A Drop of Hope

by Keith Calabrese

  “I should explain,” Mr. Hought interjected. “My father was a criminal.”

  “Well, yes,” Detective Donan said. “Technically. Ben Mattingly was what we used to call a second-story man. A cat burglar. A very good cat burglar.”

  “And you arrested him?” Ernest guessed.

  Detective Donan chuckled. “Oh, no. Ben was too good for a small-town beat cop like me to ever catch. Lucky for me he never pooped where he ate, if you know what I mean.”

  Ryan and Ernest didn’t.

  “He means that Ben Mattingly never pulled any jobs in Cliffs Donnelly,” Lizzy explained.

  Detective Donan gave her an impressed nod. “Worked out of Chicago mostly. Indianapolis, too.” The old detective was enjoying talking shop again. “He was very cautious.”

  “That was why he had a different last name?” Lizzy guessed.

  “Bingo,” Detective Donan said. “In case anyone came looking for him.”

  Mr. Hought, meanwhile, was poking a spot on the sock monkey, back near the tail.

  “Something wrong?” Mrs. Haemmerle asked.

  “Some of the stuffing must have hardened. Feels like there’s a rock in here.”

  “Give it over,” Detective Donan said, motioning for the stuffed animal. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and examined the sock monkey, paying particular attention to the stitching.

  “Young man—Ryan, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s a lady sitting about thirty feet behind me, knitting a sweater for her granddaughter.”

  “I see her,” Ryan said.

  “Tell her that Stanley would like to borrow her seam ripper.”

  Ryan did as he was told. The grandmother gave him the seam ripper and he delivered it to Detective Donan.

  “What is it?” Mr. Hought asked.

  “This stitching here.” Detective Donan pointed. “It’s not the original.”

  He laid the sock monkey on his lap. Very delicately, he eased apart the stitching, reached inside, and pulled out a large red gem about the diameter of a silver dollar.

  “Well, I’ll be double dipped,” the old man said, amazed.

  Mr. Hought’s knees buckled. “Is that the Holyoke Red Diamond?”

  Detective Donan held it up to the light. “I believe it is.”

  Mrs. Haemmerle and the kids were completely shocked. Mr. Hought and Detective Donan were both surprised and, in a way, not surprised at all.

  “They must have been close,” Detective Donan said.

  “He really … He did it for us,” Mr. Hought said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, boys!” Mrs. Haemmerle exclaimed. “Share it with the class, will you?”

  THE HOLYOKE RED DIAMOND

  “ ‘The Holyoke Red Diamond was stolen in 1952 from the private vault of Chicago dry goods magnate Eustace Holyoke,’ ” Lizzy read from Ernest’s cell phone. They were all back in Detective Donan’s room now. “ ‘At the time of its disappearance it was valued at fourteen million dollars’!”

  Mrs. Haemmerle, speaking for most of them, yelped.

  Lizzy scanned ahead to the end of the article. “It goes on to say that the Holyoke Red Diamond was never recovered.” She looked up at the group. “So for roughly the last six decades, one of the rarest jewels in the world has been hidden inside a sock monkey?”

  Mr. Hought chuckled. “In Eddie Wilmette’s attic. How’s that for a kick in the head?” Then his face clouded. “So, it was Muldoon,” Mr. Hought said in a low voice.

  Detective Donan nodded gravely.

  “Who the heck’s Muldoon?!” Ryan hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, but he could tell by the way the old men were looking at each other that the Holyoke Red Diamond was only half the story.

  “I couldn’t prove it, of course, but the minute I heard about the heist, I knew it was Ben.” The old detective looked at the Holyoke Red Diamond as if he was looking into the past. “The only fence this side of New York City who could move a rock that hot,” he continued, “was a guy out of Chicago named Orson Muldoon.”

  Ryan leaned his head toward Lizzy. “A fence is someone who buys and sells stolen goods,” she said, anticipating the question.

  “Thanks,” Ryan murmured.

  “Though we could never prove it,” Mr. Hought said, “we’ve always suspected that Muldoon double-crossed my dad and killed him to get the diamond.”

