by Laura Ruby
Lily’s mother laughed. “I guess that’s highly unlikely. Still…”
“Come on, Mom. He said he was going to come over tomorrow and help me with the stupid book. He likes that book.”
“Really? He likes The Old Man and the Sea?”
“Yes,” said Lily. “But I’ve decided not to hold it against him.”
“Big of you,” her mother said. “Did you finish those essay questions?”
“Um…”
“Um, yourself. Tomorrow’s your last chance, okay? Otherwise I’m going to make you wade through Moby Dick. Get it? Wade?”
Lily covered her ears. “Bad, Mom. That was really bad.”
Lily was sure that the nightfall would bring more surprises, or at least a little uneasiness, but the quiet of the house and her mother’s presence lulled her into questioning that anything really scary had happened there at all.
By the time Lily was perched at her usual spot at the dining room table the next day, she had convinced herself that if there was a ghost or a spy, he didn’t know who he was dealing with. At age nine, she had fed Julep through a dropper for twenty days after discovering the four-week-old kitten in a garbage can on Mott Street. At ten, she was babysitting for the family in the apartment next door. At eleven, she had driven her mother to the hospital when bad chicken had made her mother too sick to handle the car. Lily had taken care of herself since she was little, since the terrible night her father had taken his guitar to a gig and hadn’t bothered to come back.
She wasn’t going to scare so easily.
At three-thirty, Vaz showed up with a box of hot chocolate. “My turn to buy,” he said. “Maybe we can have some after we talk to the Bailey guy?” He said this as if a cup of hot chocolate in Lily’s kitchen were a date at a nice restaurant. Lily’s toes curled inside her worn boots.
“Okay,” Lily said shyly, taking the box and putting it on the floor by the stairs. “Maybe we’ll even be able to drink it without somebody breathing all over us.”
Lily got her coat, and she and Vaz walked next door to Bailey Burton’s house. Bright red with blue-and-white trim and little stars cut into the woodwork above the porch, the house looked like a giant, three-dimensional flag. Lily rang the bell and stuffed her hand back into her pocket to keep it warm.
The door opened a crack and a lone raisin eye glared at them. “What is it? Who are you? What do you want?” He sprayed these questions like a man who wouldn’t ever be satisfied with the answers to them.
“Hello again, Mr. Burton. Remember me? Me and my mother are staying—”
“My mother and I,” barked the man.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not me and my mother. It’s my mother and I.”
“Oh. Well,” said Lily, sneaking a confused glance at Vaz. “My mother and I are staying at the house next door?”
“Don’t ask a question if you’re making a statement. It makes you sound like an ignoramus.”
Lily squared her shoulders, getting irritated with the raisin and with the person it belonged to. “My mother and I are staying at the house next door. It’s my Uncle Wes’s house. The librarian told us that you run the Historical Association.”
“She sent you? What for?”
Vaz and Lily looked at each other. “She thought you could help us,” said Lily.
“With what?”
“Since you know my uncle, I was wondering if you knew anything about the house or maybe could help us figure out some of the history of the house.”
The door opened wider to accommodate the man’s other eye, but not so wide that Lily and Vaz could see the man’s whole face, just a striped down the middle. The piggy eyes looked like chips dropped in pancake batter.
“I don’t know what that woman was thinking when she sent you here, but I’m sure that your uncle would be happy to tell you the history of the house. If he knows what it is. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Well, um, it’s a surprise,” Lily said. “I thought I would do a family tree for my uncle. As a present. For letting us stay at his house.”
The man’s smile was cold and empty as a snowman’s. “I’d love to help you, but I’m afraid that your uncle’s house, your uncle’s family, is a bit of a mystery. Not a lot of records on them.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Vaz said, stepping forward, “but we were hoping that you might have some copies of some old newspapers or pictures. Maybe there’s something you missed.”
The piggy eyes pinned Vaz. “I don’t miss much. If there was something about that house to be found in the Historical Association’s library, I would have found it already.” The man drew himself up to his less-than-considerable height. “I am the foremost authority on Cape May history in this area. As a matter of fact, I wrote two books on the subject.”
“That’s very nice, but—”
“I don’t think I can help you,” the man interrupted.
“Maybe we can just see the library-”
“The library is closed for the time being. I’m packing things up in order to move it to a new location in a few weeks, and most of the documents are already in boxes. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t sound sorry. Vaz said, “But—”
The man tipped his egg-like head. “What are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re awfully dark. What are you?”
Vaz turned darker, dark red. “I’m Greek.”
“Greek?” said the man, and slammed the door shut.
They stood there in shock for several minutes, until Vaz turned abruptly and marched down the stairs. Lily had to scamper to keep up with him.
“That guy…,” Vaz spit.
Lily nodded in agreement, but Vaz wasn’t even looking. His face had turned a deep shade of plum.
“Forget him, Vaz. He’s just a little man with a complex.”
“He’s not alone, you know. There’s a lot of people just like him in this town.”
“There’s a lot of people like him everywhere, Vaz. The worst thing is to let them get to you.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
Lily felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “What are you talking about? What do you mean?”
