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Chapter 25
On Friday afternoon, Timothy found himself walking along Tannery Brook, alone.
There was a lot to think about.
All these tensions he’d been holding. His father leaving. Cathryn moving in. His mother ignoring him. His living room painted pink, his car worse than that...the list went on and on...
Charles seemed to think that if Timothy would just accept things as they were, everything would somehow be okay. But it wasn’t just a matter of accepting current circumstances. It was that the rules had been changed, the rug pulled out from underneath.
It felt right to be angry. Accepting things as they now were felt like defeat.
Having been lost in thought, his eyes came back into focus on the brook. A clump of green foam was trapped among some rocks poking through the water’s surface, one of those spots you could really hear the brook gurgling.
Timothy stepped closer. He saw it wasn’t just foam, something was caught between the rocks. He had to lean way over but he was able to scoop up...
A dead frog.
Timothy wiped the chemical foam from its lifeless eyes. Its dangling little legs dripped water down onto Timothy’s sneakers. He looked at the frog a long time. Then to the brook he’d pulled it from. Then over to the Green Apartment Building, standing watch over the field, day in, day out, whether kids were outside playing or not.
Now there were two vacant apartments inside the building that he knew of. He pictured the beer bottles inside Lynda’s otherwise empty refrigerator. Who would drink them? And the mail piling outside Ken’s door with no one to pick it up. How long before someone just threw it all in the garbage, like Ken had never even existed?
For certain, they needed to wrap up this investigation, to make sure the brook ran clean again. But to give up on Ken now, when they were this close to proving the real motive behind what had happened to him?
Timothy knew for a fact there was some kind of evidence, just sitting there, in a box, in a storage facility on Greenkill Avenue. This was his last chance.
All he had to do was make himself go over there, now, and find it.
# # #
Back at Timothy’s house, his mom and Cathryn were running around, getting ready.
Since the slide show had been interrupted a few nights ago, and since Amber was about to fly back to San Francisco, there was to be a special Friday evening Group meeting, so they could all finish watching the slide show, and have another crack at snacking and socializing.
“Sorry you have to put up with this two nights this week,” Cathryn said, piling the books on the end table as Timothy had done previously, making a place for the projector.
“That’s okay,” Timothy said. “Hey, I think I’m gonna head over to Charles’ house, can you just tell Mom?”
Across the room, his mom was occupied with Amber, in the process of moving the TV into the dining room again.
“Sure, have fun,” Cathryn said.
It was easy for her to imagine Timothy heading off to a safe place, having met Charles and being so impressed with his character.
Outside, Timothy hopped on his bike and pulled his knapsack over his shoulders.
But he didn’t pedal up the hill toward Hilltop Meadows.
He rode instead in the other direction, toward the old brewery on Greenkill Avenue.
He took side streets in case anyone vaguely parental should happen to drive by and wonder where he was going. Also checking to see if Grafton’s car was parked at his house would be a sensible precaution.
Pedaling through the midtown neighborhood on a late Friday afternoon, you could almost feel the front porches gearing up to be the site of lazy beer drinking now that the work week was almost over.
Coming up on some kids walking in the street ahead of him, he could already tell they were looking at him like he was in the wrong neighborhood. Veering to avoid them, he almost bumped into a guy he didn’t see walking in the street.
“Watch where you’re going,” the guy said roughly. As he spoke, Timothy realized it was the guy he’d usually see escorting Lynda, now walking the streets angry and alone as if he were still out looking for her.
“Sorry,” Timothy said, quickly redirecting his bicycle and moving away.
“Hey, come back here,” the guy said, as if suddenly recognizing him, but Timothy kept pedaling, not sticking around to find out what the guy wanted.
He hadn’t approached Grafton’s house from this direction last time, but when he hit Furnace Street he knew he was almost there. He made his way just far enough to confirm the Mustang was parked in front of Grafton’s place, then made a beeline for the storage space.
