Becoming the Boogeyman

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For Billy and Noah

a note to readers

Becoming the Boogeyman is a work of fiction, continuing the homage to my hometown and my ongoing passion for true crime. As with my previous book (Chasing the Boogeyman), there are slices of life depicted throughout that are very much inspired by my personal history, but other events and real people and places and media outlets / social media platforms / publications are used fictitiously, and to provide verisimilitude to this crime novel. Other names, characters, settings, and events come directly from my imagination, which remains at times a rather unsettling landscape.

BEFORE

The Baltimore Sun (June 3, 1988)

EDGEWOOD GIRL FOUND MURDERED

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 2, members of the Harford County Sheriff’s Department discovered the body of 15-year-old Natasha Gallagher in the woods behind her house on Hawthorne Drive.

The teenager was reported missing earlier that morning by her mother, Catherine Gallagher, after she found the girl’s bedroom window open, a broken screen on the ground below, and what looked like a smear of blood on the windowsill…

Harford County Aegis (June 23, 1988)

TWO EDGEWOOD GIRLS DEAD—WAS IT THE BOOGEYMAN?

Just before midnight on Monday, June 20, local police discovered the body of 15-year-old Kacey Robinson at the playground of the Cedar Drive Elementary School. She had been beaten and strangled.

Robinson had disappeared from the vicinity of her home on Cherry Road at approximately 9 p.m. the night before. After a brief search, her father, Bob Robinson, located one of his daughter’s tennis shoes in the middle of the street and immediately called 911…

Channel 2 News transcript (June 25, 1988)

REPORTER: We’re back with Evelyn Robinson, the very brave mother of Kacey Robinson, talking about the Boogeyman, which is what the local and national media are calling this phantomlike stalker. It’s my understanding that the nickname first appeared in a police report filed several weeks before Kacey’s disappearance, and that your youngest daughter, Janie, is responsible.

EVELYN ROBINSON: Yes, that’s right.

REPORTER: And how old is Janie?

EVELYN ROBINSON: She’s seven.

REPORTER: So, walk us through the events. Late one night in May, Janie wakes you up. Can you tell us what happened next?

EVELYN ROBINSON: She came into our room and told me and my husband that the Boogeyman was trying to get into her window and could she please sleep the rest of the night with us.

REPORTER: And how did you respond?

EVELYN ROBINSON: We told her there was no such thing as the Boogeyman and that it was just another nightmare, but she was so upset that we agreed to make an exception just this one time. The next morning, she was back to her normal self, so I didn’t think about it again… until I heard the news about Natasha Gallagher.

REPORTER: What did you do then?

EVELYN ROBINSON: My husband called the police and told them the whole story. They came out to the house and searched the yard and took fingerprints. But they didn’t find anything and told us that most likely we’d been right the first time—that our daughter had probably just had a bad dream.

REPORTER: Did you believe them?

EVELYN ROBINSON: I honestly didn’t know what to believe. I still don’t. I mean, what if all of us are wrong—and Janie’s right? What if someone really did try to break into her window that night? What if there really is a Boogeyman… and he came back and got Kacey?

A Current Affair transcript (August 15, 1988)

MAURY POVICH: Edgewood, Maryland. A small, peaceful working-class town nestled on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Little League baseball parades and Fourth of July carnivals. The kind of place where people don’t bother to lock their doors at night. [in a deeper voice] Edgewood, Maryland… a close-knit community now held hostage in a death grip of terror and paranoia. Three young girls. Savagely beaten and murdered. The killer has been christened the Boogeyman because of his ability to strike close to home and vanish without a trace. As one frustrated lawman lamented soon after the discovery of the latest victim: It’s like the guy sliced open a hole in the night and disappeared back into it.

Madeline Wilcox was eighteen years old. Beautiful. Kind. A bright future ahead of her. Her nude body was found under a bridge on Friday morning, August 12, by local fishermen. She’d been brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled. There were bite marks on her torso, as well as ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. The killer took his time—and tortured her.

I’m here this evening with FBI profiler Robert Neville—a man who has witnessed this type of grisly aftermath before. Welcome, Robert.

ROBERT NEVILLE: Thank you, Maury. I wish I was here under different circumstances.

