Shadows on the Train

by Melanie Jackson

  I was glad Mother and Madge weren’t there. They always acted so…uneasy when I did things in the kitchen.

  Oh, I know, I know. Technically the colander should have been washed. I’d plucked it from the sink, where bits of cooked pasta were clinging to it. Still, I didn’t think Mrs. Chewbley had to look so dismayed. She had to be used to me and my little ways by now.

  “It’s reasonably clean,” I defended myself.

  The piano teacher let out a piercing scream.

  “Look, Mrs. Chewbley, I think one can carry this hygiene thing a bit—”

  Pantelli elbowed me. I turned.

  Bowl Cut loomed grimly through the open window. He stretched over the counter, reaching for the envelope…

  Pantelli and I each grabbed a side of the window and shoved down hard.

  Bowl Cut withdrew his hand, but not fast enough. The window landed on his thumb. “YEOWWW!”

  “I know that man,” Mrs. Chewbley exclaimed. She was so excited that her hair was popping out of its pins again. “I’ve seen him skulking behind bushes and trees, up and down Wisteria Drive. A prowler! We must call the police immediately.” She grabbed the nearest phone, which happened to be Madge’s neon red and yellow cell—my sister was more into the fashion of communications than the actual function—and began jabbing at buttons. “Oh dear, I never could get the hang of these newfangled contraptions…”

  I grabbed the phone from her. There was no time to waste, because Bowl Cut was slowly wrenching his thumb back out from under the window.

  Then Talbot appeared outside.

  “EEEE-YAWWW!” He hurled himself shoulder-first into Bowl Cut. Both Talbot and Pantelli were huge Jackie Chan fans.

  Lurching, Bowl Cut smashed against the side of our house. His trapped thumb was yanked free from between the window and sill, rattling the pane so hard it cracked.

  Cradling his bloodied thumb, Bowl Cut staggered away.

  Chapter Six

  Laughs, Coughs and a Screech of Brakes

  “Talbot?!” Mother said disbelievingly. She gaped at the broken windowpane. “Talbot did this? Talbot the good?”

  “Talbot the good?” I repeated. Mother was making my dark-eyed, and at this moment very apologetic, buddy sound like some ancient Saxon king.

  “Yeah,” Pantelli said gleefully. “A first! Who woulda thought? And, man, that is some pane crack.” He leaned over to examine it with his magnifying glass. “Not unlike the shape of the St. Lawrence River. Hey!” He pointed to an oblong space where a chunk of glass had fallen out. “That could be Lake Ontario.”

  “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Galloway,” Talbot said, unhappy under his dark forelock, which, in the circumstances, appeared even more soulful than usual. “I’ll pay for it myself. I’ll go home right now, get my bank card and bike to the bank.”

  “There was an intruder,” I interrupted. “It’s not your fault, Talbot. If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine.”

  Mother let out a huge sigh that ruffled the beet leaves sticking out of the grocery bag she’d just brought home. “Your fault, Dinah? Now that’s territory I’m more familiar with.”

  “There was an intruder,” Mrs. Chewbley chimed in through a mouthful of cheese. Espying a package of old cheddar in the grocery bag, she’d removed it and sliced herself a large piece. And without asking! Mrs. Chewbley was definitely a woman after my own heart. Or stomach, anyhow.

  “Most likely this man is casing houses for break-ins,” the piano teacher continued. She wagged a fairly substantial cheese slice at us. “Best always to double-check that you’ve locked doors and windows.” She polished off the cheese.

  “I think,” I began—and then I stopped. It might be better if Mother and Madge didn’t know I’d rifled through Dad’s effects.

  I’d bundled Dad’s clothes back to the attic before Mother and Madge returned. The envelope I’d stuffed in my duffel bag. I saw no alternative but to take it with me on the train and pore over it some more. Who knew, maybe Dad had written a message on it in invisible ink.

  Madge, always more suspicious than Mother, regarded me through narrowed lupine-blue eyes. “You think what, Dinah?”

  I flashed my best phony bared-teeth smile (patent pending) at her in return. “Probably we should call the police and give them a full description of this mysterious bowl-cut intruder.”

  “Good idea,” Mother said, smiling at me. “I’m glad that for once you haven’t decided to pursue this mystery yourself.”

