“Come on,” said Nickie. “You’re making that up.”
“No! I really saw it. A long, skinny line in the sky. He’s doing something weird over there. Maybe he’s sending signals to enemy nations! Or he opens the sky, and aliens and demons ooze through!” Grover wiggled his fingers in a creepy, oozing way.
Nickie just shook her head. With Grover, she didn’t know how to tell the difference between truth and kidding. “I have to go now,” she said. So Grover led her back across the yard and into the house, down the hall among the toddlers, and out onto the front porch, where the grandmother was still sitting on the old couch.
“Going already?” the old woman said.
“I showed her the milk snake,” said Grover.
“No wonder she’s leaving in a hurry.”
“Fed him his dinner,” said Grover.
“It was gruesome,” Nickie said.
“No kidding,” said the grandma. She eyed Nickie with interest. “You going to introduce me to this young lady?” she asked Grover.
“This is my grandmother, Carrie Hartwell,” Grover said to Nickie. “We just call her Granny Carrie.” He turned to his grandmother. “And this is Nickie,” he said.
“Nickie Randolph,” said Nickie. “My great-grandfather lived here. His name was Arthur Green.”
“Ah,” the grandmother said. “He was on the side of the angels.”
Nickie wasn’t sure what this meant, but it sounded all right. She said goodbye and walked back out to the street. Her legs felt shaky and her stomach churned. Was it good, she wondered, to feed a baby mouse to a snake? It wasn’t good for the mouse, but it was for the snake. Was it evil for Grover to do it? She just didn’t know.
CHAPTER 17
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Hoyt McCoy’s Horrible House
Nickie headed back toward Greenhaven by way of Raven Road. She hadn’t really planned to go that way; her mind was on what she’d just seen in Grover’s shed. But when she found herself passing the gravel drive that led back into Hoyt McCoy’s overgrown acres, she hesitated. She thought about what Grover had said—that Hoyt McCoy cracked open the sky. Surely that couldn’t be true. But whatever he’d seen might have been a sign of wickedness. Mrs. Beeson thought there was something strange about this man, that he was probably a trouble spot. And Nickie had promised to help her. So maybe, while she was here, she should check on Hoyt McCoy. She didn’t really want to; even her strong curiosity didn’t extend to creepy isolated houses and people with a whiff of wrongness about them. But if she was going to do her part to root out badness so that goodness could win, she had to be brave.
She gritted her teeth and took a deep, shaky breath. She would just dart in and have a quick look around, hoping to see something that would let her take back a clear report to Mrs. Beeson.
She started up the driveway. Brown, shriveled blackberry vines grew along the edges; weeds sprouted up through the gravel. Tall pine trees on the left cast a spiky line of shadows, and Nickie stayed within these shadows as much as she could. She rounded a curve, and there, up ahead, was the house, a mud-colored two-story building tucked back among great looming oaks and pines, its paint worn off, drifts of old leaves on its peaked roof. She stopped and looked for signs of movement. Three birds shot up from a clump of grass, but other than that, she saw nothing stirring, either outside the house or behind its windows. So, cautiously, she moved forward again.
What was she looking for? She didn’t really know. Something truly awful, like freshly dug graves or human bones? Signs of craziness, like Hoyt McCoy dancing around naked? Disgusting filthiness, like a smelly outhouse or rat-swarmed garbage? She didn’t see anything like that—nothing but a dusty black car parked at the head of the drive. Maybe bad things happened inside that dark, silent house, but she certainly wasn’t going to go close enough to peer in the windows. She would go up to the beginning of the brick path that led to the front door, she decided, and if she didn’t see anything notable by then, she’d leave.
So she crept away from the protective shadow of the trees and tiptoed across the open space in front of the house. She stood at the foot of the path. Her gaze scanned the front door, the windows to the left and right of the front door (heavily curtained), the windows on the second floor (where the blinds were closed), and a window in a gable above them, where—she took a sudden step backward, and her knees went weak—the barrel of a gun pointed at the sky.
And as she stood there, frozen with fear, the gun angled downward until it aimed straight at her. From inside the house, a voice called out, “Stop right there, trespasser, intruder, spy! Don’t move, on pain of dire consequences!”
