by Jack Gantos
“The Western Union office called our dispatcher,” he wheezed dramatically, “and asked me to deliver a telegram to you. Whoever sent it knew you would be out here.” The envelope trembled in his hand as if a frightened idea were trapped inside.
I took the envelope, but before I read it the driver must have read my mind.
“I’ll wait for you in my cab,” he said, rubbing his roughed-up hand on the side of his wool slacks.
“Yes,” I agreed, and he walked away less dramatically than when he arrived.
“Jack,” Miss Volker instructed, “please open it. I am afraid it is bad news.”
My freezing hands were nearly as stiff and useless as hers as I clumsily ripped the envelope unevenly down the side. Maybe it was bad news from my mother, I thought as I removed the message and struggled to unfold the paper.
“Read it,” she begged, exasperated with the fumbling pace of my hands just as she always was with her own. I finally unfolded the telegram, but when I looked at it I couldn’t read it.
“These words don’t make sense,” I said. “The letters are mixed up.”
“Just read it phonetically,” she insisted. “I’ll translate it for us.”
“Via multe amis fratino,” I read, struggling with the words.
“That’s Esperanto,” she clarified. “The international language of peace. My father taught it to us.”
I didn’t know what Esperanto was but continued anyway. “Mortis je la okulo doktoro. Venu al Florido nunj. Faros funebra planoj antau ol vi alvenos. Sincerely, Mr. Hap.”
She narrowed her eyes at the telegram and jerked her head away from it at the same time, as if it was giving off a malicious smell.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This is very hard for me to say,” she replied in a steely voice as cold as the air. “My sister has died.”
“Your sister died?” I asked, shocked and trying to get a clear sense of what had happened. “The one getting an eye operation?”
“Something terrible must have gone wrong,” she guessed. “And I have a sixth sense that tells me Spizz is behind this.”
“Wait! Before jumping to conclusions,” I said, sounding exactly like Mr. Greene, “let’s think this through.”
“He killed Mrs. Custard,” she replied, “and now he somehow got to my sister as a way to break my heart.”
“We don’t know that,” I argued.
“One murder leads to another,” she pronounced. “Think that through.” Then she raised her contorted fist over her head and growled up at the leaden sky. “You hear me, white whale!” she shouted bitterly, and stomped the hard pathway like Captain Ahab striking the deck of his ship. “You are a dead man!”
I don’t know if Spizz heard her but a security guard making the rounds did. He stared across the rose garden and I did exactly what my father would do. I pointed at the side of my head and spun my finger around. “Cra-zee,” I silently pantomimed. He nodded and walked on. If she had caught me at that moment, she would have pulled out that big silver pistol and shot me.
“Well,” she said, suddenly invigorated and turning her attention toward me. “Do you have anything to say about all of this?”
I would normally have pointed out that she seemed more angry at Spizz than sad that her sister had died, but once again I thought I should hold my tongue and be the mature boy my mother had expected of me.
“I think we should go back inside and warm up,” I suggested.
“Right,” she agreed. “We have plans to make.”
“What kind of plans?” I asked.
“Whale-sized plans,” she replied.
The pathway was still icy, so she lowered her head and leaned on me for balance as we slowly shuffled back over the ash-blacked walkway to the gift shop inside the house. Once there, she took a seat in a wooden side chair with her head cradled within her open hands.
“Are you okay?” I asked after a few minutes, because I didn’t know what else to say. It was the dullest question to ask, but I was afraid to mention her sister because she might start hollering about killing Spizz again.
“I’m thawing out,” she replied. “And the more I thaw the more ashamed I am of myself. Look at me, I’ve really failed to live up to Mrs. Roosevelt’s example. She devoted her life to peace and I’ve become a cranky old lady intent on violence.”
“It’s just a bad moment,” I said.
“It’s not a bad moment that is likely to pass quickly,” she replied. “Ahab lost his leg and every leg has a twin, and now I’ve lost my twin. Every time I look in the mirror I see her face. If I don’t get Spizz, I’ll be too ashamed to ever look into a mirror again.”
