Crooked Page 23

  Though it turned out it was not a bell. There were chimes, a short melody of rich tones. From an unseen speaker, a woman’s voice said, “Yes?”

  Amos said, “I need to talk to Sands.”

  A moment passed. “May I tell Sandra who’s calling?”

  “Amos. Amos MacKenzie.”

  “Of course. Let me see if she’s available.”

  Amos waited what seemed like a long time. Finally the enameled front door swung open. Warmth from within spread out. Sands stood there in shorts and a loose white T-shirt with some kind of fancy white-on-white embroidery at the neck. She broke into a smile. “God, with a hat and dark glasses, you’d look like a Blues Brother!” She broke into an easy laugh. “Or maybe a Blues Brother’s brother!”

  Amos didn’t laugh. He waited patiently until Sands wasn’t laughing, either. “I want to correct something,” he said. “I just want to tell you that my mother does work at Bing’s, and I’m sorry I didn’t say so last night.”

  Sands smiled. “No need to apologize,” she said.

  “I’m not apologizing to you. If anyone deserves an apology, it’s my mother.”

  Sands seemed to think he was suggesting that she apologize to his mother, because she said, “Hey, that’s between you and your conscience. My rule is, Never apologize, never explain.”

  Amos gave her a somber stare. “I’m also here for my shirt.”

  Sands’s eyes widened. “The one you gave to me?”

  Amos nodded. “And the one you’re now going to give back.”

  Sands seemed amused. “Why would I want to do that?”

  Amos looked away for a moment, then redirected his gaze to Sands. Some of this technique, he realized, he’d learned from Eddie. In a calm, steady voice, he said, “So as to avoid difficulty in your personal life.”

  Sands laughed, but not very hard. “Like what kind of difficulty?”

  “I know stuff. For example, I know exactly how you and Sophie cheat in geometry.”

  Sands held his gaze for a few seconds, then all at once her eyes and smile seemed to give way. It was as if her whole aura collapsed. She opened her mouth as if to speak but didn’t. She spun and walked away, leaving the door partly open behind her. He watched her disappear.

  A few minutes later, a Hispanic woman appeared. “Miss Sandra sends this to you,” the woman said, and in her extended hands, laundered and neatly folded, lay Amos’s green shirt.

  Amos stared at Clara’s house from the bus stop across the street, standing in the shadows of a newly leafed elm. Clara’s mother’s dirty car was out front with the For Sale sign in the window. Her father’s car was gone. As Amos watched, Ham ambled around the corner into the front yard, found a spot of sun on the front porch, circled tightly, and lay down.

  Amos felt in his pockets and found a pencil and a business card from Long’s lawn mower repair. THIS IS FOR YOU, he wrote in small block letters. SORRY ABOUT SANDS. AMOS. He stepped out of the shadows, opened the Wilsons’ side gate, and latched it behind him. In the planting beds along the path, the soil was dark and chunky and gave off the rich pleasant smell of just-turned earth. Three terra-cotta rabbits sat in a row, as if waiting for the first tender shoots to appear. As Amos approached the front door, Ham’s eyes snapped open and he let out a low growl. “Hey, Hambone,” Amos said in a low, calming voice. “It’s just me, Amos.” He held out his hand, which Ham sniffed, then licked. Amos leaned the green shirt against the front door, tucked the note into its front pocket, and walked away.

  There, Amos thought.

  Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn’t. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d done something, and he was just getting started.

  41

  SETTING OFF IN THE DARK

  Clara’s skin ached. She was sitting in World Cultures thinking of Eddie Tripp. What had he meant when she’d said her father was away on business and something had flickered in his eyes and he’d grinned and said, “I understand”? What did he understand? Clara didn’t know, but there was something in that look and those words that made her a little queasy.

  Clara thought of how in this very class, she’d learned about communities in ancient cultures that would symbolically gather up all their sins and crimes and put them in a headdress and then put the headdress on a goat and drive the goat from the community, so they could get rid of the sins and crimes without really accounting for them, so that everybody could feel better about themselves and their neighbors. “This,” Mrs. Templeton had said, “is known as a scapegoat.”

  Clara thought about her own neighborhood. Ever since she could remember, almost every strange thing that occurred and couldn’t be explained was blamed on the Tripp brothers. Some government checks had disappeared from several mailboxes. Neighbors blamed the Tripps. A cat’s head was found in someone’s trash can. Blame the Tripps. Someone put sugar in the sixth-grade teacher’s gas tank. Blame the Tripps. And when Amos MacKenzie’s favorite pigeon died? Blame the Tripps. But nobody ever proved these things. So maybe Eddie and Charles didn’t do them at all. Maybe Eddie and Charles were just the scapegoats.

  Still, there was something creepy about the way Eddie had smiled and what he’d said. That was what was making her skin ache.

  For the rest of the day Clara wasn’t sure who she wanted to see in the halls, Eddie or Amos or neither or both. For a while, she saw neither.

  She did see Bruce, however, coming out of study hall.

  “Hey, did you check out Amos today?” Bruce said, and when Clara shook her head, Bruce said, “He’s wearing this goofy suit with a tie and everything. You ask why and he goes, ‘I’ve got an appointment.’”

  “An appointment? Who with?”

  “That’s the funny part. He won’t say. He just vagues out on you.” Bruce grinned and shook his head as if in wonderment. “I don’t know about our Amos. He used to be the dependable type, and now he’s just as weird as the rest of us.”

  An hour later, when Clara finally did spy Amos in the halls, she was relieved at the way her spirits rose, the way her heartbeat quickened.

  “Hey, it’s Joe Friday,” she said as they fell into close and easy proximity.

  Amos grinned and glanced down at his clothes. “It’s my father’s suit. I tried it on for size this morning and kind of liked it, so I just left it on.”

  This seemed like the old Amos to Clara, the calm, quiet, friendly Amos. His eyes weren’t nervous. He didn’t mind standing in the halls talking with her. “Bruce said you said you had an appointment.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t had it yet.”

  “But who with?”

  Amos shrugged. “It’s kind of personal. I can explain better afterward.”

  “After what, though?”

  Amos shrugged and smiled. “After the appointment.”

  This was exasperating, but before Clara could pose another question, Amos said, “I left you something by your front door at home.”

  Mild pleasure worked through Clara. “You did? What is it?”

  Amos ignored this. The passing bell rang loudly. The clamor in the hall intensified. “So I’ll see you tonight right after the play?” he said.

  Clara nodded happily and began to backpedal. “C’mon,” she called, “tell me what it is.”

  Amos stood fast, a rock around which other students streamed. “Well, it’s not a new car,” he said, grinning, “and it’s not white roses.”

  The green shirt lay folded and propped against the front door. In the pocket, on the back of a business card, was a message. THIS IS FOR YOU, it said. SORRY ABOUT SANDS. AMOS.

  Clara’s pulse accelerated slightly. Her mood, already bright, brightened further. She suddenly realized her skin no longer ached.

  She began to fold and band her newspapers, but her eyes kept floating off to the shirt, lying neatly on the front porch bench. Once or twice, she got up and moved it slightly, just to touch the soft flannel.

  Clara nearly ran through her route, came home, made some T
op Ramen, and still had some time to kill before walking to Melville for the play. She tried to read, but her gaze kept drifting toward the shirt, which sat now on top of her dresser. She was feeling too good about it, she decided, and whenever you felt too good about something, it was the same as inviting a comeuppance.

  Clara jumped up, grabbed the shirt, and climbed through the ceiling of the hall closet to the attic, where her hope chest was stored. There wasn’t much in it yet for a trousseau, only a brooch her grandmother had given her, a baby quilt, and a pair of embroidered pillowcases. Otherwise, it held old artwork, old birthday candles, and her old collection of Seneca arrowheads. Clara laid the shirt neatly on top and looked at it for a long moment.

  Then Clara climbed down the ladder, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and regarded her crooked nose for one last long moment before setting off in the dark for Melville.

  42

  THE WAITING ROOM

  Amos hadn’t seen Eddie all day, but he knew he would sooner or later, at the appointed time. He already felt better—not good exactly, but on the verge of feeling good. He’d liked standing and talking to Clara in the halls, almost willing Eddie to come around the corner. He liked telling her he’d left something on her doorstep. And he liked thinking of seeing her after the play.

  He didn’t change clothes after school. He wore the loose suit to The Smiling Gumshoe and, before curtain, kept scanning the audience for Eddie. He wasn’t there. Except for one empty seat to the rear right, it was a full house. When a student started to take that last seat, an usher quickly appeared and explained something, and the student rose, leaving the single seat vacant again. Saved for somebody, Amos thought. The principal or somebody like that.

  Presently the lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and Amos settled into the play. He’d seen it twice before, and the familiarity of the words and the dark warm auditorium induced Amos into a light but pleasant sleep, from which he was awakened by the explosion of the stage gun. He snapped open his eyes to see Clara falling forward with her mortal wound.

  After the cigarette girls in their gold satin shorts had walked in front of the curtain with the banner that said END OF ACT I, after the audience had broken into applause and the houselights had come on, as various playgoers rose and stretched and drifted toward the lobby, a large form pushed his way into the auditorium against the current, his bald head rising above the crowd.

  It was Charles Tripp.

  Amos followed his direction to the single seat that had been kept vacant, but no longer was. Sitting there now was Eddie Tripp. He must’ve come in after the houselights were off, Amos thought. But it didn’t matter. There he was. The guy he had the appointment with.

  Charles was leaning close to Eddie, telling him something. When Eddie rose and he and Charles moved quickly for the exit, Amos stood and followed.

  Okay, he thought. Here goes.

  But outside, he lost sight of the Tripps. Amos lingered in the shadows. He wanted to see Eddie Tripp, not Charles. His appointment was with Eddie. Amos ventured further and further out. Then, suddenly, off to the left, he saw their half-sedan backing out of a parking space and beginning to move away.

  Amos began to run, staying in the shadows of the tree-lined parking strip but losing ground on the vehicle until, fifty yards ahead, a green light dissolved into orange and then red. The half car, half truck pulled up to the light.

  Okay, a voice within him said. Do something. Just do it.

  Amos sprinted through the shadows. He drew close, closer.

  The red light turned green.

  As the half-sedan eased ahead, Amos lunged forward, caught hold of the back pickup rail, and was pulled awkwardly forward. He grabbed tight, retracted his feet, and felt his kneecaps swing hard into the bumper. A few terrifying seconds passed as the car moved along with Amos hanging only by his fingers, with his feet curled up behind him and rough asphalt sliding beneath him, but then he chinned himself up, and his feet found the bumpers. He rolled over the tailgate into the truck bed, hidden behind the lockbox. He took a deep breath. He was on board.

  When the half-sedan slowed and turned off of Albany Avenue, a well-lighted four-lane street, and onto a dim residential street, Amos edged himself up and peered out over the lockbox. It was a tidy neighborhood that Amos recognized as the Kensington District, on the opposite side of Bandy Ridge from Clara’s house. Older cottages sagged beside newer duplexes and a few home businesses.

  As the Tripps’ half-truck slowed further, Amos’s body tightened. He slid over the tailgate and held himself in a crouching position on the rear bumper. To his right, a beauty shop was attached to a yellow stucco house. A spotlight shone on the word Rae’s, painted in brilliant red.

  Just beyond Rae’s, the half-truck turned into a gravel driveway.

  Amos leaped off the back, ducked into nearby shrubs, and lay perfectly still.

  The Tripp brothers emerged laughing from the car.

  “Well, when you’re in the mood, you’re in the mood,” Charles said, and Eddie let out the cackling laugh that Amos remembered from that night in front of the Goddards’ house.

  Amos peered out from the bushes. At the end of the gravel driveway, sitting above an open and empty two-car garage, was an apartment with 2902A painted in ragged black on the white stucco wall. The front door and cantilevered front porch were reached by wooden stairs, which the Tripps were now ascending.

  “’Course I’m always in the mood,” Charles said, which brought more laughter from Eddie.

