Shadowmaker

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  “I’ll tell her you called,” Mrs. Ludd said. “She’ll be back Sunday evening.”

  I thanked Mrs. Ludd and hung up, nervously staring out the windows at the white soup that pushed against the glass. I telephoned Julie, who was sick with a twenty-four-hour virus, and two other girls who often ended up at our lunch table, but they were baby-sitting.

  “It’s crazy to be scared,” I said aloud, trying to talk myself into a better frame of mind. It was a known fact that the full moon, not fog, brought out the weirdos. And on such a damp, miserable night, wouldn’t even the weirdos want to stay indoors like everybody else? Sure they would.

  After I’d turned on all the lights in the house, I heated a can of soup and ate it with a stack of crackers. On a full stomach, the situation looked much better. It was Friday night, however, and I didn’t want to do homework. I tried a couple of shows on television, but didn’t like either of them. I was going to call Mom, just to talk to someone, but I didn’t want to worry her.

  I was just beginning to feel desperate, and was going to write in my journal, when I remembered the pages from Lana Jean’s journal. I don’t know why, but I felt a compulsion to read them. I settled on the living room sofa and began reading from where I’d once given up.

  Everything Lana Jean had written was about Travis—the people he talked to and even things he’d said, when she’d been close enough to overhear. If she’d told Travis even half of what she’d written about him, I could see why he’d want to destroy these pages.

  Since Travis was usually with his friends, B.J., Duke, and Delmar, Lana Jean had a few comments about them too. She thought B.J. was as mean and bossy as his father, if not more so; Duke was a show-off, always trying to impress all the girls; and Delmar didn’t think for himself, content to do everything the others told him to do.

  “They made up a club called Blitz,” she wrote, “and nobody else can be in it, and they can’t be in it either unless they follow all the rules, which go one, two, three, four, five, getting harder all the time, and if you don’t you’re out, which is all I heard.”

  I could see why Mrs. Walgren had bailed out. I read that paragraph over three times and still couldn’t quite figure out what Lana Jean was writing about.

  I was into the next page, reading about what Travis had eaten for lunch, when I realized the rottweiler was barking furiously, with the other two dogs backing him up. I became totally alert. There was a squeak as our gate was opened and slow, steady footfalls padded along the walkway.

  Frantically, I lifted a cushion from the sofa and hid Lana Jean’s papers under it. I tiptoed into the kitchen, opened one of the drawers, pulled out Mom’s largest butcher knife, and then waited. My heart was banging in my chest as I heard the footsteps stop outside our kitchen door.

  A loud knock on the door made me jump.

  “Who’s there?” I asked in a whisper. I cleared my throat and shouted this time, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Katie … Travis,” came the answer.

  Grunting with relief, I tossed the knife back inside the drawer and ran to the door, surprised but eager. I unlocked the door and let him in.

  Travis wiped his damp forehead with the back of one arm. “That fog is awful,” he said.

  “How did you drive in it?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t.” He pulled off a windbreaker and dropped it over the back of a chair. “Actually, I don’t live too far from here, so I walked.” He looked around. “Where’s your mom?”

  “In Austin. She flew there this morning, but couldn’t get back because of the fog.” I couldn’t help it. I let out another sigh of relief. “I’m awfully glad you’re here, Travis.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders and studied my face. “You were scared, weren’t you?”

  “A little. You know the things that have happened, and I keep thinking about what you said about someone wanting us out of here and maybe coming back for something he’d left.”

  “I was just guessing, trying to answer your questions. I’m sorry now I said anything. I didn’t mean to scare you, Katie.”

  “I was reading when I realized that the dogs were barking, so I knew someone was coming, and then I heard footsteps on the walk and—”

  His lips felt so intense, my knees wobbled as I returned his kiss.

  Finally, he pulled back and looked into my eyes. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to, Katie. I’ll stay all night, if that’s what you want.”

