One of Us Read online

  When I reach the stone wall surrounding the old jail the same human instinct that makes us all slow down and gape at car wrecks makes me slow to a jog and glance inside the entrance at the cracked walls covered in graffiti, the muddy ice patches, the disintegrating brick jailhouse, and the black specter of the gallows standing in the middle of it all.

  The structure looms, sinister in its simplicity and inexplicable permanence. The platform sits on top of a twelve-foot-high scaffold now black with age. One of the trapdoors dangles open. Two are missing altogether. Most of the steps are rotted through. A perverse bird has built a nest on one of the crossbars and no one has dared to remove it.

  With the advent of ghost town Internet sites and TV shows about the paranormal, the amount of tourists has increased sharply, but I think these particular visitors are often disappointed in what they find.

  Searchers of terror are a type of thrill seeker who crave the excitement of the discovery, the scare, the escape, and Lost Creek offers none of this. The horror here is real but it’s out in the open, in the light, and can’t be left behind once confronted. The gallows are terrifying not because they’re haunted by the dead but because they were conceived by the living.

  The prison and the courtyard are cared for by the long-suffering members of the Nellie O’Neill Society, aka the NONS, a rebel offshoot of the local historical society that has always vigorously asserted the executed miners’ innocence. They conduct guided tours on weekends, maintain a museum in Nora Daley’s attic, provide the hoods and nooses for the annual memorial service along with the baked goods, and have been trying to raise funds for a commemorative statue for as long as I can remember.

  They also employ an unpaid groundskeeper named Parker Hopkins, who works for beer and the sheer joy of riding a tractor mower. This time of year he spends most of his time in Kelly’s Kwik Shop across the road drinking instant hot chocolate laced with peppermint schnapps, lamenting the lack of money in the budget for a snowblower.

  But no one is here in the middle of a cold January weekday.

  I’m about to turn and leave when I notice something lying on the ground near the gallows. I think I know what it is but it can’t be. I have to check it out.

  I have my phone with me and instinctively think of calling Rafe. I have his number but lose my nerve. I don’t know what I’d say after all this time. I dial 911 instead and tell the dispatcher I’ve found a body.

  three

  THE TWO YOUNG COPS introduce themselves. The first is Billy Smalls, and I have to say he’s aptly named. I’m sure he took a lot of abuse about this fact when he was a child, which I assume wasn’t all that long ago. Short and slight, ginger haired, with big ears and a smooth, wide-eyed baby face, he seems too young to do this job or any job other than sell lemonade.

  The other is Troy Razzano. He’s a dark-haired, dark-eyed, good-looking kid, but is already starting to get thick around the middle from the doughnuts, drive-thrus, and 2 a.m. Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts of a small-town law enforcement diet. If I had to pick one reason why he became a police officer, I’d say it’s because he likes how he looks in the uniform. Even if he lives to be as old as Tommy, I’m sure he’ll want to be buried in it. I picture Billy being buried in SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas. The kind with feet.

  “Sheridan Doyle?” Billy repeats my name. “Your name sounds familiar.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of you, too,” Troy muses.

  “I grew up here. I’m visiting my grandfather. But you might know me from my books or TV appearances on the news, talk shows, crime documentaries . . .”

  Recognition fails to register on their faces.

  “I’m a forensic psychologist,” I explain further. “I’ve been involved in some fairly well-known cases. The Wishbone Killer, the Scranton Bomber, the Dolly Decker kidnapping . . . I’m Dr. Sheridan Doyle—”

  “Hey, that’s it,” Troy cuts me off. “Rafe knows you. He’s got one of your books.”

  “Yeah,” Billy chimes in. “Rafe knows you.”

  A thrill of childish pride rushes through me as if I’ve just been picked first for any type of team. I don’t know why I think I’d have the slightest idea how that feels, but for a moment, I’m sure I do.

  “So he’s still working?”

  They both smile and nod.

  “Oh, yeah,” they say in unison.

  “He’s a detective now,” Troy provides. “The first one we’ve ever had. Everyone jokes the chief made up the position for him because he knew Rafe could never handle not wearing a uniform and having to pick out his own clothes so he’d be forced to retire, but it didn’t work.”

  They fall silent. I wait for them to walk over to the body, but neither one seems eager to look at it. I imagine the Creekside Township police rarely deal with suspicious deaths, but even so, there’s nothing gory about this one. I already took a look at him. I don’t know why they’re keeping their distance.

  I start toward the man. They fall in beside me.

  “You’re an old-timer,” Billy says to me. “You probably know a lot about the town’s history. Is this the first guy to ever be killed here? I mean other than the original guys who were killed here.”

  “I’m forty-three,” I state irately. “That hardly makes me an old-timer.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why are you assuming he was killed?” I ask. “You haven’t even seen him. It could be natural causes.”

  “How about that?” Billy says, crouching down near the body. “It’s Simon Husk. I thought I saw his car over there.”

  “What do you think did it?” Troy asks me, tentatively.