When he got to Greenkill Avenue, he was glad to put the railroad tracks between him and the angry pimp man he thought might be following him, but he was now in a place desolate enough that it felt creepy in another way.
Approaching the old brewery, the sign reminded him that the gate would close at 5pm. He checked his Timex. It was 4:30, that gave him only a half hour. He would have to work quickly...
# # #
Cathryn answered the phone when it rang back in their kitchen, thinking it was someone calling to ask about the meeting.
“Hello, it’s Charles, is Timothy there?”
“Hi Charles,” Cathryn said, “Timothy just left, he said he was going to your house...”
Charles had to think quick.
“Yes, that’s right, thanks. I’ll just see him when he gets here...have a good night.”
Cathryn went back to carrying snack trays from the kitchen to the dining room.
Charles meanwhile thought to himself:
Why would Timothy say he was coming up to my house?
And then he said aloud:
“Oh shit.”
He jumped on his 10 speed and started pedaling into Kingston as fast as his legs could take him.
He kept the 10 speed in top gear the whole way.
# # #
Timothy at first did not remember how to get to D-17. The alleyways all looked the same and, for whatever reason, the numbers were not entirely sequential. But after a wrong turn or two, he found the D section and was back where he’d been the day before.
Only today he was by himself, and it was ten times creepier.
The crates that Grafton had destroyed with his baseball bat were still lying here in splinters. No one had been back here in the last 24 hours to clean them up. The tire marks in the dust where Grafton had peeled out were likewise undisturbed by human footprints.
Timothy sat himself down cross-legged in the dust in front of D-17 and examined the padlock. He’d yet to try this experiment at home, but was prepared to try it now. Nothing better than on-the-job training.
Timothy took the plastic sandwich bag from his knapsack and held it up to the light. The potassium chlorate powder he’d made by pulverizing match heads was ready. In his inexpert opinion, there appeared to be enough to blow open the padlock.
Leaning the lock up against the garage door so the bottom was facing up, Timothy slowly sprinkled the gunpowder-like substance into the keyhole, shaking the lock slightly so the explosive powder would trickle into the workings.
He hadn’t brought the Real Men’s Guidebook with him, but he was pretty sure how to do this, he just needed to whittle the wooden shaft of a single kitchen match to insert into the keyhole and function as a fuse.
The other thing he didn’t bring was a pocket knife, but he did have one implement that was incredibly sharp. Holding a tiny match in his left hand, he began to whittle it with the oversized meat cleaver.
With each tiny little chiseling action he felt sure he was about to shave his fingerprints off, ever so delicately carving the small wooden shaft until one end was about the size of a needle.
Setting the cleaver down for now, Timothy tapped the wooden shaft of the kitchen match down into the keyhole, so fragile it seemed it would break, but he managed to get it in just enough.
In truth, he did not know what size explosion to expect. His imagination provided an image of total destruction, the entire unit falling back to earth in flaming chunks after having been blown sky high. But would the Real Men’s Guide not have warned him if this were a possibility?
On his feet and prepared to run, he lit a single match. With a slightly shaky hand, he extended the match toward the other match head poking out of the keyhole, but every time he got within a half inch, he pulled it back reflexively as if he were about to get his hand blown off.
He blew the first match out before it could burn his fingers, then he lit another. Finally steadying himself, he extended the lit match, and with a sudden FFZZZ the fuse match caught fire and flared up.
Stumbling backwards he ran ten feet and turned to see what would happen.
BAM!
An explosion about as substantial as a firecracker echoed all over the place. Timothy looked around nervously as the sound subsided, then over to the lock, which was smoking.
Walking back over to examine his pyrotechnic handiwork, he was amazed to find that it had actually worked, the padlock had been blown open. Slightly warm to the touch, he jiggled it off the hasp and, just like that, the storage space was unlocked.
