Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy

by Susan Vaught

  Was that normal? I picked at the bows on my nightgown. Am I on the way to getting sick like Mom?

  No. I smacked my ears until the buzzing stopped. Not happening. Not going crazy. I was fine.

  But I saw things at the Abrams farm. Images that couldn’t have been real.

  Maybe they were real. Maybe they were flashbacks, not hallucinations.

  “No,” I said out loud this time. I had to rub my arms to keep from shivering again. It was stupid, feeling so cold when it was spring in Mississippi and already hot even with air-conditioning.

  I clicked through a few more pictures. More ashes. More soot. I printed the first one and made a note on it.

  These ashes might have dead people in them. That’s gross. And kind of sad.

  The next picture was the same, and the one after that and the one after that. I didn’t know how journalists and detectives did it, looking at pictures of crime scenes over and over again. These shots only had burned-up wood and farm tools, not bodies and blood or horrible stuff, and my brain already didn’t want to keep studying them. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for journalism, either.

  I ticked through pictures of skeleton house boards and scorched trees, then some shots of the area closer to the woods. Normal trees. Grass so green, it almost hurt my eyes. Then I found the corner of Angel’s pink dress, and one image of her sunburned knee. We were thorough investigators—but effective? Not so much. We had a long way to go before we’d be one of those teams people made television shows about.

  I shivered all over again when I got to the picture of the brush where I thought I had seen someone hiding, right after my hallucination or flashback or whatever that had been. There was nothing in the brush but trees and leaves. So that wasn’t real either. It was just me being chicken about stuff jumping at me through the darkness.

  It wasn’t something I talked about much, being scared of the dark. More like what was in the dark that I couldn’t see. I always thought something had to be there, something awful and dangerous that vanished when I finally made it to a switch and flooded the world with light. Sometimes it was hardest and scariest to see what was right there beside you—what had been there right beside you all along, waiting to snarl and bite you and eat you whole.

  My chest got tight from just thinking about how it felt to get stuck in a dark room and have to run for a switch. “I’m a great big baby,” I muttered, tempted to turn off my lamp and pull up my blinds and make myself stare out the window into the night until I just got over it. I had tried that before, lots of times, and it never worked. But I kept doing it whenever I could find the courage, because maybe the next time I’d make it past the panic and I wouldn’t be a baby anymore.

  When I stood, my legs shook. I glanced at the picture of the brush where nobody was hiding, then switched off the lamp. Then I went and opened the blinds really fast, before I could wimp out. The second they opened, I stepped toward the desk.

  Well?

  If something did jump out of the darkness and bust through my window like a rabid fire-breathing lizard on a rampage, I wanted to give it some space.

  Quiet pressed into my ears as I stared out the inky glass. If Mom had been home, she would have had the television on in their bedroom, watching true-crime documentaries or gathering recipes off cooking channels. Sometimes she listened to music, and sometimes she played movies. Silence was never a problem when Mom was here.

  But Mom’s not here. I hated that so much. Tears tickled my eyelids, but I ground my teeth until they went away. I had already cried enough after I got home, and Dad said Mom would be gone for a while.

  A moth smacked against the window, and I almost peed myself. I said something I’d get grounded for if Dad heard me, and closed the blinds as fast as I could. It took a minute before I could breathe enough to stalk back to my desk, click on my lamp, and throw myself into the chair. Still a baby. That completely sucked.

  I squinted at the picture of the brush, too ticked off for words—then I squinted harder. My fingers flicked across the laptop keyboard as I pulled the picture into the edit window, cropped it, and magnified it. Again.

  And one more time.

  I couldn’t be totally sure, but right at the edge of the brush where I thought I had seen somebody standing, Angel had snapped a photo of a shoe. It looked like a black tennis shoe, the kind grown men wore.

  I sent the photo to Peavine’s phone with the note that look like a shoe 2 u??

  Almost immediately, his text tone sang out, and I read, Kinda. Whaddya thnk?

  sumbdy wz watchn.

