Chapter 4

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, NEARLY P.M.

My leg feels worse tonight. I think it's the stress. There's a deep pain working its way up my back. Besides going to the bathroom, I haven't gotten out of bed all day. But I've calmed down. Writing everything out helped. It seems more like a story now. It feels better.

I'm finding that dull, lingering pain is ten times worse when it's accompanied by dull, lingering boredom. If not for my laptop I'm pretty sure my parents would have already found me dead from a hopeless case of endless monotony.

I can imagine it:

"Our little Ryan has died of boredom. We should have looked in on him more. Poor thing."

So the laptop rests nicely on Big Bertha. My mom says the psychiatrist gave her some software that secretly tracks my browser history, emails, IMs, everything. It's nice that my mom told me this, because the software isn't very hard to disable. Adults in general take a lot of comfort in these tools, but a fifteen-year-old who can't get around parental controls on a computer is probably also having trouble tying his shoes. It's just not that hard.

Still, timing is important. I can't be searching for weird stuff or sending emails to Sarah without having at least a few minutes to cover my tracks. It takes time to erase what I've done, and it's too late if I've just sent an email and I hear my mom walking up the stairs.

Not that I've sent Sarah any emails. I still don't know what to say.

It's hard. Maybe too hard.

To kill the boredom, I've been searching online for information about the dredge. Sarah and I have looked before and found almost nothing of interest. We searched for archived stories, blogs by people living in town, information about the Crossbones, The Skeleton Creek Irregular, and a lot more. In every case we discovered what felt like tiny shards or fragments of information, just enough to keep us going but nothing really earth-shattering.

I tried all those angles again today with the same meager results. After three hours of dead ends, I looked back through my notes and my eyes lit on the name of the company that had owned the dredge — New York Gold and Silver. I'd searched that term before, but not very aggressively. I went looking for them again, this time with more tenacity.

New York Gold and Silver has been out of business for over twenty years, but one thing about bankruptcy I've found is that all your records are open for viewing. I found a public file of the company records in a subsection of the City of New York legal archives, and within those files I discovered a file marked NYGS AM Mins. 80–85. I knew NYGS stood for New York Gold and Silver. When I double-clicked on the file, I saw that AM Mins stood for Annual Meeting Minutes and that 80–85 meant 1980–1985.

To categorize this document as boring would be way too kind. This was 127 pages of pure, undistilled drudgery. I skimmed the first 30 pages of PE ratios, cost-benefit analyses, plant closures, equity-to-debt ratios, sub-prime holdings, and a lot of other painfully tedious details of a once-prosperous company. It wasn't until I was half asleep on page 31 that I realized I could search for terms I was interested in rather than read every single word.

And that's when I found something on page 81 and something else on page 111 that made me nervous. I printed them out, and I'm going to tape them in here.

In the spring of 1985, New York Gold and Silver was served with environmental lawsuits from Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. I guess they were too busy fending off enemies to take action on their agreement to demolish #42. By June of 1985, the company was dissolved in a sea of debt and legal disputes. Things like the dredge in Skeleton Creek were forgotten as lawyers moved on to higher-profile cases. There was no money to be made suing a dead company.

It's almost nine o'clock now. Mom and Dad will be in to say good night and check up on me. They'll want to check my computer.

I know what I have to do.

I pasted the text from the meeting notes under my name and printed out the email (which is what's included above).

I hope Sarah finds my email before her parents do.

One thing I hate about writing in the digital age is that everything disappears eventually. It's like writing letters that evaporate into thin air as they're read. Which is why I keep copies. Paper feels permanent.

Time to clean up the mess before my parents come up the stairs.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, EARLY A.M.

Mom gave me more painkillers last night — the kind where they warn you not to operate heavy equipment after taking them because you get really drowsy. I fell asleep reading the end of To a God Unknown. Steinbeck could be creepy when he wanted to be, like when Joseph Wayne lives all alone at the black rock and listens to the sounds of the deep night until it drives him crazy. I need to start reading different books. Maybe I'll try a romance novel or a memoir about someone who enjoyed a really happy life.

The big news:

Sarah just sent me an email, which I have read, printed, and deleted.

I'd never ask Sarah to stop making movies, so she really shouldn't expect me to stop writing. She knows I can't stop. But she makes a good point. If my parents are sneaking around in here after I'm asleep, looking for my journals, I need to make sure they don't find them. I've been putting this one between my mattress and the headboard so I can pull it out and write in it whenever I want to. I think I'd catch them if they tried to take it while I slept. Wouldn't I?

Oh, man, this reminds me of The Tell-Tale Heart. Only six pages, but every one of them seriously spine-chilling. I can imagine my dad quietly entering my room in the dark. He's moving so slowly it takes him an hour to get to my bed — just like the madman in that story. I hear something and sit up, but it's pitch-black and I'm afraid to turn on the light, so I don't see him standing there. I sit upright for a long time and I know someone is in the room even though I can't see them. I'm terrified. And then bang! — he takes my journal and escapes.

