It Started with a Whisper

by A W Hartoin

  “Don’t call me that,” she said.

  “Go away.”

  “No, I want to know what you’re doing with that notebook.”

  “Nothing. Go away,” I said, as the ravens advanced on me. I’d never seen them so close. They were definitely bigger than the ravens in town. The feathers on their large heads were ruffled and a shiny blue-black. Their beaks and claws looked like they were carved from obsidian. The nearest one eyed my shoelace with a beady eye, ready to make off with it.

  “I’ll tell Luke,” said Ella.

  “No, you won’t. Besides, he wouldn’t listen to you.”

  “Yes, he would,” said Ella. “All their formulas are in there.”

  April arrived and hooked her arm through Ella’s. “Just tell her. It’s not like she’ll give up or something.”

  I slapped my forehead. One sister I could handle, but two was more than anyone should have to bear.

  “Come on,” said Ella. “We won’t tell.”

  True enough. We didn’t tell on each other. Nobody in The Pack did. It was an unwritten rule, but I wasn’t sure what to say, how far to go.

  “I want to find something to do to Jason Greenbow,” I said.

  “I thought we were over that stuff,” said April.

  “I’m not.”

  “Me neither,” said Ella. “We might get Miss Pritchett for homeroom. Maybe we can freak her out so bad she’ll quit. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, distracted by the ravens. They were six inches from my feet and forming a half moon around me, tilting their heads and spreading their wings. “Look at them. It’s like they’re listening.”

  “Maybe they are,” said April. “Ravens are really smart.”

  “Who cares about ravens? What should we do?” Ella kicked at the ravens. They deserted me and hopped towards her, clicking their beaks and squawking until she retreated several steps.

  “I got some ideas, but I can’t get the stuff I need,” I said, fingering the notebook. “I don’t even know how Luke and Caleb could make it, not out here anyway.”

  Ella looked thoughtful for a moment. “Some of their stuff’s out here, you know.”

  “Really? What stuff?”

  “I don’t know. I just know it’s here.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “After they blew up the lab last time, Aunt Calla banned it.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Ella. “Like they’re going to obey. Jesus, where have you been?”

  “It’s here, alright. Just not in the house.” April flopped down on the grass and peeled the paint off her toenails.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I saw them carrying some boxes out of the house in the middle of the night.”

  “That could be anything. They could be trying to grow pot again,” I said.

  “Nah. They were never really serious about that,” said Ella.

  “Looked pretty serious to me.”

  “It was just another competition to them,” said April. “It was about Abe.”

  Luke and Caleb did love a competition, especially with a friend, and Abe had the nerve to be successful. When he got tired of infrequent pot supply, he decided drug dealers couldn’t be very smart and he was at least as bright as them, so he decided to grow his own. All he needed was some dirt, seeds, water, a super exhaust fan, and a couple grow lights. After a few weeks, he had twelve plants growing in his bathtub. His setup was perfect. His mom made him clean his own bathroom because she thought it taught him responsibility and he had a separate shower. Abe built quite a business for himself. He had a waiting list. That got to Luke and Caleb. If Abe could grow good pot, they could grow great pot, the best pot, Olympic gold medal pot, but they didn’t have a bathroom. Aunt Calla wasn’t as obliging as Abe’s mom. She was into everything.

  So last summer they bought the best seeds from The Netherlands and planted the second day after they arrived at Camp. All went as expected. The plants came up in neat rows, supple and pale green. Luke and Caleb could smell their success. Then as the plants grew, they changed. They became twisted and stunted. The ravens that kept hanging out and pooping on them constantly couldn’t have helped. There were brown spots on the leaves and when a couple buds grew they looked rotted and smelled like garbage. Luke and Caleb were undeterred. They just figured they’d invented a new kind of fabulous stinkweed. After all, inventing was what they did best, but it wasn’t to be. When they tested their creation, it smelled worse than garbage and the taste was unspeakable.

  They tore out the plants and planted a fresh crop, but it turned out worse than the first one. They planted over and over again. Each crop was worse. When the fourth attempt looked like cat turds, they gave up, but that’s not what they said. They claimed they were against the drug trade and couldn’t be responsible for the deaths of millions of brain cells.

  During the summer of the pot, Mom and Aunt Calla were more alert than usual. I saw them watching Luke and Caleb disappearing into the woods. Aunt Calla followed them once. When she came back she never said anything or made a move to stop them. She and Mom did smile a lot when Luke and Caleb gave up like they knew it would happen.

  Last January, Abe’s crimes finally caught up with him. A maid found his crop in the bathtub. He refused to sell to her (he did have a waiting list to consider), she turned him in, and it was off to wilderness camp for Abe.

  “The foot locker,” said April. “They must be keeping their stuff there.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “The pot locker.”

  When I started to get up, the largest of the ravens, a black monstrosity with inch-long claws, flew at me and snatched the notebook out of my hands. The raven tried to fly, but the notebook was too heavy and he dropped it a few feet away.

  “What the hell?” I grabbed the notebook as another raven tried to drag it off.

  April yelled and another Edgar Allan Poe nightmare swooped down and snatched the notebook out of my hands. It landed and began ripping pages out. April shooed it away, but it carried the pages off to the oak tree. Ella threw a stick at it, but instead of dropping the pages, it shredded them into confetti. Pages rained down on my sisters as a wind picked up. Ella and April’s hair swirled around their heads like soft-serve ice-cream cones. The girls jumped and snatched the larger bits out of the air, stuffing them in their pockets.

  April picked up the ruined notebook. Two more ravens flew at her, snapping their beaks and clawing at the notebook. I grabbed it and swung it at one of the birds. I didn’t make contact, but lost my grip. The notebook went fluttering in an arc, three feet away. The ravens left April and sailed over me to the lost notebook. They screeched and tried to drag it into the brush. When I charged them, the largest one hopped onto the cover and let out an enormous stream of poo. He looked at me and squawked out a sound that was somewhere between a rusty garage door and a teakettle. Then he flew straight at me. His wing brushed my cheek as I dove out of the way. All the other ravens followed and flew into the woods, squawking and dangling their nasty, curved claws below them.

  April and Ella flopped down on the grass, clutching their chests and pulling shredded pages out of their pockets. The wind ceased and their hair settled back on their shoulders, tangled as ribbons on Christmas morning.

  “Whoa,” said April. “That was really weird.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  The three of us looked at the poo-covered notebook and burst out laughing. Ella and April wiped tears off their cheeks and began finger-combing their hair.

  “Luke and Caleb are going to kill us,” Ella said.

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with them,” said April, as she picked up more bits of the pages around her feet.

  “Something wrong with Luke and Caleb,” said Ella. “Definitely.”

  “No,” said April. “I mean the ravens. Maybe they’re sick.”

  I flipped the notebook over and wiped the surviving pages on the grass. Strings of white slime clung to the blade
s, but the pages wouldn’t come clean. They just smeared.

  “I’m serious,” said April.

  “Serious about what?” I asked. “That the ravens have the bird flu or something?”

  “Well, that’s not normal behavior, is it?” asked April.

  Ella rolled her eyes at April. “Since when is Camp normal? We’re not normal.”

  “But it’s weird,” said April.

  I held the notebook at arm’s length by the wire binding. “Okay, so it’s weird. What do you want us to do? Take a bunch of ravens to the vet?”

  “I’m just saying we should pay more attention to what goes on around here.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Let’s find Luke and Caleb’s stash.”

  We walked the quarter mile to Luke and Caleb’s plot, a small clearing on the crest of a hill. The spot where they’d planted their pot crop had grown over and there was nothing to show the area’s former purpose. I spied Slick and Sydney sitting on the pot locker nestled at the base of a large oak. Both had hind legs pointed toward the sky and were cleaning their butts.

  Ella brushed the cats off. “Shoo. Get out of here.”

  The cats sauntered off the locker, walked a yard away, and began cleaning again. Without the cats to mark it, the camo green footlocker blended in with the woods. If a person didn’t know it was there, they’d walk right by. Luke and Caleb had concealed it with dirt, branches and leaves. Luke found it in one of Ernest’s sheds and appropriated it for their use.

  I cleared off the top and revealed a name, Caleb Brown, painted in black on the lid. Inside were a multitude of plastic containers of different sizes and shapes. Each one had a number printed in black on the lid. I chose a tall square one and looked through the clear plastic. It contained a bunch of narrow brown manila envelopes. I shook it, but nothing about the contents was revealed.

  “What do you think?” I shook the container again.

  “Don’t open it,” said April.

  “Why not?”

  “I think it came from the university lab. They had to clear their stuff out at the end of the semester. It sure wasn’t in the house. Aunt Calla would’ve found it.”

  “So what,” said Ella. “It’s just some chemicals.”

  “But we don’t know what they do,” said April.

  Ella flipped through the notebook. “I don’t see a reference list for the numbers. I hope the lists weren’t on the pages the ravens got. Is this the only notebook?”

  “Yeah, but they must have a list or they wouldn’t have numbered the containers,” I said.

  “We have to find the list. We’ll never figure out what this stuff is just by looking at it,” said April.

  “I bet it was on the pages the ravens got.”

  “We could ask Luke or Caleb,” said Ella. “Maybe it’ll distract them from killing each other.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I’ve tried to interest them in Miss Pritchett again, but they don’t even hear me. You know how they get.”

  “They are kind of obsessive. We’ll have to think of something else until we find the list,” said April.

  “Let’s do something to Miss Pritchett’s house. We don’t need a chemical for that,” said Ella.

  “She probably wouldn’t even notice. It’s such a dump now.” I slumped against the tree trunk. Slick wriggled in between my legs and chest, purring and rubbing his whiskers on my chin.

  “Well, we’ll have to think of something they will notice, something they need,” said April.

  Ella held out her arm and examined her chipped pink fingernail polish. “We could muck with the wiring and kill the electric.”

  “No. I don’t know anything about house wiring. Do you?” I looked at my sisters, and they shook their heads. “We might start a fire.”

  “The plumbing then. We can handle that,” said April. Slow smiles spread across our faces. Mine was the biggest. I knew exactly what to do and Greenbow would never be the wiser.

  We walked back to the house to get the tools I needed, a wrench, a socket set, and a pastry knife. But when we came out of the woods, prepared to have an easy time of it, we found Mom and Dad sitting by the back door, looking like they were waiting for something. Dad still wore the work clothes he’d arrived in. Mom’s forehead had more lines in it than a roller coaster has hills. I appraised the situation mid-step and decided there was nothing to do but go ahead. If we avoided the parents, it would only make whatever we’d done worse.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Mom took a long drink out of a tall glass and Dad refilled it with a foamy blue mixture that smelled like melons. Something was going on, because she usually drank her fruity drinks late in the evening.

  “Your cousins are at it again,” said Dad.

  “What’d they do?” asked Ella.

  “Caleb handcuffed Luke to their bunk bed and tried to shave the rest of his hair. Luke broke their desk chair over Caleb’s head, and Calla had to take him to the doctor to get stitches.”

  “Where’s Luke?” April looked around like she expected Luke to jump out at her.

  “Still handcuffed to the bed. We can’t find the bolt cutters and Caleb won’t give up the key.” Mom took a long sip. “Do you know where it is? I can’t get any work done because Luke keeps screaming and dragging the bed around. If we don’t free him soon, I might have to go buy a gun and shoot him.”

  Dad concealed a smile while he poured her another drink. Behind him, Luke’s voice, filled with rage, drifted out of the screen door, and a loud banging commenced.

  “I’m going to kill him,” said Mom.

  “Do you have the bolt cutters?” asked Dad.

  We shook our heads and offered to look for them.

  It was the perfect reason for rummaging around in the tools. Normally, I wouldn’t have needed an excuse. Mom would’ve been working and Dad would’ve been drinking his beer and reading. They wouldn’t have noticed if I made off with half the cutlery, but that day was different. Mom, in particular, looked ready to pounce.

  I led the way into the kitchen. Luke’s cursing echoed off the walls and assaulted our ears. We ignored him as much as possible and went through the toolbox under the sink. We found the wrench and socket set. The bolt cutters weren’t there. Caleb probably hid them. He thought of everything when he planned an attack against Luke. There wasn’t any point in looking further. If Caleb didn’t want the cutters found, they wouldn’t be.

  The three of us went out the front door to avoid the parents, happy to leave Luke’s raging behind. We walked down the path to the pond, our bare feet making soft, scuffling noises in the quiet of the afternoon. I started around the pond when I saw Frank and Cole on the dock. Frank sat with his feet trailing in the water, his face turned up towards the sun. Cole lay on his stomach with his head hanging over the edge of the dock. One of his arms was wrapped around the log piling and his body made odd jerking movements, his feet flopping on the wood.

  I pivoted and walked out onto the dock. My sisters trailed behind me, discussing what was wrong with Cole. I didn’t need to guess.

  “Hey,” I said to Frank.

  Frank shaded his eyes and squinted at me. “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi.” April sat down between Frank and Cole. She leaned toward Frank, smiling. I squeezed in between April and Cole. Ella stayed standing and tapped her foot on the dock.

  I poked Cole in the ribs, a little harder than necessary. Cole groaned in response.

  “Is he drunk?” asked April.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Ella and April leaned forward and looked at the water under Cole’s face. They recoiled. “Oh, gross,” said Ella.

  “Poor Cole,” said April.

  Mildred glided over and disappeared under the dock. Several other geese followed. Mildred chased them away, honking and spitting.

  “She does pretty good with one wing,” said April.

  “I can’t believe someone shot her,” said Ella.

  “Maybe it wa
s an accident,” said April.

  “It was no accident,” I said.

  Cole made another horking noise, and Mildred dove under his head. I peeked over the edge of the dock. Mildred was eating the corn out of Cole’s vomit.

  “Aw, that’s nasty.”

  “What?” asked April.

  “Nothing. You don’t want to know,” I said. “So what’s the deal with Cole?”

  “He drank your dad’s beer,” said Frank.

  “That’s it?” I expected much more than one measly beer, like salmonella or a bet where Cole ate a whole raw onion. He’d been known to do that kind of thing. Beer was so boring. Cole snuck his own parents’ alcohol every chance he got, so he had a lot more practice drinking than I did. Mom and Dad usually drank red wine or some heavy-duty beer I couldn’t stomach.

  “He snuck another one when no one was looking,” replied Frank.

  “He’s that drunk on one and a half beers?” asked Ella.

  Cole lifted his head and mumbled something sounding like, “Tibble bob.”

  I laughed. “Dumb ass. He drank Dad’s triple bock.”

  We shook our heads. Only Cole would drink the triple bock. The stuff was as thick as motor oil and just about as tasty. Cole wasn’t picky when it came to alcohol. He took what he could get, rarely considering the consequences.

  “Why’d you do it?” asked April. “You know it’s bad for you.

  Cole groaned.

  “Let’s go. Come on, Frank. We need some help,” I said.

  The walk to Greenbow’s house went quickly as we chatted about the havoc we were planning. I put my arm out and stopped us before we made it to the bramble.

  “Do you smell something?” I asked.

  “I smell trash,” said Ella.

  “Not that. Like charcoal, but not.”

  “Check that out,” said Frank, pointing to an oak tree with a missing strip of bark twisting around the trunk like a candy cane.

  “Lightning strike?” asked April.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Look, there’s another one,” said Ella.

  “I count six,” said Frank.