Bobbie-Joe’s ponytail thrashed from side to side as she chased him.
“Slowpoke!”
The fire lane jackknifed to the right and Jo saw an opportunity to close the gap between her and the boy. She sped up, leaved colored somewhere between sunshine yellow and cherry red fluttering at her feet.
The corner came too fast and her worn sole skidded on the dirt. She tripped and rolled through the turn in a haze of dust. Ahead, the boy slipped past a thick mix of sugar maples and yellow birches.
“Crud!” she said.
Jo brushed off the dust to reveal two pink, scrape-free kneecaps. No harm, no foul.
She tore around the left-hand curve and slide to a stop. The mouth of the fire lane fell away to the shore of Bailey’s Lake. Multicolored stones lay baked in the sand by a scorching summer sun. Waves licked at them, teasing the cool depths within. Reflections of tall pines standing on the opposite shore wiggled with each movement on the lake’s surface.
“Where are we, Ritchie?”
“North shore, my dad brought me here fishin’ last week,” Ritchie replied.
Rocks click-clacked under Ritchie Buckner’s feet the closer he got to the water. He climbed up a boulder twice his size, staring out over the dark brown water.
“So, what do you want to do?” Jo asked next to him.
Ritchie slid off the boulder and landed to the sound of crunching rocks. Small waves whipped the tips of his black high tops at the water’s edge. He kicked at the mud sending rocks plopping into the water. Then, bent down and grabbed a bluish rock pockmarked with clumps of dirt.
“Have you heard the story about Mark Fletcher?” he asked.
“No.”
He grinned. “He went to our school before. One day Mr. Warner gave everyone this huge assignment. Like, a million problems-“
“A million?” she laughed.
“Well… two hundred. Gave them out on Friday, due Monday. Mark Fletcher went home for the weekend but didn’t do them. Warner was so mad that he kept Mark after school, but no one ever saw him again.”
“What happened?”
“His dad belted him so bad when he got home that Mark died. And since it was dinner time, his mom cooked him and ate him.”
Jo burst out laughing, “Nuh-uh. That never happened.”
Ritchie looked at the stone still resting in his palm, a wide grin across his face.
“For Mark Fletcher,” he said and tossed the stone. He watched it bounce three times before the water swallowed it up.
Jo picked up a rock with sharp points, flat as paper.
“Did you know Bella Grace?” Jo asked him.
“No.”
“Miss Bella Grace lived on Tamarack Lane.”
Ritchie shook his head.
“The road near old Thompson Bridge.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah.”
“Miss Bella Grace lived in that big white house on the corner before the bridge. Her mommy and daddy heard her talking to herself one day and asked her who she was talking to. She kept saying ‘goblins’.”
The smile faded and Ritchie sighed, “Goblins don’t exist Jo. They’re fairy tales.”
“That’s what her data said! ‘Listen here sweetie, goblins are only fairy tales. They aren’t real,'” she said in the deepest voice a twelve-year-old girl could muster.
“But the little goblins were real, Ritchie, and they did something real nasty one day.”
Jo turned the flat stone end over end in her hand. The rock was warm, begging for the cool water.
“Bella didn’t come down for breakfast, so Mr. Grace went up to her room. He grabbed her bed sheets and pulled them back.
“Bella’s mouth was sown shut with double stitched, size fifty, black thread. The same kind her mom used. And all the skin from her body was stitched onto the blanket in his hands.
“For Bella Grace,” Jo said and flicked the stone across the water. It bounced twice before sinking.
She looked at Ritchie, “The police said they found the needles and the rest of the thread in her brother’s room.”
The laughed in unison, though not as loudly as before.
“What are you two babies laughin’ about?”
They spun around to see Timothy Conroy standing on the boulder behind them.
“Hey Scratch,” Ritchie said.
Jo started nudging rocks with her foot. Her smile dissolved and she avoided eye contact with the fourteen-year-old.
“I told Jo that story about Mark Fletcher and she told me about Bella Grace,” Ritchie said.
“Ghost stories?” Scratch asked, smirking.
“It’s a game,” Jo muttered.
“Oh yeah? Show me.”
Scratch jumped off the boulder, splashing them all with mud. He towered over Jo. Her eyes focused on the unhealed cuts marring his chin. A scar ran up his left ear and disappeared behind thick hair. She remembered daring him to take his new cruiser down Big Bluff. Remembered the sound of the accident. Remembered the battlefield of bike parts and blood at the bottom.
Ritchie dipped his hand into the lake water and retrieved a round stone but after a quick inspection he shook his head and tossed it away. He reached into the muck and pulled out another, this one hazel-colored and had been broken in half.
