A Taste for Red

by Lewis Harris

  The old woman and I shared a secret glance.

  Mom had come outside a few moments after that. Neither she nor Dad realized I'd been inside the tree house when Ms. Bones had fallen. They both assumed I'd gone outside once Razor began barking, just ahead of Dad.

  Now, as I went back upstairs to my room, Mom asked, "Did you and Ms. Bones have a good visit yesterday?"

  "Yeah, she was cool."

  "And she didn't seem..." Mom tilted her head slightly, winking an eye, which was her way of saying "nut job."

  "You mean like Grandma Grimm?" Who was my dad's mom, the one I was named after. The one I thought was a little loopy.

  Mom frowned, but I could see in her eyes that she didn't mean it. "Don't be mean," she half-warned.

  "I'm not! Ms. Bones isn't like Grandma Grimm at all—she's okay."

  Mom made a shooing motion, encouraging me up the stairs and back to sleep. "Your father will fill us both in later."

  And, surprisingly, I did return to sleep, but it was not restful sleep. I tossed and turned beneath the bed, chased by dark dreams. In my nightmares, Ms. Larch clutched after me with red-nailed talons. She laughed and cackled. Her teeth were transformed, becoming pointed and razor-sharp, like those of a shark. I stumbled through the blackness of sleep, falling again and again, finally tumbling out of the tree house and crashing, not onto the ground but onto a carpet of dead cardinals and goldfish. A sea of lifeless eyes, black and filmy....

  The rooster clock showed nearly noon when I finally jerked awake, trembling, cotton-mouthed, and starving. The first thing that popped into my head was Ms. Bones—how was she doing? Then the missing girls. Then fettuccine with red clam sauce, leftovers from last night's dinner.

  My stomach growled.

  "Your dad said Ms. Bones might have to stay in the hospital for a day or two," Mom said, pushing a warmed plate of red pasta across the table to me. I could hear Dad outside in the tree house banging with a hammer, fixing the trapdoor so that it shut automatically whenever anyone went in or out of the hideout.

  "He should have done that before," Mom scolded, staring out the window.

  But it was my fault, really, for never taking the time to shut the door behind me.

  "What if Ms. Bones had broken her neck? Or, God forbid, it was you in the hospital with something broken."

  "I'm careful," I said.

  After I'd finished eating, I went outside. Dad was climbing down the wooden slats. He told me Ms. Bones had suffered a simple fracture of the fibula, which meant she'd cracked the bone in her lower leg above her foot. Crack! I hated the way that sounded. I winced, imagining my own leg bone cracking.

  "The doctor said she might be able to come home tomorrow if there are no complications," Dad added. "I told her to telephone and I'd be happy to drive her home from the hospital when she's ready." He was arranging his tools inside the toolbox. He ran the sleeve of his sweaty shirt across his sweaty brow (Dad has glandular issues). "Geez," he sighed. "Imagine if that poor lady had fallen and broken her neck."

  "She's not going to sue us, Dad," I said, trying to be funny, although the look on his face told me he didn't appreciate the joke.

  He glanced up at the tree house. "You might be a bit too old for this thing anyway, Stephanie."

  I let the name slide. "Too old to have my own space?"

  "Oh, I don't mind that," he said. "I just don't think we can afford to have our neighbors falling out of trees like acorns." He lifted his toolbox and headed for the garage. "You might have to run some meals over to Ms. Bones over the next few weeks."

  Which I'd be happy to do, I said, following after him.

  "Poor old lady's got no family around here"

  "I can do it."

  He gave me a bright-eyed smile and said I was a good girl, which made me feel kind of like a jerk. What would Dad think if he knew I wasn't being completely honest about everything? I felt awful lying to him—and Mom, too—which was really what I was doing. Even if it wasn't lying exactly, just not telling them the entire truth.

  I asked if it'd be all right if I went for a ride, and he said sure. I took off, pedaling up tree-lined Cherry Street. It was another nice day. There was a light breeze blowing, sunny skies above, happy people strolling up and down, beautiful birds whistling, butterflies floating from flower to flower. Picture-perfect: not the kind of world where monsters roamed, where sixth-grade science teachers snatched students and drained them of their blood.

  Could Sandy Cross and her friends really still be alive? They'd been missing for three days now. The authorities continued to search the woods. "Missing" posters still fluttered on telephone poles—all to no effect. I tried to picture the three girls but couldn't. Where could they be hidden? Within Larch's lair? Wherever she lived had to be a lair! That seemed the likeliest place to start, although I had no idea where that was.

  But I knew how I might find out.

  One thing was for sure: I had to come up with a plan. Everything was up to me now, wasn't it? Ms. Bones had broken her leg and wouldn't be any immediate help—even after she returned home from the hospital. Tomorrow or the next day, it didn't matter. Besides being a million years old, she was incapacitated. And she'd said so herself: the Kensington Vampire had to be stopped now, before anyone else fell into her clutches.

  I pedaled back up Cherry Street, slowing before I reached my house. I ducked into the Bone Lady's driveway, pushing my bike to the rear of the brick house. My eyes darted to the spot where the cardinal had died, but the poor bird was gone. I imagined that Ms. Bones had buried the tiny thing. Poisoned! When all along I had been the intended victim!

  The back door to the house was unlocked, and I slipped inside. The place was silent, filled with the lingering pleasantness of the old woman's warm-cookie smell. I made my way through the near-empty rooms, tiptoeing, lifting an ear to listen. The den was filled with mostly unopened boxes. The upstairs bedroom was nearly bare, with only a narrow bed pushed against the wall and a pair of black shoes in the corner. Black binoculars rested on the windowsill. The view was over the fence into my own front yard. I saw the tree house and Dad washing our car in the driveway. Razor sat in the middle of the yard, looking up at me in the window. He cocked his head curiously, but didn't bark. Good boy, I thought, and waved.

  Back downstairs, in the garage, a compact car sat in dusty silence. A pair of fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror. A bumper sticker read: HONK IF YOU LOVE GARLIC. Against the garage wall, a rake, a shovel, and a broom hung from brackets beside a door that opened onto a basement staircase.

  A switch at the top of the steps brought a light bulb into dull life below. The wooden stairway creaked beneath my black sneakers. I stepped down into the cold. It was like entering a refrigerator. The walls of the basement faded into shadow beyond the reach of the dangling bulb. A Styrofoam ice chest rested on the concrete floor.

  I waited in the half-light at the bottom of the steps and listened; there was no sound from anywhere. I knelt next to the cooler and removed the lid. The sudden squeak of Styrofoam was unbearably loud, and I winced. I moved my head aside to allow the slight light to fall into the container. Inside, there was a wooden mallet and two wooden stakes laid across a square of sackcloth. The stakes were each a foot in length, sawed-off sections of oak, as thick as a broom handle. They were sharpened to a clean point at one end and sawed flat at the other, to take the strike of the mallet. I shivered with ... what? Dread? Fear? Excitement? Or was it anticipation? My hands trembled as I reached and rolled up the mallet and stakes into the sackcloth and lifted them from the cooler. The remainder of the cooler was stacked full with clay-colored rods.

  When everything was laid out, I counted twenty-two sticks of dynamite.

  Seventeen

  With my backpack filled and hanging heavily off my shoulders, I rode down Stallings Street looking for Fumio Chen's house, the one with the tacky silver gazing ball balanced in the front yard. I found it and leaned my bike against the porch railing.
I pushed the doorbell, and a faint Bong-bong-bong sounded within.

  The girl who answered must have been his older sister. She hardly gave me a glance, turning and yelling "Fumio!" before disappearing back inside. He arrived a moment later, still dressed in what must have been his church clothes. Amazingly, he looked even less cool than usual. I frowned at his black pants and brown shoes and almost said something but managed to hold my tongue.

  "Hey, Svet."

  "You're not supposed to wear brown shoes with black pants," I blurted, unable to help myself.

  "Why not?" Fumio looked blankly down at his shoes.

  If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it? I mean, if no one's there? To hear it, I mean? Whatever. "Listen, I'm sorry." And I was. I wasn't interested in butting heads with Fumio or getting into a verbal tussle—I needed his help, and that's exactly what I told him.

  "Now, you know I'm not a licensed mental-health professional, right?" He showed me a mouthful of braces and rubber bands.

