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  “You think you can do that?” Nagel spoke in a whisper.

  “Sure.” Brock’s heart hammered against the cage of his ribs. The thrill tickled the back of his neck and his stomach at the same time. This was scary, but fun.

  All that changed when they heard the scream.

  15

  “What was that?” In the back of his brain, Brock heard how much he sounded like a little girl watching a horror movie. He felt his eyes tearing with fear, his gut loosening so that he had to squeeze his cheeks to keep from making a mess.

  Nagel literally flew off the fence. He landed like a cat, already moving when his feet hit the dirt, running toward the fields and their thick cover. Brock followed without thinking. They heard it again as they ran. Brock never understood the word “bloodcurdling,” but he did now. His blood curdled. The hair on his neck stiffened like the teeth of a plastic comb. Only in the deep bowels of the scrub hugging his knees and back-to-back with Nagel, rubbing shoulder blades, did his heart begin to slow.

  Silence.

  And then Nagel’s nervous laughter. “Crap. You know what that is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s that crazy Huggy.”

  “That’s not Coach Hudgens. That’s not even human.”

  “It’s him.” Nagel shifted in the pitch black, then lit up their cave with his key chain, casting a swatch of pale light over his face so that Brock could read his sincerity. “I never heard it before, but I heard about it.”

  “About what?” Brock asked.

  “Him. Screaming. Going crazy. Bonkers. Nuts.” Nagel widened his eyes. “My brother told me. I didn’t believe it, but I never heard it. He said they heard it one night. He said first they thought someone was being murdered or tortured or something. But my brother’s crazy friend Curtis Tasch climbed the fence and went in to see.”

  Brock couldn’t get his mind around that. What human would walk toward that demonic sound? Brock felt his face contorting with disbelief.

  “I’m telling the truth. He went in there.” Nagel angled his head toward the Hudgens property. “And it was him. It was Coach Huggy. He was sitting there with a big drink in his hand, sprawled out in a chair on his deck, just howling like a total maniac. It’s him.”

  As if to prove it, the mad howl pierced the darkness, sending fresh shivers down Brock’s back.

  “Lucky we didn’t go over,” Brock said.

  To Brock’s complete surprise, Nagel smiled. “We didn’t, but we are now.”

  “We are what?” Brock was totally confused.

  “Going in.” Nagel clenched his hands and teeth. “He’s so out of it, and old, he won’t be able to catch us. He can’t even stand up. Man, how cool will that be? We’ll smash his windows with him sitting right there, too sloppy to even chase us. Ha ha! We are so going to mess him up!”

  Nagel rose and turned to weave his way out of their dark cover.

  Brock felt numb. This wasn’t right. He’d known that all along, but he wanted to do something to pay back his dad for treating him like a suitcase. It was different now, though. Now that they were actually going to do something wrong. But he knew Nagel would call him out, so he did the only thing he could think of.

  He reluctantly followed.

  16

  Filled with dread and excitement, Brock trembled. His ragged breath came with great effort, as though some unseen hand had a tight hold on his chest. He stepped up onto the bucket, glowing dully even in the darkness, gripped the blanket, then swung, scrabbled, and slipped until he thudded down on the other side of the fence. Nagel held out two rocks, one for each hand. Their cold weight made his arms and hands feel like weapons.

  They crept through the trees. Nagel never hesitated. Brock’s invisible tether guided him along and he bumped into Nagel when he stopped at the edge of the trees. The house seemed to crouch in front of them, like a giant, who, with one forceful leap, could span the grassy lawn and be upon them, tearing flesh from their bones. The two windows side by side near the peak of the roof were like zombie eyes, shaded and lifeless, but faintly glowing, and proof of some force within.

  Brock shuddered.

  Nagel hefted his rock. “Okay, we’ll throw together, on three. One . . .”

  “Wait.” Brock kept his urgent voice low. “I can’t.”