But Nickie was not going to stand there and get shot. She dashed toward the shadow of the trees as fast as her jelly-like legs would carry her. Any second, she expected to hear a bang and feel the punch of a shot between her shoulder blades. At the edge of the driveway she stumbled and fell, and she lay there for a second, shaking, and looked back at the house. The gun was still pointing downward, but no one was shouting; no one was coming out the front door. So she staggered to her feet again. This time her legs worked, and she ran.
She knew Crystal wouldn’t be home yet. So she ran straight to Mrs. Beeson’s house, leapt up the steps, and rang the doorbell. When Mrs. Beeson answered, Nickie was breathing so hard she could barely speak. “Mrs. Beeson!” she gasped. “That McCoy man tried to shoot me!”
Mrs. Beeson’s eyes grew so wide that the whites showed all the way around. “What? Shoot you!”
Nickie told about the gun pointing out of the window and the voice that had bellowed at her.
“Oh!” Mrs. Beeson grasped Nickie by the arm and pulled her inside. “This is even worse than I thought. I must get the police—must get them out there right now—” She hurried away down the hall, leaving Nickie quivering by the door. In a moment Nickie heard her speaking to someone on the phone. “Raven Road,” she said. “Yes, McCoy. Be careful—he has guns. I’ll meet you out there.”
When she came back, she was pulling on her coat. “We’ll bring him in,” she said. “Don’t worry. You poor, brave little thing.” She gave Nickie a quick, sweet-smelling hug. “I should have known—that feeling I had. Why didn’t I—?” She clasped her hands and took a deep breath. “Slow down, Brenda,” she told herself. “Be calm.”
But Nickie wasn’t calm at all; she was terribly excited. “There’s more!” she said. “The boy with the snakes—he feeds them live baby mice! And that terrorist up in the woods—he saw him! And he told me that Hoyt McCoy cracks the sky open and sends signals to enemy nations!”
Mrs. Beeson snatched her purse from a table by the door. “I have to get out there right away,” she said. “You go back home now and keep yourself safe. Who knows, he might be—But we’ll get him, don’t worry. I’ll come and talk to you when it’s all over.”
Nickie went back to Greenhaven wishing, for once, that Crystal was around so she could tell her about what had happened. But the only sign of Crystal was a note she’d left on the hall table by the phone:
Nickie—
Your mom called. Sounded pretty tired and worried. Another postcard came from your dad. It said:
Dear Nickie and Rachel,
Everything here is going well. We’re working hard and making good progress. I hope both of you are taking excellent care of yourselves.
Love, Dad
P.S. Stayed up till midnight last night reading Shakespeare!
I didn’t know your dad read Shakespeare.
Back by dinnertime—C.
I didn’t know he did, either, Nickie thought. There was something odd about these postcards. She needed to think about them. Was he trying to send a message of some kind? He’d always liked codes and puzzles. He’d explained a lot of different ones to Nickie, and they’d had fun working on them together. Could these postcards be in code?
She went up to the nursery and laid the three postcard messages in a row on the window seat. She studie
d them for a while, but if they were in code, she couldn’t figure it out. So she gave up for the moment and played with Otis for a long time. His happy spirit made her feel better. Everything about him made her feel better, in fact—his damp black nose, the way the wavy hair grew on the top of his head, the five little pads on the bottoms of his feet, even his doggy smell. They played all their favorite games, and Nickie pondered her father’s odd messages, and thoughts of horrible Hoyt McCoy gradually faded from her mind.
CHAPTER 18
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What Grover Saw
Something was going on at Hoyt McCoy’s. Grover, who was out by the street getting the mail just before dinnertime, saw two cars—one of them a police car—streaking down Trillium Street and veering left up Raven Road, and of course he followed to see where they were going. They turned in at Hoyt’s driveway. Obviously they weren’t just stopping for a friendly visit. They were going fast. Their wheels skidded on the driveway’s gravel.
Had Hoyt had a heart attack or something? Had he maybe shot himself in the foot with that rifle of his? Maybe he had shot someone else and they were going in to arrest him. Whatever was happening, Grover had to see it.
