The Summer of Winters (7 page)

He then went over to one of the cooler units and snagged a couple of Cokes in glass bottles. As we headed back toward the front, we passed the paperback rack, and I paused, seeing that they’d gotten in a Stephen King collection called
Different Seasons
since the last time I was here. It was a relatively new book, one I hadn’t read yet, and I took a moment to salivate over it.

“You want that book?” Brody asked.

“I’m sure they have it at the library. I’ll check it out next time I go.”

“Hand it over, I’ll get it for you.”

“No,” I said a little too loudly, causing an old woman looking at greeting cards to glare my way. I just felt Brody had already done enough for me; if I let him buy me the book, my mother was sure to think I was presenting myself to the Moore’s as a charity case. “I mean, I heard it’s not even really horror like his other stuff. Probably boring.”

Brody shrugged. “If you say so.”

Up front, I went first, placing my candy bars on the counter and asking for the two packs of cigarettes. After I’d paid and got my change, I stood off to the side, waiting for Brody. The cashier, a woman named Ann who I thought looked uncannily like a nurse character on Julie’s soap, rang up the purchases, and when Brody dug his money from his pants pocket, a shower of change cascaded to the floor, rolling every which way.

I knelt down to pick up as much of it as I could for him, the small brown paper bag with the candy bars and cigarettes tucked under my arm, and that was when I noticed something other than change had fallen from the older boy’s pocket.

It was a small pink hairclip shaped like a horse with a plastic clasp. It stuck out among the change, and I assumed it must have belonged to Paige, although I couldn’t imagine why Brody would be carrying it around in his pocket. And the strand of hair trailing from it was brown, not blonde. I held it in the palm of my hand, staring down at it with a slight frown.

“Thanks,” Brody said tightly, snatching the hairclip from me. He hastily gathered up his change then headed out of the store, not even waiting for me.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my life had just changed forever.

Chapter
Six

Paige got back
home around eleven and we went to play in my backyard. Unlike Ray, she seemed to enjoy the games I’d made up. We played Robin Banks, and she was one of my cohorts called Penny Dreadful (a name she came up with herself). She proved a skilled bank robber, and we retreated to the bamboo forest to count the loot (which was nothing but leaves we’d plucked from the bushes that separated our houses).

After an hour and a half of playing in the backyard, we went inside where I made us both bologna sandwiches. Whenever Paige’s back was turned, Ray would make kissy faces and I’d shoot him dirty looks. After we finished eating, we got our bikes and headed to the public library so I could dump some books in the Return box out front.

“I don’t like libraries,” Paige said as we remounted our bikes and road away down Rutledge Avenue.

“Why not?”

“They’re always telling you to be quiet. How come? I mean, most people don’t read books
in
the library. They check them out and take them home to read, so what am I being quiet for?”

“I guess I’d never thought of it like that before.”

“Hey, let’s go back to the graveyard,” Paige said when we got to the place where Rutledge intersected College Drive. “I want to ride down that hill again, but this time I’m gonna start way back and pick up speed so I’ll really be flying when I start down.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Who are you, Evel Knievel?”

“Come on, I’ll race ya.”

We both started pumping the pedals as we rocketed the few blocks to the Oakland Cemetery. We forced an early afternoon jogger off the sidewalk and she yelled something after us, but we didn’t even pause. Paige beat me to the cemetery entrance by about five seconds.

“I let you win,” I said and tried to convince myself that this was true, but I wasn’t entirely successful.

“Sure you did. Tell you what, I’ll let you rest a little before we tackle that hill.”

We rode up to the Whisonant plot and got off our bikes, sitting with our backs against the large family marker. A couple of tall oaks provided shade, and we relaxed in silence for a few moments.

After a while Paige turned to me and asked, “So what’d you think of the movie?”

“It was alright.”

“I thought it was going to be a lot better. Last year Brody took me to see
Poltergeist
.”