“But Spizz isn’t an eye doctor,” I said, attempting to talk sensibly. “He couldn’t have anything to do with this.”
“But he has an eye for evil deeds,” she replied darkly. “And I will see to it that his deeds are the rope that hang him from the highest yardarm.”
I took off my wool scarf, which was warm from my neck, and wrapped it around her hands. “Just rest,” I said. “You’ll feel better.” After that, not another word was spoken as she pressed her face into the scarf, and I figured she needed a private moment.
I hadn’t eaten anything since we hurriedly grabbed some sandwiches and drinks before catching the train at Grand Central Terminal in New York. When I saw the candy rack at the souvenir booth I drifted over and bought a 3 Musketeers bar. It was too sweet, but to let time pass I allowed each soft bite to slowly melt in my mouth as I picked through a spinning rack of postcards. When I finished I threw away the wrapper and bought a postcard of the rose garden in bloom with an inset photo of Fala, the president’s favorite dog, who was buried close to his side. I paid for a stamp and mailed it to Mom. Miss Volker had gone to the ladies’ room, where she must have freshened up, for when she returned she had a smart look in her eyes, rouge on her cheeks, and a solid plan on her mind.
First, she had me call my mom on the gift shop’s phone. I called collect, and when Mom answered I had to shout over the operator’s voice “This is an emergency!” so Mom would accept the charges. Then I told her that Miss Volker’s sister had suddenly died and there was a change in our travel schedule. Mom listened and summed up the situation. “There is no other choice but to stick with her and continue to do any and everything she needs.”
“Okay,” I said. “That means it’s okay to miss school and everything else, right?”
“I’ll tell Miss Volker to tutor you along the way. I’m sure she knows something about everything. And,” she added rapidly, “your father has flown back to Florida and is chasing work around in that flying coffin of his. When he checks in with me I’ll tell him you’re headed for Miami. Maybe he can be in touch with the sister’s husband and meet you there and help out. So call me collect every chance you get. If you hear me tell the operator that I’m not home, just know I’m okay and have nothing new to tell you. If you have something important to say to me, blurt it out like you just did and I’ll tell the operator I’ll pay for the call.”
“Okay,” I said to all her instructions. “Count on me.”
“I am,” she said. “And Miss Volker is counting on you too, so keep an eye on her. When people are stressed they do odd things—and when they are old they do really odd things.”
“Odd like what?” I asked, and for a split second pictured the big silver pistol in her purse.
“I can’t say for sure but you’ll know it when you see it,” she said. “So stay sharp. Old people can be erratic, and very cunning.”
Next, Miss Volker called her brother-in-law, Mr. Hap, and quickly went over a few details, including inviting smelly Mr. Huffer down to prepare the body for shipping back to Norvelt. And just like that the taxi driver returned us to the Hyde Park train platform and we backtracked to Grand Central, then took a taxi to Penn Station. We booked sleeper car tickets on the next day’s East Coast Champion train to Miami, where we planned to meet up with Mr. Hap. Then we ex
ited Penn Station and stood on the noisy curb and watched the traffic rush by.
“Look out for crazy New York drivers,” Miss Volker warned me, swiveling her head back and forth like an old owl. “One of them hit Eleanor Roosevelt a couple years ago when she was crossing the street. It didn’t kill her, but it was the beginning of her end.”
“Do you want me to add that to the obituary?” I asked.
She thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “Then we’d have to add that one time she fell asleep while driving and injured a bunch of people and knocked her own front teeth out.”
“Are we writing an obituary or a biography?” I asked, but before she could answer, the light changed and we dashed across to the Hotel Pennsylvania.
That night, when I crawled into bed I thought I knew exactly what our plans were for the next week, but I had no idea that I was the most clueless kid in the world.
6
I was flat on my back and lazily stretched out across my private roomette bunk on the East Coast Champion train and my parents were hundreds of miles away.
