The Winchesters

by James Lincoln Collier

  THE

  WINCHESTERS

  THE

  WINCHESTERS

  ______________________________________________

  James Lincoln Collier

  THE WINCHESTERS

  Copyright © 1988 by James Lincoln Collier

  All rights reserved.

  First ebook copyright © 2013 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  978-1-62064-654-0 Trade

  978-0-7927-9787-6 Library

  Cover photo © LifesizeImages/iStock.com.

  For Marjory

  By the Same Author:

  Chipper

  The Corn Raid

  The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

  The Empty Mirror

  Give Dad My Best

  The Jazz Kid

  It's Murder at St. Baskets

  Me and Billy

  My Crooked Family

  Outside Looking In

  Planet Out of the Past

  Rich and Famous

  Rock Star

  The Teddy Bear Habit

  When the Stars Begin to Fall

  Wild Boy

  The Worst of Times

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 1

  We were walking along the bluestone driveway under the branches of the sugar maples way up above, when we heard the sound of voices somewhere over by the pond. It was the kind of shouting and laughing that kids do when they're fooling around in the water. We were screened off from the pond by the pine trees around the end of it.

  “What's that?” my cousin Ernest said. We never called him Ernie, always Ernest. Ernie was too low class. The Winchesters didn't allow anyone in the family to be called by nicknames. Except me. They called me Chris, not Christopher.

  “It sounds like somebody's in the pond,” I said.

  “They shouldn't be,” Ernest said. “Let's get them out of there.”

  Ernest liked to fight. The funny thing about that was that he went to prep school, where he had to say sir to the teachers and wear a jacket and tie to class every day, and I went to public school where most of the kids didn't even own a necktie and wouldn't say sir to anybody unless you held a gun on them. But Ernest was the one who liked to fight. He played blocking back on his prep school football team and defense on the hockey team and he liked knocking people down.

  I wasn't so much on fighting. I'd do it if I had to, so as not to be chicken, but I didn't get any thrill out of it. “It's a hot day,” I said. “They just want to cool off.”

  “They have the town pool.” He frowned and brushed his hair back out of his eyes. Most of the Winchesters had blond hair, but my hair was dark brown, which I got from my mother.

  “Yeah, but the town pool is usually pretty crowded.” It was beautiful under the arch of the sugar maples. Our great-grandfather had planted them a long time ago, when he built the big house where Ernest lived, so that the driveway was always cool and shaded, with bits and patches of sun coming through here and there.

  “What right have they got to complain?” Ernest said. “We gave the town that pool.”

  The town pool was twenty years old. A lot of the tiles had fallen off, and the fence around it was bent and rusty. Besides, it was all the way down at one end of the town park, and there were always trucks grinding by, sending off a lot of exhaust. “They don't like it. There's too much traffic. Besides, on a day like this it'll be jammed.”

  Ernest was still frowning. “What do they want for nothing? We paid for the pool.”

  “I thought the mills paid for it.”

  “It's the same thing.” He looked at me. “Come on. Let's get them out of there.”

  “They're not doing any harm.”

  “They'll leave soda cans around. Besides, if we let some of them come, the next thing you know half the town will be up here swimming all summer long. Then you'll have a mess—people leaving their garbage around and throwing stuff in the water and playing radios loud. Besides, Dad says that if somebody drowns we're responsible.”

  I knew that Ernest was right. If you let people from the town come up to the estate and use the place, they'd take it over. Still, it was hard to see why the whole town should be jammed into one pool and we should have a whole pond five times as big for ourselves.

  “Come on, let's go,” Ernest said.

  “Maybe we should get Durham.” Durham was the groundskeeper. You always called servants by their last names. I didn't know why. Durham was black and had been in Viet Nam and had a scar on his face from a fragmentation bomb.

  Ernest looked at me. “What are you, Chris—chicken?”

  “No, I'm not chicken.” It wasn't that—it wasn't that at all. The reason why I was arguing was because the kids in the pond were liable to be somebody I knew at school. They might be in my class when school started or on the baseball team with me. I'd been going to that school from first grade, and I'd had some of the same kids with me all the way through eighth grade. I sure didn't want to have to tell them to get out of the pond.

  “Come on. Let's go,” Ernest said. He turned off the bluestone driveway toward the pond. My great-grandfather had put in the pond, too. There had been a kind of swampy place there with a spring underneath. He'd hired a gang of men to dig it out. He'd had pines planted in a semicircle at the west end, the end away from the big house. Between the house and the pond there was nothing but lawn, so from what they called the ballroom, on the west side of the house, you could see the water. It was beautiful when the sun set through the pines and turned the water orange; it was beautiful in winter with a sheet of snow stretching fifty yards from the house down to the pond, covered with ice. It was beautiful, too, to skate on the pond. Durham always cleared the ice with the snow blower and then watered it, so that it was always slick and fast. We would skate there, Ernest and me and his sister, Anne, and their friends—they usually brought friends home from prep school for vacations. Toward the end of the afternoon, when the sun was going down, the windows of the big house would be squares of orange, so bright you could hardly look at them.

