Crooked (14 page)

“What's what?”

“The envelope with your name on it.”

Amos gave her a blank look.

“Right here,” Clara said, pointing.

Amos stood and came over. He pulled out the tack, opened the pleated envelope, and read the letter. Confusion rose in his eyes, then his face stiffened.

“What's the matter?” Clara asked.

When Amos said nothing, she turned to Bruce, who had also grown oddly still.

“What?” Clara asked, feeling suddenly scared.

Amos extended the letter toward her. She read it once and then twice and still didn't know what it meant. It was typewritten in all caps:

DEAR MR. AMOS,

DATES AND TIMES OF FUENRALS ARE EASY TO GET AND I'VE HEARD OF BAD THINGS HAPPENING SO I DECIDED TO WATCH OVER THINGS WHILE YOU WERE OUT.

SIGNED YOUR VERY OWN GARDIAN ANGLE.

P.S. I MISPLACED SOMETHING WHILE I WAS POKING AROUND, IF YOU FIND IT JUST LET IT GO.

“Creepy,” Bruce said. “Also, your guardian angel can't spell.”

“Neither can Eddie Tripp,” Amos said.

“You think?” Bruce said. “I mean,
they
cracked
your
head with a bat. You owe them one, not vice versa.”

“Yeah, but you're thinking like a human being, which the Tripps aren't,” Amos said. “They think I ratted on Charles. They think I put him in juvenile hall.”

“Did you?” Clara said. She'd remembered her conversation with Eddie in front of her locker—the part where he'd said somebody was a smudge and a stoolie.

“No,” Amos said. “I
should've,
but I didn't. I said it was too dark to tell.”

The room was quiet while this sank in. Then Clara spoke. “So how come you didn't identify them?” she said, stopping herself from adding “innyhoo.”

“Don't know.” Then: “Actually I do. I was afraid what the Tripps would do if I ratted on them.” Amos smiled unhappily. “Now I'm finding out what they would do if I didn't.”

Bruce, after staring at the note for a few moments, straightened himself and went into his Rod Serling/Twilight Zone voice: “Presenting for your consideration, a note from the great devoid.” Then, in his normal voice, Bruce said, “Well, I guess we'd better look around for whatever it is your guardian angel left behind.”

They proceeded gingerly, looking under the bed, in corners, under cushions. Clara didn't know about Amos and Crookshank, but she hoped very much that she wouldn't find anything. She had just gotten up her courage to look behind the window curtains when the door swung open behind them.

Liz stood in the doorway looking more furious than Clara had ever seen a girl look in real life. In her hand was a Tupperware container.

“What do you know about this?” she asked in a shaky voice. Her face looked not so much white as simply without color.

“About what?” Amos said.

“About somebody's sick trick, and I'm telling you, Amos, if this is your doing, or yours and your pals'”—here she let her eyes swipe past Bruce—“there are going to be real consequences.”

Even while listening to Liz, Clara couldn't take her eyes off the closed plastic container Liz held in her hand. Suddenly Clara heard herself say, “What's in the Tupperware?”

Liz turned toward Clara, then looked down at the plastic container. She peeled back its beige lid and tilted the container forward for Clara to see.

It had been a dessert, some sort of frozen lemon or pineapple custard, Clara guessed. But now, frozen on top, in a neat coil, was the pencil-thin body of a small red snake.

22

A SHORT VISIT FROM DETECTIVE O'HEARN

The next morning, Amos rode with Liz down to the police substation. This wasn't his idea. Once he'd mentioned to Liz that Eddie Tripp might be responsible for the frozen snake, she'd insisted that the police should be told. Amos wasn't so sure. Things were bad enough without upping the ante. Maybe the Tripps had had their fun, he thought. Maybe they were through now. Maybe they would go away.

“The police?” Amos said. “What can the police do?”

“Something,” Liz said. “It's their job to figure out what.”

The police substation was housed in four prefabricated units that had been rolled into the parking lot of the A&P and then bolted together to make one huge but flimsy room. The floor was covered with cheap carpet and linoleum blackened with cigarette burns. It was, Amos thought, the last place you'd want to be in bare feet. “My enthusiasm wanes,” he said as they stepped inside, but Liz charged ahead. They worked their way toward what seemed like a reception area, where two policewomen, crisp and trim in full blue uniforms, ignored Liz and Amos completely. Finally Liz cleared her voice and said she needed to talk to someone about a crime.

