Watcher in the Woods

by Robert Liparulo

  “Fell out of a tree.”

  She aimed her beady eyes at his arm for a long time, as if reading the truth from it. She pressed her lips together and nodded. Her not saying anything was worse than questioning him about his fall or even flat-out calling him a liar. He felt the urge to blurt out what had really happened . . . and along with it all the weirdness he’d seen since coming to her little slice of heaven . . . and what had happened to Mom too.

  You wanna meet Mrs. King? he thought. Pack your bags, lady, cause it’s a long trip.

  She laughed, snapping him out of his . . . what was that? Freak-out time sounded about right.

  “You have that deer-in-the-headlights look,” she said. “I don’t blame you. New town, new school, and you go and hurt yourself.” She fixed her eyes on him. Slowly she said, “And I hear you’re moving into the old Konig place.”

  CHAPTER twenty - six

  MONDAY, 8 : 22 A . M .

  “Ma’am?” David said.

  “Your house, the Victorian outside of town?”

  David nodded. He thought, Let’s not talk about the house, okay?

  She smiled and moved her attention to the papers on her desk. “Lot of work, old house like that. But once it’s fixed up, it’ll be lovely.”

  Words and laughter, the squeak of sneakers on tile, drew their attention to the classroom entrance. Three boys were barreling in, pushing each other, breaking their conversation off when they saw Mrs. Moreau and David.

  “Boys!” she said. “How was your summer?”

  They nodded, mumbled, “Good” and “Okay.”

  “Ben, Marcus, Anthony—this is David. He’s just moved here from . . .” She swung her gaze back to David. “L.A.?”

  “Pasadena.”

  The boys gave him “hi’s” and nods, and he returned them.

  One of the kids—David thought his name was Anthony—whose broad shoulders and solid chest would make him prime linebacker material in a few years—said, “What happened to you?”

  David raised his elbow in the sling. “Fell out of a tree.” Each time he said it, it got easier. Maybe he’d believe it someday as well.

  “And that shiner,” one of the other boys said. “The tree beat you up too?”

  That got them all laughing.

  “Uh,” David said. He touched the bruise around his eye. It was still tender. “I . . . my brother punched me.”

  “Why?” Another of the boys asked. This one was Ben, if Mrs. Moreau had said their names in the order they stood. He wore glasses and looked like the sort of kid who said “why” a lot.

  David shrugged. “Just playing around.”

  “Is he bigger than you?” Anthony asked. They moved closer, totally ignoring the teacher now.

  “He’s fifteen.”

  Ben said, “Does he beat you up a lot?”

  The boy who hadn’t yet spoken, Marcus, said, “I have a big sister who beats me up all the time.”

  Anthony pushed him. “She’s a girl, dude! You baby!”

  The tallest of the three, Marcus didn’t look like a baby. He looked big enough to give Xander a hard time. David wondered what kind of monster his sister must be.

  More kids streamed in—a guy and four or five girls.

  Mrs. Moreau clapped her hands and said, “Everyone find a desk. Anywhere’s fine for now. Mr. King, it would do me a great honor if you would sit up here by me.” She gestured toward a desk that was front and center. The other kids laughed and stumbled over each other getting to the back of the room.

  “Yes, ma’am,” David said. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted his disappointment to show or not. He didn’t want to get on her bad side, but if she knew he wasn’t happy there, she might let him move. He retrieved his backpack and took his seat.

  Mrs. Moreau sat behind her desk and began squaring the piles of papers. For a few moments she seemed intent on her work, not much interested in the students filling her classroom. Without looking up she tugged the newspaper with his father’s caricature on it out from under the stacks of paper, folded it, and dropped it into a desk drawer. Only then did her eyes venture beyond her desk.

  “Ladies. Nice to see you,”she said. Then, looking beyond David, “Gentlemen, welcome back.”

