by Matt Ruff
“Hello?” I said.
There was a pause, and a series of sharp clicks, and then a man’s voice said: “Jane Charlotte.”
It was the janitor, of course; he’d tricked me. All this time he’d been stringing me along, letting me think he hadn’t noticed me. The sounds in the shower stall must have been some sort of recording, meant to lull me into a false sense of security. The game was over now, though, and in a moment he’d tell me to turn around, and he’d be standing right behind me, and then I would die.
But what the voice on the phone said next was: “You don’t want to be messing around in there, Jane. He’s a bad monkey.”
Then the voice broke up in a screech of static—or maybe it was me who screeched—and the next clear thought I had I was outside, running screaming for the road.
Two state police cars were pulling up in front of the janitor’s house. Felipe’s pickup truck was right behind them, with Felipe, Carlotta, Señor Diaz, and the school librarian all jammed into the cab together.
A cop got out of the lead car, and I ran straight into his arms, shouting: “He’s the Angel of Death! He’s the Angel of Death! The janitor is the Angel of Death!” The cop grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to get me to tell him what had happened, but I just kept on shouting: “He’s the Angel of Death!”
The other cops drew their guns and advanced on the house. They were almost at the front door when the janitor came out, still damp from the shower, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. I’d started to calm down a little, but when I saw him I lost it again, screaming “Bad monkey!” and scrambling around to the far side of the police cars.
The cops pointed their guns at the janitor and told him to put his hands up, and he did. He was smooth. Instead of looking scared he acted bewildered, like he was this totally innocent guy who couldn’t imagine what the police were doing on his property.
They handcuffed him. “Come on now,” the lead cop coaxed me. “It’s all right, we’ve got him. Talk to me.” So I started babbling about the hunting knife, and eventually he nodded and said, “OK, just stay here,” and went inside the house.
The Diazes formed a protective huddle around me. “Are you OK, Jane?” Carlotta said. “Did he hurt you?”
I shook my head. “Just scared me out of my wits is all…But it’s fine now.”
Only, it wasn’t fine. I started figuring that out as soon as the cop came back with the wrong knife.
“Is this it?” he asked, holding out a scrawny little steak knife with a five-inch blade.
“No,” I said. “I told you, it was a hunting knife. It was big.”
“Show me.” He took me back inside with him. The hunting knife had disappeared; when I pointed to the spot on the floor where I’d dropped it, the cop said, “That’s where I found this,” and held up the steak knife again. “Are you sure this isn’t it?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I said, annoyed. “The janitor must have hidden the real knife before he came outside.” Then I remembered the toolbox: “Wait a minute…This way!”
I led him into the garage and around to the back of the van. “In there,” I said. “You’ll probably need his keys…” But the van’s back doors were unlocked now. The cop pulled them open.
“So,” he said, “what am I supposed to be looking at?”
The back of the van was empty. No blanket, no plastic sheeting, no luggage straps, no toolbox.
“Damn it!” I said. “He must have hidden this stuff, too.”
“What stuff?”
“His kidnapping equipment.”
“Equipment, huh?” The cop’s expression changed, in a way I didn’t like. “And you think he gathered up this…equipment…and hid it away just as we were arriving?”
“The stuff was here before, and now it’s gone. So yeah. What’s your problem?”
“No problem. It’s just, he must have been moving awfully fast, don’t you think?”
“Look, I’m not making this up.”
“I didn’t say you were making it up. Why would I think you were making it up?”
I should have just shut my mouth then. The thing was, he was right—the janitor would have had to move quickly, which meant he couldn’t have hidden the stuff very well. I’m sure I could have found it.
But the cop was giving me the same I-see-through-your-bullshit look that Officer Friendly had—only not, you know, so friendly—so not only did I keep on running my mouth, but I immediately brought up the one subject you never mention when you’re trying to get somebody to believe you.
“Take a whiff,” I said.
“A whiff?”
