The night school ended, I stood in the bathroom and stared at the mirror, gripping the sink. Another teenager might have been looking at himself, I guess, or combing his hair or dabbing on some Clearasil or making his collar perfectly straight. It was the night of my date with Brooke, after all, and I needed to get ready, but that meant something very different for me than for anybody else. I wasn’t trying to look good; I was trying to be good.
“I will not hurt animals,” I said, ignoring the rule sheet and staring straight into my own eyes. “I will not hurt people. When I think bad thoughts about someone, I will push the thoughts away and say something nice about that person. I will not call people ‘it.’ I will not threaten people. If people threaten me, I will leave the situation.”
I peered deeper into the mirror, searching. Who was staring back? He looked like me, he talked like me, his body moved when I did. I swayed to the right, then left, then back to center; the person in the mirror did the same. This was the thing that terrified me the most—more than the victim, more than the demon, more even than the dark thoughts. It was the fact that the dark thoughts were mine. That I couldn’t separate myself from evil, because most of the evil in my life came from inside my own head.
How long could I live like this? I was trying to be two people—a killer on the inside, and a normal person on the outside. I made such a show of being a good, quiet kid, who never caused problems and never got into trouble, but now the monster was out, and I was actually using him—I was actively seeking out another killer. I’d given in. I was trying to be John and Mr. Monster at the same time.
Was I fooling myself, thinking that I could split my life like this? Was it possible to be two people, one good and one bad, or was I forced to be a mix of both—a good person forever tainted by evil?
My throat grew cold, and I threw up in the sink. I shouldn’t be going out with Brooke—it was dangerous. She was the one thing that Mr. Monster and I both wanted, and that made her the gap in my armor. She was the link between us, and anything that strengthened that link would make Mr. Monster stronger. I could only hope that it would make me stronger as well. I was starting a battle that only one of us could win.
But was Brooke the prize? Or was she the battlefield?
“Hey John!”
Brooke opened her front door quickly; she must have been waiting for my knock. She was dressed in shorts, as usual, even though we were going to be out late. It was supposed to be pretty warm tonight, so she’d probably be fine, but if she got too cold we could hang out by the bonfire. Win-win. Despite the shorts she did have a jacket, though I stopped myself from looking at her shirt, to avoid looking at her chest.
What kind of crazy date would this be, if I didn’t even know what kind of shirt my date was wearing? Was this really as insane as I thought it was? How long would it be before she realized I was crazy? The only thing to do was the thing I always did—fake it.
“Hey Brooke,” I said. “Nice shirt.”
“Thanks,” she said, smiling and glancing down at it. “I figured it was appropriate, since this is kind of a school thing.” I kept my eyes on her hair, which she wore long and loose like a blond waterfall. She looked like a shampoo commercial. I imagined myself washing it, brushing it gently, gently, while she lay still on the table.
I forced the thought out and smiled. “This should be fun. You ready to go?”
“Sure,” she said, and started to pull the door closed, but someone called her from down the hall.
“Brooke?” It was her dad.
“Yeah Dad,” she called back. “John’s here.”
Mr. Watson stepped into the doorway and smiled. “Headed for the bonfire tonight?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, you be careful out there,” he said. “A bunch of kids get together in the middle of the night, you never know when one of them’s going to do something stupid and hurt somebody. But then I suppose my baby’s in good hands with you, right?”
It was frightening how much most people didn’t know about me.
“We’ll be fine,” said Brooke, smiling at me. “Besides,” she said, looking back at her dad, “there’s teachers there too—it’s like a real school activity.”
“I’m sure everything will go fine,” said Mr. Watson. He stepped onto the porch and put a hand on my shoulder, guiding me a few steps to the side. I glanced at Brooke, and she rolled her eyes. “I always imagined what I’d do the first time my daughter went on a date,” he said.
Brooke groaned behind us. “Dad . . .”
“I always kind of imagined myself threatening the boy that took her out, you know? ‘I have a gun and a shovel,’ kind of thing. But I don’t imagine that would really be all that scary to you, after what you’ve been through.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
“The thing is,” he said, facing me directly, “the things you’ve been through recommend you pretty highly for the job. Every time I imagined this in my head, she was hopping on the back of some gangbanger’s Harley and ignoring me as I waved goodbye.”