  They didn’t go through the front door. There were four windows running along the upstairs porch. Charles went to the third of these windows, slid it open, and with surprising agility slipped inside. Eddie followed behind. A moment later, one of them switched on the interior lights.

  This, Amos realized with sudden clarity, was where the Tripp brothers lived.

  Behind the apartment’s windows, Eddie and Charles were moving about the lighted room, vanishing into other rooms, returning again. Both drank from tall glasses and talked in low voices, with Eddie’s laughter carrying out into the night. At one point, to Amos’s astonishment, Charles seemed to say, “Okay, then,” and then lowered himself from view, which made no sense, because the garage below the apartment remained empty and dark.

  And then, a few minutes later, Charles’s shaved head and huge body rose again into the lighted room.

  The lights went out, and the Tripps exited as they’d entered, through the third window, which they now closed after them. They were both wearing dark clothes.

  “So we make her wait a few minutes,” Charles said, and laughed. “I’ll tell you what making her wait is. Making her wait is a freaking mood enhancer.” He laughed thickly, and Eddie’s cackle followed.

  The tires spat gravel as Eddie backed the half-sedan quickly out of the driveway, and Amos lay flat, eyes down, while the headlights passed over him as the Tripps turned onto the street.

  Amos stood and watched the taillights disappear. Make who wait? he wondered. He looked at the street, then at the apartment. He walked up the gravel, each step a loud crunching sound. The garage was empty except for empty oil cans, half-filled Hefty bags, and other trash. The walls were freshly painted, and the back wall was covered with sheetrock and hanging tools. Nothing was odd, except that it seemed shorter than most garages.

  Amos went to the foot of the stairs and looked up. Don’t hurry and don’t sneak, he thought. Hurrying and sneaking attract attention. Amos took one step, then another. His heart felt like it had risen from his chest and wedged itself between his ears, where it pounded fiercely.

  Don’t sneak. Don’t hurry. One step at a time.

  When he reached the upstairs porch, Amos went straight to the third window and, without looking around, slid it open. He bent and stepped easily through.

  Amos was inside, breathing again. The pounding in his ears softened a little.

  He switched on a light. To his surprise, the place was tidy. Tidy and strange. It l
ooked like a military dormitory. Instead of bureaus, there were two khaki-colored footlockers. The two twin beds were covered with army blankets and wrapped tight as wontons. Along one wall, an old khaki green door lay atop two stacks of milk crates to make a desktop, on which sat a newish wide-screen Sony, a neat stack of dirty magazines, a large, military-style flashlight, and a book called A Teenager’s Guide to the Legal System.

  There were three more doors in the room. One led to the kitchen, almost as tidy as the bedroom. The rinsed glasses in the sink still smelled of liquor. Within the refrigerator, besides Red Dog beer, white tequila, and some red syrupy liquid in a tall bottle, there was Kix, Cap’n Crunch, sugar in a sack, Oreos, pork rinds, and barbecued potato chips. Stuff, Amos thought, you usually kept in cupboards, unless your cupboards had cockroaches. He swung open the freezer compartment. It was cold and frosty but contained no ice, no ice cream, and—half to Amos’s disappointment, half to his relief—no frozen snakes.

  The second door led to a bathroom, also spic-and-span, and the third door accessed a closet, with clothes hanging neatly on poles. But there was something else. Hanging from the interior side of this closet door was a fold-out photograph of a naked woman with tiny random holes punched through her. The photo had been used as a dartboard. Even now, three feathered metal darts protruded grotesquely from the punctured woman. It revolted Amos. He quickly pushed the door closed.

  He looked around. So where had Charles lowered himself? And into what? Amos went over to the place at the rear of the room where Charles had seemed to be standing. There was nothing there but one of the heavy footlockers.

  When Amos gave the locker a push, it and the rug beneath it slid aside and revealed something surprising. There, in the floor, was a flush-hinged trapdoor.

  Amos gingerly lifted the small door and peered in. Nothing but darkness. He grabbed the flashlight from the desk and directed its beam into the hole. A slanted wooden ladder led down to a small room. Amos’s heart again began to beat furiously. It was creepy. It was definitely creepy.