From Norvelt to Nowhere (Norvelt Series)

by Jack Gantos

  I let her walk into the funeral parlor on her own because I wasn’t as clueless as she thought. I gave her a minute to get to the bathroom and then I dashed inside. There was a sign pointing to a VIEWING AND SERVICE FOR MRS. VALDENE HAP.

  I marched down the hall and entered the correct room. Mr. Hap was sitting in a wingback chair with his hands covering his face. He was quietly sobbing, so I left him alone. I was waiting for someone else.

  In a minute, Mr. Huffer walked into the room with his carrying case.

  “Hello, Mr. Huffer,” I quietly said.

  He gave me a distrustful look. “The last time I saw you I believe you were digging a grave. Did you ever put someone in it?”

  “Nope,” I replied.

  “Too bad,” he said. “That was a waste of good digging.”

  “So how do you like Florida?” I asked, trying to make small talk.

  “I like it a lot,” he replied. “There’s money to be made down here. What do you think is Florida’s biggest export crop?”

  “Oranges?”

  “Nope.”

  “Alligators?”

  “Nope. Give up?”

  “Yep.”

  “Caskets,” he said. “Full caskets. There are so many retired people in Florida and they are dropping like flies. Every train and plane out of here is full of dead people. Once I make some money, I’ll open a funeral parlor down here and clean up.”

  When he said money I dropped my pen behind my back and bent over to pick it up. I took my time and shook my rear around until he saw the handkerchief waving in my pocket.

  “Jack,” he said quietly, and glanced back at Mr. Hap. “Come over here. Why is that handkerchief in your pocket?”

  “You know why,” I whispered, and gave him a knowing look.

  He smiled.

  “What else do you have for me?” he asked.

  “Miss Volker planned all the murders and Spizz did all the dirty work,” I whispered. “I overheard them talking and wrote it all down.” I gave him a folded piece of paper.

  “Good job,” he replied, but when he opened it he looked puzzled.

  “It’s in Esperanto,” I explained. “Code. Just in case Spizz or Miss Volker caught me ratting them out. I signed it on the bottom.”

  He nodded as he folded up the note and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get the jump on Spizz at the viewing,” he said, “before we ship the casket up north.”

  “Now can you pay me my money?” I asked, sticking out my hand. “Half the reward.”

  “I won’t have the money until Spizz is out of the way,” he said, again glancing back at Mr. Hap. “He’s the one who confessed, so no problem collecting the reward.”

  “But I want my money now,” I insisted. “I’m only doing this to help out my family.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he said. “Believe me, I want the money even more than you do. Just be patient and let me polish off this funeral job. The other funeral director didn’t know what Valdene looked like so I said I’d make up her face for the viewing.”

  I followed Mr. Huffer to the front of the room, where two attendants had rolled in the bombproof porthole casket. It was sitting on a metal table with wheels on the bottom so it could be rolled to the back of Huffer’s hearse. Mr. Hap was in a black suit, and was now snuffling into a hankie.

  Mr. Huffer glanced at him and shook his head contemptuously. “Crybaby,” he mouthed to me. “Now let me touch up her face to make sure she looks as cantankerous as her twin sister.”

  The casket was covered with a red velvet cloth. Mr. Huffer pulled it off and neatly folded it into a square and set it aside. The first thing he noticed was the open vent on the end of the casket. “That’s a mistake,” he remarked, and slid it shut. “You only keep it open if you are using it as a bomb shelter.” Then he leaned over the glass porthole on the casket and frowned. “I told that guy not to make up her face,” he said unpleasantly. “Whoever did her face is a klutz. Look at the lipstick! I bet your Miss Volker with her lousy hands botched this up. A kindergartner could do a better job. And look at that witchy hair!”

  I moved in to get a closer look. It was awful. The lipstick was smeared around her mouth like the Joker from Batman and her hair stood out like she had been hit by lightning.

  “I’ll touch it up,” he said, clearly annoyed. “But even a real artist like me can do only so much to make the dead look alive.”

  With that, Mr. Hap let out a high-pitched wail behind his handkerchief. “She was so beautiful,” he cried as the words staggered out of his quivering mouth.

