Mrs. Mercy White talked on awhile about how things used to be between the black people and the white people who lived in Groveland. I read it for a minute, because I got interested, thinking about how life was then. Meanwhile, J. Norm kept scanning back over the page about the fire, his finger moving from side to side. He couldn’t believe it, I guessed, but I did. There at the cemetery earlier, it was like I could feel that not only was the grave of little Willie VanDraan empty, but so were the other four of them. Somewhere out there, four more kids like J. Norm had lived their whole lives, maybe never even knowing who they really were. Since they were all younger than J. Norm, they probably didn’t even remember the house with the seven chairs.
But what if somebody told them about it? What if some of them had parents who shared the truth, maybe when they got older, or after Luther VanDraan was dead and gone? What if not all the parents kept secrets like J. Norm’s mother did, like my mother did?
Could there be people out there, a family, looking for J. Norm? Maybe they’d been looking for him for years, but they didn’t know what his name was now, and they didn’t have any idea how to find him.
Right after that thought came another one—an idea that had nothing to do with J. Norm, or the house with the seven chairs, but had everything to do with me. What if there were people looking for me? What if those women in the pictures hadn’t decided they didn’t want me? Maybe they hadn’t tossed me out because my daddy died, or because they didn’t want me around, or because they were embarrassed to have some little half-and-half baby in the family. Maybe my mama just took me away, and they didn’t know where to find me. What if they’d been looking all along?
After a minute, the what-ifs started to hurt. They swelled like one of those surgery balloons they showed on a film in science class, small inside the vein at first, then pumping up and up, stretching a spot that’d been closed off for a long time. I knew if I let the balloon grow too big, something might bust, and I’d bleed all over the place, so I focused on J. Norm instead. The whole time we’d been trying to solve this mystery, maybe we’d been going about it all wrong. There was one thing we hadn’t thought of. The most obvious thing of all.
“J. Norm,” I said, “we’ve been looking up other people’s names, but you know what we didn’t do? We didn’t look up
yours
. What if, all this time, somebody’s been trying to find you?”
I was off the sofa and into J. Norm’s room for the computer before you could say
scat.
I brought it back and set it on the coffee table in front of the sofa. While we waited for it to boot up, J. Norm fingered the pages about the fire, then reached into our sack and pulled out the book with the pictures of the VanDraan family. He laid both on the table next to the computer.
The software came up. I plugged in the cell phone thing and connected to the Internet.
Aunt Char wandered by and took a peek, then went on down the hall, swatting a feather duster across picture frames, like she was trying to look busy.
I opened the browser and put in J. Norm’s name.
J. Norman Alvord.
Then I thought better of it. “What’s the J. stand for, J. Norm? We should use the whole thing.”
“James,” he answered, and I typed in the word, then sent James Norman Alvord off into cyberspace to see what we’d find.
Not a lot, it turned out. There were some history things about the name Alvord, and then a few old articles about rockets and stuff that had J. Norm’s name listed with a bunch of other names, something about a college reunion, and some genealogy pages done by some long-lost Alvord cousin who figured he and J. Norm were related. Man, was he wrong about that.
“Let’s try the other name.” I tipped the book so I could look at the old picture and make sure I spelled it right. “If someone didn’t know what your name ended up being, they might look for you by the name you had before.”
I typed the names
Luther William VanDraan Willie
into the browser bar and pushed RETURN. The stupid computer got hung up, and the little hourglass just spun and spun and spun, while J. Norm and me sat pressed together over the screen like two kids in front of the fish tank at the zoo.
“Hang on. It’s stuck.” I tried to close the window, but nothing would work on the screen. “Stupid computer. I’ll have to shut it down and start it again.”