After a long layover in Philadelphia to take on freight we were under way again. Every thirty-nine feet the train wheels steadily clacked across a steel joint that connected one rail to the next, to the next, to the next—all the way down the zigzag spine of the Atlantic coast. Outside, the heavy wet snow was pelting against the window and sticking. We had slowed down a lot but it didn’t bother me. Mile by mile the cold was falling farther and farther behind me. Miss Volker had told me Washington, D.C., was our next big stop, with sunny Florida just a few days beyond. When I stepped off the train, I figured, there would be nothing left of the snow but a puddle.
I yawned. As I settled my head into my folded-over pillow the hypnotic clacking of the wheels was like a small hammer tacking my eyes shut.
I was trying to stay awake and finish reading the new Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde comic book I had bought at a newsstand in Penn Station in New York just before Miss Volker and I boarded the train. She had sent me to find if any magazines had extended obituaries of Eleanor Roosevelt but I was too late. They were all bought up.
However, as I looked around I spotted a display rack that was loaded with a new comic book, The Incredible Hulk, which looked weird, but the newsstand owner said it was based on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He had a stack of that old story in a Classics Illustrated edition.
“What Mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her” is what Dad always said, so I bought a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Then I went running from newsstand to newsstand until I had a huge stack of Classics Illustrated titles. I figured by the time I got to Florida and then back to Norvelt I could just leave them on the train for some other kid to read. After all, sharing was a classic Norvelt way of life.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a fantastic bloody story of good versus evil, but with a twist. Instead of two conflicting armies going after each other in combat, or two vengeful fighters going toe-to-toe in a boxing ring, the good and evil were equally split up and slugging it out within the same person. The battle raging within Dr. Jekyll was tearing him apart. His evil equal, Mr. Hyde, was dead set on destroying him.
Still, no matter how gripping the story was, and how much I pondered over what good and bad stuff was within me, the constant clacking of the metal wheels slowly lulled me into a droopy-eyed trance. I gradually lowered the comic book onto my chest and slipped into a deep, black velvety sleep like one of Mr. Hyde’s murder victims who would never again see the light of day.
I don’t know how much time had passed after I fell asleep when suddenly there was a loud thump-thump-thump on my door. I pushed the comic to one side and quickly took the single step from my narrow bunk to the roomette door and pressed my eye against the tiny glass peephole.
I was hoping it wasn’t the suspicious ferret-faced man I had seen staring at me with his pinched eyes and his nose pointing at me like an accusing finger as Miss Volker and I ate a snack in the rear observation car. That long, thin nose of his kept rotating toward the far door like the magnetic needle on a compass, but I wasn’t going anywhere in his direction.
Luckily, it wasn’t him thumping on my door. Nor was it the ancient sleeper-car attendant returning my only pair of shoes. When I boarded the train in New York he noticed the leather was caked with grit and coal ash from Hyde Park. He was so insistent that he take them to his workshop for a good cleaning that I untied and stepped out of them. I hadn’t seen him since. Instead, the eyeball staring back at me through the magnified peephole may have belonged to the evil-eyed Mr. Hyde, because on the other side of the hole a fiery red pupil glared menacingly at me as if it were my own demented split personality that was planning to take over my bunk.
“Who’s there?” I asked timidly.
In response there was a cracking, head-high bash against the door followed by Miss Volker’s sharp, impatient voice. “I know you are in there,” she cawed. “Because I can see that squirrelly brown beady eye of yours, and the confused mind behind it!”
I jerked my eye back and blinked. It was true that I had squirrelly eyes. “Suspicious eyes,” my mother called them. She should know, because I was always up to something she didn’t approve of, like reading illustrated versions of great classic literature when I should have been reading the real book.
“Now open up!” Miss Volker demanded. “Or I’ll splinter this flimsy cardboard door in half like Moby-Dick ramming the Pequod.”
