Death Falls (31 page)

“Were you hit?”

Nick shook his head.

“Good.”

Tony helped him to his feet and handed him his cane. Nick clutched it the same way a crack addict held his latest stash. He wasn’t ever letting go of this puppy again.

All around them, the SWAT guys emerged from the cabins, reporting that all was clear. Only one cabin failed inspection—the second one Nick had shot into. A member of the SWAT team poked his head through the open door and bellowed, “He’s in here!”

Tony rushed to the cabin. Nick hobbled. Stepping inside, he saw four bunk beds, a dead mouse, and the names Bobby, Kevin, and Joe carved into the wall. It was the cabin Dwight Halsey had vanished from, and slumped in a corner was Craig Brewster.

The shotgun lay on the floor at his feet. Tony swooped in and grabbed it while Nick got a better look at Mr. Brewster. He was still alive, but barely. Each breath was a ragged stream that hissed through his beard. A hand was on his chest, clutching at his heart.

Nick looked for signs of bleeding. There weren’t any. The bullets had missed him, meaning something else took Craig down.

“We need to get him to a hospital,” Nick said. “He’s having a heart attack.”

Jocelyn Miller’s office was a glass-walled cube that sat just inside the front entrance to Perry Hollow Elementary School. Like specimens in a petri dish, anyone sitting in the office could be seen by those entering and exiting the building. So when Kat rushed into the school, the first thing she saw was the back of James’s head as he sat inside this administrative fishbowl.

Kat got a look at the front of him once she entered the office. His head was tilted back, nostrils stuffed with tissues in an attempt to stem a bloody nose. Drops of crimson spattered his shirt.

“Little Bear? What happened?”

Deep down, she already knew. The bullying James had been experiencing at school had been taken to another, more dangerous level.

“Chief Campbell?” It was Jocelyn Miller, standing outside the windowless room where her desk was located. “May I have a word?”

Kat joined the principal in the office, slamming the door behind her. “Who did this to him?”

Jocelyn offered her a seat. Kat remained standing. She was too angry and racked with guilt to sit.

“I’d like to talk about James,” the principal said.

“And I want to talk about the punk who beat him up.” Kat started to pace, crossing the office in restless strides. “My son is out there bleeding and you’re going to tell me who did it.”

“I’ve been an educator for twenty years,” Jocelyn said with infuriating calmness. “In that time, I’ve observed a lot of children. I think I know them pretty well. They’re emotional creatures. Quick to anger. Quick to get upset. But also, thankfully, quick to be happy again.”

“Could you please just tell me what’s going on?”

Jocelyn raised a hand, asking for patience. “Sometimes, kids do things that they know are wrong. Lying. Cheating on tests. Sometimes they steal. And sometimes they bully other kids. Why do you think that happens?”

“I have no idea,” Kat said.

“The first reason is that kids don’t understand the consequences of their actions. They just know the benefits.”

“And the other reasons?”

“They’re more complex. And they’re related. Care to guess what they are?”

Kat didn’t, especially not where the kid hitting her son was concerned. Whoever it was, and most likely his parents, were no-good trash, pure and simple.

“Anger and poor parenting,” she suggested.

“Close,” Jocelyn said. “It’s more like power and attention. Children know they have no control over this world. They’re always being told what to do, what to eat, when to go to bed. It’s for their own good, of course, but they don’t know that yet. So they sometimes pick on others because it’s something they can control. And sometimes they do it because they feel like they’re not getting enough attention at home. The bad behavior and the bullying are often a subconscious plea for attention from their parents.”

If the principal’s goal was to wear Kat down, it worked. She plopped into a chair, saying, “I just want to know what happened. Tell me the name of the punk who’s been picking on James and I’ll take it from here.”

Jocelyn crossed her arms, leaned back in her chair and contemplated Kat. “I can see why there’s a problem.”

“Excuse me?”

“A problem,” Jocelyn repeated. “With James.”

“James is just fine. It’s this other kid who’s been taking his lunches and hitting him that’s the problem. Yet for some reason I’m the one sitting in the principal’s office being given the emotional profile of a bully.”