  Mr. Huffer gave him a pathetic look. “I’m not a miracle worker,” he said with a note of cruelty in his voice. “She is old.”

  Mr. Hap turned and buried his face in a little cherub-shaped pillow as he wept.

  Mr. Huffer rolled his eyes as he set his makeup case on the floor and snapped it open. Rows of small trays folded out like stair steps, and each tray was filled with some item to help the dead look slightly less dead. I had seen that case before when Bunny made me up to look like Mr. Spizz.

  Mr. Huffer reached into the case and pulled out an open sleeve of Girl Scout cookies. “Want a Thin Mint?” he asked. “They are a breath of fresh air in this heat.”

  Not on your life, I thought. “No thanks,” I replied.

  He ate one, then removed a compact and brush, a tube of lipstick, and a packet of cotton wipes. He put them in his pocket and with great effort he lifted the top of the steel casket. “Extra heavy,” he grunted once he had it open.

  “Atomic-bomb proof,” I said with admiration.

  He leaned over Mrs. Hap’s face and with a cotton swab touched her lips.

  At that instant she let out a mummified groan.

  “Oh cheeze!” I yelped, and hopped back.

  Mr. Huffer looked at me with annoyance. “It’s just escaping gas,” he snapped. “Show some guts for a change. And if your sissy nose starts bleeding, take it outside.”

  The moment he bent forward to continue his cosmetic work on Mrs. Hap her arms suddenly reached up and her hands tried to clutch the lapels on his jacket. “Arghhhh!” she growled.

  Mr. Huffer’s eyes bugged out as he slapped hysterically at her hands. She grabbed his tie, but his fear was his strength and he wriggled out of her grip and leaped back in horror.

  “Was that gas?” I asked.

  “Shut up!” he snapped, then turned back to the body. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Your nightmare,” she cried out.

  “Cheeze!” I yelped again, and jigged up and down like a monkey-boy. “She’s alive!”

  “Did you say alive?” Mr. Hap shouted out from behind his handkerchief.

  “You bet I’m alive,” she spit back. “I’m not poor dead Valdene. I’m Miss Volker, who you’ve been bothering for days, and I know you killed those old ladies and you aren’t going to kill me too.”

  Mr. Huffer stiffened and turned pale, but from working on the dead for so long he quickly regained his composure. He pulled the pistol from his coat pocket and pointed it at her. “Say your prayers. I told you this casket is wide. We’ll have a twin killing and I’ll bury you with your sister and then take care of that moron, Spizz.”

  “What about me?” I asked. “What will you do to me?”

  “I think a packing crate to China without a return address will do for you,” he said as if he had been planning it that way from the beginning.

  “And me?” blubbered Mr. Hap from behind his pillow. “What will you do with me?”

  “Alligators eat crybabies for breakfast out in the Everglades,” Mr. Huffer replied. “Someday I might be wearing you as a belt or a pair of shoes.”

  At that moment Miss Volker leaned forward and reached toward him with her stiff hands. “Go ahead and shoot,” she said. “I dare you.”

  “Cheeze-us-crust!” I squealed. “Don’t dare him!”

  “Shut up!” he said to me without taking his eyes off of her.

&nb
sp; “Right here,” she begged him, and tapped herself on her chest. “Just like in Rugby.”

  “You’re going to go from playing dead to being dead,” he said. “I’ve had it with you.” He aimed for her heart and pulled the trigger. Click. He pulled it again and the cylinder on the pistol rotated. Click. He kept pulling the trigger. She reached forward with her other hand and slowly unfolded her nimble fingers. There were five bullets.

  “Now give me the gun,” she said.

  “Your hands,” he remarked.

  “I soaked them in the fountain of youth,” she replied smartly. “It works.”

  I was spellbound by her hands. Maybe the fountain of youth was for real.

  “Mr. Huffer,” Mr. Hap said with authority, standing up and removing the handkerchief from across his face. “You are under arrest for murder.” He held out a badge and I saw that he was not Mr. Hap at all. He was the ferret-faced private detective from the train, and he snatched the gun from Huffer’s hand. He reached for the bullets and nervously inserted them into the cylinder.

  “You can’t arrest me,” Huffer said. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I was trying to protect myself from a deranged lunatic.”

  “Rubbish,” said Miss Volker in the casket.

  Suddenly the real Mr. Hap pulled aside the velvet curtain that hung behind the casket. Another Miss Volker was wearing the same dress and had the same sloppy makeup. I looked at the body in the casket that was alive but supposed to be dead, and back at the one who was supposed to be dead but was alive—and she winked at me.

  Mr. Huffer stepped back toward the door and the detective swiftly blocked his exit and aimed the gun at his back.

  The not-dead-yet Miss Volker continued to lower the boom on Mr. Huffer. “You murdered all those old ladies. We knew there was something fishy about you when you started selling their homes. And then the detective here”—she nodded toward him—“filled us in on the details. The police have been tracking down the phony company where the fake old-lady insurance policies came from. And now they have evidence that you are behind them. Those policies wouldn’t pay out benefits in the case of murder, so as the ladies got older you had to kill them to keep from going broke.”

  “Nonsense,” Huffer sputtered. “All lies.”

  “And,” she continued, “since Spizz stupidly confessed, you figured all you had to do was kill or capture him and you could collect the reward on top of everything else!”

  “I’m confused,” I said.

  The standing Miss Volker turned toward me. “I faked my sister’s death to help me catch the killer,” she said. “You knew I thought it was Spizz at first, so I invited Huffer down to make the death look real. I didn’t want Spizz to get suspicious of the plan.”

  “How did you know he would come?” I asked.

  “History quiz time,” the real Miss Volker suddenly said to me.

  “At a time like this?” I moaned. “Really?”

  “There is never a time when being stupid is good,” she said. “So answer me this: Who was the ex-president who represented Eleanor Roosevelt at her wedding to Franklin Roosevelt?”

  “Easy-peasy,” I answered. “Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “Exactly,” she replied. “And like someone said of Teddy Roosevelt, ‘He has to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.’ And Huffer is the same way.”

  “I’m still confused,” I said.

  “I’m the sister with the good hands,” said the Miss Volker in the casket, as she cracked her knuckles like a tough guy before climbing out. Mr. Hap stepped around the casket to give her a hand.

  My Miss Volker smiled and held up her claws. “And I’m the bad-hands twin,” she said.

  The detective poked Mr. Huffer in the back with the pistol. “How about you tell us how you poisoned them?” he suggested.

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Mr. Huffer said indignantly.

  “Then why don’t you climb into the casket and think about it,” the detective said, and gave him another good jab in the back with the pistol. “I’m driving you back to Norvelt, where the police are waiting for you.”

  “What?” Mr. Huffer exclaimed.

  “You heard him,” said my Miss Volker. “You said it was big enough for more than one, so it should be spacious enough for you.”

  Huffer looked at all of us as if we were mad.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said the detective. “You better climb inside or I’ll give the gun to Miss Volker and this time she’ll have bullets.”

  I helpfully pulled a chair over to the table and casket. Huffer put his foot on the seat, then climbed up and stepped one foot into the casket, and then the other. Slowly he lowered himself until he was in the proper dead-man position. “I might just as well die,” he groaned.

  “You better give me your car keys,” ordered the detective. “I can’t strap this casket onto my side car.”

  Mr. Huffer dutifully fished them out of his jacket pocket.

  Mr. Hap lowered the metal lid and secured the clasp on the outside. I went to the end of the casket and opened the vent so Mr. Huffer could breathe.

  “What do we do now?” Miss Volker asked.

  “Let’s roll him to the hearse,” said the detective, “and I’ll drive him home in a casket even Houdini couldn’t escape.”

  He handed Miss Volker her pistol, and we all got behind the wheeled table and rolled Mr. Huffer out of the viewing room and down the hall and through the front door. We were in the parking lot when I heard the whine of an airplane overhead. I looked up just as Dad’s J-3 swooped down and wiggled its wings. If he saw the twin Miss Volkers he must have wondered who we had in the casket. Maybe he thought they were triplets. As we continued to load Mr. Huffer into the back of the hearse Dad circled around and eventually landed in an unused portion at the back of the cemetery beside the funeral parlor.

  “The police will need you all to testify against Mr. Huffer,” the detective informed us. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “We’ll do everything you need us to do,” replied a smiling Mrs. Hap. Her lipstick had seeped out into the grid of lines around her mouth so that her face looked like a street map.

  The detective tugged on the heavy door of the hearse and then stepped inside and slammed it. When he settled down in his seat he looked pretty small, and I wondered if he could reach the pedals and see out the windshield at the same time. Mr. Huffer might appreciate that bombproof coffin more than he does now, I thought, just in case they drive off a cliff.

  As the detective drove away with Mr. Huffer we all waved, but when I lowered my hand my heart lowered too. What would become of Bunny? I wanted to talk to her. I could just imagine if I called her collect the operator would ask her, “Do you accept the charges?” And Bunny would shout back, “My dad is innocent of all charges!” No matter what, she would stick up for him. And as a friend, no matter what, I would make sure to stick up for her.

  Suddenly Dad came running over.

  “Hey,” he said anxiously. “I’m double-parked next to an open grave, so we better get going.”

  “Going where?” I asked.

  “To meet Spizz,” said Miss Volker, with an enigmatic smile on her face.

  “Are you going to try to get your harpoon back?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you everything in the plane,” she said.

  Miss Volker gave her sister a hug and a kiss, and Dad encouraged them to hurry up, then turned and ran ahead of us. I glanced over at the VW. I loved that car. Miss Volker had kissed a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt goodbye, so I ran over and gave that good German car a great big kiss right on the hood. “I’ll be back,” I whispered. “Wait for me.”

  I pulled the keys out of my pocket and gave them to Mr. Hap as I shook his hand. Valdene’s lips were a little scary, so I just gave her a hug.

  “We’ll see you soon,” she said, with a little secret in her voice.

  Then Miss Volker and I held hands and marched off as quickly as we could. Once we were
seated in the plane Dad opened up the throttle. The engine roared and we scooted across a bumpy, empty patch at the back of the cemetery. Just before a row of gravestones the wheels lifted off the ground and the tail end of the J-3 swooped back and forth like a sailboat on the water. Every puff of wind knocked us from starboard to port as we climbed higher and circled around.

  Miss Volker leaned forward from the backseat and looked out the side window at the rows of gravestones. “That’s a patchwork quilt of history down there,” she remarked.

  “Kind of an underground library,” I suggested.

  “That’s a good way to look at it,” she agreed, “though I’d rather be buried in a book than in a casket.”

  “It won’t take long before we land in the Glades,” Dad said above the engine noise. “So you two better get to saying your goodbyes.”

  Miss Volker took my hand and squeezed it between hers. “You are the best friend an old lady ever had,” she said with tears in her eyes. “When I was a hothead you told me to be patient. I could have killed Spizz a dozen times, but you told me not to jump to conclusions.”

  “Did Spizz know about this plan to catch the killer?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Miss Volker replied. “Because in the beginning I thought he was the killer. Later on, I thought differently. Believe me, when I held the pistol against Huffer’s chest that night in Rugby I wasn’t quite sure he was the murderer either. That’s why I pulled the bullets out just in case my fingers did work and I plugged him.”

  Something else occurred to me. “What if Huffer had bought more bullets after Rugby?”

  “Well, there was that possibility, but it was a chance I had to take,” she said. “I gave my word to Mrs. Roosevelt at her gravesite that I’d catch the killer and I did.”

  “When were you totally sure?” I asked.

  “The little detective told me at the restaurant that it was Huffer who secretly owned the predatory life insurance company. And worse,” she added, “it was his wife who sold the policies to the old ladies.”

  “That is just what Spizz said! I guess I was wrong about him,” I confessed.

  “We both were,” she admitted. “Then you really pulled a good one on Huffer with that handkerchief in your pocket bit. He jumped for joy over that Esperanto confession he thought would get him the reward on Spizz.”