Skavenger's Hunt

by Mike Rich

  Luckily, Central Park was still enough of a frenzied mess that Henry was able to kind of disappear as he hurriedly worked his way over to Ernie’s side, which was the much safer side of the two boys, he figured.

  “I told you to scram, remember?” Jack growled at him.

  “No, no. Whatta ya mean, it may be something else?” Ernie ignored his hunting partner, whipping out his notebook just in case.

  “Skavenger puts key words into each of his clues,” Henry told them, struggling to keep up with the speed-walking boys. “Least that’s what I heard he does. Every eighth word is a clue within a clue.”

  Both kids came to a sudden stop, as did Henry.

  “Who the heck says that?” Jack cocked his head and asked. It was now fairly apparent the smirk was pretty much etched onto the older boy’s face.

  Henry wisely chose not to answer, turning to Ernie instead. “You wrote down every word, right?”

  Before he could answer, Jack stepped closer to Henry. “I asked you a question.”

  “Hey, Jack. Let him finish,” Ernie interrupted, suddenly looking curious. He flipped his notebook open like a cop ready to display his badge.

  “Read the eighth word,” Henry managed to say, realizing he was now short of breath. “The eighth word of the clue.”

  Ernie eyed him suspiciously, but he also held up a hand toward Jack, silently asking for a few more seconds of patience. He waited for a lengthy parade of Dakota-bound searchers to march by before his eyes returned to Skavenger’s announcement.

  Henry could tell Ernie was silently counting.

  “‘Call,’” he finally said. “The eighth word of what he said was ‘call.’”

  “And the eighth word after that?” Henry asked excitedly.

  “This is all a joke,” Jack huffed while Ernie counted. “I’m headin’ over to the Dakota myself.”

  “‘The,’” Ernie announced as he circled the word. “‘Call’ and ‘the’ are the first two words.”

  Jack stopped and turned, right in time to see Henry gulp. The next word was either gonna make sense or put the whole thing on a direct path toward gibberish.

  Ernie, though, was already tapping eight words ahead. The tip of his dull, fractured pencil stopped a second to write down the next word, before quickly sprinting forward again.

  “‘Number.’ Call the number.”

  Whew.

  Tap, tap, tap. “Call the number 1804 . . .”

  A smile started to spread wide on Ernie’s face.

  “Call the number 1804 NOW!” he announced to Jack with stunned disbelief. “It’s a telephone call!” he nearly shouted. “Skavenger wants us to use a telephone.”

  “COOL! We can use mine.” Henry, purely by reflex, reached into his pocket for his cell phone.

  Uh oh . . . right . . . no phone.

  “Whatta ya mean, we can use yours?” Ernie laughed. “Your family got enough money they got their own phone at home?”

  “Sorry, my bad. I mean, never mind,” Henry tried to cut his losses. “But you only said four numbers, what about the rest of ’em?”

  The boys looked at him with the blankest of blank expressions.

  “What do you mean, the rest of ’em?” Jack still looked more than willing to throttle Henry. “You only need four numbers to make a telephone call, genius.”

  Ernie closed up his notebook and tucked it away. “There’s a telephone exchange not far from here, a block away from Hell’s Kitchen. My aunt works there.”

  Telephone exchange? What’s a telephone exchange?

  But Jack’s hard gaze had yet to move off Henry.

  “Hey, tough guy.” Ernie rolled his eyes at Jack. “’Nuff with the staring. Whatta ya wanna do?”

  “I wanna know where he came up with that every-eighth-word thing, that’s what I wanna do. We’ve done this hunt twice, and I never heard of that before.”

  “Look,” Henry tried to reassure him. “I’m not trying to horn in on this, okay? The only thing I want is to talk to Skavenger, that’s it. Whatever prize there is, that’s for you guys. All right?”

  “Oh, so you don’t want nuthin’.” Jack sneered. “You got a bridge you want to sell me too? They got one only a couple years old in Brooklyn.”

  “Jack,” Ernie tried one last time. “Look around. See everyone runnin’ everywhere? We gotta decide. Dakota or telephone call. My vote’s telephone call, those words make too much sense.”

