“My bike!” Eddie whispered.
The trunk popped open, and then it became clear: They were taking the bikes.
“What are we gonna do?” Eddie said. “We can’t let them—”
Weezy nudged him. “We’re going to stay here until they’re gone, then we’re going to have to walk home.”
“That’ll take forever. And that’s my racer!”
“Better than what might happen if they catch us,” she said.
Jack didn’t know about that, but he felt a surge of anger as he watched them throw Weezy’s bike into the trunk. Then Eddie’s. His would be next. How was he going to explain the loss of his BMX?
He glanced into the clearing. He could just make out the rim of the spong in the wash of light from the search beam.
And that gave him an idea.
“Rocks!” he whispered as he raked his fingers through the sand around him. “I need a couple of rocks!”
“Come on, Jack,” Weezy said. “You don’t really think throwing rocks at them will—”
“Not at them! Find me a couple of good-size rocks.”
Jack’s fingers found the edge of a piece of sandstone. He pulled it out.
“Here’s one,” Eddie said and handed him another fist-size piece.
The crumbly, rust-colored rock was all over the Barrens.
Jack looked again and saw the suit wheeling his bike toward the trunk.
Dirty, rotten, sneering—
He crawled to the edge of the copse, rose to his knees, and hurled one of the rocks toward the spong. It missed, landing near the edge instead. But it made a loud enough clink! to stop the trooper and the suit in their tracks.
“You hear that?” he heard the suit say.
He let Jack’s bike fall and leaped to the spotlight, sweeping its beam back and forth across the clearing. Jack waited for it to pass the spong, then tossed his second rock.
This one sailed over the rim and landed with a loud splash.
“There!” the trooper cried, pointing. “Must be some sort of a pond. That’s where they’re hiding.”
Leaving the light trained on the spong, the two of them ran toward it.
“It worked!” Weezy cried, grabbing the back of Eddie’s shirt. “Let’s go!”
“Wait,” Jack said.
“Wait? Are you—?”
“Remember what Mrs. Clevenger said this afternoon about that trapper coming back?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Well, if she was right …”
“Ohmygod!” Weezy clapped a hand over her mouth. “You don’t think—?”
A cry from the trooper cut her off. He staggered, yelled again, then fell, grabbing at his ankle.
Jack pumped a fist. “Yes!”
“What happened?” the suit said, starting toward him.
Then he too cried out and dropped to the ground—where he shouted again. He rose to his knees, struggling to remove the steel trap that had closed around his elbow.
He looked so comical, Jack had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing out loud. He wanted to stand up and shout, How about another sneer for the dumb piney kids? but thought better of it.
He turned to Weezy. “Now we can go.”
A steady stream of curses floated from the clearing as Jack led the others to the rear of the cruiser where he helped Eddie and Weezy pull their bikes from the trunk. Then he ran around to the side and retrieved his own.
“Ready to go?”
Eddie looked ready to jump out of his skin. “Oh, man, are they ever gonna be mad!”
“What for?” Jack said. “We didn’t set those traps. It was their idea to go wandering in there in the dark.”
“Still,” Weezy said, “we’re going to have to cut through the trees, otherwise they’ll just catch up to us again.”
Jack shook his head. “No, they won’t.”
“Yeah, Jack, they will.”
He leaned inside the cruiser and plucked the keys from the ignition, then held them up and jangled them.
“Not without these, they won’t. Let’s roll.”
Weezy didn’t move, just stood there staring at him with her wide dark eyes.
“What?” he said.
“You’re scary, you know that? Really scary.” She jerked her thumb toward the spong. “What kind of mind thinks up something like that?”
Jack had no idea where the idea had come from. Suddenly it had just popped into his head.
“Weez, sometimes I scare myself.”
6
The sound of the lawn mower awoke him.
Jack opened one eye and looked at his clock. The blurred numbers slowly came into focus … 9:02. He groaned and rolled over.
That same clock had read 3:22 when he’d crawled back in the window last night. No, not last night—earlier this morning. And then he’d lain here, wide awake, too wired for sleep, too worried there’d come a knock on the door and the trooper and the suit would be standing there with their bloody, banged-up ankles and elbows and messed-up clothes, looking to haul him away.
He didn’t know when he’d finally drifted off. He did know he needed more sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen with the lawn mower roaring back and forth outside his window.
Officially it was his job to mow their lawn. Dad paid him to do it once a week, and usually he did it on Wednesdays. But with everything going on, he’d missed this week. He guessed Dad had decided to cut it. He did that every so often when he felt the need for a little exercise. But why today of all days?
Wait!
He bolted upright in bed. Had last night really happened? Or had it all been a dream? Could have been. More like a nightmare. Sure was bizarre enough.
He should have kept the cop’s car keys. Then he’d have proof. Instead he’d left them hanging from a branch over the fire trail. Or at least he thought he had.
He looked out the window on a sunny summer morning with his father pushing the lawn mower around the backyard. So normal, so everyday. Like something out of that old Monkees song “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” And yet just a few hours ago, and just a couple of miles away in the Pine Barrens, strange men had been digging up the earth in search of … what?
