Somewhere on the masthead

An October Moment

2017-10-31T17:37:00.002-04:00

This is not my ghost story. It’s someone else’s.

I was in third grade, a school year I remember with a special if fleeting fondness, because that was the year I got to sit by the window. Our school was an old and venerable building with many fine decorative touches, but not well designed with regard to ventilation. It had no air conditioning, of course, and each classroom had only a couple of windows. The first month of school, when September still carries the hot authority of summer, the classrooms were stifling, so it was quite a perk to be assigned a seat near the window.

And our third grade classroom had the finest windows in the school. For one thing, they were huge--you could have winched a king-size bed through them. For another, they drew in an excellent cross breeze when our classroom door was open. And when September gave way to October, there was no more wonderfully excruciating place in the world to sit, snug in your classroom, surrounded by your playmates, your body firmly planted in a world of order and safety. Your spirit, though, could only pay attention to the wind, bringing you the first hint of cold, the perfume of sweet decay, the faintest taste of wood smoke from a distant burning brush pile. You’d turn your face to that wind and gaze out at the world and want nothing more than to be out in it.

From the third-grade windows, the world that you could see was the rolling field behind the school, a sward of fading green, dotted at intervals by towering maples and a few ancient apple trees. The field, tragically, was largely off-limits. In the spring, when the weather was nice, we were sometimes allowed out there for school picnics or science activities like collecting bugs, but only under the supervision of at least two teachers, and we always confined our activities to within 20 feet of the school.

We all knew why: The field was treacherous. Our teachers told us that there was a boarded-over well out there, somewhere, unmarked. School lore held that once, a long time ago, a little girl had been playing in that field, fell through the rotted boards of the well, and drowned. The seventh and eighth grade kids had a further embellishment to the story. The real reason the field was out of bounds, they told us, was because it was haunted by the ghost of the little girl. Many big kids swore--crossed-their-hearts-and-hoped-to-die swore, so you knew it was true--that they had even seen her, lurching through the field on a foggy morning, or peeking up at the school from behind a tree, her face a puckered, flyblown mask of unholy evil, angry at her own early death, waiting for some unsuspecting little kid to wander out there. Whereupon, we were assured, she would “grab you and suck out your soul and live in your body and then you would be the ghost,” to quote an eighth grade boy I knew only as Crazy Arthur. Crazy or not, Arthur’s words made quite an impression. Four decades later, they still give me a chill.

So we stayed out of the field, but it exerted a powerful hold on our imaginations, the way hazards (especially supernatural hazards) will when you’re a child. At least a couple of times a year, usually on blustery and rainswept days, you’d hear reports from classrooms on the field side of the school: Someone had seen the Drowned Girl, flying across the field or staring with beady eyes from the branches of a maple tree. Never mind that the teachers said it was a page of blowing newspaper or the glittering stare of a bird in the tree. We knew.

Now here I was in third grade, finally on the field side of the school with a good view from my awesome window. And I looked out on that field constantly, hoping that I’d see the Drowned Girl, but worrying that I’d see her too. I imagined that eye contact might set her off. I’d spot her gliding across the field. She’d stop, turn, see me looking at her and come flying straight to my window with unnatural speed. Before I could emit so much as a startled fart, she’d muckle onto me and suck me right out the window, soul and all. The only evidence of my departure would be the fluttering pages of my math workbook on my desk, which the Drowned Girl—now living in my body—would smooth out with her ungodly hand. The one silver lining in that scenario would be that she would have to do my long division assignments and I’d be free from homework forever. But eternal damnation seemed a steep price to pay for that kind of freedom.

So I kept an anxious and fascinated watch. Misty mornings and dark, rainy afternoons seemed like the best time to spot her and then I’d scan the field carefully, warily, ready to avert my eyes if I saw a shape emerge from the fog or from behind a tree, looking to make eye contact and stake a claim on my sweaty corporeal self. It occupied so much of my attention that in parent-teacher meetings that fall, my teacher informed my mother that I was “easily distracted.” Well, you would be distracted too if you thought the school grounds harbored a soul-sucking ghost-child with a grudge. But I never actually saw the Drowned Girl.

Nicole did, though.

Nicole was a tall, quiet girl in my class. I didn’t know her very well then so you shouldn’t be surprised that my mental notecard on her now is pretty spare (taller than me, black hair, yellow sweater). She barely ever spoke in class, at least until this one week in late October when she wouldn’t shut up.

On Monday, she was late for school, late enough that her mother had to walk her in. We could hear her coming—her sobbing echoed down the hallway. I’m sure people looked up, but not me. I registered the noise, but Mr. Sensitive here was looking out the window again. It had rained a lot over the weekend and a scrim of fog hung low over the back field—prime viewing conditions for the Drowned Girl, I felt.

Then Nicole and her mom stepped into the classroom (I wasn’t looking, but based on the commotion, I like to imagine her mother dragging Nicole in by her feet while the girl’s fingers left grooves in the hallway carpet.). Once inside, Nicole really commenced to blubber, but in between sobs, she said, very loudly, very clearly. “I SAW HER!”

I turned then, boy. And I knew exactly whom she must have seen.

It took a while to get Nicole settled at her desk, but after her mom departed and she went through about half a box of Kleenex, Nicole told everyone what I already knew. She had seen the Drowned Girl.

But in a dream, as it turned out. “I was here and she was right out back,” Nicole said, pointing a skinny long arm in the direction of me and my window. “And she was looking right at me. She had flies and boogers on her face. And then she waggled her finger at me like this.” Nicole crooked her hand into a fist, extended a bony index finger and made the universal “come here” gesture. “And then I woke up.” Nicole took a shuddery breath, then looked around the room. “She wants to make me dead,” she said.

For just a moment, I was sitting in the quietest third-grade classroom on the planet.

We decided as a group there and then that we were not going out for recess.

This went on for about three days. I don’t know whether Nicole had the same dream every night or was still haunted by the one dream, but each morning she’d come in crying, she’d tell us about her dream and remained resolute that she was not going out back for recess ever again. And we didn’t go either, none of us. Now, my memory’s not what it used to be, but I have a hard time believing that a room full of children could be so induced to stay indoors voluntarily for three days. In fact, I’m reasonably certain that it rained off and on that week and it’s likely that our teacher just kept us indoors because of bad weather. But the fact remains that we didn’t go out back. And I lost all interest in looking out that window.

Something about Nicole’s dream—the way she told it, over and over again, never varying in detail—unleashed a powerful apprehension in my mind, to the point that I couldn’t bear even to see the window in my peripheral vision. I sat sideways in my chair, almost facing the row next to me, my workbook all but in my lap, so great was my nervousness about that window. Because I believed in the magnetic power of evil. I believed that if I looked in the direction of that window, I’d be compelled to crane my neck and look out. And there she’d be, perhaps hovering just beneath the sill, boogers and all, waiting to jump into my body and make me the ghost.

Wednesday was a sunny day, I remember that. I remember that we were getting ready to go outside for morning recess. Not Nicole—she was firm in her conviction that she was going to stay indoors more or less forever. I think a couple of other girls were going to stay with her, and probably our teacher’s assistant. The rest of us were grabbing jackets and getting ready to go out, but slowly. Getting our class ready to go outside was like herding cats. We were always late. The big kids were already out back—I could hear them through the window I was no longer looking out of.

And Henry, the boy who sat behind me, said a funny thing for a third grader. He said: “Holy shit!”

Then we heard the screams.

Well, we all looked out the window then, even me.

All of the big kids were running back towards the school. I spotted Crazy Arthur, of all people. He was covered in mud to his knees and one of his shoes was gone. Teachers were hollering, blowing whistles, all pushing and shoving everyone up the steps and back into school.

And just behind them we saw the sinkhole.

I didn’t know that word then. I just remember the field looking different. What I first thought was a great track of mud in the grass was actually a crack in the earth. And we could see it widening, right before our eyes, like a magic trick. By the end of the day, the sinkhole went almost up to the foundations of the school and had widened to the size of a modest pond. Tree roots from some of the old maples were exposed and later they had to be cut down.

It was not a natural sinkhole. As I learned much later, that field was home to an enormous and ancient septic tank, one that was years overdue in being replaced. That’s why we couldn’t play out there. But between the rain of that week and its already overtaxed state, it broke open. Water and sewage went pouring out the side of an embankment on the other side of the school and the ancient tank collapsed in upon itself. But there was plenty of effluent still on site. Crazy Arthur wasn’t covered in mud, let me tell you. The important thing is that no one was hurt, but it was a bit of a close call. It happened so fast that one of the teachers and a couple of kids almost fell in. Things might have been different had there been more kids out there.

We kept the windows shut tight for months afterward, although I overcame my aversion to looking out the window, especially when the giant earthmoving equipment started coming in and doing interesting things to the landscape before winter set in. By spring, the field was more or less back to normal, although missing a few trees. We still weren’t allowed out there, but only because landscapers had reseeded the grass. It grew lusciously thick, as I recall.

So the boarded-up well was a fiction, I guess, the more palatable alternative to telling parents and children that a great vault of sewage sat out in the back of the school and that it probably wasn’t a good idea to play freeze tag or touch football on top of it. I suppose the Drowned Girl was a fiction too, a highly localized fable whose purpose was to keep children safe. Although even after the sinkhole, the older kids were still telling us the ghost was real.

Many, many years later, because it’s my job and my compulsion to want to know things, I did some research on the building that served as our school. It had once been the mansion of a textile magnate back in the 1800s, but at some point he lost his fortune. He lost his young daughter, too: She died of scarlet fever in that house. So I wonder.

I wonder if Nicole remembers the dream about the Drowned Girl. I wonder if she tells her children about the spirit who came to her in a dream and made her to stay indoors. And how that dream saved her and all her friends from injury, maybe death, certainly the need to buy new shoes. I guess I’ll never know.

After all, this is not my ghost story.

Yours,

From Somewhere on the Masthead

Farewell Fiction Friday (for now)

2013-01-11T00:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, well I know I went back on my word last time, but this really will be the last chapter for now. By my estimate, I've posted about a quarter of the book, which I think is a pretty good amount. But I've reached a point where I've got some tweaks and changes to make in the narrative before any more of this sees the light of day. Hope you understand.

I'll be back soon, with some nonfiction for a change. I imagine for some of you, that will be refreshing.

Thanks for reading:

(Previous chapter)

Chapter 8

A Little Giant Clue

Ben didn't dream about the missing girl that night—or if he did, he didn't remember doing it. Instead, he dreamt that he was in the library's rare book room, holding the metal-bound edition of the Steel Sterling mystery he'd seen the day before. He was trying to put it back on the shelf, but it was too heavy. Finally, he heaved it on the shelf with a bang. Immediately, alarms started buzzing, both from speakers on the walls and from his leg. He looked down: A clock was strapped to his ankle and it was flashing. The heavy door to the main library swung shut, trapping him in the vault. Lights started flashing. A voice boomed over a loudspeaker. It said "Benjamin Bridge, you've been caught breaking and entering again. It's Hard Knocks camp for you, buddy. Stay where you are. Greg Grindle is coming to kick your butt!"

Ben jolted awake at this, but the alarm was still buzzing in his ears. For a second, Ben didn't know where he was. The room was dark, just a very faint light filtering in from the window. Then Ben saw his Gamehound on the desk, its screen flashing the time: 5:50.

Ben crawled out of bed and snapped the lid of the Gamehound shut. Instantly the buzzing stopped. An alarm clock was one of the many useful programs Oz had loaded into his game unit, but at this hour of the morning, Ben didn't feel at all like thanking his roommate for it. He looked over with envy at Oz, who was snoring contentedly away on his bed.

Rubbing his eyes, Ben stumbled around the room, pulling on clothes, then shoes, as he found them. In a moment, he was out in the hall, giving the door a satisfying slam as he did. Why should I be the only one awake? He thought.

The sun was coming up through a haze of clouds as Ben stepped out the door and started across the quad. It was cool out and everywhere, thin tendrils of mist floated inches above the ground. Ben strode across the grass and almost immediately wished he hadn't—early morning dew was soaking through the tops of his sneakers. Then he heard it: A slow measured beeping sound, different from the one in his dreams. He looked down and lifted his pant leg: The ankle monitor was showing a yellow light and giving off those measured warning tones. Ben felt his pulse rise and looked guiltily around, as though expecting police to come bursting out of the buildings and surround him.

He shook his head. Zoltan had said something the night before about the bracelets going out of curfew mode at, what? Seven? Obviously, the school's resident security and computer expert had not factored in Ben's job.

Ben didn't know how long he had before the ankle bracelet shifted out of warning mode to full-on send-in-the-SWAT-team mode, but there was only one thing he could think to do: Find the adult he was supposed to report to, then get up to the main building to get them to call in a false alarm, or whatever it was they were supposed to do. He squelched miserably along until he came to the gravel road that led from behind the main building. He followed it down the hill until he saw the building he was looking for: a red brick shed standing bright in the mist.

He went to the battered wooden door on one side and knocked. No answer. He tried to peer through the cracked window, but it had been papered over. He knocked again. Nothing, no sound. Well, except for the steady beeping from the monitor. It was distracting and worrisome.

Sighing hugely, Ben walked around the building. On the other side, he found a metal garage door, raised up just a couple of feet. He crouched down and peered in. "Hello?" he called.

Hearing no response, Ben checked his watch. It was already past 6. Ben scooted under the door and stood up.

The garage was almost pitch black, but the smell of the place made him relax instantly. He had been expecting the smell of garbage (the truck was certainly giving off plenty of that funky odor), but in here he caught only the smell of dust and oil. It reminded him of his Grandpa's workshop.

After a moment, his eyes adjusted to the dim surroundings and Ben realized there was some light in here, off in a corner. He headed that way and immediately wished he hadn't. His foot collided with something low and unyielding on the floor and Ben fell forward, landing on a pile of what sounded—and felt—like old metal and glass, judging from the massive crash and tinkle that followed.

"Hey now! Hey now! Who's sneaking around in here?" a voice shouted.

A moment later, several large fluorescent lights flickered to life and Ben found himself sprawled uncomfortably on a pile of green copper pipes. Nearby, an old mason jar—not broken, thank goodness—rolled on the floor, nuts and bolts cascading out of it and rattling on the cement surface of the garage. A shadow fell over Ben and he looked up.

Reynard looked much taller than he actually was as he stood over Ben. His sun-weathered face was contorted into a grimace of annoyance.

"Sorry, sorry," Ben said, trying to get to his feet. The little giant continued to glare at him, saying nothing. Nervously, Ben extended his hand.

"I'm, uh, I'm Ben. Ben Bridge. I'm supposed to help you, Mr. Reynard."

The man looked down at Ben's hand, but didn't move to take it. "What is that? You bring your alarm clock with you?" Ben lifted his pant leg and showed him the blinking bracelet. At that exact moment, the yellow light on the monitor box shifted to red and slow beeping tone sped up.

"It went off as soon as I stepped out of Doyle," he started, then stopped, all his words drying up under the man's harsh gaze.

Reynard glowered at Ben for a moment longer, then said, "You're late."

"Sorry. I did try—"

"Door's locked. Key's long gone. Garage is the only way in. And you're wrong."

Ben stood stupidly, his hand still held out. "Sorry?" he said again.

"It's not 'Mr. Reynard,'" he sneered, turning away. "Just 'Reynard' will do."

"Oh," Ben said. "Is-is that your first name? Or-?"

"I'll tell you when I know you better."

Reynard picked up a wooden crate and heaved it onto a work bench near the door. He began piling things into it—a giant roll of plastic trash bags, a metal brush, other odds and ends. He seemed to be ignoring Ben completely. Ben put his hand down. The incessant beeping was very loud in the enclosed space.

"Well?" Reynard said, still piling things into his crate. "You going to pick up the mess you made of my scrap pile? Don't expect me to clean it up for you."

Ben almost said "sorry" again, but instead decided it was smarter to shut up. He bent down and began pulling the various copper pipes back together, although he had no idea how tidy the pile had been before. In the end, he just stacked them as best he could. As he did this, he had a furtive look around.

The brick shed seemed much bigger on the inside than it did on the outside. The garage bay was cavernous, big enough to accommodate the dump truck. Or it would have been, if it wasn't filled with junk. The copper pipes appeared to be just one of a whole family of scrap piles, some of brass fittings and doorknobs, some of lumber. Several tables stood all around the walls, each one covered with odds and ends: old radios and telephones, broken cameras, rows of cracked cups and china.

The walls were lined with shovels, rakes, and, was that a horse bridle hanging there? Yes, it was, right next to what looked like a bullwhip straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. Ben craned his neck behind him and saw that another small wooden door led to a cramped office full of old wooden filing cabinets and a sprung metal chair.

Ben began collecting the nuts and bolts off the floor, when he spotted something dangling from the nearest table: an enormous horseshoe magnet. Ben grabbed it.

"Hey now! Did I say you could touch my lucky magnet?"

Reynard had spoken so sharply, Ben jumped, dropping the magnet. Immediately, several nuts and bolts on the floor attached itself to it.

"Not even here five minutes and he's stealing my stuff!" the man muttered to himself.

"I'm not stealing it. I just thought I'd pick up the—"

"Not without asking, you don't!" Reynard said. He had packed his crate and was now turning to give Ben his full attention.

"Okay," Ben said. "May I please use your magnet?"

Reynard shook his head. "Nope. Get those nuts and bolts off it and hang it back up. Right-side up too. Or all the luck will run out!"

Ben almost laughed at this, but one look at the little giant's face and he stifled the laugh.

"Use the small round magnet, there on the table," Reynard said. Ben hung the horseshoe magnet carefully in its place, then picked up the heavy disc on the tabletop. It was smaller, but just as strong as the horseshoe and Ben made short work of gathering up the nuts and bolts and putting them back in the jar. The magnet's owner watched him.

"How come someone smart enough to use a magnet to pick up screws is dumb enough to get in trouble with the law?" he asked gruffly.

"I dunno," Ben said. "It was a stupid mistake. I'm not a thief."

"Not what the papers said," Reynard answered back. "Yep, I can read. Know all about you. Bad enough they think I need help hauling trash. They gotta saddle me with a juvenile delinquent too. Complete with his own noisemaker, too."

Ben said nothing, but his faced burned. He swallowed his anger, then with an effort of will, looked up and stared Reynard in the eye. The man was only a few inches taller than he was, but to Ben, at this moment, he really did seem to tower over him.

"What would you like me to do next, Mr. Reynard?" he asked. He meant it politely, but for a second he caught a flash in the man's eyes and realized his error. Having already told him he was wrong to call him "Mr. Reynard," the school garbageman must have thought he was mouthing off.

"Just Reynard will do, Mister Man," he said. "Now take this crate out to the truck."

It took Ben a couple of struggling minutes, but he managed to shove the box under the garage door, then pick it up and muscle it up onto the edge of the tailgate. With a final effort, he heaved it into the bed of the dumper, and it landed with a metallic bang, echoing the sound the book had made in his dream.

Reynard followed, yanking the garage door down behind him. "Oh, good. Right in the back of the truck where it'll spill out and get garbage all over it. Now put it in the cab."

In the time it took Ben to cart it around to the passenger side, Reynard was already in the driver's seat and kicked open the door on Ben's side with one foot. Ben gasped and panted, trying to load the crate into the cab, but it was too high for him. Finally, with an exasperated grunt, Reynard reached over and grabbed the edge of the crate, hauling it—and Ben, who was still holding on—effortlessly into the cab.

"Where's your muscle, Mister Man? How much can you lift anyway?"

"I dunno," Ben said, clambering onto the bench seat and pulling the door shut.

"What do you weigh, anyhow? Hundred pounds? Ninety-eight? Bet you can't even lift your own weight. Man should be able to lift his own weight. I weigh close on to 250 pounds, Mister Man, and I can lift that and more, you better believe it."

Reynard turned the key and after an extended grinding and chuffing, the ancient truck coughed to life. Raynard revved it for a good long while, the truck belching clouds of black oily smoke into the fading white mist. Finally, when Reynard was satisfied that the truck was good and warmed up, he shifted into gear and the truck lurched ahead with a groan. They rolled down to a metal gate which Ben understood to be the service entrance to Sherrinford. For a moment Ben thought they were going to plow right through it, but at the last instant, Reynard pulled the wheel hard to one side and they made a U-turn.

"So this is the job," Reynard said. "We haul trash and that's it. The end. We do the head office first. We empty all the trash cans in the business office, the computer room, Mr. Reston's office, the Dean's office, all of 'em. Take out the old bags, put fresh ones in. We do them first while we still smell good. Then we do the cafeteria, and the kitchen and Mister Man, that's smelly. They're supposed to put all the trash from last night's supper out into the Dumpster, but they don't always. And sometimes kids sneak in there for a midnight snack and throw their mess away. They think no one knows about it, but the rubbish man knows all, and don't you forget it. Then we do the Dumpsters. Don't matter what's in the Dumpsters, we take it, throw it in back. I don't care if it's a foofy princess dress or a maggoty raccoon carcass, we muckle onto it, wing it in the back and take it to the landfill. You with me so far?"

Ben nodded.

"Jeez I hope so, because this isn't rocket science. We do the classrooms next—they're real good about putting stuff in the Dumpsters at night so we don't need to go in so much, unless we get called on a special job. We do the dorms last—there's a big trash can on every floor and a Dumpster out back for each. Whatever's in there—this side of a human body—we haul it away. That's the job, and it's simple, so there shouldn't be any questions." He paused a beat. "Any questions?"

Ben didn't have any.

They roared up to the back of the main building, where the back door was already propped open. Reynard handed Ben the roll of trash bags and led the way inside.

"I should probably talk to someone about this," Ben said, waggling his leg and the endlessly beeping monitor.

Reynard shrugged. "Worried that the bloodhounds are coming for you?" he snorted. "Needs to be rest, that's all. Old Zoltan forgot you were working for me, not sleeping in." And without another word, he strode down the hall.

The business office area was cramped, mostly cubicles and open desks with computer terminals on top. With a grimace of someone about to undertake an unpleasant task, Reynard went over to one of the terminals and began stabbing at the keyboard with two calloused fingers, swearing quietly as he did. Ben stood on tip-toes and peered over his shoulder. Reynard was in the school network and clicking his way clumsily through a series of windows until he opened an application that pulled up a screen with a list of names. Ben realized he was looking at the monitoring system, for next to almost every name was a green light. The one exception was a name near the top of the list. The light next to it was flashing red and a pop-up window kept flashing next to that, showing the word "INFRACTION" in bright red, with a date and time listed beneath it.

Alternately sighing and swearing, Reynard clicked on Ben's name, then stabbed some more at the keyboard. Then he reached into his pocket—as he did he turned and favored Ben with another glare—and turned back to the computer, hunched over so Ben couldn't see what he was doing. "Mind your business, Mister Man, while I enter this password and shut that almighty thing off," he growled.

Ben turned and backed up a couple of steps. As he did, the beeping stopped. Ben looked down and noticed that the ankle bracelet light was once again a soothing green.

"There!" Reynard huffed, glad to have his unpleasant task over with. As he turned away from the screen, Ben caught one last glimpse of his name. Next to it, there was no red or green light, just a single word: DISABLED. Did that mean what he thought it meant?

"Thought I told you to mind your business!" Reynard spat at him.

Ben pointed. "You-you forgot to shut the program off," he said. "Anyone could get in and mess with it."

Reynard glared at him some more, his nostrils flaring. "Well, well, a thief and a computer expert!" he grumbled. He gestured for Ben to start emptying trash baskets while the man himself turned back to the computer and fiddled with the keyboard some more, evidently closing the program. Then Reynard disappeared through an archway that led to a carpeted hall lined with shining wooden doors. It looked much fancier in there and Ben guessed that was where Dean Taras and Mr. Reston and a few others had their offices.

By the time Reynard returned, Ben had all of the trash collected from the cubicles. The little giant hurled a bag at Ben, which he caught just before it hit him full in the face.

"You discipline cases must be worrying Hawksmoor some. His ulcer's bothering him again," Reynard said.

Ben glanced at his watch. It wasn't even 7 yet. "He's here already? What time do the teachers come in, anyway?"

Reynard gave him another glare. "Here? Hawksmoor isn't here. Man's got an important job in the city. He just flies in with Oscar on certain days."

"But—"

"I guess you didn't hear me when I said there shouldn't be a need for questions," Reynard said curtly, and without another word, he led Ben out of the business office and into the computer lab.

The lab reminded Ben of his school—he supposed computer labs everywhere looked a bit like this—a row of desktops of varying size and age, with blue plastic chairs in front of every one. It was harder to get to the trash cans here. Several more boxes of printer paper were stacked along the walls and between the desks.

"Get back there and empty those buckets," Reynard said, pointing. Ben did as he was told, threading his way around chairs and boxes. He emptied the buckets, but on the last one, by a computer terminal in the farthest corner, he found several crumpled sheets of paper stuck between the trash can and a heavy color printer. He glanced absently at them—a few smeary emails that hadn't printed correctly, a list of cheat codes for a popular online game. He smiled a little when he grabbed the last errant piece of paper. It was a partially printed list of late entrants to the school and Toby's name was there. He was probably still sleeping up in the secret room, he realized. Why couldn't I get the library as my job, Ben wondered.

And so it went, with Reynard barking at Ben and Ben hauling trash, next from the cafeteria (gross) and then from the kitchen (super gross). But the worst was the Dumpster behind the kitchen. A bag was stuck at the bottom and Reynard made him climb inside to retrieve it, something he did only after slopping most of its contents (sour milk and mac and cheese) down his front.

Reynard kept up a regular string of chatter, alternating between gruff instruction and muttering comments of one kind or another to no one in particular, certainly not to Ben, who he barely looked at.

"Oho, I guess Grindle was sneaking around here last night," he said once when they were in the kitchen, or "Well, well, that explains a considerable lot," he said another time, as they emptied the bathroom trash (also super gross). Ben thought Reynard must have a lonely job, milling around the school before everyone was up, and so had fallen into the habit of talking to himself. You'd think he'd like a little company, Ben thought. But Reynard seemed to take no notice of Ben, except to make him the target of various insults and orders.

Finally, as the long hand on Ben's watch slowly crept toward 7, and the moment when he could make his escape (and take a shower, he thought gratefully), they made their way from the classroom building and the library over to the dorms. Ben was anxious to finish up and was leading the way to the girls' dorm when Reynard put a massive hand on his collar and pulled him back.

"You hold up there, Mister Man, where you think you're heading? Into the girls' dorm? I don't think much of that. You go empty the buckets on the floors over in Doyle. You thought the kitchen Dumpsters were bad. You try emptying the muck in a boys' dormitory. You meet me down by the Dumpster in back and I guess that'll wrap you up for today."

Ben ripped several bags off the dwindling roll and stomped over to Doyle Hall. His neck felt burned where the collar of his shirt had bitten into it. He hated when people grabbed him by his shirt collar. It was what bullies did. It was what Grindle did when he grabbed Oz on the bus. And I have to work for this guy for the whole summer? Ben thought.

And it was in this dark frame of mind that Ben made his way from the top of Doyle all the way down, floor by floor. By the time he reached the basement, he was lugging several overstuffed bags of trash. And Reynard had been right about them being mucky. More sour milk, this time mixed with flat soda, sloshed around in more than one bag. Ben caught a break in the basement—that trash bucket was already empty, so he hauled everything else out to the back, then reached into the Dumpster. He was almost all the way in, legs dangling out, to get one last bag, when he heard the roar of the dump truck and Reynard was there.

"You sure you got every bucket emptied?" he asked critically.

"Yes," Ben grunted, his voice echoing dully from the interior of the Dumpster. He was trying to grab one last bag, at the very bottom, but it was snagged on a bolt poking out from the bottom of the container.

"I don't know," Reynard said. "That seemed a little quick to me. I'm counting these here bags."

Ben sighed in disgust. He meant it to be quiet, but the echo of the Dumpster made it sound like a groan.

"Don't gripe at me, Mister Man," Reynard said. "I didn't ask to have a helper, specially not a man who can't even lift his own weight. What's keeping you in there? You planning to move in or what?"

"It's stuck!" Ben grunted. And it was. That last bag wasn't coming loose for anything.

"Oh for the luvva Mike, get out and I'll grab it. I swear—"

Ben felt the hand on the back of his shirt again, and decided that was it. With a mighty heave, he pushed himself back out of the Dumpster and whirled on the little giant.

"Don't touch me!" he shouted, surprising himself. But what surprised him even more was that the man took a step back. They stared at each other for a moment.

"I just—I don't like being grabbed. I was trying to get the last bag out and—I don't like being grabbed," Ben said again.

Reynard stared at him a moment longer, but his face didn't seem so stern now. Then he gave a small nod. "Well, that's fair enough, I guess," he said, then he walked over to the Dumpster and scrambled over the side.

"Yep," he said to no one in particular, "it's good and stuck. But I'll get er—" And with a mild grunt, Reynard pulled up, tossing the bag out onto the ground.

The bag had ripped as it came loose. Garbage spilled onto the dirt in front of Ben: old soda cans, crumpled paper airplanes, a sodden pizza box. As Reynard clambered back out of the Dumpster, Ben was already tearing a fresh bag off the roll to collect the scattered refuse. Then he stopped and stared.

There on the ground, Ben saw something he didn't expect to see falling out of a trash bag from a boys' dormitory: a flash of pink. The balled-up object looked a little like a giant wad of bubble gum. Ben nudged it experimentally with his foot and it unfurled.

It was a pink tie-dye t-shirt. With a peace symbol on it.

It was Briana Tanner's shirt.

And it was covered with dark red bloodstains.

Fiction Friday Fakeout!

2013-01-04T00:02:00.000-05:00

Ah, what the hell:

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Chapter 7

The Lay of the Land

Back at Doyle Hall, the boys were buzzing about Briana Tanner. Several boys—new and returning students alike—had questioned both Ben and Oz and other new kids who had ridden on one of the shuttles.

"Her parents didn't drop her off?" Teddy asked one of the older boys, who was roaming around the halls, a clipboard in his hand. Teddy had explained that most returning students were driven here by their parents, who themselves had often been former students, and enjoyed the chance to come up and see their old summer stomping grounds.

The older boy shook his head. "Nope," he said, consulting his clipboard, which contained a fresh memo from the Dean. "Her mom put her on a train this morning. Dean Taras says she should have been on one of the afternoon shuttles."

Ben nodded. "We were on the second one." He wracked his brain. There had been some girls on the shuttle, but he had taken no notice of them. "I guess she could have been on there, but I don't know. What's she look like?"

The older boy scowled again at his clipboard. "Girl, 12 years old. Strawberry-blonde hair in pigtails. Wearing blue jeans, white sneakers, and—" he squinted, then read aloud, "—and a pink tie-dye t-shirt with a peace symbol on it." Sound like anyone you saw?" he asked, looking from Ben to Oz.

Oz looked nonplussed. "I wasn't really looking at the girls," he muttered. "We were the last ones on the shuttle anyway, and there was—" he looked over at Ben. "—there were some distractions."

"You ought to ask Toby," Ben suggested, thinking back to how observant their new friend had been, how quickly he had spotted that Ben and Oz had opened that locked door in their room. "He was on the bus before we were." Ben looked around quickly, but couldn't see Toby anywhere in the crowd.

"How do we know she's even here anyway?" Oz asked. "Maybe something happened to her on the train."

"Or-or in the station. You know, like maybe someone jumped her in the bathroom or—" Teddy said.

"Or maybe she made it here but went exploring, maybe in one of the condemned buildings and got hurt—" Ben added.

The older boy scowled at them. "What do I look like, I care? You know, the detective thing everyone does around here gets lame after a couple years. You'll see."

Teddy frowned. "Tina says—"

"Yeah, well Tina might like the mystery crap, but the rest of us just come here to get away from our parents, see our friends. You'll see. Mean time, the Dean says I gotta ask around about this missing kid, so I'm gonna do it, get her off my back." He glowered at them a moment more, as though it was their fault he had to search for a missing girl, then went off down the hall. Teddy followed Ben and Oz up to their room.

"That's not true you know, what that doof said," Teddy insisted. "A lot of kids come here because of the stuff they learn. It's a big deal. People who went here as kids went on to be, like, FBI agents and famous crime writers. And TV reporters that catch Internet stalkers and stuff. He's just a loser."

"Like Grindle?" Oz asked.

"One of his buddies, yeah,"

They stepped into the room. Teddy looked around appraisingly. "My room's wider, but not by much. And we don't have an extra door. Wh-where's that go?"

Without thinking about it, Ben kicked his duffel into the corner, covering the scuff marks Toby had noticed earlier. He hunched down and began unzipping his bag. "No idea," he lied.

"It's locked," Oz added quickly.

If Teddy caught the tension in their voices, he didn't let on. "Yeah," he said, "there's a lot of locked doors around here. Maintenance closets and service hallways and stuff. When this was an academy in the olden days, they had maids and everything." He flopped on one of the beds as Ben and Oz finished unpacking, then sat up straight. "Hey, about that girl! I— I wonder if this is it!"

"If this is what?" Ben asked, pulling clothes out of his duffel.

"The school mystery!"

Ben and Oz stopped and looked at him.

"Tina told me all about them. They can be pretty lame some years—mostly like a scavenger hunt or-or something. But usually they're pretty awesome. The teachers take turns planning them and they do something different every summer. One year, the writing guy, Mr. Nolte, hid out for the whole summer," Teddy went on. "No one could find him. You came into his class and there would be a stack of assignments and an old tape recorder with a message from him. Or he'd have a computer set up with a Web cam and teach classes that way. Kids went nuts trying to figure out clues from the recording, taking screen shots of the Web cam video, trying to zoom in on details in the background of the images, thinking they could figure out where he was. He left clues in the library when kids went to research their assignments. It-it was pretty cool."

"Where was he?" Oz asked.

"Well, everyone thought he was hiding out in one of the closed-up dorms, but that's against the rules. Safety reasons. Tina and Greg, they thought they tracked him down to Camp Kadabra, the magic camp across the valley. They found out Mr. Nolte does card tricks and stuff and they thought he'd be over there."

"Was he?" Ben asked.

Teddy laughed. "No way! You-you're not supposed to leave Sherrinford and the school mystery only takes place on the grounds here—it's one of the rules." (Especially for me and the rest of the DCs, Ben thought, suddenly aware of the weight of the ankle bracelet on his leg.) "But Greg was sure he was over there," Teddy sighed. "He's kind of a-a dummy. He and Tina got in a lot of trouble that time. Anyway, some other kids found the teacher. The page numbers on his assignment sheets made up a code that contained GPS coordinates that led to a cabin in the woods—there are a bunch of them on this side of the mountain, old tourist cabins and places like that. Anyway, that's where he was."

"That is pretty cool," Ben agreed. "So you think Briana Tanner's made up?"

Teddy grinned shyly. "Well, th-think about it. I mean, our first night, and there's a student missing? They watch us pretty closely around here. Tina and I weren't out of the back seat of the car before Dean Taras swooped in and checked our names off her list. And what kind of parents put a kid on a train all by herself?"

"I don't know," Ben said quietly. All of a sudden, he felt an uncomfortable pang of homesickness.

Oz nodded, thinking. "But the bus driver took attendance, checked us off a list before we got on the bus. Wouldn't the driver have known if he was a name short?"

Ben grimaced. He hadn't thought of that until Oz mentioned it. I am one sucky detective, he thought, not for the last time.

Teddy shrugged. "Well, I-I don't know. But it all seems kind of funny to me."

Just then there was a knock at the door. Ben got up to answer it, expecting another counselor, but it was Toby, who looked furtively up and down the hall before jumping inside. He looked even grubbier and dust-covered than he had at supper.

"Man, this place is jumping. Lotta guys with clipboards asking questions about that Brenna chick," he warbled, throwing himself into a chair by the desk.

"Briana," Ben corrected automatically. Toby scowled at him and hooked his nostril-grabbing fingers at him threateningly.

"Teddy thinks this missing girl is part of the school mystery," Oz offered, as he rooted through various cables and junk in his massive suitcase.