Perfect. Now I have one more thing to worry about tonight.

Investigating is often how Sarah gets herself and me into trouble, so I'm worried that she used the word. And her email has that blind confidence she gets sometimes, like she's wearing glasses that only let her see two feet in front of her own face, nothing to the sides or the back or way out front — just those precious two feet telling her to charge ahead.

I wonder what she's sending me. It's unbearable having to wait.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, EARLY MORNING

Last night, after dinner, my parents moved me out to the porch so I could get some fresh air. It's getting chilly in the early evening already, but I like that about living in the mountains. The clean air is even crisper when it's chilled. I was exhausted when I finally got back to my room. I fell right to sleep (no doubt the fresh air helped). I got the video and the link from Sarah.

SARAHFINCHER.COM

PASSWORD:

PITANDPENDULUM

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, MORNING

So Sarah thinks my ghost — or whatever it was — was there the first night she went to the dredge. And the dragging leg — that would point to Old Joe Bush, wouldn't it?

It's good that Sarah doesn't think I'm insane.

But that might be because she's ins

ane, too.

Either way, she's good company.

I'm supposed to be the paranoid one. But what is she doing? Driving by my house to make sure I'm okay. Checking the doorway ten times a second to make sure nobody catches her. Asking me not to write anything down.

What's going on?

That might be the worst thing about being trapped in here: I have no idea what's going on outside this room.

I wish I could remember more. I don't think I have amnesia … or do I? I remember my name, my age, my address, and my phone number. When my mom comes in my room wearing the chili-pepper apron I gave her when I was in the eighth grade, I recognize her.

I remember, at the age of ten, holding a cold marshmallow milkshake in one hand while riding my ten-speed down a hill. A dog started chasing me and I squeezed the front brake. After I flipped over the handlebars and landed on my back, I sat up and saw that the dog had lost interest in trying to kill me. He was licking my milkshake off the hot pavement.

You see there? I remember every detail. I remember even more than that.

I remember when I limped home with skinned knees and elbows. My shirt was all dirty. Mom wasn't home, so it was a rare moment in which Dad was my lone hope of sympathy. Mom would have babied me, but I recall feeling as if I'd better not be crying when I reached the porch. I knew he wouldn't like it if I was all upset.

When he saw me, Dad sat me on his lap and touched my stinging knees with a cold dishrag from the kitchen sink.

"Mom's not going to like finding blood all over her good rag," I pointed out.

"Don't worry about your mother. I'll cover for you."

That made me smile, even though I was still concerned. "What will you say?"

"Bloody nose. I'll tell her I got in a fight. I'll say someone punched me."

"She's not going to believe you."

"Cutting vegetables?"

"You only cook pancakes."

"You worry too much."

It was a pleasant moment with my dad, like — I don't know — intimate, I guess. It didn't happen very often. He pushed his T-shirt up with a finger and scratched his bare shoulder. I caught sight of a little mark he had.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Tattoo. From a long time ago. You've seen it before."

"Can I see it again?"

He hesitated. I'd only ever seen the tattoo about three times in my whole life. It was small, about the size of a nickel. He called it his little birdie.

"It doesn't look like a bird."

"It's not a bird. I just call it that."

"What is it then?"

"It's nothing."

He pulled his sleeve back down and set me on the porch. The intimate moment had passed. I remember thinking I'd done something wrong.

So it seems I remember a lot of things — even long strings of things that happened years ago. I just don't recall all the details of the night when I fell. I guess that makes it a blackout, or in my case, a gray-out, since things keep creeping back that I don't necessarily want to remember.

I'm not surprised by what Sarah's saying in the video, about the sound being there both nights. It was like I've already seen and heard this information through a dirty window, and now the window has been cleaned. Things I already knew have become a little clearer, that's all.

But I also think there's something else. When Mom goes to work, I'll be free to watch it again. I'll listen more carefully this time.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 11:00 A.M.

I've watched it now a dozen times. No, more than a dozen. And, yes, I might have discovered something. Not just in the visuals. But the sounds. Especially the sounds — over and over and over again with those sounds. The best way I can describe it is that listening to those sounds again and again is like feeling my memory come unstuck from skipping on an old record. The sound of the leg being dragged — dragged — dragged — and then ping! Something clicked forward in my memory. Something that wasn't there before.

I remember it was dark and I wanted to go home. I was looking at the rusted-over gears, trying to imagine how they could have moved. The flashlight felt clammy in my hand when I pointed it to a thick wooden beam that stood behind the machinery. Leaning over the biggest of the many gears, I peered down onto the hidden floorboards below. There was a little round mark, about the size of a nickel. I'd seen that mark before.

The record started skipping again.

It's a birdie, it's a birdie, it's a birdie.

After that I saw Old Joe Bush sloshing toward me in his wet boots, dragging his busted leg behind.

What does it all mean?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 11:20 A.M.