Drowning of Stephan Jones (18 page)

To the lawman’s surprise, he saw Frank Montgomery turn his pain-wracked body around in the water and stop. No more dunking under, coming up, and dunking under again. He stopped, and finally, with dead-dog weariness, began his labored swim back toward the riverbank.

Chapter 19

B
Y THE TIME
the cool, coral dawn burst brilliantly over Crowley’s Ridge, Frank Montgomery, with a Red Cross blanket draped haphazardly across his shoulders, was sitting alone on the dried-mud bank of the Pascaloosa. With unblinking eyes, he stared transfixed at the river. But however hard he stared, it was uncertain if he was actually seeing or merely seeing through what was happening: the team of divers in wet suits going in and out of the water; the Parson Springs police chief mapping out likely places in the river to continue the search. The Red Cross volunteers were handing out hot coffee and warm blankets to all of the emergency personnel. It was amid this nuts-and-bolts rescue mission that Frank’s anguish stood out in startlingly high relief.

The continuous picture show of his mind was playing and replaying, not what was happening around him, but what had happened at the precise moment, at that never-to-be-forgotten or forgiven moment, five hours before. If only he could, he would have happily given everything he was, everything he would be, everything he owned or would ever have—if only he could change, change what he did for what he should have done. Sick with grief as well as thick with shame, he couldn’t help wondering why he’d split and gone racing off in the opposite direction from Stevie.

Why did he have to recall his ROTC training commands for defense? If only ... if only they had stayed together, standing together and fighting together, fighting like hell!

By seven A.M. there was no need to question the power of the electronic media, for the bridge had taken on a Sunday parade atmosphere. Lines of honking cars and mud-splashed pickup trucks clogged the lanes and within each vehicle were stretched-neck curiosity seekers who’d heard the news.

As the angry chief observed the spectacle on the bridge, he despaired that his deputies could never keep the home traffic flowing freely. Stalking up the embankment, he positioned the electric bullhorn in front of his lips: “This is Chief Marino warning you all! It is necessary that we keep this traffic moving. This bridge must be kept open for emergency vehicles! This is a warning! All traffic
must
be kept moving!”

Len Bassett adjusted his red GMC baseball-style cap before shouting out, “Chet—hey! Did you all find that queer’s body yet?”

Chet Marino placed a hand on his hip as he brought the bullhorn back to his lips so that not just Len, but everybody on the bridge could hear. “This is not a sideshow, Bassett! A man is missing and feared drowned. If you can’t show a little respect then I pity you. Get the hell out of here, all of you!”

Up and down the elevated roadway, people returned to their cars like scared turtles retreating to the safety of their shells. The chief’s brass buttons glinted in the midmorning sun as he threw brisk and authoritative hand signals to move on.

From his vantage point on the river’s bank, Frank Montgomery observed another pair of obviously disappointed divers being pulled back onto a flat-bottom boat. And as he watched still more divers come up without having found Stephan’s body, an idea began nipping at him. At first, it was merely that, a small nibble, but gradually it began taking larger and larger bites of his thoughts: the idea that maybe, just maybe, Stephan hadn’t drowned at all.

The water was only six or seven feet, and that was at its deepest. If Stephan had actually drowned, wouldn’t they have located his body by now?

Frank began to speculate with gathering conviction that a totally traumatized Stephan was still out there hiding in the woods. Stevie was only waiting until the morning, until the
full light of morning seeped through the leafy forest ceiling and then, only then, he’d feel safe enough to find his way home.

A middle-aged woman wearing the familiar and reassuring shoulder patch of the American Red Cross brought Frank a Styrofoam cup filled with steaming black coffee. As he accepted the cup, she dropped an arm around his shoulder. “Up near our van, we’ve set up some cots, Frank. Why don’t you lie down, rest for a while?”

“Rest?” repeated Frank while looking up at her with eyes that were rimmed with red. “No thank you ... not now,” he exclaimed while suddenly throwing off his blanket and rising quickly to his feet. With long strides, he headed for the line of trees, broke into a jog, and finally began to sprint.

