Young Whit and the Shroud of Secrecy

by Phil Lollar

  It was Professor Mangle’s.

  “When did it happen?” Mangle asked, clearly irritated.

  “Some kids came in on Halloween,” the second man said.

  His voice sounded familiar too, Johnny thought, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  “I was all the way upstairs,” the second man continued. “One of the boys was coming up when the crash happened. He ran back down. Lucky for us.”

  “Lucky for him,” Mangle said.

  The second man coughed hoarsely. “Anyway, they all ran off a few minutes later.”

  “I hope they didn’t look inside.”

  “I don’t think they had time—they were too spooked by the coffin. They skedaddled out of here like it was a fire drill,” he said. “I mean, as fast as they could, pushing that wheelchair an’ all.”

  Mangle’s voice changed, more curious now. “Wheelchair? One of them was in a wheelchair?”

  “Yeah. I reckon that’s why they broke through. That trapdoor wasn’t meant to hold any weight.”

  “Steven,” Mangle muttered. “Mein Sohn. I told the boys to stay out of here! The last thing I need is for them to find out about this.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t see nuthin’. An’ what if they did? They couldn’t connect it to you.”

  “Make sure it stays that way,” Mangle commanded. “You moved her out of here, ja?”

  “Yassuh, though I gotta be honest: I’m tired of doing it. It’s hard work moving her without no one seein’. Some boy almost stumbled on her in the forest a few days back. That’s why I moved her here.”

  “Well, choose a better place, man!” Mangle snapped.

  “Ain’t no one gonna find her now. They won’t never find her.” He snorted. “’Sides, even if they did, old Rakia, she can’t exactly give us away now, can she?” He let out an odd, trilling laugh.

  Mangle grunted and walked away. The other man trilled again and then followed Mangle across the floor and up the stairs, muttering as he went.

  Johnny motioned for Emmy to stay still. He wanted to be certain Mangle and his accomplice were gone. Thoughts raced through his mind. Professor Mangle did unnerve him, but the idea that he could be involved in murder seemed unbelievable. Still, he heard what they said about . . .

  Rakia.

  The note. That name was on the note the boy had slipped him on Halloween night. Rakia would have to be moved. And tonight the man with Mangle said he had to move her again. He wondered if . . .

  Yes! He suddenly remembered where he’d heard that trilling laugh before. He heard it from the hobo who came to his house on Halloween! The man spoken of in the note; the man who saw him down by the river!

  The coast seemed clear, so Johnny nudged Emmy, and they both crawled back toward the opening in the floor. He was about to jump out of the hole when he heard something move. He turned on his flashlight in time to witness a chilling sight.

  The lid on the coffin was . . . rising.

  Then, to his shock and horror, a skeletal hand emerged. It reached down and wrote something in the dirt. Johnny pointed his flashlight so he could read it.

  Help . . . him, the light revealed.

  Johnny scarcely breathed. He sat, rigid, unable to move. Then he felt something on his arm—soft at first, then gripping tighter and tighter. He tried crying out, but no sounds came from his mouth. Finally, the hand began to shake him, and his flashlight fell to the ground, breaking the bulb. It was pitch dark again—just him . . . and the thing in the coffin!

  Then, a voice moaned, low and mournful, “Jooohn . . . ny . . . Jooohn . . . ny . . .” It suddenly penetrated the darkness, into his thoughts: “Johnny!”

  It was Emmy. She grabbed the flashlight out of his hand.

  How did it get back there? he wondered.

  She turned it on, illuminating the crawl space as well as her panicked face. “What are you doing?” she asked. “They’re gone!”

  “Yeah . . . upstairs,” he answered, confused.

  “No. Gone gone! They just walked out the front door!” She studied him for a moment. “Are you all right? You’re not having a stroke, are you?”

  “Did you see that?” he blurted.

  “See what? What are you talking about?”

  He pointed to the place in the dirt where the hand had scratched out its message. “That! Right . . . there!”

  The writing was gone.

