Bad Little Falls

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The last time I saw Lucas Sewall, he left a school notebook under the passenger seat of my truck.

It was a curious document. The boy had drawn disturbing images on the covers-pictures of vampire women and giant owls with bloodstained beaks. The inside pages were crammed with his indecipherable handwriting, words so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them. There were maps labeled with cryptic directions to “lightning trees” and “old Injun caves” and hieroglyphs that might have been messages in secret code or just meaningless scribbles. With a compulsive liar like Lucas, you never knew whether you were dealing with fact or fiction.

The dated diary entries were especially hard to unravel. Between his other weird jottings, the kid had seemingly kept a careful record of the tragic events in Township Nineteen, as if he had anticipated that his eyewitness account might one day prove useful in a court of law. But who knows what was going on in that oversize head of his? In my short acquaintance with him, I learned Lucas Sewall was a deeply damaged child who believed in manipulating adults, settling scores, and tying up loose ends. Sometimes I wondered whether he didn’t see the notebook as his last will and testament, with me in the role of executor.

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