Vaz scuffed his sneakers on the sidewalk. “Forget it.”
“You think I don’t know what it’s like to have people hate me for no reason? Did you ever try to go to school in a ritzy neighborhood in clothes from the Salvation Army?”
“Look, you’re right,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “It’s just that it’s the second time it happened to me this month.”
“The second time?”
Vaz touched the tip of his nose. “Remember this? There’s a kid who’ll call you names if you’ve got more pigment than the moon. Most of the time nobody pays any attention to him. But this last time I couldn’t help it.”
“Uh oh.”
“He couldn’t bother me so he decided to bother my mom at work. She’s a waitress at Gorgeous George’s Crab House. He went there with a couple of his friends, requested a table in her section, then called her a every name their feeble little minds could think up. Her hair is red!” he said, as if that made a difference. “Then they stiffed her for the bill.” Vaz was plumming up again. “The manager is just as bad as the kids. He made her pay for that bill.”
“But that’s not fair,” said Lily.
“Tell me about it. So I jumped the guy after school. He broke my nose.”
Lily winced. “Maybe you should just have started a rumor that he wears girl’s underwear or something.”
“Hey, that’s not bad,” said Vaz. “But it worked out. I picked his pocket while he was pounding on me. He had twenty-two bucks and a pack of gum. I gave my mom the money. I gave the gum to my dog. His name’s Argos. Isn’t that a cool name?”
“Argos?”
“Odysseus’s dog? The one who lived more than twenty years and then died when Odysseus finally came back?”
“Oh, that Argos.�
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“Lily, you really have to start reading some books, girl.”
She stood in the doorway, watching her breath cotton up the air in front of her, wondering why he would stand in the cold and fight with her, what he wanted. Then she thought about what she wanted. She wanted to know what was going on. She wanted to stop being the serious girl whose wacky mother had more boyfriends and more fun.
She grabbed his sleeve and hauled him into the house and shut the door behind him.
“My mom told me about chicks like you.”
“I didn’t want that guy to hear us talking.” Lily said. She scooped up the box of hot chocolate, unzipped her coat, and led him into the kitchen. “I think we’ve got to get a look at that library.”
“But the guy just told us that it’s closed. He’s packing it up to move it.”
“Come on. Something weird’s going on. Did you hear what he said? ‘I don’t know what that woman was thinking when she sent you.’”
“Yeah? So?”
“So, did you really believe that he’s packing it his archive to move it?”
Vaz smiled wryly. “No. I don’t think Mr. You’re Awfully Dark What Are You wants to help us.”
Lily pulled a packet of hot chocolate from the box. “That’s why we’re going to help ourselves.”
“What do you suggest?”
She tore off the top of the packet with her teeth, surprising herself for once. “How do you feel about a little breaking and entering?”
Chapter Thirteen
Lily and Vaz agreed to watch Bailey Burton’s house for a couple of days before they tried to do anything against the law.
“We’ll keep track of when he comes and goes, and how long he’s gone,” said Lily. “That way we’ll know the best time for us to break in.”
Vaz eyed her with what she hoped was admiration. “Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”
He and Lily did most of the spying together, running from one window to the next, peering out, making notes in a notebook.
“Duck!” Vaz dived beneath the window, pulling Lily down with him.
“What’s going on?” Lily asked.
“Burton was looking right into this window. I think he saw us.”
“So?”
“So, you have binoculars around your neck, Lily.”
Lily looked down, first at the binoculars, then at Vaz’s hand still holding hers. “So maybe we’re bird-watching or something.”
“Come on.”
She sat up and leaned against the wall. “Look. He’s been going out at three every afternoon and coming back around five. What do you think about trying it then?”
“Kind of risky,” said Vaz. “It’s the middle of the day.”
“Most people are still at work. And we’ll try the basement windows in the back of the house. The ones behind the bushes. Even if someone were looking, they wouldn’t see us.”
“Good idea,” said Vaz, leaning up against the wall next to her. “You know, you may have a future in crime.”
Lily pulled the binoculars over her head. “I have a future in engineering.”
“Is that what you want to be?”
“That or an accountant. Or maybe something else in finance. Whatever pays the best. I like science but they don’t pay scientists very well. My mom might think being poor is cool, but I don’t.”
“Finance,” said Vaz. “I’m impressed. I have no idea what I’m going to do. I don’t want to work in a restaurant. And I don’t want to be a fisherman. Did you know that being a fisherman is more dangerous than being a cop?”
She remembered his father, the empty boat bobbing on the water. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“Has your father…um…said anything about that?”
“You mean is my dead dad giving me career advice when he haunts me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess that’s what I mean.” Lily was surprised he could speak so matter-of-factly about his father, about his ghost father. She didn’t even like to mention the fact that she had a father. “Does he ever tell you what you should do?”
“He doesn’t tell me what I should do or not do, just what he did. And Dad loved fishing. Apart from me and my mom, it was his whole entire life. But since he died, I don’t like it much.” For a moment, Vaz’s face went all loose and sad, but then he smiled and bumped her in the shoulder with his own. “How about we go into business together? You can be the accountant and I’ll be the idea man.”