Or had they? He couldn’t be sure. How could something that had felt so real then seem so unreal now?
He noticed a small, dark-brown lump on his left forearm. A closer look showed it had little legs.
A tick.
It hadn’t buried its head too deeply yet, so he flipped it on its back and pulled it out. He studied it as it crawled across his palm. A simple brown wood tick, not the tiny deer tick everybody was being warned about. Get bitten by one of those and you could catch some new infection called Lyme disease, whatever that was. What’d it do? Turn you green?
Watching the tick he realized that here was proof of sorts that he’d been in the Barrens last night—the place was lousy with ticks. But he could just as easily have picked it up during the day.
He took it between his thumb and forefinger, ready to crush it.
“You have attacked me,” he intoned, holding it up at eye level. “You have bitten me. For that you must die.”
And then he realized it hadn’t hurt him—hadn’t even had a chance to suck his blood. Just a tick being a tick.
He stepped to the window, opened the screen, and flicked it out onto the lawn. Then he checked the rest of himself for more but couldn’t find any.
Since he didn’t see any more sleep in his immediate future, he decided to get dressed. He’d just put on his jeans when his mother knocked on his door and stuck her head in. She looked concerned.
His gut tightened. Don’t tell me there’s a trooper at the front door! Please don’t!
“Jackie?”
“Jack, Mom.”
“Weezy’s here to see you.” She frowned. “She looks upset. I asked her to come in but she said she’d wait for you in the front yard.”
Weezy! She could tell him if last night had been real or not.
/> “Great. Thanks.”
As he squeezed by her she put a hand on his shoulder.
“She couldn’t be in any … trouble, could she?”
Jack froze. Did Mom know? But how could she? It was—
When he saw how uncomfortable she looked he realized what she was talking about. He didn’t know whether to laugh or get mad.
“Weez? Are you kidding? No way! How can you even think—?”
“Well …” She looked even more uncomfortable. “You two do spend an awful lot of time together … disappearing for hours …”
Now he laughed. “We’re just friends, Mom.”
“Famous last words.” She looked stern now. “Don’t you go jumping into anything you’re not ready for. Remember to use your head.”
“Okay, okay,” he said on his way to the front door. “Message received and understood.”
Why’d she have to think that? Weezy got upset a lot—a lot. It certainly didn’t mean she was pregnant.
And certainly not by me, of all people.
7
He found her in the front yard, leaning her back against the big oak. At first sight of her he couldn’t help thinking of him and Weezy … together. He never thought of her like that. They’d known each other forever. They’d hung out in her bedroom lots of times and he’d never thought about …
But he remembered her kiss. Nice …
Jack and Weezy sitting in a tree …
When she saw him she ran over. For an awful second he thought she was going to throw herself into his arms. Not that that would be so bad someplace else, but not here. Because sure as Tuesday followed Monday, Mom was watching. That’d be all she’d need.
But she stopped short and grabbed his arm and began pulling him toward the sidewalk.
Jack saw what his mom had meant about looking upset. Her eyes—no liner this morning—were bloodshot and her face was blotchy, as if she’d been crying.
“It’s gone, Jack!”
“What?”
“The cube! It’s gone! So are those tracings I made. And the photos too. Everything is gone!”
They stopped at the sidewalk where she’d left her bike.
“What do you mean, ‘gone’? Maybe Eddie’s got them.”
“He swears he doesn’t and I believe him. Besides, I had them hidden and Eddie can barely find his own shoes. He’d never find the cube.”
“Your folks?”
She shook her head. “No. They were sound asleep when we sneaked out last night, and just as asleep when we sneaked back in. I know the cube was in my room when I left—I had it out, trying to open it, before I heard the helicopters.”
“And you put it away before you left?”
“Absolutely.”
Her face scrunched up as tears filled her eyes. She looked like she was going to break down and start bawling. Jack raised an arm to put around her shoulders, but a glance at his house revealed his mom watching from a living room window, so he settled for a hand on her arm.
He could sense how much she was hurting. That cube and pyramid meant so much to her—as if she’d been looking for something like them all her life. But he didn’t know what to say to make her feel better. Was there anything anyone could say?
“Weez …”
She took a deep, shuddering breath, then seemed to pull herself together. She looked back toward the Barrens.
“Somebody took it, Jack. Someone sneaked into my room last night while we were out and stole it.”
“But you’re on the second floor.”
“I know.” She crossed her arms across her chest. “It gives me the creeps. But how did they know?”
“Maybe because they couldn’t find it in my room.”
Her head snapped around. “Your room?”
“When I came back from Steve’s Thursday night, I sensed some stuff in my room had been moved. I thought it was Tom, looking for a way to get even for the pistachios. But now … I wonder.”
“But only a few people knew we had it. Mister Rosen is the first one we showed it to.”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t tell anybody. I mean, he hasn’t got anyone to tell.”
