by Byars, Betsy
“Well, so much for 882-0085. Now, I’ll try it with a six.”
Herculeah dialed the second number. It was answered on the third ring.
A voice said, “You have reached the Poison Control Center. How may I help you?”
10
MURDER STREET
“Meat, guess what?” Herculeah said as soon as the phone at Meat’s house was answered.
There was a long, chilly pause that let Herculeah know it was not Meat on the other end of the line.
“This is Albert’s mother.” Meat’s mom spoke in that disapproving way that Herculeah didn’t care for. “And in my day,” she went on, “it was the boys who telephoned the girls and not the other way around.”
“I’m so glad things aren’t still like that,” Herculeah said with real gratitude, “aren’t you? Is Meat there? I’ve got to talk to him.”
“Albert is—”
In the background Herculeah heard Meat’s voice say, “Is it for me? Is it Herculeah?” He had heard his mom’s disapproving statement about girls calling boys, and since there was only one girl who ever called him—and he realized he was lucky to have even one—he had come immediately to the phone.
“I’ll take it, Mom.”
Herculeah heard a brief pause in which Meat tried to take the phone and Meat’s mother wouldn’t give it up. Then Meat’s voice came on.
“What’s happened?” he said.
“Meat,” Herculeah said. “I think she was being poisoned as well.”
“What? How do you know?”
“There was a phone number on the back of that note—neither of us noticed it, but the woman at Hidden Treasures did—and I called it and it was the Poison Control Center. She must have suspected something—that’s why they locked her up.”
Meat’s mother said, “Albert, are you through with the telephone?”
“No, Mom, I’m not. I just got on.”
“I need to make a call.”
“I’ll let you know when I’m through—Oh, here, take the phone. I’ll go over there.” Into the phone he said, “I’m coming over.”
Herculeah put the phone down and glanced out the window. Meat had come out on the front porch of the house and his mother had come out after him. She was pointing back to the house. He was shaking his head.
The phone rang, causing Herculeah to turn away from the drama on the front porch. “Mim Jones’s office,” Herculeah said.
“Herculeah, is this you? It’s Mrs. Glenn at Hidden Treasures.”
“Yes, Mrs. Glenn.”
“Well, I finally thought of the name of the street.”
“Oh?” Herculeah picked up a pencil.
Herculeah glanced out the window. Shoulders slumped, Meat was going back into his house. Meat’s mother threw a triumphant look in the direction of Herculeah’s house.
“It’s Elm Street—you know, like in that horror movie where all the murders took place. They should have called that movie Murder Street, if you ask me. Ever since my grandson rented that movie I haven’t been able to stand the thought of Elm Street. Just the words Elm Street give me the creeps.”
“Me too,” Herculeah admitted.
Meat sat down by the telephone. His face was grim as he picked up the receiver. “Well, I’ve got to call her and tell her I can’t come.”
“Make the call and make it fast.”
Meat dialed Herculeah’s number. He glanced up. “It’s busy.”
His mother went into the kitchen. He dialed again.
Still busy.
To pass the time he picked up the pencil and began to draw circles on the telephone pad.
He dialed the number again.
Still busy.
Who was she talking to?
As he doodled, he remembered that when he was little, he had had a great big pencil. The pencil was so big he had to hold it in his fist. He would sit at the table with a fistful of pencil, making loops and circles. He would dot some of the loops and cross others.
When he had filled a whole page, he would take his imitation writing to his father.
His father would take the paper at once, no matter what he was doing. He’d say, “What have we here?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, Albie, let’s find out.”
Meat would wait for the reaction, hoping he had written something funny enough to make his father laugh.
The laughter always came, a burst of it. “This is very, very funny. Albie, you’ve written a very funny story. You want to hear it?”
“Yeth.”
He would climb up into his father’s lap. “Once upon a time there were three little wolves and this big, bad pig was out to get them.”
And he would sit there absolutely mesmerized by what he had written. He would—
“You missed your chance,” Meat’s mother said at his elbow.
“What? What?”
“Herculeah just came out of the house. She’s going around the corner right now. Seems late to be going out, doesn’t it?”
Meat got to the window in time to see a flash of bright blue coat turning the corner.
“In my day, girls didn’t go sashaying out at this time of afternoon—and I bet nice ones still don’t.”
11
THE HIDDEN HOUSE
It was late afternoon.
The shadows were lengthening as Herculeah walked quickly to Elm Street. She had been on this street before, and she remembered it as a long, curving, graceful road with spacious houses, houses with tennis courts and gardens and stables for horses.
She stopped as she turned the corner, unprepared for the change. Ahead of her lay a street in total disarray. Bulldozers, tractors, and trucks were silent, parked on either side of the street. Their day’s work of tearing down houses, trees, fences, swimming pools, and anything else that got in their way, was over.