Timothy took a deep breath. This was the moment of truth. He reached down, took hold of the knotted bit of dirty rope tied to the handle and, with a bit more effort than it had taken Charles, managed to pull open the heavy garage door.
Behold. Boxes and boxes, piled haphazardly where Grafton had left them yesterday.
Mostly, the boxes seemed to be newish small appliances. Hand-mixers and clock-radios, with a few slightly bigger-ticket items like speakers or home stereos.
There were also the bankers boxes he’d glimpsed yesterday. One of them, he imagined, would contain what he was looking for, even though he didn’t know exactly what it was.
He looked at his Timex. It was already 4:42. There was no time to waste.
Quickly, Timothy began removing boxes and placing them onto the ground in the alleyway. This part of the process itself was difficult. Grafton was much taller than Timothy and had piled the boxes so high that Timothy had to reach way over his head to get the top ones down, and some of them were quite heavy.
Once there were a few accessible boxes to choose from, Timothy opened one.
Inside, a nonsensical mess. Receipts, letters, old photographs, all jumbled together like the box had been packed quickly with no sense of order whatsoever. Perhaps the result of a quick clean up of Luke Grafton’s personal effects, but no matter the process, if Kurt Grafton couldn’t make sense of this, how the hell could Timothy?
He decided to switch tactics and keep taking boxes out instead, maybe something large and obvious would get his attention, though the task seemed impossible as he imagined the storage unit being packed all the way to the back wall with random boxes like these.
But after he’d pulled out a second row of boxes, Timothy was surprised to find that the unit wasn’t as packed to the gills as he imagined, there was actually a lot of space in there. It was like Grafton had gotten lazy and kept piling things in front until he couldn’t get into the back anymore.
With an entryway cleared wide enough to explore, Timothy struck a kitchen match. With lit match in one hand, meat cleaver in the other, he cautiously tiptoed deeper into the storage space.
It wasn’t entirely empty. Curiously, there was an open army cot, along with a battery-powered camping light, an 8-track player with one of those plunger handles on top, and a pile of magazines.
As the match began to burn down, Timothy turned on the electric camping light, which lit the place just well enough to look around. The arrangement looked intentional, as if Grafton at various points had actually been hanging out in here. Why the hell would anyone want to hang out in a storage space?
# # #
Charles rolled up on Grafton’s place not realizing Timothy had been here not twenty minutes earlier. But by this point, the Mustang was not parked out front. Grafton could be anywhere.
Hightailing it out of there, Charles upshifted quickly trying to accelerate as fast as his legs would take him, but found his feet suddenly racing in a circle while the bike beneath him lost speed, not going anywhere.
In his haste he’d shifted more recklessly than the bike wanted him to, the derailleur throwing the chain clear off the gears.
Hopping off, Charles flipped the bike upside down. Taking hold of the greasy chain in one hand, he used the pedal to wriggle the gears forward and backward, gently coaxing the chain until its links were realigned with the gear’s teeth and it was spinning properly again.
Flipping the bike back onto its wheels, Charles was just climbing on when a hand clapped down on the handlebars.
Charles looked up to find Kyle, the kid who tried to make off with his bike last week. Only this time, he had his two buddies with him.
“Hey, it’s Mr. Tough Guy,” Kyle said. “Where’s your little white girlfriend?”
Charles looked straight at Kyle, then at each of his buddies who were moving in to flank Charles on both sides.
“I haven’t got time for this...” Charles said.
# # #
Deep inside D-17, Timothy looked at his watch. It was 4:52. He should’ve been out of here already. Hard as it was to admit, he was going to have to give up the search or risk being locked inside the storage facility overnight.
Atop one of the interior piles of small appliance boxes, Timothy spied one last bankers box. Maybe this would be the one, maybe Grafton had simply gotten frustrated and left before he remembered it was back here.
Setting the meat cleaver down for the moment, Timothy stood on the cot so he could reach toward the box. The cot held at first, but as Timothy extended his reach, the cot wiggled beneath him and suddenly collapsed into itself, sending Timothy and various boxes sprawling.