He ran up Hoyt’s driveway in the wake of the cars and stepped in among some trees at the side of the drive so he could watch without being seen. Both cars had pulled up in the open space in front of Hoyt’s awful-looking house, and from them sprang Yonwood’s policemen and Mrs. Brenda Beeson. The cops had taken their guns from their holsters and were pointing them at the front door of the house. The chief, Officer Gurney, roared in his chest-deep voice, “Hoyt McCoy! Come out with your hands up! We have you surrounded!”
Actually, they didn’t have him surrounded. They were all in front of the house. But when Gurney said that, a couple of police scurried around to the back. Mrs. Beeson, in her red baseball cap, stood behind the other two. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her nose slightly wrinkled, as if she were sniffing the air, and her eyes fixed like searchlight beams on the front door of the house.
In a moment, the door opened. The tall, stooped figure of Hoyt McCoy appeared. He had on a baggy olive green sweater and black pants, and his shaggy hair stuck together in bunches, as if he hadn’t combed it for several weeks.
“Hands up! Hands up!” yelled Officer Gurney, who must have learned his lines, Grover thought, from watching cop shows on TV.
But Hoyt did not put his hands up. He came out onto his front step and stared at the crowd in his driveway as if he thought he must be having a nightmare. Then he raised one hand, but not in surrender. He pointed a finger straight at Officer Gurney. “Off…my…property!” he shouted. “All of you. Out! What do you think you’re doing here?”
“You’re under arrest!” yelled Officer Gurney, though he didn’t take a step closer to Hoyt. “Attempted murder!”
At this, Hoyt lowered his arm and smiled. Smiled? Grover crept a little closer to make sure. Yes, he was smiling, a strange look on that long, bloodhound face of his. He smiled and shook his head slowly. He came down his front steps and approached Officer Gurney, apparently not worried that he was about to be shot. Gurney raised his other arm and took hold of his gun with both hands, as if a tank or an enraged rhinoceros were charging at him.
“Officer,” said Hoyt, “a mistake has been made, and I see the source of it standing just behind you.” He nodded at Mrs. Beeson, who didn’t move. “For some reason, this lady is determined to hound me. She sends her spies to trespass on my land. Now she accuses me of murder, which is so ludicrous that I can only smile.” He smiled again, a thin, grim smile that had no humor in it.
Mrs. Beeson stepped forward, and Grover stepped forward, too, to hear what she was going to say. It didn’t seem to matter if he came out a little from among the trees; no one was paying any attention to him.
“Attempted murder,” Mrs. Beeson said in a voice that quivered with outrage. “I have always known that you were a bad one. But now we have found you out before you could—”
“Attempted murder of whom, madam?” said Hoyt.
“A child! A little girl who had strayed onto your land and was perfectly innocently gazing at your dreadful—”
“Now, wait just a moment, dear lady,” Hoyt said. His smile vanished. His face grew dark with anger. “This is really too much! Lately my estate has been crawling with prowlers. A boy, a girl, and no doubt others I have not spotted.”
Grover knew who the boy prowler had been. But who was the girl? He didn’t know any girls who would even think of setting foot on Hoyt McCoy’s land.
Hoyt railed on. “Why, a person would like to know? Why? I happen to be intensely busy at the moment—busy with matters of great importance, matters that could alter the world’s future—and yours, madam. And yet you send spies to pester me.” He shook his finger at Mrs. Beeson. “And when I call out at them, when I rightfully demand that they leave the premises, I am accused of attempted murder? It is quite beyond belief.”
All this time, the police remained in a half-crouching position, like runners at the start of a race, ready at any second to leap forward and wrestle Hoyt McCoy to the ground. Hoyt didn’t seem to be alarmed by this. He glared straight past them and fixed his eyes on Mrs. Beeson.
She glared back. “You trained a rifle on a little girl,” said Mrs. Beeson in a breathless, furious voice. “A rifle. She saw it, and she saw you lower it—to point straight at her! She heard you—you threatened her. You—” Here she seemed to run out of both words and breath. Her face was as red as her cap.
