Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

The Quarry by Larry D. Sweazy

Larry D. Sweazy won the WWA Spur award for Best Short Fiction in 2005, and was nominated for a Derringer award in 2007. His stories have appeared in The Adventure of the Missing Detective: And 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, Boy’s Life, and Hardboiled, and have been featured on Amazon Shorts. He is the owner of Word Wise Publishing Services, and also works as a freelance indexer.

I suppose it is the time in my life for regret, for the secrets I have held so deep inside me to metastasize into cancer. Like my father, I’m a doctor, or was. Now I’m just a patient with IVs snaking into my arm, dripping morphine venom into my veins. I know by the smiles, by the ticks on my chart, that my time is short. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Teg Saidlow recently.

I know more about Teg Saidlow than I have a right to. But then again, I figure we’ve all seen people like Teg once or twice in our lives — I just couldn’t gawk for a minute, turn away, and walk on by him. Things would’ve been easier, especially with Teg dead and buried for so many years now, if I would have.

A lot of people around Harlow thought Teg was just a freak of a boy who read a lot of books and had green teeth, but I thought he was a magician. For one brief summer, sticks became swords, Ivanhoe and Don Quixote quested through the woods and ravines, hills became mountains full of gold, and my imagination was born in the sound of Teg’s storytelling voice. But, by the end, Teg was like a mouse trapped in a maze that didn’t have any cheese in it. Every which way he turned there was just another hardwood wall. And no matter how hard I fought, I couldn’t conquer the dragons that came after him.

Teg had a rough way to go from the start. He never knew his real daddy. Things got even worse when his mother married the marshal of our town when he was twelve. Now I’ll tell you, it’s hard to speak ill of her, but Teg’s momma had a real mean streak in her. I saw her kick a cat more than once, and rumor had it that she took a shovel to her neighbor’s dog for waking her up from a nap. Bad thing was, she was a looker, had legs looked like they were carved of marble, and always wore clothes that looked more like skin than cotton. She could go from a mean middle-aged woman to a smiling schoolgirl in less than two seconds.

Teg was my best friend, really the only friend I had when I was growing up. I can almost reach out and touch Teg, smell the clean summer air, and taste my momma’s homemade ice cream. I know it’s the drugs and the pain, but the funny thing is, I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. Life’s kinda funny that way, always flipping things around, tricking your senses and tearing at your heart, promising you the past. When in truth, there’s nothing but quiet darkness waiting for you at the fork in the road.

The first time I saw Teg Saidlow he was stepping off the bus with his mother in front of the Rexall drugstore. She had on a tight black skirt, high heels, and a white blouse so thin you could see the lace on her bra straps. It was the middle of July, and the woman didn’t have one bead of sweat on her skin. Her luggage looked expensive, all shiny brown with stickers pasted all over the front. My father had a similar suitcase that my mother got from the S&H Green Stamp catalog. Teg, on the other hand, carried a grocery sack that looked like it was about to bust open at the seams. His pants were too short and his hair was cut all jaggedy, like someone had taken a pair of pinking shears to his bangs. I knew right then he was going to be a bull’s-eye for Big Mike Bowman, the marshal’s nephew, if they planned on staying around Harlow very long.

Not many new people came to Harlow, and when they did, well, the tongues got to wagging. Teg’s mother’s name was Loreen McCall, and that started things off right away, considering Teg’s last name was different. The only thing worse than being black in Harlow was being different. I was a couple of years older than Teg when he arrived, but I was old enough to know trouble when I saw it. My mother and father didn’t outwardly tolerate gossip, but there was nothing they could do to stop my sister, Pearl, and her wildfire tongue when they were out of earshot. Pearl knew everything that went on in town. Some girls collected dolls; Pearl collected stories about people and then added twists and turns of her own. I know now she was just bored. Being in Harlow was like living on a desert island to her. When she grew up, Pearl went on to be a newspaper editor in Chicago. No small feat in her day and age, let me tell you, but after all that happened in Harlow, she had a mission to tell everyone the truth. It was that way with her until the day she died, except for one thing: She never told anybody our secret about Teg Saidlow.

