It’s hard to tell where I’m going, surrounded by all of the trees. They seem to stretch on forever and there’s blood in my eyes. I hear Jordy scream my name. But when I stop and turn he shouts, “Keep running, Meg.” And then he howls in pain as he’s drawn into the sky.
Jordy had been working at our video store for over two years before he started using the job as a way to deal drugs. It was a pretty simple transaction. If you came in and asked him for “a double feature and a pizza extra cheese” he’d put a quarter of weed into a hollowed-out VHS tape and give it to you. You’d pay him by taping a folded-up twenty dollar bill to your video store membership card, which he’d peel off and pocket without any of us seeing him do it.
The deal only worked when Jordy was manning the front desk. Which was often enough. Because really, Video Dreams was a family-run operation. My father treated Jordy like a son until the day he fired him.
It was twelve years before I saw Jordy again. A few days after my father’s funeral, he showed up at the social services office in Bordentown where I was working. He asked me to have lunch with him and we walked to the diner down the block.
“You were always like a sister to me, Meg. I feel like those early years at the video store with your mom and dad were the closest to a real family life that I ever got.”
I nodded but didn’t comment. Being a good social worker is about listening and not stepping in to offer a response until the emotional moment is right. I could tell Jordy needed to get something off his chest. And he was fidgety. I assumed he was still using, and dealing with withdrawal.
“I just wish I hadn’t fucked it up. It was the worst decision of my life. I wonder where I’d be now if I hadn’t been such an idiot.”
“My folks always loved having you around. You and Dad loved all the same movies.”
“Yeah, we liked the weird stuff. Movies where the heroes were just as messed up as the villains.”
Jordy’s father used to beat him with a belt. Neck down, so there were no noticeable marks. I had no idea that this was going on while Jordy was working for us. When I heard about it years later, after Jordy’s dad had fallen to his death at a construction job, I confronted my father about the beatings and asked him if he knew. He swore he’d had no idea. It was Jordy’s grandma who told everyone her son was a child beater. By then, Jordy was mixed up with some gangsters in Philly and not around town much.
“I would have never fired him if I knew his dad was hurting him like that,” my father said when we talked about it. And then he cried.
“Dad didn’t understand what you were going through. None of us did. He would have made different choices if he had,” I told Jordy.
He shifted in his seat at the diner and gave a weak smile.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we don’t always know what kind of movie we’re watching from what happens in the beginning.”
He wanted to know if I still had all the old video tapes. I did. Dad had rented a storage unit in New Hanover, more out in the country, and Mom and I planned to keep the tapes there until we figured out what to do with them. Jordy asked if we could go have a look.
“I just want to be surrounded by them again. Read some of the boxes.”
It made sense to me. He wanted to relive his last moment of innocence. Before things broke for him. I got this a lot in my line of work. People yearning to reconnect with a simple beauty that’s been lost, even if it’s just a taste. The distraught and mentally ill are like junkies for nostalgia, for the time before it went bad.
We met at the storage facility the following weekend. I think Jordy was trying to avoid being high around me so he was very jittery. He was shaking more than he had been at the diner. He had a grouchy disposition.
When I said, “good morning,” he scoffed at me and said, “Easy to say when you’ve got all the answers.”
I stared at him for a moment and he apologized. But I got the sense that he was only taking it back because he didn’t want me to leave without letting him in to see the tapes.
I’d never been in the storage unit. Dad had done a remarkable job of stacking the tapes in sections, by genre. The most recent tapes sat on top of the piles and descended by year. So it was incredibly easy to browse. Jordy wasted no time, moving for the horror pile and looking up and down the stacks while I perused our small documentary collection.
It only took him two minutes to find what he was looking for. I looked up and saw Jordy standing over me, holding a weathered copy of Def-Con 4. The cover featured a skeleton in an astronaut suit, half-buried on a sandy planet with a space station looming overhead. I’d never seen it.
“Do you mind if I keep this one? It’s an old favorite, and I can’t find it anywhere.”
There was an intensity to his request and his right hand was clenched in a white-knuckle fist at his side.
“It would mean so much to me,” he said.
I nodded. “Sure, Jordy. Of course.”
He turned quickly and walked out of the storage unit. That was all he was really looking for. I locked up. When I got back to the parking lot Jordy was in his car, disassembling the tape. I pretended to fish for my keys in my purse while I covertly watched him open it up and pull out a sandwich bag of white powder.
