The Dead Boys (8 page)

It didn't take long to reach the cemetery. It was only a mile up the road from Desert Oasis, and Teddy's adrenalin was pumping.

I've taken on the town bully twice,
he thought as he pedaled.
And I survived both times.

But he didn't feel proud—just terrified and a bit guilty. Fortunately, Henry Mulligan hadn't gotten a good look at him. Teddy was sure of that. Henry had gone straight to the floor with his hands over his eyes, yelling, “Whoever you are, you're dead!”

As Teddy rode through the cemetery gates, he looked for the row of lonely headstones he saw in the ceremony photo in the yearbook. He was pretty sure he could recognize it, because he'd noticed there were no spaces in front of the stones for graves—they were missing persons memorials only.

He found the distinctively narrow row near the back of the lot. Names were carved in the face of the granite monuments along with the dates each person was born and disappeared.

Teddy walked his bike along the row, looking for Albert's stone. Most of the missing were adults, so the dates on one stone caught Teddy's eye:

Lawrence Cox had been twelve years old when he'd gone missing. Just like Teddy.

As he continued along the row, Teddy paid more attention to the dates. He was surprised to find two
more
twelve-year-olds.

Not only were all three of the kids twelve, they were all boys like him. Teddy glanced over his shoulder nervously, suddenly wondering if it was a good idea to be wandering alone in the graveyard. He looked around for threatening trees, but all he saw were rows of small, well-trimmed saplings.

Teddy quickly moved on, and, a few steps later, he found what he was looking for:

As he feared, Albert was also twelve years old when he disappeared thirty years ago—exactly the age he'd appeared to be when Teddy met him by the river just two days earlier.

For a full minute, Teddy stood motionless in front of the stone, his logic struggling with the clues in front of him, arguing against the impossible conclusions they led to. Then he glanced to his left at the next stone over:

Teddy knelt down beside it and ran his hand across the carved surface. He hadn't known the last name of the crazy boy named Walter he'd met at the construction site, but now he had the queasy feeling that it must have been Fick. And according to the stone, twelve-year-old Walter Fick had disappeared forty years ago, the year Lynwood Court was built and exactly ten years before Albert.

There were a few more stones Teddy hadn't seen yet. He almost didn't want to look, but he needed to see if there was one more name that he knew.

He found it at the end of the row, an old, weather-beaten rock with the name chipped out. Its ragged inscription read:

In the quiet of the cemetery, Teddy whispered the one conclusion even his logic couldn't deny: “I've been hanging out with dead boys.”

As Teddy biked home, he tried to sort through the nightmarish clues he'd uncovered. The boys' memorial stones were scattered at random among other names and different ages, but the pattern was clear: Each boy had been twelve years old when he went missing, and the boys had vanished at ten-year intervals.

This last realization made Teddy skid to a stop in the middle of the street as he was struck by a horrific theory. He himself had been born in 1998, and it was now 2010—he was twelve, and it had been exactly ten years since the last disappearance.

I'm next
, he thought.

When Teddy arrived home, dripping sweat from the heat and the terror of his discovery, his mom met him at the back door. He almost started to tell her everything he'd found out, but she spoke first.

“Teddy, there's a police officer here.”

Teddy froze. “What for?” he replied as though it shouldn't mean anything to him.

“He said you might know,” his mother continued, sounding suspicious. “Come with me.”

Teddy followed his mom through the house to the foyer, where he peeked out from behind her. There on the porch stood Officer Barnes.

“Hello, Teddy. How are you?” Barnes smiled. Even though it was one hundred degrees outside, he was wearing his dark blue shirt and long blue pants.

“Hot,” Teddy replied.

“And it might get hotter too,” Barnes said, pulling out his notebook. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“About what?”

“I mentioned to your mom that we met over at Lynwood Court yesterday. Told her it was no big deal and how, being new in town, you had just gotten lost.”

“Thanks,” Teddy answered, unsure of what else to say.

“But now I'd like to talk about the Desert Oasis trailer park. You know the place?”

“It's on the way into town, right?” Teddy's mom chimed in.

Barnes grimaced. “I actually wanted to know if
Teddy
knew. You been up there lately, Teddy?”

Teddy didn't want to lie. “I was at the cemetery near there, if that's what you mean.”

His mom cocked her head in surprise.

“A man in the park described a blue bicycle near his trailer, a bike a lot like the one I've seen you riding. His name is Mulligan. You know him?”

“That sounds familiar,” Teddy's mom interrupted. “Wasn't that the name of the air-conditioner repairman?”

Barnes groaned. “I really want to hear this from Teddy, Ms. Matthews,” he said. “Is that your repairman, Teddy?”

“Yeah, I think that was his name.”

“Okay,” Barnes said, scribbling in his book. “Any reason for you to be at his trailer? Maybe you wanted to talk to him? Possibly checked inside to see if he was home?”

Teddy didn't take the bait. “No. No good reason.”

Barnes turned to his mom. “Is Teddy unsupervised all day, Ms. Matthews?” he asked.

“He's a good boy,” she replied quickly. Teddy could tell she didn't like the question.

“All right,” Barnes said amiably. “Just looking for witnesses. Mr. Mulligan was assaulted by someone he found in his trailer. He didn't get a good look at the guy, but thought he was young. He said that the suspect had rummaged his office and that he was missing a knife he'd had since he was a teenager.”

Teddy stiffened, realizing that Mulligan's old knife was still in his pocket.

“Teddy doesn't carry knives,” his mom said.

“Assault during the course of a burglary is very serious,” Barnes continued, “so we're investigating. But Mr. Mulligan is not the most reliable person I know, either.” Barnes snapped his notebook closed. “He could have gotten it wrong.”

“Is that all?” Teddy's mom asked.

“Can I talk to Teddy privately for a moment?” Barnes requested.

She looked at Teddy, and he nodded that it was okay. “I'll be in the kitchen,” she said, and she went into the house.

Barnes walked Teddy down to his patrol car. “I checked on that name you mentioned—Walter. A boy named Walter Fick went missing in 1970, which matches up with the date that Lynwood Court was a construction zone.”

“How do you know that?”

“Investigation. I'm a policeman, remember? But Walter was supposed to have disappeared near Davidson Avenue.”

“No, it was at the building site,” Teddy said before he could stop himself.

“Well, that's unlikely,” Barnes said. “But interesting.”

“What do you know about Albert Barker or Eugene Sloot?” Teddy blurted out.

Barnes quickly noted the names in his book. “Nothing yet,” he said, “but I will.” He opened the patrol car door, slid inside, and began entering the names into a portable computer. “You're a curious kid, aren't you?”

“Not usually,” Teddy replied.

“I don't know what to make of you, Teddy,” Barnes continued as he tapped away on the computer. “You're new in town, you seem nice, but both times I've run into you, you've been involved in something . . . odd.” He finished typing. “Okay, here's Eugene Sloot. Old case—not much on him.”

“He went up the tree next door and never came down,” Teddy said.

“Wow. You're right about it being next door. But it says his father reported that he ran away.”

“Maybe that's where he ran.”

“It's not likely he's been up there for sixty years. Tell me more about Albert Barker,” Barnes said, clicking the computer to another screen.

“He went into the river.”

Barnes pulled up computer images of Albert's old file. “Whoa. Sorry, Teddy. It says Albert was at a movie the day he vanished. He disappeared from the Uptown Theater.”

“No, he didn't. He went to the river on his bike.”

“I just pulled the old report. His mother told police he would never have missed that movie—he went to see it the first day it came out.”

“
The Empire Strikes Back
?” Teddy asked.

Barnes looked at Teddy and raised an eyebrow. “That's right. How'd you know?”

“He loved
Star Wars,
and
Empire Strikes Back
came out in 1980, the year he disappeared.”

“That doesn't explain why he'd be at the river.”

“He might miss a movie if he got chased off by bullies,” Teddy continued. “Were there any witnesses that saw him
inside
the theater that day?”

Barnes carefully jotted down notes in his book as Teddy spoke. “The river, eh? They never checked down there.”

“Maybe that's why they didn't find him,” Teddy said.

“Okay, then. Why would he be
in
the river?”

“What if the bully followed him and he got scared? And what if he jumped in to get away because maybe a bully wouldn't follow him into the water?”

“That's a lot of ‘what ifs' and ‘maybes.' You got a name for your theoretical bully?” Barnes held his pen ready.

Teddy hesitated. He couldn't say it. Barnes already suspected he'd broken into Mulligan's trailer, and he probably didn't need much more to make an arrest. “You don't believe any of this anyway,” Teddy said.

Barnes looked Teddy straight in the eye. “Help me believe, Teddy.”

“Did you notice that those boys were all twelve and disappeared exactly at the end of a decade?”

Barnes turned back to his computer and checked the screen, then double-checked as he scratched his chin in thought. “Nobody has ever connected these disappearances. What are you onto here?”

“I don't know,” Teddy sighed.

“Neither do I. Kids go missing all the time, and it's probably nothing more than an extremely disturbing coincidence. But I'm interested. What else can you tell me?”

“I can tell you that I'm twelve, and it's the end of the decade right now.”

“I see,” Barnes said. “Anything else?”

Teddy thought hard. It was tempting to keep talking, to tell Barnes everything, but what could he say? That he stole a knife from the bully he'd hit with a rock thirty years ago? That a tree tried to devour him?

He glanced at the sycamore above them, suddenly afraid that it was listening. “No,” he mumbled.

“Tell you what,” Barnes said as he leaned out of the car to hand Teddy a business card. “I'm going to go do some more poking around. If you think of anything else, anything at all, don't hesitate to call my cell phone, instead of nine-one-one, okay?”

“Okay.

“And whatever you do, stay out of other people's houses.”

But Teddy wasn't listening anymore.
Mulligan's house was where I found all of the clues
, he realized. He looked past the sycamore at the A-house, then back at the tree. It almost seemed like the tree was standing guard.
Like it wants to keep me away from the house
, he thought.

“Teddy?” Barnes said, snapping his fingers. “Did you hear me?”

“Right,” Teddy said, nodding and giving Barnes the fake smile he'd learned from his mother. “Stay out of other houses.”