Who Won the War? (7 page)

Caroline's lips moved.
“Darkness there and nothing more,”
she whispered.

“What?” said the custodian, quickly pulling on the rope that lifted the canvas.

“ 'Tis the wind and nothing more,”
said Caroline.

“Didn't you go to school here last year?” the custodian asked, studying her closely as the scenery rose in the air.

And Caroline answered,
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

Eight
Emergency

W
ally was sitting on the roof of his house when he heard the siren. Josh had taken Peter to Jake and Eddie's summer baseball game, but Wally said that if he was going to be roasted alive, he'd do it where there was a little breeze, thank you.

Besides, shade from the beech tree fell on the widow's walk—the small fenced-in patch of roof with the trapdoor in the middle that led down to the attic. It was supposedly the place where the wives of sea captains stood, looking out to the ocean for any sight of their long-lost husbands. Except that there was no ocean in Buckman. Only the river, not more than three feet deep in most places.

Wally had been standing perfectly still, trying to see if he could detect the direction of the wind. Actually, it was so hot and still and humid that he couldn't feel
any wind at all.
It must be a hundred and ten degrees up here
, he thought, and he wondered if he could fry an egg on the shingles.

Then he heard the ambulance coming down College Avenue, and he saw it turning in, farther on, at the school.

What could have happened at the school?
Wally asked himself. Nobody was there! It was vacation. Maybe the custodian had fallen off a ladder or something. Wally quickly crawled through the trapdoor and climbed down the ladder to the attic floor, then the stairs to the second floor, then the stairs all the way down to the first.

He jumped onto his bike and was halfway up the street toward the school when he saw the ambulance pulling out of the school driveway and heading for the hospital.

Wally pedaled as fast as he could, forgetting the heat. At last he would have something exciting to tell the family at dinner. Nobody else seemed interested in Wally's observations on mockingbirds or wind direction, but he knew he could capture the twins' attention, at least, if he could say he had chased an ambulance all the way to the hospital.

It wasn't far, and when Wally got there, he could see the two attendants wheeling somebody in on a stretcher.

Wally left his bike by the door and ran inside. The attendants were heading toward a glass door farther on. Wally raced after them and found Caroline

Malloy on the stretcher with her hands crossed over her chest.

“Caroline!” Wally gasped.

“Wally!” she said weakly, sounding as though she might cry.

But before they could say any more, the glass door closed in his face. All he could think was that maybe there had been an explosion at the school and that Mad Bomber Bill had got Caroline and it was all Wally's fault for not showing that shopping list with
Dynamite
on it to the police.

Wally sat down on a chair in the hallway. He twisted and turned and tried to see through the glass door. He untied both shoelaces and retied them. He pulled his knees up to his chest and stretched his T-shirt over them, then dropped his feet to the floor again. He listened to the names of doctors being called over the hall speaker and wondered if any were hurrying down to take care of Caroline.

At last a nurse came through the glass door. Wally leaped up.

“What happened?” he asked the nurse.

She stopped. “To whom?”

“Caroline Malloy! I saw them bring her in!” said Wally miserably.

“Is she a friend of yours?” asked the nurse.

“Yes,” said Wally. “It … it wasn't dynamite, was it?”

“Dynamite?” the nurse said. “Of course not! Something fell on her at the school, and we don't get
any answer at her house. Could you contact her parents for us?”

Something
fell
on her?
Wally's feet felt as though they were stuck to the floor. He couldn't move! Caroline was dying and he had to go tell her mother?

Hi, Mrs. Malloy. I just came to tell you that Caroline is dying.

Hello, Mrs. Malloy. Your youngest daughter is dead.

Good afternoon, Mrs. Malloy. Well, it's not a good afternoon for you, anyway. In fact, it's probably the most awful afternoon of your life, because something fell on Caroline at the school and I'm here to deliver the sad news that your youngest daughter is no more. Passed on. Deader than a doornail.

No, this wouldn't do at all.

The nurse was looking at him strangely. “Would you possibly know where her parents are?”

Wally figured that Beth had gone to the baseball game to watch Eddie play, and Mrs. Malloy was probably off doing errands or something.

“I'll see if I can find her mom,” Wally said.

“Tell her that Caroline wasn't seriously hurt, but school policy is to call an ambulance if someone has an accident on the premises. We'll probably take her up to X-ray, but we can't let her go home until a parent gets here.”