I climbed into my car and started it up. Jordy knocked on my window.
“Thanks for bringing me by,” he said. “That meant a lot to me. We’ll see how the movie plays. I have a feeling it’ll hold up just fine.”
“You take care,” I said and I drove away.
That was eighteen years ago. After that, he just sort of disappeared. My guess was that he probably got himself into trouble, either by using or mixing up with the wrong people. Maybe he was dead. Three years after our storage unit experience, he was a no-show at his grandmother’s funeral and everyone in his family was quiet when his name came up except for an uncle who I overheard say, “That boy is swimming with the fish.” Which meant that Jordy had been murdered by the mafia or gangsters. Didn’t surprise me. I had seen more than a few young men like Jordy meet a similar fate.
I thought about him from time to time. Especially when Mom and I cleared out all of the VHS tapes. We donated them to the college, after we heard they were opening a new screening center that was VHS-friendly.
It was a Tuesday in early June the next time I saw him. I had just gotten back from visiting with a family who had been dealing with an abusive stepdad situation, when Jordy approached me as I was unlocking my office door.
“Meg Manchette. The sign on the door makes you look more like a private investigator than a social worker.”
In some ways, being a social worker wasn’t so different from being a private investigator. And truth be told, I’d taken a bunch of jobs that blurred the line between social service and investigative work since I opened my own practice.
“How’s that for a rewind. How you doing, Jordy? Didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“You thought I was dead,” he said and I didn’t respond. “Can we talk inside?”
I let him into the office. We sat in the lobby and I took the armchair in the corner, the one with a Smith & Wesson taped underneath it. I deal with a lot of ugly situations and bad people in my work. This dude stole from me last time. And he was a longtime addict. I couldn’t trust him. Not anymore.
That said, Jordy was looking better. Gaunt and aged, but with good color in his face. He had a brown leather jacket on and dark slacks with black tennis shoes. Which meant he was either a caterer or a chauffeur. “You’re taking care of yourself,” I told him.
“Trying. I bottomed out hard, not long after we saw each other last. Spent five years in a Mexican prison.” I let out a whistle. Jordy smiled. “If a Mexican prison doesn’t teach you not to take your shit for granted, then nothing will. Worked on some oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for a few years. Found God and then lost him again. Got married and divorced, which was tied to the God stuff. Ended up back in Philly about six years ago. Working as a driver for some businessmen.”
I knew the kinds of businessmen that hired guys like Jordy as their drivers. They were the types of men who expected bullets from their associates and invested in human shields.
“Quite the run,” I said. “I’m happy to find that you’re alive.”
“I almost died ten times down in Mexico. Sometimes, I think I did die down there.” He looked at his hands. I got up and made us two cups of coffee from my machine. When I came back to the lobby, Jordy was standing.
“I don’t want to waste your time. I’ve done a lot of dumb things to you and your family. I’m sorry for that.”
It was okay, I told him. Shit happens.
“I don’t know who I can trust any more,” he went on. “Most of my family is dead and the ones who are still alive, I think they’re watching them. Waiting for me to show up. You were always real nice to me. Like family.”
“What kind of trouble are you in?” I asked.
“The worst kind. They’re going to kill me. The men I work for. To cover up for what they’ve done. Some crooked cops are in the mix. If I went to the cops, I’m not sure I’d find the right one.”
I knew plenty of good cops. Most of them were good. But the bad ones had their spies. If the cops were after him, it could be because he was mixed up with corrupt cops or it could be because he was a lowlife criminal that deserved apprehending.
I asked him again. “What kind of trouble are you in?”
“They call me Sleepy Head. You heard of me?”
“Have I heard of Sleepy Head?”
“Yeah. I run all up and down the state, from Philly through Trenton and Newark, up to the Big Apple.”
“I’ve never heard of Sleepy Head,” I said.
“It started out, I was just driving for this rich dude. He had someone he was having issues with, an old accountant of his. So he had me drive this guy out to the Pine Barrens at dusk. Told me to wear a gas mask and just drop the accountant off and leave him in the middle of the forest there. The guy pleaded with me, said he’d pay me to let him walk. When I left him outside in the Barrens, he got real slow, sleepy, like he was in a daze. Just kind of started wandering around. I drove away. And the accountant was never heard of again. I told a couple of other guys about that and it turns out they had some people who they wanted to have disappear. So I did it again, and again. Just dropped people off at dusk in the Pine Barrens while I was wearing a breathing mask. As soon as they’d get out of the car, they’d start wandering around like they were in a dream. I’d drive off and leave them there. And that’s the last that anyone would ever see of them.”
