The Creek (17 page)

Her flashlight abruptly winked off.

“Darn,” she said.

A hand touched her on the shoulder and she whirled around, heart pounding, flashlight raised high to protect her.

“Hey,” Zachary said, a confused look on his shiny face. He flicked his flashlight on and shone it up at his face. “We’re on the same team.”

Penny slowly expelled her indrawn breath, lowering the flashlight. “You scared me,” she said.

“Sorry,” he replied, looking crestfallen.

“It’s okay. I’m just a little jumpy.”

“Because of what happened at the pool?”

She nodded.

He looked at her flashlight. “Batteries?”

“I think it’s broken.”

His face brightened. “We can both use mine.”

“Okay,” she said, unaccountably relieved. She actually felt a little better being with another person.

“Want a piece of gum?” he asked.

“Where do you get all your gum?” she asked, taking a piece.

He winked at her like he was letting her in on a big secret. “Baseball cards.”

“I have a pretty good idea where Oren is,” Penny said. She had overheard Teddy whispering to Oren about the storm drain, how it was a good place to hide.

Zachary handed Penny the flashlight. “Lead the way.

The secret of flashlight tag was in the surprise, Penny knew. If someone who was hiding saw your flashlight coming, it was easy for them to take off to a new hiding place. So the best thing to do was to creep along quietly in the dark, flicking your flashlight on at the last moment.

Zachary stepped on a twig with a loud crunch.

“Shhh,” she urged.

“Where are we going?” he whispered.

“The storm drain.”

He blanched. “By Devlins’?”

“It’s pretty far from the house,” she said reassuringly.

Penny crept quietly through the outskirts of the woods to the yawning, snakelike storm drainpipe. She eased herself up into the opening and knelt on the rusty corrugated metal.

“Tag!” she shouted, aiming Zachary’s flashlight down the pipe and flicking it on.

Zachary jostled behind her to get a look.

But it wasn’t Oren after all. It was Becky. Her back was turned to them, and her gold hair glinted in the darkness.

“Come on, Becky,” Penny said. “We got you fair and square.”

But Becky just crouched there, ignoring them, as if they would go away if she waited long enough.

“Benji’s right,” Penny muttered to herself. Becky could be such a brat.

Penny crawled the rest of the way down the pipe, the light from the flashlight bobbing.

The little girl seemed so still.

Too still.

Mr. Cat’s stuffed body flashed through her mind.

“Becky!” she shouted.

Penny scrambled down into the storm drain and grabbed Becky by the shoulder. Becky’s body flopped like a doll and fell onto Penny. The little girl’s eyes
were wide and glassy, her neck a streak of red.

Zachary made a strange choking sound, turned away, and started retching.

The flashlight swept across the wall, and that was when Penny saw the lightning bolt—freshly drawn with chalk—pointing down at Becky’s dead body.

S
he just had to go and look, to see for herself.

As she descended the cliff to the creek bed in the still morning air, Penny remembered how ambulances and police cars had filled Mockingbird Lane after Becky had been found, how it had seemed that the street was one great flashing light. The still night had been filled with the screams of Mrs. Albright, and Mr. Albright had had to be forcibly restrained by the police after he threatened to go over and kill Caleb himself. Penny hadn’t had the courage to tell him that he didn’t have to bother.

She smelled him before she saw him, and she gagged. It was a smell so incredible, so horrible, that she knew she would never forget it, not ever. It smelled like that dead frog, but a hundred times worse. The smell of hot, rotting meat.

Caleb’s body lay sprawled like a broken puppet that had had its strings cut, arms flopping forward. Old rubber tires, rusty aluminum cans, and ancient sneakers littered the dry creek bed, and the dead body seemed to fit there, oddly enough, as if the woods had taken back one of its own.

The body was black and puffy, bloated from being out in the sun. Ants crawled over it in determined little lines, winding their way over arms and across the nape of Caleb’s neck, as if he was one big scrap of toast with jelly. Some animal had been at him, and his clothes were bitten away in places.

But it was his hand, in the end, that got Penny—the way the fingers were splayed out, reaching forward, leaving long furrows scratched in the dirt, as if he’d been trying to crawl away.