“Chief Campbell.” The principal’s voice rose just a notch, enough to make Kat sit at attention. “Your son just sent another student to the hospital. So, in my experience, James is the bully.”

Eric remained seated for the rest of the afternoon. He was too stunned to move. Or eat. Or drink. He barely had enough energy to stare at the patch of sunlight brightening the dining-room table, which moved and stretched as the day progressed. Sometimes there’d be silence, long pauses in which the sunlight edged forward an inch or two. But for the most part, the dining room was filled with the sound of his father’s voice, revealing just how he and Maggie had come to take possession of a little boy they named Charlie.

His mother, he learned, had lived in their house her entire life, growing up across the street from her best friend, Jennifer Clark. The two were inseparable. They shared clothes, makeup, secrets. When they were older, the girls would sometimes sneak away to Sunset Falls, where they sipped beer until they got dizzy.

One night, a boy from nearby Mercerville came with them. His name was Ken Olmstead.

“Your mother was the prettiest girl I ever saw,” Eric’s father said. “I was in love with her the first time I laid eyes on her.”

They were an item all through Maggie’s senior year and engaged by the time she graduated high school in 1958. They were married that August and made plans to move to Florida. Ken had distant family there, who offered to rent them a small house in the Keys starting in January 1959. There, they would build a life together, just the two of them.

It didn’t work out that way. Jennifer Clark came with them.

She had started dating a young man in the army named Craig Brewster. They saw each other infrequently, with Craig burning through weekend passes just to visit her. But it was enough time to get engaged and definitely enough time for her to get pregnant, which she confessed to Maggie on Christmas Eve.

Jennifer was scared. Of what her parents would do. Of how the world would treat a shamed woman. According to Ken, Eric’s mother came up with the solution—Jennifer could have the baby in Florida and put it up for adoption. That way no one in Perry Hollow would ever know.

She agreed, and the three of them moved to the Keys. Craig joined them that March, when he was honorably discharged from the military. It was cramped in that small house on the beach. Work was scarce and money was tight. But when Ken talked about it, there was a sad nostalgia in his voice that Eric had never heard before. It was the tone of a man recalling the happiest time of his life.

The happiness didn’t last.

As the weeks passed and Jennifer’s stomach extended, she began to have doubts about giving up her baby. She also had doubts about Craig, who didn’t seem eager to make an honest woman out of her. There were fights, which echoed in the tiny house all through the night and into the dawn.

“We heard every word,” Ken said. “Your mother and I would lay in bed and swear to each other we would never fight like that. Little did we know that, eventually, we would. Only worse.”

June rolled around, bringing hurricane season with it. As one lashed the island, Jennifer Clark’s unborn child decided it was time to greet the world. There was no hospital on the island; nor was there access to one. The hurricane had closed all routes to the mainland. Jennifer Clark had to give birth at home, with Maggie serving as terrified midwife.

Listening to his father, Eric closed his eyes and let his writer’s imagination take over. He pictured lightning casting incandescent flashes across the room where Jennifer lay in a sweat-soaked bed. His mother had boiled water, because that’s what they did in the movies, although she didn’t know why. Both girls—even though married or pregnant, they weren’t yet women—wept with fear as Jennifer grunted through another contraction and Maggie wiped her brow. The wind didn’t shake the house so much as push it.

Eric then imagined his father and Craig Brewster in another room. Pacing. Not talking. Craig maybe stepping outside to feel the rain sting his face while he wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into. Then it was back to more pacing and not talking until, through the paper-thin walls that were peeling paint because of the humidity, an infant’s wail broke through the sounds of the storm.

Once the baby was born, Eric’s parents left Jennifer and Craig alone. The goal was to let them make a decision—keep the baby and raise it together or put it up for adoption and go their separate ways. By the time the sun rose over a storm-battered island, Jennifer had told Craig that she wanted to be a wife and mother. He told her that he had reenlisted in the army and was heading back to base in a few hours.

“Craig left without even holding the baby,” Ken said. “And Jenny, well, she was devastated. The morning after Craig left, she was out of bed. Your mother told her she needed her rest, but Jenny insisted on going outside. She wanted to dip her toes in the ocean, she said. That was all. Just go to the beach and think.”

