Chapter One
The Dead Of Winter
They placed him in solitary confinement and took away his shoelaces and any personal possessions he could possibly use to hurt himself with. You wouldn't find anything about solitary confinement in any of Montauk Hills brochures, even though this is the way they handled the kids considered to be a problem child. They would put them in solitary confinement, alienate them and coerce them into a confession. Mostly kids got put in solitary confinement for simple things like lying or getting caught smoking in the woods. The worse thing anyone had done to get put in solitary confinement was stealing. Taking a life made all of these other offenses look small.
He sat on the bare mattress and looked at the walls. In the begining they gave him a tranquilizer and later some codeine for the back pain. He couldn't recall how he had hurt his back but his back was badly bruised, he had to lie on his side, and he felt both anxious and fatigued but he didn't want to sleep, because he might dream about it, that awful thing that happened in the woods. Images swirled inside of his head but he had been unable to piece them together. If he allowed himself to go to sleep it might find it's way into his dreams and he'd be back in the woods.
AND SEE THAT AWFUL THING. BRYCE. HIS BROTHER.
All across the news networks the story played. They were saying that he did an awful thing, and no one had anything good to say about him. His own grandfather thought that he was guilty. Even his friends thought he was guilty, and he understood why. Before going to Montauk Hills he and his brother were close. They started mistrusting one another, saying bad things about each other, they told on each other and they took things from one another. A few weeks ago they even got into a fist fight and the worker that broke up the fight had gotten injured. So far he hadn't reported it-but it was only a matter of time.
This wasn't right. Just because they sometimes got into it didn't mean he would take his own brothers life. He couldn't do that! His brother was all he had. Everyone else was dead or just gone. He didn't! He couldn't have! But each time he tried to sleep, he saw the blood on the ground, the deep wound, the lifeless eyes. His brother, cold and white in the woods. He had been in the woods. For what reason? He couldn't have had anything to do with his brothers death. That wasn't so. He didn't take his life. He felt that in his soul.
BUT EVERYONE THOUGHT HE WAS GUILTY.