Velvet green lawns had been stripped away. The giant Tonka toys had carved the muddy landscape into a different, flatter shape to accommodate many town houses. Two houses were already rising from the bare earth: wooden structures, only skeletons now, that would become solid when covered with stones and siding.
Elm Street was now in the process of becoming one huge, expensive housing development. This sort of thing was happening all over the city, and Herculeah hated it. She valued neighborhoods.
She walked slowly down the center of the street, looking from . side to side at the destruction. She paused at a sign that advertised:Elmwood Estates
Gracious Living
3-4 Bedroom Homes from $200,000
She shook her head in dismay and kept walking. Development was happening on both sides of the street. Another sign promised:Elmwood Manor
A New Concept in Living
Homes from $185,000
Maybe this was progress, but it didn’t look like it to Herculeah.
The street was deserted. All the workmen had gone for the day. There was no traffic, but Herculeah remembered the black car that had followed her the day before. She glanced behind her.
She walked slowly. On either side of the road trenches had been dug for sewer pipes and telephone cables. These were flanked by huge mounds of red earth. The old sidewalks were buried underneath, Herculeah thought, bulldozed to pieces.
Her heart sank with each step she took. There was nothing left of what had once been here. If the woman who had owned this coat—Herculeah wrapped her arms about herself as if she were embracing a ghost—had lived here, her past had been wiped away by the bulldozers, too.
She paused for a moment, smelling the turned earth, the scent of newly cut trees, pines as well as elms. As she turned to go, she lifted her head in sudden surprise.
Beyond the few trees that had been left standing she could see an old house. She shielded her eyes from the sunset. It was a big country house. It seemed to have withdrawn from all the confusion around it.
The house had once been yellow, but now the loose dirt had turned the lower clapboard red. There were rust s
treaks from the ruined gutters, and black shutters dangled from their hinges.
Herculeah squinted at the house. The windows stared blankly back. She had no reason to believe this was the house. But she sensed it was a house like this where the woman had been held prisoner. An ordinary house, a comfortable house from the outside, but inside ...
Drawn by something she could not explain, she turned onto the drive. There was a sign that said DANGER—DO NOT ENTER.
Herculeah stepped around it and continued slowly toward the house. She paused at the porch. Though it was empty, Herculeah had a vision of white deck chairs, rockers that might have once been lined up on the wide porch. She could see the remains of vines that had grown up the columns in happier days.
The steps were gone. Herculeah leaped nimbly onto the porch.
Again she turned and glanced quickly over her shoulder at the drive behind her. There was no one there, but Herculeah had the strange sensation that someone was watching her.
Her hair began to rise, the way it always did when she was in danger. She pulled it back into a ponytail with one hand.
She crossed the porch to the front door.
She sighed. She wished she had brought the key. She thought how satisfying it would be to put the key into the lock, turn it, and have the door swing open. That would be proof that this was the house she was looking for.
Here she was at the door, and the key was under her pillow at home.
But as she looked closer she saw that the door was not locked. Actually it was slightly ajar. She pushed it open all the way.
“Hello!” she called into the empty entrance.
No answer.
“Hello.”
The sun was beginning to set, and the sky was the color of pale lemonade. From somewhere in the elm trees came the cry of a crow.
Ever since her experience in Dead Oaks, she had associated that bird with danger. She listened as the raucous cry came again. Then there was only the rustling of the trees in the early evening breeze, a sorrowful sound, as if they mourned their fallen friends.
“If Tarot were here,” she said with a slight smile, “I know what he’d say—and it wouldn’t be ‘Oh, Mom.’”
Pulling her coat tighter about her as if for protection, she stepped inside the house. She turned and then carefully left the door open behind her.
Just in case, she thought.
12
up THE STAIRS
Inside, the air was cold and still. The floorboards creaked as Herculeah made her way into what had been the living room.
Glass crunched beneath her feet. Someone had broken the front windows, and through the ragged panes came the scent of new earth and trees, fresh as a beginning, rather than the end Herculeah knew it to be.
The rooms she saw were empty. Everything of value—light fixtures, bookshelves, carved moldings—had been taken away, leaving a shell of a house. There would be no clues left here.
Herculeah remembered the last two words in the note, Look inside. She remembered she had hoped to get in the house while it was still full of furniture. She felt she would know the meaning of those words if she could just move slowly through the rooms. She would pass a desk or a wall panel and her hair would frizzle and—
With a shake of her head she continued, making her way from one room to another. The downstairs rooms were big: a library, the walls bare of shelves; a sitting room; a parlor. All the rooms had fireplaces, but the mantels were gone.
The setting sun gave one last bit of light to the old dining room. She could see where corner cupboards had once stood. Out the window she saw a long flow of brown lawn, a forgotten garden, and in the stand of elm trees, a long, low building—a stable, perhaps.
The kitchen had been stripped of appliances and cupboards. Loose wires hung from the walls. She looked into a pantry that still had its shelves and smelled of spices.
