Don't Scream (9780307823526) (13 page)

“Absurd!” I said.

“There's lots of room for improvement. Cross-referencing, for instance, or proof of ID. But at present all that's needed is to pay the fee.”

“Eric,” I said, “let's get back to this driver's license. Are you telling me that the person who calls himself Scott Alexander is using this fake name on a driver's license?”

“Exactly. A New Jersey license.”

“Wouldn't he have to get a Texas license?”

“You didn't tell me he lives in Texas. He could easily get a Texas license by showing his New Jersey one and passing the written and driving tests. If you want, I can check out the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. Scott Alexander's photo will be on his license, if that's any help. What's your fax number?”

“We don't have a fax.”

Eric's words were spaced apart with incredulity. “You … don't … have … a … fax?”

“I don't have a computer or a fax. I'm sorry,” I said.

“I can't imagine existing without cyberspace or virtual reality,” Eric said sympathetically.

“Virtual reality?” I asked, scrabbling through my mind for what I'd read and heard about it. “I know that cyberspace is all the stuff out there on the Internet, but isn't virtual reality just those make-believe games on the Internet?”

“Don't use the term
make-believe
games,” Eric said. “Make-believe is for children. Virtual reality is a self-created form of chosen reality. Therefore it exists.”

“Okay,” I said. “Whatever works for you.” Make-believe, virtual reality—they seemed the same to me, but the last thing I wanted to do was to argue with Eric about his Internet world. “Thanks for the information. I appreciate your help.”

“Don't go,” Eric said. “I'm not through. I found out something about Edna Turner.”

“She doesn't exist either?” “Oh, she exists, all right, but in a cemetery. An
Edna Turner, from Galesburg, New Jersey, died last month. It was in the
Galesburg Gazette.
”

“I don't believe it!”

“Jess, it's true. I can prove everything I've told you.”

Feeling momentarily dizzy, I leaned against the wall and tried to keep my eyes focused through the lights that seemed to whirl around me. “How did she die?” I asked.

“An overdose of sleeping pills,” he answered. “The medical examiner listed her death as suicide.”

I needed privacy, so I went upstairs and closed my bedroom door. I called Lori.
Answer, answer, answer!
I begged, as the phone continued to ring.

Finally her mother answered, and I said, “Hi, Mrs. Roberts, it's me—Jess. May I please speak to Lori?”

“Not now,” Mrs. Roberts answered. “Lori's come down with a bug of some kind—maybe the flu. She's running a bit of a fever. She's feeling miserable and just fell asleep a few minutes ago.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I hope she's better tomorrow.”

“I do, too,” Mrs. Roberts said, “but don't count on her going to school. I follow the rule of a full day in bed after a fever's over, but I'll tell her you called, Jess.”

I hung up. I was desperate to talk to Lori about what had happened. I couldn't just hide in my room. Pepper wasn't coming back. Lori was sick. Was Ricky going to feel forgotten tomorrow?

I wandered downstairs and met Mom in the hallway. She put a thin book with a blue cover into my hands.

“Hamlet,”
she said. Do something worthwhile with your time. Read a classic.”

“Mom,” I complained, “we read
Hamlet
last year.”

“It wouldn't hurt to reread Shakespeare.”

“I didn't mind
Romeo and Juliet
, but this one I hated. Hamlet spent all his time brooding. He whined and felt so sorry for himself. He was terrible to his friends. He messed up everybody's lives—especially poor Ophelia's—because he was determined to get revenge.”

“Is that what Ms. Greer taught you?”

“No. I'm telling you the way I saw it. Ms. Greer said that revenge for his father's death was Hamlet's driving force. She made it seem as though he had no control over the way he felt. I don't think that's the way life works. Hamlet should have made up his own mind about what he wanted to do.”

“People react to situations in different ways,” Mom said. “This is a play, and Hamlet is a character.”

“He sure is. He's a real complainer.”

