It didn’t take him long to figure it out. What it was, was that she felt sorry for him. All of a sudden he knew that that was it. And that made him feel rottener than anything.
So the way it turned out, the hike that was supposed to take his mind off his problems only gave him another one to worry about. Now—besides the fight he might have to have with Garvey, and the fight that Dad and Molly were probably having—there was the fact that Amanda was sorry for him. It was all pretty depressing.
After Amanda left, David started unpacking his backpack. He’d about finished when he heard something in the pantry. Thinking that it must be mice again—like most old houses the Westerly House seemed to attract mice—he tiptoed over to the door. When he jerked it open, there was a squeaking noise—but it wasn’t a mouse.
It was Esther who had squeaked, but Janie was there, too. Still dressed in their party dresses, both Esther and Janie were staring at David with wide eyes and trying to hide something behind their backs.
“Okay, what are you guys up to now?” David said.
“We’re not swiping anything,” Janie said. “We’re just fixing some stuff from the party. See.” She brought a great big greasy-looking paper bag out from behind her. “Show him, Tesser,” she said, and Esther produced a pie pan full of a melted-looking mess with a couple of birthday cake candles sticking out of the top. “See,” Janie said. “Mrs. Calder gave everyone so much cake and ice cream that a lot of people left stuff on their plates. So we decided to keep it from going to waste.”
Esther nodded proudly and pointed to the paper bag. “See.” she said. “We made a doggy bag.”
“No,” Janie shouted. “You idiot, Tesser. I told you! It’s not a doggy bag. It’s for King Tut. It’s a turkey bag.”
“A turkey bag?” David said, grinning.
“Well.” Janie narrowed her eyes and looked at David speculatively. “Look, David. If we tell you a very, very important secret will you promise, absolutely, positively—”
“Don’t tell me,” David said, closing the door. “I can’t handle it.”
Chapter Six
LUCKILY DAVID SLEPT SOUNDLY THAT night. He’d really expected to have a nightmare or two, or at least to lie awake worrying. It must have been the hike and all the fresh air and exercise that helped him go immediately to sleep and stay that way until Rolor started rattling the door of his cage and squawking for his breakfast. David got up and fed the crow and got back in bed.
Watching Rolor eat reminded him of the huge panful of cake and melted ice cream. Had Janie and Esther really fed it to King Tut—or to what? David told himself he didn’t want to know. He had enough problems without having to worry about the kids doing exactly what they’d promised not to—encouraging Blair to take his fantasies seriously. But still, he couldn’t help being a little curious about why they’d brought home all those birthday party leftovers. He kept putting it out of his mind but it kept coming back, and finally he wound up doing a little investigating.
It was right after breakfast and David was on his way to the garage when he heard King Tut gobble. Before he was even sure what was in his mind, David found himself strolling over to the turkey pen. “Hey, Tut,” he said, sticking his finger through the wire mesh. “How’d you like the birthday cake?”
The turkey blinked his round blank eyes and bobbed his head up and down on its long scraggly neck, making himself look even dumber than usual. David grinned. He was glad Molly had saved Tut from the roasting pan. The way things had been going lately, it was nice to have someone in the family who was more of a turkey than he was. He looked around the pen. There was no sign of the pie pan, but then the kids could have taken it away. Or—they might have left it somewhere else in the first place. Like on the bench by the swing tree.
Actually it was an oak, but the kids had always called it “the swing tree.” A rubber tire swing hung from one of its thick branches and a decrepit circular bench went clear around its trunk. The pie pan was on the bench, and it was empty. Empty and very clean, as if it had been washed, or maybe—licked. David was still wondering if a raccoon or maybe Rocky, the barn cat, could have licked it that clean, when right behind him a deep gravelly voice said, “Sixty-three.” It was Mr. Golanski.
Mr. Golanski was an old farmer and handyman who lived on a little ranch about a mile up Fillmore Road. He’d lived in the same house ever since he was born; his father, who’d been a carpenter and woodcarver, had worked for the Westerlys. It was Mr. Golanski who had first told the Stanleys about the poltergeist that, it was said, haunted the Westerly House back in the eighteen nineties. That poltergeist had supposedly been stirred up by Henriette, who was a teenager and lived in the house at the time. Talking to Mr. Golanski was always like coming in on the middle of a conversation—even when he didn’t sneak up behind you first.