“That’s kind of like murder, Jordy.”
“Kind of. But it isn’t. I was just leaving people in the woods. And most of the time, I was working for cops who wanted to have criminals disappear. Bad guys who got off on charges. Then I got in so deep that I couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t let me stop.”
“How many of these rides have you done?”
“Little more than thirty. A few people got away. I don’t know how. They stumbled out of the Barrens while they were in the daze, I guess.”
That was a lot of people to have disappeared. “The ones who lived started talking about me,” he went on. “They’re calling me Sleepy Head. Now the cop dudes and bosses want to get rid of me, because they know I’ll turn as soon as I’m in custody.”
“You should turn yourself in. I’ll go with you. You’ll be safer on the inside.”
“Meg, you know how much a prison guard makes in a year. You know how much a prison guard makes for a hit? They’d have me killed the first night.”
He was probably right. But this sounded like murder to me. Any shred of kinship or sympathy I felt for Jordy was diminishing by the moment.
“I promise you. I had no choice.” He took out his phone and started going through his photos. “They took my daughter.” He flashed some pictures of him with a young girl, probably twelve. She looked a lot like Jordy’s grandmother.
“They said they’re going to put her in the Barrens tonight, if I don’t turn myself over to them.”
“What do you think happens to them at night in the Pine Barrens?”
“I don’t think, I know. The Devil gets them.”
Everyone in the area knows about the Jersey Devil. It’s what your parents told you when they didn’t want you sneaking out at night, because it’s what their parents told them to keep them off the streets and out of the woods after dark. For the towns surrounding the Pine Barrens, it’s our local version of the boogeyman. The legend charts all the way back to 1735, when Jane Leeds discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. Out of frustration and perhaps fear of the number thirteen, Jane cursed the child in her womb. The baby was born a wild demon-beast, part goat, part bat, with a taste for blood. As soon as Jane had popped out the little creature, it snarled at momma, attacked those attending the birth, and flew up the chimney and into the Pine Barrens, where it’s lived – and hunted – ever since.
Some people claim that Jane was a witch and conjured the demon child on purpose. Labelling someone a witch was an easy way to blame a woman for anything.
That’s the story. No one past the age of ten actually bought into the Jersey Devil. It was a fun thing to talk about and gave a hike through the Pine Barrens a little extra energy, but a killer goat-bat wasn’t the real reason why you wanted to stay out of that stretch of forest these days.
I’d heard that gangsters used the Barrens for dumping bodies – human remains have been discovered out there on multiple occasions. And hikers were always getting lost in the park. It’s a big area, with little in the way of marked trails or discernible geographic features. It’s just dense, flat woodland.
I wanted to tell Jordy to get the fuck out of my office. Whatever the pressures he was under, he was still responsible for leaving over thirty people in the woods to die. That would make him a serial killer. When he was telling me about the moniker he’d been given – Sleepy Head – I sensed a bit of pride in his voice. Like he was highlighting it to say that he’d finally amounted to something. Something that people knew about, and would remember. The kind of name that one of his beloved VHS movies from the 80s would carry.
But there was a young girl involved.
“Sleepy Head,” I said dubiously.
He grew grave, showing no sign of pride or pleasure in his work. “There’s this part of the forest. It’s a clearing surrounded by a tight ring of trees. That’s where I leave them. At sundown. It’s so dark you can’t tell what end is up when you’re in there.”
“And you’ve never stuck around to see what happens?”
He shook his head. “No. Some people have gotten free. I think they just got lucky. Stumbled out in the right direction before the Devil could get them.”
He leaned forward with his hands crossed in his lap. “I’m supposed to go there tonight,” he said. “In exchange for my little girl. And if I don’t show up, they’re going to put my daughter in the woods. I need your help to make sure she gets out okay.”
I realized that he didn’t want me to save him. He had accepted death.
“I’ve had this coming to me for a long time,” he said, confirming my guess. “I should have run away as soon as I knew what was happening to the people I left.”
“What happened to them?” I asked again.
“I went poking around after the fifth drop-off out there and found the person’s body.”
