The Body of Christopher Creed

  My mother was mumbling something about Bob Haines being part Lenape and probably thinking that it was okay to share the grave. He must have known about it, somehow; managed to enter without bringing too much fresh oxygen onto the dead. Something about, he didn't want to bother people who disrespected him with the prospect of a funeral. I could hardly hear her.

  I was confused, to say the least. In thinking she was either confused herself or lying to me, I blurted out the sacred question. I asked it in a whisper. "Mom. If I didn't see Chris in that cave, then where is he?"

  She dropped my hand and reached up absently for my hair. She ran her fingers through it like she hadn't done since I was ten or eleven. She wasn't looking at me, though. She was looking out the window. And if I didn't know my own mother pretty well, I would have sworn there was some look of great victory in her face.

  She only said, "I don't know."

  Twenty-three

  We tried to blow Leo's room full of shaving cream last night. That's a prank I caught wind of from some alumni who learned it at Purdue and came back this week for graduation ceremonies. Dorm pranks aren't real dramatic around here because you can get kicked out of school. But Cartright reasoned that we're graduating in two days, and we all have our letters of acceptance to our colleges, so there's not much the Gestapo could do to us.

  Cartright and this enormous dude, Todd Melefanti, whom we fondly call the Melephant, took this huge envelope, filled it with shaving cream, and shoved the flap under Leo's door. The idea is to jump on the envelope, which would force the shaving cream in a thousand directions from under the door to permeate everything in Leo's room, including his tux for the graduation dinner tomorrow night, which we knew was hanging on the front of his closet.

  It was probably my fault, because I'm the one who relayed this prank in detail to Cartright, though I never take credit for being the instigator in a prank—this one included. I can dream them up and design schemes to avoid detection, but I don't have the nerve to execute. Or maybe I just don't have the energy. That's where Cartright comes in. He calls me the brains of the operation when I tag along behind him, yawning.

  Cartright and I backed away from the envelope to make way for the Melephant. Cartright figured Mel's extra hundred pounds from constant junk-food consumption could send a more powerful blast on the unsuspecting Leo. We were standing there on either side of the envelope, and I noticed Mel's fat feet were, like, glued to the floor behind it. He pointed, and I realized right away what his problem was. Cartright, the genius, had sealed the envelope. You're supposed to leave it open, so the shaving cream has an escape valve. No telling which direction the blast would travel. Mel started waving his hands like don't, but Cartright was wound up for the kill and wasn't seeing anything. When Mel moved backward against the wall instead of forward with a jump, Cartright jumped on the thing. The BANG! sounded like a cherry bomb. I closed my eyes for fear of getting hit in the face.

  By the time I opened my eyes, Cartright and Mel were halfway down the hall, running backward, waving the envelope at me to haul my ass. I just stood there with my jaw dropped. Mel's front side was completely white, from head to toe. When Leo opened the door going, "What the hell gives?" he was faced only with me and the wall, which sported a perfectly shaped white outline of an enormous fat kid.

  "What's up, Leo?" I said, for lack of something better.

  "What the hell was that noise?"

  Fortunately I didn't have to answer, because he was absorbed in the outline on the wall. He stuck one finger in it, put it to his nose, and sniffed. Then he stared, the corners of his mouth widening out.

  "You know what?" he breathed. "I know this is crazy, but that shape looks exactly like Todd Melefanti."

  "How about that." I pulled a laugh out of somewhere.

  I'm still not a great liar but find I can ride out most situations by not offering any information at all. He didn't know we were pranking on him; the envelope was with Mel and Cartright. He admired the silhouette for a few moments more, then turned to me.

  "So, what're you doing at my door? You come to hang out?"

  "No," I said quickly, "I've got stuff to do. But..."

  I kind of went through meltdown watching his face fall. I don't think anyone ever knocked on his door for any reason except to borrow something. Poor Leo, I thought. Poor Creed.

