The Creeping

“My mother never looked at me the same,” he says louder, planting his feet on the rocks. “And then Jeanie was everywhere. She was a vindictive little bitch at six. Always disagreed with me. Never shut up. I tried to teach her.” His empty hand fists at his side, and I know I’ve heard similar words before. Don’t make me teach you.

Daniel said it to Jeanie when he thought no one was listening. I can see the afternoon as if I’m there, reliving it. He had that rusted coffee tin, the tiny holes in the lid so the bloated spiders could breathe. The three of us—me, Daniel, and Jeanie—were just beyond the strawberries. Daniel wanted us to search for owl pellets, the gut-shaped masses of bone fragments and membrane that owls vomit. Daniel liked to dissect them, to reconstruct the tiny skeletons. Jeanie told him we wanted to play dolls instead. In response he pushed the tin into her arms like she’d been begging for it. She bit back tears. Now I recognize it as the same tin Jeanie wore on a string as a necklace in the Polaroid. I recall that nothing frightened Jeanie as much as spiders did.

I was six. I didn’t understand it was Daniel’s way of punishing her, of teaching her to do what he wanted.

Daniel snorts. “Guess I’m not shocked she’s fucking with me in death.” He says it like he’s watching the memory play in my eyes. “I see Jeanie everywhere. Crowds of people wear her face. I catch her reflection standing behind me. I hear her froggy little voice. She’s taunting me. She’s waiting for me to get mine.” He closes the distance between us, hovers over me as I shrink back. “She’s waiting for you to remember,” he shouts. “It gets worse near the anniversary. I can’t close my eyes without her there. She’s wherever I am, laughing, watching me, walking down the sidewalk alone . . . .”

He straightens up. Something’s changed in him. He’s bigger against the inky sky, as though he’s drawing on its vastness. “You can’t imagine all the times I worried about what you knew or suspected or dreamed.” He raises the branch so the barbed end is inches from my face.

“For years I tried to make you tell me; I tried to frighten you into keeping your mouth shut. Then I realized something. You would remember. There was no if, only when.” He tilts his head and continues in a whisper, “I needed to beat you to it. Reopening the case was my only shot. You were going to remember and tell them what I did.” He makes me sound like I’m the villain, the killer out to steal his life away. “I needed to come back here. I needed to find Jeanie’s body. Never finding it had me fucked up. It’s somewhere.” He nods. “It’s in the woods where you left it. Or Griever took it, buried it. I thought if I could find it, prove that Griever had it all these years, the cops would arrest her. No one would give a shit about a memory you came up with in the face of physical evidence.”

He angles closer, the branch’s spike nudging my temple. “Do you know my mother blamed me once the redhead showed up in the cemetery? She didn’t believe I wasn’t responsible. Some neighbor called to tell her that a body had been found. She was waiting for me when I got home, hours after the bonfire. She was going to tell the cops what she thought we’d done to Jeanie. Can you believe that?” His mouth twists in disdain. “Her own son. She wasn’t even going to wait until morning. She just wanted to tell me to my face first—she cried that she owed me that. Jane Doe was all the proof she needed that I was the pervert she always thought.”

Daniel muffles a wet sob that comes out of nowhere and draws the branch back like he’s winding up to strike me with it. I recoil, but at the last second he hurls the bloody stick into the lake. “I begged her to listen. Dad was sleeping.” His fingers rub hard against his cheeks, contorting his features.

This is the moment when I realize that there’s no going back; the three of us aren’t walking out of these woods together. It’s so much more than Jeanie and the accident.

“She had the phone, she was crying hysterically. And then . . . then she turned her back on me, dialing the cops. Weird how hard it was to keep the phone cord around her neck,” he says, almost as a side thought. He covers his own neck with his hand and mimics strangling her. “She was stronger than she looked.”

My mind races. This can’t be happening. Not Daniel. Not Caleb. Especially not Caleb. “But my hair . . . it was braided.” It’s such a stupid thing to say. As if that one little detail can save me; as if I can prove to Daniel he didn’t do it and we can all return home.

“Mom got you to shut up,” Daniel says. “You were blubbering from being lost. She didn’t figure on your mom noticing. But now I’ve spent too much goddamned time worrying about what you suspect or what you remember.” He smirks lopsidedly with the admission. “You’re a loose end. Zoey was a loose end.”