The Secret Tree (5 page)

Early the next morning, I went back to the tree.

Its vibration hummed in my rib cage, calling to me:
Mmmmm … Mmmmminty …

I stopped and stared at the hole — a small, dark, mysterious space. I reached inside, feeling around for the last secret I’d left there, the one from the kid who was afraid something was wrong with his or her brain. I touched a slip of paper and pulled it out.

It was a new secret.

I read the secret again. I could hardly believe it.

Someone really
was
putting a curse on Paz!

The world seemed to tilt. If Paz could be cursed, anything was possible. Who knew, maybe the Man-Bat was real too.

I couldn’t leave the secret in the hole — it was too important. I put it in my pocket and walked home.

Dad was on his way to work. “I just stopped by the Calderons’ to check on Paz’s rash,” he said. The rash had flared all night but was fading by the time Dad looked at it. Just like the stomach pains. Same pattern.

“I told her no swimming for a couple of days, in case the chlorine irritates her skin,” Dad said. “But she’s fine.”

“I’ll go over and see her later.”

“That’s nice.” Dad gave me a kiss and drove off to work. I sat on the steps, fingering the secret in my pocket. Dad said Paz was okay. But this slip of paper told a different story.

Pfft pfft pfft pfft
… David and Troy rode down the street on their bikes. David leaned over and spat. Troy popped a wheelie.

“Hey, loser,” David called. I didn’t take it personally. David called everybody “loser.” I sometimes wondered if it was because he couldn’t remember anyone’s real name.

Then I saw it: another flash. It came from the edge of the woods. I focused my eyes as hard as I could until I picked out the mystery boy in his camouflage outfit. He pointed his camera at the Mean Boys on their bikes.

The Mean Boys disappeared down Western Street. They hadn’t noticed the flash. But I kept my eye on that boy.
Flash!
He took another picture.

“Hey, you!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

The boy turned and ran through the woods. I chased him. This time I wouldn’t just watch him. I was going to catch him and find out what he was up to. Unless he went into the Witch House, of course. In that case, I’d turn around and run screaming in the other direction.

“Stop! I won’t hurt you!” I yelled. The boy didn’t stop. He ran all the way through the woods. He ran right past the Witch House, past the empty, half-finished houses that surrounded it, down the dusty, unpaved road to the house marked
MODEL HOME
. He ran inside and shut the door behind him.

I dashed over to the model home and tried the door. It was locked. So I knocked. I rang the doorbell. “I know you’re in there!” I called. “You have to come out sometime! I’m going to sit right here and wait until you do.”

I couldn’t wait forever. If Mom rang the bell, I’d have to go home. But the boy didn’t know that.

The ground around the unfinished houses was just mud and straw. The Witch House was gray and peeling and cobwebby, with an overturned couch on the front porch and trash in the yard. A curtain moved in the window. Was someone watching? Or was it just the wind?

The Model Home was the most inviting place in the development, new and clean and surrounded by a carpet of green sod.

I heard a noise from inside the house. I knocked again. “I swear I won’t hurt you! I just want to talk to you.”

The door swung open, and there he stood. The boy in the camouflage.

He was short, shorter than me, and his hair was yellow fluff like a baby duck’s, shorn close to his head. Around his neck hung the chunky, black plastic thing I’d seen on him before.

“Is that a camera?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you take my picture with it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Did you steal one of my school pictures out of my garage?”

“No.”

He was lying. “I know you did,” I said. “You can tell me the truth. I won’t say anything.”

The boy said nothing.

“I know you took something,” I said. “I saw you.”

“I’ll give it back,” he said.

Aha!

“That’s okay,” I told him. “My mom was going to throw it out anyway. But you still shouldn’t have taken it without asking.”

I thought he was going to say he was sorry, but he didn’t.

“Is this your house?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I come in?”

“Okay.” He stepped aside to let me in. A painting of a farmhouse hung on the wall of the entryway, with a bowl of plastic flowers on a table below it.

“I’m Minty Mortimer,” I said.

The boy shook my hand. “Raymond Delmore Junior.” He leaned forward and sniffed me. “You don’t smell very minty. You smell kind of sweaty. And grassy.”

“Yeah, well, they didn’t name me for my smell. They named me after my grandmother Araminta.”

“My grandmother’s name is Kelly,” Raymond said. “That rhymes with smelly.”

“Yes, it does.”
Kelly
rhymed with
smelly
— that was undeniably true. But it had nothing to do with anything that I could see. “I know a dog named Kelly.”

Speaking of smells, this house had a strange one. Most houses smell like the people who live in them. I’m used to my own house’s smell, so I don’t notice it, but Paz says it smells like lemons, pizza, and rubbing alcohol. Mom does disinfect things a lot. The Calderons’ house smells like onions and wood polish and Play-Doh. The Gorelicks’ house is air freshener, menthol, and pot roast. Everybody’s house has a different people smell.

