The Water Tower in the Woods

In a small Indiana town of about 4,000 people, a water tower stood past the edge of town, visible from almost anywhere. The town's name had been painted on its side in letters that had long since faded. For a group of thirteen-year-old boys in the late 1980s, that tower was their secret kingdom—a place to drink warm beer stolen from Cooch's uncle's garage, tell ghost stories, and feel like they were getting away with something just by sitting a hundred feet above a town that thought they were asleep in bed.

The story they kept coming back to was about Aaron Pruitt, a sixteen-year-old who had been found dead on that same catwalk three summers earlier. The official cause was dehydration. A healthy boy had died of thirst while sitting on top of the town's entire water supply—a million gallons behind a quarter inch of steel. The coroner blamed drugs, but the boys knew something the adults didn't: there were no drugs in Aaron's system. Dinny's mom worked at the clinic and had seen the tox report. The grown-ups settled on the drug explanation because the alternative was too disturbing—that Aaron had been stuck up there, unable to climb down, and had died rather than descend.

The night everything changed