by Ninie Hammon
If she had one more wrinkle, she’d have to hold it in her hand!
The sun had carved deep trenches into her forehead and plowed furrows on both sides of her mouth from her nose to her chin. But her smile looked genuine, and I ached for somebody to be glad to see me, so I stepped forward and let her fold me into her boney arms.
“You and me, we’re going to do just fine.” She patted my back as furiously as a new mother burping a baby. “Just fine. Welcome home, Sugar.” Her wet hands dripped a comforting dribble of warm soapsuds down between my shoulder blades. “Welcome home!”
I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window over the sink as she hugged me. I never looked at my mirrored image if I could avoid it, particularly in dim light. There were things in the backgrounds of reflections sometimes, hidden in the shadows so you could only see enough of them to know they were there. Things you maybe didn’t want to get a good look at.
But I looked at my image then, and the most remarkable thing about the face that looked back at me was that there was absolutely nothing remarkable about it at all.
I missed my calling. I had a bright future holding up liquor stores. Nobody’d ever have picked me out of a police lineup.
Yes, sir, Anne Mitchell was imminently forgettable. Not pretty. Not ugly. Not tall. Not short. Not fat. Not skinny. OK, maybe skinny. No distinctive characteristics whatsoever. There was the long blonde hair, of course, but lots of women were platinum blondes. I just didn’t have dark roots, that’s all.
I wore no makeup and my pale eyebrows and eyelashes were invisible, so the face that peered at me from the window bore a striking resemblance to Ressusi Annie, the mannequin they used to teach CPR classes at the YWCA.
I fixed myself a soft drink, Piggly Wiggly house brand orange cola—and it did taste like cough syrup. I carefully refilled the ice trays before I began to unload my car. The sandstorm raged unabated so I only lugged in a few things. A couple of boxes, my laptop and, of course, Petey.
“That ain’t no birdcage, is it?” Bobo asked when I hauled in what was unmistakably a huge birdcage and set it on the floor in the parlor.
The room was dark again. Before I went outside, I’d opened the drapes to let in what little sunlight there was, muted and dull, shining through the brown air. Obviously, Bobo had closed them again as soon as I was out of the house.
“You got a bird in there?”
“Uh-huh. His name’s Petey. Why’d you close the drapes?”
“I’m practicing bein’ blind!” she snapped. “Listen here, I don’t want me no bird in this house. I don’t trust nothing that looks at me with only one eye at a time.”
“Aw, come on, he’s adorable.” I lifted the blue cover off the cage, leaned close to the bird inside and made smooching sounds. “Aren’t you, Petey boy?”
The bright green parakeet perched on a swing cocked his head to one side in a herky-jerky bird motion and made smooching sounds back at me.
“See! And he can talk, too, knows almost a dozen words.” I began a circuit around the room, turning on the lamps. “He can say his name and ‘hello’ and—”
“Can he say goodbye? 'Cause I want him outta here.”
OK, this is a hill worth dying on.
“Petey stays, Bobo.” I tried to sound pleasant and firm at the same time. “I got him when I first moved to England and I went to enormous trouble to get him into this country.”
It would have been easier to get a pipe bomb through customs in Newark than that one little green bird.
“He’s important to me.” I paused, then continued in a soft voice. “There have been times Petey was the only friend I had.”
“You don’t get out much, do you?” She leaned a little closer to the cage to get a better look. "The only good bird’s one frying in a skillet.” She straightened up. “Which reminds me, I got to go pluck a chicken.”
“You still keep chickens?” That filthy old chicken house had been a health hazard 25 years ago. Surely, there were city ordinances that banned such things by now.
Of course, we’re talking Goshen, Texas, here, home of not one, not two, but—hold onto your britches, Mildred!—three traffic lights.
Bobo ignored my question and headed toward the kitchen. Then she stopped in the dining room doorway, turned and glared back at me.
“I got me a friend, too,” she said, and then mimicked in a singsong whine, “and there have been times he was the only friend I had.” She turned back toward the kitchen. “Name’s Butch,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s a big, yella alley cat.”
