Flyers (9781481414449) (20 page)

I reached Bo at the pro shop and filled him in. He found a little more humor in the situation than I did but agreed it probably wasn't a good time for the Green family to be out and about. He suggested we still meet at the pond and just make it a night of R & R before our Regents exams. That sounded good to me. Then we'd be close by if Ray did find something, which I half
figured he might, based on some of the strange things I'd been seeing around there lately.

Next I called Rosasharn and explained the whole nine yards to him. Then I made him put Sudie on the line so I could fill her in. This was in case Rosasharn saw some comic potential in all this and it clouded his better judgment—assuming Rosasharn had some better judgment to cloud. Sudie said she wouldn't be able to meet us at the pond until later, but she assured me she'd keep Rosasharn's costume under lock and key and that he'd be showing up in civilian clothes—or naked.

I couldn't get hold of Jeremy, but I wasn't too worried about that. Jeremy wasn't the type who'd be likely to be parading around the neighborhood as Green Gal unless Rosasharn orchestrated the whole thing the way he did at the drug day, and since Rosasharn wouldn't have his own costume, that wasn't likely. Or so I figured at the time.

Pop called from the hospital to say that Mr. Lindstrom had taken a turn for the worse and that he and Ethan would stay on for a while to keep track of things and then have dinner in Cambridge. I offered to come over, but Pop said that wouldn't be necessary, that Mr. Lindstrom was resting and it could be days or even weeks before anything happened. The way he said it, I had a pretty good idea what he meant by “anything.”

After I hung up the phone, I grabbed my biology book, figuring I'd give studying another try. It didn't work. I kept picturing three things in my mind. The first was Mr. Lindstrom lying there on his hospital bed getting weaker by the minute, knowing—during his conscious moments anyway—that the only family member he had left in the world hated him. Other times I'd see that closet door in Andy Lindstrom's room flying open and some crazy
thing I couldn't quite picture charging out at me as I stood there frozen in my tracks. And if those two images weren't enough to distract me on their own, I kept getting this picture of Ray McPherson, bleary-eyed from a couple sixers of beer, reaching for Betsy and heading my way to dish out some justice.

•   •   •

I arrived at Blood Red Pond before everybody else and started reading a book I'd grabbed from my room. It was one of the books I'd read a while back about people dying and coming back to life. I'm not sure why that particular book caught my eye. It may have had something to do with learning that Mr. Lindstrom was going downhill, or it might have been because of Pop mentioning Judgment Day the night I found him listening to the Pogues. Or maybe neither. The fact is I've always been pretty much intrigued by death. Not like Joey Brooner, who when we were in junior high kept a scrap-book with pictures he'd clipped from the papers and
Time
and
Newsweek
of people who'd been gunned down or blown up and things like that. And not like Mrs. Quinby, who thought death was such an unnatural act that if you so much as heard about anybody who'd died, you needed crisis intervention. With me it was more of—I don't know—an amazement, you might call it. The whole idea of dying has to be one of the most amazing and mysterious things in the world, and it's probably one of the reasons I'm so interested in philosophy and religions and all that.

I skimmed through the book till I found the part I was looking for—the moment when the guy supposedly died, struck by a bolt of lightning so intense it actually melted the nails in his shoes. First he felt this excruciating pain, as you might imagine, but then a feeling of
peace and tranquility like he'd never felt in his whole life came over him. Somewhere along the line he realized he was above the scene—looking down at his own body—and he watched as his wife desperately tried CPR on him and then as the ambulance guys loaded him onto the stretcher. Somewhere along the line as he was floating up there, it hit him how the body lying on the stretcher below him really had nothing to do with who he actually was—any more than, say, a hotel room he'd stayed in would. And except for feeling sorry for all the turmoil his dying was causing everyone else, he felt totally free and happy.

I was just settling into the part where he was traveling toward what he described as a Being of Light and feeling a thousand times more love and joy than he could ever remember feeling before, when I was pulled back to earth by the sound of what could only be Rosasharn's car heading up the lane toward me. A minute later the car had lugged itself over the crest of the little hill that kept the pond hidden from the road. I shot a casual look its way and actually did one of those double takes, like in the movies. There was Rosasharn behind the wheel wearing a big goofy smile, and on the passenger side, not wearing any kind of smile was Green Gal, sitting there for all the world to see. I couldn't believe it.

