The Shadow Year (8 page)

By the time I was in the kitchen the next morning, fixing a bowl of cereal, Jim had already been out in the backyard studying the scene of the crime.

“The ladder was up against the house,” he said.

“Any footprints?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Your father is contacting the police about it from work today,” called my mother from the dining room.

Jim leaned in close to me and whispered, “We gotta catch this guy.”

I nodded.

I went to school, my head full of worry, only to learn something that almost made me laugh with joy. At recess Tim Sullivan told me that his father had said that the police were going to dredge the lake for Charlie Edison. I couldn't believe how lucky I was. It was as if someone had read my mind, and not just that, they were doing something about it. I suppose it only made sense, given the circumstances of Charlie's disappearance, but for me it was a relief.

That afternoon Krapp announced that the police were going to be “searching” the lake for Charlie on Saturday and they had asked all the teachers to announce that no kids
were allowed near the school field or in the woods on the weekend. Part of our homework assignment was to tell our parents.

“We'll go into the woods behind the Halloways' house,” Jim said later that day after I'd told him. We were in his room, and he was supposed to be doing his homework. “The cops will have guys at the school field and maybe over on Minerva, but they probably won't be that far into the woods. We'll take the binoculars.”

I nodded.

“Can you imagine if they pull him out of the lake?” he said, staring at the floor as if he were seeing it before his eyes. “We'll have to get up and go early.”

I wasn't so sure I wanted to see them dredge Charlie up, but I knew I had to go. “If they find him, does that mean he fell in or someone threw him in there?” I asked.

“Who do I look like, Sherlock Holmes?” he said.

After that he gave me instructions to rig the ladder the next day after school. “Get two old soda cans and fill them with pebbles,” he said. “Tie one to one end of the ladder with fishing line and one to the other end the same way. If he comes at night and tries to take it, we'll hear him and let George out.”

The week dragged in anticipation of the Saturday dredging. Mary sat with me the following afternoon as I worked at setting up the ladder. It lay along the fence on the right-hand side of the yard, near the clothesline. She had counted the number of pebbles I put into the first can and would not let me tie the second one on until it contained the exact same number.

“Two more,” she said when I figured I was done. I looked over at her, and she lifted her hand. First the index finger came up and then, slowly, the thumb. I laughed and put another two in.

“So Charlie's in the lake,” I said as I tied the second can
in place. I had not yet spoken to her about her Botch Town revelation.

“He'll be in the lake,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“He'll be in the lake.”

I went out on my bike looking for someone to write about and passed Mr. Barzita's house. He was such a quiet old man that I'd almost forgotten he lived on our block. There he was, though, raking leaves in his front yard. He had lived alone since his wife died, back when I was only seven. His property was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and instead of opting for the usual open lawn, he had long ago planted rows of fig trees, so that his house was obscured by a small orchard. Even though he lived in solitude, rarely emerging from his front gate, he always smiled and waved to us kids when we rode by on our bikes, and he would come to the fence to talk to grown-ups.

Mr. Barzita was one of those old people who seemed to be shrinking and would simply fade away rather than die of old age. During the winter I never saw him, but every spring he reappeared, more wizened than the year before. On the hottest summer days, he'd sit in his chaise lounge among the fig trees, sipping wine, holding a loaded pellet pistol in his lap. When squirrels invaded his yard to get at the figs, he'd shoot them. If you yelled to him, “How many?” he'd hold whatever his kill was up by the tails.

One Sunday when my father and I were driving by the old man's house, I asked what he thought of Barzita killing the squirrels. My father shrugged. He told me, “That guy was in the medical corps in the army during the Second World War. He was stationed at a remote mountain base in Europe, and there was an outbreak of meningitis—a brain disease, very contagious, very deadly. They asked for volunteers to take care of the sick. He volunteered. They put him and another guy in a locked
room with fifteen infected soldiers. When it was over, he was the only one who came out alive.”

I tried to imagine what it must have been like in that room, the air stale with the last exhalations of dying men.

“A lot of these old farts you see scrabbling around town…” he said. “You'd be surprised.”

Jim looked both ways up and down Willow to check for cars or anyone who might be watching, and then he and I ducked into the Halloways' driveway and behind the hedges. We ran around the side of the house, through the backyard, and down a slope that led to the stream. Jumping the stream, we moved in under the trees. It was a little before eight o'clock on Saturday morning. The sky was overcast, and there was a cold breeze that occasionally gusted, lifting the dead leaves off the floor of the woods and loosing more from the branches above.

