#20
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Mr. Quickel came to our kitchen screen door one night while we were eating supper and let himself in. Dad told him to sit down and eat with us, but he didn’t. He just started to talk kind of wild. Didn’t seem to care what Greg and Gina and I heard.
“It’s like a nightmare,” he said. “It just keeps getting worse and worse. Now they’re spying on Marge and me. They’re saying she’s going to leave me. How the hell do they know she’s going to leave me?”
“They’re just guessing,” Mom said.
“Well, they’re right. Twenty years, and she’s going to leave me. Can’t take the disgrace. Neither can I. They’re going to take my job away. You know I’m going to lose my job. Pretty soon they’ll start saying I’m going to lose my job, and they’ll be right, I’ll lose it. Then—”
”Nick, calm down.” Dad got up and went to stand beside Mr. Quickel, started to touch him on the shoulder and then stopped his hand and took it away again. He said, “They haven’t made a decision yet.”
Mr. Quickel kept right on talking like he hadn’t heard. “Then they’ll start talking about criminal charges, and whadaya know! Someone will bring criminal charges. They’ll be right about that too. See the headlines written on the wall?” He pointed at our kitchen wall like he saw something there. “Former Teacher Indicted for Sex Crimes. And then they’ll start saying—”
”Nick!” my mother yelled. “Stop.”
My father sort of shoved Mr. Quickel toward a chair, and Mr. Quickel sat down. But he didn’t stop talking. His voice got quieter, but what he was saying got worse.
He said, “The hell of it is, there’s just a ghost of truth behind it all.”
“What are you talking about?” My father sounded scared, but Mr. Quickel didn’t even look at him. It was like he was talking in a dream.
He said, “Must have been twenty-five, thirty years ago, there was this kid named Charlie Klunk. We got to be friends, and he and I did a few dirty things. Just fooling around. Testing out our chemistry sets. But when I went away to college, I put that behind me. I knew I wanted to be a teacher….”
He glanced up at Greg and my dad and saw the look on their faces.
“I was a stupid kid,” he begged. “You know teenage boys, they’re just hormones with feet. I’m not gay.”
He looked at Greg and Dad some more, then stood up. “Never mind,” he said. “I know I’m a goner. Might as well kill myself and have it done with.”
“Nick, no!” My mother sounded as scared as I felt. “Don’t talk that way.”
He looked at her like she was throwing him a lifeline that was way too short. “How the hell did they know?” he asked. Then he went out in the dusk and we didn’t see him again.
The next day I was lying under my lilac bush, not even playing anything, and I heard Mrs. Life say to somebody, “There goes Nick Quickel into the drugstore again. See, he’s going back to the pharmacy counter to have a prescription filled. That’s the third time this week. I wonder what can be the matter.”
It was the old man who picked up tin cans around town she was talking to. I heard him say, “Why, what do you think it might be?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say. But don’t you think he’s awfully thin for a man his age?”
Mr. Quickel didn’t have a beer belly, if that was what she meant, but he was a coach, for gosh sake. He kept in shape.
“And white?”
No wonder, with the whole town putting him through the wash.
“Here he comes out again. Do you see all those red spots on his arm? Of course they might just be bug bites….”
Her eyesight was better than mine if she could see spots on his arm from across the street.
The tin can man said, “You think he has that there disease queers get?” Whoa, he was quick for a guy his age.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”
It only took a few days, though, before most of Pleasantville knew for a fact that Mr. Quickel had AIDS. Even the people who were still his friends were afraid to go near him now.
I had started staying under the lilac bush and listening to Mrs. Life on purpose. Teachers in school were always telling kids to think for themselves, but this was the first time that a schoolteacher, Mrs. Life, had really taught me to do it. I was starting to see that she wasn’t such a nice lady at all. But I wasn’t used to having my own ideas. I wasn’t used to thinking I knew better, or going against adults. It made me feel strange, and I spent a lot of time under my bush sort of wrestling with the strangeness.
I heard Mrs. Life say, “I don’t like to speak ill of anyone, but just the same, if I were a parent I wouldn’t want my child to have him as a schoolteacher.”
I heard her say, “Would you want to use the same restroom or water fountain as him?”
I heard her say, “Even putting aside all the rest of it, suppose he should cut himself and his blood were to get on some poor little girl?”
I knew I ought to do something. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t old enough or big enough or strong enough to speak out against her. If Mr. Quickel couldn’t fight her, how could I?
Mr. Quickel killed himself the day after his wife went to Arizona to stay with her mother for a while. He did it by cutting his wrists, and he stayed in the bathroom so there wouldn’t be too much mess. He left a private note for his wife and kids and a public one for the rest of us. All it said was, “I never hurt anyone.”
The school board’s private detective found Mr. Quickel. My dad is a Volunteer Fireman, so he went with the others to answer the call. Dad came home looking pretty grim. When he told the rest of us what had happened, Mom said to him, “It’s partly your fault.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“He came to you for help, and you turned your back. How do you think that made him feel?”
He yelled, “What the hell is it with you and Nick Quickel, anyway?”
She yelled back, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I left them fighting, walked into our front room and looked across the yard at Mrs. Life’s porch. She was out there, all right.
And one of the firemen was leaning on her railing, and I guessed I knew what they were talking about. He was giving her the news.
When he left, she got up off her wicker rocker and went inside.
The whole thing made me so sad and mad and sick I could have puked. It drove me about half crazy. I ran out of my house and straight across to hers and I barged right in her front door without even thinking. I still don’t know what I meant to say to her.
There she was at her dining room table with her old tortoise-shell fountain pen, writing in one of those little notebooks of hers that she kept track of everything in. She finished writing and closed it, and I saw it was just like the others, a spiral-bound notebook from the drugstore, except it had a black cover. “So I’m short-minded, am I?” she said to it. “Short-minded, indeed.”
Then she looked up and saw me standing there. But her face didn’t change. It looked just the same as ever.
I wanted to scream, but my voice came out a whisper. “Witch,” I whispered. “You dirty witch.”
Very quietly, very coldly she told me, “Veronica Hoffman, you watch your mouth.”
I was so nuts I didn’t stop. “How many people you got in there?” I squeaked. “Go ahead, tell me. How many suicides have you done?”
“Nineteen so far,” she said.
“Wonderful. One more and you’ll be up to twenty.”
“That’s right.” She stood up, and suddenly I was terrified. “Get out of my house.”
I ran like a rabbit, and if there were a way I could have kept running clear out of this town, I would have. But there’s nothing I can do. Mom and Dad are quarreling. There’s nobody I can talk to, nobody who can help me. And already Mrs. Simmermeyer is starting to talk about how little Veronica Hoffman spends so much time back in the alley behind the cathouse, what can a girl her age be doing in such a place?
I kno
w who number twenty in Mrs. Life’s little black book is going to be.
Edgar Award-winning author Nancy Springer,
well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,
has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting…
DARK LIE
available in paperback and e-book in November 2012
from New American Library
Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer…and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.
“A darkly riveting read…compelling.”
—Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author of Nightwatcher and Sleepwalker
“A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden
Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.