Police cars were pulled up right on the sidewalk in front of the building and squeezing into the tiny alley, their lights flashing against the windows. The library’s alarm system was buzzing in the misty, humid city night. The police—two of the ones who had come about Vincent’s head, plus two more—were at the front doors, shining big flashlights through the heavy glass. If someone had broken in, why weren’t they in? And what had been stolen this time?
“Is it Vincent again?” yelled Pearl, running up the sidewalk. “Maybe the founders’ portraits? Or the clock?”
Mom took the front steps in two leaps. The police stepped back so she could open the door with her keys, but they wouldn’t let her or Pearl in until they’d gone in first to check things out. You could see their flashlights shooting light up the stairs to the floors above. After a while they returned to the first floor and opened the door for Mom, shrugging.
“False alarm, maybe,” Pearl heard the policeman with the mustache say as he finally let them in. Mom flung open the door. Pearl tore into the back hall, flipped on the back hall light, and saw, through the window, no change to Vincent. When she came back, the blue uniforms were all clustered around the circulation desk.
“Maybe a raccoon set off the security system,” said the puffy pink policeman.
(As if a raccoon would do that, either accidentally or on purpose.)
Pearl walked back outside. It was the deep dark middle of the night. She didn’t dare go farther than the front sidewalk. Over Gully’s storefront, Francine’s shades were drawn and the windows were dark.
Pearl stopped and turned back toward the library. In the window at the dimmest corner of the reference room, she saw something—a face! Salt-and-pepper hair, gray shirt, and a face the color of last week’s newspaper, eyes that had never looked so lonely and lost. “Mr. Nichols!”
Pearl waved at him wildly and ran back inside. A small swarm of police officers had already surrounded him, flashlights flaring, pulling him into the light of the circ area.
“Some old drunk!” a policewoman bawled over her shoulder to Mom.
“He’s not drunk! Leave him alone! He was just sleeping! Get your hands off him!” Pearl stood squarely in front of them, blocking their way.
“What is he, then, if he’s not drunk? Lost? Misguided? Typical.”
“Not typical of him!”
“Pearl, I’m all right—” Nichols looked dazed, but he stood straight, trying to get her to simmer down.
“You know him?” said the red-haired officer.
“It’s all right! We know him.” Pearl had never been so proud of her mother. Mom took Nichols firmly by the arm as if to say she’d be in charge of him, although Pearl knew there was no taking charge of Nichols. He might move slowly, but he went where he wanted.
A Sidebar About Exclamation Points
It’s my opinion that you just about never need to use an exclamation point. Basically, if your writing doesn’t make it clear that something is a big deal, then the exclamation point is not going to fix that. And yet!
It’s not just words that make something a big deal. Even more important is something called inflection—the way something is said. That’s what an exclamation is good for: adding emotion that is different from what’s already in the words.
Compare, for example:
“He’s not drunk. Leave him alone.”
Sounds kind of lazy, doesn’t it?
“He’s not drunk! Leave him alone!”
That’s much more urgent, the way Pearl was when she said it.
The cops said something about breaking and entering, but Mom cut him off. “The library won’t be pressing charges.”
“This is a city establishment, miss.” “Miss” seemed to be emphasized.
“It is the library,” said Mom. “And I am the librarian.”
The policewoman shook her finger. “Well, if the city decides to press charges—”
Mom shook her own finger right back. “Oh, I’d love to see the city get involved with the library,” she said fiercely. “Maybe we should make a report to the mayor.”
Mom led the police away, distracting them from Mr. Nichols by asking their opinion about the situation of crime in the neighborhood: Was there more breaking and entering lately? Were there more robberies? Should the city update the library’s antique security system, in their opinion? Would they put it in a report?