We followed a winding path toward East Lake. Jim suggested we not take the most direct route that passed closest to the school yard but that we arc out on a lesser-used trail through moss patches and low scrub. He had Pop's old binoculars slung around his neck, and I carried the Brownie camera. As we neared the lake, Jim warned me to keep quiet and said that if we were spotted, we should split up; he'd head toward the railroad tracks, and I'd go back the way we came. I nodded, and from that point on, we only whispered.

After jumping the snaking stream twice more, from mossy hillock to root bole, from sandbank to solid dirt, we came in view of the lake. Jim crouched and motioned for me to get down too.

“The cops are there already,” he said. “We'll have to crawl.”

We made our way to within thirty yards of the southern bank of the lake and hunkered down behind a fallen oak. My heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking. Jim peeked up over the trunk and put the binoculars to his eyes.

“It looks like they just got started,” he said. “There's five guys. Two on the bank and three in a flat-bottom boat with a little electric motor.”

I looked and saw what he had described. Coming off the back of the boat were two ropes attached to winches with hand cranks. The boat was moving along slowly, trolling the western side of the lake. Then I noticed some of the neighbors standing on the opposite bank. Mr. Edison was there, a big man with a bald head and a mustache. He wore his gas-station uniform and stood, eyes downcast, arms folded across his chest. It was the first I'd seen of him since Charlie had gone missing. Beside him was his next-door neighbor, Mr. Felina. There were a few other people I didn't recognize, but when one of them moved to the side, I caught sight of Krapp. There he stood, dressed in his usual short-sleeved white shirt and tie, his hairdo flatter than his personality.

“Krapp's here,” I whispered.

Jim turned the binoculars to focus on the group I'd been looking at. “Jeez, you're right,” he said.

“Wonder what he's doing here?” I said.

“I think he's crying,” said Jim. “Yeah, he's drying his eyes. Man, I always knew he was a big pussy.”

“Yeah,” I said, but the thought of Krapp both showing up and crying struck me.

Jim swung the binoculars back to see what the cops were doing. He reported to me that at the ends of those ropes they had these big steel hooks with four claws each. Every once in a while, they'd stop moving and reel them in by turning the hand
cranks. He gave me an inventory of what they brought up—pieces of trees, the rusted handlebars of a bike, the partial skeleton of either a dog or fox…and on and on. They slowly covered the entire lake and then started again.

“He's not down there,” said Jim. “So much for Mary's predictions.”

I peered back over the fallen trunk and watched for a while, braver now that I probably wasn't going to see Charlie. We sat there in the cold for two straight hours, and I started to shiver. “Let's go home,” I whispered.

“Okay,” said Jim. “They're almost done.” Still he sat watching, and our hiding and spying reminded me of the prowler.

From out on the lake, one of the cops yelled, “Hold up, there's something here!” I stuck my head up to watch. The cop started turning the crank, reeling the rope. “Looks like clothing,” he called to the other cops on the bank. “Wait a second….” he said. He reeled more quickly then.

Something broke the surface of the water near the back of the boat. It looked like a soggy body at first, but it was hard to tell. There were definitely pants and a shirt. Then the head came into view, big and gray, with a trunk.

“Shit,” said Jim.

“Mr. Blah-Blah,” I whispered.

“Hand me the camera,” said Jim. “I gotta get a picture of this.”

He snapped it, returned the camera to me, and then motioned for me to follow him. We got down on all fours and crawled slowly away from the fallen tree. Once our escape was covered by enough trees and bushes, we got to our feet and ran like hell.

We stood behind the Halloways' place, still in the cover of the woods, and worked to catch our breath.

“Blah-Blah,” said Jim, and laughed.

“Did you put him in there?” I asked.

“Blah,” he said, and shook his head. “Nah, Softee molested him and threw him in there.”

“Get out,” I said.

“Probably Mason and his horrible dumpling sisters found him and took him to the lake. They're always back here in the woods,” he said. “We should have had Mary predict where Mr. Blah-Blah would be.”

“But then where's Charlie?” I asked.

He brushed past me and jumped the stream.

I followed him and stayed close as we ran through the Halloways' backyard and around the house to the street.

When we got home, I was relieved to find that my mother wasn't sitting at the dining-room table. The door to Nan and Pop's was open. I could hear Pop in there figuring his system out loud, and, without looking, I knew that Mary was beside him. Jim took the camera and binoculars upstairs, and I walked down the hallway toward my parents' room to see if my mother was up yet. She wasn't in her bed, but when I passed by the bathroom door, I heard her in there retching.