Teg and his momma set up house in the trailer behind Miss Molly Chad’s restaurant, The Blue Moon, and it wasn’t long before Loreen McCall was waiting tables and flipping her eyelashes at the marshal. Loreen had a way of winning people over with her soft voice and the way she’d look at you out of the corner of her eye. Like I said, the questions did arise, and the women folk weren’t as taken with her as the men were. I heard my own mother whispering to Dad one night that Maggie the Cat had come to town in the form of Loreen McCall, and he’d better keep his distance. Which would have been difficult, in any case, being as he was the only doctor in the county. He said he knew how to handle stray cats and began to tickle Mother.

No one quite knew where Loreen and Teg came from, she was kind of wishy-washy on that issue, but somehow, she bewitched most people into forgetting she hadn’t been born and raised in Harlow.

Teg kept a low profile right from the start. I only saw him twice before school started that year, and both times he was taking out the trash from The Blue Moon. I really didn’t think too much about him that summer other than the occasional story Pearl reported to anybody who’d listen on the front porch. Most of her stories had to do with Big Mike tracking down the new boy, breaking his glasses, and setting fire to his books.

I was a gangly kid with my own problems and I was glad to be out of Big Mike’s headlights. You’d think Big Mike had it out for smart kids because they were weaker and he was dumb. But that was not the case. Big Mike had a pretty good head on his shoulders when it came to schoolwork. He was tall, a center for the junior-high basketball team, but he wasn’t overly muscular. I think now he was just trying to survive. He was the smartest kid to come out of the Bowman bunch in years, and being the smartest kid (along with being a decent ballplayer) meant he got to do pretty much what he wanted when he wanted. His parents had already pegged all their hopes and dreams on a fourteen-year-old boy. Big Mike wanted to make sure no one got in his way, because he was looking for a one-way ticket out of Harlow, even then.

My other problem was Pearl. She had started to court, and she was pinned for the high-school sorority, so there were slumber parties on Saturday nights and boys from the football team sniffing around all the time. Pearl and me didn’t get along too well then because Mother had appointed me as her tag-along. Let me tell you, being a chaperone at any age is no fun. Pearl and her beau of the week did everything they could to ditch me, but I was like a fly on maple syrup. There was no way I was going to disappoint my mother.

About six months after they came to Harlow, Loreen McCall and the marshal, Lehigh Bowman, waltzed into the justice of the peace’s office and got married. Now Lehigh wasn’t the brightest man in the world, but he thought he was the smartest man in Harlow. Lehigh was Big Mike’s uncle, and the gun on Lehigh’s hip made him think he knew everything. All of the Bowmans had been marshal of Harlow at one time or another, and with Lehigh being the youngest, it was pretty much accepted he would have the job for life. The job didn’t require much, and it was a good thing, because if there was one thing Lehigh Bowman didn’t know anything about, it was hard work. My dad always said he envied Lehigh because he was the only man he knew who got paid for taking naps in the middle of the day.

Anyway, Lehigh and Loreen moved onto the Bowman place, a farm where most all the other Bowman brothers lived as well, into a small two-bedroom wood-frame house that hadn’t been painted since the beginning of the big war. Teg was relegated to the basement. It seemed that being a step-daddy didn’t set too well with Lehigh; he wanted Teg as far away as possible so he and Loreen could hump like bunnies on the living-room floor whenever the urge struck them. Teg told me later that he was really happy about living in the basement. He could sneak out the window any time he wanted and disappear into the woods behind the Bowman farm.

For weeks after the marriage, Lehigh walked around town like a big Rhode Island Red rooster, saying he’d married the “purtiest woman ever to come to Harlow.” You’d’ve thought he’d won the Irish Sweepstakes. But it didn’t take long for reality to set in, and Lehigh was back to his normal routine of naps in the afternoon and drinking beer at Store Longwood’s bar on Main Street. Loreen kept working for Miss Chad, and Teg, well, that’s when things started to get real bad for him.