  “Come on.” Nagel grabbed the front of Brock’s shirt and knotted it up in his fist. “He punked you. He punked me. Let’s do this.”

  Brock shook his head.

  “Why? You can’t throw that far?” Nagel’s voice oozed with contempt. “You big wimp.”

  “I can throw farther than you.”

  “Then, let’s go,” Nagel said. “Prove it.”

  “I’ll hit the shutter. I’m not breaking the glass.” Brock couldn’t explain it. He could scare the coach. He could defy him with a loud noise that made him wince, but he just couldn’t destroy his property, and maybe hurt someone inside. “I . . . I just can’t.”

  Nagel clenched his jaw, and even in the pale light from the upper windows Brock could read the tension playing on the muscles in his neck like piano keys. “All right then, you hit the shutter . . . if you can. If you miss, you throw again. If it breaks, we run. Ready? One . . . two . . . three!”

  Brock’s mind had locked in on the word “run,” and that’s all he thought of as he took a hop step alongside Nagel and fired.

  17

  Brock’s stone hit the shutter so hard it sounded like a gunshot.

  The window exploded with a tinkling shatter.

  Nagel whooped and flew.

  Horrified, Brock turned and tripped.

  He sensed Nagel’s shape scaling the fence, mounting its top, then vanishing into the night. Brock sprang to his feet and surged ahead. He hit the fence, gripping a pointed post in each hand on either side of the blanket, feet pedaling the air in their search for footholds on the inside frame of the stockade.

  Just as his left foot caught a hold, the pointed top to the fence snapped off in his left hand. As his foot thrust him upward, his left hand flew back over his head. The rotation and the force sent his feet flying up in the air and he came down with a crunch on the back of his neck. Stars lit his universe, then swam furiously about in his darkened field of vision. His ears rang out, and time stood still as a voice deep inside urged him to his feet.

  Brock staggered and reached for the fence, this time in a daze nothing close to frantic. He pawed at the pointed tops, securing one on either side of the blanket again, then got his foothold, this time pushing his body straight up until his other foot caught the middle support in the fence’s frame. With the blanket now chest high, he slowly leaned into it, cautious and worried that another point might snap again under his weight.

  As he swung his opposite leg up to clear the blanket, something grabbed hold and yanked at him, back to the dirt inside the fence. His ears still rang and he was too stunned to gush with panic. Instead, a slow, heavy dread seeped into his body and mind as he looked up and saw Coach Hudgens.

  The Coach staggered, then caught himself against the fence. He was sloppy and drunk, but not too far gone that he couldn’t speak.

  “I . . . I got you!”

  18

  Coach Hudgens grabbed Brock by the collar and yanked him to his feet. “You’re comin’ with me.”

  Between Brock’s delirious state and the coach’s drunkenness, the two of them bumbled through the trees and across the lawn. A woman stood on the back deck, her pale-blue robe glowing in the night, both hands clutching the lower part of her face so that Brock could see her eyes, wide with disbelief. She jiggled her head and muttered something over and over that Brock thought sounded like “Oh, no.”

  “I got him.” Coach Hudgens dragged Brock up the steps and shoved him down at his wife’s feet. She jumped back, like he was a snake.

  “Coach Hudgens, I didn’t. I can explain.” Brock heard his own pleas as if he were a bystander watching from some invisible perch above them all.

/>   The wife stepped back again, and her hands went from her face to her armpits as she shivered in the night air. “Blake, you be careful.”

  “He won’t break.” Coach Hudgens had his cell phone out. “The police will fix him.”

  At the sound of the word “police,” something inside Brock unraveled.

  “Coach!” Brock crawled to the coach’s feet, hugging them, and bawling like a maniac. “No, Coach! No! No, please! Don’t call the police! Please! I promise . . . I . . . my father will kill me! I’ll do anything! Please!”

  Coach snapped his phone shut and bent down over. “Not so tough anymore? You like to break windows?”

