by Steve Cotler
Then the man stepped forward, and the light from my computer lit one side of his face. It was Officer Crompton.
My brain went completely blackout for a second and then started thinking at super speed:
Since Officer Crompton was not in his uniform, he was doing some kind of undercover mystery investigation.
Since he was at my house, the mystery involved my family.
Since he was in my room, and Georgie and I had been sort of arrested by him earlier today, he was investigating us.
Since the only thing we had done that might be mysterious was to mention in the note we gave to the old lady that there was something in the envelope we found, she must have called the police.
Therefore, Officer Crompton was here to find out what was in the envelope.
“Hello, boys. Remember me?”
I nodded. Georgie also nodded, but he was in deeper shadow than I was, so Officer Crompton probably couldn’t tell.
“I’m guessing you don’t know why I’m here.”
We both shook our heads. But we were not thinking the same thing. I was pretty sure that Georgie’s head shake was agreeing that he didn’t know. My head shake was disagreeing because I was pretty sure I did.
Without thinking, I reached toward my backpack. In the light that came in from the hall and from my computer, I could clearly see the old yellowed envelope sticking out of one of the pockets. Then I realized that a policeman on an investigation would probably be watching me for suspicious movements, so I kept moving my arm until I was petting Deeb. Then I looked back at Officer Crompton.
“I know you told us to stay away from The Toad—I mean, G. J. Prott’s house,” I said. “But tomorrow, we—I mean, the envelope and stuff was lost in Georgie’s house for over fifty years and even though, as Georgie says, finders keepers, we’re going to—”
Officer Crompton put up his hand, so I stopped talking.
“I was on duty this afternoon. Now I’m here playing cards with my friends.” He gave a sly grin. “And to remind you two to keep out of trouble.” He tossed off a sloppy salute—Dad showed me the Navy way years ago—and walked down the hall, leaving my bedroom door open.
Neither Georgie nor I said a word until we heard Officer Crompton going down the stairs.
“Glenn Philips was right,” I said, turning on my desk lamp. “Officer Crompton doesn’t know every kid in town by sight. He knew who we were today because he’s been to our houses before. I guess I just never noticed who my dad’s pals—”
“Whatever,” Georgie said. “And come on, why’d you blab all that about the envelope?”
I did not have a good answer. “I dunno. I guess I just talk stupid when the police are around.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter because tomorrow we’re going to sell that penny and get ninety-five dollars. Our summer may not be completely ruined. That’s enough to go to Six Flags. There’s some cool new rides that’re absolutely guaranteed to make you barf!”
“I don’t know. I think Officer Crompton will be watching—”
“Forget Crompton!”
We sat there in the semidark for a while. Finally I said, “It would be fun to go on the new rides.”
Then Georgie reminded me about the last time we went to the amusement park. We talked for a long time, and then, with Deeb dog-snoring at the foot of my bed, we fell asleep laughing about our sno-cone fight and our backward dizzy walk challenge.
(I don’t think I need to describe these. You can probably guess.)
Entering The Haunted Toad
I woke up early and just lay there thinking about roller coasters. Georgie was asleep on his back, one arm flopped completely out of the covers. I was in such a good mood that I decided to play a practical joke on him, one that my dad once told me he’d done to his cousin when they were kids.
I got a can of shaving cream from Granpa’s bathroom and squirted a huge glob onto the palm of Georgie’s outstretched hand. Then I took the feather out of a Robin Hood hat I’ve had for a million years and gently, very gently, tickled Georgie’s nose. He twitched. I tickled it again. He squirmed. I tickled it once more, and his hand swung up to shoo away the fly that he was probably dreaming about. Sploosh! A face full of shaving cream!
If you decide to try this practical joke on someone bigger than you—like Georgie is to me—be prepared to run.
Georgie woke up, realized what had happened, and attacked. But I was ready. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. Georgie pounded, and our noise woke up the rest of the house and gave Goon a reason to be crabby all morning.
