. The high school girls from the woods were the first I had been exposed to in at least a year, I realized. Their use of "swamp creature" to describe a destroyed parent revisited me.
"Good. It's all good..." I stood and picked up my recorder. The forward motion was to counteract this feeling of reverting back into the accused booger picker of sophomore hell—the guy that cute, giggling girls liked to torture. I'd been tripped at least six times in the cafeteria, the first time washing my face with the ins
ide of a tuna hoagie that nailed the floor a split second before I did. I did not want to go there in my mind. RayAnn does not comprehend school meanness, having never been exposed, and she stood up with me, reading my intentions.
"I ate at the airport and you didn't," she said. "I'll go ask if you can talk to them in a few minutes."
I froze with a huge wad of burger inside my cheek, lis tening to hear if they were the types who could catch RayAnn up on school meanness in one foul lesson. Fortunately I had reason to feel guilty for the swift assumption. RayAnn was giving them a lowdown of why we were here, and the response was all positive.
"Wow, that is so cool. You guys came all the way here?" They even gathered their chairs around and introduced themselves as Katy, Elaine, and Chan.
Katy was the chatty one, an endless question. "So ... do you write for a high school newspaper or a college?"
"College," we both chimed.
"Oh! Because you look older ... but you look really young."
Though it was out of range, I easily imagined the path of her pointing finger.
"Nope, I'm in college, too," RayAnn said quickly and left it at that. Bless her.
"Hey, are you blind?" A hand went slowly up and down in front of my face.
"Katy!" One of them nudged her.
"I just want to know! What's wrong with that?"
"Not entirely," I said. "I have tunnel vision and some color blindness, and if I turn my head too quickly, I've got nothing for about three seconds."
"What a bummer," she said.
"Could be worse." My grin spread as my usual speech filled my head. These were nice girls. I'd forgotten there was such a thing in high school. "It's more annoying at times than anything. For the first three months after my accident, I couldn't see anything, so I remind myself of that, and then I'm grateful instead of starting a pity party."
"So, like, how do you do college? Don't you have to read textbooks and stuff?"
"The college has to provide audio text and Internet audio software for blind students, but I also can see about half of a sheet of paper at a time. I read about the same amount as any other college student. It just takes me longer. I'm like one of those bobble-head dolls. You know, from reading." I turned my head in a wobbly, back-and-forth fashion, and they laughed.
"Is that your German shepherd out in the car?"
"Yeah, that's Lanz. He's a service dog."
"How'd you drive to here so fast from Indiana?" Katy asked.
"We actually flew. But RayAnn has friends online from, like, four continents," I said, jerking my thumb at her, thinking I shouldn't mention the word homeschooled. It would be another subject that could take up to half an hour trying to explain how you can sit in your pajamas all day in front of a computer as a means of getting through high school, your "classmates" being in New Zealand or New Jersey. "One friend goes to Rowan now. We paid the girl a hundred bucks to pick us up at the airport and do without her car for a few days."
"Good friend," Chan noted, looking slightly confused. RayAnn stayed quiet. She could have mentioned that she spent a month in Italy with the girl after they'd discovered common relatives for an online class project, but we know better than to draw attention to our own lives during interviews. Between her life and mine, it gets to be a game.
"We're calling it a rental car because it makes us feel official" was all I said. I put the recorder in the middle of the table, trying to jump-start a new subject.
"So you came out here to write about Chris Creed?" Katy said. "Chris was way older than us. We didn't know him except to see him around when we were in middle school. He was kind of dorky, a skinny little bigmouth, supposedly. He's a much bigger deal around here since he disappeared."
"Part of his intention in leaving?" I suggested.
"If that's so, he was really, really smart. He ought to be majoring in marketing, because he sure marketed himself right." Katy hooted loudly at her own comment, and it was clever enough to get chuckles all around. "Only one of us thinks he's dead, and that's Elaine. Chan and I think he's alive, though beyond that, we can't tell you anything about him. Nobody can. Save, maybe, Justin, who is also among the missing."
"Can you tell me about Justin?" I asked.
"He's in rehab. That's what we figure. We know all his friends and what they say gets around, but we don't hang with them."
"They're ... what? Different, somehow?"
"Yah, they're at the center of everything. But sometimes they can get mean," Katy said. "Justin Creed got mean this year."
"Definitely he's popular, but he's got a real mean streak lately." Chan giggled nervously.
