The last time I saw Lucas Sewall, he left a school notebook under the passenger seat of my truck.
It was a curious document. The boy had drawn disturbing images on the covers-pictures of vampire women and giant owls with bloodstained beaks. The inside pages were crammed with his indecipherable handwriting, words so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them. There were maps labeled with cryptic directions to “lightning trees” and “old Injun caves” and hieroglyphs that might have been messages in secret code or just meaningless scribbles. With a compulsive liar like Lucas, you never knew whether you were dealing with fact or fiction.
The dated diary entries were especially hard to unravel. Between his other weird jottings, the kid had seemingly kept a careful record of the tragic events in Township Nineteen, as if he had anticipated that his eyewitness account might one day prove useful in a court of law. But who knows what was going on in that oversize head of his? In my short acquaintance with him, I learned Lucas Sewall was a deeply damaged child who believed in manipulating adults, settling scores, and tying up loose ends. Sometimes I wondered whether he didn’t see the notebook as his last will and testament, with me in the role of executor.
The first entry was dated three nights before the fatal snowstorm:
FEBRUARY 12
Randle came around last night drunker than usual and made us leave the house again so he could get at his stash of drugs without us knowing where he’d hid them. Ma didn’t want to let him in, but Randle had the Glock he bought off that Mexican in Milbridge and said he’d use it this time if we didn’t wait outside in the dooryard while he got his pills and powder. We had trouble bringing Aunt Tammi down the ramp on account of her wheelchair not having good grippy-ness on the ice and snow. Ma said we should at least wait inside the car, where we could run the blower, only she’d forgotten the keys on the kitchen table. That just made her more pissed off than she already was. We could’ve waited in Randle’s car except that Uncle Prester was passed out in the shotgun seat and he smelt like he’d puked himself, which wouldn’t be the first time. Randle was inside the house a long time, making shadows behind the curtains. When he came out, Ma said they were broken up forever and she didn’t like him hiding his drugs in her house for the cops to find. That got Randle all exercised. He said if she ever ratted on him, she’d be sorry, and he said that went double for the Boy Genius. Randle didn’t figure that I’d already found his stupid drugs stuffed behind the insulation in the sewing room… easiest place in the world to find, on account of the pink dust all over the floor. He didn’t know what I did to the pills, neither… and wasn’t he in for a wicked surprise when someone swallowed one of them Oxycottons? I would pay GOOD money to see Randle get his ass kicked.
As it happened, Lucas didn’t have long to wait.
Two days later, his mother’s ex-boyfriend was dead and his uncle Prester lay in a hospital bed with blackened claws where his fingers and toes had once been.