It Started with a Whisper

by A W Hartoin

  “I got another four over there,” said April.

  “That’s a lot of lightning.” I picked up a strip of bark and slapped it against my thigh.

  Ella went ahead to the bramble. We gathered behind her and stared at the lawn.

  “What is that?” asked Frank.

  Squiggly lines of dirt had been dug up all over the place. Some were yards long. Others only a foot. I crawled over to one of the spots and picked up a long tube. It kind of looked like a stalactite, only rough and sandy.

  Frank recoiled. “What’s that?”

  “A fulgurite. Some people call it petrified lightning,” I said.

  “So that’s all lightning strikes,” said Ella.

  “That’s impossible,” said April. “There must be a hundred strikes on the lawn alone and the house looks fine.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “It’s fulgurite.”

  “That’s freaky,” said Frank. “Maybe we should go back.”

  “The storm’s over, Frank,” I said. “And it looks like they’re both gone.”

  “Probably off buying new underwear,” said Ella with a grin.

  I snuck up to the living room window and peeked inside. It was empty and the house silent.

  “Awesome. Nobody’s home,” I yelled.

  Ella and April jumped over the lightning strikes, carrying the tools. Frank dragged his feet behind them, looking like he’d rather be listening to Cole barf.

  April waved her hand in front of her face. “Phew, it stinks.”

  “I guess they didn’t pay the garbage fees.” I pointed to a pile of garbage bags lying next to the driveway in front of the house.

  “Come on. Let’s hurry. Miss Pritchett could come back.” Ella led the way to the front door. She tried the knob. “It’s locked.”

  I rocked back on my heels. Nobody locked their doors, not out in the middle of nowhere. Crime was practically unheard of. When something did happen, it was joyriding or teepeeing. I looked at the window beside the door. “What a fucking idiot. She locks the door, but leaves the window open.”

  “Well, she is pretty dumb. I mean, she’s living here.” April glanced around the porch, her nose wrinkled in disdain. She liked things to be neat and clean. Even Mom, with her haphazard ways, would be appalled by Greenbow’s house. There were stacks of newspapers, damp and moldy, covering most of the porch. Old soda cans lay in sticky pools. A bowl with a fork held what looked like a rotting salad and buzzed with a dozen flies.

  “What the hell?” Long strings of slime attached the sole of my tennis shoe to the floorboards. “I don’t think it was this bad at the beginning of the summer. At least it didn’t stink.”

  I wedged my fingernails under the rusty, damaged screen, but the screen didn’t budge.

  “Oh, no. How will we get in?” asked April.

  “Give me a break,” said Ella. “This place is a total dump. Break it, Pup. They’ll never notice the difference.”

  I ignored the disapproval on April and Frank’s faces, pressed my thumbs on the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and there was a quick snap. Then I pushed the screen up and waved my sisters inside. Frank stood on the porch, shifting his weight from foot to foot and looking over his shoulder down the driveway.

  “Frank, you’re our lookout,” said April.

  Frank gave her a thumbs-up and went to sit on the stairs beside a dead potted plant in a cracked pot.

  “Why’d you do that?” asked Ella. “We might need him.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “A lookout’s good.”

  I crawled inside and edged around the kitchen table that was covered with plates encrusted with old, molding food. Ella opened the cabinet under the sink. It was stuffed with plastic grocery bags, roach droppings, and dusty cleaning supplies.

  I cleared the area around the pipes. “Okay. Ella, get under there, turn off the water, and hold the wrench still.”

  “Why do I have to do it?” asked Ella. “It’s gross under there.”

  “It’s gross everywhere. Look around.” I threw my arms wide and gestured around the wreck of a kitchen. Someone had dropped a tomato slice on the floor. It lay disintegrating in a pool of its own slime. An old gallon of milk with a month-old expiration date threatened to explode on the countertop.

  “But I don’t have to touch it,” she said.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, I’ll do it.” April hunched down on the edge of the cabinet under the sink and leaned back in.

  I wrapped the faucet in the work cloth and tightened the other wrench around it. “Okay. I’m going to turn it.” I shoved at the wrench, and the faucet twisted. I unscrewed it, flipped the faucet over, and removed a small orange rubber ring. Then I replaced the faucet.

