The Wildman (6 page)

Somehow—although he hadn’t been there to see or hear it—Jeff associated that sound with the slamming of Jimmy Foster’s coffin lid as it locked away one of his best friends in total, eternal darkness.

With these and other disturbing thoughts in his mind, Jeff closed his eyes and let out a long, slow moan. Falling back onto the bed, he settled his head on the pillow. The single clearest thought he had was—

There … at last … I finally saw a real dead person.

CHAPTER THREE

Arrival

“
So you’re not even a little bit creeped out about going back there?”

Standing in his kitchen, Jeff hunched his shoulder to tuck the phone against his ear as he poured himself a generous shot of rum. This was his second one tonight. He never had a second shot, but he was pretty sure he needed one tonight because of the direction this conversation with Tyler was taking.

“
Not really,” Tyler said after a short pause that made Jeff suspect he might really feel otherwise. “It was so long ago, you know? I can’t say as I’ve really given it all that much thought.”

“
Seriously?”

Jeff narrowed his eyes and took a sip of rum, luxuriating for a moment as he swallowed. The liquor warmed his throat and stomach, and he had no doubt it was going to his head. He was already a bit unsteady on his feet.

“
Really. I mean … Come on. We were just kids, and it was what? Like, thirty-five years ago.”

“
Yeah, but—”

“
It’s not like any of us really
knew
J
immy Foster or anything. He wasn’t an important part of our lives all the time or anything. He was just like the rest of us—some kid from some town we’d probably never even heard of who showed up at camp for two weeks, and then went back home for the rest of the year.”

“
Hmmm …” Jeff said. “He was gone, all right.”

“
We came from all over New England. It’s not like we lost our best friend from our school or neighborhood or something.”

“
I know, but—”

Jeff interrupted himself to take another swallow of rum. He knew he was getting good and buzzed, and should stop now, but he convinced himself this was a good thing. It would blunt some of the more unsettling memories this conversation was dredging up.

“
Look, Jeff. I didn’t see what you saw.” Tyler’s voice dropped to a low, calm pitch … or maybe, Jeff thought, the rum was hitting him a lot harder and faster than he realized. “None of us saw what you saw. And I can understand how you might be a lot more freaked out about the whole thing than the rest of us. Christ, you were practically a celebrity because of what you did.”

“
But I
didn’t
do
anything.”

“Bull. You actually got to
see
Jimmy after he was dead. Do you have any idea how pissed off Bloomberg and some of the other counselors were?”

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Jeff said, but even as he said it, he knew he was lying. The image of Jimmy Foster lying there on the stretcher—cold, pale, and
dead
—was
seared into his brain. He had carried it with him his whole life, but it was something he simply didn’t like thinking about.

“
But you can’t say it didn’t creep you out?” he said, lowering his voice as he stared at the rum in his glass. “Even after you found out what had happened?”

Tyler sniffed over the phone, and Jeff could just imagine him shaking his head.

“
No one really knows what happened to him. My parents never told me what—if anything—they heard.”

“
You ever ask them?”

“
Hell, no. They both died quite a few years ago now, in a plane crash. I never got the chance to … if I had wanted to. I never thought about it.”

Jeff didn’t hear even the slightest hesitation in his friend’s voice, and he wondered how deeply his parents’ death had affected him.

Is it something—like Jimmy Foster’s death—that he never thought about?

Or had it affected him so deeply he doesn’t allow himself to think or feel anything about it?

“
But the police came to your house and talked to you about it once you got home from camp, didn’t they?”

“
Of course they did. As far as I know, they talked to everyone who was at camp when it happened—campers, counselors, staff. You must know what happened to Mr. Farnham.”

Jeff was in the middle of taking another sip of rum, and he started to choke on it when he tried to speak. The liquor burned the back of his throat and nasal passages.

“
I know that was the last summer Camp Tapiola was open.” Jeff’s nose was still stinging, and his eyes started to water. “They closed the place down, but my parents told me they’d never let me go back there no matter what. Years later, I heard that Farnham was sued by Jimmy’s parents.”

“
His mother, anyway,” Tyler said. “His father had died a few years before Jimmy did.”

“
Really? How do you know that?”

“
Jimmy told me.”

It surprised Jeff that Tyler knew something about Jimmy that he didn’t.

“
Anyway,” Jeff said. “From what I understand, things got so messed up because of the legal shit-storm surrounding Jimmy’s murder he had to—”

“
Whoa. Hold on a second, bucko.”

“
What?”

“
You just said Jimmy’s
murder.
”

“
I did?”

Tyler grunted.

“
Yeah. I guess I did.” Jeff hesitated a moment and sneaked another quick sip of rum. “But he
was
murdered. I saw his throat, and it was cut wide open.”

“
As far as I know, no one official ever concluded that’s what happened.”

“
Come on, man.”

Jeff wondered why he was getting so heated. Was it because Tyler’s a lawyer and has to have a mountain of substantiated, verifiable proof? Or was it simply too unnerving to think about Jimmy’s death, even after all these years?

“
His friggin’ throat was cut, Tyler. I know what I saw!”

“
He maybe had a wound on his throat,” Tyler said. “But there was never anything about his throat being
cut
. He went down to the swimming area, fell in, and drowned.”

“
Yeah. That’s what my folks kept telling me,” Jeff said, “but I checked it out later. Some Maine newspapers labeled it murder. A murder that’s never been solved.”

