13 Hangmen

by Art Corriveau

  “Just don’t do anything dangerous,” Julia said.

  The twins trooped back into the kitchen.

  “Best the cable guy can promise is to get the first and second floors wired today,” Mikey told Julia.

  “He said we should look into Wi-Fi for the top two floors,” Angey added.

  “I’ll talk to your father about it,” Julia said, vaguely.

  Speaking of which. Tony pulled out his phone, pretending he’d just gotten a message. “It’s Dad,” he said. “He wants me to meet him at the lawyer’s office. He says I have to sign some of the paperwork myself, since I actually own this place.”

  “Don’t even tell me you’re dogging us with all the sanding,” Mikey said.

  Angey swiped the phone out of Tony’s hand. “He’s totally lying. His phone didn’t even ring.”

  “I set it on vibrate,” Tony said, hoping it wouldn’t start to cuckoo.

  “I don’t see any texts from Dad here,” Angey said. “Just a couple from Mom.”

  “That’s because your father took my phone this morning,” Julia said. “His was out of juice. I’m charging it now.”

  “Oh,” Angey said, disappointed. He handed Tony’s phone back.

  Tony took a bite of pizza, followed by a forkful of salad. Angelo had suggested he stop eating as soon as he no longer felt hunger. But it wasn’t going to be easy for him to guess when that was, since he hadn’t felt hungry for lunch to begin with.

  Uh-oh. Benedict Hagmann straight ahead on Hanover Street, blocking the way to Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. The old man appeared to be lost in concentration, comparing the ingredients on two different bottles of bug spray at a sidewalk stand of gardening supplies out in front of the hardware store. Tony dove behind a clearance rack of seeds a few feet away. What was Hagmann toying with around his neck? Some sort of charm on a silver chain. No way! Three interconnected spirals, carved out of white stone or bone.

  Hang on! Could it actually be the pawcorance the Hagmanns were after—so they could do a little time traveling of their own?

  Hagmann’s face suddenly froze in horror. He fingered the entire length of the chain. He patted his shirt. He checked his pants pockets. He stooped forward and began searching the sidewalk for whatever he’d lost. Tony seized his chance. He tiptoed behind Hagmann’s back and ducked into the curiosity shop next door.

  “Hello?”

  The place appeared to be completely empty.

  “Sarah?”

  No answer. He wandered over to the wall of books. Secrets of the Lost Civilization of Maya. Quantum Mechanics for Better Living. Hatha Yoga and You. White Witchcraft Made Easy. He wondered, not for the first time, if Mildred Pickles—whoever she might be—was a complete lunatic. Then he reminded himself: He had just spent half the morning hanging out with his dead great-uncle.

  A whole section of the bookcase suddenly opened. Tony had to jump out of the way to avoid being flattened like a cartoon character. Sarah wafted out of a narrow passageway containing a rickety staircase that led up to the floor above. She was eating a piece of sushi from a bento box with a pair of purple chopsticks. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Want a shumai dumpling?”

  “I’m good,” Tony said.

  “So how did it go with the pawcorance? Was my hypothesis correct?”

  “Not a hundred percent,” Tony admitted. “I was definitely able to reconjure Angelo with the ball cap. But then we tried to conjure this other kid named Solly with the arm-patch number from his Red Sox uniform. He never turned up.”

  “How old was Angelo in 1939?” Sarah asked. “Exactly, I mean.”

  “Thirteen,” Tony said. “And a day. Why?”

  “And how old was this Solly you were trying to conjure?”

  Tony shrugged. “Twenty? He didn’t live in the house after that. His family sold it when he was twenty-one, as soon as he joined the team.”

  “Follow me,” Sarah said. She led him over to the slate counter. Setting the bento box aside, she reached for a gigantic leather-bound book resting on the spiral—The Compleat Numerologist— which was already open to the first page of Chapter 13. “It struck me—after you left this morning—that your anomaly was probably triggered somehow by the interaction of the numbers thirteen and nine,” Sarah said. “So I decided to brush up on some basic numerology. I’m pretty convinced your pawcorance can only connect thirteen-year-olds to each other.”