  “No,” I said, too loudly, too quickly. Trying to breathe normally I told Travis, “Since Mom’s not here, you really shouldn’t be here either. She’s got strict rules.”

  “Even when she’s not here?”

  “Especially when she’s not here. I have rules too.”

  He smiled. “I came to see you in all this fog, and you’re going to throw me out without even offering me something to eat?”

  “There are no rules regarding the kitchen,” I said, returning his smile. “What would you like? We’ve got a fudge pie in the freezer and a few oatmeal cookies left, or I could make you a ham sandwich. You name it.”

  We poked through the refrigerator, then agreed on the fudge pie, which was frozen so solid we had to hack our way into it.

  When we’d finished demolishing our slices, laughing and wiping fudge smears from each other’s face, Travis took my hand and said, “Don’t you think you can trust me enough to tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Where Lana Jean’s journal is.”

  I wasn’t sure why his obsession with her journal bothered me so much. Even so, my first impulse was to hand it over to him—all those embarrassing, detailed pages. I realized he might destroy it, but the fact remained that it was still Lana Jean’s property, which she’d entrusted to me. If I told him this, I’d be in for an argument I probably wouldn’t win, so I tried to look blank. “Isn’t the journal at her house?”

  “It is not there,” he said. “I went to see, and even helped her mom look for it.” He paused and his eyes were so dark and serious I couldn’t read them. “I think Lana Jane gave those pages to you.”

  I didn’t want to out-and-out lie to Travis. What could I say?

  At that moment the dogs set up another frantic warning, and I heard a car stop in front of our house.

  “Someone’s coming,” I said. The heavy tread of footsteps echoed along the walkway.

  “I see what you mean about the dogs being your warning system.” As Travis got up and strode to the door, throwing it open, I followed.

  Sheriff Granger paused only to give Travis a questioning look as he stomped into the kitchen, shaking beads of water from his jacket and cap. “Your mama called me,” he told me. “She told me you were supposed to go to a friend’s, but then was afraid the fog was too thick for you to get there. This is not the friend she mentioned.”

  As he glanced from me to Travis, I said, “Travis came by a few minutes ago, doing just what you’re doing, making sure I was all right. I’d appreciate it if you’d give him a lift home. He walked here.”

  “Okay by me,” he said, “but I have somethin’ to say before I go. I didn’t tell your mama because I didn’t want to add to her worries. Just afore the fog set in, Lana Jean Willis’s body was found out in the woods.”

  “Her body?” I whispered.

  “Yeah. Boyd Morris’s old hound got to nosin’ around a clearing near the highway and next thing Boyd knew was he saw a hand stickin’ up through the leaves. Shook him up pretty bad, but he came and got me.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d closed my eyes or if the room had suddenly grown dark. I tried taking deep breaths, but my lungs couldn’t seem to handle them.

  Travis rested a firm hand on my shoulder, but his voice quavered as he asked the sheriff, “Are you sure who it was?”

  “Real sure. Mrs. Willis already identified the body.”

  “How was she killed?” Travis asked.

  “Strangled. We’ll need the county medical examiner t
o confirm, but he’s pretty certain from the bruises on her neck.”

  I sat on the nearest chair, dropping my head between my knees, and it helped. The buzzing and flickering lights dissolved, and I could think clearly again.

  “Are you okay, Katie?” Travis asked. “You aren’t going to faint or anything?”

  “I’m all right,” I said, and gratefully leaned against him.

  “I notified the Houston police,” the sheriff told us. “That murderer-rapist they’re lookin’ for—it had to be him.”

  “For a minute I forgot,” I said bitterly. “You don’t have any crimes in Kluney.” My anger growing, I said, “Lana Jean shouldn’t have been killed! She shouldn’t! Why do you blame everyone outside of Kluney for crimes that happen inside Kluney?”

  His face reddened. “What crimes we get usually come from outside.”

  “Of course,” I snapped, and counted them on my fingers. “One, shoplifting; two, burglaries; three—”

  “Katie! Stop it!” Travis said. He gave me an odd look, then turned to the sheriff and began to apologize for me. “She’s in shock. She didn’t mean what she said.”