I tore over to the car, yanked Jeremy's door open, and snatched his Green Gal headpiece off. Jeremy may have flashed back to the bee attack from earlier in the weekend because he grabbed the headpiece out of my hand and started swatting me with it.

“Get that costume off!” I yelled at him.

He swatted at me a few more times and then tried to get out of the car. I crammed the door closed on him. Assuming Ray
was
out in the woods someplace
watching us, the last thing I wanted him to get was a full body view of Green Gal.

“What's your problem, spaz?” Jeremy said, reaching out through the window and taking a swipe at the side of my head.

“Where are your other clothes?” I said. “What'd you do with 'em?” I managed to duck another swipe while still holding the door closed against him.

Jeremy finally quit trying to push his way out of the car and sat there looking out at me as if I'd gone totally bonkers. “In the back, ya spaz case.”

I reached in and grabbed his jeans and shirt which were strewn across the backseat. “Put ‘em on,” I said, shoving them in through his window. “Come on. Hurry up.”

I stood in front of the door, hoping to block the view as much as possible until Green Gal became Jeremy again. From behind me I could hear Jeremy grumbling and grunting as he wrestled his way out of the costume in such close quarters. “First the stupid tub tells me to get into the stupid thing and then spaz boy tells me to get out of it. Somebody oughta make up their mind.”

A few minutes later Jeremy's door pushed into my butt and he climbed out and glared at me. “Ya happy now, scrub?”

I breathed a little sigh of relief. He wasn't exactly
GQ
material yet, but at least he looked human again.

“Look, Jeremy,” I told him, “Rosasharn was supposed to tell you
not
to wear that stupid costume—unless you like the idea of getting hit across the head with a baseball bat.” I filled him in with a few more of the details as Rosasharn looked on smiling and nodding happily.

“You
stupid
tub!” Jeremy said with a fair amount of vehemence after I'd presented enough of the facts so
he got the general flavor of the situation. “You
stupid, stupid
tub!”

“Not stupid,” Rosasharn corrected, waving his finger in the air. “I merely have an attention deficit.”

“You got a
brain
deficit,” Jeremy told him.

“That too,” Rosasharn said.

Jeremy poked at him. “Shut up, ya tub.”

I leaned on the car and had to smile. At that moment life felt more normal than it had all day.

•   •   •

The evening started out decent enough. We feasted around the campfire with the usual amount of banter and the usual minor skirmishes between Rosasharn and Jeremy. I told everybody about mowing Mr. Lindstrom's lawn and how I thought I saw something in the window, and then about the picture of Andy that had been put back up on the bulletin board. Jeremy accompanied the narrative with his ghost noises.

“Wow,” Sudie said when I'd finished. “This is giving me chills. It sounds almost as if the dead kid doesn't want anything in his room disturbed.” Sudie had arrived about halfway through dinner and had smacked Rosasharn a couple of times on Jeremy's behalf when she found out how he'd convinced Jeremy to get into his Green Gal costume.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I kept thinking some crazy thing was gonna come charging out of the closet any second and grab me.”

“It'd have to be crazy if it'd want to grab you,” Jeremy said.

Bo sat there shaking his head. “I don't know. There's gotta be some kind of logical explanation behind all this.”

Jeremy snorted. “The kid's parents fly around their basement and
he's
looking for logical explanations.” He
looked at Bo. “I'm surprised you don't believe in ghosts.”

“I do,” Bo told him.

Jeremy studied him for a moment to see if he was putting him on. “So you think there's a ghost in the house?” he demanded.

“Not really,” Bo said. “But I'd like to find out.”

“You and me both,” I said. “Only tonight isn't the best time to do it.”

“Do what?”

I almost jumped a foot in the air. The voice came from what should have been the empty spot right next to me. I turned my head and saw Ethan sitting on the other half of my rock. “Jeez, Ethe. I wish you wouldn't sneak up like that.”

“I thought you saw me.”

“I
wish.
I oughta put a bell on you or something,” I said, poking him.

“We oughta put a bell on your stupid ghost,” Jeremy said.

“What ghost?” Ethan looked up and studied my face.