  Who?

  dnt knw. the serial killer?

  A few seconds went by, then Peavine texted that he had to go to bed.

  My eyes shifted from the phone to the picture to the window. My stupid baby brain told me the darkness outside was just like a poisonous copperhead, trying to slither around the edges of my blinds to bite me. Would it get me put in some hospital in Memphis if I glued the blinds to the sill?

  Peavine’s mom was great, but I wished she would let him stay up later and talk to me. What should we do with the picture? If I showed it to Dad, he probably wouldn’t think it was anything important. It was just a shoe. I couldn’t even see if there was a leg in it. It might have been a shoe with no person attached to it at all. It wasn’t like the police could do anything with a photo of a shoe, right?

  What would a good journalist do to make sense out of this mess?

  A good journalist would write.

  But I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t even know where to start.

  Finally, I opened a document to the side of the photos and typed a list of what I knew for sure about the Abrams case:

  1. Old Mr. Abrams got shot, and nobody knows who shot him.

  2. The Abrams farm got burned to the ground, and nobody knows who set the fire.

  3. Cissy and Doc might be dead or alive, and nobody knows where they are.

  After I stared at it a while, I added some possibilities.

  4. Mom might have been there.

  5. I might have been there.

  6. Somebody might have been watching us while we searched.

  7. I might be crazy.

  Great. Peavine and Angel and I had gone to the farm to search for clues and solve some of the mystery, but we ended up finding nothing but more questions.

  I closed the computer lid, switched on the night-light near the foot of my bed, then turned off the lamp. To prove I wasn’t a complete baby, I sat there studying the blinds, making sure the darker darkness didn’t try to get inside.

  After a while I got in my bed. Then I got back out of my bed, took my pillow and blanket, and got under the bed instead. For some reason, I didn’t want to close my eyes. I didn’t want to sleep. I definitely didn’t want to dream about anything. What if the dreams turned into hallucinations and I couldn’t wake up? What if—

  “Mom?” I tried to breathe but coughed instead. My room smelled like something on fire.

  I got out of bed too fast, tangled my feet in my bedspread, and fell to my knees. My hair swung against my cheeks, making me shiver. It was wet. Why was my hair wet? It wasn’t a bath night.

  “Mom?” I got up and fought my way out of the bedspread. The muscles in my belly hurt, like the time I lifted Dad’s weights too many times. Nobody met me in the hall outside my room. Silence hung like smoke in the house. No television. No Mom. No Dad.

  My heart thumped in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I ran to the hall light switch and flipped it on. Yellow light blazed in a long strip, but darkness still crowded out of my bedroom and the guest bathroom and my parents’ room. Fast as I could, I turned on those switches too.

  “Mom!”

  Nobody answered. My ears hurt from listening. I shoved open the door to the master bathroom, but nobody was there, either. The closet—no people in there. Out in the hall again, I ran to the kitchen.

  Where was Mom? Dad should be home.

  Lights. I had to turn them on
. Kitchen. Pantry. Living room. Basement. I hit the switch at the top of the stairs, and something rattled down below.

  I froze.

  Air whistled through my teeth. My fingers dug into my palms. The muscles in my throat ached from wanting to yell for Mom again.

  But what if that’s not Mom . . .

  Downstairs in the basement, a door closed.

  I backed up so fast, I tripped over my nightgown and pitched backward—

  My eyes popped open as I swung my arms, trying to keep my balance.

  I was standing totally still in the dark, in front of the kitchen sink. A whimper slipped out as I jumped forward and flicked on the light to break the blackness before it reached for me.

  What was I doing in the kitchen?

  As I eased down from my toes where I had stretched to hit the light switch, my heel ground into something wet that crinkled. I jumped and picked up my foot.

  One of my school drinks lay on the floor, where I had crushed the pouch. Nothing much was left in it, though, or it would have made a bigger mess . . . to go along with the chip wrappers and pieces of bread on the floor.