Once inside the shadowy domain of trees and underbrush, Frank cupped his hands around his mouth. “Stevie! Stevie! Hey, Stevie, where are you?” Training his ears to hear more keenly than they had ever been asked to hear before, he listened intently for sounds. For his effort he could only catch the squawking of a couple of discontented crows.

Making his way deeper and deeper into the forest’s interior, he listened for sounds that were altogether familiar and altogether human. “Ste-vie! Ste-vie! Stevie, you don’t have to be afraid anymore,” he called encouragingly. “Come on! Out of your hiding, Stevie! It’s only me! Only Frank. All your enemies have been taken away. You’re safe, Stevie! Nobody will ever hurt you again. I promise I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”

He came upon a spot where a Plymouth Rock-sized stone protruded from the earth. A person could wedge himself up under that slightly uplifted boulder and beneath that impenetrable rock and feel hidden, secure, and safe from all danger.

As his eyes searched the damp, smoke-colored interior for signs of life, Frank could see little—but his heart beat faster
as he heard breathing. The steady inhaling ... exhaling ... inhaling ... exhaling coming from the hiding place. Sticking his head still deeper into the shadowy interior, he softly called. “Stevie? Hey, Stevie, it’s me—it’s Frankie!”

“
Ook-suwee-ook-saey-suey!”
It sounded like someone in the middle of an asthma attack. There was a rush and a blur of pink and gray, and a wild pig—a mad-as-hell razorback—was flushed from his home! Watching the critter race off into the woods filled Frank with despair. So much despair that it took all of his persuasive powers to keep from sliding into his pit of irreversible grief. He tried to encourage himself by thinking that because that particular breathing didn’t turn out to be Stephan’s, it didn’t prove a thing!

Frank walked on spongy bog grasses past clinging vines of honeysuckle that filled the morning air with a pungent sweetness impossibly at odds with his own sadness and racking fears. Thinking negatively meant giving in to grief, to believing that Stephan had drowned. Frank knew—he just knew that he hadn’t, because any fool could tell that Stephan was only ... only hiding.

Frank followed a path dictated by his will-o’-the-wisp intuition. Tramping past pine, elm, and birches, he followed the river on his hard-to-figure, helter-skelter route. From time to time, he’d come to a dead stop to halt the noisy snapping of dried branches and the rustling of dried leaves underfoot. Then he’d just stand quiet to listen for any sounds that might turn out to be human sounds. Stevie’s sound!

When Frank was satisfied that there were no noises worth investigating, he’d call out so Stephan would know that there was nobody there but him. “Hey, fella, it’s just me. Everything’s okay now. You don’t have to be afraid—I won’t let anybody hurt you, not ever again! If you’re afraid, you don’t have to come out of hiding, Stevie. Just call my name—call out my name and I’ll come to you. I promise I’ll come to you!”

Every time Frank called out to Stephan and waited for an answer—for an answer that never came—he felt as though that spiteful silence had plunged a spike directly through his aorta. Frank began to talk to himself. “Hey, just because Stevie hasn’t heard me up to now doesn’t mean he won’t hear. No answer doesn’t mean that at the next bend of the river, or maybe the next bend after that, I won’t get my answer.

“Sometimes, and I know this to be true, things turn out better than anyone would have believed. What about that time I had forgotten my cherished outfielder’s mitt—the one autographed by the great Yastrzemski himself—on the park bench at Dean Park. I begged Dad to drive me back to the park and he said he would, but he made me promise not to get my hopes up because that mitt had as much chance of still being there as ‘a snowball in hell.’ Well, chalk one up for snowballs because it was there, there exactly where I had left it. Certainly Stephan could have walked out of a shallow river and hidden in the forest. No, no miracle in that because it is the most logical explanation possible.”

But how real, he asked himself, is an act of faith unless you keep right on demonstrating that faith. So, filling his lungs with air, he cupped his hands around his mouth and called in the direction of the river. “Stevie! Stevie! Come on now ... there’s nobody here to hurt you. It’s only me ... ON-LY ME! Please, Stevie, please just let me know you’re here. Please call my name ... oh ... please, all you have to do is call my name.”

