The Long Way Home Read online

  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.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Homecoming

  I woke up in the dark. After weeks on the run, I’d taught myself to do that. When you’re a fugitive, you can’t waste the dark. It’s precious. In the dark, you can travel. You can go from place to place unseen. If the sun catches you sleeping, you can be discovered. Once the sun rises, you’re exposed, you’re a target. You have to take advantage of the dark.

  I was shivering with cold as I stumbled back to the bathroom. I washed up as best I could and got ready to go. As I stepped out of the church into the chilly darkness, I realized that I knew exactly where I was headed. An idea had come to me while I slept. I guess that was the answer to my prayer.

  I knew now where I could go, where I could hide out in Spring Hill from both the police and my friends.

  I traveled quickly, skirting the woods, crossing the fields. As I got closer to town, the buildings grew closer together. I passed a small airport, then a school, then a housing development with plenty of empty lots full of overgrown grass. I was still staying off the roads, but I couldn’t get very far from them anymore. They were always visible, the headlights rushing by in the dark. The whisper of moving traffic reached me everywhere.

  I’d drunk my fill of water in the church bathroom before I left, but the hunger came back to me now and it came back full force. I had to find something to eat in a big hurry or I wasn’t going to be able to go on much longer.

  I had money—the two hundred dollars I’d taken off the knife-man in the library. But spending it wasn’t going to be easy. My run-in with the police in Whitney would’ve been on the TV news and in the morning papers. There’d be pictures of me all over town. It was too risky for me to try to go into a store. The chances I’d be recognized were just too great.

  So I looked for a vending machine. I remembered there were some outside a bowling alley I’d been to a few times. Sure enough, they were still there. I stocked up on peanut-butter crackers and chips and chocolate bars. Not exactly health food, but it was all they had and I was starving. When I thought I had enough, I took it all out into the darkest part of the parking lot and sat cross-legged on the pavement and stuffed as much of it into my face as I could. What was left—not much, a chocolate bar or two—I saved in the pockets of my fleece for later.

  I traveled on. As I got closer to the edge of town, everything began to be more familiar. I saw a mall I used to hang out in sometimes. I saw a movie theater I used to go to. There was a gas station I sometimes used.

  It was a weird feeling to see these things and remember. I felt as if I were my own ghost haunting the places I used to live. It made me ache inside. When I had lived here, when I’d had my ordinary life, believe me, I didn’t wake up every morning and shout hooray or anything like that. I didn’t thank heaven every day for how lucky I was. I would’ve felt like an idiot doing stuff like that. It was just home to me. It was just life. It was just ordinary.

  But now, shivering out here in the dark, with the whole world my enemy—now every memory had a sort of golden light around it. I felt as if every minute I’d lived here had been beautiful and blessed. There was so much I couldn’t remember—a whole year gone. But there was so much else, so many other years, and they all came flooding back to me.

  I passed streets where I used to ride my bike when I was twelve years old. I passed a ball field where I used to watch Alex play Little League so we could grab an ice cream after the game. I saw my elementary school, a long, low gray building that hadn’t changed in all the years I’d lived here. I saw a pizza place where Josh and Rick and Miler and I used to meet to plan our strategy for mock trial class.

  It was all just ordinary when it happened. But now I ached for those days. It was like a weight inside me, like an anvil or an anchor sitting in my midsection. I felt heavy and slow as I dragged it along with me, moving closer and closer to the center of town.

  Soon I was nearing my old neighborhood, moving past familiar houses in the darkness under the trees. I had a tremendous urge to go visit my own house. I don’t know why. It wasn’t really mine anymore. My parents weren’t there. They had moved away after I was sent to prison. Whoever had moved in after them had probably changed everything. Painted it a different color or whatever. It would probably be a pretty depressing sight to see. All the same, I wanted to see it so badly, the pull was almost irresistible.

  But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t risk it. The sky was still dark, but I knew the dawn was coming. You can smell the dawn. You can feel it in the air, hear it in the way the birds start singing. That was another thing I’d learned in my weeks on the run.

  So I turned away, headed in a different direction.

  I went through more residential neighborhoods. They were empty at this hour, all the houses dark. I moved from front lawn to front lawn, keeping off the sidewalks in case a police car passed by, but keeping out of the backyards, too, because some people keep their dogs back there— another thing I’d learned about being on the run.

  I passed into a sort of run-down section of town. The houses were smaller here, and they weren’t kept up so well. There were places that hadn’t been painted in a while and others with plastic covering the windows. Some of the porches were practically crumbling. Some of the lawns were littered with garbage and old appliances and car parts and so on.

  A little farther, I came to some lots with no houses on them at all. Places where there used to be houses but now nothing was left but foundations and rubble, grass and garbage. Beyond these, there was an empty field with an old road leading through a stand of pines. The macadam on the road was practically broken to rubble. It crunched beneath my feet as I walked under the trees.

  At the end of the road was the iron gate. Beyond the iron gate was the Ghost Mansion.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Haunting

  That’s what we called it anyway. Josh and Miler and Rick and I. We had always called it that. All the kids did. Its real name was the McKenzie house. It had once belonged to a rich guy—a guy named McKenzie, I guess. He owned a factory or something back before I was born.

  In those days, this had been the fancy part of town, but now it was practically deserted. The house was deserted too. It had been for as long as I could remember. For as long as I could remember, there had been nothing behind these iron gates but a looming wreck of a building. It was three stories tall with some attic rooms in places. There were gloomy gables and black bay windows and a tower with a mansard roof. The whole jumbled structure sat on the top of a little rise of grass, and its black, broken windows seemed like dead eyes staring down at the world. It was as if the place was just watching and waiting for someone to come near it so it could . . . Well, I don’t know what, but it wouldn’t be good. If ever a house was made to be haunted, this was the house. It even had a little graveyard in back. I guess that’s where the McKenzie family laid their dead to rest.

  Now, there’s a reason I knew this place so well and it had to do with Mr. Sherman again, my history teacher. This was two years ago. He was teaching a class about the Salem Witch Trials. If you don’t know about the witch trials, they happened back in colonial days, before America became a country. There were all these hysterical girls running around screaming that witches we
re after them and they started off a sort of panic of fear through Massachusetts and other parts of New England. A lot of regular people suddenly got accused of being witches. Some of them were put in prison and about twenty or twenty-five of them were killed. Later, when all the panic passed, people realized they’d lost their senses and done a terrible thing, killing their neighbors for no reason.

  Now, to me, this was a very interesting story. It was a reminder that you should never let yourself get swept away by the crowd. Sometimes everyone you know can be saying something or believing something and it can just be dead wrong. All around you there might be people getting all excited or panicked and yelling for you to do the wrong thing or believe the wrong thing. They can make it very hard for you to refuse them or even just disagree with them out loud. People get angry at you when you disagree with them—especially when they’re wrong—and nobody likes to be unpopular or have people angry at them. Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to use your reason and your heart and stand up for what’s true—and I guess not enough people did that during the Salem Witch Trials. That’s what I got out of it anyway.

  But, of course, for Mr. Sherman the message was different. For him, the Salem Witch Trials proved that religion is bad. See, the people in Salem at the time were Puritans, very strictly religious. So since they were the ones who put the witches on trial, that proved to Mr. Sherman that religion was the whole problem. I think I may already have mentioned that Mr. Sherman was kind of a doofus.

  Anyway, Mr. Sherman gave us an assignment. The assignment was to research a superstition and show why it was untrue. Now, on the face of it, I thought this was a pretty cool assignment. It sounded like fun. But we all knew Mr. Sherman. And we all knew if you wanted to get a really top grade, you had to do stuff that he agreed with. In other words, we all knew that if we wanted an A on this assignment, we had to pick some religious belief and show why it was superstitious.

  This presented a problem for Rick Donnelly. Rick, as I said, was willing to say just about anything to get good grades so he could go to a really good college. But Rick and I went to the same church and neither of us felt we’d ever heard anything superstitious there. In fact, the stuff we’d learned there had been really helpful in just living ordinary life. So he didn’t want to attack his own religion. And it seemed kind of impolite to attack somebody else’s. So he didn’t really feel right about this assignment at all. It really bothered him.

  We talked about it in the cafeteria at lunch at our table with Josh and Miler.

  “Look,” I said, “there are plenty of superstitions. Black cats. Friday the thirteenth. Write about one of those. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “You know that’s not what he’s looking for,” said Rick gloomily. He was a tall guy, one of the tallest in the school. His big face was the color of chocolate. It usually looked a lot more cheerful. “I mean, it’s all right for you, Charlie. You argue with Sherman all the time, and you don’t care when he gives you lower marks.”

  He was wrong about that. I did care. I cared a lot. But I wasn’t going to lie just to get Sherman to give me better grades.

  We were all silent for a while. Then I had an idea.

  “Hey, you know what would be so cool?” I said. “What if we went and spent a whole night in the McKenzie mansion?”

  “What?” said Rick.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, getting more enthusiastic as I thought about it. “We spend the night there and prove there are no ghosts, that it’s not haunted. We prove that’s just a local superstition.”

  Josh Lerner cleared his throat. Josh looked like the geek he was: short and kind of slump-shouldered with curly hair and big, thick glasses and a quick, nervous smile. Josh could be kind of a dork at times, but somehow you couldn’t help liking him anyway.

  “You know, Charlie, that’s a very creative thought,” he said. “And it raises an interesting question: Are you out of your ever-loving mind?”

  I laughed. “Why shouldn’t we? We just take some sleeping bags and camp out for the night and go home and write a report about it. We could take pictures and make recordings and everything and do a whole presentation. The thing is, it would be so cool that Sherman would have to give us an A. He’d have to—or he’d have to explain why.”

