by Jack Gantos
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the creepy detective alertly extend his elastic ear in our direction.
“Maybe we should change the subject,” I advised calmly. Then I raised my voice for the detective as I added, “We have a lot of funeral plans to make for your sister.”
She sniffed and wiped tears from her cheeks just as the waiter delivered her wine and straw. “Thank you,” she graciously replied, pulling herself together. Then, before he could leave, she asked, “May I please have another slice of that extra fluffy sandwich bread? It’s so soft on my tired old eyes.”
The waiter stared at the puddle of wet bread on the leftover sandwich plate, and his upper lip was curled back with disgust so that I could no longer see his mustache. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied as smoothly as before. “I’ll be right back with the remainder of the loaf.”
This time he didn’t attempt to clear the dishes.
“Sweet man,” Miss Volker said once he had dashed to the other end of the car.
“He’s sweet if you close your eyes and just listen to him,” I suggested. “But if you look at his face, he doesn’t always look too happy with you.”
“Having a split personality seems to be a problem on this train,” she replied. “Be careful. A lot of people are two-faced and you never know what a two-faced person is truly thinking.”
That was obvious. I glanced over at the detective, who had his head stretched in our direction as if he were a dog smelling a steak. When he caught my eye he gave me a piercing stare.
I quickly turned my gaze back to Miss Volker and tried to pull myself together because my heart was pounding.
“How can you tell who is two-faced?” I asked, without expecting what she next said.
“Because I’m one of them,” she replied with her voice loudly ringing out as heartfelt and clear as if she had one hand on a Bible and was ready to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” She didn’t have a Bible but she hooked her trembling hand over my wrist and held it as firmly as she could. “It takes a two-faced person to know one,” she continued to testify. “And I’ll tell you another—”
I cut her off. “Miss Volker,” I pleaded nervously, “please keep your voice down. And don’t say what I think you’re going to say. It’s not true.”
“No!” she said, getting all worked up and shifting about in her seat. “All of those old ladies in Norvelt died by my own hands,” she passionately announced, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear. She lifted both of her claw-like hands as evidence and frowned irritably at their useless form. “Every one of those ladies has left this earth because of me.”
“Miss Volker, please calm down,” I begged. “These people don’t even know what you are talking about—and neither do I.”
I had read the Illustrated Classics comic version of Don Quixote. Like him, Miss Volker was always on a quest to right the wrongs of the world—especially in Norvelt. But now she was suddenly confessing to committing all the wrong done in Norvelt, and I felt like her faithful companion, Sancho Panza, trying to clean up her mess.
“She drank too much wine,” I blurted out to those who were staring at us. “Way too much!”
“Rubbish,” she said bravely, and puffed out her chest. “This is not the wine talking. I want the whole world to know what evil I’ve done!”
Just then the train abruptly bucked back and forth with such force the packed snow slid clean off the observation windows to suddenly reveal the bright outside world. Everyone gasped. It was as if stage curtains had been pulled aside to expose Miss Volker’s startling confession.
I didn’t know about the whole world, but when I checked on the man with the notebook, he was writing so quickly I thought his pencil point would set the paper on fire.
Luckily the steward arrived with a plate stacked high with sliced white bread.
“As you requested, ma’am,” he said with a polite nod of his head. For an instant he cut his eyes toward me as if to say, “Good luck with your mad granny.”
The moment he sped off to his lunch station, Miss Volker sat back and squinted intently at my face as if she were trying to read the small letters on an eye chart. “You better wipe your proboscis on a piece of this bread,” she suggested. “Your nose problem has returned.”
After what she just announced, I thought as I reached for a slice, it’s a wonder my nose didn’t explode like a bloody hand grenade.
I held the bread under my nostrils as if it were a folded handkerchief. When I removed it, there was a glowing red circle of blood in the middle of the white bread. It looked just like the Japanese flag my dad brought home from the war.
The moment Miss Volker saw the blood she hopped up and pointed her claw at me and now directly addressed her audience, whose puzzled members were still murmuring about her last outburst. “Look at the blood of shame running down this boy’s face. He is my accomplice in murder!”
The detective gasped and opened his mouth so wide I could count the fillings in his uneven back teeth. At the same time he pressed down so hard on his pencil the point snapped and shot past us and ticked off the little table lampshade. Then he looked directly toward me with such concentration I knew he was trying to forge his way through the labyrinth of my evil mind and enter the blackness of my old-lady-murdering heart. My brain began to throb as he slowly nodded his head up and down as if what Miss Volker said about me added up to exactly what he too had concluded—that I was her secret accomplice at murder, not Spizz. And who wouldn’t believe her? Not just because I was dressed up as Spizz when Mrs. Custard ate that cookie and bit the dust, but also because at that moment every person in the train car was staring at the blood spurting out of my nose and down over my lips and chin and dripping onto the dishes.
I opened my mouth to speak but Miss Volker cut me off.
“The blood is the mark of his guilt!” she hollered out, pointing one bent hand toward me.
A woman called out to the steward, “Is this a joke, or some kind of theatrical game?”
But the steward didn’t answer. He trotted toward me with his bar napkin in hand.
