Search for the Shadowman (8 page)

J.J. shrugged. “Deal.”

Mr. Hammergren smiled at Andy. “A little fame might go with it, too. The winners are always written up in their local newspapers and are often on the local television newscasts. Think you can handle that?”

Andy laughed. “My mom would like it, but I wouldn’t. She’d make me get a haircut and wear a shirt and tie.”

“We’ll negotiate,” J.J. said. He tugged Andy to the classroom door. “C’mon. We’ve already missed ten minutes of lunch.”

Andy had just enough time to turn and give Mr. Hammergren a thumbs-up. A statewide contest? A scholarship? Wow! He had more reason than ever to find Coley Joe.

A
s usual, Andy and J.J. walked home together. The row of white columns on J.J.’s front porch gleamed in the afternoon sunlight, and a single browned oak leaf spiraled lazily down to an immaculate green lawn. The air had the spicy smell of freshly cut grass and newly planted marigolds.

“Did Miz Minna put together a family tree?” Andy asked J.J.

“I dunno. Probably.” J.J. looked curious. “Why?”

“Because I wrote down some of what Tiffany said about her family tree, but I can’t remember where some of the people go who aren’t in a direct line. I thought Miz Minna could show me.”

“We can ask,” J.J. said. “C’mon in.”

Miz Minna shut down her computer as Andy and J.J. appeared at her open doorway. She rose with difficulty from her desk chair and hobbled with tiny steps to her large armchair by the window. Sinking into its soft curves and fat pillows, she said, “Y’all sit down, and
watch what you’re doing. Careful, Andy. There’s a pitcher of water by your elbow. Don’t tump it over.” She held out a hand toward J.J., who dutifully bent to kiss her forehead.

Andy glanced at the computer. “We didn’t mean to interrupt you, Miz Minna,” he said.

Miz Minna smiled. “You didn’t interrupt. I was just browsing. There are so many interesting Web sites to browse. And the number keeps growing. There’s a senior citizens’ board, you know. Why, last week … Would you like to hear about the topic that came up last week?”

J.J. got right to the point. “Sure, Miz Minna, but not right now. Andy’s got something to ask you.”

“About family trees,” Andy said.

“What about them?”

Andy was puzzled about the edge that had come into her voice. “I want to write down a family tree for my family, and I think I know how to put together most of it, but there are some parts I’m mixed up about. Like what to do with leftover people.”

“Leftover people?”

Andy put down his backpack and pulled out the notes he’d made from Tiffany’s chart. “Here,” he said. “You start with yourself. Then you go to your parents, and their parents, and keep going as far back as you can. But most of those people have other children. So what about all the brothers and sisters along the way and the
people they marry and their kids? What do you do with them?”

“You include them, of course,” she said.

Andy grimaced. “What if they don’t fit on the paper?”

Miz Minna’s laugh was like a tiny bell. “Their names might fill sheets and sheets of paper.”

“I don’t want to fill sheets and sheets of paper,” Andy said. “I don’t care that much about cousins and cousins of cousins. I only care about the Bonners down through my father.”
And Coley Joe, of course
, he added to himself.

Miz Minna seemed to relax. She reached out and patted Andy’s hand. “Don’t look so discouraged. If you’re interested only in a direct line from Malcolm John Bonner to you, then that’s all you need to write down.”

She giggled. “How will Miss Winnie feel, being left out?”

“Oh,” Andy said. “I’d better put her in, too.” He smiled. “But that won’t be hard. Miss Winnie didn’t get married or have any children, so there won’t be a lot of names to deal with. Maybe I can squeeze her in with the others on just one page.”

He tucked his notes into his backpack and shrugged his arms into the straps. “Thanks, Miz Minna,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t decide to tell them about the senior
citizens’ bulletin board. “I’ve gotta go home now and study for a test.”

“Wait a minute, Andy,” she said, and her little paperlike fingers pressed hard against his arm. “You haven’t told me what else you found in Miss Winnie’s box beside the Bonner family Bible.”

“A lot of papers and letters and stuff and a poetry book,” Andy said. “I told Mom I’d sort through it for Miss Winnie, but I haven’t had time to do it yet.”

“Letters? What kind of letters?”

