see it more clearly, this memory from the past, or not wanting to see them when he finally said the words? Rosie was losing patience.
“Just tell us, Gabe! What do you know?”
“It has to do with my brother.”
Joe was quick to respond. “Rick?”
“Yeah. Before he left home.”
“For the military school? But that was so long ago—Laura was, what, eleven?” Rosie remembered Gabe’s brother. Rick had been a troublemaker. Two years older than Gabe. Four years older than Laura. But he had never been their friend. Rick Wallace was the vicious dog whose house you ran past, hoping he wouldn’t see you. Joe had gotten into it with him more than once. Fists flying, even as young boys. Mrs. Wallace cried about him to their mother. How she couldn’t control him. How they had to send him away.
Joe was alarmed. “What happened with Rick?”
Gabe began the story.
“Do you remember when Laura would see Lionel Casey. In the woods?”
“Fuck, Gabe—why would you bring up Lionel Casey?” Joe was looking at Rosie when he said it. She was thinking the same thing. Of all the people, and under these circumstances … first Rick and then Lionel Casey—the homeless man who lived in the nature preserve. The man who was eventually found inside the car of Laura’s dead boyfriend, and who’d spent his life in a mental facility as a result.
“Listen,” Gabe continued. “I know it’s hard to hear the name. But do you remember when we were little, when he used to wear that cape and walk the stone wall at the end of the pond? Laura said he looked like a vampire.”
Rosie nodded reluctantly. The stories about the old hermit who lived in the deep woods of the nature preserve would have been funny now, as grown-ups, had things not ended the way they did, with Lionel Casey implicated in the death of Laura’s boyfriend.
“Of course we remember,” Rosie said. Laura always made them run back to the house to get garlic and crosses. She loved tracking him, thinking she saw his footprints in the soil. “He stopped doing that long before…”
“I know. But one time it was just the two of us. Me and Laura. I don’t know why, or where the other kids were, where you two were. But she came running over, in the house to my room, banging on the door. She said he was out there again, with that cape, walking the wall at the end of the pond. God, I must have been thirteen then. It was the last thing I wanted to do. We were getting older. Teenagers, you know? But Laura was still a kid, still wanting to have her adventures.”
“I remember,” Rosie said. “She used to beg us to play with her. She didn’t like that things were changing. She felt like she was getting left behind.”
“That’s why I went with her. We walked the path to the pond, but there was no one on the wall. She said we should split up. That I should go one way and she would go another, both of us walking around the perimeter of the pond until we met up again. I started to wonder if she’d been making it up, about Lionel Casey being out there that day. But I went along with it. I told her after we’d searched the perimeter, I was going home.
“She agreed and I started walking. I made it halfway around and didn’t see her. I thought maybe I’d been faster, so I kept walking in the same direction, until I was back where we started. With no sign of Laura. It was so quiet that day. The trees were still bare. I called her name, then listened. I called it again. Still, no answer. I didn’t know where to start looking for her. I remember hearing nothing but my feet on the dead leaves. I thought maybe he’d been there. Maybe he wasn’t just a harmless old hermit after all.”
Gabe stopped and the room was as quiet as the woods he’d just described. Lionel Casey had not been a harmless old hermit, and all those years they’d gone into the woods, he’d been there. Hundreds of times. Together, in pairs. Sometimes alone if one of them left before the others. Never aware of the danger.
“I went to the places I thought she would go—the field, the overlook. And then, finally, the fort. Remember that fort we built? One piece of plywood lodged between the trees?”