The Burned Book

The morning we found the body, as dead as the fallen leaves it had been hastily buried beneath, the fog had been so thick that it was hard to see anything. In fact, had it not been for the burnt light that shone in patches through the thick tangle of Hickory and Ash, we might never have seen the muddy boot that started the other girls screaming for their homes. I wanted to run too, but I stood there staring at him. My mother used to call me Curiosity the Cat because I could “never leave well enough alone”. At this moment, that name was like a premonition. I couldn’t help it, I leaned down to get a closer look. I recognized him right away by his thick, tangled red hair and his patchy beard.

Mr. Cole had been a history teacher at my middle school a few years ago, but a mental breakdown had sent him to Jacksonville for several months. The resulting transformation had turned him into our town’s very own Boo Radley, moving in and out of our lives like a fearsome ghost. I don’t know what made me do it, even now, but I will blame the curse of my crippling curiosity. I touched him. His skin was cold as ice beneath my fingers and I jerked my hand back in shock. In my haste to remove my hand, I had swiped his coat open and a small, worn black leather book fell to the ground. I stared at it and considered briefly putting it back in his pocket and walking away. If only I had done that. Instead, I picked it up, shoved it in my own coat pocket and started running for home. Like I said, I don’t know why I did it.

I snuck in through the back door of my grandparent’s house carefully closing it so it would not slam and crept through the kitchen to my small bedroom. Crawling under my hand-made butterfly quilt, I opened up the book and shone my nightly reading flashlight upon it’s tuckered cover. I could tell it was old and well used, but despite that the cover had maintained a supple glow. I pulled a frayed strap from around it’s edges and opened it’s yellowing pages. The pages were filled with tiny, neat scrawled writing and there were papers stuck into it haphazardly. It was in this way that I began the process of decoding the life of the neighborhood ghost.

I devoured the pages over the next few days as an investigation began less than a block from my bedroom. I took in every detail and learned the truth about a man I used to run from. The shame of that now racked me with guilt as I learned that Mr. Cole had lost his daughter and this is what had torn him apart. I had known that his wife died in childbirth, but in all the times I saw him pushing his grocery cart along the dirt roads of our town I had never thought, “where is his daughter?” Not once. The pages told me that he had lost her in a home invasion.

Since then, he had searched for truth. He wandered around, far less aimlessly than I once thought, with that squeaky grocery cart, hoping to catch a shadow or a glimpse of the men who had taken so much from him. The police had failed to do their job and as Mr. Cole grew more desperate, the men on the force grew more indifferent as other crimes took their attention. Every page was filled with careful notes, collected clues, and suspicious suspects. As I came to the end of his story, so carefully documented in his journal, I could tell Mr. Cole believed he had found the men responsible. He had begun to stalk them, waiting outside the same trailer park bar my grandmother often had to drag my grandfather out of. I did not know these men, but the last pages told of Mr. Cole’s confrontation with them and his determination to go to the police. It occurred to me then, as this was his final entry, that this confrontation was most likely the reason my friends and I had stumbled upon him in the woods.

The papers tucked inside were old photographs and collected scraps of newspaper, all clues or memories. As I unfolded the last paper, the only one in Mr. Cole’s hand, I examined it. In the now too familiar writing was an address with two numbers beside it. It came again, that plague of curiosity and I borrowed my grandmother’s car to drive the six miles to the mysterious location. I felt like Nancy Drew, decoding a mystery that Mr. Cole had already solved. I am not sure what I expected to find, but when I pulled up in front of a boxing gym, I was confused and disappointed. I walked inside and wandered around. The gym was old with frayed carpet and well cared for, but ancient equipment. I considered the numbers on the paper, 114 and then 12-07-91, his daughter’s birthday.

My wanderings led me to a room with faded blue lockers, the paint chipping away in huge chunks to reveal a rust colored underbelly. I was about to leave, when a locker caught my eye. 110 was stamped on a small, silver label and I realized with a jolt, that 114 might be Mr. Cole’s locker. I found it quickly and spun the lock to the date of his daughter’s birth. When I pulled the locker open, I let out an audible gasp and slammed the locker door, breathing heavily. I inhaled slowly, pulling deep breaths in through my mouth to calm my racing heart. Pulling the locker open again, I stared at it’s contents. The locker was full of money waded up inside plastic bags. I had no idea how much was there, but from the looks of it, it was a small fortune.

We all make choices. Sometimes these choices are innocuous or well-intentioned, but sometimes they are devious. I knew it was wrong, but I don’t even remember making a choice, I just grabbed the gym bag from the hook and replaced the tattered boxing gloves with the bagged wads of cash. It seemed like only seconds before I was parked behind the gym, counting what turned out to be $20,000. I shook as I considered my options. I had come to the conclusion that Mr. Cole’s journal must find its way to the police station. I would drop it in the mail slot in the dead of night I had decided.

Now, I wavered. I had done well in school and graduated with honors, top of my class in fact. I had been accepted into multiple colleges last Spring, but none had offered me the full-ride I needed to escape this town. I had been slowly suffocating since I was seven and lost both my parents to a rain slicked road and a set of faulty brake pads. I loved my grandmother, but my grandfather was a terror of a man. It was more than that though, I remembered and yearned for my old life. The trips to museums and theaters, my father’s hand gliding over pieces as we solved complex puzzles, the feel of my mother’s breath on my neck as I sat in her lap and heard tales of heroes like Despereaux and Aslan. I wanted more. I had grown from a curious child to a sullen teen living in a town where there was nothing to feed me. This $20,000 could be my ticket, my escape.

I drove home slowly, passing the woods now flapping with yellow police tape. I don’t know when I decided to burn the book. I don’t know when I chose to be the villain in my own story. It could have been when I got home to my grandfather banging through the house and screaming like a banshee. It could have been on that drive home, the police tape allowing me to delude myself that the book wasn’t needed to solve the case. It could have been the second I opened that locker and saw the money. I don’t know. What I do know is that Mr. Cole’s face appears in my dreams like a ghost. I see him, not as he was on that foggy day in February when we found him in the woods, but as he was when he pushed his cart through town hunting for justice for his child. Justice I could have given him, if I had made different choices. I also see the book in my dreams. I see it burning, it’s edges crisping up and it’s pages smoldering, along with the truth.

It’s been 50 years since I burned the book. I have lived a successful life- the one I thought I needed. But burning Mr. Cole’s book has never left me. Over the years, I have considered many times going back to Grenada and telling the truth. Walking into the cold police station and confessing my sins, but there has always been a reason not to- my admission to law school, my husband and my now grown children, my fancy job, my nice house. Those reasons are gone now and I am an old woman, living alone with my ghost. I leave my house and drive on the backroads and allow myself to let in the memories, for once not fighting them. I don’t know if the confession I plan to make is for me, Mr. Cole, or his daughter, but I hope it will set us all free.