Officer Gurney took a bold stride forward. “Come quietly now,” he said to Hoyt. “We’re taking you in.”
But an expression of great amusement slowly spread across Hoyt’s face. “Ah,” he said, ignoring Gurney. “Now I understand. Look up there, ladies and gentlemen.” He pointed upward and backward, over his shoulder. “There’s your murder weapon.”
Grover looked up. So did the cops, and so did Mrs. Beeson. In a gable window above the second story, the barrel of a rifle pointed at the sky. At least, it looked to Grover like a rifle, although it was bigger than the rifle his father had, and its shape was slightly different. Maybe it was actually a shotgun. That would explain why it was pointed at the sky—Hoyt was using it to shoot birds, when he wasn’t shooting trespassers.
“That,” said Hoyt, “is not a gun. That is the telescope with which I scan the skies.” He turned back to glare at Mrs. Beeson again. “And also scan my property for trespassers. I wish to be left alone. But you, Brenda Beeson, send one spy after another. Why? Why? Why cannot a person be left in peace?”
It was an interesting moment. Grover held his breath, waiting to hear what Mrs. Beeson and her men would say. Everyone waited. Mrs. Beeson, too, seemed to be waiting, perhaps for a cue from God. Grover could see her face tightening—eyes narrowing, forehead furrowing. Really, he thought, she ought to be relieved. She ought to be saying, Oh, good, no crime has taken place after all! My mistake! Very sorry!
Instead she told Officer Gurney to take one of his men and go upstairs to make sure that Hoyt McCoy was telling the truth. “And look around as you go,” she added. “In case—you know—there might be—”
“Absolutely,” said Officer Gurney.
“What!” cried Hoyt. “You assume you may come barging into my house without a search warrant?”
“It’s a matter of security,” Officer Gurney said. “In times like these, a threat to security changes the rules.”
“Outrageous,” said Hoyt. “But I won’t take the trouble to stop you. You will find nothing in my house that has the faintest whiff of criminality.”
He went inside with the two men, and they were gone for about fifteen minutes—a very boring fifteen minutes for Grover, who didn’t want to draw attention to himself by walking away. The cold from the ground was seeping up into his feet. Mrs. Beeson got into her car and sat there waiting. She looked cross and huddled, as if she were the suspect about to be taken in. Grover
thought this was rather funny. He didn’t really favor one side over the other in this dispute. He hadn’t enjoyed being yelled at and scared by Hoyt McCoy the day he crossed his property. But he didn’t care much for Mrs. Beeson, either. These days she was seeing something wicked everywhere she looked.
The police came out of the house, finally, and Hoyt stood on his step with his hands on his hips and watched them triumphantly as they got back into their car.
“Your timing was excellent,” he said. “If you’d come tomorrow, you’d not have found me here, as I am about to go away for a few days on a mission of more importance than you can imagine. You might have tried to interfere with my trip, which would have been a very bad decision. As it is, we’ve got this little matter out of the way and I hope never to have the pleasure of your company here again.”
The men weren’t bothering to listen to him. “Weirdest place I’ve ever seen,” Grover heard Officer Gurney say before he slammed the car door. “Messiest, too. The guy’s a nutcase.”
The cars started up their engines and drove off down the driveway. Hoyt stood where he was, watching until both cars had turned onto Raven Road. Grover waited for him to go back inside, but he kept standing there, and finally Grover realized that Hoyt was looking right at him.
“I see my trespasser is back,” Hoyt said. There was no anger in his tone.
“I’m leaving,” said Grover. “I just wanted to see what was going on.”
“Since you’re here,” said Hoyt, “let me tell you something.”
Uh-oh, thought Grover. Now I get yelled at. But he stood his ground. At least no one was shooting at him.
Hoyt came down the steps, stalked over to Grover, and stood right in front of him. There were grease stains on his sweater, Grover noticed, and his pants were unraveling at the cuffs. He smelled like burned toast. “What Lady Brenda doesn’t know,” Hoyt said, “is that she has the wrong information. Heaven is my territory. I know what goes on there. I know what the universe has in store for us.”