“Assignment? It’s the last day of school, for crying out loud,” Lettie called. “The assignment can wait. After all, everyone’s on vacation.”
“That’s right. We just saw Sister Redempta wearing her wading habit down at the river,” Ruthanne yelled.
I poked my head out. “You did?”
“No. But I bet that’d get you down from that tree house in a hurry.” Lettie laughed.
I pulled my head back in, feeling a little foolish. Even if Sister Redempta had a wading habit, there probably was no water in the riverbed. “I’m busy right now.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll come up. You first, Soletta?”
“After you, Ruthanne.”
I was sure they were just teasing me again, until I heard the creak and pull of the rope ladder. I tried to fold the map before they pulled themselves up. They were fast climbers.
“What’re you doing up here?” Ruthanne poked her head up first and scrambled onto the platform.
I slipped the map and keepsakes back into the Lucky Bill box. “Nothing much. What are y’all doing up here? I really don’t need help with that assignment. Nope, I’ll be long gone before Sister Redempta can lasso me with that rope around her waist. Besides, y’all probably have better things to do, like run off to the dime store or something.” I didn’t know why I was being so snippy. I guessed it was because Gideon had taught me not to be anybody’s charity case.
“Well, as a matter of fact, that’s where we just came from,” Lettie said, reaching up for Ruthanne’s hand. With her short curly hair, she looked like the salt girl on the crates, and she carried a red bandana knapsack on her back.
“We brought you something.” She opened the pack and pulled out three lovely sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, three apples, and, my goodness me, three ice-cold Coca-Colas. At the same time, Ruthanne saw me clutching the letters.
“What are you hiding?” She snatched them out of my hand.
“Give them back,” I said.
“Are these letters from your boyfriend?”
My pride welled up like a blister ready to pop. I grabbed the letters. “I know why you’re here. Y’all are the ones hoping to get noticed by the teacher or your parents for doing a good deed to the new girl. Well, I don’t need no corpus works of mercy,” I said, slipping into my new-girl-in-town way of talking. “So y’all can just find someone else to get your extra credit from this summer.”
Seeing the looks on their faces, I almost busted out crying to be so mean.
They looked at each other as if silently agreeing which one would speak to me.
“That’s just fine.” It was Ruthanne. “But I’d like to point out that they’re the corporal works of mercy. You know, doing things like clothe the naked and feed the hungry. And we weren’t doing them in the first place. But I think even Sister Redempta would agree there isn’t one among them says anything about sitting in a tree house with the pigheaded. Isn’t that right, Lettie?”
“That’s right.” Lettie was quietly putting the food and drinks back into the bandana.
“Nor one about running all over town collecting empty pop bottles for trading in to bring Coca-Colas to the ungrateful. We came up here to pay a visit and get acquainted. But it looks like you’ve got your own self to keep you company. Or y’all self or whatever it is you keep saying. Come on, Lettie. Let’s go.”
They both stood.
I wasn’t sure what to say but knew it had better be something good and quick.
“You mean y’all don’t say ‘y’all’?”
They paused; then Ruthanne answered, sounding kind of disgusted. “No, we all don’t say ‘y’all.’ That’s two words. ‘You all.’ You might as well get that straight right now.”
I cleared some dust off the floor with my foot. “Anything else I need to know? For while I’m here, that is?”
Lettie and Ruthanne looked at each other again, probably deciding if they could tolerate me another minute. They must’ve figured they could, because they sat back down and opened their parcel of sandwiches.
“Well,” Lettie said while Ruthanne popped the bottle tops off with the hammer claw, “there’s a river that when it’s in Arkansas, you can say it like that. The Ar-kan-saw River. But once it hits Kansas, it’s called the Ar-kansas River. That’s kind of important.”
“And there’s a woman up the way who sits on her porch and stares. Don’t let her look you in the eye or you’ll turn to stone,” Lettie said, as if that was on the same level of importance as how to pronounce Arkansas.