  Jack popped his suspenders again, moving from one to the other. Henry held his breath, waiting for the collar wrangler’s decision. If these guys didn’t help him get to Skavenger, he didn’t know what he’d do.

  Finally, Jack took a breath and said, “All right, but if we make this telephone call and nothing happens? You won’t be talking to Skavenger, you’ll be talkin’ to me, okay?”

  Henry gulped again. “Okay.”

  Jack turned on his well-worn heels and began to walk away from the Dakota. Henry followed, second thoughts already bumping around in his head.

  Whatta ya gettin’ yourself into here? Headin’ off into 1885? 1885! Walking behind some guy who wants to take your head off?

  Ernie fell in step next to Henry and held out his hand. “Ernie Samuels,” he introduced himself.

  “Henry Babbitt,” Henry replied as they shook. He could see that his name prompted a curious look from his new acquaintance.

  “No kiddin’?” Ernie grinned. “What a coincidence.”

  Henry looked over at Jack, who didn’t appear interested in exchanging pleasantries, even though his next words helped explain why Ernie was grinning.

  “Call me Jack,” the kid with four inches on Henry said matter-of-factly. “Jack Babbitt.”

  EIGHT

  Hazel in the Kitchen

  BABBITT? BABBITT? SERIOUSLY?

  Henry’s head spun as he followed the boys through the area of the city that was already called Hell’s Kitchen. He wasn’t sure of the exact year his great-great-grandfather had been born, but the math sure felt right.

  His father, Nathan, was born in 1965. And if Chief was almost eighty-five, he would have been born around 1927.

  No, wait. He was born in 1927. He said it was the same year as the Yankees’ big-time Murderers’ Row team.

  Henry stepped right into an unexpected gift left behind by one of the Kitchen’s many stray dogs—just one of the countless things that made Old New York a lot different from Henry’s New York.

  Almost everywhere they’d gone since Central Park had been impressively awful. No internet, no subway, no cabs. Just lots and lots of walking.

  Worst of all? Crapping dogs or no crapping dogs? The city reeked.

  Chief had told him a few years back that New York usually smelled like week-old beef with broccoli. 1885 New York was the same—multiplied by about twenty.

  “Oh man,” Henry muttered with disgust, scraping his shoe in the dirt. “I hate it when people don’t pick up their dog’s crap.”

  “Why would anybody pick up dog crap?” Ernie glanced at him as if he’d sprouted an extra head.

  Henry was smart enough to let the question go unanswered, choosing instead to get back to the family math.

  Okay, there’s Sam, Chief’s dad. He was prob’ly born twenty-five, maybe thirty years before 1927, so that would be liiiiiike 1897 or so. Sam’s dad was, yup, none other than Jackson Babbitt, who woulda prob’ly been born in the early 1870s.

  The year 1885 was the year Henry had stumbled into, and the Jack Babbitt walking in front of him—scruffy, suspenders, trouble—looked no more than fourteen.

  Chief never really talked much about his grandfather. Evidently he’d had a “somewhat checkered past,” is how he put it. Whatever Jackson had done, Chief didn’t sound too proud of that particular branch of the family tree.

  “You sure your aunt’s gonna be there?” Jack curtly asked Ernie. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “I dunno, what’s with the guff? It’s not like she tells me her work sche
dule.”

  “Stop bein’ a smartass,” Jack warned him. “I don’t have time for smartasses right now.” He nodded at Henry. “’Sides, I’ve got one more than I need right here. My new prayin’-that-he’s-right, long-lost relative Babbitt.”

  Does he ever cool off? Henry thought to himself. Even for two or three minutes maybe?

  It was late morning by the time they reached the north end of the Kitchen. Henry got the feeling this might be the poor section of the neighborhood—which, if true, would have been saying something. Almost all of the upper windows were open and draped with wet, faded clothes. Being July, he knew they’d probably dry quickly, but it was a smart bet none of them would smell summertime fresh.

  Ernie stepped over a bulging crack in the sidewalk and pointed at the small metal letters on the building in front of them.

  “Eighty-two. This is it,” he declared with a quick nod.

