The Body of Christopher Creed

  My mom watched her for a minute, and I expected her to follow up with some lecture on picking your friends, but she just kept staring. "Did you ever discuss Chris Creed?"

  "Not really," Ali told her with a shrug. "The main reason we got involved was because Bo was in the principal's office when Mr. Ames placed the first call to the cops."

  She went through the whole story about how they put the note on the floppy disk and how it got into the hands of the police. My mom sighed loudly, rolling her eyes. I guessed the disk thing wasn't good. Ali didn't seem to notice.

  "Mrs. Creed, Mrs. Creed..." Ali muttered. "This whole thing is her fault. She's blabbing this idea all over town that some boon killed her son, and, Mrs. Adams, I think it was her! I think she's trying to blame Bo so no one will suspect her."

  My mom shook her head sadly, glancing from the corner of the table to Ali. "Mrs. Creed did not kill her son, Ali."

  Ali looked defensive.

  My mom said, "She may be trying to alleviate her guilt over the idea that her son ran away. She may be pointing the finger so she doesn't have to look at her child-rearing tactics. That's probably more likely."

  "Whatever," Ali spat out. "She was all over Chris, all the time. He had no privacy, no choices of clothes, no CDs ... He had an eight o'clock curfew in the summers. How is a kid supposed to make friends when he's got an eight o'clock curfew? What other kids would want to put up with that? What if Chris stood up to her, let's say? Like, maybe this year he said, 'Mom, I'm staying out until eleven,' or something, and she got so mad she just ... clobbered him and hid the body?"

  My mom shook her head. "Don't waste your time or energy going there. And don't worry about the disk, either. There is only one thing I really want you kids to worry about. Being honest and being fair."

  "Well, people aren't being honest and fair with us," Ali started, but my mom pushed away from the table and walked to the window as if she hadn't heard.

  "This isn't the first time something like this has happened in Steepleton," she said, staring out the window. I watched her face turn from that calculating-lawyer look to that caring-Mom look. "In fact, that Indian burial ground out there is supposed to contain the bones of more than Lenape Indians. Rumor had it, when I was just a little older than you, that a man named Bob Haines walked into those woods and never walked out again."

  The silence only hung for about three seconds, and Ali and I both pushed back our chairs and walked up behind her. The light was bright above the sink, so you couldn't see anything out the window but pitch-black. I knew there was a road out behind our pool, beyond our fence, and on the other side was the place where, supposedly, the local Lenape Indian tribe had buried their dead. There hadn't been any Lenape Indians living here since 1692, when they moved to Oklahoma. I had seen pictures of them, in school, and the men looked fierce. They wore Mohawks and let feathers dangle from their hair, and they pierced their ears and wore heavy ornaments in them. When you're in second grade, seeing pictures of them, you would think they were savages. But supposedly they had been very nice to Henry Hudson and the other first white people. The white people introduced them to some of their own worst habits, like nipping the bottle, and the Lenapes finally decided the whites were a bad influence on them. They left without a fight, leaving nothing but arrowheads—which people still find centuries later—and their graves.

  "I never heard any story about any Bob Haines, Mom," I said.

  She sighed. "You wouldn't. It was something this town could never admit to. When I was in fourth grade, a teenage boy ran away from home. His name was Digger Haines. Digger was a high school football player. He got his nickname because he played defense and he could dig in and not let anybody past him. Runners would bounce off of him and land in a heap. His junior year, Digger was thrown off a motorbike down at Turkey Run. He lost his leg. Needless to say, his football days were over, as were his dreams of having a military career like his father's."

  She lowered her eyes from the window for a second, then raised them up again. "Some kids started calling Digger 'gimp' and 'pirate' and other names behind his back. But things like that get around, get back to the victim. I was only in fourth grade, but I remember hearing them. I don't think anybody meant anything by them. I think they were just calling names because..." She ran her fingers through her hair and looked ripped up. "As long as kids could make a joke out of it, then it meant that nothing serious had happened. It couldn't happen to them, couldn't even touch them."

  I thought of the jokes flying around school about Creed. I thought of Ryan and Alex joking around ... Man, somebody's got to find the spoil ... My father says that very sensitive people commit suicide in water ... Some things never change.

  "Digger lost his athletic look, trimmed down to almost skinny, grew his hair. You might have thought it was from the sudden lack of sports. But Digger left a note to his father saying he was going to the West Coast to 'find himself,' or something. It was during the hippie eta, and I guess he decided he wanted to head out to San Francisco. There were a bunch of kids living in the Haight-Ashbury district who were opposed to any sort of violence, and after his accident he was drawn to the place. Some people say Digger's accident helped him become a more compassionate person. Some people thought he went off the deep end.

  "Before the accident, his father had always wanted Digger to go into the Marine Corps, play hero in Vietnam, and sort of mirror his own life in World War II. The accident and the change in Digger were very difficult for Bob Haines to accept. All his dreams for his son had to change, and while I don't think he meant to take it out on Digger, it was hard for him to cope with his disappointment. In the note, Digger said he was having trouble getting along with his father and he couldn't take the tension any longer and he was going to Haight-Ashbury. He left, never to be seen around town again."

  She stopped, and I broke my stare from the window to shoot a glance at Ali. She was watching my mom intently.

  "Did anyone think that Digger died, like they think about Creed? Committed suicide or something?" I asked.

  My mom shrugged. "Not right away. Digger's note made it plain that he was leaving. But Bob Haines went on a month-long trip to try to find him, bring him back to Steepleton. Digger never surfaced in San Francisco or anywhere that Bob could find. Bob started to blame the kids in Steepleton for calling Digger names and driving him away. The town responded by blaming the father for being unable to cope with a son who could no longer meet his expectations. They said he drove Digger away. At that point, there were some rumors that Digger might be dead somewhere. Nobody knew. See, guys, this is what happens when a kid suffers a personal tragedy. Nobody wants to take responsibility. Nobody wants to admit they had a part in it. So, they spend a lot of time pointing the finger, and things just get worse and worse."

  I stared through the blackness toward the Indian burial ground and felt sad. This story rang of all the things I'd been thinking about people—nobody wanted to admit they treated Chris badly, not even his own parents. Everyone was pointing the finger at everybody else.

  "Did anyone ever find any trace of Digger?" I asked.

  "Yes. I did." My mom grinned, still staring out the window. "He's an attorney in Detroit. When I was in law school at the University of Michigan, he was a guest speaker at one of my lectures. He was going by the name Troy Haines, which I think is his birth name. I saw that gimp and heard the last name, and I'll tell you, I was very glad to see him and to talk to him after class." She sighed. "I have his address somewhere. I should write to him ... if he could stand to hear from somebody from Steepleton. He was glad to see me at the time. But that was before his father..." She trailed off.

  I never even remembered hearing the name Haines around here. "What happened to Mr. Haines?"

  My mom tore her eyes from the window and turned and stared at the floor. "People think that after years of being called a bad parent, he was tired. One day his house was dark and stayed dark. Some people say he simply left without even
telling anyone good-bye. Others say he was seen wandering into the Indian burial ground with his old World War II pistol in his belt. Supposedly he found one of those little burial caves, crawled in, and pulled the trigger."

  We had heard of the caves in the woods but never found any. Some were mapped out by the geology department at Stockton, but it had never been prime on our list to find them. There were three huge rocks in the center of the burial ground, and Alex and I used to climb on them and play King of the Hill. Sometimes we used to get into the old legends and dig around for bones. We never found any bones. We stopped digging once we decided we didn't want some Lenape Indian ghost crawling out from under the bed at night, with his Mohawk all decorated, seeking revenge. I hadn't thought about it in years.

  Ali shivered a little, watching my mom. "Well, what do you think happened to him?"

  A sad smile crept over my mom's face. "I'm not afraid of ghosts anymore. Not after facing life's realities every day at work. But whatever happened to Bob Haines, I know this town destroyed him. They blamed him, because it was easier than admitting they were partly responsible. I think the Indian burial ground story was somebody's imagination, a few people having one last ha-ha to tack on to an already tragic story. I hope he moved to Los Angeles and became an art dealer or something. But ... that's why I say it's very important to leave Sylvia and Ron Creed alone. They'll end up rotting away like Bob Haines, or ... something worse. They aren't perfect. But they didn't kill their son, kids."

  I cast one final glance over my shoulder at the window as we moved slowly back to the table. Ali got way quiet and dropped down in the chair beside me.

  "I should be able to clear Bo's problems up tomorrow morning," Mom said. "Right now you need to tell me if he actually broke into the Creeds', and if he actually made that phone call."

  "No," we both said slowly. I looked at Ali, and she looked at me.

  "He ... did want to break in," Ali stuttered, getting all red. "Bo wanted to search Chris's bedroom for something to counteract the fact that he had the disk. "We felt there might be evidence inside that would prove Mrs. Creed was responsible for Chris's disappearance. I watched him actually shimmy up a drainpipe and check Chris's window. When it was locked, he crawled up and over the roof. He came around the side of the house about a minute later. He didn't have any time to break in. And believe me, he would have told me at the police station." Ali looked almost disappointed. I don't think she quite believed my mom about Mrs. Creed.

  "And the phone call? Did he make it beforehand?" my mom asked.

  "No," Ali and I both mumbled. It was on the tip of my tongue to confess, if for no other reason than to prove Bo didn't do it.

  My mom spoke up quickly. "I know this is going to sound incredible to you, but if either of you made that phone call, I'm going to ask you not to tell me just yet. I'm not talking to you as a parent right now; I'm talking to you as a lawyer. I'll be a parent again once I help the kid out. For now I would be better off just knowing that he didn't make the call."

  My mom wasn't stupid. I think she knew I made the call. Maybe she wanted to face the police without feeling like she had something to hide. And then she'd kill me later.

  Ali watched her for a minute with some look like my mom was a superlady. "You can really help him, Mrs. Adams?"

  She nodded, but not enthusiastically. "That disk could look extremely incriminating. But my thought is to let sleeping dogs lie. Any day now I would expect something to break here. Either Sylvia will accept the fact that her son ran away or maybe Chris will come home. And even if he doesn't, it's not likely that Bo Richardson could be arrested for murdering him."

  "You're sure?" Ali asked again.

  "Very sure." She shrugged. "To arrest somebody for a homicide, one needs evidence that there was a homicide. Under normal circumstances there has to be a confession if there's no body. He's obviously not going to confess to something he didn't do. And right now there's no body."

  Something made my eyes jump to that window again as a chill came over me. I don't know what caused it. The window was just black. Black as pitch. I stared at it, maybe because the disappearance of Creed seemed so black. It's hard to think that the disappearance of the town weirdo could cause a chain reaction of bad happenings like the ones we were going through. It had brought out some intense side of me that was driving a wedge between me and my fun-loving friends. It was worsening Bo Richardson's already difficult life. It was making my mom have to choose between being a lawyer and being a mom. It was making Mrs. Creed so hateful that she would waste another kid's life, a kid with disadvantages in the first place. This weird kid leaves, but the weirdness stays. It starts coming out of everybody else. I felt like Chris's ghost was in us, trying to speak. Trying to make us feel what he felt, trying to make us understand.

  I could hear my mom's voice telling us we needed sleep and to go to bed, or we would never get up for school. I didn't quit looking into the darkness, though.

  "I almost forgot..." I heard her reach into her handbag for something. "Just before I left Bo, he said to give this to you. He said you'll need your book for class tomorrow."

  She tossed a composition book on the table, the kind with the black-and-white-speckled hardcover. I could see Ali's name scribbled on the outside.

  "Thanks," Ali said.

  Something cracked in her voice and made me look. Her face appeared completely casual, except the corners of her mouth were shaking as she opened the front cover. I could see her name printed clearly on the cover, but it wasn't her handwriting inside.