“Inside the van. Smell it.”
He leaned in and sniffed. “Air freshener?”
“Pot.”
His eyebrows went up. “Marijuana?”
“The janitor smokes it.”
“Really. You’d never guess that, looking at him.”
“Not to get high,” I said. “I mean, that too, but he smokes it to excite himself. Before…”
“Oh! Before he uses his kidnapping equipment, you mean…And you’re familiar with the smell of marijuana, are you?”
It was a fast trip downhill from there. The more skeptical he became, the more I talked—when he asked me what had put me on to the janitor in the first place, I actually told the truth, or at least enough of it to make myself sound like a complete idiot. “Monkey noises, eh? Well, I can see why you’d be suspicious of a man who made noises like a monkey…”
To complete my humiliation, he brought me back outside and asked Carlotta whether she knew anything about these monkey noises. “Monkey what?” said Carlotta.
“That’s what I thought,” said the cop, and told his buddies to turn the janitor loose.
My mouth wouldn’t stop running: “You’re letting him go?”
“You should be worried about whether I’m going to let you go,” the cop said. “If this gentleman wants to press charges against you for trespassing, I’ll be only too happy to run you in.”
But the janitor, still playing the innocent, said he didn’t want to press charges—he just wanted to know what was going on.
“Just a big misunderstanding, sir,” the cop told him. He shot me a look: “One that had better not happen again.”
The Diazes took me home. Señor Diaz made me ride in the back of the pickup, which I didn’t particularly mind, since he and Carlotta spent the entire trip arguing in high-decibel Spanish; when we stopped at the school to drop off the librarian, she stumbled out of the cab looking pale and half-deaf. Then when we got to my stop, Señor Diaz had a quieter conversation with my aunt and uncle. I didn’t need to listen in to know that I’d be taking the bus to school from now on.
After the Diazes left, my uncle told me that it “might be best” if I didn’t go by the diner or the gas station anymore, and my aunt added that they wouldn’t need my help at the store “for a while,” which I understood was her way of saying I was grounded. I got really mad, and started going on about how stupid it was that no one believed me, and how it wasn’t going to be my fault if the janitor killed another kid; but my aunt and uncle just shook their heads and left me alone to rant and rave.
It was Friday, so I had the whole weekend to feel sorry for myself. Monday was a little better; I got to sleep an extra hour and a half, which almost made up for having to take the school bus. I didn’t see Carlotta until second-period English. She ignored me during class, and afterwards I had to run out into the hall to catch up with her.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you, Jane,” she said. “My dad thinks you’re a bad influence.”
“I am a bad influence. It’s one of the reasons you like me.”
The joke fell flat, but at least she didn’t walk away. After a moment, she asked: “Did you hear about the janitor?”
“What about him?”
“He quit his job over the weekend. The librarian told me he called up the school superintendent on Saturday and said he was leav
ing.”
“Leaving as in moving away?”
“I guess so.”
“Well don’t you see what that means? He’s guilty! Even though the cops let him go, he’s afraid they’ll remember him next time a kid disappears.”
“Maybe,” said Carlotta. “Or maybe he’s afraid people will jump to conclusions when they hear the cops were at his place.”
“Carlotta, I swear, I didn’t make any of that stuff up.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it? I mean, if he’s really gone for good.” She looked at me. “You should probably be careful until we know that for sure, huh?”
The thought had already occurred to me. Friday afternoon, as we were about to leave the janitor’s house, I’d caught the janitor eyeballing me. The cops were already in their cars, and Felipe was revving the pickup, and I looked over and saw the janitor standing in his front doorway, still in his underwear, staring at me. He’d dropped the bewildered routine and put a whole new face on.
A hostile face?
No. He didn’t show any emotion at all. He was just…intent. Like he wanted to make really sure he’d recognize me next time we met up.