“I mean a
fictional
character.”

I giggled. “I know what you mean, Mom. I was just giving you a hard time,” I said. “But
Hamlet
doesn't matter now, because I got a B plus in the course, and nobody's going to bother me about him ever again.”

Mom sighed and was about to say something, but Dad opened the door and walked into the middle of our conversation.

“It took the town long enough to replace that streetlight,” he said. “Broken glass. Some kid probably knocked it out. But those things ought to be taken care of the day they're reported, not three days later.”

“Phil,” Mom asked, “if the light's replaced, then why bother to get upset about it?”

“Because these local government departments take their own sweet time, and we pay the taxes to—”

“Want some iced tea?” Mom asked. “Come on out in the kitchen. It'll cool you off.”

I went back upstairs and shut the door of my room, leaning against it in the darkness. My windows gleamed in the brightness from the streetlight—a contrast with last night and the night before. If it had been this bright, I would have seen …

To test my theory, I moved toward the windows. I'd almost reached them when I heard a strange
ping
and
snap
and the streetlight went out.

Someone had thrown a rock and knocked out the light!

I pressed my nose to the windowpane, straining to pierce the darkness. There was just enough thin moonlight for me to make out a shadowy form that came toward me from the corner. It blended so quickly into the dark mass of the elm tree that I
blinked, my eyes watering. I wondered if I had really seen it or if the figure had been conjured by my imagination, trying to re-create what I thought I had seen the night Peaches disappeared.

In the darkness I watched and waited until the shadows moved again. My heart began to pound, and for a moment it was hard to breathe. Someone was hiding behind the tree, waiting and watching just as I was.

But what was he watching—the Chamberlin house, the Malik house, or … our house?

What was he waiting for?

Who was he?

I had to know. Both our front and back doors were visible to this person. If I went outside, he'd disappear, and I wouldn't learn any more than I already knew. If I telephoned Mark and asked him to investigate, the watcher would see him leave his house.

The answer suddenly came to me. I left my room and leaned over the banister at the head of the stairs. “Dad!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

“Jess? Is something the matter?” he called from the den.

I could hear his footsteps approaching. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, I said, “Dad, somebody just threw a rock at the streetlight. It's out again.”

“What!” Dad bellowed like an angry bull and charged for the front door.

I had barely enough time to reach my window
before Dad had turned on our outside lights and was on the porch looking up and down the street. I had hoped the watcher would run and I'd see him, but the elm tree—its black trunk and branches highlighted in a glaring bug-yellow—stood unmoving and alone.

Dad grumbled as he came back into the house, shutting off the outside lights after closing the door. I leaned against my bedroom window, disappointed that my scheme hadn't worked.

The dark mass of the trunk of the elm shifted. The watcher was still there.

He kept vigil, and so did I, until the last of the Maliks' lights blinked off. The watcher waited just a short while, then slid away. The wide limbs of the tree blocked part of my view, but I thought I caught sight of him just before he reached the corner and disappeared.

I belly flopped onto the bed, where I tried to calm down and think sensibly and rationally. I still had no idea who the watcher could be, but I had learned one thing. He hadn't been at his post to keep an eye on Mr. Chamberlin or on us. He'd been watching the Maliks.

I knew it was unfair to immediately think of Scott. I was suspicious of Scott simply because of what I had learned about him, but he'd have no reason to hide and keep watch. I turned on my light, pulled down my shades, and got ready for bed. It was late and I was sleepy, but my mind kept churning. What was I going to do?

* * *

G
OING
TO
CLASS
without having done your homework is probably the next worst thing to nearly finishing a plate of food before finding something strange and gushy in what's left of it. Unfortunately, not just Mom had something to say to me about improving my study habits. Each of my teachers gave a firm opinion.

Mark and Scott sat with me at lunch. We talked about a schoolwide toy and book collection. I missed Lori! I badly needed her to say “Don't worry, Jess. Everybody's entitled to one mistake. So you forgot your backpack and didn't do your homework. The world isn't going to come to an end.”

