Tag! You're Dead!
Puritan Falls, although not troubled by the gang violence that plagues large urban areas, is no stranger to the petty vandalism of delinquent teenagers. Over the years, the Puritan Falls Police Department has received its fair share of calls from homeowners reporting youngsters playing mailbox baseball, racing their cars along River Road or spray-painting graffiti on the entrance ramp to the interstate. Officer Shawn McMurtry tended to go easy on the young miscreants. After all, he had been a teenager once, too. But sometimes in the annual crop of bored youths, a proverbial bad apple surfaced, and on rare occasions that rotten apple was likely to spoil others. Such an apple was Bucky Slade.
In McMurtry's day, young people looked up to the class valedictorian, the captain of the football team or the classmate who had access to his parents' car on a Saturday night. In the computerized world of the new millennium, however, many of the local young men looked up to Slade, a victim of a failed marriage between a Desert Storm veteran, who brought back a drug habit as a souvenir of his trip to Saudi Arabia, and a checkout girl from the Copperwell Walmart.
A disciplinary problem since the fifth grade, Bucky was deemed incorrigible by the time he entered secondary school. It did not take long for the teachers at Puritan Falls High to ship the troublesome freshman to the emotional support class or for the teachers and counselors there to pass him on to the county's mental health agency. It was at the county-run special education school that Bucky met his Essex Green counterpart, Vinnie Molinaro. The two became close friends, although their relationship did not prevent them from competing for girls, attention from their fellow students and, most importantly, the coveted position of the chief badass of the school.
Throughout their freshman and sophomore years, the two teens were evenly matched. It was when their second year was coming to an end, one day in late May, that Bucky suggested he and Vinnie continue their friendly rivalry during summer vacation.
"How?" Vinnie asked.
"Tagging. You and your crew against me and mine."
Graffiti was nothing new. For years teenagers had spray-painted their initials in public places. Young men proclaimed their love for young women on the sides of the Winter Street Bridge, and every year one paint-happy senior honored the graduating class on the rocks at the base of Puritan Light. Taggers, though, are much more prolific than run-of-the-mill graffiti artists since the members of each crew not only try to outdo the opposing crew but also their fellow crew members.
The "bombing raids," as taggers refer to their painting expeditions, began Memorial Day weekend. That Monday an unprecedented number of colorful names and symbols began appearing on abandoned buildings, traffic signs and rear walls of stores at the Puritan Falls Mall. Bucky, whose tag name was BAT (an acronym for Bad Ass Tagger), armed with several cans of Krylon and Rust-Oleum, racked up more than twenty tags the first weekend alone.
With school out for the summer, he spent his days pumping gas at the Exxon station on Route 692, a road still known to the locals as the Old Salem Turnpike. One day he was filling the tank of a new Lexus with premium unleaded when Jamal Berry pulled up to the self-serve pump in his fourteen-year-old Toyota Camry. After the Lexus pulled away, Bucky walked over to talk to his friend.
"What's up?" Jamal asked as he pumped economy grade fuel into the Camry's gas tank.
"Not much," Bucky replied. "What about you?"
"Nothin'. Feel like going tagging tonight?"
"Sure. I work until seven. Why don't we meet at the Burger Barn at eight? Then we can drive over to Copperwell."
"What's in Copperwell?"
"I thought we'd hit that abandoned warehouse on Roland Road."
"Didn't Vinnie and his crew already get that place?"
"It's a large building. I'm sure there's room for us, too."
"I got a better idea. Why don't we hit those old hotels up in the Naumkeag Hills?"
Bucky grinned and his eyes brightened. He had forgotten those places even existed.
Before the advent of vacation destinations such as Disney World and Universal Studios, families often spent summers in resorts along the eastern seaboard as well as in the mountain areas of the Poconos, the Catskills and the Berkshires. Although the resorts in the Naumkeag Hills were not as popular as those in the higher elevations, they offered many of the same activities, and for the people of eastern New England, they were a lot closer to home. In the late 1800s several resort hotels did a thriving business in the Naumkeag Hills, but only three managed to survive the First World War. These resorts later flourished during Prohibition, but the Depression and the threat of another war in Europe sealed their fate.
