by Lesley Kagen
I had to work to suppress a moan and Frankie did, too.
“Why, that’s a real considerate offer, but I like the nylons I got just fine and … oh Lord.” Aunt Jane May struck her forehead the same way Viv had. “Did I forget to mention that I ran into Miss Lang this mornin’? She had something very interesting to tell me about you girls.”
I felt my heart slip down to my socks at the mention of the vice president of the Ladies Auxiliary, who prided herself on having her finger in every pie in town. Besides doling out character assassinations on gals—mostly Lutherans and their new target, Audrey Cavanaugh, who’d still not answered any of their invitations to tea—she and those other prim and propers got a big charge out of wagging their tongues about the misadventures of children at their daily coffee klatches. Since Ruthie Lang liked to call the girls and me the “Unholy Trinity,” I was pretty sure that whatever “interesting” something she’d shared with Aunt Jane May wouldn’t include us receiving gold stars for good behavior.
Frankie must’ve been feeling as wary as I was, because the Roman numeral II had sprung up between her eyes, but Viv was bursting with false pride. She blew on her fingernails, ran them up and down her blouse in that “I’m a big shot” gesture, and said, “I bet when you ran into Ruthie, she told you what a good job we did helpin’ out at the paper drive last week.”
“You would’ve lost that bet.” Aunt Jane May picked up the pile of radishes laying in front of her and yanked the green tops off. “What Miss Lang told me was that she saw you three ridin’ your bikes on the county road that runs past Broadhurst yesterday afternoon, when you told me you were at the park.”
I was desperate to tell her that we were on the county road for some other reason, but there was nothing else out that way except for the Withers’ farm and she wouldn’t believe we’d been overtaken by a sudden urge to milk a cow or collect eggs. For a child who put so much stock in hope, I don’t know why I tended to slide into despair like it was a pair of worn slippers. Maybe it was because I could always count on Viv never going down without a fight.
“She told you she saw us on the county road yesterday?” she asked Aunt Jane May.
“That’s what she said.”
“Oh my goodness, that’s too bad,” Viv said in her most consternated voice. “Next time you see Miss Lang, you got to tell her to pay a visit to Doc’s office as fast as her shoes can take her.”
“And why’s that?” Aunt Jane May asked.
“’Cause the poor thing needs her eyes examined for Cadillacs,” Viv said. “We weren’t anywhere near the county road yesterday, were we, girls.”
“No, ma’am, we weren’t,” Frankie said, and I felt so relieved to say, “Cross my heart and hope to die,” and mean it for once. That busybody must’ve gotten her days mixed up because we’d taken an entirely different route to the mental institution yesterday afternoon.
Aunt Jane May said, “They’re called cataracts, not Cadillacs, Vivian, and I’ll be happy to pass that news on to Miss Lang ’cause I go to sleep every single night knowin’ the three of you wouldn’t dare lie to me.” She shook the dirt off her garden gloves and repeated her daily litany. “Keep away from Broadhurst, mind your own businesses, don’t visit Mud Town after dark, and”—she paused—“remember what the sheriff told you about keepin’ away from the Merchant boy.”
She looked like she wanted to say more, but she settled on giving us a worried look and went back to ripping carrots out of the ground like Satan had a hold of the roots and they were engaged in a tug of war for our eternal souls and she was on the losing side.
Chapter Ten
After the three of us swooped onto Honeywell Street, Viv, who never missed watching the boxing matches with Aunt Jane May and Uncle Walt on Friday nights, rang her bike bell, threw her hands into the air, and announced, “The final round goes to the Unholy Trinity!”
Unlike her, I took no pride in sparring with Aunt Jane May. I was wracked with guilt for lying and disobeying her, so as children often do, I came up with an explanation for my deceptiveness that laid the blame elsewhere.
The pull I felt to Broadhurst was so powerful—almost irresistible—and my impressionable mind was so crammed with the Bible stories and legends of saints the nuns and priests taught us at St. Thom’s that it was a short leap to hold the Almighty responsible for my disobedience and deceit. It wasn’t my fault He insisted that good Catholics were supposed to visit the sick, and the Broadhurst patients certainly were. And it wasn’t like it was the first time He had chosen someone our age to carry out His will. Take Joan of Arc. I bet she had to tell those she loved a pack of lies and sneak around her small town so she could do what God commanded her to do, too. And since His will overrode all others, including our aunt’s, unless the girls and I were willing to spend all eternity in the hellfire for disobeying a direct order from Him, what choice did we have?
When I shared that epiphany with the girls after we rounded the turn on Franklin Street, I thought they’d be impressed as all get out and feel like little saints, too. But Frankie looked at me like I was two beads short of a rosary, and Viv laughed so hard she almost fell off her bike before she said, “You’re gonna have to come up with something better than blamin’ God for lyin’ to Auntie. That sounds a lot like what Wally Hopper told the cops about the Archangel Michael forcing him to strangle the Gimble sisters.”
I consoled myself by thinking that at least we hadn’t lied to Aunt Jane May about what we were doing that afternoon. Frankie had told her we were on our way to pick up supplies to decorate our bikes for the Fourth of July parade, and we were. We just had something else to do first. Red, white, and blue crepe paper spinning around in our spokes and those pretty Kleenex flowers bobbing around on our handlebars would’ve drawn entirely too much attention on our ride over to Broadhurst.
After the girls and I reached Main Street dressed to its teeth in American flags that hung listlessly from lamp poles above baskets of wilted red, white, and blue carnations, instead of heading straight toward the road that led out of town, Frankie made an abrupt unscheduled stop in front of Whitcomb’s Drugstore.
Peering longingly and lovingly into the plate glass window at the packed fountain counter, she announced, “Change of plans.” She reluctantly pulled herself away and swung her leg back over her bike seat. “We can watch the patients today for a little while, but instead of visitin’ with them, we’re gonna come back here so I can get a brown cow, and then we’ll head to the five-and-dime to get our decorating supplies.”
I wasn’t happy about that change in our plans because I wanted to discuss something important with two of my favorite Broadhurst patients that afternoon. But woe be to anyone stupid enough to stand in Frankie’s way when she got a hankering for her all-time favorite treat, and it was blistering hot and the air felt thick enough to eat with a spoon. Pressing our sweaty cheeks against that cool, yellow Formica counter and watching an army of goose bumps rise on our arms in the newly air-conditioned drugstore as I dug into one of their excellent hot fudge sundaes sounded almost as good as talking to the patients.
For once, Viv was on board with one of Frankie’s ideas because it was a two-fer deal for her. She could dig into a banana split, and she’d have the opportunity to get caught up on the latest gossip. If we could find empty twirl seats when we returned from what Frankie decided would be a shorter than usual visit to Broadhurst, the girls and I were bound to get an earful.
The latest sightings and newest embellishments of Audrey Cavanaugh attempting to nab kids in Founder’s Woods so she could throw them into her cauldron—always bubbling—would be a hot topic. There’d also be much bragging about vacation exploits, a sort of can-you-top-that? roundtable. When it was our turn, the girls and I would mumble something about catching bloodsuckers at the creek and seeing I Was a Teenage Werewolf at the Rivoli, because we couldn’t share how we were spending most of our days and nights. Letting them know about our visits to the mental hospital and Mud
Town, and how we were keeping an eye on Aunt Jane May and Uncle Walt and Evelyn Mulrooney, wasn’t a good idea because some of those kids had inherited blabbermouthism from their mothers.
With our new plan for the day set in motion, we rounded the corner of Main and Hadley Streets at top speed, but then Frankie made another out-of-the-blue decision. She slowed down and called over her shoulder to Viv and me, “We better take the shortcut again. Ruthie Lang could still be watching the county road.”
True, but taking the shortcut to Broadhurst was not without risk either. The dirt path we’d pick up at the park petered out on the hospital grounds, but we’d have to make it through Founder’s Woods first without getting ambushed by that group of teenage bullies who acted like they owned the place.