Teddy started to protest but Toby's face lit up with excitement. "Yeahhh," he shrilled, his voice going up an octave. "I betcha you're right. Makes total sense. She sure wasn't on the bus with us." Teddy relaxed instantly, his shy smile returning. Ben had the idea that maybe he wasn't used to people thinking his ideas had any merit. "Maybe she's hiding out over in the girls' dorms. I bet there's a hidden room up there too—" Toby said, then stopped himself as Oz and Ben simultaneously gave him a warning look. None of them wanted to own up to their little adventure behind the mysterious door. They liked Teddy, but his family obviously had a history here and they weren't sure yet if they could trust him with their secret.

Teddy seemed to take no notice of this, in any case. "Well, I'm gonna go unpack. You newbies have that tour tomorrow morning. I don't need to go—my sister and parents showed me around plenty of times. See you at breakfast?"

They all grunted in the affirmative as Teddy left.

"All moved in?" Ben asked as he went back to unloading his duffel.

Toby shrugged. "My roommates are weirdos. I think I'm gonna camp out up in the secret room."

Oz looked at him owlishly. "Really? What, are you going to come and go through there?" he said, pointing to the door.

"Yeah," Toby said blandly. "Who would know?"

Ben stared at him. "You're in a school for detectives. Teddy noticed the door right away, just like you. Probably would have seen the scuff marks on the floor if I hadn't covered them. Someone would know. And it would be our butts!"

Toby waved this off. "Okay, dude, don't get 'em in a bunch. It just so happens I was up there a few minutes ago. And you didn't even know, did you?"

"You do look a little dusty," Oz offered. He was now dumping items from his suitcase onto the desk and was sorting them into some kind of order. "Let me guess, you found a back stairway or something."

"Close. I actually found a cool mini-elevator in the bathroom wall. It was behind the door. You climb in and there's a pulley. It takes you down to the furnace room."

"Dumbwaiter," Ben said.

Toby rounded him. "Dumb who, Bridge?" he shrilled.

"The elevator. It's called a dumbwaiter. We had one in our old house, but it didn't work. Dad said they had to use the shaft for the central air ducts that they added later. It's for laundry and stuff and—" Ben trailed off. The feeling of homesickness was stronger, and now suffused with guilt. His parents had loved that house—he had too. And they'd had to sell it and move into a crappy apartment, and to make matters worse, he had gone and gotten into trouble…

Toby was talking again. "Well, it's pretty handy. And I can come and go through the basement so you fraidy-cats won't have to worry about getting in trouble," he sneered. "Anyway, I meant what I said earlier: someone ought to check the girls' dorm. They probably have the same set-up and if I were a missing girl or doing a school mystery or whatever, that's where I'd hide," he said.

Oz nodded. "Makes sense. We should ask some of the new girls on the tour tomorrow."

"What?" Toby said. "And let them get credit for finding her?"

Oz held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "No, you're right," he said dryly. "You go ahead and sneak into the girls' dorm. Maybe Ben could break into their rooms until you find a door like ours, then he can pick the lock and go look for her—"

Ben looked up sharply. Given where his mind had been, this felt like a slap in the face. Oz understood his error immediately.

Toby looked up too. "Who can pick locks? You, Bridge?" he asked, sounding eager and impressed.

"Thanks, Oz," Ben said. Then he looked at Toby and nodded. "I used to, but not anymore."

"Hey," Oz said falteringly, his dry demeanor broken again. "I'm sorry. I know—"

"—that Burglar Ben Bridge could get sent to juvie prison or Hard Knocks boot camp if I do anything like that again? Yeah, you're right," he said. Ben suddenly felt very tired.

Toby bounded out of the chair. "Well, this is getting lame," he said. "I'm going to go unpack. Don't worry—" he said as Oz started to open his mouth. "I'll take my private elevator. See you losers in the morning," he said brightly, and headed out.

"Hey," Oz said again, "I'm really—"

"It's okay," Ben interrupted. "I don't mind that Toby knows, I guess. I just don't want everyoneto know. Don't worry about it." He stepped over his duffel and collapsed on his bed. For a while he watched Oz set up what was starting to remind him of his grandpa's old work bench—all sorts of tools and mysterious metal objects and other junk. The feeling of homesickness all but made his stomach ache. Ben felt in his pocket. His PerfaPick was still there. And clutching it, he fell asleep.

In his dreams, he was running down a dusty hallway, chasing a girl with strawberry-blonde pigtails. "I'm the school mystery!" she cried, her voice sounding like Tina Jordan's. Then she ducked through a little door in the wall. But when Ben got to the door, there was no dumbwaiter, just a rigid stack of air-conditioning ductwork, like the dumbwaiter shaft in his old house, the house he missed almost as much as he missed his parents.

When Ben opened his eyes, he saw another shaft, a shaft of sunlight that was in his face. He heard the clatter of feet out in the hall. He looked at his watch and saw it was 9:45. Oz was gone and Ben realized that the campus tour started soon. He leapt off the bed, threw on a fresh shirt, grabbed his toothbrush and bolted down the hall to the bathroom.

A few minutes before 10, Ben dashed across the quad to the main building, where a group of new students were milling. As he slowed to a stop, Oz stepped out of the crowd, a sheepish look on his face. He handed something to Ben, wrapped in a napkin.

"You missed breakfast," he said. "So I grabbed something for you. Hope you like bagels."

Ben looked at the bagel, a hastily assembled affair with cream cheese dripping out through the middle. In fact, he wasn't a big fan of bagels at all, but he was hungry. More importantly, he realized that this was Oz's way of trying to make up for his thoughtless remark of the night before. He took a huge bite and nodded gratefully at Oz.

"Awefum," he said around a mouthful of food. "Fanks."

A moment later, a tall girl, another counselor, appeared at the doorway and ushered the new students inside. "Come on!" she said officiously. "Sherrinford is a big place and I have a lot to show you new kids so you don't get lost." As she led them towards the corridor to the cafeteria/auditorium, she rattled off a brief history of the school and its buildings, most of it information Ben had already read online.

The girl walked them through the door Ben had seen yesterday. "Business offices are back here," the girl said crisply. "If you need to see any of the teachers or speak with the Dean, their offices are all along this corridor." It was a narrow corridor, made even narrower by an assortment of obstacles—several rolling office chairs, a cart with a couple of old computer monitors on it, and yet more white boxes of brand new printer paper, their yellow strapping still cinched tightly around each. The kids sidestepped around each impediment, but then their way was completely blocked, this time by Dean Taras herself, who was coming out of an office, talking heatedly to a man in overalls.

This man didn't look like the men Ben had seen last night. For one thing this guy was short, shorter than the Dean and most of the students. Short but wide. Muscles stood out on his shoulders and he had Popeye-like forearms that made him appear almost as wide as he was tall.

He's a little giant, Ben thought, absurdly. But it fit. Despite his diminutive stature, the man seemed to fill up the space in a most imposing way. Part of that may have been because the little giant gave off a pungent aroma that all but filled the corridor, an aroma of spoiled food and dirt. He glared at the students for a moment as if they were the ones giving off a foul odor.

"—I have to call the missing girl's mother and then speak to the police this morning, so I'll leave this in your hands. I know this isn't part of your job, Reynard, but the office-supply people gave us three times the printer paper we ordered and they're being annoyingly noncommittal about when they'll be able to return to collect the overstock. As you can see, there are hundreds of boxes, and they need to be put out of the way, I—oh, hello everyone," she said, finally noticing the throng of students clogging the hallway. Dean Taras now turned to the counselor. "Amelia, perhaps it's best if you show them the computer lab another time. As you can see, we're much too cluttered here just now."

Amelia nodded curtly, but it was clear she didn't like being derailed by any change of plan. "It's nothing special," she said as she pushed her way back through the new students and led them out the way they came. "Just a bunch of old computers from, like, the Dark Ages. The newest ones are about four or five years old."

As Ben turned to go back, he thought he heard his name and craned his neck around. None of the kids were looking at him, then he saw Dean Taras conferring with the little giant she called Reynard. And Reynard was casting a sour glance his way. Then the Dean and the man both turned and went back into the office from which they'd come.

Outside, Amelia led them on a brisk walk across the quad, where they were met by Toby, who was dashing across from Doyle Hall. "You're late," Amelia snapped. Toby favored her with a scowl, then shouldered his way into the crowd until he was standing next to Ben and Oz.

"Get stuck in the dumbwaiter?" Ben asked.

"Oh, shut it," Toby said.

Amelia led them past the girls' dorm to a row of buildings that backed up to a towering forest. Along the way, the girl noted which buildings were closed for safety reasons (although this was unnecessary—these all either had concrete barricades on the steps leading up to the doors, or the doors themselves were chained and padlocked). "Here's where you'll have your classes," Amelia said, pointing to one of the buildings directly across from them, a three-story structure festooned with fussily carved stones. Next to it was a more stately building of deep-red brick and green tendrils of climbing ivy. It was also a three-story affair, but at the top was a tall spire that Ben took for a bell tower. It reminded him of nothing so much as a church, but over the doorway, he saw a name carved on the lintel: SACKER LIBRARY.

"Awesome," Toby whispered. "This is where I'm going to work! Where are you again, Bridge?"

"Garbage duty," Ben muttered, then elbowed Toby when he started shaking with silent laughter.

Inside the library seemed like a church as well: cool and unnaturally quiet. The air was heavy with the smell of old paper and leather and Ben felt his heart slow a beat. He loved libraries, had spent quite a lot of time at the one in school. Why couldn't I have had this job, he wondered, also not for the last time.

The students filed in to a single massive room, high-ceilinged, with bright windows up in the eaves, letting in the summer light. Just below these windows, but out of the sunlight, were shelves and shelves of books. A row of desks and tables filled the center of the room, and at the end was a circular desk where a woman was hunched over a computer. She looked up at the students murmuring at the far end. The woman squinted at them over the top of a pair of bifocals, tapping a pencil thoughtfully against her teeth. Ben waited for her to drop the pencil and put a finger to her mouth, shushing the newcomers. But instead she broke into a huge grin, stuck the pencil absently into the dark hair piled on top of her head, and gave them a long, languorous wave.

"Hello everyone!" she boomed, her voice startlingly loud in the space. She leapt to her feet. She was amazingly tall and thin. In fact, she reminded Ben instantly of a female version of Mr. Hawksmoor, except that she had a slightly rounded face and a short nose. Her bright eyes sparkled as she bustled over to the students, arms outstretched.

"Welcome, fellow detectives!" she cried. "This is Sacker Library, the very best place in Sherrinford, and the finest library of mystery in the world."

"Library of mystery," Toby repeated, a big grin on his face. "Oh, I am going to like it here!"

"Shut up," Ben muttered.

"Thanks, Amelia," the lady said, then tuned to face the students. "My name is Miss Seaver, I'm the librarian here. Now, I bet some of you read about Sherrinford online before coming here. Can anyone tell me about Sacker Library?"

Ben frowned. He had read something about the library, but couldn't remember what? An eager girl in front of him raised her hand.

"Well, it's like you said, isn't it? It's a library about crimes and mysteries?" she asked.

Miss Seaver nodded excitedly. "Yes, yes! We have many, many reference books and resources on all the topics you'd expect to find at a regular library, but we do have a special focus on crime, criminal law, forensic medicine," she was gesturing now to appropriate shelves on either side of the great room.

Then she pointed to an alcove Ben hadn't noticed before, this one a clubby little room with old, overstuffed armchairs and, incongruously, a giant blue beanbag. "We also have a reading room packed with mystery and crime fiction. Including, of course, a complete set of the original Reston Twin mysteries."

Miss Seaver walked them around, showing them the reference desk computers and library catalogs, and explaining what rules existed here. "Really, the only rule I have is no food or drinks. You can come and go as you like, pretty much every book here is available to check out for as long as you like. And yes, you can talk here. This isn't a church, although it once was, back in the academy days. And just like a church, we have our sacred and priceless relics," she said, winking at them.

Before any of them could ask what she meant by this, she led them behind the circular desk to a heavy, ornately carved door hanging on massive metal hinges. It looked very old to Ben, but had one distractingly modern detail: set into the wall next to it was a small metal keypad. Miss Seaver stood in front of it, quickly tapped in a few numbers. There was a faint buzzing sound from somewhere and then the door popped open. Miss Seaver grunted and wrestled with the heavy door. Slowly, it began to open.

She led them into a very different room now: it was smaller, or at least seemed smaller, since it was filled with metal racks of books. The racks were on rails mounted on the ceiling that let them slide forward or backward. But all of the racks were at various positions on the rails so that none of them lined up in a uniform row. It reminded Ben of a maze. The air was cooler, the room felt heavy and quiet. Even the lights were different. There were no windows and Ben noticed immediately that all available light was coming from strangely humming fixtures overhead. The light made his eyes feel funny.

"Special lamps," Miss Seaver said. "So the light doesn't damage the books."

"Feels like a vault," one student remarked.

Miss Seaver smiled, her voice lowering from its enthusiastic tone to one of special reverence. "That's because it is. This is our rare book room. In it is our most special collection. The room is climate-controlled and nearly all of the books—we have over 2,000 in here—are preserved in Mylar sleeves."

Carefully, she took down the book nearest here, a small, thick tome bound in green leather. Ben caught a glimpse of the name embossed in gold leaf on the front: Edgar Allan Poe. "First edition," Miss Seaver said in the hushed tone Ben usually associated with librarians. "Over the years, students here have donated their collections of mystery and crime books. For a while, it was the fashion among mystery writers to send signed first editions to the library."

She carefully put the Poe book back. "You name it, they're here. We have a set of signed Agatha Christie books," she said, then smiled. "Well, except for the last one or two, since they were published after her death. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle donated a portion of his private library to us. Not too many mysteries, though: Sir Arthur never thought much of his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. We do have one or two of his bound editions of The Strand, the magazine that published most of the Holmes short stories. So most of his endowment consisted of books on spiritualism, a particular interest of his later in life."

Ben and the other students followed her single-file among the rows as she pointed to a stack of old pulp magazine devoted to the Shadow on one shelf, a bound volume of vintage Super Sleuth comics on another. Then she called out the names of books by mystery writers old and new—"McBain here, Dobyns here"—then Ben saw a very odd book at the end of one row. Unlike the rest of the volumes here, this one appeared to be encased in metal.

Toby noticed it too. "What's that one?"

Miss Seaver smiled, then grabbed the book. With a grunt of effort she lifted it from the shelves. "Anyone here ever read Steel Sterling?"

Ben raised his hand at the mention of his favorite hard-bitten, two-fisted private eye.

"Well, the author of the Sterling books, Simon Petrie, taught here for a year at the very end of his life. He was good friends with Oscar Reston, the first Oscar Reston, I mean. This was the last Sterling novel he ever wrote, and he had it bound in a steel cover, with silver plates embedded on the front." She huffed again and with some effort held out the book so they could see it. "Thank goodness he didn't give us a full set like this," she said smiling. She set it back on the shelf, arms trembling. Then she smiled apologetically at the group.

"Unfortunately, none of these books can be checked out. Most, like Steel here, are one of a kind. Priceless, really. That's why we keep them in this vault. Sometimes we'll get university types—doctoral students or biographers—coming here to do research. But they have to write months in advance to make an appointment."

"Has anyone ever tried to break in and steal them?" Oz asked. Most of the students nodded in agreement; it was clearly on a lot of people's minds.

Miss Seaver laughed. "I wondered how long it would be before someone would ask. It's just about the first question I get every year. And my answer is always: Who on earth would be foolish enough to try to steal books from a library in a school packed with smart young detectives?"

Then her smile faltered. "You know, one year, when I was a student here—yes, back in the Dark Ages—one of the teachers took Mr. Poe there at the end of the row and hid it for the school mystery. Unfortunately, he neglected to inform the librarian at the time. She was in quite a state that summer. In fact, she spent as much time as the students trying to solve the mystery. But one lucky girl beat her to it, and found it."

"Where was it?" a girl asked.

"In Mr. Reston's private study, right there on the shelf with all his other books. Right there for everyone to see, just like in Poe's story 'The Purloined Letter.'"

Amelia looked at the librarian and asked a question in a tone that suggested she'd asked this same question every year.

"And who was that lucky girl, Miss Seaver?"

The librarian blushed, then smiled sweetly. "You're looking at her."

As they filed out of the library back into the warm summer day, Toby hung back. "I'll catch up with you at lunch," he said. "I'm going to talk to Miss Seaver about my job. Starts tomorrow!" And with a short wave, he disappeared back into the library.

Amelia led them behind the buildings, to a low, long shed that stood beside a dirt track leading into the forest.

"This is the bike shed. We have enough bicycles for everyone in the school and you can sign them out any time from 8 til 7. We'll sound warning chimes about 30 minutes before the bike shed closes. When you hear them, come on back. Actually, anytime you hear the chimes—especially if they sound for a long time, that means the Dean wants you back here in the quad on the double. The Sherrinford grounds cover the whole north side of the mountain, and there are, I'm not kidding, about a hundred miles of walking and biking trails, but you'll hear the chimes wherever you are. And if you don't come when they sound, you'll lose bike and trail privileges." Then she cleared her throat, aiming a glare at the crowd. "And you DCs, don't even think about leaving the mountain. Those house-arrest monitors of yours will—"

"—alert the police and it's game over for us," Oz muttered. Other DCs around him grumbled. They had heard this enough already in the past 24 hours.

Amelia fiddled with her clipboard and removed a small sheaf of paper that she began handing out. Ben saw it was a map of the buildings and grounds, with some of the larger trails marked by names like Tenderfoot, Rocky Reach, Pathfinder, and True North. "There are many old sheds and cabins throughout the forest," Amelia went on. "But you won't find them on your maps, because we don't want you to go there. Most of these buildings are very old and structurally unsafe. Stay out of them. The last thing we need is somebody poking around in an old cabin and crashing through a floor or having a roof cave in on them."

Amelia let this sobering thought sink in, then noticed something new on her clipboard that she had apparently overlooked. "Also, I'm supposed to warn you this year to stay off the Pathfinder Trail. There's a ledge above it and this spring some of the rocks have been coming loose and landing on the trail. Don't be idiots—stay out of there. Bike shed will be open starting tomorrow. Which DC is doing that job?" A boy behind Ben, someone he actually remembered as being on his shuttle, raised his handing tentatively and in a moment Ben saw clearly who of the new kids were DCs like him and who were regular students: all the regular students were smirking or glowering at the boy. Including Amelia, who simply said, "Well, you better not have been a bike thief, kid."

There were some murmurs of resentment at this from Ben and the other DCs, but before anything could come of it, they heard a loud rumbling noise. Ben looked up the service road they were standing on. Coming down from behind the main building, a massive, ancient dump truck came clattering along, gravel pinging off its grille and flying in every direction. Ben and the other students jumped off the road as the truck passed in a cloud of dust and pebbles. Ben caught a brief look into the cab and saw the sun-weathered face of the little giant, the man who had been talking to Dean Taras earlier. He took no notice of the kids he'd almost run over and roared on down the road.

"Who was that?" one kid asked.

Amelia, coughing and wiping dust off her clipboard, said sourly, "There goes the meanest man in Sherrinford. That's Reynard, the garbage man." Then she brightened. "Who's the DC assigned to help him haul trash? I wouldn't want to be in his shoes!" All the students, even some of the DCs, laughed at this. "Come on!" Amelia brayed. "Which one of you is it?"

Ben kept his hands straight at his side and stared at the gravel road. Great…just great, he thought.

Final (Fiction) Friday?

2012-12-28T00:02:00.000-05:00

So, here's a nice big chapter to wind up on for now. Thanks to everyone who read this far and expressed a kind interest in reading the rest. Maybe I will post it to Amazon, although I've discovered--as some of you have, I'm sure--a few careless errors that need fixing, and perhaps one middling size plot point that might work better in an earlier chapter. Once that's done, well, maybe...

But for now, this will have to suffice:

(Previous chapter)

(Next chapter)

Chapter 6

The Second Mystery

Oz, Ben, and about a hundred other boys poured out a side door and Ben found himself on the quad surrounded by six other buildings, including a few that were closed and barricaded. Directly across from him was a building marked "Belden Hall" on an arch over the door, and from beneath that arch came an equal number of girls all trooping off toward the main building. In moments they were back at the main doors where the shuttle bus had first dropped them off.

Dean Taras was there, directing everyone down a massive corridor on the left ("straight on through. Watch out for the workmen. We're still getting settled over in the business office. No shoving once you're in line for supper! There's plenty for everyone!").

Down at the end of the corridor, they found themselves in vast open room that, to Ben's dismay, looked like every other combination cafeteria/auditorium he'd ever been in. After seeing the old-style craftwork of his dorm and the ornate turrets and roofwork of the main building, he'd been expecting chunky wooden tables with high-backed chairs, walls adorned by murals and metal scrollwork. Instead, it was just an average, cement-floored, whitewalled auditorium with several dozen foldaway tables and chairs set out. At one end, there was a doorway with an arrowed sign pointing toward another corridor (the sign read "Business Office & Computer Labs"). Just inside the doorway, a couple of guys in overalls were bustling about, shoving some unused chairs and folded tables aside to make room for two other men, who were wheeling hand-trucks stacked high with white boxes—printer paper for the office and labs, Ben supposed. To the right, just as they came into the dining hall, a long buffet had been set up, with stacks of trays and silverware set out at a table right in front of the entrance. Ben grabbed a tray and took his place in line.

After he'd loaded his tray with meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and a huge bowl of green jello on the side, he and Oz made their way to the tables. There were cards at the head of each table, marked "1^st", "2^nd" and so on through all the years the school accommodated. Ben breathed a sigh of relief. Although he didn't realize it til then, he'd almost been expecting a label reading "DCs" and thought he and his fellow disciplinary cases would be segregated from the rest of the student body.

He and Oz picked seats about halfway down one table reserved for first-year students. They saved an empty space between them for Toby, who had not yet arrived. Ben craned his neck to look at the doorway, and though the line had dwindled to just one or two stragglers, there was no sign of his new friend.

Ben found himself seated next to another boy his height an age, but with a round friendly face. He nodded. The boy nervously nodded back.

"H-hi," he said nervously. "G-guess it's your first summer here too."

"Yep," Ben said, sticking out his hand. "I'm Ben," was all he offered. He didn't know how many people had read about the escapade that got him in the school, but if Oz and Toby had, it was a good bet others had, too."

The boy introduced himself as Teddy Jordan and it turned out that he lived directly below Ben and Oz in room 323. Teddy's older sister, Tina, was also at the school. Teddy pointed up to the end of the large room, where a smaller table had been set off and Ben could see about a dozen older kids. A tall girl with long, straight blonde hair looked over, then smiled and waved at Teddy, who shyly waved back. Even though Tina had obviously been looking at her brother, Ben felt his heart race and found himself blushing as he too, hazarded a tiny wave. "She's 16, so she came back as a counselor. She's really good at English and stuff, so they're going to put her in the library," Teddy said.

"Is that what the counselors do, help out with classes?" Ben asked.

"Oh yeah, and other stuff. They work with the teachers to keep an eye out for the kids, to help them, and report on them if they get out of line. You know," he said.

Ben looked up again and saw that Tina Jordan was now talking to a somewhat beefy boy who'd dropped an overloaded dinner tray on the table next to her and was alternating between speaking to her and turning to shovel food into his mouth, then turning back to continue his conversation. When he turned his head back to his tray, Ben's heart sank to see the boy was none other than Greg, the one who had accosted them on the bus. Greg shoveled a heap of mashed potatoes into his mouth, then turned once again to talk to Tina, who by this time had bent her head back slightly. Even from this distance, Ben could see that Greg was spraying food with every word he spoke.

"So who's the guy next to your sister?" he asked.

"Oh," said Teddy, his eyes narrowing. "That's Greg Grindle. He's a counselor too." Teddy lowered his voice. "I hate him," he whispered. "But my sister thinks he's hot you-know-what."

"Well," Ben said, "maybe she just likes having food sprayed on her."

Teddy snorted and almost spit out his own food. After a hacking moment, he laughed aloud and gave Ben a cautious smile. "Be careful what you say. Greg's family has been coming here for years and a lot of people suck up to him. You badmouth him behind his back and it'll get back to him, I guarantee it."

Ben shrugged. "I'll take my chances."

Just then, Toby appeared, slamming a tray down on the table and flopping into the seat Ben and Oz had saved for him. He appeared out of breath and streaked with dust and sweat.

"What happened to you?" Oz asked, looking him over.

"Oh, nothing, just tripped in the dirt running over here. Sorry I'm late," he said, then stabbed at the salad he'd set on his plate and stuffed it into his mouth.

After about 20 minutes, when everyone had finished at least one helping of the food up at the buffet, Ben noticed a man walked to the front of the dining hall, carrying a microphone stand. It was evidently already on because he made a great deal of crackling and whoomphing as he walked along. It was this noise more than the presence of the man himself that made everyone gradually quiet down.

The man was short and stocky, built rather like Dean Taras herself, Ben thought. He was balding on top but had a thin grey mustache on his lip. He set the microphone stand down in front of the counselor's table (KA-BONNNG it echoed through the room as it landed), then cleared his throat for quiet. He needn't have bothered. By this time, everyone was stone silent.

"Good evening children," he said in a slightly nasally twang. "My name is Oscar Reston. I am the grandson of the original Oscar Reston, the author of the Reston Twins mysteries, of which I'm sure you have heard. I just flew in a short while ago and it's always a thrill to see my second home, especially from the air."

Reston paused, and in that second, even without looking under tables to check for ankle bracelets, Ben could have picked out everyone in the hall who was a regular Sherrinford student and not a disciplinary case, because they were the only ones clapping. The whole moment had a very staged feel to it, and Oscar Reston beamed for a moment, exposing a thin row of teeth just below his mustache.

"It is also my honor to be the director of the Sherrinford School, and we have a great many exciting things planned for students this year," he went on. "In a few minutes, staff and counselors will pass among you to confirm names and hand out schedules, and I will outline some of the programs and projects we'll be undertaking—both individually and as a school—this term.

"But first, I think I must address the, uh, elephant in the room. As most of you are aware, for the first time ever, Sherrinford School has opened its doors to the wider world. We have undertaken to spearhead a new initiative in reformatory education. This year, we have become a fully accredited rehabilitative facility as part of a new government juvenile justice system. As such, we have welcomed nearly one hundred young men and women into our ranks who have, er, misstepped in some way."

At this there was a minor rumbling among the students. Apparently not everyone had heard about this, Ben thought.

"I have assured your parents as I will now assure you: We have maintained full autonomy in this program and have carefully selected the candidates for the program. No disciplinary student here has been convicted of a violent crime or drug offense. Each case was individually examined in the most minute detail by our school attorney, criminal law instructor, and esteemed alum, David Hawksmoor."

At this, Reston gestured towards the counselors' table and for the first time, Ben saw a small line of older men and women gathered at doorway. The workmen had gone, their stacks of printer paper boxes towering nearby. The men and women stood in front of the boxes and Ben easily picked out the severe, hawk-nosed man he had met all those weeks ago. A small smattering of polite applause went up and Hawksmoor gave the curtest of nods.

"The students we selected for the disciplinary program—I hate to call it that, it's really a rehabilitative program—were chosen because they were, in our estimation, worthy of attending Sherrinford. Mr. Hawksmoor and our selection committee reviewed their cases and selected only those who showed superior analytical skills, powers of observation and deduction, or in some other way showed the abilities that we prize so highly in grooming our students to take their place among the very best in the ranks of jurisprudence, public and private investigation, and general law enforcement."

As Ben looked around, he could see a lot of eyes glazing over and began to wonder if maybe Oscar Reston should have given his speech before everyone had a full stomach. But then he had the sense that someone was watching him. He looked around, and then he saw a pair of eyes glaring in his direction from the counselors' table. Greg Grindle. Except he wasn't looking at Ben. Ben turned slightly and saw that Toby was engaged in a staring match and muttering something. It didn't sound like English, but it sure sounded like swear words.

Oscar Reston cleared his throat into the microphone, bringing Ben back.

"My point is, we welcome these students here," he said, blinking and looking around nervously, as if he didn't quite believe what he was saying. "They will have a few more, um, rules to follow, but aside from that and a few additional classes and duties, they are to be accorded the same privileges and rights as any other Sherrinford student, and I expect all you old boys and girls to make them feel as though they belong." At this, he arched an eyebrow and stood a little on his tiptoes, trying to look both grave and severe, but failing on both counts. "Am I making myself perfectly clear?"

There was a rumble of "Yes, Mr. Reston," at which Oscar beamed again and rocked back on his heels.

He went on to introduce other instructors at the school, reiterate warnings about staying away from buildings that were closed on campus (there were quite a few more than just the dormitories, it seemed to Ben). Then Reston went off on a long digression about being a pilot and how much he loved flying his little airplane in from the city for these summer sessions, and invited students to see his display of aerial photographs of the campus over in the hall by the staff offices. All of the droning began to run together as Ben himself was feeling the effects of his meal now and was starting to zone out. He perked up a little bit when Oscar mentioned that all trails were open to students and they were encouraged to use them during their free time after classes, and all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday—"although, again, some of you new students may have special work duties on those free days," he added, and Ben thought he saw Greg Grindle smirk at him.

"You will have tomorrow to yourselves, although for new students, there will be a tour of the campus and grounds at 10 o'clock. Meet at the front door of the main building here," he said. "Finally, you will note in your materials something about the school mystery. Our returning students will know something of that, our new students will find out in due time. We will have more information about this year's mystery later on in the week. For now, though, the school mystery will be a…er… mystery," he concluded lamely. Then he started, remembering something. "Oh, also, after the counselors have handed out the schedules, I will need all special-program students to remain behind." He seemed about to say something else, rocked on his heels for a moment, and then stepped away from the microphone.

And then teachers and counselors were passing among them, calling out names and handing out schedules. Teddy Jordan's pretty sister Tina edged by, calling out the names of first-year girls ("Emily Tancredi? Briana Tanner?"), but stopped briefly to ruffle Teddy's hair affectionately and to give Ben—who was still gawking at her—an unexpected wink. He flinched as though struck and turned his head away, only to find himself facing Toby, whose eyes were fixed on him.

"Good God, Bridge," he said, glowering. "Have some self-respect."

"Bit haphazard," Oz remarked over the top of this, as he watched teachers and counselors calling out names and zigzagging around the hall. "Would have been much easier to sit us all alphabetically, instead of by year. I'd think, uh oh—" he trailed off.

"Bridge! Burglar Ben Bridge!"

Ben looked up in time to catch a wadded piece of paper in his face. Greg Grindle moved quickly past, muttering something about criminals getting too much press, then called out more names. Ben saw that Teddy Jordan was giving him a wary look and had edged himself away ever so slightly. Ben shook his head inwardly and unwrapped the crumpled paper that turned out to be his schedule.

It was simple chart of blocked hours. As the judge had told him, he'd have classes most of the day—it really was just like summer school:

BRIDGE, BENJAMIN (DC)

SCHED MON-THURS

6-7 Work Assignment (see Dean Taras)

7-8 Breakfast

8-9 Writing/Reporting

9-10 Crime Lab

10-10:30 Break

10:30-11:30 Detectives in Fact and Fiction

11:30-1:30 Lunch/exercise

1:30-2 Observation & Deduction

2-2:30 Law and Ethics

FRI-SATURDAY

8-11 Work Assignment

SUNDAY

Free

Even as Ben felt his heart sink—he was really going to have to get up at 6 o'clock every morning and work before class? Before breakfast even?—his eyes were drawn to a cryptic note at the very bottom of the schedule:

STUDENTS OR STUDENT TEAMS MAY USE LUNCH, FREE TIME, AND EVENINGS UNTIL LIGHTS OUT (10 PM) TO WORK ON THIS YEAR'S SCHOOL MYSTERY

He was about to show this to Toby and Oz, who hadn't yet received their schedules, when Tina Jordan stopped by again, looking a little flustered. "Teddy?" she asked her brother. "Have you met any of the new girls? I've found everyone except Briana Tanner." Teddy shook his head.

"I don't know her either," Ben offered stupidly. Tina gave him a distracted smile and moved on out of the row of tables, walking over to Dean Taras and Mr. Hawksmoor, who were standing near the microphone, conferring.

Now Greg Grindle was back, charging down the table, still barking out names of first-year boys "Alan Gerrity! C'mon, c'mon, raise yer hand! Oswald Goldrick!" he said and stopped a few feet away, dangling Oz's schedule, making Oz stand up and reach for it. As soon as Oz's hand was near the piece of paper, Greg snatched it away smiling. Ben felt Toby tense like a bowstring and saw him put one sneakered foot on his seat, as if ready to launch himself across the table.

"Cool it," Ben hissed, putting a hand on Toby's arm, marveling again at the strength he felt on such a thin limb. "Geez, are you sure you weren't arrested for a violent crime?" Toby shot him a venomous look, but settled—barely—back into his seat.

In a moment, Grindle had tired of torturing Oz and let the schedule flutter to the table, where Oz retrieved it and scanned it, smiling. "Wow, Crime Lab. I bet we're going to learn all sorts of forensic science."

"Yeah, but what about the work detail?" Ben said.

Oz seemed unperturbed. "I have mine during lunch."

"What?" hooted Ben. "I have to be up at 6 every morning for my work assignment!" And he showed Oz, who looked mildly interested, as though Ben had shown him a scabbed elbow.

"Hmm, so you do," he remarked. "I'm working in the computer lab from 12:30 to 1:30." He frowned. "And Dean Taras herself will be my supervisor. I thought it would be someone on the school IT staff."

"What about you?" Ben asked Toby, then realized his friend didn't have a piece of paper yet. Toby sighed. "Guess they didn't have one printed up for me, since I'm a late entry. I'll go up and talk to the Dean," he said, pulling himself upright. He walked right by Tina Jordan, who was now at the microphone calling for her one missing girl, and spoke to Dean Taras, who seemed annoyed—Ben suspected that was her default expression—but gestured for Toby to follow her. She excused herself from Mr. Hawksmoor, who now gazed around the room. His sharp eyes briefly passed by Ben, but then came right back and fixed him with a look. He raised a hand, extended one index finger and curtly gestured it towards himself.

Ben hopped up as thought a rope had been attached to that finger and wrapped around his neck. He walked smartly to the front of the room, where Mr. Hawksmoor extended a hand. Ben took it and they shook briefly. Ben had been right: Hawksmoor's grip was as unexpectedly firm as Toby's had been.

"Benjamin. Settling in, I trust?"

"Ye-yes sir. I'm in Doyle Hall."

Hawksmoor allowed himself a thin smile. "Ah, I was there my second year. And I understand you are rooming with Oswald Goldrick?"

"Yes. We met on the way up here."

Hawksmoor nodded at this. "Hmm, hmm. Interesting combination, but not a bad one. I understand why Dean Taras had to room you together. Which reminds me: you know we have an excellent library here. You'll have free access to the computers there, since you couldn't have one in your room."

Ben nodded dumbly.

Hawksmoor went on. "I usually teach Law and Ethics, but this year I'm afraid I’ll have to engage a substitute for class—although this summer I do hope to be able to deliver one or two lectures. I suggest you pay close attention. I seem to remember in your specific instance, you have a strong sense of what's right, but less of a grasp on what's legal."

Ben bowed his head. "Yes sir."

Hawksmoor nodded, indicating their conversation was over.

As Ben walked back to his table, Toby came trotting over, holding his schedule. "Got it from Dean Taras," he squeaked. Ben looked. Toby's schedule was handwritten, apparently by the Dean herself. "I'll be helping the school librarian," he added, making Ben wonder when he'd find out about his assignment—and his schedule was the same as Ben's.

By now, all the students, except for the DCs, were heading out through the door they'd come in. The workmen were back and now they were stacking more boxes by this door. Tina Jordan was standing there, too, looking ever more upset and stopping each girl and occasionally calling out the name of that last girl she couldn't find. It was all creating quite the bottleneck.

Shouldering through the throng came a harassed-looking man holding a laptop computer and a handheld scanner just like the one used by the technician Ben had met earlier (had that really been this morning?). The DCs all had a similar look of recognition on their faces. They knew what was coming.

The man set his laptop on the buffet table and barked at the students to line up. Ben stared at the man—he was sporting the most stupendous, ridiculous mustache Ben had ever seen on anyone outside the pages of a Civil War history book. It covered his mouth entirely so that when he spoke, Ben wasn't sure if it was the man himself, or just the mustache that was issuing instructions.

