Spyhole Secrets (11 page)

H
allie was almost back to the Warwick Mansion before she cooled off enough to start thinking. Thinking and wondering about what had been going on and why she had reacted the way she did. One thing was for certain: That silly little nerd definitely thought he was a psychiatrist.

She shrugged angrily. Well, let him. Let him think that a little third-grade kid knew enough about people to help them solve their problems. She knew better. And one thing she knew for sure was that she wasn’t going to tell a dumb little kid anything about herself and her mother and father just because he was a wannabe psychiatrist. And she wasn’t going to worry about him anymore either. About him or his gorgeous sister or their weird father. And she certainly wasn’t going to waste so much time on the stupid blue-glass spyhole anymore.

And she didn’t either. Not on that afternoon or on Tuesday. By Wednesday she was beginning to change
her mind, just a little. During the day at school she found herself wondering what might be happening to Zachary, and Tiffany too. She just about decided to make a short visit to the spyhole as soon as she got home. But as she was leaving school she ran into some people she knew who were on their way to the downtown mall and they asked her to come too.

There were four of them, Erin and Jolene and two other girls from her first-period language arts class. Those other two were part of the gang that Hallie had really hated when she first came to Irvington. The kids who used all the secret in-group slang and wore expensive clothes that were the latest thing. A tight bunch of dudes who especially liked to show off for each other by dissing people who didn’t belong to their group. Dissing people like Hallie Meredith, for instance. At least that was what she’d thought about them for a while.

After she’d gotten to know some of them a little better, she decided they weren’t all so bad, particularly a girl named Katlyn McKnight. Katlyn was along that afternoon, and she and Hallie laughed a lot at Erin and Jolene, who were walking all the way to the mall because they’d heard that Jason Johnson sometimes went there on Wednesdays. So while Hallie and Katlyn shopped for some colored map-making pens, the rest of them shopped for Jason Johnson. The whole trip was kind of interesting even though nobody found what they were looking for,
and Hallie barely got home before her mom did. So no spyhole time that day either.

But then on Thursday Mom had an after-work meeting again, which for Hallie meant an extralong afternoon with nothing much to do. Sitting alone in the dingy apartment, she was feeling bored and gloomy, almost the way she felt in the days when she used to wind up looking for a place to hide. It had been a long time since she’d done the hiding thing. Still, she might have started doing it again except that her hiding urge kept getting interrupted by worries about Zachary. Particularly about his father and the gun. That was all she needed. A whole new problem to worry about. She didn’t remember deciding to go to the attic, but suddenly there she was, on her way up the stairs.

Just as she thought it would be, the spyhole apartment, at least the part that she could see, was deserted. Nothing moved in the ugly, bare-walled room. She was prepared for that. In fact, she’d brought along a flashlight and a book to read while she waited to see if anyone was going to show up.

She sat on the old trunk for several minutes, reading a page or two, or trying to in the dim light, before leaning forward to take another look. Then, just as she was about to give up and go downstairs, things began to happen.

The man appeared first. For some reason, just watching the tall, dark-eyed man walk calmly into the
room made Hallie catch her breath. Her heart began to beat faster. She didn’t know why. He didn’t seem to be angry this time. No fierce scowl or clenched fist, and the only thing he had in his hand, in both hands really, was a bunch of paper. Maybe a folded newspaper or a bunch of mail.

As always, the man was headed directly for the out-of-sight corner of the room. And just as before, right after he disappeared, his feet and ankles came back into view. Nothing more happened, but Hallie went on feeling tense and nervous, as if she somehow knew there would be more. She tried to read a little between spyhole checkups, but it was harder to concentrate now. After a while, she gave up on the book and concentrated on watching, even though there was nothing much to see. Nothing moved in the watery blue light except for the long legs uncrossing and then recrossing themselves now and then. Hallie was feeling more and more certain something was about to happen, when suddenly it did. The door opened again and Zachary came in.

Just inside the door he stopped to look around. When he turned toward the window Hallie could see him very clearly, with his pointed chin and his wide-set eyes under the fuzzy cap of hair. Compared to his tall, broad-shouldered father, Zachary looked particularly small. Small, quick, and as twitchy as a nervous animal. Hallie found herself wanting to reach out and tap him on the shoulder and whisper something
that might calm him down. Something like “Hey, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

Zachary looked around the room. As Hallie watched unblinking, he moved past the hidden corner and then back again and then slowly, uncertainly, walked toward it and disappeared. For what seemed a very long time neither he nor his father came back into view.

