Nickie turned around and walked back the way she’d come, but on the other side of the street this time. She noticed a few things that might be examples of wrongness. By the park, she saw an old man spitting on the sidewalk. Surely that was a wrong thing to do. She also saw an angry little boy pulling a cat’s tail. She told him not to, and he scowled at her. It was wicked to hurt animals, but was it wicked if a six-year-old did it? She wasn’t sure. In an alley beside the boarded-up movie theater, she saw three teenage girls smoking. She wasn’t sure about that one, either. Was it bad to smoke? Or only bad before a certain age? She would ask Mrs. Beeson.
For a few minutes, she followed along behind a group of kids to see if they were being cruel to each other, the way kids sometimes were. She saw some teasing, and a little roughhousing, but nothing much. She looked for Martin in this group, but he wasn’t there.
When she was back where she had started, at the north end of Main Street, she headed downhill. The houses were farther apart here than in Greenhaven’s neighborhood, and smaller. She saw a woman sitting on her front porch, reading the paper. A few children played ball in the street. No one was doing anything wrong, as far as she could tell. Really, Yonwood seemed like a very good town, so much better than dirty, crime-riddled Philadelphia. Following the words of the Prophet must be working.
Farther on, she came to what looked at first like a big, wild vacant lot. A high fence ran alongside it, and beyond the fence grew tall, unkempt trees. After a hundred yards or so, she came to a gravel drive with a mailbox beside it. “H. McCoy, 600 Raven Rd.” was printed in black paint on the mailbox, and a “No Trespassing” sign was nailed to a tree. She recognized the name McCoy. Mrs. Beeson had mentioned this person. He was the one she was worried about, for some reason. She peered up the driveway. At the end, rising from a tangle of trees and rangy shrubs, she could just glimpse the peak of a roof. Tree branches threw shadows across it, and the shadows danced in the wind like long, thin ghosts. Should she go in there and see what H. McCoy was up to? Not today, she thought. Some other time. She walked on.
A block or so farther on, an alley led off Raven Road—really more of a wide path, rutted and unpaved. It went behind the houses on Trillium Street. Curious, Nickie turned that way.
From the alley, she could see into backyards. Most of them were empty and quiet. At one house she heard loud voices through an open window. She paused a moment to listen. The people inside were insulting each other and swearing. Surely that was bad. Did it mean they counted as sinners?
At the next house, a wire fence bordered the alley. Beyond the fence she could see the gnarled bare branches of fruit trees, and beyond those, the back of a house that badly needed a coat of paint. Just inside the fence, so close to the alley that she could have touched it if she’d wanted to, stood a shed made of weatherworn planks.
At this place, there was a lot going on. Two small children charged around among the tree trunks yelling at each other. One of them had a toy truck that the other seemed to want, and he chased his brother wildly, falling down on skids of slippery leaves, shrieking the whole time. A window in the back of the house opened, and an old woman stuck her head out and cried, “You kids quit that!” but the kids paid no attention.
Nickie watched them, peeking out from behind the shed so she wouldn’t be noticed. The shrieking boy finally grabbed the truck away from the other boy, and that boy wailed furiously. Another child appeared, a girl maybe four or five years old, and scolded the boy who was crying. And then a bigger boy, closer to Nickie’s age, burst out the back door. He had curly blond hair, big ears, and a strong, skinny body.
The boy leapt down the porch steps. “Hey, Roddie, lost your truck?” he called. “Want an airplane instead?” And he took hold of the little boy’s hands and whirled him around so that he flew off the ground, squealing with laughter.
“Fly me!” said the other boy, and the big boy did. He flew the girl, too. Then he said, “Now, all of you quit making such a racket. There’s plenty of toys inside. Go on.”
“But I want—” the little boy started to wail.
“Go on,” said the big boy. “And leave me alone.”
Nickie expected that he’d disappear back into the house, but instead he came toward the shed at the end of the yard. She ducked down quickly. He fiddled with the door for a moment—maybe it was locked, she couldn’t see—and then opened it and went inside.
