My Brother's Crown (38 page)

Soon, the five of us were moving single file over the footbridge with me in the lead and Blake bringing up the rear. There was only one path in and out, so despite the dark it wasn't hard to find our way—except for the fact that we were still trying not to use flashlights at all, at least not until we were farther in. As we walked, I'm sure we each had our own worries. Mine vacillated between apprehension about seeing the cabin again and fear of running into a snake or some feral night creature. The farther we went, though, the more I began remembering, the more I found myself going back to the last time I made this hike when I was only a child.

Even at ages nine, nine, eight, and six, the four of us knew the trek well, so well we could have done it that year with our eyes closed. But we didn't. There were too many birds to watch, too many familiar smells to take in—the crispness of pine needles, the humid sweetness of summer moss.

Thinking back now, I could still remember the sounds of our hike, the crunch of boots on dried leaves, the sucking kiss of mud when we stepped in it. That sound, in fact, so entranced little Nicole that she'd
been slowing us down the whole way, pausing at every muddy patch we encountered to squish one foot into the brown muck and then pull it out again with a loud and satisfying
schlurp
.

“Hurry!” Maddee had scolded from up ahead. She pointed to the sky through the trees. “We're losing daylight here.”

Of course, it was only about noon at the time, if I remembered correctly, and the cabin was just half a mile away, but that was Maddee for you.

“It's all right,” said Danielle in her usual calm, peacemaker voice. She and I were always mediating between the two sisters—when we weren't cracking up at the ridiculousness of their arguments.

“Well, I'm not waiting around anymore,” Maddee snapped. Then she turned and started hiking again, expecting the rest of us to fall in line.

Danielle and I stood there on the path, suspended between Maddee's directive and Nicole's stubbornness, a place we often found ourselves. We didn't mind. We four were only together one weekend a year and we treasured every bit of it, even this.

“Fine,” Nicole snapped, making one more
smush
in the mud then running to catch up. “We'd better not keep Her Highness waiting.”

Chuckling, Danielle and I let Nicole pass and then fell in after her.

We'd been coming to these woods for a couple of years, ever since we were old enough to go off on our own without parents. The first time, Nicole had been so small she was barely able to keep up. She complained the whole way. But she had wanted to explore as badly as we did—and we never left each other out of anything. So she'd tagged along, and when the trek got really bad we took turns carrying her.

Our destination was always the same, the old cabin buried at the very center of the woods. I had a feeling it had once been a hunting cabin back before the area had grown more populated and hunting in those particular woods was prohibited. After that, it had slowly fallen into disrepair with vines growing up its sides, its old boards slowly rotting, its roof losing shingles till it looked like a dog with patches of mange.

But it was our favorite place in the world. In our imaginations, we
were pioneers in the big woods, settlers at Jamestown, conductors on the Underground Railroad.

The day of the Incident, our hike started out like every other one had. As we came around the bend and the cabin loomed into view, we all paused together to take in the familiar sight. Then we made our way to the window beside the front door—if you could call a square hole with shutters but no glass a window. The shutters latched from the inside, but this one had always been easy enough to open with the aid of a small but sturdy twig. All we had to do was insert it at the center and slide it upward, forcing the hook out of the loop. Once that was done, if we'd had longer arms, we probably could have just reached through far enough to unlock the door. As it was, we'd had to come up with a different approach.

“You know the drill,” Maddee said, stepping closer and placing her right leg forward, bent at the knee. Then Danielle did the same on the other side, and I stood behind Nicole and helped hoist her up until she was standing on their legs. Then she slid her arms inside the hole, and we lifted her, feeding her body inside, head first—but slowly enough that she didn't get hurt. As our resident gymnast and daredevil, she didn't mind all that much.

She did mind how hard it was to get the door unlocked. We could hear her on the other side, griping and pulling and trying to get it open.

“It's too dark in here,” she complained, rattling the knob. “And there's a weird smell too. Like rust.”

Finally, we heard a click and then the door swung open, letting fresh air into the dark space that had stayed closed up way too long.

“What do you know,” Maddee said as she stepped inside. “Nicole wasn't exaggerating for once. It does smell in here.”

“Let's get all the windows open. That'll help,” I offered. We started with the window at the front, the one Nicole had climbed through. There were hooks on each side, and as soon as we latched open the shutters, a breeze fluttered in. Light came in as well. Danielle and I handled the window on the right and the sisters got the one on the left. By the time we had three windows latched open, we could actually see in there.

That's when we turned to go to the last window, the one on the back wall, above the old cot.

Only then did we see that we weren't alone in the cabin.

We didn't scream, not at first. Maddee gasped. Danielle clutched my arm so hard I was sure her nails would leave a mark. Otherwise, the four of us just stood there in shocked silence, each one willing the other to speak.

On the cot just a few feet in front of us lay a man, an old man with a withered face and gnarled hands. Dressed in a tan shirt and dark pants, he was on his back, his legs stretched out in front of him as if he'd just laid down for a quick nap. But from the middle of his body protruded the wooden handle of a long knife. The rest of it, the shiny sharp metal part, was buried almost all the way in his chest.

The second big thing I noticed after the knife were his eyes, which were open. Glassy and clouded, it seemed as if they had once been blue, but it was hard to tell. His mouth was twisted open as well, almost as if he'd died midscream.

