Just before dawn on that Sunday morning in October, two seven-year-old boys, Jacob Feugit called Jac, and his twin half-brother, Quoddy ran away from their home in the Estates at Shady Walk subdivision. Fleeing immanent pursuit, they climbed down into the culvert by the side of Twelve Point Road and crawled under a breach at the base of the Tweedle’s fence. The declivity and an excess of fencing that had been pushed in at the bottom by a car accident provided the opening. They had come to that place from their house, picking their way through the moonlit woods at the end of their cul-de-sac, and emerged upon the other side where Route 557 ran away west and south and intersected with Twelve Point Road.
The boys would have continued down Route 557 for it went by their first intended stop, the Black Mill Tavern , except a stranger had frightened them and they were trying to find a place to hide. The two had a specific itinerary in mind when they left that morning. They wished to obtain some of the sacred Meteusaconk spring water that they had been told welled up somewhere within the Tavern. They wanted the help of a man their father had called Barbarossa to find their mother. They would bring the water to Crater Lake where they hoped it would provoke the Jersey Devil to rise up out of the lake and give them their true names. Then they could be Namers and try to restore The Balance; but not because it would save the world, as their father’s fairy tale claimed it might, but because they hoped it would make their mother, Charlene and their father, Finn and Papa a family again.
Across the street from Jac and Quoddy’s house, in the driveway of a new construction, a house as yet unsold, and so unoccupied, two men sat in the darkened cab of the van with the words ‘Lorner Plumbing Heating and Air Conditioning’ printed on the side. The men argued as the two small boys crept around the side of their house to the front, wearing backpacks and carrying flashlights.
“I’m telling you that’s where she lives, across the street, in that big house, -, Destiny. Only that’s not her real name.” In the passenger seat sat fifteen year old Stevie Pinto. T-shirt on a wire hanger build, thin-face with acne and a wisp of a mustache and goatee, he held a can of beer. “No shit – you mean a stripper using a fake name.” answered the man in the driver’s seat.
“Her name’s Charlene. I saw her one day at the kiddie park, so I followed her back here. I knocked on the door, and sure enough it was her, -, I saw the tat on her ankle.”
“The stripper you’re always going on about? So, did you ask her out?” the man in the driver’s seat chuckled. Earl Lorner, although much older than his companion had a young face and could have been anywhere from 35 to 50. The linebacker-sized man was clean shaven with a gelled black pompadour and Elvis sideburns. The hunting coveralls Earl wore didn’t square with his fastidious grooming and feminine lips and cheekbones but projected the unsettling suggestion of the Las Vegas costume worn by his hair-sake.