She turned a few pages and read some more:
Clarissa fled down the stone steps to the windswept beach, her raven tresses flowing out behind her. She scanned the empty sands, and when she saw no sign of Blaine, a great cry of anguish escaped her lips. She could not live without him! She would sooner die!
Nickie shut the book. There was no doubt about it: if that was love, she was not in love with Martin or Grover. She could live without either of them perfectly well.
She looked out the window, where the rain was still pelting down. At the end of the block, she noticed someone approaching, wearing a wide-brimmed pink rain hat and carrying a canvas tote bag. When the person came closer, she saw who it was: Mrs. Beeson! How perfect. If she ran fast downstairs, she could catch her and ask her what had happened to horrible Hoyt McCoy.
She didn’t bother to grab an umbrella—she just threw on her jacket and ran out into the rain. Rivers of water streamed through the gutters. All along the street, bare tree branches flailed against house walls and shut-tight windows. She ran to meet Mrs. Beeson, who smiled when she saw Nickie coming.
“Hi!” said Nickie. “I saw you from the window, and I was wondering—”
“I was just thinking of you,” Mrs. Beeson said. She looked a little frazzled around the edges. Her lipstick was slightly crooked, and her ponytail, beneath the rain hat, was damp and drooping. “You’ve been such a help. Walk with me, if you’d like. I’m delivering a few notices.”
“Notices?” said Nickie.
“Yes, urgent ones. I’m getting a little impatient. Here we have such a miraculous chance to save ourselves, and a few people are about to ruin it for everyone. Such selfishness! I have to make them understand. We have a terrorist in the woods! The Crisis gets worse all the time! In three days we might face war!” Mrs. Beeson shook her head at people’s foolishness. “So I’ve decided it’s time to take some drastic action. I’ve done the downhill ones and most of the uphill; only one more to go.” She drew Nickie in next to her, under the umbrella. Her sugary smell enveloped them both.
“What are the notices about?” Nickie asked.
But Mrs. Beeson was already on a different subject. “It was just too bad about Hoyt McCoy,” she said, “wasn’t it? About your mistake, I mean, honey. But I still feel sure that he has something to hide. Don’t you?”
Nickie was puzzled. “I don’t know what happened with Hoyt McCoy,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. Didn’t you arrest him? Did I make a mistake?”
Mrs. Beeson looked at her in surprise. “You didn’t know?” She explained about the police action and the rifle that was really a telescope. “However,” she said, “I’m sure we were right essentially. He just reeks of wrongness. I can feel it, and doing this work makes me trust my feelings more every day. It’s just a matter of catching him in the act, that’s all. But never mind. Here’s the last house.”
Nickie was so stunned by this news about Hoyt McCoy that she could hardly breathe. A telescope! And the police had gone out and aimed guns at him! Because of her.
They had stopped at a brick house with a collapsing woodshed next to it. Mrs. Beeson opened the mailbox. She reached into the canvas bag and took out a blue envelope. In the upper left corner were the words “Urgent: From B. Beeson.” She put it in the mailbox, and they moved on.
Nickie started to ask again what was in the envelopes, but Mrs. Beeson was already talking. “Sometimes I’m sorry this ever happened,” she said. “That vision of Althea’s, and then the instructions afterward. Some parts of it are very hard. The punishment part, for instance.”
“Punishment?” said Nickie.
Mrs. Beeson turned a corner and headed up Fern Street, walking so quickly that Nickie kept getting left behind. “Yes, for people who just won’t cooperate,” Mrs. Beeson said. “We can’t allow that, can we? It would be letting down everyone else in Yonwood.”
“What’s the punishment?” Nickie asked.
But Mrs. Beeson must not have heard her over the splash of the rain. “It’s such a responsibility,” she went on. “I’ve agonized over it, I must admit. Some of the things she says—I don’t know. I hate to think she really means—” She shook her head, staring down at the wet sidewalk. “I just hesitate to—”
Then suddenly she stopped, and a little rush of water flowed off the top of her pink hat onto Nickie’s head. Her voice became strong again. “What am I saying? I hesitate? Just because something is hard? Just because it means making a sacrifice? No, no, no. That’s what faith is, isn’t it? Believing even when you don’t understand.”
Nickie looked up at her. She was gazing at the sky, her eyes shining, paying no attention to the rain falling on her face. “It is?” Nickie said.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Beeson. “It is.” And with that, she hurried away.
Back at Greenhaven, Nickie went upstairs, passing some men who were polishing the floors with a roaring machine. Mrs. Beeson, she thought, seemed more fired up than ever, like an engine revved to a higher level. Nickie had the feeling something was going to happen.
In the nursery, Otis greeted her energetically. “Oty-Oty-Otis!” she cried. She rolled him over and scratched his pink tummy, and he paddled his feet and stretched his head out so she could scratch his throat, too. “You are a darling, Otis,” she said. She lifted him up onto the window seat, and she turned on the lamp. As the rain pounded down outside, she started in again on the stack of papers she’d taken from the big trunk.
She found some letters written to “Mommy and Daddy” from a girl at summer camp in 1955, and an article cut from a newspaper’s social pages about an elegant birthday party held at Greenhaven in 1940. After setting aside still more bent postcards and ancient Christmas cards and faded photographs, she came upon a fragile old envelope with a strange-looking letter inside that she thought at first was just a page of crazy scribbling. But when she looked at it closely, she could see that it was writing after all. It was a sort of double writing. The letter writer (someone named Elizabeth) had written on the page in the usual way and then had turned the paper and written right across what she’d written before! The result looked totally unreadable—like two barbed-wire fences laid on top of each other. But she found that if she held the paper in a certain way, slightly tipped, the writing going one direction faded into the background, and the writing going the other direction became clear.
The letter was dated January 4, 1919. Most of it wasn’t really worth the trouble it took to read. Elizabeth wrote about ordinary things: visitors who’d arrived, a party, new clothes, a new horse. One bit was intriguing, though: “I hope your dear mother is not so terribly sad as she was. I see as I write this that it’s been a year today since the fever took darling baby Frederick. Such a great sorrow! But time must have healed her a little by now.”
Nickie imagined the mother, young and beautiful and wearing one of those long, slender dresses she’d seen in the photographs, sitting in anguish at the bedside of her baby, not able to give him the right medicine because it hadn’t been invented yet. It would be dreadful to watch your baby die. No wonder she was still sad a year later.
She decided to keep this letter because of the strange way it was written. She set it on the shelf with the picture of the twins.
It was time to meet Crystal for dinner. Nickie walked toward downtown. Overhead, she heard the fighter jets again, roaring across the sky, above the clouds. She shivered, thinking of the president’s deadline. Only three days left.
The whole town had a gloomy, closed-in look tonight. Nearly all the houses were dark, their blinds and curtains drawn. A small house on Birch Street had lighted windows, though, and as Nickie passed she saw a police car draw up in front of it. Good, she thought. They’re going to make those people follow the rules.
When she got to the Cozy Corner and pushed open the door, warm food-scented air greeted her. The restaurant was dim because its lights were off, but candles on each table made it seem cozy anyhow. She spotte
d Crystal right away: she was sitting with her back to Nickie, at a table beside the window, and across from her sat a tall man with a little mustache. It must be Len, the real estate agent. Why was he here? Crystal hadn’t said she was meeting Len for dinner. She’d said she and Nickie would have dinner together and Nickie would tell about her adventures. Not that she had any adventures she wanted to tell about.
Len saw her standing there. He said something to Crystal, and she turned around and called, “Nickie! Here we are!”
When Nickie sat down, Crystal said, “I talked to your mother today. She got a card from your father. Didn’t say where he was or what he was doing, but he said he might have a surprise for her pretty soon.”
“He must be coming home!” Nickie said. “Oh, I hope he is.” She missed her father with a terrible ache all of a sudden. He called her his chickadee and made paper airplanes for her. She wished he were here right now.
She wanted to ask if her mother had said anything else, but Crystal had moved on to another subject. “We’ve been planning,” she said. “We’re thinking this Saturday for the open house.”
“Crossing our fingers for good weather,” said Len, grinning, and holding up two sets of crossed fingers and wagging them at Nickie.
“That means a lot of work has to get done during the next three days,” said Crystal. She sounded quite cheerful about it. She took her notebook out of her purse, and she and Len started in on still another to-do list as if it were the most fun thing in the world.
Nickie ordered her soup and stared out the window. The last of the sunlight edged the top of the mountain in gold. Someone in a “Don’t Do It!” T-shirt walked by, and someone else with a cell phone clapped to her ear. Across the street, a black car pulled into the gas station. Hoyt McCoy got out of it. Just the sight of him made Nickie feel guilty. She watched as he filled up his gas tank, and she was glad when he drove off, heading down the road that led to the highway.
Dinner took forever. Crystal’s to-do list got longer and longer, and every item had to be discussed in tedious detail. Now and then Nickie commented on something, but no one paid attention to her. She was just about to say she was going back to Greenhaven when there was a loud tap on the window next to her. Startled, she turned. Outside stood Grover, his eyes round and worried-looking.
“Who’s that?” said Crystal.
“The handyman’s son,” Nickie said. “I sort of know him.” She laughed, thinking he was joking around as usual. But instead of breaking into a smile or a maniac face, Grover shook his head and beckoned to her. His mouth moved, making exaggerated words: “Come out.” Nickie’s smile froze on her face. What was wrong?
She stood up from the table. “I have to go ask him something,” she said, and before Crystal and Len could say a word, she dashed out the door and hurried after Grover.
CHAPTER 20
__________________
Orders
He was waiting for her a few steps farther up the block, outside a shoe store.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why were you looking at me like that?”
“Something bad has happened,” he said. “You know my snakes?”
She nodded.
“They told me I have to get rid of them.”
“What? Who told you?”
“Brenda Beeson. I went home for lunch and there was a note for me in the mailbox. It said snakes are touched with evil and it isn’t good to keep them and I have to get rid of them.”
“Oh,” said Nickie, with a shock of dismay.
