Following Christopher Creed (3 page)

I went with my gut instincts. "It's a ... temporary injury. I can actually see you."

Everything is temporary.
I lifted the glasses and smiled into her pupils. Little twinkles showed up around her eyes, and it was good that I couldn't see her clearly. I sensed I'd see eyes full of mean teenager judgment. My own eyes look normal, unless you're really into pupils—t hen you might notice that mine are flower shaped from scar tissue instead of round.

"Oh. I thought you might be ... you know..."

Blind.
I would ignore that.

"What are your names?" I let my shades fall down again.

"I'm Taylor Hammond and she's Mary Ellen Noyes. So ... you came all the way from ... where is it? To write about Chris?"

"Randolph U, in Indiana. I got addicted to Torey Adams's website a few years back," I admitted.

"Mr. Famous. I heard Torey Adams posted this news about the corpse today. I doubt the corpse will bring him back here. Nothing's brought him back."

"Maybe the local gossip has something to do with that," I suggested. "Wasn't it flying around among the locals that he helped kill Chris? That could hurt a guy's feelings, especially a nice guy like that."

"Only the biggest gossipers in town still like to say that," Taylor said, laughing. "Most of that died down years ago. Now that he's a rising star, the gossip is that he'll say he was born and raised in Oregon or somewhere and we won't get any of his glory."

"It's always something," I noted, and didn't get a laugh.

"I read the whole site once, maybe a year ago. I saw all the posts from people like you ... from all over. That's weird. People from Anchorage and Arizona and Florida posting about a kid from Steepleton. Wow."

"A lot of people relate to Chris," I said, which was the understatement of the year in my case, but it wouldn't work to my advantage to spew my personal horrors from grade school and high school all over my interviewees. "The story is dying away too fast—my humble opinion. It was helping bullied kids."

"I don't see what the big deal is about Chris Creed," Taylor said with cute giggles. "Except that now there's this corpse."

"Except that now there's this corpse," I parroted, leaving aside the police verdict that it wasn't him and my confidence that I didn't need the corpse of Chris Creed to sell the story.

"People still talk about Chris around here," Taylor went on. "Justin thinks he's a legend and tried that disappearing act too, but you know what they say about some middle children and drug addiction. We think he just wanted to go to rehab without having to tote his mother in there, via,
up his ass.
He'll be back."

"Do you actually have any contact with Justin?" I asked.

Taylor and Mary Ellen looked at each other for a long time before saying no.

"Do you think this is Chris's body?" I jumped off a delicate subject, figuring I'd swing back to it when they trusted me more.

"Hell, no," Mary Ellen said quickly. "Justin knows where he is."

My heart skidded into my throat. "Really? And where is that?"

"He won't ever say," Mary Ellen said.

"If he knew, he would have told us," Taylor argued with her. "He reads like a maniac, finds all these self-help books nobody's ever heard of. Quantum thought. That's his latest rage. He thinks quantum thought will bring his brother back to him."

I had heard of quantum thought. It bordered on my favorite subject—the power of
positive
thought—but that's been around since forever. My thoughts could control
me,
could make
me
successful, but quantum thought was something about being able to control others—and things, and places—with your thoughts. A few guys in my dorm were quantum thought cultists, and I'd listened to them apply theoretical math to positive thinking, but if they'd had any results in the real world, I hadn't heard about them.

"One day, his brother's coming back. The next day, Justin's all drugged out and depressed," Taylor said. "He said none of the stuff he reads will really do anything for him until he quits abusing himself. We just want him to come home normal again. He was a fun guy. As for his brother Chris, well, Justin barely mentioned him until right around Christmas of this year. You wouldn't have known he had an older brother unless you were a Torey Adams web fan. We don't know what came over Justin, but suddenly he was obsessed, wanting to find him, denying that he's dead, and all this stuff."

Mary Ellen nudged her. "My mom—she loves to gossip but doesn't mean any harm in it. She says that Justin hit the age that his brother was when he left and it's given him a psychological twitch. A little obsession. Whatever. For Justin's sake, we'd like to know what's up with Chris—alive, dead, where, when, all of that.