It was good for a few weeks’ nightmares. In my dreams, he’d drive up to my aunt and uncle’s place after midnight with his headlights off, and sit smoking dope and looking up at my bedroom window. Sometimes he’d just sit there, thinking about how he was going to get even with me, and other times he’d get out and walk around the outside of the house, looking for a way in. One night I woke up in a sweat, sure I’d just heard a van driving away, and when I opened my window to look out, I smelled pot smoke.
I also dreamed about that voice I’d heard on the phone in the janitor’s kitchen. When I was awake I didn’t think about it so much—I mean, it’s not like I forgot about it, but it was just so weird, I sort of pretended I forgot about it. But it got into my dreams, and in my dreams, it wasn’t scary. I’d be like clutching this phone in the dark, petrified because the janitor was coming for me, and then the voice would say my name, “Jane Charlotte,” and there’d be this wave of relief, because somehow, dream logic, I’d know the voice was good, and it was on my side, on the side of all good people. And it was more powerful than the Angel of Death.
So I dreamed about this stuff for a few weeks, and then the dreams started to taper off. The janitor hadn’t come calling on me, nobody at school or in town had seen him, no more kids had gone missing, and while I still knew the guy was guilty, more and more it seemed like that was somebody else’s problem.
Then one evening my aunt and uncle drove down to Fresno to visit some friends of theirs. Originally I was supposed to go with them and catch a movie while they played bridge or whatever, but the day before, I’d gotten busted for cheating on a test, and after the school superintendent called home to narc on me, my aunt went from talking about “when we go out tomorrow night” to “when your uncle and I go out tomorrow night.”
They left around six. Storm clouds were blowing in from the west, and I was pissy enough to hope they’d get caught in a downpour. By seven the sky was overcast and lightning was flickering on the horizon, but there was still no rain.
I read a few chapters of Nancy Drew—I’d worked my way through most of the series by now, so I’d had to start rationing the books that were left—then ate the cold meatloaf my aunt had left me in the fridge. After I cleared my plate I sat back down at the kitchen table to work a crossword puzzle from the Fresno Bee. This was another Phil-type activity that you couldn’t have paid me to do back in S.F. But with no TV, a looming Nancy Drew shortage, and Señor Diaz hanging up the phone every time I tried to call Carlotta, my entertainment standards just kept getting lower and lower.
It was a hidden-message crossword, which they did sometimes: certain of the clues were highlighted, and if you solved them and strung the answers together, they’d form a saying or a quotation, like RED SKY AT MORNING, SAILOR TAKE WARNING, or THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL US MAKES US STRONGER. Usually the special clues were hard enough that you had to finish the whole crossword to get them, but sometimes, like tonight, you could solve them directly.
The first highlighted clue, 1 across, four letters, was “Defunct Life magazine rival,” and I knew that was LOOK. The second clue, 9 across, five letters, was “Opposite of over,” or UNDER. The third clue—and this one was so easy I almost laughed—was a fill-in-the-blank, 13 across, three letters, “Winnie ____ Pooh.”
There was a rumble of thunder and the rain finally started. It was the downpour I’d wished for and then some, but instead of making me happy it set me on edge. I went down the hall to the front door, flicked on the front-porch lights, and spent a long time looking out, making sure that the hiss of the rain was just rain, and not tires creeping up the drive.
The next clue was the only one I didn’t get right off the bat: 20 across, four letters, “Where the NC gun is hidden.”
NC gun?
Capital N, capital C. I thought it might be a typo, so I moved on to the next clue, 24 across, four letters, “Tarzan’s girlfriend.” My scalp prickled a little when I saw that, but what really made my hair stand up was the last clue, 31 across, nine letters, “The loneliest Brontë.”
Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t have gotten that one either, but it just so happened that we’d been reading Jane Eyre in class that week, and the teacher had given us the rundown on the whole sorry Brontë family, so I knew that the loneliest Brontë was CHARLOTTE. After Branwell and Emily and Anne all died, Charlotte was the one left over, the one left alone in the house, kind of like I was right now. And so if you added it all together, tonight’s hidden message was—
LOOK UNDER THE blank, JANE CHARLOTTE.