The Pine Hills Inn was the first to close, followed soon thereafter by Holly Manor. Falls View Lodge, the grandest of the three, actually managed to stay open throughout the Thirties and into the early Forties. Unfortunately, the owner's sons and many of the lodge's employees enlisted in the armed services following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the spring of 1942, the understaffed Falls View Lodge was forced to shut its doors.
It was hoped that once the war was over and President Roosevelt's New Deal policies restored the country's economy, the Naumkeag Hills tourist industry would be revived. Sadly, this was not to be the case. During a severe nor'easter in 1949, the Pine Hills Inn was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. In 1954 the owner of Holly Manor passed away, and the hotel was boarded up and abandoned. As for Falls View Lodge, no one in Puritan Falls knew what became of the owner, and the lodge remained closed despite the postwar economic boom.
* * *
"I thought you knew where you were going," Bucky complained as Jamal drove along the narrow back roads that wound through the wooded hills.
"Chill out. Those hotels are so large we couldn't possibly miss them, not even in the dark."
"You've done a pretty good job so far."
They drove another half hour before they came upon the charred ruins of the Pine Hills Inn.
"This is one of them," Jamal explained, "or rather this is what's left of it."
The boys got out of the car, and Bucky shined his flashlight on the burned beams, charred rubble and crumbled stone chimneys. The ruins appeared to cover an area roughly the size of a city block.
"This hotel must have been huge!" he exclaimed in awe.
"It was," Jamal confirmed. "I've seen photographs of the place. And this was the smallest of the resorts."
"We've found one; where are the other two?"
"They must be up the road somewhere," Jamal reasoned.
They were. The main entrance to Holly Manor, however, had been washed out more than ten years earlier during a tropical storm that swept through Gloucester and the surrounding communities. Though the hotel had survived with minimal damage, there was no way to get to it.
"There must be more than one entrance," Jamal declared as he started the Camry's engine. "Let's drive around and try to find it."
His friend vetoed the idea.
"Forget it. I'd rather look for the last place. That's the biggest one, right? We'll hit that one tonight and come back another time to hit this one."
Fifteen minutes later they located the winding driveway that led to the Falls View Lodge. It was overgrown with weeds and brush, and Jamal feared the Camry might not get through. It did, but the branches left several scratches in the car's faded paint job.
"Wow!"
It was the only word Bucky, with his limited vocabulary, could use to describe the towering stone and wooden edifice.
Jamal, on the other hand, was somewhat more descriptive: "It's awesome!"
The front door had been boarded up years earlier, but the teenagers had little difficulty prying the two-by-fours loose.
"Watch out!" Jamal cautioned. "Those nails are rusty."
"What's the matter? Afraid you'll need to get a tetanus shot?"
"Bite me!" Jamal retorted without rancor as the two young men, flashlights in hand, entered the lobby of the former resort.
Bucky took his can of Krylon regal blue out of his backpack and headed toward a long wall that ran perpendicular to the front entrance. He was in the process of painting a four-foot-high, two-foot-wide capital "B" when the lobby suddenly became ablaze with light. The boys looked up and saw that the giant crystal chandelier above them had been turned on.
"I thought this hotel was deserted," Bucky cried.
"It is," Jamal insisted. "It closed down more than sixty years ago. There must be a squatter here."
In the bright glow of the chandelier, the two boys got a good look at the lobby. All the furniture was still there: chairs, tables, desks and sofas. There were velvet drapes on the windows and oriental rugs on the hardwood floors.
"This place looks like it's still open for business," Jamal observed as he walked to the front desk. "There's no dust or cobwebs anywhere."
"I guess the caretaker takes his job seriously."
"How can one person keep a place this size so clean?"