  Detective Donan said, “The day before Ben skipped town, a car with Illinois plates was pulled over for speeding on State Route 72 just outside Cliffs Donnelly. Inside were two men.”

  “Muldoon’s men,” Lizzy guessed.

  Detective Donan nodded. “They didn’t have any outstanding warrants, and they were too smart to travel with any weapons in the car. The officer who pulled them over knew the two men were hitters, and that they were looking for Ben. But he didn’t have cause to arrest them.”

  “So he let them go?”

  “He had to.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “You were the officer, weren’t you?”

  Detective Donan had the look of a man who wishes he could have done things differently but deep down knows it still wouldn’t have changed anything.

  “And when you couldn’t arrest the hit men,” Lizzy filled in the blanks, “you did the next best thing. You warned Ben Mattingly.”

  “I did.” Detective Donan shook his head. “I’m guessing Ben’s plan was to take his family and disappear with the diamond.”

  Lizzy, working ahead, gasped. “But by then Mr. Hought had already given the sock monkey, and with it the Holyoke Red Diamond, to Rollo Wilmette.”

  “Wait, you’re saying this poor guy died because he hid the diamond in the wrong stuffed animal?” Ryan said.

  “That,” Detective Donan said slowly, “would not be inaccurate.”

  “Taking the time to get the sock monkey back from the Wilmette house would have been too risky,” Lizzy reasoned gently. “It could have put both the Wilmettes and his own family in danger.”

  “So he went back to Chicago,” Ryan filled in. “To lure the hit men away from his family.”

  “His body was fished out of the Chicago River three days after he skipped town. Bullet to the back of the head.”

  Ernest, who had been silent all this time, finally spoke. “He sacrificed himself to protect his family,” he said quietly.

  “And yours, too, my boy,” Detective Donan added. “After a fashion.”

  “Whatever happened to Muldoon?” Lizzy said.

  “Funny, that,” Detective Donan said. “A few months later he turned up dead as well. Rumor has it he tried to fence a copy of the Holyoke Red Diamond and made some dangerous people pretty angry.”

  “Ben Mattingly gave him a fake before he was killed?” Ryan said.

  “It stands to reason,” Detective Donan said. “Let Muldoon think he’s won. That way he stops looking for it and has no reason to come back to Cliffs Donnelly.”

  Ryan looked over at Mr. Hought, who had retreated from the conversation. To his surprise, the man was smiling.

  “And here I thought I’d wasted a quarter all those years ago,” he said, giving Mrs. Haemmerle a little wink.

  “Thompkins Well,” Mrs. Haemmerle said softly, remembering.

  “What?” Lizzy and Ryan responded in unison.

  “In our day people used to throw coins in the old Thompkins Well and make wishes,” Mrs. Haemmerle explained to the kids.

  “You don’t say,” Ryan said dryly.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Hought,” Lizzy said, “what exactly did you wish for?”

  “Like he said the other day,” Mr. Hought said, cocking his head in Ryan’s direction, “I just wanted to know why.”

  A PRACTICAL PLAN

  Eventually, the conversation returned to the elephant in the room, namely, a stolen gem that, according to Lizzy’s research, was worth more money than a small-market professional football team.


  The group quickly agreed that Mr. Hought and Detective Donan would turn the Holyoke Red Diamond over to the proper authorities. Ernest, Lizzy, and Ryan’s involvement in finding the gem would remain a secret among the six of them.

  “Best to say that Jack here found it among some old things,” Detective Donan reasoned. He looked at Ernest. “No one needs to know it was in your grandad’s house all this time. Your dad’s got a lot on his plate, and he doesn’t need a distraction like this right now.”

  Ernest wasn’t sure how to take that. It bothered him that the adults were making this decision for him and not with him, especially since he was the one who had found the sock monkey in the first place and hand delivered it, along with the Holyoke Red Diamond, right to them.

  What bothered Ernest even more was that he didn’t understand why Detective Donan said what he did about Ernest’s dad.

