by Richard Peck
It was between the Smythes and the Garrison place that I began to think somebody was tailing me. I stopped, but I didn’t look back. I thought I heard a couple more footfalls, but then they stopped too.
To make things worse, the Garrison place was the biggest pile on the block—with a drive curving around the house and a garage way back behind it with rooms up above for the chauffeur. He took the paper too, so you had to walk way back in there between the hedges.
Usually, this was my favorite part of the route because Old Lady Garrison had this classic Lincoln Continental that stood out there in the drive ready to take her to church. Not that Old Lady Garrison knew she had a classic car. She may have thought it was still new. There were always plenty of rumors about her, which I tended to believe at the time. Like she was off her head and that the chauffeur had to dress her—talk like that. But she had a claret-red, mint-condition, 1947 Lincoln Continental. Usually, I took a break then and just ran my hand over the sweep of the fenders and dreamed about driving it.
Not that morning, though. She could have had a museum-quality, 1930 straight-eight, 145-H.P., boat-tailed Packard Speedster in fire-engine red, and I wouldn’t have given it the time of day.
I started back toward the street. But Old Lady Garrison’s driveway was crushed white rock so it made noisy walking. When I got around to the front of the house, I stopped and looked up and down Prairie Avenue. It was just daylight. As far as I could see in both directions, nobody was around. So, I crunched on out the drive to the sidewalk. Just as I came around the hedge, somebody who was squatting down behind it stood up—about a foot away from my right ear.
It was Flip.
Not that I knew him in the first second, though. I jumped up in the air and came down with a grunt of real terror. Papers went all over the hedge. And the minute I saw who it was, I could have pushed his sassy face in. But he just said, “Thought you might like a little company this morning.”
Then he took the papers for the other side of the street, and we were done in half the time. I didn’t say much. Being Flip, he had to stage something dramatic, like making a sudden appearance. But then, he knew I’d be glad he was there after the first shock wore off. What can you do with a guy like that? I never could handle him.
It was when we were on the way home and the sun was up that Flip gave me the second scare of the day. The Catholics were already out, on their way to seven a.m. Mass at St. Anthony’s. It was a nice, bright Sunday morning. I was even considering telling Flip about my nightmare of OLD BONES AT THE WINDOW with the hope that maybe he might have had a restless night or two himself. Though I doubted it. When he said in his off-handed voice, “I been thinking we might have another look at the woods.”
I tried to let this pass, figuring he was just fooling around to see how chicken I was. But you never let things pass with Flip when he had an idea. And this was a serious one. So I cleared my voice, which at that age was jumping around like crazy anyway. “Why?” I croaked out.
“Well, for one thing, we never made our survey of the roller coaster pilings. Not an accurate one.”
“To hell with the roller coaster,” I said.
“And for another thing,” he said, “I’d like to photograph the site.”
“What site?” I said, as if I didn’t know.
“Where we found the body.”
“I hadn’t heard tell the Police Department had hired you on as official photographer.”
“Very funny,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Dunthorpe’s fuzz probably never even thought to photograph it. They’re not extra bright, you know. They don’t even pick up on what you can learn from TV.”
I’d had this feeling that maybe Flip was holding a grudge against the police for easing us out when it came to their investigations. Flip wasn’t a full-scale—what’s the word?—exhibitionist. But it had crossed my mind he wouldn’t have objected to a little more credit where credit was due. Maybe our pictures in The Morning Call—something like that. It was still eating him. After all, how many kids that age do you know take the trouble to write letters to the editor?
So I knew right then that, sooner or later, he’d have both of us slogging through the spooky woods, reliving the whole thing. I made up my mind I might as well try to play it cool and go through with it. But I thought it was ghoulish, and I told him so.
Of course, he was ready with an answer all thought out that stopped me cold: “It’d only be ghoulish if the body was still there, which it isn’t. Besides, we’re not going to wait till Halloween and go back there at the stroke of midnight or anything. We’re going back in broad daylight and maybe take a few pictures for kind of a souvenir about what happened. Besides, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“Says who?”
“Says anybody who’s been through something like that. If your horse throws you, you’re supposed to get right back on him and ride to prove you can. Otherwise, you might get a complex.”
“Like starting to have nightmares about it?” I said casually, looking the other way.
“Yeah, like that,” Flip said. “I can picture yours now in full color with sound effects.”
Four
It wasn’t more than a week before Flip brought his camera to school one morning. He was carefully stashing it away in his locker before First Period. Then at lunch, he said, “Old Elvan Helligrew’s taking our route this evening.” So I knew this was The Fatal Day.
That afternoon, I dragged my feet considerably the whole length of Marquette Park, trying to get Flip interested in other points of local history. When we came to where the old race track had been, I tossed out the idea that we might plot its course.
“It was supposed to be a half-mile track,” I said, trying to sound like Flip when he’s in one of his teaching moods. “If we could figure out exactly where it was, we could use it for jogging . . . work up to a couple of laps a day or more . . . be good for us . . .” I let my voice tail off. It was useless. Volcanoes suddenly erupting wouldn’t have put Flip off his stride.
But when we came up over the rise where the lake was and my stomach began to get that sickish feeling again, I happened to notice that the door to the tennis clubhouse was standing open. I put on my normal voice as a kind of a last-ditch effort and said, “Hey look, they must be getting the clubhouse opened up for spring. Let’s us go over past there and see if they’ve put the coke machine in yet. My throat’s a little scratchy.” Then I coughed a few dry coughs to prove the point. Flip gave me this knowing look, but we headed around the lake that way and up to the clubhouse. It wasn’t anything more than a delaying action. We both knew it.
But the minute we got to the clubhouse door, we could see they hadn’t even started fixing it up for the season. It was just one big room—dance floor size—and we could look across to the French doors that led out to the porch overlooking the lake. They were bolted shut, and the rest of the windows still had their winter shutters on.
No coke machine yet, either, so I was willing to give up, but Flip said, “Something funny about this. Look, the door’s been forced.” It had. The padlock was still closed, but the hasp was ripped out of the rotten wood on the doorjamb. The bent-up nails were scattered around on the front step.
I wouldn’t even have noticed it. But Flip was giving it his private-eye look. It gave me the creeps. And for a minute there, I’d just as soon have headed on into the woods. But we charged into the clubhouse, you-know-who in the lead.
At first, it looked like nobody had been there since fall. Last year’s unburned newspapers jammed into the big rock fireplace, and all the empty lockers for the tennis players’ gear standing with the doors open. It had a pretty abandoned feeling about it.
Flip was all over the place at once. “Take a look at this,” I heard him say from over in the far corner. He was squatted down in front of the giant roller they use to smooth and level the clay courts. It was propped up in the cobwebby corner. There was a thin crust of dried clay on the roller
part. Somebody had scratched a swastika on it, with a pocketknife, probably. One of those crooked crosses like this , that the Nazis used to use for their emblem. “It’s fresh,” Flip said. “Look, you can see the crumbs from the clay on the floor there. Somebody’s been carving on this recently.” I about half-expected him to take out a clean envelope and sweep the crumbs into it for laboratory analysis.
“So what?” I said. “This whole place is carved up with initials and dirty pictures and all kind of stuff like that.”
“But not with swastikas,” Flip said. “And what about those?” He nodded down at the floor. There, on both sides of the roller, were candles stuck onto the floorboards in their own wax. They were burned almost down to nubs. Black candles. Talk about weird. We just stared at them awhile. Then I muttered, “It’s almost like an altar.”
“Yeah,” Flip said, “like it meant something important to somebody.” He reached into his pocket and fumbled around through all the portable junk he carried with him and came out with a book of matches.
“Let’s forget it,” I said, but he was lighting the candles. When they began to glow, the front of the roller brightened up and the swastika stood out. It was even carved down into the metal part—very careful work with little flourishes that the candlelight picked up. It was like something in an old World War II movie—down in a bunker or something. But it was more than ever like some evil kind of altar.
“I’m getting out of here,” I said.
“Two of us,” Flip said. He stomped on one of the candles, and I stomped on the other one. And we made our exit through the clubhouse door at the same time. It was good to be outside, even with the woods that close.
In a way, The Mysterious Nazi Altar took the edge off my fear of going into the woods. “Bunch of little kids fooling around in the clubhouse,” I said, for an easy explanation.
“No. That’s not anything little kids would think of,” he said. And then, we were in the middle of the woods, almost at The Spot. “I should’ve brought my light meter,” Flip said, acting a little too easygoing, I thought. He was fumbling with the camera case, supposedly deciding on the shutter setting in the little clearing where we’d found the dead man. Neither of us looked right at the spot.
But if we were going to take a picture of it, we were going to have to locate it. In the clearing, you could still see where the cops had tramped all over the leaves and weeds. When we saw there wasn’t really anything else left, we got brave. “Stand right on the spot, right where his feet were,” Flip said. “I’ll take your picture, then you take mine.”
The truth was I couldn’t be sure where the dead man’s feet had been, and I was just as glad. So I picked a spot at random, without looking straight down, and Flip didn’t challenge it. He just snapped the picture. Then we changed places, and I took his.
After that, we didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves. I guess what we actually wanted was to relive a piece of the excitement without the full hair-raising effect of the first time. But instead, we were just standing around in the woods, and it was like nothing had ever happened there. So Flip said, “I hope I remembered to turn the film. Maybe we better take a couple more shots just to be on the safe side.” So we did. It was still a letdown, but I was feeling pretty good anyhow. Flip was probably right about climbing back on the horse, so to speak.
The sun was getting low by then, and I think he and I had the same thought at the same time. Maybe it would give us a charge to hang around the woods as it got dark. We were in the mood for a little mild spooking. So we wandered back to the roller coaster block, the one next to the creek I’d flopped on. Flip chose this to sit down on, which I didn’t particularly appreciate. But he didn’t say anything, and I sat down beside him. We started talking about what they’d probably done with the dead man’s remains. Flip thought the County must have buried him in the graveyard out at the Poor Farm.
