Edgewood Series: Books 1 - 3

by Karen McQuestion

  Mr. Specter moved quickly, putting the stone in his pocket and opening the cash register drawer. “I’ll tell you what, young man, I’ll even give you a brand-new twenty.” He handed Frank a crisp bill, and the kid bounced forward on the balls of his feet to reach over the counter to take it.

  This whole exchange confused me. None of the junk in Frank’s pocket was worth even one dollar, much less twenty. Mr. Specter must have seen the other kids picking on Frank and decided to do something nice to make up for it. It was a kind gesture, but a little weird. “You don’t need to do that,” I said to Mr. Specter. “That’s a lot of money for a stone.”

  “Believe me, it’s my pleasure to do business with a budding geologist.”

  Frank admired the money, a smile on his face. “Whoa! This has turned out to be an awesome day. First Grandpa gives me twenty dollars, and now I got this one.”

  “I’m happy it worked out for both of us,” Mr. Specter said.

  “But—” I started to object, but another customer stood behind us, waiting to check out, and Mr. Specter motioned for him to come forward.

  “See you in school tomorrow, Mr. Becker,” he said, dismissing us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As Frank and I walked out of the store, the kid was still talking about what a good day he was having and how great it was to hang out with Uncle Russ. Not exactly a thank-you, but I took it that way anyhow. If it weren’t for me, he’d have been back at the house watching TV all afternoon.

  We headed down the sidewalk toward the frozen custard shop, and when we got there, I saw the place was half filled and that the three punks were sitting up front by the display case, underneath a sign that said: TODAY’S FLAVOR: MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP.

  “Hey, Frank, how’s it going?” Weasel-Face said in this really smart-mouth way. If he’d been my size, I would have been tempted to call him out. I’ll give Frank credit though, he ignored him and kept his gaze on the glass cooler full of the different tubs of frozen custard.

  “I don’t know why you look, you always wind up getting the same thing,” I said.

  Sure enough, five minutes later we were at a table, me with my root beer float and Frank with his double dip chocolate waffle cone. We sat at a table as far away from the three boys as possible, but I kept my eye on them. I know most kids that age are obnoxious, but these three idiots took it to a new level. Backwards-Cap was the definite leader, and the other two followed everything he did. When he laughed (this annoying, donkey-like bray), the other two did too. When people went up to the counter to order, he’d repeat what they said in a mocking way. I wanted to smack the kid. When Backwards-Cap stuck his foot out to trip an old lady with a cane (she saw it and walked around), I was ready to get up and say something, but Frank, reading the intention on my face, said, “Let it go, Russ, just let it go.”

  “What are their names?” I asked.

  He regarded me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?’

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a big scene or report them or anything. I just want to know.” When he didn’t answer I leaned forward, my voice low. “The one who doesn’t know how to wear a baseball cap, what’s his name?” He looked nervously in their direction. “Frank Shrapnel,” I said, poking the table with mock impatience. “I believe I asked you a question.” He grinned. Frank loved it when I used his middle name.

  “That’s Kyle,” he said. “I don’t know the other kids. They’re all a year ahead of me.”

  Kyle. In old books and movies, bullies had names like Sluggo or Scut Farkus. Kyle wasn’t a threatening-sounding name at all. “So what’s Kyle’s last name?”

  “You’re not going to call his house or anything?” He looked over at the three punks, a worried look on his face.

  “No, I swear this is just between us. It won’t go any farther.”

  “It’s Bischmann. Kyle Bischmann.”

  “And he gives you grief about not having a dad.”

  Frank nodded and put his cone up to his mouth to lick away a drip.