“Business letters, like to an attorney about buying more acreage. Stuff like that. Boring.”

“If you find anything interesting, I’d like to learn about it. Y’hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Andy said.

Andy didn’t mention that everything he had found of interest so far had to do with Coley Joe. And he had no intention of talking about Coley Joe to Miz Minna, who had called Coley Joe a family skeleton in the Bonner closet.

The moment he arrived home, he booted up his dad’s computer. As soon as he was on-line, he went into the genealogy bulletin board section and added another message: “This is Hunter again. I asked if anyone had any information about Coley Joe Bonner. Well, now I’ve got more facts to go on. Coley Joe arrived in El Paso at the beginning of December 1877. On December
14, he wrote that he was going with a friend to San Elizario, hoping to buy cattle. If anyone knows where Coley Joe might have gone after San Elizario, will you please e-mail me?”

He wrote the same message on the Texas bulletin board.

Would he get an answer? It was worth a try.

Andy exited Windows and leaned back in his dad’s chair. He fingered the circular nail as he pictured Coley Joe’s smiling face.
If you went to San Elizario
, he wondered,
did you buy cattle? And if you did, then what happened? Where did you take the cattle? Where did you go?

Andy slowly got up from the chair and made his way to the kitchen. He poured a glass of milk, dumped a half dozen Oreos onto the table, and opened his math book. But he couldn’t concentrate. The problems squiggled on the page like pairs of pesky little black lovebugs.

He locked the back door, jumped off the stoop, fastened his helmet, hopped on his bike, and headed for the cemetery. “I’ve got to talk to Elton and find out what he knows,” he said aloud.

I
t took less than twenty minutes to pedal out to the cemetery. Andy was so intent on the questions he’d ask Elton that it didn’t occur to him, until he approached the silent, lonely rows of graves, that he’d forgotten to leave a note for his mother. He hadn’t even thought to ask J.J. to come with him.

Andy hesitated at the open gates, wondering if he should turn back and come another time—with J.J. for company.

“Back so soon?” a voice called. Elton stepped out from the doorway of his caretaker’s house.

Andy removed his helmet, leaned his bike against the wrought-iron fence, and walked into the cemetery. “If you don’t mind, there are a couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

Elton grinned and motioned toward the door. “Come on inside. It’s cooler.”

Once inside Elton’s living room, Andy sat where he had sat before on the lumpy sofa.

“I see you’re wearin’ the Bonner circle again.” Elton nodded toward the thong and nail.

To Andy’s surprise, it was hanging outside his T-shirt, in plain view.

“Want to know which Bonner it belonged to? Find the initials.”

“What initials?” Andy asked. He pulled the thong over his head and studied the nail.

“Look on the nail head itself,” Elton said. “You’ll see some initials scratched in.”

Andy squinted. Just as Elton had said, there were faint scratches. He could make out what looked like a tiny
M
and then a
J
and a
B.

“Hand it over,” Elton said. “I’ll take a look.”

He studied the nail and smiled. “Looks like you’ve got the old man’s nail. Malcolm John Bonner himself.”

Andy took a sharp breath and reached for the circle. The metal seemed warm against his fingers. “Maybe not,” he murmured, saying the words while hoping he was wrong. “His son had the same name. It might have been his.”

“Nope. His son would have had a
Jr.
scratched in.”

This circle really had belonged to his great-great-great-great-grandfather!
Slowly, respectfully, Andy hung it again around his neck, this time tucking it carefully under his shirt.

“Next question?” Elton said.

“I didn’t ask a question yet,” Andy said.

“You was thinkin’ it. Same thing. I suppose you want to know what the circle means.”

“I think I know. Miss Winnie—my great-aunt—she told me that a circle means ‘unbroken.’ ”

“Right. And these circles stood for an unbroken family circle. They all wore them—all the men in the Bonner family. Way I heard it, they was supposed to wear them forever, but old Malcolm, right there on his deathbed, tore his off. He told everybody he’d always hoped that Coley Joe would come back and return the money. But now it was too late. And then he said he wanted that serpent head carved on his tombstone so they’d all remember.”

Andy shuddered. “How could he hate his son?”

“Wasn’t hate. Just his own twisted kind of justice. Malcolm John felt betrayed.”

