it stands a statue of a bald man in muttonchops and a long doctor's coat, holding a Bible and a bone-saw, gazing stoically off to the west. Sue knows the plaque underneath the statue identifies the man as Isaac Hamilton, but it doesn't say what he did to deserve to be immortalized for decades, maybe centuries, of having pigeons shit on his head. There's a fair amount of writing on the plaque, some kind of poem, she recalls vaguely, but she's not sure. Although she grew up less than a mile from here, Sue's never bothered to look it up.
Past the park the lights of town diminish to a dull, pale haze in her rearview mirror and in front of her are occasional farmhouses, bankrupt auto body shops with state inspection signs dangling by one corner, and miles of nearly uninterrupted darkness.
Two miles down the road she turns right onto Old Gorham Road. It is a long, dithering country lane whose sole defining characteristic seems to be its determination to continue sloping steadily downward. It forks twice, and both times Sue bears left, the second time onto a one-lane gravel road with no posted name. Here the pines are close enough that their needles hiss against her windows. The gravel is covered with half a foot of snow but the Expedition makes short work of it. America's upper class is nothing if not prepared for a little impromptu off- roading.
The road straightens out. Up ahead in the high beams she can begin to make out the old playground, two metal swing sets now devoid of swings and a rusty, slumping slide, all of it overgrown by weeds. Sue's not sure whether this land was owned by the township or simply abandoned here by some private landowner, but at one point it was the choice make-out spot for a generation of townies, and not long afterward, a favorite place for local kids to hang out, just far enough away to require bicycles and determination.
Beyond it is the bridge.
It's less than an eighth of a mile in the distance but to Sue it seems a whole world away. Like the tired little cluster of playground equipment and the road leading up to it, the bridge has never had any name that she knows of nor has it needed one. It is a lonely, one-lane structure buried deep enough in the woods that the only people who could find it would have to know these dark back roads inside and out and thus have been searching for it specifically, or have stumbled upon it completely by accident.
Underneath the bridge is an overgrown swamp, two square acres at least, where a creek once flowed, long since dead. In the shadow of those rotten timbers, sunken beneath the stench of decaying leaves and plant life from decades before she was born, was the spot where something happened back in the summer of '83.
Sue feels her neck and back coiling forward as if somehow to muffle her accelerated heartbeat. Suddenly her mouth is full of sour adrenaline, its mercury drip in the back of her throat.
There is a memory here, half-buried in the wintry hush of falling snow, a thing out of some child's nightmare that years ago somehow made the leap into the real world.
All at once her phone chirps.
A great flutter of muscle causes her arms to fly up sideways, her left hand whacking the door.
'Hello,' she manages.
'You made it,' the voice says, sounding low and insolent, urgent, making her think of phone sex. 'I've been waiting.'
Waiting.Sue stares out into the dark woods, her entire body momentarily reduced to what feels like an enormous pair of eyes, darting and searching the thick blackness piled in layers around her. 'Are you out there?'
'What do you think?'
Sue is breathing through her mouth. Her heart goesthump, thump. She can hear herself, her body doing its job, keeping her brain alive. Something vaguely reassuring about the lumbering way that it goes about its work. Come hell or high water it's just another day at the cracker factory for the old human body.
He is out here too, somewhere. In the darkness, she thinks, very nearby. Perhaps under the bridge waiting for her or even closer. With the trees and the darkness and the snow, he could almost be close enough to touch.
'What do you want me to do?' she asks. She thinks reflexively of those girls in the 1-900 ads they run in the back of theBoston Phoenix and the comparison, though jarring, is not without validity.Hi, my name's Sue. Tonight I'll do whatever you want. Just name it. Sue can practically hear her friend Natalie rolling her eyes, saying,Please, but right now that's how the voice on the phone has made her feel. Tonight she is his fear whore.
'Stop the car and get out. Keep the phone with you.'
Sue puts the Expedition in park and cuts the engine. Doing this she thinks only of Veda, but now apprehension for herself has joined her fear for her daughter. She opens the door and slides down and out into the cold air. Her jacket bunches up momentarily around her waist, allowing for the blade of the wind to graze her bare skin, and she shudders, an all-over tremble that spreads from her extremities inward to the base of her spine. Without thinking she puts on her gloves and stuffs her left hand in her pocket.
Her eyes water and her nose stings at the sharp temperature drop. Standing beside the car with the dome light on and the reassuring little chime of civilization reminding her that, whatever else is going on, the door is still ajar, she waits for the sensation to come back, the feeling of being watched.
She doesn't have to wait long. She feels his stare pressing down on her from somewhere close. It is horrible, this feeling. The fear sinks to the pit of her stomach.
'Get the shovel and the canvas out of the back,' the voice on the phone says. 'You'd better take the flashlight too. It's going to be very dark where you're going.'
'What do you want me to do?'
'I want you to go down underneath the bridge.'
'Is that where you are?' she blurts, although it's not actually what she means. What she means is,Is that where my daughter is? But these questions-and any others she might care to raise-are met with such total preemptive silence on the other end that Sue realizes that he's hung up again. And now she senses that there will be nothing more forthcoming until she does as she's told.
And of course there is another problem. The items he asked her to get out, the shovel and the canvas, are not in the Expedition. They are not in the Expedition because she didn't bring them. In the case of the canvas tarp, at least, the voice on the phone must know this, since he was the one who came and took the tarp from the garden shed himself.
She does however have the flashlight and for the moment the flashlight will have to do.
Now ankle-deep in snow, she begins edging her way toward the embankment, where the bridge takes over, with the phone in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Shining it under the sagging timbers she realizes immediately the light itself will do very little good since she has no idea how deep the snowdrifts are down there. On the third step her right foot plunges through the snow to her crotch, throwing her off-balance, and for an ugly, dizzy moment she is sure she's going to go tumbling headfirst down the slope to land in a heap in the frozen swamp below.
Instead she grabs one of the timbers, hooks her left arm around it, and clings there for a span of seconds until her center of gravity is at least partially restored. Then, turning the edges of her feet against the angle of the hill, she inches downward once again, eyes riveted to the circle of the flashlight's beam ten feet in front of her. As she descends fully beneath the bridge the drifts taper away to wet, bare ground. No amount of wind could blow snow down at this angle.
Then the smell hits her, not incrementally but all at once.
The ripe and boggy rot panting upward from the very pores of the earth. It speaks directly to her limbic system and suddenly it is a long time ago and she and Phillip are standing down here, with pieces of hay and grass and sticks stuck to their skin, sweating and filthy among the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. Staring at each other dead-eyed with the knowledge of what they've done and the work that is still ahead of them on that endlessly long afternoon.
You can't tell anybody,he tells her.
Sue nods at Phillip's ghost, his earnest, eleven-year-old face split down the middle by a single ray of sunlight falling from a crack in the bridge above their heads. A bird cries out with a cackling trill.
Now she is standing at the bottom of the hill. It is so dark down here that the very absence of light itself seems to swallow her up, consuming the flashlight's illumination in a single gulp. Still, if she looks out of the corner of her eye she can make out the rough outline of wooden piling twenty feet to her right, its base implanted crookedly in the dirt. There is no wind down here, but it is cold and damp.