I picked up Petey’s cage and started up the stairs with it.
“Don’t you worry about Butch,” I whispered. “I'll bet you a bag of birdseed that big, yellow alley cat is curled up right now in the lap of the recently unemployed Maria.”
I took a few more steps and then paused. Shadows began to seep out of dark corners just beyond sight, spreading out toward me like ink through the fibers of a blotter. A glacier chill ran down my spine, and I shivered. Bobo'd have said, "Somebody's walkin' over yore grave." My heart took up the pounding beat of a lunatic fist on the door of a padded cell, and I drew a deep, shaky breath to knit together the tattered edges of my courage.
There are secrets here, the walls whispered, things you don't want to see, Annie girl. Run now, while you still can.
I faced the truth then for what it was. I was here to fight the Boogie Man, and if he won, Anne Mitchell would cease to exist. Not in some cosmic, metaphorical sense, but literally. If I challenged the Boogie Man head on and lost, this time he would kill me.
And he knows I'm coming. The Boogie Man knows it's showtime. He knows it's either him or me.
Chapter 2
A wide staircase with an intricately hand-carved railing wound up the side wall of the parlor to the center hall of the second floor. Three rooms opened off the hall. The bedroom at the front of the house above the study—which used to be Mama and Jericho’s bedroom—was mine years ago and I assumed it still was. The bedroom overlooking the backyard was Bobo’s.
But it was to the huge room on the back of the house above the kitchen that I went first. I pushed open the door with my elbow, stepped inside and set Petey’s cage on the floor. Then I flipped on the pale, pretty-much-useless overhead light and stood looking around, ridiculously thrilled that it was just like I remembered. It was big and open with two huge windows—not exactly skylights, but close enough.
Though there also were fireplaces in the downstairs parlor and in two of the bedrooms on the third floor, the one in this room was the biggest one in the house. It covered half the wall below a massive, ornate gilded mirror. An antique wind-up clock with a broken face, the minute and hour hands drooping down in a permanent six-thirty, rested on the quartersawn white oak mantel.
There was a multicolored oval “rag rug” in the middle of the room and a rolltop desk by the door. And nothing else! No furniture. Perfect, absolutely perfect! The only unfurnished room in the house, this had once been a children’s playroom, though I couldn’t conjure a single memory of actually playing in it during the year we lived in the house after the accident.
But I did remember what lay behind the door in the back corner of the room. The back staircase. A lot of old houses had them. Above me, the enclosed back stairs opened into the third floor bedroom next to the steep, narrow steps leading into the attic. And below, the stairs led down to the back wall of the kitchen beside the cellar door. The back staircase was spooky. It was dark—either it had no light or the bulb was perpetually burned out—and it always had the musty, unused smell of thrift store clothes.
I walked over to the stairs door and reached for the knob, then drew my hand back.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve come home to face my fears. I’ll get right on that.
Instead, I went back out into the hallway and climbed the wide front staircase to the third floor. The big double doors at the top of the stairs were shut. Bobo obviously had closed off the fou
r bedrooms and a bath on that floor; they hadn’t been used in years. I ambled through the hot, stale-smelling rooms, each furnished with hulking armoires, dressers, nightstands, four-poster cannonball beds, massive sleigh beds, handmade quilt bedspreads, lace curtains, pictures on the walls, rugs on the floors—like somebody, several somebodies, had just walked out and would return shortly.
These were the rascals’ rooms, waiting in the too-still silence for a herd of rowdy boys who would never come back.
I had one important item that I had to cross off my to-do list before I finished unloading my car.
Bobo’s telephone was as genuine an antique as the third-floor furniture, an old black dial-up model that sat atop a phone book next to the Philco radio in the parlor. The directory that contained the names, addresses and telephone numbers of everybody in Goshen—and all the rest of Rutherford County, too—was the size of a comic book.