Yeah. And maybe it was because it shared a couple of letters with “blank,” or maybe it was because I was sitting with my back to it, but all at once I knew that the missing word was SINK.
My aunt and uncle’s kitchen had this huge sink—“Big enough to slaughter a pig in,” my uncle said one time, and he made it sound like that was more than a figure of speech. It had a big cabinet space underneath it too, and once when we were visiting a few years earlier, Phil crawled under there during a game of hide-and-seek and split his head open on the drainpipe. So between thoughts of pig slaughter and the memory of Phil with blood streaming down his face, I wasn’t exactly eager to stick my nose down there.
Of course I had to look. I told myself that it was just a coincidence anyway, there was no way that message in the crossword could really be intended for me personally. Maybe “Look under the sink, Jane Charlotte” was a line from Shakespeare.
So I opened up the cabinet, and there was nothing there but the usual assortment of under-the-sink junk, and I’m like, see, just a coincidence. But then I’m like, not so fast, if there is a gun, it’s not just going to be lying out next to the silver polish. So I felt up in the space between the wall and the back of the sink basin. And at first I was just touching air, but then I moved my hand a little and my fingers brushed something rough. A package.
It was rolled up in a piece of potato sack and tied up with twine. I brought it out into the light and unwrapped it. And there it was.
It looked like a toy zap gun. It was bright orange, with a puffy barrel, and it seemed to be made of plastic. It was heavy, though, and from the weight and the fact that it was slightly cold, I thought it might be a water pistol. But when I checked the base of the handle there was no rubber plug, just a flat plate embossed with the letters NC.
There were more markings on the side of the gun. Near the back of the barrel, right above the trigger, was a dial with four settings. One setting was labeled SAFE in small green letters; the next setting was labeled NS, in blue; the last two settings, both labeled in dark red, were CI and MI. The dial was currently set to MI.
I did the thing that you traditionally do when you’re a teenager and you find a gun, which was point it at my own face. The dark hole of the NC gun’s muzzle seemed more real than
the rest of it, though, so I decided not to pull the trigger. Instead I looked around to see if one of my aunt’s cats was in the room. But the cats had made themselves scarce, and before I could choose something else for target practice, all the lights in the house went out.
For the first few seconds I was amazingly calm. Then lightning flashed outside and I turned towards the window above the sink, drawn by an afterimage of something that didn’t belong. When the next flash came I saw it clearly: out beyond the backyard, in the orange groves that ran behind the house, a van was parked with its headlights off.
Something big walked across the back porch, passing right in front of the window—I say something, but of course I knew who it was, and what he was here for. He went straight for the porch door, which was locked but flimsy, and banged on it hard, real hammer blows. I could feel it shaking in its frame. There was a pause, and then he started attacking the doorknob, rattling it like he meant to pull it off.
By this point I was practically shitting myself with fear. I still had the gun, but I’d gone back to thinking of it as a toy, and in another moment I would have dropped it in the sink and started running blind through the house.
Then the phone rang, a beautiful sound. The janitor immediately stopped rattling the doorknob. The phone rang again, and again, and I moved towards it, terrified that if the ringing stopped before I reached it the attack on the door would begin again. I racked my knee on a chair, and banged my side against the corner of the kitchen table, but I held on to the gun.
I answered the phone on the seventh ring: “Hello…?”
“Jane Charlotte.”
“I don’t know who this is,” I whispered, “but I need help. Your bad monkey is right outside my back door.”
“No,” the voice on the phone said. “He’s in the house.”
Down the hall in my uncle’s study, a board creaked.
“Now don’t panic,” the voice advised. “He won’t expect you to be armed. Just hold the gun steady in both hands…”
I hung up. From the phone to the porch door was about a dozen steps, but my feet didn’t touch the floor more than twice.