The deceased had been a serial criminal, a man who had killed a bunch of bodega owners in robberies, but the cops couldn’t lock him up without prints or a weapon. Jordy found him a half mile from the circle, by a small pond. He was on his knees and hunched over. Something had eaten through his face and straight into his head. Through the facial bones. His brain was gone. His head was just an empty cave, like a gored-out pumpkin.
Jordy tried to quit after that, but the bad men he worked for threatened to go after his family. So he kept cool. For a while.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked.
“Eleonore.”
“You named her after your grandma.”
He nodded and his eyes started to tear up.
I told him that I would escort his daughter to safety. But that if it meant me having to go out to the Pine Barrens, I was going to bring a friend. A very capable friend.
Jordy gave me the coordinates and a map pin for where I should wait.
“Just be there by eight thirty. They’re going to leave me right at sundown. Which is about nine. I’ll tell Eleonore where to find you before they put me in the circle.”
He hugged me and thanked me and said, “I know I was an asshole to you. But back in the day, I was a good kid.”
I knew he was.
“Thank you for helping my daughter.”
I watched him drive off and then I called my very capable friend, Brandon Calley.
I don’t date clients. Brandon was the only exception. He’s an ex-military, ex-cop with two ex- wives. He was suffering from really bad, compounded PTSD when I met him at an AA meeting. To be fair, he asked me on a date before I told him he needed my help. After three months of talking and Brandon working with a therapist friend of mine, I agreed to meet him for dinner. We dated for a few weeks before realizing that our lifestyles didn’t match well. We didn’t quite click. I loved the guy, I just didn’t love the guy. He was cool with being friends.
Brandon helped me buy the gun under the armchair and set up the security system in my office. He was doing well these days, managing a hardware store and training fighters in jiu-jitsu. He
lived in an old warehouse out in an industrial part of Philadelphia. We didn’t cross paths, but we were there for each other when needed.
He cancelled his evening class and drove out to meet me at my house. It was a muggy evening and the cicadas were out in force, already calling in the night when we left for the park at just past seven.
“This is some batshit crazy story,” he said as he drove. We had taken his truck with its off-road capabilities and its arsenal in the compartment beneath the bed.
“Bat-goat-shit crazy story,” I replied. “Jordy has done a lot of drugs in his life, but he didn’t seem to be making it up.”
“You’re good at telling when people are lying,” Brandon said.
I am.
“Doesn’t mean he isn’t full of shit. He just believes in what he’s saying.”
“What do you think?” Brandon asked me.
“I think there’s a little girl caught up in a bad mess. And we’re going to help her.”
The details change, but you’d be surprised by how similar cases of child endangerment are. It really just boils down to broken, toxic people getting themselves in trouble and pulling their kids along for the ride. Jordy was good enough to find me. That was something.
We pulled onto a dirt road into the Pine Barrens, the one that Jordy had pointed out to me on the map. It was less than two miles to the marker. Brandon parked behind a section of brush and then I helped him draw a brown tarp over his truck. It wasn’t even eight yet. We were early.
“Take a look around?” I asked him.
Brandon grabbed his backpack and we went for a hike. The trees were pretty evenly spaced in this part of the forest. I followed the map on my phone in the direction of the circle. We stopped at a fallen tree about a hundred yards out from the truck and Brandon gathered a bunch of sticks. He laid them at an angle over the tree, creating a bit of a shelter.
“In case someone follows the girl,” he said.
When we approached the circle it didn’t look like a circle at first. The trees seemed to squeeze tighter, forming a wall. It wasn’t until we were a few feet back that we could see the circular clearing in the middle of the tree perimeter. Brandon took a step to move into the clearing but I put my hand on his chest.
“Are you serious?” he asked me.
“Let’s just wait and see.”
He laughed but found a tree a few feet behind the perimeter. He climbed up and mounted a game camera there. When we got back to his truck he handed me the camera’s remote monitor and showed me how to switch into night vision. The clearing was a perfect circle. The trees must have been planted with purpose, hundreds of years ago. There was a section on the far side where the trees were spaced a bit further apart, creating a bit of an opening into the area. Brandon assembled a sniper rifle and drew two handguns out from beneath the truck’s bed. He handed me one of the pistols.
At 8:37 I spotted a heavy-set man in the circle’s entrance. He stood there, looking side to side, without moving in. A few minutes later, he was joined by a short man with slicked-back hair. They were total mafia types. Embarrassingly so. Lots of gold chains and rings. Popped collars with the top few buttons of their shirts undone.
“I’m going to see how many there are.”