While we were waiting for the computer to reboot, J. Norm got to talking about back when they used big tape reels on computers, and sometimes the reader would eat the tape, and then you had a mess. He was right in the middle of the story when Sharla came up the stairs. She called out from the top step, “Mr. Alvord . . . uhhh . . . Norman? You’ve got a phone call.” Then she walked in with the cordless phone pressed against her chest. Leaning over the lamp table from behind, she snuck a quick look at the computer and the books on the table. “I don’t know what she wants,” she whispered. “She called earlier today, too. She was very . . . insistent.”
Norman’s eyebrows humped up like caterpillars crawling down a log, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Who’d be calling us here?
The computer finished reloading, and I opened the Internet browser again, but I saw it only from the corner of my eye. I was watching J. Norm watch that phone. If he didn’t do something pretty quick, Sharla was gonna think he’d blown a gasket. “It’s probably somebody calling about the book.” I nudged J. Norm down low, where Sharla wouldn’t see. “Remember, Grandpa, we told the people in that store to let us know if they found a copy.” That wasn’t true at all, but it didn’t sound too bad. When we were shopping for Mrs. Mercy White’s book, a few people had asked where we were staying.
J. Norm took the phone and then stood up with it. Sharla must’ve caught the look on his face, because she pulled back a little, her hand hanging limp-wristed in the air between them. “Is something wrong?”
He straightened and shook his head, putting a hand over the receiver. “Oh, no . . . no, nothing. My mind was elsewhere, that’s all. We’ve been doing genealogical research.” He waved toward the computer, and then headed off to the other side of the room to take the call. I was supposed to keep Sharla busy, I guessed.
“Oh, are you kin to the VanDraans?” Sharla’s head twisted so she could get a look at the books open on the table.
I shrugged. “Oh, I dunno. All the old records about our family . . . got lost before I was born . . . back when Grandpa was little, and Grandpa doesn’t remember things so well anymore.” I tapped a finger to the side of my forehead and made a little pouty lip, like I was sad to tell her J. Norm’s mind was going.
Sharla stopped trying to listen in on the phone call and leaned closer to me. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I nodded and gave her another sad look, figuring at least I had her distracted. “It’s good that you’re helping him get his family history together,” she said. “A lot of kids wouldn’t bother.” She sat down beside me and smiled like she was impressed, and then I felt bad for lying to her. She reminded me of Mrs. Lora right then, and Mrs. Lora reminded me of church, and church reminded me that I was a Christian, saved and everything, and I shouldn’t have been lying. After the last couple days, I needed to repent like crazy. The preacher in church said that being saved didn’t mean you were perfect, but it meant you’d try to be like Jesus. Lately, Jesus was probably shaking his head at me big-time.
“I don’t mind.” That was the truth, actually. “It’s like an adventure. He remembers the store with the ice-cream counter, the one with the VanDraans’ name on it. That got us started looking up the VanDraans.” That wasn’t a lie, either. It just wasn’t all of the truth.
Sharla looked at J. Norm, but he didn’t notice. He was hunched over the phone in the corner. That had me worried. He was arguing with someone, and even if he was keeping it to a whisper, I had a bad feeling I knew who he was talking to. That sharp sound in his voice usually meant one thing: Deborah.
There wasn’t any way she could know we were here, though . . . was there?
The answer came to me as quick as one of those shocks you get when you grab the doorknob after you walk across the carpet in the wintertime. How did the police track people who came up missing, or wandered off, or all of a sudden weren’t where they were supposed to be?
The credit card.
J. Norm had been using it all along. It was like a trail. Deborah was into all of J. Norm’s bank accounts. She paid his bills. As soon as she figured out he was gone, she probably knew right where to look. We might as well have been calling Deborah to give her updates.
I heard J. Norm say, “It’s my affair if I want to take a trip—to see some places I remember.” Then there was a pause, and Deborah was talking loud enough that I could hear the rhythm of her voice through the phone, like a drum beating somewhere far away, really fast. All the while, Sharla was talking in my other ear, going on about when she was a kid and they used to go to the soda fountain at the store—by then it was Mr. Nelson’s—to get strawberry Cokes, and milk shakes, and . . .
I heard J. Norm say, “The school? What in the world for?” He was rubbing his forehead now, leaning against the bookcase.
I felt sick.
Sharla was talking about putting peanuts in Coke.
Sweat built up under my shirt and trickled down my back. What if Deborah had called the police? What if the school had? What if they’d talked to Mama? What if some sheriff was headed over here right now? He probably wasn’t gonna just tuck J. Norm and me in the back of his car and help us get away, like Mrs. Mercy White’s daddy did.
Sharla touched me on the arm. “Honey, are you all right? You look like you just saw a ghost. I’m sorry Chris got to poppin’ off about ghost stories yesterday evening, by the way. He was only joking with you, and—”
“Preposterous!” J. Norm blurted out the word so loud that both Sharla and I turned his way, and she stopped talking.
“Grandpa!” I squealed, to try to remind him that I was sitting right there,
with
Sharla. I rolled my eyes and gave her a look, like she shouldn’t worry about what he was saying, since he only had half his mind left, anyway. “That’s my aunt. She’s nuts. They argue all the time.” Sharla didn’t look convinced, so I figured I better lay it on thick. “She tried to kick him out of his house and take all his money. It’s a bad deal.” I sounded pretty convincing. Sometimes a theater class or two in summer enrichment really comes in handy. “But don’t tell him I told you, okay? It’s embarrassing.”
Sharla’s eyes were wide at first; then she softened up like butter in a pan. “You poor thing. You’re stuck in the middle of a mess, aren’t you?” Her soft, slow Southern drawl made the words sound sticky sweet.
“It’ll be all right. Grandpa won’t let her take the house. It’s been in the family forever. All my grandma’s stuff is still there. She only died a few months ago.” For just a sec, I had the weirdest feeling of sadness. Grief, I guess you’d call it—like I was missing the pretty lady in the pictures on J. Norm’s wall, like she really was my grandma, and I knew how it would be to go in her closet and play dress-up in all those beautiful clothes while she sat on the edge of the bed and told me I was her little princess.
It was a nice dream, really. Deborah didn’t know how good she had it. I’d seen the mountain of scrapbooks Annalee made. Every little thing Deborah did in her life—every blue ribbon, every Girl Scout badge, every award-winning science fair paper—was pasted in a scrapbook with pictures, the date, and some kind of note, like,
Eighth-grade science fair. First place. So proud!
If I had parents who cared enough to follow me around to the science fair and take pictures, I wouldn’t thank them by trying to take the house and stick my daddy in a nursing home. Sometimes people needed to stop and take a look around and see how lucky they were—how different life could really be.
Sharla hugged me around the shoulders, and I wasn’t ready for it. It felt good, though. I sank into it for a minute, while I watched J. Norm hang up the phone and punch the air. It was a slow, wimpy old-man punch, but I think if Deborah had been there, they would’ve been in a fistfight by now.
I could tell by his face that I needed to get rid of Sharla. J. Norm looked worried, and besides that, his face was washed-out and pasty. He took a step and swayed on his feet, like he might fall down; then he gripped the bookcase.
I scooted away from Sharla and moved the computer closer. “I better get busy, I guess. Can we borrow the phone again? We’ll probably need to call Aunt Deborah back in a minute, when everybody cools off.”
“Sure.” Sharla patted my knee, then used it to push herself to her feet. “Y’all just take your time. I’m working on some strawberry shortcake downstairs. Y’all come down and . . .” Her eyelashes flew up, and the next thing I knew, she was beating it toward the door. “Oh, mercy! I forgot I’ve got cakes in the oven!” She didn’t even look at J. Norm on the way out, which was good, because he was sagging against the shelf, breathing like he’d just done the Ironman race.
“J. Norm.” I hurried over to him as Sharla squeaked off down the stairs in her white sneakers. Taking the phone, I slipped my hand under his arm. “Are you okay?”
He scrubbed his fingers back and forth, fuzzing up his eyebrows. “I only need to catch my breath.”