Jack: Secret Histories Page 5

  “Sure,” Jack said as Weezy gave a barely perceptible nod.

  Mr. Rosen lifted it, but instead of examining it he set it aside and picked up the unfolded cube. He wiggled it in the air and watched as the six panels flapped back and forth.

  “Fascinating,” he said.

  Jack was baffled. “Why?”

  “No hinges. The squares appear to be made of thin sheets of some sort of material I’ve never seen. That’s strange enough, but they move back and forth without any sort of hinge. Just … creases. Odd. Very, very odd.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jack said.

  Mr. Rosen looked at them. “This I’d be willing to buy.”

  Weezy gave her head an emphatic shake. “Uh-uh. It’s not for sale. Sorry.”

  Mr. Rosen nodded as he put it down and picked up the pyramid. He turned it over and over in his hands, making little humming and grunting noises as he held it up to the light and checked it with a magnifying glass. His sleeve slipped back revealing a string of numbers tattooed on his forearm. Jack had seen them before but had hesitated to ask about them.

  “Let me tell you, I’ve seen many strange objects in my day—you wouldn’t believe the things people bring in to try to sell me—but the likes of this I’ve never seen. I couldn’t even guess what it is.”

  “Oh,” Weezy said, her voice thick with frustration.

  Jack hid his own disappointment. “Too bad.” Mr. Rosen had seemed to know a little bit about everything. “We were hoping—”

  “But I know someone who might be able to help you.”

  “Who?”

  Jack half expected him to say, The Great and Powerful Oz! But instead …

  “Professor Nakamura. He’s a maven of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.”

  Weezy looked at Jack. “U of P? How are we going to get to Philadelphia?”

  “You don’t have to. He lives right here in town.”

  Jack frowned. He thought he knew pretty much everyone in Johnson. “Never heard of him.”

  “Moved in about a year ago. Keeps to himself, I think, but he’s been in here a few times. Interesting fellow. His grandfather ran a laundry in San Francisco but was driven out in the twenties by the Jap haters—all fired up by William Randolph Hearst who hated Jews as well—and fled back to Japan. Now his grandson has returned as an Ivy League professor. For all we know he might be teaching the greatgrandchildren of the bigots who drove his ancestors out. What sweet irony that would be.”

  Jack didn’t remember any Oriental customers.

  “Have I—?”

  Mr. Rosen shook his head. “Hasn’t been in since you started. Collects Carnival Glass, of all things.”

  “What’s Carnival Glass?”

  “Iridescent kitsch is what it is. But he loves it. Bought every piece I had last spring.”

  That explained why Jack had never seen any—he hadn’t started here until late June.

  Mr. Rosen was fishing under the counter. “He left his number to call as soon as any new items came in.” Finally he came up with a card. “Here it is. Let me give it a try. I got the impression his schedule at the university isn’t too heavy, so who knows? You may get lucky.”

  4

  They didn’t. Professor Nakamura wasn’t home but Mr. Rosen left a message to call him back. Jack and Weezy headed back to her place. He didn’t have long before he was due at work.

  “What do we do now?” he said as they coasted along Quakerton Road.

  “Wait and see if this Professor Nakamura can help us, I guess.”

  “And if he can’t?”

  Weezy shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t you wish the TV had a channel where you could, say, ask a question and it would search every library in the world and pop the answer onto the screen? Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Yeah.” Then he thought about it a little more. “Or maybe not so great. You’d have to make TVs two-way before that could happen. I mean, it’s just one-way now—we can watch it and that’s that. But if it became two-way … it might start watching us.”

  Weezy looked at him and smiled, something she didn’t do often enough. “And you call me paranoid?”

  “Hey, less than five months till Big Brother starts watching.”

  Nineteen Eighty-Four was on his high school summer reading list and he’d found it majorly disturbing.

  “Yeah, but—” She braked and pointed. “Aw, no!”

  Jack looked and saw two guys pushing around a third near the rickety one-lane bridge over Quaker Lake. The pushers were Teddy Bishop and a blond guy Jack didn’t recognize. Teddy, with long greasy hair and a blubbery body, was sort of the town bully. His father was a lawyer and that seemed to make Teddy feel he could get away with anything.