“Someone must have told her,” Grover said. “I think I know who: my so-called friend Martin.”
Nickie didn’t answer. She stared at a man taking the display tables of on-sale shoes inside for the night. She didn’t want to meet Grover’s eyes.
“He was lurking around outside my shed a few days ago,” Grover went on. “Someone was, anyway. He ran away before I could see who it was.” He scowled. “I don’t want to get rid of my snakes.”
Nickie felt a sickening dizziness. She couldn’t remember, all of a sudden, whose side she was on. Was she God’s helper or Grover’s friend? Her mind went numb. She didn’t know what to say.
“I had to tell someone,” Grover said. “I saw you in there, so…” He shrugged, looking at her curiously, probably wondering why she was standing there like a dummy.
Without her even wanting it to, the truth pushed its way out of her. “It wasn’t a he,” she said, looking down at the sidewalk.
“What? Who wasn’t?”
“It was me. Outside your shed. It was me who told her about the snakes.”
Grover’s mouth dropped open. “You? You?”
“I’ve been helping her,” Nickie said. “Looking for things that are bad, you know, helping her root them out. I didn’t know if keeping snakes was bad. I just asked her about it. That’s all I did.”
“Why are you helping her?” Grover said. He flung his hands out and looked at her with an “I can’t believe this” expression.
“Because I want to fight against evil,” Nickie said. “Find trouble spots. Help keep everything on the side of good, so we’ll be safe.”
“You know what they’re going to do if I don’t get rid of my snakes?” Grover said.
“What?”
“Put one of those bracelet things on me. Hah!” he cried out suddenly. A woman passing by gave him a startled look. “Let ’em try it. They’re never gonna touch me.”
“What bracelet things?” Nickie asked.
“You don’t know about them?” Grover circled his wrist with his thumb and forefinger. “They hum. They go MMMMmmmm-MMMMmmmm. Some little nonstop battery thing powers them. You can’t get them off, even with a hammer or a hacksaw, because they’re made of something incredibly hard. Anybody they say is a sinner gets one. Nobody can talk to a person with a bracelet, and they won’t take it off till you either quit sinning or leave.”
“Leave?”
“Leave town. Move somewhere else.”
“That must be what I’ve heard, then,” Nickie said. “Twice I heard it.”
“There’s three or four people who have them right now. They don’t come out much. They don’t want to be seen. Jonathan Small has one. So does Ricky Platt.”
“What did they do wrong?”
“I don’t know about Ricky, but Jonathan sings,” said Grover. “No one is supposed to, since the Prophet said ‘No singing.’ But he sings these loud show tunes in the shower every morning. His neighbors heard him, and the cops came and snapped the bracelet on him. He said he wouldn’t quit singing, but I think he’s about ready to change his mind. That bracelet thing drives a person crazy.” He twisted his lips in a disgusted way. “A whole lot of people got these letters in their mailboxes. I heard about two of ’em already: The Elwoods got one for yelling at each other. Maryessa Brown got one for smoking. And you should have seen what happened to old Hoyt McCoy. They brought out the whole police force and tried to arrest him. I saw it—I was there.”
Nickie’s heart had started beating rapidly. “Maybe you should let the snakes go,” she said.
“Why should I?” he said. “What harm are they doing?”
“They could bite someone,” Nickie said weakly.
“There’s a lock on the shed! No one goes in there but me!” Grover was shouting now, and people passing by were frowning at him. His face took on its wild-eyed look. “And anyway,” he yelled, “they’re not venomous snakes!”
Nickie stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to…I don’t know, to do the right thing.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “If they try to put one of those bracelets on you, what will you do?”
“Run. They won’t catch me.” Grover’s chin jutted out, and his lips pressed together in a hard line. He pointed a finger at her and shook it in her face. “You should think about what’s the right thing to do. Not just take someone’s word for it.” And with that he turned around and stalked away, leaving Nickie
standing beside the door of the shoe store, with dark feelings swirling through her like storm clouds.
The storm in her mind got worse when she tried to sleep that night. She couldn’t stop thinking about the blue envelopes. Mrs. Beeson must have given one to every person who was doing something they’d decided was wrong. How many of them were people Nickie herself had talked about? And were they all going to do what they were told? Or were there others like Grover, who would refuse? And what was the right thing to do?
She didn’t feel well. Her stomach was all unsettled. She lay in bed for a long time, not sleeping, thinking about Grover’s snakes, and the humming bracelets, and the Prophet, and the president, and God, and about good versus evil, until her mind was a swirl of confusion. Finally, she crept out of bed. She felt her way down the hall in the dark to the back stairs, and she tiptoed up to the third floor and into the nursery. Otis, who’d been asleep on the bed that had been Amanda’s, jumped down and ran to her, wagging his rear end, and Nickie picked him up and got into the bed herself. She could feel the warm spot where he’d been lying—it was right by her knees. She put him back there and laid one arm across his furry body, and after that she felt better. But she didn’t sleep soundly that night. A dark feeling stayed with her. She wasn’t sure if it was guilt or dread.