Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man (11 page)

That’s when I realize—he doesn’t know. “You’re wrong, Mr. LeBard. Chauncy hasn’t talked to me very much at all. He can’t. He’s had a tracheotomy.”

That stops him cold. His wife says to me, “When, dear? When did this happen?”

I shrug and say, “It must have been quite a while ago, but I don’t really know. All I know is he’s living without heat or electricity or a phone or anything, and he can’t talk.”

The Mr. and the Mrs. are looking at each other, just kind of letting this sink in, and finally the Mrs. says, “Without heat or electricity? What about the inheritance? He can’t possibly have used it all up! Why, the appraiser said that—”

Douglas cuts her off, saying, “Never mind about that! If he’s spent it all, he deserves to suffer, and if he didn’t learn his lesson from what happened to Mother, it’s his own doing.”

I look at Mrs. LeBard and ask, “What happened to their mother?”

She says softly, “She died of lung cancer, dear. Douglas tried for years to get them both to quit but—”

“Courtney, that’s enough! It’s none of her business, and the whole matter is no longer any of our concern. If he’s been sick, I can’t help that. If he’s spent the inheritance, then so be it.”

“Excuse me, but it doesn’t look like he’s spent money on much of anything. Maybe if you went over there and talked to him—”

That does it. Douglas says, “Don’t tell me what to do, and don’t stand there expecting me to justify the situation to you!” He pushes past me, “Out of the way, out of the way!”

Mrs. LeBard follows him and looks over at me from the porch, but it’s pretty obvious from the way the door slams shut that she won’t be inviting me in for butter cookies.

I just stand there on their walkway like a statue, thinking. And pretty soon my brain’s whirring around inside my skull so fast that I can’t stand there anymore; I’ve got to get moving.

So I head out to Broadway, hang a left, and start walking to the Thrift Store. And while I’m walking, my brain’s busy chasing something that keeps slipping away. It feels like I’m trying to snag a fish out of the water—every time I grab for it I miss, because it’s not really where it seems to be at all.

I have to wait for the light on Stowell Road, so I close my eyes and try to imagine the scene on Halloween night. I pretend that I’m Chauncy, with my hands and feet tied and a big rubber mask over my face. Pretty soon my heart’s speeding up and I’m feeling claustrophobic and I can’t
breathe
. And that’s when it hits me: Maybe whoever
robbed Chauncy LeBard didn’t know he’d had his operation. Maybe the Frankenstein mask was more than just a blindfold. Maybe the Skeleton Man didn’t know that it
wouldn’t
stop him from breathing. Maybe, just maybe, whoever robbed Chauncy LeBard wanted something so badly that he was willing to kill for it.

Either that, or maybe he just plain wanted Chauncy dead.

I don’t know why, but the thought that the Skeleton Man might have been trying to kill Chauncy kind of stunned me. I mean, the way I’d been looking at it was that he was after
something
, not
someone
. And I was so dazed that I didn’t even notice that the light had turned green until it was switching back to red.

When the stoplight turned green again, I started running. Past gas stations and shops and about a mile of strip malls, and when I came huffing and puffing up to the Thrift Store, I felt a lot better. Like I’d outrun the Skeleton Man—at least for the moment.

The Thrift Store doesn’t usually have much in it that I like. It has lots of clothes that are okay, I guess. They don’t have tags that try to bite you, and at least they’re not going to shrink. I mean, if it’s at the Thrift Store, there’s nothing you can do with a washing machine that’s going to make it any smaller.

The trouble with Thrift Store clothes is they’re a little strange. They have pinks next to oranges, if you know what I mean. And flowers. Lots of flowers. And if you
do
find something that has okay colors and no flowers, it’s probably made of polyester or plastic. Either that or it has zippers and buttons where zippers and buttons don’t belong.

