by Lesley Kagen
Thankfully, it didn’t seem like I’d have to resort to such a drastic measure that first overnight, though, because it looked like the two of them had taken Aunt Jane May’s warning to mind their manners to heart.
The three of us downed only our fair shares of the root beer and peach pie she’d set in the tin bucket that was affixed to the tree. We took polite turns reading Nancy Drew’s The Sign of the Twisted Candles. They weren’t sore losers when I told them, “Colonel Mustard killed Miss Scarlett in the library with the candlestick.” And when I reminded them that we were supposed to write down what we wanted to do that summer, there was no arguing about who’d be the scribe. Viv had begun dotting every “i” with a heart, Frankie was overly committed to her slant, but I planned to be a writer when I grew up and believed that good penmanship was important and had the Palmer medals to prove it.
Even though I very much liked the idea of us honoring my mother’s memory, I didn’t count on that happening in the way Aunt Jane May wanted it to. I was an inordinately hopeful child, some might say pathetically so, but expecting the other “Tree Musketeers”—we began calling ourselves that after we began spending our summers in the boughs of the backyard oak—to remain somber and respectful for an entire evening? That was a fool’s mission. If I could just keep the peace, I thought, I could congratulate myself on a job well done, and with that end in mind, I smoothed a piece of paper down on the hideout floor, picked up my favorite no. 2, and suggested a summer adventure I was sure all three of us would have no problem agreeing on.
“Number one,” I announced, “visit Broadhurst and try to sneak into the Chamber of Horrors.” We’d ridden our bikes to the mental institution on the edge of town the previous summer and wouldn’t dream of giving it up. “I heard they might be bringin’ Wally Hopper in.” I looked up at Viv swaying her narrow hips to “Cathy’s Clown” coming out of our aquamarine transistor radio. “You know anything about that?”
Viv cupped her ear and yelled, “What?”
I turned the radio down, but she bent over and cranked it back up.
“The kid killer,” I shouted. “Did you hear anything about him getting moved to Broadhurst?”
Her mother, Fiona Cleary, owned the only beauty parlor in town and the gals talked so loudly under those dryers that Viv heard all the latest rumors floating around, or acted like she did. It was sometimes hard to tell Viv’s fact from her fiction, but in the looks department she was exactly as advertised. She reminded me of a matchstick, lean like that, with dark, red hair that her mother kept in a pixie cut, which was in keeping with her personality. She couldn’t sit still for long, slept with her green eyes half open, had the temperament of a leprechaun whose gold had been stolen, and lied effortlessly, convincingly, and with pleasure. She was also a master at coming up with risky plans, and whenever the three of us found ourselves in hot water, she was our mouthpiece.
Viv stuck her fists on her hips and asked me, “Where’d ya hear that about Hopper?”
Realizing my mistake too late, I mumbled, “After Mass yesterday,” and tried to change the subject. “I really like that blouse you’ve got on. It brings out the color of your—”
“Who was spreadin’ that rumor?” Viv said. “Which gal?”
I didn’t want to tell her, but along with keeping our promises and other sacred oaths, complete and timely honesty with one another was one of the Tree Musketeers’ most important rules, so there was no getting out of admitting that I’d heard that juicy tidbit come out of the mouth of the gal Viv saw as her gossip rival. “Evelyn Mulrooney said it.”
“Oh, for crissakes, you dumb chump.” Viv hawked a loogie through one of the windows. “How many times do I gotta tell ya that even if that so-and-so acts like she knows everything that’s goin’ on in this town, she doesn’t know shit from Shinola!”
I glanced behind me to see if Frankie would come to my defense, but she was concentrating on creating one of those paper fortune tellers and in her own little world, in more ways than one.
