Blunt Darts

the brush. “Stephen, wait a minute,” I said. I leaned back against a tree to ease the pressure on my breathing apparatus. “I’m hurting pretty badly. Detours are not a happy prospect right now.”
    His voice dropped very low, so low I could barely hear him, even in the summer stillness. “I want you to believe me. I want you to see this before we see the judge. Please, it’s important. Please?”
    “See what, Stephen?”
    “Please?”
    I sighed. “How far?“
    “Not far,” he said quickly. “Maybe twenty yards. He couldn’t... Maybe not even twenty.”
    I told my rib that the kid had been through a lot. “All right,” I said. “But let’s take it real slow and easy, okay?”
    “Sure. Slow and easy.”
    “Real slow and easy,” I corrected.
    “Right,” he said, and we slipped under a branch and began edging in.
    We had moved about his twenty yards when he stopped and sank slowly down to his knees.
    “This is it,” he said, looking down but not otherwise moving.
    I eased down on one knee. There was a decaying log with a large clump of wildflowers growing around it. “What is it?” I asked quietly.
    “Her grave,” he said. “My mother. This is where he buried her.”
    I had nothing to say. I looked at Diane Kinnington’s place and I thought of Beth’s place. Both were on hillsides, and both had flowers. And each, it seemed, had one faithful mourner.
    “I was there when he shot her,” Stephen said in the low, flat voice. “It was...” He stopped. Then, “Afterwards, he locked me in my room. The judge had hit me, knocked me out, I guess, but I woke up. I heard him, through the window, at the tool shed. I got up and looked out, but it was too rainy and dark to see well. The judge was carrying some tools, I could hear them clanging together, and he was hurrying down the Path with them. I must have passed out then, because the next thing I remember is being in an ambulance on my way to Willow Wood and nobody would listen to me.”
    “They’ll listen now,” I said, forgiving his failure to remember that he had been catatonic. I restrained myself from patting his shoulder. He was only four, teen, but he didn’t seem to need any comforting.
    Stephen continued. “When I was at Willow Wood, I had time to think.” He changed his voice and said, ‘“All the time in the world,’” as though he were mocking a doctor’s phrase there. “I figured out what must have happened, but I couldn’t tell anyone about the judge covering it up. Who’d believe me against him? When my grandmother got me out of Willow Wood, I came home and acted like nothing... like the judge hadn’t done anything. I was afraid to tell my grandmother, afraid that he’d kill her too. When I could, I searched. I had to be really careful. I searched for the gun, and finally found it. But first I had to search... for her.”
    The ache was getting me, so I shifted knees. Stephen tensed when I moved, then relaxed and settled from his knees onto his haunches. He had yet to look away from the grave. “I had to be sure the judge didn’t realize I was searching, so I didn’t do it every day, sometimes not even for a week. It was tough not to, but it was a quest, and I couldn’t let her down by being discovered. I knew from what I saw at the window that he had buried her somewhere down the path. But it had been almost a year, and I didn’t know if he would have dug... moved her, moved her while I was away at Willow Wood.
    “Then one day I found this spot. I remembered the fallen tree from a storm we’d had that year. But the tree didn’t look right, and I realized it was because of all the flowers. There were flowers other places, but there hadn’t been any here and now there were lots and lots of flowers, but mostly in this one little spot. At first I thought that God had put them here special, special for her and special for me so I could find her.“
    He rubbed his right forearm across his eyes. I found myself doing the same.
    “Then I read in a botany book that flowers grow over bodies that aren’t... in coffins. That’s when I was sure she was here. I came to visit every day, but I’d walk in from a different direction each time, so as not to make a path that would let the judge know I’d found her. Some days, I wouldn’t even come right up to her, because I didn’t want the plants around her to look trampled.” He finally swung his face toward mine. “Did you ever have anybody close to you be