  Johnny crawled over to the coffin. The dirt beside it was untouched, save for the handprints he and Emmy had tracked into it. The lid sat firmly atop the coffin, unmoved. Perplexed, Johnny screwed up his courage, grabbed the lid, and wrenched it open. Emmy covered her eyes and gasped.

  It was empty—just a dirty silk lining . . . and the single boot sticking through the broken end.

  Whoever Rakia was, she had indeed been moved to another resting place.

  And Johnny intended to find it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Monday morning, Johnny and Emmy walked the long walk to school. Fall was making way for winter, with light swirls of snow wafting down and covering the dormant, brown sod. The thin, white blanket gave a sheen of wonder to a world that had grown darker to Johnny over the past few weeks. They used their trip to brainstorm what they should do in light of everything that had happened Saturday night. “We need to know what we don’t know,” said Johnny. “Like, who Rakia is—”

  “Was,” Emmy interrupted.

  “Was,” he agreed. “I tried to tell Fiona this morning that it isn’t safe to open our home to every person who knocks on the door. She just laughed and said I have a very active imagination and that people who have enough courage to ask for a little help should be welcome anytime.”

  Emmy grimaced. “Unless that person has been moving dead bodies around town.” She sighed. “So, how do you propose we find out more about this Rakia person?”

  “Meet me after school down at the custodial closet,” he said.

  That afternoon, Ben listened patiently as Johnny and Emmy told him everything that had happened at Granville House. He nodded occasionally and raised his right and left eyebrows independently when prompted by an unexpected twist in the narrative. The only part Johnny left out was the skeletal handwriting in the dirt. He wasn’t about to tell anyone that—at least not yet. He’d never experienced anything like it before. More than likely, it was what Fiona had said: He had an active imagination. At least that’s what he kept telling himself.

  When Johnny and Emmy had finished their story, Ben stroked his chin, scratching the gray whiskers.

  “That’s quite the tale,” he said. He cocked his head and peered at Johnny. “You always raise Cain like this, boy? You ain’t been in town but a shake or two and already got a coupla full-blown adventures under your belt.”

  “My stepmother says I have a gift,” Johnny grunted.

  “Smart woman,” Ben agreed.

  “So, what do you think we should do?”

  Ben leaned back in his chair, considered them both for a moment, took a deep breath, and said, “Nuthin’.”

  Johnny and Emmy looked at each other with equal measures of astonishment and disappointment. “Nothing!” Emmy exclaimed. “Nothing at all?”

  “’Less Johnny wants to help me finish a project I been working on.” Ben rose, walked to the back of the room, and pushed out a small, metal-framed wheelchair, with a car battery sitting in a cradle behind it. “I’m makin’ this for Steven. Ran into his mama today. She says he should be comin’ home by week’s end. I’m tryin’ to figure out how to power it electrically. That way he can get around when he wants, without someone pushin’ him along. A boy needs to get on under his own steam.”

  Emmy smiled. “That’s really nice,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll love it. But—”

  “But are you sure I shouldn’t do anything?” Johnny interjected. “I mean, what if that guy is dangerous?”

  “I’ll look into it. You just keep it under your hat for now, all right?”

  “But—�
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  Both of Ben’s eyebrows arched up this time, stopping Johnny midsentence.

  Johnny slowly nodded. “All right.”

  “Now, how about it? You wanna help me work on this thing?” he asked, patting the back of the wheelchair.

  “Sure, but . . . how?”

  Ben peered over the top of his glasses. “Remember the experiment you told me you tried? Storin’ electricity from lightning? I was wonderin’ if you kept after it. Might suggest an alternate recharging option. If the battery will accept that charge, might be we can find a way to use something else to recharge it. These batteries die pretty quick.”

  “I haven’t done anything more with that experiment since Deputy Miller told me to stay off the water tower.”

  “Didn’t you tell me the dangerous work was already done? The wires are still out there, right?”

  Johnny thought for a second. “Yeah.”