  “You sure?” Jack wondered aloud, giving the dismal neighborhood a quick once-over. “’Cause if it is, we’re the only ones who thought of coming here.”

  He was right. The street was dead empty except for an old man rummaging through garbage and a stray dog leaving another potential booby trap for Henry’s other shoe.

  Ernie shook his head.

  “This isn’t the only place in New York you can make a telephone call, Jack,” he pointed out. “They got four or five of these places now.”

  Four or five places you can make a phone call? Wow. No more Dark Ages here.

  Jack rapped on the door with the back of his hand. “Yeah, it’ll never last. What are they gonna do? Build a telephone exchange on every street corner?”

  Well, Mr. Odds-On Great-Great-Grandfather, you’re pretty much right on that. Put your money on ’em leapfrogging that little obstacle, though.

  Ever since Henry had learned Jack’s last name was Babbitt, he’d been sneaking looks to see if there was a family resemblance—which was absolutely there, clear as day.

  Jack was tall and thin, but with wider shoulders than you might expect on his kind of frame. Probably explained why his constant suspender snapping was so darn loud. It was the same build as all the Babbitt men.

  “Every eighth word.” Jack shook his head as he knocked on the door again, shooting a glance in Henry’s direction. “Lemme tell ya somethin’, lunky-boy. Fifteen minutes from now I might have eight really good words for you.”

  Henry gulped. Long as one of those eight words is “run,” I should be good to go.

  A woman in a plaid black dress opened the door. She wore a white apron tightly double-knotted around her waist and looked as if she hadn’t smiled in a decade.

  “May I help you?” she asked. There was a thin operator’s headset running across her black hair, and her eyes looked like they were born with frown wrinkles surrounding them.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ernie replied as politely as he could. “Is Hazel Samuels here today?”

  “Whether Hazel Samuels is here today is Hazel Samuel’s concern. Not yours, thank you very much.”

  The door was nearly closed before Ernie quickly added, “Ma’am, please. I’m her nephew,” he informed her. “She’s my father’s sister.”

  Henry was sure she had a ruler tucked somewhere in her apron and was about to whack all three of them with a single swing. Instead, she leveled a hard gaze on Ernie for a few uncomfortably long seconds.

  “What message would you care to leave her?” she asked, letting out an exasperated breath.

  Ernie mustered up his finest sad expression. “It’s a message from my father, ma’am.”

  “That’s right, his father, ma’am,” Jack chimed in, trying to help. “It’s very serious. We came all the way from Brooklyn to tell her.”

  “From Brooklyn,” she replied suspiciously. “All the way to the Kitchen.”

  Henry spotted Ernie busily studying whether his shoelaces might unravel.

  “Well,” Jack sadly uttered. “Almost Brooklyn.”

  Hazel Samuels wore the same black dress and white apron as the woman who’d answered the door, but Henry noticed she was also wearing something else: the thinnest of smiles.

  Whether that meant she’d help them was another question, but it was more than the other fifty women working in the wire-strewn room were wearing. Each accepted phone call after phone call on their cable-filled connection boards with a clipped rhythmic chorus of “yes, sir” and “thank you, ma’am.”

  Henry couldn’t help but look around the bustling room. Gigi had once shown him an old rotary phone she had in storage, the kind with a round dial that you spun and it went chuk chuk chuk chuk chuk chuk. That would have put this technology to shame.

  This is where phone calls happen? Looks more like a spaghetti factory. What do they use to send texts? Ravioli?

  Jack gave Henry a quick elbow in the ribs—either to tell him to pay attention or just because he liked to elbow people.

  “An important message from your father,” Ernie’s aunt said in between telephone calls. “That was what you told her?”

  Ernie nodded like he knew he was in trouble. Hazel—who really did look like someone who would have that name, complete with a dipping nose that gave her the look of a hawk—rearranged a set of cables, keeping the handful of New Yorkers with the means of making a call talking to each other.

  She was placing calls with not ten digits, not seven—but four, as Henry had already found out the hard way.

  “Hello, this is operator forty-one, let me connect you with Queens 1468,” she said before pausing. “Yes, I’ll check back in five minutes to see if you need more time.”