MAURY POVICH: Three young girls murdered within a period of ten weeks. What can you tell us about the madman who is prowling the dark streets of Edgewood?

ROBERT NEVILLE: We believe he’s in his mid to late twenties or thirties. A white male. Likely single or divorced. Average or slightly higher than average intelligence. Good physical condition. He’s either unemployed or has a job that allows him to move around freely at night.

MAURY POVICH: And he has a very distinct M.O.

ROBERT NEVILLE: He does, indeed. The victims are young, attractive, popular. They all have long hair. The wounds left on their bodies are nearly identical. Facial injuries. Bite marks. Strangulation. He severed each of the girls’ left ears and took them with him. The last two girls were sexually assaulted before they were killed, signifying an acceleration of violence. When he’s finished, he poses the bodies.

MAURY POVICH: The murders possess an almost Grand Guignol sense of exhibition, as if the killer views himself as some kind of a performance artist. Do you think this is intentional?

ROBERT NEVILLE: Oh, most certainly. Look at the locations and the manner in which he poses the bodies. He wants them to be discovered. He wants an audience for his handiwork. Something else interesting, Maury… I’ve recently learned that the killer has left behind cryptic messages for the police after each murder. Telltales, of a sort. I have no idea as to what they are, but this pattern demonstrates…

Channel 11 News transcript (September 10, 1988)

NEWS ANCHOR: Johnathon Slate is live at Edgewood High School this morning with breaking news. What can you tell us, Johnathon?

JOHNATHON SLATE: Thanks, Jeff. Neighbors here in the Edgewood Meadows community are on high alert. Yesterday evening at around 7:30 p.m., seventeen-year-old Annie Riggs, a senior at Edgewood High School, was walking home after field hockey practice when she was attacked from behind by what she described as a large man dressed in dark pants and a dark long-sleeved shirt. He was wearing gloves and a crude mask with the eyeholes cut out. After a brief struggle, the teenager was able to use pepper spray on her attacker and flee to a nearby house to call police.

NEWS ANCHOR: What a courageous young lady. Now, it’s my understanding that the mask was left behind at the scene…

Maryland State Police report

CID#17-C-9304

November 1, 1988

… when I noticed flickering lights coming from the grounds of the Edgewood Memorial Gardens off Trimble Road. I parked and immediately began searching the property. A short time later, I discovered the partially clothed body of a young female with long blonde hair. She was positioned in front of a headstone and surrounded by six still-lit jack-o’-lanterns. She appeared to have been beaten and sexually assaulted. I counted over a dozen bite marks on her chest, torso, and legs. Once I confirmed that the female victim was deceased, I radioed for backup…

Harford County Aegis (February 23, 1989)

THE FAMILIES MOURN AND REMEMBER

By Carly Albright and Richard Chizmar

WBAL News Radio 1090 AM / 101.5 FM (April 3, 1989)

DJ: The task force—headed by Detective Sergeant Lyle Harper and composed of members of the Harford County Sheriff’s Department, Maryland State Police, and Federal Bureau of Investigation—promised during last night’s press conference to continue pursuing active leads and interviewing additional persons of interest. The tip line remains open.

The murders of Natasha Gallagher, Kacey Robinson, Madeline Wilcox, and Cassidy Burch—all residents of Edgewood—remain unsolved.

Harford County Aegis display advertisement (April 19, 1990)

CAROL’S BOOKSTORE

Come Meet Hometown Author

RICHARD CHIZMAR

author of

THE BOOGEYMAN: A True Story of Small-Town Evil

Get Your Book SIGNED!

Fangoria (May 1990, Issue #92)

Nightmare Library Reviews

The Boogeyman: A True Story of Small-Town Evil

296 pages

ISBN 1587678820

$19.95

Richard Chizmar, editor and publisher of the fledging horror magazine Cemetery Dance, has given us a heart-wrenching and terrifying small-town crime narrative that also delivers a satisfying dose of coming-of-age nostalgia…

CNN.com

(September 7, 2019)

Laurie Wyatt, CNN—Hanover, Pennsylvania

BREAKING NEWS—THE BOOGEYMAN IN CUSTODY

… to recap this afternoon’s breaking news, members of both the Pennsylvania and Maryland State Police executed a search warrant on a residential home in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and took 54-year-old Joshua Gallagher into custody, charging him with the 1988 murders of four Edgewood, Maryland, teenagers, including his younger sister, Natasha Gallagher.