"Line up!" he barked. "My name is Zoltan Zalud, and in addition to being chief of the school Crime Lab, I am also in charge of all school computers, security and associated technology!" He glowered at them. "This year, that includes setting up the monitoring system for all of the Variable Area Personal Monitoring Devices!"

As Zoltan launched into an explanation of how the bracelets worked—it was almost word for word what the technician and Ben's parole officer had told him this morning—students around Ben were already snickering and making comments about both the man's name and his outrageous facial hair. Ben looked around, sure that Toby would have some acid remark to make, but Ben couldn't see him anywhere in the crowd.

"Listen up!" Zoltan shouted, his every sentence punctuated in exclamation points. "During the day, starting at precisely 7 AM, the VAPMDs will be in Daytime Mode—programmed to allow you access to the school buildings and grounds! You'll get a map on your tour tomorrow that clearly delineates the boundaries of the school! At night, precisely at lights out, the VAPMDs will automatically go into Curfew Mode! That means the boundaries of the VAPMDs will be configured such that you can only move about within the precise GPS coordinates of your dormitory! Step more than a few feet out of the door while the VAPMD is in Curfew Mode, and your device will go into Alert Mode, sending an infraction signal to the monitoring system! Only a security admin like myself, the staff at the school infirmary, or certain other teachers, will have an access code to override the system, so if it's in an emergency, you will need to go to one of the approved admins to have the code overridden!" He paused, letting his mustache catch its breath. "Failure to do so will cause the infraction signal to stand, and the police will be called out immediately to pursue and arrest you! Any questions?"

Ben looked at Oz, who raised an eyebrow. "Forget what I said earlier about learning anything in Crime Lab," he sighed. "I could have explained the system better than that. All of a sudden, I'm really glad Dean Taras is my work supervisor."

Zoltan barked again at the DCs to line up—then realized they already were—and impatiently gestured at the first one to come forward so he could scan the ankle bracelet and log the student into the system. As Ben edged forward, he was uncomfortably aware that many of the regular students had remained in the entryway of the cafeteria, gawking. Several were laughing and jeering, and Ben was sure he could hear Greg Grindle's grating, guffawing voice over everyone's. After several humiliating minutes, it was finally his turn. Zoltan roughly grabbed his leg, and after several swipes, he finally got the beeping noise he wanted from the laptop and Ben was logged in.

Face red, Ben pushed through the other students to get out of the cafeteria. Oz was right behind him, smiling.

"I got a good look at the laptop screen while he was trying to scan you. It's a really cheap monitoring system—not a true security system, but a modified inventory database program used by Chinese cargo container ships. I think it would be fairly easy to override, if I could just get my hands on—"

"Hey!" Toby cried, pushing his way through the other students.

"Where were you?" Ben asked.

"Right behind you, duh. Was that walrus dude a dope or what?"

This made Ben laugh, and helped dispel some of the humiliation he'd been feeling. Cheered, he was about to suggest they get out of here and head back to Doyle, when Dean Taras appeared at their side with such suddenness that even Toby jumped ("That woman's everywhere!" he remarked later.)

"Benjamin Bridge!" she snapped, pointing a bony finger at him.

Ben froze. "Yes, ma'am?" he said.

Dean Taras consulted her ubiquitous clipboard and removed from it a small slip of paper. "Your work assignment. Report to the Building and Grounds Office—it's the small brick building near the south gate—at 6 sharp, Monday morning. Missing ANY work assignment could be grounds for immediate expulsion," she said, looking warningly him. Then she walked off, calling other students out of the crowd that was now finally beginning to break up and filter out of the doorway.

"What'd you get?" Toby asked, as Ben unfolded the paper. "Maybe you're in the library too?"

"Uhh, not quite," Ben said, his heart falling into his shoes as he read the two words on the note:

Garbage Duty

But before he could say anything, Tina Jordan burst into the entryway, angry and frantic.

"BRIANA TANNER?!?" she boomed, louder even than Zoltan Zalud. "HAS ANYONE SEEN BRIANA TANNER?"

Dean Taras was by her side in a second to pull the anxious girl down the corridor. But as they left, Ben heard her say, in an upset and worried voice. "You don't understand, Dean Taras! I think we have a student missing!"

A Feverish (Fiction) Friday

2012-12-21T00:02:00.000-05:00

It's Quarantine Week here at the Magazine Mansion: Her Lovely Self got strep last weekend. Then I woke up with it Tuesday. And now, today, Thomas went down for the count. And just to make an event of it, the Eclair starting vomiting, too, which may be strep, or may just be the next bug starting to make the rounds.

So instead of regaling you with vivid descriptions of the above, I thought you'd prefer this:

(Previous chapter)
(Next chapter)

Chapter 5

The First Mystery

The rooms in Doyle Hall were very basic: square rooms with two or three beds, a couple of battered desks, and a pair of rickety chairs. Two small closets with sliding doors were affixed to opposite walls. It was an old dorm and its rooms smelled it, containing the weight of age and mildew and the faint sweat of generations of students who'd lived and studied here.

Having never been in a dorm room of any kind, Ben thought the place was coolness itself. At 12, he had never been away from home, except for brief trips to his Grandpa's, although that hardly counted. Now, he had a place of his own. And a roommate too.

"You care which bed?" Ben asked. Oz grunted what Ben took to be a no and so he selected for himself the bed closest to the big window. It overlooked the yard and commanded a view of the road they'd come in on. To the left, Ben could just see a corner of the main building entrance. As he looked, Dean Taras was walking into his field of vision, Toby trailing behind her. Taras turned and said a few words to Toby, then pointed in Ben's direction. As Toby ambled across the lawn, he seemed to be skipping a little. He's sure happy about something, Ben thought. But at that same moment, Toby seemed to catch himself and hunched forward, walking toward the hall with more purpose. As he got closer, Ben noticed a netbook computer under Toby's arm.

Ben struggled with the window latch for a moment, then pulled hard. The window was apparently recent painted, because it fought him for a while before the paint holding it in place suddenly stripped away and the window flew up with a bang.

Toby heard it from below and looked up. Seeing Ben, he waved.

"Any trouble?" Ben called. Toby simply shook his head "no" and Ben realized that with his changing voice, he probably didn't want to risk raising his voice. So Ben didn't bother to ask him where he was living. "We're in 423!" he yelled. "Come up and see us when you get settled." Toby gave a silent "OK" sign with his thumb and forefinger and disappeared from view.

"What do you think of him?" Oz asked, in a tone that suggested he didn't think very much at all of their scrappy classmate. Oz was busy in his corner of the room. Already he'd moved one of the desks so that it was behind his bed. He had opened his suitcase and was rummaging through it.

"He's all right. He saved you from that jerk on the bus," Ben replied.

Oz grunted. "Maybe. Still, there's something about that kid. I mean, really: 'My uncle is in the KGB' or whatever. It's like those posers and trolls online that make up anything they want about themselves. Gets old after a while." Oz rummaged for a bit more, then pulled what appeared to be a massive armload of junk out of his suitcase and plopped it on the desk.

"What the heck is all of that?" Ben asked, stepping forward to get a better look. Oz seemed to be holding a jumble of various types of electronic and photographic equipment. Here was a large lens to a 35mm camera. There, he thought he recognized a battered old smoke alarm. Next to that was a boxy old video camera with a cracked case. Old-fashioned flashbulbs and hundreds of batteries of every size scattered across the desk.

"It's my, um, lab, I guess," Oz said. "I like to tinker. All this stuff has useful parts that can be turned into things we can use. Look at this." He handed Ben a giant plastic gunlike object which, in the shadows of the room, made Ben take a step back, but he almost instantly relaxed.

"Looks like a hair dryer," Ben said.

"That's because it is," Oz replied. "If you can reverse the polarity on the motor, instead of blowing air out, it'll suck it in and act as a cooler for, well, other stuff."

"Like what?" Ben asked, tossing the hair dryer on the bed.

"Stuff that needs cooling," Oz said simply, giving Ben a look that said Duh. Then he held up two objects: a tiny bulb on a wire—Ben realized it was a flash that had been pulled from a digital camera—and a 9-volt battery. "Here's a perfectly simple burglar alarm," he said, walking to the door. "My dad showed me this when I was a kid. You tape the battery to the door and the flash to the doorframe. Position the flash so the bottom of the wire is facing the battery—see?" Ben looked, nodded as Oz fiddled with the objects in his hands. "Then you unbraid the wires so you have two contact points for the battery. When someone opens the door in the middle of the night, the battery swings with the door, contacts the wires from the flash and—" Just then, Oz touched the battery to the bare end of the wire and there was a minor "pop" followed instantly by a blinding flash that filled the room with light and left Ben rubbing spots out of his eyes for the next 10 minutes.

"Ow!" he said, hands over his eyes. "You could have warned me."

"Sorry," Oz said, not sounding very. He was already back to rummaging through his suitcase.

Oz continued talking on and on about the various applications of the electronic junk he'd brought—the uses of an old camera flash gun, various automotive parts, and so on. But Ben gradually tuned him out as he noticed an odd feature to the room.

"Where does this other door go?" he wondered aloud.

"What other door?" Oz asked, suddenly looking up.

Ben pointed to a door set into the wall adjacent to the window near his bed. At this time of day it was completely obscured in shadow. It looked like a proper door, doorknob and all, but was just a little bit smaller than the door they had come in through.

"Maybe it adjoins the next room, like they sometimes have in hotels," Oz suggested.

"Maybe," Ben said. "But it seems like it's oriented wrong." He jiggled the handle. The door was locked. Ben bent down to example the keyhole. It looked like a basic cheap lock, one that had been put on the door in the past 20 or so years. An old keyhole sat beneath the new lock.

Ben frowned in thought for a moment, then went back to his backpack and rummaged until he found the pen light he kept in one pocket and, turning it on, poked it through the old keyhole. He'd tried to peer over the top of the light, into the narrow hole, but all the light showed was a dark, open area. Definitely no windows or any other kind of light.

"I wonder if it's some kind of service entrance," Ben said. "This is an old place, maybe they had people come and change the beds or grab up the laundry. It did cater to rich kids, you know,"

"Still does," Oz grunted, now standing behind him. "I wonder what's in there."

Ben was silent. Then he made a decision and went back to his bag and pulled out his PerfaPick.

Oz, who seemed to have a sixth sense for any kind of interesting gadget, perked up immediately. "What's that?" he asked. "Some kind of pen?"

"Not quite," Ben said, as he fiddled with it. First he removed the clip from the side of the pen—away from the pick it formed a slim metal "L."

"This," Ben said, holding it up to Oz, "is a tension wrench." Then Ben knelt and inserted it into the top of the lock. Oz understood immediately and his voice raised an octave, his laconic reserve cracking for the first time. "No way! You can seriously pick locks?"

"Technically, I'm not supposed to do this. The judge said I couldn't break into anyone else's room or office."

Oz nodded, understanding again. "But since the door is in our room, you're not really breaking the rules, are you?"

Ben nodded and pressed a button at the top of the pick, which caused a specific, narrow pick, one with several bumps along the end, to pop out. Slowly, Ben approached the lock, then stopped.

"What is it?" Oz asked.

Ben didn't answer. In the excitement of being here, in his eagerness to show his new friend that he had some special skills of his own, Ben had forgotten, but now it came back. That awful night in jail. The equally awful way he felt when he looked into his parents' eyes after his release. He pushed the pick back into its housing, took the tension wrench out of the lock and slid the PerfaPick back into his pocket.

"I…I better not."

Oz simply nodded. He stepped over to his massive suitcase and rooted around in it until he found a small plastic card.

"Credit card?" Ben asked.

Oz nodded again. "Cancelled. I keep a couple handy—the magnetic stripe in the card can be useful. But so can the card itself." And saying this, he slid the card into the space between the door and the frame, wiggling it until it hit the bolt holding the door shut. With a deft swipe, the plastic card slid the bolt back and the door popped open, the hinges screeching loudly as it did.

"Shh!" Ben said, suddenly looking around.

"I think we're okay," Oz replied, stepping back. Ben played his flashlight around the gloomy interior of the room.

The room was actually just a very wide hallway, interrupted every 20 feet or so by another doorway, which must lead to other rooms on the floor. Stepping carefully, Oz right behind him, the pair crept in a few steps.

Then a knock came on the door to their room and, startled, they jumped back out.

Oz closed the door as quietly as he could (although it still seemed to squeak very loudly in the room. Ben opened the door, and there stood Toby. He was still holding his bag.

"Couldn't find your room?" Ben asked.

"Um, it was locked. I tried knocking, but nobody answered." He paused to look around the room, and the first thing he said was, "So what's up with that door you just opened and didn't want me to know about?"

Ben and Oz gave each other what would come to be the first of many dumbfounded looks. "How did—?" Oz began.

"Oh, man it's easy, look!" And Toby pointed to the floor in front of the mystery door. A great wide scuff of dust made an arc from the doorjamb all the way to the wall, an obvious sign that someone had opened a door that hadn't been opened in a while. "And you guys are acting all weird and jumpy, so clearly I'm not supposed to know what you were up to."

Detective Bridge soon realized he had better get used to this kind of thing, if he was going to spend time at a summer camp for detectives, the Narrator lamented.

Toby threw his bag and a couple of pieces of paper on the bed nearest the door—Oz's—went over to the door to examine it. While he did that, Ben glanced at the paperwork. It gave Toby's room assignment—247, on the second floor, he supposed—and his roommates: Ray Cloutier and James Carr. He wondered if they were discipline cases like themselves, but then Toby wrenched the door open and Ben was forced to look up.

"So what's in here?" he asked.

"We were about to find out," Oz said, reaching into his suitcase and grabbing a flashlight of his own. He led the way as the trio stepped into the darkened corridor.

The floor creaked terribly, but the three quickly realized no one was likely to hear them. From the left side—the side containing all the entry doors into the other dorm rooms—they could hear muffled music and general hubbub of other kids talking and horsing around. Each door sported a number painted on—425, 427, and so on, corresponding to each room they passed as they made their way down the darkened passage, which seemed to run the entire length of Doyle Hall.

Midway along the passage, though, they stopped as they saw a bigger door to their left and a small metal set of stairs to their right. On the bigger door was painted the initials JC.

"Someone's initials?" Toby said.

Ben turned the latch. The door opened easily enough and the three found themselves standing amid a stack of damp-smelling mops lying against an old porcelain sink. It was a very small room—no more than four feet square—and directly opposite them was another door. From behind that door they could hear the unmistakable sound of a toilet flushing.

"Janitor's Closet," all three said at once.

Oz stepped over the mops and put his ear to the other door. When he was confident no one was on the other side, he eased the door open and poked his head into what turned out to be the bathroom for the floor. A long line of stalls stood in front of him. To his right, a matching line of old sinks were fixed to the wall underneath a length of mirrors. Oz craned his neck out a little farther and saw a passageway leading to what he guessed were shower stalls. He poked his head back in and closed the door.

"Yep, bathroom," he said.

Now they turned their attention to the metal stairs, which went both down and up, no doubt to other similar corridors.

"Let's go down," Toby said.

"Nah," said Oz, pointing his powerful flashlight up the spiraled metal stairwell. "We know it's more hallways. But what's above us? The fourth floor is supposed to be the top floor in Doyle Hall."

Ben kicked himself for not spotting this sooner—he was definitely going to have to pick up his game if he was to keep pace with his friends in the observation-and-deduction department. He looked at Toby, who eagerly nodded assent, and the three went slowly up.

In a moment, they found themselves on a small, cramped landing—Oz, the tallest of them, had to duck to step into it, brushing away thick cobwebs as he went. They appeared to be under a gable of some kind. It was a little stuffy in this close space, but not as stuffy as Ben had been expecting. As they stood their silently for a moment, watching as Oz played his flashlight around, Ben heard a low whistling sound and poked his head around a corner of the gable. Down at one end of the building he could see slats of daylight and realized he was looking at a vent set into the outside eaves of the building. When he turned to look toward the other end, he saw a similar vent, and also a small window, which was shut.

"Good cross-breeze up here, considering," Toby said thoughtfully.

They stepped around the corner of the gable and into an unexpectedly larger room set between the gables. Right below the closed window Ben had noticed earlier, they saw a narrow and rusty iron bedstead, an old wooden cabinet sitting next to it. Toby impulsively jumped on the bed and the box springs made an ungodly screeching that made Ben cringe and Oz jump.

"Shh! We're probably right above someone's room," Oz said.

"I dunno," Ben said. "I used to live in a big old house, when my dad—when we lived in a different neighborhood. It had a room in the attic for a maid and my dad said the rooms were always built kind of secret like, in a little corner or nook at the edge of the house so the maid wouldn't disturb anyone walking around at night. I bet if we went around to the back of the building and looked up at the gables, all we'd see would be a slight bump-out in the wall by the roofline. Maybe not even that. Those old builders were really good at hiding stuff like this."

Toby was off the bed now and examining another small door hidden in shadow at the end of the room. Inside was a small bathroom, complete with an old-fashioned tub standing on metal claw feet. Toby pushed the handle on the commode next to the tub. There was a brief shuddering sound from the floor, then the familiar sound of a toilet flushing. "Water runs just fine up here," he noted, checking the faucets in the tub, too. "It's sooo perfect," Toby said, beaming as he looked around the space.

Oz was less impressed. "Just a dusty old attic, really," he said.

"Still, I wonder how many other people have ever come up here. I mean, look at the dust on the floor. No footprints but ours," Toby went on.

"And we walked through plenty of cobwebs," Ben added. He'd read more than a few mystery stories where the hero had been able to track the criminal through an abandoned house or building simply by checking the cobwebs across the doorways and looking for the broken ones—a sure sign the villain had passed that way. Toby and Oz both nodded as he said this—clearly they had read some of the same books.

Just then, they heard a distant noise, a kind of bells chiming.

Oz shone his light on his watch. "Hey, it's 5:30, that must be the dinner chime."

As if on cue, all three of their stomachs rumbled and they quickly—but quietly—made their way back down the stairs and down the passageway to Ben and Oz's room. They closed the service door behind them, and started for the door out to the main hall, where they could hear the thundering of footsteps headed for the stairs. Ben bumped Toby's bag as he went, and a thought occurred to him.

"Hey, that Dean lady didn't give you a key to get into your own room?" he asked.

Toby stood stock still, his mouth open as though the question had been something offensive, or caught him off-guard. "Well, sure," he said, his cracking voice rising an octave. "But they had the chain up from the inside," he pointed to a similar chain on the inside of Ben and Oz's door. "I kept knocking but I couldn't see anyone or get them to open up. I figured they maybe were listening to iPods or something and had their headsets on. Anyway, you guys go on ahead and save me a seat. I should be able to go down now and stow my stuff in my room."

Ben's stomach growled like a living thing, reminding him he hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. So he shrugged and followed Oz out into the hall. He heard the room door close behind him, and turned to say something else to Toby, but he had already disappeared into the crowd of boys rushing forward to supper.

(Fiction) Friday I'm in Love

2012-12-14T00:02:00.000-05:00

Well, I had intended to post the first six chapters and it looks like we're past the halfway point. I have a soft spot for this chapter, since it introduces one of my favorite characters. And I'm not patting myself on the back in saying that either: This character took on a life of his own far beyond what I originally envisioned. I don't know quite how it happened, but I do remember feeling that strange thrill at the idea that maybe I wasn't entirely writing this story. Maybe this story was writing me.

If that makes any sense.

Either way, I give you:

(Previous chapter)
(Next chapter)

Chapter 4

Toby Speaks Up

It was more than two hours before the first of two shuttle buses blew by them there on the dusty track next to the road. Oz had seen the first and stood up. He was much taller than Ben and waved his arms. The shuttle driver stared impassively ahead as he roared past.

They stood there for a moment, before Oz announced he was going to call a cab to take them the rest of the way. He began fiddling with his Gamehound until a telephone keypad popped up on-screen and Oz began pushing numbers. Then the call dropped and Oz cursed, muttering something about poor signal coverage in the boonies. "it's okay," he assured Ben (who hadn't said anything), "I can make the call over the Web."

Oz began fiddling with buttons again while Ben swallowed inwardly. He had less than 20 dollars on him, and that was supposed to last him most of the summer. He couldn't afford a cab for the drive up to the school. He was about to say so when he spotted another bus—also bearing the words "Sherrinford" across the top—coming up the hill from below where the gas station sat. He waved wildly, but he needn't have worried. The bus was already throttling down and slowly pulled into the service station. Oz quickly stuffed his Gamehound in a pocket of his pack.

Detective Bridge and his newfound friend breathed a sigh of relief as the driver opened the door and welcomed our intrepid heroes on their last leg of the journey.

"Thought you were gonna have to hoof it, I bet?" the driver cackled as he stepped off the bus. "The other shuttle was full up. We got quite a crowd this year with all them DCs, so they sent two." He opened the storage compartment under the bus, grabbed Ben's duffel and tossed it in.

"DC?" Oz asked as he began grappling with his massive suitcase.

"Discipline cases. Brand new thing for us. Didn't know quite how many we'd get the first year, the little reprobates," he said, apparently not even considering that he might be talking to two such reprobates. "Dang, son, what in the heck you bring with you? A body?" he asked, as he helped Oz wheel his luggage over.

"Camera equipment, and other odds and ends," Oz said, then changed the subject as curtly as he had with Ben earlier. "So how far is it to the school?"

"Only another 20 miles as the crow flies, but it's mostly uphill and the road is a bit curvy. Probably take us a good half-hour, 45 minutes to get there. But don't worry, we'll be there in time for the dinner bell. Hooof!" he grunted, shoving Oz's suitcase into the storage compartment, which it very nearly filled.

The driver leaned back into the bus and grabbed a clipboard. "Names?" he asked. When they gave them, the driver scanned his list, frowned, looked meaningfully at them from beneath his eyebrows, then flipped the page to a second list—no doubt the list of students in the special program—harrumphing as he did. He nodded and clucked to himself as he found their names. The driver looked at both of them a little apprehensively, and Ben thought he might be about to apologize for his earlier remarks, seeing as he was now addressing a couple of the reprobates he'd been complaining about earlier. But Ben was wrong.

"Show me those house-arrest gadgets, boys," he said sternly. Then he made quite a deal of inspecting the monitors closely—at one point his face was so close to Ben's that he could have licked his leg. Ben was uncomfortably aware of faces pressed up against the windows of the shuttle. Even the gas station attendant had stepped out to have a gawk at them. Finally, satisfied that they hadn't tampered with their monitors, the driver let them climb aboard. He watched them carefully as they made their way down the aisle (what, does he think we're gonna steal one of the seats? Ben wondered, irritated). Finally, he took his place behind the wheel and lurched the shuttle forward before the pair of them had quite found a place to sit.

The bus had about a dozen other kids aboard, several of them older, and those kids were sitting in the very back. The rest of the kids were sitting alone, several of them looking as nervous as Ben had felt earlier when he boarded the first bus on his way here. You didn't need to be a detective to figure out which kids were coming here for the first time, he thought, although he did wonder how many of them were, like himself, DCs, as the driver had called them. He couldn't see their ankles.

He and Oz sat together on a bench about midway down the length of the bus. Right behind them, another kid looked up from a magazine. Their eyes met.

"Hey," the kid nodded, in a warbly voice. He had a round face that looked at odds with a very recent and very stubbly short haircut that made his light auburn hair look like faintly reddish turf. He seemed to want to say more, but he shut up right away and went back to reading. Ben felt instant pity for him. His own voice had started to change just after his birthday and the experience had been deeply embarrassing. Although his vocal cords had settled down recently, for months Ben was afraid to open his mouth because every time he did, he sounded just like a girl. Well, a girl with laryngitis.

Now the boy looked up at Ben and seemed to be reading his thoughts. "What are you staring at?" he warbled truculently.

"Nothing. Sorry," Ben said, sticking out his hand. "Ben Bridge."

The kid with the short red hair looked at that hand a long beat before deciding to take it. "Toby. Toby Tanalov," he said finally, grabbing Ben's hand and pumping it briefly. Toby was skinnier than Oz, but he had a wiry strength in his grip.

Oz was seated cross-legged, examining his own ankle bracelet, so he only looked up briefly. "Oz Goldrick," he said, sketching a little salute before turning his eyes back to his monitoring device.

"Where you from?" Ben asked.

"Vermont," Toby replied in his unsteady voice. "I was staying up there with my uncle. My parents kicked me out," he added, smiling, then sat up straighter, as though proud of the fact.

Ben nodded in sympathy. "So I guess you're a DC like us?" he asked.

Toby frowned at him.

"That's what I heard the driver calling us. All the discipline cases that the school is letting in," Ben explained. He craned his neck over the seat, making to look at Toby's legs to confirm the presence of the telltale ankle bracelet, but Toby's legs were shoved forward under the seat.

"What did you do, then?" Toby asked.

Ben frowned. Unlike Toby, he wasn't proud of what he'd done and this was the first time he'd had to explain to anyone—Oz had saved him the trouble by reading about him online. So he briefly told Toby, whose eyes widened.

"Oh my God!" he squeaked, losing control of his voice again. He quickly closed his mouth. When he opened it again, he had dropped his voice to a more controllable whisper. "I saw that story about you on the cable news. You broke into the school to find missing money or something."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't missing, just hidden. And it was the wrong money. I was...wrong all the way around," he said, shrugging. "That's why I'm here."

"What about him?" Toby asked, jerking a thumb at Oz, who was so engrossed in his examination of the ankle monitor now that he scarcely seemed to be breathing, let alone aware of their existence.

"Hacker," Ben said.

"I prefer the term 'hacktivist,'" Oz said, still not looking at them.

"Like that guy that was on the news?" Toby asked, intrigued.

Oz snorted, looked up briefly. "Yeah, just like. Except for the part where I got caught."

"They caught the Whiz," Ben pointed out. "I saw a report about it."

Oz snorted again. "Don't believe everything you see on the news."

Ben turned back to Toby. "So what about you?"

But before Toby could answer, a shadow fell over them and they looked up.

One of the big kids had risen from his seat in the back and had obviously overheard most or all of their conversation. He looked to be about 16, a tall boy with long, ropy arms that ended in a pair of clenched fists that hung directly in front of Ben and Toby. Like Toby, he had short haircut, but where it seemed out-of-place on Toby's softer, round face, it fit perfectly with this guy's bricklike head and square jaw.

"I hear right?" he said. "You all a bunch of miserable DCs?"

Ben frowned. And to think he'd been worried about bullies at the boot camp.

"I'm Ben Bridge—" he began falteringly.

"I KNOW who you are, nose-wipe," he hissed, leaning his face down in front of Ben's, so close now Ben could almost count the hairs in his nostrils. He stared murderously at Ben for a second, then shifted his gaze toward Toby. "So what did you do? Mug an old lady? Sell drugs?"

Oz spoke up. "Sherrinford only recruited kids who fell within a specific personality profile," he said, as he tugged gently on the ankle monitor strap. "They didn't choose from among anyone with drug records or violent offenses."

The bigger boy looked over at Oz, his face, curling into a sneer. "Yeah? Well, I still think they got no business sending a bunch of convicts to our school." As he said this, a general thuggish rumble of approval came up from the back.

"Greg, don't start this again. That's why they moved you off the other bus. You settle down back there," the bus driver called back, looking at them all through his mirror.

The boy named Greg looked briefly in the direction of the driver, then turned back, his attention still focused on Oz, who was now quite obviously ignoring him. This of course enraged Greg. He leaned over, put one hand on Oz's bony shoulder and shoved him back in his seat. Then he grabbed a fistful of the back of Oz's shirt. Startled, Oz turned.

"You LOOK at me when—" Greg started, then stopped.

After that, things happened so fast that Ben didn't really realize what was going on until it was all over. Greg's head suddenly snapped back. In the next instant, his shadow was no longer on them and he was falling backwards. It was then that Ben realized that Toby was gone from his seat and was now standing behind Greg.

Impossibly, grotesquely, Toby had two fingers hooked up Greg's nose. The moment he laid hands on Oz, Toby had reached behind him, caught him by his nostrils and pulled as hard as he could.

Having never been grabbed by the nostrils himself, Ben didn't know how easy it would be to be controlled from that vantage, but if Greg's reaction to this novel hold was any indication, it wouldn't be hard at all. Greg howled in a horrible, nasally kind of way and fell backwards, arms swinging for balance. Then Toby put a foot on the back of Greg's knee and pushed. The bigger boy went down then, sprawling in the floor as Toby let him go. He looked up at Ben and winked, then grimaced as he looked down at his fingers, but just then the bus screeched to a halt.

Greg's friends were out of their seats and coming down the aisle from the back of the bus, while the driver was charging at them from the front. Toby crouched into a fighting stance, the two fingers that had been up Greg's nose were now hooked out towards his friends. Ben looked around wildly, not sure what to do next.

Our heroes were surrounded and not for the first time, Detective Bridge wondered how he'd got himself into these kinds of messes. The sudden appearance of the Narrator surprised Ben and made him laugh nervously. A mistake.

"This isn't one bit funny!" the driver bellowed, spraying spit on all of them. Oz sat up, his face red.

"This guy assaulted—" he began.

"Don't want to hear it!" the driver shouted, then looked up at the bigger boys staring back at him. "You all sit down. And you—" he pointed down at Greg. "Get your butt up and back in that seat! And wipe your nose! You're lucky I don't turn you over to the Dean when we get to campus."

Greg's face was flushed and confused, as if he was still trying to figure out how a skinny little 12-year-old boy had gotten the better of him, but when the driver mentioned "the Dean," whoever he was, Greg blanched.

"No, Mr. Hayward, you don't need to do that. I just—these DCs—you said yourself they're gonna wreck the school." Greg bowed his head in such an overacted display of shame that Ben half-expected the driver to hand him an Oscar.

But the driver bought it hook, line and sinker. He stood there for a beat, his mouth hanging open. Then he seemed to recover himself. "Well, plenty of blame to go around. You, get back in your seat and stop picking on kids who are younger than you. You—" now he pointed to Toby, "—you don't ever want to try that kind of dirty fighting at the school. Dean Taras will set you straight about fighting in a half a second!"

Toby nodded, but didn't bow his head like the bigger boy. He just stared straight into the driver's eyes.

The driver blinked first. "All right. It's all over with. Everyone sit back down," he said, although everyone was sitting by then, including Greg, who had limped back to his friends, one of whom was snorting with barely concealed laughter and mimicking the recent tussle by putting two fingers up his own nose.

A moment later, the driver was back in his seat, too, and with a lurch, pulled the bus back onto the winding mountain road.

"That was amazing!" Ben hissed and Oz, who was evidently finished with his study of the ankle monitor, could only nod his head in agreement. "Where did you learn that? Is that some kind of ultimate fighting?"

Toby smiled and now he did look down. "My uncle taught me how to fight. There's no name for the style of fighting he does, not in English anyway. He learned it when he was...well, when he was in the secret service."

Oz looked even more alert at this. "Seriously? Like the people who bodyguard the President?"

Toby laughed. "No, not that secret service. Uncle Dimitri is from

Russia

. Their secret service."

Oz seemed goggle-eyed at this, but Ben began to wonder if their new friend was telling tall tales.

On the other hand, the Narrator spoke back, as he sometimes did, Toby sure did make short work of that thug. Not a bad ally for Detective Bridge to have on his side.

Maybe, Ben thought. Maybe. But an uncle with the Russian secret service? Come on! Why couldn't he just tell them the truth? What was Toby hiding? And then he wasn't thinking anymore, because the bus lurched around a final bend in the road and what Ben saw out the window made him and the Narrator both stop.

"Sherrinford," Toby whispered.

Even the big boys sat up at the sight before them. The bus came up a rise to a vast plateau that was bounded on one side by a high stone face. The sheer stone, which stretched hundreds of feet towards the sky, ending at the summit of Mount Sherrinford, acted as a natural retainer for the lake that sat just behind and to the left of what Ben supposed was the school's main building. It certainly was the biggest structure on campus.

It looked like a cross between an old-fashioned luxury hotel and a castle of some kind. It was a very square building, with turrets on all four corners. The building itself looked to be about four stories tall (although Ben found out later that it was really only two), with dozens of windows, all tall, narrow and bright with red trim. While most of the building seemed to be made of stone, the rooftop itself was enormous and seemed to go on and on, one massive field of scrolled copperwork, made green by age and acid rain. Here and there along the rooftop, Ben could make out small balconies.

As the bus began driving down a narrow, single-lane track to the main gates of the school, Ben noticed that there was a small square nearby, almost like a town square or a campus quad, where several smaller stonework buildings sat, each about four stories high. In front of these, Ben could see several groups of kids, some gathered around what were obviously parents' cars, others simply by themselves, talking or playing catch on the lawn. Beyond the quad, Ben could see buildings—some a little taller than the main building, but none anywhere near as massive—and what appeared to be a service road leading down the other side of the campus.

"Those all must be the dorms," Oz said, pointing to the buildings around the quad.

"Not all," Toby corrected and Ben peered closely. Two of the buildings on the quad had concrete barriers blocking the doors, and as they got closer, Ben saw that the roof on one of the buildings was partially collapsed, no doubt from some fallen tree or the weight of the winter snow. While the main building looked neat as a pin, it was clear that many other buildings had fallen into disuse and neglect, a sign of the hard financial times that had befallen the once famous school.

The driver seemed to be taking the scenic route, following a spur road that led them away from the quad now. They dipped briefly to the left, following the edge of the lake. Here, Ben got a glimpse of the back of the main building and noticed a large glass structure—like an oversized, ornate greenhouse, sticking out the back. Out on the lake, Ben could see an assortment of scuffed canoes, a half-sunken paddleboat and a seriously listing dock out in the middle. At the opposite end of the lake, near the base of the cliff, he saw that the plateau rose to a small, grassy hill with a single large tree and some kind of stone marker adorning the top.

"There's some kind of path up that little hill," he said, pointing.

"There's walkways everywhere. Miles and miles of pathways, all around the grounds and up and down the mountain. You can sign out bikes or go on hikes," Oz said. Ben's eyes tried to follow the trail as it wound its way down the hill, then disappeared near where the glass structure came into view. He wondered if the path ended there or extended into the woods.

But he would have plenty of time to explore later, he hoped. Now, the bus pulled in behind the first shuttle, which had such a headstart it had already disgorged its load of students. It was sitting, empty on the tarred drive just in front of a massive set of double oak doors leading into the main building. Nearby, a severe looking woman stood, holding a clipboard and looking expectantly at them.

"You're late," she said, glaring at them as the students stumbled off the bus. The older boys all nodded solemnly to her, and she back to them as they gathered their things and moved away—quickly, Ben thought. Ben met her gaze for a second and felt the powerful urge to offer an apology, but of course she was speaking to the driver, who never mentioned the tussle that had caused him to pull over, but instead said they were delayed because he'd had to stop and pick up new students at the gas station in town. Then he pointed at Ben and Oz, and handed her the clipboard.

"Names?" she barked at them.

Stammering, Ben gave her his name, and the woman smartly made a check on her list. She did the same with Oz. Like the driver, she also asked to see their ankle bracelets, but made far less a show of examining them. "You'll need to remain in the auditorium after supper for special instructions," was all she had to say to them on the matter.

When Toby gave his name, however, the woman began turning several pages on her clipboard, before looking up at Toby. "Why aren't you on my list?" she demanded.

"I'm—I'm a late addition," he squeaked.

"Hmph," the severe woman said, glaring at Toby. "That's unusual. I was assured that I had all names for students in the special program. I'll check the late roster in a moment. Meanwhile, you should know that I am Agnes Taras. I am the Dean of Students for the Sherrinford School. As new students, and more importantly, as students joined as a result of our new program, you should know that I will be keeping BOTH eyes on you. We do not tolerate misbehavior of any kind at the school. Our students behave as perfect gentlemen and ladies at all times. Failure to do so results in punishment. Repeated failure results in expulsion. In your specific cases, expulsion will result in you being remanded to the custody of the Albany Juvenile Detention Center until the authorities can dispatch you to serve out whatever sentence was suspended so that you could come here. Do I make myself clear?"

They all nodded.