I almost collapsed. You hear over and over again how different one sibling can be from another. But I'd always had this image of Justin growing into another Chris—another victim with no desire to get evil. I'd gotten the idea at the crime scene that he had friends, but I wasn't prepared for this.
"Define 'mean streak,'" I said, mesmerized. "Does he ... get into fights?"
"He never did until recently. Then he got in three last month," Chan said. "He's become a chronically angry person. He smiles, but generally it's when he's doing something to someone. Like this one time, he sat behind Natalee Lange at a basketball game. Natalee is a beautiful girl with this long, long, wavy blond hair. He sat a few rows up from her in the bleachers the whole first half, taking tiny pieces of his chewing gum and flinging them at the back of her hair. She never felt anything. But she went home with like thirty pieces of gum in her hair. Thank you, Justin. Natalee had to get a short haircut, and it will probably take five years to grow back."
"Yeah, that's mean," I agreed, in awe. "Why do you think he's like that? Any ideas?"
They paused, but not with the same enjoyment of deep thought as the Haydens, I sensed.
"Some say it's his mom. He gets in fistfights with her," Chan said. "Sent her to the hospital one night with a bloody nose. She pressed charges. He said a night in jail was the most enjoyable night of his life, so I guess you could say they don't get along."
"I guess not," I said through hapless chuckles. "Wow. So, what's with the rehab?"
"You know, maybe you shouldn't print this, what we're saying," Katy broke in suddenly. "What if Justin saw it?"
I agreed to use fake names if they were that worried about their necks. So, they told us that most of the really popular kids around here partied on weekends, but the "loadies" partied on weeknights or even came to school high. Almost out of nowhere, Justin had started in with coke and Valium. With his fights at school, his friends started to harp on him, saying he was turning into a loadie. And that quickly, he was gone, too.
"And you're sure he's in rehab."
"Well, I don't think that body out in the woods is Justin Creed. Word was starting to get around when we left that the body was female," Chan said.
I didn't confirm it.
"It had something to do with female clothing," Katy took over. "But I think whoever dumped the body could have put that there to confuse things. It could be Justin. He could have gotten in a fight somewhere and accidentally been hit over the head. He hung out in the woods a lot. All his friends go to this place called the Lightning Field. It's this field where the woods come all the way down to the back bay without any marshes lying in between."
Chan took over. "The Lightning Field is really just a part of the forest where there was a huge fire four summers ago. It's all flat now, except you can still see the burnt trunks that stick up, some of them thirty feet high. It's eerie. I know. I've been out there."
The note of pride in her voice let me know that this was a place for cool people and these girls weren't exactly on the list of regulars.
"Some people say the Lightning Field is haunted," Katy said. "But don't let Justin hear you say that. He thinks he talks to his brother out there. He's hit people for saying it feels creepy out there. He says it feels wonderful, like a ... a euphoria?"
I watched RayAnn's shoulders spaz as she shuddered, and
I gathered her thought was of Justin so sunk into drug culture that bad things started to feel good. But I wasn't so sure he was totally blackened by his drug use. His friends at the crime scene had mentioned him reading a slew of self-help books, including some on quantum thought, to which I was raw. But one thing Justin and I probably shared was a euphoric feeling when the right self-help authors gave you confidence in facing your life. After I read The Magic of Dreaming Big, I was high on life for about a week and a half. It was during that time that I talked my roommate, Todd Stedman, into visiting a cemetery with me late one night so that I could look for some of my ancestors, part of a Personal History class research paper.
I shared that trip with the girls, just as a note of interest. "To my amazement, I didn't feel scared at all. In fact, I wondered, as my roommate read names off of tombstones, if my great-great-great-grandparents were looking down from above, so glad I had taken an interest in them. If you believe in some sort of afterlife, then that makes sense, right?"
"Right," they chimed.
"My belief in ghosts swings with the wind. But my belief that the cemetery felt happy and not sad—I've never changed my mind about that."
"Mike can feel energy that other people can't," RayAnn bragged. "But he hates when people accuse him of being psychic."
"There's nothing magical about it," I said. "It started with being hypersensitive to people's moods. Comes from living in an alcoholic home, I think. No pixie dust."
"Do you think it has something to do with being blind?" Katy asked.
"I think that helped it along." I nodded, listening through their riveted silence until I swallowed and washed burger back with the Coke. "It got ten times keener after I lost my vision two years ago. Now I can sit in a meeting at the newspaper, and if the reporter next to me begins to disagree with something being said, or loses interest, or becomes angry over an assignment—I know which way his mind just went. The reporter doesn't even have to move."