According to a police spokesperson, Gallagher, a longtime employee of Reuter’s Machinery, had been under surveillance for an undisclosed amount of time, while police awaited the results of a DNA test…

Interview transcript excerpt—Maryland Penitentiary, Baltimore, MD (December 5, 2019)

RICHARD CHIZMAR: The media came up with a number of nicknames for you. The Boogeyman was the one that stuck. Were you pleased with that name or indifferent?

JOSHUA GALLAGHER: I was pleased. [pause] It seemed to fit, and that was the first time I was able to put a name to the bad thing living inside me.

RICHARD CHIZMAR: You actually began to think of that part of yourself as the Boogeyman?

JOSHUA GALLAGHER: I did, yes.

RICHARD CHIZMAR: What do you mean when you say the name seemed to fit?

JOSHUA GALLAGHER: On the nights I hunted, I felt… different. I felt powerful. Bold. Invincible. At one with the night around me. As if I could fly and pass through walls and make myself invisible.

RICHARD CHIZMAR: You really believed you could do those things?

JOSHUA GALLAGHER: I could. I did. That’s why they never caught me.

Vanity Fair feature article (January 2020)

GROWING UP WITH A KILLER:

THE SAGA OF JOSHUA GALLAGHER & RICHARD CHIZMAR

… and in what has become one of the most talked about stories of 2019, we recently learned that Richard Chizmar is the only journalist that confessed serial killer Joshua Gallagher has agreed to speak with. Chizmar and Gallagher grew up two blocks away from each other in the small Maryland town of Edgewood and attended the same high school. In the late 1980s, Chizmar, a budding horror author at the time, wrote The Boogeyman: A True Story of Small-Town Evil, chronicling Gallagher’s five-month reign of terror. Gallagher is mentioned several times in the book, but only as the older brother of the first girl who was killed, Natasha Gallagher. Never as a suspect. The Boogeyman was released by regional publisher Eastbrook Press in April 1990 and by all accounts sold only a couple of thousand copies. There was no subsequent paperback edition, and it eventually went out of print in 1995. Suffice to say, Chizmar is staring at a much larger payday this time around.

Publishers Marketplace deal report (November 20, 2020)

CHIZMAR’S BOOGEYMAN SPOOKS GALLERY

After an exclusive submission, Gallery Books’ Ed Schlesinger preempted Richard Chizmar’s true crime memoir Chasing the Boogeyman. Kristin Nelson at Nelson Literary Agency handled the North American and open market rights agreement. Nelson said the book, which concerns a string of grisly murders in small town suburbia…

Channel 13 News transcript (August 17, 2021)

NEWS ANCHOR: I’m here this morning with Richard Chizmar, author of the much anticipated Chasing the Boogeyman, a true crime thriller with heaps of advance buzz, as well as a highly publicized movie deal with Paramount Pictures. Today is release day, and Chizmar will be signing copies this evening at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Bel Air. Richard, good morning and welcome. How does it feel to be a hometown hero?

RICHARD CHIZMAR: [laughs] I wouldn’t go that far… but it’s all very exciting. I’m looking forward to hearing what people think of the book and hopefully meeting a lot of new readers.

Goodreads—Community Ratings and Reviews

Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar

(Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books)

megs_bookshelf rated it. ✩✩✩✩✩

One of the best true crime books I’ve ever read. As much about the victims and the promising lives they once led as the unraveling of the mystery behind the killer. Told with an underlying sense of humanity and dignity, Chasing the Boogeyman is a triumph.

Alex rated it ✩✩

As I was reading Chasing the Boogeyman I couldn’t help but think about the families of the victims. It’s a decent story but at what cost and what purpose? When I turned the last page, I felt like I needed a shower.

Justin rated it ✩✩✩✩✩

Tense. Thought provoking. Heartbreaking. A must read for all true crime fans.

destiny rated it ✩

Sensationalistic crap. Don’t see what all the fuss is about and I wish I could get my money back. Not recommended.

