Jack, Weezy, and Eddie stood there, looking at each other.
“Now what?” Eddie said.
Weezy pulled the black box from her basket. “We go back to my place and see if we can open this.”
Jack said, “What makes you think it opens?”
She handed it to him. “Check the edges. Don’t those look like seams? This could be some kind of ancient puzzle box.”
Yeah, the edges did look seamed … or creased.
“Sounds like fun but …” Jack handed it back. “I promised Mister Courtland I’d mow his lawn today.”
“You can mow it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I’m at the store. Besides, I promised him today.”
Weezy sighed. “Okay. Stop by later and see what we found.” She looked at the box, turning it over in her hands, then back at Jack. “Thanks for not mentioning it to Deputy Dog.”
“Tim’s okay.”
“Yeah, but he would’ve wanted it for evidence or something.” Her expression was fierce as she clutched it against her chest. “This is mine.”
Jack dramatically cleared his throat. “Um, if I remember, we found it together.”
Her expression faltered. “Yeah. Okay. I guess we did. You want it?” Her eyes said, Please don’t say yes.
“Nah. You keep it.”
She grinned her relief. “You’re a good friend, Jack. The best.”
She leaned close and touched his arm, and for an instant he feared she might kiss him. Not that it would be so bad in itself, but jeez, not in front of Eddie. He’d never hear the end of it.
He said, “Just let me know if you discover any ancient secrets—like eternal life, or how to turn lead into gold. I get an equal share.”
“Deal. As for secrets …” She stared again at the box. “… the world is full of secrets.”
Eddie rolled his eyes. “Here we go again. ‘The Secret History of the World.’”
“Stop it, Eddie. There is a secret history. And who knows? This just might hold one of those secrets.”
She replaced it in her basket, then waved and started pedaling off.
“See ya.”
Eddie followed. “Later, Jack.”
As Jack watched them go, Weezy’s words echoed in his head.
You’re a good friend, Jack. The best.
Am I? he thought as he hopped on his bike and headed home.
Was anyone really his friend? Sure, he hung out with kids. Not very many. Just a few, in fact. Mostly Weezy and Eddie, and lately Steve Brussard. But he didn’t feel they were true friends. More like acquaintances. The only one he felt any connection to was Weezy, and she was a girl. And even that wasn’t a real connection. He simply found her unique. No one he knew looked at the world the way she did. She was always finding weird links between seemingly unrelated things or occurrences.
He saw himself, on the other hand, as pretty dull. Whatever he liked to do tended to be something done alone. Like reading. Like mowing lawns. Like swimming—he was on the Johnson swim team, and yeah it was called a team, but he couldn’t think of many things more isolated than stroking back and forth the length of a pool where the only thing to hear was the splash of his arms and legs, and the only thing to see was the black lane strip on the bottom. Except maybe cross-country running, which he also liked.
Where did he fit? Where did he belong?
Maybe high school would be different. Dread tinged his anticipation. Meeting new kids. Being at the bottom of the pecking order. SBC Regional had kids from all over the area. Maybe he’d find a bunch he could connect with.
And maybe he’d follow the same pattern as he had in middle school.
The difference between loner and loser was one letter.
Which was he?
5
“Oh, Jackie!” his mother said as she hugged him for the umpteenth time since he’d dropped the bomb about finding the body. “Will my miracle boy be able to sleep tonight?”
“It’s Jack, Mom. Jack, okay. Please?”
He’d been called Jackie—at least at home—for most of his life. But he was heading for high school now where he wanted to be Jack. His mother was proving the hardest to break of the habit.
As for “miracle boy”—forget about it. He’d come along when she’d thought she was through with having children, thus the name. She’d no doubt call him that on her deathbed.
Mom dying … he brushed the thought away. He couldn’t imagine it. He expected her and Dad to live forever.
He had her brown hair and brown eyes, and her love of music, although their tastes were nothing alike. She listened to the same Broadway albums over and over—South Pacific was playing now—while Jack was firmly into rock. His current faves were Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and the eerie “Synchronicity” off the new Police album.
She used to be thin but now complained about putting on weight these past couple of years. He’d heard her blame it on “the changes.”
“Okay, yes,” she said smiling at him. “Jack. I’m trying, honey, but old habits are hard to break, you know.”
“Just think: Whenever you’re about to say ‘Jackie,’ cut it in half.”
She laughed. “I’ll try, I’ll try.”
She turned on the dishwasher and headed for the living room to read. She loved novels and belonged to both the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club. He’d noticed she was reading something called Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon.
Jack had the kitchen with its dark cabinets, Formica counters, and Congoleum floor to himself. The house had started as a three-bedroom ranch and probably would have remained so if not for Jack. Not so many years after his arrival, his folks had added dormers and finished off the attic into a master bedroom suite. They moved upstairs, leaving the downstairs bedrooms to the kids.
He retrieved a bag of pink pistachios from a cabinet and sat down at the kitchen counter to shell them. Rather than eating one at a time, he liked to collect a pile of twenty or so and gobble them all at once. As he shelled, he thought about dinner, just recently finished.
The hot topic of conversation around the table had been—no surprise—the body. Tons of speculation on who it was, how old it was, whether it was an ancient Lenape Indian mummy or the victim of a mob hit transported down here from New York in a trunk and buried where they thought it would never be found. Or that maybe it was Marcie Kurek, the sophomore who’d disappeared from SBC Regional last year and never been heard from since. That idea had silenced the table.
Otherwise it had been kind of fun listening to all the theories. One of those increasingly rare family dinners when everybody was present. What with Tom back and forth to Seton Hall law school and Kate getting ready to start med school at UMDNJ in Stratford, that hardly ever happened anymore. Most nights lately it had been just Mom, Dad, and Jack.
Of course the event wouldn’t have been complete without the inevitable lecture from Dad about the dangers of kids wandering through the Pine Barrens without adults. Jack had listened patiently, trying to look interested, but he’d heard it so many times he could recite it by heart. Dad was a good guy, but he just didn’t get it.
Yeah, the Barrens had its dangers. Some of the Pineys were what they called inbreds—what his brother Tom liked to call “the result of brothers and sisters getting too frisky with each other”—and maybe a little unpredictable. And you could come upon a copperhead or timber rattler, or lose some toes to a snapping turtle if you dangled a bare foot in the wrong pond. But you learned to keep your eyes open … you became Pine-wise.
Old Man Foster might have a deed that said he owned a whole lot of acres and the state conservation agency might pass all sorts of regulations, but as far as Jack was concerned, the Pine Barrens were an extension of his backyard, and no one was keeping him out of his own backyard.
Kate came in then. Slim with pale blue eyes, a faint splash of freckles across her cheeks and nose, and a strong jawline. Her long blond hair, which she worked at keeping straight, h
ad gone wavy in the humidity. Jack warmed at the sight of her. Eight years older and a natural nurturer, she’d practically raised him. She’d been his best friend growing up and had broken his heart when she left for college. Last year, when she’d spent her junior year abroad in France, had been the worst. He didn’t know what went on over there, but it had changed her. Nothing he could put his finger on, but no denying the feeling that she’d come back just a tiny bit … different.
“Just got off the phone with Tim,” she said.
Tom came in behind her, smirking. “Rekindling the old flame?”
He was ten years older with a bulging middle; his brown eyes and brown hair were the exact same shade as Jack’s. They’d never got along well. Though Tom had never said it, Jack knew he saw him as a fifth wheel on the family car.
Kate gave Tom a tolerant smile. “Not likely. He’s engaged. But he gave me what information he could on the body.”
Jack was all ears. He licked his fingertips, red from opening the pistachios. He had seventeen of the little nuts piled before him—three more to go before gobbling time.
“Do they know who it is?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. They think it’s maybe two years old.”
“Aaaaw,” Jack said as he popped open another shell. “There goes the Indian mummy idea.”
Kate smiled. “Afraid so.” Her smile faded as she glanced at Tom. “Tim says it was a murder.”
Jack froze, feeling creeped out. The three of them stood silent around the counter. Even big-mouth Tom seemed to have lost his voice.
Finally Jack regained his. “R-really?”
She nodded. “Yeah, his skull is cracked. But more than that, he says it was some sort of ritual killing.”
Jack’s mouth felt a little dry. A ritual murder … images of an Aztec priest cutting out a still-beating heart flashed through his head. Definitely gross … but kind of cool.
“Did he say what kind of ritual?”
Kate shook her head. “I asked, but he said that’s all he’s heard.”
Tom gave a low whistle and grinned at Jack. “And to think, this heinous crime would have remained undiscovered, maybe forever, if not for our own miracle boy.”
Jack was about to say something when Dad popped his head through the door. He looked excited.
“Hey, kids. Come here. You’ve got to see this.”
Jack left his pistachios behind as the three of them trooped into Dad’s study. They found him seated before his brand-new home computer. It looked like little more than a beige electric typewriter with a couple of oblong boxes atop it, crowned with a six-inch black-and-white monitor. On the table next to it lay copies of a magazine called inCider.
Years ago Dad had built an Apple I from a kit, but it never worked right. This one he’d bought fully assembled. Unlike the Apple I, which used tape cassettes to store programs, this baby used things called disk drives.
Generally pretty quiet, Dad seemed fired up. He worked as a CPA, recently moving from Arthur Anderson in Philly—for some reason, he hadn’t been getting along with them—to Price Waterhouse in Cherry Hill, which meant a shorter commute. His two loves, outside of his family, were tennis and this contraption, his Apple. Unlike Jack, Tom, and Mom, his eyes were blue, and he wore steel-rimmed glasses for reading. His formerly full head of hair had begun to thin on top.
“I just wrote this little program,” he said, pointing to the screen. “Watch.”
Jack caught a glimpse of a short column of text with lines like “N=N+1” and “Print N” and “GOTO” before Dad hit a key. Suddenly numbers began cascading down the left side of the screen:
1
2
3
4 …
And on and on, progressing from one-digit, to two-digit, and eventually three-digit numbers.
“Neat!” Jack said. “When will it stop?”
“Never—unless I tell it to.”
“You mean it’ll count to infinity?”
“If I let it.”
“That’s great, Dad,” Tom said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “But what’s it good for?”
“Nothing. I’m teaching myself BASIC, and this is a demonstration of a program called an infinite loop.” He patted his Apple. “Here’s the future, kids. I’ve got forty-eight K of RAM—could have gotten sixty-four, but I can’t imagine ever needing that much memory.”
Jack had some idea of what he was talking about—he’d been helping Steve Brussard build a Heathkit H-89 computer—but he had a lot to learn.
As Tom, Kate, and Jack returned to the kitchen, Tom whispered, “The future of what? Maybe if you’re a math geek, but for us normal folks?” He shook his head. “Dad’s gone off the deep end.”
“Oh, yeah,” Kate said. “Like you’d know a thing about it.”
“Remember when he said Betamax would last and VHS would fade away? This is the same thing—a dead end.”
The crossing topics of computers and VCRs brought to mind the tape Jack had rented last month: Tron. Much of the film took place inside a computer. The story was kind of boring but cool to watch.
“I think it’s neat,” he said.
Tom pointed to Jack. “Hear that? Miracle boy thinks it’s neat. I guess I’ll have to revise my opinion.”
Then, with one swift motion, Tom swept Jack’s shelled pistachios off the counter and popped them into his mouth.
“Hey!”
“What?” Tom said, chewing. “Were those yours?”
“You know they were!”
Jack raised a fist and started toward him—Tom was bigger but Jack didn’t care. Anger had taken control.
Kate stepped between them. “That was pretty lame.”
“What? They were just lying there.” He grinned at Jack over Kate’s shoulder. “Want ‘em back?”
Jack started for him again, but Kate held him back. He could have pushed her aside but no way he’d do that to Kate.
As Tom sauntered out, Jack said, “Bastard.”
“Don’t let Mom hear that,” Kate said.
“Well, he is.”
“Immature is more like it.” She ruffled Jack’s hair. “You rocked his world when you were born. He was cock of the walk around here for ten years, and then Mom’s ‘miracle boy’ arrived. I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it. A bad case of arrested development.”
“How about you?”
She laughed. “Are you kidding? You were a baby, a real, live baby. Suddenly I didn’t have to play make-believe with dolls anymore, I had the real thing to care for. I was in heaven.” She hugged him. “I thought you were the best thing that ever happened to me. I still do, Jackie.”
“Jack, Kate. Jack.”
6
Jack lay in bed reading a copy of The Spider, a 1939 magazine with yellowed, flaking pages. Mr. Rosen at USED, where Jack worked part-time, had stacks of old magazines and let Jack take home a couple at a time to read—”As long as you return them in the condition you received them.”
Jack had already read the half-dozen copies of The Shadow in the stacks. Lately he’d moved on to The Spider—Master of Men!, obviously a Shadow rip-off, copying the slouch hat and the billowing black cape, but a different kind of guy. Jack had thought the Shadow was cool, but the Spider was even cooler. The Shadow fought mostly regular crooks while the Spider dealt with threats to the world. Like this issue: “King of the Fleshless Legion,” with all sorts of skeletons on the cover and the Spider rushing in to save a woman locked alive in a coffin.
Neat.
He wished he could buy posters of these covers. Some of the posters he had now—especially the one of Devo in their flowerpot hats—were getting ratty. Besides, he hardly listened to Devo anymore. He certainly wasn’t going to replace his Phillies pennant, not when they looked like they had a shot at the World Series this year.
His beloved Eagles, however …
After that stupid football players’ strike last season they went a whopping three and six. Wasn’t eas
y being an Eagles’ fan these days. Maybe with Vermeil out and that new coach—
He jumped as he heard a single knock on his door. He looked up and saw his father enter.
“How’s it going, Jack?”
“Fine.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. “You sure? Finding that … body today isn’t bothering you?”
Jack realized this was a side Dad didn’t show much. He tended to be the stiff-upper-lip sort: If you fall down you pick yourself up and keep going without whining or complaining.
“Really, I’m fine.”
In fact, what the bad guys were doing to the Spider and what he was giving right back to them had pretty much wiped the body from his mind.
“You going to be able to sleep okay?”
“Think so. I’m not scared, if that’s what you mean. It was gross, but I won’t be dreaming about him coming for me or anything like that.”
At least he didn’t think so. He figured if anything kept him awake it would be questions about who was dead and who had done it and why he was killed and what sort of ritual was used. The last time he’d been too scared to sleep had been a couple of years ago, right after reading ‘Salem’s Lot—afraid to look at his window for fear he’d see Eddie floating outside it.
Dad patted Jack’s leg. “Good. But if you have any problems during the night, don’t be afraid to give a holler.” His gaze drifted to the magazine. “Good God, where’d you get that?”
Jack handed it to him. “Mister Rosen’s got a bunch.”
Dad stared at the cover, a smile hovering about his lips. “I used to read these as a kid.”
Jack did a quick calculation: They’d celebrated Dad’s fifty-third birthday last month, which meant he’d been born in 1930. So he would have been nine when this issue was printed. Nine might have been kind of young, but yeah, he could have read this very copy. Jack knew his father had been a kid once, but this made his childhood … real. He suddenly saw Dad in a new light.
“Did you like them?”
“You kidding? Doc Savage, the Shadow, and this guy … I loved them.” He flipped through the yellowed pages. “Can I borrow this?”
Jack: Secret Histories Page 3
