by Laura McNeal
“And Anne Barrineau thinks this guy just called up out of the blue?”
Bruce kept his sunny grin. “Not exactly. I happened to notice our A. Barrineau watching some preppy guy at the ice rink when he wasn’t looking. Once they actually skated into each other— something I believe she engineered, by the way—and she laughed and smiled encouragingly while he was helping her up, but he retreated quickly to the safety of his preppy friends.”
“And?”
“And nothing. The preps went home. A. Barrineau and friends went home. And then, last night, to her very great surprise, who should call but the boy who’d run into her last night at the Ice Ranch. He introduced himself as Trent deMille.”
Amos considered this. “And what if she’d known the actual name of the actual preppy she’d run into?”
Bruce grinned sunnily. “I would’ve hung up promptly.”
“Yo, Amos!” It was a classmate with his head out the back window of his mother’s car as they passed by.
“So then what?” Amos said to Bruce.
“Well, she said she was very glad that Trent had called. We went on from there. We talked for some little while.”
“No, you didn’t,” Amos said. “It was Trent and Anne Barrineau who talked for some little while.”
“And they have a date to talk again tonight.”
“But talk’s all you can do! And only on the phone, as Trent the prep stud!”
Bruce shrugged. “I can do a lot worse than talking to her. I mean, I really enjoyed it, feeling like I was, you know, somebody, hearing Anne Barrineau laugh at Trent’s little jokes, having her ask about his exciting life, listening to her talk about her own life.”
“It’s like Cyrano. Except you’re your own Cyrano.”
Bruce smiled serenely at Amos. “I didn’t memorize twenty lines of that play for nothing.” They walked a block in silence, then Bruce said, “What else should I have Trent do? I was thinking of having him fly to L.A. to take a screen test.”
“God, Crook. Why don’t you move in exactly the opposite direction? Make him a little more human, a little more like you, and then she won’t be in for such a disappointment. She might even wind up liking you, though I doubt it.”
Bruce seemed to be considering this idea seriously, but without much conviction. “Maybe, but I don’t know,” he said, and then, with a quick “Later,” split off at Omaha Road and headed toward home.
A few minutes later, Amos turned the corner of his block and stopped short. Parked in front of his house was a black-and-white police cruiser.
36
OTHER POSSIBILITIES
Inside the house, standing in the kitchen while Liz sat in a chair at the table, was Detective Lucian O’Hearn. He turned when Amos stepped into the room.
“So your guardian angel is also part tooth fairy, eh?” the big man said.
Amos looked at him with blank confusion.
The detective nodded toward a set of photographs that lay on the table in front of Liz. “You found those under your pillow, didn’t you?”
“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
“How come you didn’t bring them to police attention?”
“I was going to,” Amos said, and hated how lame it sounded. He shot a look at Liz for bringing the police into this.
Detective O’Hearn picked up the photographs and went through them one by one. Then he tucked them into an interior pocket of his coat. “Okay, here’s the deal.” He gave Amos and Liz a frank look. “Probably this is just more of the same. An extended prank. But we need to pay attention here because there are also other” —he searched for the word— “possibilities.”
To Amos, this didn’t seem like late-breaking news. He glanced outside and saw that the driveway was empty. “Mom still at work?” he said.
Liz nodded without looking at Amos. She was staring at Detective O’Hearn. “So what can you do?” she said.
“Well, what you can do is take normal healthy precautions. Lock the doors, keep the lights on, go nowhere alone. As for your police department, we can’t officially do anything without more evidence than we have in hand, but unofficially, maybe we can scare up a little surveillance and make our presence felt.”
As Detective O’Hearn was leaving, the kitchen floor gave perceptibly under his weight. At the door, he turned and looked evenly at Amos and Liz. “I’ll stop by and talk to your mother at her work. But if you folks just keep your rear ends covered, we’ll handle the rest.”
Amos tried to smile while he nodded at Detective O’Hearn. After he’d gone, Amos, as much to himself as to Liz, said, “The last time our big detective made his presence felt, the Tripp brothers came out of their cave looking for me.”
That night, when he telephoned Clara’s number, Clara herself answered the phone. “Oh, hi,” she said in a toneless voice. She sounded as if she were hoping it was someone else.
“I guess your headache’s gone,” Amos said.
“I didn’t really have one,” Clara said, and nothing else.
“You just didn’t want to talk?”
A silence, then Clara said, “I wasn’t the first not to want to talk.”
“I couldn’t talk in the halls. I mean, I could’ve, but Eddie was right there.”
“And you can’t talk to me if Eddie Tripp’s around?”
Amos told her about the pictures he’d found under his pillow when he’d gotten home from her house Sunday night, but Clara seemed unimpressed.
“That could’ve been anyone,” she said. “In fact, it sounds as much like Jay Foley or Bruce as Eddie Tripp.”
“Crook? Jeez, Clara, give me a break.”
But Clara said nothing.
“So was that why you wouldn’t talk to me last night?”
“That was part of it.”
“What was the other part?”
A few seconds passed before Clara told him about Sands wearing his shirt. “It was like she was rubbing my face in it, you know?”
“Rubbing your face in what?” Amos said, and knew at once it was a mistake. They were in cross-examination, and Amos knew from watching a lot of Perry Mason that you never asked a witness a question you didn’t know the answer to.
In a cold, steady voice, Clara said, “In the fact that you called me a dink just so you could cop a cheap feel off of Sands Mandeville.”
After a second or two, Amos said, “It wasn’t that simple.”
“Oh, yeah? It sounds pretty simple.”
Amos didn’t say anything. A solid minute passed in silence.
“So how’d she get your shirt?” Clara asked finally.
Amos took a deep breath. “Look, Clara, I screwed up. I admit it. I went over to Sands’s and we watched a movie and drank some kind of sweet brandy and sort of made out for about two seconds before she gave me a lesson in projectile vomiting, which I had to clean up. I left my shirt there. She told me I could have it back, but by then I didn’t want anything to do with her, so instead of going back over there for it, I just told her she could keep it.”
“So she could wear it to school and wave it in my face.”
Another silence. Finally Amos said, “I didn’t think she’d do that. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, that’s what the roses said.”
This threw Amos. “What roses?” he said.
This time it was Clara who held the silence for a long time before finally releasing it. “The roses I guess you didn’t send,” she said.
Amos didn’t understand this, but his footing was so slippery here he didn’t pursue it. After a few moments, he said, “Do you still want me to walk you home after the play Friday?”
What Amos would remember most of this conversation was all the stony silences. Another one stretched out now. Then, in an unenthusiastic voice, Clara said, “My dad’s going to be out of town on business. Which means I won’t have a ride. So, yeah, I guess you’d better.”
Well, I hope you can contain your enthusiasm, Amos thought, but then he decided t
hat this was one of those goes-around, comes-around things. He’d hurt her feelings and now it was her turn to hurt his. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
37
PARTY OF ONE
When Clara came downstairs Thursday morning, the house seemed quieter than ever. Her father had left early to catch his flight. On the table he left a note:
Morning, Doodlebug.
Here’s money in case you need it and also my itinerary with all the numbers where I can be reached. Be good.
Love, Dad
She was holding this note when the telephone rang. It was her mother.
“Oh, hi,” Clara said.
“Well, that’s what I call a warm reception!” her mother said cheerily. “Is something the matter?”
There wasn’t, not really. “No, nothing’s the matter. It’s just that I’m supposed to be getting ready for school.”
“Okay, I won’t talk long. But tell me what you’re doing this weekend.”
“Dad’s on a business trip,” she said, and then, thinking she needed to keep her story straight, she said, “So I’m going to be staying at Gerri’s.”
“You patched things up with Gerri?”
“Yeah,” Clara lied. Then, foreseeing her mother calling the Erickson house over the weekend to check up, Clara added another lie. “Gerri and her family are going to Canandaigua for the weekend. I’m going with them.”
“What about your paper route? And the play?”
Without hesitation, Clara said, “I found somebody to do my papers for me, and our Saturday performance was switched to tonight because of some conflict in the auditorium.” This sounded pretty good. Clara thought she was getting better and better at lying, but it was sort of like getting better and better at digging your own grave.
Before hanging up, the last thing her mother said to Clara was, “I love you. Be good.”
“Okay, Mom,” Clara said, which was not quite the same as saying, “I will.”
Clara’s interior clock, which usually zipped along on school mornings, began to slow down. Clara lingered over her breakfast, had a second bowl of Cocoa Puffs, then read every one of the funnies. She went to the living room window. The streets were dry, but the ground was dark and damp. Sitting in front of the house, looking deserted and forlorn, was her mother’s old Buick LeSabre. In both the front and the back windows were large For Sale signs, with all the specifics. In the car’s layer of grime, someone had written, Wash Me, but Clara was afraid that would make the car more attractive and she preferred that it go unsold. Sell the car and you had one less thing for her mother to come back to.
Clara looked at the clock, and then, instead of going upstairs to shower and dress, she turned on the TV.
The Brady Bunch.
I Dream of Jeannie.
When she looked up at the clock, it said 8:59. School had already started. She looked down at Ham, who lay sleeping near the sofa. “Wanna play hooky?” she said, and Ham’s tail swished approvingly.
The Monkees.
Laverne and Shirley.
Clara went to her father’s office and read in their insurance booklet that cosmetic surgery was not covered. She called a doctor specializing in ears, noses, and throats, and the receptionist told her, “We don’t do nose jobs, miss.”
Embarrassed, Clara hung up.
At 10:45, she showered, put on nice clothes, and, after taking the bus to town, walked to Kaufmann’s Department Store. She looked at the girls’ clothes and then for a while at the boys’, trying to imagine what might look good on Eddie (almost anything in black or white) and on Amos (blues, browns, and greens). Eventually she found herself upstairs, in linens.
“Can I help you?” It was an elderly woman with stiff blue hair. From her tone of voice, it was clear that she thought she couldn’t help Clara, and in fact regarded Clara’s presence in her department as something of an intrusion.
“I don’t know,” Clara said. “The last time I was in, I got some help from a nice woman. I was getting 300-count pima cotton sheets.” Clara wasn’t sure what 300-count pima cotton sheets were—she’d just heard her mother talking about them with her aunt Marie.
“The sheets are that way,” the blue-haired woman said, and gave a vague nod in a vague direction.
“That woman was quite tall, with reddish-brown hair like mine. Does she still work there?” Clara knew, of course, that her mother didn’t still work here, but she was hoping the woman might say something to explain why.
“I’m the only sales associate on the floor now,” the woman said, and, curtly turning her back on Clara, began to refold a stack of oversized bath towels.
Outside Kaufmann’s, Clara began to walk without conscious destination, so that when suddenly she caught sight of the Tiffin Room, it came almost as a surprise. She hadn’t realized how tense she had been until, slipping into this warm room of dark wood, maroon leather, and soft music, her whole body began to relax.
“Party of one?” the hostess said, and after Clara nodded, asked, “Booth or counter?”
Clara slid into a booth and slipped the plastic-covered menu from its chrome holder. Meat loaf, chow mein, club sandwiches. The same specials, the same dishes, and—Clara looked around—the same waitresses. It was strangely reassuring.
A familiar waitress approached the table, pulling a pad from the pocket of her white apron. “Let’s see, now,” she said. “A Reuben with extra mustard and a strawberry shake.”
Clara looked up in surprise. This waitress had always remembered her order, but it had been a long time since she’d been in. “You’ve got a good memory,” she said.