I didn’t set out to be friends with Teg Saidlow, but it happened the summer after he and his momma came to Harlow. Lord knows I had enough trouble in school on my own, fending off Big Mike too much to notice that Teg was too. As I already told you, I wasn’t very athletic. My biggest muscle was on top of my shoulders. Except I didn’t know that then. Oh, I liked to read, and my mother was always reciting poetry and listening to opera records she’d purchased in New York City when she was a girl, but I thought most everybody knew the things I knew.

Every Sunday morning Pearl and I woke up to Maria Callas belting out an aria I couldn’t understand the words to. We knew the music was an ongoing fight between her and my dad. You see, he went to the Pentecostal church on Sundays, and Mother stayed home, refusing to step foot in a building where they kept snakes under the pulpit. She wasn’t against church, really, and she understood that Dad had to fit in to Harlow because he was the only doctor, but she felt worshiping God had more to do with how people acted every day. The “little things,” she used to say, “like a smile to a stranger, or a dime to a hobo, are worshiping too.”

My dad told me after she died that he’d always agreed with her, but he felt it was his duty to go to church on Sundays, just in case one of the snakes forgot they were in a house of God and bit somebody. It happened three times before he retired, and each time, Dad saved the believer from making an early journey to Heaven.

So, it was on a Sunday morning that my friendship with Teg Saidlow really began. Mother forbade Pearl and me from practicing a heathen religion, so we were not allowed to go with Dad. Don’t think we got off scot-free, though, we still had our duties to the Lord. And they came in the way of good deeds. “God didn’t put people on this earth to sit on their butts on Sunday morning and listen to some madman trying to scare the bejesus out of them,” she’d say. “He put them here to do something to make the world a better place.” And that was that.

Because of Dad’s job, Mother knew everything that went on in Harlow. She just didn’t talk about it like Pearl did. Maybe somewhere along the line, she learned a lesson, as Pearl eventually would, about when to keep her mouth shut.

While she listened to Maria Callas, Mother would be in the kitchen cooking up a feast for Pearl and me to disperse to those who couldn’t do for themselves. The baskets on our bikes were loaded with sweet potatoes, jars of chicken soup, leafy salads that she’d picked out of her garden that morning, tubes of salves, headache pills, and a list of names that had to be scratched off before we were allowed to come home and enjoy our own day of rest.

Sorry, I get long-winded in my memories. I miss those old days when Teg Saidlow walked the world, and my mother hummed to Maria Callas as she cut up vegetables. Things were simple, but they weren’t always clean. I get so damned angry sometimes listening to people wish for the past because it was so pure and perfect, I’d like to hit them upside the head. The world was bad then, too. Teg would tell you that if he could. The world has been a mean, ugly place since Cain and Abel, and to think otherwise, well, you might as well be as dead as the past.

Now that morning, my heart sunk, because Loreen Bowman’s name was on my list. The last thing I wanted to do was walk right into enemy territory. Big Mike had laid off Teg since Lehigh came into the picture. And he’d decided to make me an example to every other kid in our class who got better grades than him. After I snitched on him for copying off me in history class and told him that I wasn’t ditching a test so he could be at the head of the curve, things got even more physical. I tried to trade lists with Pearl. I even offered to get lost on one of her outings, but she just laughed and sped away on her bike.

Loreen was on solid bed rest for a week. My dad had seen her the night before. The story was that she had miscarried, but even my father was unsure of whether that was the truth or not, even though he didn’t come right out and say it. He’d seen her in his office the week before and told her that Lehigh’s baby was healthy as a horse, growing in her womb just like it was supposed to. I heard him tell Mother after he came home that things didn’t add up. Of course, he took it personally when some sort of tragedy took place. He should’ve seen it coming, prevented it, saved a life, but he didn’t see this, and it hurt him badly. My dad had a weak stomach when it came to losing babies. Mother had miscarried after I was born, leaving her unable to have any more children, and it broke my dad’s heart. He relived that pain and suffering every time a baby failed to take that first breath of air.