Hallie pressed her forehead against the crack in the wooden paneling and stared until her eyes began to blur and she had to shake her head and blink rapidly to clear her vision. She was just leaning back to the spyhole when Zachary exploded out of the corner and bounced across the room. Whirling around, jumping and dodging, he bounced into the dining area and straight to the sideboard. Jerking open the drawer, that same long drawer she had seen his father open, he pulled something out. Holding it in both hands, he waved it around wildly as he ran back to the hidden corner.

What was it? What was he holding? Hallie couldn’t be sure. His hands covered most of it, but the part she had seen was dull black and had a squared-off, blunt shape like … Hallie didn’t move. She couldn’t seem to take her eye away from the spyhole, even though once again, there was nothing to see. But while her eyes saw nothing except the empty room, her mind was seeing a whole series of imagined scenes.

Violent scenes, most of them, in which Zachary was holding the black gun above his head, and then pointing it at… Could she hear a gunshot from inside the double-paned windows of the apartment building? She wasn’t sure. Another scene appeared in which Zachary’s dad was slumped in the chair while Zachary stood in front of him and a curl of smoke drifted up from the black blur in his hands. And one more, in which the father grabbed Zachary’s arm and wrestled the gun out of his hands. Pulled it away and then…

A strangely unmeasurable amount of time passed. The frightening images flashing through Hallie’s mind were so vivid that when somebody finally appeared she was, for a moment, uncertain whether he was real or imagined.

Imagined? No, definitely real. It was Zachary’s father. Blank-faced and empty-handed, he strode across the room and disappeared through the door that led to the hall. Several minutes passed. Nothing else moved, no one else came into view. More images began to appear behind her eyes. Images of Zachary, alone now in the invisible corner. Alone, lying limply in the chair, eyes closed and… But then his father came back.

Standing in the doorway, he turned toward the invisible corner. He was saying something, his lips were smiling and then moving quickly, pausing and moving again, and then he was gone. And Zachary was
running after him, still clutching the strange black object in both hands.

Still holding her forgotten book and flashlight, Hallie sat on the old trunk for only a few seconds before she jumped up and ran across the attic and down the stairs. Not even stopping at the door to her own apartment, she ran on down the second flight and the first and then out on to Warwick Avenue. She was still running when she got to the main entrance of the Warwick Towers building.

T
he elevator guard in the lobby of the Towers apartments looked startled as Hallie burst through the door and skidded to a stop in front of his desk. A skinny, bony-faced man with a ponytail this time. Not the one she’d met before when she’d made up the story about having an aunt who lived in the building. That was good. That, at least, was good.

“Yes, can I help you?” the man said as Hallie gasped and panted, swallowed hard and then blurted out, “The Crestmans. I need to see the Crestmans.”

“Crestmans.” The man started to scroll down the computer screen and then stopped. “Your name, please?”

“My name? Do you have to—”

“I’ll need to tell them your name and ask if they’re expecting you.”

“Oh, I didn’t know …,” Hallie began uneasily, and then, getting control of herself, she went on,
“Tell them Hallie. That’s H-A-L-L-I-E. Ask for Zachary and tell him Hallie is here to see him.”

Mistake! A
voice in her head was shouting.
If something terrible has happened you don’t want your name mixed up in it. Mistake! Mistake!

Hallie was still trying to argue with the voice in her head when another one interrupted. “They don’t answer,” the doorman’s voice was saying. “The Crestmans aren’t answering and their machine isn’t on. They must not be at home.”

Hallie stared at the guard indignantly.
They
are
home
, she wanted to shout.
I saw them just a few minutes ago.
But of course she mustn’t say that. Anything but that. “But they
are
home,” she said. “I know they’re home.” The guard was staring at her, his eyes asking questions she knew she couldn’t answer.

“What do they look like?” he asked.

“Don’t you know?” Hallie was amazed and unbelieving.

“No.” The guard was smiling. “I’ve just started here. I haven’t gotten to know—”

“Oh, okay. Okay. Maybe they’re not home. I’ll come back later,” she babbled as she backed toward the door.

Outside on the sidewalk she started to run again— and then stopped. Where was she going? Not to look for someone who could tell her what to do. There wasn’t anyone. There wasn’t anyone who would understand if she said she had been watching this
family in their own living room and something bad was happening to them, or was about to happen.