Unlike Viv and me, Frankie wasn’t born in Summit and she wasn’t all white. Her Caucasian father was never spoken about, but whoever he was, he was one smart cookie and she took after him. She and her mother, Dellatoria “Dell” Martin, had moved to town from Milwaukee nine years ago after Dell had been hired by my other next-door neighbor, Salvatore Maniachi, to keep house and help care for his crippled twin sister, Sophia. Of course, the Maniachis knew that Dell and Frankie were a package deal, and they welcomed the lovely three-year-old into their home and their hearts. But not everybody in Summit would be as generous. A “colored” maid was one thing, but a “mulatto” child living on our side of the tracks? That was verboten back then. So when the town busybodies got around to asking who the little girl with the year-round tan, beige eyes, and wavy dark hair belonged to, Salvatore Maniachi told them Frankie was an orphaned relative. I wasn’t so sure the small but dedicated group of Germans in town who believed the whiter someone’s skin was the better fell for that lie, but Frankie was such a close match to the Maniachis’ Mediterranean coloring that everyone else in town seemed to. Far as we knew, anyway, nobody except those who’d take that secret to the grave knew for sure that the beauty and brains of our threesome was passing herself off as a “bambina,” and if anyone ever did find out—there’d be hell to pay.
I nudged Frankie’s bare foot with mine. “Did Jimbo say anything to you about Hopper?”
The same way Viv stayed on top of gossip at her mother’s beauty parlor and I learned about the healing arts from my aunt and my father, Dell’s cousin, Jimbo, who’d moved to town the same time she and Frankie had, would give us behind-the-scene information about the goings-on at the mental hospital. Mostly Jimbo, who was an orderly up there, shared stories about the criminally insane patients who were confined at Broadhurst because we begged him to and he was a pushover where we were concerned. Like the killer known as the “Blackjack Scalper,” who’d stabbed a couple of gals in Kenosha twenty-one times and fashioned wigs out of the hair he’d cut off by the roots. But he told us gory details about other Wisconsin killers, too. Like Ed Gein, the “Butcher of Plainfield,” who’d murdered all those poor gals near our state capitol, upholstered his furniture with their skin, and fashioned bed posts out of their skulls. And soon after Wally Hopper got charged for ending the lives of the young Gimble sisters in Milwaukee, Jimbo had us on the edge of our seats yet again.
“After Hopper got caught, he told the police that he’d murdered those little girls, but it wasn’t his fault,” Jimbo told us on the sagging porch of his Mud Town house, the spot where he did his best telling after the sun went down. “He said that someone made him do it.”
In the tradition of all world-class storytellers—I learned my trade at the feet of a master—Jimbo knew how to build tension. He paused so long that I had to ask, “Who’d Hopper say made him do it?”
He took the last swallow of his long-neck beer and rolled the brown bottle across his brown forehead. “That man believes Michael the Archangel commanded him to strangle those little sisters.”
Now, Jimbo’s stories could usually raise the hair on the back of our little necks, but that night the girls and I rode our bikes back over the railroad tracks like we were getting chased by the minions of hell and heaven. We slept in a puppy pile for the next week, telling one another whenever the hideout creaked in the wind or a coon knocked down a garbage can, “Quit bein’ such a titty baby. Nobody’s gonna murder us and blame it on a saint. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen in Summit, right?”
After Frankie shook her head to my question about whether Jimbo had shared any extra information about Hopper getting moved to Broadhurst, Viv couldn’t leave well enough alone. “You sure he didn’t tell you something about that kid killer?” she taunted Frankie. “You sure you’re not holdin’ something back?”
I tried to cover up the edginess in her voice by chirping at Frankie, “Your turn! What do you wanna do this summer?”
Frankie wouldn’t holler over the radio like I’d been. Raising her voice wasn’t her style, unless Viv pushed her too far. But when she tilted her head toward the glossy pictures of the movie monsters taped on the wall, I knew what she meant, and I said, “Number two—see scary movies.”
“Monsters are fine,” Viv said, like she was above that sort of thing now. “But I need as many pointers as I can get if we’re gonna find out who Aunt Jane May is trotting hotly with. Write down spying on her and seein’ more romance movies, Biz.”
Soon after Viv’s breasts began to bud (a recent development) and she’d grown a few red hairs down there, she went full-out boy crazy. She dragged Frankie and me to a couple of those mushy movies and had begun to see love everywhere. She was sure Aunt Jane May was sneaking out of the house at night to meet a “tall, dark, and handsome mystery man” and she’d been bugging Frankie and me to follow her for weeks. Of course, we’d told her, “No dice,” and tried numerous times to explain that even if she was right and Aunt Jane May did have a suitor, we couldn’t risk getting caught spying on her, but would Viv listen? No, she would not. Once that girl latched onto something, it was like trying to remove lint from a black velvet dress.
