The police found Brady only a few minutes later.
In spite of their fears, after what the Jantzen kid had cried out, he wasn’t dead. But then he wasn’t exactly alive either.
A short hospital stay would probably be enough for Kyle, already safely in the back of a County Hospital ambulance waiting for his father to arrive when the police entered the back bedroom at 1066 Oleander. It would take a longer stay-a much longer stay-to do the other boy any good.
He wasn’t hurt physically. Not much, anyway. A man’s mutilated body had toppled onto him and bruised his shoulder and his hip. But the carpet had cushioned most of the weight. If he was hurt much, it didn’t show. But when the police pulled the body away, he was staring straight ahead, as if he were examining on a microscopic level the shard of blood-encrusted glass still embedded six inches deep in the corpse’s throat, not three inches from the boy’s own throat but miraculously (it seemed then) not touching him.
He was still staring straight ahead half an hour later, an hour later. Days later.
Three weeks after Halloween night, the Wiltons put their house up for sale, and before Thanksgiving they had gone.
Kyle never saw Brady again.