This model home smelled like vinyl, paint, and new carpeting. It had no “people” smell.

Raymond led me into the living room. There was a black leather couch, some stiff-looking chairs, and a Barcalounger with the footrest out. The glass coffee table
was littered with comic books, a harmonica, an open can of grape soda, a notebook, glue, tape, scissors, and a pencil.

“So this is really your place?” I asked.

“Sure is.”

“Where are your parents?”

“They have their own houses. This house is just for me.”

“Wow. How’d you get your own house?”

“The construction workers left it for me,” Raymond said. “They left a few weeks ago and they haven’t come back. I think they ran out of money.” He paused. “So it’s my house now.”

He plopped down on the Barcalounger, king of the castle. I stayed on my feet. I had something to confront him with and wanted the advantage of height.

I pulled the latest secret out of my pocket — the one about the curse — and waved it in Raymond’s face. “What do you know about
this
?”

His eyes lit up. “Another one!” He grabbed the paper and read it, moving his lips slightly.

“Are you putting a curse on my friend?” I demanded.

Instead of answering, Raymond reread the secret.

“Why do you keep taking pictures of us? Are you a spy? Or are you using the pictures to cast a voodoo spell?”

Raymond opened the notebook on the coffee table and held the slip of paper over it.

“Can I have this?” he asked.

This was not the reaction I was expecting. This boy wasn’t easily intimidated. “I don’t know,” I said. “What are you going to do with it? Use it in one of your curses?”

“I’m not cursing anyone,” Raymond said.

“How do I know you’re not lying?” I asked. “You lied before, about my school picture. For all I know you’ve got voodoo dolls for everyone in Catonsville.”

“I need this.” He clutched the scrap of paper. “Please let me keep it.”

“What do you need it for?”

He paged through the notebook. There were pictures of people from the neighborhood: Lennie playing kickball, Hugo and Robbie wrestling on the grass, Casey Murphy riding her bike in the driveway, Melina playing her guitar. Raymond added two more pictures to the book: Troy and David on their bikes. The photos he’d just taken.

“You took these pictures?” I asked.

“With this.” Raymond touched the blocky camera around his neck. It said
POLAROID
in small silver letters on one side. “See, you take a picture, and a second later it comes out of this slot.” He showed me where the pictures came out. “You don’t need a computer or anything. You just wait a few minutes for it to develop itself.”

“So why did you steal my school picture?” I asked. “Why not just take one of me with your camera?”

“This camera’s old,” he explained. “I’m on my last roll of film.”

“So? Buy more.”

“I don’t have any money. Besides, this film is hard to find.”

Raymond turned another page. There I was, smiling dorkily in last year’s school picture.

“Hey! You
did
steal it.”

“I needed it.” He closed the book and hugged it to his chest. “For the book.”

“What is this book?” I sat down on the couch. “Let me see it.”

He clutched the book tighter.

“I promise I won’t take it away. I just want to see it.”

He hesitated.

“You have to show it to me,” I said. “Because my picture’s in there.”

Raymond set the book on the table. On the cover, in crayon, was written,
My Book of Frends
.

“You spelled
friends
wrong,” I pointed out. He picked up a crayon and added an
i
.

I opened the book. Taped to the first page was Paz’s missing photo ID.

“You stole this too!” I peeled Paz’s photo ID off the page. “From the roller rink! I didn’t see you there.”

“Nobody saw me,” Raymond said. “When I wear my camouflage, I’m practically invisible.”

“I can see you just fine.”

“That’s because I let you see me.”

“Okay …” I turned another page in the book. A few scraps of paper were slipped between the pages. They were just like the notes I’d found in that murmuring tree. Secrets.

“I found this one before.” I pointed to the badly spelled note. The others I hadn’t seen. “Where did you get them?”

“From the Secret Tree.”

So I wasn’t the only one. To be sure, I said, “You mean … that tree in the woods? With the big hole in it?”

Raymond nodded. “A ghost lives in that tree. He eats secrets.”

“A ghost.” I blinked. That would have sounded crazier to me than Lennie’s stories of the Man-Bat, except … I’d felt something. The humming. The murmur.

“People tell secrets to the spirit in the tree, and the spirit makes the secrets go away,” Raymond said. “He swallows them and whispers them out on the wind.”

“Who told you that?”

“Otis,” Raymond said. “He drives down our road once in a while. He gives me some strawberries or a watermelon, if he has extra. He says if I don’t take them, he has to throw them away.”

“Does he ever talk about your aura?” I asked.

