nacits
Sheboygan County, Wisconsin
1999
UNDER A CLEAR August sky, the little girl with the pigtails and calico dress and apron ran skipping toward the cornfield. Clenching something tightly in one fist and concealing a small leather pouch in her apron pocket, she giggled as she went, with three older boys on bicycles in hot pursuit, trailing some fifty yards behind on the long, single-lane country road. Dead Man’s Road—that’s what the locals around Elkhart Lake called it. There were many stories of how the road got its name, but no one could vouch for the real truth of the matter.
“Hey, wait up, yous guys! No fair! The cornfield is off limits,” shouted the smallest of the boys pulling up the rear, his chunky, prepubescent frame huffing and puffing as he tried his best to keep up.
The little girl disappeared from view as she slipped into the dense field of corn and was quickly swallowed up amid its towering stalks, their ripening ears all plump and nearly ready for what promised to be a bumper crop harvest.
In a burst of dust, the first two boys came to a pivoting stop at the field’s edge where they’d last seen the girl. The chunky one soon joined them as he brought his bike to a slow, sure stop.
“I don’t see her,” the first boy said as he dismounted his prized Schwinn, brushing aside a shock of red hair that partially covered his eyes and freckled face. He wore a red flannel shirt and faded jeans threadbare in the knees.
“But I can still hear her,” the second boy said. He was shorter, stockier than the first. His jeans were even more worn, marking him as the obvious leader of the pack.
The girl’s giggling voice mixed with the rustle of a gentle breeze from across the field. “Betcha can’t find me!” she taunted. “You gotta find me if you want them back!”
The stocky leader turned to the chunky one. “It’s your fault, Pudge!” he scolded. “If you hadn’t let her in the tree house to begin with, she wouldn’t have taken them. I don’t care if she is your sister!”
Pudge looked down, nervously fingering the streamers on his handlebars. “Aw, it’s okay, Chuck. We’ll get them back. She’s just teasing. That’s how she is. Always teasing, ’n so.”
The tall, freckle-faced boy in front perked up. “Shush! I think I see her. Over there.” He pointed. “See? Where the tassels are moving.”
The boy darted off in the direction of the moving tassels, but his progress was hampered as he entered an especially dense stand of corn. His two companions trudged close behind, trying their best to keep up.
“I can’t see anything,” Pudge shouted out. “The corn is way too high and thick.”
True. The corn towered over even the tallest of the three boys, though he seemed loath to admit it. “Nah! Just keep up with me,” he said. “She can’t be that far ahead of—”
The space just ahead of them erupted in a flurry of feathers and flapping wings as a flock of nesting pheasants bolted into flight, coursing past the startled boys in a frenzied rush.
“Ah! What the—!”
Like a three-car pileup, the boys collided, falling to the ground in a single heap.
“Hey, get off me!” Chuck protested, disentangling himself from the scrum. “C’mon, yous guys! It’s just a bunch of crazy birds.”
Sprawled out on the ground, they all sat up, laughing and tossing broken ears of corn at one another.
“Okay, let’s get serious,” Chuck said, trying to take control of the situation. “We gotta find her.” He looked up. Pudge followed his gaze. The sky directly overhead was sunny and blue.
“Nacits!” Pudge said.
“Not really,” Chuck replied. “See over there?”
Indeed, angry-looking clouds were approaching from the west not far away.
“Yeah. Looks like a storm headin’ our way, fer sure,” said the freckle-faced boy. “I can feel it in my ears. Pressure droppin’. Sure sign of a storm.”
The other boys looked at him quizzically.
Chuck laughed. “What? You can feel it in your ears?”
“You betcha!” Freckles answered. “I can always feel a storm comin’. The hair on my head starts tingling from the electric charge. And the pressure drops, ya know. And this one’s droppin’ fast. Might even be a twister, eh?”
“Cool!” Chuck said. “Never seen a real twister before.”
But Pudge wasn’t liking the thought of it one bit. He gave a big holler across the cornfield. “Hey, sis! Better come out, okay? There’s a big storm brewin’, ya know.”
The boys quickened their pace through the cornfield as Chuck led the way this time. Pudge was sure they had lost her trail but didn’t want to be the first to admit it. At last, Chuck stopped in his tracks and turned to the others.
“Look,” he said. “I think we should split up. Better chance of at least one of us finding her.”
His two friends paused. But before either could respond, there was a loud scream and a commotion to their left, far and away from the path they had been following.
“What the—!”
The boys reacted together, momentarily freezing in their tracks.
The girl’s screams continued as clouds of dust mixed with torn shards of cornstalks flung high above the distant tassels.
“Oh my God!” Chuck said. “Something’s wrong. Let’s go!”
The boys darted in the direction of the screams and dust. Pushing their way through the field of corn, the tall stalks appeared to stiffen, taking on an almost sentient nature, seemingly bent on impeding their progress. The screams were becoming fainter, even muffled, now.
“Hang on, sis!” Pudge cried.
“We’re comin’, Allie!” Chuck shouted.
When they finally got to where they thought she should be, they found themselves in a patch of open ground surrounded by a veritable wall of corn, twisted and skewed in a generally counterclockwise, spiral pattern. The earth beneath them was all churned up and littered with uprooted, broken stalks, like someone had taken a plow to it. But there was no sign of Pudge’s sister, Alice.
The boys stood there, dumbfounded.
“So, where is she?” Pudge exclaimed.
“Uh, maybe… a twister?” Chuck offered.
Freckles shook his head. “No way. Twisters just don’t, well, just don’t act this way, ya know?”