Brandon slinked away with the sniper rifle in hand.
The goons moved from the circle area. The sun was dipping, giving way to the cries of night birds. Brandon came back five minutes later and whispered that there were two SUVs filled with mafia heavies, but no sign of Jordy or his daughter. Then, at five of nine, with the sun almost down, the goons pushed Jordy and Eleonore into the circle.
They wobbled a bit. Turned in circles, looking to the treetops. And then Jordy dropped down, taking Eleonore in his arms. He nodded to the other side of the circle, in my direction. The girl seemed to plead with him and put up a fight, but Jordy pushed her through the far side of the tree wall and I could see her pass just beneath the camera we had mounted.
“I’ll go get her.”
“Roger that, Captain.” Brandon gave me a wink and said, “I’ll be watching,” as he raised the rifle’s night scope to his eye.
The light was fading fast. She hadn’t gotten far from the circle when I met her. She was trembling.
I said, “Eleonore, I’m your father’s friend, Meg.” She had a dazed look about her. “You’re coming with me, okay?”
She nodded. I took her hand and led her back in the direction I had come. I heard footsteps nearby and voices. We ducked into the fallen-tree structure that Brandon had put together and waited. Not a minute later, some of the mafia boys held up near us. I put my finger to my lips, gesturing for Eleonore to stay quiet.
“He wants us to find her,” one guy said and the other replied, “He wants us to find her to make sure she stays in the woods. She probably stumbled off in the other direction.”
“What if she went to the road?”
“She couldn’t have made it there that fast.”
One of them lit a cigarette. They were close enough that I could smell the smoke. Brandon was watching. If they made the mistake of finding us now, he’d open their heads up like cans of soup.
“I don’t want to be here. Sun’s almost down,” the one guy said, taking nervous drags on his cigarette.
“If he asks, the girl wandered off into the woods and we lost her when it got dark. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” his partner responded, and they shuffled their meaty frames back to their SUVs with their gold chains and heads intact.
When we emerged from the shelter, the faintest sliver of light lingered through the trees.
“Thank you, Ms. Manchette,” Eleonore said. “Can we go get my dad now?”
I told her that the bad guys who took her might still be watching where they left her dad and that if we went back now, they’d get both of us.
“We can’t leave him in there,” she said.
“We’ll get him out in a little bit. We just need to make sure the coast is clear first.”
I moved a few steps ahead of Eleonore, leading her to Brandon and the truck, when she broke away from me and ran back towards the circle. Her footsteps made a lot of noise. I followed her.
I found her in the circle, crouched over Jordy. Her father had taken his shirt off and covered himself in dirt. He wasn’t moving.
I moved into the circle to meet them and as soon as I broke the tree perimeter, my head started to swim. I could feel sweat rise up all over my body. It felt a bit like food poisoning. I was reeling. Next thing I knew, Eleonore was standing over me. I must have fallen to the ground. She had her t-shirt pulled up over her nose and mouth, and gestured for me to do the same. I was blinking in and out of consciousness and really just felt like I needed to go to sleep. She pulled my shirt up over my face. After a few breaths, my head calmed down. I stood up, stumbled a bit, and then leaned on Eleonore.
“Can you help me drag him?” she asked.
I didn’t think I could but I nodded all the same. She supported me as we moved over to Jordy. He was shaking on the ground and covered in dirt. His eyes fluttered. Eleonore let go of me and grabbed her dad’s left leg. That’s when we heard some rustling in the treetops. I gave a quick look over my shoulder and saw him there. A man in shadows, hunched atop a pine tree at the far end of the circle. He wasn’t moving. Just sitting there, watching us.
A surge of adrenaline shot through me and I shouted, “Let’s go.”
We each took a leg and dragged Jordy to the edge of the circle. When we were a few feet away from the treeline, the man dropped down to the ground. He couldn’t have been more than fifty feet away from us. I stayed focused on dragging Jordy out of the circle.
If you look at the Devil, can you look away again? I was certain I’d be overcome by the circle’s power if I stopped doing what I was doing. I needed to get off of this patch of land.
We made it through the trees and paused to catch our breath. I looked back. The Devil was flying inside of the circle, round and round along the inner edge at such speed that the trees shook as he passed.
“We need to keep moving,” Eleonore said.
We dragged Jordy another fifteen feet and then he came to. He coughed as he sat up and looked behind to where the Devil was still flying in the circle.
“There he is,” Jordy said.