Nichols and Pearl were left at the dusky circulation desk. “I fell asleep,” Nichols told her. “In the chair behind the atlas, where we always sit. When I woke up, it was dark.” He held his forehead in his hands, rubbing. “I tried to find my way out, but the doors were locked on the inside. Then I must have tripped the alarm somehow. All of a sudden there was a light in my face . . . sirens . . . yelling . . . noise!” He covered his ears with his hands and closed his eyes as if he was so embarrassed he wanted to shut her out. “I’m sorry!”
Pearl pulled his hands down from his ears. She hated, absolutely hated, how scared he looked. “It was Bruce’s fault for locking you in,” she said.
“No,” said Nichols, shaking his head, trying to gather himself together.
“It’s okay, Mr. Nichols,” Pearl told him. “Don’t worry,” she added.
Bruce—finally, he was here!—elbowed his way through a small crowd of neighbors that had gathered on the street, toward Mom and the cops. “I’m the library manager,” he said. “It’s my fault this man was in the library.”
“And now I’m on my way,” Nichols said, his voice still quavering. He turned and made a little bow. “Thank you, Pearl. Thank you, Mrs. Moran.” He hoisted his backpack over his shoulder and walked off into the dark. At least he hadn’t been arrested.
But the night wasn’t over. Gully came tearing across the street, his hair messed up from sleep, having maybe slept in his clothes. He seemed to wish he could run two ways—toward the cops, and after Nichols. He flung his arms in each direction, demanding, “You’re not going to just turn a man like that loose in the neighborhood at this time of night, are you?”
None of the police moved a muscle.
Bruce put an arm around Gully’s shoulders. “No harm’s been done,” he said.
“No harm! Lights and bells in the middle of the night! This area didn’t used to welcome—”
“What?” said Bruce.
Gully shut up a second, then changed tack. “Anyway, I think the papers should know about this.”
“Mr. Gulliver,” Mom said through her teeth, “I think we should all go back to bed.”
Gully went.
Pearl slumped down onto the front steps, her cheek against the iron railing, bone tired. The police took their time writing up their report as if the library was some huge crime scene instead of just a place where one man neglected to wake up and another forgot to check a dark corner.
Pearl’s head dropped onto her chest for one minute . . . two minutes . . . a half hour. Then Mom’s hand was on her shoulder.
“Come on, Pearl girl. Let’s go home.”
Pearl sleepwalked her way home between Mom and Bruce. She staggered to her chair-bed, kicked off her flip-flops, and rolled in. She stayed dimly awake for at least three minutes, long enough to notice that the sky was already getting a little bit light. It was long enough to notice that Bruce was still here in the apartment, in the kitchen talking to Mom, each of them calming the other one down after the scare. It was long enough to notice that they were laughing, the way they used to, when they used to talk about something else besides the library.
12: THE ROCK LADY
LATER SEP 9
Pearl lay in the garden grass below Vincent’s feet, still sleepy from the wild night before, her head buried in her arms, when she realized Francine was there beside her, toes clicking against the bricks.
“What are you doing, Pearl?”
“Writing a story.”
“I don’t see a pencil,” said Francine.
“In my head,” said Pearl.
“You’ve got a pencil in your head?”
Pearl rolled her eyes.
For several minutes Francine was so quiet Pearl thought she’d gone away until she said, “What’s it about?”
These were magic words to a storyteller like Pearl. “It’s about Vincent,” she said, pointing up at the statue. She was sharply aware that for once an audience had come to her—usually she had to look for one.
Pearl began her story: “So. Vincent wakes up one day, a cold winter day, a cold winter day when the snow is falling, and she’s freezing, hard as an ice cube. She wants to go into the library to get warm, but she can’t move, since she’s a statue.”
“In my dance, the Rock Lady can move,” said Francine.
“Your dance?” What was Francine talking about? “Also, Vincent is not called the Rock Lady.”
Francine laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me about the Rock Lady—no, Vincent—before she starts moving.”
Irresistible. “All right!” said Pearl. “So she starts to think about all the things she could do and see if only she wasn’t frozen in place.”
Francine said, “Want to make up the story together?”
