Grounded (9 page)

Boy, did I get an earful on the drive home.

“I have never been so angry in my life,” Mother began.

“I just—” I said, trying to explain.

“I am
talking
!” she hissed. “When I got to the beauty parlor this morning and saw your library card stuck in a corner of your mirror, I decided to walk it over to the library. I thought you’d need it to check out books. But Mrs. Jan Whitehead told me you hadn’t been in today. And then her assistant, Miss Carrie Cline, said she’d seen you standing in front of the crematorium earlier this morning, talking to Mr. Clem and Aunt Josie.”

Mother took a deep breath as if to steady herself. She was mad enough to burst into flames.

“I was only there because—” I put in quickly.

“If you want to associate with those two
operators
,” she interrupted, “you can just be my guest. Just
be
my guest. I have enough on my plate trying to take care of Mamaw and my customers and the house and the yard. I swear, you can just
live
with Aunt Josie, if that’s what you want. Just go down there and
live
with her.”

“She’s moving to Chicago with—”

“I don’t want to
hear
it!” Mother yelled. The tires were screeching as we turned in our driveway. She got out on her side and slammed the car door with all her strength. Then she walked up the porch steps.

“I had some thinking to do,” I said, unfolding myself from my side of the car. “And I like to do my thinking at Doc Lake, just like Daddy used to do.”

She stopped on the porch, turned, and looked me dead in the eyes. “You did
not
have my permission to go to the lake.”

My stomach turned sour at the sound of those familiar words. This was the same reason I’d been grounded last October. It was the reason I wasn’t in Daddy’s plane when it crashed.

“I was only trying to…” I stopped. There was no
sense explaining myself, so I switched gears. “I’m too
old
to be grounded.”

“Oh, is that so?” Mother said. “You’re too
old
to be grounded. That’s news to me. Go to your room.
Now.
You’re grounded for the rest of the summer.”

“Fine!” I cried. “Why don’t you just ground me for the rest of my
life
?”

“Good idea. You’re grounded for the rest of your
life
.”

“SEE IF I CARE!” I yelled as I ran upstairs. I tripped over a pile of dolls on the landing. “I hate these damn things! They’re stupid and
dead
! Everything in this house is dead! I bet you wish
I
were dead, too, don’t you? DON’T YOU?”

I slammed my bedroom door as hard as I could. Then I stood in my room and waited, my hands braced against the door like I was a human blockade. In my mind I dared my mother to try to punish me for cursing.

Just try it! I dare you!
But she didn’t come upstairs.

Minutes later, I heard Mother on the phone in the front hallway. It was obvious who she’d called.

“Yes, in fact I
do
mind,” Mother was saying. I put my head against my bedroom door. The attic fan was drowning out most of what she was saying. I could
hear only bits and pieces: “What people think” and “You wouldn’t know because you don’t
have
any children, Josie” and “An absolute disgrace to the family.”

I couldn’t tell if Mother was talking about me or Aunt Josie. Either way, it made me furious. I abandoned my position at the door and flopped on my bed in a rage.

Two hours later, I heard Mother knock on my door and set something in the hallway. I could tell from the smell what it was: a Salisbury steak TV dinner and a burnt Parker House roll.

Like I wanted to eat
that
!

I didn’t want dinner. I wanted to know why Mr. Clem was telling different stories to Aunt Josie and me. I wanted to know why he was so keen on his horse-and-carriage idea when he had the nicest car in town. I wanted to know why he’d stolen my idea for living funerals, and what he’d meant when he said it was a beautiful day to be alive. Was there a beautiful day to be
dead
?

More than anything else, I wanted to know if he was so nice and generous, why did he remind me of a big, mean snake stuck in a small, cracked aquarium?

But now I was grounded. I couldn’t do any investigating. I couldn’t do anything.

I reached under my bed and pulled out my book of
Pertinent Facts & Important Information.
I started writing:

I stopped. I was too restless to write.

Instead, I stared at myself in the mirror. My hair was starting to grow out. I mussed it up with my hands and squinted at my reflection. I looked like Wayne Junior, after he got back from sleepaway camp.

When I got tired of looking at myself, I looked at the reflection of my room in the mirror. I stared at the chair in the corner where Daddy had taught me how to read a flight schedule so I’d know where his postcards were coming from. I looked at my messy bed, where Lilac Rose had crawled in with me a million times when she woke up from a nightmare and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I used to do the same thing with Wayne Junior when I was little and scared.

They were all dead. Gone. There was nothing I could do about it.

And now Aunt Josie was leaving me. She wasn’t dying, but she was moving to Chicago, which from my point of view was as bad as dying. Worse yet, she was going with a man I had a bad feeling about.

My head hurt from thinking about it. But if I didn’t think harder, something terrible might happen.