No. No one could help her. She would have to decide what to do all by herself. She must have covered the short distance between the entrance to the mall and the Warwick Mansion in a kind of trance, and then, still lost in thought, sat down on the mansion’s front steps. She didn’t remember deciding to do it but that was where she still was a few minutes later when a familiar voice said, “Hallie. What are you doing? Did you lose your key?”

“Oh, hi,” Hallie said. “Hi, Mom. No, I have my key. I was just—sitting here.”

Carrying two bags of groceries, Mom came up a couple of steps and sat down beside her. She looked over at Hallie once or twice, but for quite a while she didn’t say anything. Hallie didn’t either, but she wished she could. She wished she could tell her mother what she had seen and what she was worrying about…. But there just wasn’t any way.

Where would she start? With that day in September when she was looking for place to hide and somehow wound up in the forbidden attic? And if she started there, she would have to go on and try to explain the blue-glass spyhole and everything she’d seen through it, right up until today. Right up to what she’d seen happening, or about to happen, to the Crestman family less than an hour ago. No. There was no way.

After a while they both got up. Hallie took one of
the bags from her mom and they went on up the stairs together.

That night Hallie managed to put the Crestmans out of her mind. At least she tried hard to, and most of the time she was pretty successful. While she helped get dinner ready and then ate it, she managed to concentrate on what was being said. They talked about the new general manager at the savings and loan and the latest news about Erin and Jolene and the Jason Johnson fan club. And about how Katlyn had asked her if she could come over sometime to help her figure out how to play her new computer game.

But later, in her own room, it was impossible to keep from going back over everything she had seen through the spyhole. Not just that afternoon but every time she’d been there and everything she’d seen and heard about the Crestmans. All of it kept playing through her mind like the rerun of a television story that never got to any sort of ending. At least not to the kind of ending that might help her understand what she’d seen happening that afternoon.

Had there really been a gun in the sideboard drawer? And why had Zachary waved it over his head as he rushed back to where his father was sitting? Could it all be related, in some way, to whatever it was that had been in the newspaper? And what about that time when the poor little kid had been spying on that scary, angry argument from behind the sofa? What had been going on then?

But most of all, Hallie’s mind kept going back to whatever it was that Zachary’s father and then Zachary himself had taken out of that drawer. Had it really been a gun? Over and over again she closed her eyes and tried to picture it, but the image kept changing and blurring. Sometimes it looked exactly like a gun—but other times she wasn’t sure.

Was it or wasn’t it? If only she knew even that much for sure, she would know what had to be done. If it wasn’t a gun, all she had to do was forget it. But if it was, she really should do something she hated even to think about. What she would have to do was tell her mother first and then probably the police. And part of the telling would have to be about the blue-glass spyhole, and what she, herself, had been doing there ever since the first week in September. For a whole lot of reasons, confessing seemed almost impossible.

But before she decided she had to be absolutely sure. And the only way that might happen was for her to keep looking for Zachary at the library as well as through the spyhole.

Zachary didn’t come to the library on Friday, and because she waited there for him for such a long time, she had very little time left to watch for him to show up in the Crestman apartment. And of course he wasn’t there either. Nobody was.

As soon as Hallie sat down on the trunk and
leaned forward to the spyhole she saw that the familiar blue-tinged room was empty. But she had been at the window for perhaps a minute before she began to notice that it was even emptier than usual. The longer she stared through the flawed blue glass, the more she began to suspect that, whatever else might have happened to the Crestmans, they were no longer living in the spyhole apartment.

She didn’t want to believe it. After all, she told herself, it didn’t look all that different. Most of the large, shapeless pieces of furniture were still where they had always been, and there never had been a whole lot more. But now even that little bit was missing. There were no magazines or newspapers on the end tables now, no dishes behind the glass doors of the sideboard, and, most importantly, no fanged and feathered witch-doctor mask on the mantelpiece. The dreary, lifeless spyhole apartment was completely deserted.

Stunned, Hallie went on sitting on the old trunk for an uncertain amount of time trying to guess what might have happened. To figure out why the Crestmans had gone, and most of all, why their disappearance was making her feel so lost and miserable. When she finally got up, crossed the attic, and trudged down the stairs, she still didn’t have any answers.