So she
wasn't
dying!

Wally got back on his bike and headed for the road bridge leading to Island Avenue.

As he crossed the bridge, he saw Mrs. Malloy's car
ahead of him, just turning into the driveway of the Malloy house. Wally rode up behind her.

“Hello, Wally,” Mrs. Malloy called, getting out of her car and pulling two empty boxes from the backseat. “How are you?”

“I'm fine, but Caroline's not,” said Wally. “Something fell on her at the school and she's at the hospital.”

“What?”
cried Mrs. Malloy, dropping the boxes.

“She's okay, I think. But the nurse said for me to come and get you.”

“What
happened?
Why was she at the school?” cried Caroline's mother.

“I don't know; I'm only the messenger,” said Wally miserably.

Mrs. Malloy jumped back into the car and turned around so fast that she ran over one of the boxes. Soon the car was out of sight.

Wally rode down the hill to the swinging bridge and walked his bike across. Two more days and the Malloys would be gone. If he could just lie low for two more days—forty-eight hours—he could stop worrying that some terrible thing would happen and that he would be stuck with the Malloys forever.

Stranger things had happened. Suppose Mr. Malloy died of heatstroke in Ohio and Mrs. Malloy put the girls in the car to go home for the funeral and she was so upset that the car went off the bridge and the only person who survived was Caroline. And suppose his own mother said, “Poor Caroline! She has no one to
take her in. We'll have to adopt her, and she can be your little sister, Wally. She'll be moving into your room and you can bunk with Peter.”

Wally felt sort of sick. What if Caroline was hurt worse than the nurse thought? What if the X-rays showed that a broken bone had punctured her heart? What if she died here in Buckman and the Hatfords went to the funeral, and, because Wally had been in her class, he had to stand up in the front of the church and say nice things about her? What if he had to lie and say she was a true and loyal friend and her death left a hole in his heart forever?

Wally went into the house, lay down on the couch, and pulled a pillow over his head.

Nine
Oh, No!

T
here were no broken bones in Caroline's body, but Mrs. Malloy said she almost felt like breaking somebody's neck if anybody caused her any more trouble in the next two days. She said she didn't care if Caroline wanted to be onstage more than anything else in the world. Caroline ought to have had more sense than to go sneaking into a school where she shouldn't have been, and Mrs. Malloy told the girls' father this when he called to tell them that Ohio was really suffering in the heat wave.

“No more than we are here, George,” she said. “It's so hot, I'm almost afraid to let Eddie play ball.”

Nonetheless, she told him, as she had told the girls, the moving van was coming on schedule on Wednesday. It was due at eight in the morning, and as soon as all the furniture was out, she was turning the
house over to a cleaning crew to get it ready for the Bensons' return. She and the girls had been invited to the Hatfords' for brunch before they left town, and wasn't that nice of Mrs. Hatford?

There was too much to do to even think about the Hatfords, and Caroline realized that perhaps they would see them for the last time on Wednesday and that would be that. Suddenly, after all the pranks and teasing and horseplay and fighting and laughing and swimming and walking to school together, it all would be over.
Poof!

Beth was certainly happy. Her fantasy story about the Shanatee Indians had won second place in the library's short story contest. Eddie and Jake's team had tied for first place in summer baseball, and the league had called off the last game because of the heat.

But cars were pouring into Buckman from east and west and north and south because the college was celebrating its hundredth anniversary. For four days, every hotel, motel, boardinghouse, and bed-and-breakfast was full, not a single room available within thirty miles of Buckman. There were very few parking spaces as well.

“It's a good time to be getting out of town,” Mrs. Malloy said to her girls. “If your father were still working for the college, I'd have to go to every tea and dinner and concert there was. I've never been so glad to go around in shorts and sandals as I am now. We're leaving town just in time.”

Caroline tried to stay out of trouble. Her mother
did not need one more aggravation, that was certain. The heat made everyone short-tempered and miserable, so people tended to stay indoors in air-conditioning. This, of course, meant that they had more opportunity to get in each other's way.

The Hatford boys did not come over, and the Malloy girls did not go over to the boys' house. No one mentioned the old coal mine, and that was just as well. The swinging bridge between them remained deserted, as the muddy river beneath it moved sluggishly downstream.