Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos

  But what if Spizz denied it because he didn’t like me anyway? Then I would be the suspicious one—the prime suspect. Everyone else had a reason why they used poison, but I didn’t have a reason for what I did with it. I didn’t even have the tin of 1080 I bought, which would look to the police like I had tried to hide the evidence. All night I kept thinking it through, and still I didn’t have an answer to why all the old ladies were dying.

  But somewhere inside me I must have known I was onto something ghastly, because when I woke up in the morning my pillow looked like a big loaf of bread pudding soaked through with blood.

  26

  On Sunday after church I made an appointment with Miss Volker to fix the leaky side of my nose. I told Mom I had to go down to her house and help with her laundry, which was sort of true because she had trouble getting the washing machine started and she definitely couldn’t pin her clothes onto the outside lines to dry.

  When I arrived at her house I quickly went into the basement to get a load of sheets going. When I turned on the light I saw that Miss Volker had put out more chocolates sprinkled with 1080. There were a few dead mice scattered around, which only reminded me of the dead old ladies. I tried not to look at their tortured little bodies as I filled the washing machine, added the soap, and got it started.

  I dashed up the stairs as quickly as I could and went into the kitchen.

  “Would you like some cookies before your operation?” she cheerfully asked, and nodded toward where she had a package of them spread out across the kitchen counter. They were the same cookies she packaged up for the old ladies.

  “No—no thanks,” I said hesitantly. Mushrooms, casseroles, chocolates, and cookies were suddenly off my food list.

  “It’s always good to have a little something in your stomach before an operation,” she suggested. “How about just one little cookie to help settle you down?”

  “I’m just eager to get this over with,” I replied. I went to her linen closet and got a sheet for the kitchen table. Then I gathered up her special tools.

  She got her bucket of paraffin heated and dunked her hands into the hot wax while I numbed my nose with the anesthetic. Once she got her fingers moving she peeled off the wax, then grabbed the cauterizing instrument and held the sharp tip of it under the flame until it turned a painful shade of bright red.

  “Now,” she said, pivoting quickly from the stove and staring as she pointed the menacing wire toward my nose, “let’s get this done once and for all.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked in a small voice.

  “You know I don’t like to be questioned,” she said sternly.

  “Okay. Do it—but don’t make it painful,” I begged and gritted my teeth. She looked like she had just one purpose on her mind as she aimed for the dark cave of my left nostril. Maybe she knew I thought she could have poisoned those ladies, and now she had me pinned to the table and she was planning to jab that sizzling hot blade and wire right up into the caramel center of my brain. I’d be dead in an instant and all she would have to say is that I sneezed and jerked my head forward and impaled my own self on the wire.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. She peeked up my nose and then, as steadily as she could, she inserted the tiny blade. I felt the fierce heat inside my nostril and knew that one false move, one little hiccup …

  And then the telephone rang.

  “Don’t bat an eyelash,” she whispered, and carefully lifted my hand to the wood handle of wire and blade. “Just … hold … it … right … there. I’ll be quick.”

  “But…”

  “Hush!” she snapped, and turned toward the telephone. “Or your hand will move and you’ll deform yourself.”

  She had enough flexibility in her hot fingers to pick up the receiver. “Miss Volker here,” she announced. “Make it snappy. I’m in the middle of a nose job.”

  Someone said something to her.

  “Okay,” she said hastily. “I’ll be right there. No problem. My driver is with me now.”

  Just then I had to sneeze. “My nose!” I wailed. “Hurry.”

  “Don’t jerk your hand!” she hollered from the phone.

  But it was too late. I sneezed and scraped the blade and wire against the inside of my nose as I yanked it out.

  “Bless you,” she said.

  “I think I sliced half my nose off,” I cried. “I’ll be a freak on one side of my face and have to walk around in profile like an Egyptian drawing for the rest of my life.”

