Peeled (22 page)

Mrs. Horton said, “I’ll get the phone book for the sheriff’s office.”

“I know the number.” I had it on speed dial. I gave Mr. Horton the phone.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said to them. “We’re going to stand together on this.”

“Well, well, well,” said Baker. “Look what we’ve got here.”

Here was Baker’s computer screen. He’d called an old friend at the DMV, who’d quickly traced the Massachusetts license plate on the black Cadillac of the cold-hearted creep who had threatened Lacey and her family.

“Seems the bad guy’s car is registered to none other than D&B Security in Boston.”

“What?” That’s where Houston Bule and Donny Lupo worked. “I thought they’d gone out of business!” I shouted.

“Guess not.”

My mind tried to make sense of this. “So that means the creep in the Cadillac doesn’t just work for D&B, he works for Midian Associates.”

“You’ve got it, kid,” Baker said. “Call your source. Tell her what you already know.”

I punched in Veronica Blitzer’s number as Baker walked out the door.

After five rings she answered.

“Veronica,” I said into the phone, “this is Hildy Biddle.”

No sound.

“Veronica?”

A quiet “yes.”

“I believe you contacted me because you want to help this town. I need to understand what you know and how you know it. I will never use your name. I promise.”

Absolute silence.

“Veronica, please help me.”

She took a big breath. “A while ago, I found some holes in
The Bee
’s financial records that didn’t make sense—big checks were coming in from Midian for ‘advertising’ and we’d never run any advertising for Midian—not once. I went to Pen. He said we were publishing advertorials for Midian. That didn’t sound right. I started looking deeper.”

Their master plan is to turn the Ludlow house along with the Red Road properties into a haunted tourist attraction. In the process, Pen Piedmont, editor and publisher of
The Bee,
has been paid twenty-five thousand dollars by Midian Associates to write articles denouncing the state of the properties in addition
to being a partner in the enterprise. Midian hired Donald Lupo and Houston Bule of D&B Security to break into the Ludlow house allegedly to use scare tactics to frighten neighbors, but that plan was stopped when Bule was arrested and, later, Lupo was found dead on the property from a heart attack. Midian Associates also paid Madame Zobek to come to Banesville and con local residents into believing that the ghost of old man Ludlow was present, dangerous, and deadly. The amount Zobek was paid for her part in this corrupt corruption is unconfirmed, a source close to the investigation said. At least three people were paid by Pen Piedmont to put up the frightening signs that appeared on the Ludlow property beginning in the summer.

The strong-armed tactics of Midian Associates were well known among the orchard owners of Red Road. “They sent a big guy to threaten us,” one owner recalled. Other orchard owners felt that the safety of their families could be at risk if they did not sell their property at below market prices to Midian.

I wrote and rewrote and checked my notes and ate cinnamon cookies until my sugar level had me on the ceiling. Finally, at 5:00
A
.
M
. I was done.

I sent the article to Baker, leaned over my desk, and fell asleep.

Mom woke me at 8:00
A
.
M
., holding out the phone. “Baker for you.”

Reaching for consciousness, I croaked out, “Hi.”

“It’s great, Biddle. You nailed them.”

“Thanks.”

“Take out
corrupt corruption.
It’s too much.”

I
liked
that.

“But you’re still not done.”

I caught my reflection in the mirror—rumpled hair, sallow skin, dark circles. I sure looked done. Overdone.

“Call Piedmont and Midian. Read the article to them over the phone. Ask them if they have any comments.”

That woke me up.
“Are you kidding?”

“Cover all the bases, kid.”

“But I’m clandestine.”

“So, you’re calling on behalf of
The Peel.
You want to give them a chance to respond.”

“But Piedmont has
never
done that for us!”

“That’s right. Remind him of how it’s done.”

It was a slow morning for crime, and Sheriff Metcalf was eating a glazed apple doughnut when Zack and I walked into his office, holding hands.

“Can I use the phone, Sheriff?” I asked him.

“Are you all right?”

I explained about calling Martin Midian and Pen Piedmont and what I’d discovered. I showed him my article. “I thought I should call from here.”

He pressed line three. “Take it at the back desk,” he said. “I’ll pick up when it starts ringing.”

It’s easy to be brave when you’re writing in a room all by yourself. It’s much harder to hold on to courage when you have to confront someone.

Zack put a hand on my shoulder as I tried to reach Martin Midian. He was unavailable for comment.

Suit yourself. I made the next call.

“The Bee,”
the receptionist answered cheerily.

“Pen Piedmont, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

I took a deep breath. Time to come out of the shadows. “This is Hildy Biddle calling on behalf of
The Peel.”

She gasped. I heard a click.

“Piedmont.”

No turning back now. “Mr. Piedmont, this is Hildy Biddle.
The Peel
is running an article and we wanted to give you the opportunity to respond.” No sound on the other line. “Mr. Piedmont… ?”

“Read it to me,” he snapped.

I did and it wasn’t easy, especially since after every sentence he started yelling that it was all a lie and he was going to call his lawyer and if we published that
fiction
he’d bring us down every way he knew how.

I wrote down everything he said. “Is that all you have to say, sir?”

Not exactly. He let loose a string of four-letter words and hung up. I wrote those down, too; my hand was shaking.

If you need to be popular, journalism is not for you.

The sheriff said, “We’ll make sure your papers get distributed.” He stood up and headed out the door. “I’ll be over at
The Bee.
Mr. Piedmont and I are going to have a nice long talk.”