  “He would,” murmured Rick, nodding to himself. “I mean, it would just be that cool.”

  “It would be cool,” said Josh, “but you’re leaving something out.”

  “What?”

  “The part where we get so terrified we have heart attacks and die.”

  “I could see where that would cut into the coolness factor,” said Miler Miles. Miler was a small, thin guy with short blond hair over a long face. You only had to look at him to know he was going to be some big corporate muck-a-muck when he grew up.

  “Why should we be terrified?” I said. “We’d all be together. We’d have flashlights, cell phones . . .”

  “Garlic, silver bullets, wooden stakes,” Miler added.

  “I think I’m having a heart attack already,” said Josh. “Really. I’m serious. I can feel it.”

  As Josh gripped his chest with a worried look in his eyes, Rick nodded. “I’d do it,” he said quietly.

  “Sure,” said Miler with a shrug. “I’d do it too.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Josh. “I can’t spend the night in the Ghost Mansion. I have a nervous condition.”

  I looked at him. “What nervous condition?”

  “I’m nervous about spending the night in the Ghost Mansion.”

  I laughed again. “Well, you don’t have to do it then. You’re not even in Sherman’s class.”

  “Oh, right. I’m gonna let you guys go and me stay home—like that’d ever happen.” Josh gave an elaborate sigh. “All right, all right. I’m in. Just mention how brave I was at my funeral.”

  So we decided to do it. Josh and Rick and I decided anyway. In the end, Miler said he couldn’t do it because he was training for a track meet and needed his sleep. The assignment was due on Monday, so we went out to the mansion on Friday evening.

  Now, I have to be honest here and say we didn’t exactly get permission from our parents for this. It just wasn’t a serious possibility. There were all sorts of signs around the Ghost Mansion saying it was private property and warning you to keep out and that you were entering at your own risk and so on. I was pretty sure that would make my father say no. He’d be all worried about lawsuits or whatever. As for my mother—well, she’d be worried about everything. She was like that. I mean, she worried about me going to school. I might fall out of my desk and land on my pencil or something—I don’t know. She just found things to worry about. I knew there was no way she would let me do this.

  It’s not like I was going to lie about it or anything. I was just going to tell the truth a little late, that’s all. I told my parents I was going to have a sleepover with Josh and Rick—I just didn’t say where. Later, when we came home, I figured I would sort of just casually mention that little part of it. I didn’t expect to get away with it altogether. I thought I might get grounded for a weekend or something. But once my parents knew we were all right and understood why we’d done it in the first place, I thought I would get off pretty easily.

  Anyway, off to the mansion we went just before sunset. We had our sleeping bags and flashlights, our cell phones—which we could also use as cameras—and a little MP3 recorder I had. Josh even brought his Sony PSP so we’d have something to do if we got bored.

  It was easy to get inside the house. The heavy front door was locked, but there were plenty of other doors that were open. We found a big empty room—a parlor— on the second floor and set ourselves up in there. Then we took a look around so we could take some pictures.

  The place was pretty spooky, I have to say. The rooms were mostly empty, but now and then you’d find an ancient sofa or a dresser or something—just standing there alone in a room as if it was waiting for someone to come
in and use it. The windows were all broken so the wind came through, making the dust shift on the floors and the spiderwebs wave back and forth in the corners. There were these creepy noises, too, every once in a while: little footsteps. Mice in the walls. That’s what we told ourselves anyway.

  But it wasn’t until the night came down that the real, serious creepiness set in. The house sort of settled around us then, making all sorts of little creaks and pops that sounded like somebody walking around. The mice went crazy, running here and there in the walls. Some even came out and we would jump when we saw them suddenly scampering past the doorway. The wind picked up. It played in the branches outside, making the trees whisper and groan as it went past.

  But the spookiest thing of all was the graveyard.

  In the upstairs parlor where we were, there were two big windows on one wall, the panes half-broken. When we went to stand in front of one of them and peered out through the jagged shards of glass, we had a full view of the McKenzie family cemetery in the back. It was a scary sight to see.

  The night was clear, but there was only a sliver of a moon. At first, when we looked out, all we could see were the trees, their great spread of naked branches black against the starlit sky. The grass below them was in deeper darkness. But after only a moment or so, our eyes adjusted and the shapes of the graves came clear.

  They were mostly headstones, about a dozen of them. But there were also a few obelisks here and there. Then, off to the right, there was a statue, just one statue, all alone. It was a statue of a woman with a sort of hood over her head, a cowl. You couldn’t make out her face in the dark at this distance. But she was making a gesture with her hand, reaching out as if trying to stop someone from leaving.

  “Look at that,” said Rick quietly. “Weird, huh?”

  I used my flashlight to try to pick out the statue’s face. The light just barely reached her, but its faint ray brought her figure out of the darkness so that it seemed more real somehow, almost alive.