“Oh my gosh,” said Brooke, turning red and covering her face.
Mr. Watson kept going. “I guess what I’m saying is, given the options, I’m glad she chose the local hero instead.”
What?
“Hero?” I asked.
“And humble to boot,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time—you asked her out, not me. Brooke, you remember the rules?”
“Yes,” she said, turning to go.
“And?”
She rolled her eyes again. “No drinking, no driving fast, home by midnight.”
“And you have your phone?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“And you will call home if . . . ?”
“If we get lost or stuck somewhere.”
“And you will call the police if . . . ?”
“If we see drugs, or if someone starts a fight.”
“Or if he tries to kiss you,” he said. Brooke turned bright red, and Mr. Watson laughed and winked at me. “Hero or not, you’re still out with my baby.”
“Holy crap,” Brooke muttered, grabbing my arm and dragging me toward the car, “let’s get out of here. Bye Dad!”
“Bye Bubba!” he shouted.
“He calls you Bubba?” I asked. Brooke was thin as a rail.
“Baby nickname,” she said, shaking her head, though I could see that she was smiling. We crossed around the car to the passenger side and stood by her door.
And stood by it a while longer.
I realized abruptly that she was waiting for me to open it for her. I glanced at her quickly, then stared at the door. This was her door. One of things I never touched. I glanced at her again, just long enough to see that her eyebrows were scrunching down a bit—she was confused. If I delayed any longer, or if I made her do it, what would she think? She’d seen me look at the door, then back at her—I couldn’t feign ignorance or bad manners at this point, unless I wanted to look like a complete jerk. I reached out my hand and opened the door, imagining as I did all the times her hand had touched the same door, her fingertips pressed against the same handle. When it was unlatched I let go and grabbed the top of the door instead, pulling it open that way.
“Is there something wrong with the handle?” she asked.
“There was a wasp in there earlier,” I said, thinking quickly. “I think it was trying to build a nest.”
“That seems like a weird place,” she said.
“That’s because you’re not a wasp,” I said, holding it open as she sat. “It’s all the rage for wasps these days.”
“And you’re up to date on wasp trends?” she asked, smiling mischievously.
“I read one of their magazines,” I said. “Not mine, of course, I saw it at the barbershop. It was that or Moose Illustrated, and I had to read something.”
Brooke laughed, and I closed her door. How long could I keep this up? It was six o’clock now, and her dad wanted her back by midnight. Six hours?
Trying to look normal when I was one in a crowd was easy. Trying to look normal one-on-one was going to be very hard work.
I went to my door and climbed into the car.
“It’s going to be weird seeing a big fire that you didn’t start,” said Brooke.
I froze. What did she know? What had she seen? Her voice had sounded so casual, but . . . maybe there was some hidden cue underneath that I hadn’t picked up on. Was she accusing me? Was she threatening me?
“What do you mean?” I asked, staring ahead.
“Oh, you know, like the big fires the Crowleys used to have in their backyard, like for neighborhood parties and stuff. You’re always the one who tends those.”
I sighed in relief—literally a sigh, as if I’d been holding my breath without knowing it. She doesn’t know anything. She’s just making small talk.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I started the car and smiled. “I’m great.” I need an excuse quick. What would a normal person say in this situation? Normal people have empathy; they would react to the people in the story, not the fire. “I was just thinking about the Crowleys,” I said. “I wonder if Mrs. Crowley’s still going to have those parties.” I pulled away from the curb and drove toward town.
“Oh!” said Brooke, “I am so sorry; I didn’t mean to bring that up like that. I know you were really close to Mr. Crowley.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I had to force myself to continue—talking to her had been against my rules for so long, it was hard to just speak freely. “Now that he’s gone, I look back and I think I didn’t really know him at all.” Nobody did. Not even his wife.
“I feel the same way,” said Brooke. “I’ve lived here for most of my life, and he lived right there, two doors down, and I didn’t really know him at all. We’d see him at those parties, of course, and trick-or-treating and stuff, but I feel like I should have . . . I don’t know, talked to him more. You know? Like, where was he from, and what was he like as a kid, and stuff like that.”
“I would love to know where he came from,” I said. And if there are more like him.
“I love talking to people and hearing their stories,” said Brooke. “Everyone’s got their own story to tell, and when you sit down with someone and really talk to them, you can learn so much.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but that’s really kind of strange too.” I was starting to fall into a rhythm, where words came more easily.