Weezy’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you so sure? I mean, what do we know about him—really know about him? He comes to Johnson from who knows where, opens a store that sells junk, doesn’t even live in town, and—”
“His trailer is just up the highway. You know that.”
“Right, with dozens of antennas on the roof and the biggest satellite dish I’ve ever seen. I mean, that thing belongs at Lakehurst.”
“He can’t get cable out there so he pulls in the signals with the dish.”
“How do we know all that stuff’s just for receiving? Maybe some of it transmits. Who’s he communicating with?”
Jack saw Weezy’s new suspicions as good news and bad news. The good was she seemed to have pulled back from the meltdown point and returned to her old off-the-wall-conspiracy-theory self. The bad was she was talking down Mr. Rosen, and he didn’t like that.
“He’s a good guy, Weez, and he’s not communicating with aliens.”
“Who said anything about aliens? He could be—”
“He’s not doing anything but watching TV. Trust me. But I’m not so sure about Steve’s old man.”
“Mister Brussard?”
“Yeah. Add it up: I showed him the box and mentioned that we’d found it. Since he saw me with it, wouldn’t it be natural to assume we were keeping it at my place? And if he wanted it, wouldn’t my room be the first place he’d look?”
“But since he didn’t find it in your room,” Weezy said in a soft voice, “mine would be the next best choice.” She shook her head. “But wait—I can’t see him climbing up on my roof to get to my room.”
“Maybe he used the back door. Isn’t that what you used going in and out? And you said no one heard you.”
Jack realized whoever had been in her room could have used the front door as well. He wondered if maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that most folks in Johnson never locked their doors at night, or even when they went away for a weekend. On hot nights they’d leave all the doors and windows open to let the air through.
“Yeah, but—”
“Wouldn’t even have to be him. Could have been someone else from the Lodge.”
“The Lodge?”
“Yeah. The Lodge. Every time I turn around lately it’s the-Lodge-the-Lodge-the-Lodge. Mister Sumter and the other two dead guys were Lodge members, and the body we found right next to the cube was another. Mister Brussard’s a Lodger—and he can open the cube. So as far as I can see, the Lodge is definitely involved.”
“Oh, wow.” Her eyes were wide. “Do you think whoever killed that man buried the cube with him? Maybe both were supposed to stay buried, but we found them.” She looked at Jack with even wider eyes. “We could have had a killer in our bedrooms!”
Jack had been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t wanted to mention it. The thought of any stranger in his room gave him a major case of the willies. But a killer …
He kept up a calm front for Weezy.
“Well, whoever it was, they didn’t come to harm us, just take back what was theirs.”
Weezy grabbed his arm and squeezed. “The Xeroxes! Do you have them?”
He nodded. “Safely hidden away.”
“You’re sure?” Her eyes bored into his. “When was the last time you saw them?”
“Um, last night.”
Her grip tightened. “Last night! Then the copies could be gone too! Go check.”
“Weez …”
She was squeezing hard now. “Please, Jack. I’ve got to know. I mean, what if that whole operation we saw last night was just a ruse to get us out of our rooms?”
Jack shook his head. She was getting way far out now.
“I can’t see them going to all that expense and taking all that time just to get hold of our little cube.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you heard that cop
say they could have come by another route, from the south, but no, they flew right over Johnson. Why would they do that, hmmm?”
“Just coincidence.”
“And weren’t we wondering why they locked us in the car instead of shooing us home?” She was on a roll now. “Maybe they wanted to give their operatives back here enough time to get the job done.”
“‘Operatives’? Weez, do you hear yourself?”
Her tone turned angry. “Yeah, I hear myself. Now you hear this: The cube is gone, Jack. And since I didn’t lose it or misplace it, that means someone took it.”
“Okay, okay. But that doesn’t mean the helicopters and the excavating had anything to do with the cube disappearing. Someone may have been watching your house, spotted you leaving, saw his chance, and took it.”
“Just check for me, Jack. Please?”
He didn’t feel like going back into the house, but had to admit that whoever had stolen from Weezy’s room while they were out could just as easily—more easily, since he was on the ground floor—have stolen from his.
Plus he found it hard to refuse that pleading look in her eyes.
“Okay. Be right back.”
“If they’re there, don’t bring them with you. Don’t let anyone know you have them.”
Wondering at the bizarre turns of events since he’d dug into that mound, Jack hurried inside. He passed Mom on his way through the living room. She was giving him a funny look.
“Is anything wrong?”
“Weezy lost something—that little cube I showed you the other night. She thinks someone stole it. That’s why she’s upset.”
“She should report it to Tim.”
On his way out of the living room, he said, “She’ll probably do that.” But as he headed down the hall, he thought, Then again, she probably won’t.
If Jack were betting on it, he’d go with not. Tim worked for the county sheriff’s department, which routinely traded information with the state police. And the state police often wound up working with the federal government—the “feds,” as they said on TV. And the feds worked with the CIA, which was part of a network of global organizations.
Jack: Secret Histories Page 17