After I fed Deeb (on my hands and knees, remember?), Georgie and I celebrated our secret plan to sell the penny and go to Six Flags by eating a gargantuan number of gobbler wraps. Everyone else calls them pigs in a blanket—breakfast sausages rolled up in pancakes—but Dad likes turkey sausage instead of pork, so he came up with a new name. Goon ate only pancakes. Because she is a vegetarian, she calls sausages “flesh tubes.” It doesn’t bother me one bit.
We were in such a good mood that we forgot about the time. Suddenly I jumped up and grabbed my backpack. “Come on, Georgie! We’re late.”
“Where’re you going?” Mom asked.
“Out.” When she gave me another raised eyebrow, I added, “Georgie and I volunteered to help some lady.”
I shouldn’t have offered so much information. Mom pressed. “Who is she? And where does she live?”
“We don’t know her name. She’s really old. We found an envelope she lost, and we’re returning it, and she lives about halfway to school. We’ll be back before lunch.” I was out the door before Mom could ask any more questions.
“You lied to your mother,” Georgie said as we got on our bikes.
“Did not.”
“You said you didn’t know the old lady’s name.”
“I don’t. Someone signed the note ‘G. J. Prott.’ But maybe it wasn’t the lady in the window. Could’ve been her second husband’s sister’s stepson. Who knows?” I stood up on my pedals and yelled, “Beat you to The Toad!” The race was on!
We had only gone two blocks, with me ahead as usual, when Georgie yelled, “The coin store!” and made a U-turn.
I braked, skidded to a stop, and turned around, but Georgie was way ahead. I had no chance to catch up. He was straddling his bike and leaning against the cobbler statue when I got to the stamp and coin dealer’s store.
“It’s closed.”
I looked at the sign on the front door—“Open at 10 a.m.”—and then at the clock on the wall inside. It was 8:50.
“This actually helps,” I told Georgie. “We’ll go to The Toad and give back the envelope and the necklace. And we don’t have to lie about the penny. We’ll mention it, but since we don’t actually have it, maybe …” I paused to think. “Let me do the talking.”
Now that I had actually seen that someone lived in The Haunted Toad, the house seemed very different to me. Before, it was the building itself that was alive. Georgie and I had pretended that it breathed, had thoughts, and maybe even moved when we weren’t looking. Now the structure was just wood and windows, green-gray and still. But the insides had changed entirely. The ghosts that we knew weren’t real had become an old woman who we knew was.
We leaned our bikes against the front fence and went through the gate.
“I admit it,” Georgie said. “This is very spooky.”
“Me too. What if the old lady has a crazy nephew locked in the attic? Or if she turned all her dead relatives into mummies and they’re sitting in chairs all around the house? Or if she has a room filled with tarantu—?”
“Cool it, Cheesie. This isn’t funny.”
We walked up the porch stairs. They creaked loudly, and I thought how Granpa would have been impressed with how I avoided the squeaks the last time. There was no doorbell. Just an enormous metal knocker shaped like an artichoke.
Georgie reached for the knocker.
“Remember, let me do the talking,”
I cautioned.
“Sure. You did so well with the policeman. Blither, blather, blah, blah, blah.” He grinned at me, then got serious. “Here goes.” He lifted the artichoky thing and let go. The knocker fell, but stopped itself before hitting the door. No sound. Georgie tried it again. Nothing. Georgie looked at me with a what-do-I-do-now face. This would have been an excellent time for me to do my “ow-hooo-eeeee” wail, but to be honest, I was a little bit anxious myself. I pushed by him, lifted the knocker, and yanked it down hard. It hit the metal plate with an enormous clank, then pulled completely off the door and almost smashed my foot.
I picked it up and was trying to hook it back on when the door opened. The old woman stood in the doorway. She was tiny, smaller even than Mrs. Crespo. Her hair was pure white and bunched up inside a cloth hat that was the same green-gray color as The Toad. Her eyes, also the same color, flicked back and forth between me and Georgie, and her hands fluttered like small wings.
