I could see why none of Great-aunt Rose's own kids ever invited her over anymore for the holidays. She was a real joy to have around.
"What about my mom and dad?" I asked. "Where are they?"
"Your father went to one of those restaurants of his," Great-aunt Rose said, in tones of great disapproval. Restauranting was probably, in her opinion, another example of time frittered away. "And your other brother went with your mom."
"Oh, yeah?" I pulled on the biggest, heaviest coat I could find. It was my dad's old ski parka. It was about ten sizes too big for me, but it was warm. Who cared if I looked like Nanook of the North? I certainly wasn't trying to impress the guys at the Stop and Shop. "Where'd they go?"
"To the fire," Great-aunt Rose said, and turned back to the newspaper that was spread out in front of her. LOCAL RESIDENT FOUND DEAD, screamed the headline. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED. Uh, no duh.
I thought Great-aunt Rose had finally gone round the bend. You know, Alzheimer's. Because the fire that had burned down the restaurant had been nearly three months ago.
"You mean Mastriani's?" I asked. "They went to the job site?" It didn't make much sense that they'd go there, especially on a day like today. The contractors who were rebuilding the restaurant had knocked off for the winter. They said they'd finish the place in the spring, when the ground wasn't so hard.
So what were my mom and Michael doing at an empty lot?
"Not that fire," Great-aunt Rose said, disparagingly. "The new one. The one at that Jewish church."
Now Great-aunt Rose had my full attention. I stared at her dumbfounded. "There's a fire at the synagogue?"
"Synagogue," Great-aunt Rose said. "That's what they call it. Whatever. Looks like a church to me."
"There's a fire at the synagogue?" I repeated, more loudly.
Great-aunt Rose gave me an irritated look. "That's what I said, didn't I? And there's no need to shout, Jessica. I may be old, but I'm not—"
Deaf, is what she probably said. I wouldn't know, since I booked out of there before she could finish her sentence.
A fire at the synagogue. This was not a good thing. I mean, not that I go to temple, not being Jewish.
Still, Ruth and her family go to temple. They go to temple a lot.
And if the fire was big enough that my mom and Mikey had felt compelled to go …
Oh, yes. The fire was big enough. I saw the dark plume of smoke in the air before I even got to the end of Lumbley Lane. This was not good.
I slogged through the snow, heading for the Stop and Shop, which was fortunately in the same direction as the synagogue. They have plows in my town, but it takes forever for them to get around to the residential streets. They do all the roads around the hospital and courthouse first, then the residential areas … if they don't have to go back and do the important roads again, which, in a storm like this, they'd need to. They never bothered with rural routes at all. A big storm tended to guarantee that everyone who lived outside the city limits was snowed in for days. Which was good for kids—no school—but not so good for adults, who had to get to work. Lumbley Lane had not been plowed. Only our driveway had been shoveled. Mr. Abramowitz, the champion shoveler in the neighborhood, had barely made a dent in his driveway. . . . Only enough had been shoveled so that he could get the car out, undoubtedly so that he and his family could head over to the synagogue and see what they could do to help, the way my mom and Mikey had. In a small town, people tend to pitch in. This can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing. For instance, people are also eager to pitch in with the latest gossip. Which—case in point, Nate Thompkins—was not always so helpful.
By the time I got to the Stop and Shop, which was only a few streets away from my house, I was panting from the exertion of wading through so much snow. Plus my face felt frozen on account of the wind whipping into it, despite my dad's voluminous hood.
Still, I couldn't go inside to warm up. I had a call to make on the pay phone over by the air hose.
"Yeah," I said, when the emergency operator picked up. "Can you please let the police know that the kid they've been looking for, Seth Blumenthal, is at Five-sixty Rural Route One, in the second trailer to the right of the Mr. Shaky's sign?"
The operator, stunned, went, "What?"
"Look," I said. This was really just my luck. You know, getting a brain-dead emergency services operator, on top of a freaking snowstorm. "Get a pen and write it down." I repeated my message one more time. "Got it?"
"But—"
"Good-bye."
I hung up. All around me, the snow was swirling like millions of tiny ballerinas in fluffy white tutus. You know, like in that Fantasia movie. Or maybe those were milkweed pod seeds. Whatever. Any other time, it would have been pretty.
As it was, however, it was a huge pain in my ass.
I could have gone inside the Stop and Shop and warmed up, but I decided against it. It would be just my luck if Luther—Luther had worked the Saturday morning shift at the Stop and Shop since I'd been a little kid, and I had gone down there religiously every weekend to blow my allowance on licorice and Bazooka Joe—remembered I'd been there. When Cyrus came around and started asking questions, I mean, after Seth Blumenthal got found. Luther had a memory like a steel trap. He could name every race Dale Earnhardt had ever won.
The snow and wind were pretty bad, but they weren't blizzard level. You could get around, it was just really awkward. If I'd had a car, though, it probably would have been about as bad. I mean, I'd have made just about as much progress.
By the time I finally got to the synagogue, the wind had died down a little. There was still that eery silence, though, that you get when everything is carpeted in snow … this in spite of all the fire engines and men running with hoses. I spied my mom standing in the synagogue parking lot—all the snow there had melted on account of the flames and the water from the fire trucks—with Mikey and the Abramowitzes. I picked my way across the maze of hoses on the ground and came up to them.
"What is it with this town," I asked my mom, "and buildings going up in flames?"
"Oh, honey," my mom said, slipping an arm around me. "What are you doing here? You didn't walk all this way, did you?"
"Sure," I said, with a shrug. "Anything to get away from Aunt Rose."
My mom fingered my hood distractedly. "Why are you wearing Daddy's old coat?" she wanted to know. But I didn't have a chance to reply, because Michael punched me on the arm.
"So you finally decided to join us, huh?" he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Thanks for waking me up."
"I tried," Michael said. "You were dead to the world. Plus it looked like you were having one hell of a nightmare."
He wasn't kidding. Only it hadn't been my nightmare. It had been Seth Blumenthal's reality.
Ruth, standing there with her brother and parents, looked miserable. Her nose was red, and tears were streaming down her face. I didn't think from the cold, either.
"Are you okay?" I asked her.
"Not really," Ruth said. "I mean, I've been better."
"Oh, Jess." Mrs. Abramowitz noticed me for the first time. "It's you." I guess she hadn't recognized me right away with my dad's ski parka on. "Isn't it awful?"
Awful wasn't the word for it. The building was almost completely destroyed. Only a couple of interior walls still stood. The rest was just charred rubble, black against the whiteness of the snow.
"They couldn't get here fast enough to save it," Mrs. Abramowitz said, wiping a tear from where it dangled off the end of her nose. "On account of the ice."