So I went straight past all the racks of clothes to the back of the store where the shoes are. Most of the shoes are worse than the clothes. They’ve got pilgrim shoes and platform shoes and shoes that look like they’ve been worn by a duck, but in between all these ugly shoes they’ve also got high-tops. Really great high-tops. And I noticed a terrific pair of black and white ones right away.

Trouble is, they were about an inch too big. I tried them on anyway, thinking that maybe I could wear two pairs of socks until I grew into them, but one lap around the shoe rack told me it’d be like wearing flippers.

I flopped around in the black-and-whites looking for another pair, but all I could find that might’ve fit me was a pair of plaid ones—red and
pink
plaid.

So I took another lap around the rack, thinking that maybe I could get used to the flippers, but finally I just sat down and switched back into my green ones.

I headed for the door, zipping right past lamps and books and toasters and mixers, but then I noticed something. I wasn’t being real observant or anything, I was thinking about
shoes
, you know? I just noticed them because there they were, all alone, decorating the middle of a black Formica table.

They weren’t silver, and they weren’t stainless steel or aluminum. They were just a dull gray, and kind of rough. But the longer I looked at them, the more sure I became—these were Chauncy’s candlesticks.

I didn’t touch them for a long time. I just moved around the table telling myself, Nah! It can’t be.… Then I got the idea to trace around the base of the candlesticks. I knew the
lady at the register wasn’t going to offer me a Magic Marker to scribble up her table, so I used the next best thing—spit. I got my finger good and wet and went around the base of a candlestick, making a nice shiny outline on that old black table. And when I picked up the candlestick and looked at my little spit tracing, well, I couldn’t say for
sure
, but the design in the dust at Chauncy’s house and the spit spot seemed to be about the same size and shape.

I flipped the candlestick over, and there was the price—$10.75 for the pair. Which was about $10.75 more than I wanted to pay for a pair of candlesticks that might never have seen the inside of the Bush House.

So I marched them right up to the cash register. Right up to CeCe.

Most people think CeCe’s a little strange, but I happen to know she’s sharp like paper. She looks like a bag lady, and I’ve heard people say she used to
be
a bag lady, only she was so good at collecting stuff that she had to open a store just to have somewhere to put it all.

Bag lady or not, she’s like a walking commercial for her store. She wears hats and scarves and lots of orange and pink polyester with jewelry dangling everywhere. And every time I’ve gone into the Thrift Store she’s been friendly to me—like she remembers me even though I only go there a few times a year.

She looks at me over the top of her glasses. “Didn’t have your size?”

At first I didn’t know what she was talking about—I was thinking about the candlesticks. Then I realize she must have been watching me do laps in her shoe department.
“No.” I look down at my Marsh Monster shoes. “And if I don’t find a pair soon, my grams is going to force me to go to the
mall
.”

CeCe wrinkles her nose in sympathy and then looks over the counter at my feet. “Too bad they’re worn out. That’s a beaut of a color.”

I look at her and start to laugh, but then I can tell she’s serious so I switch the subject. “How long have you had these candlesticks?”

She looks at them through the bottom part of her glasses, and her eyebrows disappear under her bangs. “They’re new. Why do you want to know?”

I’m trying to come up with something that isn’t a complete lie, when CeCe looks at me straight through the middle of her glasses and says, “Ah-ah. Out with it.”

I take a deep breath and say, “It’s important. They might’ve belonged to a friend of mine.”

She chews on this a minute. “Wouldn’t know about that. They were a donation. Got dropped off in the box outside.”

Hearing that gets my heart thumping around a bit. “Was there anything else with them?”

She squints at me, then nods toward the appliance table. “They were in a sack with a toaster. Sucker had a loose wire’s all. Fixed it up and buffed it out. It’s good as new.”

Now my brain’s whirring and clacking, thinking
Rats!
because if she hadn’t cleaned it up maybe there’d be fingerprints. “Which toaster was it?”

She walks over to the table and picks one up. “You act like a cop, you know that?”