If they caught us, they might shove us around, give us Indian burns on our wrists, and make us empty our pockets, but they wouldn’t do any permanent damage. In a few years, those boys would trade their ducktails in for crew cuts and, same way their fathers had, they’d marry their high school sweethearts in blue suits instead of blue jeans. They’d work the family fields or sell life insurance, get their babies baptized at St. Thomas’s, and chuckle about their wayward adolescences over beers at Top’s Bar on Saturday nights. All those boys except for one of them, that is. And as we drew closer to the shortcut through the woods that afternoon, I found myself doing what Aunt Jane May had told us to do before we’d left the house that day—“Remember what the sheriff told you about keepin’ away from the Merchant boy.”
When a tease of an easterly breeze had come up off Lake Michigan a few nights ago, Frankie, Viv, and I were sitting on the front porch of the house trying to catch our fair share of it, when the sheriff’s squad car pulled up the driveway. There wasn’t much crime in Summit other than occasional drunk-driving or traffic violations, so he’d often stop by when he was on patrol in the evenings to have a slice of warm pie and a glass of cold milk with Aunt Jane May.
Over the years, the girls and I had amassed a treasure trove of talents—lip reading, burping the alphabet, secret hand signals, and producing flatulence under our arms—but above all, we prided ourselves on our ability to pay close attention to details, so we knew right off that the sheriff had not stopped by for a social visit that night. When he came across the lawn toward us, he didn’t look like the cock of the walk the way he usually did, and when he set his foot on the bottom step of the porch, he didn’t show off his dimples or pull a quarter out from behind one of our ears.
As serious as I’d ever seen him, he said, “Girls, I have something important to talk to you about.” He was fidgety and sounded so uncharacteristically ill at ease that I knew at once why he’d come. To put him out of his misery, I almost told him that we’d already heard how Elvin Merchant had attacked Cindy Davenport at the Starlight Drive-In. That he’d ripped her blouse off, pawed at her chest, and thrust his hands up her pleated skirt. When she fought him off, he pushed her out the door of his souped-up hot rod, took off, and left her crying hysterically in the dust.
Mr. Hawthorne, the owner of the Starlight, called the sheriff. When Uncle Walt showed up, he calmed Cindy down and offered to call her parents, but Dr. and Mrs. Davenport were in Chicago at a dental convention, so he ended up taking her home. Because it was late, he told her to get some sleep and come to the station house in the morning so he could take her statement.
She showed up bright and early and sat on the edge of the wooden chair across from the sheriff’s desk. Told him she was sorry for wasting his time, but after she thought about it, she realized she’d made too big a deal of what’d happened up at the drive-in.“It was all just a silly misunderstanding,” Cindy said with a smile. “High jinks! Hardy-har-har.”
The sheriff didn’t believe her, of course, but he had no choice but to accept her story. Seemed like everyone in town wanted to chalk up the incident to “boys bein’ boys,” but there were some rumors, of course, about what Elvin Merchant had done to ensure that Cindy would keep her mouth shut.
Supposedly, he’d knocked on the Davenports’ front door soon after the sheriff had dropped her off, and Cindy, who thought Elvin had come by to say he was sorry for the way he’d treated her at the drive-in, welcomed him with open arms. And when that handsome boy smiled and told her so sweetly, “I got a little something for you, honey,” she thought he was holding apology flowers behind his back, but it was his switchblade and her pet tabby cat. “Real bad things can happen to pussies that don’t keep their mouths shut,” Merchant said when he brought the knife up to Queenie’s furry throat, which was so god-awful that when we found out later that summer that the rumor was true, nobody could blame the girl for not pressing charges at the time.
Uncle Walt thought we were too young and naive to go into any of the particulars of that incident when he came to talk to us that night, so he kept it simple. He fingered the silver star pinned to his tan shirt pocket—what he did when he wanted to remind us he was speaking to us as the sheriff, not our uncle—and said in his lawman’s voice, “The Merchant boy is a rotten apple who didn’t fall far from a rotten tree. I want the three of you to keep away from the woods and the service station. That’s an order.”
Easier said.
The girls and I would wait to mount our bikes until it was too dark to be seen by Aunt Jane May or someone who might snitch us out, but there was only one way to get over to Mud Town from Honeywell Street. We couldn’t avoid going past Merchant’s Service Station, even if we wanted to. It was next to the railroad tracks that separated white Summit from not-white Summit.