The Bowman place was about a mile north of town, hidden by a ridge of pine trees. I saved my delivery to Loreen for last. By the time I arrived, it was nearing noon, and most of the Bowmans were at the main house eating Sunday dinner. Don’t get the wrong idea when I say “main house,” I don’t mean to imply that it was anything grand. Very simply, the Bowmans lived in a collection of ramshackle houses and rusted trailers with no wheels. There was no sign of prosperity. Those years were long past. The main house was a collection of add-on rooms on an old farmhouse that had been built by carpetbaggers and pioneers.

Lehigh’s house sat at the back corner of the property, and I had to peddle past an empty barn that was guarded by a pack of yapping mutts. Mosquitoes swarmed over a green-scum pond just to the left of the house, and the stench coming from the barn was stinky enough to knock a buzzard off the fertilizer spreader.

Teg was sitting on the front stoop reading a book.

“Hey,” I said.

Teg looked up from his book. He was reading White Fang. The jagged haircut was gone; someone had shaved his head for the summer. There’s nothing worse than ticks or lice living in your hair, especially during summer, but I figured whoever had shaved Teg’s hair did it more for economic reasons than for Teg’s personal comfort. I had never seen Teg at the barber with Lehigh on Saturday mornings. He was still skinny as a rail, and he wore glasses that weren’t quite as thick as Coke bottles but pretty doggone close.

“I got some stuff for your momma.”

He closed his book and stood up. “Momma’s in bed. What do you got?”

“Medicines from my dad.” I wanted to drop the bag and go, just in case Big Mike showed up.

“You’re Doctor Kent’s boy, ain’t you?”

I nodded. “Brady,” I said.

“I know your name. Lehigh’s people are taking care of her. You better just get on home. Momma said she don’t want to see Dr. Kent anymore.”

“Well, I gotta leave this package somewhere, so I might as well leave it here and be on my way.”

“Nothin’ stoppin’ you,” Teg said. His momma coughed inside the house and I saw a shadow drift past the screen door.

I shook my head. This was the first real conversation I’d had with Teg, and it wasn’t too pleasant. Normally, I would’ve just turned and gone on my way, but there was something there, like he wanted to say something else, but he couldn’t. Now, I didn’t normally make it a point to strike up a friendship with someone younger than me, but the fear in Teg’s eyes made me curious and sad. I forgot all about Big Mike. Besides, what was the worst thing the crazy lunk could do? Beat me up? He’d already done that. I’d just make up another lie to my mother about the scratches and bruises I came home with. Somehow, I’d managed to keep my war with Big Mike Bowman a secret, even from Pearl, and I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but right then, I didn’t care. I saw a little bit of loneliness that I recognized all too well.

I set the package down beside the bike, shifted a bit, and looked around past the house to the woods. “You found the swimming hole down at the old quarry yet?” I asked.

Teg looked over his shoulder and stepped off the stoop. “Momma’s gonna get real angry if you don’t leave,” he hissed as quietly as he could. “She starts makin’ a ruckus, it’s hard tellin’ who’ll show up.”

“I was just trying to be friendly.”

Teg looked at me funny, then said, “I don’t need no friends, so don’t be doin’ me any favors.”

“Well,” I answered, “I’m gonna stop for a dip on my way home. I was hoping not to go by myself.”

Loreen coughed again, and then appeared behind the screen. “Is everything all right, Teg-Baby?”

“Yes, Momma, it’s just Dr. Kent’s boy bringin’ you some stuff.”

“Tell him to go home.”

“I already did.”

I knew that was my cue to get out of there, but before I climbed up on my bike, I told Teg, nodding at the book on the porch, that if he liked Jack London then he ought to read Treasure Island. He said he already had.

The quarry had been deserted for years. The water was deep and clear, surrounded by fifty-foot limestone cliffs. The limestone that came from the quarry was now part of the Empire State Building in New York City. I’d seen pictures of it in Mother’s photo album, and I always dreamed I would go there someday. She said I would, if I wanted to bad enough. She was right. I went to New York City for a while, touched the limestone on that tall building as if it was a monument to Teg, but somehow, I ended up back in Harlow. Funny how things come full circle, but that’s another story, and really, I don’t think I got time enough to tell it. The only important thing is that when I was old enough, I wanted to get as far away from this town as I could. But the ghosts of the past followed me every damn place I went, so in the end, I figured I might as well just come back home and look ‘em in the eye.