"If you guys happen to hear from Justin, would you tell him this reporter from Randolph is his number one fan and would like to talk to him?"

"What are you going to write about Justin?" Taylor asked.

"Just ... the truth. I feel the world owes him that much." I didn't know if the truth was actually bad or good, but I hadn't lied about what I would write, and the girls took it with pride.

"Definitely. We'll call you. He should call us any day. You got a cell?"

I gave the number to them and watched little lights flash as they bleeped it into their cell phones. I knew they had talked to Justin recently, but there was no point in alien
ating them by making accusations. I wondered if I should ask them to a local diner or glue myself to them a little better before leaving. I didn't want them to space on calling me. I might be a budding reporter, but high school girls could bring on earth-shattering flashbacks, and I could think of nothing further to say that would make me memorable to them.

I remembered promising RayAnn I would spend more time in town talking to people than studying a corpse. So I left Taylor and Mary Ellen then, drawn back to RayAnn and Lanz like a metal spike to a giant magnet. They were a safe haven while I played crown prince to my own former likenesses—emotionally tormented kids who might also be drawn to Chris Creed, whom I could make understandable to the masses.

That was a second reason I was here, the first being to amuse myself with a great story about Steepleton. I rarely do radical things for one reason only; I'm just too conservative a player. Beyond the great story, my gut instincts were telling me,
Now is the time.
I didn't understand gut instincts very well—which isn't to say I didn't use them. I used them almost constantly.

T
HIS GREASY SPOON DINER
lay out on the marshes behind Steepleton, and Adams had talked about its fantastic bacon grease-burgers on his website. It was so small a diner, it didn't even have a name, but all the locals knew of it and I wagered some folks in there loved to talk.

We found it after asking a man walking his dog through the center of town, and he pointed us down a road leading to the back bay.

The diner had only one couple in it, though RayAnn said the place could seat two dozen people at its paltry three tables and three booths. I felt hopeful more would show up, but between ordering and the arrival of our cheeseburgers, I did my usual mental relaxation exercises, which I got from a dozen books and as many websites I subscribed to. If you were legally blind and trying to become a reporter, after obtaining a bachelor's degree from a well-respected university, you would meditate on this stuff, too:

What men can believe, men can achieve. Napoleon Hill.

If the dream is big enough, the facts don't matter. Zig Ziglar.

You're like a teabag ... not worth much until you've been through some hot water. John Mason.

Then, I said one of my daily affirmations loudly in my head:

I am the star of my own show. My life is my own creation and choosing. On this date five years from now I will be ... the youngest executive on the
New York Times
and will be taking my vacations in Polynesia, sucking back margaritas on a dock. I will. I will. I will.

As I felt RayAnn's fingers wrap around mine and pull my hands into the middle of the table, I was reminded of how much my daily affirmations had helped me recently.
This year, some woman will love me ... okay,
like
me
had recently been dropped from my mantra because it had come true.

She cleared her throat and said, "'The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.' Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

I smiled. "How'd you know I was meditating?"

"For one, you just saw a corpse. Logic by default. Second, your lips move when you're thinking emphatically."

"Where'd you find that quote?"

"John Mason's Nugget of the Day this morning, in my e-mail box. I memorized it for you. Rising to challenge and controversy is the story of your life, Mr. Geeky Dweeb."

"Like attracts like, Ms. Dweeb. You went out with me without a gun to your head, if I remember right."

RayAnn also was considered a dweeb at Randolph, but it had nothing to do with her looks. She has swirly, rusty blond hair to her shoulders and so many freckles that you can't find her nose. She's got a shy, squinty smile and dimples, and if she thinks I'm too fat, she doesn't hold it against me. She is to skinny as I am to fat. We both have one foot on the beyond normal line and the other foot on a banana peel.

"If my dad knew I was actually going out with you, he would be upset." She giggled.

"Tell him I was never fat until college. Dorm food, carbo hell."

"You're not that fat, and you know that's not what I'm talking about."