Harford County Aegis—Letters to the Editor (November 4, 2021)

… and that’s precisely my point in writing today. As a lifelong resident and community leader in Edgewood, I would like to address the recent publication and rampant celebration of Richard Chizmar’s Chasing the Boogeyman. While many misinformed and miseducated individuals are claiming that Mr. Chizmar has put Edgewood on the map, I feel strongly that he has done nothing more than add to Edgewood’s longstanding reputation of ill repute. Upon reading no further than the introductory matter of Chasing the Boogeyman, it became painfully clear that Mr. Chizmar should have titled his book Chasing the Great American Dollar. To make matters worse, the only thing worse than Chizmar’s ghastly subject matter is his sophomoric purple prose. Both are worthy of the internet tabloids…

Variety (April 11, 2022)

While some critics have accused Chizmar of dipping his pen in a fountain of golden-tinged nostalgia, Martin Blevins from the Washington Post described the film version of Chizmar’s acclaimed book as "The Wonder Years meets The Silence of the Lambs" and an unqualified success. After making its debut earlier this year at Sundance, The Boogeyman has gone on to amass surprisingly strong box office returns and looks to perform even stronger via streaming outlets. Based on the New York Times and USA Today bestselling book by Richard Chizmar, The Boogeyman tells the story of one small town’s descent…

The True Crime Forum message board (April 17, 2022)

Thread: Chasing the Boogeyman

Started: August 17, 2021

Page 114 of 114

SHIRLEY FINCH

(Sunday, April 17, 2022, 7:14pm) We read it last month in our book club and everyone loved it. We always give the books we read grades and the only one ranked higher is I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK.

NIGHTHAWK

(Sunday, April 17, 2022, 7:16pm) Can you really swab a piece of furniture for DNA or was that made up?

GREG SALLADE

(Sunday, April 17, 2022, 7:23pm) Good book not great but good

KRIS WEBSTER

(Sunday, April 17, 2022, 7:27pm) What about all those rumors that Gallagher isn’t human? Back in 88 one woman told a reporter she saw a dark figure, seven feet tall, unfurl wings and fly over her backyard fence. Someone else swore they saw a man with horns protruding from his forehead trying to break into their basement door. Seems like there were a lot of stories going around like that.

THE SPLAT PACK

(Sunday, April 17, 2022, 7:34pm) It’s blood money, plain & simple. You see Chizmar’s house in that Vanity Fair article? Holy shit! Who the hell has a lake in their side yard?

SEXYLEXI

(Sunday, April 17, 2022, 7:35pm) I thought the same fucking thing… the House That The Boogeyman Built!!!

From: Kristin Nelson

To: Richard Chizmar

May 3, 2022 at 10:29 PM

Hodder & Stoughton, Sperling & Kupfer, and Paramount are offering to co-sponsor a European tour to promote the paperback/overseas film releases. Six countries in 15 days. Kara can go with. They’ll let us know proposed dates next week. Discuss later this afternoon?

-kn

NOW

Excerpt from phone interview with Peter Atkins, correctional officer at Cumberland Penitentiary, recorded on May 5, 2022:

ATKINS: He’s a big reader. Paperback westerns mostly. Oaters, he calls them. He gets books by the boxload with all the bad parts blacked out. He’s not allowed anything too violent or sexual. He also subscribes to a couple different newspapers.

CHIZMAR: Anything else you can think of?

ATKINS: He’s a big game player. Chess. Backgammon. Crossword puzzles. And a lot of cards. Hearts. Spades. Bridge. You name it. He’s pretty good, from what I hear.

CHIZMAR: Any disturbing or unusual interactions?

ATKINS: Well, I mean Gallagher’s a weird dude, for sure. Keeps to himself mostly. He’s usually in his cell sleeping or answering mail. God, he gets a ton of mail. He also talks to himself a lot.

CHIZMAR: What does he say when he talks to himself?

ATKINS: Usually just mumbling that I can’t understand a lick of… although I’ve heard bits and pieces here and there. One time he said clear as day, Hair like sunshine, eyes like pennies. Another time it was I keep trying, but there’s no answer.

CHIZMAR: Anything else that you can remember?

ATKINS: [hesitates] There was one time… at night… I was doing my rounds and I walked by his cell, and Gallagher wasn’t there. I swear to Christ he wasn’t. His bunk was empty. He wasn’t on the toilet. He wasn’t anywhere. Right away, I broke out in a cold sweat and unhooked my radio from my belt, but by the time I got it to my mouth and looked up again, he was lying there on his bunk. Curled on his side, facing the wall, snoring.