“The what?”
“The idea man. You know, the guy who thinks of all the big ideas, the guy who understands the big picture.”
“And what’s the big picture?”
“Guys are better than girls.”
“Can you get us in the house?” Lily asked.
“No.”
“Then I’ll be the idea man. We break in tomorrow.”
The next day, a half-hour after Bailey Burton locked up his front door, Lily and Vaz were crouched next to Bailey Burton’s basement windows and were thrilled to find that he kept them unlocked. The basement was dim but not dark. Lots of boxes and old furniture lay rotting on the damp floor, and there was a strong smell of mildew.
“Ladies first,” Lily said, and crawled in front of the window, turned to face Vaz. She put both feet into the opening and wriggled her body through like a woman trying to fit into a tight pair of jeans. She landed with a soft thud on top of a pile of soggy newspapers.
“Ugh,” she whispered. “I think something died down here.”
Vaz wriggled through the opening feet first the way Lily had , also landing on the newspapers. “Man!” he whispered, covering his nose. “Let’s get upstairs. He wouldn’t keep anything important down here. It’s too…gross.” Vaz lifted one of the newspapers, which seemed to be growing dozens of little brown feet. “Mushrooms,” he said, pulling out the tiny disposable camera that he’d brought.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking a picture.”
“For what?”
“Science class.”
They made their way through the piles of junk, trying very hard not to touch anything, and walked up the basement stairs. The door at the top was closed, and they looked at one another as Lily turned the knob and slowly pushed open the door.
The dining room table was worse than any dump. Half-eaten burgers were half wrapped in tissue paper and shoved into empty pizza boxes upon which cheese had hardened into plastic. Old soda cups leaked sugary water onto the scratched surface of the table. Paper plates littered with crumbs and smeared with sauces perched on every surface: the chairs, the top of the buffet, on the piles of books.
“I think Mr. Burton’s got an eating disorder,” said Vaz.
“It’s disordered all right,” said Lily. She kicked at a burger that was on the floor with a few bites taken out of it. It reminded her of a leaf ravaged by a hungry caterpillar. Lily pictured Bailey Burton and revised her label for him: he wasn’t Angry Baby Man, he was Angry Larva Man.
Vaz picked up a straw and lifted the corner of a pizza box. “Do you think there are any human bones under all this?”
Lily shivered. “Let’s find that stupid library before we catch something.”
“Or worse.”
They walked through the dining room, down the hallway. They found the library on the other side of the large front staircase. Unlike the other rooms they had seen, the library was clean and neat, dominated by several huge bookshelves, the spotless fireplace, and a large oak desk.
“I bet this is the only room he lets people see,” said Lily.
“People would run screaming if they saw anything else,” said Vaz. He ran a finger over the spines of all the books in the shelves. “Look at all the weird books he has.” He pulled out a volume. “The Life Cycle of the Horseshoe Crab.”
“It’s nice that he keeps up with his relatives,” said Lily.
He walked a few feet and pulled out another book. “
Bold in Her Britches.” He flipped to the back cover. “It’s about girl pirates.”
“That’s even cooler than the crabs,” said Lily.
“Not necessarily,” said Vaz. “The crabs could eat the girl pirates. It’s a food-chain thing.”
“We found fungus in the basement and bacteria in the dining room. This whole place is a food chain thing,” said Lily. Her stomach was quivering, both in disgust and in excitement. “Do you see any newspapers or anything?”
“No, not yet.”
“He’s got to keep them around here somewhere. You don’t think he has them on microfilm or something, do you?”
“He could, I guess,” said Vaz. “But I don’t see a reader.” He plucked a model of a ship off the mantel. “Quedah Merchant. 1699.” I know this name, but I can’t remember where I heard it.”
“I think I found the papers,” said Lily.
There was a rectangular wooden rack with rows of spokes running horizontally. A newspaper was draped over each spoke like a pair of slacks on a hanger. Lily removed a paper. “The Cape May Star and Wave,” she read. “September 29, 2002.” She put the paper back and pulled out another. “November 13, 2002. She shook her head. “These are too recent. The older ones have to be somewhere else.”
Vaz put the model back on the mantel. “Did you look in all these books?” He knelt and gestured to a shelf full of large albums covered with leather. “These look like big scrapbooks or something.” He sat on the floor and opened one in his lap. “This is it, Lily. Look!”
Lily sat down next to him. The large albums contained copies of old Cape May newspapers, with each paper in its own plastic cover. “He keeps his old newspapers cleaner than he keeps his silverware,” she said. “What’s the date on that album?”
“1977.”
“Okay,” said Lily. “Is there a book for 1930?” She scooted on her knees across the floor, head tilted sideways so that she could read the legends. “Yes! Here it is. 1930.” She pulled it off the shelf and opened it on the floor. She and Vaz flipped through the articles.
“There’s a lot on the depression, here, but not much else,” said Vaz. “Let’s try the next volume.”