The Body of Christopher Creed

  Isabella plopped a green bottle down on the coffee table in front of me, and I stared at it. Beer never came to us this easy. We normally had to con Ryan's older brother, Earl, into running into Absecon, and it was a big, sneaky thing. This was like playing grown-up.

  "Yeah, Roger told me about Chris disappearing," she said, dropping into a chair and pulling her legs up in a pretzel. "I was sorry to hear about that. He was sweet."

  Roger was Chris's uncle who owned the restaurant where Chris met this girl. I asked, "So ... you don't know where he is?"

  She shook her head in confusion. "Why would I know?"

  My jaw bobbed around, then I asked, "Didn't you go out with him last summer?"

  "You mean ... as in a boyfriend-girlfriend thing?" She laughed. "No."

  I watched in amazement as she hunted for words. "Chris ... was ... how can I say it? He could latch on to you and just refuse to let go. I never wanted to hurt him. But he never gives up until you say, Listen, kiddo. Reality check. I do not like you, I will never like you."

  Ali covered her face and laughed. "Oh my god, I feel like such a bonehead. Torey, he made the whole thing up! We all knew he never had a grip on reality ... I guess we should have figured he would make you up, too."

  "So ... you're not really his friends, either." The girl was smiling and all. She added enthusiastically, "Because when you called and said you were his friends, I thought, Hmm ... wonder what these dudes are like?"

  I could see she wasn't the judgmental sort. I decided to tell her the truth. "He had this diary, and we got ahold of it. You're all over the place in it. That's why I thought you might know where he is."

  "Oh Jesus," she muttered. "What did he say in this diary?"

  Ali told her about the walks down the boardwalk, the thing on the beach, and this one outrageous sex scene that she must have read when I wasn't around and hadn't told me about. Isabella just kept shaking her head, and every once in a while she would nod.

  "That is, like, ninety-percent fiction," she said. "Here's the real story. One day, on my lunch break, he asked me to go for a walk on the boards with him. I thought, Why not? That part is true. I could see he was having trouble getting along with the other busboys, and I felt a little sorry for him. He was shaking in his shoes when he asked me. I thought it was cute. So we went walking, and when we came back, it was like he was glued to my side for the rest of the summer. He was really, really hard to shake."

  "So, you never actually went out with him?" I asked.

  "Well, I did it with him once," she said with a shrug. My neck snapped a little to hear how she said that so casually. She went on, "I couldn't shake him, and after a while I thought, Maybe he just needs to hook up with somebody. So, why not? But it just made him ten times worse. I wish I hadn't now. Doing a virgin is not all it's cracked up to be."

  I watched this girl, trying to imagine what it would feel like to have a runaway life like this. Just parties and having sex with people at random. And I couldn't get over that Creed spent his summer writing in great detail about something that never happened at all. It was nuts.

  "And this one time, he told me he wanted to visit my aunt who's a psychic. I felt that he was trying to find yet another excuse to be with me. But I took him because I figured I could give my aunt the high sign or something. There have been times before when I was trying to ditch some guy, and my aunt would pretend to give him a reading and say that he shouldn't be with me. 'The woman of your dreams is waiting if you will let go of this wrong relationship.' It worked a couple of times. So, I let her tell his fortune with the tarot deck. I figured halfway through I would kick her under the table and give her the eye. She just started reading the tarot cards, and before I knew it, she said, 'I see death in the woods.' She read 'death in the woods' about three times and finally scared him so bad, he wanted to leave." She laughed pretty hard.

  "Really?" I asked. "Was your aunt faking?"

  "I don't think so." The girl shrugged. "I never gave her a sign. I've been meaning to ask her. But it's not like the kid was a big part of my life or anything."

  She stopped herself from giggling, remembering the situation. "He did start to leave me alone more after that. In fact, he got kind of serious toward the end of summer. Serious and quiet. You know how he was always laughing and grinning and trying to get attention?"

  "Yes," we both chimed.

  "Who knows. Maybe he started to think about suicide at that point. I hope not, but..." She shrugged. "Pretty weird, huh?"

