18
Poughkeepsie Journal
VAN DRIVES OVER SIDE OF ROAD OUTSIDE OF ELLENVILLE, MULTIPLE DEATHS
A van containing at least five passengers went through a guardrail and down a cliff drop, falling over seventy-five feet.
The damage to the van and its passengers has made identification nearly impossible, and the intensity of the fire suggested
there may have been extra accelerant in the vehicle, possibly in the form of gas cans. As the crash occurred at an early hour,
the vehicle burned for some time before police and firefighters could reach the scene.
Pieces of the van were used to establish that it was a green 1968 Chevrolet G10. Locals reported that a van of this description was connected to a commune on Cragsmoor.
“People around here know that 52 is a tricky stretch of road,” said Officer Peter Sweeney, who was the first on the scene.
“You have to watch out on the cliffside roads. There are very sharp turns. And the people who owned this van were very countercultural.
We suspect they may have been using drugs at the time of the crash.”
Investigators believe there were at least five victims in the van. Because of the intense damage, and the fact that residents
of communes are often transitory, police suspect that no identifications may ever be made.
“Wow,” Stevie said. “What good police work.”
As soon as Loretta was off the phone, Stevie had feverishly searched online for anything about a van accident in Ellenville
in September 1976. She found one hit and paid a newspaper site ten dollars a month to read the article in full.
The fact that they could only say the van contained “at least” five passengers meant that the remains were truly charred to dust. Also, the police made it very clear that since the victims were likely disgusting hippies, there was no point in trying to even identity the bodies.
These same police seemed sure the passengers were high at the time of the crash, something they could not possibly have known from looking at these charcoal-like remains.
They couldn’t even say for sure how many bodies were in the van.
It was a commune van and it had fallen off a cliff and gone up in a fireball. Sorry, hippies. You exploded.
So Helen was part of a commune that sounded less like a commune and more like a high-control group. Something not quite consensual.
Like a cult. She had lived in the mountains and baked bread for them until one day when she went to the local town with Melissa
Long, who made a lengthy phone call. The next day, the members of the cult all died in the crash—but not Blue, and not Melissa,
because Melissa’s bones were found miles away. Because Melissa had been murdered.
Stevie ate her cold dry pancakes and stared out at the street and mulled this over, jumping when Nate slid into the other
side of the booth. He had freshly washed hair, still damp and flat on his head, so she could see his whole face. He looked—a
bit hallowed. Tired.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What? Are you okay?”
He blinked several times and ordered coffee and key lime pie to go, then chopped at the table surface nervously with the edge
of his hand. Then grabbed a ketchup bottle and spun it slowly.
“My book . . .” he began, “is due.”
Stevie continued to wait for the explanation. Nate’s book had been due the entire time she had known him. His personality
was my book is due. It was the reason he avoided writing, or wrote compulsively, or, as they’d just found out in England, applied to seventy-one schools as a displacement activity. (That number finally increased to eighty-six, but then he stopped when Janelle took his computer for a day.)
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
“No, I mean it’s due due. Like, this is it. If I don’t finish by January fifth . . .”
He stopped spinning the ketchup bottle and stretched his fingers, working up the will to speak.
“If I don’t finish, they cancel the book. I have to pay them back everything they’ve given me for this book. All my college
money. It means it’s over. I’m over.”
Bing Crosby started to sing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire in what now felt like a very threatening manner.
“How can they do that? Don’t they just wait? Isn’t there some book that’s like . . .”
“I’m not George R. R. Martin. I’m Nate Fisher. I kept telling them I couldn’t finish because I was at school or on break at
home with my parents so . . . they offered me this place to stay because they thought it would help me to have somewhere totally
private and sort of near them. My editor said she wouldn’t be far and she’d speak to me if I needed her. But now they have
to have it or . . .”
He fanned out his hands. Boom.
“And I crashed,” Stevie said as the horror of the situation struck her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What was I going to say? No? No, you just left your parents and have nowhere to go and you’re in some kind of endless breakup from hell. No, Stevie, you can’t come with me to New York. Stay here alone on murder mountain.”