I crawled in bed and closed my eyes. I pulled the covers over my head, defeated by my investigation. But it was no good. There was no chance of sleeping at seven o’clock on a summer night. I flipped and flopped for an hour like a fish out of water.

Fishing. It was the only thing I wanted to do right then. Daddy always said the brain works best when you stop thinking and start fishing. So that’s what I did.

Standing on my bed with an imaginary pole in my hand, I cast off into an invisible body of water in my room. I reeled in and cast off again, dozens of times. Then I began fly-fishing with my other hand, rocking my invisible line back and forth from ten to two, ten to two. I was reeling in speckled trout with one pole and bluegill and catfish with the other.

I fished with flair and acrobatics. I jumped from
my bed to Lilac Rose’s, dodging giant white sharks that were trying to kill me. I didn’t think about anything but fishing.

I pretended I was Pickles, fishing for dinner in Bud Mosley’s aquarium. Then I pretended I was me, deep-sea fishing with Clem in Key West.

I caught a mackerel. Holy mackerel! Then an octopus. I jumped from bed to bed, flying and fishing! I thought I saw a jellyfish.

And then Uncle Seneca’s head floated by.

It was only a doll’s head that rolled out from under Lilac Rose’s bed. But it stopped me cold. My hands fell to my sides. My imaginary fishing poles disappeared. I stood on my bed like a bird on a tree bough. The idea of seeing Uncle Seneca’s head in the water paralyzed me.

With that image in my mind everything made sense, including the dinner that was waiting for me in the hallway.

I opened my bedroom door. The Salisbury steak TV dinner was cold and congealed. It didn’t interest me as a meal or as a clue. But the Parker House roll was different. It contained a secret I could feel in my bones.

I stared at the cold burnt roll, my heart still beating fast from my fishing expedition. Slowly, I picked up the roll and held it to my nose, inhaling deeply.

I
knew
it.

I waited until midnight, when I knew Mother would be asleep. Then I dressed silently, barely breathing. I grabbed my book of
Pertinent Facts & Important Information
and crept downstairs.

In the basement I found Daddy’s tackle box where I’d left it two Sundays before. I used a flashlight to find the tooth I’d fished out of the lake. I stuck the tooth in my front pocket. Then I dug out the biggest, heaviest trawling hook I could find, and stuck it through my belt loop. I slid a couple of line sinkers in my back pocket, along with the flashlight. Finally, I grabbed my fishing pole and tiptoed back upstairs to the den, where I’d left my book.

With all my gear in tow, I walked as quietly as I could through the breezeway into Mamaw’s house. I left through her back door. I couldn’t risk waking up Mother with our squeaky screen door.

The night was black with a little toenail clipping of a moon hanging all alone in the sky. It looked like how I felt.

I walked fast. The familiar path I’d hiked so many times by day felt different at this hour. I kept seeing things that weren’t there: snakes, dolls, decapitated heads. I suspected what I might find in Doc Lake, but I wasn’t sure. I hated to think something so bad could happen in Digginsville.

When I finally got to the lake, I found the spot where I’d been the previous day. I put my book down at my feet and turned on the flashlight so I could hook the trawler on my fishing line. But the second I turned on the light, I saw something under a tree.

“What brings you out here on a nice summer night?” Mr. Clem yelled. He was maybe forty yards away.

I stopped breathing. “Nothin’,” I hollered back in a high voice. “Nothin’ at all, sir.”

My eyes scanned the lake. I spotted his yellow car parked on the opposite side of the water. No other vehicles were in sight. No other people. Just me and Mr. Clem.

He started walking toward me along the water’s edge. “You don’t even have your tackle box with you,” he said with a laugh.

“No sir,” I said, watching him get closer to me. I felt dizzy with fear.

“Is that a book you’ve brought to read?” he asked, eyeballing my book of
Pertinent Facts & Important Information.
“Or is that your diary?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just…a book.”

I tried to float above myself. I tried to rise up and out of my body, like I’d done before. I wanted to hover over myself, to not be there, to just observe it all from a safe distance.

But I couldn’t do it. My body felt heavy and stiff, like a statue. Like a gravestone. Like a corpse.

“You can’t very well read by moonlight,” Clem
said. He was taking slow, deliberate steps in my direction. “I bet I know why you’re here on a hot night. You’re planning to do a little swimming, aren’t you?”

“I’m not here to swim,” I said, backing up slowly.

“Oh, I bet you are,” he said. “Even though I
told
you how dangerous swimming without a lifeguard can be.”

“I’m not here to swim,” I said again.

“Now, now,” he said with a hollow laugh. “I know all about you and your misbehaving. You seem to have a hard time minding adults, don’t you, Dolly?”

“No.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard,” he replied. “After all your mother’s been through, you’re still disobeying her.”

