Despite being uer for a day, the body was identified as that of young Oscar Love. The sheet pulled back, the shog bloat of the drowned, and sure enough, it was him, although the truth is, none of us could bear to look closely. Had it not been for the strating around the waterlogged corpse, maybe no one would have thought it anything other than a tragic act. He would have been laid to rest uwo yards of good earth, and his parents left to their private grief. But suspis were raised from the moment that they gaffed him from the river. The corpse was transported twelve miles to the ty mue for a proper autopsy and i. The ers searched for cause but found only strange effects. To all outward appearance he was a young boy, but when they cut him open, the doctors discovered an old man. The weirdness never made the papers, but Oscar later told me about the atrophied internal ans, the necrosis of the heart, the dehydrated lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, and brain of a death-defyienarian.
The strangeness and sorrow surrounding this discovery were pounded by the vanishing act of Jimmy Cummings. With the rest of the searchers, he had goo the woods that night but had not returned. When Jimmy did not show up at the hospital, we all assumed he had gone home early or found another exit, and not until the evening did Gee begin to worry. By the third day, the rest of us were all anxious about Jimmy, desperate for any news. We plao go back to the woods that evening if the weather held, but just as I sat down with my family for dihe ph i. Elizabeth and Mary both sprang from their chairs, hoping a boy might be trying to reach them, but my mother ordered them to sit.
"I dont like your friends calling in the middle of meals." Mom picked up the receiver from its cradle on the wall, and after she said hello, her face alette of surprise, shock, disbelief, and amazement. She half turo finish her discussion, leaving us to stare at the back of her head. As she hung up the phoh her left hand, she crossed herself with her right, then turo share the news.
"Its a miracle. That was Oscar Love. Jimmy Cummings is okay, and he found him alive."
My sisters stopped mid-bite, their forks suspended in the air, and stared at her. I asked my mother to repeat the message, and in so doing, she realized the implications of her sentences.
"They walked out of the woods together. Hes alive. He found him in a hole. Little Oscar Love."
Elizabeths fork fell and clattered on the plate.
"Youre kidding. Alive?" Mary said.
"Far out," said Elizabeth.
Distracted, Mom fretted with the bobby pins at her temples. She stood behind her chair, thinking.
"Isnt he dead?" I asked.
"Well ... there must be a mistake."
"Thats a helluva mistake, Mom," Mary said.
Elizabeth asked the not-so-rhetorical question we were all w about. "So whos that in the mue?"
Mary asked her twin, "Theres another Oscar Love? Thats so cool."
My mother sat hard in the chair. Staring at the plate of fried chi, she seemed lost in abstra, reg what she ko be true with what she had just heard. The twins one-upped each other with hypotheses too absurd to believe. Too nervous to eat, I retired to the porch for a smoke and plation. On my sed Camel, I heard the noise of an approag car. A cherry red Mustang veered off the road and barreled up our drive, kig up gravel and fishtailing to a stop. The twins rushed out to the porch, the s door slapping s