“Really?” Now this had my attention. I loved horror movies, and I’d been dying to see
Poltergeist
, which would probably never happen unless they aired it on TV. Besides, when they aired horror movies on TV they always cut out the best parts. “How was it?”

“I slept with my parents for a week after. They weren’t too happy with Brody for taking me to see it, but it was a blast. Skeletons bursting up from the floor and floating around in the swimming pool, a woman being dragged across the ceiling, trees coming to life and attacking a little boy. You should have seen it.”

I wished I had. If only the Moore family had moved to Gaffney a year earlier, maybe I could have seen
Poltergeist
instead of stupid old
Superman III.
I realized I was being what my mom called an ingrate and I silently chastised myself.

“Hey, what’s that?” Paige said, staring off to the left, shielding her eyes with a hand as if saluting.

I followed her gaze. The land to the left of us sloped gently down to the road, and there were fewer graves here. However, halfway between us and the road, peeking out from behind a larger tombstone, was what looked like a foot covered with a purple sock.

“Do you have a lot of homeless people here?” Paige said, turning back to me.

“What?”

“Well, in Columbia there were a bunch of homeless people, and sometimes they’d sleep in parks and graveyards.”

“It’s awfully late for someone to still be sleeping.”

Paige rolled her eyes. “Homeless people don’t keep the same hours as regular people. I mean, it’s not like they have jobs or school to worry about. Let’s go take a look.”

I won’t say I had anything as strong as a premonition, but I definitely didn’t want to go. What I wanted to do was get back on my bike and hightail it home, pretend I’d never seen that purple foot.

But when Paige got up and started down the slope, I followed. We’d only been friends for a short time, but it was already becoming clear how the dynamic between us worked. She led, I followed.

As we approached the tombstone—
Beulah Granger Beloved Wife and Mother
—it became obvious that the foot was too small to belong to an adult. I started to hope it was just a doll; people sometimes put dolls and stuffed animals on the graves of children. But the dates on the tombstone confirmed that Beulah Granger had been no child, had been almost eighty-three when she died.

We stepped slowly around the tombstone—or at least it felt slow to me, as if we were moving in slow motion—and part of me was already mentally prepared for what I was going to see, leaving me in a numbed state, which was probably why I didn’t react right away.

Apparently Paige had not harbored the same suspicion as me, because she screamed shrilly and ran back up the hill, dropping down to her hands and knees behind a marble marker with a little bit of poetry carved into it—
Remember me as you walk by. As you are now so once was I. As I am now so you must be. So go prepare to follow me.
I could hear Paige throwing up.

I stood as if frozen, staring down at nine-year-old Sarah Winters.

She was on her back, her eyes wide open and staring up at the sky. Only they weren’t seeing anything, even I could tell that. I’d never seen a corpse before in my life except in movies, and those weren’t
real
, but I knew right away that she was dead. Her skin was the color of cottage cheese, her tongue lolling out fat and bloated. Her throat sported a ghastly necklace of purple-and-black bruises. Even worse was what lay below her waist. Her dress had been hiked up over her hips, and if she’d worn any underwear they had been torn away. I had never seen what was between a girl’s legs before, and I hoped that this bloody, ripped mess wasn’t a good representation.

Yet none of this was what really drew my attention. I mainly had eyes for her hair. One side was disheveled and tangled, fanned out around her head; the other side was pulled neatly into a pigtail.

A pigtail held in place by a pink plastic hairclip shaped like a horse.

***

The next few hours passed in a blur. I was in shock, moving in a daze. When I would look back on the events later, it seemed like I was watching something on TV, not something I’d actually lived through.

After finding the body, I wanted to get back home and tell my mother so she could call the police, but I couldn’t get Paige to move. She sat on the ground, knees drawn up to her chest, rocking back and forth and crying. My attempts to get her to her feet were met not with resistance but with…nothing. She was just dead weight and trying to move her was like trying to move one of the tombstones.