I wasn’t supposed to go to the quarry. But tell a kid he can’t go somewhere and it becomes the Promised Land. Nothing you say or do can keep them away; starve them, tie them up, ground them, it doesn’t matter. Mother was more understanding about my need for adventure. But my dad, well, he’d seen more than one person drown in the quarry, and the last thing he wanted was to see me in the coroner’s office with a gash in my head and my belly puffed up like a dead possum on a summer day.

I didn’t really expect Teg to show up, and truth be told, I didn’t care if the little snot did. I was hot and tired, and a cool dip and a short nap sounded good before I headed home to my own dinner. I was just relieved that I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Big Mike. But Teg did show up. He appeared out of the woods, walking silent like an Indian might, and scared the bejesus right out of me.

“You’re awful jumpy for a doctor’s kid,” Teg said.

“What do you know about it?” I had one leg out of my trousers, and I tumbled over on my aching butt. “Damn it.” I rolled and kicked off the other leg.

Teg burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he cried and had to sit down.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothin’. Nothin’. Except you look like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz fallin’ off his post. I’m sorry,” he said. “I better go.”

“No, don’t. I mean, you can stay.” I stood up, and pulled up my skivvies. “You ever swim here?”

“Nope. I was kind of scared to. It looks deep.”

“It is, but here, let me show you, over here it’s not so bad.” I made my way through a thicket and found a path that led down to the edge of the water. There was a twenty-foot bank of sand that eased slowly into the water before it dropped off to depths unknown. I dived in, expecting Teg to follow. “Come on,” I said. “The drop-off is fifteen feet out. You can see it.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ve swam here a million times.”

He nodded, took off all his clothes except his Fruit of the Looms, and jumped in.

“Feels great!” he screamed. His voice echoed off the limestone walls and he laughed.

“Yeah,” I said, “it does.”

I swear I heard someone in the woods that day, but I thought at the time it was a deer or a coon, even though it felt like someone was watching us.

It’s funny. One day a snot-nosed kid walks out of the woods in the summer, and the next minute he turns into your best friend. The joys of childhood, I suppose, are pretty much lost by the time you get to be an old man like me. Or taken from you. Innocence is robbed from you like a thief in the night carrying a long switchblade. But I didn’t know any of that then. All I knew was that I liked being around Teg.

He’d read everything. He told me about Don Quixote, and David Copperfield. He liked the classics, but his momma would buy books from the dime store and he’d been reading a lot of books by a guy named Raymond Chandler that first summer. He used words like “dame” and “gams,” and before long, much to my own mother’s dismay, I was using them too.

We went to the Rivoli together on Saturdays when Teg could break away from his momma, and we’d watch Roy Rogers or Francis the Talking Mule movies. Movies played forever in Harlow, but it didn’t matter, we’d go anyway. I must have seen Francis Joins the Navy ten times. I think I still do a pretty good imitation of Chill Wills, but I’ll spare you that talent for the moment.

I never went to the Bowman place. Teg always came to my house. And my mother, well, she took him under her wing like the stray pup he was. Teg didn’t talk about Lehigh or Loreen much, but when the subject came up, he got real quiet. Loreen had recovered from her miscarriage, but she didn’t work for Miss Chad anymore. Lehigh thought that she should stay home and be a proper wife, which to Loreen meant sleeping till noon, making Teg do her chores, and moaning about some new sickness that had set in. It seemed the only cure for her was a whiskey bottle she kept under her mattress that she began sipping on as soon as her feet hit the floor in the afternoon.

I think my mother was thrilled that I had a friend of my own, so she didn’t push much, but I could tell she was a little nervous around Teg sometimes, like she was going to say the wrong thing. Dad was always coming or going, so he didn’t seem to notice Teg being around as often as he was. He readily accepted Teg’s presence as if he’d always been there. But Pearl, well, Pearl was Pearl, and that meant she had her chance to be as difficult with my friend as I had been with hers.