I dialed the number wrong the first time; that little circle with holes in it threw me. A cheery voice announced Goshen News when I tried again, and I placed the classified ad I’d composed during the 10 hours I spent in the air between London and Louisville. It had taken almost the whole trip.
I pulled the hair that stretched down my back almost to my waist into a ponytail and braided it so the wind couldn’t whip it into my face. Then I went outside and began unloading my stuff. I brought in two big suitcases and an overnight bag and dropped them on the bedroom floor, and dumped three or four loads of boxes in the playroom. I figured the rest could wait. I’d shipped most of my belongings anyway, and they weren’t due to arrive in Goshen until the end of the week.
I’d had to go through all Mama’s things, too, so we could sell her Louisville townhouse, as well as figure out what I wanted to keep of my own stuff that I’d left stored in her garage for years. It added up to lots of moving parts, but I had the process ruthlessly organized, all the way down to a manifest. I didn’t really need it, though. I knew exactly what was in every box.
I can zero in on my pearl-handled hairbrush like a narc dog at a border crossing but I don’t have a single memory of my only sister.
I’d had to jam into my car a random collection of items the movers left behind and I could bring in the rest of those tomorrow. I locked the car and left it parked at the curb in front of the house, though I hated to abandon my poor little blue Honda to the storm. There were folks who’d swear that a full-bore West Texas sandblasting could chew the paint off a car all the way down to bare metal.
I thought I remembered a garage in Bobo’s backyard—across from the chicken house—and Bobo didn’t own a car. But it was a safe bet the building was jammed with fifty years of accumulated flotsam and jetsam.
Upstairs in the playroom, I set my laptop on the rolltop desk, emptied one box beside it and dumped out the contents of two other boxes on the floor, various items I would put on shelves as soon as I bought some. I sat down Indian-style in the middle of what I’d unloaded and picked through it, wondering if Bobo really did go out to the chicken house and wring a chicken’s neck.
“Who’s Filbert?” she asked from the doorway. I jumped, startled, and dropped a handful of books.
That woman moves as quiet as a mouse in house shoes!
“Where’d you hear about Filbert?”
“I’m old; I ain’t dead. I get around. I know what’s going on. I know more’n you think I do, Missy.”
“Actually, it’s Sir Filbert.” I picked up one of the books I’d dropped and held it up for Bobo to see. “Sir Filbert Wellington Frog III. He’s a tree frog who lives in Christ Church College in Oxford.” Filbert gave her a cockeyed grin from the book jacket. He was a skinny green creature with elongated fingers and toes, wearing a monocle and a dapper, royal blue ascot around his scrawny neck. “He’s the character my books are about.”
Bobo came into the room, stepping carefully around the brushes, tubes of paint and small canvasses strewn about the floor, and took the book to inspect it. She pulled rimless glasses from her apron pocket, parked them on her nose, held the book out at arm’s length and tilted her head back as far as she could so the milky blue eyes deep in her sunken eye sockets could squint through the bottom portion of the bifocal lenses.
“You write about a frog?”
“They’re children’s books, Bobo.”
“And little kids like to read about frogs?”
“Sure they do.”
She plucked the glasses off her nose, deposited them in her pocket and gave the book back to me. “That’s dumb as a shovel.”
“It’s no dumber than SpongeBob SquarePants.”
I tried to pull packing tape off a box lid but it was stuck tight.
“Hand me that pair of scissors, will you? Next to the pink Post-It notes."
She turned to the desk, moved things around until she spotted the scissors, leaned over and gave them to me. The liver-spotted skin on her arthritis-gnarled hands was as thin as gauze, with veins that looked like fat blue worms beneath the surface. Her large, swollen knuckles had twisted her fingers so severely they no longer extended straight out. They were attached to her hand at an angle, like lumpy, sea turtle flippers.
“That Sponge Bob Pants a children’s book, too? About a washrag to scrub the grease off a pot? That’s dumber’n a shovel.”
“SpongeBob SquarePants is a sea sponge, not a cleaning sponge.” I cut the packing tape holding the box flap, then sliced the blade down the center. “He lives at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.”
