Whistling In the Dark

by Lesley Kagen

  Ethel got up with an aaahhhmen and kissed both of us on our foreheads and went back into the house with a slam of that screen door, her sweet lilies of the valley perfume staying behind to sit with us a while longer.

  My head was on one end of the straw couch and Troo’s on the other and her bare feet were next to my tummy, so I rubbed them a little for her until she fell asleep, which was almost right away. Then I got up as quiet as it is when you can’t sleep at night. I stared down at Troo’s red waves streaming out of her coonskin cap. It was a full moon night and some of its glow was falling across her face and made her look like a saint. I pulled the sheet right up to her chin and then walked over to the edge of the screen porch so I could get a good look at Rasmussen’s house. It was all dark except for a light on in what I thought might be the kitchen. Maybe Rasmussen was out looking for Greasy Al Molinari like he told Mr. Fitzpatrick he would. Or maybe he was hiding right around the corner, waiting and watching for me like he had that first night when he chased me down the alley. After Rasmussen did away with me, Troo would be all alone. Even though she acted so tough sometimes, I remembered what she was like after Daddy died. She couldn’t take something like that again. She’d turn into a nutcase and have to go out to the county looney bin and live there with Mrs. Foosman from over on Hi Mount Street, who had tried to drown her two kids in the bathtub because God had told her they were little devils. I couldn’t let that happen. I could never let Daddy down like that. I’d rather be dead, that’s how much I loved my Trooper.

  To keep her safe, I needed to make my scheme come true. I was going over to Rasmussen’s house and look around a little to see if I could find Sara’s other tennis shoe or Junie’s St. Christopher medal she got for her First Holy Communion, which Fast Susie Fazio said had never been found. And then I would come right back to the house and wake up Mr. Gary and he would take the shoe and the medal and drive them over to the police station and then the cops would come to get Rasmussen and electrocute him ASAP.

  I wanted to ask Ethel for help, but I didn’t. Because I knew she really liked Rasmussen. She even did charitable things for him. Like watering his garden if it had been a hot day and he couldn’t come home from the police station. Or if he had to leave very early, Ethel would bring his milk and butter in from the chute and put it in his refrigerator.

  One night, I asked Ethel while we were playing go fish why she liked Rasmussen so much. She leaned forward, quickly plucked three cards out of her hand and placed them facedown in front of me. The first card she flipped over was the jack of hearts. “See that?” she said. “Let’s say that’s Dave Rasmussen.” Then she flipped over the middle card. “And then let’s say”—she tapped the queen of hearts—“let’s say that’s . . .” She almost said a name, but caught herself. I slit my eyes at her. Ethel had her no-how-no-way look on her face, so I knew there was no use asking who had just been sitting on the tip of her tongue.

  “You know why that jack of hearts has such a sad-lookin’ face?” Ethel asked.

  I studied the card. “Because he has to wear those dumb-lookin’ clothes?”

  Ethel snorted. “ ’Sides that.”

  I am usually very good at guessing games because of my imagination, but for the life of me I couldn’t come up with anything. “I don’t know, Ethel. Why’s he look so sad?” He really did look awful.

  “Well, it’s all because of this here queen.” Ethel picked the card up and waved it at me. “She was deep in love and wanted to marry this jack.” She put the cards together like a couple walking down an aisle. “But this jack”—she put it right up to my face—“even though he was deep in love, too, he told the queen he couldn’t marry her.” She tsked . . . tsked . . . tsked. “So the queen done went off and married someone else.” She turned over the last card. It was the king of diamonds. “So now the poor ole jack has got a permanent fracture of the heart.”

  Sometimes I had to pay very close attention to Ethel and her stories. They could be as confusing as one of those soap opera stories she listened to on her kitchen radio while she was ironing.

  “Ethel, are you tellin’ me that Rasmussen loved a woman with all his heart and soul and all the stars in the sky and starfish in the sea and she married somebody else?”

  “That’s ’xactly what I’m tellin’ you, Miss Sally,” she said. “Truth be told”—she leaned in so close I could see the hairs in her nose—“that queen got married to somebody ’sides that jack more’n once.” And I could tell by the wrinkle that came between her eyebrows that the whole story had made Ethel, who was a real romantic woman, feel just terrible for Rasmussen.

  Oh, poor Miss Ethel Jenkins from Calhoun County, Mississippi. Rasmussen had even fooled the smartest woman I knew. But he couldn’t fool me. I pulled carefully on the creaky screen door that led out of the porch so it didn’t wake Troo. Then I walked out of Mrs. Galecki’s yard into the alley because a white picket fence full of sleeping yellow roses separated the two yards and I didn’t want to come back later all scratched up. That would make Ethel suspicious in the morning. I held my breath and looked around. Nothin’ seemed like it shouldn’t, so I walked around Rasmussen’s garage and tried to peek in. I bet when he stole girls he brought them here to molest them. Because those girls were both taken right off the sidewalk. Sara had been on her way to get that milk for her mother and Junie, I heard, had been on the way to her dance class at Marsha’s Dance Studio, where they had children’s tap and ballet lessons. And they weren’t found right away after they disappeared. So Rasmussen had to have brought them somewhere after he grabbed them. He probably had a car like Mr. Gary. Hardly anybody had one around here. Most people took the bus or walked to where they had to go every morning, like to the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory or to church or to the Kroger.

  I snuck into Rasmussen’s backyard, slowly, slowly closing the gate but leaving it unlatched in case I had to make a fast getaway. I couldn’t believe my eyes! There was the garden Rasmussen had told me about. Oh, it was a sight. There was a birdbath with water and a little birdhouse on a stick. And carrots and tomatoes and radishes in rows. And small green beans growing on large poles that looked like a tepee. And so many different kinds of flowers, some I’d never seen before. It was truly a Garden of Eden. Mrs. Goldman would just go crazy for this garden. So would Daddy.

  I walked on the grass real quietly up to the house. I leaned against his back door waiting for my heart to stop fluttering like a kite on a windy day. Then I crossed myself and slowly pulled the handle down. And it was then that the whole backyard lit up like daytime. A car was pulling into Rasmussen’s garage. I dropped down and belly-crawled as fast as I could toward the garden because that was about the only place to hide. It seemed like forever until Rasmussen pulled that garage door down with a clickety clickety clickety. I could hear his footsteps, but I couldn’t see him. I’d gotten inside the green bean tepee to wait for him to go into his house, to hear the slam of the door, but nothing happened. After a few minutes or so, I peeked. I shouldn’t have. They always tell you not to do that when you’re hiding from someone, but I had to know where Rasmussen was because he was tall enough to look over his fence and there would be Troo sleeping in the screen porch. Easy pickin’s, as Ethel would say. I held my breath and looked through the green bean leaves. And in the light of the moon, right next to the yellow roses, Rasmussen was sitting in his glider, rockin’ slowly back and forth. Crying his eyes out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  When that puppy of his began barking from inside the house, Rasmussen blew his nose into a handkerchief and said, “Okay, okay, hold your horses, Lizzie, I’m comin’.”

  After I heard the door clank shut, I sat in that green bean tepee counting up to sixty Mississippi until I thought it was safe to come out. A smart thing to do would’ve been to go back to Mrs. Galecki’s and get back under that sheet with Troo, but I guess I really wasn’t that smart like Nell always said because I didn’t do that. I had a scheme and I was sticking to it.r />
  I looked around the yard for something to stand on so I could peep in on him. Next to the back door was an orangish flowerpot like the one on the front porch that was full of red geraniums, which I had noticed because they were Mother’s favorite flower. But this pot was empty so I kinda dragged it over to the side of his house, right below a window. I crouched up on it and straightened a little at a time. I could see right into Rasmussen’s house! There he was opening a can of something that must’ve been dog food because that puppy was jumping all over his leg like Butchy used to do when I’d feed him. All I could see was the kitchen. I needed to see more of what Rasmussen was doing, how a murderer and molester got ready for bed. Maybe he would take Sara’s shoe or Junie’s St. Christopher medal out of their hiding place.

  I tiptoed down the path and then set the pot down outside another window that looked into the dining room, which seemed a lot like ours but didn’t have Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottles all over the shiny wooden table. But it did have something else. Something so astounding that I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it. There, on the dining room wall, surrounded by a golden frame—and I could see this so clearly because there was a little light above it like a lamp—there was a picture of Junie Piaskowski in her First Holy Communion dress. It was the same picture of her that Rasmussen had in his wallet, only a lot bigger. I ducked down when he walked through the dining room. He didn’t even stop to look at the picture. Just went past it like it was no big deal.

  I closed my eyes and thought maybe I had lost every one of my marbles. But when I opened them, there she still was—Junie. Then Rasmussen walked by again, now in his underwear, which were the boxer kind, and a bare naked chest. He turned off all the lights except for the one above Junie’s First Holy Communion picture and disappeared again with that little dog. I looked back at Junie again. She was smiling on an island of white light in the dark, her hands folded on her lap like she was praying the rosary she had wound around her fingers.

  Rasmussen was the worst kind of creature there could ever be! Not only had he murdered and molested Junie, he had her picture hanging in his dining room like he was bragging. Like Mr. Jerbak did about those deer heads hangin’ on the wall up at the Beer ’n Bowl.

  I had to go wake up Ethel and tell her immediately. Here was the proof! Maybe now she wouldn’t think Rasmussen was such a good ole boy. I didn’t even put the flowerpot back. I just ran right through the garden, back into the alley and through the screen door, past Troo and into Mrs. Galecki’s house. Ethel’s bedroom was off the kitchen like Nell’s was in our house and I didn’t even think of knocking, that’s how scared I was. I jumped right onto her bed and began shaking her by the hip. “Ethel . . . Ethel Jenkins . . . wake up.” Which I hated to do, because I knew that she was not good at this sort of in-the-middle-of-the-night scariness because that KKK club had given her some very bad memories. That’s when Ethel said the KKK liked to come. In the black velvet cloak of the night.

  Ethel sat right up real fast. She had something over her hair like a hat or something. And she had on a white frilly nightie. “What’s wrong!?”

  “Oh Ethel, you have to come see. You have to come see.” I pulled on her hand and she tossed back the sheet. She slid her feet into the slippers that she called mules and then let me pull her along out on the screen porch.

  Ethel whispered, “Is it Miss Troo? Is she feelin’ poorly?” She looked over at Troo, who hadn’t moved one iota on the little straw couch.

  “Troo’s fine,” I whispered back. “It’s Junie Piaskowski.”

  Ethel looked at me when I said that and then put her hand on my forehead to check if I had a temperature. “You know, you’re beginning to worry Ethel.”

  “Just come with me real quick, Ethel. Real quick. I have something to show you that you are not going to believe!” She looked at me again and then back at Troo but followed me back to Rasmussen’s, her mules slapping. Ethel stopped for a second after we went through the gate into his garden and did a whistle and said, “That man has a green thumb like I never seen.” She picked off a small tomato and popped it into her mouth, and then because she was getting more awake now and wondering what the heck I was doing, she said, “Miss Sally, I believe you are havin’ some kind of nightmare or walkin’ in your sleep. Let’s go back to bed.”

  In my most serious voice, one I didn’t even know I had until right then, I said, “Ethel, no!”

  Ethel frowned down at me because I was not using my manners, but she came along to the side of the house anyway. I stood back up on the flowerpot, but she didn’t need to do that because she was taller than a lot of men. I pointed at Junie’s picture and figured I didn’t need to say anything else. That picture, like Granny said, was worth a thousand words. When Ethel saw Junie in her little white Communion dress and veil, a mixed-up look came over her face. She looked down at me and said, “What is wrong with you, child?” acting like it was la de da normal that Rasmussen had a picture of dead Junie Piaskowski hanging on his dining room wall.

  I got so mad and sad all at the same time that I burst right into tears.

  Ethel said, “It’s okay. It’s all right.” She ran her hand carefully down my back, like I was one of Mrs. Galecki’s china dolls. “Miss Junie’s with Jesus in Heaven.”