As she moved from one empty room to another, she realized there was not a room here where a person could be held prisoner.
She opened a door just off the pantry and peered inside. This door had once led to the cellar, but the cellar itself was missing. The house had been moved from its foundation.
She went into the hall and glanced over her shoulder again, unable to shake the impression that someone knew she was in the house. Slowly taking the steps one by one, she went to the second floor.
There were six bedrooms and four baths, all as empty as the rooms downstairs. Faded wallpaper showed flowers and plaids, and in a small back room, a parade of tattered wooden soldiers.
But all of the rooms had windows. Herculeah remembered the note had said there were none where the woman was held prisoner. The woman couldn’t tell night from day.
Also, there was something about this house ... Herculeah couldn’t explain it, but she had the impression that the house had been safe and secure, a place where happy lives had been lived.
Of course she would never know about the cellar.
Herculeah saw a door at the end of the hall and opened it. A musty smell filled her nostrils.
The attic.
She felt a chill of dread, something she had not felt before, not even as she peered down into the missing cellar. She tried to shake off her fear.
Why is everybody afraid of attics? she asked herself. It’s just another room.
And: If you don’t go up, you’ll always wonder if it was the woman’s prison.
And: Look how dusty the stairs are. There’s nobody up there.
And: It’s going to be dark soon, and it’ll be worse then.
Another chill went up her spine. Someone walking on my grave. That was just an old expression, she reminded herself. Nothing to it.
She started up the stairs.
Unbidden, the words of an old camp song came into her mind. To pick up her spirits she began to sing to herself.
They wrap you up in a big white sheet.
She moved slowly. The air was stifling, probably the same air that had been here for fifty years. It could not be healthy to breathe fifty-year-old air. Get on with it, she told herself.
Drop you down about fifty feet.
She wished Meat were with her. He could have stayed hidden in the trees and given one of his famous whistles if anyone appeared.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out ...
But Meat was back at home. “Where you ought to be,” she heard her mother’s voice say.
“Oh, Mom,” she answered.
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
This song was definitely not picking up her spirits.
Gripping the handrail, she took the stairs in twos. Yet even before she got to the top, she knew ‘this could not have been a prison. There was too much light. Wide windows were at either end of the empty room.
She walked toward one of the windows. The floor beneath her feet was littered with dead flies and bees, the attic’s only prisoners. She glanced out the window.
Not a car, not a person was in sight.
So why, Herculeah thought uneasily, do I have the feeling someone is out there? That someone knows I’m here?
The coat, she thought. Could it be the coat? She folded her arms around the front of the coat, drawing it closer about her. Had Meat been right? Had someone recognized the coat?
What if someone saw me from a distance and thought I was ... She couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know. Still, she shivered beneath the heavy coat. More footsteps on my grave. She forced a smile. Heavy traffic this afternoon.
She glanced one last time out the window. This time her eyes narrowed. She thought she saw a movement through the trees.
Maybe it was only a lengthening shadow, maybe it was her imagination, but the thought made Herculeah say, “I’m getting out of here.”
She stepped back and then, in the final rays of the sun, she saw it.
It wasn’t her imagination.
Her hair began to frizzle.
There was a car just beyond the trees.
>
And it was black.
13
DEATH BY BLACK CAR
Herculeah ran down the attic steps. Her heart raced. She flew across the hall and down the main stairway.
At the bottom of the stairs, she paused. She glanced out the window to see if the car was still there.
It was.
She ran into the kitchen. She remembered a back door there. She yanked at the doorknob. It came off in her hand. She flung it across the room.
A window—a window—it would have to be a window.
The window over the kitchen sink was broken, the glass jagged. Herculeah thrust the window up, leaped sidesaddle onto the sill, and threw her legs over.
She paused to look around the outside, checking each bush, each tree, anything large enough to conceal a man. After all, whoever was following her could have left the car. He could be anywhere.
The sun had gone down behind the trees, leaving the sky the color of pale mustard. The chilly afternoon breeze had now become a cold wind. A flock of crows flew overhead, cawing.
Herculeah glanced down at her coat—electric blue, the woman at Hidden Treasures had said. It would be easily spotted. She took off the coat, folded it so that the lining was outside, the brilliant blue concealed. She rolled it into a bundle and stuck it under her arm. In one quick motion she jumped to the ground and ran, zigzagging for the shelter of the trees.
She paused there for a moment, considering her chances. She could make her way through the trees, but sooner or later she would have to come out on Elm Street. She remembered where the car had been and felt that if she could come out of the trees behind it, she could make a dash to Main Street before the driver could get the car turned around.
Jogging through the trees, her hair blowing behind her, she could hear the traffic on Main Street. She slowed as she came to Elm. She peered around the trees. There was no car in sight.
“It’s gone,” she said.
She was ashamed of the fact that she suddenly felt weak with relief.