Summer of Night

TWELVE

After seeing Jim Harlen, Duane sat in the shade on the courtyard square for several minutes, drinking coffee from his Thermos and thinking. He didn't know Jim well enough to know if he was telling the truth about not remembering what had happened on Saturday night. If he wasn't telling the truth, why the lie? Duane sipped coffee and considered possibilities:

(A) Something had scared Harlen so badly that he wouldn't ... or couldn't . . . talk about it.

(B) Someone had told him not to talk and backed it up with sufficient threat to make Harlen obey.

(C) Harlen was protecting someone.

Duane finished his coffee, screwed the lid on the Thermos, and decided that the last possibility was the least likely. The first choice seemed the most likely, although there was nothing but a feeling Duane had to suggest that Jim Harlen had been lying. Any head injury serious enough to leave someone unconscious for more than twenty-four hours certainly could leave that person without memory of the injury.

Duane decided that it would be safest to assume that Jim did not remember what happened. Perhaps later.

He crossed the square to the library and hesitated before going in. What did he expect to find here that would help O'Rourke and company find out anything about Tubby, Van Syke, Harlen's injury, Duane's own close call, or anything else? Why the library? Why look at the history of Old Central when it was obviously some individual bit of insanity-or probably just Van Syke's perversity-that was behind these seemingly random events?

Duane knew why he was going to the library. He'd grown up searching out things there-answering the many private mysteries that arose in the mind of a kid too smart for his own good. The library was a no-questions-asked, private source of information. There had to be many intellectual puzzles that could not be solved by a visit-or many visits-to a good library, but Duane McBride hadn't found one yet.

Besides, he realized, this whole tempest-in-a-teacup mystery had begun because of his and the other kids' bad feeling about Old Central. It was something that had bothered Duane and the others long before Tubby Cooke disappeared. This research was overdue.

Duane sighed, set his Thermos behind a bush alongside the library steps, and went inside.

It took more hours than Duane had expected, but eventually he found most of what he wanted.

Oak Hill Library had only one microfiche machine and few things actually on microfiche. For the history of Elm Haven-and of Old Central in particular-he had to go back into the stacks for the locally published and bound books kept there by the Creve Coeur County Historical Society. Duane knew that the Historical Society actually had been one man-Dr. Paul Priestmann, former professor at Bradley University and a local historian who had died less than a year earlier-but the ladies who had collected money to publish Dr. Priestmann's books, the last volume posthumously Duane discovered, kept the Society alive even if only in name.

Old Central had a prominent part in the history of Elm Haven-and in Creve Coeur County, Duane discovered-and it took half of his notebook to record the pertinent parts. Every time Duane visited this library, he wished that it had one of the new Xerox copying machines that businesses were beginning to use. It would make the job of copying information from reference books one couldn't check out ever so much easier.

Duane looked at the pages of old photographs Dr. Priestmann had set in to illustrate the construction of Old Central . . . just Central School in 1876 . . . and then more pages, the photos sepia tinted and frozen in the formality of early, slow photography, showing the opening ceremonies in the late summer of 1876, the Old Settlers' Picnic held on the school grounds in August of that year, the first class to enter Central-29 students who must have been lost in that huge building-and ceremonies at Elm Haven's train depot as the bell arrived earlier that summer.

The large-print caption under the last photo read: Mr. and Mrs. Ashley and Mayor Wilson Greet Borgia Bell for New School. And the subcaption went on: Historic bell to be crowning achievement for Elm Haven's citadel of learning and pride of County.

Duane paused. The belfry on Old Central had been boarded and sealed for as long as he could remember. He had never heard any mention of a bell, much less of something called a Borgia Bell.

Duane leaned close to the page. In the old photograph, the bell was still in its crate on the flatcar, the bell itself partially in shadow, but obviously huge: it stood almost twice as tall as the two men on the flatcar who stood shaking hands in the center of the picture-the better-dressed man with mustaches and a well-dressed woman hovering near his side probably Mr. Ashley; the shorter, bearded and bowler-hatted man perhaps Mayor Wilson. The base of the bell looked to be eight or nine feet wide. Although the ancient photo was of too poor a quality to give much detail-a carriage on the far side of the tracks seemed to be hitched to two phantom horses because the time exposure was too slow to capture their movements-Duane used his glasses as a magnifying glass to make out metal scrollwork or some sort of inscriptions running in a band around the bell about two-thirds of the way up.

He sat back and tried to imagine how much a bell ten or twelve feet tall and eight feet wide might weigh. He couldn't do the math, but the mere thought of it hanging on rotted timbers above his and the other kids' heads over the past years made the flesh on his neck go cold. Surely it couldn't still be there.

For the next few hours, Duane pored through the Historical Society books and spent a dusty hour in the "archives"-a long, narrow room off the room where Mrs. Frazier and the other library employees ate their lunch-going through the tall books holding old copies of the Oak Hill Sentinel Times-Call, the local paper that Duane's Old Man invariably referred to as the Sentimental Times-Crawl.