The waitress shrugged. “In this business, it doesn’t hurt.” She finished writing in her pad. “So how’s your mom doing?”
Clara’s expression shrank slightly. “Fine.”
The waitress nodded, taking this in. “Yeah, she just kind of stopped coming in here.”
“She moved,” Clara said. “To Spain.”
The waitress nodded again. “And today—what?—you must be playing hooky?”
Clara felt her face getting hot.
The waitress laughed. “Well, there’s kind of an art to it, and the first thing you’ve got to learn is how not to blush. I personally got real good at playing hooky, which is one reason I’m a forty-nine-year-old waitress.” She laughed again. “I’ll be right back with your shake.”
The same songs played on the Tiffin Room jukebox, old singers her mother had taught her to recognize—Dinah Washington, Julie London, Billie Holiday—and all at once, for the first time all day, Clara was truly glad she’d played hooky. She liked it here. That was part of it. But there was something else. This was a place her mother had outgrown, but Clara knew that she herself never would, never in a million years. And she also knew that if she ever came here some Saturday with Eddie Tripp, he would make fun of the weird music and the waitresses’ big hair, whereas Amos wouldn’t. Amos would like it, and would sit within its warm influence and have interesting things to ask and interesting things to tell. Suddenly, thinking of Amos standing by his rickety pigeon coop on the day of his father’s funeral and telling the story about Ruby and Hurricane, a kind of dam gave way within Clara, and a whole rush of good feeling for him went flooding through her.
But later that afternoon, after throwing her paper route, after going upstairs to her room, Clara saw something she could hardly believe. It was a note taped to the outside of the window facing in, so that it could be read from inside the room. In big typed letters, it said, DOLLFACE IS AN 11 ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10. A faint thrill of exhilaration moved through Clara’s body. Dollface was what Clara’s character in the play was called. She rolled open the casement window, pulled the taped note from the window, then glanced down. Whoever had put the note in her window had climbed the rose trellis, then braved the steepest part of the slick slate roof. Whoever had put the note up was reckless and possibly fearless. And with absolute certainty, Clara knew who’d put the note there. It w
as Eddie.
38
THE PRISONER
“Uh-oh.” It was the boy across the lunch table from Amos. They’d all been talking noisily. But now, seeing Eddie Tripp moving their way, the whole table fell quiet.
When he drew close, Eddie leaned back and squinted exaggeratedly at the edge of the table. “My, my, I thought that’s what it said there in the fine print.” He looked up and beamed a broad grin from face to face to face, stopping finally at Amos. “What do you suppose it says?”
Nobody spoke.
Eddie squinted at the imaginary spot again. “It says, This table reserved exclusively for dinks.”
Eddie directed his grin evenly at Amos. The silence at the table deepened. “You believe me, don’t you, Hero?”
Amos looked down.
Eddie smiled mildly. “You’re kind of a low talker, Hero. You’re going to have to speak up.”
In a brittle voice, Amos said, “Yes, I believe you.”
“Why don’t you come over here and read it for yourself.”
Amos rose and came over. He felt like a robot on low batteries.
“Read it,” Eddie said mildly.
Amos looked at the blank spot.
“Read it.” This time there was a hint of the real Eddie in the voice.
Again Amos looked at the blank spot. Then, in an automatic voice, he said, “This table reserved for dinks.”
Eddie grinned. “Exclusively. This table reserved exclusively for dinks.”
Amos said it.
“Louder.”
Amos said it louder. “This table reserved exclusively for dinks.”
“Now kindly be seated,” Eddie said, and Amos sat. The whole table was not only soundless but motionless. No one looked at Eddie. No one looked at Amos. No one looked at anybody. “Okay, at ease, dinks,” Eddie said, but still no one moved, not until Eddie had come up behind Amos and whispered something in his ear before sauntering away.
Amos noticed two things when Eddie whispered something in his ear. One was that the menace he’d kept out of his voice for the other boys had returned in his whisper. The other was that his breath was minty.