“
I thought you said you didn’t think about it. When’d you do all of this?”

Jeff realized he had said too much already, but now that it was out there, he knew Tyler wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

“
A long time ago,” he said.

“
So t
his
has
been an issue for you,” Tyler said, his voice fairly dripping with accusation.

Or is he trying to piss me off?
Jeff wondered.

“Sure. It’s something I’ve paid attention to some. But I wouldn’t say it’s been an
issue
for m
e, exactly.”

“
Well …” Tyler sighed deeply. “I can’t say as I’d blame you. Like I said, the rest of us never saw what you saw.”

Someone else did .. The person who killed him,
Jeff was about to say, but he kept quiet and took another swallow of rum instead. The glass was already half-empty, and Jeff was definitely a “half-empty,” not a “half-full” kind of guy. He reached for the bottle to top off his drink.

“
The way you’re talking, though,” Tyler said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you shouldn’t come to the reunion. It might dredge up too many of these memories for you.”

“
I never said that, but … well … I dunno. I just asked if the whole idea creeped you out, and obviously it doesn’t.”

“
But it
does
c
reep you out.”

“
A little … yeah.”

“
Good. At least you admit it.”

Jeff could easily imagine that this was the tone of voice he used when he knew he was winning a case in court

“
And I, for one, would be really bummed if you didn’t come.”

“
Oh, I probably will.”

Jeff glanced at the clock and saw that it was already past eleven. Six o’clock came early. He had to get to bed, so he said a quick good-bye to Tyler and hung up. He staggered a bit as he made his way slowly up the stairs to the bedroom, turning lights off behind him as he went. His head was spinning, but that didn’t stop the rush of thoughts and memories and images that filled his mind when he lay down to sleep.

Thanks to the rum, though, he drifted off quicker than usual. Still, his sleep was thin and disturbed.

* * *

Over the next several weeks, scores of e-mails and a few telephone calls went back and forth among the friends. Jeff kept going along with the plans, but he was more and more determined to ditch the whole thing once it got a little closer. He was waiting until the last minute so there would be no possibility Evan and his former friends would try to reschedule the reunion so he could make it, too.

July passed into August with another long stretch of scorching, humid weather. Then, toward the end of the month, the days began to get shorter, and the nights cooled off noticeably. “Good sleeping weather,” people called it.

During this time, work at Bayside Realty remained steady if not hectic, and Jeff felt a growing agitation. Maybe it was the upcoming reunion, but he had begun an exchange of hostile e-mails and telephone calls with Susan concerning child support for Matt. She had married someone she had known and dated back in high school, and she had relocated to California. Jeff argued that, if he was going to have full custody of Matt, she was going to have to start paying him child support.

Susan wouldn’t yield.

She insisted their divorce agreement was finalized, and it fully covered her commitment regarding joint custody and child support. There was no provision about any changes based of either one of them remarrying. Jeff countered that it had never crossed his mind either one of them would ever remarry—especially so soon—but Susan insisted that it
was
his
and his
lawyer’s
fault for not planning for that contingency. No ma
tter how many times he told her he had trusted her to do what was fair and reasonable, if only because the welfare of their son was involved, she wouldn’t budge.

“
If I’m ever gonna get married again, I’ll find a woman I hate and give her a house and car,” Jeff said more times than he cared to remember. It usually made his friends at the office laugh, but he was half-convinced he meant it.

The difference was, in his case
,
he
had kept the house and car. He wanted to keep them if only to provide Matt some illusion of stability while he was off to college, even if the house
was
much too big for him, now that he was living alone. The cost of upkeep made it so he had little to no discretionary income, not that having a kid in college allowed much discretionary income.

As the weekend for the reunion drew closer, Jeff began to think how it might not be such a bad idea after all to hook up with some old friends. He could really use a weekend away, drinking and reminiscing with people who had known him long before he married Susan. Evan had finally settled on a weekend—the last weekend of October, a few days before Hallowe’en. Everyone agreed this was a good time for them, and they began to make their plans to rendezvous at the landing dock on Shore Road where Evan would meet them with a boat and take them over to Sheep’s Head Island and Camp Tapiola.

For a while, Jeff had argued that going out so late in the year might be a colossal mistake. The way he remembered it, the temperature had dropped close to freezing on a couple of nights when they were there in the middle of July.

Imagine it in October? … a lake in western Maine? … sleeping in an un-insulated, unheated building? …

That didn’t sound very appealing.

If they were still kids, it might be an exciting adventure, but at their age?

No way.

The other guys—especially Evan—scoffed at him via e-mail for sounding like a pussy and for lacking imagination. The problem was, Jeff could imagine all too easily how things could go wrong. If—and if was still a big
if
—he even went to the reunion—he would be sure to bring plenty of rum to
keep him warm and pleasantly buzzed for the entire weekend. Hell, maybe he’d even see if he could score some weed. That would certainly make for a fun weekend.

The month of September was rainy and much colder than usual. Jeff hoped Evan would finally see reason and call the whole thing off until next spring. But Evan insisted that, as soon as the ice was out of the lake come spring, his construction company was going to bring in bulldozers and other machinery to start tearing apart the old campgrounds. By June of next year, the island would be unrecognizable. If they wanted one last chance to see where they had spent a short but significant time of their lives … if they wanted to recapture some childhood memories, this was their one and only chance.