  I stretched my insincere smile wider. As long as Mrs. Chewbley didn’t mention that we’d been discussing elk stamps and philatelists…

  But the piano teacher gave no sign of doing that. She plugged in the kettle for fresh tea and reached into the grocery bag for a packet of fudge Oreos. Her mind was on food. The best people’s were, I decided and felt very fond of Mrs. Chewbley, even if she didn’t appreciate my loud piano-playing.

  Softball in the park again, the last practice before we boarded the train for Toronto. The other girls on the bench were all cooing about how exciting it was.

  Except for Liesl. Though it was her turn to bat, she was slathering on bright red lip-gloss. “Just one more layer,” she called to Talbot, who was shaking his head at her.

  The funny thing was, much as I’d longed to appear on Tomorrow’s Cool Talent, I didn’t want to go. Not till I’d found the eighty grand Ardle claimed we had. Not till Bowl Cut was caught.

  The police had promised to look out for him. “Unless he visits the hairdresser any time soon, he should stand out like the sore thumb you gave him,” Mother had assured me.

  I twirled my cap on my forefinger. (Laundered, it was now egg-free.) If only I didn’t have to leave Vancouver. Not yet. Not yet.

  And “Black Socks,” the song I’d been belting out when I was five and Ardle had knocked on the door, came back to me:

  Someday I think I will wash them,

  But something keeps telling me

  Don’t do it yet,

  Not yet, not yet…

  A cloud of smoke encircled me, followed by a laugh-cough.

  “Ardle!” I exclaimed, jumping. “That’s weird. I was just thinking about you.”

  Ardle grinned. His lips were pursed as if he were trying to hide his few lopsided teeth. “Checked out your house, but no one there. So I thought I’d stroll down to the park, catch some rays and wait fer a while. And here ya are…Whoa, that’s a gigantic sore yer friend’s got.”

  He peered over his cigarette and down the bench to Liesl, who’d finally finished layering on the lip-gloss. Her mouth was a round, red sheen, like the planet Mars.

  “Liesl the Weasel’s no friend of mine,” I replied sourly. “You won’t believe what she did to me the other day.”

  And I blabbed the whole incident to him. What can I say? Sometimes my lips have sneakers tied to them.

  “I’ll take care of this fer ya,” Ardle promised, adding ominously, “Nobody behaves like that to a kid of Mike Galloway’s.” He marched, in his bobbing-up-and-down way, past the bench and alongside the baseball field.

  “Um, wait,” I began uneasily.

  Talbot pitched. Liesl walloped the ball. Ardle leaped, smacked his knees and laugh-coughed hysterically.

  Talbot and Liesl turned and stared.

  “Ooo, sorry,” Ardle apologized, wiping his eyes.

  More pitches, more wallops, more leaps and laugh-coughs.

  “Now look, buddy,” said Talbot. He started toward Ardle.

  Ardle held up his hands. “Sorry—it’s a condition I have.”

  Talbot hesitated. On his sensitive features, doubt struggled with his natural good manners toward an adult. “Maybe you could laugh and cough somewhere else,” he suggested.

  “Sure, buddy! With McBean, you kin McCount on it.”

  Right. When Talbot made his next pitch, Ardle was still there. This time Liesl, her eyes panicky above her Mars-like mouth, freaked and missed completely.

  If only—if only—Talbot hadn’t glance
d at me just then.

  Though I was chomping down on the inside of one cheek to keep from laughing, I couldn’t help letting a smile flit across my face…

  Ardle cheered my hits, which was a bit of a stretch. He sure was loyal to the memory of my dad.

  When I’d finished and was slinking away from Talbot’s accusing this-guy’s-a-friend-of-yours? expression, Ardle announced he had to go for fresh “smokes.”

  “How many packs a day do you go through?” I demanded disapprovingly.

  “Measuring by tens or dozens?” He bobbed off, laugh-coughing, past the wading pool and surrounding hedge at the far corner of the park.

  An ancient, dented gray Buick careened around the park, past the softball diamond, toward that far corner.

  From behind the hedge, a figure sprang up. I couldn’t see his dinner-plate face, but I didn’t need to. I’d recognize that bowl cut anywhere.

  Ardle started to cross the street.

  The gray Buick screeched toward Ardle. Bowl Cut leaped and reached for Ardle.

  “WATCH OUT!” I yelled, flailing my arms.

