Death Falls. Todd Ritter
In order to sell the place, he’d have to clear the whole thing out, including Charlie’s room. If there was something inside that could help the investigation, that was even more reason to search it.
“No time like the present,” he told the phone. It responded with silence.
He trudged upstairs and stopped in front of Charlie’s room. Unlike the rest of the doors in the house, which had been replaced over the years, this one was an original. Brass doorknob. Old-style keyhole. Although he knew the door was locked, Eric tried the handle anyway. It barely turned. In order to open it, he’d need one of two things—a key or a crowbar. Mitch Gracey would have gone straight for the crowbar. Eric opted for the key.
Wherever that was.
Before his mother’s death, little had been done in terms of planning. Other than the instructions in her will, Maggie did nothing to ensure Eric knew what to do when she was gone. Some of it, like learning when bills had to be paid, he had picked up easily. Other bits, such as knowing where the key to Charlie’s room was hidden, had eluded him.
He started the search in his mother’s room, rooting through her dresser and closet shelves. Then it was on to the kitchen, where every open drawer yielded only utensils, household minutiae, and Betty Crocker recipes.
Eric decided the next place to look would be the only spot in the house where he knew there was a visible trace of his brother—the basement.
Creaking down the stairs, he saw that little had changed there since he was a snooping kid. It was still strewn with dust-encrusted junk. Crates sitting upon boxes sitting upon chests. An array of appliances that spanned decades. And books. Stacks of them, some almost as tall as Eric herself.
Cutting a swath through all the debris was a foot-wide path that led to the furnace. Eric followed it to the end before he turned left. With his back pressed against the wall, he had just enough room to skirt past the bulk of the more recent junk and reach a section of old junk.
He cleared a space on the floor and sat down next to an eight-millimeter film projector he never knew his mother owned and sifted through box after box. Each one unearthed a long-neglected memory—Halloween decorations, mothballed clothes, Christmas ornaments that tapered into silvery points and had once seemed as delicate as stained glass. After an hour of searching, he opened a box and saw his brother staring back at him.
Eric recognized it instantly as a school picture. His own class portraits had been taken in front of the same blue background at Perry Hollow Elementary School. In the photo, Charlie looked uncertain. He was smiling, yes, but it was slightly crooked, with a hint of sadness at the edges. Eric saw the same sadness in Charlie’s eyes. He looked like a boy who knew he didn’t have many class pictures left.
There were more school photos beneath it, each one taken a year earlier than the one before and showing Charlie getting younger in a distinctly Benjamin Button–like fashion. There were pictures of him at Christmas. Blowing out candles on a birthday cake. Posing one Easter in a powder blue suit that Eric would have torn off had he been stuffed into it.
Below that was a photograph of Charlie holding a baby in his lap. The baby, Eric realized, was him when he was only a few months old. He and his brother were on the brown couch his mother had kept until 1982. Charlie looked at the camera, beaming, as Eric wriggled in his arms. Charlie looked so happy then. Eric saw that he did, too. It reminded him that although he had grown up an only child, he once had a brother, and it might have been nice to grow up that way, too.
There was one more photograph in the box. So many years there had left it flattened facedown against the bottom. When Eric pried it up, he saw it was a picture of his parents standing on a beach. His father wore a crisp white T-shirt and dark shorts. His mother had on a two-piece bathing suit. Both of them grinned madly for the camera.
Also in the photo were a man and woman Eric had never seen before. The man had a deep tan, slicked-back hair, and a devil-may-care smile. The woman wore a flowing white dress that fluttered in the breeze. Eric had no idea who they were. Friends of his parents, he assumed. He also had no clue when the picture was taken—certainly years before he, or even Charlie, were born—and he was struck by the sight of his parents in their youth. His mother had been so beautiful then, with a smile brighter and wider than any he had ever seen. His father, too, was good-looking—strong and handsome, with the confidence of someone who had yet to be defeated by life’s disappointments.
After studying the picture a few moments longer, Eric placed it back in the box with the others. Then he slid the box back into its original position, noticing something unusual just behind it. A large piece of plywood had been propped in front of an alcove beneath the basement steps. It wasn’t meant to hide the space. Bits of darkness could be seen above it and on each side. Rather, it looked to Eric like it was put there to hide something inside the alcove.
Like more of Charlie’s possessions, Eric thought. Perhaps even a key.
Sliding the plywood aside, he didn’t see a key or anything that might contain one. But he did find another one of Charlie’s possessions—his bicycle.
It stood alone in the center of the alcove, unsteadily resting on its kickstand. The front tire was flat. The rear one was badly mangled. Four decades’ worth of cobwebs dangled from their spokes. Rust had taken over the base years ago, and there were too many dents and nicks to count. Yet Eric could still make out bits of blue paint and tiny white marks that he guessed were stars.
When he slid a hand across its surface, his palm came up black with dust. He wished his mother had shown him the bike when she was still alive. He wished she had opened the door to Charlie’s room and let Eric roam around it. Most of all, he wished his mother had trusted him enough to at least express her suspicions about what happened. And her hope. And her frustration and sadness and regret.
Tears welled up in Eric’s eyes. He wiped them away with his clean hand. Since Gracey sure as hell didn’t cry, Eric wasn’t going to, either. Not when he still had work to do. He still had to find a key, and other than making him emotional, the trip to the basement had been fruitless.
Backing out of the alcove, he bumped against the plywood board. It tipped over, landing against the boxes behind it. Eric spun around, startled. What he saw unnerved him even more.
A map of Pennsylvania has been tacked to the other side of the board. It showed the entire state from border to border. Perry Hollow was marked with a large red circle. Five other spots on the map had similar circles. In the center of each was a thumbtack that held a length of red string in place. Each string stretched to an area outside the map, their ends also secured by tacks. Pinned next to every strand was a newspaper article.
Eric scanned the entire board, stopping at the string that led to Perry Hollow. The article that accompanied it was illustrated with a picture of Charlie—the same class photo Eric had seen in the box. The headline was a punch to the gut: PERRY HOLLOW BOY, 10, MISSING.
His gaze jumped to another article. And another. And another. Each one sent his heart racing a little faster and tightened the knot that had suddenly formed in his stomach.
“Mom,” he said in astonishment, “what the hell were you up to?”
There were no arbors at Arbor Shade. As far as Nick could tell, there wasn’t much shade, either. While the name conjured up English gardens and rolling meadows, what he and Kat encountered was a clay-colored building just off the highway. Despite some shrubs by the front door and a smattering of trees on the lawn, the place looked anything but bucolic.
“Promise me something,” Nick said as they neared the entrance.
“What?”
“That you’ll shoot me before I ever end up in a place like this.”
Kat agreed, adding, “Only if you do the same.”
Arbor Shade wasn’t much nicer on the