He had that twinkle in his eye again. The same one he had when he fished the VHS of Def-Con 4 out of my father’s storage unit.
“He won’t kill me. Not after everything I’ve done for him.”
Jordy got up. He looked like he was about to walk back to the circle. Eleonore grabbed his hand and said, “I’m tired of your shit, Dad. Let’s go!”
We hadn’t gotten much further on the trail when the Devil landed in front of us. He was about seven feet tall, with long, skinny limbs that bent at animal-like angles and ended in curved hooves. His pointed tail whipped and flexed behind him. His head was that of a man. Except for his long, sloped mouth that looked kind of like a goat’s. He smiled and flashed jagged, decayed teeth. Enormous bat wings spread behind him. He had human eyes, which studied us with thoughtful interest.
“Hi, baby,” Jordy said. “It’s just me this time. These are my friends. I’ll bring you something to eat real soon.”
Jordy reached out and placed his hand on the Devil’s chest. The creature lunged in and bit Jordy on the shoulder, tearing off a bit of flesh. Jordy screamed and Eleonore and I ran away.
He shouted behind us, “It’s okay. That’s just how he plays is all.”
The Devil flew up behind us and took Eleonore in his arms. He drew the girl up to a branch that was at least fifteen feet high. He sat there, holding her, watching me as I screamed and shouted at him to bring the girl back. He clenched Eleonore to his chest.
“Let her go, baby!” Jordy shouted.
But the Devil held the girl out and opened his fanged mouth wide.
That’s when his head exploded. Brandon had connected with a clean shot, right through the middle of the Devil’s head. The creature fell to the ground with Eleonore in his arms. When I pulled her free she was grunting, fast and repeatedly – she was in the throes of shock.
Jordy drew a hunting knife out from his boot and stood over the dead beast.
“Take my daughter out of here,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to clean him like a deer. And then I’ll eat him.”
At first I thought I heard him wrong. And then I was overcome by a wave of horror and panicked realization. I pulled Eleonore away. Jordy got right to it, sawing into the Devil’s chest cavity with his serrated knife.
I didn’t look back. When I got to the truck, Brandon had already started it. He sat behind the wheel, staring through the windshield. He didn’t turn to me. I could tell it was all coming back on him in that moment – the deaths in aggregate, his accumulated kills – as he sat with a cold terror about his face. Like a man who believed he was marked. Killing the beast wasn’t as easy as pulling the trigger. There was a residue. And worse, a meditation on all of the evil and death wrought between them.
Eleonore slept in the truck’s cabin on the drive back while Brandon and I rode in silence.
When he dropped us off at my house he said, “Why did he cut it up?”
I wasn’t sure, but I said, “To get rid of it forever, maybe.”
I didn’t tell Brandon that Jordy was planning to eat the Devil’s flesh as well. I never told anyone about that part.
The girl was in bad shape the next day. She was distraught over what happened to her dad. I told her that he was fine and still alive. That he had some injuries and needed to get fixed up in the hospital, but that we’d hopefully see him soon. I didn’t know what else to say. I took off the next day and stayed at home with her. I got Chinese food delivered for dinner that night.
As we feasted on dumplings Eleonore said to me, “He’s not in the hospital, is he?”
I apologized. Told her that I lied because I didn’t want her to be freaked out.
“But he’s still alive?”
I nodded. I was pretty sure that he was alive. And out in the Pine Barrens. She left it at that and we finished eating.
Before bed she said, “He goes missing all the time. Leaves for a day or so. I get nervous when he’s gone. But he comes back for me. He always does.”
That night she woke up screaming. I ran into her room and she was frantic. Said she had a nightmare.
“My dad was flying around the city like a dragon.”
I looked out the window.
“I don’t see him out there,” I told her.
I made up a bed for her on the floor in my room, but I don’t think she went back to sleep after that. When I woke up at dawn, she was sitting in the window of my room staring out.
I found Jordy’s aunt, Beverly, who still lived in the same apartment building where he grew up. I informed her that Jordy had gone out of town and that I was pretty sure he was in some trouble. Could she watch Eleonore for a little while? She said she hadn’t heard from Jordy in twenty years and didn’t even know that Jordy had a daughter. But she was happy to watch the girl.
Before I left Eleonore with her great aunt, we talked about keeping everything that happened in the Pine Barrens our secret. I’d check in with her every few days.
“I’m going to look for your father,” I told her, and she made me promise that I would find him.