  David glanced around shyly, nodding when he caught someone’s eye. Several girls had their heads together, glancing at him and giggling. He turned back to find Mrs. Moreau watching him from the corner of her eye. He looked away quickly, not sure if he should acknowledge her attention or pretend he hadn’t noticed.

  Before he realized it, the classroom had filled up. A bell sounded to mark the beginning of the period, and a few students, who had been standing, rushed to their desks.

  Six hundred miles from the last school he had attended, but still so many things were the same: the glare of the fluorescents, competing with the daylight; the little noises of chair legs scraping on the floor, cleared throats, the tick of the clock; the mingling odors of a dozen different shampoos and laundry detergents, sweat. He heard the murmur of persistent whispering and wondered if it was about him.

  The teacher used her palm as a gavel against a stack of handouts. “Quiet down,” she said. “We have a lot to go over and a lot of papers to distribute, some for you and some to take home to your parents. Let’s start with roll call.” She began with “Abernathy, Jennifer” and proceeded down an alphabetical list, last name first.

  David tried to pay attention, tried to remember each name, though he wasn’t turning to see which student it belonged to. Another reason sitting up front stunk.

  Mrs. Moreau called “Jennings, Anthony.” David thought the quy responding “here” sounded like the Anthony he had met.

  “King, David.”

  “Here,” David said.

  The room around him erupted in quiet laughter and whispered comments: “King David? Ohhh.”

  “Did you kill Goliath?”

  “Isn’t that the naked statue?”

  The last one brought a new burst of giggles from the girls and a few harr-harrs from the boys.

  David felt the eyes of his classmates on the back of his head like raindrops blowing into him. He almost cringed, tucking his head down into his shoulders, but stopped himself.

  Just wait it out, he thought. Don’t say anything. You’ll just give them more to laugh about. He was only glad his name wasn’t Arthur.

  “Hey! Hey!” Mrs. Moreau snapped. Her palm had become a gavel once more. “We do not poke fun at people’s names. David’s name has a rich and regal legacy. When the David you’re thinking of was just a boy, he killed a lion with his bare hands.”

  Several “oohs” around him.

  Shhh, he thought, you’re making it worse.

  But she continued: “And he was probably no older than any of you, than our David himself, when he slew the giant Goliath with a single stone.”

  Several kids went, “Ooohhhh!”

  Someone asked, “Was he naked when he sleeeeew him?”

  The entire class cracked up.

  David felt his face flush. No doubt his face was as red as Mrs. Moreau’s dress. His head got heavier, and it was harder not to let it sink between his shoulders.

  Mrs. Moreau’s hand slammed down with a bang! She stood up from her chair and said, “Clayton!”

  Don’t do it . . . don’t do it . . .

  She did it. “You can take that smart mouth to the office right now.”

  David let his head drop. She had just made sure that Clayton’s comment about nakedness and “slewing” giants would be passed on to every student in the school, and David would be reminded about it the whole year.

  “What?” Clayton protested.

  “You heard me, young man.”

  From the heavy sigh and banging, David knew Clayton was obeying, but was not happy about it. From the corner of David’s eye, Clayton came into view. He was a stocky kid, brown hair, freckles. He wasn’t mean-looking, just a twelve-year- old kid. When he was almost to the door, Mr
s. Moreau stopped him.

  “And Clayton?” she said, almost sweetly. “Do you know whom to ask for?”

  Oh no! David felt his eyelids stretching until he thought his eyeballs would fall out onto the desk. He shook his head no at Mrs. Moreau, but her attention was on Clayton.

  Clayton glared at her, his lips tight.

  Her thin lips pursed before opening them to squawk, “Ask for Mr. King, our new principal.”

  Clayton’s eyes grew as wide as David’s and snapped over to him. Shocked whispers filled the air like buzzing bees.

  “Yes, Clayton,” Mrs. Moreau continued, “David’s father. You may call him King Edward if you’re still feeling smart when you get there.”

  Clayton frowned, shook his head, and pushed out of the door.

  David was certain his face would remain red forever.

  Mrs. Moreau took her seat again. She cleared her throat, checked a sheet of paper in front of her, and said, “Krakauer, Amy.”

  CHAPTER twenty - seven

  SUNDAY, 4 : 10 P . M .

  “And after that, everyone kept calling me King David!”

  In the front seats of the 4Runner, Dad and Xander nodded knowingly.

  “It’s embarrassing,” David said. He made a face at Toria, who was sitting in the backseat with him.

  She tilted her head and stuck out her bottom lip, feeling for him.

  “Get used to it,” Dad said.

  Xander twisted around in his seat. “Nobody’s said that to you before, back in Pasadena?”

  David shrugged. “Sometimes, but it wasn’t mean. These guys are mean.”

  “Mean how?”

  “You know, little-kid-giant-killer and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “The . . . Michelangelo thing.”

  Xander laughed. “You’re too sensitive, Dae.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” he repeated.

  “What Michelangelo thing?” Toria asked.

  Xander said, “It’s a statue—”

  “Nothing!” David said. “Can we drop it already?”

  Xander grinned. “You’re just—”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Dad said. He slapped Xander’s thigh. He moved the inside rearview mirror to find David’s face. “Otherwise, how was it, Dae?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “I’m Star of the Week in October,” Toria said brightly.

  “Your birthday week?” Dad asked. He moved the mirror off of David to find her.

  “No . . . some other kid has a birthday that week too. They gave it to him.”

  “That’s not fair,” Xander declared. “You’re a girl; you should’ve got it.”

  “Tell that to Mrs. Varley,” Toria said. “She doesn’t believe in girls first or any of that. She even said there’s no difference, so there should be no special treatment.”

  Dad braked at a crosswalk. He signaled for a couple of kids to cross. To Toria he said, “Do you believe there’s no difference?”

  “Well, of course there is!” She could have added: Duh.

  “I mean beyond the obvious,” Dad said. “Should boys treat girls special?”

  “We are special.”

  “And boys aren’t?” David asked.

  Toria stuck her nose in the air. “Mom says boys would be like rocks if it weren’t for girls.”

  “Rocks?” David said.

  “God made girls special, so we can teach boys how to feel.”

  David shook his head. “I don’t need girls to teach me how to feel.”

  “Guys fight and girls looove.” Toria strung out the last word in a swooning, romantic way and batted her eyes.

  “I know Mom didn’t say that,” Xander said.

  “I said that,” Toria said.

  David liked talking about Mom. It kept her with them, in a way. He said, “I wonder what she would have put in our notes today.”

  Toria beamed. “Oh, yeah! Mom always put notes in our lunches on the first day of school.”

  Xander crinkled his nose. “Mushy, corny ones. Half the note was I love you this and I’m proud of you that. The other half never made sense.”

  David grinned. “Like last year. She told me not to rip my pants or try to open doors with my face.” He shook his head. “What was that about?”

  “She told me not to put Skittles in my nose,” Toria said.

  Xander said, “And she never even tried to explain them. She’d just look at you like Whatta ya mean, you don’t get it?”

  They all laughed. That was Mom. She wasn’t very good at telling jokes. She either forgot the punchline or said it too soon or set it up all wrong. But her lunch-box notes had always made David smile, and they’d all laugh about them later.

  “You know,” Dad said, “she gave me notes too.”

  Xander looked surprised. “She did?”

  Dad tilted his head. “Once, a long time ago—Xander, you were just a baby, David and Toria, you weren’t born yet—she sent me off to my first day on a teaching job with a brown-bag lunch. I put it in the refrigerator in the faculty break room. There were half a dozen brown bags just like it, and one of the other teachers got mine by mistake. He found the note, and it said, ‘Honey, don’t forget to glue on your hair.’ I had a big ol’ mop of hair back then, but from that day on, I could never convince anyone that it was really mine. I would pull on it and invite them to yank on it, too, but they would just laugh and say I must use good glue.”

  They all laughed. Xander lifted his own hair on both sides to show both its volume and authenticity.

  “Let me tell you,” Dad said, “for a guy with lots of hair, that was devastating.”

  Toria pulled at her hair with both hands; David did the same with his one good hand. Together they said, “I must have used the good glue!”

  Dad remembered more. “At the faculty Christmas party, I tried to get her to admit she was joking, but she played it straight. She never actually said I was bald, but she said things like, ‘There’s nothing wrong with male-pattern baldness. Look at Sean Connery.’ As sweet and innocent as can be.”

  “Is that when you started calling her Gee instead of Gertrude?” Xander asked.

  David added the line he’d heard his dad say so many times: “Because she definitely isn’t a Gertrude!”

  “Nah,” Dad said. “She’d been going by Gee since she was a little girl. She was named after her grandmother, but her parents knew right away that she wasn’t going to live up to the old-fashioned prim and properness that name brings to mind.”

  “What do you think she should have been named?” Toria said. Dad smiled. “Honey.”

  As the SUV progressed up Main Street toward home, their laughter faded. David knew that the others were thinking of Mom, just as he was.

  After a minute Xander said, “What are we going to do? About getting her back?”

  “I was thinking,” Dad said. “We’re going to need a central place to figure out that house, to gather everything we know and everything we learn about those rooms upstairs.”

  “A war room,” Xander said.

  “A mission control center, like NASA ’s,” David suggested.

  Dad nodded. “You’ve got the right idea.” He pulled off the main drag into a drive-in diner. It was the kind of place where you ordered from your car and they hooked your tray of food onto the car window. He smiled at them and raised his eyebrows. “Who’s up for an ice cream?”

  CHAPTER twenty - eight

  MONDAY, 5 : 18 P . M .

  “Okay, where?” David asked.

  The whole family was in the library. Boxes from their old house were stacked there, waiting to be unpacked—the movers had come on Friday, and Mom had been kidnapped Sunday night: almost everything they owned was still boxed up and would probably stay that way for a while. Dad had identified the cartons that would be most useful to their task, the ones from his home office.

  David had spotted a dry-marker board and pulled it out from between a w
all of boxes and the built-in library shelves. Now he needed to know where to take it: what part of the house would become their mission control center?

  “How about this room?” Xander said. “It’s got shelves. It’s close to the kitchen.”

  “Nah,” David said. “If we have to go back and forth between the control room and the portals, this is too far away. Two flights of stairs and the other end of the house.”

  Dad said, “Besides, it’s open to the foyer. Anybody coming over would see it. We don’t want that.”

  “What about in the hallway on the third floor?” Toria chimed, apparently stunned by her own brilliance. “Right there next to the doors and everything!”

  “That’s a little too close for me,” David said. “The way those locks came off, and everything that’s happened up there . . .”

  “It’d be like having a war room right on the front lines,” Xander agreed. “Bullets zinging around—you’d never get any planning done.”

  “How about the servants quarters’?” Dad said. “Big room. Has its own bathroom. Right at the base of the stairs leading up to the portals.”

  “Perfect,” Xander said.

  “I like it,” David agreed. He walked out of the room with the dry-marker board, heading for the stairs.

  Xander lifted a box that had the word Mac scribbled on one side. “I’ve got the computer,” he said, hurrying after David.

  “Yea,” David said. “I’ve got a computer class and have to get online.”

  Xander said, “Not in our control center, dude. It’s only for things that will help find Mom.”

  “We only have one computer,” David complained.

  “Tough.”

  They had reached the top of the stairs. David called over the banister, “Dad! Can I use the computer for school?”

  “We’ll see,” Dad called back.

  David yelled, “We only have one!” He showed Xander a sour face.

  Xander scowled back at him and leaned close. He whispered, “We only have one mom.”

  It felt like a punch to David’s stomach. He frowned and carried the dry-marker board toward the room that would become their control center. As he was leaving, Xander caught him by the arm.