  "Leo, about the other day, man, I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me."

  He grinned in this combination of surprise and discomfort. "It's okay, man. I just figured you were wigging about something. Had nothing to do with me. That's what I thought."

  "Yeah. Absolutely."

  "So, you're okay now?"

  "I'm fine."

  "So ... what was bugging you, man?"

  I sighed, deciding on the honesty routine. Less energy involved. "I was just reading something I wrote last year. You know, something that I was tied up in. You know, something that was important to me."

  "Yeah? Have anything to do with that guy you're looking for?"

  I watched him, thinking the guy had no shame. "What did you do, click through my files while I was in class?"

  "No way, man. You got that web site. I've seen your web site. It's interesting. Way interesting."

  I don't know why that bowled me over. I mean, I know when you post a web site, everyone and their brother can see it. I just always had these thoughts that whoever looked at my web site was from France or Iowa or Toronto. Since I didn't talk about my web site to anyone around here except Cartright, it seemed totally weird that people I lived with could look at it. Having read all of Creed.doc, I felt less keyed up, less concerned that Leo could ruin my life at this point. Still, I was glad we were graduating soon.

  "I saw it on your hard drive last week when you let me use your computer," he said. "I don't know why, I just called it up later on my terminal."

  I nodded, polite as I could, thinking, I never, ever said Leo could use my computer, but he made it sound like I did. I turned to walk away. Because the next question would be, "Did you find the guy yet?" If I ever gave anyone an out-loud dissertation on the weirdness of my web site replies, it wasn't going to be Leo. I could feel him doing his usual stare routine on me as I left.

  I didn't feel like hearing Cartright and Mel guffawing. I just went back up to my room and turned on my computer. I called up what I had written the night before. I wrote it just after I finished reading Creed.doc. The memories hadn't left me completely insane—just full of regrets, which I tried to get over by writing more. I didn't like my original final pages. I didn't have enough brainpower, back when I wrote the thing, to tell a whole lot about what came down in Steepleton after the body turned up. I wrote the new file to explain things that have happened since I came to Rothborne.

  I watched my screen bring up the last thing I saved, which I called Creedmore.doc:

  I didn't get out of mental health until Christmas, and had decided at that point not to go back to school. My parents, diplomatic sports that they are, let me finish on a homestudy program and signed me up at Rothborne for my senior year. I spent most of my spring writing Creed.doc, but I tagged along with Bo and Ali sometimes when they were going to the mall or to the Wawa. It was hard being around anyone, but especially them in certain ways. People whispered a lot when I was with them but didn't recognize me quite as much when I was alone. I loved Bo and Ali but hated the idea that people could accept a lie without question—and being with them seemed to heap that situation on my ears like an air raid: "...killed that kid in the woods ... just never found the body ... his mom's a lawyer, so..."

  Not everyone believed it. Alex actually came over a few times, like he wasn't sure he should have ever believed Renee, and he even apologized once. But that wasn't good enough. He seemed like a little kid all of a sudden, all immature, talking about how he hasn't gotten laid since Renee. Big deal, like he had to let me know that he wasn't a virgin anymore. He broke up with her the day after I got injured, and he couldn't get over
the fact that she henceforth called him a socially inept retard. She continued to call Ali a slut, despite the fact that Renee sleeps with all her boyfriends and has a new one every three weeks.

  Ali and Bo broke up at the end of the year, but only because Ali wanted to graduate early and go to college. She wanted to go far away, and settled on Boston U. Bo quit school when she did, figuring he had no reason to go anymore; he was almost eighteen, anyway. He took a job at a gas station. But he's still the only person I feel like seeing when I have to go home for a holiday, and I always stop at the station. He wants to go into the army, and I'm trying to talk him into it.

