Dead Letter (5 page)

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Authors: Betsy Byars

BOOK: Dead Letter
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Herculeah shook her head and smiled. “No, not really. Nothing serious.”
Her mother said, “Good. I'm in a hurry. I'll be late, Herculeah. Don't wait up.”
“I never do.”
On an impulse, Herculeah got up and followed her mother to the front door. “Can I ask you something?”
“I'm on my way out.” Her mother turned. “You'll have to be quick.”
“Suppose you had a phone number, Mom,” Herculeah began in a rush, “and you wanted to find out who lived at that number, how would you do it?”
“Well, I've got an old high-school buddy at the phone company. You met him, Frankie Bumgardner. I've done a couple of favors for him, he does some for me.”
“I know that, but suppose you didn't want to bother him—or couldn't. What would you do? What if you had to have the information right this minute?”
“Let's see. I'd dial the number and I'd say, ‘Good afternoon, a new phone directory will be issued shortly,'—see, I never lie, Herculeah, they issue phone directories all the time, so one will always be issued shortly—‘and I would like to confirm your listing.'”
“And they tell you?”
“Nine out of ten times they do. If not, I'd say, ‘Please give me your name and address as you wish it to appear in the directory. Last name first, please.'”
“And they tell you.”
“Unless they've got something to hide.”
Herculeah hesitated. She had the feeling that the people with this phone number might really have something to hide. “Thanks, Mom.” Herculeah turned back to the living room and her mother's desk.
“Whose number are you after?”
“Oh, it's nothing, just a number someone wrote on the back of a note.”
Her mother hesitated as if she was sifting the information through her mind. Herculeah could see the moment that her mother made the wrong decision not to ask to see the note.
“Don't you stay up too late.”
“I won't.”
Her mother went out the door and Herculeah picked up the phone. She dialed the first number. A mechanical voice answered, “The number you have reached is no longer in service.”
“Well, so much for 882-0085. Now, I'll try it with a six.”
Herculeah dialed the second number. It was answered on the third ring.
A voice said, “You have reached the Poison Control Center. How may I help you?”
10
MURDER STREET
“Meat, guess what?” Herculeah said as soon as the phone at Meat's house was answered.
There was a long, chilly pause that let Herculeah know it was not Meat on the other end of the line.
“This is Albert's mother.” Meat's mom spoke in that disapproving way that Herculeah didn't care for. “And in my day,” she went on, “it was the boys who telephoned the girls and not the other way around.”
“I'm so glad things aren't still like that,” Herculeah said with real gratitude, “aren't you? Is Meat there? I've got to talk to him.”
“Albert is—”
In the background Herculeah heard Meat's voice say, “Is it for me? Is it Herculeah?” He had heard his mom's disapproving statement about girls calling boys, and since there was only one girl who ever called him—and he realized he was lucky to have even one—he had come immediately to the phone.
“I'll take it, Mom.”
Herculeah heard a brief pause in which Meat tried to take the phone and Meat's mother wouldn't give it up. Then Meat's voice came on.
“What's happened?” he said.
“Meat,” Herculeah said. “I think she was being poisoned as well.”
“What? How do you know?”
“There was a phone number on the back of that note—neither of us noticed it, but the woman at Hidden Treasures did—and I called it and it was the Poison Control Center. She must have suspected something—that's why they locked her up.”
Meat's mother said, “Albert, are you through with the telephone?”
“No, Mom, I'm not. I just got on.”
“I need to make a call.”
“I'll let you know when I'm through—Oh, here, take the phone. I'll go over there.” Into the phone he said, “I'm coming over.”
Herculeah put the phone down and glanced out the window. Meat had come out on the front porch of the house and his mother had come out after him. She was pointing back to the house. He was shaking his head.
The phone rang, causing Herculeah to turn away from the drama on the front porch. “Mim Jones's office,” Herculeah said.
“Herculeah, is this you? It's Mrs. Glenn at Hidden Treasures.”
“Yes, Mrs. Glenn.”
“Well, I finally thought of the name of the street.”
“Oh?” Herculeah picked up a pencil.
Herculeah glanced out the window. Shoulders slumped, Meat was going back into his house. Meat's mother threw a triumphant look in the direction of Herculeah's house.
“It's Elm Street—you know, like in that horror movie where all the murders took place. They should have called that movie
Murder Street,
if you ask me. Ever since my grandson rented that movie I haven't been able to stand the thought of Elm Street. Just the words
Elm Street
give me the creeps.”
“Me too,” Herculeah admitted.
 
