Free The Turtle Boy by Kealan Patrick Burke

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.
     

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     
    Summer ended, and as per the rules of
the seasons in Ohio, there was no subtle ushering out of the
warmth; the weather dropped in temperature and the earth darkened
on the very day the calendar page turned.
    Spurning all attempts his father made
at trying to come up with something fun for them to do on what
might be the last Saturday of good weather for quite some time,
Timmy took a walk.
    Fall was already setting up camp on the
horizon, prospecting for leaves to burn and painting the sky with
colors from a bruised pallet.
    He wanted to forget, but knew that
would never happen.
    There were three reasons why the fear
would always be with him, dogging his every step and making
stalkers out of the slightest shadows.
    First, the reporters. In the
months since Pete's and Mr. Marshall's deaths, the newspapers had
played up the ghost angle, delighting in the idea that an
eleven-year-old boy had helped solve a murder through an alleged
conference with the dead. There were phone calls, insistent and
irritating, from jocular voices proclaiming their entitlement to
Timmy's story.
    They were ignored.
    But this only led to
speculation, and Timmy's face ended up in the local newspapers,
topped with giant bold lettering that read:
     
    11-YEAR-OLD BOY RESURRECTS THE DEAD,
SOLVES MURDER!
     
    Then the curiosity seekers
started showing up, some of them from the media, most of them just
regular folk. Their neediness frightened the boy. We just want to touch him ,
they said. Others wept and begged his mother to let the boy see if he can bring my little
Davey/Suzy/Alex/Ricky/Sheri back . And they
were still coming to the house, though not as much as they had in
the beginning.
    The second reason was that even if
Timmy managed to dismiss the calls, the desperate pleas of
strangers, the newspaper reports and the occasional mention of his
name on the television, there were still the nightmares. Vivid,
brutal and unflinching. In his dreams, he saw everything, all the
things he had been able to look away from in real life. All the
things he had been able to run from.
    Every night, he drowned and
ended up behind what Darryl had called 'The Curtain.' In the waking
hours, the name stayed with him, conjuring images in Timmy's mind
of a tattered black veil drawn wide across a crumbling stage. He
imagined a whole host of the dead crouching behind it, waiting for
their chance to come back, to find their own killers. And perhaps
they would. Perhaps also they would only be successful if they had
someone to draw strength from, as Timmy was sure Darryl Gaines had
drawn strength from him and Pete.
    Or perhaps it was over.
    Believing that required the most
effort.
    Because the final reason,
the last barrier stopping him from releasing the dread and shaking
off the skeins of clambering horror was the recollection of
something else The Turtle Boy had said: You
don't know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let
it change you . He had mulled over this
every day and every night since the discovery of the bodies. It
would have been simpler to forget had he not realized something
about the murders, something that came back to him weeks
later—Wayne Marshall was Darryl's uncle. The story had it that
Darryl had been visiting his uncle and that's why he was there in
the first place. But Timmy had been there, however it had happened,
standing on the bank of the pond when the big man had come
strolling over the rise. Among the things he'd said had
been: I'm a friend of your uncle's. We're
practically best friends! Which meant
Darryl's murderer had not been his uncle.
    But every time it got