“Hi,” David said, when he’d finished almost jumping out of his shoes. “Sixty-three what?”
“Sixty-three years old.”
Mr. Golanski was carrying a gun. A huge heavy-looking gun with two barrels. David stared at it. “Oh,” he said, nodding. It took him a minute to get his mind off the gun, but when he did it occurred to him that maybe Golanski meant it was his birthday. He was starting to say “congratulations,” when he noticed that Golanski was pointing. “Ohhh. You mean the tree?”
Mr. Golanski drew his bushy eyebrows together into a white hedge that ran clear across his face. “The tree,” he said sternly, “is much older than sixty-three. The bench is sixty-three years old. I watched my father build it when I was very young. Where is your father?”
David went to the back door and called, and in a minute Dad came out, followed by the whole family. Golanski was such a weird old character that people tended to be curious, and Janie, David suspected, had some kind of tall tale going about him, because she and the twins never lost an opportunity to stare at him.
Mr. Golanski wouldn’t come inside even though Molly invited him in to have breakfast. “Breakfast?” he said, frowning and looking up at the sun. He didn’t say it was too late to be eating breakfast, but he might as well have. “I want only a moment of your time,” he said to Dad. “There is something you should be told.”
But when Dad asked him what it was, Golanski only frowned his famous bushy frown and jerked his head toward the kids. “In private,” he said. So Dad asked them all to go back in the house, which obviously bugged Molly and made everybody extremely curious—particularly Janie, who left very slowly with her head turned so far around backwards that she looked like an owl. As soon as she got into the kitchen, she ran to the sink, and climbed up on it and stared out the window, as if she thought she could read Mr. Golanski’s lips. The minute Dad came back into the house, everybody pounced.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Dad said. “Stand back. Give me air. I’ll tell—every word—I promise. Mr. Golanski seemed to feel that what he had to say was too frightening for the tender ears of women and children, but he obviously lives in the far distant past. Ears in general have toughened since his heyday, and in this particular family—”
At that point nearly everybody interrupted at once. “Jeff,” Molly began—and then everybody was saying things like, “Okay, okay,” and “Ears—schmears.” And louder than anybody else Janie was yelling, “What did he say? Why did he have a gun? What did he say?”
“All right,” Dad said. “All right. Quiet! That’s better. It seems that Mr. Golanski has been having trouble with thieves. He’s lost a few chickens, and things have been disappearing from his spring house. Milk and cream and ham and once an entire pig carcass. He’s convinced that the culprits are escaped prisoners. It seems some prisoners escaped from a conservation camp somewhere up in the Fillmore Hills, and there was some reason to think they headed this way.”
“Oh yes,” Molly said. “I think I heard something about it on the radio just this morning.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “Some of the kids were talking about it at school. They said a police hel
icopter had been flying around looking for them.”
“For goodness’ sake,” Molly said. “So that’s what they were doing. A helicopter flew over here several times, while you were all at school. Friday morning, I think it was. It kept going back and forth right over the house, or at least that’s what it sounded like.” Molly looked a little worried.
“Escaped prisoners!” Janie’s eyes had their high-frequency gleam and her tone of voice was the one a normal kid would use to say “a free trip to Disneyland” or something. Dad shook his head.
“Now look here, Janie. This not a game. I don’t think for a minute that Mr. Golanski is right about the prisoners hiding out near here, but if they were, it would be a serious and possibly dangerous thing. And just to be on the safe side we’re going to take some precautions. It might be best if there were no more hikes in the hills until this thing is settled. And we’ll all have to be extra careful about keeping everything locked up.”
Esther began to whimper and say she was scared.
“There’s no need to be frightened,” Dad said. “Those prisoners could be clear across the country by now, and they probably are. David, you and Amanda were up in the hills yesterday. You didn’t see any signs of campfires or anything like that, did you? Any signs of someone hanging around?”
