The long way home

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Murder There were clouds blowing by in the dark overhead, but there were great swaths of open sky. A half-moon shone, lighting my way, and I had stars enough to guide me.

I jogged down lonely country roads. When I heard cars coming, I ducked off behind the surrounding trees or dodged into an isolated driveway and hid behind a parked car.

Sometimes I heard sirens in the distance. Those were the cops, I guessed, still hunting for me. But that was back toward town, back toward Whitney. Out here, it was just me and the passing cars.

The farther I got from the little city, the easier it was to keep off the roads completely. I cut across flat farm fields harvested to the nub. I tried to lose myself in high brown grass and high brown stalks of gathered corn. Sometimes there were forests, and I'd slide in between the trees. But I couldn't go too deeply into the woods. At night, with no flashlight, it was just too dark in there, too easy to lose my way.

Once, in the middle of a great, broad space, with a vast sky of stars wheeling above me and the clouds sailing by overhead like big ships headed for faraway lands, I looked off into the distance and saw the fearful red and blue flashers of two cruisers passing on the state highway. They were heading east, toward Spring Hill. I guess it hadn't been too hard for them to figure out I was going home. I knew now they would be waiting for me, searching for me, the minute I arrived.

But I kept on. Getting tired now. My legs feeling like lead. Sometimes my head hung down and my eyes closed, as if I could sleep and walk at the same time. I was thirsty and hungry too.

I couldn't keep going. I needed a place to rest. Some00- where secluded, somewhere safe. I considered a barn I found, but the farmhouse was too close. I could see the lights in the windows, hear the voices of the people talking inside. It felt dangerous. Someone could spot me or hear me moving. Someone could come out and surprise me while I slept.

Tired as I was, I forced myself to move on.

I was about two miles away from Spring Hill when I saw the church. It was an old one, but I'd never seen it before. It stood on a stretch of open grass, pressed close to a cluster of hickory and pine trees. In the moonlight, its white clapboards showed gray streaks where the paint had worn away. It had red cedar on the pitched roof and gray shingles at the top of the steeple. At first, as I approached, I thought it might be abandoned. But as I got closer, I saw the sermon sign and it was up-to-date. The preacher was going to give a sermon next Sunday called "Be Not Afraid." It sounded like good advice. I wished I could take it.

I tried the front door. Locked. But it was only a padlock, looped through a hasp. The hasp was screwed into the wood of the jamb. The wood looked old and soft. As soon as I pulled at the door, the hasp started to tear away. I pulled harder, making the hasp rattle. The screws started to come out. Every time I yanked at the door, the hasp got looser. Finally, there was a ripping noise and a rattle of screws. The hasp came off and the door swung open.

I went into the church and pulled the door closed behind me.

There was a deep quiet inside, but it was surprisingly bright. The windows were tall and the moon shone through on one side, painting the place silver with deep gray shadows. There wasn't much to see. No decorations or anything. Just pews and a pulpit and an altar with a cross hanging on the wall behind it. And words above the cross: "Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground."

That sounded like good advice too.

I made my way carefully down the side aisle, moving slowly, reaching out in front of me so I wouldn't bump into anything. I found a door near the pulpit and went through. There was a small changing room. There was a narrow corridor lined with hanging robes. I pushed between the robes until I made out a door standing open at the end. A bathroom.

I turned on the light in there. Found the sink. I ran the faucet and filled my hands with water and brought it to my mouth and gulped it down. I did it again and again. I never wanted to stop. I felt energy rising inside me as the water filled me.

When I was done, I turned the lights off again. I didn't want anyone passing by to wonder who was inside. I made my way back down the corridor, out of the changing room, back through the door behind the pulpit. I picked a pew for myself, a pew under a window with the moonlight falling directly onto it. I sat on it heavily. Then, exhausted, I lay down on my side, my shoulder against the hard wood.

It was cold-cold and damp too. I turned up my collar. I put my hands under my cheek and pulled my arms in tight against me. After a while, with my chin tucked into my fleece, I felt warmer, warm enough to get some sleep anyway.

But I didn't sleep. Not right away. As exhausted as I was, my mind wouldn't stop working. Images kept flashing at me. The man with the knife in the library bathroom. The thugs who nearly hustled me into their car. The police cruisers racing after me on the lonely street. The gunshot that struck so close to me in the alley that it turned my guts to water with fear.

The flashbacks wouldn't stop coming, and with every one my heart raced faster. After a while, tired as I was, I knew I would not be able to sleep. Still lying on the pew, I reached inside my fleece and found the papers I'd stuffed into the inner pocket: the news stories I'd printed out in the library. I drew them out into the moonlight.

