Halloween by Curtis Richards Page B

walked slowly, scanning the stones.
    "Every town has something like this happen," the puffing man said. "I remember a guy over in Russellville, Charley Bowles? Nicest guy you could ever imagine. You could boot him in the tail, he'd never complain. Then, maybe some twenty years ago I recollect, he finished dinner, excused himself from the table, and went into the garage. Come back with a hacksaw, he did. Kissed the wife and two kids good-bye, then proceeded to . . ."
    "Mr. Taylor, where are we?" Loomis snapped.
    Taylor held his note pad up to catch the fading sunlight. "Just right over there a ways. And I remember Judith Myers. Talk about sweet girls. She'd bat her eyes at you, you wanted to melt through the floor. Of course, they did find traces of semen, and this fella did admit he'd been humpin' her a few hours before, but that doesn't make a girl a tramp. Not these days. I know of a fourteen -year-old who's been . . . hmm . I thought it was right about here." He consulted his pad and looked at a marble marker sunk into the ground at the convergence of two paths.
    "Lost?" said Loomis with a sharp edge of exasperation.
    "Should be right behind Ed Sanders and next to Cornelia Stirley. Aw, shit!"
    They stepped up to the Judith Myers plot.
    The stone was gone.
    The earth had been exposed so recently, Loomis could smell the fresh loam and see long livid earthworms trailing into the ground after their violent disturbance.
    "Goddamn kids. This happens to me every Halloween."
    "You're sure it's Judith Myers?" Loomis's eyes glowed red in the direct glint of sunset.
    "Here, see for yourself." Taylor held the note pad up for Loomis to read. Pointing a pudgy finger at the diagram, he said, "See? Seventeen, eighteen is Myers, nineteen is Cornelia Stirley. It's Judith Myers, no doubt about it. Stone should be lying around nearby, if you want to help me look for it. They usually get tired of trying to haul these things and give up."
    "Who does?"
    "The kids. Teenagers, college kids."
    "What do they do with them?"
    "Play pranks. Put them on people's lawns. One bunch two years ago put one in the principal's office at school. Ho, what a stink he made, whoo-boy!" Taylor took a few paces downhill, scanning the surrounding ground for the stone.
    "You won't find it," Loomis announced calmly.
    "What makes you so sure?"
    "I'm sure. He's come home," Sam Loomis said, leaning heavily on a tombstone.
     

10
     
    The trick-or-treaters were in full bloom. The children had poured out of their homes simultaneously, as if on some signal unheard by grown-ups. Laurie stood on the sidewalk outside her house, one eye cocked for Annie's red two-door hardtop, and watched the procession of pirates, clowns, cowboys, witches, skeletons, ballerinas, policemen, firemen, doctors, nurses, and soldiers that trooped up and down the block in clusters of four or five, methodically working the streets with their ever-fattening mass-produced orange-and-black shopping bags.
    What touched her most deeply was the realization that these children were free and safe to roam the streets unhindered, unworried by the bullies and muggers and purse snatchers that lay in wait in the shadows of New York or Chicago or the other big cities. Oh, one or two knots of children were accompanied by an adult, but this was for traffic supervision, not protection against crime. The littlest ones tended to cross streets without looking at this dusky hour, where the all-but-settled sun glinted with a brightness equal to the orange jack-o'-lanterns that rested on porch railings or in windows in every house. Oh, one did read in the newspapers every year about some mad person who hated children and injected poison into apples or concealed razor blades in trick-or-treat candy. But that wasn't why the occasional parent could be seen tagging along with a pack of beggar-children, looking foolish in grownup clothes or even more foolish in costume. No, there was no danger to the child who walked the sundown