Newspaper articles from the summer of 1876 were the most informative, going on in their overwrought, hyperbolic Victorian style about the "Borgia Bell" and its place in history. Evidently Mr. and Mrs. Ashley had discovered the artifact in a warehouse on the outskirts of Rome during their honeymoon-cum-Grand Tour of the Continent, verified its authenticity via local and imported historians, and then purchased the thing for six hundred dollars to be the piece de resistance for the school the Ashley family had been so instrumental in building.

Duane scribbled quickly, filling one notebook and going into his spare. The story of the Borgia Bell's shipment from Rome to Elm Haven took up at least five newspaper articles and several pages of Dr. Priestmann's book: the bell seemed-at least in the lurid prose of the Victorian correspondents-to bring bad luck to everyone and everything associated with it. After the Ashleys purchased the bell and set sail for the States, the warehouse the thing had been stored in burned to the ground, killing three local people who apparently had been living in the old structure. Most of the unnamed and uncatalogued artifacts in the warehouse were destroyed, but the Borgia Bell had been found sooty but intact. The freighter carrying the bell to New York-a British ship, the H.M.S. Erebus-almost foundered during an offseason storm near the Canary Islands: the damaged freighter was towed to harbor and its cargo transferred, but not before five crewmen drowned, another was killed during a sudden shifting of cargo in the hold, and the captain was disgraced.

No disasters seemed to accompany the bell's month-long storage in New York, but some confusion in labeling almost left the thing lost there. Some of the Ashley family's New York lawyers tracked down the missing piece of history, had a major reception for the bell at New York's Natural History Museum, where attendees included Mark Twain, P. T. Bar-num, and the original John D. Rockefeller, and then loaded it aboard a freight train bound for Peoria. There the spell of bad luck seemed to reassert itself: the train derailed near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and its replacement was involved in a trestle collapse just outside of Richmond, Indiana. The press accounts were unclear, but apparently no one was killed in either accident.

The bell finally arrived in Elm Haven on July 14, 1876, and was ensconced in its reinforced belfry several weeks later-that summer's Old Settlers' Fair used the bell as its centerpiece and there were numerous dedications, including one which involved bringing in Peoria- and Chicago-based historians and grandees on specially laid-on railroad cars.

Evidently the thing was in the belfry in time for the beginning of school on the third of September that year, for a news tintype of the opening day of Creve Coeur County schools showed an Old Central in a town strangely devoid of trees, under the caption: Historic Bell Rings Local School Children to New Era of Learning.

Duane sat back in the archives room, mopped sweat from his face with the tail of his flannel shirt, closed the stiff-boarded newspaper volume, and wished that the excuse he had given Mrs. Frazier for his work in here had been true-that he had been planning to do a paper on Old Central and its bell.

But no one seemed to remember that the bell was there. After another hour and a half's research, Duane had come up with only three other references to the bell-and none of them referred to it any longer as the Borgia Bell. Dr. Priestmann's book reprinted early captions calling the thing the Borgia Bell, but nowhere did the local historian himself refer to it as such. The closest reference Duane could find was a paragraph mentioning-"the massive bell, reported to date from the Fifteenth Century and quite possibly being that old, which Mr. Charles Catton Ashley and his wife purchased for the county during their tour of Europe in the winter of 1875."

It was only after reading through four volumes of the Historical Society's books that Duane realized that there was a volume missing. The 1875-1885 volume was intact, but it was mostly photographs and highlights. Dr. Priestmann had written a more detailed and scholarly account of the other years of the decade under the general heading Monographs, Documentation, and Primary Sources, with the dates indicated in brackets: 1876 simply was not there.

Duane went downstairs to talk to Mrs. Frazier. "Excuse me, ma'am, but could you tell me where the Historical Society keeps its other papers these days?"

The librarian smiled and lowered her glasses on their beaded chain. "Yes, dear. You must know that Dr. Priestmann passed away ..."

Duane nodded and looked attentive.

"Well, since neither Mrs. Cadberry nor Mrs. Esterhazy . . . our ladies who were responsible for the fund-raisers to support the Society . . . since neither of them wished or were able to continue Dr. Priestmann's research, they donated his papers and other volumes."

Duane nodded again. "To Bradley?" It made sense that the old scholar's papers would go to the university from which he had graduated and at which he had spent so many years teaching.

Mrs. Frazier looked surprised. "Why no, dear. The papers went to the family who had really supported Dr. Priestmann's research for all those years. I believe it had been arranged previously."

"The family ..." began Duane.

"The Ashley-Montague family," said Mrs. Frazier. "Certainly being from Elm Haven ... or living near there . . . certainly you've heard of the Ashley-Montagues."