  He was so clever. Ha-ha. "Listen," I said. "This is for your benefit, too. You want to be a reporter, right?"

  "I am a reporter."

  "That's what I mean—you are a reporter. So we can help each other out, see?"

  "Is this about Ms. Larch trying to kill you?"

  "Just holster the questions for now, Lois Lane. We'll round up your friend Jimmy Olsen, and I'll fill you both in then. But first, you better change out of those sharp threads—and I suggest a pair of running shoes."

  Fumio rolled his eyes but came outside a few minutes later changed from his church clothes into shorts and a T-shirt. We pedaled over to Dwight Foote's place on Mango Court. The house looked like some kind of mansion. There was a spouting fountain in the front yard like the kind at the mall that dingbat people throw coins into. The famous Foote Family bird feeders were in the front yard, too, along with bushes sculpted into animal shapes and three—count 'em, three!—ultra-tacky gazing balls. Two stone lions with attitude crouched on pedestals at the end of the driveway, one on either side of the opened gate. Pretty ritzy.

  We followed the winding drive up to the open garage doors, where Foote was patching the front tire on his bike. "Had a nail in it," he said, lifting his big head and grinning.

  I whistled at the three fancy-pants luxury cars lined up inside the enormous garage. "Didn't know you were rich, Foote."

  "My dad's a cardiologist," he explained, tightening the bolts on the wheel.

  "That's a heart doctor," Fumio offered.

  "Duh," I said.

  Foote clamped on an air hose and began pumping up the tire. He asked what we were up to.

  "Svetlana wants to stalk Ms. Larch," Fumio said.

  I balled up my fist, and Fumio stepped away. "I just want you guys to show me where she lives."

  "What for?" Foote asked.

  "You'll see. And you don't have to do anything but show me." I slid my thumbs under my backpack straps, easing the pressure off my shoulders. The bag seemed to be getting heavier. "You think I'm crazy, so what's the big deal?"

  Foote said, "We'd be accessories to your insanity."

  "Yeah," Fumio added. "We'll be enabling you."

  Oh, brother. "You need to lay off the Oprah, brace-face."

  "Ms. Larch wasn't driving that van yesterday," Foote said. "You saw that. Nobody's trying to kill you"

  "All you've got to do is show me where her house is."

  "And then what are you going to do?" Foote wondered.

  "Then I'll see," I said. "I'll look around. Even if she wasn't in the van yesterday, don't you think it's worth a look? What about the missing girls? I'm telling you, there's more to Ms. Larch than meets the eye."

  Fumio said, "You're a riot, you know that?"

  "If you're a reporter, then you need to learn to follow your nose," I told him. "My nose can run circles around yours, easy. But I'll give you a snoop lesson—free of charge. Worst-case scenario, you've still got a great story. I'll even give you the headline: 'New Girl Goes Off Deep End.'"

  Fumio shook his head, but he was smiling. "Dwight," he said. "Go get your camera."

  Eighteen

  Fumio Chen had an idea of where Larch lived because of the story he'd written about her for the Sunny Hill Bee. Or at least he thought he did. Somewhere along Culver Point Road, a dirt track that dead-ended at the Flint River.

  "There aren't many houses out there," he said.

  "Just get me close." I had a pretty good idea I'd figure out which was hers. I was counting on my nose and the foul stench of the Kensington Vampire.

  Culver Point Road was on the far side of City Park, where I'd never been before. The sun was still hanging in the sky, but already it was creeping up on six o'clock. Foote and Fumio didn't seem concerned by the hour. I knew I wouldn't be making it home in time for Sunday dinner, but I couldn't worry about that. Maybe I'd already eaten my last meal and didn't even know it. But that wasn't being very positive.

  My parents were going to kill me, anyway.

  Culver Point Road started off paved, but soon turned into gravel, then sand. There weren't many houses along the road, just as Fumio had said. And after a while, there were none. The thin tires on my bicycle didn't do well in the sand. The heavy backpack dug into my shoulders. Foote offered to tote it for a while, but if he and Fumio found out what I was hauling, they'd bug out in a panic.

  More than a small part of me thought turning tail wasn't such a bad idea. Instead, I said, "Are you sure Larch lives out here?" I was beginning to think that maybe Fumio didn't know where he was going. I hadn't picked up a whiff of anything remotely evil.

