Chapter Four

Two weeks later, Gene pronounced Jonathan and Mary husband and wife as Conner and Michael, dressed in tuxedos, watched on, standing beside him like sentries. Mary’s eyes lit up when Jonathan said, “I do.” His heart was consumed with guilt when she slid the ring on his finger.

They panicked the night Gene shot that boy. They were drunk. It was pitch black – not even a moon – and they were in the middle of nowhere, living out every hunter’s worst nightmare. The whole Gulch was filled with movement and they were terrified. Looking back, Jonathan wasn’t sure what he’d been more terrified of – the fact they’d just killed a child or that someone might be there in the woods who’d witnessed it. But the sound was too great to be any one person – it was like a fast-moving river and the four of them a small rock in the middle.

Gene was still crying, pulling at the boy, trying to revive him, trying to check him for a pulse until Michael decided to end the lunacy and dragged him away from the body like a man handling a small dog.

“Where did he even come from? What the hell is he doing out here?” Michael was screaming, raising his voice over the din of Gene’s breakdown.

Conner was talking about calling 911 and what to tell them. “It was an accident! We saw the eyes!”

“Those eyes were eight feet off the ground! A kid’s eyes don’t light up! It was a moose or something, it had to be!” Gene sat on bloody grass, rocking back and forth, his voice trembling “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. It’s not right. It can’t be…”

Jonathan stood staring down at the boy with a star-shaped crater where his eye should be. Michael searched the tree line and the creek bed with the spotlight, trying to find where the boy had come from and what he was doing there. Conner weighed the possibilities, how this might all turn out.

The boy was dead. There was no one else in Coombs’ Gulch. Michael searched high and low that night, but there were no other people, campers, hunters – nothing.

And there was nothing that would bring the boy back from the dead. Involving the authorities, at this point, would be futile. Decisions had to be made. There was no life to save other than their own. It would be irrational and unreasonable to ruin their lives and futures by going public with the accident. No good could come of it.

“We would be on the hook for murder, manslaughter, whatever it might be, but it would certainly mean careers ending, relationships ending, public shame and prison.” Conner was exasperated, his voice growing louder with each breath. “And why should we have to face that? Where are this kid’s parents? What the fuck is he doing out here in the freezing night miles and miles from the nearest town? We saw the eyes in the spotlight! It was a clean shot! Where the fuck is the goddamned deer?”

The world would have no sympathy for them. It isn’t just hunters who shoot to kill; courts and newspapers can sometimes do worse than a gun. Gene was still too distraught to think, but Jonathan, Conner and Michael stood in the night staring at each other and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this accident would ruin their lives. There was no one else for miles around. It was the middle of the night and they were alone. It seemed the best thing for everybody.

“This is the only way we’ll still get to live our lives,” Conner said.

“It’s not our fault,” Michael said.

“What would Mary say?” Jonathan said.

“Mary isn’t going to know. Two weeks from now, you’ll get married and go on to live your life the way you’re supposed to. This is a fucking fluke. It’s not our fault. What is he even doing out here?”

“Don’t they always say the cover-up is worse than the crime?”

“Not this time,” Michael said. “And only if you get caught.”

Michael and Conner hiked back to the cabin while Jonathan waited with Gene, who had now gone silent, sitting in the tall grass, wet with the boy’s blood and cold condensation. They returned with a thick, airtight plastic trunk from Conner’s truck, a military-grade storage container meant to keep gear outdoors for long periods of time, immune to water, rot or rust. They brought shovels and a pickaxe from Bill Flood’s barn. It was two in the morning and freezing, but they were sweating, digging, chopping through the stony soil, digging deep enough that it wouldn’t be found. The sealed trunk ensured bears couldn’t smell the body or that a wayward hunting dog wouldn’t bring a boy’s desiccated hand back to his owner instead of a turkey. They laid the boy in the trunk, bending him into a fetal position so he fit. Conner locked and sealed it, and together they dropped the trunk into the ground beside the massive wild raisin bush where they found him.

The work took all night and by the end they were dead tired, dazed and no less guilty.

It was all for nothing, Jonathan thought. Here he was now, sitting before Conner and Michael in the East Side Tavern, his childhood friend dead, his own life in shambles under the burden of that one night, and now he was being told he had to go back and relive it – to dig it all back up.

A tree falling in the forest may or may not make a sound, but the death of a child reverberates the world over with or without a witness.

Jonathan felt the world drop out from beneath him. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s too much. I don’t think I can do this.”

“They’re going to be clearing out the forest and digging up the ground,” Michael said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“I can’t, it won’t matter.”