It was gutting. Nate could have lost it all, but he hadn’t left her alone. She would have cried, but she wasn’t going to add
that to the list of things that would freak him out. She had to rise up, get herself together.
“So now I have to figure out how to do this with two more people in the apartment,” he said.
“They said they could get a hotel.”
He shook his head. They were past that kind of thinking. This was now the thirty-first of December in New York City. They
might as well have gone looking for a Fabergé egg in the grocery store.
“How close are you to being done?”
“What’s done? I have words. I have lots of words. Some people might say I have too many words. It’s two hundred thousand words long.”
“Is that bad?”
“It is if you aren’t sure about one hundred and fifty thousand of them. But it’s possible, if I could just get to the end.
All I need to do is write the end. In the first book, Moonbeam gets recruited to help find the Arm of Lore, which is an ancient
weapon that can kill the Nullax. You remember?”
Stevie vaguely remembered this. Her brain was wired to memorize every detail in a mystery novel or look through crap in rooms
she wasn’t supposed to be in. When it came to fantasy books, everything got a little wobbly.
“Yeah,” she lied. She would reread it later.
“At the end of the book they let the Nullax live because they’re peaceful, but they keep it at bay and out of the Wood of Wen.
In this book, you find out that because they let the Nullax live, it joined Spiro, the leader of the High Army.
Spiro wants to capture the Library of Ness, which contains the Book of All Living.
No one has ever been able to translate it, but it’s known to contain ancient powers that could either heal or destroy the world. Are you following?”
Stevie may have looked a little vague.
“Bad guys now have pet monster, want to steal the book that can blow up the world.”
“Got it,” Stevie said.
“By this point in the story the bad guys have penetrated the library, which has twelve levels. The bad guys are down to the
eleventh level with just one to go. Moonbeam has the Arm of Lore, so he and his group are able to get down as far as the ninth,
but the bad guys are setting traps for them all over the place. I need to get them down these last three levels. Three levels
and I’m done.”
“That sounds possible,” Stevie said.
“Does it? You tell me how they do it. I’ve used everything already. Elliot keeps talking about how sunning your balls for
thirty seconds a day fills your body with energy and for a minute there? For one minute? I thought about it. I thought, maybe
I should sun my actual balls in Central Park. I had no shoes on. Why not the balls? But there is some part of me, some small
part . . .”
He pinched his fingers together like he was holding an invisible pen.
“. . . some small part of me that believes I’m not a total failure and can figure this thing out. And you know what? This
last month? You weren’t you. I don’t know what you were, but Stevie was gone. And what I miss is Stevie. Because right now,
I’m scared out of my fucking mind, and I need her. Because she’s insane, and when she’s insane, things seem to work. So if
you’re here, maybe I can do this, but I need you to help me. And if you don’t help me, I’m going to sun my balls, I guess,
because I have no other plan.”
Stevie was struck silent. Nate swallowed hard and looked down.
“It’s weird to hear you talk about your balls,” she finally said.
“I know.”
“I don’t think you should whip them out in the park.”
“Probably not,” he said.
“But if you do want to sun your balls in the park, I will support you.”
“Stop saying balls,” he said.
“I kind of can’t. Once you start saying balls you can’t stop.”
“That’s not helping,” he said.
“So how can I help?”
“Just . . . don’t tell Janelle or Vi. Help me get out of going out tonight. Janelle’s going to have some kind of party plan or something. I don’t want anyone else to know. I don’t want to talk about it. It feels like . . . failure.”
That was a feeling Stevie had gotten very accustomed to.
“Okay,” he said, getting up. “I’m going to go back and have a panic attack and then fix two more chapters. As long as I never
stop working and everything goes right and maybe no more neighbors die or whatever, it’ll be okay.”
“You can’t give up if you’re already down,” Stevie said, gripping his wrist. “Is that anything?”
“Pay for my pie,” he replied, taking his bag of food.
Stevie did, and decided this was not the time to tell him that there was a line of dead bodies leading to Helen’s door. And
Janelle and Vi, who were now barreling toward them—they were coming for New Year’s Eve in New York. Maybe they could have
one nice, normal night together before she dropped that information on them.