The Dead Boys (7 page)

Teddy turned to Sloot for help, but Sloot was gone. The knothole in which he'd been sitting yawned open, bigger and dripping wet now, and Teddy was glad he wasn't any closer to it.

Just then, the limbs supporting Teddy's weight rose, lifting him up toward the black opening like hands shoveling food to a drooling mouth.

Teddy glanced around, frantic, and shouted. “Help! Sloot, help me!” But he was no longer there, and Teddy was too high for anyone else to reach him in time.

He had no choice. Teddy ripped away the leaves clinging to his flesh, tore himself loose from the limbs that held him, and jumped.

He didn't fall far—there were too many branches. The next one down caught him on his stomach while he clawed for a handhold on another. But when he got hold of the branch, it jerked him upward again.

Teddy let go instantly, dropping through the tree again. He felt a branch slam into his shin. Another whacked his head. As he bounced back and forth between limbs like a pinball, he thought he might be pummeled to death before he reached the ground.

At last, Teddy tumbled clear of the huge lower branches. He saw the ground coming at him out of the corner of his eye and managed to squirm around so that he could try to land on all fours.

The impact stunned him, and he instantly hurt in places he didn't even know existed. But there was no time to see if he'd broken anything—he was lying right beneath the tree, and two huge branches were swaying back down toward him. Frantically, Teddy dragged himself to his feet and stumbled across the yard toward his house.

Bruised and shaking, Teddy took a shortcut through the garage. As he hurried past the shelves, he grabbed a hatchet and a small plastic pump-spray bottle of weed killer, which he stuffed in his pocket.

For the next three hours, Teddy cowered in his room. He kept an eye on the tree from his bedroom window, hatchet in hand. But it didn't move again, and there was no sign of Eugene Sloot.

After a while, Teddy calmed down enough to consider what had happened in the tree, as well as all the other strange events of the last two days. Sloot was the third kid to mysteriously disappear. But, like the others, Teddy didn't think he could prove it to anyone—he couldn't even prove it to himself. Each crime scene changed as soon as he left. Even the sycamore just looked like a motionless tree now—nobody would believe it had tried to eat him.

Keeping an eye on the tree, he quickly moved into the study, sat down at the computer, and scanned the local news again. There was still nothing about recently missing kids.

Back in his own room, he checked his window latch again. There was no question now that he was unsafe even in his own house. Whatever ghastly fate was stalking the other boys, it had come as close as next door to get Sloot.

I have to do something,
Teddy decided. But it was all a horrible puzzle, and he still had no idea where to look for answers or what to do next.

That is, until the mail slot clanked in the foyer.

Teddy crept downstairs to see what had arrived, and lying on the floor in the entryway beneath the slot, he found a bill for the air conditioner from Mulligan Repair Service.

“Mulligan?” he said to himself, trying it aloud as he walked the bill toward his mom's desk. It sounded familiar. He recalled that the repairman's name tag on his uniform read “Hank.”

“Hank Mulligan,” Teddy said, wrapping his mouth around the entire name. But as he ran his finger down to the bottom of the page, he realized that Hank was a nickname. He found the man's full proper name printed below the signature line.

Henry Mulligan
.

Teddy biked madly down Saint Street, out toward the desert, then hung a left. If his own repairman was Henry Mulligan, the kid he'd hit with the rock had to be Henry Mulligan, Jr.

After all,
Teddy thought,
how many Henry Mulligans can there be in Richland?

Mr. Mulligan would have answers about his son. He probably knew all about Leslie Groves Park, too, and maybe even the other boys.

The mobile home park Teddy had seen when they first came into town was less than a mile from the corner where he turned. He covered the distance in record time and skidded to a stop in front of the park.

He recognized the faded sign over the cracked blacktop pavement leading into the park from two days earlier. The old trailers looked like they had just been plopped on top of the desert sand and sagebrush and simply left to rot.

He bit his lip and pedaled in, winding his way through a grid of streets between the mobile homes until he came to the return address on the repair bill. Before he could chicken out, he walked straight up onto the porch and knocked.

Nobody answered.

Teddy shuffled around on the porch, rising on his tiptoes to look in the window. He couldn't see anything through the dingy curtain, but he couldn't leave, either—no questions had been answered.

Taking a deep breath, Teddy pushed the door. It squeaked open, and he grimaced as a dry heat wafted out. It seemed hotter in the trailer than it was outside in the sun.

“Hello?” he called just to be sure nobody was home. When he again received no answer, he took another deep breath and slipped inside.