  Ernest was running toward the pine trees. He looked back. “Come on, Chris,” he shouted. Ernest always tried to get me to do what he wanted me to. He didn't know he did that, but he did. Someday he was going to be boss of a huge business worth millions and millions—the family had never let it out how much—and he was already getting into the habit of giving orders. It didn't bother me that he did that. He was supposed to get in the habit of giving orders. In fact, I kind of admired him for it. I wasn't much on giving orders myself, and I wasn't sure that I could ever learn. But Ernest was my cousin and he was my friend, and so I would never let him boss me around too much. Sometimes I would do what he wanted, and sometimes I wouldn't. It all depended.

  But this time I was stuck. He thought he had a right to chase these kids out of the pond. In fact, he thought it was his duty to do it. He thought if he didn't do it, he would be chicken. He thought that if we got Durham, instead of kicking these kids out ourselves, that would be chicken, too. Ernest would never understand if I didn't help him. Anyway, the best thing would be if I went with him to see if I could settle it some way. So I raced after him through the mowed field and caught up with him just as he was going into the pines. I loved going into the pines, feeling the needles soft underfoot and smelling that sweetish pine smell, which cam
e up strong on a hot day like this. We jogged on through the pines and came out onto the bank of the pond.

  There were three kids in the water, splashing around and shouting. Their bikes were lying among the pines on the pine needles, along with their clothes and a couple of soda cans they'd dropped. We stood on the bank looking out at the kids. They were splashing each other, and I couldn't see who they were.

  “Hey,” Ernest shouted. “You're not supposed to swim here.”

  The kids stopped splashing, and now I could see who they were. One of them was Benny Briggs. The other two were guys he hung around with. I didn't know their names for sure, but one of them had a French-Canadian name, like Goffere or something. I knew Benny Briggs, all right. He was a year ahead of me in school and had been on the junior-high-school baseball team with me the year before, when he was in eighth grade and I was in seventh. He was going to Everidge High already, and maybe I'd be on the baseball team with him again.

  “You're not supposed to swim here,” Ernest shouted again.

  They didn't get out, but stayed there, treading water. “Don't give me any of that,” Briggs shouted. “This pond doesn't belong to you.” Benny was a kind of tall, gangly kid with black hair and a long face. He played shortstop. He was pretty good.

  “Yes, it does,” Ernest shouted. “It's ours. You can't swim in it.”

  Then Briggs recognized me. “Hey, Winchester, are you trying to tell me this lake belongs to this guy?”

  “It belongs to his family,” I said.

  “Come off it, Winchester,” Briggs said, still treading water. “This lake doesn't belong to anybody.”

  “It sure does,” Ernest said. “It belongs to us. You guys get out.”

  Ernest didn't understand what was going on in Benny's mind, but I did. Benny's folks worked for the Winchester Mills. I didn't know exactly what they did, but it was on an assembly line putting together condensers, or spray-painting steam valves or something. They weren't poor, but they weren't rich, either, and got laid off here and there. They probably never could afford a new car, but always got one three or four years old. They couldn't afford to own a motorboat, and they lived on the second floor of one of the old wooden houses on a back street in town. For fun they watched TV and, on hot summer nights, sat in the backyard of a friend who had a backyard and drank beer and ate potato salad and hot dogs. Sure, they probably had as good a time as most people, except for worrying about getting laid off. I knew all about that, because a lot of the kids from school lived like that. In fact, my girlfriend, Marie Scalzo, lived like that, except her dad didn't work for the Winchester Mills, but ran a little store.

  She and her sister shared a room, and her older brother, Frankie, had a bed in the little storeroom behind the store.

  Most of these people didn't have any real idea of what it was like to be rich. Benny Briggs just couldn't understand that anybody could own a whole pond. Something like a pond would just be there and wouldn't belong to anybody any more than the Atlantic Ocean belonged to anybody. Oh, he knew he wasn't supposed to swim in it. For people like the Briggses, there were a lot of things they weren't supposed to do. But they did them anyway, if they figured they could get away with it.

  I knew about that, too, because when I was little and first came to live in the gatehouse on the Winchester estate, I was scared of doing nearly everything. I figured I wasn't allowed to ride my bike on the driveway or play ball on the grass, and I wouldn't go into the big house unless somebody told me to, and wouldn't go in by the front door, either, but always went in through the laundry room.

  I'd got over a lot of that from hanging around with Ernest, who could do what he pleased and go wherever he wanted. He rode his bike on the driveway and played ball on the grass, and I went along with him. But I still wouldn't go into the big house unless I had a reason for it, and I still always went in through the laundry room, unless it was Christmas or Thanksgiving and I went up with Mom and the twins, all dressed up in a suit and a tie. Then we went in through the front door.