  The beard and olive-drab fatigue jacket on the guy getting pushed around identified him as the town’s only Vietnam vet, Walter Erskine—or, as he was more commonly known, Weird Walt. It looked like Teddy and his friend were trying to grab the brown paper grocery bag Walt had clutched against his chest.

  Before Jack knew it, Weezy was pedaling toward the scene, yelling, “Hey! Stop that!”

  Jack wasn’t surprised. Though young enough to be his daughter, Weezy had a thing for Walt. If she met him on the street she’d walk with him; sometimes they’d sit on one of the benches down by the lake and talk—about what, Jack had no idea.

  No use trying to stop her, so he followed. Couldn’t let her face those two creeps alone. He watched her jump off her bike and quickly set the kickstand—Walt or no Walt, she wasn’t going to let that cube fall. Then she ran over, stepped in front of Teddy, and pushed him back. Not that she had much effect. Teddy was an ox. But Weezy was fearless.

  “Leave him alone!”

  “Yeah, lay off!” Walt said, raising a gloved hand. He always wore gloves.

  Walt had a hippieish look with a gray-streaked beard and long, dark hair. His voice sounded a little slurred. No surprise there. Jack didn’t know of anyone who’d ever seen him completely sober.

  Teddy laughed. “Look at this! Weird Weezy and Weird Walt together. How about that?”

  Jack lay his bike on the grass and looked around. Last time Mom had taken him for a checkup he’d been five-five and one-hundred-two pounds. Teddy had two years, two inches, and maybe fifty lardy pounds over him. He’d need an equalizer. He looked for a weapon, a rock, maybe, but found nothing.

  Swell.

  He approached the group empty-handed.

  “What do you want with him?” Weezy was saying. “He’s not bothering you!”

  “We just think he should share some of his hooch. We ain’t greedy. We don’t want it all, just a little. So get outta the way.”

  Teddy’s friend’s hands moved toward Weezy, as if to shove her aside.

  “Don’t touch her!” Jack shouted.

  Teddy spun, looked surprised, then grinned. Jack saw now that he was wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt.

  “Well, look who it is. What is it with you two—you find a dead body and suddenly you’re Guardians of the Universe?”

  “Just let her take him home.”

  Teddy, his expression menacing, took a step closer. “And if I don’t?”

  Jack felt his heart racing, but with more anger than fear. And the anger was growing, quickly overtaking the fear, blotting it out.

  “You lay one finger on her and I will kill you.”

  The cold way the words came out startled Jack. He sounded like he meant it. And at the moment, he did.

  Teddy stopped and stared, then smiled. Jack wondered at that smile until he felt a pair of arms wrap around him, pinning his arms at his sides.

  “Gotcha, squirt!” said Teddy’s friend.

  Jack had been so intent on Teddy and Weezy he’d forgotten the friend.

  Teddy’s grin widened as he cocked a fist back to his ear. “Let’s see who’s gonna kill who.”

  Jack lowered his head as he struggled wildly to get free. This was going to hurt. He heard Weezy scr
eam, quickly followed by a cry of pain from Teddy, and another from the guy holding him. Suddenly he was free. He leaped to the side, raising his fist, ready to swing, but stopped.

  Teddy and his friend were cowering and rubbing their heads. Between them stood a heavyset old woman brandishing a silver-headed cane. She wore a long black dress that reached the sidewalk and had a black scarf wrapped around her neck. Like Walt’s gloves, she wore that scarf no matter what the weather. Beside her stood a three-legged dog.

  Mrs. Elizabeth Clevenger.

  But where had she come from? Jack was sure she hadn’t been in sight when he’d come over here. How—?

  “Damn you!” Teddy shouted.

  He took a step toward her but stopped when the dog bared its teeth and growled. A thick-bodied, big-jawed, floppy-eared mutt—Jack thought he detected some Lab and some rottweiler along with miscellaneous other breeds—it seemed all muscle under its short, mud-brown coat. He’d seen it lots of times; the missing leg didn’t slow it down at all.

  “That dog bites me my dad’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got.”