I look it over and see an $8.50 sticker on the side. “Can I borrow this and the candlesticks for a day?”

She tosses her head back and laughs. “Oh, that’s a good one. I suppose next you’re going to tell me they’re stolen property. I’ve heard
that
one before.” She goes back to the register and settles onto her stool. “And no, I won’t come off the price any.”

So I stand around trying to figure out some way around paying for stuff I don’t even want, when she taps the
ALL SALES FINAL
sign behind her. “Don’t be gettin’ any bright ideas, girl.”

I sigh and say, “Look, I’ve only got about nineteen, and with tax—”

She perks right up. “Cash? Forget the tax. I’ll refigure. We’ll call it an even nineteen, if that’s all you’ve got.”

She tucks the money away in one of her polyester pockets, puts the candlesticks and the toaster in a paper sack, and says, “Come back anytime!”

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I’d been an idiot for giving CeCe all the money I had. Now I couldn’t ride the bus. Instead I had to trudge along Broadway with my green shoes and nineteen-dollar sack of junk.

The whole time I’m walking, I’m thinking. And what I’m thinking is, before I go home or even over to Hudson’s, I’ve
got
to go to Chauncy’s and see if this is his stuff. So when I get over to Stowell Road, I hang a right and keep on walking until I get to Miller Street. Then I walk and walk and walk some more until finally there’s Orange Street.

And I walked down Orange Street like I didn’t have a care in the world. I picked up a stick and ran it across
Chauncy’s neighbor’s picket fence, slapped the
FOR SALE
sign with it, and then poked my way through the bush tunnel and right up to Chauncy’s door like I’d done it a hundred times before. My heart wasn’t thumping, my knees weren’t bumping; I just pounded on the door and hollered, “Chauncy! Open up! Hey, Chauncy, it’s Sammy! Open up!”

But he didn’t open up. And pretty soon I’m tired of banging my fist on his splinters, and I’m thinking that maybe he can’t hear me because he’s out back watching Fuzzball.

So around back I go, ducking branches and thorns like I own the place, and, sure enough, there’s Chauncy, up to his forehead in binoculars. And since the rusty old chair he’d used the last time I visited was still out, I just sat down and waited.

And waited and waited. And when he finally takes the binoculars down and looks at me, he says, “You’re … per … sistent”—the way most people would say, You stink.

I just smile at him and pop a candlestick on his rusty little table. “This yours?”

At first he stares at it, then he stares at me. Then he picks it up like it’s made of crystal instead of tin, and he nods as he turns it over and over.

I tug the other one out of the sack. “Are you
sure
they’re yours?”

He holds them both and nods a bit faster.

So I pull out the toaster and say, “How about this?”

Well a toaster was about the last thing Chauncy expected
me to pull out of my little bag of tricks. He scratches his head. “Where … have … you … 
been?
”

So I told him everything. Including how it had cost me nearly twenty bucks to get his stuff out of CeCe’s store.

The minute he hears about the money, what’s he do? He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. And while he’s piecing together twenty bucks, my eyes kind of bug out and I say, “When’d you get your wallet back?”

He hands me the money, then flips his wallet closed. “Police. Found … near … mall.”

I think about this a minute. “Was anything missing from it?”

Chauncy shakes his head no.

“Was Officer Borsch the one who brought it back?”

He nods.

“Did he have anything else to say—like who their suspects are?”

“No.”

I kind of mumble, “Figures,” and for a split second I thought I saw a little twinkle in Chauncy’s eye, but it was gone before it was really there.

We sit a minute, and then I ask, “Have you found anything else missing?
Anything?
”

There goes his head again, shaking back and forth.

“Well have you
looked?
”

He gives me half a shrug and looks the other way.

Now with all this shaking and shrugging he’s doing, I’m getting pretty frustrated. So I take the toaster and stuff it back into the sack and say, “Okay, you tell me—why
would someone come into your house and steal some stuff he didn’t want?”