“Strange?”
“Well—it’s strange to look at people and think that they have a past,” I said. How could I explain what I was trying to say? “I mean, obviously everybody comes from somewhere, but . . .” I pointed to a guy on the side of the street as we passed. “Look at that guy. He’s just some guy, and we see him once, and then he’s gone.”
“Oh, that’s Jake Symons,” said Brooke. “He works with my dad at the wood mill.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “To us he’s like . . . like scenery, in the background of our lives, but for him, he’s the main character. He has a life and a job and a whole story. He’s a real person. And to him, we’re the background scenery. And that guy,” I pointed at another person on the street, “he’s not even looking. He might not notice us at all. We’re the center of our own universes, but we don’t even exist in his.”
“That’s Bryce Parker,” said Brooke, “from the library.”
“Do you know everybody in Clayton,” I asked, “or am I just picking bad examples?”
Brooke laughed. “I go to the library like every week, of course I’m going to know him!”
“So how about that guy?” I pointed at a man mowing his lawn about a hundred feet ahead.
“No, I don’t know him,” said Brooke, staring closely. We drove past him and he turned at the last minute, giving us a clear view of his face, and Brooke laughed out loud. “Okay, okay, I do know him—he’s the guy from Graumman’s Hardware, uh . . . Lance!”
“Lance what?”
“Lance Graumman, I assume,” said Brooke. “It’s a family business.”
“You know a lot more about the hardware store than I would have guessed,” I said.
Brooke laughed again. “We remodeled our upstairs bathroom last summer, and I don’t think we ever bought the right size stuff on the first try. I was in there a lot.”
“That would explain it.” It felt odd talking to her, chatting so freely about nothing. I’d fantasized about her for so long, and forbidden myself to communicate with her in any depth, that even this simple small talk felt powerfully intimate. Intimate and empty at the same time. How could such meaningless drivel feel as if it meant so much?
I turned out of town, on the road toward the lake, and fell into line behind a couple of other cars full of high school kids. I studied the backs of their heads, hoping I could recognize them and show Brooke that I knew other people too, but even though I knew I’d seen them before, I couldn’t think of their names. They were a few years older than us, so I’d never really interacted with them.
“Hey!” said Brooke, “That’s Jessie Beesley! That’s not her boyfriend, though, I wonder what happened there.”
The sun was still high, and I adjusted my shade flap thingy to block it. “You know every single person in town,” I said, “and I don’t even know what this thing is called.”
“It’s the . . .” Brooke grimaced. “The thing that blocks the sun?” She laughed. “What is that thing called? It’s a . . . shade. It’s a blocker. It’s a very small awning.”
“It’s a flat umbrella.”
“You could put lace on it and call it a parasol,” said Brooke. “It would be precious.”
I glanced over and saw she was smirking. I’m pretty good at reading people, for a sociopath, but sarcasm is so hard to identify.
Looking at her, my mind drifted back to her dad’s words, and the trust he had placed in me to take care of her. He’d called me a hero—me, the crazy, death-obsessed sociopath who worked in a mortuary and wrote all his class papers on serial killers. A hero. It stirred up thoughts I’d almost forgotten—I’d been so focused on how to kill the demon, and on the psychological aftermath of actually doing it, that I’d almost forgotten why. I focused so much on “killing the bad guy” that “saving the good guys” had been pushed aside and forgotten.
But nobody knew I’d killed a demon. Even Mom did her best to forget what little she understood about the real story behind that night in January. All Mr. Watson knew was that I had been outside that night, that I’d moved Dr. Neblin’s body, and that I’d called the police. Was that enough?
“I wonder what food they’ve got,” said Brooke, and I realized suddenly that my thoughts had left a void of silence in the car. “I assume it’ll be hot dogs; I don’t know what else you’d eat at a bonfire.”
Crap. It hadn’t occurred to me that the food would probably be meat. What was I going to eat?
Just say something, I told myself. “They might have s’mores.” It was all I could think of. “Those are good bonfire food. Also squirrels, with very poor senses of direction or self-preservation.”
Brooke laughed again. “That would have to be a really mixed-up squirrel to just wander into a bonfire.”
“Or a really cold one.”