“And you might want to work on your grammar,” Ruthanne added with a mouthful of egg salad sandwich. “It doesn’t bother us any. Fact is, during the summer we all talk however we want. But come fall, Sister Redempta’s kinda picky when it comes to ‘don’t need nos’ and ‘might couldas.’ And as for that lasso around her waist, it’s not a lasso. It’s a rosary and it’s for praying on.”
I could tell it would take a while to learn the lay of the land. But that was okay. Those girls were real friendly, the Coca-Cola was going down good, and come fall I’d be long gone, I told myself, pushing aside the wobbly feeling I’d been having off and on.
I opened the cigar box. “You ever seen a spy map?” I asked.
Main Street, Manifest
MAY 28, 1936
“An honest-to-goodness spy!” cried Lettie as the three of us crouched behind the wooden Indian in front of the hardware store. “Right here in Manifest! Why, I’ve never heard anything so exciting.”
I kept the mementos hidden away in the cigar box, but showed them the first letter and the spy map. It might’ve been a little selfish of me, but I wanted to read the other letters by myself before letting Lettie and Ruthanne see them. Maybe there would be some mention of Gideon in those.
“The Rattler. That sounds as mysterious as the Shadow.” Lettie took on the deep, dramatic voice everyone knew from the Sunday-night radio broadcast. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”
Ruthanne rolled her eyes.
“In fact,” Lettie continued, “it’s just like that episode a few months ago. A lady, she gets mysterious letters from her dead husband—well, they’re not letters really, they’re more like notes, because they don’t come in the mail, they’re just left under her pillow, and right before she goes insane—”
“Not now, Lettie,” Ruthanne said. “The Rattler, whoever it was, could still be here, spying on us at this very minute.”
“After all this time? The letter was written”—Lettie did the calculating in her head—“eighteen years ago. And I don’t see how this map is going to help us.” She looked over the paper. “It’s just a map of Manifest, or at least Manifest as it was back in 1918. See here, that Matenopoulos Meat closed down forever ago.”
The cousins’ debate continued. Ruthanne said, “So, maybe it’s a map of likely suspects and places the spy might frequent.”
“Maybe he’s dead by now. The Matenopoulos place is on there and Mr. Matenopoulos is dead.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. Come on, let’s scout around.”
As we all got up, I figured Ruthanne had won. And from Lettie’s skipping along beside us, I gathered she didn’t mind.
We looked up and down Main Street, taking in store owners and passersby.
There was the butcher, hanging up a big hunk of meat to cure outside his store. He pulled the fleshy meat hook and wiped it on his already bloody apron. The iceman whacked his spiky tongs into a block of ice and hoisted it out of his truck. The barber shook out his apron and wiped his razor blade clean. Thinking of spies and people going insane made everyone seem a little frightening.
They were like nameless men in a scary nursery rhyme—the butcher, the iceman, and the barber—until Lettie identified them as Mr. Simon, Mr. Pickerton, and Mr. Cooper.
We made our way into and out of a few stores, asking if anyone had heard of the Rattler. No one seemed inclined to shed any light on th
e matter.
“The Rattler could be any one of them,” Lettie breathed. “But I still say the Rattler could be dead and buried by now.”
“Or maybe not,” Ruthanne said with authority. “Look.”
It was the undertaker, all dressed in black, hauling a slab of granite into the Better Days Funeral Parlor.
“Maybe it’s Mr. Underhill,” Ruthanne whispered. “He’s always itching to carve somebody a grave marker. Maybe he even killed a few bodies himself.”
“The letter didn’t say anything about murder. We’re just looking for a spy, right, Abilene?” Lettie asked.
“Yes, but …”
“But what?” Ruthanne asked.
“Well, say there was a spy. What do you think he was spying on?”
Lettie and I looked at Ruthanne. She rolled her eyes and gave a sigh, like she was disgusted to have to explain something so simple. I figured she was just stalling till she could think up an answer.
“There was a war going on, you know,” Ruthanne said.
We kept staring.
“And in wartimes there’s always secrets that need keeping from the enemy.”
Still staring.
“So what makes you think Manifest didn’t have a few secrets of its own that some spy might want to find out about?” Ruthanne asked.