  “Okay, take off the wrench and turn the water back on.”

  April came out from under and dusted off her shorts. She shivered at the invisible dirt and kept brushing at her arms and slapping her hands. “What’d you do?”

  “Remember when the sink at home sprayed Mom?”

  April and Ella smiled. Dad replaced our faucet at home last fall, but he forgot to put the o-ring in it. He tested it and it worked just fine. But when Mom came and turned the faucet on full blast, water sprayed out, soaking both her and half the kitchen. Mom’s cursing reached new heights that day and Dad still hadn’t lived it down.

  “That’s awesome, Pup. Plus, she’ll have to clean the kitchen,” said Ella.

  “I hope Greenbow gets the face full of water,” I said.

  “Not Miss Pritchett?” asked April.

  “Greenbow deserves it more.”

  “Because of Shasta?”

  Ella broke in. “Hey, check this out.”

  We came up behind her and looked in the living room. Hanging on the opposite wall was the head of a six-point buck. The mouth hung open and a shiny fake tongue was thrust out from between the lips. The head’s glassy eyes glinted in the sun and looked so real, I expected it to blink. Four hooves were mounted on a plaque below the head and a tanned deer hide hung over a chair.

  “I guess we know who killed the deer now,” said April.

  “We always knew,” I said.

  “We did?” asked Ella.

  “Well, I did. After we found out Greenbow was living here, I knew it had to be him. Who else could it be?”

  “It must’ve been so beautiful,” said April. “Why did he have to kill it? He didn’t want the meat.”

  “He didn’t have to. He wanted to,” said Ella.

  I thought of Shasta’s bruises and shaking body in the truck after we ran into Greenbow in town. “He’s that kind of guy,” I said. “We better go.”

  We went back to the front window, tiptoeing past piles of old magazines and dirty laundry. I held up the screen and ushered Ella and April through the window. Frank helped them on the other side, his face filled with relief.

  April twirled a wrench between her fingers and looked back through the window. “You know, it doesn’t smell that bad, considering how gross it is.”

  I sniffed. She was right. It should smell worse, a lot worse. Then it came to me, the idea to end all ideas. One worthy of Luke and Caleb at their best. I smiled. Ella and April returned my smile, their pale brows creeping northward.

  Frank started toward the stairs, but when he saw my expression, his face lost its relief and he froze mid-stair.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You can still be the lookout. Has anybody seen a ladder?”

  A search of the yard revealed a half-rotted ladder just tall enough to reach the roof. I propped it up against the backside of the house. My foot was on the lowest rung when Frank ran around the corner. “Somebody’s coming.”

  I paused for a second and considered going ahead, but beads of sweat ran down Frank’s face and his hands were shaking. It wasn’t the time. I pulled the ladder down. The weeds closed over it, completely hiding its location. The sound of cr
unching gravel stopped and a car door slammed. Frank’s breathing grew ragged as we pressed ourselves against the back of the house. Ella and April retreated to the shelter of the trees. Even at a distance, I could sense their fear, but I wasn’t worried. My hands tingled and I couldn’t stop smiling. I was absolutely sure we wouldn’t be caught. Maybe this was how Luke and Caleb felt when they sabotaged Miss Pritchett’s blackboard or glued her to her chair. If I had been worried, it wouldn’t have been about getting caught. It would’ve been about being known. I didn’t want Greenbow to know I was around.

  “Oh, God,” said Frank. “She’s in the house.”

  We listened to the creaking floorboards, and then the sound of rattling dishes.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Frank followed me as I sprinted across the yard into the trees. We stopped behind a wide oak tree. Frank put his hands on his knees and swayed from side to side.

  “I’m never going back,” he said between gasps.

  Ella and April arrived in time to hear him. “I agree,” April said. “That was too close.”