  But what bothered him most of all was that Ryan and Lizzy seemed to know exactly what the old detective was talking about.

  AARON ROBINETTE IS UNDETERRED

  Aaron Robinette hated Jamie Dahl. He was Aaron’s best friend, but Aaron still hated him. Hated the way he’d humiliated Aaron in front of the whole class, mocked his footage, made them all laugh. The jerk.

  When Aaron got agitated or self-conscious, his body would get restless. If he was sitting, his legs would start bouncing so fast the floor beneath him would vibrate. His arms would tighten and he’d press his palms up against his forehead as hard as he could, leaving red splotches over his eyes.

  Right now he was very agitated. Every muscle in his arms, legs, and neck squeezed as he felt the kind of overpowering frustration that can only be tamed by breaking something large and important. He looked over at his desk and nearly grabbed his computer and threw it on the floor.

  But he didn’t. That computer was insanely expensive. His parents had bought it for him last Christmas in the hopes that shamelessly throwing technology at him might direct his dogged imagination away from monster hunting and a possible college degree in medieval folklore and toward, well, just about anything else.

  It was a beautiful piece of machinery, with an operating system that had enough power to do all kinds of things. Like position a satellite or manage the traffic systems for a major metropolitan area or …

  Run the latest in image-enhancing software.

  THE PRETTY MUCH

  “Your dad’s trying to get a loan from the bank to save the factory,” said Ryan. “That’s what your dad and my dad have been working on the last few weeks. Why they haven’t been around.”

  They were standing outside the retirement home waiting for Mrs. Haemmerle to finish talking to the men. Ernest was feeling that particular brand of irritation where a little bit of knowledge makes you feel dumber than you did when you had no idea what was going on at all.

  “Your dad told you that?” Ernest said.

  “Ernest, the whole town pretty much knows all about it.”

  Ernest felt his cheeks flush, as what had been merely embarrassing a moment ago was now humiliating on a positively thermonuclear scale. The whole town?

  The whole town, of course, except for him.

  He must be the pretty much.

  “So you can see how a news story about a priceless, stolen red diamond in your late grandfather’s attic would look bad,” Lizzy said, putting a comforting arm around Ernest’s shoulder. “People wouldn’t understand why your dad needs the loan if you have rare jewels and who knows what else hidden in your house.”

  Ernest started to protest, but then Mrs. Haemmerle came out of the retirement home. The adults had decided the simplest thing to do would be to stick to the actual story up to the point where Ben Mattingly hid the Holyoke Red Diamond in the sock monkey. But Mr. Hought would leave out the part about giving the sock monkey to Rollo as a birthday present. Instead, he would say that it had been his all along, and that he had recently discovered it buried in an overlooked box of mementos from his late mother’s house. Like the best lies, it was close to the truth. Which meant it was easier to remember, and more likely to withstand scrutiny.

  Ernest sulked the entire ride back from Shady Lanes. Realizing that he was pretty much the only person in town not to know about the precarious state of his own family’s business put him in a bit of a funk.

  But then, once they got back to Ryan’s house, Ernest saw his mother there with his overnight bag and the pot of chili Mrs. Hardy had going on the stove, and remembered about the sleepover. And suddenly his spirits lifted.

  His first sleepover!

  As the kids said goodbye to Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Wilmette, who were going over to Lizzy’s house to help her mom get ready for a work event, Ernest realized something. It had been a great day, a magical day. What else could you call it? A diamond hidden inside a sock monkey, an amazing story with thieves and killers and a father who gave up his own life to save his family—this day had everything.

  Of course the bit about keeping what they did a secret was a downer, but even that was all right because he had friends. Friends who were perfectly content to eat chili and watch action movies with him all evening, and pretended not to notice when he looked away at the scary parts. Friends who didn’t treat him like a baby, friends who had believed in him, and friends, he was now convinced, who were going to stay his friends even though his business with the well was over.

  And it was over. Ernest felt that more powerfully than any feeling he’d had since this all started. As he drifted off to sleep, curled up in a beanbag chair in front of the TV, he knew he’d never go back inside Thompkins Well again. The way it went down today with the sock monkey, the symmetry and closure and the we-will-never-speak-of-this-again conversation they’d had with Mr. Hought and Detective Donan, everything convinced him that this was the big finale.