Since Lettie and I couldn’t come up with a better explanation, we shrugged and turned our eyes back to Mr. Underhill, who’d come outside. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and looked up at the cloudless sky.
“Look at him,” Ruthanne said. “He’s sniffing for death in the air.”
A breeze picked up and when Mr. Underhill crossed the street, walking in our direction, I thought for sure he’d pluck one of us for that new grave marker. We backed into an alley and watched as he passed by. He hunched forward and his arms didn’t move as he walked. They just hung stiff by his side.
“Come on,” Ruthanne whispered, and we all three took off after Mr. Underhill. He headed to the edge of town and skirted around the trees near Shady’s place. Lettie stepped on a twig, snapping it in two, and Mr. Underhill turned around. We stayed still in the darkness of a tree until he moved on.
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
“Where else would an undertaker go?” Ruthanne pointed ahead to the wrought iron fence that surrounded hundreds or maybe fifty or so graves. “Come on, there’s an opening on the other side.”
This was one of the universals I had so far avoided. In other places, I’d seen kids who followed their leader like blind mice, right into the carving hands of the farmer’s wife. Being an outsider, I didn’t usually fall under the leader’s spell. But I’d never been on a spy hunt before. So here I was, traipsing after Ruthanne, enjoying the excited, scared feeling that made my spine shiver.
Ruthanne went first, squeezing through the fence where there was a missing iron rod. Then Lettie, then me.
“Over here,” Ruthanne said, crouching behind a tall tombstone. We followed, then waited. And peeked.
Mr. Underhill plodded over to a grassy spot between two graves and stretched his arms between the markers. His fingertips barely brushed the stones on both sides. I’ll be hung if he didn’t lie flat on his back then, like he was ready to die himself. From our hiding spot, we could only see his knees poking up as his long legs butted against another grave marker in front.
He lay there, seeming a little too comfortable. Then he got up and made some notes on a pad of paper and, arms hanging down again, walked out of the cemetery.
We waited for the gate to quit squeaking before we gave up our hiding spot.
“He’s measuring for somebody’s grave,” Lettie said.
Ruthanne looked over the grassy space Mr. Underhill had recently occupied. “The way his legs were bunched up, looks like there’s not enough room for a full-grown adult.” She stretched out her arms, measuring length, as the undertaker had done. Then, with one hand about the same height in the air, she turned real slow. “In fact, I’d say there’s probably just enough room for someone about the size of … one … Soletta Taylor!” She placed her hand on Lettie’s head.
“You stop that right now, Ruthanne McIntyre! Or I’ll tell your mother that you used her colander for catching tadpoles.”
Ruthanne laughed. “Oh, don’t get your knickers in a knot.”
“Let’s go home, Ruthanne,” Lettie said. “I’m thirsty and Mama will be awful upset if she finds out I was clear out in the woods. It must be near midnight.”
“For heaven’s sakes, Lettie, it’s barely dark.”
“Still …” Lettie whined just a little.
“Oh, you’re probably right. Supper will be waiting at my house too,” said Ruthanne.
I hated to see them go. “Maybe we can find a creek to fill our pop bottles,” I suggested.
“There’s nothing more than a trickle within a hundred miles of here. Everyone knows that,” said Ruthanne, kicking up dust as we walked.
“My daddy said he’d heard the drought hadn’t taken hold here like it had in other parts.”
“Bad enough,” she answered, stuffing a wad of grass in her lip like tobacco as we made our way back to Shady’s place.
“Still,” said Lettie, “Uncle Louver says folks around here are lucky. Least there’s underground wells to draw from to keep people watered. He says places not that far west of here are so dry people shrivel up like November leaves and blow all the way to California.”
We started back toward the tree house to get Ruthanne’s pack.
“I’m tired,” Lettie groaned.
“Nice to meet you, Tired. I’m Hungry,” Ruthanne answered, pulling a half-eaten apple from the pack.
Truth was we all seemed to be getting a little tired of the spy hunt and probably would have dropped the whole thing right then if it hadn’t been for what happened next.