"Very well," she sniffed, then looked back at her clipboard. She nodded at them. "You will be roomed together in the boys' dormitory, Doyle Hall at—wait a moment—" she squinted at her clipboard, her eyes scanning what appeared to be an important note. Then she looked up, first at Oz, then at Ben.

"Young man," she said, her eyes boring into him. "Did you bring any kind of computer with you?"

Given his family's current financial situation, Ben would have laughed at the idea if it had been anyone else asking. "No," he said, "don't have one."

Taras turned to Toby. "And you?"

Toby nodded. "I have a netbook in my pack. And a smartphone."

Taras nodded, scanning her almighty clipboard again. "Well, the phone won't do you much good up here." She gestured behind her in the general direction of the mountain. "There are no cellular towers on the mountain, so mobile phones of any kind have no reception here. On your tour of the campus, you will be shown landline phones available for student use, and the times during which they may be used. You may also use your computer to access our local network, although I must tell you that our wireless capabilities are extremely limited and do not function more than a few feet beyond the walls of the main building or the library."

She consulted her clipboard again, and made a couple of notes. "You will be roomed with other students," she said to Toby. "But we will arrange your accommodations as soon as I've found your name on the list. Follow me to my office. You two," she said, pointing again at Ben and Oz. "Doyle Hall. Just over there." She pointed to the quadrangle of buildings where Ben had seen students earlier, and began fishing in her pocket. "Look for the name on the building. Room 423. Do NOT indulge the temptation to explore the buildings whose front doors are barricaded. They are closed for your safety. Supper will be served promptly at 5:30. Listen for the chime and come to the main building, where you'll be directed to the dining hall." She found two room keys and handed them to Ben and Oz. "Good day, and welcome to the school." She snapped at Toby and with a single forlorn glance, Toby gave a brief wave, then followed after the Dean.

"Wow, they really don't want you messing with computers, do they?" Ben asked as he grabbed his duffel and slung it on his shoulder.

Oz nodded, but he wouldn't look at Ben. He appeared to be too busy trying to balance his massive suitcase on its wheels and tug it behind them. "Just remember, don't tell anyone about the Gamehound, okay?"

Ben nodded, though by that point Oz was already rolling his suitcase across the yard to the dorms.

Freaky (Fiction) Friday

2012-12-07T00:02:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's a good thing I took the precaution of writing a book before taking this new job, otherwise I'd feel really guilty about not posting anything.

The job goes well, thanks for asking. After a long year of being the editorial equivalent of a traffic cop for a wide variety of print and digital products (and it's a dire sign indeed when your editorial job description calls the stuff you work on "product"), I am back where I belong, somewhere on the masthead of a magazine. This may seem like a strange thing to admit on a blog, but God, I love magazines, be they print or digital editions. I'm starting from scratch with a brand-new crew of immensely talented folks (plus me). There's a steep learning curve ahead, and I'm racing to get my head around my new responsibilities (and also to finish hiring some open positions). Yeah, my days are full, but so is my heart.

And before I sink us all into a diabetic coma, let's see what Ben Bridge has been up to since last we left him...

(Previous chapter)
(Next chapter)

Chapter 3

On the Road to Sherrinford

The rest of the school year—there were only three weeks—passed with agonizing slowness. For all the good the newspaper and online stories about his case had done him, they did him no favors in the hallways or classes of Rockaway Junior High. Ben was the subject of much finger-pointing and derision. Of course, he had been before—he had never had many friends at school—but this was different. Everyone knew him as the weird, nosy boy detective, but now he was the weird, nosy boy detective who'd been caught burglarizing the school. Some wise-crackers started calling him "B&E Bridge": "B&E" of course being slang for "breaking and entering," but the initials also happened to be the first two in his name (Benjamin Ernest). He was notorious.

But not notorious in a cool way. Not like, say, the Whiz, another young criminal who had been in the news that year. Earlier, through the winter and spring, news channels had been abuzz about a computer hacker who went by the handle of the Whiz. He (or she) was an online sensation, supposedly hacking into bank networks and transferring millions in cash from giant corporations to the accounts of people who had almost no money, a Robin Hood of the digital age. Ben had followed the case in the news for a few reasons—first, because the FBI cyber-crime division revealed that they thought the Whiz was young—under 18 anyway (although how they knew that, they never said).

Second, because even though he kind of admired the Whiz's exploits—especially the one where he had paid off the mortgages of 50 families facing foreclosure from a notorious bank—Ben couldn't help but indulge a private fantasy in which he got involved in the case. It seemed like a Sherlock Holmes/Professor Moriarty kind of match-up—the youngest detective against the youngest criminal genius. But unfortunately, his parents had had to sell their computers and cancel their Internet in order to pay the rent and keep food on the table, so Ben could only follow the case using the clunky old computers at the school or in the public library.

But then, about a month before Ben's own midnight escapade at school, the nightly news blared the bulletin that the Whiz had been caught. He (or she) was indeed a minor, so the FBI didn't reveal his (or her) name (and apparently no one got to interview the Whiz's parents, he thought ruefully). Ben was kind of sorry to see the Whiz go away. In his daydreams, Ben wanted to be the one to take the Whiz down.

But now, with school winding down, Ben's opportunities to use the school computers were also coming to a close, and he used all his free time online to find out all he could about Sherrinford, not to catch up on the Whiz, who was fast becoming old news anyway. The last report he'd read stated simply that the unnamed kid had pleaded guilty to his (or her) crimes and federal prosecutors were deciding what to do with him (or her). Ben wondered if somewhere there was a camp for wayward hackers, just as there was apparently one for wayward sleuths.

Although he'd never heard of it, back east, it seemed that everyone—well, everyone who was rich or well-connected—knew about the Sherrinford School. Like Hawksmoor said, it had started out as an upstate New York prep school, but after the stock market crash in the late 1920s, the well-to-do bankers who'd sent their kids there had to pull them out because they could no longer afford tuition. The school limped along throughout the Great Depression, but by World War II, the school itself appeared to have fallen on hard times. It was abandoned and derelict for a few years, there on Mount Sherrinford in the Catskills.

But by the early 1950s, the school and all the land around it—which basically included the entire north half of a mountain, complete with a natural spring-fed lake—was bought by Oscar Reston, the famous mystery novelist, whose twin sons, Jack and Jake, were amateur detectives, just like Ben. Except that, unlike Ben, the Reston twins actually had some success in their chosen endeavor. They caught a gang of notorious counterfeiters single-handedly, and their father turned their story into a best-selling book. The public demanded more, so Oscar fed that demand by writing a dozen or so mystery novels loosely based (how loosely was never specified) on the Reston Twins' real-life adventures. For nearly a decade, the Reston Twins were more popular than Lassie and Davy Crockett put together. Kids (kids who were now grandparents, Ben realized) flocked to join the Reston Twins Junior Detective Brigade.

And it was at the peak of their popularity that old Oscar bought up the grounds—buildings, lake, mountainside and all—of the Sherrinford school and ran it as a summer camp for all those junior detectives. The crazy thing was, the school thrived—for a little while anyway—after the popularity of the Reston Twins waned (the last mention Ben could find of Jack or Jake was when one of them had been arrested at a college protest march of some kind). But that was because the school ran one of the most aggressive and ambitious summer programs of its kind.

Like the judge said, the school offered classes on law and ethics, but also on the art of observation and deduction. Apparently, enough well-to-do kids went there that, when they grew up and had families of their own, they sent their kids there. It was the sort of extracurricular activity—summer at Sherrinford—that Ivy League schools looked for on college applications.

This was all news to Ben, and he spent hours both at the Sherrinford School's Web site (pretty clunky and outdated, although he did like the school's crest: an eye peering through a keyhole above a Latin motto—Quaerite et Invenietis—whatever that meant) and in various searches of stories about the school, including a recent news item about the school's new joint operation with the Department of Justice. In it, he read a brief interview with Oscar Reston III, grandson of the original and now head of the school. "We see too many young men and women turning to crime earlier and earlier, we see the rise of a juvenile justice system that is improperly equipped to deal with some of these children," Reston told the interviewer. "Some of these young men and women show great promise, and we will seek them out, offer them a place here at the school in a special program, where they can hone their skills and learn to serve the public good."

The story didn't explain much more about what that program offered, however. From there, the writer talked about how Sherrinford needed the money that a federal program would provide, how attendance had been dropping just like Mr. Hawksmoor had said, how some of the buildings on campus were falling into disrepair. Ben scanned the rest of the story, but in a distracted way. He was still thinking about that last quote of Oscar Reston III. Was that why he was offered the chance to go? Had the Reston family seen some potential in him that people like Azoline—and even his own parents—saw as a nuisance?

It was a thought that buoyed him up in the difficult weeks that followed, weeks of avoiding the Veep and the less-than-kind remarks of his classmates. Even his old pal, the Narrator, had been silent in his head, too ashamed to recount Ben's life in his usual over-the-top fashion.

But finally, the first week of June arrived, and Ben found himself waking up early one Saturday with more than a little excitement. In a few hours, he'd be on the bus to Sherrinford. Families were responsible for transportation to and from the school. It was a long trip, but there was no way his parents could afford a flight or even a train, so the bus it was. But first, he'd had to return to the police station where he had spent the worst night of his life. The excitement he felt vanished for a time, replaced by shame and apprehension.

On this visit, Ben was not led to a jail cell, but to a room where his parole officer and a man who identified himself only as "the technician," fitted Ben with the device he'd been filled with both curiosity and dread to see: his house arrest bracelet.

"It's actually called a Variable Area Personal Monitoring Device," the technician said. He grabbed a handheld barcode scanner off the table and ran it over the side of the device. A second later, the laptop on the table beeped. "There, it's logged into the system."

He held the device up for Ben and his parents to inspect. It looked to Ben like a very large wristwatch. It was a dark plastic strap attach to a black box slightly smaller than a deck of cards. "It's completely waterproof, so you can wear it in the rain, in the shower, wherever," he said, gesturing to Ben to lift his pant leg. Although Ben would often refer to it later as "the ankle bracelet," the technician actually cinched the strap around Ben's shin, high enough that the black box wouldn't chafe his ankle. Once Ben confirmed that it was comfortable on him—well, as comfortable as you expect a plastic strap you had to wear at all times—the technician pointed to the box, which had a little speaker on it and a couple of blinking lights.

"There's a GPS unit in there, and it relays your position to the central monitoring system at all times," he said. He pointed to a laptop sitting on the desk nearby. "The school will have access to the monitoring system, which is programmed with a map of the grounds." The technician made a couple of adjustments to the black box with a very small screwdriver, then went to his laptop.

"As long as you stay within the school grounds," Ben's parole officer explained, "you'll be fine. But if you go outside the boundaries marked in the program, the monitoring device will know it, and will automatically send an alert to the system." He nodded to the technician, who tapped a few keys on his laptop.

The blinking green light on Ben's ankle bracelet suddenly shifted from green to a flashing yellow. A slow beeping sound filled the room. "That's a warning tone," the technician said. "It's a signal that you're at the edge of the preset boundaries in the system. And if you go outside the boundaries…" then the technician hit another button. The green light vanished and a red light flashed on the monitor, accompanied by a loud and insistent beep.

"That means you're in violation of your parole," his parole officer said. "The violation will be logged into the system, and I'll get a message about it. So will the local police and officials at the school. Unless we get a follow-up message from the school that it's an error, or they've authorized you to leave the grounds because of an emergency or something, then you'll be considered a fugitive and we'll send local police the signal for this monitor and they'll be able to track you down. You understand?"

Ben nodded. The bracelet was beginning to look more like a ball and chain than a cool piece of technology.

The technician hit a few more buttons and the alarm ceased, the red light vanishing in place of the green. "You're in roaming mode now, and will be for the next 18 hours—long enough to get to the school, where an official there will log you into the local system and confirm you're on the premises. When you get there, you'll get more information about the bracelet, like the Curfew Mode," the technician smiled as he said this, but not in a mean way. "It's really a pretty amazing system."

The parole officer gripped Ben by the shoulder, wanting his full attention. "The monitor box is tamper-sensitive, Ben. If you try to remove it, you'll set off an alarm and be in violation of parole. If you try to cut or stretch the bracelet and slip out of it, a sensor in the bracelet will trigger an alert and you'll be—"

"—in violation of parole, I got it," he said miserably.

"If you accidentally damage the bracelet or it goes off for no reason, report to the head of the school or one of the instructors immediately," the technician added. "They're the only ones who can let us know it's a false alarm. Got it?"

Ben got it. He felt like a dog wearing a shock collar.

On the ride to the bus station, Ben was uncomfortably aware of the weight of his new fashion accessory. Every time he shifted position in the car, he could feel the bracelet shifting between his pant leg and his skin. He didn't think he'd ever get used to it.

But he did forget about it, at least briefly, when he got to the bus station and quickly found himself sitting in a sprung and slightly odorous seat near the back of the bus.

He looked out the window at his parents, who waved vigorously enough, but their smiles were at kind of half-mast. His parents were relieved to see him go, he knew. It's not that they wouldn't miss him or weren't sorry he was leaving. But they were glad that he wasn't going off to juvie hall or some awful boot camp in the desert. "You caught a very lucky break indeed," his dad had said, after hugging him goodbye. "This is your last chance, Benjy. Please don't blow it."

Ben was duly cowed by this farewell, and his guilt at letting his parents down felt 10 times heavier and more uncomfortable than the bracelet on his leg. But as the bus roared off out of town, he couldn't help but feel a growing sense of excitement.

And so our hero headed into the east, his heart beating in growing anticipation as he faced a new horizon, filled with the promise of new adventures, new mysteries to solve, the Narrator intoned in his head, a voice he hadn't heard in weeks. It heartened Ben, and with the voice still echoing in his head, he dozed off.

He woke, sweaty and groggy, several hours later, when the bus jerked to an abrupt stop outside a gas station. The sun was shining hotly through the windows of the bus where Ben had been sleeping. He stretched in his seat and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he looked on the seat next to him and panicked—his backpack was gone.

His fear was short-lived—the pack had only slid down onto the sticky, gum-strewn floor of the bus. Ben clutched it to himself like it was a teddy bear, then unzipped it and carefully checked its contents while the driver made announcements to the passengers, which he didn't bother to listen to.

Everything Ben really cared about in the world was in that pack, even if one of the items he'd packed was with a certain pang of guilt: his PerfaPick, which the police had miraculously overlooked when they arrested him. He was stunned to see it slide out of the envelope along with his wallet, house keys and other personal effects given back to him after his arrest. But then, the cops had never realized that he'd picked a lock to get into the Veep's office (and he never bothered to set them straight, having shared that fact only with David Hawksmoor), and the pick did look uncannily like a pen, right down to the ballpoint-like clicker on top and the clip on the side for slipping into one's shirt pocket. Ben didn't really have any intention of ever using it again, but he was glad to have it back. It reminded him of his Grandpa, who had thought everything his grandson did was brilliant, and who would have been proud that Ben was going to Sherrinford, no matter what he'd done to get there.

At the bottom of the bag, Ben found his Gamehound, the handheld video game unit that pretty much every kid his age had or longed to have. This had been a gift on his last birthday and he had been stunned to see it when he unwrapped the present. His birthday came not long after they'd lost the house and he remembered sitting in the dingy apartment that was now their home, his mom and dad smiling at him. The Gamehound had been the only present that year, he remembered his parents apologizing for that, and his face burned at the memory. Gamehounds weren't cheap, after all.

When Ben protested to that effect, his dad insisted that he'd got a good deal on it—had won it in an online auction, so it was second-hand. And Ben couldn't help but notice that it was a bit scuffed, and last year's model to boot, but he didn't care. He felt lucky to have it. More than once, when he'd seen his parents' faces, usually as they were looking over some new bill that they couldn't pay, Ben had asked them to sell the gaming unit, but they always refused, instantly and adamantly.

"Times are tough, Benjy," his dad had said, "but not so tough that we'd ever make you sell your toys."

Ben was clutching the game unit and staring down at it when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and he looked up, startled.

It was the bus driver. "Didn't ya hear me, kid? End of the line. Where you headed?"

"Um, the Sherrinford School, up on—"

"Mount Sherrinford, I know. You gotta wait here," he said, pointing outside to a bench next to the gas station. "The school sends a shuttle that makes the rounds to the airport and the train station. It'll come on through here in an hour or two. Come on, now. I gotta get this bus back to the garage."

Ben stumbled off the bus and found himself on a dusty stretch of ground between the gas station and the state highway. It was late in the afternoon, and the gas station was abuzz with activity as the bus's other passengers greeted those who had come to meet them, or else used the pay phone nearby to call a cab. Ben's duffel bag was sitting next to the bus, the only piece of baggage as yet unclaimed, so he grabbed it and dragged it over to a rickety wooden bench near a battered vending machine next to the station's service garage.

He realized he would be sharing the bench, judging by the enormous suitcase propped up against the vending machine. He'd never seen luggage so large—it looked almost the size of a steamer trunk. Ben sat down on the bench, stuffing his duffel under the seat and stared at this monstrosity of a suitcase. As he did, he began to play the Game, a mental exercise he'd read about in the Steel Sterling novels. Steel was always looking at something—like this bag—and try to deduce as much as possible about the owner.

Ben stared hard at the suitcase for a moment, then noticed a number of torn tags still hanging by an elastic band around the handle. A traveler, he thought. Someone who was on planes a lot, judging by all the luggage tags, many indicating destinations in Europe,

Japan

, even

Afghanistan

. Big guy, very strong, judging by the strength needed to haul a bag like that. Maybe a former soldier, if he'd been to

Afghanistan

. Older, too, set in his ways. Likes to bring his creature comforts with him. Maybe a bit of a clotheshorse, likes to take his wardrobe along.

That was as far as Ben got, when he heard the door to the gas station's rest room slap open and shut behind him and heard footsteps on the gravel. He immediately began rummaging through his backpack, minding his own business. A shadow passed him and then he heard someone sit on the opposite end of the bench. He looked up, and his heart sank: He couldn't have been more wrong in his deductions. Steel Sterling, if he'd been real, would have been laughing in his ear.

The owner of the bag was a kid, like himself, although quite a bit taller and skinnier (How does he haul that suitcase? Ben wondered). He had a shock of curly black hair that needed cutting and his general appearance was certainly not that of a clotheshorse. He wore a ripped t-shirt over faded, torn blue jeans, really not much different from Ben's attire. He had bright, intelligent blue eyes, which seemed to stand out even more in stark contrast to his extremely pale skin. He looked almost ghostlike. Guess he doesn't like the sun very much, Ben thought.

The young man nodded at Ben, giving him a once-over with those piercing blue eyes. Ben nodded back, then lifted a chin toward the suitcase. "You've been to

Afghanistan

?" he asked, pointing to the tags. The boy smirked as though he thought Ben was making a joke, but said nothing. Ben tried again. "Big bag to lug around," he remarked.

"It's got wheels," was all the boy said, then he stood up, fished in his pocket for some change and began to review his selection of beverages at the soda machine.

The bus driver said the shuttle would be along in an hour or two, which struck him as maddeningly imprecise, but either way he figured he had some time, so he fished his Gamehound out of his bag and inserted the one game cartridge he owned, which was a collection of various board games. Ben picked chess and began to play.

After a moment or two, he became aware of those sharp blue eyes on him. He paused his game and looked up. The boy was staring, not at Ben, but at the game in his hand. It was a look he'd seen before, and it meant one of two things: it was either a stare of envy from a kid who didn't have a Gamehound (in which case, he'd follow up his staring by pointing to the unit and saying, "Is that a Gamehound? Can I try it?") or it was a look of smug dismissal and the person staring would shortly reveal that he had the latest model, which was far sleeker than the old unit Ben owned.

But the boy with the bright blue eyes simply continued staring. Finally, he said, "Is that a Version 1 or a 1.7?"

"Uh, I don't know," Ben said, surprised to find the boy had found a third option he hadn't considered. "It's not new. I mean, I got it online, secondhand."

The boy didn't ask to see the game unit, just held out his hand, rather imperiously. The gesture annoyed Ben. But what annoyed him even more was how quickly he handed his prized game unit over.

The boy turned the Gamehound over, scrutinizing the metal label affixed to the bottom. Then he smiled, a sly grin that Ben liked instantly. "Huh—it IS a 1.7 You've got a wireless data card on this," he said.

Ben shook his head. "I wish," he said. Everyone knew the newer unit had wireless data capability to play games with other Gamehound or smartphone owners, or link to the Web and trade messages and set up matches with users around the world. "This is the older unit. It didn't come with—"

"Version 1 didn't," the boy cut him off, as he flipped the screen open and began pushing buttons. "But Version 1.7 DOES have wireless functions built in. These are made in

Japan

, you know. Over there, the 1.7s were the first units to have it. But you need a special kind of FCC clearance to have it in the States, and the company didn't have the license when they imported 1.7s over here, not til Version 2 came out. They had to kill wireless on these units, but the chip is in there. Look."

He handed the unit back to Ben and he saw that the boy had called up some kind of system menu that revealed all sorts of information about the unit—processor speed, memory, that sort of thing. At the bottom of the list, Ben was astounded to see a listing that simply said: "Wireless: Disabled."

Ben fiddled with the buttons, trying to get back to the regular gaming screen. "So?" he said. He looked up at the boy, who was unzipping a bulging front pouch on his massive suitcase. He pulled out a sleek silver Gamehound that looked like the slimmer, faster, better, newer unit. And then some.

"Is that the new one?" he asked.

"Actually, it's version 2.5. Really superior to the earlier versions. Models like yours are really susceptible to magnetic fields, for example. The new ones are shielded. Got it directly from the manufacturer. They won't be in the States til Christmas," the boy said, with just a little hint of smugness.

"What? Did you fly to

Japan

to get it?" Ben asked, pointing to the luggage tags again. The boy looked around, saw what Ben was pointing to.

"You're obsessed with the tags," he murmured. "This bag belonged to one of my brothers. Does a lot of traveling for his job, that's all." Then the boy seemed to hunch down and look around. After a moment, he fished out what Ben thought at first glance was a necklace of some kind: a long silver chain with assorted bulky charms on it. Then he squinted and saw that the chain was actually a cable and the charms were actually a series of USB flash drives, all connected to one another. The boy plugged one end of the necklace into the USB port in the back of the gaming unit. The lights on the various flash drives began flickering.

Ben couldn't help himself and began edging closer to the boy. On the gaming screen, the boy had pulled up a keyboard—the kind you use to enter your initials when you hit a high score on a game. Only this keyboard was different somehow—there was space on the screen for typing more than initials.

"What's with the USB necklace?" he asked.

The boy smirked but didn't take his eyes off the screen of his Gamehound. "It's a little homemade hard drive. I hardwired about a dozen flash drives together on one cable and they work as a single unit. I keep a few things stored on there, like this keyboard, which I modified to work with the Web browser."

"Version 2.5 has a Web browser?" Ben asked.

The boy looked up, his blue eyes glittering. "Mine does." He went back to the screen. "There's hardly any cellular coverage up here—no service at all up in the mountains, according to the coverage maps I looked at. And I have no idea what kind of Wi-Fi network they've got where I'm going, so I'm looking for a signal here to see if I can access the company's support site in

Japan

. There we are—" As Ben watched, the screen filled with Japanese symbols.

"You read Japanese?" he asked.

"A little," the boy answered, not looking up, "Enough to find my way around the support site and—oh, wait, there it is. Give me your Gamehound."

Ben held onto his unit, which looked decidedly scuffed and clunky next to this boy's sleek Gamehound. "What are you going to do?"

Now the boy did look up. "Do you want that wireless card working on your Gamehound or not? You've already got the hardware built-in. I'm just going to download the firmware that will tell your unit to turn the chip on."

Ben was too impressed to do anything but hand the unit over. The boy plugged Ben's game into the other end of the USB necklace and continued punching buttons on his unit. "This might take a few minutes," was all the boy said, so Ben decided to stretch his legs. He'd been on the bus a long time and his limbs felt achy and heavy, especially the one wearing the ankle bracelet.

He walked into the gas station, where he saw a state map and learned he was in the town of Ambler Mills, more than 20 miles south of the eminence noted on the map as Mount Sherrinford. He asked the attendant if he knew when the shuttle to Sherrinford would be coming by.

"Oh, no schedule for that," the attendant said. "They only run the shuttle at the start and end of a session. They did the run to the airport and train station this morning. They come back up through here late in the afternoon. Your best bet is to look for a white van with the Sherrinford name on it, and flag 'em down. But usually they stop. Usually," the man said.

Ben wasn't exactly heartened by this news, but he was excited to come out of the store and see his Gamehound sitting on the bench a few feet away from the pale boy with the blue eyes, who now seemed totally engrossed in his own game.

Ben picked up his scuffed old Gamehound and opened the lid to reveal the two screens on the unit, the viewing screen and the touchscreen. The viewing screen was blank, but the touchscreen now had that same modified keyboard he'd seen on the boy's newer unit. Ben tentatively poked a button on the touchscreen and the viewing screen came to life.

"Ready for chat." The screen said. Near the bottom, he saw a little icon of a satellite dish with radio waves blinking in front of it. "Wireless Mode On" read a legend next to it.

Just then the "ready for chat" message vanished and was replaced by a new one.

"U like?" was all it said.

Ben looked up. The boy, it seemed to him, was deliberately not looking at him, his fingers poised over his own gaming unit.

"Yes. Thanks." He typed back, somewhat clumsily. "I'm Ben Bridge. Who R U?"

There was a brief pause, then the reply. "Oswald Goldrick. Pls just call me Oz."

"OK Oz" he wrote back. Then he wrote. "What else did u do?"

There was a brief pause, then a list flashed on his screen. It read:

"U can: surf Web, play remote games, IM. Also put in WP."

Ben wrote back: "What is WP?"

"Word processor."

Finally, Ben couldn't stand to do any more messaging to the boy sitting two feet from him. "How did you do all this stuff?"

Oz looked up. "It's my hobby. Gamehound homebrew. People write their own apps to run on the gaming unit. My brothers showed me how. I wrote a word processor, a basic operating system, and one or two other things."

Ben felt his jaw drop. "And it all runs on this thing?" he said, holding his Gamehound. "But, how?"

Oz shrugged. "On the first home computers, you could write letters, do spreadsheets, and play games on unit that had a max memory of 16k. Even an old Gamehound has about a hundred times that capacity. Plus it has two processors—one to run the viewscreen, one to run the touchscreen—so it has more than enough power to run the programs. And anything I write that's too big for the game, well," he shook his flickering USB necklace. "That's what this is for."

"So, basically," Ben said, hefting his gaming unit with new respect. "You just upgraded me to a little home computer."

"Well, more like a smartphone than a computer, but yeah," Oz said, smiling. Then he frowned, as though he just remembered something important. "But listen, don't tell anyone, okay?"

Ben shrugged. He thought this guy was brilliance itself. Why would he want to hide the fact? "Ok, if you say so."

"Thanks. I just don't want every kid at Sherrinford hitting me up for free upgrades."

"Sure," Ben nodded, then he froze. "How did you know I was going to Sherrinford?"

Oz smiled. "My luggage isn't the only thing with tags on it," he said, pointing at Ben's pant leg. Ben looked down and saw that his pant leg had ridden up a little, exposing the bottom edge of the monitoring unit and its pulsing lights. Ben tugged the cuff of his pants down, feeling as strangely embarrassed as if someone had pointed out that his fly was open. But Oz was ignorant of his shame, and simply turned the screen of his gaming unit so Ben could read it. In the few seconds since he'd messaged his name to Oz, the boy had entered it into a Web search engine and pulled up one of those news stories about his arrest. "This filled in the blanks," he added.

Ben felt his face turn red and looked down. "I, uh—"

Oz smirked, and all of a sudden Ben wasn't sure whether he liked this boy or not. "No sweat, Ben. You're not the only discipline case going to Sherrinford this year."

Ben looked up at that. "You mean you—?"

Oz met his gaze for a second, then looked down, nodding toward his own legs, and Ben saw the telltale bulge by the boy's ankle—Oz had a monitoring device of his own. Ben could have kicked himself for not noticing sooner.

"Pretty amazing piece of tech," Oz said, not seeming anywhere near as humiliated as Ben was to be wearing it. "The company that makes them uses a proprietary system to transmit and receive signals from the GPS satellite system. It's encrypted and very hard to crack."

Ben had no answer for this—indeed, he'd barely understood what Oz had just said. He decided to change the subject. "So, what did you do to—?"

"Hacked into my school's computer to protest unfair grading practices—"

"You mean you changed your grades?"

"Not mine, no. Just everyone else's. I was trying to make a point. Never mind. The real point is, I got caught. It was stupid. My parents wigged. Didn't want me turning out like that other kid, you know, the one in the news a while back—"

"The Whiz," Ben said, nodding

"Yeah. They thought a summer at Sherrinford would straighten me out. No more computer or Internet access without adult supervision. And supposedly they teach a whole ethics course that includes cyber-crime."

Ben relaxed at that. "Oh. So what—?" he began, but Oz cut him off.

"Hey, Ben, let's swap criminal histories another time." He waggled his Gamehound. "You feel like playing against me? Check your directory—I downloaded some new games for you."

Ben looked at his screen and discovered about a dozen new games. He and Oz spent the next hour engaged in wandering around a tiny virtual dungeon, shooting trolls and minotaurs. Ben was so enthralled by the features his new friend had given him that he was willing to let Oz's abrupt change of subject go. For now. Still, it bothered him that Oz had an advantage. Ben's story was pretty much a matter of public record, but he knew nothing about Oz. He decided that before the summer was out, he was going to learn everything he could.

Thank God It's (Fiction) Friday!

2012-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

Well, all I can say is, it's a good thing enough of you liked the first chapter that I feel sufficiently emboldened to post the second. Because in truth I would have been a little busy to write something else: See, I started a new job this week, and things have been a tad hectic. But enough about that! Let's see what Ben Bridge is doing...

(Previous chapter)
(Next chapter)

Chapter 2

Meeting Mr. Hawksmoor

It was almost 3 in the morning by the time Ben was processed through the system, by the time his parents were called, by the time it was determined that he was going to have to spend the night in jail.

Ben tried not to cry when the police officer slammed that barred door home, locking him into a tiny cell (he had it all to himself, which was a small mercy. For a moment, when they led him into the back, past the large holding cell full of mean-eyed criminals and slurring drunks, he was afraid they were going to put him in there). But he couldn't help it.

When that door closed and he found himself in the little space, all he could think of was the looks on his parents' faces when they came into the interview room at the police station, their pale faces, their watery eyes as the arresting officer told them he'd responded to a silent alarm at the school (where had THAT been? He wondered. He thought he'd cased the place so carefully) and found their son kneeling on the floor of the vice principal's office, holding an envelope stuffed full of cash. He remembered especially his dad's look of blind, uncomprehending pain as he stared at his son and could only form the question, "Why, Benjy? Why would you DO this?"

It turned out breaking-and-entering was a felony, especially if the police thought they had caught you stealing more than 500 dollars. The fat envelope had held close to a thousand. Ben had wondered only briefly where the rest of the money was, but as he would find out later, the money he'd discovered in the coffee maker was not the missing five grand Ben had been after; it was the school's petty cash fund. Ben tried to explain why he was there, how he'd been on the trail of some missing money, but the police just looked at him with a certain amount of pity and disgust. Mostly disgust: In their eyes, he was playing a game that had gone long past being fun.

From their point of view, they had everything they needed: here was a kid from a family that had fallen on hard times—Dad out of work, kicked out of their home when they failed to keep the mortgage up to date, living in some dingy apartment on the north side, no money for anything. And so the kid found out where he could get his hands on a secret stash of cash, thought it would be easy pickings, and broke into the school to get it. Open and shut, for them.

The police could have sent him home with his parents, but they didn't. The officer in charge, a self-important fellow who reminded Ben a lot of Azoline, made a big deal to Ben's parents about their son's actions, claiming that an overnight stay in jail might teach Ben a lesson. And anyway, he pointed out, it would be morning in a few hours, and Ben's parents could take him home after his arraignment. So Ben spent the night—what was left of it—in jail, and it was the worst experience of his life. His hearing was later that afternoon, and on the advice of the public defender they'd given him (no way his family could afford a lawyer), he had pleaded guilty. Since it was his first offense, the judge had set a modest bail, but his parents couldn't even afford to pay that, and so he had waited in his little cell for several more hours until his parents could borrow the money from a friend. Finally, he was released, on orders to return in three days for formal sentencing (why couldn't they just have ended his parents' suffering and sentenced him then?). When Ben was finally in the car with his parents, he waited for them to yell and scream at him, but they said almost nothing, not in the car, not back at their little apartment. They left him alone with his thoughts, and that was even worse.

During those three days, Ben could think about nothing but the trouble he's caused for his parents, and had made up his mind about one thing: he was done with detective work. He doubted he could ever work for the police or the FBI now, anyway, not with a criminal record. But it didn't matter either way. His love of mysteries had led him to this scary little jail cell, and if he ever got out of it, he decided, he would be done with solving mysteries for good.

But meanwhile, other people were making their own decisions where Ben's detective career was concerned. A lot happened in that time as he waited to hear his sentence. After his hearing, the court reporter for the local paper had written up a brief story—a 12-year-old caught burglarizing the school was news in itself, and it was plastered on the front page of the local paper, as well as its website. The first news briefs about it had left Ben anonymous—he was a minor and there were rules about revealing the names of minors in criminal cases.

Then the reporter did some digging—interviewed the Veep himself, who was none too happy to find out his office had been broken into, but not exactly surprised that it had been Ben who'd done it. "That kid, I warned him about his snooping," was what he told the reporter.

Then he talked to Ben's parents, who had agreed to the interview—and to releasing Ben's name—in the hopes of creating some goodwill for their son in the public eye, or perhaps shaming him publicly, he wasn't sure. Ben refused to talk with the reporter, so Ben's dad was the family spokesman. He told the reporter the usual things you'd expect a respectable parent to say when his 12-year-old son has been found breaking and entering. But to his great credit, Ben's dad had also given the reporter the little case file Ben had kept in his room, detailing all the information on the Veep and the school fundraiser, the copy of the deposit slip that was missing $5,000.

The Veep had a good explanation, of course: he had put that money in a separate account, one Ben never found a deposit slip for—it was earmarked for improvements in the school sports program and so was separated from the rest of the money, he claimed. But now the reporter had a more interesting angle: a kid playing detective breaks into the school to investigate a teacher he thought was crooked. The reporter's story raised questions about what the man was doing with nearly a thousand dollars cash stuffed in a coffee maker in his office.

Boy detective arrested for breaking-and-entering: it was a story that had the kind of ironic twist editors loved, so it went out on the Web and got picked up by hundred of papers and news sites. Cable news did a piece on it. By the day of Ben's sentencing, a lot of people knew about him. Including one very special person, who had seen the story and called Ben's public defender.

So on the morning of Ben's sentencing, Ben and his parents went into the room where they were to meet with Ben's attorney and were surprised to find the lawyer sitting with a man they'd never seen before. He was an older man, very distinguished-looking, with a long, sharp nose and glittering eyes that reminded Ben of some deadly bird of prey. He seemed to stare through Ben as he walked in.

"Well, Benjamin," his lawyer began. "There's, ah, been some developments in your case." He turned and gestured to the man sitting next to their parents. "This here is, uh, he's a—"

"David Hawksmoor," the man cut in smoothly, extending his hand to Ben, who shook it warily and with some surprise. The man was tall and cadaverously thin, but there was amazing strength in that grip.

"Who are you?" Ben asked, somewhat curtly, but he didn't care. He hadn't slept in three days and he just wanted this to be over. But something about the man said that things were far from over; if anything, Hawksmoor carried with him the palpable sense that things were just getting started.

"Have a seat. You look tired," Hawksmoor said, gesturing to the desk.

Hawksmoor sat opposite Ben, who was now flanked on either side by his parents. Those piercing eyes continued to stare a Ben, almost as if he hoped to drill through him. What was he searching for?

Hawkmoor placed an expensive-looking leather valise on the desk and opened it, began ruffling through papers.

"I represent an institution in the east, upstate New York, in fact. Are you familiar with the Sherrinford Academy?"