Mr. Merchant would’ve hung the garage’s “CLOSED” sign and taken the proceeds over to Top’s Bar hours before we’d reach the station, but no matter what time the girls and I departed from the hideout, there Elvin would be. Leaning back on an orange crate in front of a garage door lit a hazy yellow by a tin overhead light. He would give Viv and me the once-over as we pedaled past, but it was lovely Frankie who grabbed the lion’s share of his attention. He’d take a long draw off his Lucky Strike and in its amber glow we’d see the sickly way he grinned at her, and we’d pray our bikes wouldn’t get caught up in the tracks and buck us off, and our prayers had always been answered.
Hindsight being what it is, I can see now that Frankie, Viv, and I were on the road to hell paved with good intentions that afternoon, but when we burst out of the trees at the edge of Founder’s Woods and onto the sunny grounds of the mental institution unscathed by Merchant or any of his disciples? It felt like a miracle to me, like a parting of the Red Sea, and like God had our backs yet again.
Chapter Eleven
After the three of us propped our bikes against the trunk of the Hanging Tree, we got comfortable on our lookout branch. We were up high enough that if you got shoved off by the kid sitting next to you damage could be incurred. Frankie and Viv were giving each other stink eyes on the way ride over, so as a precautionary measure, I planted myself between them to wait for Jimbo and Albie to guide their charges out of the hospital and into the recreation yard after Bigger Dolores fed them lunch in the dining room.
Frankie repeated to me for the fourth time, “Remember, no visiting today. We’re headin’ over to Whitcomb’s soon as—”
“All right already,” I said as I focused on the hospital door the patients would be exiting from. I’d be able to see them just fine without the glasses, but I liked looking closely at their faces, not just the big picture. “I capiche.”
As Dr. Cruikshank had mentioned at the town hall, the top floor of the hospital was reserved for the patients who’d committed monstrous acts and had been judged criminally insane in a court of law. A lock secured their cell doors, the windows were barred, and they weren’t allowed out without having their feet and hands shackled. Jimbo told us that Wally Hopper had been moved into a corner room a few days after the emergency meeting, which was sooner than Dr. Cruikshank had led folks to believe. The girls and I thought it was pretty sharp of him to slip the child killer
into town while folks still felt their children were safe, because Evelyn Mulrooney was bound to get them worked up again. She hadn’t succeeded in convincing anyone at the emergency meeting to close Broadhurst down, so she’d have to dream up some other way to prove to the sheriff that she was marriage material, and give the voters another reason to oust Mayor Kibler and write her name down on a ballot come September.
The room next door to Hopper’s belonged to Douglas Quick, the man the newspapers had dubbed the “Blackjack Scalper” because he’d stabbed those gals twenty-one times each, sawed the hair off their heads, and made wigs for himself.
The final patient on the top floor was the one we’d learned more about at Earl Spooner’s place when I’d first gotten the idea to visit with the patients the previous summer. Albie had told us that the man believed that he was a newspaper reporter, but I could no longer recall his name.
The middle floor was reserved for deeply disturbed but nonviolent patients who were rarely allowed in the yard. Some of them were schizophrenics, and some of their lives had become so unbearably painful they’d attempted to end them. A couple of them had received what Jimbo called “treatments” in the basement room only Dr. Cruikshank and Nurse Holloway could open. And Viv. We figured that one of her keys was sure to work on that door, too. Because Jimbo and Albie would speculate as often as we did about what went on in that room, if we got an opportunity to take a peek inside the Chamber of Horrors, I hoped we could count on them to lend a helping hand—or at least turn a blind eye.
The patients who were the least threatening to society, and themselves, were housed on the ground floor. They were the ones Frankie, Viv, and I were most familiar with, and some we counted as dear friends.
Because we’d not been stopped by Dutch Van Heusen, Elvin Merchant, or any of the other bullies that afternoon, we made such good time through the woods that we arrived before the first-floor patients had been turned out into the recreation yard, and Frankie was not happy. I was afraid she might tell us she didn’t want to wait, that we needed to go back to Whitcomb’s immediately for her brown cow, but other than shooting a disgruntled look at me, she suffered in silence.