  “And you already connected them to the rod on the tower, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Battery still out there?”

  “Unless someone took it.”

  “Then seems to me, all you gotta do is stay on the ground, connect the wires to the battery, and wait for a storm. Am I missin’ somethin’?”

  “Yeah. It’s November. We won’t see any more lightning this year,” Johnny lamented.

  Ben frowned. “That so? . . . I suppose the weather bureau and the Farmer’s Almanac must be wrong then. Wouldn’t be the first time.” He pushed the wheelchair back into the corner.

  “What did they say?” Emmy asked.

  “Big storm’s comin’ this weekend. But Johnny’s probably right. What do they know?”

  Johnny held up his hands. “Hey, I’m game if you think it might help.”

  “Never know until ya try,” Ben noted. “But you do need to get your folks’ permission first. Y’hear?”

  Johnny nodded, not sure how he would accomplish that.

  “All right.” Ben turned to grab his cleaning supplies.

  The kids took that as their signal to leave and began walking to the door. Just then, Johnny remembered something. “Hey, do you know anything about the symbols around town?” he asked.

  “What symbols you talkin’ about?” Ben asked, gathering a bucket and the mop he called Sarepta.

  “One was of two diamonds—you know, like on the playing cards. Another was the number eight with a line down the middle of it.”

  “Oh, you mean the hobo code,” Ben stated flatly, setting down his things.

  “Hobos have a code?” Emmy questioned.

  “Sure they do. A whole lot of ’em. They scratch ’em in fence posts and such to leave notes for others that come behind. Some are warnings, others are about where to get food and such. The two diamonds mean to stay quiet around there. And the number eight with the slash means church folks live about. They’re usually more generous.”

  “We also saw one with two Ws,” Emmy noted.

  “And one more with a hat and pointy brim,” Johnny said.

  “Well, if I got it right, the first one ain’t Ws, they’s teeth. Means a vicious dog lives there. And the hat one I never saw. Can’t say what that means.”

  Emmy suddenly remembered something. “Oh! What about the designs on the coffin?”

  “I forgot about those,” Johnny admitted.

  Ben’s eyebrows rose. “Symbols on the coffin? What symbols?”

  Johnny sketched them out on a piece of paper.

  “Those ain’t hobo code,” Ben said.

  “Are you sure?” asked Emmy.

  “Very. That’s somethin’ completely different. Somethin’ I know too well.”

  Johnny’s brow furrowed. “What?”

  “Symbols from the Underground Railroad.”

  Johnny and Emmy looked at each other, eyes wide. “Wait—the Underground Railroad?” she said. “The one Harriet Tubman worked on?”

  Ben nodded solemnly. “One and the same. Usually you’d find them symbols on quilts hangin’ on the line. Back in the day, before slavery was abolished, they gave runaway slaves directions on the safest way to travel, or warned them about dangers in the area. That first one with all the squares in it is called ‘crossroads.’ So when the runaway slaves saw that, they knew to travel to the main crossroad in Cleveland, Ohio.”

  “That’s so neat!” Emmy squealed.

  “That second pattern is called ‘bow ties.’ Since most slaves was in tattered clothes, they was easy to spot. When they saw this pattern, they knew the owner of the house would give them nice clothes so they could blend in with the free blacks along the way.”

  “But why would the symbols be carved on a coffin lid?” Johnny asked.

  “Folks is clever; that’s why.” Ben set his bucket on the floor and then set Sarepta in the bucket and leaned on her handle. “In those days, it wasn’t unusual for coffins to be made ahead of time, preparing for the inevitable, you see. Undertakers would leave ’em outside, leaned up against a wall to keep water from pooling up inside ’em.” He leaned forward, his voice getting lower and softer. “There was them coffins . . . just standin’ there. People walkin’ by, tryin’ to ignore ’em. But out of the corner of their eyes, they saw ’em. And when they did, all they could think of was that they was boxes of death . . . that one day, they’d be inside a box like that, waitin’ to meet their Maker. But—” he straightened up, and his voice became stronger and a bit proud—“that box they saw weren’t no box of death. It was a box of life. It sat outside like a beacon, pointin’ runaway slaves to freedom.”

