by Susan Vaught
“I’m sorry about not telling you.” I pulled the key out of my pocket and held it up, letting our entryway light play off the gold edges.
Dad studied it, but he didn’t try to take it away from me. He didn’t even ask to hold it. “Sooner or later, I want to read what Mama wrote. All of it. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “And yes, Night on Fire’s fiction, but there’s truth in it, and fiction, but I think there are lies, too. Lies, or something else Avadelle wants to keep to herself.”
Dad started to argue with me, but I put the key back in my pocket, then raised one finger. “First, we know Grandma and Avadelle didn’t get clean away like the two characters in the book. Grandma got hurt—and that ghost story about screams in the steam tunnels around the Lyceum, it’s probably related to that night.” I raised a second finger. “Their friendship ended when Night on Fire came out.” Third finger. “The way Avadelle acted at Square Books—there’s definitely something she doesn’t want anyone to know. Something Grandma’s ready to tell. Something she needs to tell. She keeps trying to say it, so hard. I think—I think she might need Avadelle.”
Dad leaned his head back against the rock wall and closed his eyes. He seemed to be thinking. “I just can’t see any good coming out of this, Dani.”
I didn’t want to hear that. I didn’t want to lay everything out for him and have him say it didn’t matter. It did. My Grandma’s tears and misery counted. Her pain, that was important. The fact she wanted me to find out what happened, that meant a ton to me too. Anger flashed all over me, but I knew I wasn’t mad at Dad. Not really.
Weird. I had no idea what or who I was actually mad at.
My fingers curled against the wooden step beneath me, and I pushed myself to my feet. I crossed the wood and tile floor and sat down by Dad, my leg resting against his. Everything inside me kept jumbling up until my own feelings didn’t make any sense at all.
“The copy of Night on Fire I read, it was Grandma’s,” I said, fishing for anything I might have forgotten that would help Dad understand how much we needed to figure this out. “She donated it to the library, I guess. Her name was in it, anyway, and an inscription. It said, ‘Ruth Beans was here.’ ”
Dad turned his head in my direction and opened on eye. “Seriously? That’s what she inscribed?”
I leaned in to him. He smelled like garden sweat and spearmint, too, a little. And pineapple, and lemon, from all the different types of mints I knew he had been trimming. “I thought it was strange, like what a little kid might write.”
“Nah.” Dad opened his other eye and gave me a sad smile. “It’s a soldier thing. In wartime, Kilroy—remember him? Bald sketch with just the top of his head and a nose? That little guy got to be a thing in World War II, when your grandmother was a kid. Now, when soldiers are deployed or campaigning, it’s tradition to graffiti him up somewhere. Kilroy was here.” He shrugged. “Guess it’s a way to say, Remember me, I was real, I fought here. . . .” He stopped for a second, then added, “You know how she liked William Faulkner. Well, Faulkner said, ‘What matters is at the end of life, when you’re about to pass into oblivion, that you’ve at least scratched “Kilroy was here,” on the last wall of the universe.’ ”
Suddenly, Grandma’s inscription made all kinds of sense. Ruth Beans was here. Her mark on the universe.
“I wasn’t even old enough to enlist in World War Two,” Dad said. “But Mama, she was fighting her very own war, I guess, even that far back, and every year after.” He glanced up the stairs. “But this one she’s fighting now, she’s losing it. Soon, I think.”
He closed his eyes again, and rubbed his head. “Sorry. Headache again. I think my allergies are getting worse.”
“Want me to get you some aspirin?”
“Thanks, I’ll get some when I get up.” Still with his eyes closed, looking way more tired than I wanted him to be, Dad asked, “What exactly are you wanting to do about this key, baby girl? Spell it out for me.”
Hope fluttered up in my chest, and the shiver in my throat made it hard to talk. “I want to go look for the steam tunnel entrance where you think Grandma fell, in case she put the box in the tunnel. I also want to search between the Lyceum and Ventress.” I swallowed, working not to talk too much too fast and make him quit listening. “I mean, if she gave me the key, the box has to be somewhere, right?”