  Renee Bowen stuck to her story—Bo and I had played slice-and-dice with Creed—long after it got out that the body found belonged to Bob Haines. She gathered a great following at first, and I decided people love to believe evil shit about other people. The new police chief, Chief Rye, addressed the student body, along with Mr. Ames, and they tried to counter Renee's story with their feeling that Chris had run away, because a body would have shown up, especially if two novice-killer teenagers had been the culprits. A lot of people dropped it at that point, at least dropped me from their suspect list, though it was harder to drop Bo.

  He reveled in it, but not me. I stayed home, stayed out of harm's way until it was time to leave for Rothborne. I suppose I looked guiltier by having left. But screw 'em all, I figured. All I had wanted to do was help a few hurting people—Bo, Ali, and Creed himself. I didn't figure for my next trick that I'd lay myself wide open for the grand trophy of small-town scrutiny and humiliation, compliments of Renee Bowen.

  She added to the mess by saying that her dad split from her mom because too many people were lying about him and he couldn't take the strain. Jesus and Mary.

  I've stayed awake wondering what people think when they spit out some enormous lie, like, do they even stop to think, Why am I saying this? or do they just grab on to it like one of those folding deck chairs that floated off the Titanic? Is it a choice or a panic reaction to deep-brain freeze? Those types of questions have probably kept me awake at night—probably more often than questions about ghosts and psychics.

  Which isn't to say I haven't done my pondering about all of that—ghosts, psychics, whatever is out there. Some people like to state their opinions as fact. I'm sort of the opposite. I'm afraid of believing some lie for the sake of convenience.

  It would be very convenient for me to say that after what happened, I absolutely do believe in ghosts. On the one hand it makes sense that I saw one. There actually was a body in the Indian tomb that didn't belong there, and I had no way of knowing that. I was on my way home to spill my guts to my mom and would probably never have gone in there had I not seen what I saw. Or what I thought I saw.

  There are a couple things that make me feel otherwise. A lot of mystery always surrounded the burial ground where the pine trees never grew. That fact was written off to the legend that Indian ghosts killed off the trees as a statement about the place being sacred. After I unearthed the grave and the Stockton professors came running, they discovered the cavity was in an enormous limestone slab that lies only about five feet under the earth there. Stockton proclaimed that no pine tree could take root there because when the roots got deep enough to hit the slab, they would die from self-strangulation.

  Limestone. Not ghosts.

  With that part of it solved, I had to take another look at what happened to me. Mysterious as it seemed, a possible ghost gets some of the life sucked out of it when its brother mystery proves to be nothing more than five feet of legend covering science. And this is the tough part. Believing I saw a ghost would be a lot more convenient than believing I might have the type of mind that could hallucinate under extreme provocation. I think that's where most people would fall off. I haven't yet. It's tough, but I'm generally not swearing to any ghosts—not unless I'm in an emotional mood.

  Then, there's the psychic who told me I would find the body, and what do I believe about psychics? The fact that the psychic nailed certain things but screwed up whose body it was seems to work more against her than for her. That's a pretty major part to screw up.

  However, Dr. Fahdi pointed out, for the sake of diplomacy, that the psychic never actually said she saw Creed.

  One thing I remember about her speech was an implication that the dead want to be seen now, and that seems like another miss. There is no possible reason why Bob Haines would want to be seen. The fact that he crawled into a grave to kill himself indicates that that's where he wanted to stay. After the discovery my mom tried to contact Digger Haines to tell him. His former law office told my mother he had died in Detroit, a victim of a drive-by shooting—one of his former clients who had gotten a bad verdict. It was something else I didn't need to hear, another gory death, and it meant that finding Bob Haines wouldn't even mean anything to Digger. Maybe it did something good for the Lenapes, who some ghost-lovers might say did not share Bob's feelings about additions to their graves being welcome. But that gets back into whether I believe in ghosts killing off pine trees and all that stuff. I don't take truth from circular arguments, and I have no opinion about psychics.