I was tempted to just jump on my bike and go for help, but I didn’t want to leave Paige alone with the body. So I did the only thing I could think to do, which was stand in the middle of the graveyard screaming for help.

It seemed I stood there screaming for hours, but it was probably more like minutes. It was the jogger we’d run off the sidewalk earlier that came to our aid. I found myself unable to speak, just broke into hysterical tears and motioned back toward the body. When the jogger saw Sarah, she began panting as if hyperventilating and ushered me away. Paige was still withdrawn into herself, so the woman lifted her into her arms and took us to her house, which was only a block down College Drive.

We sat in her living room while she called the police, then she told us her name was Maggie and asked for ours. I answered for both of us. I gave her my number, but I didn’t know Paige’s. Maggie gave us some Chips Ahoy and milk; Paige didn’t touch hers, and much as I thought I’d never see the day, I didn’t have much appetite for cookies myself.

My mother arrived before the police, and she’d brought Mrs. Moore along. At the sight of her mother, Paige seemed to snap out of her catatonia and ran into her arms, babbling through her tears about what we’d found. I turned to my own mother and apologized for making her come out when she had a headache. It was an absurd thing to say, but my brain felt as if it had been scrambled like a couple of eggs.

When the police arrived, Maggie left with a couple of officers to show them where the body was, and a young officer with a buzz-cut stayed behind to question Paige and me. Not that there was much to tell. We went to the graveyard to ride bikes and found the body. Simple as that.

Or was it? I didn’t tell the officer about the hairclip, the same kind I’d seen in Brody’s possession earlier in the day. I wasn’t sure why I held back that information, probably because I couldn’t believe that someone I knew, someone who lived right next door, someone who’d taken me to a movie and bought me popcorn, could be capable of such an act.

And what proof did I have, really? A hairclip? I was sure that hairclip wasn’t unique, probably lots of girls had them. The one Brody had could very well have belonged to his little sister. Didn’t mean he’d snatched it off a dead girl’s head after doing…horrible things to her.

But I kept remembering that strand of hair stuck to it. Not Paige’s curly blonde hair. Straight and brown…just like the hair of Sarah Winters.

I wasn’t thinking clearly, I knew that much. I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut about the hairclip until I’d had time to really mull the situation over.

Maybe then I could figure out the right thing to do.

Chapter
Seven

I didn’t see
Paige for the next three days. My mother didn’t even want Ray and me going out of the house. On Tuesday I begged Julie to let me go to the library and check out some new books, and while she wouldn’t let me go on my own, she finally agreed to take Ray and me herself as long as I waited until after her soap was over.

The trip was brief—and Ray whined the whole time about how boring the library was—but it was enough to give me an idea of how the people of Gaffney were reacting to the news of the Sarah Winters murder. Fear, paranoia, and suspicion.

I could see it in the face of Miss Kennedy, the old librarian. In her eyes, the way she seemed to look at everyone as a potential madman. Even me and Ray. Over by the newspapers I heard two men talking about how they wouldn’t let their children or their wives out after dark. I saw a mother taking her five year son around the library, keeping a death grip on his forearm the whole time, as if she thought he’d be snatched away from her if she loosened her hold even for a second. If the people I saw in the library were any indication, Gaffney was a town in the grips of a panic.

Those three days I paid very close attention to the local news, and actually read through the Monday and Wednesday editions of
The Gaffney Ledger
, something I rarely did. It seemed the police had no leads. No one had seen Sarah since she left the Capri by herself Saturday night. No witnesses had come forward saying they saw her getting into a strange van or talking to a man in a trench coat offering her candy or anything of the sort.

There were plenty of editorials mourning the town’s loss of innocence, wondering what kind of inhuman monster could be capable of such an act, decrying this modern age where no one was safe. I also read more than a few Letters to the Editor urging the citizens of Gaffney to arm themselves and defend their families against the demon in our midst. The phrase “shoot first, ask questions later” was used more than once.