“It will matter,” Conner said. “Everything we have now, our families, our lives, will be gone. It’s still out there, and they will find it, and it will be all too easy for the cops to figure out who it was.”

For years afterward, Jonathan had scanned missing person reports, news sites, online databases, anything he could find for a sign of the boy they buried in a box in the woods. He was sure the others had as well, trying to see if and when the axe would fall. He combed through the seemingly inexhaustible lists of the missing, the vanished, the ones who had been given up on by all but their parents, and even the parents – grown so weary of the search and not knowing – were relegated out of news reports to poor webpages where their child was nothing more than a needle in a haystack of other special and forgotten children. He looked through them for years. He pictured each boy with a giant star-shaped cavity in his face, and each time that horror anchored his guilt. There were plenty of boys who resembled the boy in the woods, but the details were all wrong; a kid who goes missing in Colorado probably has little chance of showing up in the middle of Coombs’ Gulch near the Canadian border. Not impossible, but not likely.

But even more convincing than the lack of any picture, and without any bit of rationality, was that none of them felt right; there was not that blazing moment of recognition where the ancient, evolutionary part of the brain that puts faces together cries out and says, “That’s him.” Even though Jonathan couldn’t quite be sure of his features, there was something inside him that screamed he would know the boy when he saw him. It was the same something that made him shake his head when he gazed upon some other black-haired boy who wandered away from home never to be seen again.

Despite years of searching, there was no record of a similar-looking boy missing in that area. No reports of pleading and terrified parents. No news stories of a body being uncovered in a remote part of the Adirondacks. It was as if he’d never existed, and in one way it was a relief, but in another, more tragic way, it was worse. Had no one cared enough to look for him? Was he a tortured creature totally alone in the wilderness? Jonathan eventually gave up the search. After this long, if there was no sign of him in the world, there probably never would be.

It made him question his sanity, whether the incident that night had even occurred, whether they had somehow all just imagined it together – one drunken, shared hallucination.

But no. That was impossible. The gunshot was deafening. The eyes in the night were bright yellow. The steam rose from the bloodied hole in his eye socket and curled in the night air. He could remember the goddamned smell of it. Jonathan’s life was a spent shell of what it should have been, and Gene was dead by his own hand – a rifle shot under the chin. It was all too real to have been imagined.

“There’s never been any report,” Jonathan said.

“You think we don’t know that?” Conner said.

“It won’t matter once they find it,” Michael said. “We don’t know for sure there hasn’t been a report, and it won’t matter. Once they find it they’ll have to investigate. They’ll figure out cause and approximate time of death, and the first goddamned person they’re going to ask is Bill Flood. It will probably take them a week before they’re knocking on our doors.”

“I just don’t think I can go back there,” Jonathan said.

Michael turned his head away, sighing with frustration, perhaps disgust.

“This is not about us,” Conner said. “It’s about Mary and Jacob. It’s about Madison and Aria.” Conner looked at Michael. “It’s about Annie and the family you’re trying to have. This blows open and our lives are over. Maybe we were wrong with what we did, but admitting to it now would just be worse. We owe it to the people we love to make sure this is gone forever.”

Conner was speaking in platitudes, Jonathan thought. Ripping lines he’d heard countless times in made-for-television movies or paperback thrillers. It made the whole notion of it more unreal, as if it were all scripted and they were just reading their lines. He had no choice but to continue. The show must go on.

Michael’s eyes were dead serious with a glaze of ice over them. “You don’t have to convince me.”

Jonathan said nothing but stood and went to the bar for another pitcher of beer. He slugged down a rocks glassful of Canadian Club while he was there.

The bartender eyed him. “You okay?”

“No.” He took the beer and sat back down at the table. He looked at Conner and Michael. “So what are you suggesting?”

Conner, realizing that he was finally reeling Jonathan toward this terrible shore of reality, held his hands up in a calm, stabilizing manner – likely taught to him by Human Resources. “We just have to go up and move the trunk,” he said. “I’ve already arranged to rent the cabin again from Bill Flood.”

“Jesus. He’s still alive?” Jonathan said.

“Yes. And that’s part of the problem. Any records he has will have us on them at the same time that kid went missing. Plus, he’s got a mind like a steel trap. Remembered everything about us when I called. One of those old guys who can’t find his way home, but remembers everything about you. He’s selling his land to the developers. This is the last shot we have at this before they break ground and start digging in the spring. We just go up there like we’re going hunting again, dig up the box and move it somewhere no one will ever find it.”

“What makes you think we can even find it once we’re up there?” Jonathan said.

“Have you forgotten where it is?” Michael said.