David opened his mouth and then closed it. If anyone questioned Pete Garvey about being out in the hills near Golanski’s place, he would know immediately who had told. Dad looked at David questioningly, and he was still opening and closing his mouth when Amanda said, “Well, we did see some dirt bikers, in a big valley not far from Golanski’s place. But I don’t think they’d steal his stuff. Not milk and pigs, anyway.”
“Yeah,” David said, gratefully. “If he was missing stuff like tools and gasoline it would be different, but I don’t think those guys are interested in food.”
Dad grinned. “Well, I certainly don’t understand people who go out and destroy virgin land with those contraptions, but I imagine they’re human. I suspect they get hungry, just like anyone else.”
“Yeah. I guess so,” David said, “but I just don’t think . . .”
“Couldn’t it have been an animal?” Amanda asked.
“I asked Mr. Golanski about that,” Dad said. “It seemed quite possible to me, particularly since the thieves apparently strike at night. But he said the spring house door was latched, and the milk and cream disappeared from pans on a high shelf. The ham and the pig carcass were cut down from where they were hanging from rafters. He’s sure no animal could have done it.”
“Well,” Janie said cheerfully, “if it wasn’t an animal or the dirt bikers, it must have been those escaped convicts. I’ll bet it was escaped convicts. I’ll bet they’re hiding in the woods, and when they get hungry, they just go to someone’s house and steal food. They’re probably going to try to steal our food, too.”
Molly rolled her eyes and said, “Bless you, child. You’re such a comfort.” And Dad said, “Okay, Janie, cool it.”
The discussion ended at that point, but David went on thinking about it, trying to make up his mind whether animals, Garvey and his friends, or escaped convicts were the most likely suspects.
He was still thinking about the spring house mystery that afternoon while he worked at the carpenters’ bench in the garage. It was a neat place to work. The bench itself, with its shelves and drawers and tool pegs, had been built by Mr. Golanski’s father a long time ago, and when the Stanleys bought the house a lot of old tools were still there. David had done quite a bit of building since they’d moved in. Small things mostly, like bird houses and benches, but the tree house was going to be his masterpiece. At the moment he was working on some eight-sided windows for it. He’d sketched out a pattern, measured the boards, mitered the corners, clamped the first piece in the vise and was starting to saw. The saw was old and needed sharpening, so the sawing took a long time. As he worked, David found himself going over the whole thing about the spring house robbers for about the dozenth time.
After considering all the possibilities again, he was beginning to lean toward Garvey and the dirt bikers. He’d really meant it when he told Dad he didn’t think they’d be interested in stealing food, but on second thought he could see how it could have happened. They could have stayed late in the valley riding their bikes, until it got dark and they got hungry. And then, instead of going on home, they could have decided to stay and have a barbecue—with Mr. Golanski providing the pork chops. He wouldn’t put it past them. And it certainly wouldn’t have been very difficult.
David had been to Mr. Golanski’s farm several times, and he remembered the spring house. Dad had asked Mr. Golanski to show it to David and the other kids because it was, Dad said, a relic of the past. Instead of having a refrigerator for his cream and cheese and butter, Mr. Golanski had this little stone house built into the side of a hill where a spring of cold water came out of the ground. Inside, it was always very cool and smelled faintly of milk. As David recalled, the thick heavy door was only fastened by an old-fashioned wooden latch. It would have been a cinch for Pete and his dirt biking friends.
As the saw bit slowly through the hard wood, David was picturing it all in his mind—evening shadows, crouching figures creeping silently across the barnyard, the raspy squeak of the spring house door, the narrow beam of a flashlight playing on Pete Garvey’s wide flat face . . .
“Hey,” somebody said. David looked up, right into the same face, staring in at him from the garage door. For just a fraction of a second he wasn’t sure it was real—as if, by thinking about him, he’d somehow conjured up an imaginary Garvey. But then the face opened its mouth and a familiar voice said, “Hi-ya, Stanley.” It was Pete Garvey in the flesh.
