Chapter 5

 

 

 

A day later, Debbie told me that Matt Visser had been asking her if it was true that I’d seen the dead girl.

Every neighborhood has an obligatory weird kid, and Matthew Visser was ours. Nobody knew what had happened to his mother; we only knew that Matt lived with his father, and spent a lot of time alone because his dad was always working. 

Matt was a smart kid—he’d tested insanely high on his IQ test—but he had a mean streak. I wondered sometime if his dad beat on him, and Matt carried it on down the line and abused other kids. He had this toy that heated up and could cook little rubber monsters, and he loved to try to lure the unwary into touching the burning-hot surface. He’d fry ants with a magnifying glass on summer days or put dead cockroaches on a girl’s chair at school. He’d spent more time in the principal’s office than anyone else in school. You’d think Debbie and I would have avoided him like the plague.

But we didn’t. Maybe it was because he lived two houses down from me, and we’d all grown up together, or maybe Debbie and I secretly felt sorry for him, because he didn’t have a mother or siblings, and we seemed to be his only friends.

Debbie thought it would be fun to go tell Matt about my encounter with a corpse, so we went to see him.

We knocked on his front door, and after a few seconds he answered. “Oh, hi, you guys,” he said, regardless of our gender. “Hey, you gotta come see this – I’ve got something really great to show you.”

Matt had dried blood on his white T-shirt.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Yeah…why?”

“Is that blood on your shirt?”

He stopped in the kitchen doorway and glanced down. “Oh, yeah, I guess it is. S’okay, though—it’s not mine. Now c’mere.”

We followed him into the kitchen. I noticed the smell—foul and musky—before I saw what was on the kitchen table.

Matt had laid out some kind of animal there. It was dead (from the smell I was guessing it’d been dead for a while), but it was so badly mangled it was at first hard to make out what it’d been. Then I saw the big, fluffy tail, and I guessed we were looking at a squirrel that’d been hit by a car.

“God, Matt, that’s gross,” Debbie said, grimacing.

Debbie was putting it mildly: this was weird even for Matt. “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

“Found it this morning in the gutter over on Camino Real.” He stuck a finger in the thing’s split side, and something bluish-grey poked through the matted fur. “You think that’s the liver?”

“I don’t think you should touch it,” I said.

He looked at me with surprise. “I thought you liked dead bodies.”

“No, I don’t, and why would you think that?”

“You found Mary Ann Wilson, didn’t you?”

“No, my brother did.”

I didn’t like the way Matt’s eyes were glistening—he reminded me of a rabid dog. “But you saw her, didn’t you?”

“Well…yeah…but there’s a big difference between seeing something and liking it.”

Matt shrugged. “If you say so. Hey, want some ice cream?”

The idea of eating anything near that rotting little carcass made me nauseous. Something was really wrong with Matt, and I was starting to think leaving sounded like a great idea.

Debbie wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily, though. “What’s your dad going to say when he comes home and finds this mess all over the kitchen table?”

Matt stuck a finger in the squirrel again. “Maybe Dad’s not coming home.”

I started for the front door. “C’mon, Debbie…”

She followed me but couldn’t resist a final jab. “Yeah, let’s leave Doctor Frankenstein here to creating his perfect bride.” But Matt wasn’t listening; he was too busy poking through the squirrel’s innards with that grimy finger.

When we got outside, I stood on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what bothered me. It took me a second, but I finally got it: Matt’s dad’s car was parked in the driveway.

I knew then we’d never see Mr. Visser again. At least not alive.