It suddenly occurred to me that I shouldn’t have made such a mess on the floor right in front of the door. I got on my hands and knees and hurriedly scooted everything toward the walls, making a path through the center like a snowplow. I didn’t want Bobo to trip over something and break her neck, though she seemed remarkably agile and sure-footed. She hobbled a little, favored her right leg because of the arthritis in her hip. But she didn’t move the careful way a lot of old people did, like they were balancing on the deck of a ship in a rolling sea.
“And he may be cross-eyed and goofy looking, but SpongeBob has made Stephen Hillenburg a boatload of money.”
She didn’t touch my laptop, just looked at it like she feared it might open up and bite her. But she did pick through the collection of miniatures I’d set on the desktop—a carved elephant no bigger than my thumb that I got in Cambridge, a thimble-sized crown from Windsor Castle and a three-inch bagpiper in a kilt from Covent Garden.
“Edgar’s got money,” she said.
“Who’s Edgar?”
“He’s coming to get me in the morning, and we’re going downtown to take us a walk along the pier!” There was no pier in downtown Goshen, or any body of water bigger than a horse trough for 250 miles in every direction. “And right after lunch, we set sail. We’re going on a cruise!”
Ole Ed better have an ocean in his pocket.
She picked up a tiny glass ball from Chicago, shook it and watched sparkling snowflakes fall on the Sears Tower. “We’ll eat at the captain’s table, and Edgar won’t let that woman steal my food!”
“What woman?”
“She’s an ugly old thing, face’d sour new milk. She comes in my room and takes my lunch near ever' day and can’t nobody do nothing 'bout it.” She pronounced “can’t” so that it rhymed with “paint.” “She stole my sandwich today, and I was hungry.”
I heard what sounded like real distress in her voice, and I stopped emptying the box and looked at her.
“Bobo.” She met my gaze. “Bobo, who stole your sandwich?”
“Just … that woman.”
I turned back to the box.
“Your frog make you boatloads of money like Sponge Pants?”
“Not boatloads, but enough.” At least he used to. Unease settled into the pit of my stomach. “He’s on vacation right now though; taking a little time off, sort of a … “ What was it Jack had called it that day, the day he phoned to tell me my career was over?
I’d been on the M25,
the London motorway known as the biggest parking lot in Europe, when my cell phone frog-croaked from the bowels of my purse. If caller ID had identified anybody but Jack I wouldn’t have answered; it is, after all, illegal in England to talk on a cell phone while you’re driving. But technically I wasn’t driving. I was sitting dead still.
“You’re an early bird this morning.” Noon in London made it seven o’clock in New York. “Was your bed on fire?”
“Nobody likes a smart ass,” Jack grumbled. A short, bald troll of a man, Jack Bartley was the assistant art director at Bristlecone Publishing and as close to a father figure as I’d ever known. It was Jack I’d sat beside on the flight that changed my life.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m homesteading a piece of property on the M25, prime real estate near the M3 exit to Heathrow. Got a great view and the price is right.”
“Like I said, nobody likes a smart ass.” He paused. “So you can’t get to the originals of the drawings you sent me last night.”
Jack was working with me on my latest book, tentatively titled “The Rogue Gargoyle.”
“Nope. What’s up? Did I leave off one of Filbert’s toes?” Some authors of children’s books paid illustrators to come up with artwork for their stories. I did my own. That’s what landed me in this profession in the first place—the cartoon tree frog I was sketching as I sat next to Jack for eight hours between Heathrow and JFK five years ago.
Jack didn’t answer.
“I didn’t really, did I? I didn’t leave a toe off. I couldn’t have!”
“No, all Filbert’s body parts are intact. Look, maybe we better talk about this when you get home where you can see the originals.”
“Oh no you don’t. I screwed something up, didn’t I? What? What did I leave out?”
“It’s not what you left out; it’s what you put in.” There was a beat of silence. “What’s with the weird eyes?”