  Sarah explained: The number thirteen had always been troublesome when it came to time. That’s because there were thirteen lunations—full moons—to a solar year, and so far no culture in the history of humankind had ever been able to divide a year into a nice neat thirteen-month calendar without a few pesky minutes and seconds left over. The twelve-month Gregorian calendar used today was totally inaccurate. When you did the exact math, a year was 365.2422 days long. Almost a quarter of a day had to get lopped off at the end of most years, with an extra day added back to February—a leap year—every fourth year. (Same was true of the Jewish calendar, by the way, even though it was actually based on the thirteen lunations; the Sanhedrin still had to add the occasional leap month to sync everything up.) The Aztecs had probably come the closest with an eighteen-month calendar of twenty-day weeks, cycling over fifty-two years. But even they had had extra time left over—which, they believed, was responsible for that tiny bit of chaos in ordinary existence they called change. “In other words,” Sarah concluded, “I think the number thirteen is an anomaly in itself. It probably keeps time marching forward—causing change as it does so—but, in the process, also creates anomalies in the space-time continuum.”

  “For thirteen-year-old boys,” Tony said.

  “Or girls,” Sarah said. “Just because you’ve only conjured a boy doesn’t mean you couldn’t, in theory, conjure a girl.”

  “Noted,” Tony said.

  “Here’s something else,” Sarah said. “The prime thirteen inhabits that transitional space between single- and double-digit numbers.”

  “What about eleven?” Tony said. “That’s also a prime.”

  “Except that eleven’s chief characteristic, mathematically, is to stay the same. Eleven times two is twenty-two. If we’re talking about change, here, thirteen is totally that awkward age between childhood and adulthood. The perfect moment, really, to enter an anomaly. All very scientific, when you think about it.”

  Tony wouldn’t have gone that far. But he did see Sarah’s point. “So let me get this straight,” he said. “If I want to conjure Solly, it’ll have to be when he’s thirteen. But to do that, I’ll need to find an object that connects him to thirteen-year-old Angelo.”

  “I’d start with an object that contains the number nine,” Sarah said.

  “Why’s that?” Tony said.

  “It’s all right here in Chapter Nine,” she said, flipping to a dog-eared page closer to the front of the book. “The symbol for nine is, in fact, a simplified spiral. And mathematically, nine does the same thing—it turns in on itself.” She drew it out with a purple pencil as she explained: Whenever you multiply nine by any number other than zero, the sum of the digits in the total is always nine (9 x 2 = 18, 1 + 8 = 9; or 9 x 13 = 117, 1 + 1 + 7 = 9). “Bottom line?” Sarah said. “Nine can’t help but seek out and return, time and again, to its own nine-ishness.”

  “Wow,” Tony said. “That’s intense.”

  “No doubt why the anomaly only connects thirteen-year-olds in years ending in nine,” Sarah said, closing The Compleat Numerologist with a satisfied thwack. “And probably why the object being used to establish the connection between two thirteen-year-olds needs to contain the essence of nine.”

  “Like the number on Ted Williams’s baseball cap!” Tony said.

  The front door jangled. Tony’s heart leaped to his throat. What if Old Man Hagmann had spied him through the display window? It wasn’t him. It was just some random guy with crazy white hair zigzagging out of his head like lightning bolts. “Video shop’s a couple of doors down,” T
ony said.

  “I don’t want to rent a video,” Zigzag said. “I’m here to look at snow globes with Boston scenes inside.”

  “They’re over next to the geodes,” Sarah said. “I’ll be right there.”

  “I have one more question,” Tony said. “Are pawcorances supervaluable?”

  “If you’re Algonquian, I guess,” said Sarah. “As a curiosity, they’re only worth a couple of hundred bucks. They aren’t very rare. Hundreds of them are still scattered across New England.”

  “But mine still works,” Tony said. “Do you think that would make it valuable enough to, say, murder someone for it?”

  “Only if you’re thirteen,” Sarah smiled. “Otherwise, it’s just a slab of slate carved with a spiral, right?”

  “I guess,” Tony said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Tony quickly told her about the Hagmanns and their obsession to own 13 Hangmen Court. As far as he could tell, though, there wasn’t anything even remotely special about the town house, apart from the pawcorance in his room. But all the Hagmanns who seemed to want the place were way over thirteen.

