Forest Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

What does that mean?’ asked Corinne. Under normal circumstances, she would have known, or guessed, but here in this makeshift mortuary with all of its green-sheeted bodies and its smell of lavender room spray, she needed to have it spelled out to her.
    The woman looked at Jack, raising her thick black eyebrows like two crows taking off from a field. Jack leaned closer to Corinne and said, ‘He cut his throat, Corinne. I’m sorry.’
    Corinne stared back at him in green-eyed disbelief. ‘He cut his throat? He wouldn’t! He
couldn’t
have. Why would he
do
that?’
    ‘Why did any of these kids kill themselves? And these adults, too. That’s for the cops to work out. I can’t think of any explanation at all.’
    Corinne reached out and touched Malcolm’s forehead with her fingertips.
    ‘He’s so cold,’ she whispered, and then her knees buckled and she almost fell to the floor. Jack managed to catch her around the waist, and hold her upright. She was too heavy for him to lift and carry out of the assembly hall, but he managed to support her as they made their way back between the green-sheeted tables to the doors.
    As the doors swung closed behind them, she stared at Jack, and her face was bloodlessly white. ‘My God, Jack. He’s really, really dead.’
    ‘Come on,’ Jack told her. ‘Sparky’s outside. Let’s go join him and get ourselves some fresh air.’
    When all the relatives had identified their dead, they boarded the bus again and drove through the trees to Lake Wolverine. The clearing where Bill had found all of the bodies was still cordoned off with yellow tape, and five forensic officers in white Tyvek suits were crawling around it on their hands and knees, sifting through the twigs and the leaf mold.
    ‘How are you feeling now?’ Jack asked Corinne, as he helped her down from the bus.
    ‘Oh, much better, thanks, Jack. It was so terrible to see Malcolm like that, but I’m still glad I came here. If I hadn’t, I always would have wondered what it was like, where he died.’
    They looked around. The sky was beginning to grow more overcast now, and the color of Lake Wolverine was changing from blue to slate-gray. A whippet-thin sheriff’s deputy with a bristly little moustache came up to them and said, ‘Deputy Jeppersen. OK if I ask you folks some questions?’
    ‘Of course,’ said Corinne. ‘Whatever I can do to help.’
    Deputy Jeppersen made a note of Malcolm’s name and Corinne’s contact numbers. Then he said, ‘Did your boy ever talk about taking his own life, for any reason?’
    Corinne shook her head. ‘His father died suddenly last year and Malcolm was naturally very upset. He was always talking about seeing him again when he got to heaven, but he never gave me the impression that he would take his own life to do that.’
    ‘Did he ever talk about suicide pacts? Or mass suicides, like Jonestown, that kind of thing?’
    ‘Never. He liked his video games, and I guess some of them were quite violent. What’s that one called? Grand Theft Auto? But that was all. He liked building model airplanes, too.’
    ‘Did you supervise his internet activity?’
    ‘No. I didn’t see the need for it. He was always real quiet and well-behaved.’
    ‘Those quiet and well-behaved ones, ma’am, sometimes they can turn out to cause the most mayhem.’
    ‘Malcolm was never any trouble, Deputy,’ said Jack, sharply. ‘I can vouch for that.’
    ‘OK, sir. No offense meant. But you won’t object if your local PD takes away your son’s PC, just to check his hard drive for anything that might give us a clue?’
    ‘No, I won’t object to that.’
    ‘Just one more question, if you don’t mind, and I know that this is kind of touchy, to say the least. Did you ever get the feeling that your boy might be engaged in some inappropriate relationship with any of the adult scout leaders or any of the other boys?’
    Corinne stared at him hard. ‘You’re asking me if my twelve-year-old son who