“You knew Tommy Baker, right Scratch?”
“Yeah, had these huge Coke-bottles,” Scratch said. He formed big circles with his thumb and forefinger and pressed them around his eyes. “He moved away a few years ago.”
“But that’s not what really happened.”
“Then what really happened, Ritchie?” Scratch mocked.
“Tommy was home along and climbed onto the stove to get food out of the cupboard. He got a can of beans out but the other cans fell and knocked him down. His glasses hit the ground and shattered all over.
“Tommy couldn’t really see but he was still hungry so he put the can against the electric opener and pressed the button. It started opening but the can slipped and opened up his whole arm. Right up to here,” Ritchie said and nestled a finger in his armpit. “His parents found him covered in blood, laying with the cans on the floor.”
“Really?” Scratch asked.
“Yup, I heard my dad talking about it.”
The three of them stood silently looking over the water, the waves requesting a stone.
“For Tommy Baker,” said Ritchie and tossed the rock. The half-moon skipped over the surface twice before cutting through.
“Ok. You babies wanna’ hear a story? How about this…”
Scratch scooped up a handful of mud and stones, flicking away the ones that were too small and misshapen. Mud oozed between his fingers.
“Lyle Buckner, he worked at the granite pit outside the south side of town for fifty years until-“
“Wait,” Ritchie interrupted. “My dad still works there, and he’s only forty-three.”
“I changed the names, idiot. Stop cuttin’ me off and just listen. So, one day the mining company sold the whole pit and fired everyone that worked there.
“Lyle was too old and slow to get another job. After a few weeks his family was out of money and food. They didn’t pay their bills so the didn’t have hear in their house either. A few days later he woke up in the middle of the night and got his shotgun from the gun rack. He didn’t want his family to suffer any more so…”
Stretch loaded one of the stones in his right hand and cocked it back.
“He put the barrel against his daughter’s head and blew ‘er head open,” he said, whipping the stone across the water.
Ritchie thought of his sister Maggie.
“His son woke up yellin’ and Lyle shot ‘im in the chest.”
He violently threw another, water spraying with each skip.
Jo stuffed her fingers in her ears. Her eyes squeezed shut forming wrinkles on the bridge of her nose.
“His wife started screamin’. She tried to run but he shot ‘er in the leg and the head.”
Another stone bounced across the water.
Ritchie’s eyes were as wide as the stone in Scratch’s hand.
“And then he sat down on his bed and put the butt of the gun on the floor with the barrel in his mouth. He tried kickin’ the trigger, but it didn’t go off. So he took off his slippers, slid his big toe over the trigger, and the gun exploded out the back of his head.”
The last stone sailed out of his hand and skittered across the water.
“For the Buckner’s,” he said with a grin, his palm still caked in mud.
“Ritchie, I don’t wanna’ play this anymore,” Jo said quietly. “Let’s go.”
“It’s just a story, don’t be such a baby,” Scratch said.
“Yeah maybe… we should go,” Ritchie suggested.
Jo gasped. A small girl stood beside her.
“Oh, Molly May,” she said to the chubby five-year-old. “I didn’t see you come down.”
Neither had Ritchie.
“What’re you doin’?” asked Molly May, her voice high and light.
Jo started, “Well…”
She tried to think of an excuse; a lie to spare Molly May from the nightmares this game would most definitely cause.
“We’re tellin’ ghost stories and when someone dies in it you skip a stone,” Scratch blurted.
“Oh.” Molly May looked back out across the water and nodded. She started to scour the cattails on the right. Worming her hands between several boulders she fished out a smooth oval rock. She walked back to the group and lifted a dripping piece of driftwood to find another. Scratch stumbled backwards as Molly May pushed him, sifted through his footprints, and found a third stone.
“Watch it!” Scratch barked.
Molly May approached the water and looked down at the three perfect ovals resting in her hand.
She skipped the first.
“One for daddy.”
She skipped the second.
“One for mommy,” her voice quavered.
Rivers of salty tears streaked from her chubby cheeks to her chin. She held her arm up to her eyes and dug her face into the inside of her elbow.
Jo came over and unwrapped the stone from Molly May’s hand. It was warm and smooth. She quietly pulled her arm back and let it go, watching it skip across the lake.
“And one for me,” Molly May forced.
The stone disappeared in the center of a thin, rippled wave. Each ripple shrunk until the waves paused and the lake was still.
“C’mon Jo, let’s go,” Ritchie said.
Ritchie wiped his mud-covered hand off on his jeans. He grabbed Jo’s hand and she wiped away the saltwater rivers with the other. They disappeared into the fire lane, leaving only the shore behind.