  He’d fulfilled his grandfather’s legacy.

  THE FALSE CALM

  Later that night, when everyone else was asleep and Ryan was watching one last movie in the recliner, he felt content, for the first time in a long while. That sock monkey, it seemed, had wrapped up the whole Thompkins Well business in a neat little bow.

  From here, Ryan was sure, things would start getting back to normal. But a different normal. Maybe a normal that was just a little better than the one before.

  The movie Ryan was watching—well, only half watching because he was getting pretty sleepy himself—was a thriller about a detective who falls in love with a woman he’s trying to protect from a serial killer terrorizing the city. Ryan had learned from his dad that a common device in these kinds of movies was a plot twist called the false calm, a trick ending whereby the killer is either caught or killed so that the hero will let his guard down, only to then discover that the police arrested the wrong guy or the killer faked his death and that everyone is now in even worse danger than before.

  The movie Ryan was watching happened to employ just such a false calm, but he fell asleep before he got to that part.

  TODAY’S TOP STORY!

  By Monday, the jewel-pooping sock monkey was one of the top news stories in the country. And why not? It had a little bit of everything. It was incredible, it was funny, and it was heartwarming, but with a backstory of suspense, danger, and tragedy.

  Not to mention that “jewel-pooping sock monkey” had a really catchy ring to it.

  Shortly after the federal authorities announced the return of the diamond, the story was picked up nationally, and for a while there, Cliffs Donnelly was kind of big news. Jack Hought and Detective Stanley Donan (Ret.) received a modest reward from the Holyoke Foundation and even appeared on a couple of talk shows, during which Mr. Hought told the story of how he visited Thompkins Well as a boy to ask what had happened to his dad. It was quite the crowd-pleaser.

  Ryan really wished the old man hadn’t done that, but he couldn’t blame the guy. And it didn’t seem to have done any harm.

  Besides, even if Mr. Hought hadn’t said the well was responsible for finding the di
amond, everyone else in Cliffs Donnelly would have assumed as much anyway. By now, across Cliffs Donnelly, from North Side to South, Thompkins Well was all anyone was talking about.

  Like some kid in line at the movies:

  “I went to Thompkins Well because my sister was hanging with these burnouts in the woods and getting in trouble and stuff. And, like, a week later she completely stopped hanging out with them and things are cool again.”

  Or a group of girls out in front of school:

  “My cousin was a Marine and he was in the Nature Preserve during that fire. He put it out with a fire extinguisher he found on the ground and now he’s with the fire department!”

  Or Aaron Robinette:

  “Just you wait, guys … It’s Bigfoot. I’ll show you all!”

  Everyone was talking about the well these days. And not just kids anymore, either. The forgotten old landmark was now the talk of the town. Like a local sports team or an upcoming civic event, it was a conversation starter, something to gossip about in a coffee shop or a hair salon.

  Everywhere he went, it seemed, Ryan couldn’t escape the chatter. He even took to humming loudly in the hallways between classes just to keep from hearing any other kids talk about the wishes they made or were granted. Until, finally, when Ryan seriously considered faking an illness just to stay home and get some peace and quiet, it all seemed to stop. The story about a small-town wishing well and a priceless jewel hidden in a stuffed monkey’s butt had run its course, and people turned their attention to other things.

  And that was more than fine with Ryan. Even Ernest was surprisingly keen to take a step back. It was settled, then.

  Ryan, Ernest, and Lizzy agreed they would not return to Thompkins Well.

  SHIFT CHANGES

  Tommy Bricks’s parents started leaving him home alone when he was six. Some of this was logistical. His dad worked the line at a factory that made kitchen appliances and preferred second shift (four to midnight) so he could hit the bars afterward, sleep during the day, and then leave again before Tommy got home from school. His mom worked first shift but took a lot of overtime, so sometimes she didn’t come home until Tommy had already gone to sleep.