“Aniday, do you still want to leave?”
“Leave? Where would I go?”
“Just leave, right now. We could go. I don’t know. West to California and stare at the deep blue sea.”
Another noise in the water silenced us. Perhaps a person wading in the stream, or the splashing dogs as they crossed, or perhaps a deer quenching an evening’s thirst.
“You’re not going to leave, are you, Speck?”
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
We froze and listened hard. Creeping along through the brush, we carefully investigated the noise. A few hundred yards downstream, a most peculiar odor—neither human nor animal, but something in between. My stomach pained me as we moved along the banks of the water. Around a bend and in the fading light through the trees, we were nearly upon him before we saw the man.
“Who’s there?” the figure said, then ducked down, trying to hide.
“Speck,” I whispered. “That’s my father.”
She stood on her tiptoes and peeked at the crouching man; then she held her finger to her lips. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in deeply. Speck grabbed my hand and led us away as quietly as a fog.
? CHAPTER 19 ?
Despite being underwater for a day, the body was identified as that of young Oscar Love. The sheet pulled back, the shocking bloat of the drowned, and sure enough, it was him, although the truth is, none of us could bear to look closely. Had it not been for the strange netting around the waterlogged corpse, maybe no one would have thought it anything other than a tragic accident. He would have been laid to rest under two yards of good earth, and his parents left to their private grief. But suspicions were raised from the moment that they gaffed him from the river. The corpse was transported twelve miles to the county morgue for a proper autopsy and inquest. The coroners searched for cause but found only strange effects. To all outward appearance he was a young boy, but when they cut him open, the doctors discovered an old man. The weirdness never made the papers, but Oscar later told me about the atrophied internal organs, the necrosis of the heart, the dehydrated lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, and brain of a death-defying centenarian.
The strangeness and sorrow surrounding this discovery were compounded by the vanishing act of Jimmy Cummings. With the rest of the searchers, he had gone into the woods that night but had not returned. When Jimmy did not show up at the hospital, we all assumed he had gone home early or found another exit, and not until the next evening did George begin to worry. By the third day, the rest of us were all anxious about Jimmy, desperate for any news. We planned to go back to the woods that evening if the weather held, but just as I sat down with my family for dinner, the phone rang in the kitchen. Elizabeth and Mary both sprang from their chairs, hoping a boy might be trying to reach them, but my mother ordered them to sit.
“I don’t like your friends calling in the middle of meals.” Mom picked up the receiver from its cradle on the wall, and after she said hello, her face was a palette of surprise, shock, disbelief, and amazement. She half turned to finish her discussion, leaving us to stare at the back of her head. As she hung up the phone with her left hand, she crossed herself with her right, then turned to share the news.
“It’s a miracle. That was Oscar Love. Jimmy Cummings is okay, and he found him alive.”
My sisters stopped mid-bite, their forks suspended in the air, and stared at her. I asked my mother to repeat the message, and in so doing, she realized the implications of her sentences.
“They walked out of the woods together. He’s alive. He found him in a hole. Little Oscar Love.”
Elizabeth’s fork fell and clattered on the plate.
“You’re kidding. Alive?” Mary said.
“Far out,” said Elizabeth.
Distracted, Mom fretted with the bobby pins at her temples. She stood behind her chair, thinking.
“Isn’t he dead?” I asked.
“Well . . . there must be a mistake.”
“That’s a helluva mistake, Mom,” Mary said.
Elizabeth asked the not-so-rhetorical question we were all wondering about. “So who’s that in the morgue?”