  The three of them studied me, especially April. She bit her lip and twirled a lock of hair around her finger, waiting for me to agree. I didn’t. I wasn’t done.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  THE SUMMER HAD gone awry in my estimation. We were supposed to be having fun and torturing Greenbow. Instead, Luke and Caleb were at war and everyone treated me like I was a rabid dog, likely to go out of my mind. April, Frank, Cole, and Ella decided that Greenbow was over. They wouldn’t help and kept following me around, like I was up to something. The Pack was smaller, too. Sophie and Jewel refused to come out until Luke and Caleb stopped fighting, and that wasn’t happening anytime soon. Luke kept ranting about his bruised wrist from the handcuff incident. Caleb only produced the key after Luke threatened to gnaw his arm off, but that wasn’t the end of it. Caleb spent every moment plotting to shave Luke’s head.

  Abe would’ve been able to calm them down. He’d done it before, but a marijuana seed catalog showed up in his mailbox and his mom grounded him from joy and happiness, which, of course, meant Camp. The rest of their friends had done the unthinkable and gotten jobs. Only Mom and Aunt Calla were the same. As the summer progressed, they got more and more involved in their work and only came off their porches to eat and sleep. The smell of butane and chemicals drifted around the house, old friends on an extended visit. I liked that, the sameness of it.

  Finally, I got so bored I decided to find out about the old lady on Tyler Street that Caleb had been talking about on the night of the storm. It’d taken a couple of days to put the street name together with the person, Mrs. Lana Obermark, but it was easy to remember what happened to her. Two guys broke into Mrs. Obermark’s house, robbed her, and then beat her up. It happened three blocks away from my house, so I wasn’t likely to forget. There had to be more to it, but I was ten at the time and nobody would give me the details. What I remembered the most was Mom. She went to the hospital and when she came back, she was silent. That might not be odd for other mothers, but my mom was never silent. In the weeks after Mrs. Obermark was attacked, Mom walked around not saying a word to any of us and looking like a thunder cloud. And she cooked. I’d never seen so much food. She and Aunt Calla sang over pots of ragu, tiny molten cakes, roasts, and racks of lamb. Then they delivered it in carefully arranged meals on silver plates to Mrs. Obermark at the hospital. They kept it up until she was released and moved to Ohio to be with her sons. It was a strange time, but I still didn’t know what Caleb was getting at, and it was bugging me.

  I snuck onto Mom’s porch when she was off working in the garden and googled Mrs. Obermark. There were several articles about the attack, but I didn’t see what that had to do with Mom and Aunt Calla. Just when I was ready to give up, I spotted another mention of Mrs. Obermark in a police blotter section. The police had arrested her attackers on charges of robbery and sexual assault and they’d been released on bail. I stared at the screen. Mrs. Obermark was in her seventies. What the hell? I googled the guys and what I found rocked me back in my seat. Grady Pink and Samuel Abert were dead, killed in freak accidents. Both were struck by lightning and the incidents were so bizarre the National Weather Service was investigating them. The article said the chance of getting struck by lightning was one in a million. The chances of getting struck by lightning five times was considered to be so unlikely, nobody’d even calculated the odds. But that’s what happened to Pink and Abert twenty hours after they were released on bail.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  I turned to find Mom leaning on the doorway, arms crossed.

  “Yeah, I did,” I said. “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Isn’t that my line?” Mom smiled.

  “Not today.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What happened to these guys?” I pointed at the screen.

  “Looks like a couple of sons a bitches got what they deserved.”

  “They got struck by lightning five times.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That doesn’t happen.”

  “Apparently it does. Says so right there.”

  Mom calmly watched me, her face smooth and open. She probably would’ve told me anything I wanted to know. Instead, I got up and left. I don’t remember deciding to leave, I just did it.

  Mom touched my arm as I passed. “When you’re ready to ask, I will answer.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready. It was too much. Too complicated. Too improbable. I tried to tuck all thoughts of Mrs. Obermark and what had happened to her safely away in the back of my brain. But thoughts of those lightning strikes over at Greenbow’s house kept popping out. If he got zapped a little, I’d be okay with it. I wondered what Mrs. Obermark thought when she heard. Were five bolts enough? If I’d been stronger I’d have gone and asked Mom, but I was afraid of what she’d tell me. We were weird enough already.