One of the boxes, apparently, landed right on top of the 8-track player, which suddenly started blaring music out of its tinny little speaker.
It took Timothy a moment to get his wits about him and realize what was going on. When he figured which box had triggered the music, he lifted it, and fumbled with the switches on the 8-track until he finally got the thing to stop playing.
The storage space grew silent for a moment. But not totally silent. In the background, Timothy could hear the growing rumble of a singularly distinctive car engine.
The Mustang was pulling into the alleyway.
With nervous hands, Timothy fiddled with the camping light but in his panic could not figure out how to turn it off.
He picked up the meat cleaver and crouched in the corner, his intestines loosening like they were literally going to empty out into his pants.
“What the fuck?” he heard Grafton say as he cut the engine and got out of his car.
He began kicking past the boxes littering the alleyway, then realized that a path had been cleared into the unit and a light was shining out from within.
He reached back into his Mustang for the baseball bat.
“Who the fuck is in here?” he called out, now bashing his own possessions to clear a wider path as he made his way inside.
Petrified, Timothy rose to his feet, holding the meat cleaver aloft, half as if surrendering it, half as if feebly using it to protect himself.
“Who else is in here with you?” Grafton demanded, it seemed unlikely the kid had busted in here by himself.
“No one,” Timothy said, shakily.
Then he zeroed in on what Timothy was holding clumsily in his hand.
“A meat cleaver? Whaddah you gonna do with that, huh?”
Grafton stepped closer with the baseball bat.
“Huh?” he repeated, and with a quick flick of the bat, grazed Timothy’s wrist just hard enough to send the cleaver clattering to the cement floor.
Timothy’s wrist stung, but his heart was racing so fast he barely felt it.
Grafton extended the baseball bat and used it to rake the cleaver across the cement toward himself. He bent over and picked it up.
Setting the bat down, he hefted the cleaver menacingly back-and-forth between his hands.
“You gonna come at me--with this thing?” Grafton said. “How ’bout I chop off your fucking head?”
Grafton begin to hold the cleaver aloft and stepped closer, as if intending to do what he’d just said.
Out of nowhere, a swoosh followed immediately by a thud was heard, and Grafton was suddenly collapsing onto Timothy, the cleaver again crashing onto the floor.
“Ayy, what the fuck!” Grafton said, holding his head, writhing on the floor in pain.
Using adrenaline-enhanced strength, Timothy managed to wriggle out from beneath Grafton and make his way to the open door of the storage unit, where stood Charles holding another baseball at the ready, in case he needed to throw a second fastball.
“You little fucker,” Grafton called, still recovering on the floor inside, “I’m gonna kill you!”
“Let’s move,” Charles said.
Timothy hopped back on his banana saddle, Charles was on foot for some reason, but running just as fast as Timothy could pedal.
In their confusion, they again took a wrong turn into a dead-end alleyway.
“Fuck, try the next one!”
Their darting eyes could barely scan fast enough to find the exit sign, but Charles finally spied it and redirected them until they came out of the maze of corrugated buildings.
The gate was just ahead of them, but it was well after 5 and closed for the night.
Somewhere deeper in the complex, they could hear the Mustang revving up.
With all their weight they both jumped on the pad, but even together they lacked the tonnage to trigger it open.
“This way!” Charles said, and led Timothy to the spot in the fence he’d obviously scaled to get in here, his own bike waiting in the weeds just on the other side.
The two of them together lifted Timothy’s banana saddle up and up, trying to get it over the fence. Timothy looked at Charles up close for the first time and realized he had blood coming down the left side of his face.
“What happened to you?”
“I’m fine, you should see the other guys--keep lifting!”
With a final push, they managed to get Timothy’s bike up and over the fence. Charles then linked his fingers together to form a stirrup and knelt down.
“C’mon, move, move, move,” Charles said, over the rumbling sound of a train pulling south out of the rail yard.
Timothy stepped into Charles’ interlocked fingers, Charles stood and lifted at the same time, giving Timothy the boost he needed to get to the top.
This was the one spot along the fence where the barbed wire had been tamped down, but it still had barbs, one of which caught Timothy’s shirt and ripped it as he was pulling himself the rest of the way over, before falling to the ground on the other side otherwise intact.
Left on the inside alone, Charles backed up a few feet to get a running start, then sprang at the fence. Despite his agility, the height of the fence presented some difficulty. He nonetheless managed to use his momentum to make it just high enough to execute a sort of flip which quickly vaulted him up and over and onto the ground alongside Timothy.
They mounted their bikes and began to ride just as the Mustang approached the gate, resting on the pad in the road, growling impatiently as Grafton waited for the gate to open wide enough to pass through.
Charles and Timothy were able to get a precisely one block lead before coming to a full stop at the tracks as an unknowably long freight train lumbered past.
“For the love of fuck!” Charles said.
There were no other roads in or out of the old brewery. You could not go over, under, or around a passing train, whose awesome power would crush a person sure as Grafton would.
They could do nothing but wait.
Behind them, the gate finished opening. Grafton threw the Mustang into gear and began accelerating toward them.
Both Charles and Timothy looked at the Mustang, then back at the train, whose caboose was now in sight as the remaining cars click-clacked past them.
It seemed that Grafton would reach them first. And he did.
Ducking under the gate as a last attempt to distance themselves, Charles and Timothy got within inches of the locomotive behemoth rumbling past them.
Grafton got out of the Mustang and began lurching toward them. Ducking under the gate, he was within feet of either grabbing them or pushing them into the train, when the caboose rolled past, and Charles and Timothy took off like a shot across the tracks.
An increasingly furious Grafton, rubbing the lump on the back of his head, got back into his car and again had to wait for another gate to open before he could move.
Charles and Timothy had bought enough time to get two blocks ahead on Greenkill Avenue. But there were no additional gates that could hinder or save them, and once the Mustang was freed to tear up the road, it caught up with them in no time.
“Split up!” Charles called out.
Timothy cut right onto Wilbur, Charles continued straight on Greenkill.
The tactic worked at first, at least in terms of saving Timothy.
Grafton continued to follow Charles who, through sheer force of will, was able to stay ahead just long enough to fly through a busy intersection, at which Grafton paused momentarily, but was back on his trail in seconds.
With inches to spare, Charles spied an opening in the fence surrounding a field behind the old age home. Charles jumped the curb and flew through the opening. He knew this field from back when he’d gone to George Washington Elementary like Timothy. He knew it would deliver him to a parking lot and through to the next block.
When he emerged on the other side, he figured he’d bought Timothy enough time to escape, so proceeded to zigzag through the intervening streets on his way, ultimately, to the safety of his own suburban neighborhood.
What Charles did not realize was that two moments after he’d given Grafton the slip, Timothy had emerged onto Wall Street not half a block in front of the Mustang, prompting Grafton to change targets.
Timothy, hearing the Mustang approaching behind him, made a quick right just to get away, but this was actually taking him further away from his home.
The Mustang, of course, gunned it and continued to follow.
Timothy managed to stay ahead just long enough to pull into the Gulf Station where he filled up his tires.
“Sal, Sal!” he called, hoping the garage owner would come out and protect him.
But as Grafton came squealing into the station, Timothy pedaled off again, away from the pumps just in time to avoid the Mustang, charging like a bull, DING DINGing at high speed as it flew over the wires without stopping.
Sal came out of the station, moments too late, looking both ways, trying to figure out what the heck had just happened.
Timothy, meanwhile, had gotten back on course. Approaching his elementary school, he cut diagonally across the playground blacktop, which was clearly marked “School Buses Only,” but Grafton ignored the sign and continued to follow, causing two kids who were playing a late-day pick-up game to grab their basketball and take cover.
Back on Wall Street, Timothy only had two blocks to go, but Grafton was right behind him. He ducked down the alley that ran alongside Terri’s Market. He’d never actually been down this alley because it always had the strong, sour smell of rotten meat, and he didn’t know where it would lead.
Grafton came to a screeching stop, running into the alleyway himself.
Timothy came to a dead end and turned around to see Grafton running at him. Abandoning his bicycle, Timothy climbed on top of the foul-smelling dumpster and was clambering over a paint-chipped fence when Grafton grabbed him by the foot.
The only advantage Timothy had at this point was gravity. As he fell toward the gravel driveway waiting on the other side, his shoe came loose in Grafton’s hand.
Hitting the ground hard, Timothy got up onto his feet immediately and started running. With no bike, one shoe, and a ripped shirt, Timothy had one block to go as Grafton jumped back into his Mustang and came barreling after him.
Rounding the corner onto Warren Street, the Mustang skidded around the same corner just behind him. Almost tripping several times on the uneven bluestone sidewalk, Timothy at last reached his house with Grafton screeching to a stop in the middle of the street right out front.
Timothy raced up the steps of his front porch and threw open the screen door. Grafton, beyond any sense of rationality of whatever, did not pause.
Flying through the front door into the living room, Grafton reached forward and grabbed Timothy by the torn shirt. He was on the verge of throwing him to the floor when he paused momentarily, trying to figure out what he’d just stumbled into.
A roomful of protective women, having just finished watching a slideshow about female empowerment, rose to their feet.
“Timothy, what the hell is going on?” his mom said.
Grafton, whose lizard brain was not going to disengage at this point, seemed to say to himself Fuck it anyway. He shook Timothy’s body and clocked him at least once in the head before, en masse, the collective force of Group lunged toward him.
Enraged beyond reason, Grafton let go of Timothy and whirled toward the crowd with both fists clenched, hitting with full force whatever got in his way.
Several of the women got clocked in the process, but no one was backing down.
The sheer physical entanglement of the situation prevented Grafton from continuing to swing his fists with full power.
From somewhere in the middle of the Group, policewoman Sarah managed to push her comrades aside to get up front.
“Get the fuck out of this house!” she yelled at Grafton as the other women began to step aside for her, momentarily giving Grafton free range of motion once again.
“Fuck you dike!” he yelled at her, preparing to strike with the full force of his rage.
But Sarah moved more quickly and efficiently than Grafton could.
Executing a single, perfectly positioned throat strike, she sent Grafton crumpling to the living room floor, holding his trachea, making some kind of gurgling noises.
Taking no chances, Sarah capably grabbed Grafton’s wrist, getting him into an arm lock. She pushed him face down, pressed him down with one foot, and signaled for one of the other women to throw her her leather bag, from which she pulled a pair of cuffs and an official KPD walkie talkie.
“I’ve got a Code 30 at 11 Warren Street, requesting back-up...”
# # #
Not five minutes later, three squad cars were double parked out front, flashers lighting up the street.
Women of Group stood here and there, neighbors came out to see what was going on, as two beefy Kingston cops led a cuffed, semi-conscious Grafton out to their car.
Timothy, flanked by his mom and Cathryn, who was holding a compress to his forehead, sat outside on the front steps while the ranking police officer was trying to figure out what happened.
“Now, start from the beginning, in your own words,” the officer said, holding his notepad at the ready.
Timothy shook his head.
“I’m not saying anything without my partner...”
The officer chuckled slightly and looked to Timothy’s mom and Cathryn, who both shrugged their shoulders.
“Your partner?” the officer said. “Who’s your partner?”
“Charles Lambeau, Jr.,” Timothy pronounced succinctly.
“Oh boy,” the cop said with a falling voice, putting down his notepad. “We got trouble…”
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Wowza! Record speed read for that chapter!
Group to the rescue!