She stumbled back and threw up until there was nothing left in her stomach, then tucked her head between her knees, feeling light-headed and breathing hard.

Somewhere in the back of her head she’d worried that Caleb was still alive, or maybe even a zombie, wandering around killing little girls and stuffing them into storm drains. But looking at the body now, for the first time since that horrible day, she knew for a fact
that it hadn’t been Caleb who had killed Becky last night. No, he had been too busy lying in the creek being dead.

She couldn’t deny it anymore.

It had been someone else all along. Someone who wanted them all to think it was Caleb. Someone who knew Caleb’s history and how everyone would react when things started up again.

A shaft of sun broke through the thick trees and struck the dry creek bed. Something bright glittered.

Penny got up and went over to investigate. It was Caleb’s silver cigarette case, fallen from his pocket. She picked it up gingerly and forced herself to open it, expecting, even now, to see a row of crusty, dried-up pinky fingers.

Three stale cigarettes tumbled out.

She pocketed the case and ran through the woods, the heavy weight of it burning her like a hot coal.

They met in the musty quiet of Mac’s basement to speak of the unspeakable.

Benji looked positively gray. It had been two days since Becky’s body had been found, and he had aged in that short time. Gone were the impish lines around his mouth, the ones that made him look as if he might
burst into a grin at any moment. His mouth was a grim, hard line, his eyes dull. He seemed a ghost of the boy who had kissed her in the cool, damp woods.

“How’s your mom and dad?” Penny asked gently.

“Mom’s sort of messed up. She won’t come out of her room. Mrs. Schuyler’s helping out with the cooking and stuff,” Benji said, the pale evening light filtering through a crack of basement window.

Penny could only imagine how he felt. He was Becky’s brother, he was supposed to be looking out for her. What if it had been Teddy?

“The funeral’s gonna be tomorrow,” Benji added in a hollow voice.

Oren shook his head. “Did the police arrest Caleb?”

“They went to question him last night, but he wasn’t home,” Benji said. “His parents say he hasn’t been home for days.”

Since the Fourth,
Penny wanted to blurt out, but bit down on her tongue so hard she tasted blood.

“He took off,” Mac said, stating the obvious. “He’s a million miles away by now. The police are still looking for him, right?”

Benji nodded.

“So now what?” Zachary asked anxiously. Zachary had been particularly shaken up during the
last few days, as if he was just waiting for Caleb to finish him off, too. Part of Penny wanted to tell him that he didn’t ever have to worry about being beaten up by Caleb again.

“What do you mean, ‘now what’?” Benji was angry, angrier than they had ever seen him.

There was a flurry of noise upstairs. From the sharp click-clack of shoes, they knew it was the moms.

“This way,” Mac hissed, getting up and walking through a door that led to the unfinished part of the basement, where the floor was poured cement and it smelled mildewy because it flooded every spring. Mac pointed silently to a grate in the ceiling.

“What are we doing?” Zachary blurted.

“Shut up, you retard!” Mac shot back in a fierce whisper, punching Zachary hard in the arm.

“Ow!” Zachary winced, rubbing his arm and flinching as Mac raised his fist again.

Voices from the kitchen above drifted down, strong and clear.

“Have they found him?” Penny heard her mom say, in a voice tinged with worry.

“No,” Mrs. Bukvic said angrily. “They’ll never find him. He’s gone. He killed Buster, too, I just know it.”

“We have to keep the kids indoors,” one of the mothers declared.

Mrs. McHale groaned. “All summer? That’ll kill
me!”

“Maybe if we just keep them in the yards….” This from her mother.

“I tell you, we can’t take any chances, not with him on the street.”

“Bethany, could Phil come over and take a look at the locks on our doors and make sure they’re okay?” Mrs. Loew asked nervously. “I worry, being alone and—”

“Of course,” her mother murmured back.

This was how it had all started in the first place, Penny thought. They had let fear and panic and, most of all, the seductive voices of the adults convince them that it was Caleb. She could see it clearly now, how she had allowed her fears to sweep her along, like a leaf in the water, to the easy, obvious conclusion that Caleb was the culprit because he was a bad boy from a strange family who didn’t quite fit in.

