The Narrows (28 page)

“Was that all?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Did he have any other injuries or anything?”

“No.” They stepped off the footbridge and began climbing the grassy slope toward the factory. Sweat already ran down Ben’s forehead.

“Are you sure?”

He paused and glanced at her. He felt himself offer her a crooked smile though it was more out of discomfort than humor. Wincing in the bright light of day, she looked up at him, her face otherwise expressionless.

“Of course I’m sure,” he said evenly. “Was there something else you wanted to ask me?”

“You said my mom already told you about the T-shirt we found in the yard? Matthew’s T-shirt?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I guess that’s it, then.”

They continued up the incline until the trees parted and the massive stone façade of the ancient plastics factory rose out of the earth. As recently as a few years ago, the factory grounds had been part of the department’s patrol area, in an effort to keep an eye out for potential drug users or neighborhood delinquents who found it exhilarating to throw bricks through windows and spray graffiti on walls. But it seemed no one ever trespassed on the property. When the land eventually reverted back to the county, officers stopped coming up here. There was no landowner to complain if anything ever happened, and it seemed that nothing
did
ever happen. Quite often, Ben forgot the place even existed.

It seemed to greet him now, however.
If buildings could smile,
he thought and shivered.

He moved around the side of the building and Brandy followed, her footing as delicate as a fawn’s. The shrubbery was overgrown back here, obscuring most of the windows and doorways. Back when he had still patrolled up here, there used to be a dirt access road that toured the circumference of the building. That road was gone now, and Ben could not even see remnants of it beneath the overgrown grass.

“Where are we going?” Brandy finally asked after the two of them had spent a substantial amount of time stumbling through the underbrush.

“There’s a set of doors back here somewhere,” he told her.

“There,” she said, pointing through a part in the trees.

Ben bent down and peered through a curtain of crispy red leaves behind which stood a set of double doors made of oxidized copper. A thick chain wound itself around the rectangular doorhandles.

“Nice lookout,” Ben said, stepping through the trees while brandishing the bolt cutter. He held branches out of the way so that Brandy could follow him, unimpeded.

“What’s that smell?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Ben whiffed the air but didn’t smell anything. “What does it smell like?” he asked.

“Like the cleaner my mom uses to scrub the bathroom.”

Ben gathered a link of chain between the teeth of the bolt cutter and squeezed. A second later, there came an audible pop and the link widened into a
C
. Ben cut the same link again and the chain came apart and dangled from the doorhandles like a mechanical snake. With one hand, Ben unwound the chain from the handles until it coiled to the ground. His fingers came away orange with rust.

“Matthew would have found another way in,” Brandy said at his back.

“Yeah,” he responded, though he was already quite certain her brother had not found a way into the old building. He was more curious about who else might have found a way in—whoever it had been that Matthew Crawly had thought he had seen in here…

Ben took a step back, already breathing heavily though he hadn’t done anything except walk here. “You know what,” he said. “Take a few steps back. I don’t know what might come jumping out when I open these doors.”

“Jumping out?”

“A raccoon or possum, I mean,” he said, though he was thinking
mountain lion.

“Oh. I thought you meant…” But her voice trailed off, her thought unfinished. Brandy took a few steps back, the boughs of the trees sweeping down over her like curtains after a stage exit. Ben dropped the bolt cutter onto the ground and grabbed the doorhandles in both hands. The doors were enormous, pitted monstrosities, like the doors on an old battleship.

“Here goes,” he said, and heaved them open.

The stubborn hinges squealed and flakes of rust snowed down on him. They came only partway open, either impeded by the encroaching trees or simply refusing to budge any farther on their uncooperative hinges. A panel of darkness—of varying shades of darkness—appeared before Ben. Stale air breathed onto his face. There was another smell, too. Suddenly, he could smell what Brandy had smelled just a moment ago—the acrid, chemical stink of industrial cleaner. Though more potent, it was similar to the smell at Porter Conroy’s and Ted Minsky’s farms.

“Yuck,” Brandy commented from behind the tree branches.

Ben stepped inside, cautioning Brandy to be careful as she followed him. He entered into a room as spacious as an airplane hangar. The upper portions of the walls were lined with tiny square windows that reminded Ben of tic-tac-toe grids, the windowpanes so thick and grimy that only the barest hint of sunlight permeated. The floor was a level plain of concrete covered in an ancient blanket of dust. Large machines stood at intervals about the room, looking like a cross between an oil rig and dinosaur bones. The ceiling, with its exposed iron girders and sheets of hammered tin, reminded Ben of the high school gymnasium. Some sections of the ceiling were missing, allowing shafts of sunlight to slide like rapiers into the factory.

“This place,” Brandy said. Her voice was almost reverent and hushed as she walked slowly across the floor. “This place doesn’t seem like it belongs here in Stillwater.”

Ben thought it was a pretty astute comment, particularly coming from a sixteen-year-old. “Don’t wander off too far,” he warned her.

“Matthew!” she shouted, startling Ben. Her voice echoed off the walls and the corrugated-tin ceiling. Flocks of birds lifted off rafters and funneled through the rents in the roof.

“Quiet,” he told her.

“He could be anywhere.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t need to start an avalanche.”

He unhooked his flashlight from his belt and went over to one of the large industrial machines. It was enormous, and looked like something that had been conceived and engineered on some distant planet.

“What do these do?” Brandy asked. She was examining one of the machines, too.

“I have no clue. It looks like an old printing press, only bigger. Much bigger.”

Brandy opened a small hatch on the side of the machine and peered in. “Dusty,” she commented.

