Murky Waters
"Do you think we’ll ever know?" Christine asks.
"No."
Christine peers out the window into the dark. "Sometimes I wish they’d come back for a day and tell what happened. What could it be? It’s like some evil force out just lurking in the dark."
Since October, Justin’s four friends have returned to him, one by one, in dreams. Their not being together seems meaningful to him, since one of the many unknowns is whether they entered the water all at once or one at a time. In each dream, Justin asks the question. What happened? Kenny, Jamie, Sean and Dontel have been unable to provide an answer, but they have offered clues.
Sean, who had a primordial and lifelong fear of water, was the first to come, in late October. "He just sat there smiling, doing this" -Justin shows how Sean beckoned eagerly with his hand-"so I followed. He took me to the river. When we got there I say, ‘Sean, tell me what happened. Who did this to you?’ So he gets in the water to act it out and show me. He’s splashing, flapping his arms. Then something gets him. Like this invisible force that starts shaking him in the water. Back and forth. Something real strong. It shakes him and then it puts him under, and then he’s gone."
CAPT. TOMMY QUINN, the police department’s commander of detectives in Southwest Philly, has a stony face and the low, droll voice of a radio dispatcher; he doesn’t fool around. But as with the half-dozen detectives working beneath him to answer the question of what happened to the four boys, this case has Quinn in the habit of thinking aloud, sifting, stream-of-consciousness, through its few, weird constants.
"You got four good kids who do everything together," he begins. "Biking to North Philly, Penn’s Landing. You got working class parents going to the limit to keep their kids out of the drugs and street crime. Then this. Of all the things to kill a kid around here … I don’t know. The medical examiner can say it’s a textbook drowning. But what happened?
"Go to the rock they went off of-the rock is important. You’ll say, They musta gone in together. And then, coulda been one at a time. I don’t know. So why did they go in? The temperature that day sure wasn’t summer. Was it a dare? Day before the incident, a fisherman overhears Kenny Ruffin brag to his friends he’s gonna swim the river. It’s odd though- they didn’t even begin to make it across. It was schoom straight down to where the divers found them.
