Denis Ever After Read online

  “When I drove into the driveway,” Mom whispers, “the house was dark, the front door was wide open. I heard Denis screaming his head off, but the moment I ran in, he stopped. He stopped crying, like someone threw a switch. I ran up the stairs, terrified. I shouted for her, but she didn’t answer. GeeGee didn’t answer. I ran into Denis’s room and I saw him. Him.”

  I felt his arms around me. I was lifted, I floated up.

  “Who? Mom, who was it?”

  “He held Denis in his arms and rocked him back and forth. Like Daddy used to.”

  I stopped my crying. I floated up.

  “Who was it?”

  “A man, some man! I screamed at him. He didn’t move. He just rocked Denis and stared at a photograph of a Civil War soldier. I ran at him, screaming, but he just set Denis down in his crib and pushed past me. It was some horrible stranger. I remember he smelled like oil or ashes or something foul. He’d broken into the house. He’d picked up Denis, then he just . . . ran away.”

  Matt’s mouth hangs open. My heart is pounding. But we both remember now. It’s seared in memory, and we both know this moment.

  “What happened then?” he finally says. “Where was I?”

  “I scooped Denis in my arms. Then I saw blood on his eyebrow. And on the floor. He must have fallen from his crib. I called for you. You were in your great-grandmother’s room, hopping around her bed like a bunny.” Mom chokes on a sob, reaches for him.

  “I was trying to wake her up,” he says. “She was sleeping. I needed to wake her up.”

  “But you couldn’t.” Mom leans over and hugs him. “I’m so sorry, Matt. She had gone.”

  “Gone?” He goes frigid. “She was . . . She died while we were there? I made GeeGee chase me around? While Denis was crying? And the phone rang and rang? Seriously? I killed her!”

  “Matt, no. Never!” Mom is sobbing outright now, holding him. “You were two! She was eighty. It was my fault for leaving two babies with an old woman. It was her heart—”

  I stagger back to where my bed used to be. You wear me out! Are you feeling better? I fell asleep! GeeGee’s words rush at me.

  The threads. The threads! Where do they start, where do they end?

  GeeGee died because because because . . .

  Matt wipes his face. “Who was the intruder? Did you ever find him?”

  “No, no. He’d vanished. I put you in the car and drove home as quickly as I could. I called the Valdosta police to get a message to your father. Daddy came back. The man, whoever he was, never returned.”

  “Did he wear camouflage? Ask her that.”

  “I . . .” Matt searches for me, sees me, pleads with me, but seems unable to ask the question.

  “Never mind. I know he did.”

  Mom sits up a little, tries to regain whatever she can of herself. She manages to breathe. “That’s all I know. The terrible secret. Your great-grandmother died while I was trying to find your dad, and you were alone with some stranger. Only for minutes, but yes, there it is.”

  “Dad doesn’t know about the man?”

  “I didn’t tell him the circumstances, no. The first time I told him something like that, two people died. I never reported it, either, because the man ran away, and Denis was all right.”

  “But you never told Dad?”

  “Don’t you get it, Matt? Your GeeGee died because I abandoned you there! Or maybe because Daddy abandoned us. We were so shaky then, him and me, it was just easier not to tell him. Or you. Or anyone. It was just easier.” She wipes her cheeks and sits upright on the edge of the bed. “So, this ends it, Matt, yes?”

  He tries to bring it all together in a way that, right now, seems completely impossible. So of course he can’t bring it together. He fails to tie it off. It bleeds like severed arteries.

  He says the opposite.

  “That ends it, Mom. Thanks.”

  “All right, then,” she says. “Time to sleep.”

  She steps back, hugs him for a second, then again for a long time. Gazing at where my bed used to be, she walks to the door. I blow my nonbreath on her face. A couple of strands of hair move. I can’t be sure she even feels it. She switches off the lamp and pulls the door closed against the downstairs lights.

  40

  Missing Someone

  We’re both roaring inside, our hearts slamming against our ribs.