Duane nodded, thanked her, made sure all of the books were reshelved properly and that his notebooks were in his pockets, went outside to retrieve his Thermos, and was shocked at how late it had grown. Evening shadows stretched from the trees and lay across the courthouse grounds and the main street. A few cars moved down the highway, their tires hissing on the cooling concrete and making galloping sounds on the tarpatched joints in the pavement, but the downtown itself was emptying out toward evening.

Duane considered going back to the hospital to talk to Jim again, but it was around dinnertime and he guessed that Harlen's mother would be there. Besides, it was still a two-to three-hour walk home the long way, and the Old Man might worry if Duane were out after dark.

Whistling, thinking about the Borgia Bell hanging dark as a forgotten secret in the boarded-up belfry of Old Central, Duane headed for the railroad tracks and home.

Mike gave up. He'd tried hard on Monday afternoon and again all day Tuesday to find Karl Van Syke in order to follow him around, but the man wasn't to be found. Mike tried hanging around Old Central, saw Dr. Roon show up shortly after eight-thirty on Tuesday morning, and watched until a bunch of workmen with a cherry picker-but no Van Syke-showed up an hour later to start putting boards over the second- and third-floor windows. Mike continued to hang around the door of the school until Roon chased him away in midmorning.

Mike checked the places one might usually see Van Syke. Carl's Tavern downtown had three or four of the usual drunks hanging around-including Duane McBride's dad, Mike was sorry to see-but no Van Syke. Mike used the phone in the A&P to call the Black Tree Tavern, but the bartender said that he hadn't seen Van Syke in weeks and who was this calling? Mike hung up fast. He walked up to Depot Street, checked out J. P. Congden's house because he knew Van Syke and the fat justice of the peace hung out together a lot, but the black Chevy wasn't there and the house looked empty.

Mike considered hiking out the tracks to hang around the old tallow plant, but he felt sure that Van Syke wouldn't be there. For a while, he just lay in the tall grass out by the ball diamond, chewing on a stalk of grass and watching the little bit of traffic that went out First Avenue past the water tower; mostly farmers' dusty pickups and big old cars. No Rendering Truck with Van Syke at the wheel.

Mike sighed and rolled over on his back, squinting at the sky. He knew he should hike out to Calvary Cemetery and check out the shed there, but he couldn't. It was that simple. The memory of the shed, the soldier, and the figure in the yard last night lay across Mike's chest like a heavy weight.

He rolled over and watched Kevin Grumbacher's dad's chrome-silver dairy truck coming in from Jubilee College Road. It wasn't noon yet and Mr. Grumbacher was almost done with his day's work collecting milk from all the county's dairy farms. Mike knew that the truck would head off for the Cahill Dairy twelve miles east, right at the head of the Spoon River Valley, and then Mr. G. would be finished for the day except to come home, rinse the truck, and fill it with fuel again from the gas pump he had on the west side of their house.

By rolling on his left side, Mike could see the Grumbach-ers' new house under the elms next to Dale's big old Victorian house. Mr. G. had bought Mrs. Carmichael's old abandoned place on Depot Street about five years ago, just before Dale's family had moved to Elm Haven, and the Grumbachers had razed the old house and put up the only new ranchhouse-style home in the old section of town. Mr. Grumbacher himself had used a bulldozer to raise the level of the soil so the low home sat higher than the windows on the east side of Dale's house.

Mike always felt funny the few times he'd been in Kev's home. It was air conditioned-the only air-conditioned place Mike had ever been except for Ewaits' movie theater over in Oak Hill-and it smelled funny. Stale, but not really stale. It was as if the cool scent of the concrete-and-pine two-by-fours and fresh carpet still filled the house even after four years of the people living there. Of course, it never really looked to Mike that people actually lived there: the Grumbachers' living room had plastic runners on the floor and a crinkly plastic on the expensive couch and chairs, the kitchen was bright and spotless-it held the first dishwashing machine and eating counter Mike had ever seen in a home-and the dining room looked like Mrs. G. polished the long cherry table every morning.

The few times Mike and the other kids were allowed to play in Kevin's house, they went straight to the basement ... or what Kev called the "wreck room" for some reason. There was a Ping-Pong table there, and a TV-Kev said they had two more television sets upstairs-and an elaborate electric-train layout filling half the back room. Mike would have loved to play with the trains, but Kev wasn't allowed to touch the controls unless his dad was there, and Mr. G. slept most afternoons. There was also a long galvanized steel water trough in the back room-the metal as bright and clean as everything else in the house-which Kevin said his dad had put in so the two of them could play with motorized boats the two made in their spare time. But Mike, Dale, and the other kids were only allowed to watch the boats, not touch them or handle the neat radio-control devices.

The gang didn't spend much time in Kev's house.

Mike got to his feet and started walking toward Dale's back fence. He knew he was thinking of dumb things, trying not to think about the soldier.

