Adam's Woods Read Free Page A

minutes on the concrete railing searching for courage to leap. Each moment delayed built a case for cowardice and a motion for stepping down, but he couldn’t do that either. His peers had at first urged and encouraged him, but had grown bored with his inertia and resorted to taunts.
     
    Chicken (and a few chickenshits from those bold enough to try cursing).
     
    Baby.
     
    Come on Eric. If you aren’t going to jump then get out of the way.
     
    He could hear them as if fresh echoes, the words spoken only moments ago.
     
    And then he’d just done it, stepped out into nothing while watching someone else’s legs directed by someone else’s brain, but his body that fell and splashed into the water, feet driven down into the gravel creek bed by his momentum. He had surfaced whooping with joy and triumph and pleased with the knowledge gained of himself and jumped a dozen more times before walking home accompanied by backslaps and cheers.
     
    The drop didn’t seem so far now, but he did notice that the gravel had piled up at the point of impact and doubted anyone could jump without breaking a leg. From there it was only a twenty-second drive to his house, a distance that seemed like a long hike to a weary but satisfied boy of eight. He had been eight on the first jump, the same age as Adam when he’d died. Adam, six then, had been in awe of him. The pleasure of the memory faded with the intrusion of his brother, sucked into that vortex as all of his childhood memories invariably were. He wondered just what the hell he was doing here again but got back in the car and continued on his pilgrimage.
     
    His mother had chosen the color of the boxy two story house, called goldenrod that must have held some appeal as a swatch in the paint store but looked like something a baby produced when applied on the actual structure. He was surprised to see it still bathed in that color. He was more surprised to see the For Sale sign in the front yard.
     
    Eric drove by, past the house and several others with mature maples and oaks fronting the road, down to the corner where the grocery store was still open and started around the block, lost in thought. He couldn’t believe he was actually considering calling the number on the sign. What could he possibly want with that house? Peace of mind, his mind answered. For the same reason he was writing a novel that touched on his crippling fear over two decades ago. To reach back and maybe grab the parts of him lost here to patch them up and fit them back in as best as he could. It wasn’t like he had to actually live here, or at least not all of the time.
     
    He came around by the church, where a right would repeat his route past the house and instead went left, up a small incline that had required standing and hard pedaling to summit on a child’s bicycle and pulled into the dirt lot that bordered the cemetery. There were a few houses up here. He didn’t see anyone but did catch the rustle of a curtain as he got out and weaved through the headstones. He stopped before Adam’s grave, grateful to whoever pulled the weeds and kept it presentable. Adam Kane, 1978-1986. The modest marker sat a little apart from the others. Most of the dead here represented families, generations interred in territorial blocs of hallowed ground. Adam was the only Kane in attendance. Their father had worked for a furniture manufacturer in Drake City about ten miles away, where they had been bused to school, and had bought a house here for the peace and safety that a close knit community offered to families with young children. The tragic irony of this philosophy lay six feet below ground in front of him.
     
    Whoever killed Adam hadn’t been caught. No one had seen anybody that shouldn’t have been there. No other kids disappeared or died or reported seeing a stranger. The boy who had found him, John Thomas Grove, fourteen at the time and a friend of Eric’s, had been suspected then and maybe even now by some.