37
His name was Paul. They took him to the Cale Community Park, which had been his destination anyway. He said that some friends were meeting there. School, to him, was just a waste of his time. None of it mattered. The teachers sucked, and he got picked on all the time by the jocks. He was a frail kid, tiny in that big jacket, and Mary could see how he would be a favorite of the bullies at Cale Central. She had gone to Holy Cross in Louisville, and even at that Catholic school there were kids like Paul, kids who were the brunt of jokes, too scrawny to take up for themselves. Kids who had become bitter toward the system, and toward any adult. Paul’s clothes, his look, his face, even, asked the question: Why don’t you help me? Why didn’t you help me?
“My grandparents live in the house where that girl lived,” Paul told them. “Deanna. The one who went missing from Cale. Two or three years ago my friend Tony and me heard about this other girl, the one who looked like Deanna. My friends at school are dogging me all the time, you know, trying to have me get my grandparents to let them come over and have a séance. Sometimes we go over there in the field beside their house and smoke cigarettes. Drink wine coolers and stuff. My girlfriend, Therese, is big on that spiritual stuff. We took a Ouija board out there once and the thing started going crazy. It freaked us all out.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Mary said.
“Oh, Papa wouldn’t shoot anybody,” the boy said. “His shotgun isn’t even loaded. Anyway. Tony told me his older brother went to school out at Bell East with this girl who looked just like Deanna. It didn’t really mean anything to me until I started doing some research. In the computers at the library one day I looked her up on the computer. Saw a picture of her. They could have been the same girl. Polly and Deanna. Deanna and Polly. I started thinking about it, you know. Started wondering where it was leading.”
I know exactly how you feel, thought Mary.
“Well, one day me and Tony were bored and we decided to go out to Bell City to try to find out about this girl. This woman, I mean. We asked around, and someone said she was living down on Rattlesnake Ridge with some guy. Her family had left Bell City, but Polly hadn’t liked it so she came back. This was just down the road from that old bar, the Wobble Inn. Tony-he’s older than me, you know, out of school-we drove over there and talked to them. Acted like we were just interested in buying a car this guy had for sale, this red Honda. I kept looking at the woman, kept trying to place her, and man, was she weird. Kept hiding her face from me, turning it to one side so that I couldn’t, like, get a good look at her. It was almost like she was wearing a disguise.
“Of course I thought it was Deanna. Tony did, too. We got back to school and told a few people, and you know how that goes. Everybody wanted to see this woman. They’d all heard about her, back when it happened, back when their parents were in school. But it was like another chapter was opening now, and we had started it. We thought we were going to hit it big, solve this old crime and get famous, but it never turned out like that. Polly, or Deanna, or whoever the hell she was, left Bell City. It made the papers. Polly’s aunt and uncle even made a statement, said that it was ridiculous to suggest she and Deanna were the same person. They’d raised her from when she was a little girl. Her uncle even wrote a book about Deanna, I heard. Or at least that’s what Mrs. Sumner says at school. I never read it.”
“I don’t recommend it,” Brian said bitterly. “It’s boring.”
“So anyway, it blew over. We never did go back there to that house in Bell City. We were too scared to. My mom and dad got a letter from someone, a real heated thing, saying we had opened up old wounds that should have never been opened. It wasn’t too long after that that someone started that rumor about Deanna’s remains being found out in California, but I never believed it. I think she’s still out there somewhere, and I think if you can find Polly you’ll find Deanna.”
Mary looked at this scrawny boy, trying to register what he had said. Some girls played tennis up on the park courts, laughing at every missed hit. The playground was empty, the swings blowing back and forth, their rusted chains squeaking. She could not get her mind off something Paul had said, some bit of information that was almost buried in there.
The car. A red Honda.
Mary knew that they would have to return to Bell City to find the house Polly had stayed in when she returned to Bell City with her red car. The car would not be there, of course-not now. But this is where they needed to go, Mary knew that much. Once again, they were being led. The kid lit a wrinkled cigarette, and the smoke caught in the wind and trailed away across the field off to their right.
A car pulled up then, an old Bondo’d Mustang that was packed with kids who looked just like Paul except for the white hair. He said good-bye and piled in the car, and the kids disappeared down a little dirt road into the heart of the park.
“Where now?” asked Dennis. But of course he already knew.
38
The house on Rattlesnake Ridge was easy to see. It was just up the hill from the Wobble Inn on a little switchback-heavy road named St. Louis Street. Through the trees you could see the top of the inn where they had questioned the bartender just twelve hours ago.
The house was dilapidated and probably empty, but Dennis knocked on the door anyway. “Nobody’s home,” he said. They all stood around the car, waiting for some divine inspiration. It was after 11:00 a.m. They had missed all of their classes now, and still they hadn’t made any progress since last night.
“Let’s go down the hill to the bar,” Brian said. Mary shrugged. They didn’t have anything better to do.
There were no cars parked at the Wobble Inn today. The place had a desolate air, empty and ominous. Brian tried the front door, but it was locked. “Closed?” he asked. They looked in the streaky front windows, and saw that there were no tables inside as there had been last night. The booth where the men had played poker was gone. The bar itself had been torn out. Wires swung from the ceiling where the beer lights had hung.
“What the hell?” Dennis asked.
Mary felt that constriction in her heart again, just as she had at the Collinses’ yesterday. Things were beginning to move, the pattern was revealing itself. They had to figure out the pattern before this afternoon, before Williams’s deadline expired.
“Let’s go to the back,” Brian said. They went around the building. The back doors were locked, too. When they looked inside, it was the same thing. Emptiness. No tables, no bar stools. Nothing except the floorboards and the bare walls.
“What should we do?” Mary asked. She was feeling an anxiety like she had never felt. It poured down on her, opened her up from the inside out. She felt every notion of the world, every lick of the wind and every beam of heat from the sun. The spin of the planet, too, under her feet. She felt it, all of it, and in a strange way it was exhilarating.