“They could just build the fire on top of a gopher hole,” said Brooke, “and then they could pop out pre-cooked, like a vending machine.”
Wow. Did she really just make that joke?
“Sorry,” said Brooke, “that was kind of gross.”
I looked at her with new eyes, watching her as she talked. She glanced over at me and smiled. Did she think I was a hero?
Did she think I was good?
We pulled off the road at the end of a long line of cars—there was a field up ahead, of sorts, where big groups could park for parties by the lake, but the Bonfire always drew a massive crowd, and the sparse parking was overflowing by nearly half a mile. As we walked toward the party I looked at each person we passed—other students that I’d known for years—as if seeing them for the first time. Did this one think I was a hero? Did that one? It was the first time in my life that I’d assumed people were thinking good things about me, rather than bad ones, and I wasn’t sure what to think.
But I liked it.
“I love this smell,” said Brooke, walking with her hands in her jacket pockets. “That cool breeze off the lake, mixed with the smoke from the fire and the green from the trees.”
“The green?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “I love that green smell.”
“Green isn’t a smell,” I said, “it’s a color.”
“Well, yeah, but . . . don’t you know that smell? Trees and reeds and grass sometimes just smell . . . green.”
“I can’t say that I’m familiar with the smell of green,” I said.
“There’s Marci,” she said, “let’s ask her.”
I looked where Brooke was pointing and immediately looked away; Marci was wearing a low cut tank top that practically screamed ‘look at these!’ I watched Brooke’s feet as she hurried to meet her, keeping my gaze down—just because I was breaking a few of my rules to be with Brooke didn’t mean I was going to throw caution to the wind and break them all. Looking at a girl’s chest was strictly prohibited.
“Brooke!” shouted Marci. “Lookin’ hot! I love the shirt.”
Man, I really wanted to know what her shirt looked like.
“Good to see you,” said Brooke.
“And John,” said Marci. “I didn’t expect to see you here, that’s awesome.”
“Thanks,” I said, staring at her feet. Then, because I didn’t want to seem like a freak, I glanced up—first at Brooke’s face, then at Marci’s. Her line of cleavage was prominent in my peripheral vision, and I looked out across the lake. “Nice night.”
“You gotta answer this question,” said Brooke. “Do trees smell green?”
“What?” asked Marci, laughing.
“Green!” said Brooke. “The trees here smell green.”
“You are insane,” said Marci.
“Who’s insane?” asked Rachel Morris, joining the group. I smiled at her politely, grateful that she was dressed more modestly than her friend.
“Brooke says the trees smell green,” said Marci, struggling not to laugh out loud.
“Totally,” said Rachel, nodding her head. “This whole place smells green—and a little brown, because of the smoke.”
“Exactly!” cried Brooke.
“Can you believe these two?” asked Marci, looking at me. I focused on her ear, trying not to look at anything else.
“Must be a shared delusion,” I said, then stopped myself before getting any deeper into a psychological hypothesis. That was probably not the kind of small talk that would go over well in this crowd.
It felt strange to be talking to Marci—partly because of the way she was dressed, but mostly because of the simple fact that we didn’t know each other well. Just like the people in the car ahead of us, Marci was someone that I “knew,” in theory, but in practice we had never really talked or interacted. I glanced around quickly at the mass of teenagers, all people I had grown up with, but with whom I’d had virtually no direct contact—no shared experience. It seemed unbelievable that we could have been born and raised in the same small town, going to the same schools in the same grade year after year, and yet we’d never really had a conversation. Max would have been delighted to talk to Marci—and to ogle her—but I was more bothered than anything else. My life had been just fine without all of these extra people in it.
“Can you smell other colors?” asked Marci, folding her arms for a mock interrogation of Brooke and Rachel.
“It’s not the color,” said Brooke, “it’s the trees. Green’s just a good word to describe what a tree smells like when it turns green.”
“It’s like spring,” said Rachel, “except ‘springy’ sounds dumb.”
“And ‘green’ sounds totally normal,” said Marci. “Uh huh.”
The breeze off the lake was cool, and I could see goose bumps on Marci’s arms. Before I could stop them, my eyes wandered to Brooke’s legs; they had goose bumps too.
