Sanctuary

by Jenny Carroll

  "The convenience store?" Great-aunt Rose looked shocked. "You have a refrigerator stocked with every kind of food imaginable, and you still can't find something to eat? What could you possibly need from the convenience store?"

  "Tampons," I said, to shut her up.

  It didn't work, though. She just started in about toxic shock syndrome. She'd seen an episode of Oprah about it once.

  "And by the time they got to her," Great-aunt Rose was saying, as I stomped around, looking for a pair of mittens, "her uterus had fallen out!"

  I knew someone whose uterus I wished would fall out. I didn't say so, though. I pulled a ski cap over my bed-head hair and went, "I'll be right back. Where is everybody, anyway?"

  "Your brother Douglas," Great-aunt Rose said, "left for that ridiculous job of his in that comic book store. What your parents can be thinking, allowing him to fritter away his time in a dead-end job like that, I can't imagine. He ought to be in school. And don't tell me he's sick. There isn't a single thing wrong with Douglas except that your parents are coddling him half to death. What that boy needs isn't pills. It's a swift kick in the patootie."

  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. H
er 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."

  "Now, Louise," my mom said, reaching out to give Mrs. Abramowitz's shoulders a squeeze. "Remember what you told me when it was the restaurant that was burning. It's the people that matter, not the building."

  "Right," Mr. Abramowitz said. He and Skip were standing there with some other men, huddled in the wind. "No one got hurt. And that's what's important."

  "No," Mrs. Abramowitz said, mournfully. "But … but the Torah. It's just too awful."

  I looked questioningly at Ruth.

  "The Torah," she explained. "You know, the holy scrolls. They think that's what they lit on fire first."

  "They?" I stared at her. "What are you talking about? Someone set this fire? On purpose?"

  "Judge for yourself," Ruth said, and pointed.

  Following the direction of her gloved hand, I looked. Across the street from the synagogue stood our town's only Jewish cemetery. Because there aren't a whole lot of Jews in southern Indiana—there are more churches here than there are McDonalds, for sure—the cemetery was pretty small.

  So it had been pretty easy for whoever had gone to town on it to knock over every single headstone.

  Oh, yes. Every single one. Except of course the mausoleums, which they couldn't knock over. But they'd satisfied themselves by spray-painting those with swastikas. Swastikas and something else. Something that looked familiar.

  It took me a minute, but finally, I recognized it: the symbol I'd seen on Nate Thompkins's chest.

  C H A P T E R

  9

  "It's a gang," Claire said.

  "It's not a gang, all right?" I was pacing up and down the hallway outside Michael's room. "Nate Thompkins wasn't in a gang."

  "Just because his sister doesn't want to believe it," Michael pointed out, "doesn't mean it isn't true."

  "She said all they wanted to do was scam prescription drugs," I said. "Does what happened over at the synagogue look like the work of people whose primary interest is in partying?"

  I threw an aggravated look at the two of them, but it was no good. They refused to get as upset about it as I was. This was partly because Claire was sitting in Michael's lap. I guess it's hard to get upset about murder, arson, and bias crimes going on in your own town while you're getting cozy with that special someone.

  "Grits, then," Claire said, with a shrug.

  I blinked at her. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Well, think about it," Claire said. "We were all so worried when the Thompkinses moved in, that the Grits were going to try something. You know, burn a cross on their lawn, or whatever. Maybe the Grits did it. Killed Nate."

  Michael brightened. "Hey," he said. "Yeah. And Grits hate Jews, too."

  "Oh, my God." I stared at them. "Would you two stop? Grits couldn't have done any of this."

  "Why not?" Claire asked. "When we had to read Malcolm X in World Civ, a lot of the Grits wouldn't do it, because they said they wouldn't read a book written by a black person. Only they didn't say black," she added, meaningfully.

  "And I heard a Grit," Michael said, "at the grocery store the other day, going on about how the Holocaust never happened, and was all made up by the Jews."

  "Would you two cut it out?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Not all Grits are like that."

  "She just says that," Michael said confidently to Claire, "because she's dating one."

  Claire looked at me with bright-eyed interest. "You are? Oh, my God, Jess! That's so politically correct of you. But does he talk about NASCAR racing all the time? Because that would really bore me after a while."

  I tried to give Michael the same kind of evil death glare Great-aunt Rose had down so perfect.

  "Don't try to blame all this on the Grits," I said. "The Grits have been around a long time, and so has the synagogue, and we never had a problem like this before."

  Michael looked thoughtful. "Well," he said. "That's true enough."

  "Grits are, for the most part, hard-working people," I said, "who haven't had the same advantages as us. It's wrong to blame them for every bad thing that happens in this town just because they happen to have less money than we do."

  Claire went, "Well, there's only one explanation, then. It has to be Nate's gang."