One day Pearl was spouting a story to a circle of her friends on the porch about Lehigh Bowman getting drunk and almost running over Bobby Fuller, the high-school quarterback, with his police car. She didn’t know Teg was in the house; he had been engaged in a conversation with my mother in the kitchen about the latest round of books he’d got from the library. The story Pearl was telling was all true, but she veered off the path a bit, as usual, about the time Teg came walking out onto the porch to go home.

“...And that’s when he belted Loreen one, right square in the mouth,” Pearl said.

Teg stopped directly behind Pearl. Missy Bernice sucked in her breath and motioned for Pearl to shut up. Pearl didn’t notice, she just kept at it. “Then he went after Teg.”

Teg couldn’t take much more, so he pushed by her. Lord, I thought Pearl’s legs were going to disintegrate right then and there. She stuttered and stopped, trying to apologize.

Teg would have none of it. He just kept walking until he was off the porch, and then he stopped and turned back to Pearl.

“Lehigh never hits anybody, Pearl. At least not where it can be seen by the light of day.” With that, he turned and started for home.

Mother and Pearl had a big to-do after that little round of storytelling, and, well, things changed for Pearl pretty shortly after that, too. Because it wasn’t much longer, a week to the day I think it was, that Teg Saidlow turned up dead.

Pearl’s current beau, Tommy McVey, was fishing down at the quarry when he found Teg floating facedown. Teg was caught under some brush and the fish and turtles were already starting to nip at his flesh.

Tommy ran like lightning to our house, and Dad promptly called Lehigh Bowman. There was nothing my father could do, of course, but you could see it in his eyes, a glimmer of hope, a chance that he hadn’t woken up in a world where another boy had drowned at the quarry.

I begged him to let me go.

Dad stiffened as he grabbed his black bag of wonders. “I don’t want you to see that,” he said.

A whisper in the form of Mother’s voice drifted in from the kitchen. “Let him go, Earl. Let him see what happens when you swim at that quarry alone.” She assumed Teg had gone swimming, and that it would be a good lesson for me to see.

Dad looked at me; the sheen of his face flickered deep red. The only time I saw that look was when I’d disobeyed him and was about to get a good swat on the ass. The red faded when he made eye contact with Mother, and he motioned for me to come along.

All the way out to the quarry I kept praying to Daddy’s snake-taming Pentecostal God that Tommy was mistaken, that it really wasn’t Teg he’d found. But when we got there, I saw my prayers weren’t answered, and it was the last time in my life I ever prayed to that God for anything.

Lehigh beat us there, and he and Big Mike were pulling Teg out of the water.

“Damn it. Damn it! What the hell am I going to tell Loreen?” Lehigh yelled as he dropped Teg onto the ground.

Teg Saidlow lay lifeless on the ground, arms stretched out as if he was about to be fitted for a crucifix. His eyes were wide open, and he was completely dressed. I knew right then that Mother was wrong about that swim; Teg would’ve never swum with his clothes on. He only had two pairs of pants, and a few pairs of socks. Besides, he knew better than to walk into Lehigh Bowman’s house dripping wet. Teg always swam in his underwear.

“Stay back,” Dad said, just as if he were talking to a dog. I froze, watched as he scrambled to Teg’s side and tried to breathe life into his mouth. He tried for more than twenty minutes to revive Teg, but to no avail.

“How long you figure he’s been dead?” Lehigh asked.

“Hard to say.” Dad answered. “When’d you last see him?”

“Last night. Loreen can’t keep track of that boy. Sometimes she goes to get him for breakfast and he’s done snuck out of his room.”

“I guess he could have been here all night. You sure you didn’t see him at breakfast, Lehigh?”

“Nope. Loreen was still sleeping. Neither one of them is early birds.”

“What about you, Mike? When was the last time you saw Teg?”

Big Mike glared at me, shifted his weight, and looked away. “I ain’t seen him for about a week.”

My father nodded.

