“I’m not telling you anything, Jack. I’m not even saying there was a note. This is an ongoing investigation.”
“Please, Tim?”
He pointed back toward the firebreak trail. “Get!”
As they walked toward their bikes, Weezy said, “Why are you so interested in why he did it?”
“I just am.” How he wished he could unburden himself to her. “He’s the first person I’ve ever known who killed himself. Hopefully the last. I’d like to understand.”
“We may never know. There could be a million reasons.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
Jack just hoped his locker wasn’t one of them.
“And what do you think’s going on in the dead zone? I mean, a sock?”
Jack shook his head. “I wish I knew. There’s something really weird going on here.”
“You think those were … his footprints?”
Weezy couldn’t seem to bring herself to say his name.
“Toliver’s? Yeah, I do. But why he buried that sock there I can’t even begin to imagine.”
Weezy said, “Maybe he was so completely out of his head that we shouldn’t expect him to make sense.”
Jack found himself unable to reply to that, because he was the one who’d helped drive him out of his head.
5
It hit Jack hard later on when he was alone. He kept seeing the shock and terror on Toliver’s face when he saw that dead possum. Jack had reveled in it at the time, but now, knowing what it had led to, it sickened him.
If only he could talk to someone about it—someone who knew the whole story and could understand the guilt he was feeling.
His folks hadn’t helped. Oh, they’d meant to, but their consolations were based on the assumption that Jack was down because he’d lost a schoolmate he’d looked up to. Nothing was further from the truth.
But it only got worse.
He’d struggled through his homework and finally finished it. Now he was trying to read a science fiction novel—one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s old Mars tales—in the hope that it would grab him and give him a break from thinking about Carson Toliver. It wasn’t working. And then his mom called from the kitchen.
“Jack? Kate’s on the phone.”
Kate … good old Kate would help.
“Oh, Jack, I’m so shocked to hear about this boy at school. You must be feeling terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.” Had to be careful. His mother was over by the sink, hanging on every word while pretending to be busy with something else. “No one saw it coming.”
“I took a few psychology courses in college and that’s too often the case. But usually, when you look back, there were signs.”
“Um, someone was kind of harassing him.” He needed to bring this up somehow, and figured this was the best way. “You know, breaking into his locker and leaving stuff. It kind of embarrassed him. And then he had to be benched during the game against North. Do you think all that could have had anything to do with it?”
“Could have. Mom told me he was the most popular boy in school.”
Jack could feel his stomach tightening. Come on, Kate. Help me out here.
“He was. Who could have thought that stuff would make him, you know, kill himself?”
“You never know, Jack. Some people who look like they’ve got the world on a string are barely holding it together. They’ve learned to hide all sorts of inner turmoil and put on a good front. But when things start to go wrong, they can’t cope. Things that would simply upset you and me bring the world crashing down around them. They decompensate, and some of them … some of them see no way out, so they end it all.”
Jack closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. He’d picked on a guy who’d been walking a psychological high wire. He’d made him lose his balance and fall. The fact that he hadn’t known about the high-wire act was some defense, but if Jack had stayed away from the locker, Toliver would still be alive.
Then again, if Toliver had left Weezy alone, Jack wouldn’t have gone near his locker.
What a godawful mess.
“Thanks, Kate,” he said, hoping he sounded sincere through the growing wave of nausea. She’d tried her best. She didn’t know the whole story. “You’ve been a big help.”
Jack managed a little small talk with her, then hung up and wandered back to his room.
He could tell he had a long, sleepless night ahead of him.
WEDNESDAY
1
A second bomb dropped the next day.
The bus to school was not as quiet as yesterday’s ride home. The kids were talking, but only about Carson Toliver. No one was crying … yet.
In school Jack forced himself to walk by the locker, now draped in black bunting. Nearby he saw three senior girls in a tight group hug, sobbing. The sight built a lump in his throat.
The school brought in counselors who went from class to class and talked about coping with death and loss. Jack barely listened. He wished they were talking about coping with causing death and loss.
The teachers tried to teach but they knew the kids were only half there so they didn’t pull any pop quizzes. Mrs. Schneider even canceled a history test she’d had scheduled.
All the kids who thought they were feeling about as bad as they could feel in school were wrong.
Things were about to get worse.
2
Jack knew something was up the instant Weezy dropped into the last empty chair at the table where he and Eddie were eating lunch. First off, sophomore girls didn’t hang out with freshman boys, and second, her usually pale face was dead white—as white as Saree’s. Even her lips were white. Which made the redness of her eyes even more startling.
“What’s wrong?” Jack said. He knew she couldn’t be this upset about Toliver now—not a whole day after the news.
She sniffed. “Didn’t you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“Somebody just heard it on the radio. The police dug up a body in the Pines yesterday.”
Jack nearly choked on his sandwich as the table went silent. His mind raced. Another Lodge member, like the one he and Weezy had found? Or…?