Ben shook his head, looked at his parents. His dad had raised an eyebrow at the name the newcomer had uttered, but otherwise he stared straight intently at Hawksmoor, with a kind of desperation.

"Not many have, not these days," Hawksmoor said with a somewhat disgusted sigh. "Many years ago, at its founding, Sherrinford was a highly regarded preparatory school. Later, it became even more famous for its summer programs for children." Hawksmoor closed the valise with a snap. "I gather from your father's expression that he's somewhat familiar with the meaning that the Sherrinford name once carried."

Ben looked at his dad, who nodded. "Ben's grandfather talked about it. He said—"

Hawksmoor put up a hand and nodded politely to Ben's dad, but it was clear he was cutting Mr. Bridge off nonetheless. "Before we talk anymore about Sherrinford, I need some information from you, Benjamin." Hawksmoor folded his hands together, steepling them under his chin, his eyes now locked on Ben. "I need you to tell me everything that happened. Why you were in that office in the middle of the night, how you got in, what you did, everything. You've already pleaded guilty so there's no reason to withhold any information."

Ben looked up at his lawyer, who simply nodded. Ben shuddered inwardly at the idea of relaying what he had come to think of as his last case, then took a deep breath and told Hawksmoor everything, his suspicions, the case he'd built ("Yes, I know about that part," Hawksmoor had said, producing Ben's slim case folder, which his dad had obviously handed over). Ben even revealed that he'd got in the office by picking the lock, something he hadn't told the police (they assumed he'd found the door unlocked and he let them. Somehow he had a feeling it would be worse if they'd known he'd picked the lock). His parents gasped at this and his Dad shook his head, but Hawksmoor only let a thin smile play across his lips.

Finally, Ben finished, "Anyway, there was nowhere else he could have hidden anything in that office, so I just looked in the coffee maker and there the money was. That's when the police found me. That's it."

Hawksmoor scowled at this and leaned forward. "Are you sure that's it, Benjamin?"

Ben thought a minute. What else was there? What did this guy want from him? "I don't understand."

"A coffee maker is not an obvious place to look for money, which is what made it such an ingenious hiding place. So, what made you think to look there?"

Ben looked down at the table, his mind racing. He was so tired; he just wanted this to be over. "I dunno. I guess I just...I had this picture in my mind of the Veep—of Mr. Azoline laughing at me when I couldn't find the money. I could see his teeth. His white teeth. And well, no one with teeth that white would be a coffee drinker. So what was he doing with a coffee maker? That's all. It just struck me as out of place. So I looked. And there was the money."

He looked up. Hawksmoor was smiling now, showing his teeth, which were also very white.

"Interesting," was all he said.

"Now, what's this about Sherringford? I thought it no longer existed," his dad said.

"Sherrinford, Mr. Bridge," he said. "No G. And while I will admit the academy has slipped somewhat into obscurity, it still exists. Indeed, thanks to some recent developments, it is our hope to rehabilitate the Sherrinford name—and in some measure rehabilitate the new students we will be accepting this summer as part of a somewhat unconventional educational program."

"I don't understand. Is it some kind of reform school?" Ben's mom asked.

Hawksmoor shook his head. "Oh no. Sherrinford seeks to inspire and educate children with very special talents. It is, as some of our attendees quaintly call it, a school for sleuths."

Ben felt his heart race, forgetting for a moment that he had promised to give up mysteries and detective work forever. Had he heard right?

"For what?" his mother asked.

"For sleuths, for those who have a calling in the field of observation and deduction—detectives. When it failed as a preparatory school, the buildings and grounds were purchased by the Restons—surely you've heard that name? Heard of the Reston Twins mystery books, possibly seen the old Disney movie? Very popular back in your grandfather's day, Benjamin—"

Ben nodded. Even he had heard of the Reston Twins.

"And young men and women flocked to spend summers at the school, where they were instructed by detectives and investigators of every stripe, and solved mysteries constructed for them by the school staff."

"Right," Ben's dad said, nodding. "It was a summer camp for kids who liked to play detective."

"Seriously?" Ben asked, his astonishment now total. How had he never heard of such a place?

"Is the idea so unusual?" Hawksmoor asked. "We live in an age of highly specialized summer programs. Parents send their children to computer camp, chess camp, cheerleading camp. And of course there are those fashionable fantasy camps now. The mythology camp where children learn about Greek gods and embark on 'quests' created by the counselors, for example. Across the valley from us is a so-called magic camp," he said sourly, the corners of his mouth curling downward in obvious disdain. "The children there learn card tricks and practice sawing one another in half, I suppose. For all I know, they may also run around in robes and pointed hats, waving wands and shouting garbled Latin 'spells' at one another."

Hawksmoor sighed. "But to answer your question, yes, Sherrinford does operate its own summer program. Has done for nearly 50 years, and was indeed the forerunner of so many of these theme camps you see nowadays, although I like to think we offer students something rather more exciting and worthwhile than waving pom-poms or concocting ersatz magic spells. To date, our clientele has been somewhat exclusive, and, to be completely honest, shrinking. Boy and girl detectives are not as popular in books and film as they once were, alas, and so fewer families send their children to us." Hawksmoor said this with a certain note of sadness in his voice. Ben thought of all those books in the library, all those children's mystery stories that only he seemed to enjoy reading now, and knew exactly how Hawksmoor felt.

"But starting this year," Hawksmoor went on, "the directors deemed it appropriate to enter into a special…partnership with the federal government that allows us to offer a new kind of enrichment program to a wider range of students. And so alumni like myself—I attended the school when I was a boy—have been called into service to seek out certain candidates for the program. I saw young Benjamin's story in the news and thought he might be a possible candidate. But the authorities may feel differently."

"What do you mean?" Ben asked. But before Hawksmoor could answer, there was a knock on the door and the bailiff poked his head in.

"Very well," Hawksmoor said suddenly, opening his valise again, and rummaging through it. He extracted a couple of pieces of paper, then snapped the valise shut. "I think I have everything here that I need." He stood up, looked at his watch, then at Ben and his parents. "Thank you for your time."

He started for the door, leaving Ben and his parents to stare at one another. His father opened his mouth to speak.

But at the door, Hawksmoor turned back, focusing on Ben. "It may interest you to know, Mr. Bridge, that I was once an inveterate coffee drinker. Bad for the teeth, as you observed, and bad for the stomach too, I might add. But there are dental treatments which can whiten coffee-stained teeth," and then he smiled again, showing those whitened teeth. "A good detective should follow his hunches, but he should also think before he acts, prove his theories before committing himself. Good day." And then he was gone.

Their attorney went out the door after Hawksmoor, while Ben and his parents followed the bailiff down the hall to the courtroom, which was really just a small conference room. When they walked in, his attorney was there, talking with the county prosecutor, and Hawksmoor, who hadn't left after all, Ben noted with some relief, but was conferring with them. Finally, the prosecutor gave a curt nod, and went back to his desk. Ben's lawyer came back to Ben's side and began to explain when the judge spoke.

"When I was a boy, my father caught me smoking a cigar from a box in his office," the judge said. "He decided to teach me a lesson: Since I liked cigars so much, I would have to smoke an entire box. About five cigars in, I was so sick, my face turned green and I was in bed for about a week. But I never touched a cigar again. Today, we might look on his punishment as cruel, but his goal was sound: he cured me of my desire by giving me the very thing I wanted, to such a degree that I was sick of it forever."

Ben nodded. He thought of the promise he'd made to himself in his jail cell, and knew where the judge was going with this.

"Well," he continued. "It was my intention to recommend a 90-day term in a juvenile behavioral modification program—a boot camp program for first offenders."

Ben swallowed hard. The public defender had mentioned this, the chance that the judge would send Ben to some kind of juvie hall or else commit him to Hard Knocks, a camp about 500 miles to the west, on the edge of the desert. He'd be living in tents and peeing in the bushes with about 100 other kids who'd been arrested for theft or gang-related stuff or drug charges. The very idea horrified Ben, not just because he was a slight, skinny kid, barely weighing over 100 pounds, and not likely to hold his own against the kinds of bullies that would end up in a camp like that. Actually, what horrified him the most was the idea that he would be lumped in with common criminals.

The judge went on. "But Mr. Hawksmoor here has provided a more, um, appropriate option." He looked at Ben. "I've read your story in the news. You've become quite the little sensation—a boy detective straight out of a Hardy Boys or Reston Twins adventure. Well, son, you need to learn that even private eyes have to follow the law. I understand you thought you were doing a good thing, but the end doesn't justify the means.

"You are hereby sentenced to spend 90 days at the Sherrinford School for, ah, Wayward Sleuths," he smiled at his own joke. "It's the same term than I would have given you in a juvenile boot camp program, but you can come home every 30 days, and I daresay you'll find the accommodations more agreeable than at Hard Knocks."

He leaned forward in his chair and stared hard at Ben. "Understand me, young man. This will not be a summer vacation. You will be under house arrest at this school, and required to wear an electronic monitoring device at all times. You will be attending classes on the law and ethics, on forensics. You will be conducting daily exercises on investigative procedures and tested on your performance. You will be under the supervision of government and law enforcement officials who are better detectives than you could ever hope to be. If you fail to satisfactorily complete the program, if you are caught backsliding—and most especially, if you are caught breaking into anyone's room or office while you're there, no matter what the reason, you will be found out, son. And if you do step out of line, you will be summarily sentenced to six months at the juvenile boot camp. Do you understand?"

Ben nodded.

"Also, from what I gather of this program, it has until this year been a very closed, exclusive community, offering programs only to a certain clientele and their children. The fees for attending this summer program are fairly steep. But because the Sherrinford school has partnered with a special federal program, the cost of your enrollment will be defrayed by the

U.S.

government. However, as part of your rehabilitation and to cover your room and board, you will also be expected to work at the school. You will be assigned a work supervisor and your work detail will be explained to you when you get there." The judge looked over some papers in front of him. "You will finish out your school year at Rockaway, and then you will report to Sherrinford the first week of June, when their summer programs commence."

He paused and looked again at Ben. "From everything Mr. Hawksmoor tells me, this is going to be a hard summer for you, and you will attend to your studies. By the end of the summer you will gain a higher appreciation for the field of investigation and perhaps become so sick of it that you will never pick up a magnifying glass again. From everything I understand about your background young man, it sounds like that would be a good thing, for your own sake and your parents."

Ben looked over at his parents and felt a pang of guilt. He felt vaguely sick to his stomach, as he imagined the judge had when his father had forced him to smoke those cigars. Right now, he never wanted to do anything like detective work ever again, but the judge had just sentenced him to a whole summer of it.

The judge rapped his gavel on the table. It echoed loudly in the small conference room.

"Good luck to you, son. Next case," he said.

The Thanks You Get

2012-11-23T21:37:00.000-05:00

Since you asked, the release of The Book went about as expected, which is to say it was well-received. Thomas read the whole thing, from beginning to end in about 48 hours and spent much of that time exclaiming in surprise and satisfaction in all the right places. Then he went back and read it a second time, taking a full three days, and this time he allowed that he enjoyed the first half better than the second half. Understandable: He got the first half for his 13th birthday, and waiting a year for the rest of the book is a good way to build your expectations a little high. Then he read it a third time, I think, because now he's in workshop mode, pointing out problems in the narrative, places where the pace gets a little too frenetic, and generally reminding me why I chose a career in nonfiction.

But that's okay. I'm pleased to have finished it. I even went the extra step of converting the manuscript to the mobi format for Amazon and shared it with a few people. I'm bracing for the inevitable notes, or emails with subject lines like "Huh?" and "Don't Quit Your Day Job."

But I haven't forgotten you, my friends and closest strangers, who have sent much mojo and encouragement over the years I have toiled at this labor of love.

Thus it is, in this season of thankfulness, I offer you the opening pages of the book. I gave it a suitably chewy working title, and it will have to suffice until someone offers me a better one.

Here, then, is Sherrinford's School for Wayward Sleuths.

Chapter 1

Breaking and Entering

As the moon rose above the treeline outside the darkened school, Detective Bridge stealthily snuck through the back door, his heart beating in double-time as he realized the case was finally drawing to a close.

With a clatter and a bang, Ben Bridge barked his shin on a bucket of sand the custodian had set by the back door of the school. He'd left a shovel there, too. It fell over with a clatter that made Ben cringe and silenced his inner Narrator.

Okay, not so stealthy with the sneaking, he thought.

His heart was definitely beating fast, though. Even with the moon, Ben hadn't expected it to be quite so dark, nor for the school to seem so creepy at night.

He'd been going to this school for years, knew its every nook and cranny, but his knowledge was suffused with sunlight. Like most students, he never stayed here longer than he really needed to, and that included after dark. It especially included after midnight, he realized, as he looked at the glowing dial on his wristwatch. It was 12:37, A.M., and he yawned, more out of reflex than anything else. He certainly wasn't tired. He was way too excited to think about sleep. After all, he was close to cracking the case.

That brought the Narrator back to life.

Detective Bridge played his flashlight around the entryway, looking for any cameras, motion detectors, or silent alarms he'd overlooked when he first cased this doorway earlier that week. Of course, he'd done his job only too well—he had overlooked nothing—but in this business, he knew, it paid to be careful.

Ben often narrated his life to himself, especially when he was doing anything that felt remotely like detective work. Not like a voiceover in a movie or on TV, though. At times like this, his thoughts were more like the narrator in a Steel Sterling crime novel. Ben loved Steel Sterling.

He kept his flashlight pointed down at the scuffed linoleum floor of the hallway and walked, his footsteps echoing dully in the corridor. Lockers flickered by in the light, the combination locks on the front glittering at him, an honor guard of metallic cyclopses watching him.

He had come in through the back door, by the Dumpsters, the door that the custodians always left opened. He remembered one of them saying that it was just easier to leave the door open than to lock and unlock the darn thing every time he wanted to step outside and have a cigarette (Rockaway Junior High was, after all, a Smoke-Free Environment). Getting into the school after hours had never been the challenge. The challenge would be breaking into the vice principal's office.

Ben was convinced the Veep (as everyone knew Alan Azoline, Rockaway's dean of discipline and second in command) had taken the money from the school's annual carnival fundraiser; had at least skimmed the collection. Ben had the tally sheets from the individual carnival booths and when you added them up, they didn't match the total that the Veep had deposited. Getting a copy of the deposit slip had taken some doing—nothing like the doing he was about to take, but still—and it had been the proof. The school had cleared close to $20,000 in the carnival, but the Veep had deposited a little less than $15,000. So where was the other five grand?

Ben thought he knew. Azoline was smart; he wouldn't start spending the money. Nor was he likely even to have it in an account of his own yet. No, he would have it squirreled away in his office, on school grounds. That way, if he got caught, he could always lie and say he'd overlooked it. Why, here it was still in his office. Oh my gosh! What a blunder! And of course it would be embarrassing. But nothing compared to the embarrassment that would come with losing his job. Or going to jail.

So Ben was going to find the money, stashed away somewhere in the office. He was going to find it, and take pictures of it and establish his chain of evidence. And then? He wasn't sure. Call the cops? Call the principal? No, he decided he would call the cops. He liked the school principal, but he had no idea whether or not he and the Veep were in cahoots. Besides, this was grand larceny. A big deal.

Might finally make it onto the front page of the news sites, he thought, as he walked around a corner and into a pitch-black corridor. He could make out streetlights through the windows on either side of the hallway and decided to wait a moment until his eyesight adjusted. As he did, he imagined the camera flashes, the photos and videos, the headlines: Young Detective Solves Fundraiser Felony (that's what he called it in his mind: The Fundraiser Felony).

His eyes adjusted to the light, or lack of it. He shut off his flashlight; this corridor joined the old school with the annex where the school offices were located, and it was lined with windows on both sides. Anyone walking through—especially in the middle of the night, with a flashlight in his hand—would be easily spotted from the street. He ducked down, eyes barely level with the window sills, and walked in a crouch all the way along the hallway.

As he did, the Narrator remained silent, but that's only because he was playing his personal soundtrack in his head. But not Ben's Theme, the usual tune his memory played back (for it was a conglomeration of great bits of movie music from all his favorite films). This was something new, something suited to the mood—a little jazzy number, a single cymbal tishing rapidly, in time to his heart.

He stared out at the sodium lights illuminating the street, expecting a police car to come rolling along any minute. But in the few seconds it took him to traverse the hallway, not one car passed by the school. With a long and scarily audible sigh of relief, he felt his feet step from linoleum to carpet and he knew he was in the administrative wing of the school. His heart slowed, the cymbals died, giving way to a single stringed instrument, plunking a series of tip-toey notes.

He switched his flashlight back on and, keeping it pointed at the bottoms of doorways, Ben walked down the hallways, counting doors. Just after the fourth door, he crossed another corridor and turned right. He stopped at the next door he came to. He didn't have to look at the nametag velcroed to the front. He knew it read "Alan Azoline, Dean of Discipline."

Ben tucked the flashlight under his left arm and fished around in his pocket. His gloved hand fell on a slim metal cylinder. He ran a finger thoughtfully over the burnished metal edge, feeling the timeworn pits and dents of age and use. At the age of 12, Ben Bridge didn't have many practical skills as a private detective, but, thanks to his grandfather, he did have one: He could pick a lock.

Grandpa Bridge had been a locksmith and made good money too. But his knowledge had been of old-fashioned locks and tumblers. When the digital revolution came, when the electronic locks, with their access cards and their wireless readers, made their debut, Grandpa bowed out, retiring to Florida with his meager savings and one or two handmade models of the only thing he ever invented: the PerfaPick.

Ben took the device out of his pocket and depressed the stem at the top. The PerfaPick looked exactly like an old fat fountain pen, but with the stem and the clicking noise it made, it sounded like a ballpoint. It was neither, of course. The PerfaPick was meant to overcome one of the great inconveniences of locksmithing life: carrying a whole purse of picks and tension wrenches around. Instead, the PerfaPick contained six different picks with a variety of configurations that covered most any key-operated lock. Even today, those locks pretty much came in two flavors—5-pin locks and 3-pin locks. Three-pin locks were a breeze to pick—Ben mastered those easily. Five-pin locks were a little more complicated, but the PerfaPick was equal to them. Ben had seen Grandpa pick hundreds of them and he was pretty sure he could do it himself.

He knelt down and shone the light into the keyhole. Right away, he could see it was a 5-pin lock. He held the PerfaPick up to the light and began fiddling with a control knob on the side, wheeling the 5-pin pick into the channel. He clicked the stem and the pick poked forward, into the lock.

Grandpa always said lockpicking was more art than science. While it was true you had to manipulate the lock so that the pins lined up, allowing you the turn the tension wrench (which Ben placed at the top of the keyhole now), you still had to feel the pins line up, had to sense the lock as it teetered on the cusp of opening. This was something Ben strove to learn, but he hadn't yet succeeded. At the time of his grandfather's death last fall, Ben had not yet picked a 5-pin lock. Tonight he would though.

As he fiddled with the pick, he let his mind drift, go silent. This was no time for a Narrator, nor any personal soundtrack. Instead, he tried not to concentrate on anything, not the creepiness of the school, nor the performance of the pick, nor what he would do once he found the money. But then he thought about the news stories that would celebrate his genius once he cracked the case. Would he tell the reporter that he had picked a lock to get into the Veep's office? That was breaking-and-entering, after all, a crime (was it a felony or a misdemeanor? He wasn't sure).

Stop, he thought. Let it go.

This time, he stared at the ceiling panels, at the dots in each panel above him, and let his hand guide itself. He angled the pick this way, then that, feeling the slight, almost imperceptible shift of each pin as it lined up in the lock. As it did, he applied a little extra pressure to hold each pin in place, yet still he moved the pick. When he felt the fourth pin line up, he turned the tension wrench slightly and let his hand tremble. If the fifth pin was close to lining up, the vibrations might be enough to nudge—

snick

He felt it more than heard it, but there was no doubt that it was the last pin. With a jerk to the left, the lock gave and suddenly the doorknob turned.

It took all he had to suppress a whoop of triumph. Instead, the detective simply allowed himself a silent grin. The Narrator was back.

Ben remained kneeling on the floor and pushed the office door open. He played the light around before stepping in. It was pretty basic: a metal desk at the far end, under a set of double windows, set high into the wall. On one side, the wall was filled with black metal filing cabinets. On the other was a small refrigerator with a coffee maker on top, and a couple of chairs. Ben had sat in one of those chairs a few times in his career at Rockaway Junior High. Sometimes a case put you at odds with the authorities. There was the time he'd tried to stow away on the late bus so he could sneak into the school motor pool and see who was painting graffiti on the sides of all the buses.

Another time, he'd been caught on the roof, which was totally out of bounds, but he wanted to see if that's where Skids Farris and his crew had hidden the file of exam answers they supposedly stole (he was escorted off the roof before he could find it). Rather than praising him for his grit and determination to right wrongs and discover the truth, Azoline had always come down hard on Ben.

"I don't like snoops," he said, just about every time he saw Ben. "Neither does anyone else. Maybe you'd have more friends in this school if you figured that out. You need to learn to mind your own business in this life, young man, or you're going to wind up in lots bigger trouble than you are right now." And then he'd give Ben a week's worth of detention.

Most kids said Azoline wasn't all that strict, but he sure seemed that way with Ben. Maybe he just didn't want a detective operating on school grounds because he figured that sooner or later that detective would get wise to him, he thought.

Ben had been a detective of one kind or another since he was 8 or 9 years old. He had always loved the children's mysteries section of the school library, had read every selection—most of them twice—in the shelves there. He seemed to be the only one who liked those books anymore, something he'd observed when he examined the checkout card and realized that many of the books had not been checked out in months or even years. Seemed like, when kids read at all, they wanted fantasy. Magic, ghost stories, fairy tales. When his dad was a boy, he remembered being told, mysteries were all the rage. Every boy wanted to solve crimes like the Reston Twins or Steel Sterling. Or help neighborhood kids with their everyday mysteries, like the McGinty Organization did in their series of books. But these days, no one read mysteries, so that Ben felt like that section of the library was his own private wing. Wasn't there anyone else out there like him, he'd often wondered? Not just someone who loved a good mystery, but who was inspired by them, wanted to be like those heroes? Not at this school. More than a thousand kids, and so far as Ben Bridge knew, he was the only one who ran a detective agency, even if it was just a detective agency of one.

He finished playing his flashlight around the room and stepped in, crouching low to avoid the windows, although they were plenty high. He looked briefly at the cabinets. All had alphabetic labels on them and he guessed they were all student files. He went around to the desk and sat in the Veep's chair.

The chair squeaked loudly, like a stool pigeon being leaned on. Ben froze for a moment, cringing at the noise, then inched it slowly back.

He trained the flashlight on the drawers. None of them was locked, which he found surprising, and a little disappointing. A locked drawer would have been a dead giveaway of something valuable hidden within, and with the PerfaPick, he'd have made short work of it. But instead, all he could do was very quickly rule out the desk as the location of any hidden money, just school stationery, a complement of basic office supplies, and a small but interesting collection of adult novels and trashy magazines—the Veep's disciplinary duties included confiscating inappropriate reading material from the student body.

Ben sat back and looked around the room. It really was very sparsely decorated—no pictures or posters. Just one wall-hanging, a framed certificate which, upon closer inspection, revealed itself to be the Veep's state teaching certification. Ben lifted the frame from the wall, but knew already that he'd find nothing, no hidden safe or recess. The walls were solid, whitewashed cinderblock.

With a sigh, Ben got up and started to the check the file cabinets. They werelocked, as it turned out, but file cabinet locks were easy—the first ones Ben ever learned to pick, all those years ago, first on the battered ones in Grandpa's basement, later on the rather nicer oak ones in his Dad's den, back when they had the big house on Fernhill Drive in the Heights, before Dad lost his job.

There were six cabinets in all, each of them containing five long drawers packed full of student files. Ben gave a quick look through each drawer, his heart sinking as he did. Had he been wrong after all?

In his mind's eye, the Detective could almost imagine his foe laughing at him, his bright white teeth flashing in the darkness. He—

"Wait a second!" Ben hissed, cutting the Narrator off. In his mind, he had seen the Veep's face, imagined his harsh, cutting laugh, seen his gleaming white, sharp, shark's teeth, guffawing in the hall as he and the principal shared a joke.

Ben's eyes fell on the coffee maker.

He went over and looked at it, still thinking oddly of the Veep's teeth. The flashlight beamed refracted through the round glass carafe, sending strange glints of lights this way and that across the cinderblock walls. Ben knew how these things worked—he'd made coffee once for his parents, that time they'd been up all night in the big house on Fernhill, sitting in Dad's office, hunched over the calculator, their faces grim. He's found some kind of special coffee in the fridge—it came from Hawaii and it was expensive. When his parents heard the machine hissing and sputtering, they came into the kitchen then. His Dad smiled at Ben, ruffled his hair. "Thanks for making the Kona, buddy," he said. "With your old man out of a job, we won't be drinking that again for a good while."

Ben looked behind the small fridge on which the coffee maker was resting—and noted it wasn't plugged in. He saw a lid on the top—the water reservoir—and flipped it open. Nothing—not even a drop of water. He lifted the machine off the top of the fridge and looked under it, thinking maybe there was another opening or it was hollowed out in some way, but no luck. Then he noticed the little handle on the front. He knew that had to be the filter compartment, where you placed a new paper filter and poured in the coffee grounds. He grabbed the handle—it was barely more than a plastic nub—between his thumb and forefinger and tugged, but it was stuck. Something was jammed in there.

He set his flashlight on the desk behind him and grasped a little more firmly. Slowly, the lid gave, and then it opened all in a rush and he lost his grip. The coffee maker fell to the floor, the glass carafe shattering loudly in the dark. But there was another noise too, a muffled yet heavy thump of something solid hitting the floor.

Ben reached behind, scrabbling for the flashlight. He got it and played it across the floor. Glass shards twinkled in the torchlight, beautiful and sharp.

And there, amid the shards, was a small zippered case, slowly unfolding itself. It had obviously been stuffed into the filter compartment. And as it opened, slowly, like a flower in the dawn, he saw the words Monopolis State Bank emblazoned on the front.

Ben squatted, not wanting to kneel in the glass. He reached out and snatched the envelope from the floor. It was heavy for its size. He unzipped it and immediately saw the corner of a stack of twenties.

In Ben's mind, music swelled to a triumphant crescendo.

Bingo! the Narrator said.

"Gotcha," Ben whispered.

"Police! Don't move, son!" yelled another voice by the door.

As it turned out, Ben had been right about one thing that night: he did finally make it onto the news sites—front page, too. But at the time, he was way too busy being under arrest to enjoy it.

Here's Chapter 2, if you can stand it. Thanks to those of you who made it this far.

An October Moment

2012-10-29T22:04:00.000-04:00

Over the past few moves, I've thrown out a bunch of my kids' stuff on the sly: broken toys, favorite clothes that don't fit anymore, and countless stuffed animals. Not the favorites, not the sleeping buddies—I'm not a complete ogre—just the stuff that's gone ratty and gross and isn't played with anymore. And I know for a fact that I threw this thing out:

This is Squeeky. Seen here, he is so matted and abused that I couldn't honestly tell you if he's supposed to be a fox or a squirrel. The Brownie gave him his name—the fact that he came equipped with two implanted squeaky bulbs may have had something to do with that. She played with Squeeky for hours on end, possibly even years on end. But when we were packing up at our last place and I was filling trash bags left and right, I found Squeeky. Before I could hesitate, I threw him out. That was a year ago.

I've since come to regret that rash choice. Because Squeeky was a beloved toy, as beloved in his own way as the Éclair's talismanic Kitty (who sleeps with her every night), or Thomas' stuffed train (which he does not sleep with anymore, but which I know he keeps tucked away in his room), or the Brownie's pink bear that she's had since she was one year old.

But Squeeky did not belong to the Brownie. He belonged to this fellow:

The Brownie never tired of throwing that thing for Blaze, and he never tired of retrieving it for her. But I threw Squeeky out after Blaze died. It was just too hard to see it there on the floor.

You never did know where you would find it. Blaze would carry the thing around from room to room, dropping it in the most random and unlikely places: the toilet, deep under the sheets of someone's bed, carefully deposited in my shoe. When he had it in his mouth, he always worked it around to get to the exact spots in the body and tail where the squeaky parts were implanted. Then he would expertly squeak at us, as shown in the video, and to the kids' endless delight. I used to wonder if he thought that he was speaking some kind of code or doggy language to us, but then he died without confirming that fact, and every time I've seen him since, I always forget to ask.

Yeah, I still see him, but not in the way you're thinking. He shows up in my dreams a lot. I don't, as a rule, have recurring dreams, or dreams with recurring people in them, but Blaze is the exception. Once, not long after we moved into the new Magazine Mansion, I saw him in the upstairs hallway. The hallway was about 10 times longer in the dream than in real life, and it was pitch black in the middle. I was beginning to panic that I was trapped in some kind of endless corridor, but then, some distance ahead, I heard a strange but comforting whisking sound, like someone was sweeping the floor—really fast—with a broom. I walked towards the sound and eventually came out of the darkness to the girls' room at the other end of the hall.

Blaze was lying on the floor across the doorway, as he always used to when the girls were little, part nanny, part burglar alarm, in the perfect position to alert us if one of the kids got up in the middle of the night…or to guarantee a swift and fatal crotch bite to any intruder foolish enough to come anywhere near his babies.

In the dream, Blaze didn't move when he saw me. Well, except for his tail, which was whisking furiously on the floor. He just followed me with his eyes.

Then he said, "Ah. There you are."

"Hey," I said quietly, too startled even to breathe. "I thought you were gone."

He snorted. "Please. You haven't seen the last of me."

And I woke up with a start.

***

In another dream, a few months ago, I was at work and my phone started ringing. When I looked at the screen, there was a picture of him, with a flashing message: "Incoming Call From BLAZE," it said.

I answered.

"What in the name of Dog are you doing?" he asked.

"What?" I said.

"I insist you drag your aging haunches out of your kennel and make your rounds," he said.

"What?" I said again.

A long-suffering sigh filled my ears. "Get up, you monosyllabic monkey! Instantly! The wolves are at the door! I mean, honestly." Then he hung up.

I woke in mid-leap from the bed, grabbed my trusty cricket bat and checked on everyone. No problems, all kids safe and slumbering in their beds. Then I went downstairs and found that the wind had blown our front door open (we had had furniture or something delivered earlier in the day and apparently hadn't closed the door quite shut afterward). I turned on all the lights and did a circuit of the house. Finding no intruders, I came back by the front door and saw, through the windows, a flash of motion in the darkness. I pressed my face up against the glass in time to see two coyotes--we live now in a somewhat wooded area--trotting around in the yard. Not wolves, but still. Every hair on my body stood on end as one of them turned and looked at me. His eyes flashed at me in a kind of fury. Then he and his mangy companion whirled, startled, as though something was sneaking up behind them in the darkness. Spooked, they both ran for it.

***

The latest dream, a few days ago, was also a phone dream. This time I got a text from Blaze. The message read, simply: KEEP YOUR EYE ON HER.

Saturday, while Her Lovely Self and the older kids were out, I left the Éclair down in the basement--she was making a birthday card for her brother in our little craft room. I was going outside to rake leaves or something, but abruptly decided instead to clean up my little workshop in the basement by the furnace. Five minutes later, I heard an ungodly crash and muffled cries. I was 10 feet away and sprinted to the craft room, where I discovered that a large cabinet had tipped over (the Éclair later admitted that she might have been climbing up its shelves), pinning my 5 year-old beneath, the weight of it crushing the breath from her. I hulked out and flung the cabinet off her. Except for a couple of bruises—and, one hopes, a lasting disinclination to climb shelves—the Éclair was unharmed, thank God. But if I'd been outside when it happened…

Never mind. No harm done.

Later, cleaning up the debris in the craft room, I saw what I thought was a mouse, cowering under another cabinet. I never would have seen it if I hadn't been there on the floor, picking stuff up. I grabbed some gloves and reached under to catch the mouse.

But as you must certainly have guessed by now, it was no mouse. It was Squeeky.

There's no real twist to this tale, by the way. The Brownie fessed up later that she saved Squeeky from the trash and kept him safe in a box in the craft room all this time (although how he got under the other cabinet is still a mystery). I just didn't know about Squeeky because my daughter didn't want me to throw him away again. So, perhaps not the best note to end an October Moment on.

Except to say this: We haven't seen the last of him.

And I'm not talking about the toy.

Not Dead, Just in Rewrites

2012-10-23T16:03:00.001-04:00

Sorry I’ve been away, but it’s one week to the Book Launch.

That’s right, sports fans, the global release of The Book I Wrote for My Kid is October 30—also known as Thomas’ 14^th birthday—in seven short days. I just have a few notes to massage into the manuscript.

Well, a few hundred thousand notes.

Note to self: Handwritten notes to self are time-sensitive. After 72 hours, they will not make a lick of sense to anyone. Including you. In fact, especially you.

Since I first posted about this, I have spent at least a few hours every night, and most waking hours of

my weekends scribbling notes, rewriting or moving around whole chunks of story and twice, so far, firing up the editorial backhoe to fill in two gaping plot holes.

I’m in the homestretch, though, just five chapters (out of 31) to go. Only one substantial rewrite left. And I’m not quite happy with the last page. Is anyone every happy with the last page? I don’t know.

I do know this: In a long career of overdoing it when it comes to my kids’ birthdays, this may be the pinnacle. Well beyond, say, the all-nighter I pulled building Thomas a fantastic wooden train layout in the living room, or the month I spent driving across half the Midwest to find him a specific action figure.

It does, however, pale in comparison to the efforts of Her Lovely Self, who once carried him around in a bag of water for nine months, then forcibly ejected him into the world. You have to keep perspective on these things.

I don’t know how many thousands of hours I’ve spent on this book over the past few years, but I do know if I were to multiply it out based on, say, my hourly freelance rate, it would have been cheaper to buy Thomas a car. Instead, he gets a book, the slightly desperate hope of his father that it doesn’t suck, and the reassurance that, whatever efforts I’ve expended to make him this gift, he is absolutely more than worth it.

So, apologies, all. I know some of you were hoping for an October Moment, but at this particular moment in October I’m haunted by the thought of not finishing this book, and that's scary enough for me, thanks. Hope it is for you too.

More soon…

A Stitch In Time

2012-09-13T18:30:00.002-04:00

So, it was the first week of school, and a bit of a nail-biter for the kiddos. Like me, my children can pretty much worry at will—it’s our super-power—and this past week, the angst engine was school. Thomas was playing the long game, worrying not so much about starting 8^thgrade as he was about the fact that it was his last year of junior high and high school loomed. You know, in a year. But he wasn’t going to let time get in the way of a good brood.

The Brownie was riding the bus with her brother this year, her first year of junior high. My middle child plays things close to the vest, so it’s not always obvious to me what’s worrying her, only that something is. Certainly it wasn’t academics. Anna inherited her mother’s brains (thank you God) and cuts through school work like a hot knife through butter. It turned out what was really troubling her were clothing issues—what other kids would be wearing on the first day, whether this top was okay or those shoes were cool enough. She was particularly worried about her ensemble for physical education class. I found myself utterly unequipped to address her concerns, since it wasn’t til very late in my school career that I gave a second thought to what clothes I wore, a fact my own mother used to her advantage, as we shall see. Luckily, in Anna’s case, her mother grasped her concerns only too well and was able to address them with reassurance, and promises of an after-school shopping trip should some sartorial disaster befall my little fashion-plate snowflake.

And then there was the Éclair, who starts kindergarten this year. Who rides the bus by herself this year. And who will be gone from eight-ish in the morning til almost four in the afternoon all day.

This news left Her Lovely Self in blinking astonishment. Both of us and the two older kids all started out with a half-day kindergarten program, but the school here only offers the full day option. Which I’ll admit sounds like a bit of an adjustment for a 5- year-old, but not the end of the world. Not for me anyway, because I’m gone for pretty much the same time span. No, the person who had the biggest problem with it was Her Lovely Self. The Éclair is our youngest and when she is gone there are none left. For nearly 14 years, my bride has devoted most of her waking hours to dealing with our offspring. Having spent some time with our offspring, I thought HLS might be glad of some hours of solitude, you know, but I thought wrong. My wife doesn’t like solitude. She likes company. And having abandoned her career to be home with the kiddos, I could see where it might be a jolt to suddenly have them gone for all day.

