Forest Ghost Read Online Free Page B

tinted windows of the bus, the woods on either side went by like the landscape in a dream. Again, most of the journey passed in silence, with only the occasional sound of a woman’s muted weeping. Outside the reservation buildings, eight or nine squad cars from the Muskegon County Sheriff’s department were parked at all angles, as well as three khaki panel vans from the Medical Examiner’s office and satellite trucks from all of the local TV stations. A flag was flying at half-mast, and flapped in the desultory wind like somebody giving a slow hand-clap.
    As the relatives disembarked from the bus, sheriff’s deputies and staff from the Medical Examiner’s office were on hand to direct them through to the main assembly hall. There, the bodies of all those scouts and scout-leaders who had committed suicide were lying on trestle tables, covered with sharply pressed green sheets. The assembly hall was lit by shafts of sunlight, and there were two priests standing in the far corner, one Episcopalian and one Catholic, so it looked more like a church than a morgue. But there was an underlying smell like rotten chicken, which was quite unlike a church, and somebody had obviously tried to mask it with lavender room spray.
    As they approached the double doors that led into the assembly hall, Corinne took hold of Jack’s hand and said, ‘Will you come in with me? I don’t think I can face this on my own.’
    Jack looked at Sparky, who said, ‘That’s OK. I’ll wait outside. I want to remember him the way he was when he was alive. And I need to see the woods, because that’s where it is.’
    Jack said, ‘OK.’ He didn’t ask what ‘it’ was. He was used to Sparky coming out with odd remarks like that and most of time he took no notice. They almost made sense and that was good enough.
    Sparky went off toward the back of the building and Jack saw him asking directions from an Eagle Scout. The Eagle Scout had his hand on Sparky’s shoulder and was pointing to the glass doors that led outside to the verandah.
    ‘You ready for this?’ he asked Corinne.
    She nodded, and took hold of his hand, and gripped it tight. Together they pushed their way into the assembly hall, where medical staff were already lifting up several green sheets so that relatives could identify their dead.
    Across the end of the hall, Jack saw a banner with the scout rallying cry
Attawaytago!
sewn on to it in bright red cotton letters.
God
, he thought,
you couldn’t get any more
bitterly appropriate than that. That’s the way to go.
    He couldn’t stop himself from looking as they made their way between the trestle tables. He saw an African-American boy, no older than thirteen, whose face was completely unblemished, as if he were smiling in his sleep. He saw another boy, white, with tousled brown hair, but this boy looked more bewildered, as if he couldn’t understand why he was killing himself. He had a bruise on his cheek and his neck was covered right up to the chin by a thick white crêpe bandage.
    ‘Cusack?’ asked a large red-cheeked woman with a frizzy black perm and a clipboard.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Jack.
    The woman folded back the green sheet and there he was: Malcolm Cusack, with his gingery hair and his freckles. He looked ridiculously boyish to be dead, and Jack half-expected him to suddenly open up his eyes and say: ‘Surprise!’ But he didn’t open his eyes, and he wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t breathing. Like the brown-haired boy, he too had a bandage covering his neck.
    ‘Why does he have that bandage?’ asked Connie. She was gripping Jack’s hand so tight that his wedding band was digging painfully into his middle finger.
    The woman consulted her clipboard. Jack noticed that she had a large brown mole on her upper lip. He tried gently to twist his hand free but Corinne still wouldn’t let go.
    The woman said, ‘Cusack, Malcolm J.? The cause of death was … his external carotid artery was severed.’
    ‘What?