I pressed my eye back against the peephole. “If you are Miss Volker, then answer me this,” I asked, wanting to show off my Moby-Dick knowledge from reading my Classics Illustrated edition. “Why did Melville name the ship the Pequod?”
“Because the Pequot Indians were all brutally killed off by the Puritans,” she replied. “And the pure white whale was avenging those black sins of the Puritans.”
“A-plus!” I exclaimed.
“Now open this door before I harpoon you with a hairpin right through your beady eyeball,” she threatened. She painfully clenched her stiff, quivering fingers together and removed the long thin hairpin from the ropy braid coiled on her head so I could see she wasn’t fooling. “Now open up!”
I slid aside the brass dead bolt and yanked the wooden door wide open just as the train careened around a tight bend and leaned sharply in my direction. Miss Volker had been in the act of once more hammering her anvil-heavy head against the door, and when the train tilted she gave out a squawk and lunged toward me as if she had pitched herself off a precipice. I held out my arms to catch her, but she came at me like a howling wildcat and I stumbled back onto my bunk as she mashed down on top of me. I was just quick enough to twist my face to one side so she didn’t slam her jutting chin into my nose. Instead, she crushed my ear into something that must have looked like a wrinkly slice of dried apple.
“A half hour ago,” she reminded me, with her steamy breath making my ear hole damp, “I told you to meet me in the observation car. What’s taking you so long?”
“I went but you weren’t there,” I replied, straining to get the words out. “And that creepy ferret-faced man from earlier was there again so I came back here.”
“Well, that’s good to stay away from him,” she said. “I think he’s a detective. When I called Mr. Huffer about my sister yesterday he told me to look out for private detectives.”
“Why?” I asked, shocked that a detective was after me. “Am I in trouble? Did my mother hire a detective to keep an eye on what I was reading?”
“No, but she should have. Huffer told me he figures those old ladies bought a lot of no-good life insurance from someone they trusted—but the insurance company didn’t have to pay out if the old ladies died because of a criminal act—which they did. The families are so angry about not getting any death benefit they put the ‘dead or alive’ reward out on Spizz. Now every private detective on the east coast is trying to catch Spizz and cash in on the reward.”
“It doesn’t mak
e sense that Spizz would be on this train,” I reasoned. “Why would he show up here if he just killed your sister in Florida?”
“Maybe the detective thinks I’m next on Spizz’s hit list,” she speculated. “He does have a love-hate relationship with me.”
“Well, even if Spizz showed up, that scrawny ferret-faced guy couldn’t arrest Spizz,” I said. “Spizz is old, but he’s big. He’d throw that guy off the train.”
“I doubt there is only one detective. They always travel in pairs,” she said knowingly. “There is an obvious one and a sneaky one. We’ve seen the obvious one, but I haven’t spotted the other one.”
“He’ll be the muscle,” I figured.
“And there might be others,” she added. “So keep your eyes peeled for oddballs.”
“Will do,” I said eagerly, thinking that this might be a lot of fun because the train was full of oddballs.
“Do you really think Spizz might follow you?” I asked, because it was an eerie thought.
“Could be,” she said with a shrug. “Earlier I passed a door and I thought I heard him talking to himself. I knocked on it but it was just a motion-sick old lady moaning, and I ended up having to take her temperature.”
“Is she still alive?” I asked. “You know those old ladies don’t last long once you pay them a visit.”
“You’ll pay for that remark,” she threatened, then lifted her head and hammered her whiskery chin into my ear again.
I whimpered. It felt like I’d been kicked by a horse.
“Respect your elders,” she advised. “My heart is still broken from those old ladies being murdered—but I’ll feel better after I cast my harpoon into that white whale!”
“Is that why you brought that pistol in your purse?” I dared to ask. “To shoot Spizz?”
I winced as I waited to get smacked on the head again.
“As a matter of fact, it is,” she replied. “I told you I’m going to kill him, and when I get a chance I’ll put that bullet right through his heart and that will be the end of the last chapter of his history—plus now I’ll make a few bucks off the reward.”