  “If I let him at you it won’t be for a bite—he’ll have you for lunch. All of you.”

  One look at the dog’s cold eyes and big jaws and Jack believed her. So did Teddy, apparently, because he backed off.

  Jack felt his heartbeat slowing but his hands felt cold, sweaty, shaky. He’d been awful close to getting his face rearranged. Too close.

  “Bitch!” Teddy said.

  “Don’t you dare speak to your mother like that!”

  “You ain’t my mother!”

  “Sadly, I am. But only because I cannot pick and choose my children. Now be gone.” She brandished her cane. “Off before I cast a spell on you!”

  That seemed to do it. Teddy jammed his hands into his jeans pockets and started to move away.

  “C’mon, Joey. Let’s go,” Teddy said to his friend.

  “Wait,” Joey said, his eyes wide with disbelief. “‘Cast a spell on you’? Is she kidding?”

  “Shut up, Joey. You don’t know nothin’.”

  The two of them walked off, arguing, Teddy looking over his shoulder from time to time.

  Clearly Joey wasn’t from Johnson. Otherwise he’d have known that old Mrs. Clevenger was a witch.

  5

  “Are you all right, Walter?” Mrs. Clevenger said, rubbing her hand along his upper arm.

  He nodded. “Yeah. They just pushed me around some. I’ve been through worse.”

  “I know,” she said. “Much worse.” Then she turned to Weezy. “That was a brave thing you did, child.”

  “Not so brave.” She seemed to have trouble meeting Mrs. Clevenger’s eyes. “I was scared half to death.”

  “The brave are always scared.” She turned to Jack. “I know why she helped Walter—he’s her friend. But why did you?”

  Jack figured the reason was obvious. “Because she’s my friend.”

  The old woman gave him a long stare, her green eyes boring into his, then nodded. “Friendship … there is nothing better, is there?”

  “Nothing,” Weezy said, beaming at Jack.

  The lady said, “Walter is my friend. I’m going to walk him home now, but first …” She looked past them to Weezy’s bike. “That box … put it back in the ground where you found it.”

  Jack spun and stared at Weezy’s bike. Only a little bit of the towel wrapping the box was visible in the basket, nothing more.

  Weezy’s mouth dropped open. “H-how do you know about that?” Her brow furrowed. “Did Mister Rosen—?”

  Mrs. Clevenger smiled, which added more lines to her already wrinkled face. “I know more than I should and less than I’d like to.” The smile disappeared. “But hear me well. That thing is an ill wind that will blow nobody good. It was hidden from the light of day for good reason. Return it to its resting place.” With that she started to turn away. “Besides, you will never get it open.”

  “But we did,” Weezy said.

  Mrs. Clevenger’s turn came to an abrupt halt, then she swiveled back to fix Weezy with her stare.

  “We? Who is we?”

  Weezy looked flustered. “Well, not ‘we,’ really. Just Jack. He’s the only one who can do it.”

  She turned her gaze on him. “Not such a surprise, I suppose. But that does not change anything. Put it back where it belongs.”

  Jack wanted to ask her why that wasn’t a surprise but she’d turned away again. She took Walter’s arm and the two of them began walking, her dog close behind. Jack heard bottles clinking in Walter’s paper bag.

  “Now, Walter,” Jack heard her say, “you’re overdoing the drinking. You must learn to pace yourself, otherwise you won’t survive to complete your mission.”

  Walter shook his shaggy head. “Not surviving … that doesn’t sound so bad. I hate this …” He glanced back at Jack. “Do you think he might be the one?”

  “I can understand why you might feel that way. But no, he’s not the one you seek …”

  And then their voices faded.

  What were they talking about? Why was Walt seeking someone, and why could Mrs. Clevenger understand why he might think Jack was the one? Jack wanted to trail after them and hear more, then realized that they were both sort of crazy. He couldn’t expect to make sense out of a conversation between those two.

  Weezy too was watching them go, but she had her own questions.

  “How could she know about the box?”

  Jack shrugged. “And where did she come from? Did you see?”

  Weezy shook her head. “No. All of a sudden she was there, swinging her cane.”