“Am I mistaken? Or are you Messrs. Sinkoff and Mack?” She spoke very rapidly. Her words were like sweet, sharp notes on a piccolo.
(It took me a long time to write that last sentence because it was really hard to find the right description. She had the most unusual voice I have ever heard.)
“I’m Ronald Mack,” I said. “And he’s Georgie Sinkoff.”
“Please come in. Of course, I’ve been expecting you, and you are right on time. Excellent. Excellent. Come in.” Everything about her from the waist up was in constant motion. She waved her arms to indicate that we should step inside. Her head nodded repeatedly to show us that if we did, we’d be doing the right thing. Her mouth smiled, then didn’t, and repeated that over and over. She blinked a lot.
I set the metal artichoke down on the porch, and we went in.
Inside, The Toad was dark and cool. It smelled sugary and musty. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was sort of like when my dad turns the car heater on after we haven’t used it for a long time.
She closed the door, and the normal sounds of town totally disappeared. I couldn’t hear any cars or birds or wind or airplanes. It was as if The Toad was a soundproof chamber deep inside a mountain or something. The place was stuffed with old furniture and other old junk. It looked to me like she hadn’t bought anything new in a long time.
“Please sit in there.” She pointed into a room. “Yes. There are chairs, a sofa—two sofas, actually. Choose whatever suits you.”
Even though her motions and speech were rapid, her progress from the front door to the parlor was unbelievably slow. (She didn’t call it a parlor. I just thought it looked way too old-fashioned to be called a living room.) Hands fluttering, she walked with extremely small, very careful steps, like she was a tightrope walker balanced way above the ground.
Georgie sat carefully on one of the sofas. I scooted in next to him. The cushion was very fat and felt like no one had ever sat on it.
The woman finally got to a small chair. It took her a long time to change from standing to sitting, but when she did, everything slow and frail about her disappeared.
“I should introduce myself,” she said. “Yes. That’s the proper thing to do. You have introduced yourselves, and I should do the same. My name is Glenora Jean Prott. I’m ninety-six years old. That must seem remarkably old to you. It surely does to me. Who would ever, when she was a girl your age—I’m guessing you boys are eleven or twelve. Or maybe you—your name is Georgie?—you might be thirteen. Am I right? Am I wrong?”
I started to speak, but didn’t.
“Who would ever guess one would live so long? I surely didn’t. But then, no one really thinks about such things when just a young girl, does one?”
I shook my head. Georgie did, too. Georgie’s eyes were wide, and his mouth was hanging open in a way that did not make him look very intelligent. I bet I looked stupid, too.
Glenora Jean Prott plucked a piece of paper out of a pocket of her sweater. It was the note we had left her.
“So, young gentlemen. You found an envelope. An envelope you think was once mailed to me.” Her smile was like a lightbulb: on, off, on, off.
I took off my backpack and swung it around onto my lap, hitting Georgie in the head in the process. He was in a trance or something. He didn’t even flinch.
“We did. I mean Georgie did. It was in his basement.” I took out the envelope. “Did you used to live at thirty-nine Sutcliffe Street?”
“Oh, yes. For many years.” She nodded several times. I guess she was emphasizing how long it was. “I was born in Pennsylvania, but I lived in Nova Scotia as a young girl. That’s Canada. But you must know that. Am I right? Am I wrong?” She tilted her head several times.
I thought she might be waiting for an answer, so I said, “You’re right.” I knew where Nova Scotia was. It’s a province. That’s like a state.
“My father was a mining engineer. Coal mining. He took me into a coal mine once. You cannot imagine how dark it is in a coal mine. Well, actually, I suspect you can imagine how dark it is. Sutcliffe Street …” She paused and moved one finger in the palm of her other hand, like she was counting the years. “We moved there when I was eighteen. And we moved here after my father passed away. 1957. Late in the year.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. “He died in autumn.”
While she was talking, I had taken the old envelope out of my backpack and emptied the heart necklace into my hand. I reached over and handed her the envelope. She smiled, then peered at it closely.