I held the pages up in front of my face, angling them so the silver moonlight played over them and I could read the words. I shuffled through them until I found the headline I wanted: "Local Teen Found Stabbed to Death."

That was Alex. Alex Hauser. We'd known each other since kindergarten and for years we did just about everything together, even studied karate together for a while. Then, when Alex and I were both sixteen, Alex's dad and mom got divorced and his dad moved away to another town.

It hit Alex hard. He'd hear his mom crying in her room all the time and he didn't know how to help her. They didn't have as much money as they used to either. Alex had to move to a different neighborhood and start going to a different school. He and I couldn't hang out together the way we used to. Alex started going around with a lot of not-so-nice friends and doing stuff he shouldn't have been doing. Drinking, stealing, fighting, stuff like that.

While all this was going on, according to my friend Josh, Alex also started hanging out with Beth Summers. Beth was one of the nicest girls I'd ever met, really sweet- natured and always interested in people and kind to them. I guess it's kind of obvious I liked her a lot myself. She and Alex were both working down on Main Street at Blender-Benders for the summer and they started walking home together. Anyway, according to Josh, as Alex started changing, Beth stopped liking him so much and stopped hanging out with him. Later, when the school year got started, I saw my chance and I asked Beth if she'd go out with me sometime and she said yes.

This is all stuff I can remember. Stuff that happened before this weird yearlong darkness came over my brain.

I also remember what happened the night Alex was murdered. I was in the mall parking lot outside my karate studio after a lesson. I was just tossing my bag into the back of my car-my mom's car, really, but I was driving it. Alex and a couple of his not-so-nice friends came up to me. I guess Alex had heard about me asking Beth out. Even though he wasn't seeing Beth anymore, he was pretty angry. At first, it almost looked like he and his pals were going to start a fight with me. But Alex had second thoughts and he kept things cool.

Instead, he got into the car with me. We took a drive together. It was the first time we'd talked in a long while. Alex was about as upset as I'd ever seen him. He told me how it was at his house since his father left and about his mother crying and all that other stuff.

I didn't know what to say. I mean, my family had its problems like everybody, but this sounded really tough, tougher than anything I'd been through. I just tried to listen to him and be encouraging. I tried to get him to keep strong and not give up on things.

I had a card I used to carry with me in my wallet. An index card Sensei Mike had given to me. He'd written something on it, something a former prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, had said when his country was in danger during World War II:

"Never give in; never give in-never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty; never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

I tried to get that idea across to Alex. It was easy for me to say, I know, but that doesn't mean it wasn't true. You have to keep going. I've learned that for a fact now. No matter how bad it gets, you have to keep looking for a way through.

But Alex didn't want to hear that. As hard as I tried to be helpful, our conversation turned into an argument, a big one. I'd stopped the car near the Oak Street park at that point. We were still sitting inside, still talking, and the conversation was getting very intense. Alex started saying all this stuff about how everything people told you was a lie and how you couldn't believe in anything and everything had to be torn down and started again. It was crazy stuff as far as I could see, but he said he had all these new friends who agreed with him and he trusted them.

Finally, he got really angry. He told me I didn't know what I was talking about or what he was going through. He got out of the car and I got out after him. He was really yelling at me-so loudly that a woman who was passing by walking her dogs stopped to look at us.

Then Alex ran away. I tried to stop him, but he ran off into the park. That was it. That was all that happened that I saw.

But there was more in this newspaper-this newspaper story I was holding up in the church moonlight. I had to strain to make out the words, but I could read it. According to this, Alex never made it out of the park alive.

There were a couple of kids in the park-that's what the paper said. Their names were Bobby Hernandez and Steve Hassel. They were just a couple of middle-school kids who had gone into the park to smoke and drink beer where no one could see them. They told the newspaper that they heard Alex and me arguing with each other on the street. A few seconds later, they said, they saw Alex come running into the park. He paused under one of the park streetlamps. That's when they saw his face-that's how they could identify him later. After that, they said, he walked off into the shadows. They could still make out the shape of him, though. He seemed just to be standing there, thinking about something.

According to these kids, Bobby and Steve, another guy came up to Alex after a while. This other guy was in the shadows, too, so they never did see his face, but they could see that he and Alex stood talking together as if they knew each other. After a while, these kids said, Alex and this other guy started arguing. The kids couldn't hear what they were saying because they kept their voices low, but they could make out the tense, angry sound of their words.