Then suddenly, totally unexpectedly, against the floor of the forest, there was a breaking and cracking of branches. At first Frank was terrified that his senses were playing dirty tricks on him and that he was “hearing” only what he so desperately needed to hear. But no—no, there it was again, brittle limbs and twigs cleanly snapping under the feet of a large something or someone running this way. In the direction of the commotion, he cried out joyously, “Here, Stevie! Here! I’m here!!!”

Then every bit as miraculously as some of those Bible miracles of old, he heard a young man’s voice clearly echoing through the otherwise still woods: “Frank! Hey, Frank!” When he heard his name being called, Frank’s hand rushed to his heart. It was as though he were frightened that his heart would literally splinter apart with happiness. Then raising his arms heavenward, Frank raced frantically toward the voice while crying loudly enough to terrorize all the creatures of the forest, “Here! Here! Stevie! Stevie! I’m here!!!”

But the person who stepped through the partial clearing to face Frank Montgomery was not Stephan Jones! It was the officer in the smart blue uniform from the Parson Springs Police Department. “Uh, Frank, uh, Chief Marino sent me to bring you back.”

Frank stared at the officer as though he had never before actually seen a man wearing a uniform. “I can’t go back, not yet,” he finally explained. “Not until I find Stevie.”

“The chief wants you, Frank. You must come. Please, it’s best.”

“I
already
told you that I can’t! Not until I find Stevie!”

“I’m really sorry to tell you this, Frank, but Stephan Jones has already been found. The chief wants you to come identify the body.”

Frank listened without really hearing, or at least without giving even the slightest indication he had understood what he had heard. Then, his face took on a puzzled look. Finally he smiled and began shaking his head no. “Whoever it is you’ve found, it’s certainly not Stevie!” he stated emphatically. Then Frank affected a lifeless laugh, as if he were trying desperately to convince himself even more than the officer. “Definitely not Stevie! Hey, no way!”

“Well come on with me, anyway, okay, Frank?”

“I
can’t
—don’t you understand!? I’ve got to stay here, search for Stevie!”

“Frank, listen to me, please. Come back to the command post with me and if the man the divers found isn’t Stevie then I’ll come back here to the woods with you and help you search—we all will!”

The dazed man slowly nodded his agreement before following. At first Frank’s trek back seemed mechanical, almost robotic, but as his fear began to expand, his pace, too, began to quicken, until in the final stretch he was running. By the time they reached sight of the base, the perspiration was rolling in rivulets down Frank’s body.

At the disaster scene, people with badges on their chests and official-looking patches on their sleeves stood around. Divers were being helped out of their rubber suits. With a sense of hopeless finality, a seasoned emergency medical technician slammed down the plastic lid on his fibrillator. A few feet away, Chief Marino was giving an impromptu press conference for reporters. But by far the largest hub of humanity was clustered around a stretcher, its shiny chrome wheels reflecting the rays of the newly risen sun.

As Frank raced forward, most people seemed to respectfully back away from him. The group stepped back from the stretcher, revealing a blue-gray blanket that covered a decidedly human shape. Frank stood staring at the blanketed form as though he were the master of all time, all the time in the world. Then, with a trembling hand, he finally reached out to turn back the cover.

The face beneath the blanket appeared to be the cruel prank of a particularly sadistic cartoonist, for it didn’t look nearly as much like Stephan Jones as like a hideously grotesque version of Stephan Jones. His pale porcelain skin had taken on a bluish cast and the once well-defined planes and valleys of his sculptured face were hideously swollen. And those hazel eyes, which only yesterday were alive with life, were closed, closed now and closed for all eternity.

Frank gasped like a stabbed animal, and it was a gasp that carried unspeakable agony! Frank dropped to Stephan’s side, crying out, “Oh, my God! My God! My God!” then abandoned himself to uncontrollable sobs.

Chapter 20

A
LTHOUGH THE TRIAL
that nationally came to be known as the “Trial of the Rachetville Five” did not actually commence until the second week in September, the summer air hung thickly with a blanket of oppressive heat. Inside the turn-of-the-century courtroom, overhead fans lazily stirred the steamy air, sluggishly moving it from one hot place to still another.

As Carla leaned forward to better hear Andy smoothly reciting his answers from the witness stand, Judith gave her daughter a couple of rapid, reassuring pats to the forearm. It was her way of letting someone she loved know and understand that whatever happened, she would always be there.