Correct. This is RayAnn's dweeb issue: her age. She'd turned seventeen just two days ago. Yes, I, at twenty, had been going out with a sixteen-year-old, and I'm not even from the bayou. If I'm a cradle robber, Randolph is a bigger cradle robber: They admitted her. RayAnn acts older, so it's hard to remember her age. She had been homeschooled and all that yada yada that goes with homeschooled kids: Got her GED at age fifteen, started Randolph at sixteen. Her parents are liberals, deep thinkers who enjoy fudging all lines of convention. Except they didn't want her roommates or the campus party animals being her introduction to romance.

"Your parents ought to love me. I'm not exactly Joe Rapist, am I?"

"No," she agreed quickly. "I wouldn't say that...
at
all."

Her sarcastic giggling noted, I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

"Our relationship is only a month old, RayAnn. You'll get mad at me at some point and then it will all have become 'statutory rape.'"

"If I get mad, we can talk it out."

"I'm not a therapist. And I don't need a statutory rape sentence dirtying up my future glory."

"We'll work on your trust issues."

"I'm going to write this piece, RayAnn. I'm going to be catapulted to fame and fortune via Christopher Creed...
Be he alive or be he dead
..."

"
Freight train running all through my head... Gone, gone, gone in the morning,
" she sang back at me. It was lyrics from Torey Adams's virgin album, appropriately named
Torey Adams.
The album wasn't released yet, but I'd gotten a pirated download of "Gone" after hearing a preorder clip on Amazon. I knew it had to do with Chris Creed, though it was the only song on the album that hinted at Adams's distant past.

We held hands across the table, and eventually the couple let on to the waitress how they'd traveled around to the wrong side of the woods, so they never found the cops or the corpse. The woman's talking painted a picture: Their son was a rookie cop, and her job as his mother was to bring the squad homemade cider and brownies if a crime or accident scene kept them somewhere longer than a couple hours.

I could sense the couple watching us, and finally the man asked: "Is that couple praying?"

RayAnn and I withdrew our hands to our laps, and RayAnn giggled. Having come from a small town, I know that's how small-town people get strangers to warm up to them. They make you laugh.

"Hi, we're from Randolph State," RayAnn said in her totally friendly way. "My boyfriend, Mike, and I are journalists there. Mike came out to do some research. I'm helping him."

"I didn't know Randolph had a journalism major," the man said. He was well spoken and would have to be educated to know that. "I thought it was an engineering school. Why not go to Indiana U?" the man asked. "That's the state's writing school."

I smiled and simply said, "I like the road less traveled." The whole truth contained a practical side: I could be a desk editor on Randolph's newspaper in another six weeks—after the next editor joined the eighty students monthly who flunked out of engineering. At Indiana, a thousand writers lie in wait for desk positions—too much competition for a job that is coveted but not difficult. I ended with a joke: "We're newspaper geeks, and I can't remember what my major is. I just know it's not dance."

They laughed and quit glancing at my shades, their suspicions about my impaired vision confirmed. They didn't fire any related questions at me.

"I'm Forrest Hayden," the man said. "This is my wife, Annie."

I reached my hand out and they shook it.

"So, what research are you doing way out here in New Jersey?" Mrs. Hayden asked.

I told them my interest in Creed, generated from Torey Adams's website.

"Well, you picked a great time," Mrs. Hayden said quickly, "with that corpse turning up in the woods. They found one almost five years back, but it wasn't Chris. We rather hope this one is. His mother would rest more easily if she had answers."

"Do you mind if I ask you some questions?" I brought my tape recorder out of the pouch in the poncho and held it in my lap. They didn't object as I turned my chair toward them. We'd already had our small talk, so I cut to the chase.

"How would you say that Steepleton has changed since Chris disappeared?"

A long pause was followed by nails drumming on the table.

"
Guilt,
" Mrs. Hayden finally said. "There's this underlying feeling of
guilt.
Like we've all done something. We just don't know what. We were a pretty normal town before the kid left and it turned into an unsolved whodunit."