Part Two
The woods began at the far edge of the school's baseball field, and were as familiar to her as her own back yard. In a small town, few areas go unexplored by kids; these woods played host to countless games of hide and seek, capture the flag, and Land of the Lost. Clandestine adult activities took place there, too, as evidenced by the crushed Coors cans, cigarette butts, and used rubbers strewn about, as if deposited there by a white trash tsunami. She didn't exactly know what rubbers were, but she knew they were something...dirty, and she felt strangely guilty. oddly titillated, upon seeing them.
Approaching a small, well-worn clearing, littered with the aforementioned detritus, her eyes shifted sideways, stealing a glance.
"Do you come out here a lot?" he said, his voice cutting the silence, and she wrenched her eyes forward, face reddening, as surely he must have noticed where her gaze had fallen.
"Sometimes," she said in a voice that sounded alien to her, somehow not her own, yet familiar, distant.
"I sleep out here sometimes, when I can't go home," he said cryptically. "He chases me away, though, so sometimes I don't sleep at all."
Who was "he"? she wondered, momentarily forgetting she was afraid. A policeman? She brightened a little at this thought, imagining the crisp blue uniform and shining tin badge of the jovial, ruddy-faced officer who would appear around the next bend in the path, ordering Abel to move along now, and escorting her out of the woods, all the while lecturing her on the perils that await little girls who wander off alone: don't want to end up like that young Mercer gal, now, do ya? he would ask. Bobbie Mercer, a year ahead of Lisa in school, had disappeared one early fall afternoon, two--no, three years ago last September. They found her broken, flyblown body two days later, hidden in a dense thicket of trees. The town remained fear-stricken for months, and although rumors and speculation abounded in those first harrowing weeks, no killer was ever caught.
"It's not safe to come out here alone, though," he warned, as if reading her mind. "I found a dead cat out here once. It was covered in flies and all smashed, like someone hit it with a bat."
Or a big stick, she thought, with a shudder.