  Kyle Bischmann. What kind of insensitive dirtbag torments someone about their missing father? I watched Kyle across the room, laughing his stupid braying laugh, and suddenly I found myself madder than I’ve ever been in my life. At my side, my curled fists pulsed with spasms of barely-contained energy. I seriously wanted to kill the kid. Pictures filled my head—flashes of me pounding on Kyle Bischmann and his moron friends. Another picture came to me too, and this one was even worse: me shooting lightning bolts from my palms into their chests and watching them recoil in pain as their flesh sizzled. I felt my muscles strain like I was lifting weights at the gym. “Look,” I said to Frank, my voice a deep growl I barely recognized, “if Bischboy every does anything to you, anything at all, you let me know and I’ll take care of him for you.”

  Frank’s eyes got wide with delight and he laughed. “Bischboy! That’s really funny, Russ. I’m going to tell everyone at school that you said that.”

  And just like that, I snapped out of it and my anger faded. Kyle turned from a monster who had to be destroyed to a stupid eleven-year-old kid who thought he was hot stuff. I shuddered, thinking how close I’d come to getting up and walloping him across the face. How would that have looked? I outweighed Kyle by fifty pounds. If I’d lost control and hit him unprovoked, who would be the bully then? I probably would have gotten hauled off to jail.

  I shook my head. “He’s just a jerk,” I said to Frank. “He’s got nothing on you.”

  “He comes to my class for math,” Frank said. “He got held back in a few subjects.” We sat for a few minutes without talking. When the frozen custard in his cone was nearly gone, he started nibbling on the edges of his waffle cone. “This is really good.”

  Kyle and his cohorts made a point to walk right past us as they left the place. “Bye, Frankie,” Kyle said.

  Frank didn’t even look up. “Bye, Kyle. See you in math.”

  Kyle looked a little startled, but he didn’t say anything back, just kept going.

  At that moment, I saw Frank with a new admiration. You think you know someone and then you see another side of them and you realize there’s more there than you gave them credit for. “You are one cool little dude,” I said, and his cheeks flushed pink at the praise. He wasn’t such a bad kid. I’d have to start pointing out his positive traits more often.

  We were finishing up when I said, making small talk, “What are you going to do with that twenty dollars you got from Mr. Specter?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe give it to my mom. She comes up short a lot.”

  I’d heard that expression from Carly more than once. She borrowed money from my folks all the time and that was always her excuse. “I’m coming up short this month.” My mom wasn’t all that sympathetic, but my dad was a sucker for her sad stories. She never asked me for money, which was good because I wouldn’t have given her any. “You shouldn’t have to give your mom money,” I said. “Parents give kids money, not the other way around. Grown-ups are supposed to be the responsible ones.”

  “Yeah, I know. She just has problems.” Frank sighed and I saw how her problems sometimes became his problems and how that weighed heavily on him. No wonder he liked coming to our house where he could just be a kid. “Besides, it’s just extra money for a stone I got from the mud on your shoes, and Grandma already paid me two dollars for cleaning the shoes.”

  Wait a minute—I reached over and grabbed his arm. “Let me get this straight. You got that stone out of the bottom of my shoe?” His words triggered something, and my head reeled with the sequence of events that must have occurred for this to have happened. I saw it in a collage of images: me walking at night in a damp field among (apparently) magic light particles; Frank cleaning the bottom of my shoes the next day; him (I now knew) removing a stone from bottom of said shoe and keeping it, and finally, Mr. Specter buying that same stone from Frank. As I was figuring this out, Frank had a worried look on his face like he was afraid t
hat answering my question would get him in trouble. I tried again. “So you’re saying that the stone Mr. Specter bought from you came from my shoe?”

  His head bobbed up and down. “Grandma told me to clean ’em. They were all crusty and gross with mud, and she said she’d give me two dollars if I could get the bottoms spotless. I had to pry a lot of junk out with a butter knife, and then I washed ’em in the sink in the basement. It took me like forever. But I found a cool stone wedged in there, and she said I could keep it for my collection.” His eyes widened. “You’re hurting my arm, Russ.”

  “Sorry.” I released my grip. “What did the stone look like?”

  “I don’t know.” His shoulders came up and he raised his palms. “Like a stone?”

  “Describe it.”