Nickie should probably have left at this point. She had no reason to think this was a trouble spot. But, as usual, curiosity took hold of her. What was the boy doing in this falling-down shed? Because the shed backed up against the fence, and because there was a dusty window in the back of the shed, just the right height for looking into, she might be able to see in without being noticed. She put her eye to the glass.
CHAPTER 12
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Inside the Backyard Shed
It was Sunday morning and for once a sunny day. Grover’s father was in the garage, getting ready to change the oil in the car. His mother had gone to church. Grover finally had some time to himself.
When the little kids had finished their breakfast, he shooed them outside. “Get out there and tear around,” he said. “There’s sun today, but it might be gone tomorrow.” They charged into the backyard, and he sat with Granny Carrie at the kitchen table while she finished her cup of coffee. He contemplated his grandmother. She was wearing a plaid flannel shirt this morning, with an old green sweatshirt over it, and orange sweatpants with thick, fuzzy socks and her duck slippers. Her short white hair was so wispy that her pink scalp showed through.
“Going to sit out on the porch this morning,” she said. “Take in some sun.”
“You’d better wear a hat,” Grover said. “It’s chilly out there.”
“I will,” she said. “I’ve got that nice green-and-yellow one your mother knitted me.”
Grover smiled to himself. His grandmother didn’t care a bit what she looked like. She’d happily wear fifteen different colors, all clashing with each other. She sometimes looked like a heap of bright laundry with a little wrinkly walnut head on top. His mother was always trying to get her to spiff up, but Grover thought she looked fine the way she was: completely different from every other old lady in town.
From outside came five or six piercing shrieks. Granny Carrie rose from the table and hoisted up the window by the back door. “You kids quit that!” she yelled.
More shrieks followed, and then a wail.
“I’ll go deal with them,” Grover said. “I’m going out there anyway.”
He took his jacket from its hook by the back door and went out into the yard. For a few minutes, he fooled around with the kids, and then he shooed them back into the house and went down to his shed. If the kids behaved, and if his father didn’t call him to help with the car, he’d have at least an hour, maybe more, all to himself.
The shed’s door was fastened with a combination lock, its combination known only to him. He twirled it, opened it, and went inside, closing the door behind him.
And as soon as he was in there, he became, as always, a different Grover. Not the funny Grover, not the big brother Grover, but the serious, brilliant, totally focused Grover, pursuing his passion.
A few rusted garden tools still hung on one wall of the shed, but he’d cleaned out all the old broken flowerpots and half-empty boxes of plant food and bags of moldy potting soil that used to be in here. Along one side of the shed he had built a wide shelf, and on the shelf were the two glass tanks, each equipped with lights and sitting on a heating pad, where he kept his prized possessions: his snakes.
He bent down and peered into each tank in turn. “How’re you doing, my beauties?” he murmured. Both snakes were barely visible. They’d burrowed under the dry leaves and bark he’d put in the tanks for shelter. All he could see was a small patch of patterned scales pressed against the glass in one tank and the narrow tip of a tail lying across a twig in the other.
&
nbsp; He checked the temperature in the tanks—86 degrees for one, 80 for the other. Just right. Then he raised the glass top of the tank on the left and set it down on the shelf. He reached inside in a slow, unstartling way, and he took hold of the snake gently, a few inches behind its head, and raised it up into the air.
It curved and whipped, looping itself into an S and then a J and then an S again, flowing like a moving rope between Grover’s hands. It was a gorgeous creature, nearly two feet long. Rings of black and yellow and rusty red alternated all down its slim body. It looked like a beaded belt, except that at the top end was a head with glittering black eyes and a darting tongue like a sliver of black paper.
“Pretty soon,” said Grover, “I’ll have some dinner for you. Maybe tomorrow or the next day. Something delicious.” He held up the snake and looked it in the eye. “Okay?”
This snake’s name was Fang. He’d found it during the summer, sleeping at the base of a rock in the woods. It was the first milk snake he’d captured, and he was very pleased with it. For nearly eight months now, he’d kept it alive and healthy. Fortunately, it didn’t have to be fed very often during the winter. Finding food for it wasn’t easy, and he couldn’t always afford to order from the reptile supply company. Of the dozens of snakes he’d captured in the last three years or so, he’d kept this one the longest. If he couldn’t find food for his snakes, or if they started to look sickly, he always let them go.
Grover was on his way to being a snake expert. Four years ago, a snake had come out of the bushes and crossed the path in front of him as he was walking in the mountains. He had stopped and watched as it slithered along, moving without legs, swimming without water, a creature built all in one line, strange and beautiful and, to him, thrilling rather than frightening. He’d been nine years old at the time. The whole rest of that summer, he’d scrambled around in the woods, looking under rocks and logs and in holes in the ground, hoping to find a snake to take home with him so he could see it up close and watch it live its life. He went to the library and got out books about snakes, and on the library computer he went on the Internet and found endless pages of information and pictures. Before long his head was packed with snake knowledge.
For a while, he talked to everyone about this new passion—his parents, his grandmother, his friend Martin. But his parents were too busy to be very interested, and Martin didn’t understand how he could care about such dirty, slimy things. Only his grandmother really listened. She thought it was a fine idea to collect snakes as long as he didn’t ever show them to her. She said she would scream like a fire engine if any snake got close to her.
So now Grover kept his snakes to himself. He fixed up the shed (his father didn’t have time for gardening anymore, so he didn’t mind), and he used every penny he could earn on snake supplies. So far, he had found, kept, and released thirty-seven snakes. Only two had died in his care. He knew all the kinds of snakes around where he lived. Now his ambitions had grown. He had a plan. All he needed to make it happen was money, and he was working on that. Success was near.
He told this to his snake. “Success is near, Fang,” he said. “Really. No doubt about it. You’ll see.”
With the hand that wasn’t holding Fang, he took the lid off the other tank. This tank held Licorice Whip, his young red belly snake. He’d had it only a few weeks. It was the thickness of a slender cord, about a foot long. He lifted it out. He held the two snakes up, one in each hand, and gazed at them as they wove among his fingers and coiled around his wrists, sliding their cool dry skin against his skin, raising their small, elegant heads and staring back at him, almost as if they were about to speak.
Then suddenly he heard a noise: a soft thump against the wall of the shed, and a rustling. He shifted his gaze to the dusty window just in time to see something move quickly on the other side. Someone was out there. As fast as he could, he set the snakes back in their tanks and put the lids on. Then he dashed out and ran along the fence to the gate that led out to the alley. Up ahead, going around the curve, someone was running, but it was too far away to see who. He didn’t try to give chase. Probably it was Martin, who used to be his friend, trying to catch him doing something forbidden. He didn’t bother to run after him. He went back to the shed.
“What is the matter with that guy?” he said to Fang and Licorice Whip. “Seems like he’s out to get me.”
He took Fang out of his tank, draped him around his shoulders, and started in on the task of cleaning tanks. But after he’d been working twenty minutes or so, he heard footsteps outside. The door of the shed opened, and his father leaned in. “Got an emergency job to do,” he said. “Leaky pipe. I’m going to need your help.”
Grover sighed. He put Fang back in his tank and, after locking up the shed, followed his father back to the house.
CHAPTER 13
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The Perfect Living Room
Nickie had bumped against the shed by accident when her foot slipped on a stone. She’d seen the boy’s face turned toward the window, and she’d dashed away, going up the hill toward town, running until she was sure no one was following her.
What she’d seen in the shed had given her a chill: the boy holding the snakes up in both hands and gazing at them so ardently, the snakes twisting in the dim air, their black tongues flicking in and out. She’d never seen a live snake before. Weren’t most snakes poisonous? Wouldn’t it be dangerous to have snakes in a place where there were little children? She felt a surge of excitement. This might truly be a trouble spot. She reminded herself of Mrs. Beeson’s words: A sense of wrongness. Sometimes you can just feel it. The boy with the snakes definitely gave her a strange, creepy feeling. She walked faster. Mrs. Beeson would be home from church by now. She would go straight to her house. She had a lot to ask her about.
Mrs. Beeson’s doorbell had three bell-like notes—ting, ting, tong. After Nickie rang it, she waited nervously. Maybe you were supposed to have an appointment to talk to Mrs. Beeson.
But the door opened, and there she was. She had no hat on, but she was still in her church outfit, and she had her DATT phone clapped up against her ear. Sausage came trotting up behind her and sniffed at Nickie’s shoes.
“Just a sec, Ralph,” Mrs. Beeson said into the phone. She smiled at Nickie. “Come on in, honey,” she said. “I’ll be off the phone in a jiff.”
Nickie walked in. As she waited, she noticed again the round blue button pinned to Mrs. Beeson’s sweater. What was that little picture on it? It seemed to be a tall, narrow building, like—Of course. It was a tower. And the Prophet’s name was Althea Tower.
“So Ralph,” Mrs. Beeson said into the phone, “you just have to trust me on this. We have to get everyone behind us, and if we need to use unusual measures, well, then we do. These are unusual times.” She paused. “I know, I know, but that’s what she said. I’m sure. Uh-huh. All right. See you later.” She set down her phone and turned to Nickie. “Come right in here,” she said, leading the way into the living room.
Nickie was curious to see if Mrs. Beeson’s house was as perfect on the inside as it was on the outside. It was. Mrs. Beeson had the coziest and neatest living room Nickie had ever seen. A fat white couch sat opposite fat blue armchairs. A coffee table held a plate of cookies and three books, neatly stacked, the top one black with gold letters on the front—probably a holy book of some sort. Three pictures hung on the walls: one was a beautiful scene of a mountain lake, one was a color photograph of Sausage, and one was a photograph of a freckle-faced young man in a soldier’s uniform. “My husband,” Mrs. Beeson said. “Killed twenty-two years ago in the Five Nation War, fighting against our enemies.” A vase of artificial roses stood on the mantel and next to it a box in the shape of a heart. There was no mess at all. No sweaters draped over chair backs, no flopped-open magazines, no shoes left on the floor. No stuff scattered anywhere. It was just the opposite of Greenhaven.
A jingly tune was playing softly, but Nickie couldn’t tell
where it was coming from.
“Mrs. Beeson,” she said. “I need to ask you about some things.”
“Very good!” said Mrs. Beeson. “Have a seat. Help yourself to a cookie.”
Nickie sat on the white couch. Mrs. Beeson was about to sit down across from her when suddenly a soft roar started up, and a little dome-shaped machine rolled into the room. Sausage skittered frantically and jumped onto Mrs. Beeson’s lap.
“Don’t mind the robot vacuum,” said Mrs. Beeson. “Just lift up your feet when it comes close. It makes Sausage a bit nervous, but I think it’s marvelous. I’ve programmed it to do the whole house every other day.”
Nickie watched, fascinated, as the vacuum trundled back and forth across the floor. “It’s cute,” she said. She took a cookie from the plate.
“It is, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Beeson. “I’ve found many of the new gadgets so helpful. Like my little DATT phone. It can take pictures, send e-mail, record TV, get instant news, identify poisonous substances, tell one fingerprint from another…all kinds of useful things. Now if it could just detect wrongdoing!” said Mrs. Beeson, laughing. “What a help that would be.” She scratched Sausage’s ears. “So. You have something to ask me?”
“Yes, I do.” Nickie set down her half-eaten cookie and told Mrs. Beeson about the old shed and the boy with the snakes twining around his arms. “I wasn’t sure if he would count as a sinner or not.”
“Snakes?” said Mrs. Beeson. She lifted a foot as the robot vacuum rolled beside her chair. “Where was this?”
Nickie told her.
“Interesting,” said Mrs. Beeson. “I’ve been reading a great deal of spiritual literature these last months, and I haven’t come across one good word about snakes.”
“Some other things, too, I wondered about,” Nickie said. “Spitting on the sidewalk, and pulling a cat’s tail, and smoking. I wasn’t sure about the cat or the smoking. It was a little boy hurting the cat, and some teenagers in the park smoking.” Mrs. Beeson nodded, frowning. “And some people were yelling in a house on Trillium Street,” Nickie went on. “It sounded like a bad fight, but I didn’t hear what it was about.”