  “Coach, I didn’t do it, I swear. It wasn’t me.” Not for an instant did Brock consider protecting Nagel, or anyone else. All he knew was that he had entered a dark and horrifying place. All his anger and sullenness and hurt feelings from being torn out of the bottom of the sixth inning in the championship had melted away. He only knew that he had broken enough of his father’s rules that—if it was truly possible for a father to kill his son—his father would certainly kill him. Hiding in the pit of that belief was the certainty that his father was a killer. He knew that as clearly as he knew Coach had yanked him back to his feet and was propelling him through the sliding glass door into his living room.

  Coach’s wife followed, frantic. “Blake! Blake! What are you doing? Let him go!”

  But Coach either didn’t hear his wife, or he didn’t care. Brock was dragged by the collar through the house and up the stairs where both he and coach stumbled twice. Down a hallway. Hard left and Coach flung open a bedroom door, and a weak yellow light seeped out into the hall. On a night table a small round lampshade bloomed like a mushroom out of a ceramic model of Yankees Stadium.

  Brock caught his breath.

  Shards of broken glass sparkled up at them from the floor. Night air seeped through the black hole in the window, caressing the faded curtain. A musty rug shed its scent to mix with the smells of dust and dried glue. In the corner, an empty bed slept beneath curling posters taped to the wall: Cal Ripken Jr., Wade Boggs, and Mark McGwire. A shelf busy with books and trophies ankle deep in dust sat against the opposite wall. Above that, two signed bats hung from a rack. Framed pictures of Little League baseball teams orbited the bats, each one boasting its own version of a very different Coach Hudgens from another place and time.

  “You didn’t break a window?” Coach howled and let him go, pointing to the glass. “You didn’t do that? You didn’t destroy his room?”

  Brock shook his head and the sobbing started up again.

  “Blake, come out of there!” Coach’s wife hollered at him from the hallway, unwilling to enter the room herself. “Right now! Come out!”

  Brock had to look at her. Her voice held the knowledge of something awful, like a bomb ticking down its final seconds, and then he heard the thing she feared. The scream.

  Terrifying.

  Bloodcurdling.

  Brock’s heart froze.

  19

  Coach was on his knees just as Brock imagined the boy who once lived in that room had been, night after night to say his prayers at the edge of his bed. Coach’s hands were clasped, too, but instead of bowing his head, his chin stretched toward the ceiling and the back of his head mashed down the collar of his shirt as he howled like a wolf to the moon.

  Coach’s wife grabbed Brock, dragging him from the room, and slamming the door behind them, muffling the horrible sound of eternal pain, but not blocking it out. The entire house shook under its power. Back down the stairs they went. Coach’s wife deposited him on the couch in the front room where a single lamp on a table in the corner lit the room in a dull yellow glow.

  The house went silent.

  “Why? Why would you do something like that?” Coach’s wife glared at him.

  “Are you going to call the police?” Brock felt bad for the crazy coach, but he had his own life to worry about.

  “You boys.” Coach’s wife frowned and beneath the wrinkles of her face Brock realized she had once been a pretty woman, before her brown hair had begun to fade to gray. “Torturing cats. Blowing up frogs with firecrackers. You’re sick. Mason wasn’t like that.”

  Coach’s wife looked out the window into the night and she sniffed. “He was different. Maybe that’s why he’s gone. Maybe.”

  Brock was beginning to think that he might have an angle. “Who was Mason?”

  She gave him a startled look, like she’d forgotten he was there. “He was our son.”

  Brock lowered his voice to match hers. “And . . . he’s gone?”

  She stared at him for a minute, her lower lip drooping so that her bottom teeth—which couldn’t be real—stared out at him too. “You better go.”