The younger of the two women looked up, split a glance between Liz and Amos, and said, “Somebody beat up on the boy?”

“No,” Liz began, “somebody broke into our house.” After about two more sentences, the policewoman's face went bland with disinterest and she began looking around the room for someone to pass Amos and Liz on to. “There,” she said, interrupting Liz, “see the large gentleman over there?—blue shirt and red tie?—that's Detective Lucian O'Hearn. He's the one you'll want to talk to.”

Amos would've guessed it was impossible, but Detective O'Hearn seemed even less interested in Liz's story than the policewoman. While Liz spoke, he gazed at her with a glazed half smile. He seemed not to have noticed Amos at all, but when Liz finished talking, the detective blinked slowly and suddenly redirected his gaze toward Amos. “Where'd you get those shiners, son?”

Amos was caught off guard, but Liz jumped in. “Somebody hit him with a baseball bat!” she said. “The older brother of the one who broke into our house yesterday!”

Detective O'Hearn nodded seriously. “So what would you like me to do, miss?”

“Arrest Eddie Tripp.”

Detective Lucian O'Hearn had a large, perfectly bald head. He tilted back in his chair, stretched, and then folded his hands serenely on his ample stomach. He looked benign, imperturbable, and he was wearing a gun. He turned his calm smile back to Liz. “Did you say what kind of dessert it was that was decorated with the reptile?”

Amos wanted to leave. The man was making fun of them. Amos hardly ever felt sorry for Liz, but he felt sorry for her when she said in an earnest voice, “My mother calls it pineapple icebox dessert.”

“Pineapple icebox dessert,” Detective O'Hearn repeated. He seemed to be suppressing a great laugh, the kind of laugh that might make his whole stomach shake like a Jell-O mold. But he kept his benign official smile. “And tell me again what this criminal stole from you?”

Liz looked suddenly confused. “Well, he didn't steal anything. But—”

The large detective steered his smile to Amos. “Look, son, you're at an age where buddies play tricks. Sometimes they get a little carried away. Sometimes they do things that aren't in the very best taste.”

Liz stood abruptly and in a snappish voice said, “I want to file a report.”

Detective O'Hearn smiled and shrugged. “Suit yourself, miss.” He nodded back toward the bored policewoman at the desk. “Officer Evans will take a report.”

As they were heading back toward Officer Evans, the large detective said, “Say, Miss MacKenzie, give me the suspect's name again.”

“Edward Tripp,” Liz said. “Two
p
's.”

“Two
p
's,” the detective said amiably, and went away.

Officer Evans, when advised that Liz and Amos wanted to file a breaking-and-entering report, told them to take a seat and she'd get to them as soon as she could.

Twenty minutes passed, and Liz went back to the desk to ask how much longer it would be. Without looking up, Officer Evans said that was impossible to say.

“Well, then, maybe we'll go back where we came from,” Liz said.

Officer Evans just kept staring at the computer screen in front of her. She didn't seem to mind if Liz and Amos went away mad, as long as they went away.

“C'mon, Amos, this is hopeless,” Liz said.

But as they were leaving, the floor began to tremble slightly. It was Detective O'Hearn, lumbering their way. He motioned them back to his office, where he said in a quiet voice, “Okay, just so you'll know. Edward Tripp has no record at all. None. I'm not saying he's a Boy Scout poster child or anything, but most kids who dabble at crime finally get caught at it. Now his brother, Charles, is another story. Juvenile detention is his home away from home. It's also his alibi, in this case. He's been in juvenile detention since”—Detective O'Hearn peered down at his notes—“the third, and he won't be sprung for another ten days.”

Ten days. Amos could hardly believe it. Charles Tripp was only in J.D. for ten more days? “What happens after he's out of juvenile detention?” Amos asked.

The big detective shrugged amiably. “A free man till he makes his next mistake.”

Amos stood silent, taking this all in. He didn't like what he was hearing. He didn't like it at all. He guessed it must've shown on his face, because Detective O'Hearn said, “Tell you what. Once Charles is sprung, I'll visit him and Eddie and see if I can't get their attention.”

“Thanks,” Liz said, as if she meant it. Amos thanked the detective, too, but insincerely. What he really wished was that Detective O'Hearn would leave the Tripps alone so maybe they'd do the same for him, Amos, the milkboy hero.

23

DISCONNECTION

A few days later, Clara and her father were driving to the airport to see her mother off to Madrid. Clara and her father rode in silence. The fields they passed were frozen on top. The cattle and horses seemed neither to move or to breathe.
Madrid,
Clara thought. Her only images of Madrid were from the reassuring black-ink drawings of a children's book, where a peaceful bull named Ferdinand slept under a cork tree. It was a book she had loved, and now she wished she'd never seen it. Finally Clara said, “Isn't March a funny time for Mom to start a teaching job?”

Her father kept staring at the highway ahead. “Somebody quit,” he said. “They needed someone right away to finish the term.”

They fell into another silence; then Clara said, “Okay if I turn on the radio?”

“Sure,” her father said vaguely.

Clara worked her way through the stations—news, talk radio, country and western, farm reports, commercials. Before she could change the channel, they listened to a woman gush over the linens at Kaufmann's Department Store. Clara glanced up at her father, but he didn't say anything. How odd to think that your own mother had run away.
Run, run, just as fast as you can,
Clara thought.
You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man.
Clara felt like running or shouting, but all she could make her body do was curl up tighter. She put her feet on the dashboard, which was forbidden. She was almost relieved when her father said, as he always had in the past, “No feet on the dash, please.” He didn't say it in his usual funny way, but at least he still said it. She put her feet, which felt tense and cold, back on the floor.

When they got to the airport, Clara was surprised to find that her father wasn't going into the terminal with her. “I've already said good-bye,” he told Clara. “This is your chance. Just go straight to gate 24a. She'll be waiting for you.”

Clara nodded dumbly and walked off. But instead of going to gate 24a, she went through the security gates and into the ladies' lounge. She went to the mirrors and applied lip balm. She pushed her nose straight for a moment. She combed her hair, and then combed it again with water. She always had static in the winter. Twice she went into a toilet stall, closed the door, and just stared at the floor.

She could hear the flights being called:
Flight 1201 to Dallas,
Flight 331 to Edinburgh, Flight 609 to Atlanta.
It was a woman's voice, then a man's, impersonal and automatic like the faucets that came on when you waved your hands under them. She felt like she was in a tunnel, a shiny white tunnel at the center of the earth.

While she sat in one of the stalls, Clara began rummaging through her purse for nothing in particular. She examined paper-sleeved toothpicks, splayed barrettes, and finally a matchbook that read in gold letters, THE TIFFIN ROOM. The paper corners had been rubbed into softness by her purse, but the words were still legible. SERVING JEMISON SINCE 1942.

The Tiffin Room was a restaurant in the same downtown area as Kaufmann's, and sometimes on Saturdays, Clara would meet her mother for lunch during her mother's break. “Wherever you want,” her mother said. Clara loved these lunches. When they met at the Tiffin Room (and at first, Clara never chose anywhere else), they each arrived independently with their purses and nice clothes, and it was as if Clara were not a child anymore. The Tiffin Room was all dark wood and maroon leather, the kind of place that served veal cutlets, meat loaf, chow mein, shrimp cocktail, and club sandwiches. The waitresses were all older and called Clara “love” or “hon.” They had hair like lacquered pinecones and wore short beige dressy uniforms with white aprons.

While they ate, her mother would talk to her almost as if she were an adult—a daughter, say, who was home from college. Her mother would talk about the funny customers who'd been in that day, and she'd talk about this coworker, who was especially nice, and that coworker, who was not.

Outside the stall, two stewardesses were talking and the bathroom was loud with swirling, plummeting water.
Run, run, just as
fast as you can,
Clara thought again, picturing the cookie arms and legs in motion, running headlong to the river. Clara flipped the matchbook in the toilet.
I don't care,
she thought suddenly, and it was true, she didn't. She didn't care that Mr. Duckworth had given her an F for missing the exam without an excuse note. She didn't care that her math homework wasn't done, that her history homework wasn't done, and that she didn't know this week's vocabulary words. And she didn't care that her mother was going to Spain.

When Clara left the bathroom, she found herself under a sign pointing to gates 14 to 24.

Flight 1755 to JFK, with connecting flights to Madrid and
Helsinki, is now boarding at gate 24a.