  “That’s it,” Matt hisses. “The big secret. We—you and me, but mostly me—killed GeeGee.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, I did.” He pounds his mattress with both fists. “And we’re still nowhere! That’s the worst part. Who killed you? We don’t know. What did GeeGee mean? Ten years ago there was a stranger? A creep who broke into her house that no one ever found? Fine, but why Gettysburg, why give clues to your murder? Maybe Maywell Tibbs lied, after all!”

  This doesn’t sit right. “Except I believe him. I believe that Maywell let me go.”

  “Well, that makes one of you. But if he didn’t kill you, who did? Riddle me that.”

  Thousands of thoughts race in my head and none of them answer that question.

  “Who did?” he repeats. “For Gettysburg to make any sense at all, the killer has to have a connection to Georgia. But there isn’t one. This stranger person is no one, not even a clue. Maybe Dad was right. It’s random. We have nothing. Nothing!”

  “No,” I whisper, almost to myself. “We’re missing someone. There’s more—”

  He snorts sharply. “Yeah, or guess what, maybe there isn’t more, and there’s no solving this because it can’t be solved, and this—this—is the way it is. Mom and Dad won’t be getting back together, and all I have is just year after year of horrible Novembers forever.”

  The room looks strangely empty without my bed, not that I need it. This isn’t my home.

  “First thing in the morning I’ll call Dad about Maywell Tibbs. He asks his father what to do, and his father says ‘let you go’? That’s just creepy-guy lingo for ‘murder him,’ I’m sure of it.”

  His phone vibrates. He slides it out of the covers and holds it up. “Trey.”

  “Answer it.”

  “It’s late. I’m shaking. I don’t want to.”

  “Answer it,” I say.

  He gives me a face, swipes it open, hits speaker. “Denis can hear you—”

  “We need to talk,” Trey says in a whisper. “I broke it open. The case. The thing you—well, all of us—have been looking for.”

  “It’s not open. It’s closed. I just had a big thing with Mom. It’s over, Trey. Good night.”

  “It’s not over. Not yet. Denis, tell your dumb brother I just found something beyond big. It’s huge. H-U-G-E. You’ll have to travel, but you’ll just need your bike, some cash, and Denis.”

  Matt snorts. “And I don’t really need him—”

  “Meet me before school tomorrow, early. I’ll show you everything.”

  Trey hangs up. Matt stares at the phone, says nothing. Neither do I. After the last living-room light flicks off, there’s the sound of feet on stairs and then the master bathroom faucet. A few minutes later Mom’s bedroom door closes. After that it’s dark and quiet in the house.

  Matt lies awake. “I trust Trey, but if this goes nowhere, the whole thing is over, and I’m done. I am so done!”

  “Me too.”

  But I’m trembling like a leaf. It has to be over, I know that. But then what?

  In the morning he silently pulls on his clothes. We’ve already said all there is to say to each other. It’s bitter cold, bleak and pitch-black out. He wears two T-shirts, two actual shirts, and a thick sweater. Breakfast is as normal as it can be.

  “It’s freezing out there,” Mom says. “I’ll drive you.”

  He swallows his juice. “No, thanks. I want to bike. It might be the last time for a while. And there’s a test first period, so I’m meeting Trey early to study. But I’ll call you.”

  They hug. “I love you,” she says.
/>
  “Love you, Mom.”

  And it’s true, he does love her. The angry way he bangs out the door proves it. He jumps past the garden to the shed and practically tears the latch off. After wheeling out his bike, he redoes the latch, and wheels the bike down the driveway to the street.

  It’s early, all right. Not a soul around except me.

  I find myself instinctively checking for gray pickups, but I know Maywell Tibbs’s part in this is truly over, even if Matt isn’t sure. The man I see in my mind is not him. The man hurtling among the yellow leaves in the falling snow is someone else.

  Matt looks blankly at me, then at the house. It’s so dark and cold.

  “You okay?” I ask as he pedals silently to the corner.

  “What do you think? I hate lying to Mom. I hate all of this.”

  “I get it. Last time, bro. I’m pretty sure.”

  I’m also pretty sure “last time” means something different to both of us.