Dale and Kevin were lying on the grassy incline between the Grumbachers' and Stewarts' driveways, waiting for Lawrence to fly a balsawood glider. Then both of the older boys would fire away with gravel from Dale's driveway, trying to knock the plane out of the sky. Lawrence had to launch and duck fast before the missiles flew.

Mike grabbed some gravel and flopped down on his back next to the two. The trick seemed to be to hit the thing without raising your head from the grass. Lawrence launched and ducked. Rocks flew. The glider looped once, flew toward the big oak tree that sent branches over Dale's bedroom upstairs, and then landed in the driveway untouched. All three grabbed more ammunition while Lawrence retrieved the plane and straightened the wing and tail.

"Gettin' rocks in your side yard," Mike said to Dale. "Going to be tough when you mow."

"I promised Mom we'd pick them up when we're through," said Dale, cocking his arm in anticipation.

Lawrence launched a high one. They all missed on the first ground-to-air attack, each boy unselfconsciously making gun or missile sounds as he threw. Mike hit it with his second throw, smashing the right wing and sending the glider into a spin into the grass. All three of the others made jet-out-of-control and crashing-and-burning sounds. Lawrence slid out the broken wing and ran to a stack of replacement parts by the old stump.

"I can't find Van Syke," Mike said, feeling as if he were in Confession.

Kev was piling launch-sized stones next to himself in the grass. His parents would never let him throw rocks in his yard. "That's OK," he said. "I found Roon this morning, but he isn't doing anything except supervising the windows getting boarded up."

Mike looked. Old Central looked different with all three levels boarded up-four levels if you counted the basement windows, and Mike could just make out that they had removed the screens, boarded those windows, and set the screens back. The school looked weird . . . blind in a strange way. Now only the tiny dormer windows set in the steep roof had glass panes, and few kids Mike knew could throw that high to hit them. The belfry had always been boarded up.

"Maybe this following people around isn't such a great idea," Mike said. Lawrence was putting masking tape around parts of the next plane . . . "armoring it," he said.

"I know it wasn't a good idea for me this morning," said Dale. The other two boys quit playing with their ammunition while Dale explained most of what had happened out on the tracks this morning.

"Jeez," whistled Kevin. "Criminitly."

"What'd Cordie do next?" asked Mike, trying to imagine having a rifle pointed at him. C. J. Congden had picked on Mike a couple a times in the lower grades, but Mike had always fought back so hard, so fast, and so fiercely that the town's two punks tended to leave him alone. Mike glanced at the school. "Did she come in and shoot Dr. Roon?"

"If she did, we haven't heard it," said Dale.

"Maybe she used a silencer," said Mike.

Kev made a face. "Idiot. Shotguns can't have silencers."

"I was kidding, Grump-backer."

"Groom-bokker," Kevin corrected with automatic sullen-ness. He didn't like it when people fooled with his name. Everyone in town said Grum-backer.

"Whatever," said Mike with a sudden grin. He gently tossed a rock at Dale's knee. "So what happened next?"

"Nothing," said Dale. Something in his voice suggested that he was sorry he'd told the others. "I'm keeping a watch out for C. J."

"You didn't tell your mom?"

"Uh-uh. How'm I supposed to explain why I had Dad's binoculars to spy on Cordie Cooke's house? Huh?"

Mike made a face and nodded. Being a Peeping Tom was one thing; doing it at Cordie Cooke's house was worse than weird. "If he comes after you," he said to Dale, "I'll help. Congden's mean but stupid. Archie Kreck's even stupider. Get on Archie's blind side in a fight and it's no contest."

Dale nodded but looked gloomy. Mike knew that his friend wasn't very good in fights. It was one of the reasons Mike liked him. Dale muttered something.

"What?" said Mike. Lawrence was saying something at the same time from the end of the driveway.

"I said I didn't even go back for my bike," Dale said a second time.

Mike recognized the tone of voice as the one he used for his most serious sins during Confession. "Where is it?"

"I hid it behind the old depot."

Mike nodded. To retrieve the bike, Dale would have to go back through Congden's neighborhood. "I'll get it," he said.

Dale looked at him with what looked like a mixture of relief, embarrassment, and anger. The anger, Mike figured, was at feeling so relieved. "Why? Why should you get it? It's my bike."

Mike shrugged, discovered that he was still carrying some of the grass from the field, and chewed on the bottom part of it. "It doesn't make any difference to me. But I'm going up that way to church later, and it makes sense that I get it. Think . . . Congden isn't looking for me. Besides, if I'd had a rifle aimed at my face once today, I wouldn't go looking for another chance. Uh-uh, I'll get it after lunch when I'm up there running an errand for Father C." Mike thought, Another lie. Do I confess this one? He didn't think so.

This time, Dale's expression showed so much pure relief that he had to look down as if he were counting his pile of stones to hide it. "OK," he said faintly. And even more faintly, "Thanks."