“Well, I guess he decided to go swimmin’ and banged his head, huh, Doc,” Lehigh said.

“Could be, but I don’t see any sign of that.” Dad had begun to examine Teg, running his fingers through Teg’s hair, putting pressure on the skull, looking for a soft spot. “Not a drop of blood, though. I imagine the coroner’s going to want an autopsy done.”

“I don’t want Loreen to go through that.”

“Can’t be helped, Lehigh, you know how these things work.”

“Maybe he just drowned. Just got caught on something.”

I spoke up. “Teg was a good swimmer.” Dad looked at me curiously and then I sighed, nodded. I knew I had just told on myself, so I figured I might as well tell everything else I knew. “Teg wouldn’t have swum with his clothes on. He never did, Dad.”

“I don’t know what the boy’s tryin’ to say, Doc, but this here is an accidental drowning and nothing more.”

“Might be, Lehigh, but it might not be, either.”

“I said it was an accident, and that’s the way it’s gonna be.” Lehigh said.

In the end, Lehigh was right; Teg’s death was ruled an accidental drowning. Now I figure if it would’ve happened in today’s world, with forensics being what they are, things might’ve turned out differently. Old man Deeter was the coroner when he wasn’t overseeing the only funeral parlor in Harlow, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was playing poker in Store Longwood’s basement, so he probably wasn’t much motivated to order an autopsy. Right before the funeral, I overheard Dad tell Mother something about some bruises on Teg’s back around the kidneys that didn’t make sense. Dad knew it wouldn’t do him any good to raise a stink, but I think he thought the same thing I did: Teg Saidlow might not have drowned all on his own.

Two things happened that day that changed everything. The first being Loreen at the funeral. She looked as if she’d woken up from a coma, like a big weight had been lifted off her. She had healed from her latest sickness, and glued on a shiny black dress to attend her only child’s funeral. She almost looked high society, hat and all. Now I fully expected Loreen to play it up, throw herself on the casket like my cousin June did when her husband, Buddy, got run over by a train, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t see her shed a tear.

The other thing was Pearl. She comforted me, held my hand at the funeral, even gave me a hug at the cemetery and said she was sorry.

As we got in the car to go home, Pearl said, “There’s something about this that’s just not right, Dad. And Lehigh Bowman could care less.”

I nodded.

“That’ll be enough of that kind of talk, Pearl, you hear me?”

“Yes, Daddy, but...”

“No buts. Let the boy rest in peace.”

Now Pearl and I, we put our heads together, and figured there was a murder to solve, with at least three suspects: Big Mike, Lehigh, or a madman loose at the quarry. Pearl put her nose to the grindstone and found out pretty quick that Big Mike had been hanging out at the gas station with a couple of his friends, smoking cigarettes and tinkering with an old Ford, so that pretty much ruled him out. That left the bogeyman at the quarry and Lehigh.

The bogeyman theory didn’t hold a lot of mustard from the start; we’d have heard about it from somewhere else if an escaped prisoner was living in the woods, or a Gypsy had taken up residence in one of the old shacks out there. We hadn’t heard anything of the like. I was suspicious of Loreen, but Pearl wore me down on that one; she just couldn’t believe a mother of any kind would kill her only son.

That left Lehigh. Tracking him down was like tracking a snake in water, if he wasn’t napping in his usual places.

We had just about given up until, as fate would have it, Mother came home one day all up in the air. Loreen Bowman had been getting her hair done at the same time Mother was. And Loreen had been talking about Teg, about how hard to control he’d been, how Lehigh had to threaten him just to mind. Mother told Dad that Loreen said, “If I wasn’t so weak I’d a given him a good spanking and shaped him up, but I left that to Lehigh. Some days it’s a blessing he’s with the Lord now.”

I had told Mother that Teg was exiled to the basement, and I think she was putting two and two together. Somebody had hit Teg too hard and then dumped his body in the quarry. Add in what Teg had said to Pearl — “Lehigh never hits anyone, at least not where it can be seen by the light of day” — and you pretty much came to the same conclusion. Somehow, Lehigh had killed Teg.

