Crooked Read online

  Eddie grinned and raised his hands in mock horror. “Hey, hold on, sister. Can’t we work this out in some neighborly way? You be nice to me and it’ll help my powers of concentration and I’ll figure out some way to start the car.”

  Clara, still holding the rock, turned her back on him and began to walk down the muddy lane.

  “Hey, c’mon!” Eddie called out. “What’s wrong?”

  Clara kept walking. She wanted to run but had the feeling it might arouse some chasing instinct in Eddie, so she just walked slowly, one rubbery step after another.

  “Hey!” Eddie called again. This time there was something plaintive in his voice.

  A few seconds later, from behind her, the engine roared alive. She looked back. The sedan was in motion, turning around. So there was nothing wrong with the battery—he’d only told her it was dead. It was like the running-out-of-gas thing you saw in stupid movies, only this wasn’t a stupid movie. This was Eddie Tripp. Clara ran to a bend in the lane, then ducked into the woods and lay flat behind a fallen tree, blackened by lightning. The half-sedan rolled slowly along the lane, passed by, and then backed up and stopped. “Clara?”

  Clara stayed low and squeezed shut her eyes. There was the sound of twigs breaking underfoot, and then stillness.

  “Clara? It’s me, Eddie.” He was closer, maybe thirty feet away. “That was just a joke back there. A bad joke, one I kind of learned from my brother, but still just a joke. The battery’s fine. If you come out, I’ll take you home now.”

  A steady cold wind made a low, scary Coke bottle whistling in the trees. Otherwise, it was quiet. Clara was frozen in place. She could hardly breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” Eddie called out finally. A long second passed. “I can’t leave you up here.” Another second. “You could get hurt or sick up here and I’ll get in lots of trouble.” Then: “I promise I won’t touch you. I mean it. You have my promise.”

  Please, God, make it be true, Clara thought before she rose and walked toward the car. She got into the backseat and squeezed herself against the right rear door, as far as she could get from Eddie, who quietly drove her home, as promised.

  Only when he pulled up in front of Clara’s house did he turn to speak. A hint of his cocky expression had returned to his face. “Well,” he said, “you can’t say it wasn’t interesting.”

  “That what wasn’t interesting?” Clara said.

  “You know.” Eddie grinned. “Our little adventure.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Clara said in an icy voice, trying to make herself believe it. “I know that this afternoon with you never ever happened.”

  The house was dark. It was after five and her father still wasn’t home. In her father’s study, the message light flashed on the answering machine.

  “Hi, it’s me, Amos. I’m still coming tonight. It’s kind of weird we haven’t talked for so long, but I’m coming anyway. At six, right? Okay, bye.”

  Everything seemed wrong to Clara. The house was dark, her father wasn’t home, and she felt horrible. It wasn’t just that her clothes were smudged with soot from the blackened log she’d hid behind, it seemed as if she herself were smudged. She sat on the floor and began to cry and didn’t stop until Ham came up to her and started licking her salty cheeks. She snuffled and wiped her nose. She turned on a light. The clock said five twenty-five. Where was her father? He was supposed to be home by four. He should be home, she thought, and the more she thought it, the madder she got. He should be home now, and he should’ve been home when Eddie came tapping.

  In the drawer of her father’s desk, in her father’s address book, there was nothing under the name Lydia or Elgin. But under Upchurch she found a number along with the notation Elgin/divorced . Clara dialed the number.

  A woman said hello after the eighth ring.

  Clara said nothing.

  “Hello?” the woman said again.

  “Oh, hi,” Clara said in a kind of blurt. “This is Clara Wilson and I need to talk to my father.”

  A moment passed before the woman said, “Hold on a second.”

  While the phone was down, Clara could hear music in the background. It sounded like Frank Sinatra or somebody old-fashioned and romantic like that.

  Then her father said, “Hi, Polkadot. Is something wrong?” He was trying to sound casual, but there was strain and surprise in his voice.

  “You were going to be home at four and get pizza.”

  “Oh, my gosh. I’m sorry. I just completely forgot.” His voice sounded kind of caved-in, but then, recovering, he said, “If I pick up the pizza on the way home, I can still make it by a little after six. Will that be okay?”