Lawrence was standing twenty feet away, "armored" plane poised. "Are you jerks ready or are you gonna keep talking all day?"

"Ready," said Dale.

"Launch!" cried Kevin.

"Duck!" yelled Mike.

The missiles flew.

The Old Man wasn't home when Duane got there just before sunset, so he walked back out through the fields to Wittgenstein's grave.

Witt had always carried his after-dinner and gift bones out to this flat, grassy area in the east pasture, burying them in the soft soil at the top of the hill above the creek. So that's where Duane had buried Witt.

Beyond the pasture and cornfields to the west, the sun hung on the horizon in the thick-aired, full-bellied Illinois sunset that Duane could not imagine living without. The air around him was blue-gray with the end of day and sound traveled with the slow ease of thought. Duane could hear the soft shuffle and wheeze of the cows coming in from the far reaches of pasture even though they were still out of sight over the hill to the north. Smoke hung thick in the air from where old Mr. Johnson had been burning weeds along his fence more than a mile to the south, and the evening tasted of dust and tiredness and the sweet incense of that smoke.

Duane sat next to Witt's small grave while the sun set and the evening allowed itself to go gently into night. Venus appeared first, blazing above the eastern horizon like one of the UFOs that Duane used to sit in this field at night and watch for with Witt lying patiently at his side. Then the other stars moved into the sky, each quite visible this far from any scattered light. The air began to cool off slowly, reluctantly, the humidity still causing Duane's shirt to cling to his ample torso, but eventually the day's heat dissipated and the heaped soil under Duane's hand cooled to the touch. He patted the grave a final time and ambled slowly back to the house, aware again of how different it was to walk alone through the high grass rather than keeping one's pace slow to accommodate an aging and half-blind collie.

The Borgia Bell. He'd wanted to talk to the Old Man about it, but his father wouldn't be in any mood to talk if he'd been at Carl's or the Black Tree all afternoon.

Duane made dinner for himself, frying pork chops in the large skillet, cutting up potatoes and onions with a practiced hand while turning his radio, and listened for a while to WHO from Des Moines. The news on the hour was the usual stuff-Nationalist China was still complaining in the U.N. about Red China's shelling of Quemoy the previous week, but no one in the U.N. seemed to want another Korea; Broadway shows were still shut down by an Actors Equity strike; Senator John Kennedy's people were saying that the once and future candidate was going to give a major foreign-policy speech in Washington the next week, but Ike seemed to be stealing the limelight from all potential candidates by planning a major trip to the Far East; the U.S. was demanding that Gary Powers be returned by the Russians while Argentina was demanding that Israel return the kidnapped Adolf Eichmann. The sports included an announcement of a ban on homemade scaffolds at the Indianapolis 500 of the kind that had collapsed during this year's Memorial Day race, killing a couple of people and injuring almost a hundred more. There was talk of the upcoming rematch between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson.

Duane turned the volume up and listened as he ate alone at the long table. He liked boxing. He'd like to write a story about it someday. Something about Negroes maybe . . . Negroes finding equality through fighting in the ring. Duane had listened to the Old Man and Uncle Art talk about Jackie Johnson years ago, and the memory had stuck in his mind like the plot of a favorite novel. It could be a good novel, Duane thought, if I knew how to write it. And knew enough about boxing and Negroes and Jackie Johnson and life and everything to write it.

The Borgia Bell. Duane finished his dinner, washed the dishes and coffee cup along with the Old Man's breakfast dishes, put them back in the cupboard and walked through the house.

It was dark except for the kitchen light and the old place seemed creakier and eerier than usual. The upstairs, with the Old Man's bedroom deserted, Duane's old room unused, seemed a heavy presence above him. The Borgia Bell, hanging up there in Old Central above us all these years? Duane shook his head and turned on a light in the dining room.

The learning machines sat there in all their dusty glory. Other inventions littered the worktables and floor. The only one that was plugged in or working was the phone-answering device the Old Man had built a couple of winters ago out of pique at missing calls: a simple combination of telephone parts and a small reel-to-reel tape recorder, the device plugged into the phone socket, gave a recorded message, and invited the caller to leave a message.

Almost everybody who called-except Uncle Art-hung up in anger or confusion at having a machine answer the phone, but sometimes the Old Man could tell who was calling by recorded curses or mutters. Besides, Duane's father liked the irritation it caused. Even to the phone company. Ma Bell people had been out to the farm twice, threatening to shut off the McBrides' service if Mr. McBride didn't quit breaking the law by tampering with the phone company's equipment and hookups, not to mention violating federal regulations by tape-recording people's conversations without their permission.

The Old Man had pointed out that these were his conversations, that the people were calling him, that FCC regulations demanded that the person know they were being taped- which he said right on his tape-and, when it came right down to it, Ma Bell was a motherfucking capitalist monopoly and it could go stick its threats and equipment up its corporate ass.