He knows too much about me. He knows exactly where to strike.
He was getting closer. From the back of Mrs. Staniss’s class to the chalkboard—that’s how close he was.

“But do you know what I think?” he asked. “I think this is a perfect night to break the rules. I think this is the night you and I should go for a swim.”

“I don’t want to,” I whispered.

“What did you say?” he asked. “I can’t hear you.”

“I don’t
want
to.”

Move faster
.
Just get the toupee and get out of here.

“Don’t be silly,” Clem said. “I won’t tell anyone. Let’s go swimming.”

He was ten feet away. I could see his face clearly. The moonlight reflected off his shiny white teeth. I pointed my fishing pole directly at him like a sword. He just laughed.

“You wouldn’t hit me with that thing, would you?” he asked. His voice was mocking, but I didn’t care. I knew exactly why he was there. I knew what was in that lake. Or rather,
who
was in the lake. I was the only person in Digginsville who had figured out Clem’s secret. And he knew I knew.

I shined my flashlight at Clem’s eyes while I looked in the dark for the sticker bush. I kept my fishing pole aimed at him like a weapon.

“You’d have to insert that pole directly into my eye socket to do any real harm,” he said. “Is your aim that good, Dolly? Is it?”

I was pretty sure I knew which bush it was under. I’d have only one chance to get it. Quickly, with one smooth motion, I pivoted my body and stuck my fishing pole under the bush. I dragged the matted hairpiece out, all the while shining the flashlight in Clem’s eyes.

When I had the toupee in my hand, I threw the fishing pole at Clem as hard as I could. I threw my flashlight at him, too. It hit him in the face.

“Hey!” he yelled. “That hurt. Now wait just a minute!”

But I didn’t wait. I grabbed my
Pertinent Facts & Important Information
book and Mr. Aubrey Bryant’s toupee and started running.

I cut through the woods. My heart felt like fireworks going off inside my body. Within minutes, I could hear the low sound of Clem’s convertible slithering down Highway E. Where the trees were thin, I could even see his headlights. They were like big yellow snake eyes, looking for me.

I ran through the scratchy woods, hoping my instincts were right. I knew if I started second-guessing myself, I’d get turned around and never find my way out. I pretended I was a pilot, flying on a secret night mission. I tried to fool myself into thinking I wasn’t scared to death.

When the woods ended and town started, I took the alley. Avis Brown’s white Oldsmobile was parked in her driveway. I knocked on her back door. No answer.

I knocked again, harder. And then again. My
frantic heartbeat was keeping time with the sounds of big-winged night insects hovering around me. I started pounding on the door.

When Avis finally answered, it was obvious by her curlers that I’d awakened the publisher of
The Digginsville Daily Quill.

“Dolly,” she said. “What’s wrong? Where’s your mother?”

“Mother’s fine,” I said. “The reason I’m here is this.” I showed her Aubrey Bryant’s toupee.

“If that’s a dead animal you’ve found, it can wait until morning,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

I told her it wasn’t a dead animal, and that it couldn’t wait one minute more. So she invited me in and made a pot of coffee. Sitting at her kitchen table, I told Avis Brown everything I knew. I used my book of
Pertinent Facts & Important Information
for exact dates and quotes.

“Unbelievable,” Avis said, paging through my book. “Simply unbelievable.”

“Don’t pay any attention to the Dear Daddys and all that stuff,” I said. It occurred to me only then that maybe I should be embarrassed for writing all those letters to my deceased family members.

But Avis didn’t seem to think that part was strange at all. She threw a housecoat over her nightgown and drove us like a bullet to Sheriff Walter Whipple’s house.

I felt bad for waking up the sheriff and his wife. But they said it was okay.

“Comes with the job,” Sheriff Whipple said. Then he turned to Avis. “You want to tell me what’s gonna be on the front page of your next edition?”

“I’d rather let Dolly tell you,” Avis said.

So I did, right there in the Whipples’ kitchen. Sheriff Whipple listened carefully while studying the tooth and the toupee. He even thumbed through my book. He was still wearing his plaid pajamas when he started making phone calls.

Jimmy Chuck Walters arrived just as Mrs. Whipple was pouring pancake batter in her skillet. Avis said we’d have to take a rain check on breakfast.

By four o’clock in the morning, I was back at Doc Lake, watching men in canoes glide silently across the silver water. The search crew, led by Uncle Waldo, included members of the Digginsville Volunteer Fire Department. They dragged the lake using long poles with hooks and nets.

Less than one hour later, I saw the late Mr. Aubrey Bryant being pulled to shore. His bloated, naked, bald-headed body was harshly illuminated by a search light. Just before sunrise, a second body was found.

It was obvious what had happened and who was to blame. But by then, Clem Monroe was long gone.