If Pearl thought Francine had been listening, she was wrong. “Not if your story is about being headless,” Pearl said.
“I’ve never known her any other way but headless,” Francine admitted. “It’s just that drama is more interesting than books. You should know, you’re the one who screamed. What book did you ever scream about?”
“I screamed because Vincent has been here since before I was born. So she’s like a member of my family. And how would you feel if one of your family members got her head stolen?”
Francine just said, “I think she’s kind of cool, headless.”
“What else do you think is cool, dead dogs and car wrecks?” Pearl felt, even as she said the words, that they were way too harsh.
It was Francine’s turn to gape. “No,” she said in a tiny voice, before tapping slowly away down the alley.
Too bad, Pearl thought, surprised at the drop she felt in her stomach at Francine’s departure. Any audience was better than no audience.
But then Francine came flying back, her feet clattering. “He’s coming! That reporter!”
And Mom and Simon appeared in the doorway with Jonathan Yoiks.
Two days ago, Pearl would have been overjoyed to see Yoiks: more publicity to help them get Vincent back. Now she thought of Mr. Bull and Mr. Dozer and how that publicity had turned out. What would Yoiks do with the Mr. Nichols “break-in”?
A Sidebar About Saving Other Souls (you might call it S.O.S.)
If you want to save someone, knowing what to do is half the battle, whether it’s figuring out what to give a homeless person, rescuing a helpless animal, and so on. These are common skills you can learn.
But the hardest battle is noticing that there’s a problem in the first place. That is another ability altogether, something that comes from the heart.
—M.A.M.
Francine was grinning up at the reporter, acting like she was ready for her close-up.
“Edna St. Vincent Millay was a Unique New Yorker,” Pearl offered slyly.
Yoiks said, “That’s not my angle on her.” He walked around the garden taking pictures of Vincent from different sides.
(That was not what he meant by angles. He meant type of story: News? Feature? Human-interest? Profile? At the moment, Vincent didn’t fit any of those. The truth was that Yoiks didn’t seem to know exactly what kept drawing him back to the library. I call it journalistic instinct.)
“What did you come back here for?” Pearl finally asked.
“I came back to see my friend,” Yoiks said. Francine stood taller and smiled as if she was ready for another pose. But Yoiks was nodding at Vincent.
“Is this for the paper?” Francine couldn’t resist asking.
“Just for me, for now,” Yoiks said with a sigh. “Until I can convince my editor it’s worth covering. A human-interest story from a neighborhood like this? It would help Lancaster Avenue’s image. Or even some crime leads? You don’t have any clues about the lost head yet, do you? It would be a better story if it got found someplace dire. That would make everybody happy. Good and dramatic. Headline-worthy.”
Pearl squinted at him. Why was he here, if there wasn’t a story good enough, dramatic enough, for his editor? She said, as if she was a television detective, “Well, they didn’t use the wheelbarrow, and they didn’t roll it in the grass.”
“They?”
“The head robbers,” she said. “The criminals.”
Francine said, “The decapitators,” in a way that made Yoiks chuckle.
“How much do you think a head like that might weigh?” he asked.
“As much as a bowling ball,” Pearl said. “It’s like a block of concrete.”
(There was a strange little outraged peep from behind the bushes, but not a person there heard it except the boy who made it.)
“Here’s another thought,” said Yoiks. “From what I’ve seen of vandalism, it’s about cheap thrills. Sometimes people just want to mess with your head—oops, sorry.”
“What do you mean?” asked Simon, sidling over. Pearl caught his eye: Why was the reporter here, since there was nothing to report on? Why was he hanging around talking to a bunch of kids about a statue of a dead poet?
Yoiks turned to Simon. “I mean, the thrill for vandals is beheading the statue and having everybody wake up and find it gone. Once the pranksters have done that, they might just take the head and toss it somewhere nearby. If I were a vandal who’d stolen a head,” Yoiks mused, “the first thing I’d do is get rid of the evidence.”