  We both nodded. It was weirder if the aunt hadn't been faking. "Can we ask your aunt if she was being serious?" I asked.

  "Sure." She stood up, with another shrug, and I thought she was going to the phone. "Bring your brew. She lives over the garage."

  The garage was no neater than the house. It wasn't completely gross, but as we came up the stairs, I saw the type of mess that looked like nobody ever bothered to pick up anything. And the furniture was more used than the stuff in the house.

  "Aunt Vera? These are friends of Chris Creed's."

  The aunt was sitting in a big armchair, staring at Wheel of Fortune. She looked about forty, maybe, and was pretty heavyset. She was eating corn chips our of the bag and had an ashtray beside her with at least fifty butts in it. She didn't look at us.

  "Remember Chris Creed, Aunt Vera? That blond kid I had in here in July? You kept reading something about death in the woods."

  With that she looked at us. Looked me up and down, and then Ali up and down. She was chewing a big mouthful of corn chips. She nodded.

  "Aunt Vera, this is really important. You know how sometimes you're really seeing, and then sometimes I bring a guy in here that you know I don't like? And you'll ... you know. Mess with him?"

  The aunt started to smile but turned her eyes back to Wheel of Fortune.

  Isabella laughed. "Come on, Aunt Vera. Tell us the truth. That kid is missing, you know. He's missing, and he lives near a whole lot of woods."

  With that, the aunt stopped chewing. She blinked a few times. She had this knowing look on her face, and I didn't think she seemed that surprised.

  "So ... you were being serious, right?" Isabella asked. "You weren't just fooling around with the men in my—"

  "No. I was not fooling around." She shook her head. Then she looked at me. She said, "I saw death in the woods. And you will find death in the woods."

  She kept looking straight at me. She had this raspy voice that sounded like a mixture of corn chips and too many cigarettes.

  "What do you mean, I will find death in the woods?"

  "You. Not anybody else. When you are alone, you will find him. In the woods."

  I watched her, trying to decide what was going on here. I wasn't so naive as to think I would come in here and find a bunch of lit candles surrounding a woman with a bone through her nose. But she's telling me, around a mouthful of corn chips, with Wheel of Fortune going on in the background, that I'm going to find Creed. An image was coming into my head of me walking through the woods and coming across a half-decayed body. I laughed nervously, but the picture made my heart beat hard.

  "What do you mean, alone?" I demanded. "Why do I have to be alone?"

  The woman shook her head with a shrug and said, "I just see you finding him when you are alone. Nobody is with you."

  "Can she really do that?" My head snapped toward Isabella. This just felt all weird, all wrong.

  "Yes, she can do that." Isabella nodded hard. "She can meet somebody on the street, or in a restaurant, and just see things about them. Sometimes a lot of things. Sometimes just a few things. But yeah. She's doing it to you right now."

  I looked back down at the woman, trying to get these flashes out of my head of a dead, unrecognizable body lying in front of me. The woman hadn't taken her eyes off me, hadn't even blinked. It made me want to run. Somehow I didn't.

  "Are you saying that ... he's really and truly dead?" I asked.

  This time, she actually closed her eyes. S
he took in a long breath of air and let it out slowly. Then she nodded. "I see him. He is dead."

  "But..." This was crazy. "But I don't want to find him dead in the woods while I'm alone. That's gross." It was terrifying. Ali and I had just been talking about that Chamber of Horrors making me puke once. And those guys were made of wax. If I came across a bloody body of somebody I knew—I could not imagine it. Maybe I would never go into the woods again, and that would be the end of that.

  I guessed she didn't understand my meaning, because she said, "Oh, it's not all woods. It's ... a primitive cemetery. Something like that."

  "A burial ground?" Ali asked.

  She nodded. "You will find him shot through the head on a primitive grave. There are other graves around, but this one is marked with three large rocks."

  My chest turned to fire because I could picture right where she was talking about. There was a clearing inside the Indian burial ground. Legend had it that the Indians cleared it to bury their dead, and the pine trees never grew back. That's where Alex and I had played King of the Hill. Right there on those three rocks...