If my little Éclair sensed her mother’s distress to any degree, she sure didn’t show it. If ever a child was ready for all-day kindergarten, it was my youngest. She was up bright and early on the first day of school, dressed in an outfit of her own selection. And unlike her older sister, she suffered no concerns about fashion. “I look SO awesome in this!” she announced when she came downstairs in a glittery star-spangled top with a checkered skirt that even I could see did not match. But never mind. It’s kindergarten!

I went to work late so I could see the Éclair off on the bus. (The older two catch the bus to junior high at 6:45 (dayum!) but the kindergarten bus didn’t come til around 8:30.) It was a good thing I lingered, since my wife was not—and I mean this in the most loving possible way—in her right mind. When she wasn’t weeping, she was hiding behind the car, hyperventilating, so I thought I should stay as backup in case Her Lovely Self went clean off the rails and did something rash and impulsive, like assault the bus driver or commit to homeschooling on the spot.

Naturally, the bus was late too—it was the first day and I found out later that a lot of parents—mommies and daddies alike—were having a hard time keeping their shit together. It’s hard to let go. I get it. I suffered through it myself with the two older kids, but not so much. As in all things, I took my cue from my parents, who, while loving us unconditionally, couldn’t palm us off on school fast enough. My own first day of kindergarten, my mom didn’t even walk me in.

I shared this little nugget with the Éclair, thinking she should feel lucky and beloved that both of her parents would be there for her on her first day. But she just nodded, simply accepting the fact.

“Well, that was in the Olden Days,” she said. The Éclair understood, as all kids do, I suppose, that the Olden Days were a time when children were astonishingly, ridiculously on their own recognizance. They walked to and from school unsupervised (and through varying levels of predatory or environmental impediments—wolves, snow, hills of impossible topography such that they can be inclined in two opposing directions at once). I asked the Éclair once how long ago it has to be for it to be the Olden Days. She answered quickly and precisely, “Twenty-three years.” That was as high as she could reliably count at the time, you see. “After that, it’s all Olden Days mashed together,” she added mysteriously.

But as I stood with her at the end of our driveway, I suddenly felt very olden. It occurred to me that my first day of kindergarten, the day after Labor Day, 1972, was 40 years ago. Forty freaking years. I had a moment, then. I’ve been having a lot of moments lately—maybe it’s a midlife thing—where it dawns on me that something I do, something I own, someone I know, has been around for longer than I’m really comfortable admitting to: I am closer to the age of 50 than the age of 30. I’ve been committed to the same woman for 20 years. I’ve had a valid driver’s license for an entire generation. I own clothing—a lot of clothing, some of it underwear—that’s older than any of my children. And I started school four decades ago. It gives you a moment. Especially if you’re wearing the underwear.

I’m pleased to say, however, that on my first day of school (40 years ago!), I was wearing new undies. My entire ensemble from the inside out was brand-new. That was a thing with my mom: We always had new clothes on the first day of school. So I was feeling pretty snazzy when Mom pulled our old Oldsmobile Omega up to the long driveway of our school and pretty much pushed us out.

“Have a good day!” she yelled as she practically peeled away. “Your brother will walk you in.”

I watched her turn the corner on two wheels and disappear, then turned back to BB. Or where BB had been. But now he was halfway down the driveway to the school, running for all he was worth towards the front door. I assumed this was because he was so eager to fill his big puddin’ head with knowledge. In fact, he didn’t want to be seen with me.

I didn’t mention this, but my mom was a seamstress. So when I say she outfitted my brother and me with new school outfits, I mean she made them herself on her trusty Singer sewing machine. Thus my brother was smartly attired that day in a stylish, tailor-made leisure suit, the kind with lapels wide enough to get him airborne on a breezy day, and pants so bell-bottomed you couldn’t be sure he actually had feet, both items of the suit in a matching bright yellow pattern that I can still see with my eyes shut. In fact, that you could see too, right now, if you shut your eyes and rub them really hard.

I didn’t get a leisure suit, alas. When making my school outfit, my mom went retro. I think my ensemble was meant to resemble that of a 19^th century school boy: It featured a short jacket and—I wish to God this was not true but it is—knee-length britches, whose cuffs just came over the tops of a pair of—yes, alas, yes--harvest-gold yellow knee socks. Oh, and there was a hat too, a floppy cap that hung down over one eye.

And the whole thing (except for the socks) was constructed from the same bolt of blue-and-yellow plaid.

“It’s a Buster Brown outfit,” my mom said when she stood me in front of the mirror that morning. I wasn’t sure who Buster Brown was then—I only knew he had something to do with shoes. But I didn’t look like Buster Brown. I looked like Raggedy Andy’s gay golfing cousin. I looked liked I’d wandered off the set of a Captain & Tennille TV special. At the time, I didn’t have any problem with this. And you know what, neither did any of my classmates, who I eventually met, after being found wandering the kitchen somewhere in the back of the school. Without a brother or parent to guide me, I had entered via an alternate door. Why I did this was a mystery. Surely I must have seen other children entering through the proper door and followed them? Surely I had wits enough for that? On the other hand, look at what I willingly wore to my first day of school.

The thing was, my classmates didn’t care. I don’t recall anyone making an unkind remark (well, except BB and his worldly second-grade friends, whom I heard from a distance, later, at recess). But never mind! It was kindergarten! When else can you get away with wearing mismatched clothes (or in my case, The Blue Plaid Special), and no one will care? I had many, many years thereafter to suffer under the judgment of my peers (and to occasionally hand some of it out myself), but there wasn’t any on that day.

I said as much to the Éclair, but you know, she’s in kindergarten, and lessons of this kind are pretty much lost on her. She just wanted to know if I still had the floppy cap.

“No, it’s long gone,” I said (In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s in a box in my Big Brother’s attic right now. Mom tended to save the clothes she made for us. And I’m sure this outfit hasn’t succumbed to moths or mice, because it was made of an indestructible polyester blend such as the textile industry of the 1970s specialized in). “Why?” I asked. “Would you wear it to school if I had it?”

The Éclair recoiled from me in rank horror, as if I had asked if she’d like me to pee on her Disney Princess backpack. “No! It wouldn’t go with my awesome outfit!” she cried, pointing at her glittery starry top. Well, of course.

The bus hove into view then, and my little Éclair hopped excitedly as she waited for it to stop. Her Lovely Self came sprinting around from behind the car, camera in hand, looking like a crazed member of the paparazzi, wanting to capture the moment. We waved and/or bawled our eyes out as she climbed aboard and the bus pulled away. Even as it turned the corner, I could still see the smiling face, the glittery stars of her shirt. I wondered what the Éclair’s kids would be wearing when it was their turn to get on the bus. I wondered if I’d be around to see it. I’d be, what? In my 70s or 80s? It would be nice to think I could make it. Apart from anything else, I would enjoy reaching an age where, once again, I could wear blue-and-yellow plaid in public and not be embarrassed.

Hell, at that point, I’d probably be happy wearing glittery stars and a checkered skirt.

Home Improv

2012-08-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

So, after two years of living in apartments and/or some form of corporate housing, we once again have a Magazine Mansion.

The previous Magazine Mansion readers here came to know was never a house I was entirely at home in. To be sure, it had its fine qualities: lots of room on a spacious lot in a neighborhood full of families; a basement capacious enough to store all manner of CRAP, a secret room (the famous Foxhole), that sort of thing. But it was a new house, built in the let’s-throw-some-plywood-and-Tyvek-up-and-sell-it-as-fast-as-we-can frenzied heyday of the 90s housing boom. And it showed. A brochure for our housing development breathlessly promised that these homes were “built to last a century,” but the builders must have meant only the 20th century. Eight years on, there we were fixing roof leaks, eroding masonry, rotten siding and leaky plumbing. A few of the rooms and all of the closets were paneled in ¼-inch drywall—a good sneeze would put a hole in them. The bathroom tubs and sinks looked as aged and yellowed as the teeth of a confirmed smoker. It was our home, to be sure, and my two older kids will have nothing but fond memories of the place. But that’s because they didn’t spend their weekends with a can of spackle in one hand and a caulking gun in the other (oh my God, the caulking! I can’t tell you how many tubes of the stuff I sunk into that sponge of a house. My house, it was a real caulk-sucker).

If I’m being honest, the constant home repair didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the fact that these constant repairs were required of an eight-year-old house. “If I have to do this much maintenance on a place, every single weekend,” I once remarked to Her Lovely Self, “I’d much rather do it on an old house.” I had grown up in old houses, see, every one of them at least a century old—two of them over the 200-year-old mark. Now there, you expected to do some maintenance. But you had good bones to work with: real brick and stone, beams, rafters and studs made from good, hard wood, not the yellow sticks of balsa wood the local home improvement store passed off as 2x4s. You work on a house of good, venerable age (for this country, anyway), you feel that you are contributing something, that you are extending the life and beauty of something that isn’t around much anymore. Expend the same amount of effort on a house that’s the same age as your son, and that effort feels cheapened, foolish, and wasted, like installing a toilet in a tent.

And it was in that frame of mind that Her Lovely Self and I, eventually, and after much searching, settled on a 70-year-old wood and stone edifice as the Magazine Mansion Mark III. It sits on a leafy lot, surrounded by trees of towering majesty, and facing the lush and attractive expanse of the back nine of a golf course. I don’t play golf, of course. With my luck, I am precisely the sort of guy who would be struck by lightning the moment he picked up a club, or get brained by some errant, slicing ball from nowhere. Still, the view is nice, and infinitely preferably to, say, my neighbor’s front windows, or a shopping center. I can’t tell you how happy I was when I pulled into the driveway for the first time as this house’s owner. I got my wish. I got an old house.

And immediately, I rediscovered what it was I’d really been missing about owning a house, old or new. Not the thrill of gathering and unpacking all your far-flung possessions from various storage units and relatives’ basements. Not the joy that comes from arranging furniture and slapping on new coats of paint and in all other ways imposing your personality on an impersonal space. Strangely, perversely, what I really enjoy is the opportunity to fix things.

Now I freely grant you, I take no joy in the unhappy moment of discovery that presages those opportunities, as in the case of two recent examples. Staggering down to the basement at some pre-dawn hour to check out a suspicious sputtering noise and discovering that it is the water pump running full bore—when no faucet or toilet or water-bearing appliance is actively engaged—yeah, that’s no one’s idea of fun. Nor is finding out that one of the towering majestic trees in your yard harbors a ginormous dead branch in the canopy some 50 feet above and that a really good breeze or some sharp, unexpected impact—from an errant golf ball, say—would be enough to bring the thing crashing down like the sword of Damocles on the heads of your unsuspecting children or (more likely in my specific case) on your own tender noggin.

But once the problem cannot be denied, I do enjoy puzzling over it, and bringing to bear whatever improvisational, problem-solving skills I have when it comes to meeting and vanquishing a domestic challenge. No doubt I get this from my parents, who were both intensely—one might even say pathologically—self-sufficient. If there was a mechanical problem or some other urgent issue at home, they never called in the professionals if they could help it. I’m sure part of it was that we never had very much money when I was growing up, but that was only part of it. They took great solace knowing that, in an ever-changing world, they could count on themselves, on their own ingenuity and resourcefulness, to solve most any problem.

In fact, in the whole of my childhood, I can only think of one time my mom phoned for help, and that was when I was about seven and we had water in the basement. We lived near a rather large and freely flowing brook—a small river, really—and we often got water in the basement, especially during the spring thaw. When that happened, my mom simply fired up the sump pump—a stupendous contraption that my dad built using parts from an old lawn mower, an industrial vacuum cleaner, and whatever spare lengths of pipe he had lying around the garage that day. But this was a lot of water. In fact, the basement was entirely submerged. Closer inspection of the brook revealed that a dead tree and huge chunks of ice had redirected the entire flow of the brook, and we were mere hours from the whole house being swept off its foundations. So mom was right to call for back up.

But that was the sole exception. Otherwise, my parents gave off a clear vibe that, between the two of them, they could cope with just about any other contingency. Thus it was that, when the fuel line from the heating-oil tank froze in the middle of one frigid winter night, my mom, wrapped in two bathrobes and a parka, went out and thawed the line herself (with, I’m aghast to inform you, a propane torch). When a lightning strike set the garage ablaze one cold spring morning, it was my dad who bolted straight out of bed, grabbed a ladder, and yelled for the rest of us to start filling buckets. He wasn’t wearing a parka or bathrobe either—Dad slept in the nude. I can tell you, watching your father clamber around on a rooftop, fighting a fire naked, a one-man bare-assed bucket brigade, is not a sight you forget in a hurry. It changes you. It makes you realize that, whatever fate and the elements throw at you, you’ll be able to handle it. Preferably while wearing pants.

In my own specific examples above, the pump was running because the kitchen’s water filtration system—a dizzying array of pressure tanks and looping plastic tubes and valves that dates to the Reagan administration—was leaking from multiple places, as though someone had taken a shotgun to it. Naturally, the system was hopelessly obsolete and I had no way to acquire replacement parts, not without the aid of a time machine. I couldn’t see spending thousands on a new system—I just bought the damn house!—so I shut the whole thing down and put it under observation for a few days.

We had running water to the rest of the house, but the lack of filtered drinking water did not go over well with the family. For one thing, we’re on a private well. For another thing, our well (we discovered belatedly) harbors a little microscopic something known as sulfur-reducing bacteria, which, according to the scientific literature, oxidize naturally occurring sulfur present in the soil, reducing it to hydrogen sulfide which, while present in nontoxic levels in our well, is nevertheless detectable through basic human olfactory perception.

Translation: Our well is home to an organism that eats sulfur and poops out something that makes our unfiltered tap water stink like rotten eggs.

So, not as pressing a danger as, say, having a flood wash away your house, but still not an ideal situation. And with my parents five years in the grave, I wouldn’t be getting much advice from that quarter. Still, I had grown up with their example. If they could apply open flame to live fuel pipes, if they could fight fires naked, surely I could handle a collection of tubes and valves filled with water.

In the end, I took the system apart, figuring that the worst that could happen is that I’d never be able to put it back together, let alone identify the cause of all the leaks. In which case, I’d have to spring for a new filtration system, which was what I was facing anyway. So I dissected the thing. And wouldn’t you know it? Almost immediately, I identified two or three cracked plastic valves (easily fixed with super glue), as well as several rotted or broken gaskets. The gaskets proved harder to replace (they were in custom sizes, of course, made exclusively by the now-defunct manufacturer of the filtering system), until I found a bag of exceedingly tiny rubber bands at my local hardware store and discovered that they fit perfectly. Drinking water restored! Hail Dad, the bringer of water!

Sadly, my track record when it comes to dealing with tree branches has been less than stellar. Lacking a ladder with sufficient height—and more to the point, lacking any kind of enthusiasm or courage when faced with the prospect of working 50 feet in the air, I fashioned my own rope saw.

(Like this, only I substituted a broken chainsaw blade, attached to two lengths of clothesline, and instead of a throwing weight, I tied one end of the clotheslines to a tennis ball full of bolts. Otherwise precisely the same.)

I tell you, the old man would have been proud. While I stayed safely at ground level, I worked that saw until it cut the branch like a hot knife through butter.

And then the branch in its turn parted the high-voltage power line just below it, separating it with a startling snap, crackle and thwang! before plunging my new home into darkness.

It was no flood, and there was no fire (not at first), but I thought it was time to call in the professionals anyway. Improvisation can take you only so far.

Rhymes with Comet

2012-08-03T04:41:00.000-04:00

This is not something I expected to be writing, but it’s on my mind, so better out than in.

Which incidentally, is what my mom used to say whenever my Big Brother or I were sick, and indeed it’s the same mantra I’ve been employing for the past three or four hours, when the Éclair awoke some time after midnight and was extravagantly sick. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say it was like the aftermath of a natural disaster in her bedroom. She had not called out to her parents for assistance; it was pure Daddy Sense (well, and probably my nose) that woke me. I found her trying to mop up the mess herself. With Kleenex.

“Why didn’t you yell for help?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” she cried, as I rolled in her into a couple of towels and carried her at arm’s length to the shower. “I thought I would get in trouble,” she said. Oh yeah, no parental guilt there. “I just don’t know the rules for throw up!” she added. And then she threw up some more.

I suppose that’s a fair point. When it comes to some of the less glamorous bodily functions, there’s all kinds of self-help literature out there, but most of it’s focused on potty training, or voiding your bowels. When Everyone Poops dominates the market, it’s hard for vomit to make a splash, as it were.

And, on reflection, I guess there isn’t as much need for rules and guidelines for something that we don’t—or at least shouldn’t—do every day. But as I sit here—it’s about 3 in the morning, and the Éclair can’t lie down because her tummy hurts, so we’re propped up in bed, watching Looney Tunes on DVD—it occurs to me that I have evolved a few simple rules, which I was inclined to share with my youngest child, but right now she’s more interested in the antics of Wile E. Coyote than she is in Daddy’s sleep-deprived ruminations, so I shall store them here for posterity.

Embarrassment? Forget it. To paraphrase that popular excretory tome, Everyone Pukes. It’s nothing that most people in the modern era do for fun, but sooner or later it’s going to happen, and when it does, you might as well own the experience. You might even write about it. Many times. Perhaps too many times.

Pick a euphemism.Your first step to owning the experience. Naming the act gives you a sense of control over what is, to a large degree, an uncontrollable act. The word “vomit” just isn’t enough, and “throw up,” well, that just sounds defeatist, doesn’t it? I think we as a species know this, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many colorful synonyms for the act of emesis. Barf, puke, yak, yark, hurl, ralph (and his girlfriend edna). My people have always eschewed the longer metaphorical forms—making the Technicolor yawn, driving the big white schoolbus, parking the tiger (parking the tiger?)—they try too hard. Brevity is the soul of ‘mit, and I have tended to favor short, emphatic onomatopoeic forms. My brother and I never lost our lunches nor tossed our cookies, not when we could “blurp” or even, occasionally, “mump” (the sound our cat Stanley made, repeatedly, to announce the arrival of a hairball).

Go loud. I’ve known too many people—Her Lovely Self in younger days, to pick one shining example—who came to the inevitable act with a certain amount of timidity. To this day, if I happen to hear her coughing in the bathroom, I have no way of knowing—not without visual confirmation, and my interest only goes so far—if she’s clearing her throat or her whole upper digestive tract. I realize this is not a biological event most people look forward to, but if it’s going to happen anyway, you might as well get what you can out of it. Go for the Oscar, I say. Open wide and roar. (As a practical matter, the more the mouth is engaged, the less likely it is that the nose will be called into play as an avenue of egress. And that’s a good thing. Nasal vomiting is an act against God, I’m sure. Also, it changes forever your relationship with chicken noodle soup.) Live like the Romans. They had vomitoriums, you know, and I imagine they were built to maximize sound effects. If I have to give my food the old heave-ho, I’d just as soon everyone know it. No coughing or throat-clearing for me, boy. I roar, head as deep in the bowl (or sink or tub or garbage can) as anatomy will allow, for maximum acoustical effect.

(Incidentally, I sneeze the same way. No namby-pamby little “achoo” for me. I want people in the next room to think I’m Bruce Lee, about to split a stack of bricks with his bare hand.)

Know your place.In my experience, there are two types of vomiters: sprinters and sprayers. At first, everyone starts out as a sprayer. When you feel sick to your stomach, wherever you are—in bed, in a high chair, standing in a park, staring at your shoes—that’s where it happens. But when you get a little older, you have to make a choice: stand and spray, or sprint and spew. This may require a bit of soul-searching, and an honest appraisal of how long you can delay the inevitable in hopes that you can reach a proper receptacle. My Big Brother realized early on that his size and general disinclination to physical activity marked him for a sprayer. And spray he did, sports fans--couch, bed, school desk, even right at the supper table, a moment during Thanksgiving 1977 that will live in infamy for all who were present (except the dogs).

It almost goes without saying that I was a sprinter—as much to show my brother up as anything else. I have a 35-year unbroken record as a bombardier who always reached his target before releasing the payload. During one particularly bad flu season, I remember beaming with pride when my harried mother remarked with a whoosh of relief that she never once had to clean up after me.

What you want to avoid, of course, is trying to be a sprinter if you’re a sprayer. I myself think it’s next-to-impossible to cross over. In my experience, shame can be the only result. I’m thinking in particular of an unfortunate fellow named Wyatt, a friend of my college roommate. Wyatt was clearly a sprayer, which my roommate found to his dismay after one night of hard drinking in which Wyatt ended up crashing back at our place. On my bed. (I was sleeping elsewhere). Some time during the night, Wyatt apparently awoke and decided that maybe, just maybe, he could be a sprinter too. He was wrong. I wasn’t there, but I imagine the look on my roommate’s face when he encountered the meandering trail—a trail of tears (and beers!)—leading out of my bedroom, down the hall and to the bathroom must have been one of the great all-time looks. To their credit, they cleaned up the mess by the time I got home. Wyatt never showed his face at the apartment again, but he lingered on in infamy, initially as an unpleasant smell of malt and disinfectant, and more enduringly as the man we came to call Wyatt Urp.

There are more rules. But it’s rounding on four in the morning and I think we’ve both had enough of the subject.

Besides, my daughter is asking for the bucket. Better out than in.

A Portrait of the Art Lad as a Young Man

2012-07-25T20:33:00.002-04:00

Transcript from a typical day:

[Door opens. Slams shut. Windows shake in their frames. Candlesticks fall from tables.]

MM: Hey. Is that you? How was your day?

[silence]

MM: Hello? Thomas?

[silence]

MM (louder): Thomas? Hey, who just walked in the back door?

[distant rustling sounds, as of someone rifling through cabinets and drawers]

MM (very much louder): HEY! Who just came into my house? I’m here in the living room. And, uh, I’m armed. Thomas? THOMAS!!

Thomas: God! What?!? I said it was me!

MM: Did you say it telepathically? Because—

Thomas (with heavy, oh-my-god-SO-heavy sarcasm): Like anyone would break into this place! Like hell! Just getting something to eat. Is that okay? Is that allowed?

[more rustling sounds. Extravagant beeping of the microwave. Footsteps, coming closer]

Thomas: Hey.

MM: Oh my God, what is that?

Thomas (aggrieved): What? I made some nachos. It’s a snack. Oh, we’re out of Velveeta. I had to use the whole brick.

MM: Dinner’s in 20 minutes!

Thomas: I just need five.

[loud crunching sounds, followed by satisfied lip-smacking]

The Brownie: That is SO gross.

Thomas: Muh rrr ow fumpha buhnuh, mummafumpha!

MM: HEY! You don’t talk to your sister like that!

Yeah, that’s 13 in a nutshell.

I had hoped my offspring might avoid the cliché, go for something more original when he hit adolescence, but my people are, at their core, great traditionalists and my son is no different. He is the living damn avatar of the surly, sarcastic, misunderstood teen.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t like this when I hit my teen years. Ahhh, we all know that’s bullshit, don’t we? Okay, fine: I was a self-important wiseass, always listening less and speaking more, always so sure I was right about everything, and convinced that any authority figure who tried to tell me what to do was criminally stupid. Good thing I outgrew that.

I was different from Thomas in one way, though: I talked more to my parents. I may have been rude and obnoxious most of the time, but my parents—my mom especially—had a pretty clear window into my life. Mom had a way of finding common ground with me, some little thing that gave her a foot in the door. Thus she came to know me at that age: she knew who my friends were, she knew what, or who, was troubling me at school, what my aspirations and ambitions were. Thomas and me? Not so much. Not at all, in fact. Somewhere in the past year or so, he turned into the fricking monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey: Dark, inscrutable, unsettlingly mysterious.

Also big, did I mention that yet? Not beefy, chunky like my Big Brother. Tall-drink-of-water big like both of my grandfathers, who cleared six feet easily. Last summer, Thomas went through a growth spurt that was a little slower than, but not otherwise dissimilar from Bruce Banner transforming into the Incredible Hulk. Like so:

But the hardest change to bear was that my son seemed to back away from all of the creative endeavors that used to define his very existence. A couple of years ago, he was scribbling away on a novel of his own (perhaps trying to nudge me by example to finish mine), working with scary intensity on stop-motion animation videos, and still finding time to draw a few pictures, comic strips, and storyboards of his videos.

As near as I could tell, all of that went away. Thomas started spending more and more time suckling at the great teat of the XBox, squirreled away in darkness, playing Halo online with friends from school who have never come over to the house, who I wouldn’t know if I passed in the street. When we moved from our last apartment into the new Magazine Mansion last summer (just shy of Thomas’ 13th birthday), I tasked the kids with getting rid of junk they didn’t want anymore and it broke my heart to see that at the top of Thomas’ throwaway pile was the looseleaf binder containing his novel in progress. He gave various LEGO sets—in other words, all of the props, sets, and actors of his stop-motion epics—away to his younger cousins. I tried gently to convince Thomas to rethink keeping some of these things, advising that later he might regret getting rid of them. But my parental wisdom was met with a contemptuous scowl and utter silence.

“Don’t you like doing this stuff any more? You’re really good at it,” I offered.

Scowl, scowl. “Like hell. You have to say that. Parents always have to say that stuff.”

“You’re very creative. And you know, it’s not just me. You had a lot of fans in your Art Lad days, you know.”

Scowl, narrowing of the eyes. “Please. I was, what, six? Art Lad is dead.”

I confess that I lost patience. I lose patience a lot with the adolescent who has displaced my sweet boy. In a vast and eye-popping catalog of my failures as a dad, this is my most glaring right now, hitting that breaking point, and abandoning whatever wisdom I might have in favor of haranguing him. Our battles, marked by both tremendous shouting and deafening silence, have been epic, sparked by a range of topics that are eminently sensible: enforcing parental rules and oversight regarding his use of the computer, insisting on talking, howsoever briefly, to his XBox Live battle buddies (the better to confirm that every one of them is indeed a school friend, or at least not some perv or troll on the prowl). But all too often they descend to the absurd, such as an argument that almost came to blows over Thomas’ inability to sort his own socks. Not our finest hour.

Too often, I wonder if it’s me who really has the problem. At least once a day, I find myself telling him to get his head out of his butt, to unstop his ears and listen once in a while, to show a little more appreciation and gratitude, to treat his parents with respect. Good God, who’s the walking cliché, huh?

And yet…

And yet there are days when things are sublime, when the surly teen surprises me, and I see something that gives me hope for the future.

One night not long ago, I found myself coming downstairs to perform my nightly—and nightly hated—duty of peering into the darkness of the basement and telling my surly teen that it was time to say goodnight to his XBox buddies and go to bed.

For some reason, I didn’t announce myself on this particular night. For a change, I was actually silent, speaking less, listening more. And what I heard from the top of the basement stairs shocked me. Ordinarily, most of what I can discern from the basement when Thomas is gaming is a series of muffled grunts and guttural orders, shouted into a headset and, I always assumed, related to some group tactic involving the digitally rendered mass destruction of a mutual enemy.

But this night, for the first time, I actually listened to the voice coming up from the basement.

“Okay, Pwned27, I need you up on the platform while I set up this tracking shot. Jubjub12, Magooberax, you to move across the field from left to right. Remember, you’re running at the end so it’ll match up with the next scene.”

I blinked. That didn’t sound like a tactical plan in the offing. That sounded like…

“Are you making a movie?”

Thomas yelped and leapt off the couch. “God! You scared me! Why’d you sneak up like that?” He turned his head slightly, speaking into his headset. “Not you, Pwned. Let me know when you’re in position. No, I can’t see for myself. I’m not looking at the screen.” He looked at me, frowning and guarded. “What?”

I looked over his shoulder. In the dim light, I could see he was running his XBox through an old video capture device I had last seen in a carton of cast-off electronics in the bowels of the old Basement of Crap, and now that device was in turn connected to our aging laptop, where he was running a video editing program that I could never figure out. His online pals with the goofy names were performing a scene. And Thomas was directing.

>

“You ARE making a movie,” I said, staring at the laptop screen.

“It’s machinima,” he said, the disdain plain in his voice.

“Your what-a-ma?”

He sighed. “Never mind. Yes, I’m ‘making a movie.’”

I looked at the computer, then back to him. “Can I watch?”

Thomas blinked, surprised. But the “Like hell!” still fell from his mouth reflexively.

“I’ll be quiet,” I said. “I won’t say anything or ask any questions.”

My son looked me in the eye. He’s tall enough to do that now. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Also, you don’t have to go to bed til you finish this scene,” I added.

“Have a seat,” he offered.

Well, it was a revelatory hour, I’ll say that for it. During that time I learned that Thomas and his friends spend most of their evenings, not shooting aliens or one another, but improvising stories about videogame characters who shoot aliens and one another.

“A lot of companies build machinima software tools right into their games, so it’s pretty easy to do,” Thomas shared, in between directing takes of his scene. He shared other tidbits as he went about his work—it was like being on the inside of a DVD commentary track. He was directing one of his players to move to another level of an elaborate platform, with stairs going every whichaway. Some of the stairs didn’t appear to lead anywhere. The construct looked familiar.

“I had to build the set for this scene—" he started.

“You built this?” I began. “How--?” But he gave me a stern look and I remembered my promise.

“The game includes the tools to make your own levels and structures. It’s not that big a deal. Anyone could do it.” He squinted at the screen. “I was trying to build something that looked like Escher’s Relativity.” He looked at me. “That’s a picture by M.C. Escher, with a bunch of staircases that are, like crazy. They’re upside down and sideways to each other, but people can walk on each one and—“

“I know the image,” I said, thinking, I didn’t know the name, but I know the image. And I’m impressed as hell that you do, too. Then, not knowing why I wouldn’t say that too, I went ahead and said that, too.

Thomas smiled, and forgot to remind me of my promise to shut up. “Well, I read about it. It’s a neat image. Anyway, I can’t really get it to work here, because I need, like three different gravity fields to really use the staircases. But I’ve got three characters in this story and they all have, like three different reasons for fighting this war. And I thought: well, I could use the Escher tower as, you know…”

“…a symbol?”

“Yeah.” He turned into his headset then to issue more instructions to his cast (however did he get three other teenagers to follow his directions, I wondered).

I sat for a while longer, but the scene was running long. In the end, I left him there, indicating that he should go to bed when he finished, and not before. He nodded and that was that.

The next day, he showed me what he’s put together so far. His machinima masterpiece currently is over 40 minutes long, and he estimates that he’s halfway through.

Then, the day after that, we were back to the same old script, arguing again, this time about the importance of locking the shed door after you’ve finished mowing the lawn.

So in the end there was no great, lasting rapprochement, no magical sea-change that led us to a perfect father-son relationship. But we had a moment. And you know what? I’ll take it.

Art Lad is dead?

Like hell.

The Cobbler’s Kid

2012-07-20T00:24:00.000-04:00

Before we can go forward, we have to go back. To understand the mystery of Now, you have to reconstruct events by sifting through a big honking pile of Then.

We could start here (from the blog, Feb. 21, 2008):

…there's the story I promised Thomas I would write. Not long ago, I told him about my real-life boy detective adventure and what really impressed Thomas was not that his Dad actually acted and thought like a genuine detective at the age of 11, but that he broke all these rules and still got away with it…I assured him that I was simply very stupid and very lucky, and that today, if I'd been caught…they'd probably send me away to reform school…Thomas insisted that I wouldn't go to reform school (or "kid jail," as he charmingly called it) because those were places for bad kids, and I was just a good kid who did one little thing wrong. He seemed to think there ought to be a reform school for good kids who did one bad thing. "You know," he said, "maybe you'd get sent to, like, a home for wayward boy detectives."

My 9-year-old’s last statement stuck in my head, and led to a few nights’ fun talking about what it would be like to go to a place that corralled characters based on every boy (or girl) detective I ever loved, and taught them the skills and procedures that real detectives use. After a few conversations about this, Thomas got bored—he was 9 after all—and our nighttime chats and stories soon turned to other more fascinating subject matter, such as dinosaurs. Or poop.

Time passed, spring and summer rolled in, and one long weekend, during a brutal heatwave, I found myself stuck indoors and at loose ends. Her Lovely Self and the kids were gone for a week, visiting the grandparents. Nothing good was on TV, and the dog was never much of a conversationalist, so eventually I found myself on the computer, doing work. In fact, I was editing a story that was about to run in my magazine—a family-focused feature about all the amazing and diverse summer camps you could send your kid to. I was reading through a sidebar listing all manner of highly specialized kids’ camps: for cheerleading, chess, computers, karate, the list went on.

I thought, idly, There should be a camp for boy detectives. I would have been all over that when I was a kid.

And then, remembering those nighttime conversations back in February, I started writing a story. When I surfaced for air a day or so later, I had written 55 pages.

I got distracted for a day or so, and when I finally came back to the story and read through it, a terrible thing happened: I remembered that I suck at fiction.

This is a painful admission for me. When I was a boy, I filled whole notebooks with nothing but fiction. Actually, nothing but detective fiction. I began writing mystery stories when I was 9 or 10. They were largely one-page stories, starring myself and my friends. I remember that I dispensed with any kind of plot (as a purely labor-saving measure) and generally cut right to the action: me and my friends storming the secret hideout, or the abandoned mill (all locations in my stories were either "secret" or "abandoned"), foiling the counterfeiters or rescuing the girl, sometimes with the aid of advanced martial arts, often armed with "smoking hot .45s, blazing bullets of death at the criminal evil-doers."

My friends enjoyed these little daydreams on paper, although one day, my friend Shawn said, "You know, these are pretty good. But when are you going to write a real mystery?"

Literary criticism was a concept then unknown to me. "Whadda ya mean?" I asked. "That's real!" I said, shaking my notebook at him. "That's real as it gets!"

"No," he insisted. "This is, like, the end of the story." He opened my notebook and read the opening line of the story. "'Once the last piece of the puzzle fell into place, the answer hit the brilliant young detectives like a bug on a windshield.'" Then he looked at me. "Well? What was the piece? Heck, what was the puzzle? That's what’s cool about a mystery—the puzzle part." He handed back the notebook. "Also, the whole thing about using .45s is stupid," he added. "I would definitely have a .357. Like the guy on Starsky and Hutch."

In the moment, I'm sure I grumbled about this unlooked-for appraisal of my plotting skills, but I took his comments to heart, and shortly thereafter I started writing mysteries under the heading of "YOU Figure It Out!" (in my head, I always shouted this, typically at Shawn, the mystery critic's friend). I can't say they were a big improvement over my previous efforts—they were still very short stories, and the solution of the mysteries nearly always hinged on a suspect making a minor slip of the tongue, an error of obscure historical fact, or revealing information he had no way of knowing ("unless HE'S the culprit!!"). I can't show you any of these stories, because I'm sure the estate of the recently departed Donald J. Sobol would initiate immediate litigation, and they'd be right to do so. I never strayed far from my inspirational sources.

But a curious thing happened: These stories started making the rounds beyond my circle of friends. During our school's silent reading period (every hour after lunch), other kids started asking to borrow my notebook. Although I see now that this was due to the fact that we had a very small library at school, at the time, I took it as a sign of my growing literary prowess.

I was wrong, of course. About having literary prowess of any kind, a fact that did not hit home until college. The school I went to had a much-esteemed creative writing program whose faculty then included a modern master of short stories and, more interesting to me, a highly regarded novelist of crime fiction. To get into any of their creative writing classes, you had to fight for a spot by submitting audition stories for their judgment. For three years I tried to get into the creative writing classes, and for three years, I was rejected.

My senior year, I decided to dispense with the whole submission process and simply showed up to class. That was a high point in the annals of MM's Most Embarrassing Moments, I can tell you. I guess I thought the class would be in some big lecture hall, with dozens of students, and I could more or less blend into the background. In fact, the creative-writing workshop was held in a little lounge filled with cushy chairs, all occupied by a grand total of eight students. I couldn't have been more awkwardly out of place if I had showed up buck-naked and announced my intent to use one of the cushy chairs as a toilet (although if I had, it might have given the other students something to write about). The teacher was unfailingly polite and kind to me, but he threw me out just the same. Later, when I caught him in his office, he surpassed himself in grace and kindness by pulling all of my audition stories out of a file and critiquing them on the spot.