  “Relax,” she said, standing over me. “It’s just a small burn blister at the tip of your nose.” Then with her other hand she shined a flashlight up the nostril. “Hey, not bad,” she concluded. “Not bad at all. Looks like that sneeze helped you cauterize the rest of the capillaries. You might make a good doctor someday.”

  I sat up. I still couldn’t feel my face. “You didn’t stick a pin in my nose this time, did you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said impatiently. “Now let’s get going. I just found out Mrs. Droogie will no longer be sharing air with us on this planet.”

  We left the house so quickly she didn’t see the box of chocolates and note sitting outside by the porch door. It wasn’t there when I arrived this morning, so Mr. Spizz must have sneaked over when I was on the operating table.

  * * *

  As usual, I drove and she talked. “Well, this is a day I’ve been waiting for a long time,” Miss Volker said, and sighed as if a great weight was off her chest. “Now it will all come down to me and him! We are the last two Norvelters standing.”

  “Are you going to have a shoot-out at high noon?” I asked.

  “That’s not how I operate,” she replied. “He’ll never see me coming!”

  But Mr. Spizz did see us coming. When we pulled into Mrs. Droogie’s driveway he was sitting on his tricycle with a superior smirk on his face, as if he had just won a super tricycle road race. Behind him were two county troopers standing in front of the doorway and they had their thumbs hooked into their pants pockets. With their puffed-out chests and thick necks they looked like owls rotating their carved faces back and forth. Off to one side Mr. Huffer stood next to a twiggy, water-starved azalea and posed like his usual wilted teapot self.

  When Miss Volker stepped out of the car they all stared at her, but she was accustomed to being the center of attention.

  “Gentlemen,” she announced to the troopers, “this is my jurisdiction and I’ll take charge of the examination.” They nodded and quietly the five of them filed into the house. I lagged behind and stood in the doorway. Mr. Huffer had Mrs. Droogie laid out on the couch in the living room, where she had died while watching TV after dinner. As soon as I caught sight of the body I hopped back and gazed off to one side, but I could still hear.

  Mr. Huffer pulled the sheet back from Mrs. Droogie’s heavy body. “No unusual marks on her face,” Miss Volker announced, “other than the bruise from where she fell from the couch to the floor. Her belly’s not swollen. Her legs are contorted but that is just the rigor mortis having set in.” I knew Miss Volker’s hands must have cooled down and would be seizing up, but she just took a deep breath and proved to the police that she could complete a thorough job.

  Miss Volker went over Mrs. Droogie from top to bottom. I heard Mr. Huffer pull the sheet back up over her, so I stuck my head around the corner. Miss Volker stood fully erect and looked at Mr. Huffer and the unblinking troopers and Mr. Spizz. “It is death from natural causes,” she said with confidence. “All very routine. Looks to me like it was a stroke, given the burst capillaries in her eyes. Her gums are badly infected too, and often that infection spreads to the heart so it is possible she had a heart attack. She had high blood pressure, minor diabetes issues, and if you look at her foot you will see that one shoe is partially cut open across the side because she had gout in her foot, and the only way she could get her shoe on was to split the side to accommodate the swelling. Gentlemen,” she said, summing up her case, “what you
see before you is the result of eighty-three years of growing old.”

  It was a top-notch examination. She showed off all her skills and perceptions and I was very proud of her. It went well until she turned to Mr. Huffer and asked, “Cremation as usual?”

  That was when the two troopers stepped forward and one of them said, “We have an order to take charge of the body and send it to the lab for a full autopsy. After that we’ll release it back to Mr. Huffer.”

  “Suit yourself,” Miss Volker said, “but you are wasting your time and taxpayers’ money.” Then she turned on one heel and marched out the front door with me right behind. She was quiet in the car except to point out, “The dear lady died on a day with some great history. August 12 is the day on which we remember the death of Antony and Cleopatra two thousand years ago.”

  “I know she was the last Egyptian pharaoh and died from a snake bite,” I said. “Poisoned by asps. But how’d her boyfriend go?”