When we got back to Shady’s property, we saw that there was a note nailed to the trunk of Fort Treeconderoga. At eye level, right on the knobby bark. Someone didn’t want us to miss it.
“What’s it say?” Lettie asked.
I tore it off the nail and adjusted the paper to read it in the dimming light. There were only four words written on it, each one capitalized. I read it out loud.
“Leave Well Enough Alone.”
It was more jarring than scary. But it was scary too. To think that somebody not only knew we were on the trail of the Rattler but had taken the time to write a note to three girls. What had we stirred up? What was the writer of the note afraid of?
“That means the Rattler is still here,” Ruthanne said, “alive and kicking.” She took a bite of apple.
“How can you eat at a time like this?” Lettie said with a shiver. “He knows we’re looking for him.”
Ruthanne continued munching, pondering the situation. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come right out and asked about the Rattler.”
It was a little late for that revelation, I thought. “What are we going to do now?”
“What are we going to do now?” Lettie repeated. “Aren’t we going to leave well enough alone?”
Ruthanne looked at Lettie like she’d given the wrong answer to two plus two. “Of course we’re not going to leave well enough alone. We’re going to start up our spy hunt again first thing tomorrow.”
I put the note into my pocket for safekeeping. We made plans for Lettie and Ruthanne to come back the next morning and said our goodbyes.
The saloon-church looked warm and inviting with its light glowing through the stained-glass windows. But I wished Gideon was there waiting for me. To say good night to me. I reached for the compass to hold, but it was gone. My heart pounded, and even though I hadn’t moved, I felt like I’d lost my bearings. The compass was my most valued possession and I’d lost it twice in two days! I must have snagged it when I’d squeezed through the cemetery fence.
The cemetery. Now, no human being wants to be in a cemetery at night—no normal one, anyway—but I had to find Gideon’
s compass.
“Ruthanne. Lettie,” I called, hoping they’d go back with me. They were already out of earshot.
I couldn’t ask Shady. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about us following Mr. Underhill into the cemetery in the first place. I didn’t plan to show him the note either. That would surely end our spy hunt. So I did the only thing I could. I turned my feet back toward that cemetery and made them walk, one in front of the other.
The moon was on the rise and shed some light for me to look around by, but also made strange shadows on the tombstones. I searched near the fence but found no compass. I slipped back through it to look. Wandering around the markers, I couldn’t help noticing the dates, wondering if Gideon had known some of these folks while they were still among the living.
Some stones had sweet little verses. Others said something about the person who was six feet under. Some of them spoke volumes about the deceased’s life and times.
HERE LIES JOHN FOSTER—EXEMPLARY HUMANITARIAN,
DISTINGUISHED BUSINESSMAN, CIVIC LEADER,
GENEROUS PHILANTHROPIST,
AND DEVOTED FATHER OF TEN.
And next to John Foster:
HERE LIES MARY FOSTER—WIFE OF JOHN.
The wind was picking up, blowing a warm, dry air over me. I was about to give up my hunt until morning when I heard a faint sound, something akin to church bells beckoning in the distance. I squeezed back through the fence and let the breeze take me just a little farther toward the sound.
I knew I was nearing the gate marked PERDITION, and sure enough, there was what Charlotte had called Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor. That den of iniquity. Preachers used the word iniquity when talking about the strange and wicked. That divining parlor looked to fit the bill.
Wind chimes of all shapes and sizes lined the porch, making their lonely music in the breeze. And hanging among them was my compass, glinting in the moonlight. How it had got there, I couldn’t be sure. But I knew the wind hadn’t carried it. Someone had hung it there.
The house was dark and a rocking chair added an unharmonious sound to the delicate tinkling of the chimes. It creaked back and forth in the dark shadows of the porch. I opened the wrought iron gate, with all its welded forks and pans, and tender-footed my way to the porch. The compass hung far from the stairs, and the porch was too high to reach from the ground. But beside the uneven steps was a large clay pot. Going up onto the porch seemed like it would be asking for trouble, so I scooted the pot over. It was so heavy I could barely move it. I hoped I’d scooted it within reach of the compass.