“Why don’t we head toward the fire?” I asked. Brooke nodded, and Marci and Rachel followed us through the loose crowd of people. The bonfire itself was visible through the trees ahead, a rough parabola of orange flame, though the sky was still too light for the fire to really stand out. The forest here was sparse and patchy, with more scrub than trees, and the fire itself had been made in a large, round clearing just a few dozen feet off the road. As we drew near I could see that the party organizers, whoever they were, had spared no expense on the fire—there were huge logs in its heart, and stacks of cordwood and split logs waited in the background, piled high against the trees. In the fire wood cracked and split, sap popping and hissing at the center, and behind it all was the dull static roar of oxygen being sucked into the center of the greedy flames. It was talking to me.
“Hello,” I whispered, answering back. I stepped closer, holding out my hands to probe the heat. Just right in some places, but too cool in others and too hot at the peak. The structure at the base was more open than it needed to be; the fire would be hot and powerful, but it would burn itself out too quickly. Logs like that could last all night if you set them carefully and tended them just so with the other pieces of wood.
There didn’t seem to be anybody in particular in charge of the fire. There was a five-foot branch with a blackened tip laying just to the side, which I assumed had been used to poke and position the wood, so I picked it up and adjusted the blaze; knock this piece down, stand that piece up. A fire could tell you what it needed, if you knew how to listen. I felt the heat; I listened to the growl of the air; I watched the lines of brilliant white heat on the surface of the wood, shining out as if something radiant and perfect were stretching out from within, ready to be born into a dull and lifeless world. Another tweak, another push.
Perfect.
A split log sailed past me in a tight arc, crashing into the fire and making it flare up with a roar.
“Yeah!” Someone screamed beside me, a thick senior with close-cropped hair and a meaty red face. “Let’s get this fire going!”
“You’ll get a better flame if you . . .” I tried to talk to him, but he turned and shouted to someone.
“Clayton Crusaders!”
Several voices hollered back, and he shook his fists triumphantly in the sky before heading back for more wood.
“It works better if you plan it out,” I said, mostly to myself. I turned back to the fire and poked it again, trying to repair some of the damage, when a second log crashed into the middle, then a third.
“Clayton Crusaders!”
“You know,” said Marci, standing next to me, “some things you just can’t plan.” I looked at her quickly, surprised, and she smiled. “You know?”
Where had she come from? I’d been so caught up in the fire I’d lost track of the girls completely.
“No hot dogs yet,” said Brooke, walking over from somewhere. “They’re not breaking out the food til around 6:30. Wanna hit the lake?”
“Well I’m definitely not going in,” said Marci, “but I wouldn’t mind taking a look.” The three girls started walking away, then stopped and looked back.
“Are you coming?” asked Brooke.
But . . . there’s a fire.
I looked back at the bonfire, still strong and powerful despite the chaos from the new logs. I didn’t need the fire; I was here for Brooke.
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll be back at 6:30 anyway, right?” I put down the branch and walked toward them.
“Thanks,” said Rachel. “We need our brave protector.”
“No kidding,” said Marci. “With all these dead women they’re finding, even a huge group like this gives me the creeps.”
There it is again: John the brave. How many people see me as some kind of hero? And how did I go so long without noticing?
“We used to come out here to go fishing,” said Brooke, watching the clear line of water emerge through the thinning trees. The sky was still light, but muted, and the lake reflected the clear blue of the sky like the bottom half of a giant, lacquered shell. We stopped on a low ridge where the trees parted and the ground turned down sharply to the glassy lake beyond. Brooke stepped up onto a sharp rock to get a better view, teetered for a moment, then put her hand on my shoulder for stability. It felt electric, like a sudden surge of energy flowing in at the point of contact. I pretended to stare out at the water, but my whole being seemed focused on Brooke’s hand.
“It’s beautiful,” said Rachel.
A couple of guys splashed by in wet shorts and T-shirts, hip-deep in the water.
“Come on in!” they shouted at us, though I had a feeling they were thinking more about the girls than about me. The girls ignored them, so I did the same. The guys saw another group up the shore and slogged toward them through the reeds, leaving us alone again.
Brooke sighed. “What are you guys gonna do?”
“Just hang around, I guess,” said Marci. “See who shows up; see who’s with who.”
“Did you see Jessie Beesley?” asked Rachel. “I wonder what happened to Mark.”
“Not that,” said Brooke, “I mean, what are you gonna do with your lives? With the future?”