"How do you know the rest of the place looks like this?"
Jamal was not overly anxious to find out if it did. In fact, he wanted to leave the resort, get into his Toyota and go home. On the other hand, he did not want to lose face in front of his friend.
"Let's go explore," he suggested, putting on a false show of bravado.
* * *
There were no guest rooms on the first floor. They were all located on the second through fifth floors, accessible either by a large wooden staircase or a decrepit, iron-gated elevator. While a good portion of the first floor was devoted to the kitchen and main dining room, there were also banquet rooms, a library, a cocktail lounge and an exercise room that featured a stationary bicycle and a manual treadmill, both of which looked like they were on loan from the Smithsonian.
"I can't believe someone would leave all this stuff just lying around," Jamal exclaimed.
"Who would want it?" his friend asked. "It's just a bunch of junk."
"Did you ever see how much money some of these antiques sell for on eBay?"
Bucky raised an eyebrow. He did not know a thing about computers and always laughed at people who frittered away their time on the Internet, but if there was money to be made, he was interested.
"Your sister has got a computer, doesn't she?"
"Yeah," Jamal laughed. "She's into all that Myspace crap. Why?"
"You and I might make a few bucks if we could get her to sell some of this junk for us."
"How are we gonna fit a treadmill in my car?"
"I don't mean this stuff, you moron. But there might be other, smaller items lying around here."
Jamal smiled. He did not make much money stocking shelves and rounding up grocery carts at Shop 'N Save, and with the price of gas going through the roof, he could use a little extra cash.
* * *
After leaving the exercise room, the two young men searched the library, the kitchen and the dining room, but there was little, other than books, cookware, cutlery and dishes, for them to steal. They next entered the lounge where they saw a variety of sizes and shapes of glassware, everything from champagne glasses and brandy snifters to long-stemmed wine glasses and beer mugs.
"You think these are worth anything?" Bucky asked.
"Who knows? But look at how clean they are. There's not a spot on them."
"What the hell is this, a Cascade commercial?"
"Doesn't it make you wonder? A caretaker wouldn't have the time to clean all these glasses."
Bucky was not one to waste time pondering questions to which he had no answers. Besides, there were more important matters at hand.
"Let's see if there is anything of value upstairs."
The boys crossed the hall and headed toward the lobby.
"What are we gonna find in the rooms?" Jamal asked with skepticism. "Only things I ever saw in a hotel room were towels, writing paper and Bibles."
When they returned to the lobby, they were surprised to see an elderly man at the bottom of the grand staircase. Bucky quickly assessed the situation. The man was alone and appeared to be unarmed. Since he and Jamal had the advantage of both youth and numbers, he saw no reason to run.
"Are you the caretaker here?" he called out.
"Good heavens, no!" the old man chuckled. "Fernando died back in 1961, or was it '62?"
"Then who are you?" Jamal asked.
"I'm Pierce Hartwell. I own this place. I live in an apartment on the sixth floor."
"We were told the lodge closed down years ago."
"It did," the old man confirmed. "You're the first visitors I've had since Fernando left. Why don't you come upstairs? I'll get you something to drink, and you can tell me what's going on in the world."
Bucky rolled his eyes. He was not interested in talking about current events, but when the old man turned and headed toward the elevator, he began to follow. Jamal grabbed his arm.
"Let's get out of here," he urged. "That old guy gives me the creeps. I wouldn't be surprised if he was a refugee from a funny farm. He's probably been living here since they closed up Danvers State Mental Hospital."
"What are you afraid of? Look at the guy. He must be ninety, at least. If he gets any funny ideas, you and I should be able to take care of him."
Hartwell's apartment encompassed nearly half of the sixth floor. His large living room was tastefully decorated with priceless antiques and fine artwork, a sign that the owner of Falls View Lodge was once a very wealthy man.
"This place reminds me of a museum," Jamal blurted out without any thought as to whether or not his remark would hurt his host's feelings.
"Yes, I suppose it must," Hartwell apologized. "I keep the room the way your mother decorated it. After I lost her, I couldn't bear the thought of changing anything. I don't suppose you two boys remember much about her?"
Jamal cast a wary look at his friend as if asking, "Didn't I tell you the old man was nuts?"
Bucky paid no attention to him.
"Sorry," he humored Hartwell. "I don't."
The old man pointed to a large oil painting above the fireplace mantel.
"She was so beautiful," he said with a wistful smile. "You two remind me of her quite a bit."
The young man frowned. Perhaps Jamal was right. Maybe the old geezer was off his rocker.
"Let me get you two kids something to drink," Hartwell said cheerfully, heading toward the kitchen.
He returned minutes later with two bottles of soda.
"Here's Grape Nehi for you, Skip, and Orange Crush for you, Teddy. I knew you'd be here, so I stocked your favorite soda pop."
"Thank you, but the name's not Skip; it's Bucky. And just for the record, my favorite soda is Coke, but this will do."
Jamal did not comment. He felt too uneasy. When the elderly host led them to one of the bedrooms, he became even more uncomfortable.
"Just like you left it," Hartwell announced as he opened the door.
Then he put his arm around Bucky's shoulder in a gesture of fatherly affection.
"As you can see, I kept all your baseball cards and comic books. And look, here's that bottle cap collection you were so proud of."
Jamal began to perspire, but his friend showed no fear. He was fascinated by the things the hotel owner had preserved in his son's bedroom. The baseball cards alone were probably worth a small fortune.
"Everything in here is mine, huh?" he asked, favoring the old man with a false smile.
"Of course. Your brother's things are in his room."
"I want to go—NOW!" Jamal whispered when Hartwell crossed the hall toward his younger son's bedroom.
"Not yet. Come on, little brother. Let's go see what treasures Dad has in store for you."
Apparently, Hartwell's second son had been the nerdier of the two boys. While Skip's room was filled with comic books, baseball memorabilia and bottle caps, Teddy's contained a chess set, a microscope, a set of encyclopedias and a stamp collection.
"Guess what, Skip," Hartwell cried, "that old Victrola still works. Come on, I'll show you."
"What the hell is a Victrola?" Jamal wondered as the two teenagers followed the old man back to the living room.
Hartwell took a vinyl record off the bookshelf and placed it on an antique record player. The unfamiliar sound of big band music filled the room.
"Yup. That's Tommy Dorsey. I remember how you always liked his band. What was that song of his you played so much?"
Bucky, who only listened to rap music on his iPod, had no idea who Tommy Dorsey was—and if what he was hearing was a sample of his band's music, he had no desire to hear more.
"I got it!" Hartwell exclaimed and then began to croon. "Marie, the dawn is breaking. Marie, we'll soon be waking to find your heart is aching. You used to sing that all the time. Damn near drove the hotel staff crazy!"
When the old 78 rpm record came to an end, Hartwell's good humor faded.
"Those were the good old days," he sighed. "Then came December 7, 1941."
"That was long before I was born," Bucky said.
Hartwell was puzzled.
"What do you mean? You were nineteen at the time; your brother was eighteen. You both enlisted in the Navy after Roosevelt declared war on Japan and Germany."
"Whoa! Wait a minute, Gramps! You must have us confused with someone else," Bucky said, growing tired of his host's faulty memory. "Look, we're not Skip and Teddy. That's not our stuff in those bedrooms. I don't like Tommy Dorsey or baseball, and I certainly never joined the Navy."
Hartwell abruptly dismissed the tagger's denial. He was convinced the two young men he had found downstairs in the lobby were his sons come back from the war.
"I've waited a long time for this day. I always knew you'd come home. Now that you're finally here, we can open the hotel up again. Falls View Lodge will be as fine a resort as it was before the war. And when I die—which won't be for a few years yet, God willing—you two boys will inherit the place. I know you both love it as much as I do."