  “Pretty smart,” Johnny said, “putting the directions on something no one wanted to look at.”

  “But how did the slaves know to look?” Emmy asked.

  Ben smiled. “Because, child, one of the main leaders of the Underground Railroad was a Quaker man by the name of Levi . . . Levi Coffin.”

  Emmy’s jaw dropped. “We were looking at a piece of history!”

  “An important one, too,” Ben added.

  Johnny was still puzzled. “But that doesn’t explain why the coffin was down in the crawl space. Or who the woman in it was.”

  “I’m not convinced it was a woman,” Ben said.

  “But we heard them say so,” Emmy persisted. “They moved it several times.”

  “And why would they do that?” Ben asked. “Why not just bury it someplace permanent? Or dispose of it someplace where no one would even notice? No, there’s more to this thing than meets the eye.”

  “But they called her by name,” Johnny blurted.

  Ben stiffened. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Sure I did.” He paused, thinking. “Didn’t I?”

  Emmy shook her head. “No. I wondered why, but I figured you had your reasons.”

  Johnny shook his head. Everything going on in his life at the moment had begun to jumble into one big, confusing pool. “I guess I just didn’t think of it.”

  Ben rested Sarepta’s handle against the workbench and fixed his gaze on Johnny. “What was the name?”

  “Rakia. They said her name was Rakia.”

  A shadow moved over Ben’s face, like a cloud passing in front of the sun.

  “Ben, did you know her? Rakia?” Emmy asked.

  He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought. “Maybe,” he admitted, “though if it’s who I think it is, I know her by another name.”

  Johnny and Emmy exchanged glances. “What name?” he asked.

  Ben scowled at him. “Never you mind.”

  “Does it have to do with the Underground Railroad?” Emmy asked gently.

  Ben slowly shook his head, and his voice dropped to a low growl. “No, girl. It has nothin’ to do with that.” Sadness filled Ben’s eyes, and pain formed the lines on his face. “Sometimes,” Ben almost whispered, “folk use holy vessels for unholy purposes.”

  He picked up the bucket and Sarepta and walked out the door.

  Emmy looked at Johnny. “What was that about?” she asked.r />
  “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “But there’s obviously more going on here than we thought. And Ben might be the missing piece of the puzzle.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The storm that the almanac and weather bureau forecasted didn’t come that weekend. Johnny had given up hope that he’d be able to resume his experiment before spring, as winter’s colder air seemed to be beating back any vestiges of autumn’s last gasp.

  What did come that weekend was more bad news.

  “I just heard from Karl. Steve’s gotten worse,” Harold said.

  “But I thought he was getting better,” Johnny said. “That he was supposed to come home this weekend.”

  “What happened?” Fiona asked.

  “Pneumonia. In both lungs,” Harold answered. The way he and Fiona looked at one another told Johnny everything he needed to know: They weren’t sure Steve would live through it.

  “What are the doctors doing for him?” Johnny said.

  “There’s not much they can do, except let it run its course and hope his body is strong enough to fight it off,” Harold replied.

  I have to take the cloth to him, Johnny thought. “Can we visit him?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid not, John,” his father answered. “He’s much too sick. The doctors don’t want anyone unintentionally exposing him to any other sickness.”

  “But I have to see him. Please!”

  “If he gets better, we’ll go. But not now. It’s too dangerous.”

  It’s more dangerous for him if I don’t go, Johnny thought. “But, Dad—”

  “Enough, John!” Harold snapped. “We’ll go once he starts to improve.”

  Johnny paused. “What if he doesn’t improve?”

  Fiona put her hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “We need to pray that he does, love.”

  Over the next few weeks, Steve alternated between improving and being a hair’s breadth away from dying. Every morning, Johnny awoke wondering whether his friend had made it through the night. Each night he had.