  Too few minutes later we’re rolling into the school parking lot. My mind is a whirling jumble of faces and places. Trey is sitting on the curb, laptop out. Only the custodians and kitchen staff are inside. I can tell from their cars.

  “He’s here.” Matt thumbs toward me, giving Trey a quick embrace.

  “Hey, Denis. No time for ghost hugs, even if we could,” Trey says, brushing the sweaty hair from Matt’s forehead. “This is it. It’s about Macy Tibbs, the father you saw at the Lincoln Inn encampment. Take a look.”

  Trey flips up the laptop. The screen flashes to life. It’s Melrose Tibbs’s obituary in the Butler Eagle, appearing the Saturday after I died. It’s the same one he had me read to him.

  “We know this, Trey,” Matt says. “Denis read it out at the hotel.”

  “Apparently not well enough. Listen to it again.”

  Trey focuses on the screen. “‘He is survived by his mother, Maybelline, currently of Buckwood, but predeceased by his father, Macy Tibbs, a decorated veteran of the Korean War, formerly of Coraopolis.’”

  Matt shoots me a look. “I know that. We read those same words. Trey—”

  “Define read. Come on, Matt! Predeceased by his father. If Macy Tibbs died before his son Melrose—who died the same day as Denis—how could his other son Maywell possibly ask his father what to do with the kid in his trunk? Answer me that!”

  Matt narrows his eyes. “All it means is that Maywell lied to us—”

  “Unless he didn’t,” Trey says, with an inch of a smile. “There’s only one place you go to talk to someone who’s dead, right?”

  “Trey, seriously. It’s freezing—”

  “The cemetery! Maywell asked his father’s advice at his tombstone. Which means we know exactly where he dropped Denis off on the day he died. Done! And done!”

  Matt squints at Trey for what seems like minutes, his face going through a bunch of expressions before he grabs Trey’s shoulders and shakes.

  “That’s brilliant! Trey, you are brilliant!”

  “I know it. I’ve known it for a while, but I— What the— Whoa!”

  I’ve rushed into Trey’s arms, which Trey doesn’t exactly feel, but knows, because Trey nearly falls to the sidewalk. “I felt that! Denis, I felt that! Wow. But you know the very best part? The cemetery is only a bus ride away.”

  “Where?” I ask, and it’s suddenly as if Trey can hear me, too.

  “St. Timothy’s churchyard,” Trey says. “In Zelienople.”

  Matt shoots me a look. “Zelienople. Where Dad lived with GeeGee!”

  And I see the camouflaged man move stealthily across my mind. I press at the figure, claw at this raw fragment of memory, but he vanishes among the white birch trees.

  Zelienople, a town thirty-eight miles from Funland, twenty-four miles from Buckwood.

  Zelienople, the place where I died.

  I turn to Matt. “This is it. The thread that connects the kidnappers to our family. Zelienople where the threads cross. It’s where we’ll understand the last few hours of my life.”

  “And discover the identity of your killer.”

  Watching his face, I sense that every tick of Matt’s brain toward the solution is one tick closer to me fading into the hills, away from all this. Is he torn? Does he want it to end?

  He gives me his answer too soon.

  “We’re going there now.”

  “It’s right on the bus line,” Trey says, bringing up a map on the computer. “You can bike to the station. I’ll cover for you. I know my parents will, too, if I have to loop them in.”

  I imagine Matt and Trey together, and know that they’re already closer than we ever were. It’s obvious that Matt’s got a fine future without me. He can do anything in the world.

  A final hug, a shiver in the cold, and we’re on our way.

  41

  A Town Called Zelienople

  Matt pedals quickly away from school as more and more cars arrive and park. I fly in the road by his side. By now, he can see me whenever he wants to. He doesn’t need a slant of light or dust in the air or snowflakes. We’re so alike. His cheeks, his chin, his nose are the same as my cheeks, my chin, my nose. Being here with him like this, I ache for all the years I missed. But the sound of his breathing, and the way his sparks spray the air, sensing the future he’ll have without me, I know it’s all heading to a sharp point, an edge, an end.

  Soon, no more biking. Soon nothing at all. But for right now, this is everything.