CHIZMAR: What did you do?

ATKINS: What could I do? Nothing. It was the weirdest thing. I know I didn’t imagine it, but what else could it have been? A trick of the light is what Bobby Deakins said when I told him about it the next morning, but come on. I’ve been working at that shithole for fifteen years now. The light ain’t that tricky. Still gives me the heebie-jeebies every time I think about it.

ONE

LIFE AND DEATH

He wanted to be seen. This was a performance.

1

The morning of Friday, June 3, 2022, dawned cloudy and unseasonably cool. I watched from my bedroom window as wisps of ground fog—a legion of restless ghosts haunting the predawn—drifted slowly across the dark surface of the pond before dissipating in the woods beyond. Even though I was lying snug beneath a blanket, the sight raised gooseflesh on my arms and sent a chill scampering across the back of my neck.

Later, when the memory returned to me in the midst of a nightmare, I realized it had been an omen of what was yet to come.

2

The house I lived in with my wife, Kara, and my sons, Billy and Noah, was actually two houses in one. The original home—built in 1796 by Thomas Moore, a prominent miller and tanner, and soon after christened Mooresland Manor—was constructed of rough blocks of stone taken from a local quarry. A second, much larger section was added by Moore’s eldest son, Eli, in 1841. As a result, the house had two foyers, two sets of stairs leading to the upper floors, and two front-facing living rooms. This was how 701 Southampton Road, Bel Air, Maryland (a mere fifteen-minute drive from Edgewood), became known as the House with Two Front Doors.

The surrounding seven-acre property boasted a spring-fed pond, a meandering creek, an orchard, open fields, and woods. Geese, deer, foxes, and raccoons were regular visitors.

A U-shaped driveway and low stone wall fronted the house, with nearly 150 yards of head-high wooden fencing running along the eastern border of the property, shielding the pond and side meadow from passing cars and pedestrians. A narrow strip of grass and a gravel shoulder separated the fence line from Southampton Road.

It was there, leaning against a fire hydrant, that JJ—Billy’s nine-month-old Bernese mountain dog—discovered the garbage bag.

3

A lot had changed in my world since the August 2021 publication of Chasing the Boogeyman.

Most of it good, but not all of it.

My oldest son, Billy, had recently graduated from Colby College in Maine and was once again living in his third-story attic bedroom, spending his days writing and editing fiction and working on various film projects. He’d listened dutifully to all the well-meaning warnings and lectures regarding how difficult it would be to follow in his old man’s footsteps, but in the end, he’d ignored each and every one of them and forged ahead anyway. I was proud of him. He was working hard and had already earned considerably more success than his father had managed at that age.

Billy’s younger brother, Noah, had just completed his freshman year at the University of Virginia. He was spending the summer mowing grass at a golf course in Charlottesville and taking a four-credit statistics class. He’d recently moved into an apartment with three of his lacrosse teammates and together they were learning the finer points of cooking, cleaning, and figuring out how to find and hold on to a girlfriend. Kara and I FaceTimed and spoke on the telephone with Noah several times a week, but it wasn’t the same as having him home. We missed him terribly.

It didn’t help matters that I was feeling homesick myself. The runaway success of Chasing the Boogeyman had led to a seemingly endless string of promotional appearances. Due to COVID restrictions, I’d spent most of the late summer and fall of 2021 participating in dozens of virtual book clubs. That hadn’t been so bad. Wash my face, throw on a clean shirt, click a Zoom link, and spend an hour or two hawking books from the comfort of my own home. Easy enough.

But then the holiday season arrived—just as COVID constraints were lifted—and the publicity machine shifted into high gear. Instead of lounging in my home office, talking to a computer screen, I was suddenly crisscrossing the country with a revolving cast of barely-old-enough-to-drink publicists assigned by my publicity director. In-person bookstore signings, radio and television interviews, early morning talk shows, bookfairs (never in my life had I ever imagined there were so many blasted bookfairs)—you name it, I did it.

And to the publicists’ credit, the hustle seemed to work.