For a few seconds, Dad didn’t speak. His eyes came open, and he seemed to stare in the general direction of Grandma’s room. Finally, he said, “I don’t even know where that steam tunnel entrance is—or if it’s even still there, after they relandscaped the Circle. And what if you find it—or find that lockbox? What if that box holds some deep dark terrible truth about the riot or about Night on Fire that blows Avadelle’s novel all to hell and back? Will we be turning that over to the press so they swarm us and the Richardsons and tear Avadelle and her people all apart?”
“Well . . . um.” I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Just about finding the secret. “No. I guess I’ll bring it to you, and we’ll figure out what should happen, and what Grandma needs.”
Dad made eye contact with me then. He shifted one of his arms, and put it gently around my shoulders, pulling me to him. I leaned in and rested against his chest, not caring about the dried dirt that flaked off on my face and fingers.
“Mama’s peaceful enough now, baby girl. She barely talks at all, and whatever agitation she had, it’s not much now. I think for everybody’s sake, this big hunt for answers needs to stop. Avadelle might have had the right of it, that digging up bones doesn’t do anything but make angry ghosts.”
I wanted to argue, but what could I say? At that moment, when he was so tired and hugging me, and Mom was struggling to work late, and Grandma was sleeping, and the house was so quiet, I almost agreed with him. Almost.
“How about we make a little deal?” Dad gave me an extra squeeze. “You let this go so I can be sure you won’t do any more craziness like going places you don’t tell us and hiding in Dr. Harper’s closet, and I’ll talk to your mom. We’ll see about easing up on the grounding, step by step. See how it goes?”
I sighed but didn’t agree.
“Come on,” Dad urged. “You can get yourself busy with camp projects and reading, and helping me take care of Mama. That’s enough activity for anybody, baby girl.”
“It is,” I agreed.
Dad seemed to think I was taking his deal, because he said. “Good. Now, let’s get Mama taken care of, and get you ready for bed before Cella comes home and calls me a slacker.”
“Okay,” I said, already feeling guilty, and wondering if I really should leave everything alone, like Dad thought I would, and sort of promising myself I’d do just that. “Does this mean I get my phone back?”
“I said we’d make a deal, Dani, not call down miracles from heaven.”
Oh well. It was worth a try.
20
RUTH BEANS WAS HERE
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 462
After people die—especially those who weren’t soldiers and accidentally stumbled into the battle—everyone questions why we fought. I know I did. So did Leslie. But that didn’t stop us.
“Jim Crow isn’t just a bunch of laws,” Leslie told the new class full of White kids even younger than her. Despite the riot—maybe even because of it—those kids meant to head into Hell itself, to help with voter registration in Mississippi.
“It’s an entire system of oppression designed to keep White people in charge and Black people kneeling on the ground.” She glanced at me, a little nervous, since this was the first time she had taken the lead. I gave her a smile. She smiled back. Then she talked for near about an hour.
Right about the time the whole group looked flattened, Leslie finished with, “I decline to accept the end of man . . . I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” The kids perked up at those hopeful wor
ds, and they listened that much harder.
The lines were from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize banquet speech. He gave it in Stockholm in 1950. My aunt Jessie could call him a shiftless drifter all she wanted, but to me, William Faulkner was a visionary. He saw the Civil Rights Movement coming decades before it happened, and that always made me wonder how much everyone saw coming.
Then again, most people don’t notice that single, heart-stopping moment when rage and fear turn human and dig in for war.
LATE-DAY HEAT SHIMMERED OFF THE cross-walked pavement in front of Ventress Hall, turning the scene into an oil painting in the bright afternoon sun. Indri sat at the base of the Confederate Monument, a splash of pink shirt and faded jeans across the white marble of its chess-piece base. Above her, the confederate soldier stared down University Avenue, hand to his forehead to block the light, his rifle clutched close to his side. Behind her shoulders, the statue’s inscription read To Our Confederate Dead, 1861–1865, Albert Sidney Johnston Chapter 379 U.D.C.
