Blood Trail Read online

  “I can’t!”

  I sighed again, harder, heaved myself to my feet, walked out there, and opened the door. I wasn’t afraid, because I didn’t feel like anything was real anymore. It was like I was walking through cobwebs, like a bad dream. Come to think of it, most of my life had felt that way lately.

  Two cops stood on the doorstep, and I knew both of them. Their eyes widened when they saw me.

  “It’s just lipstick,” Jamy blurted.

  One of the officers asked, “What’s going on here?”

  I said, “I was stabbing a pumpkin.”

  They just stared at me. The other cop asked, “Were you screaming? One of the neighbors heard screaming.”

  I shook my head—not to say I wasn’t screaming, which would have been a lie, but because I didn’t like what I was thinking. I asked, “Why didn’t somebody call you guys when Aaron screamed? He must have screamed.” Even to me I sounded dumb as a plum, but at least I’d said it.

  “Been wondering about that myself, son.”

  Silence.

  “People don’t like to get involved,” the second cop said.

  “But he must have screamed more than I did.”

  The cops looked at each other. Then, “You were stabbing a pumpkin?” one cop prompted like he was coaxing a crazy person.

  I said, “I wanted to see how many times I could stab it before I pooped out.”

  “How many did you get to?” asked both cops at once.

  But I was looking at the red smears Jamy had put all over my arms and chest. “Sixteen, seventeen,” I said, counting the marks, but the cops took that as my answer.

  “I got mad at him,” Jamy explained, “and I put lipstick on a rubber knife—”

  Twenty, twenty-one. “She stabbed me twenty-one times,” I told the cops.

  They looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “Look,” one of them said, “next time you kids play murder, warn the neighbors first, okay?” They started to turn away.

  “Hey,” Jamy said, “you would know—is it true …”

  They stood there, polite, waiting to hear her question.

  “A girl in school, her uncle is the ambulance driver,” Jamy said, “and she says he said Aaron’s eyes were gouged out. Is that true?”

  I ran. If they answered, I never heard. I ran for the bathroom, and by the time I got there, I was crying so hard I couldn’t see.

  Half an hour later, I was in the shower when I heard Mom yelling, “Jeremy? Jeremy!” and knocking hard on the bathroom door.

  God damn, she was going to yell at me to stop wasting water, I’d been in the shower for twenty minutes. God, when was life going to give me a break? I hollered above the water noise, “What!”

  She yelled, “Are you okay?”

  “Huh?” Huh, hell, pay attention. I’d heard her, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you okay?”

  I sighed and turned the water off. By then I was mostly done bawling, and I hoped the shower noise had kept anybody from hearing. I had scrubbed the lipstick marks off my arms. At least the brat hadn’t gone for my neck or my face. Probably afraid she’d put a rubber bayonet in my eye. Aaron’s eyes gouged out… the thought still made me sick to my stomach. Was I okay? Compared to what? Compared to any day this past month, yeah, I was fine. I grumped, “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  “Jamy’s afraid she might have upset you.”

  “Tell Jamy to go milk herself!”

  “Jeremy,” Mom reproached me, “she’s crying. What in the world is going on? I can’t get any sense out of her.”

  I stood there listening to the water dripping off me like rain.

  “Jeremy?”

  “Just a minute. I’ll be out.”

  I took my time drying off and getting dressed. Needed time to calm down, think, figure things out. Finally I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and barefooted downstairs. My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, not crying anymore but not helping, either, while Mom stowed groceries in the cupboards.

  I walked up behind the brat, leaned over, and hugged her around the shoulders.

  It’s not like I do that all the time. Hardly ever, I guess. She stiffened at first like she was surprised, but then she turned in her chair and hugged back.

  I let go of her and mussed her hair. “So, you got a clue?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You got it through your head? I would never take a knife to you.”

  She kind of gulped, and I knew I’d guessed right. I sat down across from her.

  “You’ve been scared ever since Aaron got killed,” I said.

  She nodded, then whispered, “They… they sent Aardy away …” Damn, she was crying again. Tears on her face.