  "Chris Creed is dead," I mumbled. "You're saying that Chris Creed is definitely dead."

  I got hot and dizzy. I had said many times myself he might be dead, but you're never prepared to hear something like that. It was like when Chief Bowen had said the word murder the day before. Only this was worse. She was telling me I was going to find him.

  "Oh, I rarely say specifics as definite fact," the woman said quickly. I turned to see her eyes staring back at mine like she was trying to cover herself somehow. "I'm saying I see death in the woods. I'm saying it has to do with this boy."

  You just told me be was shot through the head, you stupid witch, my brain was heaving.

  "Look, don't play with me," I muttered to her. "This isn't funny."

  "I'm dead serious!" she said defensively. "I can't help what I see."

  Whatever. I was thinking how many times Alex and I jumped and played on those rocks, never thinking, doyee, that they marked an Indian grave. Probably fifty times in our childhood we had jumped off those rocks.

  She was sitting there with corn-chip pieces dribbling down onto her huge chest. I couldn't believe this woman with manners like a pig could just blow out something psychic. I don't know what manners had to do with it, but I was hypnotized, watching her.

  Ali cleared her throat shyly and said, "Can you see ... how he died? Did ... somebody kill him, or did he kill himself?"

  The aunt looked down, blinking into her lap until she swallowed more corn chips. Then she nodded. "Suicide. He killed himself."

  "I mean, will the police be able to see that it was suicide?" Ali reworded it. She was thinking about Bo, I realized.

  "If that's what they want to see," she said with a shrug. Not very encouraging.

  "Well..." My brain was screaming with questions, and I just threw one out. "They already searched the Indian burial ground last Saturday. Nobody saw anything. How could all those searchers have missed a dead body in the middle of a clearing?"

  She did that thing where she shut her eyes, took in a deep breath, and let it out. She said, "The dead didn't want to be seen. They can do that. Hide until they get what they want."

  I wanted to say, This is bull, the dead don't play hide-and-seek, and you're insane. She spoke up before I had the chance.

  "Be very careful about your actions. A person's liberty is at stake here."

  Bo's liberty. I stared back and tried to think of ways she might be playing with me. She was definitely covering herself with that "I rarely say anything as definite fact." It made me mad, because I figured she was BS-ing me.

  But how could she make up those rocks or that clearing that I knew so well? I wanted to ask her where Creed got the gun, but every time she had opened her mouth it just got worse and worse. I didn't want to hear any more.

  I handed back the almost-full beer bottle to Isabella. "Thanks for your time."

  "Oh, god, I'm sorry!" She came barreling down the stairs behind me and Ali. "I should have told her not to ... not to startle you. Discretion is not her strong suit. That's why she's not in business. Like, who would invest in her?"

  I stalked off toward the street, with Ali following me and Isabella apologizing behind us.

  Isabella finally went back in her house, to party some more and forget this whole schmear, I guessed.

  "That girl was too weird for me, Ali. And the aunt? You want to know what I think? Here's what I think! I think Creed was a very, very impressionable person. If she said she saw death in the woods, she could have put the idea in his stressed-out head. He might never have done it except for her big mouth. Psychic, my ass. I think she should be arrested."

  "It's not her fault that Chris was messed up," Ali said quietly, but I wasn't in the mood to be sweet.

  "And that girl? Oh my god. Let's just get laid with a sheltered kid because we're bored or something—"

  "The girl is messed up, that's all. But she's no more messed up than Chris was. She's just cooler about it."

  I glanced at her, irritated, wondering how she could make the girl so fast and so sure. I guessed that, somehow, going through family junk can have its flip side, like it can make you more insightful. And more generous, maybe. Ali was making me feel guilty on top of my heart attack.

  "Are you going to go look in the woods?" she asked.

  I realized that was the answer. "No. I'm not. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ten years from now. If I ever get the chance, I will tell Mrs. Creed, and she can haul her sorry ass in there and look. I'll never go in the woods alone again."

  Ali nodded and just walked along beside me like she didn't want to tangle with my foul mood. That was a good idea, because she would have lost.