  “Russ, Grandma said I could keep it.” He rubbed his arm.

  “I know, Frank, I’m not mad that you took it. I just need to know what it looked like. Think.”

  “It was sort of round-ish.”

  “How big?”

  “You saw it on the counter.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy talking to Mr. Specter. About how big was it, Frank?”

  His forehead scrunched in thought. “Maybe the size of a nickel?”

  Okay, now we were getting somewhere. “What else?” I asked.

  He looked down at the table, concentrating. “It had these sparkles in it.”

  “Like fool’s gold?” I said.

  “You mean pyrite?”

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t believe he knew the actual word. “Like pyrite.”

  “No, it didn’t have gold on it. The sparkles were inside of it.”

  “Inside of it?”

  He nodded. “It kind of glowed sometimes. Like there was a little, teeny-tiny flashlight inside of it.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I slapped my palm against the tabletop. “You had a stone that glowed all by itself and you didn’t think to mention it to anyone?”

  “It only glowed sometimes,” he said, defensively. “And not really that much. You could barely see it unless it was completely dark.” As if that made a difference.

  I buried my head in my hands. How had this happened? I couldn’t believe we just handed the stone over to Mr. Specter. And how would he have known what it was? Had it started to glow on the counter and I didn’t notice? I could just imagine Jameson’s reaction when I shared this story. He already thought I was mentally challenged. This would confirm it. I got up suddenly, my chair scraping against the flooring. “Come on, Frank. Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?’

  “To get that stone back.”

  I headed down the sidewalk at a fast clip, dodging an old couple and darting around a teenage girl who carried a crying toddler on her hip. Frank was on my heels, jogging along, just barely keeping up. “Wait, Russ!” he called out. “What are you talking about? I can’t get it back. I already sold it to the guy.”

  “He took advantage of a kid,” I said, not slowing. “We need to get it back.”

  The door to Power House Comics jangled as I went through, but I didn’t even stop to hold it open for Frank. The kid was ten. He knew how doors worked. I went straight to the front counter where we’d just checked out less than an hour before. No one was at the register, but I wasn’t going anywhere until we got this thing worked out. Behind the counter, a drape covered a doorway leading to the back room. I said, loudly, “Excuse me, could I get some help?” It was exactly the kind of thing my dad did sometimes. When he did it, I wanted to sink into the carpeting from embarrassment. Right now Frank, standing next to me with the bag of comic books under his arm, looked like he wanted to sink into the carpeting himself.

  “Let’s just go, Russ,” he said, still trying to make everything okay. “I don’t mind that he took advantage of me.”

  I shushed him. “Let me handle this.”

  A dark-haired man with excessively long sideburns came through the curtain. He was about forty or so, with a beer gut covered by a large T-shirt with the Flash logo across the front. His name tag identified him as Kevin Adams, owner of Power House Comics. I’d seen him in here many times before, but didn’t really know him. “Sorry about that,” he said, brushing his hands together. “What can I help you gentlemen with?”

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Specter,” I said, my hand resting on Frank’s fidgety arm.

  “You just missed him,” he said, a bit too cheerfully as far as I was concerned. “Finished working and headed out about ten minutes ago.”

  “Do you know where he went?” I glanced down at my nephew, who seemed relieved that there wouldn’t be a showdown after all.

  Kevin Adams shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say he went home. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said.

  As we walked out of the store, Frank said, “Well, I guess that’s it then. I’ll just keep the money.”

  “You can keep the money,” I said, “but this isn’t over. I’ll see Mr. Specter in school tomorrow and I’ll talk to him then.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mondays tend to be long anyway, since they start off the school week, but this one was the worst. I had science class last hour, and since I’d decided to talk to Mr. Specter afterward, the whole day felt like a countdown. At lunch I saw Mallory across the cafeteria, but I couldn’t catch her eye. I hadn’t yet filled her in on the stone issue, since I no longer trusted phones or computers. Without them, communication was limited to notes and face-to-face contact, which really sucked. Now I knew how people felt during the Dark Ages. I probably wouldn’t be able to talk to her until science class or after school.

