by Nikki Loftin
“I’m sorry, sir,” my dad said. “I need his help to trim those sycamore branches.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can do without him for a few hours.” Mr. King’s voice sounded happy, but his eyes were flat and hard. He was used to getting his way.
But my dad wasn’t going to give up that easily. “It’ll take longer,” he said. “Cost more in the long run.” He nodded once.
Mr. King waved a hand, flashing his diamond cuff links as he dismissed my dad like he was a waiter bringing a refill of water. “Not a problem.”
Dad had never been able to hide his feelings. Of course, nobody had ever told him that—he was too quick-tempered. But his expression showed it all. Usually it was helpful; I knew when he was getting mad, so I could get out of arm’s reach in time. But watching as he swallowed his anger, seeing humiliation parade across his face as his boss dismissed the prospect of extra money like it was a pile of dead leaves, I wished he could hide it. My own face burned as Mr. King’s eyebrow twitched upward.
I think the man was trying not to smile.
He took a step and patted my dad on the shoulder, like they were friends. “Oh, come on, John. Trim that sycamore later. You still have some work on those pecans, and he’ll be done soon enough. I just need him for a while.”
“What for?” my dad said, echoing the same words I’d gotten in trouble for.
“Oh, some light gardening,” Mr. King said as he shepherded my dad back toward the truck. “Snails in the bulb beds, that sort of thing.”
Dad jerked his head once. “Fine.” He walked off to our beat-up truck without looking at me, without saying anything.
I turned to Mr. King. “Sir? If you show me where the snails are—”
He cut me off. “There’s plenty of time for that . . . John, isn’t it? John, like your dad?”
“Yes, sir.” He wanted something, I could see that. His eyes were shadowed and bloodshot, with tiny red veins stretching out from them like veins on a leaf. Dark circles, too, like he hadn’t slept in a month. “Did you have something else for me to do?”
“A question, actually,” he said. His eyes shifted back and forth, from me to the fence line where the sycamore stood, leaves rustling lightly. I waited for the question, but he didn’t say anything, just stared at the spot on the fence.
Or right above it.
“About Gayle?” I asked after a few seconds.
“Who?” I had startled him, I think. He spun back to me, his lips tight, but he didn’t look mad, just intense. “The girl who was singing, that’s her name?”
“Gayle,” I repeated. “Yeah.”
“I thought . . . I heard it was something else. Tell me about her,” Mr. King said. “What do you know?”
I had never seen a grown-up look the way Mr. King did when he asked about Gayle. His face shone like a kid who’d just seen a candy truck tip over on the highway.
Greedy.
I didn’t like it. I took a step back. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“I tried,” he said, still not looking at me. “I heard her singing this morning and went over. But she was frightened. She”—he laughed once, a soft huff of air—“she flew away.”
Flew away. That’s what Gayle had said about her parents. Had he heard everything Gayle and I had been talking about the day before? He was sure interested in that little girl . . . but he didn’t look just interested. On his face was something . . . deeper.
A chill ran down my spine. I was glad Gayle had run off; this guy was definitely creepy. I took another step back.
“Well, ask Mrs. Cutlin, then.”
He sighed. “I tried. She wasn’t . . . receptive.”
So even the nasty old Mrs. Cutlin had thought Mr. King’s interest in Gayle was weird? Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
Finally, he looked down at me. His face changed the instant he did—and as soon as he saw my expression he laughed. Not just laughed, he belly laughed, and sounded like Santa. “Oh, John, you should see the look on your face!” he managed after a few seconds. “Looking at me like I was planning to kidnap that little girl.”
“Were you?” I tried not to sound as suspicious as I felt.
“No, of course not,” he said. “Don’t ever try to play poker, by the way. You’re worse than your father, wearing every thought on your face. You’ll lose your shirt.”
I didn’t say anything. My gut churned, though, at listening to him talk about my dad that way. Like he was pathetic. I felt ashamed of my own feelings from a few moments before.
Mr. King laughed a couple more times, then got control of himself, leaning against the stair rail. “It’s commendable that you want to take care of her, though. Honorable.”
“Thanks,” I said. Honorable? That was a word I’d never heard used, at least not about me. And I still didn’t know what he wanted. “About those snails . . .”
“Well, I’ll admit, I didn’t really want you to help with the garden.” His lip twisted up on one side into a half smile. “I did want to talk to you about the girl. But not for any nefarious purpose.”
“Why, then?” I didn’t know what he meant by nefarious, but I still didn’t trust him. This time, though, I tried not to show my feelings on my face. It must have worked, since he didn’t smile. He looked serious and motioned me into the house. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
I’d never seen anything like his house. I don’t think many people had; he never invited anyone over—not that my mom and her friends knew of, anyway. They gossiped about him a lot—about how much money he had, and why he lived alone in a little Podunk town like ours, in the middle of Mills County, and what he did locked up in that big house all day long.
I had a feeling I was about to find out. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and tried to remember what I was seeing, so I could tell Mom later. She’d love that.
It was so dark at first, though, and my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the inside, that I missed a lot. I could tell there was wood paneling, dark wood like walnut or old cherry, and a few tables and chairs—carved ones—here and there in the front hall. No flowers, though, even if the gardens outside were full of them. No pictures hanging up that I could see, but there were—plates, it looked like. China. What kind of guy hung a bunch of dishes on the wall?
I remembered something my mom had said: The Emperor’s Emporium stores had sold china plates first. Cheap ones that chipped the first time you used them. She’d gotten a set for a present when she got married, still had one plate that she used at Christmas to serve the cranberries.
The plates on Mr. King’s walls looked fragile, sure. But not cheap. They looked like something you’d find in a museum. Delicate and expensive. You’d never touch them, that was for sure. “Woo-ee,” I breathed. I stuffed my hands deeper in my pockets, the rustle of the candy wrapper shushing me.
As Mr. King led me down the hallway, our feet tapped on a floor that shone in the dim light like glass. It was marble, I saw, with some sort of inlaid pattern in blues and greens that made me think of foreign countries. It looked icy, almost, and it matched the cold air that jetted out from the AC vents high up on the walls. The chill reminded me of the principal’s office at school; Ernest had always said the principal kept the temperature set to subarctic, so that the misbehaving kids were already trembling before he called them in.
I’d only been to the office once, for punching Jeb, but Ernest had been right about the cold, and the shivering. Maybe that was why I was shaking a little bit now, thinking about the principal.
“My study is this way,” Mr. King said. He opened a sliding door, and I followed, feeling my feet sink into thick carpet at the doorway. It hardly seemed possible, but it was even colder in the study.
“This is what I want from your little friend,” he said and motioned to something on the low table in the center of the room.
I couldn’t see what it was, but the gleam was back in his eye. It made my skin crawl. What was he pointing at? I took a step to the side and saw it at last, but I still didn’t understand what I was looking at.
There were blinking lights and a microphone, a bunch of black boxes with dials and knobs. It looked like a combination of a computer and an old-fashioned radio. “What is it?” I asked after a few seconds.
Mr. King’s eyebrows dipped, like he was disappointed in me. But then he tilted his head, thinking. “I suppose you could call it,” he said at last, his voice going dreamy and soft, “a cage.”
“What the he—” The cuss almost slipped out as I backed away. This man was officially nuts, and I felt like getting the heck out of there, just in case it was the contagious kind of crazy. But I stopped myself. He wasn’t threatening me. And if he was planning to do something against Gayle, I wanted to know exactly what. “What do you mean, a cage?”
Mr. King was fiddling with knobs and dials on the machine in front of him and didn’t answer for a minute. While he worked, I looked around the room. There weren’t any bars on the windows, just sheer curtains. But the walls? I’d never seen anything like it.
The walls were papered with music, sheets of music that looked like they were originals, not copies. Hanging in golden frames were dozens of pictures of singers—opera singers, I guessed, since I didn’t recognize any of them, and they were all sort of fat and dressed in formal clothes. The pictures were all signed “Dear Emperor” or “To my favorite monarch.” Things like that.
Was Mr. King a musician? I scanned the room for instruments—a piano or guitar or flute. But there wasn’t anything in the room except one chair, the table with the machines, and shelves that were crammed with folders of some sort.
“What did you mean, a cage?” I asked again, when it seemed like Mr. King had completely forgotten I was there. But he just held up one finger and pushed a button. “Listen,” he whispered, commanded. “Listen.”
A woman’s voice soared out of the machine. Well, not out of the machine exactly—it thundered out of the walls, crashing onto both of us like a tidal wave of sound. Where was it coming from? The walls, I realized. He had built-in speakers surrounding us, and the singing was pouring out of every wall. “Turn it down,” I yelled, and covered my ears.
He stood there for a few seconds more, glorying in it, his face shining, eyes closed. Then he twisted a dial, and the music became bearable, less intense. “I love this part,” he said, and motioned to the chair. “Sit down,” he urged. “Listen. This note—the one that’s coming—hear how she holds it, unfurls it, teases you with it, then draws it away. Ah! Magic. And I have it here, captured. Only for me.”
I listened, but shook my head. I didn’t hear all that, but I didn’t want to say so. I just heard a woman singing opera. What I wanted to know was why he had called the machine a cage.
And what it had to do with Gayle.
I suppose he saw my expression and realized I wasn’t really listening. He muttered a word that sounded like “philistine” and turned it off. My ears hummed with the leftover vibrations.
“Thanks,” I said. “That was loud.”
“I thought you kids liked loud music,” he grumped, fiddling with his cuff links. “Rock music concerts and such.”
“Yeah, well . . .” I said, trailing off. I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t like that. I hadn’t spent much time with music at all, opera or rock. Music didn’t matter that much to me.
Or it hadn’t before I heard Gayle. “So, why did you say it was a cage?” I asked, trying to keep the suspicion out of my tone. “It’s a music player, right?”
“And a recorder,” he corrected, moving his hands over the controls again, as if he couldn’t stop touching them. “I’m a collector, young John,” he said, waving a hand at the black boxes. “But I don’t collect stamps or”—his eyebrow quirked up—“worthless porcelain dolls from television advertisements.”
I flushed, thinking about Mom’s prized collection of Franklin Mint dolls that had sat in her closet until a few months back.
“I collect voices.”
“How do you collect a voice?” I asked.
He smiled, like I’d asked the right question. “I’ve traveled across the world and recorded all of the great voices of our age—the most beautiful sounds any human has made for thirty years. I have them here.” He motioned to the shelves. “Records first, then tape recordings, CDs. Now digital—it’s wonderful, it catches every single vibration.” He stood up and walked over to the wall. “It’s only a cage for sound, but it’s the perfect cage—all those voices, like birds in a personal aviary.” He laughed—at himself, I thought. “And I’ve made this room into a studio, of sorts. I’ve embedded acoustic insulation, microphones as well.”
“So, it’s a recording studio?” I looked around. “Who are you going to record?”
His smile moved slowly across his face, spreading from his lips to his cheeks, then his glittering eyes. “That’s the thing. I’ve been looking for the perfect voice for decades. And I think I’ve found it.” His eyes darted to the window, in the direction of the Cutlins’ house.
I had to warn Gayle about this nut job, and the sooner the better. “Look, Mr. King, I’m not certain what you want from me. I’ll be happy to help you with your snails, or whatever, in your garden. But I can’t help you with . . . this.” I waved at his machine.
The smile dipped, and hardened. “I think you can,” he said. “And I think you will. I’m not going to hurt that little girl, or you.” He paused, and in that pause I heard the words he didn’t say, the words we both knew. Even though he could hurt me, and her. Even though we couldn’t do anything about it. And then he went on, “Or your father.”
I tried not to gasp. I got it. He wouldn’t hurt us . . . if I did what he wanted.
I stood up, right next to him, and took a quick step back. For the first time, I was aware of Mr. King’s size. He was shorter than I was—five foot six, maybe. Not tiny, but I was bigger. It didn’t make any difference, though. Even if I was bigger, he was stronger in all the ways that mattered. He could ruin my life, fire my dad. Mom was already having trouble finding food enough for the three of us on Dad’s pay. And rent was due soon. If Mr. King fired him . . .
“What do you want?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking, from anger or shame or fear, I didn’t know. I had to get away before I did something, said something I shouldn’t. I balled my hands up, stopping the trembling in my fingers.
“A small thing,” the Emperor said. “I want you to ask your little friend to sing for me. Here, in my house. That’s not hard, is it?”
I hesitated. What was the catch? “Just . . . sing?”
“Yes,” he said. “Just a song. I want to record her voice. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I guess not.” I had a thought. “Why don’t you just ask her yourself?”
“I’ve been trying to,” he said, and laughed. “For some reason, every time she sees me coming, she runs off, or hides in that tree.” He paused. “She’s built a nest, hasn’t she? Like a bird?”
“Yes,” I said, remembering for an instant the softness of her hair. I’d felt that same softness somewhere else, I thought. Where had it been? Trying to remember, I almost didn’t hear Mr. King’s next words.
“—five hundred dollars, if you can get her to come inside in the next few days. Does that sound acceptable?”
“What?” He was talking about money? “Excuse me, I didn’t hear that. What hundred?”
“Five hundred dollars,” he repeated, moving slowly toward the door. I followed him, went through the opening and back into the hall of plates. “If you can convince that remarkable girl to sing her best for me, here.”
Why was he offering to pay me? It felt wrong, like there was something he wasn�
�t telling me. Five hundred dollars, though. That was as much as my dad was making in a week. With five hundred dollars, I could buy all sorts of things. A really good video game setup, like Ernest had, or an MP3 player. I could get Mom some new clothes, or take her to dinner. Heck, I could buy Dad a fishing rod, too. He had been a great fisherman when I was younger, bringing home giant catfish and bluegill most weekends for Mom to fry up. You never had to worry about going hungry, Dad had told me once, if you had a fishing rod.
Of course, he’d had to pawn his, right after the funeral. Too bad the funeral home man wouldn’t take fish for payment, Dad had said.
People always said money couldn’t buy happiness. Well, rich people said it. Me? I had been poor for a long time, and unhappy on top of that for the past ten months. I wasn’t sure if money could buy happiness, but five hundred dollars? It was worth a shot. Still . . . I thought of Gayle, sitting up in her tree, the bruises on her arms. I didn’t want her to get any more hurt.
Well, come on, Little John, I thought. You’re not going to let this man do anything. Anything other than record her singing, if she’d let him. I was plenty taller than him, and if it came down to it, I could probably beat him. He had soft hands, small arms. He was weak, in the way only rich men could afford to be.
I remembered the feeling of Gayle in my arms, the lightness of her body and her smile. I’d protect her with my fists, if I had to.
Really, what could it hurt? Just a song. That was all he wanted.
“I’ll ask her,” I said at last. “She may not be home today.”
“School doesn’t start for weeks,” he said. “And I heard her singing out there this morning.” He paused, his hand on the front door handle. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Her voice. Have you ever heard anything like it?”
“No,” I said, remembering the way the sound had tried to lift me off the ground, into the sky. “Have you?”
“No.” The Emperor’s eyes glimmered as he whispered his answer so softly the closing door almost stole the word. “Never.”