Now Simon caught Pearl’s eye: If the kids could solve the crime, would that be a juicy enough story for Yoiks’s editor?
“Hey!” Yoiks gave a startling sort of whisper, and caught all their eyes. He cocked his head toward the garden and the pine trees. “Who’s that kid?” he asked softly.
They looked to where he was pointing his chin and saw the back of a boy wearing baggy cargo shorts and a Day-Glo green shirt. The boy saw them looking and darted away, across the yard that backed up to the library garden.
“He’s a spy!” Pearl said. “I’ve never seen him before in my life!”
“You, you think you know everybody,” said Francine. “But I’ve seen that kid. He goes to Gully’s all the time.”
“Well, he’s gone now,” said Yoiks. “And so must I be. You all keep your eyes open and your thinking caps on.” Since that was the kind of smarmy thing adults said to kids, Pearl and Francine caught each other’s eyes and made faces.
“Trouble is, you don’t know a good story when you hear one,” said Pearl.
“Tell it to my editor,” said Yoiks. “Or maybe I should say, ‘Tell it to the marines!’”
“Stand up to him,” said Francine. Yoiks just laughed, and left.
Simon trailed him, but not before hissing at the girls, “Leave that kid alone, you guys. If he’s too shy to come to the library, don’t make it worse for him.”
The minute he was gone, Pearl began crawling through the yew bushes along the back of the library property. “What are you doing now?” asked Francine, tapping nervously next to the statue.
“Looking for Vincent’s head, what do you think? If that boy can sneak around back there, maybe it’s a good place to hide things.” Pearl had to crouch to avoid clonking her head on the low branches of the pine trees. It was surprisingly dense in there.
“Is it spidery? Are there rats?” called Francine.
Pearl didn’t answer, on purpose to increase the suspense. She felt as if she was in a forest.
“Pearl? Are you okay?”
“Quit worrying about me!” yelled Pearl, creeping back to the fence. An old wooden shed-shaped box came into sight. Could it be that easy? She’d open the lid, look inside, and there would be Vincent’s head?
No. It was just somebody’s old stuff:
a flannel shirt too hot for a day like this, some other clothes, a duffel bag, and a mailing tube. She opened that: a thick roll of envelopes, letters to some woman Pearl didn’t know, Berniece Hernández, Esq., in Albany, New York, which was the state capital.
“Did you find her?” Francine called from outside the bushes.
“No,” said Pearl. “Just some old junk.” She emerged from the trees, asking, “Why would that boy lurk around here near those smelly dumpsters?” She felt satisfied with herself about the exploration and proud to have the secret of the box to herself.
Francine suggested, “Maybe he’s just shy.”
“Maybe he saw you dancing,” Pearl teased. “Maybe he wants you to dance some more.”
Francine looked amused. She started tip-tapping on the path.
“Anyway, what’s the story behind your Rock Lady dance?” Pearl asked, cursing herself for even thinking the name “Rock Lady.”
Francine gave her a distrustful eye and sat down in the grass, leaning back on her hands. “Tell me your story first.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe you can think of a really good one. You don’t seem to have that much creativity to me. You just tell stories out of books.”
Pearl went deadly quiet. She knew a challenge when she heard it. She thought Francine was—what had Ramón said?—throwing down the gauntlet. She leaned forward and tapped her forehead. “It’s all right here,” she said, as if her brain held treasure.
Francine snorted, but a man’s voice said, “I’d put my money on any story of Pearl’s.”
“Mr. Nichols!” Pearl jumped up.
He looked the same as ever: denim jacket, clean khaki pants, one of his four T-shirts, the one with the arrowhead on it and the words ARROW NAILS. Pearl didn’t know why, but part of her had expected he would look different after the alarm incident.
“I’m here to tell you that your mother is looking for you. And that I’m leaving.”
“It’s not closing time already, is it?” Francine sprang up from the ground. Pearl wondered what the drama was about closing time. What would that granny of hers do if she came home and found Francine not there? Anything?
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 8