While I’ll admit to being hopeful, I wasn’t stupid. I knew I’d reached a fork in the road and that neither path would deliver me to my intended destination. If I didn’t write down on the list Spy on Aunt Jane May and See romance movies, Viv would throw a fit. If I did write her requests down, Frankie would get hot around the collar because romance of any kind, but especially watching smooching on the big screen, made her want to vomit into her Cracker Jack box, as Viv well knew.
When the two of them butted heads like this, I’d learned over the years that nothing I’d say would convince them to back down, so I did the only other thing I could think of to keep things on an even keel. I faked a yawn, lowered the train lantern, and told them, “Holy cow, I’m beat, aren’t you? Let’s figure out the rest of the list in the morning. I made up a story in honor of tonight. You ready?”
One of the few things they could agree on was how much they loved falling asleep to one of my stories, so when all I heard was the bullfrogs croaking in the sliver of Grand Creek that ran behind the hideout, the Harris’s dog barking two streets over, and the late train rumbling down the tracks, I thought the excitement of the day had finally gotten to them and they’d drifted off.
Relieved and grateful that we’d made it through the sleepover without any major upheaval, I rolled over and was about to do what Aunt Jane May had asked of me, when Frankie’s voice came out of the darkness with a demand.
“Get up, Biz,” she said. “I want to add something to the list.”
And all I wanted to do was commemorate my mother by breathing in the lingering scent of the pink and white peonies she’d planted along the backyard fence to welcome me into the world and think about how my father’s saw and pounding hammer must’ve covered up the sound of his tears when he built the hideout at her behest.
But ignoring Frankie wasn’t an option. She’d toe me in the back until she reached my spine if I didn’t slide the paper out from under my pillow and say, “Make it quick.”
Like the howl of a werewolf, the high-pitched buzz of a flying saucer, or the sound of beating bat wings warned us of impending doom in the third row at the Rivoli every Saturday, when I looked up and saw her lovely mouth twisted into a malicious grin that night, I knew Frankie was about to do something I really wished she wouldn’t, and how right I was.
“Put down that I dare Viv to talk to Audrey Cavanaugh,” she said.
It takes your brain a few seconds to register an injury and that’s about how long it took before Viv gasped like it was her last, and I said, “Aww, Frankie. What’d you have to go and do that for?”
Summit prided itself on what most of the Germans in town called Gemutlichkeit and the rest of us called friendliness, but when Audrey Cavanaugh moved into the old Jasper house down the block from us, she wouldn’t play along. She didn’t show up at Mass or the Harvest Festival or the lighting of the Christmas tree in the town square, nor did she RSVP any of the invites to the coffee klatches the Ladies Auxiliary held around town every afternoon.
Predictably, our new neighbor giving the town the cold shoulder set the gals gossiping, but just about nothing could get children’s tongues wagging faster than a mysterious stranger showing up a few days before Halloween. Quicker than you could say, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” word got out among us that Audrey Cavanaugh was a witch, so you better watch out. If you got caught in her talons, she’d chop you into little pieces and toss you into the stew she needed to partake of once a month to sustain her supernatural powers, the scope of which varied depending upon the descriptive powers of the kid doing the telling.
Name-calling, shoving, and Indian burns were par for the course, but daring Viv to talk to the Summit Witch? It was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen Frankie do. And the most confusing.
Because even though she kept her feelings well hidden, I knew that she loved Viv more than she did me. I’d catch her looking at her sometimes in a different kind of way. And by the light of the moon, I’d seen her press her cheek against sleeping Viv and breathe in her exhales and tenderly stroke her hair. And I was pretty sure she purposely agitated Viv into arm wrestling just so she could hold her hand.
“Have you lost your mind?” I asked Frankie, because she knew darn well that the mere mention of a witch, a kid lugging around a broomstick on Beggar’s Night, or even Aunt Jane May dabbing witch hazel on her skeeter bites scared Viv down to the bone, and I mean that quite literally. Because it wasn’t the owner of a gingerbread house in the Black Forest or a hag offering a poisoned apple to a beauty that had far surpassed her own that’d traumatized her. It was her own flesh and blood.