Chasing the Boogeyman stuck around on the hardcover bestseller lists for seventeen consecutive weeks—a rare occurrence these days unless your last name happens to be Grisham, King, or Patterson—and when it finally dropped off in mid-January, it didn’t go very far.

Retail sales remained surprisingly strong throughout the early quarter of 2022. The book surged into a fifth and sixth printing. Eventually, I ran out of bookfairs to attend and got to stay home for a couple of months, long enough to welcome a new puppy to the family and put the finishing touches on a manuscript I had started the previous summer. I even managed to regain a few pounds from Kara’s home cooking.

And then it felt like I blinked one morning, and the movie version of Chasing the Boogeyman hit U.S. theaters and pay-per-view channels—and off I went again. More red-eye flights and hotel rooms, more signings and interviews, and you guessed it, more bookfairs.

In the past six weeks, I’d only been home long enough to sleep a handful of nights in my own bed—and it didn’t look like that was going to change any time soon. With the movie scheduled for overseas release in mid-July, I was already preparing for a whirlwind promotional tour spanning much of Europe.

Kara, who had recently purchased a brand-new set of luggage for the trip, was over-the-moon excited and counting down the days until we boarded the plane.

I was not.

I was dog-tired and moody as hell. Most days, shuffling around the house or my hotel room enveloped within a hazy, dark cloud of unshakable melancholy. Or as my dear departed father would have said: walking around in a serious funk.

Most likely, I was burned-out. I’d always been a loner by nature, and socializing with friends and strangers alike—even the wonderfully supportive group of readers I’d been blessed with—took a lot out of me. Being a writer had normally been such a solitary activity in my life. I sat by myself in an office with no windows and tapped away on my laptop. That was it; that was the job. But the landscape was different now, the stakes higher, and I was the first to admit that all the travel and publicity had worn me down—not only physically, but also mentally.

Or maybe what I was feeling was just part of life, part of growing older and learning how to embrace the future and let go of the past—something I struggled with, even on my best days. All I knew was that despite my recent successes, the world felt somehow heavier. And with the exception of the ongoing horrors of the pandemic, I could honestly think of only one good reason for that.

The previous fall, one of my best friends in the world, Carly Albright, had lost her husband to cancer. On the October morning he’d been diagnosed, Walter Scroggins was in perhaps the best shape of his life. He cycled and jogged several times a week and played eighteen holes of golf (he was a walker, too—no electric carts for Walter) and mixed doubles tennis on the weekends; he and Carly were even learning how to play pickleball and had recently joined a league at their gym. Six weeks later, he was gone. At the time, it’d felt as if a tornado had touched down out of nowhere and ravaged the lives of an amazing woman and her three beautiful daughters, and then up and blown away without a trace into the treetops. The rest of us had been left standing there dazed and confused, staring up at tranquil, baby blue skies, and wondering: Did that really just happen?

And when it was over—after all the tears and hugs and Saran-wrapped casseroles; after the final black-clad mourner had shuffled out of the memorial service and into the parking lot and the heavy doors had closed and the lights dimmed, and the world went suddenly still and silent—what then could you possibly say to a woman who meant so much to you, to a woman who had just buried the beating heart of her entire universe?

I’m so sorry for your loss. I love you dearly and I’m here for you always.

As it turned out, those were the exact same words pretty much every one else had said to Carly Albright on that dark and dreary day—and during all the days that followed.

So tell me then, how in God’s name could they have been the right words, the best words, I could muster? When it mattered most, how could they have even made the slightest bit of difference?

No wonder it’d felt as if she were so disappointed in me.

When everything was said and done, as autumn passed into winter and winter gave way to the promise of a new year, it felt as though I’d lost the both of them. Kara and I hadn’t seen Carly since before the holidays, at a gift exchange dinner at a crowded Baltimore restaurant that had felt forced and hollow from the onset. Carly and I still spoke on the telephone, but only occasionally and rarely at length anymore. She was different now. Harder-edged. Always busy. Always trying to distract or forget. She often used the girls as an excuse for not having any free time, but how could I take issue with that? How could I blame her? The landscape of our relationship had shifted beneath our feet and we had become like strangers to each other. I knew this sort of thing happened all the time, but it made me sad to think about, so most days I tried not to. Most days, I tried not to think of her at all.