Jennifer gave Maggie a long hug and a peck on the cheek before she left. It was the last time Eric’s mother ever saw her.

No one knows what really happened in the roiling ocean. There were no witnesses, no random passersby who saw Jennifer walk into the water and slip beneath the waves. It could have been an accident. It could have been suicide. All Ken knew was that her body washed ashore a day later, which is all that really mattered.

Between her disappearance and discovery, Maggie cared for the still-unnamed baby as if he had emerged from her womb. She bathed him, fed him, and made makeshift diapers out of bedsheets, using sewing skills she had picked up in home economics classes. When the police came around to talk about Jennifer, they asked Maggie who the child belonged to.

“Your mother told them he was ours,” Ken said.

Maggie didn’t discuss the decision with him. She didn’t even warn him it was coming. Instead, she calmly told the police the partial truth—that the infant had been born during the full thrust of the hurricane and that Jennifer’s disappearance prevented them from going to the nearest hospital when the storm had passed. She didn’t feel the need to mention Craig Brewster, currently on his way to Fort Rucker in Alabama, or the true identity of the infant’s mother.

The police easily accepted that explanation and even drove them to the hospital, where the baby got a checkup. On the birth certificate, Ken and Maggie Olmstead were listed as his parents. When it came time to pick a name, they chose Charles, in honor of Ken’s grandfather.

“The only time we talked about it,” he said, “was when we got back from the hospital. Your mother swore it was the right thing to do. She said Jennifer would have wanted us, and not some strangers, to raise the boy. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I was afraid someone would realize what we had done.”

They passed the first test when Mort and Ruth Clark flew down to Florida to cremate their daughter and scatter her ashes into the sea. Maggie told them the same story she gave the police. When they saw the newborn in her arms, they said he looked just like her.

The second test came a few weeks later, when they decided to return to Perry Hollow. They moved in with Maggie’s parents, who were stunned to learn about their new grandchild.

“We told them we kept it a secret because there were complications and we weren’t sure if the baby would survive,” Ken said. “Who knows if they believed us. But they never asked about it again.”

Soon Maggie’s parents moved out, leaving them the house. Charlie grew up across the street from his true grandparents and Maggie eventually got pregnant for real, giving birth to Eric.

“The rest,” Ken said, “you know about.”

Finished at last, he stood and stretched, the cracking of his joints filling the silent dining room. Then he headed to the front door, where he had kicked off his boots the night before. The sound of him slipping them on prompted Eric to speak.

“But I
don’t
know the rest,” he said, confronting Ken by the door. “There are a lot of gaps to your story.”

“I told you my memory isn’t what it used to be.”

When Ken headed upstairs, Eric doggedly tailed him to his mother’s bedroom. “What about Craig Brewster? Did you ever hear from him again?”

“Only once,” Ken said. “The day after Jennifer was found, I called his base to give him the news. When he asked about the baby, I told him the truth. He said we were doing the right thing.”

He picked up his denim jacket, which had been tossed onto the floor the previous night. He stuffed a hand into the pockets, digging for his keys. Now that he had spilled all the family’s secrets, he was preparing to leave again, even though he had no place to go and Eric still had another day’s worth of unanswered questions.

“Why didn’t you tell the police you weren’t Charlie’s real father? Surely, Craig would have been the prime suspect if you had.”

“Craig wanted nothing to do with him, that’s why. When I told him we had Charlie, he vowed never to bother us.”

His father edged into the hallway, Eric right behind him. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t come and take Charlie. I can’t believe you just assumed he was innocent.”

“Charlie died,” Ken said. “He walked to the creek, fell in, and went over the falls. End of story.”

“
Walked
to the creek? I thought he rode his bike.”

Ken tried to cover his mistake. “That’s what I meant to say.”

Eric’s mind began to race—a dizzying spin that brought back everything he knew about Charlie’s disappearance and his father’s role in it. The fact that he never told the police about not being Charlie’s birth father. The way he asked Kat’s dad to stop investigating the incident. The way he just admitted he knew Charlie had walked to the falls, even though his bike was found at the base of it. All this led to a conclusion that made Eric sick deep down in the pit of his stomach.