The Crossroads

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Howdy, ma’am.” She did Joe’s voice, too. Rugged and tough.

  “Hey, Zack?” Judy asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think Mr. Joe can handle hazmats?”

  “What’s a hazmat?”

  “You know—hazardous materials? You just kind of chop the words off and squish them back together. Haz-mats.”

  “Oh. I dunno.”

  “Lives are at stake. Toes, too.”

  Zack stared at Judy. He was still trying to figure this lady out. Sure, she was pretty and his dad laughed a lot whenever he and Judy were together. Judy laughed, too, because Zack’s dad was almost remembering how to be funny again. Her books about the cat were kind of okay. Zack had read a couple, even though they were mostly for little kids. Still, they were kind of funny. Especially when Curiosity Cat got into trouble poking his nose into places he shouldn’t. One time, he even blew himself up, but because he has nine lives it didn’t really matter.

  And Zack had never heard Judy yell at his dad, not once.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “It’s a pretty serious situation out there,” said Judy. “We’re talking broken glass. Open-toed sandals. Things could get ugly.”

  Zack looked into Judy’s eyes. She had big brown ones, the kind you see on friendly cartoon bears—the ones you can trust, not the growly, grizzly types you can’t.

  He played along. “Mr. Joe?” he said to the action figure.

  “Yeah, Zack?” Judy grunted back.

  “Um, have you ever worked hazmat duty before?”

  “Hazmat? Sure, sure. All the time. I’m fearless. I’m also plastic, so, you know, I can’t get injured unless, you know, I melt or a fire truck backs over me. That’ll hurt.”

  A smile stole across Zack’s face.

  “Ask Joe if he’s ever had to deal with broken glass.”

  “Okay. Hey, Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You ever work with glass?”

  “Glass? Schmass. Can’t cut me, pal. Well, it could, but I wouldn’t, you know, bleed or nothin’.”

  “Because you’re made out of plastic, right?”

  “Exactly!”

  Zack laughed. Judy, too.

  George Jennings and Judy Magruder were married the Saturday before Memorial Day. Zack Jennings was his father’s best man and official ring bearer.

  After their rooftop wedding reception, the new family flew to Orlando for a weeklong honeymoon and vacation at Walt Disney World. While they were in Orlando, the moving company would clean out their apartments and truck everything up to North Chester, Connecticut, the small town where George had grown up.

  Their new house, a just-built three-story Victorian—with gables and a wraparound porch—was located in the brand-new Rocky Hill Farms subdivision west of town.

  Right near the crossroads where County Route 13 meets Connecticut State Highway 31.

  Every Monday morning, Gerda Spratling rode into North Chester like her family still owned the town.

  Her chauffeur would pilot her 1952 Cadillac Coupe DeVille down the center of Main Street. A few cars would honk their horns at the big black boat straddling the solid yellow line, but the locals simply moved out of the way. They recognized the antique automobile and knew that inside was the sole surviving member of the family that had made North Chester famous. In fact, the quaint little town was still called Clocksville, as it had been for nearly a century, because of the timepieces once mass-produced in the sprawling Spratling Clockworks Factory.

  “Spratling Stands the Test of Time,” their ads used to say. But the redbrick factory with its colossal smokestacks had been shuttered since the early 1980s.

  Since this particular Monday morning was also Memorial Day, tourists and townspeople were lazily enjoying the unofficial start of summer by poking around Main Street’s shops and cozy boutiques.

  “Why aren’t these people at work?” Miss Spratling asked her driver.

  “It’s a holiday, ma’am.” The chauffeur was eighty-six years old. Miss Spratling was seventy-two.

  “Holiday? God in heaven. Lazy, shiftless layabouts.” Her voice was sharp and brittle.

  The car coasted to a stop.

  “Why are we stopping?” Miss Spratling demanded.

  “Red light, ma’am.”

  “God in heaven.”

  Downtown North Chester had only one stoplight—at the intersection where the town clock, a massive stone tower, also stood. Miss Spratling’s great-grandfather had commissioned the six-story fieldstone monument to commemorate his family’s Germanic ingenuity and American industriousness. The clock had ornately scrolled hands and a filigree face, but it no longer told time. The hands stood frozen at 9:52.

  The light changed.

  “Hurry along, Mr. Willoughby,” Miss Spratling ordered from the backseat. “Hurry along.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Miss Spratling had two standing appointments in town every Monday. First the beauty parlor, then the florist. Her personal assistant, a young woman named Sharon Jones, followed the Cadillac in a Hyundai hatchback, just in case Miss Spratling should require anything at all. The Cadillac had bullet-shaped bumper guards, tail fins, and a massive chrome grill and was kept in mint condition by Mr. Willoughby, the gaunt and gangly chauffeur.

  The two cars parked in the No Parking zone alongside the curb in front of Mr. Antoine’s House of Beauty. Mr. Willoughby shuffled around the car to open Miss Spratling’s door. The skinny assistant stood with bowed head and slumped shoulders at the curb.

  “Wait for me. Both of you.”

  Miss Spratling would have her hair done by Mr. Antoine himself—even on a holiday. The hairdresser was years younger, but he knew the old-fashioned way to curl her limp locks, using rollers the size of coffee cans and a helmet-shaped hair dryer—the kind beauty parlors had back in the 1950s.

  After her hair appointment, Miss Spratling was driven up Main Street to Meade’s Flower Shoppe, where she would purchase one dozen white roses. She had purchased the same thing every Monday for nearly fifty years. Her assistant came into the store with her because it was Sharon’s job to actually carry the thorny roses.

  This Monday, Meade’s was unexpectedly crowded.

  “Miss Spratling! So good to see you again!”

  “Mr. Meade.” She tugged on her elbow-length black gloves and slid her cat’s-eye glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Who are all these people?”

  “It’s Memorial Day, ma’am.”

  “So?”

  “They’ve come in to buy flowers to take out to the graveyards.”

  “I see. Need a federal holiday to remember the dead, do they? Where were these people last Monday?”

  Mr. Meade nodded sympathetically. “You know, Miss Spratling, I was just asking myself the same thing.”

  “Enough chatter. Move along. Bring us our roses.”

  “I’ll be right with you. Mrs. Lombardi needs—”

  “We haven’t the time to wait.” Miss Spratling moved forward, her hands clasped behind her back. “You know what we require. Either produce it immediately or next Monday we will be forced to make alternative arrangements.”

  “Yes, Miss Spratling…. Of course, Miss Spratling….”

  The florist skittered away. An elderly woman in a faded Windbreaker smiled at Miss Spratling. She was clutching a bouquet of red, white, and blue carnations.

  “They’re for my Arnie,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The carnations. They’re for my son. He died in the war. I take him flowers every Memorial Day.”

  “I see. That makes it easier to remember, doesn’t it? The federal holiday.” Miss Spratling fussed with her hard helmet of hair. The woman in the Windbreaker stared at her.

  “God in heaven, woman, whatever are you gawking at?”

  “That dress. I had one just like it. Years ago. When Mr. Lombardi and I went to our first formal at his fraternity. Must have been 1948.”

  Miss Sp
ratling wanted to be left alone. “Mr. Meade?” she called out.

  “Of course Mr. Lombardi passed on. Last year. Congestive heart failure. I’m all alone now. I do the best I can. Stay busy. Volunteer at the thrift shop…”

  “Mr. Meade?” Miss Spratling rapped her knuckles on the counter.

  “My dress was white,” Mrs. Lombardi said. “Not black like yours.”

  “Mr. Meade!”

  The frazzled shopkeeper came hurrying out of the back room with a dozen white roses wrapped in a cone of clear cellophane.

  “Kindly charge them to my account,” Miss Spratling snapped as her assistant took the flowers from the frightened little man.

  Mr. Meade smiled feebly. “Of course. No problem, Miss Spratling. Have a nice day.”

  “How sweet of you to suggest such a thing,” she coldly replied. “Unfortunately, I have not had, as you say, a ‘nice day’ for nearly fifty years!”

  The two cars crawled out of North Chester and headed up Route 13. A few miles outside of town, both vehicles parked on the soft shoulder of the road.

  Mr. Willoughby once again shuffled around to the rear of the Cadillac and pulled open the heavy door. Miss Spratling snatched the roses out of her assistant’s hands and carried the bouquet as though it were her wedding day. She crossed over the drainage ditch and made her way up a well-worn path until she came to a gigantic oak tree.

  There was a white wooden cross nailed into the tree. It had hung there so long, swollen bark had grown in around its edges. A small aluminum bucket, also painted white, was bolted to the tree underneath the cross. It was filled with a dozen wilted white roses, their tissue-thin edges rimmed brown with a week’s decay.

  Miss Spratling did what she did every Monday: She tossed out last week’s dead roses and put the fresh ones in. She pressed her left hand against the furrowed bark and said some prayers.

  Five minutes later, she made her way back to the waiting car. Her assistant met her at the crumbling edge of the roadway.

  “We have done our duty, Sharon.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Take me home, Mr. Willoughby.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the ancient chauffeur.

  The Cadillac drove away. Miss Spratling would come back again the next Monday and the next one and the one after that. Every week, she’d bring fresh white roses to decorate her roadside memorial at the crossroads where Route 13 met Highway 31.

  “The Tree of Life has three hundred and twenty-five images of endangered and extinct animals carved into its trunk, roots, and branches,” said Judy.

  On Memorial Day, Zack, Judy, and George—the whole new Jennings family—wound their way around the fourteen-story-tall man-made baobab tree that was the centerpiece to Disney’s Animal Kingdom amusement park.

  “It’s awesome!” Zack stared up at all the animals etched into the fake tree like a gigantic interlocking jigsaw puzzle.

  “Can you see the lion?” his father asked. “In the bark there? I think it’s a lion. Maybe a leopard. I know it’s not a panda bear….”

  “Yeah. Cool.” Zack had been having a blast in Orlando and figured his new stepmom could turn out to be a whole lot more fun than his real mom.

  That’s when he smelled her, smelled the cigarette.

  His mother.

  Zack imagined she had come back from the dead to teach him a lesson. How dare he have fun with his pretty new stepmother when his real mother was dead on account of him? This wasn’t the Tree of Life. It was the Tree of Death!

  “Zack?” his dad asked. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded. Tried to speak. “Yeah. Fine.”

  Judy sniffed the air. She smelled it, too.

  “Somebody’s smoking,” she said.

  “I thought the whole park was nonsmoking.” Zack’s dad sounded mad.

  “It is,” said Judy. “But you know smokers. They have trouble reading signs.” Now Judy looked at Zack. She must have seen the panic in his eyes. “You okay, hon?” she asked softly.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Zack knew smokers, too. Lived with one most of his life. His mother went through two or three packs a day. Sucked on them hard, like she wanted to drain each stick dry. His mother kept smoking until the day she died, even though the cigarettes were what caused the cancer.

  “They’re the only joy I have left,” she used to croak from that hospital bed in the dining room. She would stare at Zack with a look that seared his soul deeper than the glowing tip of a cigarette could scorch his skin. “My only joy in the world.”

  Gerda Spratling lived in the one true mansion near North Chester, Connecticut: Spratling Manor.

  Her great-great-grandfather Augustus J. Spratling, the founder of Spratling Clockworks, had built the stately stone castle in 1882 on one thousand forested acres six miles west of town. Miss Spratling had lived in the manor her entire life. When her father died in 1983, he left her the house and a handsome inheritance. Her mother had died years earlier, when Gerda was an infant.

  It had been twenty-five years since her father had passed away, and the money was starting to run out. Still, she had enough to live on, provided she lived frugally. She sold off some of the land, trimmed the staff to three, shut down parts of the mansion, and kept most of the rooms upstairs locked or boarded shut.

  Miss Spratling had moved her bedroom furniture into what had once been the library, a mahogany-paneled chamber entered through colossal sliding doors and connected by a secret passageway to the Spratling family chapel.