“Do they know who it is?”
She nodded, tears welling in her eyes. “They say it’s Marcie Kurek.”
Jack felt a chill. Marcie Kurek … the sophomore girl who’d disappeared last year.
“Did they say where in the Pines?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Jack looked straight into her eyes. “Do you think it could have been…?” He didn’t want to say where.
Weezy stiffened as if she’d been hit with an electric shock.
“Ohmigod!”
“What?” Eddie said. “What are you two talking about?”
A couple of the other kids at the table wanted to know too.
Jack leaned back. “Nothing.”
“Bull!” Eddie said. “You guys know something. Give. What is it?”
Jack looked around the caf. He could see the news spreading from table to table like a wave. He heard screams from over where the junior girls usually sat—Marcie would have been a junior this year. Jack had never met her, and had seen her face only in newspaper photos shortly after she disappeared, but she had been talked about so much in the past year, he felt as if he knew her.
He closed his eyes and wished he could teleport himself into the Pines, because he knew—or at least was as sure as he could be without actually going out there—where they’d found Marcie.
School seemed like a prison now. He knew where he’d be headed as soon as he was sprung. He glanced at Weezy and knew she’d be with him.
3
But Weezy couldn’t.
She had to go to Medford with her mother. She didn’t say why, but Jack suspected it was to see that Dr. Hamilton. He’d spotted her in the car with her mother last Wednesday. A weekly visit?
The state police and the sheriff’s department had only one ca
r each in the Pines today. Jack recognized the license plate on Tim’s unit. No surprise since he patrolled this section of the county.
He dropped his bike and hurried along the ruts. This time, in addition to the suicide tree, he found the entire dead zone taped off as well. Jack moved up as close as the tape would allow. A large hole, big enough to fit a human, had been dug in the center of the clearing.
I was right, he thought, feeling suddenly short of breath. She was buried right here … right where they found that sock.
He’d suspected it earlier, but now … to see … to know …
He looked around and saw Tim Davis walking his way, an angry look on his face.
“You’re really pushing me, Jack.”
“That’s where you dug her up, right?”
Tim pointed toward the firebreak trail. “Out. Now.”
Jack started to obey, then stopped and held his ground.
“Come on, Tim. You owe me.”
His expression changed to surprise. “Because I once dated your sister? I don’t think so.”
“No, because I showed you where that sock was. You wouldn’t have found Marcie without that.”
“Yes, we would have.”
“But who knows when? You were digging way over the by the sui—by the oak.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw it yesterday. Come on, Tim. It’s only fair.”
He stared at Jack a long moment, his eyes unreadable behind his sunglasses. Finally he sighed and looked around.
“Okay. It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper anyway. I guess I can give you a preview.”
Jack had been putting the pieces together all day. He was reasonably sure of the answer, but asked the question anyway.
“Do you know who did it?”
Tim nodded. “Carson Toliver looks good for it. He’s our number one suspect.”
Jack said nothing. Like seeing the spot where they’d dug up Marcie—one thing to suspect it, quite another to hear it confirmed.
“You don’t look surprised,” Tim said.
“Yeah, well, that’s what I thought.”
Tim snapped off his glasses and stared at Jack. “The hell you did! No way you could put that together.”
Based on the little Tim thought Jack knew, that would seem true. But Jack knew Toliver was capable of violence—though he’d never dreamed he would kill—and had seen him in the dead zone Sunday night. It had never occurred to Jack that Marcie might be buried there until he heard that she’d been found. Then the pieces had begun creeping together.
Blood on Toliver’s hands … Saree had been right about that, but wrong about the piney part. Marcie wasn’t a piney. She’d lived in Shamong.
Unless there was another victim …
“Well, I’d seen Toliver with the sock you pulled out of that bare area. Did it belong to Marcie?”
Tim nodded. “Yeah, we found a ring and a sneaker too, all on the list of things she’d been wearing when she disappeared.”
“What’d he do … keep them as souvenirs?”
“That’s the odd part. The crime scene people say they were buried with her—on her—and had only recently been removed. Lots of ‘products of decomposition’ or something like that on them.”
Jack swallowed. “You mean he dug her up and…”
“No. They say the body hadn’t been disturbed since it was buried a year ago.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me about it. The only thing we’re missing from the list of what she was wearing is a pink hair band. We’re getting a search warrant for his locker and his home.”
Jack’s mouth went dry. The pink hair band around the neck of the possum—only he hadn’t put it there and hadn’t seen it in the locker.
As a matter of fact, he hadn’t seen the sneaker in the locker either. And the ring … it had fallen out with the marbles, but there’d been no ring in the box when he’d set it up.
An ice-footed spider scurried up his spine to his neck and settled there. Something was going on, something that couldn’t be.