  I rolled my eyes. I couldn't believe we were back to square one all over again.

  Fortunately at that moment footsteps sounded on the stairs. We turned to see Douglas, covered from head to toe in protective outerwear, but looking chilled to the bone nonetheless, come staggering into the hallway. His face, the only part of him that wasn't covered, was flushed. There were snowflakes in his eyelashes.

  "Where have you been?" I demanded.

  "Nowhere," Douglas said, with deceptive innocence, as he reached up to pull off his knit ski cap. His hair, beneath the cap, was sweaty looking, and stuck up at weird angles. He looked like a demented snowplow driver.

  "What?" Michael said. "Did Dad corner you about the driveway?"

  "Uh, yeah," Douglas said, ducking into his room. "Yeah, that's where I was."

  He shut the door, so we were all looking at the DO NOT DISTURB sign he'd pinned up there.

  Mike glanced at me. "Do we start worrying about him now," he wanted to know, "or later?"

  The phone rang. I didn't rush to pick it up, or anything, since no one but Ruth ever calls me. And I knew Ruth wasn't home. She and her family had gone over to their rabbi's house, to try to console him over the loss of the Torah, which turned out to be a really bad thing. Like someone coming in and burning your Bible, only worse, because Torahs are harder to replace.

  So you can imagine my surprise when my mom called up the stairs, "Jess, it's for you. Your friend Joanne."

  Which would have been fine, of course. Except that I have no friend named Joanne.

  "Hello?" I said curiously, after picking up the extension in Mike's room.

  "Mastriani." It was Rob. Of course it was Rob. Who else would call me, pretending to be someone named Joanne?

  "Oh," I said, watching with a fair amount of disgust as Mikey and Claire started kissing. Right there in front of me. Granted, it was Mike's room, and I guess he could do what he wanted to in it, but excuse me, ew. "Hey."

  "Listen. About tonight," Rob said, in his deep voice. I wondered how he'd managed to fool my mom into thinking he was someone named Joanne. Had he spoken in falsetto? Or had he had his mom ask for me? Surely not. I mean, then he'd have had to admit to his mom that I hadn't told my parents about him. And that was something I was pretty sure Rob wasn't going to admit to anybody.

  "You still want to do something?" Rob asked.

  I prickled immediately. "What do you mean, do I still want to do something? Of course I still want to do something. We're going out, right? I mean, aren't we?"

  Mikey and Claire, distracted by my tone of voice, which had suddenly gotten a little shrill, stopped kissing, and looked at me.

  "Is that the Grit?" Claire mouthed, excitedly. I turned my back on them.

  "Well," Rob said. "I don't know. I mean, yesterday at the mall, you seemed to wig out a little."

  "I did not wig out," I said, appalled. "That was not wigging out. That was just … I mean, come on. That was weird. I mean, your mom, my mom. Whatever."

  "Right," Rob said. But he didn't sound very convinced. "Whatever."

  "B
ut of course I still want to go out tonight," I said. I was clutching the phone very tightly, so tightly my knuckles were white. "I mean, if you want to. Go to dinner. Or a movie." Or to your uncle's Christmas Eve wedding. Whichever. Or both, actually.

  "Well," Rob said, stretching that single syllable out unbelievably far. I hung onto the receiver in breathless anticipation. This was, I knew, ridiculous. Ruth would have killed me for it, if she'd known. Ruth has very firm rules about boys, and one of the rules is that you should never, ever chase them. Let the boys come to you.

  And even though Ruth isn't what you'd call your stereotypical babe, the whole rules thing seemed to work pretty well for her.

  But then again, as far as I know, Ruth isn't going out with a high school graduate who happens to have a criminal record.

  Before Rob could say another word, however, the call waiting went off, as it usually did, right when I least wanted it to. I said to Rob, "Hold on. I've got another call." I tried to make it sound like this other call might conceivably be from one of the many other boys I knew who were just dying to take me out, but I don't know if I did a very convincing job. Especially since the only other boy I happen to know who wanted to take me out was Skip from next door, but Saturday nights he's always busy grand-wizarding the neighborhood Dungeons and Dragons game, so it probably wasn't him.

  So, not surprisingly, when I pressed the receiver, the voice I heard on the other line was not Skip's. But I was far from expecting to hear from the person to whom it belonged.

  "Jessica," Dr. Cyrus Krantz said. He sounded agitated. "We've got a problem."

  You think you've got problems? I wanted to say. I got a guy on the other line who apparently isn't aware that I am the best thing that ever happened to him.

  Instead, I said, "Oh?" like I couldn't imagine what he was talking about. Even though I had a pretty good idea. He was calling about Nate Thompkins and the synagogue.

  Only it turned out he wasn't. He was calling about something I'd almost managed to forget about … almost, because it was so horrible, I doubted I'd ever fully be able to forget it.