Clara walked into a magazine shop on her left. It was just the first call. She had plenty of time. She picked up
Cosmopolitan
and flipped around until she found an article that gave pointers for saving your marriage after your husband had had an affair. “Don't use the other woman as a cudgel to punish him. Slipping her name into conversation will only drive you farther apart.”
Don't use the other woman as a cudgel?
Clara was thinking.

Final boarding of Flight 1755 to JFK at gate 24a.

Clara, turning, saw a man and woman trotting down the corridor, baggage slung over their shoulders. Clara put the
Cosmopolitan
back in the rack and walked slowly toward gate 24a. Up ahead, the trotting man and woman were waved through a door and up the enclosed ramp. Standing beside the door, looking distractedly around, was her mother. Clara stepped back behind an awning stretched from a fancy coffee-and-pastry wagon, where she could watch her mother unobserved. A stewardess was talking to her mother, but Clara's mother kept looking over the stewardess's shoulder, frantically scanning the path that led to the waiting area. The stewardess firmly took hold of her mother's arm with one hand and motioned toward the ramp with the other. Even as she began to move up the ramp toward the plane, her mother kept looking back.

Clara bolted from her hiding spot and ran toward the door, but her mother had disappeared up the ramp. A male steward closed the door securely. From one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, Clara peered out at the enormous jet. There seemed to be hundreds of windows on the side of the plane. There were faces at all of them, strange faces heading for strange cities.

Clara raised her hand and waved it slowly. “Bye, Mom,” she said.

“How did it go?” Clara's father asked when she got back to the car.

“Not that great,” Clara said. “I got mixed up and got there just as the last passengers were loading.”

Her father took this in slowly. “You mean you
didn't
say good-bye?” He stared at Clara while she stared out the window. Finally he said, “Do you feel bad you missed her?”

Clara thought about it. “A little bit,” she said.

“But not a lot?”

Clara didn't answer.

“Did you dawdle on purpose because you're mad at your mother, Clara?”

Clara thought about how angry her father would be if she lied. “Maybe,” she said. “I don't see what difference it makes. Aren't you mad at her?”

Her father started the engine and merged with the lines of departing cars, the cars of people who were not going anywhere or who had for some reason chosen cold upstate New York as their destination.

“I'm sad she's leaving,” her father said at last. “I'm a little mad at myself for the mistakes I've made along the way. But no, I'm not really mad at your mother.”

Clara thought about something her mother had said in their last phone call: “The only thing I completely, totally, 110 percent regret is leaving you,” her mother had told her. Why didn't her mother regret leaving her father, too?

Clara and her father fell silent. Perhaps ten minutes passed. The highway cut through frozen farmland. “Is she going to call?” Clara asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to talk to her?”

Her father seemed thrown off by the question. “Well,” he said carefully, “I told her it wouldn't be a good idea for her and me to talk while she was in Spain, but we both agreed that it would be good for her to talk to you.”

Clara looked out at a boy about her age chipping ice from a stock watering tank. She said, “If Mom calls, I don't want to talk to her.”

Her father let the car decelerate ever so slightly. “Polkadot...”

“No,” Clara said. “I really don't want to. It'll just make me more upset.” She thought about it. “Anyhow, she made her decisions about what was best for her, and now I'm making my decision about what's best for me.”

“You should sleep on this, Polkadot. It's not right to make a decision when you're in this kind of mood.”

Clara stared out the window. “I'll sleep on it,” she said. “But I won't change my mind.”

It was true. She didn't. The next morning, while she and her father were having breakfast, the telephone rang. “You get it,” her father said casually, but Clara wouldn't. The answering machine was off. The telephone rang and rang.

“Clara, pick up the phone,” her father said.

Clara stepped close, but she didn't pick up the phone. It kept ringing.

“It's probably Gerri or the MacKenzie boy,” her father said.

Clara raised the receiver to her ear.

“Hello?” It was her mother. Her voice sounded close by, like she still might be at Aunt Marie's in Dalton. “Hello? Clara? Monty?”

Clara said nothing.

“Sweetie?” her mother said in a hopeful tone. “Is that you, sweetie? It's me, Mom, and I'm in Valencia, Spain, in a beautiful old hotel that was a convent two hundred years ago. Are you there, sweetie?”

Clara didn't answer. She didn't care if it was cruel or childish. She set the receiver down hard in its cradle.