We don’t know whether the talk was nice or not. We do know that it was long. Pen Piedmont denied everything
and accused
The Peel
of libel, which meant we knowingly printed things about him that weren’t true. Then Sheriff Metcalf called Martin Midian as
The Peel
came out in full voice. My headline read:

The sheriff took the papers to the official drop-off centers and guarded them as shopkeepers and other distributors picked them up.

It was a new day, all right.

Piles of unopened
Bees
were left on the streets for recycling.

Signs in shops sprouted up.

We do not carry
The Bee
anymore.

Proud distributors of
The Peel.

The sign at Lull’s Cheap Gas was my favorite:
Get Peeled Here.

Pen Piedmont tried to backpedal, saying that Midian Associates was paying him for “advertising consultation” on the ads they were planning to run for the real estate project.

Madame Zobek declared that ghosts were gathering on the high school property and we’d better watch out!

Zack and I were feeling the rightness of our relationship. I trusted him so much, I told him about how Nathan and Lev had cheated on me.

He held me close. “I can’t imagine anyone with a brain wanting any other girlfriend except you.”

I was sitting with Zack at Minska’s, watching Jarek’s cousin lift huge barbells up and down outside. Weightlifters get the point across that a place is heavily guarded.

“Do you like guys like that?” Zack asked quietly.

I took his hand. “I like brainy guys.”

“I’d better keep reading then,” he said, squeezing my hand.

That’s when Madame Zobek walked in. She paused at the door for an extra moment to make sure everyone saw her.

There was a murmur in the restaurant as she slowly moved to a table, raising her hand as a few people said hello. She stopped at one booth, putting her hand to her forehead.

“Your scarf,” Madame Zobek said to a woman. “It has been to a sad place.”

The woman caught her breath. “I just bought this.”

Minska sat Madame Zobek at a table.

“A little water, please, dear one.”

The restaurant became very quiet, then a woman’s voice rang out: “Did you see that?”

Heads turned to Madame Zobek, whose hand caused a knife to move around the table. That wouldn’t have been a big deal if she’d touched the knife. The thing is, she didn’t.

“Silly me,” she said. “Sometimes the power, you know, just comes out. I cannot help it.”

The knife moved just slightly as Madame Zobek’s hand hovered over it.

“Science in our everyday lives,” Zack said, and headed to her table.

He stood in front of her.

“You are forthright,” she said to him. “You have come for information.”

“I’ve got the information,” Zack said loudly. “Like poles repel, unlike poles attract.” He grabbed Madame Zobek’s hand, turned it over, and something from her hand fell out and clinked onto the floor. Zack picked it up, held it high, and announced, “Magnets have remarkable power, ladies and gentlemen.”

That’s how she moved the knife!

Madame Zobek rose quickly. “I thought this was a friendly place. I sense great darkness here.”

“Go figure,” Zack said.

She tossed her cape dramatically and left.

“Good friends,” Minska said, laughing, “spread the word.”

No one knows what the sheriff said when he spoke to Madame Zobek, but the next day she’d left town fast and put a note on her studio door that she had been “called to a new place. The stirrings are strong.”

I heard the police had trailed her just outside of Syracuse.

It was like a house of cards falling.

Chad Pritt of
Hair-Raising Haunts
canceled the Ludlow cable TV taping due to “questions of authenticity.”

Mrs. Kutash countersued Pen Piedmont on behalf of the school, saying he had knowingly and with malice shut down a “vital school communications network”
(The Core).

He denied everything, saying the whole world was out to get him, blah, blah, blah, but even committed liars can’t weasel out of everything.

Soon after, he left town on “an extended vacation.”

Don’t feel the need to hurry back, Pen!

It’s a wonderful thing when truth hits the streets. It’s like people were starving for real news.

There were smiles—that’s the first thing I noticed. Minska said when fear begins to lift, you can see the freedom in people’s faces.

Even the early winter vegetables at the farmers market seemed happy. A potato farmer started decorating some of his spuds with smiley faces. Cabbages sprouted eye holes and big toothy grins.

The Elders Against Evil felt the cheer and decided to decorate Farnsworth Road for Christmas with hundreds of blinking lights. They stuck Frosty, Rudolph, and the Holy Family up, too, until a freak lightning storm decapitated Frosty and left the Baby Jesus looking irked.

The big question in town was whether
The Bee
would shut down.

The big question at
The Peel
was, do we fully unveil ourselves and write under our bylines?

I talked about it with Mom.

“I wonder, Hildy, how people would have reacted to a teenage paper, really. We adults aren’t always the most open-minded when it comes to your age group.”

Tell me about it.

“But now I think you’re free to let people know who you are.”

I went to Minska’s to get her opinion.

“The women in the underground press,” Minska reminded me, “didn’t get the recognition, but they got the results.” She handed me the picture of Anna shaking her fist at the Lenin Shipyards. “For you.”

“Oh, I couldn’t take it, it’s—”

“For
you.
” Minska tapped the glass over Anna’s determined face. “During all the uprisings, everyone knew her name.”

I held the photo close.

“What are you going to do now, Hildy?”

I laughed. “I’m going to sleep longer.”

“For a little while,” Minska said. “And then you take up the next thing.”

The next thing came fast and with a fury.

On December 8, Martin Midian held a press conference in Boston.

“We are fully committed to building our haunted village,” he declared. “We own the Ludlow estate and several properties along Red Road and will not let challenges
stand in our way. We are proud to announce that major construction will begin next week in Banesville, New York.”

Behind him was a black banner with white letters: