The third body filled Timmy with a wave of grief he was afraid would never leave him. Every time he stared up at his bedroom ceiling; every time he glanced at a comic book or thought about the red clay in Patterson’s field, he saw Pete’s face.
Pete had never made it to summer camp. His body had shown signs of chronic physical abuse, culminating in a broken neck sustained—according to the evidence obtained from the Marshall house—from a fall against the edge of a marble fireplace. It was assumed Wayne Marshall had killed his son by accident, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage.
Panicked, Wayne decided to dump his son’s body in the pond (perhaps so he could claim later that the boy had run away) and was readying himself to do so when Timmy’s father arrived on the scene.
“I just stood looking at him,” Timmy’s father said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Wayne, with Pete in his arms…I didn’t want to believe he was dead, couldn’t believe Wayne would kill his own son. I watched him lay the boy down on the grass. That’s when he pulled the gun on me. That’s when I saw his eyes and knew he was lost. Jesus, I should have known, should have done something sooner.”
Timmy only smiled through the tears when he thought of what Darryl’s turtles might have done to Wayne Marshall.
Wayne Marshall, the faceless man Timmy had seen at the pond, murdering his nephew and leaving him beneath the water to feed the turtles.
The visitors came and went, attempted to soothe Timmy with words he couldn’t hear and through it all, through the mindless passage of feverish recollection and the debilitating agony of loss, The Turtle Boy’s words returned to him again and again, nagging at him and begging to be decoded: You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you.
Maybe he deserves to die.
Three weeks later, they filled in the pond. They’d been trying for years but somehow mechanical difficulties had always kept them away. Timmy thought he now knew what had caused those problems.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Summer ended, and as per the rules of the seasons in Ohio, there was no subtle ushering out of the warmth; the weather dropped in temperature and the earth darkened on the very day the calendar page turned.
Spurning all attempts his father made at trying to come up with something fun for them to do on what might be the last Saturday of good weather for quite some time, Timmy took a walk.
Fall was already setting up camp on the horizon, prospecting for leaves to burn and painting the sky with colors from a bruised pallet.
He wanted to forget, but knew that would never happen.
There were three reasons why the fear would always be with him, dogging his every step and making stalkers out of the slightest shadows.
First, the reporters. In the months since Pete’s and Mr. Marshall’s deaths, the newspapers had played up the ghost angle, delighting in the idea that an eleven-year-old boy had helped solve a murder through an alleged conference with the dead. There were phone calls, insistent and irritating, from jocular voices proclaiming their entitlement to Timmy’s story.
They were ignored.
But this only led to speculation, and Timmy’s face ended up in the local newspapers, topped with giant bold lettering that read:
Then the curiosity seekers started showing up, some of them from the media, most of them just regular folk. Their neediness frightened the boy. We just want to touch him, they said. Others wept and begged his mother to let the boy see if he can bring my little Davey/Suzy/Alex/Ricky/Sheri back. And they were still coming to the house, though not as much as they had in the beginning.
The second reason was that even if Timmy managed to dismiss the calls, the desperate pleas of strangers, the newspaper reports and the occasional mention of his name on the television, there were still the nightmares. Vivid, brutal and unflinching. In his dreams, he saw everything, all the things he had been able to look away from in real life. All the things he had been able to run from.
Every night, he drowned and ended up behind what Darryl had called ‘The Curtain.’ In the waking hours, the name stayed with him, conjuring images in Timmy’s mind of a tattered black veil drawn wide across a crumbling stage. He imagined a whole host of the dead crouching behind it, waiting for their chance to come back, to find their own killers. And perhaps they would. Perhaps also they would only be successful if they had someone to draw strength from, as Timmy was sure Darryl Gaines had drawn strength from him and Pete.
Or perhaps it was over.
Believing that required the most effort.
Because the final reason, the last barrier stopping him from releasing the dread and shaking off the skeins of clambering horror was the recollection of something else The Turtle Boy had said: You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you. He had mulled over this every day and every night since the discovery of the bodies. It would have been simpler to forget had he not realized something about the murders, something that came back to him weeks later—Wayne Marshall was Darryl’s uncle. The story had it that Darryl had been visiting his uncle and that’s why he was there in the first place. But Timmy had been there, however it had happened, standing on the bank of the pond when the big man had come strolling over the rise. Among the things he’d said had been: I’m a friend of your uncle’s. We’re practically best friends! Which meant Darryl’s murderer had not been his uncle.
But every time it got this far in Timmy’s head, heavy black pain descended like a caul over him and he had to stop and think of nothing until it went away. It was too much. Maybe in the years to come it would make sense. For now, it would hang like an old coat in a closet, always there but seldom worn.
Maybe he deserves to die.
His walk took him back to the pond, to where bulldozers stood like slumbering monsters next to a smoothened oval of dirt. They’d drained the pond and ripped away the banks. The telltale signs of man were everywhere now, the animals quiet. Despite his relief at having the dark water gone, Timmy couldn’t help the twinge of sadness he felt at having the good memories buried beneath that hard-packed dirt, too. All around him the land was changing, becoming unfamiliar.
He sighed, dug his hands in his pockets and walked on, unsure where he was heading until he was standing staring down at the railroad tracks. A cold breeze ran invisible fingers across his skin and he shivered. A quick glance in both directions showed the tracks were deserted. No trains, no funny tireless cars with flashing yellow beacons.
School would begin soon, and he hoped it would be the distraction he needed from the crawling sensation he had been forced to live with, the sense of always being watched, of never being alone.
It’ll pass, son, his father had told him, I promise.
Timmy prayed that was true.
Because even now, with not a soul around, he could feel it: a slight thrumming, as of a train coming, the air growing colder still, the sky appearing to brood and twist, the hiss of the wind through the tall grass on either side of the rails.
And a droning, faint at first.
A droning. Growing.
Like a machine. Or an engine.
Pete’s voice then, disgruntled, whispering on the wind: They were stupid to ride that close to the train anyway.
Not an engine.
Muscles stiffening, Timmy drew his hands out of his pockets, held his hands by his sides. He felt his knees bend slightly and knew his body had decided to run, seemingly commanded by the small fraction of unpanicked mind that remained. He looked to the right. Nothing but empty track, winding off out of sight around a bramble-edged bend.