“That it?” Jake asked, turning the paper over, looking for something else.
“No, there’s also this,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the small wooden egg, which I put in his hand. “This was with my fourth clue.”
“Sometimes we didn’t finish a hunt, so my father would give in, tell us the final clue so we could have our candy before the mice found it. Sometimes I think there might be forgotten clues all over this house.”
“You really think so?” I took a sip of my Coke. Frances had just taken one from the ancient refrigerator, which despite its age had cranked to life after being plugged in and snorting for a couple of hours. I cleaned the coils; she cleaned two months worth of black mildew from the interior; and now it was stocked with soda and fruit juices.
“I know so. Sophie told me she’d found an old clue tucked in our father’s desk. That was...” Frances looked off thoughtfully, then her eyes twitched to me. I wondered then how much of Frances Carter was simply an outlandish act; she seemed to enjoy teasing me too much. “...last summer, right after she wrote me that she was fixing up this place. But she followed it to the next location and nothing was there. We’d probably solved that game long ago as children. Still, there are those few hunts we never did finish. My father was working on one the summer he died.”
“Really?” I leaned forward on the table.
“Really.” She mimicked my pose on the opposite side and I sank back. Her eyes, laughing, stared straight through me. “So if you find any... odd bits of paper with words that look like clues on them, you must promise to save them for me. Yes? Because if anyone finds anything...” She took a sip from her soda. “...it’s going to be you.”
“Yeah, so that’s where I’m stuck. Clue number four,” I said.
“It’s an egg,” Jake said; he still held the small, inch-long wooden egg.
“Yeah, it’s stupid, I suppose, a kid’s game. I got work to do and I want to get the outside stuff done before the weather turns cold.” I shrugged. “It is a job, Jake. No one bugs me; even when she was here, she didn’t bug me. She worked upstairs mostly, and in the attic. There are more animals up there. A lot of smaller specimens like game birds and stuff.” Suddenly I felt kind of foolish. “Look, Jake, I don’t feel like hanging around today. Let me reset the timers and we’ll go. I got a paper to work on and...” For the first time the house didn’t feel quite the same. Instead of large and warm and safe, it had a different feeling: smaller now with Jake in it, and somewhat tainted or dirty. Despite all the work I’d done, it seemed I hadn’t done enough, and like the treasure hunt games still hidden in the house, the house itself was unfinished. I could see streaks in the windows where I had washed them and dust on the floor where the remaining afternoon sunlight was streaming in.
“Fine. I’ll wait in the car,” Jake said. “Come out when you’re done. No hurry.” Then he turned and left.
“Thought I’d come by, say hi.” It was Emma, the green-haired girl I’d been stupid enough to think liked me, the girl I’d been stupid enough to like back. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?”
I let the wheelbarrow full of brush and privet branches drop to the ground and just stared at her. It was a gloomy Sunday and I wanted to get in some work before it started to rain. Emma Presley was an unwanted distraction.
No, rephrase that: Emma was just unwanted.
“Your friend, the cop, he told me where you were. But I already knew you were working here. Heard at school.”
I still said nothing. I had too much to do and the skies were growing ominously gray. I had an entire hedgerow to clean out; small pines and maples were growing up through the privet and each one had to be cut back or pulled up. I lifted the wheelbarrow up and turned it around.
“Herbie, you haven’t talked to me in weeks. I pass you in the halls and you just ignore me.”
Still, I said nothing, even though she was right there at my elbow. She wheeled her bike alongside me.
“Herbie, he... the kid you saw me with that day, he’s just a friend. I’ve known him since third grade. I’ve been trying to tell you that, but you won’t talk to me, Herbie.”
I dumped the brush behind the bigger of the two sheds; Sammy was there, tail high in the air, twitching back and forth.
“You know...” I heard the awkwardness in her voice. “I heard that the lady you’re working for, well, that she’s really beautiful and...”
“She is.”
Maybe it was my tone, or the fact that I responded to her, or to the mention of Frances, because Emma spun her bike around, glared at me, and said, “Very beautiful. Are you... are you in love with her?” Her entire face spoke ridicule and incredulity and bitterness.
I refused to answer. I lifted up the wheelbarrow to return to the front yard.
“Or... is it that you’ve been hurt so many times before, you can’t trust anyone? Is it that?” She hurried after me, trying to catch up. “Because I know. I heard about your mother. Everyone knows.”
I left the wheelbarrow where it was, figured if I got the ladder, went up to clean the gutters, she wouldn’t be able to follow me up there with her stupid bike.
“I wished you’d called. I wished you’d talk to me.” She was relentless, following me back to the shed and standing there while I wrestled an old folding aluminum ladder out of the back. Sammy was with me and I hit something in the rafters, a bucket or some clamming gear. It crashed to the floor and the cat went bounding out of the shed.
“Herbie, I want to talk. Why won’t you talk to me?” Emma demanded. She was standing in the door to the shed; I made a great act of dragging the ladder around her. “Damn you, Herbert Sawyer!” she cried as I headed back to the front of the house. “Damn you!”
“You don’t need girls. They’re worthless,” I told Samson as he sat before me, his broad tail pounding down on the wooden floor of the shed. “And untrustworthy.” I was wrapping a rag around my hand where I’d cut it on a broken gutter. The ladder was outside, lying on the ground. It was raining now; there was a steady drip-drip on the wooden eaves overhead. I needed to go inside, make some tea, and work, or maybe read. I had something to read, but I couldn’t even remember what novel we were doing in English class. I shut my eyes and leaned forward as Sammy’s tail went thump-thump-thump on the warped floorboards. “Come on, Sammy.”
I got up, went to the door, but Samson didn’t move. I turned around; he was still sitting in the middle of the little shed, his tail continuing to thump-thump-thump, but not the floor. He was sitting on something painted a pale green, something with...
I walked forward. Something with a brass handle attached to it. A trapdoor. A cellar door.
I was the caretaker, which meant it was my job to take care of things, right? Probably an old root cellar. Storage. We were far enough from the ocean to make cellars possible and the house itself had a cellar, so I didn’t think much of it when I leaned over, scooted the cat off the door, and pulled up on the handle.
“Well, looks like we found Dan Church,” the medical examiner said in passing to me and Jake. His gray eyes took me in severely. “Not a word, Herbie, until we notify next of kin.”
Jake had made some tea, then spent the next half hour making a swift round of phone calls, one of which was to Frances in New York.
The rain was coming down in a steady torrent. The medical examiner owed me nothing, but he was drinking Frances’s tea and I was the caretaker, and even if I was only fifteen, I deserved some explanation. Besides, this man knew me, and if he was going to fill Jake in, then he had to fill me in, too.
“Looks like the door hit him in the head. That’s my first guess. He doesn’t seem to have been shot, and there are no apparent wounds on the body, but he’s been down in that hole a while, at least four, five weeks, or more. He was reported missing when?” He looked at Jake.
“About six weeks ago.”
“Well,” the man wasn’t ready to make any hard and fast pronouncements, “it might be accidental death. He was going down into the cellar and the door fell forward on his head, and then he tripped, broke his neck. But then again, someone might have...”
“Dropped it deliberately on his head.” I refused to be sick, despite the odor, despite the awful knowledge that had hit me with that odor.
“Won’t know anything definite until the autopsy. Until then...” He looked at Jake, then to me. “Thanks for the tea,” he said.