Dead Man's Song

Page 53

“So, I just sat there and watched the sun go down, trying to understand the enormity of the fact that Billy was dead and was going to be dead forever, and that I would never, ever see him again. I kept wanting to, you understand. I think I even wished on the first star that came out just to be able to see him one more time. Maybe I was half asleep, or maybe I was so wrapped up in thinking about it that I had sort of hypnotized myself. Either way, just as the sun was dipping down over the treeline I heard something crunch down on a branch behind me. I actually believed it was Billy. Boppin’ Billy come back to be with me, smiling that cocky smile of his. I remember that I was actually smiling when I turned my swing around to face him, grinning the way I always did when Billy came home from school. I swung myself around and I think I even said his name.
“But…it wasn’t Billy, of course. That was stupid. It was—someone else. He grabs me by the front of my shirt and throws me—actually throws me—across the yard. I go flying, screaming, terrified, and crash right into a big azalea bush, land upside down, still screaming, hurt, confused…nothing making sense. I can hear whomever it is running at me, grunting and wheezing with effort. Sounds like a bear with all the noise he’s making. I get only one brief glance at the man’s face, and even then it isn’t a good clear look. I have leaves and stuff in my face and fireworks going off in my head. When he grabs me again I try to hold onto the branches, try to keep from being picked up again. I never made the connection that this might be the same guy who killed Billy, dumb as that sounds. For a minute there I actually thought it was…my father.”
“Your father?”
“Sure. He was always kicking the shit out of me. Sometimes it was as bad as what was happening that night in the yard. Sometimes he’d beat me so bad I’d be out of school for a week, two weeks.”
“Jesus…”
“And you can leave that part out of the article, too.”
“Uh, sure, man. Don’t worry. “
“Good,” Crow said firmly. “Anyway…the guy starts grabbing at me and I’m thrashing around, trying to hold onto the bush, trying to kick him, and this time I get a real good look at his face, which is when I really start screaming my head off. He suddenly lets go, and I fall and whack my head against the trunk of a pine tree. I’m lying there, stars in my eyes, and I hear the sounds of a scuffle and some screams and even something that sounds like a roar. The next thing I know, someone is grabbing at me again, but this time it’s different, gentler. I stop fighting back and let myself be picked up. Once the fireworks in my head settle down I can see that the man holding me is Oren Morse, and the other guy—the real attacker—is running away down the alley.”
“Damn,” Newton said, scribbling furiously in his notebook.
“Then there were lights on in all the houses around, people are coming from everywhere. My father comes hustling out of the house carrying a big son of a bitch of a shotgun. Everyone swarms around me and Morse, and my father literally tears me out of the Bone Man’s hands.”
“Is that when they got the idea he did it?”
“No, not then. Too many people had looked out of their windows and backdoors and saw him fighting with some other guy—something they all conveniently forgot later when the Bone Man got blamed for everything. Right then they saw some other guy hotfoot it out of there and Morse helping me up.”
“Morse chased him off, then?”
“Well, if no one else had showed up, I think both Morse and I would have been killed, but the Bone Man slowed the killer down long enough for the commotion to get the neighborhood up in arms. With all that had been going on in town, everyone was trigger-happy and came running with plenty of artillery. Typical of these things, nobody got a good look at the attacker. At least none of the neighbors, but Morse must have, though, ’cause later he knew where to go looking for the guy. But, I’m getting ahead of the story. I don’t want to tell it out of sequence. Morse was kind of out of it right then. The other guy had smacked him around pretty badly, his nose was bleeding and all.”
“The attacker got away clean?”
With a sigh, Crow sipped his Yoo-Hoo and then said, “The guy ran, all right, but he didn’t give up. He went all the way over to the far side of town, the upscale part of Pine Deep. Mind you, at the time, the town was not as rich as it is now. Back then only Corn Hill was ritzy. Well, this sonovabitch went over to Corn Hill and found another yard with another kid. Actually, two kids. He scaled this big wooden security fence and there was a little girl playing in the yard, right in sight of the kitchen window, and her older brother in his tree house reading Fantastic Four comics by the light of a Coleman lantern. He didn’t waste any time throwing her around—he just pounced on her, tore her throat out, and hacked her body up pretty bad. They said it looked like a bear had mauled her.”
“Good God. What happened to the boy?”
“No one has ever been able to put that together clearly. The popular version of the story has it that the boy jumped out of the tree to try and save his sister, and the killer gave him a couple of pretty bad slashes across the chest and left him dazed and bleeding. By that time their mother was running out of the house with a .22 caliber rifle. She found the boy sitting on the ground holding his sister’s body. He was in a kind of coma, but he was alive. The little girl, of course, was dead.”
“Jesus…that’s horrible. It’s so…sad!”
“Yeah.” Crow wiped his mouth. “The boy was in the hospital for over a month, and when he snapped out of the coma, he couldn’t remember a single thing.”
“Maybe it’s better for him that way,” suggested Newton.
“Maybe. Who’s to say?”
“Did you know those kids? I mean, did you go to school with them or anything?”
Crow looked at him, eyes steady and glittering. He said, “The little girl’s name was Amanda. The boy is Terrance.”
Newton made a note in his notebook. “Last name.”
“Wolfe,” Crow said simply.
Newton’s pen froze halfway through writing the W. He looked up. “Wolfe? Terrance…Terry Wolfe?”
“Yeah.”
“Then the little girl was—”
“Amanda Wolfe,” Crow said. “Mandy, to us.”
“Good God!” Newton chewed his lip for a long minute, then he gave a flustered series of blinks and looked at his notes. “Okay, now, from what I’ve read about the Massacre there were sixteen murders. Mandy Wolfe was number five.”
“Right, but after that the killings stopped. Not completely, mind—just for a while. For twenty-eight days, actually. During that time whole town went absolutely crazy. There were carloads of guys with guns riding around, shooting at anything that moved. I think they managed to bag one mangy German shepherd that had escaped the original dog slaughter, three cows, and a guy getting a blow job from his neighbor’s wife in the hedges behind his house.”
“They kill him?”
“No, but she got so scared she nearly bit his pecker off.”
“Resulting in nineteen stitches,” Val said, “and two divorces. But they never bagged the killer, and by the end of those twenty-eight days, everyone had figured that the killer had skipped out and was terrorizing the citizenry of some other town. He’d had a couple of near misses that last night. Seems reasonable that he’d take off before his luck completely ran out, but on the twenty-eighth day the killings began again. Just like the first ones. People were attacked and savagely murdered. One of them was a cop.”
Crow nodded. “The bastard hit him so fast that he never had the chance to draw his gun. Maybe he knew him, let him get close. Hard to say. Next victim was the cousin of a local farmer. His name was Roger Guthrie.”
“Guthrie!” Newton looked sharply at Val, who nodded.
“He was my second cousin. Staying with us while on leave from the Air Force. Rog was strolling through the cornfields out behind the house, smoking a cigar and just relaxing. We all heard him scream and when Dad and his brother, Uncle George, came running up with rifles, Roger was dead.”
“That’s incredible! Two murders in the same family, thirty years apart.”
“In the same field, too,” observed Crow hoarsely, “almost the same spot where Henry was gunned down.”
That fact seemed nailed to the air in front of Newton and he sat there, staring for a while. Then he shook his head and his eyes refocused, and he rifled through his notebook. “How many deaths is that?”
“Actually Rog was the sixteenth. I skipped some of the others. You can look up the names, but we didn’t know any of them. Just names and pictures in the newspapers. Roger, though, he was the last one killed during the massacre.”
“But,” Val said significantly, “there were two more killings.”
Crow nodded. “Oren Morse…and Ubel Griswold. And”—he held up a finger—“this is where I go into the area of conjecture. What I think happened was this—Oren Morse tracked Griswold down, chased him into the woods, and murdered him somewhere out beyond the Guthrie Farm, somewhere in or around Dark Hollow.”
“So…what? He thought Griswold was the killer because he’d seen him when he attacked you in your yard?”
“Sure,” Crow said, setting his bottle down. “That has to be it. I mean, I saw Griswold’s face, too, but since I’d only seen him once before in town I didn’t recognize him at first. It wasn’t until things had settled down that night and I was about to go to bed that I realized that I had seen my attacker’s face before. Morse had worked for him, of course, and he knew him very well.”
“Didn’t he make a police report?”
Val said, “My dad told me some years later that Morse had told him that he’d tried to make a police report and the officer at the desk had laughed him out of the office. Nobody believed him.”