If she could only go back to that one moment when she was standing on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the creek, she would. Because now, deep in her soul, she knew Caleb had still been alive—in
her mind’s eye she could see his hand shudder, reaching forward. And she had left him there to die, alone and in the dark. Didn’t that make her just as bad as Becky’s killer?

She looked across the dark basement at Benji, his face a mask of grief. Nothing in this world would bring his sister back. Penny felt a swirl of self-hatred at how mean she had been to the little girl the last time she’d seen her, but still she couldn’t bear to let Caleb take the blame for Becky, not when the real killer was still out there somewhere.

“You guys,” she said tentatively. “What if it was someone else? You know, like the policeman said: who else knew that we were playing flashlight tag?”

Mac exploded. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve
been the one all along who’s been saying that Caleb’s after us. What about Teddy?” Oren asked.

“Yeah, what about me?” Teddy said, stricken. “I told you it was Caleb!”

“It’s just that I don’t think he killed Becky,” Penny said in an awkward rush. “I mean, why would he do it?”

Benji walked right up to her, a terrible expression on his face. “Because he’s evil, Penny,” he said in a voice so hard she almost flinched. “Got it?”

She looked at the coldly furious faces, and she got it all right. It was just like Mr. Schuyler always said.

The only person you could count on was yourself.

Penny sat quietly in the pew.

It was a huge church, bigger than the one she and her family occasionally attended. The ceiling arched high, and the walls had lots of ornate stained glass depicting the life of Jesus: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus and the apostles at the Last Supper, Jesus suspended on the cross. Jesus’ eyes seemed dark and cool and condemning. A little like Caleb’s eyes, Penny thought with a shiver.

Teddy sat next to her, stiff and uncomfortable in his suit jacket and tie. He was wearing sweatpants, and his cast poked out of it, a dark reminder to Penny of all that had happened.

Farther down in the pew were her dad and mom, and Baby Sam. Penny swung her shiny black patent-leather shoes back and forth, thinking hard. She remembered how the police had questioned her and the other kids after Becky’s body had been found. How they had kept asking her the same questions over and over.
Had she seen any strangers in the neighborhood? Or any big kids she didn’t recognize? What about odd-looking cars?

Her own parents had lectured her and Teddy in the car on the way to church.

“You two are to keep your eyes open from now on,” her mother said, a fierce look on her face. “If you see Caleb, you are to run to the nearest house immediately. Do you understand? He’s killed a little girl. There’s no telling what he’ll do next.”

They had nodded mutely back. Penny knew the other kids had all received similar lectures from their parents.

It was obvious to Penny that with everyone looking for Caleb, the real killer would be off guard, careless. She had to find him before everyone discovered that Caleb was dead. Her gaze swept the church.

He could be right here,
she thought slowly.

Penny craned her neck to look through the crowd. There was Zachary and his mom, way up front. Zachary’s mom was wailing away like a professional mourner, and it struck Penny as odd. Had Mrs. Evreth even known Becky? And wasn’t there something just a bit creepy about the way she was always trying to lure the kids to her “Bible group”? Mrs. Evreth wailed loudly, and with each loud sob an embarrassed-looking Zachary seemed to sink lower in his seat. Penny felt sorry for him.

She spotted Oren and his mom. Oren’s dad was sitting on the other side of the aisle with his new girlfriend. Oren sat very still, his curly hair tamed, his suit • pressed. Oren was very smart, she knew, the smartest of them all when it came to school and grades. He always got straight A’s. He was an easy kid to play with, fair and reasonable. But he had also been acting strange lately, sort of angry and withdrawn, something that she had chalked up to his parents getting divorced. But maybe there was more to it.

Mac, wearing a dark, tight-fitting suit and a belligerent expression, sat hunched over in front of Oren and kept turning around to whisper to him, clearly bored by the proceedings. Penny thought of all the times that Mac had dismissed her fears. Also, he had always hated Becky the most. As if sensing that Penny was studying him, Mac turned around and stared at her, his face hard.

Penny’s swinging feet banged into the pew ahead in nervous excitement.

“Penny!” her mother hissed, a look of displeasure on her face. “Settle down.”