The dead and bloated face staring back at him was Pete’s.
Someone grabbed Timmy’s shoulder and spun him roughly around. He looked up into the frightened face of his father, noticed his swollen eye and crushed nose, and almost wept again, but there was no time. The sirens were growing louder, drowning out the shrieks and snapping sounds from beneath the pines. Timmy let himself be led and almost didn’t feel Kim’s hand slipping into his own. He smiled at her but it was an empty gesture. There was nothing to be cheerful about and, head afire with unanswered questions, he looked over his shoulder as they descended the rise as one huddled, broken mass. Pete was gone. The earth still crawled and among the seething shadows The Turtle Boy stood, unsmiling in his victory.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Timmy slept for days afterward, speaking only to his parents and Kim and occasionally a police officer who tried his best to look positive. Timmy saw the horror in the man’s eyes, a horror that began on a warm sunny morning at the start of summer.
What he learned, he learned from his father, the papers and Kim who in turn had heard it from her own parents—apparently too shocked to be discreet in their gossiping.
They had pulled three bodies out of the pond. One was a young boy, little more than a skeleton cocooned in algae. According to the medical examiner’s report, he had been there for some time and had died as a result of a broken neck, sustained it was assumed, by a fall from an old tire swing that had hung for a brief time above the pond back in the late seventies. They had identified the body as Darryl Gaines, nephew of the second decedent, Wayne Marshall. Apparently, Marshall’s nephew had visited him back in 1967 while his mother was being treated for drug abuse. Marshall was drinking in his backyard with friends and poking fun at the boy (according to Geoff Keeler, an ex-buddy of Wayne’s) and the kid had run off in a sulk. They’d never seen him again. Divers had searched the pond and come up empty (“apart from some big <bleepin> turtles” one of them stated on the news, obviously relishing the attention of the camera). Shortly after, Darryl’s mother, Joanne Gaines was institutionalized. She committed suicide a month later.
The third body filled Timmy with a wave of grief he was afraid would never leave him. Every time he stared up at his bedroom ceiling; every time he glanced at a comic book or thought about the red clay in Patterson’s field, he saw Pete’s face.
Pete had never made it to summer camp. His body had shown signs of chronic physical abuse, culminating in a broken neck sustained—according to the evidence obtained from the Marshall house—from a fall against the edge of a marble fireplace. It was assumed Wayne Marshall had killed his son by accident, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage.
Panicked, Wayne decided to dump his son’s body in the pond (perhaps so he could claim later that the boy had run away) and was readying himself to do so when Timmy’s father arrived on the scene.
“I just stood looking at him,” Timmy’s father said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Wayne, with Pete in his arms…I didn’t want to believe he was dead, couldn’t believe Wayne would kill his own son. I watched him lay the boy down on the grass. That’s when he pulled the gun on me. That’s when I saw his eyes and knew he was lost. Jesus, I should have
Timmy only smiled through the tears when he thought of what Darryl’s turtles might have done to Wayne Marshall.
Wayne Marshall, the faceless man Timmy had seen at the pond, murdering his nephew and leaving him beneath the water to feed the turtles.
The visitors came and went, attempted to soothe Timmy with words he couldn’t hear and through it all, through the mindless passage of feverish recollection and the debilitating agony of loss, The Turtle Boy’s words returned to him again and again, nagging at him and begging to be decoded: You don’t know who did it.
Three weeks later, they filled in the pond. They’d been trying for years but somehow mechanical difficulties had always kept them away. Timmy thought he now knew what had caused those problems.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Summer ended, and as per the rules of the seasons in Ohio, there was no subtle ushering out of the warmth; the weather dropped in temperature and the earth darkened on the very day the calendar page turned.
Spurning all attempts his father made at trying to come up with something fun for them to do on what might be the last Saturday of good weather for quite some time, Timmy took a walk.
Fall was already setting up camp on the horizon, prospecting for leaves to burn and painting the sky with colors from a bruised pallet.
He wanted to forget, but knew that would never happen.
There were three reasons why the fear would always be with him, dogging his every step and making stalkers out of the slightest shadows.
First, the reporters. In the months since Pete’s and Mr. Marshall’s deaths, the newspapers had played up the ghost angle, delighting in the idea that an eleven-year-old boy had helped solve a murder through an alleged conference with the dead. There were phone calls, insistent and irritating, from jocular voices proclaiming their entitlement to Timmy’s story.
They were ignored.
But this only led to speculation, and Timmy’s face ended up in the local newspapers, topped with giant bold lettering that read:
Then the curiosity seekers started showing up, some of them from the media, most of them just regular folk. Their neediness frightened the boy.
The second reason was that even if Timmy managed to dismiss the calls, the desperate pleas of strangers, the newspaper reports and the occasional mention of his name on the television, there were still the nightmares. Vivid, brutal and unflinching. In his dreams, he saw everything, all the things he had been able to look away from in real life. All the things he had been able to run from.
Every night, he drowned and ended up behind what Darryl had called ‘The Curtain.’ In the waking hours, the name stayed with him, conjuring images in Timmy’s mind of a tattered black veil drawn wide across a crumbling stage. He imagined a whole host of the dead crouching behind it, waiting for their chance to come back, to find their own killers. And perhaps they would. Perhaps also they would only be successful if they had someone to draw strength from, as Timmy was sure Darryl Gaines had drawn strength from him and Pete.
Or perhaps it was over.
Believing that required the most effort.
Because the final reason, the last barrier stopping him from releasing the dread and shaking off the skeins of clambering horror was the recollection of something else The Turtle Boy had said:
