“Excellent,” said Mrs. Beeson. “We have to love God more than anything else. If you do, then you’ll do fine. You can help us build a shield of goodness.” With another beaming smile, she turned and headed out the door.
“Isn’t this just amazing?” Amanda said when Mrs. Beeson had left. “I was so scared when she came to the door. I mean, she’s a real nice person, but I thought sure she was going to send me to a home. I never thought something like this could happen. Me taking care of the Prophet! Whoo! Do I look all right?”
“You look fine,” said Nickie. “But what about Otis?”
“Oh, Lord, Otis,” Amanda said. “Can you take care of him? He might hurt my chances to get hired. Can you feed him? And take him outside a couple times a day? Just for a little while? Please, please, please?”
And of course Nickie said she would.
As soon as Amanda had gone off with Mrs. Beeson, Nickie found a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote down these words: Sinners. Wrongness. Forces of evil. Shield of goodness. Those were the things to remember. It was so perfect—she could accomplish her Goal #3 by helping to battle the forces of evil and build the shield of goodness. Just the very words made her feel like a warrior. Maybe she should give something up, the way everyone else was. If she did, would she have more love to give to God? She thought probably her love for God was a little weak, since she didn’t know much about him and hadn’t really thought about whether she loved him or not. It was hard to love someone invisible that you’d never met. Giving up something might strengthen her devotion. What could she give up? She’d think about it.
Then she ran up to the nursery to see Otis. She knelt down and held him up by his front paws so that they could look at each other eye to eye. “Otis,” she said, “Amanda had to go away. I’m taking care of you now. Okay?” Otis gazed back at her. His eyes were like shiny deep-brown marbles. He cocked his head, as if trying to make sense of her words.
It was going to be a little tricky, taking care of Otis. She’d have to keep Crystal from coming up to the third floor. And she’d have to feed Otis and take him outside without letting Crystal see him. She hated leaving him all alone in the nursery room with nothing to do but chew things up. Did dogs get depressed from being alone too much? She didn’t want Otis to be depressed. Luckily, it looked as if Crystal had so many errands to do and people to talk to that Nickie could probably be alone at Greenhaven for hours every day.
She pulled Otis onto her lap and hugged him. He wiggled out of her arms—his small blond body was amazingly strong—and then he sort of danced in front of her, his front paws stretched out straight and patting the air. “Woof!” he said, and Nickie instantly understood that woof meant play.
In the closet she found a little brown shoe that must have belonged to a child years ago. “Watch this, Otis!” she cried, and she threw the shoe across the room.
Otis hurled himself after it. He snatched up the shoe and raced back to her. He gave it a shake to make sure it was dead, and then he dropped it and waited, his round brown eyes on hers, shining with expectation.
They played Retrieve the Shoe for a long time, until Otis got distracted by a spider on the floor. Nickie went downstairs for another cup of hot chocolate and got back to find Otis in a squatting position, his back humped and his tail up and a faraway look in his eyes. Just in time, she seized an old magazine, put it under his rear end, and caught what came out before it could stain the rug.
Take him outside twice a day, Amanda had said. She’d forgotten. She found a leash hanging in the closet, hooked it to Otis’s collar, and led him downstairs and out the kitchen door.
While he trotted among the bushes, she looked around. There was a clothesline back here and a concrete terrace bordered by a low stone wall. In the back of the house was a door that probably led to the basement. She tried it, but it was locked.
Once Otis was emptied out, they went back upstairs to the nursery. Nickie wondered if Amanda was having her interview with the Prophet at this very moment. She was so curious about the Prophet. She longed to meet her.
It was almost noon, but Crystal wasn’t back yet, so Nickie went into the next room, one of the rooms crammed with trunks and boxes. Moving aside a stack of old magazines, she opened the biggest, oldest-looking trunk and saw a great jumble of stuff—mostly papers—inside. She scooped up an armful and took it back to the nursery room to look through.
No one had bothered to put any of these things in order, or even to store them neatly so they didn’t get bent and crumpled. There were a lot of old Christmas cards, some faded snapshots of babies, and bunches of ancient bills and report cards and school papers. Toward the bottom of the pile, she found an envelope so old that its edges had come apart. Inside was a photograph on cardboard backing. She had just time to glance at it, and to notice that something about it was odd but she wasn’t sure what, when she saw Crystal’s car pull up outside. Nickie put the photograph back in its envelope. She scooped her piles off the window seat and put them in the toy cabinet, where Otis couldn’t get at them. “Now, you sleep,” she said to Otis. She left the room, closed the door behind her, and crammed some rags under it. Then she raced downstairs.
Crystal was just coming in the front door. She took her coat off and hung it on the coatrack in the hall. “Well, I met the real estate agent,” she said. “Len Caldwell, his name is. Quite nice and helpful. He’s very tall and has a funny little mustache.” She smiled at Nickie. “And what’s been happening here?”
Nickie opened her mouth and then quickly closed it. “Oh, I’ve just been wandering around,” she said. “I love how big and spacious this house is, don’t you?”
“It’s big, all right,” said Crystal. “There is something nice about having space to spread out. Of course, it’s just more space that has to be cleaned.”
Nickie was about to mention the beautiful curving staircase and the view of mountains from the back windows—but just then the phone rang.
Crystal picked it up. “Hello?” she said. “Rachel! How are you?”
It was Nickie’s mother.
“Uh-huh,” said Crystal. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. I know, it’s really hard.”
“I want to talk to her!” Nickie whispered loudly.
“You did?” said Crystal. “What did it say?”
“What did what say?” Nickie said.
“Huh,” said Crystal. “Odd. Here, tell Nickie; she wants to know.”
“Mom!” said Nickie into the phone. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” said her mother’s weary voice. “I got a postcard from your father.”
“You did? What did he say?”
“Not much. I hope he’s all right. I just wish I knew where he was.”
“Read it to me,” Nickie said. “But wait a sec—I need to find a pencil. I want to write it down.”
So her mother read her the postcard, and Nickie wrote down what she said. Then they talked for a while about her mother’s job, about bomb alerts in the city, and about how cold it was. Nickie said how much she loved Greenhaven, and what a terrible mistake it would be to sell it. When they said goodbye, Nickie would have felt sad if she hadn’t had the words of the postcard to study:
Dear Rachel and Nickie,
All is fine here. Work is going well. Wish I could tell you where I am, but it’s strictly forbidden.
My love to you both, Dad
P.S. Three sparrows came to the bird feeder today!
Her mother was right. It didn’t say much. Though it did tell her something new about her father—she hadn’t known he was interested in birds at all.
CHAPTER 7
__________________
The Short Way Home
Grover couldn’t concentrate at school that day. The classrooms were alive with whispers about the terrorist in the woods, and the bloody letter, and what Brenda Beeson said it meant. Even his teacher seemed nervous, Grover thought. She kept glancing out the window, and twice she came up with the wrong answers
to the problems she was explaining.
After school, still more kids surrounded Grover and asked him to describe what he’d seen. He wished he could tell them that the Prophet herself had come to examine the bloody cloth. She was the one they were curious about. But no one had seen her since she’d had her vision—besides the doctor, no one but Mrs. Beeson and her small, devoted group. Grover remembered seeing Althea Tower in the bookshop sometimes before her vision, but she hadn’t been interesting then—just a sort of fluffy-haired woman with rimless glasses and dust on her fingertips from handling used books. She’d always smiled at him when he went in there, but she never said much. She was pale, as he recalled, and wispy, and had a quiet voice.
But now he’d like to get a glimpse of her, to see if her eyes looked scorched and her hair frizzled like electric wires, to see if her face looked blasted, or frozen into astonishment, or whatever look there might be on the face of a person who had been shown a vision by God. If it really was God—Grover didn’t know, and mostly he didn’t care, as long as the results didn’t affect him.
He ended up spending so much time talking to the kids in the schoolyard that he was in danger of getting home late. He was supposed to be home by three-thirty to help his grandmother with the kids; if he got home after his mother did, she’d tell his father, and his father was sure to yell at him. So he decided to do something he rarely did, because it was a bit of a risk: take the short way home.
The short way home was through Hoyt McCoy’s backyard. Actually, backyard was too small a word for it; Hoyt McCoy’s house lay within a large and brambly acreage. He had two or three times more land than most of his neighbors. At the rear part of it, a few slats of the fence had fallen sideways, making a hole big enough for a skinny boy to get through. Grover, holding his schoolbooks close to his chest, was just skinny enough.
Crossing Hoyt’s yard cut a good five minutes off the time it took to get home. Grover knew this because he’d done it a few times before. The only risky part was at the back corner of the property, where the house stood. Here he would be within view of some windows, if anyone happened to be standing by them. But so much overgrown shrubbery grew up the back of the house, and the windows were so coated with dust and grime, that he didn’t think the chance of being seen was very great.
This time, though, he was wrong. As he came up behind the house, staying as close to the fence as he could and trying not to crunch too much on the fallen leaves, an upstairs window flew open. The deep voice of Hoyt McCoy rang out.
“Halt, trespasser! I have you in my sights! Vacate these premises instantly!”
Grover stopped so fast that he dropped his books. He froze, hoping the bushes would hide him. He waited, watching the open window. Did Hoyt mean he had a rifle trained on him? Would he actually shoot it? Grover didn’t know. So he stayed where he was until finally the window closed. Then he waited a little longer, and at last he bent to pick his books up and moved on, staying in the shadows, setting each foot down with great care, until he came to the gravel drive that led out to the street. Then he ran.
Hoyt McCoy was one of Yonwood’s oddities. He’d moved there about ten years ago from a university town somewhere. For a year or so after he’d bought the house, workers from out of town had come every day, and sounds of drilling and sawing and hammering had issued from inside. People thought maybe Hoyt’s family was coming to live with him—but no. Hoyt lived alone. Sometimes he went away for weeks at a time, leaving the gate across his driveway padlocked. When he was at home, he seemed almost never to have visitors, although a few times Grover had seen a dark green sedan turning in at his driveway, in which there were always two men in suits. They were probably tax collectors, Grover thought. It wasn’t likely Hoyt McCoy would have friends. He was tall and gaunt, with caved-in cheeks and dark hollows around his eyes. He walked with his shoulders stooped and his head craned forward, as if he were looking for something to pounce on—and in his way, he did pounce on things. Everything met with his disapproval. On days when Hoyt showed up at the market or the post office or the drugstore, Grover had seen him tut-tutting at loud children, shaking his fist at cars that came too close to him, and scolding clerks for being rude. He also scoffed at everything Mrs. Beeson said about the Prophet’s vision. “Orders from heaven,” he would say, pursing his lips. “Nonsense. She doesn’t know. I’m the expert on heaven, not her. If you want to know about celestial matters, ask me.” But no one ever did ask him, as far as Grover could see. Hardly anyone ever spoke to him at all, if they could help it.
When Grover got home, only a little bit late, he found his grandmother in the living room in her usual spot, the armchair by the heater, with a baby on her lap. All around her, little kids of various ages crawled and toddled, babbled and cried and screeched. The TV was on. A newsman was saying that the president had set a deadline of one week, exactly seven days, for the Phalanx Nations to deactivate their missiles. Otherwise, the United States would have no choice but to—
His grandmother aimed the remote and flicked off the TV. “Heard there’s more trouble in town,” she said.
Grover dumped his books on a side table. “I was the first one there, Granny Carrie,” he said. “I was the one who told Andy.”
“Good for you,” said his grandmother. “On top of things as usual.”
One of Grover’s little brothers whacked his sister with a stuffed animal. The little girl wailed. The baby on his grandmother’s lap started to cry.