  Clara held out for a moment or two before saying, “I guess it’ll have to be.”

  A silence followed. Clara realized that the volume of the Frank Sinatra music in the background must’ve been lowered, because now she could hardly hear it.

  In a careful voice, her father said, “Did I give you this phone number? Because I knew I meant to, but I thought I went off and forgot it.”

  “Yeah, I think you forgot. But I kind of knew where to get hold of you.”

  Her father chuckled uneasily. “Well, Doodlebug, if you ever give up on medicine or the law, you could always make a career of private investigation.”

  But later, while standing in the shower trying to get herself clean, Clara decided the last thing in the world she wanted to be was a private investigator, because it seemed like the more you looked and the deeper you dug, the more you found stuff you never really wanted to find.

  32

  IMPERSONATIONS

  The doorbell rang while Clara was on her knees in the bedroom, fully dressed except for shoes, which she was sorting through in hopes of finding a pair she had forgotten but really liked, sort of like finding a stray five-dollar bill in last winter’s coat.

  Clara dropped the cranberry pumps she was considering (too enthusiastic) and walked downstairs in her stocking feet. Carrying from the front porch were two voices—Amos’s and Bruce’s— and then, bursting through those voices, came the slamming sound of her father’s car door. Greetings followed. Bruce? What was Bruce doing here? When Clara realized her hand was pushing at the swoop of her nose, she made herself stop. She took a deep breath and walked out.

  Ham had already jumped up on Amos and Bruce by the time Clara reached the entryway. Amos was holding a pumpkin pie, and Bruce was holding a can of whipping cream. Her father held the pizza, and for a moment, Clara couldn’t tell why he looked kind of kidlike himself. But it was because his hair was mussed and his shirt was wrinkled. He seemed hurried and uneasy. She could tell he was about to say something embarrassing, but Amos spoke first.

  “My sister made pies today and she said I could bring one.” He turned his eyes on Clara. “It’s pumpkin.”

  Clara’s plan had been to act a little icy, at least at first, but now she felt shy when she looked at Amos’s hair, which had been wet-combed very carefully to the side. He looked tense and shy himself.

  Clara’s father broke into the awkward silence. “Well, I love a pumpkin pie, so you’re at least scoring points with the elder Wilson.” He nodded at the Reddi Wip Bruce was holding. “And today your sister made cans of whipping cream?”

  Clara was about to interrupt and say that Bruce didn’t have a sister when Bruce, quick on the uptake, said, “Yep, she’s quite a gal. She just loves to can.”

  Clara’s father laughed a deep-from-the-belly laugh, which bothered Clara, in part because she was hearing it as if through Amos’s ears and in part because it seemed like a New Dad kind of laugh.

  “You didn’t say you were having two boys over for pizza,” her father said.

  “She might not have known,” Bruce said. “I sort of invited myself.”

  But having Bruce there, Clara decided, was not so bad. He was at ease and able to talk when neither Amos nor Clara could, at least not with comfort, and then, when he heard Clara’s father poking around the
kitchen, he went out to give a hand. This left Amos and Clara alone.

  Amos sat on the arm of the sofa and looked uncomfortable. Clara knew she ought to say something nice and hostess-like but didn’t. Finally Amos said, “I tried to find you at school all week, and I tried to call on the phone a bunch of times. After a while, I decided you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to talk to you?” Clara said.

  Amos stayed on the arm of the sofa and looked at his fingers.

  Finally Clara said, “You can go ahead and sit all the way down if you want.”

  Amos did, but still didn’t speak.

  “So why wouldn’t I have wanted to talk to you?”

  “Well,” he said finally, still looking down, “I guess you must know what happened.” He glanced up—Clara did nothing to suggest this wasn’t true—and looked again at his hands. “What I did was really bad, and I still can’t figure out how I could’ve done it. But if you could possibly just not ask me any more about it...” He stopped. His face had turned red. “I mean, at least not until you have a chance to know me better and maybe have other things to weigh it against.” He looked up at her with eyes that seemed, oddly, both earnest and frightened. Even while Clara was wondering whether she ought to give in, she knew she already had.

  From the kitchen, Clara’s father said, “We’re dressing the salads. If you don’t want blue cheese, speak now or forever...”

  Clara raised her eyebrows in a question at Amos, who shrugged. “Blue cheese is fine!” she called back.

  “I went to the play both nights,” Amos said. “I liked it. You were really good, and the play was a lot better than I expected.”

  Clara was pleased, but she couldn’t keep herself from wondering if he hadn’t chiefly come to see Sands Mandeville. “You could’ve come backstage afterward and said hello.”

  Amos looked her in the eye. “Well, you might not believe this, but I didn’t want to come backstage because I was afraid I’d run into Sands or Sophie.”

  Suddenly, without warning, a pleasant warmth flooded through Clara. So maybe Amos actually had come to the play to see her. And he’d thought she was good.

  At that moment, Bruce appeared with a tray of salads, which he set on the coffee table in front of the sofa. “Scooch,” he said, and Amos moved over toward Clara so that Bruce could sit, too.

  “Yeah,” Amos said, “I thought you really had been shot.”

  Though secretly pleased, Clara said, “That’s probably more of a compliment to the stage gun. According to Mrs. Van Riper, it’s the same kind they use on Broadway.”

  Amos was smiling, Clara was smiling, and suddenly, somehow, the evening had broken free. While they ate, she sat next to Amos on the couch, but Bruce was also on the couch, so she didn’t feel she had to worry all the time about how close Amos was, or whether that was Ham on the stairs or her father. And it seemed as if she really could forget that her afternoon with Eddie Tripp had ever happened.

  They found a movie on TV and started watching it, but when Clara said one of the characters reminded her of Mr. Mueller, their U.S. history teacher from the year before, Amos said, “Hey, Crook, do Mueller.”

  Clara had no idea what this meant, but after some prodding, Bruce stood and, shoving his hands into his pockets and thrusting out his chest, did his impersonation of Mr. Mueller, which was remarkably like the real Mueller, only funnier. Bruce pointed his jaw sharply as he loudly and lengthily cleared his throat, then peered down, as if over reading glasses, to address Clara and Amos. “You may well wonder about Lewis and Clark. These were not merely cartographers, children! These were men of vision and men of genius! Mapping with only the aid of the stars and a sextant! And no women! Not for months and not for miles! You talk about hormonal yearning, and don’t shake your heads, children, I know you do!” He paused and let his voice settle to a calmer register. “But these men! This Lewis and this Clark! They pressed northward, hormones or no!”

  “Who wants root beer?” Clara said, jumping up, afraid not so much that Bruce’s comments might stray too far as that her father might overhear them. Still, in the kitchen, cracking ice from the tray, it was a surprise to her that somebody as goofy as Bruce Crookshank should have this impressive comic talent. And to her surprise, part of what she felt was envy—Bruce was probably one of those kids who got decent grades without ever seeming to study.

  From the entry, Clara heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. When she turned around, Amos was standing there. “Don’t bother getting anything for Crook. He took off.”

  “For where? And how come?”

  “Well, for one thing, the reason he came along in the first place was his father was in one of his moods.” Amos shrugged. “His father drinks and gets real cranky until he falls asleep listening to Mozart in his chair. And the other reason was he’d heard that Anne Barrineau was going skating with a bunch of girls at the Ice Ranch and he wanted to go by there on the way home to see if he could see her.”

  “Bruce knows Anne Barrineau?”

  Amos shook his head. “Only from afar. He won’t even go into the Ice Ranch. He’ll just look in through those viewing windows they have.”

  Clara thought about it—going by the Ice Ranch to sneak a look at a girl who doesn’t know you exist and then going home on the hope that your father’s passed out so he won’t bother you. “Bruce isn’t so bad.”

  “Yeah.” He sipped from his root beer. “He calls following Anne around the Barrineau Project.”

  Clara thought about it. “If it were somebody else, it’d be creepy.”

  Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. From overhead, the tinny sounds of TV voices drifted down—Clara’s father was watching a movie. Suddenly, from his coiled sleep in the middle of the room, Ham blinked open his eyes, alertly raised his head, and let out a low, apprehensive growl, as if he’d heard a prowler.

  Clara rose and pulled the curtain on the picture window behind the sofa. “It’s not that we need privacy or anything,” she said so Amos wouldn’t misunderstand. “But sometimes I get the creepy feeling somebody’s out there looking in.”

  After a second, Amos said, “Yeah, that’s the feeling I get at school sometimes, and usually it’s nobody, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s Eddie Tripp.”

  Clara thought of talking about her terrible afternoon with Eddie Tripp but didn’t. She said nothing.

  After a few seconds, Amos said, “Do you still have that blue-and-white dress that looks kind of like a sailor dress?”

  Clara laughed. “The sailor dress? My mom made that for me last year. I think it’s kind of awful.” The truth was, she hadn’t thought the dress was awful until she’d worn it to school one day and Gerri had said, “Chip, chip, ahoy!”

  “I like it,” Amos said. “Or liked it. You hardly wear it anymore.”

  Clara shrugged and smiled. “My mom made it. It reminds me of when my mom was still here and trying to do nice things for me.” After a second or two, she explained to Amos about Old Dad and New Dad, and how she was beginning to think it was also Old Mom and New Mom.

  “Yeah,” Amos said, “my mom’s definitely different now, too.” He turned his empty glass on the coffee table. “It used to be that on Sunday nights, my father always made cheeseburgers and chocolate milk shakes, but he’d always make a little extra chocolate shake that we’d save. After we ate the hamburgers, we’d all go into the family room at seven sharp and watch an old Perry Mason show. It’s pretty lame, in black-and-white and everything, but I got to like it. It’s a one-hour show, and after forty-five minutes, we’d each write down on a secret ballot who we thought the killer was, and whoever got it right got the leftover milk shake.” Amos paused. “Since my dad died, nobody knows what to do, and my mom just goes off to the little den and reads religious stuff. So last Sunday night, we tried to do the old routine. Liz cooked the burgers and I made the shakes and we all tried to watch Perry Mason, but after about ten minute
s, my mom started crying in this real quiet way, and pretty soon she had to leave the room. Liz turned the TV off, and we just sat there in the den with the TV off, not saying anything.”

  Upstairs, Clara’s father could be heard walking from the bedroom to the bathroom. The toilet flushed, the water ran, and then he returned to his TV show.

  Clara said, “We used to have a Saturday night thing where my mom would make breakfast for dinner, usually waffles, then we’d work on a jigsaw puzzle. My mother always picked ones of exotic foreign places.” She made a faint smile and looked at Amos. “I guess that should’ve been a clue.”

  They fell silent, but to Clara, it didn’t feel like an uneasy silence. Eventually Amos said, “What jigsaws did you pick when you got to choose?”

  “Horses,” Clara said, laughing. “Horses of every which kind. Wild horses, racehorses, draft horses.” She laughed again. “Everything but a zedonk.”

  “A what?”

  “When a zebra and a donkey mate,” Clara said, “they have little zedonks.” As she said this, without wanting to, she thought of the word seduck.

  Amos was chuckling. “That’s what the Tripp brothers are, a couple of zedonks.”

  Clara felt her face flush but said nothing.

  Amos said, “I saw Eddie last night. Cruising around after the play.”

  Again Clara felt her face get hot. This time she said, “Eddie offered me a ride home.” She looked straight at Amos. “It was pretty nice of him actually.”

  “Maybe,” Amos said, but he sounded doubtful. He told Clara about the Tripps feeding a kitten to a boa constrictor and then about the episode with Eddie in the west-wing bathroom. “He just held out his arm and calmly sliced himself with that razor,” Amos said. “I call that more than a little weird.”

  Clara nodded. It was weird. Eddie was weird. But he wasn’t totally bad. He’d kept his promise to bring her safely home this afternoon, for example. Clara said, “Next Friday, maybe you could meet me after the play and we could walk home together? That way I wouldn’t have to depend on New Dad—or anybody else.”