Finally, and perhaps weighing most heavily of all upon my shoulders, was the shameful, secret notion that I was walking around every day feeling like an ungrateful prick. There’s a scene in one of my favorite movies, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, where Mr. Wonka says to his younger protégé, But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.

What happened? Charlie asks.

Mr. Wonka grins his impish grin and says, He lived happily ever after.

Happily ever after.

God knows that should have been me.

As a two-time cancer survivor by the time I was thirty, I’ve always climbed out of bed each morning embracing an overwhelming sense of gratitude—for Kara and the boys; our wonderful families and friends; our pack of dogs and our lovely home; the clean air to breathe and the warmth of sunshine on my face. If there was one thing I’d learned over the years, it was to take absolutely nothing for granted—including, of course, my career as a writer.

From the time I was a boy, I’d always been a dreamer, but I’d never dreamed this big.

Never once had I entertained the thought of cowriting books with Stephen King or hitting international bestseller lists or having my stories adapted into movies and television series. Hell, I’d never even imagined speaking at a bookfair.

Yet it was happening. It was all coming true.

So why then, Mr. Chizmar, all the doom and gloom and bitching and moaning?

That’s exactly what I was trying to figure out.

And pretty much the only reason I was up and out the door so early on that chilly June morning, walking JJ on a leash instead of letting him scamper out the doggy door along with the rest of his siblings into the fenced-in backyard. I’d figured a good, strong dose of fresh air and exercise might help to clear my head. It might even help me to sleep better at night.

That was the plan, anyway.

4

It had rained most of the week, and there were puddles scattered along the driveway and the shoulder of the road. The front yard was soggy and the grass needed to be cut. By the time we reached the fence post that marked the border of our property, my shoes and socks were soaked. JJ, of course, paid no mind to any of this. Tail wagging, nose hovering an inch or so above the ground, he dragged me onward along the fence line, stopping every so often to lift his leg and mark his territory. Still half-asleep, I yawned and let him lead the way. I was in no particular hurry, and the only notable thought bouncing around inside my head was a half-hearted debate involving what I was planning to eat for breakfast. A part of me was leaning toward a relatively healthy combination of cereal and fresh fruit. Maybe some yogurt. A much larger part was craving a cholesterol time bomb of bacon and eggs served with a side of biscuits and sausage gravy. And a sixteen-ounce Sprite to wash it all down. It wasn’t a tough decision.

I was trying to figure out where I could hide a big pot of sausage gravy from my wife when JJ suddenly skidded to a halt—and started growling.

JJ was a lot of things—sixty-five pounds of fluffy cuteness, hilariously clumsy, endlessly hungry, and annoyingly energetic at bedtime—but a growler wasn’t one of them.

What’s wrong, JJ? I asked, following his intense stare.

There was a shiny black garbage bag leaning against a fire hydrant maybe twenty or thirty yards ahead of us.

JJ growled louder and retreated a few steps.

C’mon, boy. It’s okay. Let’s go see. I gave the leash a gentle tug, trying to nudge him forward. He stared at me and refused to budge.

I’ll give you a treat when we get home. C’mon, boy. You want a treat?

He tilted his head to the side and licked his lips, considering my offer. After a moment, once again betrayed by his stomach, he inched forward until he drew even with me. He whined and nuzzled my leg with his nose. The message was clear: he’d go with me if he had to, but he was no longer interested in leading the way.

Big chicken, I said, and started walking. Scared of a bag of trash.

Head hanging in shame, tail tucked between his legs, JJ followed reluctantly behind me.

Southampton Road cut through the heart of Bel Air, and along with the frequent traffic came quite a bit of roadside litter. Kara and I may have felt as though we lived in the middle of nowhere with our little plot of land and our towering two-hundred-year-old trees, all safely hidden behind a tall fence, but in reality, we lived right smack-dab in the middle of town, not even a half mile away from a number of schools and grocery stores, not to mention 7-Eleven, Taco Bell, and Dunkin’ Donuts.

I had already picked up a couple of fast-food wrappers and an empty cigarette pack and stuffed them into the back pocket of my jeans to dispose of later. Other days, it might have been discarded beer cans or broken liquor bottles, windswept pieces of junk mail or cardboard pizza boxes, sunglasses with one of the