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But no one is following me.
At least, no one I can see.
That—and the fact that I hear nothing as I resume walking now—makes me think what I heard back there really was an echo of my footsteps. Or my imagination getting the best of me.
Or maybe it was just an auditory hallucination. Considering everything I’ve experienced in the past few days, that’s the likeliest explanation. That guilt, grief, and a lack of sleep have at last broken my brain.
But then my phone pings in my pocket, reminding me that at least some of this is real. Trail cams don’t capture hallucinations. Whatever it just sent me is real and currently in my yard.
Henry, it turns out.
I open the app, and there he is, standing in front of the camera with a big grin on his face and a sheet of paper in his hands. He’s written on it with Magic Marker.
Hi, Mr. Marsh!
I see it and smile. Ashley’s right. Heisa good kid, and the tinge ofworry I feel for the boy is nothing compared to what she must endure every single minute of every single day. Life is hard. There’s no point denying it. The world is often brutal and cruel, and it only seems to get harder as time marches forward. The pressures and dangers kids face today are so much worse than when I was that age. I can’t imagine how parents like Russ and Ashley handle the anxiety. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for it. Something Claudia never understood.
Now that the phone is in my hand, I think about calling her, just to tell her I’m currently marching down a wooded hillside, surely getting poison ivy as I go. Claudia was the outdoorsy one in our marriage, constantly dragging me to one park or another to, in her words, “experience nature.”
“I’d like to experience my couch,” I’d tell her. “And my television.”
But I’ve already called too much in the past few days. I cringe when I think about the voicemail I left last night.I think Billy might be haunting me, Claude.So I send a text that’s short, sweet, and one hundred percent true.
walking in the woods and thinking of you
Once the phone’s back in my pocket, I continue my descent to the rest of the Hawthorne Institute grounds. The forest thins where the land flattens. There’s even a gravel path that I remember from thirty years ago. I take it now, going in the opposite direction of the route we followed back then. I wouldn’t mind avoiding the things we encountered that day.
I follow the path’s winding route past a field of wildflowers and over a stone bridge that spans a tributary of the lake. On the other side, in an area that had once been a meadow but is now slowly being overtaken by trees, is a barn that looks as old as the land itself. Its wooden walls are unpainted and sun-bleached, and the whole thingleans slightly on its stone foundation, looking like it could be toppled by a stiff breeze.
The barn’s door is ajar, a sliver of darkness tantalizing not for what it reveals but for what it hides. Curiosity draws me closer, and I find myself leaving the path to peer through the crack.
The barn’s interior is a web of shadows broken only by the occasional slash of sunlight leaking through gaps in the walls. I smell more than see what’s inside. Dried hay, likely baled decades ago. Dust. The warm, earthy scent of old wood. There’s something else, too. Something distinctly unpleasant.
I spot the source on the barn floor, sitting in the strip of light coming through the open door behind me.
A tin can.
Now that’s odd.
The can’s been opened, its flip-top lid hanging on by a jagged thread. Even from a few feet away, the stench wafting out of it tells me what it had once contained.
Tuna.
Surrounding it are footprints that spread in all directions. Some are pointed toward the door, others deeper into the barn. Mine do a little bit of both, toes aimed at the barn as I take several quick backward steps away from it.
It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be squatters on the property. But now that it’s clear there are, it makes perfect sense. The Hawthorne Institute is an isolated place, all but abandoned save for the occasional wedding or private event. Someone could live here undisturbed for days, possibly weeks. And while it’s unclear just how long these footprints have been here, I don’t want to stick around to find out.
Back on the path, I quicken my pace, going over another bridge and past a semicircle of statues, the ground surrounding them choked with weeds. I round a corner and am stopped cold.
This is the place we’d stumbled upon thirty years earlier.
The place I’d been hoping to avoid.
Staring at it now—the granite walls, the wrought iron gate—I’m struck by a single, all-consuming thought.
This is where I betrayed Billy.
Friday, July 15, 1994