Indri seemed to be imitating the soldier, holding her hand to her forehead and squinting across the redbrick walkway and road that separated us from the rounded turret end of Ventress. She had a sketchpad open on her lap, trying to get the curves and angles just right. I sat beside her with a notebook open on my lap. I had drawn a picture too, but mine was of the route between Ventress Hall and the Lyceum. The Circle, the treed area behind Indri and the statue and me, was laid out like an uneven wagon wheel with twelve spokes. My grandmother could have buried the box with her hands just about anywhere in that area—but she would have had to stuff it in the ground pretty quick, since Dr. Harper followed her to the Lyceum soon after she left Ventress.
She could have stuffed the box into something else, or under something too. Or left it lying on the sidewalk, and somebody threw it away, or took it home and tossed it in a garage, or—
I didn’t want to think about those possibilities.
My sketch had a few X’s and O’s in spots, reminding me of one of Mom’s body diagrams. The marks were spots I thought might make for good box-hiding between where Dr. Harper last saw Grandma and the Lyceum. I marked little trees with soft dirt and pine shavings all around them, a bench, flowerbeds, and added a question mark because I didn’t know if the old steam tunnel entrance where Dad thought Grandma had gotten injured still existed.
I planned on starting with the trees—but after camp, after Indri left, so I wouldn’t drag her into my breaking the deal with Dad that I sort of didn’t make, or get her in trouble for poking around the Circle.
“Don’t look now,” Indri muttered. “Jerk alert. And he has the Wicked Witch of Oxford with him.” She lowered her head to keep sketching, but I couldn’t stop myself from craning my neck until I spotted Mac and Avadelle moving down the sidewalk away from us, heading toward the Grove. Avadelle had on something loud and purple, along with her usual fedora. Mac was just in jeans and a T-shirt, like always.
My hand moved to my pocket for the phone I didn’t have. Indri didn’t have hers either, and neither of us had been able to check e-mail or messages since we were grounded. No way to know if Mac was trying to communicate with me or not. No way to get him any info, either.
I blew out a breath.
Yay for a little freedom, but the whole situation still sucked.
“Guess he’s not in that much trouble,” Indri said without looking up from her sketch, which was turning out really good. I could pick out the spire at Ventress, and all the main angles of the old building. “Though I guess escorting Avadelle around town could be its own form of punishment.”
“No kidding.” I tried to go back to my own sketch of the Circle, but my eyes kept drifting up, following Mac and Avadelle until they disappeared into the Grove. A few minutes later, Ms. Yarbrough came over and inspected our work. Indri’s sketch earned an enthusiastic, “Excellent first effort!”
As for mine . . .
“That looks a bit like a treasure map, Dani.” Ms. Yarbrough managed a sort-of smile. “Were you trying to draw the building?”
That had been the assignment, but I hadn’t bothered. Stick people, stick houses, stick buildings—yeah, I wouldn’t have gotten very far. I shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t figure I could do it justice, so I was working on the greenery.”
Sort of the truth, right?
And it earned me another sort-of smile. “I see.” Ms. Yarbrough didn’t comment on my notes with the question marks and cross-outs. “Well, ladies, camp’s at an end for today. I’ll take you back to the Grove with everyone else to get picked up—except for you, Ms. Beans. You’re a walker today, and I believe it’s closer for you to head out from here.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I closed my notebook and tucked my pencil behind my ear. Then I gave Indri a quick hug.
“Maybe we’ll get our phones back soon?” Her smudged fingers smeared black pencil dust on my arms as she let me go. “For the weekend at least?”
“I hope so,” I told her.
She walked off with Ms. Yarbrough, giving me a few extra waves every few steps, until they passed Ventress Hall and shifted into the Grove’s trees. I waved back every time, until I couldn’t see her anymore. Then I glanced down the long sidewalk that ran along beside University Avenue, and knew my father was expecting me to head down it, toward home. Trusting me to do that.
Instead, I turned back to the Circle and started toward the Lyceum.
* * *
Mom was working late like she had to do every night now. Dad would be gardening until sunset and looking after Grandma, and oblivious to the outside world. So I figured I had almost two hours before Dad would notice I wasn’t home yet and come looking for me.