  “You think that’s why? Because big brothers kill their little sisters all the time?”

  “I don’t know. I—never got—to talk with her.…”

  All of a sudden I saw—jeez, I’d been so sorry for myself since Aaron died, I’d never thought.… I blurted, “You miss Aardy?”

  “Of course I miss her, bung brain! Duh!”

  I just sat there, feeling toad stupid.

  “And I feel bad for her.”

  I recognized the quiver in Jamy’s voice. But there was nothing I could say, because there wasn’t a thing she could do to help Aardy. Any more than I could help Aaron.

  Feeling like I had to do something, I looked for the pumpkin mess, but somebody had already cleaned it up. “Mom,” I called, “I’ll get Jamy another pumpkin.”

  Mom just nodded, staying out of it.

  “You better,” Jamy said, her voice stronger now. “So what about you? You got a clue now?”

  “Huh?”

  “You got it through your head?” She mimicked my voice. “Nathan killed Aaron.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just sat there, trying to visualize it like visualizing a football play beforehand, trying to—trying to understand, damn it. But I still couldn’t quite get a grip, trying to take in the idea of Aaron, stabbed seventy-three times, head almost severed, eyes gouged out—God. Thinking about it made my whole gut go sick and watery.

  My mind winced away one more time, telling me it couldn’t have been Nathan. Telling me that Nathan was a skinny debate club nerd and Aaron was bigger, stronger, so why hadn’t he defended himself?

  But it was no good. I knew the answer to that one now. Aaron hadn’t defended himself because he was attacked by somebody he just couldn’t hurt, that was why.

  And I knew too well who that had to be. Anybody else, and Aaron would have taken them apart—

  But it was up to the judge and the jury, not to me.

  Or like the minister had said at the funeral, up to a higher authority. And yeah, I did want justice.

  Finally I said, “If Nathan really did do it, I hope he fries in hell.”

  Mom closed a cupboard door with a slam and said, her voice as flat as plywood, “I imagine he’s already there.”

  chapter twelve

  With the springtime sun warm on my shoulders, I sat in the bleachers, Mom on one side of me and Jamy on the other, all of us dressed up like for another funeral. About ninety percent of Pinto River was there at the football stadium, and a swarm of newspeople, photographers, TV crews, CNN, the networks, the whole hairy enchilada. And cops—township police, state police, rent-a-cops, security out the wazoo. And just like at Aaron’s funeral, there were all these people and I never heard a crowd so quiet. You could hear the robins singing in the bushes beyond the stadium fence, it was so quiet.

  Morgan and her family filed in below us. I didn’t call to her, but I waved, and she saw me and waved back.

  My nosy sister asked, “Who you waving at?” and glanced up. “Oh,” she said, and she went back to looking at all the pictures of Aaron in the program booklet. Aaron as a football player, Aaron as a little kid, Aaron horsing around with Aardy. And Nathan. Lots of pictures of Aaron with Nathan. The Gingriches had probably made sure of that. They had hired
a platoon of lawyers—they were spending their life savings, Mrs. Ledbetter said. She’d heard they’d double-mortgaged the house. Anyway, the lawyers were doing all kinds of legal back flips to delay Nathan’s trial, and meanwhile the Gingriches were doing everything they could to make Nathan look like a loving brother. Including the new scoreboard, which Nathan was going to dedicate to Aaron’s memory, which was why we were all here today.

  I didn’t want to look at the pictures of Aaron right now. Later. I kind of hoped Morgan would come sit with me. She’d been my date for the prom, and we’d had a good time, and thank God, nobody had gotten killed in a car wreck, although one boy had rolled his girlfriend’s old pink Tracker and put himself and her in the hospital. They were supposed to be out for graduation in a few weeks.

  Dad was coming to graduation. He’d promised. And Mom had promised she would be polite to him. He could sit with her and Jamy.

  I looked for Morgan again and saw that she wasn’t going to sit with me today. She had turned away to sit with her family. Okay. In a weird way, today felt like baccalaureate or something. Mom must have been thinking about graduation too, because she said, “I’m glad I’m not on the school board.”