And there was no question he was dead. Not just because of the knife and the eyes and the stillness, but because of the blood. Lots and lots of blood, way more than a body could spare. Even at nine, I knew enough to realize the knife must have pierced his heart or maybe sliced some artery, because it was everywhere. Pooled on his chest, splattered on the wall behind him, soaked into his clothes, puddled on the floor below.

“Do you think he's sleeping?” Nicole whispered, startling me from my observations.

I stepped closer, looking for signs of movement, for a chest rising and falling, but I already knew. This man was not asleep.

I felt the three of them behind me, watching, waiting for me to do something, anything. I was the oldest after all, even if only by a few months. But I didn't know what to do. In the distance, a robin sang. A chipmunk chattered from a tree. And the four of us just stood there, staring down at the grisly sight.

“Wake up, mister,” Nicole said. Then she stepped forward, reached out, and patted him on the shoulder.

Somehow, I don't think she'd comprehended the knife before then, or the dead open eyes, or the blood. But when she looked down, she realized she was standing in a dark syrupy puddle, the tip of her boot coated in red as if she'd dipped it into a jar of finger paint, and then she began to scream.

That's all it took.

In an instant, we were all screaming, all hysterical, all certain that whoever killed him was going to kill us next.

Nicole ran to the door and then out, and we had no choice but to take off after her, even though we knew at the moment we were probably safer inside, where no killer was lurking, than outside, where surely he was lying in wait, ready to strike again.

We'd never run so fast. You would think by being the smallest that Nicole would be the slowest, but it was all we could do to keep up with her. The hike that had taken us maybe half an hour coming in couldn't have taken more than ten minutes going out.

At least we never saw anyone, never heard anyone behind us, never spotted any lurking killers anywhere. We burst out of the trees and headed for the footbridge, pounding across as our screams started up again, running toward the rest of our family, who were still eating and enjoying the sunshine as if nothing was different, as if our four small lives hadn't been changed forever.

Hearing the ruckus, our parents came running to meet us. I flew into my father's arms and just held on and sobbed, my body trembling violently as I tried to tell him, between gasps, what we'd seen. Around us, my cousins were explaining to their parents as well, and soon a whole group of concerned and angry Talbot men were preparing to go see exactly what this was about.

It took Granddad to talk them all down, saying it wouldn't be safe, that the killer could still be lurking nearby, that they simply had to wait for the police. Only when they finally agreed to wait, albeit grudgingly, did he head for the house to call 911.

It took forever for the police to get there, but when they finally arrived and had questioned us and were ready to venture into the
woods, they allowed only the three fathers to go with them. Everyone else—including us girls—had to stay behind.

They were gone a long time, maybe half an hour, and I knew the moment they came back and I saw the weird expression on my dad's face that something was wrong. Much of what followed was a blur to me now, but a few parts I could still remember. The shock of being told there was no dead body in there, no blood. Just a pile of blankets and a stick and a puddle of rainwater.

I remembered becoming angry, really angry. I marched over to Nicole and demanded, “What do you call this then?” as I pointed down to her bloody boot.

Only the blood wasn't there anymore. It must have washed away as we ran down the muddy and puddle-ridden path.

I remembered Maddee and Danielle sobbing, Nicole curled up in her mother's lap sucking her thumb—a habit she'd given up long before. I was the only angry one, the vocal one who refused to believe what they were saying. Eventually, reluctantly, the men agreed to go back to the cabin one more time and bring us with them.

Once there, the sight in front of us was even more shocking than the old dead man with the knife in his chest: the
lack
of anything remotely resembling the grisly scene we'd encountered when we were here before. No body, no blood, no knife. Just a scene that had been staged to make it look as if we were idiots, children so caught up in our imaginations that we didn't know the difference between a pile of fabric and a recently slaughtered corpse.

It wasn't long before we were the laughing stock of the reunion—at least in snickers and whispers and appraising looks. A few of the boys dubbed us the Liar Choir, a name that stuck for years.

My mother gave us the benefit of the doubt, but only to the extent that she thought perhaps a practical joke had been played, that someone had created a fake grisly scene and then removed it again once we were gone. But even that infuriated me.

There had been nothing fake about any of it. I knew it then, when I was nine.

I still knew it now, whether tonight's test proved it or not.

“I think we're getting close,” Maddee said, startling me from my thoughts.

Suddenly, I wasn't a child anymore. I was an adult. My three cousins were adults. And for the first time since that horrible day, we were almost back to the scene of the crime, at the cabin in the woods.

I felt my heart surge with righteous indignation, pushing away the fear. It was high time we did this. I was ready.

As soon as we came around the final bend, there it stood. The cabin. During the walk, the clouds had drifted away, letting the moonlight through. Now it shone down on the place, which was smaller than I remembered and so ramshackle by this point that I wasn't sure if it was even safe to go inside.

But Blake didn't seem to share my concern. I felt a warm hand on my back, and I turned to see him next to me now.

“You okay?” he asked softly.

I nodded.

“Good. Still want to do this?”

I nodded again.

“Good.” He let his hand drop, and then he stepped forward to address the group.

“I'll go in alone first and check for structural integrity. If it looks okay, I'll come get Renee so she can help me set things up. You three should probably wait outside until we're ready to spray the luminol, but then we'll call you in so you can watch as we do it. Sound good?”

My three cousins nodded, their expressions somber.

He and I began moving toward the cabin. When he reached the door, he pushed at it, but it didn't budge.

“You know the drill,” Maddee said, teasing Nicole.

“Yeah, right. I'm not y'all's trained monkey anymore.”