But the threats had kept the Old Man from ever trying to market his answering devices-what he called his "telephonic Jeeves." Duane was just happy they still had a phone.

Duane had refined the Old Man's device in recent months so that a light blinked when there were recorded messages. He'd actually wanted to fix it up so that different-colored lights would glow at the recognition of different voices on the tape-green for Uncle Art, blue for Dale or one of the other kids, flashing red for the phone company guy, and so forth-but while the problem of voice recognition hadn't been too hard to solve . . . Duane had hooked up a rebuilt tone generator to an ID-circuit based on old tape recordings of callers, then made a simple schematic for a feedback loop to the battery of who's-calling lights ... the parts had been too expensive, so he'd quit at having a light blink once for each call on the tape.

The light was off. No messages. There seldom were.

Duane went to the screen door and looked out toward the pole light near the barn. The light threw the driveway turnaround and outbuildings into arc-lamp glare, but made the fields beyond seem even darker. The crickets and tree frogs were very loud tonight.

Duane stood at the door a minute, thinking about how he could get Uncle Art to drive him to Bradley University the next day. Before going back into the dining room to call, however, he did something he'd never done before. He put the hook latch on the screen door and made sure that the rarely used front door was locked.

It would mean that he'd have to stay up until the Old Man got home to let him in, but that was OK. They never locked their doors-not even during those rare times when Duane and the Old Man joined Uncle Art for a weekend in Peoria or Chicago. It just wasn't something they thought of doing.

But Duane didn't want the door unlocked tonight.

He tapped the tiny hook set into the light wood, realized that he could open it himself from the outside with one serious tug or a kick at the screens, smiled at his own foolishness, and went back to call Uncle Art.

Mike's small bedroom was above what had been the parlor but was now Memo's room. The upstairs had no direct heat, merely broad metal grilles that allowed the warm air to rise into the upper rooms. The grille was right beside Mike's bed and he could see the faint glow on his own ceiling of the small kerosene lantern they let burn all night in Memo's room as a night-light. Mike's mother checked on Memo several times each night, and the dim light made it easier. Mike knew that if he got down on his knees and peered through the grille, he could see the dull bundle of bedclothes that were Memo. He wouldn't do that; it would be too much like spying.

But sometimes Mike was sure that he heard Memo's thoughts and dreams come up through the grille. They weren't words or images, but rose to him like half-heard sighs, alternate drafts of warm love or the cold breezes of anxiety. Mike often lay awake in his low-ceilinged room and wondered if Memo died at night when he was here, would he sense her soul rising past him through the grille, pausing to enfold him in its warmth the way her body used to each night when he was little and she stopped by to tuck him in and check on him, the flame of her small kerosene lamp flickering and making a soft hissing in its glass chimney?

Mike lay there and watched the faint leaf shadows stirring on the steeply pitched ceiling. He had no desire for sleep. All afternoon he had been yawning and gritty-eyed from the previous night's lost sleep, but now that darkness and deep night were here, he was afraid to close his eyes. He lay there and tried to stay awake-imagining conversations with Father C, dreaming of the days when his mother still smiled at him and hugged him-when her voice was less sharp to everyone and her tongue dripped Irish sarcasm but not so much bitterness, and finally just dreaming of Michelle Staffney, imagining her red hair-as soft and pretty as his sister Kathleen's but framing intelligent eyes and an expressive mouth rather than his sister's slow gaze and slack features.

Mike was on the verge of drifting off to sleep when he felt a cold breeze brush past him. He snapped awake.

The room was hot even with the small window open. All the day's heat had risen into the upstairs and there was no cross-ventilation to dispel it. But the breeze that had wafted past Mike had been as cold as the drafts that blew through the small room on January nights; and it had carried a cold-meat and frozen-blood smell which Mike associated with the refrigerated lockers where they kept the sides of beef down at the A&P.

Mike rolled out of bed and onto his knees by the grille. The lamplight down there was flickering wildly, as if a windstorm were blowing in the small room. The cold enveloped Mike as surely as if chill hands were seizing his wrists and ankles and throat. He expected to see his mother rush into the room, robe clutched shut and hair awry, checking to see what was wrong-but the house lay still and silent except for the sawing of his father's snores in the back room where his parents slept.

The cold faltered, seemed to withdraw through the grate, and then rose with the force of a January wind through open windows. The kerosene lamp flickered a final time and went out. Mike seemed to hear a moan from the corner of blackness where Memo lay.

Mike jumped to his feet, grabbed a Louisville Slugger from the corner, and flew down the steep staircase, his bare feet making almost no noise on the wooden steps.

Memo's door was always left open a crack. Now it was closed tightly.