“Don’t worry, son,” he said, fussing over me with the napkin and wiping blood from my face. “You’ll be just fine.” But as he dipped the napkin in a glass of water and continued to mop my face, his nervous eyes said the opposite. “You’ll be just fine,” he repeated.
I didn’t believe him.
“Is there a doctor on this train?” I asked.
“For you or for you-know-who?” he whispered, tilting his head in Miss Volker’s direction.
“Me,” I said. “She’s beyond helping.”
“Steward,” Miss Volker demanded, and stamped her foot down for extra attention. “Please take my wineglass and the rest of the bottle to my room.”
The moment he withdrew to get the bottle of wine she winked at me and under her breath whispered, “Oh, by the way, was that juicy enough for you?”
“Why are you pretending that we killed the old ladies when you think it was Spizz?” I whispered back.
“Because they’ll just arrest him somewhere and that’s not good enough. I want to catch him first and make him suffer, and then I want to kill him myself.”
“Well, did you ever think Spizz wants to kill us first?” I suggested. “Maybe he’s tracking us down.”
“Then he’ll step right into my trap,” she said, nodding smugly as she patted the side of her purse.
“Remember, Mr. Greene said there might be other suspects,” I said, trying to reason with her.
“Captain Ahab knew there were a lot of fish in the sea,” she countered, “but there was only one white whale.”
Then she stood and marched unevenly down the car and toward her roomette.
I quickly turned and looked toward the detective.
He pointed toward his nose but he really meant I should take care of my own nose, which was still dripping. I pointed right back at his nose but my message was differ
ent.
“Don’t be so nosy,” I mouthed.
8
I needed tissues. The men’s toilets were down the hall from the dining car, and since I didn’t have shoes on I had to enter a narrow stall wearing just my socks, which was pretty bad but not as bad as if I took them off and walked in barefoot. I plopped down on the lowered seat cover and lifted my feet off the floor. I unrolled two piles of toilet paper and with my feet still raised I wrapped the toilet paper around them as if I were preparing an Egyptian mummy for burial. I had just lowered my feet onto the floor when a man entered the next stall. I quietly breathed two or three times but he knew I was in there.
After he dropped his pants and heavily settled himself onto his seat he knocked on the wall between us as if it were the front door of my house.
“Hey, neighbor,” he said in a muffled voice from the other stall, “let me introduce myself.” He sounded vaguely familiar even though it was obvious he was holding something over his mouth. “I’m the second detective you might have been expecting. I’m the clever one. The one who hears everything you say, but you never see him until it’s too late—like right now.”
I pulled more toilet paper off the roll and tightly squeezed my nose, which was still leaking. “My mother warned me not to talk to strange men in bathroom stalls,” I said, sounding like a kazoo. “She said it’s unhygienic and dangerous.”
“Don’t you think it would be far more dangerous if I climbed over this partition to speak to you in your stall?” he asked in a logical voice. I couldn’t see his face but I could imagine his sick smile as he chuckled after his own joke.
“Okay,” I quickly replied. “We can talk. But stay on your side.”
“That’s a deal,” he agreed, and I heard him strike a match and start puffing on a cigarette. “You want a smoke?” he asked.
“I don’t smoke, or drink,” I stated.
“Well, that’s two out of three,” he replied.
“What’s the third?” I asked.
“Murder,” he said bluntly. “The day after Mrs. Custard died we found an open tin of 1080 in Mr. Spizz’s office. What do you know about that?”
“I already went over this with the police,” I said.
“Let me tell you the difference between me and the police,” he explained in a hard voice. “The police arrest people only after they slowly find out the truth. But I like to work a little faster, so I just hurt people when they don’t tell the truth right away, and that speeds up the process and then I get the reward money and everyone is happy—except for the killer. So tell me what you saw.”
“Well,” I said, starting to talk right away because I believed he meant what he said about hurting people. “I had heard someone in Spizz’s old office that night. Someone was in there just before Mrs. Custard died and again later, right after she died.”
“Are you sure you aren’t overlooking the possibility that it was you in that office?” he suggested. “You could have popped the tin of 1080 open, made the poison cookie, and given it to Mrs. Custard—after all, you said in the police report that you gave her a cookie.”
“I told the police I gave her an Oreo,” I stressed. “Not a poison Thin Mint! I think it was Spizz who was in his old office, but I was too afraid to open the door and check for myself so I can’t say for sure.”
“That is your alibi?” he said doubtfully. “That you were too afraid to poke your nose into the office and catch Spizz in the act of preparing a deadly treat? So you didn’t see him, but yet you’re suggesting it was him? Ha! Kid, that is your alibi? Believe me, they’ve sent murderers to the electric chair for less than killing old ladies, so why don’t you tell the truth? It was you.”
“You don’t scare me,” I said boldly.
“But you should be scared,” he replied, “plenty scared. You ever hear of George Stinney?”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“A nice innocent kid who was only fourteen when he got the electric chair for the murder of two girls that maybe he did or didn’t commit.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said, and dabbed at my nose.
“He was so small,” the detective continued in a sorrowful voice as he drew on his cigarette. “He was about your size. They had to use a Bible for a booster seat on the electric chair.”
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said.
“Yes you do,” he insisted. “Because you don’t want to be arrested for something you didn’t do, which is why you should tell me how Miss Volker did it.”
“She didn’t kill anyone,” I replied. “She always takes care of people.”
“Depends on how you define takes care of,” he said. “I know it must be hard on you to realize that Miss Volker is a murderer. It’s certainly easier to believe that Spizz did it all on his own, but think about it—did he? Could he, without her knowing? She put the cookies together. She signed off on their death certificates and had the ladies cremated before they could have an autopsy for poison. She had 1080 all over her house. And the last lady, Mrs. Custard, she was murdered like all the rest. Sure, Spizz was in town, but he needed a helper—he needed someone to go into the office and get the 1080 and deliver it to him. He was certainly too afraid of being seen at the Community Center. So who do you think went into his old office and got the poison? It had to be her—his girlfriend. They are a deadly duo.”
“But her hands,” I said. “She couldn’t use them.”
“You mean she couldn’t use them for long.” He pressed forward, breathing hard behind whatever masked his mouth. “Think to when she grabbed you by the back of the neck—were her hands warm?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. I was too shocked that he had seen that to say anything.
“Yes they were,” he said, “because I went into her house and she had cooked her hands in wax. The pot on the stove was still hot and I’m guessing that her hand was still a little warm and flexible when she grabbed your neck, otherwise she couldn’t grab you because her hand would have been a cold claw.”
“I can’t remember,” I said, feeling trapped.
“Of course not,” he rapidly answered. “You were taken by surprise. You were scared. Think about it.”
He smoked his cigarette while I sorted through so much he had said, and some was true. But Miss Volker cooked her hands a lot because the heat wore off in about ten minutes. If she was in Spizz’s old office she might have been trying to find the 1080 and dispose of it. When Mrs. Custard unexpectedly returned, it ruined Spizz’s love plan. Surely he wanted Mrs. Custard dead so Miss Volker would again become the last old Norvelt lady alive and have to marry him. That was the deal they had made. Plus, according to Mrs. Custard, a man who looked like my Spizzy grandfather gave her the cookie to eat right before Bunny and I arrived. That made sense, because Mrs. Custard said I looked like a junior Spizz. Now this detective was trying to say that Miss Volker helped Spizz—but with all her ranting about running a harpoon through Spizz I did not believe she would ever help him.
“You are all wrong,” I finally replied. “It has to be Spizz acting on his own.”
“Well, I respect you for trying to protect your lady friend. Nobody likes a snitch. So if you won’t tell me how she did it, let’s try a new approach to this conversation. I have a deal to make with you,” he said, once again trying to sound as nice and friendly as he could behind his muffled voice. “It’s a good deal. It will keep you out of trouble and make you some real money—cash money.”
“I don’t need a deal,” I replied. “I’m telling the truth, so I’m not in trouble.”
“Well, just listen to my offer,” he continued. “There’s this book, Strangers on a Train, where two troubled guys meet by chance on a train—just like you and me are doing. Anyway, in the book the two guys start to talk about their unhappy situations. One guy has a wife he doesn’t like and the other guy has a father who won’t share his fortune with him. So after a few glasses of wine one of the guys has
a brainstorm and says to the other, ‘Hey, I’ve got a plan.’ And he proposes that he kill the other guy’s wife and in return the other guy kills the father. ‘This way we both get what we want and nobody will guess it is us,’ says the first guy. ‘We’re total strangers. They’ll never connect the murders back to us. It’s too random. Untraceable.’”
“What’s your point?” I asked, trying my best to sound pretty smooth while on my side of the wall my hands were shaking as I was twirling thin coils of toilet paper way up my nose.
“That you and I,” he continued, “can be like those two strangers and help each other get what we want and no one will ever have to know.”
“I think I want to remain a stranger,” I said.
“Relax. Don’t worry so much,” he replied. “Here’s my offer. I’ll accept your word of honor that you and Miss Volker are innocent, and in return you just tell me where Spizz is hiding. I’ll take care of him, and then I’ll split the reward with you—and there is a lot of money because the relatives were in a foul mood when they found out the life insurance didn’t pay one red cent for murder.”
“I don’t know where he is,” I said. “He could be on the moon.”
“Don’t be childish,” he said dismissively. “You know he’s not on the moon. He’s like a hound dog always tracking after Miss Volker—”
“Mister, I don’t know for sure who killed all those old ladies,” I said, and flushed the toilet like I was getting ready to run out of there.
“I think you know very well who killed them,” he said with more bite in his firm voice. “So let me remind you that if we make this deal like two strangers on a train we’ll both be happy. I’ll get Spizz and the reward. Volker can get away with murder, and you can become a man and fill your pockets with big bucks.”
“I don’t want the money,” I said. “I’m a kid. And she didn’t kill anyone anyway.”
“Remember poor George Stinney,” he reminded me. “Being a kid is no alibi for murder. I’d hate to tell the police that you helped Spizz. That would make you an accessory to the crime. Instead, think about this. The reward money could help you and your family get a new start in Florida.”