  Too late. The Buick slammed into Ardle, sending him Frisbee-like through the air to smash on the sidewalk.

  The Buick tore down the street. It swung left on busy Broadway. Amid the angry honkings of other motorists, it disappeared.

  I was already running to Ardle. I could see Bowl Cut bending over Ardle’s inert body, reaching inside his jacket pockets. Searching for the eighty-thousand-dollar king, I thought.

  The singing exercises I had to do each week for my voice instructor paid off. Though out of breath, I was able to yell at Bowl Cut.

  “AAAGGGHHH!”

  Okay, not overly articulate, but Bowl Cut did whip round. “AAAGGGHHH!” I re-hollered. I splashed through the wading pool, causing waves that capsized a cute toddler’s plastic ship. He burst into loud, uncute wails. His mom was on her cell, 9-1-1-ing it. “Terrible accident…Garden Park,” she jabbered.

  I sprinted the last few yards over to Ardle. He was sheet-pale. His breath came out in ragged gasps. Kneeling beside him, I grasped his nicotine-stained fingers. “Hold on for the ambulance,” I begged. Had someone been there to tell Dad that after his car accident? My eyes swam with tears, which plopped onto my glasses’ frames.

  I glared blurrily at Bowl Cut. “You did this,” I accused. “Is eighty grand that important? IS IT?”

  Bowl Cut’s round face soared up and out of sight like a wayward ping-pong ball. He ran up to Broadway.

  An ambulance, a fire truck and two police cars screamed up to us in a splash of red lights.

  “Hey, Di.” Talbot knelt beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “Hey,” he said.

  He held out a folded white handkerchief. I blew my nose into it with my usual deafening honks. I was suddenly glad for Talbot’s well-brought-up conscientiousness, which included carrying clean hankies around and somehow not minding what a doofus I was.

  Ardle, who hadn’t been at all well brought up, winked at me weakly from the stretcher he was being shifted onto. I bet he had his good points too—more challenging to find, that’s all. If I ever had the chance to find them now.

  “I’ll be okay,” he croaked. “Yer a good kid. Mike Galloway’s kid. Crumbly Hall, huh?” And then, incredibly, he managed a laugh-cough.

  As the ambulance attendants hoisted him, Ardle’s lean features stiffened. “Careful,” he wheezed, clenching my hand. “Be careful of …” And with his other hand he gestured in the direction Bowl Cut had fled. “Mighty dangerous.”

  He shut his eyes. The attendants lifted the stretcher.

  “But who is Bowl Cut?” I demanded. In a minute Ardle would be in the ambulance. Already a policewoman’s hands were on my shoulders, prying me away. “And who’s this king?”

  “A king, yeah. A king who lost his head,” Ardle muttered on a cigarette-smoky breath.

  “Huh?”

  Ardle wagged his head feverishly. “Naw. Shouldn’t have said that much to ya. Too dangerous…”

  The attendants heaved Ardle away.

  “Poor fellow,” the policewoman tsked. “Imagine babbling out such nonsense! Dazed by the accident, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  The doors closed behind Ardle, and the ambulance shrieked off.

  Chapter Seven

  A Peanut-Butter Voice Creates

  a Sticky Situation

  I rang up Vancouver General Hospital with advice about Ardle. “Put him near an open window. He needs lots of fresh air. He’s a smoker,” I finished ominously.

  “But I’m just the receptionist,” the young man on the other end bleated.

  “Fine. Put me through to surgery.”

  Mother grabbed the phone and hung it up. “Dinah, I promise you we’ll check in a while. It’s much too soon to—”

  Brrring!

  I lunged for the phone again. Mother, Madge and Jack, at the kitchen table knocking back cups of tea, exchanged despairing glances through the Earl Grey-scented steam. Or maybe it was Darjeeling or Ceylon steam. The three of them had become tea fanatics and grew quite tiresome with their discussions of hint of vanilla here, touch of red pepper there and so on.

  “Hello!?” I shouted into the phone. It’s good to take the upper hand immediately in calls, I find.

  A feeble croak limped out of the receiver. “Please, Dinah. I’m already ill—no need to deafen me.”

  “Mr. Wellman!”

  “I can’t go to Toronto with you,” my agent rasped back.

