The Turtle Boy

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Despite their fears — and Timmy was in no doubt now that they all shared the same ones — Mr. Marshall’s porch was a welcome oasis from the storm. Timmy shuddered at the cold drops that trickled down his neck. Kim shivered, her hair hanging in sodden clumps like leaking shadows over the moon of her face. They snapped their umbrellas closed and his mother trotted up the three short steps to the front door.

It was already open.

His mother turned back to them, her face gaunt as she hurried them down from the porch and back into the rain.

“What is it?” Timmy asked, shouting to be heard above the shrieking wind. Sheets of icy rain lashed his face. Kim gave him a frightened look he figured probably mirrored his own. All he had seen as the door swung open had been a dark hall, broken at the end by the fluorescent glare from the kitchen. He was sure no one had been sitting at the table.

“Nothing,” his mother called back. “Nothing at all. But I don’t think they’re here!”

Timmy felt as if his head had been dunked in ice water. His teeth clicked and an involuntary shiver coursed through him. Over their heads, a plastic lighthouse struggled valiantly to keep its wind chimes from tearing loose. The resultant muddle of jingles unsettled him. Mr. Marshall’s weather vane groaned as it swung wildly from south to north and back again, adding to the discordant harmony of the turbulent night.

“Then where are they?” Kim shouted, her arms crossed and buried beneath the coat as she danced from foot to foot.

But Timmy knew the answer.

“The pond,” he said. His mother turned toward him and put a hand to her ear.

“The pond,” he repeated. Another chill capered down his spine, like a flow of icy water.

“That’s absurd,” she said. “Why would they go back there? Especially on a night like this!”

Timmy shook his head, but in the wind he heard his father: I think the reason Mr. Marshall is so mad is because he’s seen it too.

It occurred to him then that The Turtle Boy — Darryl, or whoever he was — had come to Myers Pond not for Timmy, or Pete, or any of them. He had come for Mr. Marshall. And Mr. Marshall had been acting so strange, so angry because The Turtle Boy was tormenting him, frightening him.

But why?

It didn’t make sense and the more he pondered it, the less likely it seemed. All he was sure of in that moment, standing in the pouring rain outside Mr. Marshall’s house with the nervous white faces of his mother and Kim fixed on him, was that for whatever the reason, the men had gone to Myers Pond.

“I’m going to call the police,” his mother said, already mounting the steps. “You two wait here and yell if you see them coming.”

With that, she disappeared into the house, the door easing closed behind her.

Timmy turned.

“Hey!” Kim called and he looked back at her. She was a huddled mass of shadows, only a trembling lower lip visible through her hair. “Where are you going?”

“To the pond. I think Mr. Marshall is going to try to hurt my father. If we wait for the police it might be too late.”

“But what are you going to do? You’re just a kid! You can’t stop a grown-up if he wants to do something bad. Especially a crazy grown-up!”

Timmy shook his head. If Mr. Marshall intended to hurt his father, he at least had to try to stop it. Chances were he’d end up getting hurt in the process, but that didn’t matter. He remembered his father reading to him, hugging him in the kitchen and telling him he loved him. He remembered riding his father’s shoulders through the cornfields and feeling like the king of the world atop a throne. He remembered the disappointment of being in his first school play without his father present, only to see him creep to a seat next to his mother halfway through. He remembered the nightmares, the dreams in which he lost his father. He remembered the fear, the horror at being left alone without his father to live with the ghost of his mother.

No.

He would try. It was all he could do and just maybe it would make a difference. Determined, he stalked through the curtains of rain, flinching when the sky cracked above his head. He squinted through the temporary moonlight of the lightning, the mud sucking against the soles of his shoes.

“Timmy, wait!” Kim cried and he faltered at the far side of the house.

After a moment, he called to her: “Just tell my Mom where I’m going and not to worry.”

“You idiot, of course she’ll worry!”

“Just tell her!”

“Tell her yourself,” Kim shouted, the hurt in her voice ringing over the raging wind.

He walked on until the ground hardened and stones rolled beneath his shoes. In a flash of lightning that sent stars waltzing across his field of vision, he saw the gravel winding ahead of him, emerging like a pale tongue from the black mouth of the weaving trees. Then the shade of night dropped once more and he was blinded, walking on a path from memory.