I gave out the opinion there wasn’t enough left of him to fill a box; and so, they probably cremated him. Flip thought this was possible, and that got us to wondering if they’d yanked out his gold tooth before they disposed of him. Flip thought it would make a pretty good ornament for a key ring or a watch chain or to hang around your neck on a lanyard. So, as the conversation went on and the sun went down, we managed to give ourselves a little minor thrill or two.
We were getting each other worked up pretty good and decided to tell Dracula. We hadn’t told Dracula in maybe two years. In grade school, that never failed to get to us. Sometime around fourth or fifth grade, I’d slept over at Flip’s house one night. They showed Dracula on the “Creature Feature Midnight Matinee of Horror” on Channel Twelve. The real, original, black-and-white version with the horses pulling the carriage turning into bats and the whole bit.
But it was no good. We’d outgrown it. Instead of scaring each other like in the old days, we kept arguing on the details of the plot. Finally, Flip said, “I guess we might as well head home. I’ve got to see the Nitwits get their dinner.” The Nitwits are Flip’s three younger sisters. His dad’s in the Navy and away most of the time and, when his mom was out playing golf or something, he had to ride herd on the Nitwits. This wasn’t his favorite duty, but I’ll tell you one thing: when he cracked the whip, the Nitwits jumped.
So we got up from the roller coaster block. Flip picked up his camera case and was just about to swing the strap over his shoulder when he froze and whispered, “Jeee-sus!”
Now this was more or less what he’d said when he’d found the dead man. And it scared me so bad I nearly wet my pants. Then I thought he was trying to pull something on me. But he wasn’t.
He was staring at the concrete block we’d been sitting on. And right where our bottoms had been, there it was—another swastika. It was carved just about as carefully as the one in the clubhouse, but deeper and bigger. The concrete was kind of porous, so the detailing wasn’t as good. But it had taken somebody quite a while to do. Painstaking wedge-shaped cuts. It was a wonder we hadn’t noticed it before we sat down.
“Hitler strikes again,” Flip said finally, but his voice was shaky.
“That wasn’t there the other day,” I said. “We’d have seen it.”
“I know.”
Then a kind of hissing, swishing sound made us look up. We could see a flash of white through a break in the trees over by Dreamland Lake. One of the big swans was soaring in an arc up over the water, like something had stirred him up. He was moving his big wings in a slow, easy motion. Like a large albino bat.
“Home,” Flip said. And we hustled out of the woods, very close together.
The other ducks were kind of agitated by the big, swooping swan. They raised an unearthly racket, squawking at each other and swarming out of the water and up on the grassy bank. We were watching them as we walked along the shore path. They were tame as anything and waddled along ahead of us like a bunch of little old men.
So they got to the barricade closing off the condemned footbridge before we did. And they all waddled over something lying right in the middle of the path. At first, it looked like a stick that had fallen there, but when we got up close we saw it was a long, skinny, leather pouch with a little flap at the top fastened shut.
“Now what,” I said, as Flip picked it up.
“I don’t know, but something’s inside it.” He unfastened the flap, and there was the handle of something inside. He let the leather sheath fall. And then he was holding the wickedest-looking knife I’d ever seen. Polished to a high chrome finish and razor-sharp.
If knives are your thing, this one was a beauty. It was like a bayonet, and the handle was perfectly shaped for a good grip. Flip stood there holding it and gawking, completely dumfounded—a look he generally tried to avoid.
“This is worth something,” he said. “Get the leather thing.” We walked off, and he held it away from himself. It was one mean-looking weapon. “It’d cut your damn fingers off if you took hold of it by the blade,” he said.
Up by
the tennis courts, we sat down on the bleachers they have there for tournament time. Flip laid the knife down between us. “Look, we both found it so it’s ours, but I’ll take it home.”
“How’d we come to that decision so quick?” I asked, even though I figured it would naturally stay in Flip’s possession.
“Because if you take it home, your mom will find it. And if I take it home, my mom won’t.” It was as simple as that. My mom notices everything. His mom notices nothing. “Slip it back into the holster or whatever you call that leather thing,” he said, “but be careful.”
Then we made our final discovery of the day. Right on the handle where Flip had been carrying it, there was a design worked into the black wood. It was getting toward evening, so we had to bend over it to see. There was a little wreath of leaves, very tiny and intricate. Inside that there was an eagle, looking to one side, with stiff, straight wings. The eagle was perched on a little round thing like a ball or a circle. And inside the circle—you guessed it—another swastika.
“Is that . . .”
“Yeah, it sure is,” Flip said. “And this one’s the real thing. I mean it’s a real Nazi relic from Germany.” He was standing up and sort of hopping around in excitement. “From World War II or before. Authentic.”
“But what’s this all about?” I said. “There aren’t any such things as Nazis anymore. They lost the war. Besides, there never were any in Dunthorpe. Couldn’t have been.”
“That’s what you said about the roller coaster,” he said, giving me this keen, squint-eyed look, “but there was.”