Marci laughed. “You’re very cute when you’re deep, Brooke.”
“What, you don’t have dreams?” asked Brooke.
“Oh, I’ve got dreams,” said Marci, “believe me. And they have nothing to do with Clayton County.”
“I’m getting out of here so fast,” said Rachel. “A town with only one movie theater barely counts as civilization.”
I stared at the lake, remembering the dead body the demon had sunk below the ice in November.
“Are you going anywhere specific?” I asked. “Or just running away from here?”
“College,” said Brooke. “Travel. The world.”
“Nobody wants to stay here,” said Rachel.
“I don’t mind the summers,” said Marci. “But sometimes I wonder how we got here in the first place.”
“The logging industry,” I said.
“Yeah, but why us?” asked Marci. “Why are we here and not somewhere else?”
“It’s not that bad,” said Brooke.
“It’s worse,” said Rachel.
“Who were the first ones?” asked Marci, staring at the lake. “Are we all just children of children of mill workers, who grew up and lost their dreams and got stuck forever? Somebody came here first, when there was nothing else, and they built a city in the middle of nowhere and made money out of nothing and they did it.” She looked up at the sky. “I guess I just don’t understand, if that’s the kind of people we come from, why we all just sit here doing nothing.”
Rachel opened her mouth to answer, but a shriek cut her off—loud and piercing, and just up the shore. We spun around to look, Brooke tightening her grip on my shoulder, and saw the two guys from before splashing frantically out of the water. The group of girls they’d been flirting with was backing up in terror, and now all of them were screaming. Brooke jumped down and ran toward them, and I followed close behind.
“She’s dead!” someone shouted. “She’s dead!”
More people were coming now, from all around through the trees. It looked like the group by the shore was backing away from a wild animal, like they were afraid of being bitten, but as we drew closer I could see what they’d been screaming about—there was a rotted log half in and half out of the water, surrounded with reeds, and poking out from beneath it was a human arm and hand.
“Call the police!”
“She’s dead!”
“I’m going to be sick!”
As soon as we saw the hand Brooke stopped, hanging back, but I kept moving forward. When I reached the line of retreating students I paused, wary, then made up my mind and broke through to the inner circle. It was just me and the hand.
It was a woman’s hand, her body floating just below the surface and hidden in the reeds. Somehow they’d jostled the log and dislodged her, and the arm had popped out into the air. Her hand was poking up, twisted like a claw; her chipped, broken nails were painted bright red.
It’s the new killer, I thought.
There was a voice behind me, deep—a man’s voice. It seemed to echo through a vast, empty room.
“What do we do?”
I had to see it; I had to know if it was covered with the same little wounds as the others. “She might be alive,” I said, splashing into the lake. “We’ve got to check.” The exposed hand was soggy and covered with flecks of mud and rotten wood; there was no way she was alive. “We’ve got to pull her out.”
There was another splash behind me, faint and distant. It was hard to hear with my own heartbeat suddenly roaring in my ears.
I grabbed the arm and pulled; it shifted, but it was heavier than I expected. Another pair of hands, rough and old, reached in next to me and we pulled again. The body shifted and the arm rose further out of the water, stiff and pale.
“It’s been weighted down,” I said.
“She’s pinned under the tree.”
“No,” I said, “the body slides too easily to be pinned. Don’t try to pull up, just drag it sideways toward the shore.” We pulled together, dragging the body into shallow water where it could float closer to the surface. It was indeed a woman’s body, stark white and naked except for a few bright nylon cords. The nakedness didn’t bother me—dead bodies never did. I pulled on one of the cords, lightly at first, then harder as I tested the resistance. It was very heavy. With two hands I heaved it up and found a cinder block tied to the other end.
I looked at the person helping me. It was Mr. Verner, the social studies teacher.
“Someone weighted it down,” I said again. The shore behind him was lined with students and other teachers, many of them turned away from the dead woman bobbing in the water. Beyond them I could see the bonfire raging, distant and bright.
“What do we do?” asked Mr. Verner again. Of course he was asking me; I knew more about this situation than anyone here. Did they know that? Was I revealing something secret?
“Call the police,” I said. “Call Agent Forman of the FBI; he has an office in the police department.”