What I'd found out about Scott bothered me. I tried to act as though everything were normal, but it must not have worked, because I caught Scott studying me, questions in his eyes.

Mark stopped talking about the collection and suddenly changed the subject. “When are we going to get together and hunt for the old cemetery?”

“Scott's already started looking,” I told him.

Mark gave Scott a sharp, questioning glance. Scott blinked with surprise.

“No, I haven't,” Scott responded.

“Lori told me you were going to explore the woods yesterday,” I said.

Scott busily searched the bottom of his Fritos bag for the crumbs. “She got that wrong,” he said, and looked up. “Remember, I came by to apologize to you yesterday.”

“I remember,” I said. But Scott's visit had only
lasted a few minutes. He would have had plenty of time to enter the woods. Scott had asked me to trust him, but that seemed unreasonable when once again I knew he was lying.

During our conversation I noticed Mark looking back and forth from Scott to me as though he were at a tennis match.

“But when are
we
going to hunt for the cemetery?” he asked.

“We have to wait for Lori,” I answered, guilty that I was using her illness as an excuse. “Her mom told me Lori has the flu, so we'd better not plan on this weekend.”

“I think we should call off the search,” Scott said. “From what I've found out, the cemetery is just a rumor. We'd be wasting our time.”

“When did you come to that decision?” I asked him.

Scott shrugged.

I should have been glad that Scott was making it easy for me to get out of going far into the woods; I wouldn't be tempted to break my promise to Mom, but I couldn't let the matter alone. “You found out something, didn't you? What did you find out?”

Scott's face darkened as he leaned toward me. “I found out that nobody really believes that cemetery is there, except for a few old ladies who keep telling the story over and over. There are no records of it in the city's archives. Nothing. Okay?”

“Okay,” Mark said. “We believe you.” He began
peeling an orange and talking about what movies were coming out, but I couldn't relax. Scott had told Lori he was going into the woods. Why did he tell me he hadn't? He was the one who had been so eager to explore. Scott knew something we didn't. What?

I was glad when the bell rang.

In journalism class we worked on our stories for the next edition of the school newspaper. Mr. Clark assigned me to write the story about the volunteer program at the hospital's children's ward.

When I finished, he read it and made a couple of marks with his red pencil. He gave the work back and said, “Good first try. Make the corrections I've marked and add the names of the committee members.”

“I head the committee, Mr. Clark,” I said.

“That doesn't matter. The information belongs in the story.”

“But then I feel like I'm bragging.”

“You're not bragging,” he said. “This feature captures a warm feeling about the kids and how much they need volunteers. You did a good job, Jess. People will want to read this human-interest story. That's what counts.”

I got a chance to talk to Eric just after the bell rang for the next class.

“Thanks for finding out the information I needed,” I told him.

“No trouble,” he said. “Any time you …” He straightened and slapped the palm of his hand
against his forehead. “I got the rest of what you were looking for, too, but I left it home. And you don't have a fax.”

“That's okay,” I said. “Please bring it tomorrow.”

A question had been bothering me since the night before:
Why was someone watching the Maliks?
If I knew more about
them
, I might discover the reason. “Eric,” I asked, “is it a lot of trouble for you to look up more information for me on your computer?”

“No,” he answered. “It's easy.” He smiled. “It's kind of fun, too. It's like being a private investigator. You know that some of them do ninety percent of their work with computers, don't you?”

Dad had mentioned the Maliks' names: Frank and Eloise. I bent over and wrote the three Maliks' names on a blank sheet of paper in Eric's notebook. “Could you check on these?” I asked. “The same kind of information you did before?”

“Sure,” Eric said.

If I'd been asked to get information about someone, I would have wanted to know why, but Eric didn't even ask. I knew I could count on his being silent because answers weren't as important to him as what he could do with his computer.