  Brock hopped up and scrambled for the door. He flung it open and escaped down the front steps and the length of the driveway. His feet clapped the pavement of the street and he was halfway home before he heard the siren of Coach’s pain drift up from the house in the corner. Brock ran faster, darting into his own home, banging the door shut behind him, and holding the knob, turning the cold metal hardware to lock out the night and everything crawling through its darkness.

  He leaned against the door and let his breathing slow before he dashed through the house, turning on every light they had and flinging open every closet door and driving out even the hidden shadows. He put the TV on for the noise and settled onto the couch with his book. Six times he read and reread the first page. The words found no traction in his mind.

  He couldn’t get the dead boy out of his thoughts. He remembered the Hudgenses, their broken window and their broken hearts. Brock felt horrible for his own part in adding to that pain, the sound of Coach’s agony fresh in his mind. He wondered if Nagel knew, and then realized instinctively that even if he knew, Nagel wouldn’t care. Brock tried again to retreat inside his book.

  Finally, he gave up. He set his book on the coffee table and curled up on the couch with all the lights burning around him. As he drifted off, he wondered what would awaken him. Would it be the morning? Might his father return early? He sometimes did.

  Or, would it be the knock of the police?

  20

  Brock’s mother woke him.

  Or, the dream he always had about her did. She floated into his sleep, took his hand, and led him as always to the edge of a cliff. Far below, waves crashed in a tight cove. Yellow foam spewed from black rocks as the water smashed the base of the cliff and retreated, smashed and retreated in the orange light of dusk. In the circular cove, bobbing like rubber ducks in a bathtub, were five or six brightly painted boats. Fishing boats? Tugboats? Thick and sturdy hulls and proud conning towers dressed in horns, cables, and tattered flags. One red, one yellow, one powder blue, and others.

  “Which one?” his mother asked.

  Brock had no idea what she meant. He never did. Did she mean which one did he like? Which one did he want to board? Which one would be the last to be destroyed? All he knew was that each boat was doomed and she somehow expected him—despite the impossibility of the situation—to save them. The dark and faceless shapes of men clung to the boats’ ropes and lines as the water exploded around them, and even through the howling wind he could hear the screaming as death swept down upon them.

  Then she jumped, taking him with her by the hand, and they would scream too, and he’d wake.

  Brock bolted upright on the couch, his own cry still echoing in the empty room. Gray light filtered in through the windows. He turned off the lights and went upstairs. His father’s bed lay made and unslept in. He listened for a sound. Nothing. His heart began to gallop even before he eased open the bottom drawer to the dresser where his father kept some sweaters. In the upper left corner—it was always the upper left corner of the bottom drawer—beneath a brown wool V-neck, Brock removed a wooden box so smooth and shiny it might not have been real except that when he cracked it open that luscious cedar smell filled his nose.

&n
bsp; His heart sprinted now and he looked around at the empty room, nervous even though he knew his father was likely days away from returning home, and if he came now, Brock would hear him open the garage door. He’d have plenty of time to return the box.

  Inside was a silver heart locket he clutched in his palm, warming it, the delicate links of the chain dangling from his fist. With the fingertips of his free hand, he lifted the photo and studied it. He couldn’t believe how young his father looked, or how happy, with his face hugged right up next to his mother’s,

  a strong forearm clamped around her shoulders. Wind tangled their hair. Behind them stood grassy dunes of sand and a horizon of water and sky. They wore matching grins.

  Brock studied her face and sighed. He didn’t know her, not really, but somehow he felt he did, and he loved to look at this picture to bring his foggy image of her into focus. He’d been just two when it all began, he and his father running from one life to the next. His mother gone.

  He rested the picture on the dresser top and tilted the box so he could see the newspaper, brittle and yellowing now. He had no idea why his father would keep such a thing, the story of a young woman brutally murdered, her body found floating, snagged by a buoy in the East River. His mother.

  Brock felt something like soda fizz in his nose and his eyes welled up with tears. The flood of questions turned his stomach over, then drew it into a knot. He cleared his throat and put the things away, then began getting ready for school.