  “Interesting,” Sarah said. “Mildred has an excellent genealogy book on Boston. I’ll skim through it as soon as I get rid of the tourist.”

  Tony told Sarah he would give her his cell phone number so they could update each other. He pulled one of Mildred Pickles’s business cards from the holder on the counter. He flipped it over and wrote out his number on the back. He tucked another card into his wallet, just in case. “Where is Mildred Pickles?” he said. “How come I’ve never seen her?”

  “She’s here most of the time,” Sarah said, shrugging. “I’m usually at my real job.”

  “Where’s that?” Tony said. If she had a real job, did that mean she was sixteen?

  Before she could answer, Zigzag wandered over. “That’s a great flag,” he said, pointing to the Stars and Stripes above Sarah’s head. “Good ol’ Betsy Ross. Is it for sale?”

  Tony and Sarah rolled their eyes at each other.

  Tourist.

  Angelo was lying on the brass bed when Tony let himself into the attic. “I’m listening to the end of the game on my new radio,” he said. He wasn’t dressed in his uniform now. He was wearing a pair of Levi’s and a checked shirt. “Ted Williams is playing, just like you predicted. He just hit a home run, even though his ankle’s all taped up. The Sox are ahead by a mile.”

  “Why aren’t you there?” Tony said.

  “Cronin fired Solly last night for dragging Williams away from the game. And he fired me today, as soon as I got to Fenway, for giving them a place to hide. Cronin told the press it was a loyal Sox fan—Cyril Hagmann!—who tipped him off as to Williams’s whereabouts. Cyril claimed he grew concerned when he saw number 27, Weinberg, filling Williams’s head full of Commie-Jew notions of equality by showing him an immigrant slum in the North End.”

  “Ouch,” Tony said.

  “No wonder you’ve never heard of Solly,” Angelo said. “Cyril the Squirrel gets him blackballed from the major leagues.”

  “Jerk,” Tony said.

  “So what’s the news on your dad?”

  “Not good,” Tony said. He explained what Julia had told him at lunch—that Michael was being held at the station, pending further investigation. Which was why they really needed to try conjuring Solly again—thirteen-year-old Solly—so they could get to the bottom of why it was the Hagmanns, not the DiMarcos, who were desperate to own No. 13. Tony told Angelo about his most recent chat with Sarah, and how they needed to find a new object with nine-ish energy.

  “Hey, how about that prayer scroll?” Angelo said. “The one Solly tucked into Ted Williams’s cap at my birthday dinner? He said he’d been carrying it around with him since he was a kid.”

  “What’s nine-ish about that?” Tony asked.

  “Just before he tucked it into Williams’s cap, he sprinkled it with nine pinches of sugar—remember? He said some prayer in Hebrew nine times.”

  Tony crossed the room and grabbed the cap off the pawcorance. He checked behind the 9 of the inside brim. The scroll was gone—

  And so was Angelo.

  Panicked, Tony placed the cap back on the spiral. Angelo materialized on the bed before his very eyes, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “How spooky was that?” Angelo said.

  “The scroll’s not there anymore,” Tony said.

  “I know,” Angelo laughed. “I was just telling you when you disappeared. I took it out. It kept scratching my forehead while I was trying to make the cap fit better.” Angelo unscrewed the brass knob of the right bedpost. Out of it he pulled a small, rolled-up piece of parchment. “Solly told us it was for protection,” he said, sheepishly. “And you’ve got to admit this room is awful creepy. At least now I know why.”

  “Go ahead and place it on the spiral,” Tony said.

  Angelo hoisted himself off the bed and joined Tony at the pawcorance. He set the scroll next to the cap. They both hovered their hands over it. Tony’s palm began to itch. He could tell by Angelo’s grin that he too could feel the static electricity.

  “I think it must be working,” Tony said. “Can you hear the echo of a boy’s voice?”

  Angelo nodded. “It’s faint, though. I can’t make out what he’s saying.”

  “Maybe Solly is too far away,” Tony said.

  “What do we do?” Angelo said.

  “Wait for him to hear our voices, I guess,” Tony said.

  “Prayer scroll!” Angelo shouted. “On the spiral! Now.”