  “Self-inflicted wound,” she recalled without sympathy. “He and another Roman general, Octavian, were fighting over who would rule the Roman Empire. Once Octavian had conquered Antony and Cleopatra’s army, someone told Antony that Cleopatra had been killed during the battle. In grief Antony fell on his sword but did a crummy job of killing himself, so he was very slow about dying. However, Cleopatra wasn’t dead. She was hiding in a little fortress palace, and when she heard about Antony she had him brought to her. He moaned and groaned and whined and cried, and after he finally died she allowed the asps to bite her on the breast with their deadly poison.”

  “Romantic,” I said, “wow. Now that’s the way to go!”

  “Not romantic,” she disagreed. “To me it would be romantic if Antony properly fell on his sword and kicked the bucket and Cleopatra escaped and lived a lovely life sailing along the Nile without him and his big ideas ruining her kingdom. She was better off without him.”

  I knew what she was getting at. It was time for Spizz to fall off his tricycle and onto his sword and leave her alone to live the new life she wanted in Florida with her sister. But I didn’t think Spizz was going to just fall on his sword.

  When we returned to Miss Volker’s home I sat down at my desk, as I had all summer. I raised my pencil and Miss Volker fell back into an easy chair.

  “Mrs. Droogie,” she started up, and already her voice sounded tired, like a cold engine that didn’t want to turn over. She paused and took a deep breath and began again, and this time her engine sputtered to life. “Mrs. Droogie was a lovely woman and lived a long and satisfying life. She loved her family, her community, and her country and in return she was loved and respected by all who knew her. As a child she was a violin prodigy who at the age of eleven played with the New York Philharmonic. She went on to perform with the world’s greatest symphonies, but by the age of twenty-three she set down the violin and never picked it up again. When asked why she quit she replied that one day she realized she was only playing to please her parents and that she really didn’t enjoy it. Instead, she retreated to Norvelt where she married Mr. Droogie, who was best known as a clown at children’s birthday parties and was famous for his sense of humor—and Mrs. Droogie became famous for her laughter. They were a perfect couple.”

  I waited for Miss Volker to continue but she had run out of gas and slumped back into her chair. “That’s all I have to say,” she said. “Mrs. Droogie was a lovely woman who proved that you don’t have to do what your parents want or what your boyfriend wants for you to be happy. You just have to be yourself, for there is no love greater than self-love.”

  “I’ll type this up,” I said dutifully, and then I asked something that had been on my mind for a long time. “Miss Volker, now that all the original Norvelters are dead, doesn’t that mean you have to marry Mr. Spizz like you promised him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” she replied with a wry smile. “And I realized that I failed to inform that bonehead of one key fact—I’m an original Norvelter too. So I guess he’ll just have to wait until I drop dead to marry me. Like I said, his alphabet soup only spells out D-U-M-B.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’ll be very happy about that,” I said. “Because he already left you a little gift by the back door.”

  Instantly her face stiffened. “Go get it for me,” she snarled. She looked even more tired. “I expect it’s more mouse bait.”

  I went out to the porch and retrieved the box of chocolates and the note and brought them to the living room.

  “Read the note,” she instructed.

  I pulled the tape off the package and opened the envelope. “As God intended, it is just the two of us left in this Garden of Eden. Marry me. —E. Spizz.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “To quote Cleopatra,” Miss Volker sang out, “‘The enemy is at the gate.’ Believe me, if I had a snake I’d use it on him. Now go answer it.”

  It was Spizz. “Gantos boy,” he bellowed. “Figures you’d be here.” He stared down at me as if I were a piece of gum he might scrape up.

  “I was just leaving,” I said to him, and stepped onto the porch. I hadn’t gone far when I heard his foghorn voice holler out, “Hello, good-lookin’. Looks like we’re the last two old birds at the party.”

  I knew she was about to let him have a piece of her mind and I didn’t want to hear it. I had heard enough already. I took the obituary down to Mr. Greene.

  He was wiping ink off his hands with a rag. “I told you there was something suspicious going on,” Mr. Greene said, feeling pretty proud of himself and puffing up a noxious cloud of cherry tobacco smoke, which burned my eyes. “We’ll know soon enough if someone has been killing those old ladies.”

  “Or not,” I added.

  “How much do you want to bet? I say that Miss Volker killed them,” he declared as he pulled out his wallet.

  I pulled out my two-dollar bill. “I say she didn’t,” I replied.

  He took my money and his and put them in a desk drawer. “Winner takes all,” he said, puffing excitedly.

  “Takes all,” I repeated, then walked straight home. I was exhausted.

  * * *

  I didn’t know what to do but try to distract myself by reading while waiting for the autopsy report. I looked over all my books but every one of the histories reminded me of Miss Volker. The Crusades, The Magna Charta, The F.B.I., Women of Courage, Custer’s Last Stand—I could just hear her voice behind each book, linking the past to the present and the present to the future. But what was her future? That question was why I couldn’t read a word, because I was looking out the window and toward her house and trying to read her mind. I wanted to sneak back down there and snoop but I was still grounded.

  Police cars had been coming and going. Spizz’s tricycle was parked by her back porch. Men had been carrying boxes and bags out of her house and loading them into trucks and driving off. Mom wouldn’t let me call her, so my only hope was that Miss Volker would call me. And so I waited.

  * * *

  When the telephone rang I ran for it and picked up the receiver. “I’ll be right there,” I cried out to Miss Volker.

  Only it was Mr. Spizz. “Gantos boy!” he hollered so loudly I could smell his breath through the phone. “I got some bad news for you.”

  “Is it about Miss Volker?” I asked nervously. “Is she okay?”

  “She asked me to call you and let you know that the police have arrested her for murder—they say she killed all those old ladies.”

  “She did not!” I shouted. “How could she have done it?”

  “Poisoned them,” he said slowly. “Heartlessly.”

  “That cannot be true,” I stated.

  “Mrs. Droogie was full of poison. The police have proof it was your girlfriend who did it,” he said quickly.

  “What proof?” I shot back.

  “They found 1080 all over the chocolates at Miss Volker’s house,” he barked. “She must have been giving them to the old ladies.”

&nbs
p; “She was poisoning the mice in her basement with the chocolates you gave her,” I shot right back. “She hated those crummy chocolates. She gave the old ladies Thin Mints.”

  “Don’t be so smart-alecky! They found 1080 in the Thin Mints too,” he snarled.

  “So what. A lot of people use 1080,” I said as calmly as possible. “That doesn’t mean anything. You use it. And Mr. Huffer uses it.”

  “We use it for pests,” he said, getting wound up. “Not for people. We don’t cook with it or sprinkle it on cookies or serve it on chocolates.”

  “Maybe it was the Hells Angels,” I suggested. “Miss Volker said they brought a curse on the town.”

  “That phony curse was just a way of covering her tracks in advance of murdering those ladies herself. Believe me, I know how she operates. She says one thing when she means another.”

  “I guess that means she won’t marry you?” I surmised. “Even though she said she would.”

  “I’m the one asking the questions,” he said in a steely voice. “Did you help her? She can’t use her hands so she must have had a murder accomplice.”

  “I didn’t do a thing,” I said, standing up to him. “I don’t even believe she did it.”

  “Well, the police might want to talk with you next,” he said. “So you better get your story straight and tell the truth.”

  “Then I can tell them that you were the last person to touch the food before serving it to the old ladies,” I reminded him. “You probably murdered them.”

  “I’m a police officer,” he said with authority. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to accuse me of murder.”

  “You made me buy you the 1080,” I said.

  “The police were informed that you bought it for Miss Volker,” he replied smoothly. “They found it at her house.”