“No,” Raymond said. “But he told me about ghosts and spirits, and how they can live in the trees.”

“That’s just a story,” I said. “Like the Man-Bat.”

“It’s true. One day the construction workers were digging up the dirt under that house there —” Raymond pointed out the window at the unfinished house closest to the woods. “And they found a skeleton. They dug up a grave by accident.”

“A grave!” I thought of Crazy Ike, buried long ago on the Witch Lady’s farm.

Raymond nodded. “They took the skeleton away and kept on building the house. I told Otis about it, and he said it must have been the bones of Crazy Ike.”

“The boy who died from a bat bite!” I knew it.

“Otis said when you disturb a spirit’s grave, the ghost floats out of the ground and goes to live in a tree. Especially a tree with a hole in it. And it eats secrets. So if you find a tree with a hole in it, you can put your secret in there, and the spirit makes it go away.”

“So Crazy Ike’s ghost lives in that tree? I thought Crazy Ike turned into the Man-Bat.”

“You believe in the Man-Bat?” Raymond scoffed. “He’s not real.”

“And Crazy Ike’s ghost is?”

“Yes.” Raymond said. “I saw him. I saw his spirit float out of the ground and fly into the woods. He lives in that tree. Didn’t you feel it humming? That’s his spirit. He’s calling out, ‘Bring me your secrets….’”

“I did feel it humming,” I said. “It sounded like voices murmuring.”

“Those are the secrets blowing on the wind,” Raymond said.

“Oh.” This story was crazy, far-fetched … but I believed it.

“After they dug up those bones, the construction guys started having problems. One of their trucks broke, some pipes wouldn’t work, and the wood they used had termites. They stopped coming to work. Otis said Crazy Ike cursed them.”

“Because he was mad that they dug up his grave?”

“Yes. But I think Crazy Ike made sure they left this model house for me to live in. Because Crazy Ike looks out for me.”

“How does Otis know so much about spirits?” I asked.

“He’s from Louisiana,” Raymond told me. “He knows voodoo.”

Voodoo! That could not be a coincidence.

“Do you think Otis put a curse on my friend Paz?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” Raymond reached for the can of grape soda and tilted it toward his mouth. It was empty. “Why would he?”

“He probably wouldn’t.” But the Witch Lady would.

I looked at the notebook again. “What about all these secrets? Why didn’t the tree eat them?”

“Maybe it was full.”

“Raymond —”

“Or maybe I took them out of the hole before the tree had a chance to swallow them.”

“But that means those secrets won’t go away.”

“These are my friends’ secrets,” Raymond said. “I’m just trying to help them. That’s why I made this notebook. I put in pictures of all my friends and try to match the secret to the person. When I’ve matched them all, I’ll put the secrets back in the tree.”

“I think you should put them back now,” I said. “And stop taking pictures of everybody.”

“But don’t you want to know who put a curse on your friend?” Raymond asked.

He was right. Paz had already suffered a stomachache and a rash. Something worse — much worse — could be next.

“We’ll make a list of suspects,” Raymond said. “Then spy on them to find out if they’re doing curses.”

I knew it wasn’t right to spy. But this was a matter of life and death. Possibly. Anyway, it was extremely important.

“Where should we start?” I wanted to start with the Witch Lady, but I was afraid to say so. I hadn’t quite figured out what Raymond’s relationship with her was, if any. After all, he had his own house. Maybe he had nothing to do with her.

Or maybe he was related to her. And maybe he got touchy when people called her a witch.

“How about those Mean Boys?” Raymond suggested.

“Good idea. They’re mean to everybody. But they could have a special grudge against Paz.” I suspected Troy
of having a crush on Paz. That would be a weird reason to curse someone, but Troy had a twisted mind.

“If they do, we’ll find out. And I’ll take pictures so we’ll have proof.”

“Then we can call the police on them and get them arrested,” I said.

Raymond paled. “Not the police. We can handle this without them.”

“We’ll tell my parents, then. And Paz’s parents.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll start tonight,” I said. “Meet me at the edge of the woods across from my house, just after dark. And bring your camera.”

“I will.”

I picked up Paz’s ID. “I’m taking this back to Paz.”

“No! She’ll think you stole it.”

“I’ll tell her you stole it,” I said. “That happens to be the truth.”

“No. You can’t tell her about me.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t tell anyone about me. And you especially can’t tell anyone about my secret house.”

“But why?”

“Because we’re spies now,” Raymond said.

“But —”

“Promise you won’t tell.”

“But —”

“Promise. Or I won’t help you find out who put a curse on your friend.”

I wanted his help. And nothing was more important than saving Paz from the curse.

“Okay,” I agreed. “But once the mystery is solved, can I tell?”

“No,” Raymond said. “Never.”