he shuffled back into the living room and, heaving a sigh, sat back down on the couch. But no matter how much he tried not to think about it, now that his memories of that long-ago summer had been stirred up, there was no way he could stop himself from thinking about Jimmy Foster and what had happened exactly thirty-five years ago.
“BFF,” he muttered as he leaned back, closed his eyes, and took a huge gulp of rum. “Best fucking friends.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Last Day of Summer
Before he was twelve years old, Jeff had never seen a dead person. Not a real one, anyway. He’d seen plenty of corpses pile up on TV and in movies and comic books, but the only two real deaths he could remember in his immediate family were when his mother’s mother, “Grammy Parsons,” died of a stroke when he was eight, and his father’s brother, Uncle Billy Cameron, a railroad man, who drank himself to death.
Both deaths had affected Jeff deeply—especially Uncle Billy’s because, drunk or not, Uncle Billy was one hell of a funny guy. In both cases, however, his parents hadn’t allowed him to attend either the visiting hours at the funeral home or the funerals themselves. His mother told him she wanted him to remember the people he loved the way they were when they were alive, not how they looked when they were dead and all made up by the undertaker.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that he was older, Jeff saw how it might have created a warped attitude toward death and grieving on his part. Death had always held a strange fascination for him, and he thought it was in part, anyway, because his parents hadn’t let him confront it head on, as a normal and natural part of life. He had been denied the opportunity, if that’s the correct word, to deal with seeing a dead person—a real corpse—up close and personal.
That all changed on a hot July afternoon following rest hour when everyone in camp went into panic mode because Jimmy Foster had gone missing. As soon as he heard the news, Jeff knew something really bad had happened because of the cold, sinking feeling of dread in his gut.
“I’m tellin’ yah,” he said to his tent mates as they huddled in the sun-dappled protection of the brown canvas tent they all slept in. He was sitting Indian-style on his lower bunk with his tent mates gathered around him like he was holding court.
“He didn’t run away, and he’s not hiding. Jimmy would never do something stupid like that.”
“You sure?” Evan asked. His pale, thin eyebrows arched like twin commas above his eyes. He seemed to resent that Jeff was the center of attention. “If you’re so smart, where is he?”
“I have no idea,” Jeff replied, reacting as if Evan’s question was a veiled accusation that maybe he knew more than he was saying. “When did you see him last?”
For a tense moment, Evan stared straight back at him, not even blinking until—finally—he cleared his throat and said, “Last I saw him was when we all did. At the softball game.”
“So what do you think happened?” Tyler asked, wedging his way into group the way he always did. “I’ll bet you a million bucks he ran away.”
“And—what, is swimming for the mainland?” Mike Logan said.
“Why would he do that?” Jeff asked.
Both he and Evan stared at Tyler until he backed up a few steps. Then Jeff said, “Last I remember, he said he had to take a dump and left to go to the crapper.”
“And he didn’t come back,” Mike said, “‘cause he’s a pussy. He’s probably hiding in the woods somewhere, cryin’ like a little baby ‘cause he struck out ‘n is afraid I’m gonna pound his sorry ass.”
“Hey! Watch the language in there!” Mark Bloomberg, their counselor, shouted. He was standing out in front of the tent, talking to several other counselors. Jeff had thought he was far enough away so he and the other counselors couldn’t hear them, but that was obviously not the case.
“No way,” Jeff said, lowering his voice and shaking his head in such firm denial someone might have thought Mike had called him a pussy.
Mike was a head taller than the other boys and was the “jock” of the group. For him, it was all about winning. Not just in sports. In life, too. Everything was a contest to see who was fastest and strongest