  I have wished I could have talked to Digger Haines, at least once. I would have liked to ask him what he had hoped to find when he left Steepleton. I'm sure it was some sort of search for truth, based on my mother's comments about him. I wondered if he found it stifling to live in a place where people didn't really care what a truth was.

  Here's the mother of all lies.

  After the autopsy, Mrs. Creed got back on her soapbox about Chris being dead in the woods somewhere. A few days later, Justin Creed paid a visit to the principal of his middle school. The principal picked up the phone and dialed the new chief of police before Justin even had a chance to spew the whole thing. Justin told them that the night before Chris disappeared, Chris and his mom had had an argument. It was over his privileges, or the lack of any. Mrs. Creed was saying she would decide what privileges her children had, and that was the end of the story.

  Justin swore that he heard Chris threatening to send a derogatory e-mail about her to Mr. Ames the following day. Mrs. Creed solved that by removing all the cables to Chris's computer system. While she was disassembling, Chris read calmly over her shoulder the letter he planned to send. Justin said from what he heard, it sounded exactly like the e-mail that Mr. Ames had received from Chris, the one sent from the library.

  Mrs. Creed had blown a lot of shit around—that Chris could not have written that letter—and yet, there's the truth: Chris read the thing to her before he ever disappeared, and before the cops ever got it and showed it to her.

  The horror is that I was in mental health, and Mrs. Creed was still cooking dinners, chauffeuring kids to and from school, and making speeches in church. I've come to think that she wasn't going to any great effort to cover up the letter when she gave her little "Why Would My Son Run Away?" spiel that Sunday. Maybe as far as she was concerned, she had never heard the letter. It didn't exist.

  There is justice in an insanely cruel world. Despite the twos and threes I started getting after that night I discovered Bob Haines, I got one surefire ace. My fourth week in mental health, lyrics started passing through my head. First it happened in small breezes, then in waves, and tunes would roll right in underneath them. I'd spent years agonizing to make up even dumb songs, and all of a sudden, all I had to do was pick up a pen and kick back. Some were morbid:

  Two torn aces on a stone,

  Two torn aces burn to stone,

  Two young men at the mill wheel grinding,

  One left standing and the other went flying,

  Gone, gone, gone, in the morning.

  So I'm not Eric Clapton, but it's a step up from "A Song to the Blues."

  Some lyrics got insanely hopeful:

  On a mountain, somewhere over there,

  Broken bones grow straight like arrows.

  Broken hearts unfold to care.

  I am strong. I'm
an answer to a prayer.

  I am hope. I'm a fountain.

  I am someone. I am someone, over there.

  Considering I didn't drop any acid to get my lyrics, I'm okay with them. I'm very grateful, and I feel like I owe something to Creed. Yet I don't play my songs for anybody. They're private. And I can't find Creed to give him a tape. Nobody in Steepleton has ever found so much as a hair from his head.

  It gets me with almost a crushing sadness sometimes, because to me, he has become a hero and a legend. He was an innocent kid, a victim, and I still have the same feeling I had when I first saw my name in his note. Like I could have shared some part of myself with him—whatever part he was thinking of when he saw fit to put my name in his e-mail. So I feel like there's a part of me rotting on the vine sometimes, no matter how many songs I write and what other things I do.

  I did get obsessed for a while with finding things to do. I was watching TV one night when I was still in the psychiatric hospital. I saw a documentary on these guys in Belfast who refused to cut their hair until some IRA guy got released from prison, and there were IRA sympathizers walking around all over Belfast with hair to their asses. I liked that story and decided I would not cut my hair until someone turned up information on Creed. By the start of senior year, I had a ponytail about six inches long, and fortunately they don't care much about hair length at Rothborne. I never told anyone in Steepleton why I was doing it, except Ali, because I was afraid some Renee Bowen sympathizer would accuse me of trying to prove my innocence.

  My dad promised me a Dodge Durango for graduation if I did cut it. I refused on that count, too, but eventually decided that hair was a nonfunctional protest and I could probably find other ways to help my own cause.