"Okay, Dad, anything you say," Bucky declared, his unexpected about-face taking Jamal by surprise. "Hey, you got any more of that grape soda?"
"Sure, I do."
"Would you get me another bottle while I go to the bathroom? Then we'll listen to some more Tommy Dorsey, okay?"
Hartwell beamed with joy.
"One Grape Nehi coming up."
As soon as the old man went into the kitchen, Bucky ran into Skip's bedroom, grabbed several stacks of baseball cards and stuffed them into his pockets.
"What are you doing?" Jamal asked.
"What does it look like I'm doing? Do you know how much money these old trading cards must be worth? Grab the rest of them and then let's get the hell out of here before the old kook notices we're gone."
When the two thieving teens ran out of the apartment, they found themselves in a dimly lit hallway. Neither had his flashlight with him.
At the bottom of the staircase, they heard Hartwell call out, "Skip? Teddy? Where are you?"
"Which way is out?" Bucky asked.
"I don't remember. This way, I think."
Unable to see clearly in the darkness, the teenagers inched down the hall toward the lobby, their hands feeling along the walls as they went. Bucky bumped into a small table that had been placed against the wall, and the sound alerted Hartwell to their location. A moment later the lights came back on.
"There you are!"
"Look, we don't want any trouble," Jamal warned.
"You boys aren't in any trouble. Let's go back upstairs. I've got your bottle of Nehi, and I've found another record by Tommy Dorsey. I'll bet you can't guess which one!"
When Hartwell turned back toward the staircase, the two teens ran for the door. Curiously, the old man made no attempt to stop them.
"Good riddance, Whacko!" Bucky shouted as he reached for the handle, but the door would not open.
"Let me try."
Neither young man could get the heavy door to budge. Jamal, who had been fighting to suppress his fear all evening, finally lost the battle.
"Let me out!" he screamed.
"Forget it," Bucky instructed. "I got an idea."
He grabbed the poker from the large stone fireplace in the lobby and swung it at one of the lodge's plate glass windows. The force of the blow made his wrists ache, but the glass did not break.
Hartwell suddenly appeared behind the two boys.
"You know better than to behave that way, Son," he said, reaching for the poker.
Bucky pulled away from him and with a batting stance that young Skip would have envied, he swung the poker and made contact with the force of the Red Sox's Big Papi.
* * *
When Bucky and Jamal failed to return home the following morning, their parents phoned the police. Although Officer McMurtry filed a missing person's report, he had little doubt the troublesome teens would turn up; bad apples usually did. When the boys were still missing the next day, the police began to search in earnest.
It was not until a week later that they discovered Jamal Berry's Toyota Camry parked on the driveway of the abandoned Falls View Lodge. McMurtry called the station to report the discovery.
"What do you think they're doing in there?" fellow officer Greg Pierson asked.
"They might be smoking crack," McMurtry replied with a wink, "but my guess is they're covering the walls of the old place with graffiti."
Officer Pierson opened the door of the abandoned resort and yelled inside, "Police officers. Is anybody here?"
He had not expected a reply, so he was not disappointed or alarmed by the tomb-like silence.
* * *
Bucky, exhausted by his exertions, slid down the wall and collapsed on the floor. Beside him, Jamal was curled in a fetal position. This was appropriate since for some time he had done nothing but cry like a baby.
"There has to be a way out of here, and I'm going to find it."
Bucky stubbornly stood up again and walked toward the main entrance. His fingers, already torn and bloody from trying to pry open the door and windows, scratched at the wooden jamb but to no avail.
From upstairs came the music of Tommy Dorsey's orchestra and the sound of a young boy singing "Marie."
* * *
The two police officers walked into the lobby where they found Bucky Slade's backpack and several cans of spray paint.
"Just like I thought," McMurtry announced, as he spotted the large letter B on the wall. "Come on out, boys," he shouted. "We know you're in here. It's time to go home now. Your parents are worried sick about you."