Half-expecting the door to be bolted on the inside-an impossibility if Memo were alone-Mike crouched a few seconds outside the room, fingers flat on the door like a fireman feeling for the heat of flames behind the wood-although it was the cold he half-sensed through his fingertips-and then he swung the door wide and went in quickly, baseball bat off his shoulder and ready to be swung.

There was enough light to see that the room seemed empty except for the dark bundle that was Memo and the usual clutter of her framed photographs on every surface, the medicine bottles, the hospital tray table they had bought, the additional useless clutter of her rocking chair, Grandpa's favorite chair sitting in the corner, the old Philco radio that still worked ... all the usual stuff.

But even as he stood there on the balls of his feet, baseball bat poised, Mike felt certain that he and Memo were not alone. The cold air blew and rippled soundlessly around him, a whirlpool of chill, foul-smelling air. Mike had once cleaned out a freezer full of chicken and ground beef at Mrs. Moon's after the electricity had been off for ten days. This smelled like that, only colder and more repellant.

Mike lifted the bat even as the wind blew in his face, whirled around him: cold fingernails rasped at his stomach and back where the pajamas did not cover; a sensation like cold lips brushed the back of his neck; there came a foul breath on his cheeks as if some invisible face were inches from his, exhaling the rot of the grave into his face.

Mike cursed and swung the bat at darkness. The wind whipped around him; he could almost hear its black roar like someone hissing in his ears. The loose papers in the room were not disturbed. There was no external sound except for the faintest rustle of corn in the fields across the street.

Mike choked back a second curse but swung the bat again with both hands, standing in the middle of the room in a stance part batter's, part prizefighter's. The dark wind seemed to retreat to the far corner; Mike took a step toward it, glanced over his shoulder and saw Memo's face pale in the heap of black bedclothes, and stepped back instead so that whatever it was couldn't get around him. To her.

He crouched in front of Memo, feeling her dry breath on his back now-knowing that she was still alive at least-trying to keep the coldness from her with the heat of his own body.

There was a final rustle and curling of breeze, almost like a soft laugh, and the cold rushed out of the open window like black water pouring out a drain.

Suddenly the lamp flickered on, its hissing flame and dancing shadows of gold light startling. Mike onto his feet and causing his heart to leap somewhere near his throat. He stood there with the bat hefted, still waiting.

The cold was gone. The open window admitted only warm June breezes and the sudden resumption of cricket sounds, leaf stirrings.

Mike turned and crouched next to Memo. Her eyes were wide open and the irises looked all black and moist in the light. Mike leaned forward, was reassured by her rapid exhalations, and touched her cheek with his free hand.

"Are you all right, Memo?" Sometimes she seemed to understand and blinked her answers-one blink for yes, two for no. More often these days, there was no response.

One blink. Yes, Mike felt his heart resume its wild pounding. It had been a long time since Memo'd talked to him . . . even in this crude code.

He felt his mouth go completely dry. He uncleaved his tongue from the roof of his mouth and forced the words. "Did you feel that?"

One blink.

"Was something here?"

One blink.

"Was it ... real?"

One blink.

Mike took a deep breath. It was like talking to a mummy except for the blinks, and even those seemed illusory in the half-light. He would have given anything he had or would ever earn in his lifetime if Memo could've talked to him at that second. Even if just for a minute.

He cleared a throat suddenly filled with emotion. "Was it something bad?"

One blink.

"Was it like ... a ghost?"

Two blinks. No.

Mike looked into her stare. Between answers, she did not blink at all. It was like interviewing a corpse.

Mike shook his head to get rid of the traitorous thought.

"Was it ... was it Death?"

One blink. Yes.

When she had answered him, her eyes closed, Mike leaned forward to make sure she was still breathing, and then touched her cheek with his palm again. "It's all right, Memo," he whispered next to her ear. "I'm here. It won't come back tonight. Go to sleep."

He crouched next to her until her choppy, ragged breathing seemed to slow and regulate somewhat. Then he got Grandpa's chair and dragged it close to the bed-even though the rocker would have been infinitely easier to move, he wanted Grandpa's chair-and then he sat in it, the baseball bat still on his shoulder, the chair and him between Memo and the window.

Earlier that evening, a block and a half west of Mike's house, Lawrence and Dale made ready for bed.

They had watched Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges at nine-thirty-their one exception to the nine p.m. bedtime rule-and then gone upstairs, Dale first to enter the darkened room and feel around for the light cord. Even though it was ten o'clock, a faint glow of the near-solstice twilight still came through the windows.

Lying in twin beds separated by only eighteen inches, Dale and his little brother lay whispering for a few moments.

"How come you aren't scared of the dark?" Lawrence asked quietly. He was lying with his panda bear in the crook of his arm. The bear, whom Lawrence insisted on calling Teddy despite Dale's insistence that it was a panda and not a teddy bear, had been won at the monkey-race attraction at Chicago's Riverview Park years before and looked the worse for wear: one eye loose, the left ear almost chewed through, the fur balding around the middle where it had been rubbed off by six years of hugs, and the black string of the mouth unraveling to give Teddy a lopsided, smirking appearance. "Scared of the dark?" said Dale. "It's not dark in here. The night-light's on."