  “They decide yet?”

  “Not yet.” They had to rule whether Nathan was allowed to attend graduation. The criminal court judge had said yeah, okay, innocent until proved guilty and all that, Nathan could go anyplace in Pinto River as long as he wore his electronic ankle bracelets and had a parent supervising him at all times. The Gingriches wanted Nathan to graduate with his class. So now it was up to the school board. Nathan had been on home instruction all year, and he’d made passing grades. I wondered what it was like to be a teacher and go to Nathan’s house to see whether he did his calculus homework. I wondered whether he was applying to colleges. If he was, I wondered what he told them about himself.

  I still wondered whether it was possible that he hadn’t done it. Whether it was possible, as Mr. and Mrs. Gingrich kept insisting, that the real murderer was out there somewhere.

  “There they are,” Mom said as Mr. and Mrs. Gingrich and Nathan walked onto the football field with a dozen TV cameras swiveling to film them.

  From up in the bleachers, Nathan looked very small to me, like a plastic doll or something. Aaron had never looked so small on a football field. Aaron would have been laughing if he could have seen it, a draped platform perched on the fifty-yard line and all the VIPs sitting on it and a bazillion potted flowers all around. He would have wanted to run broken field patterns between all those flowerpots.

  Watching the Gingriches walk up the steps to the platform, Mom murmured, “I can’t imagine what they’re going through. How they go on. I just can’t.”

  We all watched them take their seats in front of the high school principal and the school board and the mayor and the minister. Mr. Gingrich, Mrs. Gingrich, Nathan in the middle, with the whole crowd as quiet as my breathing.

  Mom said, “I feel for them. I wonder what they really think, in their heart of hearts, about Nathan.”

  She had spoken softly, but an older man in front of us turned around and said, “They have to believe he’s innocent. They just have to. What else are they supposed to think?”

  “I know,” Mom said.

  “It’s bad enough they lost their one son the way they did. They can’t let themselves lose both of their boys.”

  Mom nodded. She hadn’t meant to get into a conversation with a stranger.

  “And that Nathan boy looks like a nice clean-cut kid,” said the man in a low voice. “Why would he have done such a thing? That’s what I can’t get past. Why?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But wouldn’t you think, if there was something really wrong with him, the parents would have noticed?”

  The woman who was sitting next to the man turned around, too. “You got to wonder what went on in that house,” she whispered. “I just don’t get it.”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Maybe it was one of those Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde things,” the man said. “Split personality.”

  Mom said again, “We don’t know.”

  I wouldn’t have thought the brat was even listening, but she looked up from her program book and said, “Maybe Aaron had something Nathan didn’t have.”

  “Such as?” I said just to argue with her.

  “Friends.” She lifted the program book and pointed at one of the pictures. “Jeremy, shouldn’t you be there?”

  I looked. It was a good picture of Aaron after a football game, in his dirty uniform, grinning, with his arm around another player’s shoulders. The other player was cut off, along with part of Aaron’s arm. Yeah, the cut-off player would have been me. I recognized the picture; the Gingriches had given me a copy at the time. Now they wanted me out of Aaron’s picture and out of their lives.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t that be you?” The brat was insisting on an answer.

  “Jamy, shush,” Mom said. “They’re about to start.”

  All of a sudden I couldn’t stand it. I stood up. “Mom, I’ve gotta get out of here. I’ll walk home.”

  She gawked up at me. “Jeremy, what—”

  The old guy in front of us exclaimed, “Aren’t you the boy who ratted on him?”

  He said it like I was a celebrity or something, but I felt like he’d stabbed me in the gut. There it was again, the blood trail, all over me, all over the whole damn town, and it would never totally go away, and I … my fists clenched, but there was not a freaking thing I could do about it. I turned away and blundered out of the bleachers, pushing past people’s knees and stepping on their feet. I loped down the stadium steps two at a time. Some reporter spotted me and called, “Jeremy! Jeremy Davis!” but I kept going. When I got out of the stadium gates, I ran.