  I wanted to shout, “I did too!” but I realized that Mom would have done just what Travis was doing, and I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been rude.”

  Sheriff Granger walked to the door and held it open for Travis. “If you need anythin’, you’ve got the number of the station. Just give a call. They’ll get me on the radio.”

  Radio … another unanswered question. “Could I ask you a question, Sheriff Granger? That radio we found here at our house … Did you ever discover who it belonged to?”

  “Miz Jocie Baker,” he said. “But don’t go suspectin’ her of breakin’ into your house. Eighty years old and wouldn’t hurt a fly. That radio was on the list of things that got stolen when her house was burglarized last month.”

  “Do you have any idea how it got into our house?”

  “No,” he said, “and it’s the least of my worries right now.”

  “Katie shouldn’t be alone—” Travis began, but I firmly shook my head.

  “I am fine. Honest.” I wasn’t pretending. I needed to be alone, because I had an awful lot to think about. “I’ll call my mother at her hotel. She’ll appreciate that both of you came to check on me. Thanks. Good night.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As I sat alone on the couch, I started to think. Whoever had burglarized Mrs. Baker’s house, and was interrupted burglarizing ours, hadn’t been leaving us any gifts or souvenirs. The radio had been here, and he was taking it away. Had he stashed the things he’d stolen in this old house, thinking that no one would bother to search it? Was he the one who had tried to scare us away, and when we hadn’t left, had come back to collect his loot? Was our burglary just a cover-up?

  At first it made sense, but then it began to get fuzzy. Mom and I had cleaned every inch of the house from top to bottom. If anything had been hidden away, we would have found it.

  From top to bottom?

  I walked into the hallway and glanced up at the rectangular door fitted into the ceiling. Then I remembered that when we were getting this house ready to live in I’d asked Mom if we should clean the attic, and she said there was no need to clean up there.

  I reached up and tugged at the short length of rope that hung from the rectangle and pulled down the folding stairs that led up into the attic. Was there a light switch up there? I had no idea. I got a flashlight, tried not to think about mice and cockroaches, and carefully climbed the stairs.

  The moment my head poked above the attic floor I swept my light around in every direction. Ugh! I’d been right about mouse droppings. The attic, which stank from dust and mildew, was filthy.

  I sneezed, raising a cloud of dust, and quickly climbed up the rest of the stairs. There were footprints … lots of footprints. Mom’s uncle Jim hadn’t made these footprints, because they were far too new. And so was the small television set at one side of the small space and the microwave next to it. Just as I’d suspected, this is where the thief had stashed the things he’d stolen. Mom and I had interrupted him before he’d been able to get them all out of our house.

  But who was the thief? In this perfect town of Sheriff Granger’s Kluney, who could he be—and was there more than one? Could they be the beach bums who’d been seen around here?

  At the sound of a faint rustling in the corner, I quickly left the attic and raised the stairs into place, making sure the door was snug.

  With Mom away, I had no desire to call the sheriff and show him what I’d found. I wasn’t sure it would do any good, aside from a couple of people getting their stolen property back, and they could wait. They didn’t need it tonight.

  I made a mug of hot tea, with lots of lemon juice and honey and cinnamon in it—comfort tea, as Mom calls it—and curled back up on the sofa to sip it.

  One, two, three kept coming back to my mind. One, two, three. One … shoplifting; two … petty burglaries; three … major thefts; four … If there was a pattern to the crimes in Kluney, each group of crimes getting more severe, then drifters or beach bums couldn’t be responsible. The criminals had to be local—someone on hand to make the pattern work.

  The answer came so suddenly I jumped, sloshing tea down my shirt and onto my jeans.

  I snatched Lana Jean’s journal pages out from under the sofa cushion and began reading, more carefully than I’d ever read anything before.