  At lunchtime I sat with Mick, Justin and his girlfriend, and a few of her friends. The number of kids at our table had grown over time (freshman year it had just been the three of us), but I didn’t feel like I really knew any of the new ones all that well. Mostly I listened, which served me well today, because I had a lot on my mind.

  The day before, after I’d called my dad to pick us up from the strip mall, Frank and I had waited outside of the custard shop. He leaned against the side of the building and cracked open one of his new comic books, eager to get started. I knew the feeling of having a brand-new story and wanting to get at it right away. I also was glad not to have to talk anymore, so I didn’t take it personally.

  While I lingered on the sidewalk, I happened to glance into the frozen custard shop and saw that the closest table to the window was occupied by an uptight-looking middle-aged woman sitting across from what looked like a teenager in a sweatshirt with the hood up. The woman didn’t look happy. She had a scowl on her face, and from the way she jabbed her finger toward her kid, she was pissed about something. I watched the whole thing out of the corner of my eye, feeling sorry for whoever was on the receiving end of the verbal abuse. If that were me, I’d hide under my hoodie too.

  When the woman got up from the table, the teenager finally raised her head, and when I caught a glimpse of her face, I saw, with a shock, that it was Nadia. She recognized me at the same moment, and a look of understanding passed between us. The angry woman, I realized, had to be the mother who never let her out of her sight.

  Nadia nodded and then slowly raised a hand and pressed it to the window, first her palm and then her outstretched fingers. From my side I could tell exactly where the flesh made contact with the glass. Like handprints made in kindergarten, the impression showed the surface of her hand in perfect clarity. I saw the bands dividing each knuckle and the swoop of a lifeline across her palm. Without even thinking, I put my hand on the other side and we connected through the glass, my hand covering her much smaller one. It was a show of solidarity, a sign we had a secret between us.

  Nadia smiled, the first time I’d ever seen her do so. At the same moment, she lifted her chin and pushed her hood back slightly. It was then I noticed the scarring on one side of her face, the skin rippled like fried bacon. The damaged skin
covered part of her forehead and all of her cheek to the top of her chin. The scars were deeper in color than the rest of her face, making them stand out even more. Something terrible had happened to her, and she wanted me to see. I nodded to let her know I understood, and I did. It was if she’d spoken through the glass. This is who I am. This is why I stay hidden. I didn’t think she showed her face to too many people. I knew I should feel honored that she’d let me into her world, and I was, of course, but it also made me want to know more. Nadia had been attacked on a city bus, Mallory had said. Whatever had happened had left its mark.

  I watched as a tear slowly dripped down her good cheek. She blinked twice before wiping it away with her free hand. And then, in an instant, Nadia dropped her hand from the window and the hood went forward as well, covering everything. Her mother returned with two sundaes, and they sat silently and began to eat them. Nadia never looked in my direction again. When Dad pulled up and Frank and I got in the car, I glanced back to see her still working on her sundae, her head down, the plastic spoon moving back and forth from the cup to her mouth. What normally would be something fun—going out for a treat—felt sad and socially limited. Who wants to go on an outing with your mom when you’re in high school? Especially a mother who criticizes you in public. Nadia’s life was the worst.

  When we got home from the strip mall, Carly was already there, waiting to pick up Frank. My dad had said she was at an enlightenment workshop with her new boyfriend, but she didn’t look enlightened to me. If anything, she looked a little tired and was showing her age more than usual. “Hey there, Russ, how goes it?” She ruffled Frank’s hair. “I hope the kid didn’t give you any trouble.”

  “Never,” I said. “Frank is always great to hang out with.”

  Frank beamed. It took so little to make him happy.

  Carly said, “I’m glad he’s well behaved at his grandparent’s house. Sometimes he’s kind of mouthy to his mother.”