Gemini Summer by Iain Lawrence Page A

like a bit of old rope. Then she screamed and screamed and screamed, until someone came to help her.
    It was Mrs. Elliot from up the street. She came running in her old-lady shoes, her spectacles swinging on the string round her neck. She tried to climb the mountain but couldn’t. All covered in mud, she stood at the bottom and shouted up, “What’s happened, Flo? What on earth has happened?”
    When a car came by, she ran and flagged it down—Creepy Colvig in his station wagon. He swerved right past the old woman before he stopped. Then his brake lights flashed red, and Mrs. Elliot screamed at him, “You get out of that car! You come here and help!”
    He scaled the mountain. He took one look in the pit, then led Mrs. River and Danny down to the road.

twenty-seven
    An ambulance came, its lights flashing, its siren whooping through the Hollow. Men in blue jackets went into the pit, and they fussed over Beau, but didn’t bring him out. They put a blanket right over him, right over his face, until only his fingers were poking out.
    The police came next. They came in two cars, the lights going round and round on their roofs, and the policemen looked in the pit but didn’t bother going down. They took out black notebooks and skinny little pens. They talked to Danny and Mrs. River. They asked Danny, “Can you tell us what happened, son?”
    Danny said he couldn’t remember what happened. A policeman said, “You’re not in trouble, son. No one’s going to get angry with you.”
    Then Danny said he did remember. He said, “Dopey was here. Dopey came and pushed him.”
    “That’s the Colvig boy,” said Mrs. River. She was holding Danny. “They live up the street.”
    The police went to the Colvig house, then came back and talked to Danny again. They said Mr. Colvig had told them his son hadn’t left the house that morning. “Were you just playing?” asked one of the policemen. “Is that it? Were you just playing, and your brother had an accident?”
    “I don’t remember,” said Danny. “I think it was Dopey.”
    The Old Man arrived half an hour later, roaring down the hill in the big truck, another police car in front of him with its siren blaring.
    Everyone who lived in Hog’s Hollow had gathered outside the gray house, and they all shuffled aside as Old Man River pulled up in the truck. A policeman got them to move away, and they retreated to the other side of the street.
    The Old Man came out of the truck looking like a figure made of chalk. His boots slipped in the mud as he hurried to Flo, who stood with Danny at the foot of the steps. He hugged them both at once, and then he shook and trembled, and looked up at the sky with his face all wet with tears.
    “What happened?” he asked.
    “It was that pit,” she said. “It was that goddamned hole of yours.”

twenty-eight
    For two hours Beau lay at the bottom of the pit, in the rain and the mud. Men in business suits took pictures of him, their flashbulbs popping out blasts of white light. Then the ambulance people zipped him into a black bag and carried him out.
    The men in their suits asked all the same questions that the police had asked. They stayed all that day and came back the next, and the next after that. They knocked at every door along the winding street, and they plodded up and down through the pit until their black shoes were just blobs of thick mud. They talked to the Colvigs and talked to the Rivers. Again and again, they asked Danny what happened.
    Danny stuck to his story. “We were playing,” he said. “Then Dopey came, and I don’t remember after that.” Whenever he tried to remember, it was like looking through a fog. Sometimes it was like looking into blackness, and he could never be sure what he really remembered and what he thought he remembered. “I think it was Dopey who pushed him,” he said.
    Creepy Colvig also came to the old gray house. Danny heard him shouting and, looking out, saw three men in suits holding him