This was how it always was at Grover’s house. He had six brothers and sisters, all younger, who created a constant uproar. His father worked as a handyman, and his mother worked at the dress shop, so his grandmother was the one who minded the children. Grover had to mind them, too, when he came home from school. All of this meant he was always short of time—time for homework, and time for other things that were more important to him than homework.
“Look here, Grover,” Granny Carrie said. “I found some good ones for you.” She leaned over and picked up a stack of magazines from the floor. “There’s one that gets you ten thousand dollars. Another one gets you a car, but you could trade that for cash.”
“Great,” said Grover. He took the top magazine and opened it to the page his grandmother had dog-eared. “The Fabulous Dorfberry Sweepstakes!” it said in big red letters. “Hundreds of Prizes! Grand Prize $10,000!” He read the fine print. All you had to do was collect five box tops from Dorfberry’s Cornmeal Products and fill out an entry blank. Easy. His family ate a ton of corn muffins and cornbread. He could collect five box tops in less than a week.
“For this one here,” said Granny Carrie, opening another magazine, “you have to write a paragraph.” She showed it to him. “Why buy Armstrong Pickles?” said the ad. “You tell us! One hundred words or less.” The grand prize was five hundred dollars, which would be more than enough.
“This is good,” said Grover, moving the magazine away from the reaching fingers of his littlest brother. “Thanks. I’ll probably win a whole lot of these and have money left over. I’ll buy you a Cadillac.”
“You better not,” said Granny Carrie. “You can buy me some new slippers. These ones are getting worn out.” She stuck out her feet, on which she was wearing yellow slippers with duck heads on them. They were a little ragged around the edges.
“Okay,” said Grover. He’d be happy to buy his grandmother anything she wanted.
At five-thirty his mother came home, looking tired and carrying a bag of groceries. “Somebody’s lurking around in the woods,” she said, setting the bag down and taking off her coat.
“I know it,” said Grover.
“Don’t you go up there,” she said. “You stay around here for a change.” She started taking boxes and cans from the bag and putting them away.
A little later, Grover’s father came home. He came in the back door, leaving his toolbox on the porch. “Hear about the break-in?” he said.
“Yes,” said everyone.
“Gurney
and his men ought to get up there in the woods and flush that guy out,” said Grover’s father. “Take their rifles with them.”
“Don’t talk about rifles,” said Grover’s mother. “It scares me.”
His father just shrugged. “Serious times call for serious solutions,” he said.
“A shield of goodness is a better protection,” his mother said.
“Fine,” said his father. “You work on being good; I’ll keep the gun loaded.”
“It could be just some poor wandering tramp up there,” said his grandmother.
“Trouble is,” said his father, “we don’t know. He could be a tramp; he could be a guy scoping out bomb sites. Do you want to take the risk?”
Grover noticed a smear of grease on the side of his father’s neck. Probably he’d been doing a plumbing job today. He could do just about anything—plumbing, carpentry, electrical work. He always had a lot of jobs, and he always came home tired and slightly grumpy in the evening.
“I’m going down to the shed,” said Grover. There was still at least half an hour before dinner, and he wanted to use it.
“Now, listen here,” said his father. “You waste a lot of time fooling around in that shed. What about your homework? Don’t tell me you don’t have any.”
“I do, but I can do it later,” Grover said.
“What comes first, getting ready for your future or fiddling with your little hobbies?” Grover’s father put one foot up on a chair and untied his shoe. “If you’re going to do something useful with your life, you’ve got to get started.”
“I am going to do something useful,” Grover said.
“Not the way you’re going, you’re not,” said his father, untying the other shoe and letting it thump to the floor. He started in on the rant Grover had heard a thousand times. “You have to think practical. The world is headed for disaster; I think we can say that for sure. But afterward, assuming the human race survives, there’s going to be a big need for builders, architects, engineers. Study a little harder, and you could be one of them.”