Chapter Seven
GARVEY WAS SMILING. EVEN STANDING as he was with his back to the light, it was clear that the expression on his face was definitely a smile. The chipped tooth gleamed in the front of the mouth, and the lips were curved way up at the corners. Not that it mattered. Garvey always smiled while he was punching people out. “Hi,” David said warily.
“I got a flat tire,” Garvey said.
David hadn’t even noticed the bicycle until then. It looked old and rusty and a lot too little for a guy as huge as Garvey. As he pushed it forward, it made a clunking noise. As Garvey came toward him, David tried to make up his mind whether to run for it or not.
“What are you doing here, Garvey?” Amanda was standing in the entrance to the garage.
Garvey whirled around, swinging the bicycle as if it were light as a feather. “Hi-ya,” he said. “I got a flat tire.”
Amanda walked around Garvey and the bicycle in a wide circle. When she was standing beside David, she said, “Yeah? So what?”
“I was riding to town only my tire went flat. Right out in front of your place. I just came in to borrow a pump. You got a pump?” Garvey’s grin was wider than ever, but something about the way he was talking sounded phony, as if he were reciting lines from a play.
“Not me,” Amanda said. She was giving Garvey the look David called her “Medusa special.” Guaranteed to turn its victim into stone, or at least into a stuttering klutz. An icy voice went with the stare. “Have you got a pump, David?”
“I’ll get it.” Still keeping his eyes on Garvey, David sidled along the bench to where he kept his bicycle stuff. He had started back when Amanda grapped the pump out of his hand and headed toward Garvey. Suddenly David was angry. She was treating him as if he were a helpless baby who had to be protected.
“Hey,” he said, trying to take the pump back. Amanda held the pump up high with one hand and pushed him so hard with the other that he stumbled and almost fell down. She went on, holding the pump over her head.
“Take it easy,” Garvey said. He turned loose of the bike with one hand and tried to move around to the other side, so it would be between him and Amanda. The front wheel began to swivel, and the bike slid sideways. Garvey hopped and stumbled and stepped into
the spokes of the front wheel. When he lifted his foot and shook it, the whole bicycle came, too. Then the other wheel swung around and hit him on the back of the leg, and he stumbled backwards and sat down on the bicycle.
Amanda laughed first. David had been trying not to, but when Amanda started, he couldn’t help himself. But even while he was laughing he was thinking, This is it—now he’s going to murder me, for sure.
Garvey got up slowly and pulled his foot out of the spokes. Then he lifted the bike by the handle bars and held it out in front of him. The spokes in the front wheel looked like a bunch of spaghetti and the rim of the back wheel was obviously crooked. After a while he began to grin.
When Amanda finally stopped laughing, she said she guessed he wouldn’t be needing the pump, and Garvey said no he guessed he wouldn’t, and then he stood around awhile more, still smiling in a strange way and not saying much. After several more very weird moments, he said he guessed he’d better go, and started off down the drive pushing what was left of the bicycle. But a minute later he turned around and came back.
“Hey, Davey,” he said. “Guess I’ll just leave this old wreck here till tomorrow. Maybe I’ll come by after school and try to fix it up. Looks like you got lots of tools and stuff. I’ll come by tomorrow. Okay?”
“Well, okay,” David said uncertainly.
Pete Garvey trudged off down the road. David and Amanda stood at the garage entrance and watched him go.
“I don’t believe it,” Amanda said.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” David said. There was something very phony about the whole thing. The strange stiffness of Garvey’s smile, for instance, and the way he’d talked, like a bad actor reciting lines. And the whole thing about the bicycle. Garvey just wasn’t the bicycle type. A dirt bike or motorcycle, sure, but not a spindly little old rusty one-speed. David went over to where Garvey had left the bike, leaning against the wall. The front tire was flat all right—he hadn’t been lying about that. But then David made a discovery. The back tire was flat, too. Obviously, Garvey was lying when he said he was riding by on his way to town when he just happened to get a flat tire. Unless he’d gotten two at the same time—if you could believe that. David didn’t.
Blair’s Nightmare Page 5