  Travis, Travis, and more about Travis. I came to a mention of B.J. checking out Mrs. Walgren’s set of four black hoods for a skit in drama. “Very funny,” Lana Jean wrote, “because B.J. hadn’t signed up for drama, and neither had his friends.”

  Lana Jean went on to describe what Travis ate for lunch. I lay the pages on my lap and concentrated on what I’d read. Black hoods. Black cloth? Could the scrap of black cloth I’d found have come from one of the hoods?

  What had she written earlier? “One, two, three, four, five, getting harder all the time, and if you don’t, you’re out.”

  Four … The crimes were getting more difficult and more daring. Could four have been a planned armed robbery? And could that armed robbery have gone wrong and turned into murder?

  “The guys in Blitz have to prove themselves,” Lana Jean had said.

  With Lana Jean dead it was up to me to do some proving. I owed her that.

  In agony I closed my eyes, but I could see Travis’s face, his smile, his dark eyes … I could feel his kiss.

  “No,” I groaned, and dove into the journal pages again, concentrating on what I was reading to keep from dwelling on my own feelings about Travis. I read Lana Jean’s entire entry about the carnival: how Travis and his friends had gone on some of the rides, what they had eaten, which carny games they’d played, even a jealous mention of the cheerleader Travis had met behind the Ferris wheel. And, finally, I read that one by one Travis and his friends had slipped away into the woods to find … a pigeon?

  I was stumped. It actually took me a few minutes before I realized that Lana Jean had taken literally what she’d overheard. Now I knew better. I could see Travis and the others following the tracks of a carnival worker who had probably been looking for a quick and private place to goof off from his job. Their pigeon.

  Travis, the leader of his friends in Blitz … Had he robbed the worker at gunpoint, then pulled the trigger?

  Lana Jean hadn’t been simply a victim of wishful thinking. She’d been telling the truth about Travis asking to take her out. Travis had been the one who had lied. Filled with an aching, cold misery, I realized that when Travis discovered that Lana Jean must have seen or overheard enough to place the members of Blitz with the carnival worker, he must have killed her. I was grief stricken. Pathetic Lana Jean dead and Travis a killer.

  But who would believe me? How could I possibly prove it?

  My head throbbed as I tried to put everything together. I must have fallen asleep on the sofa because I woke the next morning
to see that the sun was rapidly burning away the fog. I stacked Lana Jean’s journal pages. I had to hide this important evidence. Now I knew why Travis was so eager to get his hands on these pages—he wasn’t embarrassed—he was protecting himself. I folded them and decided a safe place was to stuff them inside the outside packaging for a frozen carton of chicken à la king, and put it underneath an assortment of frozen stuff in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. If Travis came searching for the pages, I doubted he’d think of looking there.

  In order to dispose of the frozen chicken à la king, I stuck it into the oven and ate it for breakfast.

  Mom would be home soon. I hadn’t called her because I didn’t want her to be worried. After giving the situation plenty of thought, I finally decided to keep everything to myself for just a little while. Mom would naturally call the sheriff, and all my suspicions would be out in the open, with no one able to prove things one way or another. There’d be even more reason for people to want us out of here, and Mom would never get her novel written.

  I had an idea, and I was counting on B.J.’s mean disposition to help me follow through.

  When Mom got home, she was so busy, it was easy to tell her that she could see I was still in one piece, and avoid any other questions. Two inspectors came with her from Austin, and they all headed for the Hawkins Brothers Waste Disposal company. Mom asked if I’d like to go with them, but I knew they didn’t need me, and I had other things to work on.

  “Can’t,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do, and first, I’ve got to make a trip to the library to check out a copy of The Three Musketeers.”

  “You read that last year,” Mom said. “Is your class repeating it?”

  “No,” I said. “This is for an interpretation.” In answer to the question in her eyes I said, “Interpretations are complicated. I’ll explain later.”

  Mom gave me a lift to the library, and after I’d checked out the book I walked home, talking to each of the dogs who guarded the road to our house. They barked at me anyway. That was their job, and I was glad they were good at it.