“Oh, my!” Her hands flew up to her face, sort of crushing the envelope against her cheek. “This is my sister’s handwriting.” She began to cry.
Not counting TV and movies and Aunt Brenda’s wedding when I was six—Meemo was bawling because she was so happy that her youngest daughter finally got married—I had never seen a grown-up cry. So when Glenora Jean Prott cried, I had no idea how to react. I just sat absolutely still. I was right next to Georgie, but I couldn’t even turn my head to look at him. After a few moments, Georgie poked me with a box of tissues that had been sitting on the lamp table next to him. I took the box, and when I gave it to her, I realized that I was still holding the heart necklace.
“Oh, and this”—I held out the necklace—“was in the envelope and there was a …” Her eyes widened, and then she sobbed, and maybe she didn’t hear me say, “… penny in there, too.”
Her hand, which had amazed me by moving so fast when she spoke, now moved very slowly toward the necklace, finally touching the heart.
“Elaine’s …,” she said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “It was Elaine’s. She sent it to me when she knew she was …” Glenora Jean Prott took a deep breath and stopped crying. “When she knew she was dying.” She took the necklace, cupped her hands around the heart like a hug, and smiled. “I lost it when we moved here to Eureka Avenue. Oh, I was so miserably sad about it.” She looked up at us. “Where did you boys find it?”
“It was in Georgie’s basement … where you used to live,” I said. “Stuck behind some wood under the stairs. Right, Georgie?”
He nodded.
She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “I had torn the corner off the envelope so I could write Elaine’s new address in my address book. And then the envelope was gone. I must have dropped it down the cellar stairs. Oh, you cannot imagine how unhappy I was.” She looked at Georgie. “Was it you who found it?”
Georgie nodded.
Her on-off-on-off smile came back. It made me feel good to see her smile.
“Did you know that this opens up?” she asked, holding up the silver heart.
Georgie shook his head and looked at me. I shook my head, too.
“Come look, boys.”
We wiggled off the puffy couch and came closer. Georgie stayed sort of hunched over behind me, like he was using me as a shield. Glenora Jean Prott held up the heart and used a fingernail to press a hidden niche that neither Georgie nor I had noticed. It popped open like a clamshell. Inside were two pictures of grown women, one on each sid
e.
“This is Elaine,” Glenora Jean Prott said, pointing at one of the tiny photos. Georgie leaned over me to see better. “She was the beautiful and smart Prott sister. She was only forty-eight when she died. It was the cancer, you know.”
“Is this other lady you?” I asked.
Glenora Jean Prott nodded several times. I could tell that she had almost completely recovered from her sadness—except her eyes were still reddish—because her head and hands and eyes and everything were moving full-speed again. And I suddenly figured out that she was Ms. Prott, not Mrs. Prott.
Can you guess how I knew? The answer is at the end of this chapter.
Georgie leaned even closer and peered at Ms. Prott’s tiny photo. “I think this woman—I mean you—was very pretty.” It was such a surprising thing for Georgie to say, especially because he hadn’t said one word since coming into the house.
Ms. Prott beamed and touched Georgie on the head. There was a long silence. I was pretty sure she was thinking about her sister. Then she stood up and began to walk slowly out of the room. When she got to the door, she said, “Please wait.” She went around the corner, and we heard her small steps.
“What are we going to do about the penny?” Georgie whispered.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I heard the small steps returning.
She reentered the room carrying a framed picture. She came toward us and turned it around so we could look at it. It was a photograph of two young women, all dressed up, doing a very crazy dance.
“This is Elaine.” She pointed at one of the two women, and then nodded her head several times and smiled on-off-on-off. “This is me. Actually, I was a better dancer.” She giggled. I had never heard an old woman giggle. It made me smile.
“Umm, we also found a penny in the envelope.” The words just popped out of my mouth. “But we didn’t bring it.” I looked at Georgie. He was expressionless.