Jonathan looked down at his drink. “No, no, I haven’t.” Then, “Where do we move it?”

“There’s a lake on the other side of the western ridge,” Conner said. “Part of the deal for the roadway and the developers was that section of forest would be preserved indefinitely. The lake there is deep, two hundred feet, easy. Made from an old glacier back in the ice age. It’s even more remote than Coombs’ Gulch.”

“How far?”

“Seven miles.”

“Seven miles? Are you kidding me? Hauling that thing through that terrain?”

“We put some holes in the trunk, load it with rocks, take it out to the center of the lake and sink it. It’ll never be found.”

“It,” Jonathan said.

“That’s the best I can do. I don’t know what to call…whatever. That’s the plan. It would probably be a two-day hike, considering the gear. We’ll need a raft to get the trunk to the deepest part of the lake. After that we haul ass back to the cabin and just…just forget about it.”

“This is so wrong,” Jonathan said.

“It’s been wrong since the beginning,” Michael said. “Wrong would be letting it ruin everyone else’s life besides our own. This is the best we’ve got.”

There it was, Jonathan thought, the same excuse used around the world for centuries to justify every lying, cheating and murderous man of means or politician to cover up his crime after the fact. But they weren’t even men of means; they were just three losers sitting in a bar, trying to eke out a middle-class existence. Their downfall would ruin the lives of the people they loved. For everyone else it would be a quick headline in the newspaper.

But still, the thought of Mary or Jacob knowing what he did – and subsequently who he truly was – meant he had to do it. Exposing his soul terrified him more than any prison sentence and more than any seven-mile hike, hauling the remains of his life over a mountain so it could sink to the bottom of a lake. Jonathan realized just then that he was the most frightening thing he’d ever encountered. He thought suddenly of that night in the strip club, of stumbling hand in hand with a dancer and catching a glimpse of a pathetic and evil creature in the mirror. Since that night in Coombs’ Gulch, he had lived with that mirror image; it was horrible and twisted and inescapable. He was no longer sure which version of himself was true, but he didn’t want to gaze upon it anymore and never wanted his wife and child to see it – ever.

“No one else will be up there?” he asked.

“According to Bill, no one has been up there for years. Hunting went to shit. Place is all dried up. He even tried to convince me not to waste the money because the animals had all cleared out. I told him we just wanted to get away, old times’ sake.”

Jonathan looked at the Braddick brothers across the table, both of them staring back in unison like a pair of snakes, entrancing him with their eyes.

“How long have you been planning this?”

“I found out six months ago,” Conner said.

“And you’re just telling me now?”

“We didn’t think you’d say yes until now.”

Jonathan slowly moved his finger around the rim of his beer. “Did Gene know?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear them say it. He looked back and forth between the two brothers.

Conner sighed. “We told him last week. We thought he could help convince you.”

Jonathan stared at them. “You’re the reason he’s dead. The two of you. You fucking killed him.”

“No,” Conner said. “Gene killed himself when he pulled the trigger and if we don’t fix this it will kill the rest of us, too.”

Jonathan drove the short distance home that night drunk, the heavy, impenetrable darkness of a moonless night surrounding his car – the lone beacon of light on the roads. There were no streetlights in their small town; the setting sun plunged the area into darkness. He turned into his wooded neighborhood and it seemed abandoned, every house light off, everyone unconscious in their sleep, a whole world slumbering away, blinked out of existence. Up ahead – just beyond the cone of his headlights – some animal trundled across the street and looked up at his encroaching vehicle. Its eyes shone two spectral, glowing circles in the night before it scurried into the underbrush. The truncated lope told him it was a large raccoon, but in his dreamlike state of fear and drunkenness, he pictured it as a skinny, naked child demonically galloping across the roadway in a horrifying animal pantomime. Jonathan wondered, deep in the reaches of his most delusional suspicions, what had truly happened that night in Coombs’ Gulch. All of it – the terror, the fear, the shame, the years of searching – made him question the very facts of the night that ruined his life.

Jonathan unlocked the door and walked into a silent house, both Mary and Jacob asleep. He walked upstairs to change and pass out in bed. He saw Mary breathing lightly beneath the sheets. Beside her a smaller figure, curled into a ball and tucked back into her belly. Seeing them there together in a symbiotic-like unity made him feel achingly alone, as if he had no part in Jacob’s creation. No. He was meant only for destruction. Perhaps that is all men are good for, he thought, tearing down, blood, death. Perhaps that served a purpose, but it was not the purpose he glimpsed while watching Mary and Jacob curled together, breathing in unison.

He took some blankets from a wicker bin in the living room and fell asleep on the couch.