Pudge reached down and picked up something from the ground.
“Well, here’s the rabbit’s foot she took from the treehouse,” he said. He looked around. “But I don’t see the pouch anywhere.”
The leather pouch contained treasured items from their tree-borne clubhouse: an assortment of genuine Indian artifacts unearthed from neighboring fields, arrowheads, small fishhooks carved from bone, copper trinkets, a few kernels of corn, and a small wad of tobacco they had added for authenticity’s sake.
“Okay. Fine,” Chuck said. “So, where is Allie, for Pete’s sake? She must still have the pouch.”
The boys shouted out her name, but there was no reply. No sound at all, except for the cawing of crows and the rustle of corn as a stiff breeze started up out of the northwest.
***
TWO HOURS LATER young Deputy Dan Meyers and Sheriff Ben Hodges arrived on the scene in response to a frantic call from Pudge’s mom reporting “our little Alice” missing. By now the fast-moving storm had passed, leaving behind a rainbow calling card and a dank, soggy field of corn. Ben and Dan had quizzed the boys over and over on what had happened, trying to trip them up, but their stories always remained the same.
Ben was in the cruiser filling out the initial police report as Dan stood at the edge of the cornfield some ten feet away sketching a map of the crime scene. He wrote down the letters N-A-C-I-T-S, then read them aloud—“Nacits”—in a barely audible tone.
“Huh? Whatcha say?” Ben responded.
Dan turned to see Ben adjusting his hearing aid. He smiled and spoke up clearly. “Nacits! ‘Not a cloud in the sky.’ Remember, that’s what that little pudgy kid said.”
“Mm-hmm,” Ben mumbled.
Dan repeated the word to himself, over and over, as he pictured that little kid, the girl’s older brother, the one his friends called Pudge, and the utter sadness in his eyes. “Sure is a puzzlement.” He scratched his head. “How she could have just vanished into thin air, ’n so?”
“A puzzlement indeed,” Ben replied with a grunt. “But puzzles were meant to be solved, Dan. All it takes is good police work.”
Dan chuckled. “And a little luck, eh?”
Ben harrumphed. “Serendipity, young man. I call it serendipity.”
Dan was fresh out of the academy, eager to serve, eager to please. Ben was eager too, as Dan knew—eagerly awaiting retirement once his term of office expired. “Getting too old for this kind of work,” Ben was often heard to say of late.
“Ya know, Dan, I have a young granddaughter,” Ben said. “Six years old. Same age as Alice.” He gave a wistful sigh. “And this case tears at my heart. Sure rings of child abduction. And I swear, before I retire, I’m gonna hunt down and find the sick bastard who took her! Luck or no luck, mark my words.”
Dan nodded. “Yes, sir.” He peered back into the cornfield, the words of the young boys and their story reverberating through his head. He turned to face Ben.
“Well, so far, all I’ve been able to come up with is this here arrowhead.” Dan held up the plastic specimen bag for Ben to see. “I don’t think it has any bearing on the case. Unless we got some renegade Indians hiding out in the cornfield, eh.” He chuckled at the thought as he studied the arrowhead and looked up. “I’d like to go back in there, Ben. Take another shot at it.”
There was dogged determination in his voice.
“Okay,” Ben said. “See what you can find. Footprints, articles of clothing, any signs of foul play.” He reached into the back seat. “Here, you may need these.” He handed Dan a pair of latex gloves and some more plastic specimen bags.
Dan put down the map, took the bags, and went back into the cornfield, intent on scouring the area one last time for clues.
“You know, it’s really strange,” he called out after a few minutes. “I can’t get over the way the ground is all stirred up, like a bomb went off or something.” A little while later he shouted back over his shoulder in a sullen tone. “Well, nothing here, Ben. Just… Hey! Wait a minute!” He perked up.
There on the ground not ten feet away, the glint of something trapped in the tangled mass of stalks and husks had caught his eye. He approached the object and knelt down. The earth all around was churned up and had a strange gauzy look to it, like cotton mixed in with the soil. Picking up the object with his gloved hand, Dan brushed it clean and gave it a once-over before placing it in a specimen bag. As an afterthought, he scooped up some of the strange-looking white soil, filled several specimen bags, and returned to the cruiser, holding up his shiny-object find to Ben.
Ben squinted. “Ah, looks like a gold band wedding ring.” He took the bag for a closer look. “Woman’s ring by the size of it. Stone’s missing. Hmm, appears to be something engraved on the inside. Can’t quite make it out.” He handed the bag back to Dan. “If we can find the owner of this, it just might lead us to the girl. We’ll have the boys in forensics see what they can make of it. Good work, Dan.” He did a quick double take. “So, what’s in the other bags?”
“Oh, just some soil samples.” Dan held up a bag so Ben could see. “Looks kinda strange, dontcha think?”
Ben grunted. “If you say so. Tag them for forensics.”
Dan labeled and dated the specimen bags—August 20, 1999—while Ben put the finishing touches on his report.
“Not much more we can do now,” Ben said. “Go ahead and mark off the area with yellow crime tape. I’d like to come back with a shovel and cadaver dog and see what else we can find. If the boys’ stories are true, though, I doubt we’ll find anything. Simply no time to bury a body.”
Dan nodded in agreement as he glanced down at the group of specimens.
“So, really Ben. What should I do with this arrowhead?”
Ben harrumphed. “Add it to your collection of Indian artifacts.”
Dan’s brow furrowed as he studied the arrowhead. “Don’t have a collection,” he called out.
“Then start one!” Ben shouted back.
Copyright 2022 by Stephen Goldhahn