Somewhere along the road to dotage, her grandmother, Esmeralda, had gotten it into her superstitious, zealous head that Viv was possessed by the evil spirit of one of their ancestors— a gal by the name of Bridget who’d been found guilty of practicing witchcraft in County Tipperary in the 1800s and was subsequently burned alive in the town square. Granny Cleary had recently taken to keeping a bottle of holy water strapped around her waist and she’d jump out at her granddaughter and douse her in it every chance she got. And whenever Viv stepped out of line—exactly as often as you’d think a kid like her would— anyone within a block of the Cleary house could hear that pipe-smoking shrew yelling at the top of what was left of her wee lungs, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, remove your evil curse from this child! Be gone with you, witch! Be gone!”
When Frankie didn’t respond to my scolding, I tried to appeal to her softer side. “Look at her.” I pointed across the hideout at Viv, whose normally pale face had gone whiter than her Holy Communion dress. “Please take the dare back.”
Frankie got such a sweet look in her eye that for a moment I thought she might do as I’d asked, but her mouth said otherwise. “Forget it,” she snarled. “That’s what she gets for wantin’ to watch those disgusting movies and botherin’ us about chasing after Aunt Jane May and some stupid mystery man a hundred times a day. She made her bed.”
“I’m begging you.” I waved my prayer hands around. “She can’t even talk!”
But Viv, a resourceful child who had four obnoxious older brothers to contend with, as well as her fervent granny, proved me wrong when she uttered what she usually did when she needed to distract an attacker long enough to escape from the corner she’d been backed into.
“Don’t look now, but …” she said and pointed her spindly arm over our shoulders. “The handyman is watching us in the shadows behind the creek.”
“No, he’s not! You’re just tryin’ to make me forget about the dare. Admit it!” Frankie said like she was arguing a case in a court of law. “And remember—you’re under oath!” She jabbed her finger toward the rusty mark in the middle of the hideout floor like it was damning evidence,
which, of course—it was. Because that wasn’t any old stain. It was an indelible reminder that the girls and I weren’t just best friends. We were family. Blood sisters. That stain was our coat of arms.
Of course, it’d been Viv’s idea to perform the ritual we’d seen the natives do in Voodoo Island. A goat had been tied to a stake in the movie, so she suggested, “Let’s steal a kid from the Erdman farm.” Not feeling entirely sure she wasn’t referring to one of the Erdman children, I put my foot down. “I’ll beat the bongo,” I told her, “but that’s as far as we’re going.” And after I grabbed the drum off the shelf, we mumbled some jumbo, lit a few candles, and Frankie used a penknife to prick my finger and then hers. But when she cut thin-skinned Viv’s thumb, the blood came gushing, and the stain remained to remind us what we meant to one another and always would.
With my last hope for a night meant to honor my mother’s memory and my father’s devotion to her destroyed by Viv’s baiting and Frankie’s dare, I blew a gasket. I got to my feet, drew myself up to my full height, and growled, “If you don’t go to sleep, I’m gonna throw the both of ya out the window!” (I could’ve, if I wanted to. I had five inches on them and the shoulders of an English milkmaid.)
When we were woken the following morning by a cardinal that called the oak tree its summer home, too, and the smell of pork sausage emanating out of the kitchen window of the house, I’d hardly describe the girls and me as bright eyed and bushy tailed. With sweat wiggling down my sides, my stomach complaining, and a hope hangover, I couldn’t have cared less which of us went down the wooden steps first, but the two of them picked up where they’d left off the night before, and I had to force them to do our agreed-upon tie breaker.
When Viv lost the rock, paper, scissors shootout, she shrugged it off, but I saw her give Frankie a vengeful look before she picked up the jump rope and shoved it down the front of her shorts. Viv could hold a grudge much better than she could her temper, so I suspected she was up to no good. But as I ran across the backyard to catch up with them, there wasn’t a doubt in mind that if the rest of the summer went as badly as our first overnight had, we’d remember it for as long as we lived. If we survived it.