  I ran like my life depended on it. Some news van chased me for a while, but I cut through somebody’s woods to the river road and lost them. Kept running, but not running home. Didn’t know where I was going. Not to Aaron’s grave; I’d been there, and it didn’t help. No, I just wanted to run, run, out of Pinto River and out of the dark shaggy scowling mountains and off the edge of the universe if possible. I felt like I could have run that far and I wanted to, even with my suit flapping and my dress-up shoes blistering my heels. Run, run, fists pumping, heart drumming, I must have run five miles along the river road. Coach would have been proud of me. Run, run, pulse thumping in my head, river air rushing in my lungs felt mint crisp. I wasn’t thinking of Nathan or Aaron, wasn’t thinking of anything. But something made me swerve off the road, slow down, walk down the rocky trail, and there I was at the swimming hole.

  He had smiled. Never mind, I’m being stupid, he had said, imagining things. Time to get home.

  I would never understand what had happened.

  In my sweated-up suit I sat on the same boulder where I’d sat that day. Sun warm on my shoulders. My breathing quieted. Sunbeams made the shallow water golden. I stared. I didn’t see any crayfish, but I saw tadpoles swarming like starlings, and off to one side, some minnows flashing.

  I ought to go fishing this summer. Hadn’t been for years. Aaron and Nathan and I used to go fishing for sunnies when we were kids—

  God, I hurt.

  I must have sat there a long time. After a while I realized I was still carrying the program book in my clenched hand. I opened it and looked at the crumpled pictures of Aaron and Nathan. How could Nathan have done that to Aaron? To me? To all of us?

  Hindsight might be a liar, like the detective said, but still.… There should have been something I could have done or said, something somebody could have done to make things … different.

  I looked into the river some more. In my nightmare it had turned to blood, but it would never really do that. It just kept on flowing. A kingfisher flew upriver in a blur of neon blue, made a noise like a ratchet, and snagged a minnow out of the shallows with its bayonet beak. It all happened so fast that if
I’d blinked, I would have missed it.

  The angle of the sun had changed, and in my sweaty clothes I was starting to get cold.

  I still sat there. Didn’t want to go home.

  I’m afraid to go home, he had said.

  Footsteps scrunched on the shale and gravel of the trail.

  I looked up, and for a freaky second I expected it to be Aaron, his hair shining reddish in the sun, like maybe he’d been out on his bike or out running and I was in my blue jeans instead of in my good suit with sweat and dirt all over it, and Aaron was meeting me at the swimming hole, saying “Hey, Booger, what’s up, man?”

  Actually, it was my mom and my sister. Jamy yelled, “Booger! See, Mom, I told you!”

  “May we join you?” Still in her heels and dress, Mom perched on the other boulder.

  “You’re going to get your skirt dirty,” I told her.

  “So what is this, role reversal?”

  Damn, she made me smile. “How was it?” I asked.

  “Lots of speeches that didn’t say anything.”

  “Awful,” Jamy summarized, sitting on my rock beside me. “Hey, tadpoles!”

  We all looked at the tadpoles like we’d never seen any before.

  I said to the river, “I’m never going to understand.”

  Jamy said, “I wish he’d just confess and go to jail. Then maybe Aardy could come home.”

  Mom shook her head like it would never happen. “That poor girl—if she saw him with blood on his clothes, on his hands.…”

  Aardy was never going to be the same.

  Neither was I.

  “Even if he did confess, I still wouldn’t get it,” I said. “Or even if they find him guilty … I just don’t damn understand. How. Why. I mean, I knew him and Aaron practically my whole life.”

  “That’s what I keep thinking,” Mom said quietly. “How you can know somebody for years, and just not know them at all.” The way her eyes darkened, I knew she was thinking about Dad. She had thought she knew him, and he had turned out to be a different person.

  “I don’t have any answer for you, honey,” Mom said. “I’m sorry.”

  “But that’s kind of an answer,” I said. I mean, she was there. My brat sister was there. Two out of three ain’t bad. And the blood trail … the blood trail ended at Pinto River.