For more than an hour, she sat perfectly still, counting the passing minutes on the clock over the refrigerator and silently praying her mother would walk through the door, released early from her shift.
Eventually, her butt became so numb she could no longer feel it. Ashley scooted away from the door, staying low out of fear the monster would be watching through the open blinds.
She crawled on her hands and knees into the living room and then stood and ran to her bedroom, slamming and locking the door behind her.
She grabbed her aluminum baseball bat and crawled beneath her comforter, wishing her mother hadn’t picked up the second shift.
7
Armed with a gardening fork and a can of bee repellent, Ashley headed into the woods behind her house. Her weapons were meager, but she didn’t actually want to encounter the monster, just find evidence that he’d been there. And she needed to check on the raccoons.
After walking for five minutes, she spotted a person through the trees.
Ashley ducked behind the fat beech tree she and Sid called The Walrus.
Shane Savage was sitting on Carl Lee’s rock, his legs dangling over the side, his eyes gazing into a space of trampled grass. For several minutes he didn’t move, barely blinked, and Ashley grew antsy behind the tree.
Finally, she stepped out and planted her hands on her hips. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“This your rock?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.
A sheaf of blond hair fell over one half of his forehead. If it got much longer, it would obscure his left eye.
“No, it’s Carl Lee’s rock. So why are you sitting on it?”
Shane laughed. “Carl Lee’s dead.”
The blunt way he said the words knocked Ashley off kilter. She searched for a witty comeback. “Exactly,” she said at last. “You don’t live over here.”
“So?”
“So, maybe you should go back to your own woods.”
Shane lived several miles away in a stretch of barren fields called Sycamore Mobile Home Park. Warren lived there too.
“My cousin lives over here. I was looking for her.”
Ashley frowned. “Who?” she demanded.
“Ask me nice and I’ll tell ya.”
Ashley huffed and started to turn away. “Why don’t you like me?” he retorted. “I’ve never done anything to you.”
“Your friends have done plenty,” she barked, turning back around to face him. She would not run away from her own woods. If anyone should leave, it was Shane Savage.
“The Thrashers aren’t my friends,” he told her. “I skate with them sometimes. That’s it. They’re a bunch of shit eaters.”
Ashley spurted laughter, and Shane’s own face broke into a smile.
“Total shit eaters,” she agreed.
Shane stood on the rock, stretching his arms overhead with a loud yawn. He hopped down and turned back to gaze at it.
“Weird isn’t it? Someone died right there on that rock.”
Ashley nodded.
It was weird. Sometimes she sat on the rock and had those exact thoughts. She wondered if animals crept up to Carl Lee’s body and sniffed it, and if police found the tracks of birds in the blood that coated the surface of the rock.
“My dad knew him,” Shane continued. “Carl Lee. He was a Vietnam Vet. On Independence Day every year, he flew a black flag from his porch.”
“My mom knew him too,” Ashley admitted. She’d bugged her mom into telling her details about Carl Lee on more than one occasion, but Rebecca Shepherd rarely complied. “They went to high school together. I think she might have dated him when they were kids.”
Shane whistled. “That’s far out. He wasn’t like your dad or anything?”
Ashley glared at him, and his eyes shot wide.
“Shit, what? Not cool? I just know you don’t have a dad, so…”
Ashley stuffed her hands in her pockets.
“I do have a dad, dickweed,” she spat. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m not exactly white. My dad lives in Mexico.”
Shane nodded as if that were cool, though she wasn’t sure what part he found cool, her absentee dad or her non-whiteness.
“My dad’s a dick,” Shane admitted. “My mom’s cool, though. Why’s your dad in Mexico?”
Ashley shrugged.
“My mom met him there on vacation and got pregnant when she was nineteen. The rest is history.”
“So, he’s never been around?”
Ashley sighed, kicking at a clump of leaves.
“Why do you care?”
“Why not?” he asked. “Have somewhere better to be?”
Ashley considered the possibilities. She could go home, eat a bowl of cocoa puffs and flip through the channels. Or she could continue down her original path, searching the woods for clues of the boy or the monster or whatever he was.
“No, he’s never been around. I’ve never met him. I talked to him on the phone a few times when I was little. He and my mom talked about making a go of things, but…” she trailed off. There wasn’t much more to tell.
“That must suck for your mom. I mean doing it all on her own.”
Ashley nodded.
“Yeah, probably. I had my Grandma Patty until a year and a half ago. She lived with us.”
“Your mom’s mom.”
“Yeah.”
Grandma Patty’s small bedroom remained in the back of the house. Ashley’s mom had tucked her coral print comforter into the creases of the bed and stacked her pile of pillows, crocheted with little sayings like ‘This house is a home,’ near the headboard. Ashley went in sometimes and curled up on the bed.
The room no longer smelled like her grandmother. The residual odors of the medicine and the lotion that had consumed her final days remained. It stank of the disinfectant cleaner her mother used to wipe down the rocking chair and the dresser after Grandma Patty went into the ground.
“No grandpa?” Shane asked.
Ashley shook her head. “He died when I was like five. I have a few memories with him. He drove a big truck for a living. Had a massive heart attack on the road one day, and his truck just drifted into a guardrail.”
Shane grimaced. “Damn, at least he didn’t take out like a school bus of little kids or anything.”
“Yeah.”
Grandma Patty said Grandpa died doing what he loved, chugging down the road, watching the trees whip by as the sun rose over a new horizon.
“So, why do you come out here?” Shane asked, leaning back against the rock. He wore a black t-shirt displaying the band AC/DC over jean shorts. A chain ran from his wallet to one of his belt loops.
Despite going to the same school, Ashley had rarely spoken to Shane Savage. They’d shared only a few classes, and he tended toward the punk-rock cool kids while Ashley’s group included Sid and a handful of other kids from her neighborhood who liked to watch horror movies and build forts in the woods.
“I like the woods,” she said. “And…” The story of the boy in the forest pushed to the tip of her tongue and there she stopped it, clamping her teeth together.
Shane hung out with the Thrashers. Maybe he didn’t call them friends, but how much would he love to take Ashley’s crazy tale of a boy in the woods back to those jerks. The Thrashers would have new material to torture her and Sid with for the summer.
“And that’s it. I like the woods,” she finished.
Shane frowned, and Ashley wondered if he’d push for more. Instead, he shrugged.
“Me too. Though this spot gives me the creeps.” He leaned a hand on Carl Lee’s rock and then pulled it away as if burned. He barked an embarrassed laugh. “Do you think he haunts this place?”
Ashley glanced at the rock and then the dense forest beyond Shane.