  "When I interviewed her, she said she liked living near the river. That's got to be the Flint River, so that's got to be this road. There aren't any houses along the river, except out here. At least not in town."

  "Maybe it's one of the houses we already passed," Foote said, ready to turn back.

  "But the river's up ahead," Fumio noted.

  I said, "I'll know her place if it's out here." I had no doubt of that.

  Fumio was watching me. "What do you think you've got? Some kind of psychic power?"

  "No," I fibbed, "just a bad feeling." To the bone.

  Through the woods, the river was beginning to appear and disappear, winding closer to the dirt road. Birds tittered and flitted in the branches crisscrossing the tract of sky overhead. All around, everything was being swallowed in shadows. Sunlight was dwindling as the road narrowed and the woods closed in.

  "Let's come back and do this tomorrow after school," Foote suggested, looking nervously at the fading light.

  The day suddenly seemed to be draining away, almost sucked away. Sweat soaked through my shirt where the backpack pressed between my shoulder blades. The chain on Fumio's bike squeaked. Spokes creaked. Wheels crunched and shushed over gravel and sand. Up ahead, the road curved around a bend and out of sight. Through the trees, I made out the shape of a lone house.

  All three of us swung off our bikes and stood at the side of the road, silently peering through the woods. I became aware of the murmuring of the river moving unseen beyond the bend. There was only that and the sound of our breathing. The birdsong had ceased. Leaves hung motionless in the still air. I pushed my bike forward.

  "Hey, this is the end of the road," Foote whispered.

  I looked over my shoulder, and he was waving at me to come back. He blinked, but his eyes didn't look blue now, they looked gray in the dying light. The shoulder sling was gone from his arm today, but the plaster cast ran from elbow to fingers. I could make out scribbles of black marker where friends had written on his cast. He'd asked me to sign it, but I was too cool for that. Now it didn't seem like such a big deal. I should have signed it. "You two wait here," I whispered back.

  Fumio hissed, "Don't go!"

  I pushed my bike into the bushes and laid it down. I didn't stop to think. I knew if I did, I'd chicken out. I crunched ahead over dead leaves and branches, stooped, watching the house grow big
ger as I edged my way through the underbrush. I could see where the dirt road wound around and ended at the front of the two-story structure. The last house on a dead-end street. It seemed to fit the bill—the kind of place where something bad could happen.

  The house was weathered, built of worn wood. Despite its size, it seemed almost to lean backward, as if it might slide down through the trees and into the river behind it. A two-car garage was attached at the side. I made out the corner of a wide deck on the back of the house. The land sloped away from the porch, leading to the shadowed river beyond the trees and a rickety dock leaning on stilts in the water. I crept forward and halted at the edge of the neglected yard, flinching as a thorny bramble scratched my cheek. I knelt in the bushes, resting my knuckles in the dirt, watching.

  I smelled the rot. It could have been some poor possum or lonely raccoon, some tired animal that had curled up and died, but it wasn't. This was her place—the Lair of the Kensington Vampire. Ms. Larch's Dark Abode. Diana Frost's Fortress of Despair. You get the idea. There was no doubt in my mind. A round knocker in the center of the front door spied like a watchful eye. The windows were shuttered with dark curtains. A mildewed tarp covered an abandoned vehicle parked alongside the house. Thirsty plants wilted half-dead in pots lining the front stoop and walkway.

  So now what? I shrugged off my backpack. Could the front door be unlocked? Not likely, but I wouldn't know unless I tried. Maybe I should try a window first? That would be best—sneak around and see if I could peek through a window. Maybe find one I could push open and slip through. The house seemed empty, felt empty. Only the rotted smell told me that Sylvia Larch lived there.

  Could the missing girls be inside? Just within those walls, only feet from where I stood? And what would I do if Ms. Larch were indeed inside right now? I looked to the row of dusty windows along the top of the garage door. The windows were too high to peek through. But if I stood on something, I could peer inside; I could turn over one of the potted plants and stand on that. If her car was in the garage, then I'd know she was home. The car beneath the tarp clearly wasn't hers. The mildewed plastic was heaped with dead leaves, and the vehicle had obviously not been used for some time.