I knocked once. “Are you all right?” I called.

“I'll be out in a second,” she said.

It had been obvious since the start of the school year that Mr. Rogers, the librarian, had been losing his mind. During his lunch break, when we were usually laboring over math in Krapp's class, the old man would be out on the baseball diamond walking the bases in his rumpled suit, hunched over, talking to himself as if he were reliving some game from the distant past. That loose dirt that collected around the bases, the soft brown powder that Pinky Steinmacher ate with a spoon, would lift up in a strong wind, circling Rogers, and he'd clap as if the natural commotion were really the roar of the crowd. Krapp would look over his shoulder from where he stood at the blackboard and see us all staring out the window, shake his head, and then go and lower the blinds.

The loss of his giant dictionary seemed to be the last straw for Rogers, as if it had been an anchor that kept him from floating away. With that gone, as my father would say, “he dipped out.” Each week we would be delivered to the library by Krapp and spend a half hour there with Rogers. Of late the old man had been smiling a lot, like a dog on a hot day, and his eyes were always busy, shifting back and forth. Sometimes he'd stand for minutes on end, staring into a beam of light shining in through the window, and sometimes he'd be frantic, moving
here and there, pulling books off the shelves and shoving them into kids' hands.

Bobby Harweed was brutal to him, making gestures behind the librarian's back, coaxing everyone to laugh (and you had to laugh if Bobby wanted you to). Bobby would knock books off the shelf onto the floor and just leave them there. For Rogers to see a book on the floor was a heartache, and one day Harweed had him nearly in tears. I secretly liked Rogers, because he loved books, but he was beginning to put off even me with his weirdness.

On the Monday morning following the dredging, we had library. Rogers sat in his little office nearly the entire time we were there, bent over his desk with his face in his hands. Harweed started the rumor that he kept
Playboy
magazines in there. When the half hour was almost up, Rogers came out to stamp the books kids had chosen to borrow. Before he sat down at the table with his stamp, he walked up behind me, put one hand on my shoulder, and reached up over my head to the top shelf, from which he pulled a thin volume.

“You'll need this,” he said, and handed it to me. He walked away to the table then and began stamping books.

I glanced down at the book. On the cover, behind the library plastic, was a drawing of a mean-looking black dog; above the creature, in serif type,
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I never got the chance. News spread quickly through the school the next day that he had been fired because he went nuts.

Having the
Baskervilles
in my possession was, at first, an unsettling experience. It felt like I had taken some personal belonging of my mother's, just as if I had stolen my father's watch or Nan's hairnet. The book itself had an aura of power that prevented me from simply opening the cover and beginning. I hid it in my room, between the mattress and box spring of the
bed. For the next few days, I'd take it out every now and then and hold it, look at the cover, gingerly flip the pages. Although by this time my mother used the big red volume of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
only as an anvil in her sleep, there had been a time when she'd read it avidly over and over. She'd read a wide range of other books as well but always returned to detective stories. She loved them in every form and, before we went broke, spent Sunday mornings consuming five cups of coffee and a dozen cigarettes, solving the mystery of the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

Painting, playing the guitar, making bizarre collages—those were mere hobbies compared to my mother's desire to be a mystery writer. Before work became a necessity for her, she'd sit at the dining-room table all afternoon, the old typewriter in front of her, composing her own mystery novel. I remembered her reading some of it to me. The title was
Something by the Sea,
and it involved her detective Milo, a farting dog, a blind heiress, and a stringed instrument to be played with different-colored glass tubes that fit over one's fingers. Something by the Sea was the name of the resort where the story took place. All the while she wrote it, she kept
Holmes
by her side, opened to
The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Thinking about my mother one night, I wondered if maybe there was something in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
that could tell me something secret about her. I passed up Perno Shell and pulled the book out from under the mattress. That night I stayed up late and read the first few chapters. In them I met Holmes and Watson. The book wasn't hard to read. I was interested in the story and liked the character of Watson very much, but Holmes was something else.

The great detective came across to me like a snob, the type my father once described as “believing that the sun rose and set from his asshole.” I imagined him to be a cross between Perno
Shell and Phileas Fogg, but his personality was pure Krapp. When told about the demon hound, Holmes replied that it was an interesting story for those who believed in fairy tales. He was obviously “not standing for it.” Still, I was intrigued by his voluminous smoking and the fact that he played the violin.