“But lots of things could have happened to Coley Joe. Why was Malcolm so sure that his son had stolen the money?”

“I always heard there was proof.”

“What kind of proof?”

“Now you gone past me with your questions. The
way the story goes, there was some kind of proof all right, but I never learned what it was. You got to find the answer to that one yourself.”

“How?”

“I done told you once. Ask the dead. William Shakespeare’s dead King Lear gave you one answer, didn’t he?”

“Well, yes, in a way,” Andy answered.

“So find out what the Bonners have got to tell you,” Elton said.

“How?” Andy wailed.

Elton leaned back in his chair and scratched his stomach. “I made the first part pretty easy with my Shakespeare clue! I can’t answer everythin’ for you. Some things, like the big answers, you just gotta figure out for yourself.”

T
hat evening Andy raced through his homework and began to sort out the papers in Miss Winnie’s box. There had been a few bad years, but mostly the Bonner ranch had thrived. Andy found countless bills of sale for livestock and for additional acreage.

You came out here owning nothing but land
, he said to Malcolm John,
and you made a comfortable life for your family. You can be proud of that.

But Andy pictured Coley Joe’s smiling face and, for a moment, was swept into a dark well of sadness.
Why
couldn’t you have forgiven your son?
he thought.
What is this terrible proof that destroyed you?

Andy didn’t expect an answer, in spite of Elton’s insistence that he should question the dead, so he wasn’t disappointed when an answer didn’t come. He sorted papers, fastening them together with rubber bands, until his mother came in to tell him it was time for bed.

Before Andy turned out the light, he sat on the side of his bed, his mouth still minty with the lingering taste of toothpaste. Slowly, he opened the drawer of his nightstand and sighed. Just as he had expected, the poetry book was in the drawer—but it was lying on top of the letters. Hadn’t he put the letters on top? He’d meant to, but he couldn’t remember.

Carefully, deliberately, Andy placed the letters on his nightstand and laid the poetry book on top of them. He pulled the leather thong from around his head and placed the circular nail on top of the book. “No more dreams. No more scary stuff,” he said aloud. “I’ve got school tomorrow. I want to sleep.”

But during the moments when he hung in an unreal haze between drowsiness and sleep, Andy heard Elton’s voice saying once again, “Find out what the Bonners have got to tell you.”

“Which Bonners?” Andy murmured.

No one answered.

A
ndy walked home by himself the next day, since J.J. had left school early for an appointment with his orthodontist.

Andy saw that their street-side mailbox was stuffed with the fall and early Christmas catalogs. He swept up the armful, carried it inside, and dumped it onto the kitchen table.

To his surprise, one of the envelopes had his own name and address printed on it, but there was no return address. As he stared at the thick block letters on the envelope, he felt that there was something ominous inside the envelope.

He didn’t want to open it, but his curiosity won out. Andy reached into the nearest drawer, pulled out the letter opener, and slit the top of the envelope.

The block printing on the sheet of paper was the same as the address. The message was short:

Andy heard his mother’s car in the driveway, stuffed the frightening threat back into the envelope, and shoved the envelope inside the waistband of his jeans,
under his T-shirt. There was no way he was going to show the letter to his mom.

How could he explain this letter? He needed to talk to J.J. Andy glanced at the kitchen clock. J.J. should be home from the orthodontist by this time.

As Mrs. Thomas entered the kitchen, Andy dashed out. “Hi, Mom. Bye, Mom. Going to J.J.’s. Back before dinner!” he yelled.

Andy ran the entire way. J.J., who answered the doorbell, didn’t even have a chance to say hello as Andy pushed him into the den.

“What’s with you?” J.J. asked.

“I got this letter today. You have to read it.” Andy pulled the letter from his shirt and shoved it into J.J.’s hands.

J.J. opened the letter while Andy collapsed on the sofa.

As he read the letter, J.J.’s eyes grew wide. “Who’s this from?” he asked.

“I don’t know. No return address.”

J.J. plopped down beside Andy and stared at the letter again. “I think it’s a joke—just like that warning you got over the telephone.”

“Joke?” Andy sat upright, snatched the letter, and stuffed it back under his T-shirt. “Some joke!” He lowered his voice. “The letter writer called me Hunter. Only a few people know that name is mine.”