  Her eyes met mine, and I had to look away really quick to keep from falling off my chair. Yeah, I guessed Bo was an ace liar. He got Creed's diary to us via my own attorneymom, and I knew I would never get over that fact as long as I lived. I also would never get over how you can become invisible and do magic if you want something bad enough.

  My next hope was that Creed's words were in there: My mother has threatened to kill me, and I'm afraid she will.

  Twelve

  I lay in bed thinking I could crawl on the ceiling. There was no way I could sleep, not with that diary in Ali's paws in the guest room. I heard the big door downstairs close and my dad's briefcase hit the floor with a thud. I knew my parents would be upstairs in half an hour. I would just have to wait it out. I cast a glance over at Greg, in the other bed, who was curled up in a little ball, making him look even smaller than he was. I wondered what I would have felt like as a seven-year-old with a mother acting like a turbo slut and a moved-out father.

  One day earlier I might not have been able to imagine it. But having been there made it easier to put myself in Greg's and Ali's shoes. I figured Greg would be okay for a couple years, but by nine or ten, kids stop being sweet. If something didn't change, he would start to respond to it. He would have his thoughts: There's nobody to really look out for me ... I better act tough or somebody will think that I'm scared ... I better cut up a lot so people will laugh, and so long as people laugh, the world is still a big joke ... I better pick on lots of other kids so that everyone sees their problems, and then they'll miss mine...

  It struck me that I was describing Bo Richardson's life. I had been thinking about how I would be if I were Greg at nine or ten, and I had just described the worst kid in school. If I were Greg, I would become like Bo. If I had Bo's life, I would be Bo. Probably worse. That was a real awakening thought.

  I tried to decide what Ryan and Renee would get out of it if someone forced them to live in Creed's house or Bo's house or Ali's house. If the average Steepleton kids had to walk a mile in one of their shoes, would that make them more understanding? I had this weird feeling that it wouldn't change a lot of my friends. It might scare them or piss them off, but it wouldn't make them understand.

  That made me feel all alone and kind of strange, like I didn't know who I was all of a sudden. I had always been just "normal," Torey Adams, that kid who wedged his way onto the football team despite the fact that he can't throw or
block. Well, hell, he can kick, so we'll let him on. The kid who played guitar well enough for being in high school, but who wrote dumb-ass songs that didn't mean anything. The only thing that ever made me stand out, I thought, was Leandra Konefski—the most beautiful girl in these parts.

  Some fear grabbed hold of me—like if I changed too much I would lose Leandra. I had the feeling my new understanding of Steepleton was going to cause a few fights, and it made me nervous.

  I came out of my thoughts, realizing that the house was quiet and my mom and dad must have gone to bed. I listened for floor creaking and was sort of aware of having heard some but didn't hear any at the moment. I shot out of the bed, stuck my head into the hall. There was no glow to indicate that a downstairs light was still on.

  I stepped close to the wall to keep from making squeaks as I crossed our three-hundred-year-old floors. I pushed open the door to Ali's room slowly and faced an eerie orange glow. She had taken a towel and draped it over the lamp to keep it from shining very bright. She was on the bed in a sweat suit, with the diary hiding her face. She laid it flat and looked at me.

  I tiptoed over to the side of the bed and pointed to the wall, as if to say, Squash over. She squashed, and I sat down slowly so we didn't make a lot of creaks.

  She eyed the ceiling nervously, and I whispered, "If they get out of bed, you'll hear the floor creaking really loud. What's he saying?"

  I gripped one side of the diary and pulled it over so that half was in front of each of us.

  "His handwriting is terrible," she whispered. "I've only gotten through four pages. It starts last summer. He hasn't said anything about either parent yet. But guess what? You won't believe this. He had a girlfriend."

  "No way."

  She nodded. "Her name is Isabella."

  I looked to where she pointed on a page. His handwriting was mostly scribble, but I could see the name Isabella in a line that I eventually made out to be: Isabella told me she loved me today, and I promised her that I would come back tomorrow.