  Jack looked at the Old Town bridge that spanned the narrow midsection of the figure-eight-shaped lake. On the far side of that creaky one-lane span lay the easternmost end of Johnson, where it backed up to the Pine Barrens. The area included the six square blocks of the original Quakerton settlement, called Old Town for as long as anyone could remember. Nobody knew for sure when it had first been settled. Most said before the revolutionary war—long before the war.

  Mrs. Clevenger lived in Old Town. She must have come from there.

  Jack reconstructed the chain of events: Johnson didn’t have a liquor store, so Walt must have been stocking up in Old Town. Some of the Pineys had stills, but instead of using corn they made their moonshine from apples. Every Wednesday and Saturday one or two of them would come in from the woods; they’d park their pickups at the end of Quakerton Road where it dead-ended at the edge of the Pines and sell their applejack. They transported it in big jugs and customers had to bring their own bottle—or in Walt’s case, bottles—to be filled.

  Nearly everybody in Johnson had at least one bottle of applejack in the house, and it was an ongoing argument as to who made the best—Gus Sooy or Lester Appleton.

  Walt must have gone over to get his bottles filled and run into Teddy and Joey on the way back. Mrs. Clevenger must have been close behind him.

  Well, wherever she came from, Jack was glad she’d arrived when she did.

  He looked back and saw the pair turning the corner onto the block where Walt lived with his sister and brother-in-law.

  “There goes an odd couple,” he said.

  Weezy nodded. “Way odder than Oscar and Felix. She wears that same scarf day in and day out, and he wears gloves no matter how hot it gets.”

  “You believe she’s a witch?” Jack said as they headed back to their bikes, and immediately realized Weezy was probably the wrong person to ask.

  “Could be. She’s hard to explain. I mean, how did she know about the box?”

  Remembering that caused a trickle of uneasiness to go down Jack’s spine.

  “I don’t know, but should we follow her advice?”

  Weezy looked at him as if he’d suddenly grown a second nose and a third eye. “Are you kidding me? Go back and bury it? No way! Even if she is a witch.”

  Obviously he’d struck a nerve. No surprise, though.

  “We
ll, I don’t believe in witches, but did you hear her threaten Teddy with a spell?”

  “So? I can threaten you with a spell, Jack. Doesn’t mean I can cast one.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe she just pretends to be a witch. She’s already got the Clevenger name. Maybe letting the more superstitious folks around here think she’s the Witch of the Pines come back from the dead works for her somehow.”

  She and her dog had moved into Old Town a dozen or so years ago. Her mysterious ways—disappearing for months at a time and then suddenly around every day, wandering through the Pines at night—had started some folks whispering that she was really Peggy Clevenger, the famous Witch of the Pines. But how could that be? Everybody knew how the real Peggy Clevenger’s decapitated body had been found in her burned-out cabin back in the 1800s.

  Weezy shrugged. “Could be.” She gave Jack a sidelong look. “You know they say Peggy’s body wanders the Barrens at night looking for her head. But I’m just wondering …”

  “Wondering what?”

  “What if she found it and put it back on?”

  Jack laughed. “Come on! Even you don’t believe that.”

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But how do you explain Mrs. Clevenger’s ever-present scarf? Why would she wear it on a hot day like this?” Weezy dropped into her ooh-spooky voice. “Unless she’s hiding the seam where she reattached her head.”

  Jack picked up his bike and waited for Weezy to knock back her kickstand.

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  She looked at him with those big, dark, black-rimmed eyes. “Okay, fine. Your turn then: Give me another explanation for the scarf.”

  Jack couldn’t come up with one. Not for lack of trying. He really wanted another explanation. Because he didn’t like Weezy’s one bit.

  6

  Jack spent the afternoon at USED.

  The best thing about the job was he hardly ever did the same thing two days in a row. One day he’d spend dusting all the antiques and just plain junk; the next he’d supply a third or fourth hand to help Mr. Rosen fix an old clock; another he’d wind all the clocks and watches—not too far—and make sure they were set to the right time. Today he was helping Mr. Rosen pretty up some antique oak furniture he’d just bought—a rolltop desk and a round table with cool lion paws at the ends of its legs.