“Stay here,” he told her. “I’m going to take a look around.”

“I want to come with you.”

“Just stay here. It’s too dangerous.”

“He’s my brother,” she challenged.

He pointed his flashlight at her face. “I thought we went over this outside? You do as I say.”

She continued to stare at him until he softened.

“Okay,” he relented. “But stick close to me.”

She followed him into an adjoining room where the ceiling wasn’t as high. Enormous lights were recessed into the hammered tin and caged with a metal meshwork, similar to the light in the sally port back at the station. The floor was empty, though there were piles of sawdust everywhere. What looked like jewels glittered on the floor as Ben panned his flashlight across the room. He bent down to examine some only to find that they were little metal shavings in the shape of fingernail clippings.

“Tetanus city,” he muttered to himself.

Brandy said, “Huh?”

“Never mind.”

At the end of the corridor they arrived at a wall of iron grates, blackened and fire-scarred. Ben assumed medieval prisons probably looked no worse. He went to one of the grates, shone the flashlight into it. The throat of a narrow pipe carried the light to an elbow that bent up into the stonework.

“What is this?” Brandy asked.

“Some sort of kiln.”

“What’s a kiln?”

“Like an oven. Don’t you take pottery classes or something in school?”

Brandy shrugged and peered through the slatted iron bars.

“I think these pipes all go up into one of those smokestacks,” he said.

She pulled away from the bars. “I don’t like this place.”

“I don’t think your brother came in here, Brandy.”

By the expression on her face, he could tell she didn’t think so, either.

She’s trying to hold out hope,
he thought.
In all likeliness, the kid probably did come out here and fell into the Narrows. I should alert the state police and they should keep an eye on the mouth of the Potomac. Jesus fucking Christ.

Ben felt sick.

“What’s that stuff?” Brandy asked. She pointed to a series of wooden rafters along one wall. The rafters themselves looked like some sort of scaffolding, yet there was something dripping from them that reminded Ben of spelunking as a child in Shenandoah. Specifically, he was reminded of the stalactites, those calcified horns of stone that hung from the ceilings of caves. Similarly, this stuff had hardened into corkscrews and hung from the scaffolding, a mottled white and black and gray in hue. On the floor beneath the scaffolding, mounds of the stuff rose up. As Ben shone the flashlight on the mass, large blackflies spiraled dizzyingly into the air.

“That’s guano,” Ben said.

“What’s
that?”

“Bat shit.” He shot her an apologetic glance. “It’s, uh, bat feces. Like, uh…bowel movements or…”

“You can say
shit.
I know what shit is.” She stared up at the hanging columns of dried dung, nearly mesmerized. “There’s so much of it.”

“We’ve been having a bat problem lately. I guess this is where they’ve been roosting.”

“But where are they now?” Brandy took a few steps back, her eyes still trained on the rafters. “It’s daylight out there. They should be in here sleeping, right?”

“I don’t really know too much about bats,” Ben said, though he thought,
She’s right. Bats are nocturnal. Where are they?

“He’s not in here, is he?”

Ben clicked off his flashlight. “No, hon. I really don’t think so.” He caught another whiff of that antiseptic stink—that burning, medicinal smell that reminded him of doctors’ offices. It made his eyes water. “Let’s get you home, okay?”

Back in the car, with the ribbon of asphalt that was Route 40 curving around the mountain ahead of them, Brandy said, “Thanks for taking me out here and for taking a look around.”

“It’s okay, Brandy. I wish I could be more help.” He glanced at her profile against the passenger window. “We’re doing all we can.”

“I know.” She played with the door lock while she watched the countryside shuttle by. “I still have the shirt, in case you want to take it for evidence or whatever. I didn’t wash it and kept it just like we found it.”

“The shirt?”

“Matthew’s T-shirt,” she said. She looked at him. “You said my mom told you about it, right?”

“Your mom said she found one of his shirts out in the yard. She said it probably blew off the clothesline.”

“Maybe,” Brandy said. “It’s the holes that bother me.”

“What holes?”

“The holes in the back of the shirt.” With an index finger, she dotted the air in a vertical line. “There were these little holes going down the back of his shirt. I do his laundry all the time and never noticed them before.”

Ben’s skin went clammy. “Yeah?” he said, realizing his mouth was suddenly dry. “Holes?”

“Yeah.” Brandy turned back to the window.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you give me that shirt, huh?”

“For evidence?” she said.

“Yeah.” His mind was reeling now. “For evidence.”

2

Ben pulled up outside the Crawly house and Brandy got out of the car. The door still open, she peeked in and said, “I’ll be right back.” Then she took off toward the house, leaving the door ajar.

Unsettled, Ben turned on the goodtime radio, located a classic rock station, and tried to grow comfortable with one of his favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. Yet his mind was on other things.

The unidentified boy’s body had been found by some watermen late in the day. Both Ben and Mike Keller had responded to the scene. What they found was the doughy outline of a young boy, naked and bloated, strewn in the reeds at the mouth of Wills Creek where the creek joined the Potomac River. They had rolled the boy over and found his face a sodden, swollen mess. The boy’s eyes were like jelly in their sockets. There had been a stiffening rigor to half the face, giving the corpse the frozen grimace of a stroke victim. Lord knew how long the boy’s body had been in the water, but it had been long enough to pull body hair out by the roots and turn the skin into glue. Ben had called Deets in from Cumberland, and the fastidious little medical examiner addressed the scene perfunctorily, taking pictures of his own and scribbling in a notebook. Deets called the death and he assisted a pair of medics in loading the corpse into the back of an ambulance.