Deeper Than the Dead

16

The Roache home was a modest bungalow in a slightly shabby part of town. The house could have used a coat of paint, but the place was otherwise neat. Someone had put a pot of rust-colored mums on the front step, adding a splash of fall color to the picture.

Anne rang the doorbell and waited. Cody’s mother had called the school that morning to say that Cody was ill and wouldn’t be in class. Anne had found her thoughts drifting to him off and on all day. He was the only one of the four children who had discovered the body she hadn’t seen for herself. At the end of the school day, she got in her car and drove directly to the Roache home.

A small dog yapped its way through the house, followed by Renee Roache. Cody’s mother was small and weedy with limp brown hair and a pale complexion. She worked days as a waitress at a diner near the college where the pace was hectic and the tips pathetic. Her husband was a maintenance man who worked nights at Mercy General.

“Mrs. Roache, I hope I’m not imposing,” Anne said. “I just wanted to check on Cody to see how he’s doing.”

Renee Roache looked perplexed, as did the dog at her feet, a fat brown-and-white terrier, tipping its head quizzically from one side to the other. “That’s beyond the call of duty, isn’t it? It’s just a stomach bug.”

It was Anne’s turn to look puzzled. “Um, well, I had a feeling, after what happened yesterday . . .”

“What happened yesterday? Did something happen at school?”

“Didn’t Principal Garnett’s office call you?”

“Not that I know of. I ran out to get something for Cody’s stomach this morning. Maybe they called then. We don’t have an answering machine.”

“Oh,” Anne said, at a loss. Cody had obviously not told his mother about finding the body in the woods. It was a hard idea to grasp that a child would keep that kind of information to himself.

“What happened?” Renee asked, getting anxious.

Anne took a deep breath. “You might want to sit down for this.”

They went into the Roaches’ tiny living room where the television was playing a Star Trek rerun. Anne expected to see Cody on the couch, watching intently. Spaceships were his obsession. But the couch was empty and Renee offered her a seat there.

Dinner was cooking, the smell of roast chicken drifting in from the kitchen. The little dog hopped up on the couch to give Anne a closer look.

Anne told the story for what seemed like the tenth time in twenty-four hours. Cody’s mother sat, stunned.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, her voice as thin as she was. “He came running home yesterday with a bad stomach. He’d had an accident in his pants. I thought maybe it was something he ate at school, or there’s always a bug going around . . . He didn’t say a word.”

“Did he seem upset?”

“Well, yeah, but . . . He’s a ten-year-old boy. I thought he was upset about having the accident. He gets picked on a lot, you know.”

That was true. In the jungle that was childhood, Cody Roache was well down in the pecking order. Children could be cruel, their meaner instincts yet to be padded over by the layers of subterfuge, dishonesty, and social niceties adults accumulated over the years. And the kids who were a little different, a little slower, not as hip, took the brunt of it.

Cody was small and homely and a little odd. He didn’t really have friends, Anne had observed. He had Dennis Farman, but that relationship was symbiotic, born out of necessity. None of the kids liked Dennis because he was a bully. He had teamed up with Cody to have a sidekick who looked up to him because of his toughness, and Cody had made friends with Dennis because it was safer for him to be for Dennis Farman than against him.

“He was sick all night,” his mother said. “And still this morning. He stayed in bed all day. I can’t get him to eat anything.”

“Would it be all right with you if I spoke with Cody?” she asked. “I’ve had some training . . .”

She felt like a fraud saying it. She was no more a child psychologist than the man in the moon. But for the time being, she was the closest thing these kids had.

Renee Roache led the way down the short hall to a bedroom with Star Wars stickers all over the door, knocked once, and cracked the door open.

“Cody? You have a visitor. Miss Navarre is here.”

Not a sound came from inside the room.

Renee opened the door and went in. Anne followed. The room held the musky gym shoes smell of ten-year-old boys—a combination of sweat and dirt and less-than-meticulous hygiene. The room was dark, the shade pulled down on the single window. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Slowly she began to make out a small lump in the twin bed that was pushed up against the wall in one corner of the tiny room.

Cody’s mother sat down on the edge of the bed, turned on the lamp, and peeled the blankets back, exposing the boy’s head. He played dead, squeezing his eyes shut a little too hard.

“Cody, why didn’t you tell me what happened yesterday?” his mother asked.

“Nothing happened,” he said.

One eye cracked open. His mother handed him his glasses, newly taped together with adhesive tape. He sat up and put them on, blinking at the light.

“Hi, Cody,” Anne said softly. “I was worried about you today. How are you feeling?”

He rubbed his nose and scrunched his shoulders up around his ears, then pulled his knees up to his chest and bound them there tightly with his arms.

“Your mom tells me you’ve been really sick.”

She could see the little wheels spinning in his head, wondering just what she knew, what he should reveal, what he should admit to.

“I know what happened in the park yesterday,” Anne said. “I talked to Wendy and Tommy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Cody?” his mother asked again, her tone edged with hurt.

Cody looked at her, looked at Anne, looked down and scratched his shin through his red pajamas.

“Mrs. Roache,” Anne said. “Would it be all right if Cody and I spoke alone for a few minutes?”

Renee Roache looked uncertain, but she got up and left the room just the same. Anne sat down on the edge of the bed, near the foot, not wanting to crowd the boy.