  No one at the station bothers to ask why a schoolkid with a bike is taking a bus. I guess it’s easier not to. A bit after nine we jump off at the stop in Zelienople. Matt bikes casually through the streets to the church, me swimming alongside. It’s fiercely gray now, and colder than I expect, with no sun and the strong scent of snow on the way. I try to flash forward to how the day might end, but I don’t want to press it. Nothing comes anyway.

  “We’ll start at Macy Tibbs’s grave and hope something clicks,” I say for probably the third time, just to fill the quiet.

  “It better click. It has to click,” Matt responds as he has all those times before.

  He puts his weight into the pedals, following the map on his phone. He and I learned most things together, walking, talking, playing catch. Some I was better at, some him.

  But with biking, we took off equally.

  I remember Dad watching us on weekends as we biked around the parking lot of his landscaping company. It was gravel and pebbles and rutted dirt, packed hard by truck and tractor tires, and in the sun of an afternoon, or on a spring dawn before school, Matt and I would go around the lot, one chasing the other, crisscrossing our tracks.

  It never got better than that, just wheeling around, and when we bumped and laughed, Dad laughed too; a hard-won laugh, I know now, but a laugh no one’s heard for years.

  Laughing’s over now. The threads twine tighter. The closer we get to the cemetery, the sooner I’ll see birch leaves being buried by snow. The camouflaged man. The shadow in my left eye. The silver that is not a lake. All the final clues will knit together, and that’ll be that.

  St. Timothy’s cemetery is a neat neighborhood of dead folks, a trim garden of stones. The headstones and smaller in-ground plaques for ashes are spread over a wide gentle rise of grass surrounded by a stone wall about waist-high. Some of the upright stones are tilted, others stand straight, an uneven jumble like everything else in this world. The layout of the place reminds me of the streets in Port Haven, but the graveyard is far bigger than we thought it would be.

  “Dang,” Matt groans. “We need a directory.”

  Then a question I never thought to ask before wriggles into my mind, and I get a sudden ache in the pit of my stomach. “Do I have one of these?”

  Matt leans his bike against the wall. “A gravestone? Of course. In Buckwood.”

  “Do you ever visit me? I mean, you haven’t since I came back, so . . .”

  He looks me in the face, then nods. “Dad does. Mom. I always had your bed in my room.
That was you to me. Close by. Not in the ground.” He turns away.

  I wonder what it looks like to see my name, and the dates that go with it. “I’d like to see it before . . . you know, too long.”

  “Sure, sure.” He shivers suddenly and points. “There.”

  A small house stands on the edge of the lawn against the outer wall. Outside it there’s a man in overalls lying next to a tipped-over snow blower, digging at the blades with a kitchen knife.

  “Excuse me, sir!” Matt calls.

  I expect the guy to shriek, as if one of the yard’s inhabitants has decided to visit, but he doesn’t flinch. He just jabs at the blades like he’s in a knife fight with them. Matt leans and touches the man on his arm.

  “Oh holy mother!” the guys shouts. “Where in heaven’s name did you come from?” He taps his ear gently with the knife blade. Flecks of rust stick to his lobe. “Didn’t hear you!”

  Matt smiles. “I’m sorry. I had some—”

  “What? Marjorie! Marjorie! We have a visitor! And bring my ears!”

  A woman totters out of the small house, holding a flowerpot. “Oh good lord!” she says, but not at Matt this time. If her husband can’t hear, she can see, and what she sees is me.

  “You have a bloody spirit with you!” she gasps.

  “What?” the man says. “What’s going on?”

  Matt sucks in a breath. “My brother, Denis. He died. In fact, we think he was killed near here. We’re trying to find out how it happened.”

  I give her a wave. “Hey.”

  “What are you looking at?” the man yells at his wife.

  She plugs in his hearing aid and hisses into it. “SPEER-IT!”

  “Oh? Oh.” He squints in my basic direction, then shrugs. “She’s got the gift, not me. I got to get this blower working before the snow.”

  Seriously giving me the eye, his wife says, “What can I help you boys with?”

  “Is a man named Macy Tibbs buried here?” Matt asks, and my heart pounds, waiting for the answer.