  Twenty

  My mom was sitting at her desk in her study when we got home. I noticed her ink pen wasn't flying. She was just staring into space.

  "What's up?" I asked. She shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers in a way I didn't like.

  "Sit down," she told us. We sat, watching her rock and sigh.

  "It seems that Bo announced to Chief Bowen that the man's children know about his affair last year."

  "He's so stupid sometimes!" Ali cringed. "It was bad enough he said it to Renee!"

  "Well, he told me that he thought Renee Bowen had run home and told her father as soon as she and Alex heard it. He thought he was telling Chief Bowen something he already knew. Let's say he was half stupid."

  "So, what did Chief Bowen do?" Ali demanded.

  As my mom told it, Chief Bowen's life went down the drain when Bo said that to him. He had been trying for years to keep his troubles under his hat, but now he felt like the town would know tomorrow. Bo said it so heartlessly, and he had already repeated it that way to one of Chief Bowen's own kids.

  "Daryl lost his temper and hit Bo about six times," my mom said, rubbing the bridge of her nose in that tired way. "There were two other officers present and they saw the whole thing. I'm sure they would have kept the dirty little secret, but despite what you may think of him, Chief Bowen is not all bad. He resigned at six o'clock."

  Ali and I sat there frozen. Chief Bowen had been chief of police since I could remember. I tried not to think about that. No point to it, except that it would make me crazy. Bo was really bad with authority figures, that much we knew. But he only brought up to Chief Bowen what he thought the man already knew.

  "Did he break any bones? Did he really hurt Bo?" Ali asked.

  "Bo's got a couple of black eyes, but nothing is broken. He'll be okay. But he's not helping his image at all. Even police are human. They really ... hate him. They would love to find evidence to convict him on this charge and send him off to someplace worse than Egg Harbor, never have to deal with him again."

  I thought about this Egg Harbor place. There were mean kids in there. Ryan used to pass on stories to me from his dad about the kids up there. There was a kid in there f
or raping his own sister. There were violent schizophrenics, drug addicts, juvenile sex offenders, along with a general population of lawbreaking teenagers. I was glad Bo was pretty big. But I was scared a bunch of messed-up kids could get at him if they wanted to. I thought of Bo saving Ali from her mother's weird boyfriend. Now he had his back to the wall with people even crazier.

  "I'll get him out on Monday." Mom said it almost in a whisper. "I'm still pretty confident that he will never be charged concerning Chris."

  "How do you know?" Ali asked with a shaking voice.

  "Because I think Chris Creed is alive." She leaned forward, took hold of that pen of hers, and brushed the feather under her nose. She looked off into space in a way that made me curious. And confused.

  I muttered, "We saw a psychic tonight."

  She shut her eyes slowly, and when she reopened them, they were glaring right at me with what my friends always called the look. It could boil you. She always told me that you made your own future, and that psychics could make you "fatalistic." Not only that, but a fake could really mess you up.

  "We didn't mean to see her, we just sort of fell into it," I blabbered under her gaze. "We went to visit this girl Chris used to know. She took us. At any rate, the psychic said Chris is dead in the woods. She says he shot himself."

  She rolled her eyes off to the side in a way that read complete disgust. Finally, she sighed. "Well, I'm not psychic, but I'm your mother. Do I rank in there somehow?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Chris Creed is not dead in the woods. I can take my paycheck to the bank on that one."

  I stared at her tired face. "What makes you so sure?"

  "Because I've lived here my whole life, and I know the people here pretty well. Glen Ames told me you had a conversation with Sylvia Creed yesterday. She may have been relentless, Torey, but what that boils down to is survival. People will do and think whatever it is they have to in order to survive. I feel that Chris probably learned his bad social skills from Sylvia. But he also learned from her to be a survivor," she muttered in a soft but firm way. "When he disappeared, I just knew in my gut, like I know this town, like I know the Creeds. Sylvia Creed is far from perfect, but her life didn't kill her. Digger Haines's life didn't kill him. I'm not a psychic, but I know people pretty well. And my feeling is, Chris Creed is alive."