  “Don’t you mean, who did it? Not what?” I reply.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “I don’t think anyone did anything to him,” I go on. “There’s no blood. No sign of trauma on the body. Heart attack, maybe.”

  I glance at the boys. They look skeptical.

  “He was an older man, overweight,” I explain. “Smells like a smoker. Looks like a drinker. A diabetic.”

  “How do you know he was a diabetic?” Troy asks me.

  “He’s wearing a MedicAlert bracelet.”

  Billy barks a laugh.

  “You’re a regular Sherlock freakin’ Holmes, Razzano.”

  Troy shifts around and hitches up his utility belt hung with twenty pounds of equipment featuring a huge flashlight, which is the most formidable object on it. In this well-armed community of hunters, veterans, and Second Amendment–loving patriots, his holstered Glock carries the intimidation factor of a squirt gun.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right about the heart attack,” he concedes.

  “Do you have an alternative theory?” I ask them.

  “Isn’t it true you can be scared to death?” Troy wonders. “I mean, can’t something scare you so bad it gives you a heart attack?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Billy jumps in.

  “They could be zombies,” Troy says to him in a private aside that leads me to believe this isn’t the first time they’ve had this discussion.

  “What are you two talking about?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  “The Nellies . . .”

  “We don’t believe in them,” Troy adds quickly. “But what if Simon here believed in them . . . ?”

  He leaves the idea hanging in the air for all of us to consider.

  Simon Husk certainly wouldn’t be the first person to have ever allegedly seen a ghost at the gallows, or lingering in the jail, or roaming morosely through the field where the Nellies were buried without so much as a rock a child might use to mark a pet’s grave to commemorate their final resting place.

  The town has been the continual darling of ghost-hunting societies and research foundations for as long as I can re
member. They show up periodically with their cameras, recorders, thermometers, and gadgets to gauge electromagnetic disturbances. Believers and skeptics alike have reported sightings of glowing orbs of light and faint bluish mists accompanied by sudden drafts of cold and suffocating feelings of dread. Every Halloween someone sees and hears Prosperity trudging along a road with his dinner pail swinging by his side whistling “Yankee Doodle.”

  “Husk just sold the gallows and the jail to Walker Dawes, and he’s going to tear it all down and drill for gas,” Billy informs me.

  “The gallows are being torn down?”

  I can’t believe Tommy didn’t tell me this.

  The young cops nod in unison.

  “Why now? Why after all this time?”

  They both shrug.

  “The Nellies could be mad at Simon for selling the gallows, so they killed him,” Troy continues theorizing.

  It’s obvious from their expressions that they believe it’s a possibility, but they laugh and shake their heads when they notice me staring at them.

  “We’re just messing with you,” Billy says, squaring his slim shoulders.

  We’re interrupted by the sound of a car door slamming and one side of a heated conversation ringing out clearly in the cold white dawn silence.

  A man in rumpled gray pants, a pair of Caterpillar boots with bright yellow laces, a strobing red-and-blue-striped tie, and an olive green corduroy blazer all topped off with a camouflage hunting jacket comes tromping toward us, taking a slight detour in order to kick a Pepsi can across the prison yard.

  They were right about him not being able to pick out his own clothes.

  “I don’t care,” Rafe shouts into his phone. “It’s not my car anymore. I don’t own it. I don’t drive it. And I’m sure as hell not going to pay to replace its timing belt.”

  He pockets his phone but continues his tirade.

  “When we were married she’d go for days, weeks, without talking to me. Now we’re divorced, she wants to talk to me all the time. What are you looking at?” he snaps at Billy, who flinches at the edge in his voice.

  Rafe stares him down with a surly blue squint, then flashes one of his disarming smiles that somehow manages to be both angelic and menacing at the same time, set in the fine-featured, booze-ravaged face.

  He turns to me.

  I wait breathlessly for some kind of sentimental greeting. Will he embrace me? Shake my hand and pat me on the back? It’s been twelve years and I’ve accomplished a lot during this time; will he be too choked up to speak?

  “What the hell are you wearing?” he asks me.

  I glance down at my running attire: Sugoi RSR running tights, a North Face Apex ClimateBlock zip jacket, neon-orange reflective Saucony gloves, and a waterproof Asics beanie. I’ve come a long way from the wrestling team’s hand-me-down shapeless gray sweats, tube socks for gloves, and Steelers knit cap topped with a big yellow pom-pom of my youth, but I doubt if he considers this an improvement.

  Before I can come up with a response, he digs out a pink Jolly Rancher from his coat pocket and strips off the plastic wrap.

  I remember he only likes the watermelon ones.

  “Are you still trying to quit smoking?” I ask.

  “Once a year.”

  He pops the candy into his mouth. I listen to the clicks and clacks of it hitting his teeth as he moves it around his mouth.

  “How’re you doing, Danno?”

  His words whisk me back to the day we first met and he sat with me in the kitchen where I would one day get to know my father’s feet while the other police officers took away my mother in handcuffs and the remains of my infant sister in a body bag no bigger than a backpack and he pushed a Tootsie Roll across the tabletop and asked me the same question.

  I automatically started to say okay, my conditioned response, then I looked up and met his stare full of anger and concern but no pity or blame, and for the first time in my young life I felt I could be honest.

  “Not very good,” I told him that day.

  “I’m great,” I tell him today. “How are you?”

  “Still kicking, which is more than I can say for old Simon here.”

  He kneels next to the body. We wait for his appraisal. Rafe’s the only one here well acquainted with the sight of death. He only ever mentioned Vietnam once to me during all the time I’ve known him. I don’t know any details about what he saw or did there, but I’ve always assumed it was bad for him. I’ve spent a few nights at the Red Rabbit with him years ago watching him drink with a mechanical purpose I know has to be motivated by something more torturous than life in a used-up coal town and four divorces.

  “He’s dead all right,” he announces. “What was he doing here?”

  “We don’t know,” Billy answers. “His car’s parked on the street. Looks like he drove himself here.”

  “I thought he sold this land to Dawes.”

  “He did.”

  “I’m going to go talk to the wife,” he tells the boys. “You two wait for the coroner.”

  “But . . .” Troy sputters.

  “What’s with them?” Rafe asks me.

  “They’re spooked,” I tell him.

  “I’m not spooked,” Billy insists roughly.

  Rafe grins. He opens his eyes wide and makes ghostly moans while fluttering his fingers at them.

  “What do you think? Old Prosperity and Footloose are finally getting their revenge? Souvenir sales are going to skyrocket for the NONS,” he whoops.

  He abruptly turns and begins walking back to his car and I happily trail after him, instinctively falling into the puppy dog role of my youth.

  He looks back at me over his shoulder.

  “You gonna tell me why you’re here?”

  “I was out for a run.”

  “I can see that. You run all the way from Philly? I mean, why are you in town?”

  “I came to take care of Tommy.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t hear you say that,” he snorts. “Tommy’s the last guy who will let someone take care of him. He’s out of the hospital. He’s doing fine as far as I know.”

  He stops and watches me, clicking his candy against his teeth, waiting for me to explain why I’m really here. For once in my life, I can’t put something into words, except to say I need to see my grandpa in the flesh.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” he suggests. “We can catch up.”

  “Come with you on an interrogation?”

  “Interrogation, hell. I’m gonna go tell Bethany Husk her husband’s dead. We can get a beer after.”

  “Aren’t you on duty?”

  “On duty,” he snorts again.

  He reaches into his pocket and holds out a piece of candy to me.

  “I’ll go off for an hour or two. No one will miss me.”

  four

  AFTER MEETING FOR THE first time on the day of my mother’s arrest, Rafe continued to keep an eye on me. He’d stop by occasionally with a candy bar or baseball cards. Eventually he started taking me on ride-alongs in his police car.

  I was eager to go but soon discovered there was nothing exciting about his kind of police work. It consisted for the most part of driving around and sometimes sitting in the gravel lot behind the beer distributor’s waiting for someone to break the speed limit on Jenner’s Pike. Everyone did, and since it wouldn’t have been fair for him to only ticket people he personally disliked, he devised a sort of game for us to play where I’d pick a number and we’d count the cars that went past until we reached it and then went after the unlucky one. He never rejected my choice of a number whether it was two or twenty-two. Once I picked 116. We spent several hours playing checkers on the board he set up between us in the front seat, but only thirty cars passed during that time so no one got a ticket that day.

  When
something out of the ordinary did happen, it never involved a car chase or a shoot-out or any kind of confrontation with a criminal or evildoer like police work did on TV. From what I could see, Rafe’s job consisted of cleaning up the messes of ordinary people and then directing them—sometimes with the help of handcuffs—toward others who could help them find ways to cope with their mistakes and disappointments. Saving them from the bad guys turned out to be nothing more than saving them from themselves.

  The giant Husk house sits alone on a hillside, a reproduction of an antebellum mansion constructed without any of the craftsmanship or natural building materials used in the Old South. It’s a testament to how much square footage can be encased in vinyl siding and covered in stain-resistant carpeting.

  Rafe pounds at the front door with the flat of his fist, ignoring the faux-brass knocker. A woman in her sixties wearing gold jewelry and a purple velour jogging suit answers.

  “Mrs. Husk?” he asks.

  “Yes?” she asks, crinkling her brow uncertainly.

  He shows her his credentials.

  “I’m—”

  “Rafe,” she suddenly gushes before he can finish introducing himself.

  A sentimental smile lights up her face and I’m not surprised. Every woman in the county between the ages of thirty and seventy has had some sort of intimate dealings with Rafe, whether real or imaginary.

  “We went to school together,” Mrs. Husk explains to me while never taking her eyes off Rafe. “Do you remember—?”

  Rafe nods and pops two Jolly Ranchers into his mouth in rapid-fire succession.

  “Mrs. Husk,” he cuts her off.

  “Bethany,” she offers.

  “I’m here to talk to you about your husband.”

  Her smile and the misty softness in her eyes vanishes.

  “Simon?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  “Oh my God!”

  She slaps a hand covered in chunky rings like small brightly colored ice cubes to her mouth.