  Had I been eating in my sleep? I had heard of sleepwalking, but sleep-eating? Really? My heart slowly moved from gallop to trot, then on down to walk. Little by little, I managed to breathe normally, even though I couldn’t tell if my belly was bigger than usual.

  I had completely trashed the kitchen in my sleep. I glanced toward the hall but didn’t see Dad’s light. I hadn’t turned on the hall light, like I did in my dream. Could people hallucinate in dreams? Were dreams just hallucinations anyway?

  Of course I dreamed all of that—it hadn’t been real, any more than what I imagined I saw at the Abrams farm. I mean, bits and pieces of it, maybe. My thoughts felt cramped and muddled, so I rubbed the sides of my face.

  Nothing came clear.

  I looked at the clock on the stove. The only thing I knew for sure was, I needed to clean up the kitchen as fast as I could, because here in not-dream-totally-real-world, it was almost time for Dad’s alarm to buzz.

  From the Notebook of Detective Peavine Jones

  Interview of Armstrong, Cory J., CPT USAR, Eleven Days After the Fire

  Location: Captain Armstrong’s House, with Lemonade

  Everything is really, really, really clean in here. It’s kind of weird.

  Captain Armstrong: You two know it’s really early, right?

  Footer: Sure, but I know you get out pretty early to run, before it gets too hot.

  Captain Armstrong: Well, come on in. I’ll get you some lemonade. How’s your mom, Footer? Hear anything yet?

  Footer: No, sir.

  Captain Armstrong: You two are pretty tough kids. You do well, for your mom being sick, and you, Peavine, with your dad leaving and all. I’m proud of both of you.

  Me: Thank you, sir. Could you tell us a little about flashbacks?

  Captain Armstrong: [Suspect looks surprised.] That’s a strange question. I thought I was pretending to be a suspect in the Abrams fire.

  Footer: I read about flashbacks on the Internet, and—

  Captain Armstrong: Don’t fill your heads full of that crap you can read online. Look, it’s no secret I got problems from the war, so I guess it’s natural that you come to me if you’re curious about it. But why?

  Footer: If people see something really bad, like a murder and a fire, could they get flashbacks?

  Captain Armstrong: I’m sure they could. Lots of traumatized people out there, because the world has gone totally [censored] insane. Oh, uh, sorry about the language.

  Footer: What caused your flashbacks?

  Captain Armstrong: Describing my time in the service is hard, Footer. Sometimes when I talk about what happened to me in Afghanistan, or see pictures that remind me of the war, or hear certain sounds or smell certain smells, I relive the worst of what I went through over there.

  Footer: Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that, sir. Thank you for your service to our country.

  Captain Armstrong: You’re welcome. But you don’t have to apologize for asking.

  Footer: What I really want to know is, with your flashbacks and stuff, have you ever realized you forgot something important, like a really, really bad thing you saw?

  Captain Armstrong: Yeah. That’s part of it. But I always remember it later, usually at the worst possible moment. [Suspect leans forward. Journalist leans back, probably because Suspect is so tall, and sort of scary with that glare.] War isn’t like on television or in the movies. Even when they get it right on film, you can’t smell the blood or taste the sand scraping your face or feel the desert sun trying to cook your brain to dust in your skull.

  Footer: [Journalist looks a little green.] I see. Okay. But if you wanted to remember what you forgot, is there any way to set a flashback off on purpose—you know, to make yourself remember?

  Captain Armstrong: I never want to remember. None of us do.

  Footer: [Journalist is quiet for so long, I almost start talking, but she stops me.] One more question, sir.

  Captain Armstrong: I’m listening.

  Footer: Do you always wear those black shoes when you run?

  Captain Armstrong: [Suspect stares at his own feet.] Yeah. Why?

  Footer: Just wondered. Thanks! [Journalist leaves the house so fast, I have to hustle to keep up with her.]

  What I Did Over the Weekend

  Footer Davis

  2nd Period

  Ms. Malone

  This is a copperhead snake–bit rotten foot that had to get cut off. I didn’t have to get my foot cut off, because Mom saved me.