  Nothing.

  “This could take ages,” Angelo said. “How should we kill the time?”

  Tony had an idea. But he could feel himself going red at the very thought of it.

  “What?” Angelo said.

  “You told me the Sox did weight-loss exercises as part of their spring training,” Tony said. “Maybe you could teach me a few.”

  “Why not?” Angelo shrugged.

  “Let me just change into a pair of gym shorts and a tank top,” Tony said, relieved. “It’s kind of hot up here.”

  “Not for me,” Angelo said, flopping on the bed. “So far it’s been a pretty rainy May.” He started tossing the brass knob with one hand, catching it with the other. “What’s wrong?” he said when he noticed Tony hadn’t moved.

  “Aren’t you going to step outside?” Tony said.

  “What for?” Angelo said. “I spend half the afternoon watching the Red Sox get dressed and undressed—well, until today, that is.”

  “I’m kind of shy,” Tony admitted. “The twins give me a pretty hard time about my weight.”

  “You think I’m going to make fun of you?” Angelo said. “I used to be way fatter than you.”

  Tony pulled off his polo shirt and dropped it to the floor.

  “Go on,” Angelo said. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  Tony shucked off his jeans.

  “Underwear sure hasn’t changed much,” Angelo said, yawning. “Hang on a sec—where did your clothes go?”

  “They’re right there,” Tony said, pointing.

  “More spookiness,” Angelo said. “I can’t see your shirt or your jeans anymore.”

  “Try taking off your T-shirt,” Tony said.

  Angelo did. It vanished. “Very weird,” Tony said. He went to the dresser and pulled his favorite tank top out of the second drawer. He tugged it over his head. “Can you see what I’m wearing now?”

  “SpongeBob for President?” Angelo laughed.

  “Maybe all we can take into the anomaly is the clothes on our backs,” Tony said. He fished the cell phone out of his jeans pocket. “Which is why you can’t see this.”

  “See what?”

  “It’s a phone,” Tony said. “They’re wireless in my time. Everybody has one. We take them with us wherever we go. It’s what I was fiddling with earlier.”

  “Rats!” Angelo said. “I’d love a look at one of those.”

  Tony pulled on a pair of b
asketball shorts. “Apart from each other, we only seem to be able to see stuff from our own times.”

  “So how come we can both see this bed?” Angelo said. “And that dresser, and the bookcase over there?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony said. “Because I can’t see the quilt your mama made on the bed, any more than you can see my Red Sox comforter. You can’t see my murder mysteries, and I can’t see your Hardy Boys books. Maybe all we can see is stuff from the house that exists for both of us.”

  Angelo hopped off the bed and had a look through the dresser drawers. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just my own socks and underwear inside.”

  “I guess that’s why we can both see Ted Williams’s cap,” Tony said.

  “I wonder why you can also see Solly’s prayer scroll,” Angelo said. “It wasn’t in the cap by the time you got it.”

  “It must belong to the house somehow,” Tony said.

  They both glanced over at the pawcorance. Still no Solly.

  “Ready to sweat?” Angelo said.

  “I guess,” Tony said.

  Angelo taught Tony several old-school calisthenics. First jumping jacks, then sit-ups, then push-ups. Tony got winded pretty fast. After ten squat thrusts, he suggested they take a break. They both sat on the floor, leaning against the foot of the bed. Tony noticed Angelo’s glasses had fogged up. “I almost forgot,” he said. He grabbed his jeans, which were still lying on the floor. From the back pocket he pulled the page he had printed off the Internet. (By the time he got home from Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, the cable guy had finished installing broadband in Michael’s new office, and Julia had set up Michael’s laptop and printer so they could all check emails.) He unfolded the printout and offered it to Angelo.

  “Um, I don’t see anything,” Angelo said.

  “I guess I’ll just read it to you,” Tony said. “It’s the history of contact lenses.”

  “What’re they?” Angelo said.

  “Like tiny eyeglasses you wear directly on your eyeballs,” Tony said.

  Angelo laughed.

  Tony told him he was totally serious. All the big sports stars would eventually wear them. According to Wikipedia, Angelo would only have to wait another decade before scientists invented hard lenses.