I told him what I'd already told the others about my afternoon and the moved picture and all that. “I was almost sure I saw something in that window,” I said. “And I
know
I left that picture down on Andy's desk.”

Ethan took all this in without saying anything. But I could tell he was really hashing it over in his mind.

“So what do you think?” I still had a hunch Ethan knew more than he was letting on.

He shrugged. It was the same kind of shrug he'd given the day before when I'd asked him what he thought he saw when he kept looking out into the woods.

“Well, we can't do anything about it tonight anyway,” I told him. “Not with Ray McPherson over there
snooping around with a baseball bat, just waiting for somebody to make a move.”

Ethan glanced up at me. He didn't say anything, but his face had kind of a stricken look to it. Sudie must have thought so too.

“Don't worry,” she told him. “Ray won't bother us. Not as long as we're dressed like
people
anyway.” She elbowed Rosasharn and gave him a dirty look.

Rosasharn went into his Italian weeping routine. “I maka one mistaka,” he wailed. “How longa must I pay for thissa one mistaka?” He raised his fists to heaven and did some more wailing.

I looked over to see if this got a smile out of Ethan. It didn't. He was standing up and looking even more serious than usual. “I think I'll go home,” he said, and gave my shoulder a little tap.

“You just got here,” I said.

He shrugged apologetically. I waited but he didn't offer any explanation. He gave us his little aloha wave and started walking down the lane.

“He's been acting funny all week,” I said as soon as he was out of hearing range.

“Maybe he's a ghost,” Jeremy said.

“He's probably a little upset about Mr. Lindstrom,” Sudie said. “That's gotta be tough on a kid his age.”

“It's more than that,” I said. “It's like he's up to something.

“Ethan?”
Sudie said. “He's more responsible than we are.”

“I'm following him,” I announced, deciding all of a sudden. “This whole thing's driving me crazy.”

“You want us to go with you?” Bo asked.

I shook my head. “Thanks. But it'll be hard enough to follow him without . . .” I indicated Jeremy,
who was pretending he had a phone up to his head.

“Hello, FBI? This is Gabe-boy Riley. I think my brother is a ghost. I have evidence. He just left our campfire here and said he wanted to go home.”

“Hey, Jeremy,” I interrupted. “Can you order me a pizza on that thing?”

“Shut up,” he told me.

•   •   •

I'd never in my life tailed Ethan before, but I knew it wouldn't be easy. For one thing, Ethan generally travels without making a sound, and I generally don't. Also, Ethan has a natural awareness of things going on around him, which meant I had to keep as quiet as I could
and
keep my distance, which in turn meant that by the time I reached the road Ethan was long gone.

I stood still for a few seconds, listening, but of course it didn't do me any good. I half expected Ethan to tap me on the shoulder right while I was standing there looking up and down the road.

My first impulse was to head north toward my house. I was thinking about how Ethan had been sneaking around there the night before and how different things there had turned up missing. But at the last second I decided to go the other way. Ethan had announced he was leaving right after hearing about Ray being over at Mr. Lindstrom's place, so I figured there was probably a connection. And I definitely didn't like the idea of Ethan being around Mr. Lindstrom's house alone—not with Ray lurking around in the bushes and God knows what lurking in the house.

Halfway to Mr. Lindstrom's house I stopped in my tracks and listened. Since I was on a paved road, I was making pretty good time and didn't want to overtake Ethan by accident if that was the direction he'd gone in.
I didn't hear anything and I couldn't make out any movement in the road ahead of me, so I continued on. A few minutes later I was approaching the place. The first time I looked out across the field toward the house I didn't see anything, and I felt a small sense of relief. That didn't last long. After taking a few more steps, I could see a crack of light coming from an upstairs window; it had been blocked by the old box elder at first. I crouched down and tried to decide what to do. Remembering how I'd run out of there that afternoon in broad daylight, I wasn't eager to go sneaking down the driveway at night, especially since I didn't know for sure if Ethan had even come this way. Then there was the Ray problem. I hadn't seen his car yet, but that didn't mean anything; there were any number of places where he could have pulled off into fields, and it was dark enough so I could have walked right by his car without seeing it. For all I knew he was crouched behind me in the ditch, watching me and telling Betsy to get ready for some action.