* * *
"It's no use," Bucky sobbed. "There's no way out of this place."
Suddenly, an icy cold draft seemed to invade his body. The sensation passed quickly, but then a second draft, equally swift and unpleasant, enveloped him.
"What was that?"
He ran to the window, and his heart leaped with joy when he saw McMurtry's patrol car parked in the hotel's driveway.
* * *
"They should have torn this place down years ago," Shawn complained as he and Pierson searched the dilapidated, rodent- and insect-infested remains of the once grand resort hotel.
"I don't think those kids were back here," Greg declared from the doorway of the hotel kitchen. "There are no footprints in the dust, and the cobwebs haven't been disturbed."
"Let's go take a look upstairs," McMurtry suggested. "Maybe they're in one of the guest rooms."
That plan had to be discarded when the two police officers discovered that not only had the grand staircase collapsed more than a decade earlier, but the elevator cables had long since rotted away as well.
* * *
Bucky shook his friend, saying, "Come on. We're getting out of here."
Jamal remained curled in a ball and continued to cry softly.
"The police are here. I just saw McMurtry's car parked outside."
There was no response.
"Didn't you hear me? We're gonna get out of here."
* * *
"I don't see any sign of them," McMurtry said. "The staircase is gone, and the elevator probably hasn't operated since 1942. So, I don't see how they could have gone upstairs."
"Where do you think they went then?" Pierson asked.
"Beats me. I just know they're not here in the hotel anymore."
"Why would they leave their stuff here, especially Jamal's car?"
"Who knows? Maybe something scared them off. This place must be pretty frightening in the dark. Something probably spooked them, and they took off into the hills."
"If they got lost in those woods, it might be weeks before they turn up," Pierson predicted. "If they turn up at all."
* * *
When Bucky finally realized that Jamal had lost his mind—or perhaps just his nerve—he decided to leave his friend behind and save himself. He assuaged his momentary guilt by swearing he would send McMurtry inside to find Jamal once he was safely on the outside. Bucky raced back to the front door and was alarmed to see that it was still tightly closed.
"Hey, McMurtry," he yelled. "We're in here. Can you hear me?"
His question was met with silence.
"Police! Help!" he screamed.
For the first time in his relatively short life, he was actually anxious for the cops to appear.
He went to the window and called again, "Hey, McMurtry ...."
The words died on his lips. The police car was gone.
* * *
Bucky no longer looked out the windows of the Falls View Lodge. There had been no sign of life out there since the day the wrecker from the Exxon service station towed Jamal's Camry away.
There was little change in his friend in the years that followed. Although he no longer cowered in the dark corners and wept, his mind still functioned at the level of a two-year-old. In a way, Bucky envied him. He imagined it would be easier to retreat into insanity than to face the grim reality of the situation.
As he walked down the grand staircase, the former self-proclaimed badass turned his head, wanting to avoid the sight of the door that taunted him and of the decomposed remains of Pierce Hartwell that served as a constant reminder of his crime. He kept his eyes down and his gaze on his feet as he walked to the library. He took a volume off the shelf, sat on one of the Chippendale chairs and opened the book to the first page.
Above him, on the sixth floor, a younger, more handsome Mr. Hartwell was in the living room with his beautiful wife. His son Skip sat on the floor, reading a comic book and drinking a bottle of Grape Nehi. Teddy sat at the dining room table, gluing postage stamps in his album.
As Bucky turned to page two of his book, the strains of Tommy Dorsey's "Marie" filtered down to the library. He closed his eyes and recalled the old adage that "one man's heaven was another man's hell." Little had he known, until he crossed the threshold of the abandoned Falls View Lodge, that the two extremes could co-exist in a single location in a dimension parallel to that inhabited by the living. In Bucky Slade's case, his hell and Pierce Hartwell's heaven were both located in a six-story grand resort hotel that for the past sixty years had existed only in the memories of the man he murdered.
This was before Salem adopted the tag name CWA - "cat with attitude."