Using the grid I’d drawn, I hurried down the widest wagon-wheel spoke of the Circle, the main sidewalk that would take me to the center flagpole. A few paces down that spoke, I turned right onto the grass and headed to the first little tree. I tried to pretend I was Grandma the night she took the box back from Dr. Harper, in a hurry, maybe confused and thinking somebody was watching me or wanting to steal my precious lockbox. I got close to the little tree, dropped to my knees, set my notebook aside, and pushed my hands into the sun-heated dirt and shavings around its base. Above my head, tiny leaves fluttered, casting shadows across the ground in front of me as I dug.
As I watched my hands plunge into the red mulch and crumbly brown dirt, I couldn’t help remembering the black-and-white photos Ms. Manchester had shown us, the ones from the Meredith riot. If I had been in this exact spot that afternoon, I would have seen carloads and busloads of folks driving onto campus. I would have seen angry people and scared people and curious people. I would have seen furious people with guns and baseball bats, determined to stop progress because they thought change would ruin their lives or end their world or—something.
That kind of hate and violence didn’t compute. My heart bumped hard as my fingers moved against pebbles and roots. I wiggled my fingers and pushed my hands deeper, as deep as I figured Grandma could have done the night she fled Ventress hall with her lockbox.
Had the same thing happened to her the night she took the box back? Was she remembering the riot the night when she hid her treasures? Sometimes, for people with Alzheimer’s disease, the past could seem like yesterday, or even right now. I hated to think of how scared she might have been—both when she got hurt in the riot, then later, when her disease could have made her relive every minute of that pain.
I went all around the soft dirt area of the first tree, but I didn’t find anything. I didn’t find anything under the second tree, either, so I moved to the next, and the next, until I’d poked around all the little trees in that first section of wagon wheel. Each time I gave up on an area, I patted the dirt back down and smoothed out the shavings, then drew a line through the tree on my sketched grid.
People passed by me as I dug, but nobody said anything. So I just kept digging. Fifteen more minutes, then fifteen more. About half an hour later, digging b
ehind the second bench I had marked on my grid, I had managed to collect a green toy soldier with a chewed-off leg, a golf ball, three acorns, and a quarter. I also had about a pound of dirt crammed under my fingernails and caked all over my jeans, and sweat trickled down both sides of my face.
I sat against the back of the bench, picked some of the dirt out from under my thumbnail with my teeth, and spit it off to the side.
“Hey!” somebody yelled. “Ew!”
And I closed my eyes, because I knew that voice.
“Truce, okay?” Mac said. “No more spitting.”
I opened one eye and looked up at him. He stood between me and a bunch of trees and Ventress Hall, with late-afternoon sunlight streaming all around him like a halo. The bright light made his shirt and jeans look almost neon.
I shaded my eyes. “You don’t sparkle in the sunlight. Your vampire powers must be fading.”
“I vaaannnt to feeed,” he said with a horrible Dracula accent. “For zee sparklies to come back, you know?”
I didn’t even bother with groaning. I was pretty sure people on the other side of University Avenue could see my eye-roll.
Mac eased out of the sun’s glare, and sat down in front of me near the bench. His gaze moved from my dirty clothes to my dirty hands, and finally to my face. “Do I want to know why you’re digging up the Circle?”
“Do I want to know where Avadelle is?” I wiped more dirt off my hands, then off my jeans. “Is she about to swoop down on me like a fedora-wearing bat and hit me with her cane?”
Mac laughed. “No. My aunt picked her up ten minutes ago.”
“Thank goodness.” I wiped sweat off my cheek, then realized I had probably smeared dirt all the way to my chin. “Not up for bats and canes right now. I’m trying to find Grandma’s lockbox. I thought she might have buried it somewhere in the Circle the night she took it from Dr. Harper, since it disappeared from her hands between Ventress and the Lyceum.”
Mac glanced around. “There’s, um, a lot of ground to dig up, if you’re planning to search everywhere in this wagon wheel. You know that, right?”