  “The way I feel, the only trip I’ll be taking anytime soon is to the graveyard. Some fool showed up today wanting to be taken on as a client. Guess what the idiot’s specialty was. Whistling. Like I could get bookings for a whistler.”

  “How about for Whistler’s Mother?”

  The rasp turned into a growl. “No jokes, Dinah Mary Galloway. This whistling idiot had the flu—and breathed all over my lunch as we chatted. I should sue, I tell ya. Sue.”

  Mother started up from the table. “Did I hear my name?”

  I handed the phone to her. “Hi, Suzanne,” I heard Mr. Wellman hoarsely bark. “You won’t believe…”

  I fled. Sorry as I felt for Mr. Wellman, I wanted to pore over Dad’s envelope some more. Was there any clue to the eighty grand on it? And what had Ardle meant by a king who lost his head?

  As I climbed the stairs, a plaintive cry from Madge echoed through the house: “What? I have to escort Dinah, Talbot and Pantelli to Toronto—alone?”

  “It’s not that bad,” Jack told my sister as I sat on my suitcase to force it shut, and he fastened the latches. “I mean, Dinah, Talbot and Pantelli aren’t animals.”

  Madge looked up from the very tidy, compartmentalized suitcase she was about to close with a slim hand. “Jack, their ages range from twelve to thirteen. You know very well that’s the most gruesome possible stage in a human being’s life. The age when kids go through,” she shuddered, “transition issues. Emotional changes.”

  Then she noticed herself in the hall mirror: slim, porcelain-skinned, and impossibly, for that hot August day, cool and elegant in a sleeveless indigo top and matching Capri pants. She gave a satisfied smile. “I was a model twelve- and thirteen-year-old. Quiet, well-behaved, causing no trouble whatsoever. All the teachers commented on it.”

  Jack shot her a fond, exasperated glance. Then, hoisting my case, he frowned. “This feels suspiciously heavy, Dinah.”

  I shrugged. “One day they’ll make lighter PlayStations, I’m sure.”

  “You packed a Pl—? Remove it pronto, young woman.”

  I frowned back at him. Like, c’mon. A PlayStation was a must-have accessory when traveling. “I’m being restrained,” I defended myself. “I told Pantelli he’d have to bring the TV.”

  “Not after I phone Mrs. Audia, he won’t,” Jack said firmly.

  Jack was getting awfully bossy, I reflected, and he wasn’t even a member of the family yet. Not officially. In fact, I sometimes wondered how their weddi
ng could ever occur, what with Mother and Mrs. Rinaldi complicating it more each day with their “plans.”

  Anyhow, Jack and Madge planned to live, if or when the wedding did happen, in our long-neglected basement. Madge had sketched designs, and she and Jack were renovating the basement bit by bit every day. Their downstairs suite was going to be pretty nice, with French doors opening out onto our lilac-fragrant, blackberry-wild garden. And I was delighted they wouldn’t be moving away—yay!

  Except at moments like now, when Jack was being unreasonable. “We’re talking two PlayStation-less weeks,” I muttered, dragging the machine out. Okay, so the case was now lighter, but no way I’d admit that. “I’ll have withdrawal symptoms,” I warned.

  Nobody heard me. Jack and Madge, holding hands, had one of those sweetheart-only, glued gazes going that normal people find extremely annoying. Jack was saying, “I, by contrast, was not a model twelve- or thirteen-year-old. Adults despaired of me until a couple of teachers inspired me to think about what I could be, as opposed to what I was. Yup, I used to be pretty beastly, all right. Then look what happened: The beast ended up with the beauty.”

  Amazingly they were oblivious to my barfing noises. Hmm. I must be slipping.

  They didn’t hear, either, the rhythm-and-blues set that was the sound of Jack’s cell going off. Ever helpful, I grabbed it from the hall table.

  “Psychiatric ward,” I said into it.

  “I beg your—is this Jack French’s number?” inquired a female voice, smooth and gravelly at the same time, like creamy peanut butter with chunks.

  In my opinion, the very-much-engaged Jack French should not be receiving calls from women with chunky peanut-butter voices. “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Is this—” The voice faltered. “This isn’t Madge, is it? Er—oops, wrong number.” Click!

  My disapproval rating of Jack shot way up. I narrowed my eyes at him, not that he noticed. He was still in tender-gaze mode with Madge.