Shadows Remain

Prologue

September 17, 1987

The scream was high and shrill, full of fear and lacking any sense of hope. It echoed off the granite headstones, filling the air like a thick cloud of pollen. A scream like I’d never heard, yet it held a certain familiarity. Something I recognized. Not its tone, but its source.

Connor! My shout paled in comparison to the anguished wail assaulting my ears from the darkness.

Come on, Adam! Nick pulled at my red and black flannel sleeve, ripping the seam at the shoulder. We gotta get outta here, man! We gotta go!

When our eyes met, the moonlight turned his damp eyes to glass; fear pried them wide.

We can’t just leave him! I pleaded. We can’t leave Connor!

We stood at the entrance to one of a handful of cemeteries in Broken Tree, our youthful courage running on empty. Already through the towering iron gate, Nick implored me to join him in the perceived safety beyond the fence. But my feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t set free the iron bars clutched in my white-knuckled fists. I remained frozen. Frozen with fear. Frozen with the realization that our game of hide and seek had taken a wrong turn.

A very wrong turn.

Connor! I shouted my friend’s name one last time before slipping through the gate and joining Nick on the other side. The screams had died away, and other than the rhythmic drumming of my heart in my ears, the echo of my voice was the only sound cutting through the silence.

It took another hard tug from Nick to break the cemetery’s grasp on me.

Then I ran. Finally, I ran.

We’d left our bicycles propped against a tree twenty yards from the gate. It took forever to reach them. Working the pedals like our lives depended on it, we sped down the country road and into our neighborhood, weaving through streets, sidewalks and the occasional side yard on our way to the intersection of Locust and Willow. We knew the route by heart. The moonlight made our navigation easier since our neighborhood suffered from a lack of streetlamps.

Toward homes with darkened windows and sleeping parents, clueless of our midnight antics in the graveyard, we pedaled as fast as our twelve-year-old legs could. It wasn’t the first time the three of us had played in the cemetery at night, but I had the unsettling feeling it would be the last. Three friends, who’d played together, grown up together, and as of last week, had lost our innocence together by way of the stack of dirty magazines we’d discovered in a dumpster.

But that’s where the togetherness would end. Of the three of us, only two had left the graveyard.

He’ll make it home. Nick didn’t lack for optimism as we stood on the corner of Willow and Locust, straddling our bikes, taking a moment to catch our breaths. We risked the occasional glance behind us, making sure we weren’t being followed. I wasn’t sure what might be following, or what we would do about it if something or someone was, and that’s what made the whole thing even more frightening.

He’ll come knockin’ on our doors in the morning, Nick said. You’ll see.

I looked at him with his long, dark hair hanging over his eyes. Did he really believe that? But I didn’t question my friend’s confidence out loud. In fact, I didn’t say a word as Nick turned up Willow without so much as a wave and started peddling the two-block trek to his house. After a final glance back toward the cemetery, I walked my bike across the street and headed around the side of my house. My bedroom window waited for me in the shadows.

Moments later, I crawled under the new Superman sheets my mother had recently bought me. After sleeping over at Connor’s a couple of weeks before, I’d come home raving about his Green Lantern sheets that glowed in the dark. Even though my Superman sheets didn’t glow in the dark, I was happy with them. Superman would whip Green Lantern’s ass. He was, after all, the man of steel. Able to leap tall buildings. Stop trains and bullets and all manner of bad intentions. Which was all great, but right now, I wanted only to be protected from the boogeyman who had just proven his existence to our group of three. In case we were doubters before.

I pulled the sheets and comforter up over my head. I focused on the ticking of the alarm clock sitting on my dresser, hoping to block out the scream reverberating inside my skull.

Tick… tock… tick… tock…

It didn’t help.

The following morning brought a knock on the door, but it wasn’t Connor, and somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be. It was a police officer. I watched him enter the house from the top of the stairs, an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. When he shook my dad’s hand, the first thing I noticed was the shiny gold badge pinned to his chest. It stood out against the dark blue of his uniform. My focus soon turned to the officer’s hat. I thought it was strange that he wasn’t wearing it, but had it tucked under his arm. Did that mean something?

I strained to hear the conversation, but the words were hushed. I made out very few. Their voices ascended the stairs in a soft murmur, interrupted a moment later by a wail of anguish from my mother. I didn’t have to wait long to find out what the visit was about. Minutes after escorting the officer into the front room, my father emerged at the bottom of the stairs, calling for me to come down. His expression ensured me that the unsettled feeling in my stomach was warranted.

Adam, this is Officer Wilson.

I scanned the room for my mother, but she must have left because her face wasn’t among the concerned. After being instructed to have a seat on our brown plaid couch, I was told that Officer Wilson had a few questions for me. I was also told that I wouldn’t get into trouble because of my answers. But that doesn’t do much to calm a young boy’s nerves when a police officer is standing over him with a list of questions. My nervousness must have been obvious, because I was also told to relax.

Ten minutes later, the officer flipped his notebook shut, rose from the couch with a reassuring smile and told my dad he’d be in touch. After my dad escorted the officer out, it was his turn to ask me some questions. With a gentle hand on my knee, he explained the situation: around the same time Connor’s mother was finding his bed empty that morning, a grounds worker for the cemetery was making a discovery of his own. He’d been mowing the grass when he’d come across a small red sneaker outside the abandoned receiving vault. When he investigated further, he found Connor’s body inside the vault.

Like any good parent would, my father spared me the gruesome details. But later that morning, I heard my parents discussing those details in the kitchen. Conner had been practically naked, slumped against the back wall of the vault. A couple of thread-bare blankets, tin cans and a trash bag had surrounded him, stuffed with assorted clothing. Covered in mud and blood, only his ripped t-shirt, socks and one shoe remained on his person. Even his glasses were missing. He’d been strangled and discarded, left lying on a pile of dead flowers the groundskeeper had tossed in to rot. Conner had died alone, the cemetery’s residents the only witnesses.

Less than a week later, the transfer my father had requested came through. Within days, we were driving down Interstate 74, Broken Tree, Minnesota, growing smaller in the rear-view mirror. And whether it was because of Connor Westphal’s death or not, we never looked back.

Present Day

The cardboard boxes in the front of the moving truck were heavier than those by the door. At least, that’s how it seemed. Either way, my thirty-six-year-old back was protesting the physical labor. All morning, the voice in my head reminded me that the hours sitting behind a drafting table and computer monitor were taking a toll. The extra twenty pounds I carried around my middle probably weren’t helping. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, and I already desperately needed a shower. The transformation of my t-shirt from light grey to dark was almost complete, and my odiferous scent could best be described as foul.

It’d been a long morning spent carrying boxes, mattress springs, dining room chairs, office equipment, architectural supplies and everything else we’d brought with us on the eighteen-hundred-mile trip from Tucson. We’d rolled into town in the wee hours, caught a couple restless hours in sleeping bags spread out on our new living room floor, then cracked the lock on the moving truck around 7:00 am, coffee in hand. As the morning wore on, the other thought I had was: I should’ve hired someone.

Sixteen! Ben shouted, buzzing me on his bike the way Maverick had buzzed the control tower in that movie I’d let him watch a couple of weeks ago. He’d liked the movie so much, he ended up watching it four more times over