They discovered the body on a rainy afternoon.
“Aren’t we there
Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Eddie Connel labored through the sandy
soil on his bike. His face was red and beaded with perspiration;
sweat soaked through his red Police T-shirt, darkening Sting’s face. Chunky
Eddie wasn’t built for speed. He wore his sandy hair shorter than most, which tended to make him look even heavier than he was. Eddie’s idea of exercise was
a day on the couch playing
envied that machine. He was stuck with a 2600.
“Only Weezy knows,” Jack said.
He wasn’t sweating like Eddie, but he felt clammy al over. With good reason. The
August heat was stifling here in the Pine Barrens, and the humidity
made it worse. Whatever breeze existed out there couldn’t penetrate the
close-packed, spindly trees.
They were fol owing Eddie’s older sister, Weezy—real y Louise, but no one ever
cal ed her that. She liked to remind people that she’d been “Weezy”
long before
She was pedaling her banana-seat Schwinn along one of the firebreak trails that
crisscrossed the mil ion-plus acres of mostly uninhabited woodland
known as the Jersey Pine Barrens. A potential y dangerous place if you didn’t
know what you were doing or where you were going. Every year hunters wandered in, looking for deer, and were never seen again. Locals would wink
and say the Jersey Devil snagged another one. But Jack knew the JD was just a folktale. Wel , he was pretty sure. Truth was, the missing hunters were
usual y amateurs who came il equipped and got lost, wandering around in circles until they died of thirst and starvation.
At least that was what people said. Though that didn’t explain why so few of the
bodies were ever found.
But the Barrens didn’t scare Jack and Eddie and Weezy. At least not during the
day. They’d grown up on the edge of the pinelands and knew this
section of it like the backs of their hands. Couldn’t know al of it, of course. The
Barrens hid places no human eye had ever seen.
Yet as familiar as he was with the area, Jack stil got a creepy sensation when
riding into the trees and seeing the forty-foot scrub pines get thicker and thicker, crowding the edges of the path, and then leaning over with their
crooked, scraggly branches seeming to reach for him. He could almost believe they were shuffling off the path ahead of him and then moving back in to close it
off behind.
“See that sign?” Eddie said, pointing to a tree they passed. “Maybe we should
listen.”
Jack glanced at the orange letters blaring from glossy black tin:
NO FISHING
NO HUNTING
NO TRAPPING
NO TRESPASSING
No big deal. The signs dotted just about every other tree on Old Man Foster’s
land, so common they became part of the scenery.
“Wel ,” he said, “we’re not doing the first three.”