  Cable connection in. Cable connection out. Impressively fast, Henry had to admit.

  Hazel turned her attention to Ernie. “Ernest, how dare you use your own father as an excuse to come in here. Being as you can’t.”

  Henry whispered out of the corner of his mouth to Jack, “What does she mean, he can’t?” He hoped Hazel hadn’t overheard, but he’d forgotten she was in the business of listening.

  “Because his father,” she snapped at Henry, “who was my husband’s brother, God rest his soul, has passed on. That’s why. As has Ernie’s mother. Any other questions?”

  Henry shook his head.

  “Perhaps if you accepted more of our offers to help,” she quickly resumed laying into her nephew. “Perhaps if you stayed out of the Juvenile Hall for at least a month, you wouldn’t be greeted with so much suspicion. You still have family, Ernest, a family who wants very much to help you. One you ignore far too much.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” Ernie looked down, his hat ironically in his hands. “Oh, and please say thanks to Uncle Phil. He gave us some food this morning from the restaurant, out in the back alley, enough for two or three days. Really appreciate it.”

  He thumped the bag on the floor that had been draped over his shoulder since Central Park, but Aunt Hazel was having none of it.

  She jammed a phone jack into an open router. “Operator forty-one, how may I help you?” she asked with a harsher tone than usual.

  Hazel was able to shield some of the hurt Henry saw on her face, but not all of it. He’d become an unfortunate expert on that subject following his own father’s death.

  He glanced at Ernie, who shook his head in a manner that clearly said: Don’t worry, lemme handle her.

  “Connecting you to Manhattan 0855. Go ahead, ma’am.” Hazel pressed the four numbers before asking Henry, “And who are you, young man?”

  Henry glanced at Jack and Ernie, unsure of what to do.

  “Don’t look at them, look at me,” she demanded.

  He hesitated, which he figured might not help. “I’m, uh, I’m Henry Babbitt, ma’am,” he answered her.

  “Henry Babbitt . . . really?” she replied. “Jackson, you never told me you had a brother.”

  “He’s not my—”

  “One of the many things you’ve never told me over the years, I’m sure,” Aunt Hazel interrupted, before turning her rapi
dly cooling eyes back to Henry.

  “Well, Henry Babbitt. Being as I will not get the truth out of these two hooligans, I’ll ask you.” Henry gulped as she put him on the spot. “What are the three of you doing here? And if you lie to me, trust me, I’ll know.”

  Ernie tried to help out. “Aunt Hazel, we just met Henry this morning, and—”

  “This Henry? The one to whom I just asked the question? The one to whom the question was directed? That Henry?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nodded.

  Henry could tell he was on his own. Hazel clicked a switch to check on a call before putting him back on the hot seat. “You were about to say, young man?”

  “Oh, well, yes, ma’am,” he stumbled, praying another telephone caller might help him out. The singsong chorus of polite operators provided the only background as Henry began to fidget.

  “Yes, ma’am, what?” Hazel was growing impatient.

  Henry hesitated again. For whatever reason, aside from the fact that he had to say something, he told her, “We need to make a telephone call, ma’am, because we think it’s a clue in Mr. Skavenger’s Hunt.”

  Without looking, Henry could tell Jack was holding back from belting him on the spot. He likely would have, he guessed, except for the fact Aunt Hazel was sitting between them.

  “Ah haaa, Mr. Skavenger,” she said with cynical exasperation. “I should have guessed. These two wasted almost all of last summer trying to find even one clue. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  Jack answered her with a level of courteous respect that surprised Henry. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “we thought we’d found the first one last year, but I guess we didn’t.”

  “This is operator forty-one again,” Hazel interrupted Queens 1468, “would you like five more minutes, sir?” She listened and then replied, “Very good, thank you,” before ending the call.

  She casually asked the boys, in a very offhand manner, “And why would you need my help with a clue to this year’s hunt? An incorrect clue, I’m sure.”

  Henry had to hide the smile tugging at his cheeks, because he’d just seen Ernie’s aunt soften. Now there was a certain gleam in Hazel’s eye, illuminated by the dim light just above her station.