"You know what I mean."

Dale knew what his brother meant. And he knew how hard it was for Lawrence to admit his fear. During the day, the eight-year-old was afraid of nothing. At night he usually asked for Dale to hold his hand so he could get to sleep. "I don't know," said Dale. "I'm older. You're not afraid of the dark when you're older."

Lawrence lay in silence for a minute. Downstairs, their mother's footsteps were barely audible going from the kitchen through the dining room. The footsteps stopped as they reached the carpet of the living room. Their dad was not home from his sales trip yet. "But you used to be scared," said Lawrence, not quite making it a question.

Not as chicken as you, scaredy-cat was the first reply that came to Dale. But it wasn't the time for teasing. "Yeah," he whispered. "A little bit. Sometimes."

"Of the dark?"

"Yeah."

"Of coming in to find the light cord?"

"When I was little in the apartment in Chicago, my room-our room-didn't have a light cord. It had a switch on the wall."

Lawrence raised Teddy to his cheek. "I wished we lived there now."

"Naw," whispered Dale, putting his hands behind his head and watching the leaf shadows move on the ceiling. "This house is a million times neater. And Elm Haven's a lot more fun than Chicago. We had to go to Garfield Park when we wanted to play, and some grown-up had to go with us."

"I sort of remember," whispered Lawrence, who was only four when they moved. The insistency came back into his voice. "But you were afraid of the dark?"

"Yeah." Dale actually couldn't remember being afraid of the dark in their apartment, but he didn't want Lawrence to feel like a total sissy.

"And of the closet?"

"We had a real closet then," said Dale. He glanced over at the corner closet made of yellow-painted pine.

"But you were afraid of it?"

"I don't know. I don't remember. Why are you afraid of this one?"

Lawrence didn't answer at once. He seemed to hunker deeper in the bedclothes. "Something makes noises in it," he whispered after a while.

"This old house has mice, stupid. You know Mom and Dad are always setting traps." It was Dale's job to dump the traps and he hated it. Frequently at night he could hear the scurrying in the walls even up here on the second floor.

"It's not mice." There was no doubt in Lawrence's voice, although he sounded sleepy.

"How do you know?" Despite himself, Dale felt a chill at what his brother had just said. "How do you know it's not mice? What you think it is, some sort of monster?"

"Not mice," whispered Lawrence, on the verge of sleep. "Same thing that's under the bed sometimes."

"There's nothing under the bed," snapped Dale, tired of the conversation. "Except dustballs."

Instead of continuing the conversation, Lawrence extended his hand across the short space between the beds. "Please?" His voice was dreamy, slurred with sleep. Lawrence's sleeve was halfway up his forearm because his favorite Roy Rogers pajamas were too small for him but he refused to wear anything else.

Sometimes Dale refused to hold his brother's hand-after all, they were both way too old for that-but this night it was all right. Dale realized that he needed the reassurance himself.

"G'night," he whispered, expecting no answer. "Pleasant dreams."

"Glad you're not afraid of stuff," Lawrence whispered back. His voice was from another place, filtered by the veil of sleep.

Dale lay with his left hand holding Lawrence's, feeling how small his brother's fingers still seemed. When he closed his eyes, he saw the muzzle of C. J. Congden's .22 pointed at his face and he lurched awake, his heart pounding.

Dale knew that there were still darknesses he was afraid of. Only these were real fears, real threats. During the coming weeks he'd have to be extra careful to stay away from C. J.

and Archie.

At that moment, Dale realized that the game they'd been playing hunting for Tubby Cooke and following Roon and the others around was finished. At least as far as he was concerned it was over. It was silly and it was going to get someone hurt.

There weren't any mysteries in Elm Haven-no Nancy Drew or Joe Hardy adventures with secret passages and clever clues-just a bunch of assholes like C. J. and his old man who could really hurt you if you got in their way. Jim Harlen had probably already broken his arm and stuff because of their stupid sneaking around. Dale had gotten the feeling that afternoon that Mike and Kevin were tired of the whole thing too.

Much later, Lawrence sighed and rolled over in his sleep, still clutching Teddy but releasing Dale's hand. Dale rolled over on his right side, beginning to drift off. Beyond the screens on the two windows, leaves rustled on the big oak and crickets played their mindless tunes in the grass. The last of the evening glow was long gone from the window, but a few fireflies sent signals against the blackness of branches.

As Dale dozed off, he thought he could hear his mother ironing in the kitchen downstairs. For a while there was no sound in the room except for the regular breathing of the two boys. Outside, an owl or a dove made swallowing sounds. Then closer, in the closet in the corner, something scrabbled and clawed, paused, and then scratched a final time before falling into silence.