Finally, said Bobby and Steve, this guy who was talking to Alex stepped in really close to him. He took hold of Alex's shoulder with one hand and his other hand went to Alex's chest. The next thing the kids knew, Alex had dropped to his knees and the other guy was running away, disappearing into the darkness of the park. Then, as the kids watched, Alex pitched over and fell to the ground.

"At first, we didn't know what was going on," Bobby Hernandez told the newspaper.

"We were, like, scared, man," said Steve. " 'Cause we didn't want anyone to know what we were doing in the park."

"But the dude just kept lying there and he didn't move," added Bobby, "so finally we had to go over and see what was wrong."

What was wrong was that Alex had been stabbed in the chest.

"It was intense," said Bobby. "There was blood all bubbling out of him, and his shirt was, like, soaked with blood, all red and everything."

"He couldn't move no more, but he was still breathing," said Steve. "His eyes were all, like, open. And he just kept saying this name over and over again. He just kept saying, 'Charlie, Charlie…' "

The kids called 911 on one of their cell phones, but Alex was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

I lowered the page and let it rest on my chest. There was a lot in the newspaper story I hadn't known before. The day after Alex died-that was the day my life disappeared. The next morning-what I thought was the next morning but was really a year later-I woke up captured by the Homelanders. All my memories of that missing year were gone.

How do you know if you're the good guy or the bad guy?

I lay there on the pew. I stared up at the window, up at the half-moon in the sky with the clouds blowing by beneath it. I thought about Alex, about him lying on the ground with the blood coming out of his chest. I thought about him whispering my name with his last breaths. I remembered how we had been kids together and played ball in the streets and played video games and went to the movies. It hurt to think of him, lying there like that, gasping my name out to strangers as he died.

I remembered what I did the rest of that day. At least I thought I did. I remembered how I went home and did my homework and IM'd with Josh and talked to Rick on the phone. I even remembered going to bed. Wouldn't I have remembered if I'd done anything to hurt Alex?

I mean, wouldn't I?

I wasn't sure anymore. Maybe I didn't remember. Maybe something snapped inside me and it was such a shock that I forgot it all. The police said I killed him. The jury said so after listening to all the evidence. Maybe I was a murderer. Maybe I belonged in prison, the way everyone said I did. Maybe when the cops tried to capture me next time, I shouldn't run away at all but just give myself up.

But down deep in my heart, down deep in every part of me, I just couldn't believe it. I knew I was not that guy. No matter how angry I got at Alex, I wouldn't stab him, kill him. That was crazy. I wouldn't kill anyone. I wouldn't hurt anyone, not unless I absolutely had to. That was something I learned in church all the time, something I learned in karate class all the time, something Sensei Mike drilled into my head. Blessed are the peacemakers. Even if someone slaps you, turn the other cheek. Do everything you can to avoid a fight-everything-walk away if you have to, even if people call you a coward, even if you feel like a coward. The only time you fight is if there's no other choice. If you have to defend yourself or someone else or if you have to defend something even more important than yourself, like your freedom or someone else's freedom. I believed that was right. I believed it a hundred percent. I couldn't remember the entire year after my argument with Alex, and because I couldn't remember and because the police were after me and the court had found me guilty, I was afraid; I suspected the worst of myself. But whenever I looked into my own heart, I knew I hadn't killed him.

At least, I thought I knew it.

About a month before this, the police had caught me and arrested me. They were about to put me in a car to take me back to prison. But just before I got in, someone- I don't know who-someone in the crowd around me-loosed my handcuffs so I could escape. At the same time, he whispered something in my ear.

He whispered, "You're a better man than you know. Find Waterman."

You're a better man than you know.

I had to believe that. I had to believe I wasn't a killer. I had to believe I could find this Waterman and clear my name. It was all I had to hang on to.

I lay there staring up at the moon. I didn't know where to begin looking for this Waterman. I didn't even know who he was. But I knew where to begin looking for proof of my innocence.

I had to go back-back to Spring Hill. I had to find out what really happened to Alex. I knew the police would be waiting for me there. I knew they would be looking for me. I would have to keep low, keep away from them. And I would have to keep away from my friends too. The last thing I wanted was to get them involved in this, get them into any danger or trouble.

But if there was proof that I wasn't a murderer, that's where it would be: Spring Hill. If there was proof that I was a murderer… well, it would be there too. Either way, whatever the truth was, I had to find it.

I closed my eyes. I started to say a prayer. I started to ask God to help me figure out what to do next.

Before I could finish, I was asleep.