It was stuffy in the trailer, and all of the blinds were closed. The only furniture in the front room was a ratty old couch—the sort that looked like it would have stale corn chips buried in the cushions. It sat across from an old big-screen TV that took up an entire wall.

Teddy gave the room a long look. He still wasn't sure what he was searching for, but felt he'd know it when he saw it. Whatever it was, it wasn't in the front room.

“Hello? Mr. Mulligan?” Teddy called again. The place was small—he could see all the way to the other end. It would only take a few more steps to get a quick peek in the other rooms, so he started down the short hallway to the back of the trailer.

The bedroom on the left had a pair of long, narrow work boots sitting on the floor—clearly not a kid's shoes—so Teddy continued down the hall. He walked nervously past two doors, one of which opened into a bathroom. The other was a utility closet.

When he reached the final room at the rear, he looked around, puzzled. It seemed to be an office, and there was no kid's bedroom.

Actually, the office was no more than a room with a dresser that had a stack of papers piled on top and a cheap folding chair in front of it. But it occurred to Teddy that there still might be clues here.

Every dad has photo albums,
he thought.
And in such a small trailer, any albums with pictures of Mulligan's son would have to be in this room.

Teddy started with the top drawer. There he found an old, rusty folding knife and a tattered junior-high yearbook from 1980 sitting in a cardboard box. He picked up the knife and turned it over, examining the blade. Albert had said Henry carried a knife, but the one Teddy held looked far too old.

Next, he took the yearbook out and flipped through each grade to find Mr. Mulligan's teenage photo from three decades ago. It turned up in the eighth-grade section. Teddy expected that Mr. Mulligan's picture would look a bit like the boy he'd hit with the rock at the river.

But Teddy was wrong—the photo looked exactly like him.

Henry Mulligan's sneering face was surrounded by long, stringy hair and marred by exactly the same acne. He was even wearing the same muscle shirt. A chill ran up Teddy's spine as he remembered how the forty-year-old repairman had a pockmarked complexion and an old scar above his green eyes.

As Teddy's heart raced, the yearbook shook in his nervous hands. He'd come looking for answers and he'd found one, but not one anyone could believe, even him. The boy he'd hit with a rock and his repairman were the same person!

He picked up Mulligan's rusty knife again, and with an ache in the pit of his stomach, he realized that it was the same knife the young bully had used to terrorize kids thirty years ago.

Then Teddy had an even more disturbing thought.

He turned back to the seventh-graders in the thirty-year-old yearbook. By now he had a creeping feeling that he should get out of the trailer soon, but he had to check one last thing.

On page ten in the seventh-grade section, he found what he was looking for. A chubby boy in the first row of the old photos grinned up at him with a familiar squinchyeyed smile.

It was Albert Barker.

At first, Teddy refused to believe it. But there was a memorial page for Albert, the kind schools include in the back of the yearbook when a student dies during the year. It named his favorite movie as
Star Wars,
and it had pictures of him goofing around at the school in his old bell-bottom jeans. There was also a short, photocopied newspaper article listing him as missing.

On the facing page there was a photo of a ceremony at the cemetery Teddy and his mom had passed coming into town. It showed a row of stone markers, one of them with Albert's name on it and flowers on the ground below.

As Teddy stared at the picture, still in disbelief, he heard the unmistakable crunching sound of tires on gravel outside. He ran for the door, but it was too late.

An old Ford pickup rolled to a stop directly in front of the porch. Through the window in the front door, Teddy saw Henry Mulligan step out of the truck. It was the same Henry he'd hit two days earlier with a rock, only grown up—the same man who'd found tree roots in his air conditioner's pipes.

Henry stomped toward the front porch, but stopped when he saw the bicycle in his yard. He frowned and took a shiny new folding knife out of his pocket. With a quick flick of his wrist, he flipped open the blade. “Someone there?” he called as he stepped up onto the porch. “Somebody's gonna get stuck if they ain't careful,” he added.

His heart pounding, Teddy ducked into the coat closet, hoping that Henry would pass by so he could make a run for it. As he heard Henry enter the trailer, he realized he was still holding Henry's rusty old knife. He couldn't drop it, for fear it would make a sound, so he stuffed it in his pocket. But as he did, it hit the hard plastic nozzle of the little weed killer bottle and made a clicking sound.

“Aha!” Henry said, and he grabbed the handle of the closet door.

Teddy didn't have a plan, but he was dead certain he was about to be stabbed. So when the door flew open he did the only thing he could think to do—he sprayed weed killer in Henry Mulligan's face.