  Instead, I interviewed murder suspects and had to clean snake guts off the bird feeders Sunday evening. Some of the guts were the same color as my hair. That’s gross. The houseflies on the snake guts were more gross.

  Now that I know houseflies eat snake guts, I don’t want them crawling on my head.

  I might have to move to Alaska. They don’t have many houseflies. They don’t have many worms, either. Alaska would be the best place ever, except for the whole sixty-degrees-below-zero-in-the-winter thing. Oh, and walruses. I saw a special about them last week. Walruses kind of freak me out.

  Mom had to go to the hospital because she shot the snake and almost broke her shoulder. She didn’t stay long in the emergency room, because they sent her to Memphis. I want to go see her soon, but I’m not allowed to go on the unit where she stays. Being eleven years old sucks. When I’m twelve, I’ll be able to visit Mom when she’s sick. I hope she doesn’t forget about me while I can’t see her. Plus, Dad only knows how to cook fish sticks and hamburgers. Fish sticks and hamburgers get icky after a while.

  Peavine, Angel, and me I went to the Abrams place. We didn’t find much. Angel says the ashes have dead people in them. That freaks me out almost as much as walruses.

  C+

  Needs more organization—and this was supposed to be two pages. Nice try. Also, illustrations really aren’t necessary. I’m glad no one was injured by the snake, and I’m sorry about your mom.

  PS I have never been fond of walruses myself. They’re gigantic and wrinkly, and they look like they accidentally stuck straws up their noses.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Eleven Days After the Fire

  Hot-for-spring turned into wicked hot by Tuesday morning, and the air conditioner at school stopped working by lunch, and my yellow blouse kept sticking to my back. I wanted school to let out for the summer already, but we still had seven weeks to go.

  I didn’t get much sleep Saturday night, or Sunday night either, because my stomach hurt after I went back to bed. I worried about sleep-eating, and a little bit about the shoe picture. I didn’t worry about the barrette Angel found. That could have been anybody’s. So what if Mom got new barrettes after the fire? That didn’t mean she had lost her old ones. And even if she did lose her old barrettes, that didn’t mean she was over at the Abrams farm the night it burned.

  None of th
at stuff had been real.

  Hurry.

  That’s what Mom said to Cissy Abrams in that sort-of-hallucination or flashback or whatever it was. And then the other dream, where I woke up alone, after a bath I didn’t remember, smelling smoke even though there was no fire in my house. . . . I had to be losing it. I barely got all that food mess cleaned up before Dad came in to make breakfast.

  Peavine thought we should send Angel’s shoe picture to the MBI, since they thought Cissy and Doc might still be alive and kidnapped, and maybe the shoe was on the foot of a serial killer stalker creep who was watching us to make sure we didn’t discover the right clues to blow up all his plans.

  Captain Armstrong has shoes just like that.

  That kind of freaks me out, but Peavine says a lot of people have black running shoes and I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. He’s probably right. Captain Armstrong is too nice to murder anybody.

  I just needed to find the MBI’s e-mail address and do it when I got home. I glanced at Peavine from two rows back, tasting and retasting the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich I had at lunch. His white T-shirt looked as sweaty as my shirt.

  I gripped the sides of my book. Sweat trickled down my neck on both sides as I went back to staring at a black-and-white photo of pantyhose crumpled next to a box full of people parts. That was pretty disgusting. All around me, pencils scratched out the assignment I had already finished.

  My eyes narrowed at the photo.

  Cissy Abrams, looking dead . . .

  Those awful black flecks . . .

  My mom, wide-eyed as I fell . . .

  Waking up, smelling the world on fire . . .

  I got out of bed the night everything happened. I remember doing that. The house was so motionless and silent, it scared me, so that much of my dream had been real. I remembered running to turn on lights, but my folks never left me alone.

  Pushing open doors to dark rooms and digging for light switches . . .