“That must have been pretty scary finding that body like that. What a terrible thing to see. I think I would have run away if I had come across that like you did. I would have run straight home.”

She could see him relax the slightest bit. If she said she would have run away, then maybe it wasn’t so bad or embarrassing that he had run away.

“I ran away,” he confessed in a small voice.

“I don’t blame you. I think I would have gotten sick. I think a lot of people would have.”

“Did Tommy get sick?”

“He was pretty upset.”

He thought about that for a minute. “I bet Dennis didn’t get sick.”

“I don’t know,” Anne said, her mind going to the things Wendy had said, that Dennis had touched the dead woman. She thought about what she had seen in the woods—Frank Farman allowing his son to scamper around the crime scene like it was a playground, taking it all in with great interest. “You don’t think so?”

Cody shook his head, his gaze sliding away from her, his mouth turning down at the corners. It wasn’t the expression that would have accompanied hero worship, which she might have expected. It didn’t say Dennis is tough, Dennis doesn’t get scared, I wish I could be like Dennis.

“Why do you think that, Cody?”

He gave half a shrug.

She let it go for the moment. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about what happened yesterday?”

He was thinking about it. He looked down at his bare feet, then pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“We talked about it in class this morning,” Anne said. “We talked about how sometimes bad things happen, really bad things. And that’s hard to understand—why one person would do something so terrible to another person.”

“ ’Cause they’re crazy,” Cody said.

“Sometimes. And when we hear about this scary, terrible stuff it makes us all feel like the world isn’t a safe place. You know what I mean?”

Cody nodded slowly. The fat terrier nosed its way into the room, jumped on the bed, sniffed the boy up and down, then went to the foot of the bed, and turned around five times before curling into a ball.

“Is that how you feel?” Anne asked. “Like if you go back out in the world something like that might happen to you?”

He thought about that one for a long time and chose not to answer her, which was an answer in itself. She couldn’t blame him. He had caught a glimpse of the worst thing one human being could do to another. Like ripples in a pond, that violence touched everyone who heard of it. Every woman in Oak Knoll would be locking her doors and windows tonight. How could Anne possibly convince a ten-year-old kid that violence couldn’t touch him?

And why would he trust her anyway? She barely knew him. If she had to admit it, she knew him less than she knew Tommy or Wendy. He wasn’t a good or enthusiastic student. The only attention he drew to himself was when he got caught up in Dennis Farman’s disruptive vortex. She felt guilty for not knowing him better, and wondered how many other kids she was seeing only in the periphery of her vision.

“That chicken smells really good,” she said, pushing to her feet. “Think you’ll eat some dinner?”

Once again he didn’t answer her. She felt his mind was still on the last question she had asked him, that he was still wrestling with something, but she couldn’t pull it out of him. He had to want to give it to her.

“If you decide you want to talk about it,” she said, “don’t be afraid to come to me, Cody. Or tell your mom. You don’t have to keep all those feelings bottled up inside you.”

Anne turned for the door, took a step, then another. Then Cody Roache said something that ran a chill straight through her.

“Dennis said there were bodies buried in the woods.”

Anne turned back around slowly.

“What do you mean, Cody? He said that yesterday? After you found the body?”

Cody Roache was as white as a sheet, his dark eyes huge behind the too-big lenses of his taped-together glasses.

“Before that,” he said in a tiny voice.

Anne came back to the bed and sat down. “I don’t understand. When did he tell you this?”

“A while ago. We were in the woods playing commandos and he told me there were dead bodies buried there.”

If he had told her this two days ago, Anne would have written it off as something Dennis would say just for shock effect. But as it turned out, there had been a body buried in the woods.

Maybe Dennis had been there on his own some other time and had seen something happening. From the corner of her eye she could see Cody staring at her intently, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t know what to say.

“Do you think Dennis killed that lady?” he whispered.

“No,” she said. “No, of course not. What exactly did he tell you, Cody? Did he tell you he had seen a body?”

“He said there were bodies buried there and they were rotting in the ground and we were running over the top of them and stepping on them. And then there was that lady!”

She needed to call Detective Mendez. If there was a chance Dennis had seen something . . . She wondered if Dennis had told his father . . . and if Frank Farman had passed that information on to Mendez.

“I’m scared,” Cody said.

Anne looked at him sitting there curled into a ball in his red pajamas, his dark hair standing up in tufts.

“What are you scared of, Cody?”

He swallowed hard. “Dennis.”

“Dennis didn’t kill that lady.”

“How do you know?”

Because Dennis was an eleven-year-old boy and certainly not capable of doing what had been done. But Anne said none of that to Cody. Instead, she gave him the pat answer adults always give children when they don’t want or know how to tell them the truth.

“Because. I just know,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out, trying to decide what to do next.

“Thank you, Cody,” she said, standing up. “You did the right thing telling me this.”

Cody didn’t look so sure about that. “Don’t tell Dennis I said it.”

“Don’t worry about Dennis,” Anne said. “Feel better. I would like to see you back in school tomorrow.”

She spent another few minutes with Renee Roache discussing what had happened and the fact that Detective Mendez would probably want to speak to Cody. Then she left the Roache home and the smell of chicken roasting, to go in search of Dennis Farman.