  So I knew how Benny Briggs felt. But Ernest didn't. He didn't have any idea of what Benny Briggs was like at all. Ernest knew that some people had more money than other people, but he couldn't imagine what it was really like. He couldn't imagine that some kids never had their own room, but had to share with brothers and sisters. He couldn't imagine that some kids had never been in a powerboat or gone water skiing. So it wasn't just meanness that made him want to get Benny and the other guys out of the pond. He couldn't imagine that they didn't have a decent place to swim.

  “Listen,” Ernest shouted. “You guys better get out of there.”

  Briggs flopped over and began to do a backstroke. “Who's going to make us?” he said. He turned his head and sucked up some water and spurted it in the air.

  There were three of them and they were older than us, but I knew that wouldn't stop Ernest from going after them. “I'm giving you a last chance,” he shouted.

  The other two guys weren't swimming, but were still treading water. “Hey, Benny,” the French-Canadian kid said. “Maybe we better get out of here.”

  “What for? This kid doesn't own this lake.”

  “I told you, it belongs to my family,” Ernest said. He figured he was in the right and they were wrong, and he was getting sore. He was getting ready to go after them.

  “Up yours,” Benny said. He spurted some more water in the air.

  Suddenly Ernest pulled his T-shirt over his head and flung it on the ground. Then he kicked off his running shoes and began tearing off his socks.

  “Ernest,” I said. “Take it easy a little. You can't fight them all.”

  He looked at me. “You're going to help me, aren't you?”

  Out in the water Benny Briggs had stopped floating around and was treading water with the other guys, watching to see what we were going to do. I knew that if Ernest went in the water after them, I'd have to go with him. “Ernest, calm down a minute,” I said.

  He gave me another look and began taking off his jeans. “Are you coming with me or not?”

  “Ernest—”

  “Are you coming, Chris?”

  I looked out at Benny Briggs. Ernest would go for him first, I knew. “Sure, I'm coming.” I began to kick off my shoes and strip off my T-shirt. The best thing I could do would be to let Ernest fight Benny and see if I could keep the other guys out of it while they fought. My heart was beating pretty fast. The last time I'd been in a real fight was with Ernest. He'd checked me too hard when we were playing hockey and I lost my temper and tackled him, and we'd rolled around on the ice for a while trying to slug each other until Durham came down and broke it up. I knew I could fight if I had to, but there were three of them against two. I felt scared, all right, but I figured you were bound to be scared if you were going into a fight.

  Ernest had got his clothes off. “Hurry up, Chris.”

  One of the guys in the water said, “Benny, maybe we better get out of here.”

  “No way,” Briggs said. “I'm not scared of these guys.”

  I slipped out of my jeans and stood on the bank, ready to go. “Let's go,” Ernest said.

  Then there came a low, rough shout. I turned and looked. Durham was standing on the lawn by the side of the pond that faced the house. He had Duchess, the big Doberman, on a leash. Duchess was stretched out at the end of the leash. If Durham let her go she'd tear into the water after those guys and chop them up. “You people get outta there,” Durham shouted. “And you stay the hell outta there.”

  But already Briggs and his friends were swimming as fast as they could toward the other end of the pond where their bikes lay among the pine trees.

  CHAPTER 2

  My mother had a genealogy of the Winchester family that showed all of our ancestors going way back. We could trace some branches of the family back to the 1500s. There were lots of famous people in our genealogy—a governor, two senators, a famous general in the Revolution, a lot of people who fought in the Civ
il War, and some others. I never could keep them all straight. But my mother said, “Your dad always said that most of the people in the genealogy were just plain people—farmers and fishermen and storekeepers who worked hard all their lives and tried to do right by their families. Only a few of them back there were important. The Winchesters are always going on about General Markham and Governor Winchester, but mostly they come from plain people, just like everybody else. Your dad always made a point of that.”

  I guess he was right, for the Winchester money didn't go all that far back. The business was started by my great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1855, before the Civil War. There was a portrait of him, big as a window, hanging in the dining room in the big house. He had on a dark suit and a white shirt, and he looked very fierce. It was one of those pictures where the eyes follow you around the room—no matter where you went, he always looked at you. He used to scare the daylights out of me when I was little. We would go up there for Thanksgiving or Christmas, when they had a big family dinner for all the cousins—thirty or forty people maybe, three turkeys, plum pudding from England, thousands of dollars worth of glassware and silver gleaming so bright the table sparkled. But the whole time I was there I had the idea that that old man was staring at me, just staring and staring, waiting for me to make a mistake in my manners so he could jump out of that picture and start shaking me by the collar.

  His name was Amos Winchester. He was some kind of a cloth salesman, traveling around Massachusetts. One time he ran into this crazy inventor who'd figured out an improved safety valve for steam engines. Amos Winchester made an agreement with him. He got some people to back him, and he set up a factory to make this improved safety valve. It was a huge success. Steam engines were coming along big at that time, because the railroads were expanding all over the United States, steam engines were taking over from water power in factories, ships were switching to steam from sail. In the end it turned out that the inventor, who didn't know anything about business, had signed all the rights to the valve over to my great-great-grandfather. He ended up owning the whole thing.