  The area around her island of bedroom furniture was empty save for her father’s old rolltop desk and the dusty bookshelves climbing up the towering walls.

  There was a rolling stepladder resting against the tallest bookcase. No one had ascended it for twenty-five years, not since Miss Spratling’s father had climbed to its top, noosed a braided curtain pull around his neck, kicked the ladder aside, and fallen just far enough to snap his neck and die.

  Miss Spratling’s personal assistant, Sharon, slept in the walk-in pantry off the kitchen so she would be close at hand should her employer require anything during the night.

  Sharon’s mother, a chambermaid who had worked for the Spratlings for many decades, lived in a ramshackle carriage house down one of the winding drives coursing through the estate’s overgrown grounds. Mrs. Jones roomed there so Miss Spratling would not have to listen to the screaming infant the woman took care of: Sharon’s baby boy.

  A little before midnight, Sharon awoke to see a black silhouette standing in her doorway.

  “Sharon, we have run out of Frangelico. Sharon?”

  Sharon’s name always had a much longer “ssshhh” at the front of it on Monday nights when Miss Spratling had been drinking. The weekly visits to the memorial made the old woman sad, and sadness made her drink more than usual. Frangelico was Miss Spratling’s favorite alcoholic beverage: a sweet and syrupy concoction that tasted like a hazelnut milk shake, except that it burned your throat.

  “Sharon? God in heaven! Wake up, girl!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sharon mumbled.

  “You must go to the store immediately!”

  Sharon knew no liquor store would be open at this hour, so she would need to improvise. She sleepwalked to the curtained shelves where she kept her work clothes.

  “Hurry along, girl! Lay a patch, as they say.”

  Sharon drove over to the Mobil station on Highway 31. They were open twenty-four hours and had a mini-market that sold coffee. At the counter with the Styrofoam cups and plastic lids were tubs of flavored nondairy creamer. One was called Hazelnut Delight, which sort of tasted like Frangelico, especially if you never saw the tiny tubs. She’d bring home a few dozen, empty them into a glass, and add some whiskey.

  “Just the coffee?” asked the checkout clerk.

  “And the creamers.”

  “Did she run out of Frangelico again?”

  Sharon nodded.

  “You sure you have enough?”

 
; “Yes.”

  Sharon pulled out a wrinkled dollar bill.

  “Coffee’s free tonight,” said the clerk. “Creamers, too.”

  “Really?”

  The clerk winked. “Yes, ma’am. Happy Memorial Day.”

  “Thank you.”

  Sharon scooped up the creamer tubs and slipped them into the pockets of her smock. She wasn’t a nurse, but Miss Spratling insisted that she wear a uniform. She hurried out to her car. It was well past midnight.

  She drove away from the gas station and reached the darkest stretch of highway. No strip malls. No houses. No lights. Just the dark forest lining both sides of the road, the treetops becoming a dense stockade fence, running their jagged tips against the inky sky. Sharon had the road to herself, except for the moths and bugs intent on dive-bombing into her headlights. She flicked on the radio but heard nothing except static.

  She looked down.

  Weird.

  She’d never had radio trouble in this spot before. Even at night.

  Weird.

  She looked up from the control console to the road.

  “Oh, no!”

  There was a girl standing in the middle of the road. A girl dressed all in white.

  Sharon slammed on her brakes. The front end of the car swerved left; the rear end skidded right.

  Sharon’s heart thumped against her chest.

  She tried to breathe.

  Her front bumper was only two inches away from the girl in white.

  I could’ve killed her.

  A smile blossomed on the girl’s placid face as she made her way over to the passenger-side window. She seemed to glow, to carry her own aura of throbbing red light. Then Sharon realized she had come to a stop at the crossroads, with its blinking red stoplight.

  “I wonder if I might trouble you for a ride?” the girl asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m terribly late.”

  She could also be terribly mental, thought Sharon.

  Standing in the middle of the highway like that.

  “Where are you going?” Sharon asked.

  “Down the road. I’m late.”