  On Thursday, Carrie’s dad dropped her off again and I surprised myself by being happy about it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Carrie. She was a member of The Pack, but mostly she was just there, like sunlight or Mom’s cursing. She’d bring Ella and April around, and I planned to enjoy some normalcy for a change. But it didn’t happen that way. Carrie seemed normal until she unpacked and pulled out a huge stack of celebrity magazines. My sisters and Carrie flopped down on the living room floor and began to talk about second-rate stars like they were first cousins. They didn’t want to go swimming, make ice cream, play ball, or do anything they normally did. When I suggested those things, the girls looked at me like I was an idiot. How was I the stupid one? I wasn’t reading articles about emotional cheating or butt size. What was emotional cheating anyway?

  I gave up and slipped out of the house for a walk. Luke and Caleb screamed at each other from under the hood of their car. I watched until I realized I’d heard all the threats before. They were beginning to sound like “Good Morning” or “See ya later.” Luke’s new shower cap did provide a moment of amusement and I sorely needed it.

  Luke had taken to wearing a shower cap, mostly at night, but sometimes during the day, so Caleb couldn’t get to his hair. The shower cap was blue and proved to be quite slippery when Caleb tried to snatch it off Luke’s head. Luke kicked Caleb in the shin and he fell to the ground howling.

  “I’m not shaving my head, fuckwad,” said Luke as he walked away.

  Caleb stood up and shook his leg a couple of times. “Crap, that hurts. You know I’m going to get him, right?”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure. The twins had fought before, but nothing quite so long or violent. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would have a winner. Caleb’s bruises ranged from pale red on the shoulder to a purplish black on his jaw. His hair was three-fourths of an inch long and didn’t begin to cover the ten stitches on the back of his head from Luke breaking the desk chair over it. Plus, the stitches were black and had lots of pointy stiff ends s
ticking out. The stitches were just gross enough to look pretty cool. I wouldn’t have minded going back to school with stitches like that. I wondered what Melody would think, and then I wondered why I wondered. She hadn’t emailed me since the Fourth of July picnic. I was relieved, but I sort of missed the attention.

  Caleb began rummaging around on the porch, looking through boxes and some of Aunt Calla’s supplies. I went on into the kitchen. Cole was peeking around the edge of the door to the living room. I came up behind him and looked over his shoulder. The girls sat on the floor talking about how one knew if one’s lips were large enough. That wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was Frank. He sat on an ottoman, carefully avoiding the spring poking out of the left side. April sat on the floor next to him. They shared a magazine. April’s hand was on Frank’s knee, and his hand rested on hers.

  “What are you going to do?” whispered Cole.

  I was so surprised, I could only say, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? He’s touching April. I just looked at her and you about beat me to a pulp.”

  That was true, but I knew Frank, and Frank was no Cole.

  “Hey,” said Cole, his brown cheeks turned pink, and his eyes glittered.

  “Hey what? It’s just Frank.”

  “He’s a guy.”

  “I guess.”

  With that, Cole slugged me in the shoulder and I fell into the living room. When I looked up, Cole was gone. The girls stared at me. Frank had both of his hands raised like he was being arrested. He looked at April’s hand on his knee like it was a red-hot poker.

  “What are you doing?” asked Ella.

  “Nothing. I…um…tripped.”

  I returned to the kitchen, sort of surprised I wasn’t going to do anything. April was my sister. It was my job. But I couldn’t kid myself, it was Frank. Frank was afraid of Miss Pritchett, riding in a car without a seatbelt, and liver spots. I didn’t think I had much to worry about. If it turned out I was wrong, I could always remind Frank of how good Luke and Caleb were at gluing body parts together.

  I picked up an apple out of the bin and took a bite. Juice ran down my chin, sticky and fragrant. I wiped it on my forearm and saw the cats watching me from under a chair, their large eyes pale and unblinking. They’d been my constant companions since the time I stole Miss Pritchett’s oil cap. I had a cat skulking under my chair at every meal. They slept with me and followed me everywhere. They even liked to watch me sit on the toilet, which wasn’t as creepy as you’d think. You kind of get used to it.