  “Ethel, d-d-don’t you understand?” I pointed at Junie’s picture again. “I saw them together last summer at the Policemen’s Picnic and they were flying a kite and Rasmussen was lookin’ at Junie in a certain kind of way . . . like he loved her or something . . . and he even had his hand on her shoulder and he was touching her and then she turned up dead. He’s the murderer and molester. There’s the p-p-proof.”

  Ethel’s mouth dropped almost down to the sidewalk. And then she said in her lowest voice, the one that sounded like a box fan on a hot day, “Oh my, my, my, my, my.”

  What was wrong with Ethel? Why wasn’t she running to wake up Mr. Gary, who would call the police on Rasmussen?

  Ethel lifted me up off the flowerpot and set me gently down on the ground. “We need to have a talk, Miss Sally.”

  I jerked my hand out of hers and whisper-yelled, “Ethel!” “Come here to me.” She pulled me into her bosoms and swatted me a little one on my butt. “Now just settle down so I can tell you what’s goin’ on here. It ain’t what you think.”

  I let her lead me around the corner of the house and over to Rasmussen’s green glider that still had a slight smell of that orange aftershave he wore. We sat down and she rocked us a few times and then said, “You have gone and done some jumpin’ to conclusions, which is a bad business to be in.”

  “But, Ethel . . .”

  “Just hush up for one minute.” I was so jumpy mad that I tried to get up off the swing, but Ethel grabbed me by the arm and reeled me back down. “The reason Mr. Rasmussen was lookin’ at Miss Junie like he loved her was cuz he did. He was Miss Junie’s uncle. I thought you knew that.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, because I was sure I’d heard her wrong.

  Ethel said slowly, pronouncing each word very carefully, “Junie was Mr. Rasmussen’s little niece. His sister Betsy’s girl.”

  I just couldn’t believe it. This man was the evilest thing walking around on two feet.

  Rasmussen had murdered and molested his own niece!

  I couldn’t talk for a minute because suddenly I didn’t trust Ethel, which made me feel really deep down slimy. “Poor Dave. Little Miss Junie was the apple of his eye.” She stopped rocking us and said, “For land’s sake, why’d you go and think he’d murdered her? Why, Mr. Rasmussen, he can’t even murder one of God’s worst ideas, that’s what a good man he is.”

  “I’m sorry to have to say this, but you are so wrong, Ethel. Rasmussen did murder Junie and he murdered Sara Marie, too.” My mind felt like the inside of a beehive. “And he’s got a picture of me in his wallet so that means he’s coming after me next.”

  Ethel let out a little surprised whoop. “Oh, wait ’til I tell Ray Buck.” And th
en she really broke out laughing hard, maybe because she was tired or maybe to make me feel better because she knew how much I loved to hear that laugh that sounded like a million bucks, deeply rich and no end to it. “I always tol’ you that imagination of yours was goin’ to get you into trouble someday and today is that day, Sally.”

  Even though she was laughing I could tell she was a little upset with me because she had forgotten to call me Miss Sally. I leaned into her when she put her warm arm around me and said, “I promise you this. Mr. Rasmussen, he’s the best man around here. A true gentleman. He wouldn’t never hurt nobody and somehow you just gotta make yourself stop thinkin’ like that.”

  The smell of Rasmussen’s roses was getting mixed in with that smell of chocolate chip cookies and they made a wave of sweetness that I wanted to do a swan dive into. It woulda been so nice to believe Ethel. To think that somehow I had gotten the idea about Rasmussen being a murderer and molester into my head the same way I’d thought Mr. Kenfield was a spy and that Butchy was the devil in a dog disguise. Seeing Rasmussen look at Junie over at the park when they were flying that kite and thinkin’ he was up to something, and how he was always so nice but looked sad sometimes when you’d walk past his house, and how he never got married and all those other things I’d been thinking . . . it was all my imagination?

  “Maybe it’s because your mother is sick. The worry of that can make a body’s brain think somethin’ that might not be right,” Ethel said. “And your daddy dyin’ not that long ago. I seen this happen before. Folks can go off their head for a bit because they’s so upset ’bout somethin’.”