The Turtle Boy

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Timmy slept for days afterward, speaking only to his parents and Kim and occasionally a police officer who tried his best to look positive. Timmy saw the horror in the man’s eyes, a horror that began on a warm sunny morning at the start of summer.

What he learned, he learned from his father, the papers and Kim who in turn had heard it from her own parents—apparently too shocked to be discreet in their gossiping.

They had pulled three bodies out of the pond. One was a young boy, little more than a skeleton cocooned in algae. According to the medical examiner’s report, he had been there for some time and had died as a result of a broken neck, sustained it was assumed, by a fall from an old tire swing that had hung for a brief time above the pond back in the late seventies. They had identified the body as Darryl Gaines, nephew of the second decedent, Wayne Marshall. Apparently, Marshall’s nephew had visited him back in 1967 while his mother was being treated for drug abuse. Marshall was drinking in his backyard with friends and poking fun at the boy (according to Geoff Keeler, an ex-buddy of Wayne’s) and the kid had run off in a sulk. They’d never seen him again. Divers had searched the pond and come up empty (“apart from some big turtles” one of them stated on the news, obviously relishing the attention of the camera). Shortly after, Darryl’s mother, Joanne Gaines was institutionalized. She committed suicide a month later.

The third body filled Timmy with a wave of grief he was afraid would never leave him. Every time he stared up at his bedroom ceiling; every time he glanced at a comic book or thought about the red clay in Patterson’s field, he saw Pete’s face.

Pete had never made it to summer camp. His body had shown signs of chronic physical abuse, culminating in a broken neck sustained—according to the evidence obtained from the Marshall house—from a fall against the edge of a marble fireplace. It was assumed Wayne Marshall had killed his son by accident, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage.

Panicked, Wayne decided to dump his son’s body in the pond (perhaps so he could claim later that the boy had run away) and was readying himself to do so when Timmy’s father arrived on the scene.

“I just stood looking at him,” Timmy’s father said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Wayne, with Pete in his arms…I didn’t want to believe he was dead, couldn’t believe Wayne would kill his own son. I watched him lay the boy down on the grass. That’s when he pulled the gun on me. That’s when I saw his eyes and knew he was lost. Jesus, I should have known, should have done something sooner.”

Timmy only smiled through the tears when he thought of what Darryl’s turtles might have done to Wayne Marshall.

Wayne Marshall, the faceless man Timmy had seen at the pond, murdering his nephew and leaving him beneath the water to feed the turtles.

The visitors came and went, attempted to soothe Timmy with words he couldn’t hear and through it all, through the mindless passage of feverish recollection and the debilitating agony of loss, The Turtle Boy’s words returned to him again and again, nagging at him and begging to be decoded: You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you.

Maybe he deserves to die.

Three weeks later, they filled in the pond. They’d been trying for years but somehow mechanical difficulties had always kept them away. Timmy thought he now knew what had caused those problems.