The last one he looked at, the one I was proudest of was, of course, a mystery story: A first-person thriller told from the perspective of a douchebag frat boy whose mistreated girlfriend is systematically killing (or extravagantly maiming) the frat boy's pals until he's the last douchebag standing (that might have even been the title of the story). Oh, and the best part: He's absolutely clueless that his girlfriend is the killer/maimer. As he relates everything that's happened, as the body count rises and the net tightens, it becomes horrifyingly clear to the reader what's going on, but the fact that the narrator himself hasn't twigged was, I thought, a mighty feat to pull off, heightening the suspense to absolute Everest altitude.

The kindly master writer didn't agree. In what I thought at the time was a compliment, he did comment on my fast pacing, and on the snappy reportorial style I employed. Then he suggested that I consider switching majors from English to journalism.

"I'm a dual major in the j-school," I admitted.

"Well, there you go!" he said brightly, handing me my stories. With a gentle wave toward the door, he signaled the close of our interview, and the end of this surprisingly long digression.

That was pretty much it for my career in fiction.

And now here I was, 20 years on, looking at these 55 pages and feeling like I was back in that office or even the workshop lounge, buck-naked and looking for the nearest chair to crap in.

To sum up, I had written 6 and a half chapters focused primarily on a boy who, as we meet him, is in the process of breaking into his school in the middle of the night. He's caught by the police, charged with a felony, spends a little time in jail, and then is transferred to a specialized juvie boot camp with other delinquents, where he quickly becomes friends with an amoral computer hacker and a kid who likes beating people up. These are the three main characters I chose for my young-adult mystery/adventure story.

What in the name of God was I thinking? I wondered. This is complete crap! I dragged the file to the trash and turned my attention to something I knew how to do: nonfiction. I probably wrote a blog post.

Summer passed. Fall arrived. The kids started school. I came home one day to find Thomas on the computer, ostensibly doing homework. He was reading what appeared to be a very densely worded assignment sheet on screen. It wasn’t.

"Where did you find that?" I asked, eyes widening in horror.

"It was in the recovered file folder," Thomas murmured, barely registering my presence.

"Well…well, don't read it. It's…"

"It's pretty good," Thomas said. "Did you write this?"

"Months ago. It's—"

"It's really good," Thomas clarified. "Are you going to write any more?"

"I don't think so," I said. "I kind of hit a dead end. I'm not really sure where else to take it. Probably should just delete it."

Instead, Thomas saved it as a proper Word doc. In a folder marked "Dad's Book." Right in the middle of the desktop. Where I couldn't miss it.

But there it sat, untouched, unread. By me, anyway. Time passed. I lost my job. I took up freelance work. I started working on another book—the nonfiction thingI shared here a few years back (and which you probably thought was the book I had finished when I posted last night after a year of monastic silence. Boy, were you wrong, huh?). I stopped working on that book to take another job. We moved. I took another job. We moved again. Life became an unending succession of transitions and turmoil and uncertainty. Addresses changed. Kids grew. Computers crashed. Dogs died. The world turned.

But there was one constant. Every few months, Thomas would ask, "Hey, are you ever going to finish that story?" A folder marked "Dad's Book" mysteriously appeared on our new computer. And my laptop. Cleaning up our apartment last summer—during a long weekend when the wife and kids were, coincidentally enough, off on their annual sojourn to the grandparents—I was dragging out debris from under Thomas' bed and found, carefully folded in a shoebox, 55 dog-eared pages. They had been read many times. But the shoebox had a thin layer of dust on it.

On my stomach, stuck halfway under the bed, up to my elbows in gum wrappers and comic books and LEGO blocks, I lay there and traced my finger in the dust on the lid of that shoebox. For a fleeting moment, I felt like a child again, the boy detective, on a case, searching for clues. And for sure, I was in the presence of a mystery, the kind of mystery every parent encounters when his child does something strange and wonderful. For three years, for a full quarter of his life, my son had kept this fragment of a story in his heart (and under his bed). Despite the passive disinterest of the author and the active discouragement of his father, he had never stopped asking me if I was going to finish the story. In deed, if not in word, he had never stopped asking me the question all storytellers hope to hear: "What happens next?"

Someday, he’s going to stop asking, you know.

I cannot tell you where this thought came from, nor convey to you just how much that thought chilled me to the bone. But it struck me with such force that I sat bolt upright. Which, by the way, I don’t recommend when you're under a metal-framed bed.

I saw very clearly that I was the proverbial cobbler who had let his kid go without shoes (although at least he had a shoebox). My entire adult life, I made a living by putting one word after another, writing and editing vast swaths of copy for money. But had I ever done that for my kids, for love? I fished the pages out of the box and, after finding an ice pack for the lump on the back of my head, I sat down and read through those 6 and a half chapters for the first time in three years.

Maybe it was the blow to the head, but I saw something different when I read the story. The characters didn't seem quite so negative and aberrant as they had three years earlier. I remembered that each of them had admirable qualities and skills, and their own peculiar moral code. I just hadn't yet given them enough pages to show it. I also realized one big thing about one of the characters, something I hadn't realized before. And this realization also seemed to point a way around the wall I had hit. So I fired up the laptop and found that folder. Where it had been waiting for me all this time.

I am here to tell you that the past year has seen me do some of the hardest, most exhausting work I've ever done. Writing, as I'm not the first to observe, is work, brother. Fiction especially. I'm sure there are many out there who take to it like a duck to water. But for me? After 20 years? As a lefty, it was like trying to write a letter with my right hand. It's awkward, mentally fatiguing, and takes an enormous amount of time and focus to make the words on the page even remotely readable. And the whole time you're doing it, you're only too aware how easy it would be to just stop, to switch to your good hand and stick with what you know. But my kid didn't want nonfiction from me. He didn't want journalism. Good or bad, he wanted this story.

After a slow start occasioned by a total write-over of the first 55 pages, I hit a respectable pace that first month of 1,000 words per night (2,000 on weekends). Then we moved out of our apartment to the new Magazine Mansion, and the pace dropped to around 1,000 words per week. But that was okay: I had crossed the 100-page threshold. The story had critical mass. More importantly, I began to see that there was a story, containing all the elements that I had loved as a child. I had worked in a few riddles and codes and mini solve-it-yourself moments that were building to a larger mystery. But there was more: danger, excitement, clues in unlikely places, secret underground passages, hidden staircases, abandoned buildings, mysterious figures in the moonlight, bicycle tracks in the mud. My characters came to life for me. They were jerks, they were kind, they had their flaws, but also their radiant virtues. They made mistakes, they said and did stupid and funny things. But they were also brave and loyal and absolutely dogged in their determination to see the thing to its end. Like some kids I know.

I had my moments, though. Sometime last October, I began to see that the story was going to be long, 5 or 6 times longer than those first pootling 55 pages. It's too big, I thought. I'll never get to the end. I shared my misgivings with Her Lovely Self, and my brilliant wife said, "Well, why don't you give Thomas what you've got so far and see what he thinks? It's what got you to keep writing in the first place."

I was coming to a big moment in what I now saw was the first half of the book. It seemed like a good temporary waypoint. By Thomas' 13th birthday at the end of October, I finished part 1—which ends on a pretty decent plot twist (if I say so myself), printed it out, hand-bound it and gave it to him as a present. The first half weighed in at around 200 pages. My son, newly minted as a teenager, thanked me laconically, then set the book aside and went on to the next present.

It's too late, I thought. He's not interested anymore. It's all dinosaurs and poop, and no more detective stories. But we'll see, I thought. Give him a couple months to start reading it. Then we'll see...

Thirty-six hours later, Thomas burst into the bedroom. It was after midnight. He had read the thing in one sitting. And let me tell you, few events in life compare to the moment when your cooler-than-thou teenage son appears in your bedroom in the middle of the night, book in hand, jaw hanging open, screaming "Wait! You mean [what I thought was happening] is really [something completely different that just blew my freaking mind]?!?"

"See?" Her Lovely Self slurred in her sleep. "Now you have to finish it."

That was eight months ago. In that eight months, I've been knee-deep in all sorts of unexpected home improvement (and repair) projects. I weathered the storms of corporate upheaval at my current employer and found myself promoted to a new job in the company, one that often leaves me stressed and too tired for words at night.

But.

Three weeks ago, wife and kids left again for the summer trip to the grandparents. I shoved things around at work, gave myself an unnaturally long weekend, and took a running start at the homestretch. By the time the unnaturally long weekend was over, I was just finishing the penultimate race down the abandoned logging road as our heroes tried to intercept the villain at the secret airstrip before he could make good his escape. All that was left was the wrap-up chapter.

It was, you might say, a long goodbye. My first pass at the last chapter had more false endings and dragged-out farewells than the Lord of the Fricking Rings. But finally, inevitably, I knotted the thing off and called it good.

Except that I didn't.

Someone—Neil Gaiman, I think—once observed that you teach yourself to write a book while you're writing it. Which means, unfortunately, that when you get to the end, since you now know how to write the book, you have to go back to the beginning and write in the things you didn't know when you started. And to my utter astonishment, that turned out to be completely true; I have to go back. But that can wait. For now, I'm going to stick the story in a folder and let it age. Not for three years, but maybe for three weeks. Then I'll go through and make some hard-copy notes. Then I'll do a second pass. I think I can get it where I want it to be in time for Thomas' birthday in October. I don't know. But then, I don't know how I got here in the first place. I don't know how my son kept his faith in 55 poorly written pages for all those years. I honestly do not know how I managed to write a 433-page book that will, incidentally, never be read by more than a few people. Because after all these years, after all those late nights and long weekends, I don't know if this damn book is any good at all.

All I know is this:

It’s a mystery.

A Picture Worth 115,000 Words

2012-07-19T00:04:00.000-04:00

To answer your question, this is what I've been up to:

Done.

Normal programming will resume shortly...

Nonperishable Items

2011-06-13T19:29:00.004-04:00

“Oh man, that’s a tough break, kid. Blaze was an awesome dog,” my Big Brother lamented when I called him with the news that our dog had died. I had just picked up Blaze’s ashes and was feeling pretty low, not to mention at a loss for what to do with my dog’s remains. We have yet to buy a house here, and I couldn't see scattering or burying his ashes here, in a place my dog barely knew. Strange, I know. It's just ashes, and Blaze is comfortably past caring, but there you are.

“You know,” BB said after a moment, “why don't you guys bring him when you come here this summer. There’s always a spot for him up on the hill. I know he had a blast when he was up there last time.”

And this was absolutely true. Two years ago, Blaze and I stayed with BB for a month. I spent my mornings writing at the house, but in the afternoons, Blaze and I went up on the 100 or so acres of land that have been in our family for generations, and of which my brother and I are now stewards. Some days I just wandered around, reacquainting myself with landmarks I’d remembered from childhood. Other days, I went up armed with a chainsaw and an industrial-grade weed whacker and worked on reopening the logging road that led to an old campsite.

While my routine varied, Blaze’s was the same. The moment we crossed onto the property, I unhooked him from his leash and let him explore to his doggy heart’s content. Having lived in the suburbs, he had never enjoyed this kind of freedom and it rather went to his head. He’d vanish for hours at a time. Occasionally, I’d hear him yipping joyfully in some distant part of the forest, hot on the trail of a new and diverting scent. Other times, he’d be so far away I couldn’t hear him at all. And just as I’d worry that he had gotten lost, or fallen into a pit or something, he’d turn up, interestingly spackled with twigs and mud (and once, memorably, with a dead snake in his jaws). Blaze had a good life at the Magazine Mansion and was always happy to be with us in our cozy suburban life, but on the hill, it was different. He was different. He seemed to sense that this moment in June of 2009 was a special time for him, and it made him positively radiant.

Blaze had even been to the secret spot on the hill that BB had been referring to: the sun-dappled glade that served as a cemetery to our family’s many pets. Here was where I had buried Pilgrim and Mayflower, the two dogs I had grown up with. I had put them in a place of honor, on a small rise, near a massive boulder of milky white quartz. Lower down on the hill were lesser dogs (the one who dined regularly out of the litter box, for example) and at the bottom of the rise was a flat place given over entirely to cats, more than a dozen of them, all members of the colony my mom acquired over the years. And that particular summer of two years ago, we added a few mounds to the graveyard, and Blaze was part of it.

Our funerary fun started the day after we arrived. As was my habit when I’d been away from the house for a while, I was poking around various rooms and closets, not really snooping, just nosing about. The last time I had been here was just after my parents’ death, when BB officially took ownership of the house. He had moved a few things around to suit his lifestyle. The room I normally stayed in had been converted into some kind of in-home gun repair shop. The pie cabinet where Mom had kept her collection of cookbooks was now filled with videogames and DVDs. The annex off the kitchen--a room Dad had been renovating singlehandedly at the time of his death--was now a massive storage facility for tools, dirty laundry, and palette after palette of nonperishable food and drink. BB appeared to be developing a survivalist streak, and I teased him about it mercilessly.

“Hey ass wipe,” he said, peering owlishly at me over the top of a five-foot high pyramid of Bush’s Baked Beans. “You’ve been living in civilization too long. I get snowed in here, I’m screwed. I gotta have some backup!”

“You live right on a main road,” I said. “You have a truck with a snow-plow attachment. You’ve lived in New Hampshire your entire life and never been snowed in anywhere longer than a couple of days.”

“So far!” he said shortly, and somewhat inadequately.

But I wasn’t there to fight, and presently, I found my attention diverted to a loose piece of plywood in a corner of the room which, when lifted, revealed a dark hole in the floor. When Dad started rebuilding this room, he had done it from the ground up, having a new foundation dug and poured. On the work order, it was listed as a “basement excavation” but my people don’t go in for basements. This was a cellar, dank, cobwebby and wonderful. I hadn’t been down there before, so I grabbed a flashlight and hopped down for a look. Blaze yipped when I did. He wanted to come with me. It probably smelled good to him. But evidently Dad hadn’t got around to building stairs, so the only way down was a straight drop into darkness. Or, as I discovered a second later, a crotch-traumatizing fall onto the top of a too-short step ladder.

After some fumbling about, I discovered a switch which, when thrown, illuminated the cellar in a feeble light. Like the upstairs, it too was full of tools, as well as food. But most of the floorspace under the lights seemed to be given over to a giant, humming freezer (however did Dad get that down here?).

“I see Dad bought himself a new freezer,” I called up, remembering the pride the old man had shone when he bought his first freezer, a real extravagance for him. He loved it so much, he used to have anxiety dreams about people stealing it.

“Oh!” BB cried. “That reminds me. Open it up, will you?” I did as asked, and as the frigid air hit me in the face, I saw that it was stacked to the top with assorted round objects wrapped in plastic bags or butcher paper.

“Look for a big one marked ‘R.B.,’” my brother called down. “Do you see it?”

I certainly did. It wasn’t a particularly large parcel, but it was weirdly shaped--round on one side and sort of bumpy on the other, all wrapped in freezer tape. It was awkward to handle and took whole minutes to wrestle it up out of there.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Rocky Balboa. One of mom’s cats,” he said.

I gave a squawk and lost control of the parcel. It fell on the floor and almost broke my toes. Above, I could hear my brother cackling.

“I’m kidding. It’s a roast. I thought I’d thaw it and cook it up. We can have it for dinner, slice it for sandwich meat. I know Blaze likes roast beef, right?” And up above I heard the excited clicking of the dog’s paws as he started dancing around at the sound of those two magic words.

It took some effort to heft the thing up to the top of the ladder and, with an awkward clean-and-jerk motion, get it up to the floor above, where BB and Blaze were waiting.

“You had me going there for a second,” I said. “I almost believed you when you said it was a cat.”

BB looked offended. “Please!” he cried. “As if Dad would ever let Mom stow a dead cat in his new freezer.” He paused a beat. “We always put the dead cats in the old freezer.”

And then there came the long pause during which I realized that BB wasn’t kidding.

I went back down the ladder and peered around before I noticed it. There, in the furthest corner of the cellar, just beyond the faint glow of the overhead lights, was Dad’s original pride and joy, his first freezer (how did he get that down here too?).

Well, of course I had to have a look. Now BB sounded alarmed. Or annoyed. Or both. “I was kidding!” he cried, too quickly and shrilly. I waded through a curtain of cobwebs, flashlight bobbing on the scuffed surface of the old freezer which, after the briefest hesitation, I opened.

In years past, whenever my mother had reported the death of one of her beloved cats, especially if that death had occurred in winter, when the ground was too hard to dig, I had jokingly (and, upon reflection, insensitively) suggested she pop the bodies in the freezer until the spring thaw. I didn’t seriously believe that she would ever do that. But I was wrong.

“There’s a dead cat in here!” I cried.

Now, for the cat lovers among you (of which, I hasten to assure you, I am one. And so was my mother) I wish to point out that I didn’t open the freezer to see an actual kitty cat, frozen stiff, whiskers rigid, paws out straight, fur covered in frost. It wasn’t like that.

Instead, there was simply a plastic bag. Actually, it looked a lot like the roast I had just conveyed upstairs. It was wrapped in freezer tape. And it had a label on it. The label read “Sparky.” Sparky had died in January, living to the ripe age of 20 before his kidneys failed and my brother had him put to sleep. And then apparently tucked him away in the freezer.

“What. The. Fuck?!?” I shrilled.

“Oh shut up!” BB called back. “He died in the winter. You can’t dig a grave up here at that time of year! Not without dynamite!”

"But- but-" I sputtered.

“It’s the same with people, you know! You’ve had grandparents die in the winter and they had to go into cold storage til the ground thawed. It was good enough for them!”

I stood there in the dark with my mouth open. For one thing, I was pretty sure the funeral parlor down in town didn’t stick people in a 1970s model Kenmore chest freezer in their cellar. For another, it was the middle of June. What had my brother been waiting for? But I just couldn’t see the argument going anywhere useful. Besides, I was too distracted by what I found when I hefted Sparky out of the freezer: the cat had been laid to rest on top of a box of popsicles. This was too much for me. I lifted that out, intending to throw the box away.

And that’s when I found two more parcels wrapped in plastic and sealed with freezer tape.

“Smokey and Tigger are in here too, you know,” I said in a normal tone of voice. Already, I was desensitized to the surreal quality of this day.

There was a strangled cry of vulgarity from above, followed by a heavy thunk as BB tripped over the frozen roast, then there was some frantic scrabbling and extravagant grunting as my brother lowered himself down the ladder and made his way over to the freezer.

“The fuck there is. Dad buried them just before ohhhhhh, shit, there they are!” he said, now standing next to me. He looked aghast. As well he should. I couldn’t be certain as to the exact time of death, but I knew Smokey and Tigger died sometime in the frigid depths of late 2006, early 2007, well over two years prior to this increasingly odd interlude in the summer of 2009.

“Dad said he was going to bury them,” BB hissed. “I thought he did.”

“You mean you didn’t notice them when you dropped the popsicles in on top?” I asked.

But BB didn’t seem to be hearing me anymore.

“Oh man. I’m going to be on CNN,” he said, in a scarily sober and sensible voice that sounded quite unlike his normal one. “One of those crazy hicks they haul out in a strait jacket.”

“Right. Because having just one dead cat in your freezer is okay. But three, well, that’s really crazy.”

BB was in a place beyond my reach now.

“They’ll probably use tear-gas. Afterwards, they’ll bring cameras in and see the stacks of food and the guns everywhere and I’ll be that nutjob hoarder who lives in his dead parents house with their dead cats in the freezer. I’m a fucking Alfred Hitchcock movie waiting to happen!”

“Okay, okay, don’t hurt yourself,” I said. “You’re on your own with the nutjob part, but we can fix this.” I reached into the freezer. “Here, grab a cat.”

I don’t know what Blaze made of the spectacle that followed, watching two grown men pulling heavy plastic bags out of a hole in the floor and hauling them (with, I might add, a certain dignity and solemnity) out to the pickup, then running around, frantically looking for shovels, but he commendably kept his silence. I think he was happy just to be included, since we popped him in the cab with us and drove straight for the hill. He didn’t run off when I unleashed him this time, but followed us to the secret glade. When we got busy with the shovels, he even pitched in, digging a little with his forepaws.

We worked with a will, BB digging furiously, as though he expected a CNN truck to roll into the clearing at any minute. But after a while, we had everyone, you know, settled in. I found a few nice rocks to roll on top of the mounds. Then we stood there in the woods, listening to the wind, the chittering of the birds, drinking in the sudden, unexpected peace of the moment.

Having attended a couple of the ceremonies on this spot, I remembered it was customary for us to say a few words. Blaze seemed to think it was proper too. He came over and sat next to us, looking up at us expectantly.

BB spoke up. "Well, Smokey was a pretty crazy cat. She lived under the bed, but she liked Mom pretty well. Tigger was a great mouser, and he sure could climb trees. Sorry you guys were in cold storage for so long. The old man never got around to planting you, and then he went off and died with Mom and never got around to it. Sparky was a good cat. He was Tigger’s littermate and after Mom and Dad died, he always used to follow me around the house. Geez, I hated putting you down. You—"

BB went silent then. It had been quite a speech for him anyway, and I figured he was getting emotional, so I didn’t interrupt. But after a moment, I hazarded a glance at my brother, thinking he might be a little choked up about things, and not just the three cats we’d laid to rest. I was wondering what I might say to cheer him.

But BB wasn’t crying. He was scowling at the graves in front of us.

All four of them.

“What the fuck,” he said quietly. “Did we just bury the roast, too?”

And we had, of course. But you know what? By then we’d pretty much lost our appetite.

***

“Well, at least Blaze will already have some roast beef waiting for him on his way to the happy hunting ground,” BB said philosophically. Then, despite himself, he started laughing. Which, incidentally, is one of my Big Brother's radiant virtues: the ability to find humor in the most unlikely places. Which is probably why I called him in the first place. Suddenly I was laughing too, the first time I’ve been able to do it in almost two weeks. But it felt right. So did BB’s suggestion to bury my dog on the hill where he enjoyed that special and all-too-brief summer.

And no disrespect to the family cats who rest on our hill, but Blaze won’t be with them (or the roast). He’ll be up on that sun-dappled rise.

With the good dogs.

Blaze of Glory

2011-06-02T12:58:00.002-04:00

You know, I never meant to be away this long, and I certainly didn’t mean for my first post in months to be such a painful one to write, but it can’t be helped.

You see, Blaze died last night.

I wish there was a better way to tell you this, to ease you into the awful moment. Nearly everyone who has ever been a friend of the blog was a devoted admirer of my dog. And with good reason, if you check any of the links in the sidebar about him.

It all happened very quickly. I came home from work last night to find out Blaze had been throwing up a little. He’s a dog, of course, and barf-production is part of the job description. Plus he has always been prone to springtime allergies, which also leads down the path to vom, so his being sick was in no way unusual.

As he came to the door to greet me, it did seem to me he was walking a little slowly. I chalked it up to some arthritis issues he’d developed over the winter. We never did know Blaze’s true age, but he had to be at least 10. Most days, he was his usual manic self and once in awhile he’d have an off day and totter around for a bit. This too was par for the course.

He laid around the living room with the kids for a little while last night. The Brownie spent time with him, stroking his head while he wagged his tail. The Éclair put some food in his bowl and brought it over to him. “Blazey’s tired,” she said. But Blaze didn’t want to eat. He got up, walked slowly over to me and nudged his head under my hand. I was in the middle of something and gave him a perfunctory pat. Then he went to Thomas’ room, where we put his kennel and dog bed, and laid down, keeping Thomas company while my son did his homework. After putting the Éclair to bed, I went to check on the guys a short while later. Blaze seemed to be sleeping peacefully. But in fact, he was already gone.

Thomas was beside himself--he’d been in the room the whole time and hadn’t heard or seen any signs of a problem. Screaming and crying, he begged me to help him get Blaze out of his kennel. Things got a little blurry after that, a jumble of images. Her Lovely Self is holding a door for us, her face streaming with tears. The Brownie is standing in the hall, head turned, unable even to look at her dog. Next thing I know, I’m speeding down the highway to the veterinary ER, Thomas in back holding Blaze. But we both know it’s too late.

It turned out Blaze had some kind of fluidic cyst near his heart, a defect he was probably born with, and which never gave him any trouble. Until it ruptured last night, and the excess fluid pressed on his heart, stopping it with crushing swiftness.

“Even if you’d brought him in earlier, there was probably nothing we could have done,” the vet on call told Thomas kindly. I wasn’t so sure about that--all I could think was why didn’t I pay closer attention to my dog? I would have seen something was wrong. I could have saved him--but I kept my mouth shut. I have never seen Thomas in such a state. But I wasn't surprised. Twelve is a hard age to lose your dog. He was beyond hysterical, howling like a dog himself. But it was a busy night at the ER and there was nothing more to be done and soon it was time to say our goodbyes.

Thomas mastered himself, wiped his eyes on his sleeve, put a hand on Blaze’s cold head. “Sorry I lost my shit, Blaze,” he said, a little breathless. Then he drew a deep breath and took his hand away, some kind of realization dawning. “He’s not there anymore, is he, Dad?” he asked. “The real Blaze is somewhere better, right?”

I was stunned to discover that I couldn’t speak. I had no words. All I could do was nod. And then I lost my shit. I cried for Blaze harder than I have cried for any pet, harder than I have cried for quite a few humans, to be honest. I don’t know what that says about me. A good thing, I hope. When a dog loves you, he loves you entirely, nothing is withheld. His love is undaunted by pettiness, by emotional baggage, by anything. So I guess it’s only right to repay that love with copious, uncontrollable grief, nothing held back.

And still I have no words, none that seem remotely adequate to express our sorrow. And stark surprise. Blaze didn’t die as I sometimes imagined he might--he didn’t fall defending his children from a mean dog, or protecting us from a home invader. He didn’t die chasing a rabbit into the street, or in any one of a number of moments of foolishness of which he was all too capable.

In the end, he went quietly, asleep on his bed, not in a sterile office after a long decline, but in a place of warmth and good smells and family and love. And if anyone deserved what grace or peace such an end might give you, Blaze surely did.

But he left too suddenly for me to say a proper goodbye. And to thank him.

For his unflagging enthusiasm in everything but baths and shots. For his rock-steadiness in what has been too many years of upheaval and change. For his unceasing devotion and attention to my children. And not least for his ever-ready willingness to go along with me in indulging whatever stupid idea I ever got into my head.

He was my companion, good and true, through many adventures--and many more misadventures. And he was that very best kind of friend, the kind who stands by you even when he knows you’re wrong. Sometimes even when he was the one you wronged.

Hopefully, though, we gave Blaze more rights than wrongs. In 2003, he was an abandoned stray doomed to a slow death, staked out in an empty yard. We lifted him out of that bad story, and wrote him a new one, one where he was the hero, valiant and loyal and smart and even a little handsome. For eight years, we loved him as well as we knew how, and counted ourselves lucky to have him. He was ours. And we were his, utterly and completely. I hope he knew that. I think he did.

Goodbye, Blaze. You were, first, last, always, a good dog.

In Which I Stand Naked (well, semi-clothed) Before You...

2010-12-09T23:19:00.001-05:00

Well, that was quick, wasn’t it?

Seems like it was October just a minute ago and we were celebrating first Art Lad’s 12th birthday and then Halloween (although it’s a toss-up as to which event was scarier. I mean, my son is 12. Twelve! How did that happen?).

Now here I am, closer to Christmas than Halloween, sitting snowed in at an extended-stay hotel full of consultants and salesmen, and two guys I’m not sure about, but who might be drug dealers. And me, 16 days into my new job.

Which is going well, thanks for asking. There’s a lot to learn, a whole production process to figure out, many system passwords to juggle (and, for the most part, forget). I’m busy, but I’m happy. Just need to find a house so I can bring my family here to live and the picture will be complete.

And I have much to tell you, but for the moment, this will have to serve as a postcard confirming that I’m alive and well.

But I hate to send you out the door empty-handed, so instead I will direct you to a little piece of writing I did. I was of two minds--okay, three--to tell you about this, but the story wouldn’t have existed without this blog, so you deserve to know.

Some months ago, a long-time reader of the blog reached out to me to see if I wanted to write something for a new magazine he was in charge of. Kevin and I had traded emails a few years back--he's a magazine man himself and it’s always nice when such folks drop by to talk a little shop. But now he had an assignment to offer me, and as someone who remembered well what unemployment felt like, it was a hard thing to turn down paying work. More importantly, I liked the sound of the magazine he was working on, and it was a chance to write an essay about my life as a Dad, something I seldom get to do outside of the confines of the blog, so I jumped at it.

The story I wrote began as a couple of sentences of a post I had once tried to write for the blog, but never quite got around to fleshing out, I don’t know why. That’s how it is sometimes. You head out the door with a specific destination in mind, but you’re not quite sure which road will take you there. So I put those first few sentences away. But when I revisited that brief starting point, I realized I now knew the route, and writing the whole thing took only a few days.

The story appears in this magazine, which just hit the stands and which I’m told you can find on the rack at Borders and Barnes and Noble, although I haven’t seen a copy yet. Have a look at the Web site, though, and see if you can find an excerpt of the story I wrote. I bet it will take you, oh, about this long.

I was of three minds to mention this because one, Kevin is no longer the editor of the magazine. That’s also how it is sometimes. Editors come and go, and everyone has his reasons for staying or leaving. But even though I now don’t know anyone involved in the magazine, I figured that was no reason to keep silent. Kevin did good work while he was there, and he deserves as wide an audience as possible to see his efforts.

Two, I was hesitant to mention this because I don’t like making anyone feel that they have to go out and buy something in order to read what I wrote. But you’re big people and can make up your own minds about that. And if you want free stories, well, there are still plenty here.

Third, I’m also featured in the magazine’s contributor page which, for the first time in print, reveals my authorship of the blog. Of course, anyone who has read this thing in the past three years can figure out who I am fairly quickly, but the idea of having full disclosure on the printed page seems weird, almost contradictory to the spirit in which this place was launched. Also, it makes me feel oddly undressed before you. And trust me, the last thing anyone wants is to see me walking around in my underwear.

But what the hell. We’re all friends here. And anyway, you might like the story.

So enjoy. And try not to hold it against me that I’ve been gone so long. I’ll be back soon.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

An October Moment...

2010-10-29T01:01:00.000-04:00

October 14, 1992

I don’t care how rational and level-headed you are, once you get a crazy thought in your head, it’s hard to keep it to yourself. So it was only a matter of time before Tammy shared with her best friend at work her growing concern that she, or possibly her apartment, or possibly both, were possessed. The voices, the smells, the disappearing objects—heck, even the vomiting of blood that everyone attributed to the ulcer that hospitalized her—it all pointed in her mind to this one crazy idea.

I think if she’d been sleeping better, had not been so loopy on whatever medication the doctors had given her, Tammy might have thought it through a bit more. Or might at least have remembered that her work pal, while a genuinely sweet person, also had a big mouth. So it was that by the time Tam returned to work half-days, everyone in our office knew Tammy’s secret. Most folks did what most folks do, chalked it up to confusion and fatigue and illness and let it go. But more than a few had a lot of fun at her expense.

“So I hear your apartment is the Amityville Horror now,” brayed Z, our boss. And then he laughed his terrible “Hyuh-hyuh-hyuhhhhh” laugh. “Should we call a priest and get an exorcism going? Or will that work, since you’re Jewish? Hyuh-hyuhhhhh!”

Still others were overly fascinated, trying to pump Tammy for specifics, which she had been silent about. She had really only gotten as far as telling her friend that she was seeing and hearing and smelling strange things in her apartment. She hadn’t gone into the details of what she’d seen or heard or smelled. Her big-mouthed friend hadn’t given her the chance before she told Tammy she needed to go back to the doctor and get tests, that maybe this was some multi-sensory side effect of her medication, or the result of blood loss to her brain from when she passed out. Oh, and then she blabbed to everyone else that Tammy was under the delusion that she was in the grip of demonic possession.

“I’m not saying another word about it!” she said shrilly to me, late her first morning back to work, when I poked my head into her office during a quiet moment. “I’m not telling anyone anything else!”

“Okay,” I said, turning to go. “But I just wanted to apologize.”

She looked sharply at me. “For what?”

“For not asking you about the old lady. The one I saw in your living room when I stopped by that day.”

Weak though she was, Tam’s grip was viselike when she caught my sleeve. “You saw her!”

I nodded. “Smelled her too.” Tam motioned for me to kick her door shut, and we had a little catch-up.

---

It was a little after 12 when I arrived at Tam’s apartment, a second-floor walk-up over a hairdresser’s establishment. I rang the bell and, after a long moment, she buzzed me in. I walked up the stairs to her apartment door on the second floor.

“It’s open,” a voice called from deep within her apartment. So I opened the door.

My eyes immediately began watering as I was hit by an amazingly strong perfume-y smell. It smelled like Tammy had broken a gallon jug of lilac toilet water just inside her front door. Tammy’s apartment door opened on a main room that contained a few bookshelves, a TV, and a sofa, sitting directly across the room, facing the door. Next to the sofa was the open doorway to the kitchen. And behind that sofa, I could see someone. Not clearly—my eyes really were streaming, I’ve always been ridiculously sensitive to fragrance—but I could definitely make out a woman in a dress, one hand held up in a kind of tentative wave. As my eyes began to clear, I realized pretty quickly that this wasn’t my ailing workmate Tammy, but another woman altogether, an older woman, it seemed. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see that she had white hair, not the long black hair my friend had. I pulled off my glasses and mopped my eyes on my sleeve.

“Hi,” I spluttered, still choking on the lilac fumes. “Are you—?”

I was about to ask the old woman if she was a relative, possibly Tammy’s mother or grandmother or something. But when I looked up, I noticed a funny thing about the woman I was addressing.

She was gone.

I set the container of soup down on the floor, put my glasses back on, blinked, looked around, turned a full circle to see where the old lady went. Not a sign.

“Hello?” I whispered tentatively. Nothing. Feeling a little foolish, I stepped over to the couch and peered behind it to make sure the old woman hadn’t ducked down behind the furniture. She hadn’t. I was completely alone in that room, except for the overwhelming scent of lilacs, although now I realized that even that was dissipating.

I looked around furtively again, in the manner of one afraid of being caught doing something childish. Tam was a practical, level-headed sort—what would she have made of me if she saw me now? All the same, I was just 23, still a kid, and not so far removed from the weirdness of my childhood in New Jersey. Whatever compass needle that had become attuned to things unseen when I was a teenager was still spinning somewhere in my head. I took a deep breath and extended my hand into the empty air behind the couch, tensed in the manner of one expecting to dip his hand into ice water.

Nothing happened.

I relaxed after a moment, confused, then waved my hand around some more, feeling for something, but not finding it. Beginning to doubt what I’d just seen (although my eyes were still smarting a little from the lilac smell) I went back, grabbed the soup, set it on the counter in the kitchen, then made my way down the hall to a closed door I assumed was Tammy’s room.

I tapped on the door. Tammy screamed in surprise. “Who’s there?” she yelled.

“It’s MM!” I answered. “Who were you expecting?”

Tammy got up and opened the door.

“Are you okay?” I asked, wiping my eyes one more time to clear them. Tammy gave me a funny look before she turned and shuffled back to her bed.

“Sure!” she said, in a forced way that suggested she was anything but. “Sure. I’m just not sleeping well. Must be a side effect of the meds they’ve given me.”

“Well, are you hungry? I can find my way around the kitchen and find a bowl for the soup I brought,” I offered, and began stepping out the door.

Tammy sat up again. “O-okay. But, do you mind if I eat in here?” she asked, her face showing the slightest pink as she blushed. “I don’t usually entertain in my bedroom, but I’d rather—well, I’m just so tired--"

“Sure,” I said, as I backed into the hall and turned to head back toward the kitchen. “I’ll see if I can find a tray or—" As I turned fully down the hall, I saw a head peeking around the corner at the far end, near the kitchen. But the moment I was turned fully to face it, the head ducked away.

“What?!?” Tam asked as I hopped back into the room.

Okay, now you’re just freaking her out. Get a grip! I thought. “Never mind,” I said. “Be right back.”