I looked again at the body, twisted like a sculpture. Her limbs were stiff and crooked. “This is rigor mortis,” I said. “It means it’s only been dead a few hours, maybe a couple of days at the most.” There were red marks on the wrists, and cuts and blisters on the chest and back, just like what we’d heard about the other bodies. “Did you call Agent Forman?”
Mr. Verner shouted to the shore. “Who has a phone?”
Rachel waved her hand and pointed at Marci, standing next to her with her cell phone to her ear. “She’s on the phone with her dad,” said Rachel. Marci’s dad was a policeman. I looked at them, more directly now than I had all night, then looked back at the dead body, bobbing obscenely in the wavelets coming off the lake. It shouldn’t be easier to look at it than at the girls, but it was.
In my peripheral vision teachers were herding the students away, and someone was bringing a blanket. Mr. Verner waded over to get it, then brought it back and draped it over the body.
“Come in to shore,” he said, putting a hand on my arm.
I stumbled in, leaving the body in the water. The party had become a loose web of chaos, with some students pulling back, others dumbstruck and motionless, and still others crowding forward for a better view. Teachers were trying uncertainly to herd them in a knot of different directions.
Brooke met me at the top of the ridge, white as a corpse. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Do you have your phone?”
She nodded mutely and fished it out of her pocket. I dialed Agent Forman’s cell number and sat stiffly on the ground, breathing slowly.
“This is Forman,” said the voice on the other end, crisp and direct. There were sirens in the background.
“You’re already on your way,” I said.
“Dammit John, are you tied up in this?”
“Rigor mortis,” I told him, “fully rigid. That means at least twelve hours, maybe more. The lake’s pretty cool and that might have slowed it down.”
“What are you doing, John?” Forman asked. “You’re not a cop; you’re not an investigator.” He paused. “And yet you’re always the one who finds the bodies first.”
“Someone else found it,” I said, closing my eyes. I could see the contorted body in my mind, stippled with angry red blisters. Had she been burned? “I’m just here by coincidence, Forman. The entire school is here, and everyone in town has known for weeks that we would be. If he left the body here recently, right here by the bonfire, he knew we’d find it. I think he wanted us to find it.”
“Who’s ‘he’?” asked Forman.
“The guy who killed it,” I said. Was it a man or a demon? “There’s no missing body parts,” I said, staggering to my feet, “and no major lacerations that I could see. I’m going to look again.”
“No, John, leave it—”
Before he could finish something hit me from behind, slamming me between the shoulders, and I tumbled to the ground. I rolled onto my back and looked up: it was Rob Anders.
“What is wrong with you?” he said. “You dive in there like it’s Christmas morning, you haul her right out where everyone can see her, you know the damn FBI agent’s phone number by memory—”
“What?” I asked, shaking my head.
“Nobody innocent acts the way you act,” he said. “Nobody normal knows the things you know. What’s all that crap about rigor mortis?”
He was shouting, red-faced, waving his arms. He was far angrier than I would have expected. Why is he so upset? Think, John, think like a person with empathy. Maybe he has a connection to the victim.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“What kind of a sick question is that, you freak?”
“Leave him alone, Rob,” said Brooke, stepping in to help me to my feet. Rob shoved her away, knocking her to the ground—
—and I snapped.
I leapt up at Rob, taking him by surprise and knocking him down, pinning him under me. I’d never been in a fight—not with anyone who could fight back, at least—but I’d knocked the wind out of him, which gave me a moment to raise my fists and slam them clumsily into the top of his head. He swung a punch that hit me right in the eye and knocked me off the side. I staggered to my feet, ready for another swing, but Mr. Verner and another teacher were already there, pulling us apart.
“It’s okay,” said Brooke, pulling me back, “he’s just a jerk, just ignore him.”
I turned to face her, realizing what I’d done: she’d been threatened, and instead of trying to help her I had attacked the assailant. Just like I did with the demon. I didn’t even help her stand up.
What’s the right answer? I thought. When do you help the good guys, and when do you stop the bad guys? I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know which one I am.
I felt light-headed and sat down, finding Brooke’s phone on the ground where it had been knocked out of my hand.
“He’s a part of this,” Rob was saying, arguing with Mr. Verner as he pulled him away. “He’s a sick freak. He might even be the killer!”
I held the phone to my ear; Forman had already hung up.
“Call your dad,” I said, handing Brooke the phone. “Tell him you’ll be home late. This is going to take a while.”