 
Meat sat down by the telephone. His face was grim as he picked up the receiver. “Well, I've got to call her and tell her I can't come.”
“Make the call and make it fast.”
Meat dialed Herculeah's number. He glanced up. “It's busy.”
His mother went into the kitchen. He dialed again.
Still busy.
To pass the time he picked up the pencil and began to draw circles on the telephone pad.
He dialed the number again.
Still busy.
Who was she talking to?
As he doodled, he remembered that when he was little, he had had a great big pencil. The pencil was so big he had to hold it in his fist. He would sit at the table with a fistful of pencil, making loops and circles. He would dot some of the loops and cross others.
When he had filled a whole page, he would take his imitation writing to his father.
His father would take the paper at once, no matter what he was doing. He'd say, “What have we here?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, Albie, let's find out.”
Meat would wait for the reaction, hoping he had written something funny enough to make his father laugh.
The laughter always came, a burst of it. “This is very, very funny. Albie, you've written a very funny story. You want to hear it?”
“Yeth.”
He would climb up into his father's lap. “Once upon a time there were three little wolves and this big, bad pig was out to get them.”
And he would sit there absolutely mesmerized by what he had written. He would—
“You missed your chance,” Meat's mother said at his elbow.
“What? What?”
“Herculeah just came out of the house. She's going around the corner right now. Seems late to be going out, doesn't it?”
Meat got to the window in time to see a flash of bright blue coat turning the corner.
“In my day, girls didn't go sashaying out at this time of afternoon—and I bet nice ones still don't.”
11
THE HIDDEN HOUSE
It was late afternoon.
The shadows were lengthening as Herculeah walked quickly to Elm Street. She had been on this street before, and she remembered it as a long, curving, graceful road with spacious houses, houses with tennis courts and gardens and stables for horses.
She stopped as she turned the corner, unprepared for the change. Ahead of her lay a street in total disarray. Bulldozers, tractors, and trucks were silent, parked on either side of the street. Their day's work of tearing down houses, trees, fences, swimming pools, and anything else that got in their way, was over.
Velvet green lawns had been stripped away. The giant Tonka toys had carved the muddy landscape into a different, flatter shape to accommodate many town houses. Two houses were already rising from the bare earth: wooden structures, only skeletons now, that would become solid when covered with stones and siding.
Elm Street was now in the process of becoming one huge, expensive housing development. This sort of thing was happening all over the city, and Herculeah hated it. She valued neighborhoods.
She walked slowly down the center of the street, looking from . side to side at the destruction. She paused at a sign that advertised:
Elmwood Estates
Gracious Living
3-4 Bedroom Homes from $200,000
She shook her head in dismay and kept walking. Development was happening on both sides of the street. Another sign promised:
Elmwood Manor
A New Concept in Living
Homes from $185,000
Maybe this was progress, but it didn't look like it to Herculeah.
The street was deserted. All the workmen had gone for the day. There was no traffic, but Herculeah remembered the black car that had followed her the day before. She glanced behind her.
She walked slowly. On either side of the road trenches had been dug for sewer pipes and telephone cables. These were flanked by huge mounds of red earth. The old sidewalks were buried underneath, Herculeah thought, bulldozed to pieces.
Her heart sank with each step she took. There was nothing left of what had once been here. If the woman who had owned this coat—Herculeah wrapped her arms about herself as if she were embracing a ghost—had lived here, her past had been wiped away by the bulldozers, too.
She paused for a moment, smelling the turned earth, the scent of newly cut trees, pines as well as elms. As she turned to go, she lifted her head in sudden surprise.
Beyond the few trees that had been left standing she could see an old house. She shielded her eyes from the sunset. It was a big country house. It seemed to have withdrawn from all the confusion around it.
The house had once been yellow, but now the loose dirt had turned the lower clapboard red. There were rust streaks from the ruined gutters, and black shutters dangled from their hinges.
Herculeah squinted at the house. The windows stared blankly back. She had no reason to believe this was the house. But she sensed it was a house like this where the woman had been held prisoner. An ordinary house, a comfortable house from the outside, but inside ...
Drawn by something she could not explain, she turned onto the drive. There was a sign that said DANGER—DO NOT ENTER.
Herculeah stepped around it and continued slowly toward the house. She paused at the porch. Though it was empty, Herculeah had a vision of white deck chairs, rockers that might have once been lined up on the wide porch. She could see the remains of vines that had grown up the columns in happier days.
The steps were gone. Herculeah leaped nimbly onto the porch.
Again she turned and glanced quickly over her shoulder at the drive behind her. There was no one there, but Herculeah had the strange sensation that someone was watching her.
Her hair began to rise, the way it always did when she was in danger. She pulled it back into a ponytail with one hand.
She crossed the porch to the front door.
She sighed. She wished she had brought the key. She thought how satisfying it would be to put the key into the lock, turn it, and have the door swing open. That would be proof that this was the house she was looking for.
Here she was at the door, and the key was under her pillow at home.
But as she looked closer she saw that the door was not locked. Actually it was slightly ajar. She pushed it open all the way.
“Hello!” she called into the empty entrance.
No answer.
“Hello.”
The sun was beginning to set, and the sky was the color of pale lemonade. From somewhere in the elm trees came the cry of a crow.
Ever since her experience in Dead Oaks, she had associated that bird with danger. She listened as the raucous cry came again. Then there was only the rustling of the trees in the early evening breeze, a sorrowful sound, as if they mourned their fallen friends.
“If Tarot were here,” she said with a slight smile, “I know what he'd say—and it wouldn't be ‘Oh, Mom.'”
Pulling her coat tighter about her as if for protection, she stepped inside the house. She turned and then carefully left the door open behind her.
Just in case, she thought.
12
up THE STAIRS
Inside, the air was cold and still. The floorboards creaked as Herculeah made her way into what had been the living room.
Glass crunched beneath her feet. Someone had broken the front windows, and through the ragged panes came the scent of new earth and trees, fresh as a beginning, rather than the end Herculeah knew it to be.
The rooms she saw were empty. Everything of value—light fixtures, bookshelves, carved moldings—had been taken away, leaving a shell of a house. There would be no clues left here.
Herculeah remembered the last two words in the note, Look inside. She remembered she had hoped to get in the house while it was still full of furniture. She felt she would know the meaning of those words if she could just move slowly through the rooms. She would pass a desk or a wall panel and her hair would frizzle and—
With a shake of her head she continued, making her way from one room to another. The downstairs rooms were big: a library, the walls bare of shelves; a sitting room; a parlor. All the rooms had fireplaces, but the mantels were gone.

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