“Okay,” Jack said, choosing his words carefully, “if the sock you dug out of the sand was the same one I saw fall out of Toliver’s locker—”
“It was—or at least we’re ninety percent sure it was. Here’s what we think happened: He left school, went home, stole a bottle of vodka from the house, a coil of rope from the garage, came out here, got drunk, buried Marcie’s belongings over there, right over her grave, then walked over to the tree and hung himself.”
“Somewhere along the line he wrote a note, didn’t he?”
“Right. Forgot to mention that.”
“Can you tell me now if it said who he hoped was ‘happy’?”
“From what we can tell, Marcie Kurek.”
“Huh?”
“The note said: ‘You win, Marcie. I ruined your life so I guess it’s only fair you ruined mine. I hope you’re happy.’”
Jack felt his knees soften with relief. He could have kissed Tim, although that might have got him arrested.
You win, Marcie … That meant guilt over killing her had made him believe Marcie was haunting him, ruining his life because he’d ended hers. That, not losing the game, had driven him to tie a rope around his neck.
Maybe Toliver had brought her out here thinking she’d be easy, and she wasn’t. Maybe he got rough with her like he had with Weezy, thinking she was playing hard to get, or maybe he simply wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, had always gotten what he wanted, didn’t know the meaning of the word “no,” and didn’t care to learn. Maybe things got too far out of control and he had to silence her.
He remembered Toliver’s words right out here Sunday night …
It was an accident! I didn’t mean it!
Whatever happened, Marcie wound up dead and he’d had to hide her body. Why he chose that particular spot, Jack couldn’t say, but with nothing growing there, he wouldn’t run into any roots, making the digging easy. Like digging at the beach.
Maybe killing Marcie awoke some sickness in him that liked what he’d done. Maybe it had driven him to kill a piney girl. And to bring Weezy here last week.
“You okay?” Tim said.
Jack yanked himself back to the here and now. He’d been fighting a wave of nausea at the thought of what might have happened to Weezy if she hadn’t escaped from Toliver’s car.
“I-I’m fine. I’d just like to know how that sock got from Marcie’s grave to Toliver’s locker without her body being disturbed.”
“So would we all. But we’ve learned that someone was harassing him lately, someone who was able to break into his locker and leave surprises. We’d like to talk to that person.”
Jack went cold. He’d covered his tracks well enough to keep anyone at school from tracing him—except Levi—but was that good enough to elude the police?
He needed to muddy the waters a little.
“Everybody would,” he said.
Tim looked surprised. “They would? Why?”
“Because no one can figure out how he got into Toliver’s locker the last time.” He described what Toliver had done to his last lock, then added, “But whoever it was got into the locker anyway.”
Tim shrugged. “All he’d have to do was cut off the lock.”
Jack shook his head. “Toliver had to cut off the lock the next morning. And the possum was inside. How do you explain that?”
“I can’t.”
Jack made a point of taking a long, slow look at the grave.
“Maybe Marcie was doing it.”
Tim grunted. “Oh, come on, Jack!”
“Well, from the sound of his note, Toliver seemed to think so. So until someone comes up with a better explanation, that seems as good as any.”
Jack had said it as a spur-of-the-moment thing, but the more he thought about it, the better he liked it. Not that he believed it for an instant, but if he mentioned it here and there around school in a half-serious fa
shion, he bet it would catch on and spread like a midsummer wildfire in the Pines.
“If you think about it, Tim, it answers all the questions. No one could figure why the prankster was picking on the most popular and best-liked guy in the school, but revenge by Marcie answers that question. It also explains how the objects got off Marcie and into the locker, and how every lock was bypassed.”
Tim’s expression was incredulous. “You expect me to believe there’s a ghost involved?”
“It fills in all the blanks. Got a better theory?”
“No, but I’m sure as hell not telling the sheriff a ghost story.”
You won’t have to, Jack thought. Because everyone else is going to believe it—or want to.
That was what living close to the Pines did to people. Strange things went on in that nearby wilderness, and after a while you either accepted them or moved away.
The Revenge of Marcie Kurek … Oh, people were going to love that story, and they’d tell it and retell it until it became an accepted part of Pinelands lore.
Jack, of course, knew better. He and he alone knew who had really broken into Toliver’s locker and why.
Except …
Except for the sock, the ring, the sneaker, and the hair band … someone had to put them there. Jack didn’t believe in ghosts, but if not Toliver—he’d looked genuinely shocked to see them—and not Jack …
Then who?
4
“I can’t believe it,” Weezy sobbed as she buried her face in her hands. “Carson Toliver killed Marcie?”
Dark had fallen and they were sitting on one of the benches by the lake. Jack had relayed what Tim had told him.
“Tim says, with the note and all, everything points to him. It’ll be in the paper tomorrow.”
She raised her head and looked at him. Her tearstained cheeks glistened in the glow of a nearby streetlight.
“But that means I could have been…”
“I know…”
He could have added “next” but no need. She’d already reached that conclusion.
She wrapped her arms across her chest. “I feel so scared and cold and … I think I’m gonna be sick.”