Proving it was another matter. And once again, Dad wouldn’t hear of making a fuss. He told me years later that he regretted not doing so, but back then, he wasn’t up to facing down the Bowmans. The whole family had a way of making it tough on someone if they put their minds to it. Big Mike had learned his bully lessons well. I never could tell Dad what Pearl and I knew, and that galls me to this day.

But we did prove Teg was murdered. At least to ourselves. Knowing the truth came with a huge price, though.

One day, about a week after the hairdresser incident, Pearl told Mother she’d heard that Loreen had taken sick again.

“Let her rot,” were Mother’s first words. And then she shrugged, her shoulders sagged with defeat, and finally said we’d have to make her a basket come Sunday. Mother wasn’t the kind to carry a grudge, you know, but I really think she could’ve hated Loreen Bowman if she’d let herself.

Pearl drew the short stick this time. We figured she would. Mother had forbidden me from ever stepping foot on Bowman property or going near the quarry. But I rode out with Pearl because she helped me with my route so we’d have time to find out what we could about Lehigh.

Once we got to the road that led to the big house, I broke off, hid my bike in the woods, and made my way toward Teg’s transom window. Pearl and I had the whole thing worked out. We figured if we got caught, we’d be in trouble until the time we left home, but it was worth the risk, finding out who killed Teg and bringing them to justice if the grownups weren’t going to do anything about it.

What happened between Pearl and Loreen before I came into the picture was told to me by Pearl, so I’ll tell you the best I can.

Pearl had to damn near push her way inside the house. Loreen was drunk. The house was a wreck, and Lehigh was nowhere to be seen. Pearl knew he was behind the post office, fast asleep.

So Pearl said, “I’m sure sorry about Teg, Mrs. Bowman.”

Loreen barely answered, took the basket, and told Pearl to leave.

“Oh, I will, Mrs. Bowman. But I heard Daddy talking to another doctor the other night and they were talking about Teg. I thought you’d want to know.”

Loreen dropped the basket. “What’d they say.”

“Well, I didn’t hear it all, but it had something to do with the bruises they found.”

“They ought to just leave well enough alone.”

“I think they said something about digging him up.”

Loreen was teetering with rage. Pearl said the stench of alcohol was so thick she almost felt drunk herself.

“Get out of my house...” Loreen screamed.

By this time I was halfway through the transom window, and the important part of our plan was about to come into play. I slammed the transom window closed, just the way Teg used to do when he was angry.

Pearl said Loreen froze like a coon in a flashlight.

“Somebody’s in here.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Pearl said.

“Goddamn it, somebody’s in the basement.” Loreen went to the door that led down into Teg’s bedroom. “Who’s there?”

I had crawled into Teg’s bed, pulled the covers over my head. “Me, Momma. Why’d you let Lehigh kill me?” I whispered loud enough for her to hear.

“Lehigh didn’t kill you! I didn’t mean to hit you so hard...” Loreen screamed. And then she realized that Pearl was standing behind her, that she was, to all intents and purposes, talking to a ghost.

Loreen collapsed.

I swear on Pearl’s grave that she reached out for Loreen, tried to catch her, tried to break the fall down the stairs, but she wasn’t quick enough. Loreen flipped head-over-heels until she landed on the hard cement floor with a bone-cracking thud.

The fall didn’t kill Loreen Bowman. But she was paralyzed from the neck down. Pearl lied to Dad, and to everybody, about how it happened. She never told a soul that I was in that house and we caused Loreen to fall. We never told anybody about what she said, either, that she admitted to killing Teg. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it wasn’t. Nobody’ll ever know, because Loreen wasn’t able to talk, either. She lived four more years, all of it in that house, in the bedroom above the basement where Teg Saidlow dreamed of slaying dragons instead of windmills.

I’ve lived with the guilt all my life, knowing we hurt Loreen Bowman like we did. But I hope there’s some redemption in our finding out the truth, and finally telling it.

Teg Saidlow was my best friend.

I hope I get to see him when I fall asleep for the last time.

© 2008 by Larry D. Sweazy