I walked, quietly, gingerly, almost on tip-toe, down the hall, bracing myself to see something around the corner. Again, nothing and no one was in sight. I thought I could smell the lilacs again, but I may have been kidding myself. I peered around into the galley kitchen. The soup was sitting there where I’d left it, in a Styrofoam container on the counter. Right next to a large bowl. Was that bowl there before? I wondered.

I looked around, now feeling somewhat peeved, more at myself than anything else. I had forgotten some of the tips I’d learned as a teenager from Ruth, the daughter of the Witch Man, my name for the local psychic/crazy guy who had freaked me out when I went looking for him one summer to try and get to the bottom of the weird shit that had been going on at my own house. He had been of no help in the end, but Ruth turned out to be awesome. She had been a font of all manner of tips and strategies for dealing with this stuff. And one of her tips had been Don’t be afraid to talk to them. As a corollary to this, she probably should have added Don’t be afraid to feel stupid when you do it either because I did feel stupid, especially with my sensible, level-headed colleague just down the hall.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Anyone there?” I asked, then kicked myself. Ruth had often said you shouldn’t ask a question unless you want to get an answer, and in this situation, that answer was likely to get me suffocating on that overwhelming lilac smell again. I tried a different tack. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just a friend bringing some food.” Oddly, just talking like this almost immediately put me at ease, made me feel less stupid. I might have been talking to my plants, or a dog, or just muttering to myself. Okay, yes, that still felt stupid, but on another level, it felt right, too.

I jabbered on. “Just gonna heat this soup up—thanks if you put the bowl out, although I really don’t know if you did or not—and bring it to her. She needs to keep up her strength and get her rest and I’m running out of things to say. Please don’t jump out at me as I carry this hot bowl of soup on this tray down the hall. I like to hum “Pomp and Circumstance” when I carry hot liquids. I don’t know why, it’s just my way. Dahhh dah-dah-dah dahhhhh-duhhhh, dahhh dah-dah-dah duhhhhh-duhhhhh...”

---

“Oh, my God!” Tammy cried as I related this (even, God help me, humming "Pomp and Circumstance") in her office. “Why didn’t you say something? I thought I was going crazy!”

“Well,” I said, “you’re no crazier than me, if that’s any comfort.”

“You really saw her?” she asked, practically giddy with relief. “I’ve been freaked out for days. It’s like a horror movie. I’m gone for a week and come back and my apartment is possessed! I told my boyfriend—he said he could smell the perfume, but I think he was humoring me because then he wanted me to call the doctor and see if I had brain damage or something. Oh my God! I’m always hearing someone puttering around out there in the living room and I’m too scared even to go to the bathroom. This is just not something that really happens, you know? What am I going to do, MM? Is Z right? Am I going to have to call a priest? I’m Jewish! I don’t think my mother’s rabbi would go in for that sort of thing. I’m totally talking a lot, aren’t I? You really saw her?”

“Saw her, smelled her, the works,” I said. “It’s not something I talk about much, but I have a little experience with this stuff. I mean, not exactly like this. It’s weird that there’s no cold spot. That’s usually how I know—well, never mind. But I don’t think your apartment is possessed. Not the way you think it is. So nothing like this happened before you were sick?”

Tam shook her head. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me in my life! First night by myself and I could smell that lilac stuff everywhere. Then in the morning, I went to the kitchen to get some water and heard someone say, ‘Well, hello!’ Like they were right there in the living room. I almost called the cops until I saw no one was there! I really thought I was losing my marbles. I had my boyfriend sleep out there until he got fed up and left.” She grabbed my sleeve again. “You really saw her.” It wasn’t a question, but a hopeful statement of confirmation.

“Oh yeah,” I said, nodding. “And it’s not the devil. You don’t need an exorcism, I don’t think.” I paused a minute, wondering how much of a discussion the level-headed Tammy was willing to entertain on this subject. “Have you ever gotten a good look at her? I mean, does she seem familiar to you?”

Tam just stared blankly. “I don’t understand. I told you nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I don’t believe in this stuff! So no, I’ve never seen or heard anything—"

“No, no,” I said, a bit sheepishly. “I meant, did she remind you of anyone you’ve ever known in your life, like a grandmother or—"

Tam was shaking her head. “No, no, no. My grandmothers both died before I was born,” she said, a little irritably now. “You’re not trying to tell me some dead grandmother came back from the grave to take care of me, are you? Because that is just crazy!”

“Tam, having some strange old lady stinking up your living room with lilac perfume is crazy too, but it’s happening, right? So let’s just try to embrace this for a minute.”

“Ok. Sorry. No, I guess I get what you’re asking. She doesn’t seem familiar. At all.”

I thought about this. “Maybe...maybe she latched onto you at the hospital. I had a friend, Ruth, who used to say that sometimes people—you know, spirits—get confused. They don’t quite get that they’re dead. I’ve read cases where sometimes they see a person who reminds them of someone they knew and they latch onto them. Maybe she thinks you’re her daughter or granddaughter or something—"

Tammy threw her hands up. “Great! So I AM possessed!” I could sense that I was fast exhausting my coworker’s patience.

“No! Believe me, that’s a whole other thing. And if that were the case, I think you’d know it. I don’t think you’d have spent one night in your place, no matter how sick you felt. Look...you said you could hear her talking. Maybe you should try talking back.”

“What? No! I should go back there tonight and talk to thin air and tell her she’s in the wrong apartment and is freaking me out and needs to beat it? Are you serious?” And she gave me a guarded look that I had seen once or twice, the look I got when somebody began to wonder if maybe I was the one who wasn’t getting so much blood to his brain. The look that made me stay quiet about this stuff for years—until I met all of you, in fact.

“Well, I’d be a little nicer than that, but basically, yes,” I said, perhaps a bit stiffly. Then I left pretty quickly.

The next day, Tammy was back at work. She looked better, more rested anyway. But when she poked her head into my cubicle, she had that guarded look about her. “I just wanted to say thanks. I know you’re trying to help me, but I think maybe we’re both a little crazy, and I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay,” I said. And that was that. I felt a little sad, closed off, I guess. And I itched to know what happened, but could never bring myself to ask her. I really liked and respected Tammy, and I wanted us to get along and work well together, so I shoved the whole thing aside.

Within a few months, I left that job anyway, and lost touch with Tammy, so it became a moot point. Sure, I sometimes wondered how she was doing, if she ever resolved the situation with her unwanted roommate, but I figured I’d never find out.

And then, this past spring, out of nowhere, completely unlooked for, this message popped into my work email inbox:

Dear MM,

I just saw the press release—a few months old—about your new job as editor-in-chief. Congratulations! I was so happy to find you—I’ve been out of magazines for years, but I think of you often and am so glad to see you’re doing well.

[redacted boring paragraphs about life, love, marriage, moving around, finding new careers, etc.]

While I would love to hear from you and catch up on everything, I feel as though I should take a few lines now to thank you for your advice way back when I was sick, and had that little “problem” I refused to talk about. It really weirded me out, and I was mortified that people at work were talking about it. But you were really trying to help me and I shut you down and I’m sorry about that.

So...I thought you’d like to know that I really did take your advice and started talking to my unexpected "friend." It took a long time, but I did it. I mean, we never had a conversation or anything. I just talked out loud in the apartment and acknowledged that "Grammy"—that’s what I started calling her—was there. All the weird stuff stopped mostly (things stopped disappearing, anyway, which was a relief because that was the thing that bothered me the most) and it actually became kind of nice to have her around, if that makes sense.

I lived in that apartment for a long time, but when I was getting ready to get married, and preparing to move out of that place, one of my bridesmaids came over to help pack. She'd never been to my place before. She was like you—she’d grown up in an old house where all sorts of stuff happened—and she knew right away that Grammy was lurking around. She’s really into parapsychology and she called up a friend whose mother is a psychic and she insisted on coming over. I hadn’t talked to anyone about this in years—and never told anyone about our conversation.

So, the psychic came in and immediately said that whoever was in my apartment had been sick in the hospital for a long time, years and years ago, and just stayed there. When she saw me (when I was in the hospital), I reminded her of her daughter and she followed me home. I got chills down my spine when she said this. Do you remember how you said pretty much the same thing?!?

Anyway, the psychic did a “cleansing” right there in my living room. Can you picture me sitting in my apartment with lit candles (lilac scented candles!) while this psychic lady talked to my little “problem”? It sounds hokey—the whole guiding a lost spirit toward the light—but it was kind of cool. Afterward, the psychic said that Grammy had moved on, and I should feel blessed that I helped her do that.

Well, I just thought you should know. Please call or write when you have a chance (but I’ll understand if you don’t. I must sound crazy to you now, but who cares?) I’d love to catch up.

PS: You should feel blessed too.

I do, Tammy. I really do.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

An October Moment...

2010-10-27T23:27:00.000-04:00

October 2, 1992

I’ll call her Tammy. She was a brilliant young woman who worked for a trade magazine in the Chicago area. Tammy was a very even-keeled, deeply practical and rational woman. Not the sort of person given to flights of fancy, but level-headed, the sort of person who is very good at the sort of work a trade magazine demands.

She was also a kind person, particularly to her coworkers, most especially to new ones, who she took under her wing, showing them the ropes with unfailing patience. She especially helped her colleagues, new and old, when it came to coping with the innate craziness of the boss, a fellow we’ll call Z. Suffice it to say, Z had a tendency to create high levels of stress in the office. He had this way of hounding his editors, of making them feel that their work—and their general existence—were so far below par as to warrant an emotional response from him that was somewhere on the underside of contempt.

Tammy had done an admirable job putting up with Z. All told, she had worked for him for going on five years, and seemed more or less immune to his abuse, which he ladled on her at least as often as he dumped on everyone else. Tammy had some resistance to him because she was already a pretty harsh critic of her own work, which was needless, of course. But Tammy was a bit of a perfectionist, tended to set a very high personal standard, and was consequently merciless with herself. That probably made Z’s rants and criticisms sound like just another echo in an already loud chorus.

So it was something of a shock to her coworkers late that summer, when Tam suffered a rather sudden and precipitous decline. First, she started having terrible stomach pains. Her friends and family and coworkers had begged her to see a doctor, but she was getting ready to travel for the magazine and wanted to get ahead of her deadlines a little. If anything, she was pushing herself even harder.

So it was that one day, while eating lunch in the atrium of her office building, Tammy collapsed. Her coworkers managed to revive her, but almost as soon as she was sitting upright, Tam began vomiting blood, so someone called an ambulance and by the time the EMT squad arrived and loaded her onto a stretcher, she was white as a sheet—well, the parts of her that weren’t covered in blood, anyway. The doctors told her she had a perforated ulcer, and was bleeding directly into her digestive tract. Although, it must be said, they were a bit tentative about the diagnosis, especially since she'd had no previous symptoms or signs of trouble before the most dramatic ones manifested themselves.

Tam was in the hospital for a week before she went home, where she was told to rest and avoid strenuous or stressful activity for another two weeks. At her insistence, her parents took her to her apartment, which was just outside the city of Chicago, in the suburb known as Park Ridge. Tammy lived alone, but she insisted on going there, even though her parents wanted her to come home with them. “I really need some peace and quiet,” she had told a friend over the phone. “Staying with my parents would have killed me.”

Having grown up in Chicagoland, Tammy had a lot of friends as well as coworkers who were only too willing to help her. Several of them took turns bringing her meals or running errands for her. Tammy was glad to see them, and often became anxious as they were getting ready to leave. This seemed quite out of character for her. Tammy liked her own space—even her longtime boyfriend kept his own apartment, more at Tammy’s preference than his own.

Toward the end of Tammy’s first week home, it fell to one young coworker, the rookie of the team, to bring her some soup, as well as a few movie rentals from the local Blockbuster. This fellow liked Tammy, but didn’t honestly know her all that well, so he was intrigued to visit her in her apartment and get some sense of what she was like when she wasn’t at work. Before he left to see her, the young editor was taken aside by one of Tammy’s best friends. “Don’t just drop stuff off and go. Stay with her a little bit. Maybe eat lunch with her. She doesn’t seem like herself and the more people spend time with her, the better,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, she just seems jumpy. And she’s definitely not getting much rest. She’s got dark circles under her eyes and she just seems...not herself. Stay with her a bit. Tell her one of your goofy stories,” she suggested. The young editor nodded in understanding. In his short time on staff, he had unaccountably gained a reputation for relating oddball anecdotes about his life and family, which Tammy in particular seemed to enjoy.

Thus it was, a little after 12, that the young coworker arrived at Tam’s apartment, a second-floor walk-up over a hairdresser’s establishment. He rang the bell. Tammy heard it and buzzed him in from the intercom in her bedroom. Ever since her first night alone back at home, she hardly ever left her room. In the distance, she heard the footsteps as he walked up the stairs to her apartment door on the second floor.

“It’s open,” she called from deep within her apartment. She heard him open the front door. Then all was quiet. Too quiet. And for too long.

Suddenly, there was a soft tapping on the door. She screamed in surprise. “Who’s there?” she yelled.

“It’s MM!” he answered. “Who were you expecting?”

Tammy got up and opened the door.

“Are you okay?” he asked, as he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. Had he been crying? She decided she was too tired to ask and turned and shuffled back to her bed.

“Sure!” she said, in a forced way that suggested she was anything but. “Sure. I’m just not sleeping well. Must be a side effect of the meds they’ve given me.”

“Well, are you hungry? I can find my way around the kitchen and find a bowl for the soup I brought,” he offered, and began stepping out the door.

Tammy sat up again. “O-okay. But, do you mind if I eat in here?” she asked, her face showing the slightest pink as she blushed. “I don’t usually entertain in my bedroom, but I’d rather—well, I’m just so tired--"

“Sure,” he said, as he backed into the hall and turned to head back toward the kitchen. “I’ll see if I can find a tray or—“ As he turned fully down the hall, he froze, then turned and stepped back into the room.

“What?!?” she asked.

The young editor, never known to be at a loss for words, seemed now to be wrestling with something, trying to find the right thing to say, or perhaps wondering if he should say it at all. In the end, he just said, “Never mind. Be right back.” Good as his word, he returned shortly with Tam’s lunch and they had an amiable, if somewhat subdued meal together. Both of them seemed to have a question for the other, but neither one asked it.

Later, after her coworker had left, Tammy wished she had asked him her question. Asked him why he had lingered so long in the main part of her apartment. Asked him why he was wiping his eyes. Asked him about the smell. Asked him if he had seen or heard anything...odd.

Tammy certainly had. Ever since she’d returned home, she knew something was wrong. In fact, she thought she might be going crazy. She heard voices in her living room. Objects—dishes, jewelry, hairbrushes—had disappeared and mysteriously turned up in different places throughout the apartment.

She had tentatively confided in her boyfriend about this, a big mistake. He had commented on the smell, and so she told him about the other things. He even agreed to sleep out in the living room. But after one night of that he was gone. He told her that morning, in a somewhat shaky voice, that maybe it would be a good idea for Tammy to call the doctor and see if she had suffered brain damage from blood loss or something. That would explain all the other stuff.

But Tammy, rational and level-headed though she might be, thought she already knew what the problem was.

She was possessed...

An October Moment...

2010-10-12T13:48:00.003-04:00

Oh, I had such plans for October, and October Moments (and if you're new to the campfire, here's a little background).

This was finally going to be the year that I'd tell the saga of what happened when my Big Brother used the Ouija board in our old haunted farmhouse, of the strange and increasingly disturbing events that followed, of the Witch Man and his daughter, of the Demonologist and his wife.

And maybe by writing that modestly tantalizing paragraph, I'll feel sufficiently guilty (or in fear of my life. I know many of you are frustrated that I have yet to get off my ass and tell this one) to write the thing.

But October has been a busy month, and it's not getting easier. We finally sold the Magazine Mansion, but will be spending the latter half of the month packing and moving all of our crap out of state, then dealing with the bureaucratic beast that is known as Closing.

Oh, and also: I quit my job.

That's a multi-post event in itself, and I swear I'll tell it soon, but suffice it to say I'm at the tail end of my two-week notice period, and I have yet to find a place to live at my new job (editing another magazine, although one very different), never mind figuring out which school to send the kids to, nor all the other details that come with uprooting your family once more and heading off into the great unknown.

So for now, let's just say I have never forgotten the story about the ouija board and it's an October Moment I have every intention of telling.

But for today, this will have to suffice:

Through the Glass

When she was little, the Brownie often demonstrated a sensitivity to—and a more or less total comfort level with—things that most people, children and grown-ups alike, could not see. I’ve recounted a couple of her experiences in previous October Moments, but those moments don’t occur so much any more. Now that she’s pushing 10, she’s morphed into this practical, capable, unsettlingly mature young woman. And while I admire her poise and grace and general levelheadedness (all qualities I lack), I feel at a distance from her. I miss the fanciful little girl who believed utterly in “sugar-plump” fairies, and thought nothing of seeing dead people hanging around on a street corner, nor of having backyard conversations with her great-grandfather, already 30 some years in his grave.

Her little sister, the Éclair, has her own flights of fancy, of course, but aside from a brief period in infancy, when she sometimes appeared to be smiling and cooing at empty hallways and corners, my youngest child seems to have adopted her big sister’s practical, grounded sense of confidence and capability.

So it was something of a surprise this past summer when, at a family reunion just outside of Chicago, the Éclair came tearing down a hallway with a pale face I’d never seen on her before. She didn’t look confident or capable. She looked spooked.

The reunion was held in a partially refurbished old mill, all crumbling stonework and overgrown shrubbery. The mill was one of the oldest buildings for miles around, and had a colorful history. As a working mill, it had closed down in the early 1900s. In the 20s, during Prohibition, it had been a convenient hiding place for illegal liquor and the occasional gangster on the lam. By the end of World War II, it was a locally notorious brothel. For the next few decades, it had been allowed to slide gently into decline, its various sheds and outbuildings slowly sliding down the high bank above the river.

Then a cousin on my wife’s side of the family bought it for a song about 10 years back and had just as slowly been building the place back up. The main building that had once housed the millworks—and several rooms where the mid-century ladies of the night had once plied their trade—were now almost fully restored. But there were still many empty rooms, devoid of heat or intact windows, or sometimes even a floor or wall. In the back, stone pathways and stairs led to precarious falls or balconies that no longer existed. It was not exactly a safe place to let children roam free, and we parents who had brought some along had taken great care to ensure the kids stayed largely in the main house (still massive, with dozens of rooms and stairs and echoing hallways). We had all been assured that the main building was perfectly safe, but here was my daughter, pounding down a hall, looking frightened.

I set down my plate and tried to intercept the Éclair, but she ran by as if she hadn’t even seen me, making a beeline for the front door, the only outdoor space approved as safe, where the Brownie and her cousins were hanging out. They had already explored the house to their satisfaction and were now taking their ease on the porch. In fact, the Brownie had been out there pretty much all day, coming in at only the briefest of intervals to restock on lemonade or cheese doodles.

Over the general hubbub of adults telling family stories and renewing old sibling rivalries, I couldn’t make out everything the Éclair was saying, but the Brownie was hunched over her solicitously. I edged closer. The Éclair had tears standing in her eyes and was gesticulating back behind her to the house.

“…scary lady took my bear. I need my bear!” was all I heard. It was then that I realized the Éclair was indeed not carrying her treasured pink bear, her constant companion, especially when she was at any gathering full of people she didn’t really know.

The Brownie didn’t seem interested in the disposition of the bear. “Where’s the scary lady? In that back room I told you to stay away from?”

The Éclair was silent, then nodded guiltily.

The Brownie stood up now, and she had The Look. This is not one of many Looks her mother has passed on, this is a Look unique to my older daughter. It’s a narrow-eyed, tight-lipped smile of a Look, a Look that says Ass Is About To Be Kicked, and God help you if you are between her leg and that ass. I promptly stepped backward and melted into a wall as the Brownie strode purposefully into the house, the Éclair trotting behind her.

Of course I followed them, sidling down hallways, ducking into alcoves. I couldn’t see my daughters, but I could hear them. Mostly, I could hear the Éclair, whining that she didn’t want to go, that could her big sister just go get the bear for her, please, please, please. The Brownie muttered back words I couldn’t hear, but once I did hear her say, “Elizabeth, you’re coming with me!” The Brownie never uses her sister’s real name unless she’s Very Serious. And it almost always induces obedience in the Eclair. How I wish that tricked worked for her mother and me.

I trailed them on and on, well past the few rooms I’d toured when I first arrived. On we walked, past empty parlors, vacant bedrooms, through a vast and austere ballroom. I ducked under a sheet of hanging plastic, marking the boundary between the mostly refurbished millhouse and the extended network of dilapidated connecting rooms and areas still undergoing restoration. It was a warm summer day, but this part of the complex felt distinctly damp and cold. And growing colder with every step.

Finally I came to a stop in a musty hallway. Broken tiles shifted under my feet. Behind me was a narrow staircase leading up. Off the stairs was an alcove leading to a storage closet and an old phone booth, the ancient hand-crank phone still mounted above the bench inside. To my left and right were two other doorways. I felt like I was in a video game—which route to take? I listened, hoping to hear either daughter, but all I heard was a distant chuckling of the river on the far side of the millworks. I shivered for a second, and it was that shivering that suddenly made me realize what might be going on.

Tentatively, in the half-embarrassed way of a middle-age guy employing a skill he hasn’t used in a long time, I put out my hand, and turned a complete circle in the hallway. It was already cold in this part of the house, but that was just the normal damp and cool of a moldering old stone building settled on a riverbank. Then my hand passed by the left-hand passage and I felt a completely different cold. Ice water mixed with electricity. The hairs on my arms and neck stood up straight. Cold spot, I thought. And I knew exactly which way my daughters went.

I poked my head into the next room, skin prickling, ears ringing, not sure what I was going to find. But there was nothing. It was just another room, a chamber of bare brick walls, glistening slightly with moisture. The window was long gone from this room and I could hear the river more clearly here. To my left, across a floor of more broken tiles and some dirt, I saw another opening—a doorframe missing its door, a tattered and stained flap of plastic wafting partially across the space, making a combined crackling and rasping noise that set my teeth on edge. Nervous now, I crept to the doorway. Just beyond it was another room, a ramshackle foyer leading out to one of the balconies that overlooked the riverbank. This room did have a door, with two stout planks nailed across it, because the balcony beyond it, I found out later, was not merely structurally unsound but entirely absent.

The Brownie and the Éclair were standing in front of it, their backs to me. The Éclair was clutching her big sister’s leg with one hand, while the other hand clasped her bear, a little dusty and cobwebby, as though it had been dragged across the dirty, tile-strewn floor. The Éclair had her face buried in the back of her stuffed animal, something she usually only does if her brother is viewing a scary TV program and she can’t bear to watch, but can’t quite bring herself to leave either.

The Brownie wasn’t averting her eyes. She appeared to be staring straight up at an oval window set in the wall next to the door. The window was cracked and dirty, but it had once been a fine thing of glasswork, all etched around the edges with fussy designs.

Then I saw something outside, something flit by the window—something shadowy and head-shaped—and I forgot all about the fussy edging.

I felt all the muscles in my hands and legs lock up, my lips clamped down across my chattering teeth. I was scared in that moment, and it wasn’t the mundane fear of a 40-something man with children to care for and bills to pay. It was fear shot through with excitement. It was the fear of a child. Well, someone had to be feeling childlike fear at this moment. My nine-year-old daughter certainly didn’t have any.

“Stop that,” she said, speaking to the window—and whatever was beyond it—in the imperious voice of playground authority. You’d have thought she was scolding a playmate who tried to cheat at hopscotch, not a shadowy something standing on a balcony that no longer existed. “Just stop it," she said. "It’s not funny."

And would you believe it? It did stop. Skin prickling, ears ringing, intense cold, it all melted as though someone had just opened a door to the outside and let a gust of summer air in.

“See?” the Brownie said, trying to get her sister to look up. “The scary lady’s gone. It’s not even really a lady, it was just—"

But I’ll never know what the lady really was or was not, because the moment she turned to talk to her sister, the Brownie saw me, cowering in the doorway. She gave me her Look for a moment, and in that moment I thought that maybe she was going to make me go away too. But then the look melted into her usual expression of amused disdain.

“Oh, hi Dad,” she said.

The Éclair did look up at this. “Daddy!” she said in an awed whisper. “The lady took my bear and Anna—“

“Shh,” the Brownie said, and the Éclair was instantly silent, a paranormal event all by itself. Then the Brownie picked the Éclair up and the pair of them nudged by me, back into the party.

I tried, I really did. I looked for quiet moments later that day to quiz my older daughter on what her sister had told her, what she herself saw, what she did, whether this is something she deals with all the time. But she rebuffed all attempts at conversation with the same maddening mixture of silence and offense, as if I were quizzing her about something intensely personal (as I suppose I was). Even the Éclair, who can sometimes be tricked into revealing sisterly secrets, was frustratingly circumspect. The most I ever got out of her was, “The scary lady took my bear. But Anna got it back. Because she is very scarier.” She repeated this last sentence with heartfelt emphasis, and beyond that she would not be drawn further. And why should she? It is the truth.

But it hurts a little to be on the outside of a mystery, a shadowy figure on the wrong side of the glass. I guess I just miss that fanciful little girl who thought nothing of sharing her unusual experiences with me. On the other hand, I am enjoying getting to know the woman she’s becoming.

Even if that woman is indeed very scarier.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Get A New Lease...

2010-08-26T11:57:00.000-04:00

For the first time since 1996, I have a landlord again.

It’s weird to be a renter once more, especially after so many years of home ownership. Of course, that’s what’s put us back on a lease again: With the Magazine Mansion still unsold, I’m in no position to buy another house. And even when the place does sell, Her Lovely Self and I will probably look long and hard before choosing another property. So an apartment made the best sense no matter how you looked at it.

Still, it is, as I say, weird. And I’m getting to that age where I begin to wonder what my kids must make of the Old Man. Did he let them down, losing his job and forcing them to move from a neighborhood they love to a strange city and a new school? Do they see this as a setback, especially in light of the fact that, since winter, we’ve been housesitting in a truly huge mansion that was awesome in all kinds of ways (except for the roaming attack dogs out on the grounds)? And now, Dad’s making them pack up again and move to a small three-bedroom apartment in some godforsaken suburban cookie-cutter nowhere?

Well, no. Apartment life is turning out to be a welcome novelty for them—after all, it’s not something they’ve ever experienced in their lives. And it must be said, Her Lovely Self found a very nice place in Suburban Cookie Cutter Nowheresville. For our reasonable rent, we’ve landed in a fairly new complex (it’s called The Village, and we’re in building #6, which pleases the Prisoner fan in me). The apartment is actually pretty spacious, when you consider that its square footage is just a little short of the footprint of the first house we ever owned. Plus new carpets, new fixtures, attached garage, and a nifty community pool that the Éclair believes is there for her private enjoyment (and who are we to contradict her?). And I don’t mind it that much myself. When the dryer failed to complete its eponymous function after the first load we tossed into it, it was the work of a phone call—and the work of some guy who wasn’t me—to fix it. I enjoy being mildly handy—I am my father’s son, after all—but it’s nice for the moment to have someone else muckle onto a heavy household appliance and make it work.

Indeed, there’s lots to be said for apartment-dwelling, which may explain why I did so much of it as a young person. I loved apartments when I was in my 20s, although I never lived in any one for more than a year, much to the despair of nearby friends who helped me move, and distant friends who were constantly scratching out addresses for me and writing new ones in. But it suited me. After my college years, I was a long time shaking off the migratory impulse that the life of a full-time student instills in you, the late-summer loading of hatchbacks and moving into dorm rooms, followed by the late-spring process in reverse and heading home.

When I finished graduate school in June of 1991, I walked out with both a diploma and a job in hand. The job didn’t start until July, so I had a few weeks to find a place to live. That was the beginning of my Apartment Era, an era that seemed very long in the living of it, but which lasted just five short years and included six apartments, each distinctive and cherished in my memory. And each equally awful and eccentric in its own way. Especially the four I rented as in my Single Guy years, which will always stand out for me as being particularly, astonishingly, dementedly distinctive and cherished and awful and eccentric.

The Olmsted

I had lived in dorms or rented rooms in houses throughout the college years, but this was my first real place of my own, a first-floor, one-bedroom flat in a massive old brick building on the very border between Park Ridge, Illinois and the city of Chicago in a little neighborhood called Edison Park. The building was called The Olmsted and it was on Olmsted Avenue, a lucky accident of mnemonics, since I was never likely to forget where I lived. No matter how drunk I got (which in those days was quite often), I could always slur to a cabbie “Olmsted on Olmsted!” and expect to find myself more or less on my doorstep (except for the time I found myself deposited in the lobby of the Homestead Hotel in Evanston, but never mind).

The building’s super—a cranky, thick-accented Polish guy straight out of Chicago Central Casting—made a big deal of how special this apartment was as he took me through it. He told me it had once been the home of the owner’s mother and that he had spared no expense in lavish appointments, especially in the kitchen, which included a massive refrigerator, huge multi-burner stove, and even a dishwasher. Which all sounds really impressive, until you actually see the kitchen and realize the appliance set dates from the late 1950s. The dishwasher—an old top-loading model that could have been in the Smithsonian—was rusted shut and didn’t work (although it gave off a constant aroma of decay and water left too long on the stove. Visitors speculated that a corpse—possibly of the mother herself—was hidden away in its porcelain-and-steel confines). The bathroom appeared to have the ceramic equivalent of mange: tiles were forever falling from the walls and ceiling—it was vital to keep the toilet lid down at all times, except when in use. Every humid shower softened the grout further and it fell in clumps—often with sharp bits of tile—whenever I washed. There were only three working electrical outlets in the whole place—that changed to two when the outlet behind the fridge burned out one morning in a spectacular flash of light and smoke. The super’s answer was to run a meager extension cord from the back of the fridge to the other working outlet in the kitchen. That Eisenhower-era fridge sucked a lot of juice through the little straw of that cord, which was often hot to the touch, but never actually managed to cause a fire.

I cringe to think how much of my paycheck I blew on that pit every month, but it was still superior to every dorm room I’d ever lived in. And it was spacious. Aside from my bedroom, I had a massive living room (made all the more so by dint of my having no furniture beyond an old sofa and a milk crate for a TV stand) and a capacious formal dining room, complete with pull-out buffet table. The kitchen was large enough to accommodate a little eat-in table, and the oven at least worked well. I used it to bake my first on-my-own Thanksgiving dinner (served to pals who made a 13-hour road trip to share it with me, there on the dining room buffet table).

That stove was also a valuable ally in my love life. One cold November Sunday, as I was sitting with my feet on the open oven door (the apartment had almost no heat to speak of—no wonder utilities were included in my $525 rent), reading a book, the phone rang, and it was Her Lovely Self. By sheer luck, the Olmsted sat near to the route she took every Sunday from her apartment to her sainted grandmother’s house, a few miles away on Overhill. “So, what are you up to?” she asked.

“Oh, just puttering around the kitchen. I thought you had a date with whatsisname.”

“Yeah, well, he blew me off. So…are you cooking or baking or something?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, taking my feet out of the oven. “Just whipping up a batch of cookies.” In my experience, few women could resist fresh-baked cookies of a cold November Sunday.

“Ooh, they’re not chocolate/peanut butter chip are they?”

“How’d you know? Want to come by and try some? Should have the first batch out in about 20 minutes.”

“Okay! See you in a bit.”

And then I hung up and dashed out the back door on smoking feet, headed for the grocery store a block over, hoping I had enough money to buy the ingredients for the cookies I’d said I was making. I always did. I baked cookies for that woman for 10 Sundays in a row and it never once occurred to her I did it only to lure her to my wonderfully crappy first apartment.

The Monticello

By late spring of the next year, Her Lovely Self and I were dating, and so she felt a little more confident revealing to me something I knew all along: the Olmsted was a disaster area, a monument to lack of maintenance, not to mention freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer (most of the windows were painted shut). Plus it was expensive—she was convinced I could find better, cheaper digs if I moved further into the city. The fact that she also was moving into the city may have figured in her arguments as well.

That very weekend, by happy coincidence, I got a call from my pal Matt, a photographer for the Chicago Tribune. Matt had grown up in and around the city and knew all the great neighborhoods (where “great” is tabulated by the number and proximity of Irish bars that have live music and serve Guinness). He himself lived on the second floor a three-story building between Addison and Irving Park, called the Monticello. It struck me as a lyrical, romantic name, like Jefferson’s home atop a mountain. Except that it was just a basic red brick building on a street populated by cars up on jacks, dirty children playing in the street, and an alley with a Dumpster that was home to a pride of feral cats. But otherwise just like Jefferson’s home.

Matt’s downstairs neighbor was moving out of his one-bedroom apartment, and my friend wondered if I wanted to take a look. I did. The rent was 30 bucks cheaper, plus it had several luxurious touches the Olmsted lacked—windows that opened, working outlets in every room, kitchen appliances that were younger than I was. As a bonus, the former occupant was leaving behind several items of furniture, a carpet, and a color TV. Plus the landlord was willing to go month-to-month on the lease. I already had a girlfriend, so that was enough commitment for me. I had my security deposit in the owner's hand by the end of the day. Her Lovely Self was excited—she was just a couple miles down Addison in Wrigleyville—and I didn’t mind it so much either.

The Monticello was far and away my favorite apartment. I was just starting to freelance for national magazines when I lived there, and the spacious closets and vast hardwood floors seemed purpose-built for much of my work (which at that time involved reviewing sporting and exercise equipment). Matt was a good neighbor, often inviting me up to dinner (by stomping on the floor four times) and I just as often had him down at my place to drink beer and try out whatever toy I was testing. Every other Thursday, we got together with Declan, the crazy Irish guy on the third floor, and had a poker night, playing for laundry money. I loved the convivial, sit-com feel of the whole arrangement. It suited me down to the ground floor.

So it’s ironic that the Monticello was also the apartment where I spent the least amount of time. By that point, things were getting serious with Her Lovely Self and I was over at her apartment most every spare minute, except when she was over at mine (except on Poker Night, of course). Then winter rolled in, and I got a shock. Unlike at the Olmsted, utilities were not included in the rent at the Monticello, and my flat had had its radiators torn out long ago, replaced by electric heat. And with a cold empty basement below, I used a lot of juice to get the apartment to a temperature where I didn’t see my breath in the morning. Suddenly all the money I’d made freelancing was going to pay enormous heating bills. And I needed that money; I had begun to think I might want to save it up for something, something diamond-like and ring-sized.

So it was with some regret—and after just eight months--that I gave my 30-day notice to my landlord and began casting about for new digs, and a roommate. I found both with the aid of Jeff, a grad school classmate who had taken over my lease at the Olmsted and had found it just as crappy as I had. God love him, he did all the legwork and found...

The Eastwood

This was a three-bedroom apartment that occupied the entire second floor of a brownstone over in Lincoln Village, even closer to Her Lovely Self. Rent was $650, split down the middle, with heat included. Since he had found the apartment, Jeff took the big front bedroom with the picture windows and the view of the tree-lined street below. I took the small room—small like a walk-in-closet—off of the kitchen, which itself was little more than a glorified porch that stuck out over the back of the apartment and almost touched the El track platform that ran behind it (so close, in fact, that the train often sounded like it was running through my room). The third bedroom we used as a shared office. I tended to take over this space. My freelance work was booming--I had landed a regular writing gig for a local business magazine, and it paid really well. That money, plus the hundreds I was saving every month in rent and heating bills, I socked away like a madman, saving enough to buy an engagement ring early that spring.

It was also around this time that I got an unexpected job offer back east in Washington, which I took (without consulting my girlfriend, an unwise decision recounted in painful detail here). I only had a weekend—really, just a Saturday afternoon—to find a place to live. The Beltway is a painfully expensive place to live on $27K a year, so my only option was to find an apartment in the vast warrens of those ugly brick postwar constructs that I called…

The Slums of Arlington

The landlord was a criminal. The apartments smelled of fumigant (except for the closet-sized kitchens, which smelled of beans and diapers). The buildings were stuffy and irrepressibly hot well into November, after which they immediately became bone-chillingly cold. The faucets groaned like the ghosts of women in labor, and spewed greenish water. The carpet was thatched with the severed legs of ten million crickets and roaches. But the rent was under 500 clams a month, making it the only thing this side of the East Falls Church Metro station that was within my price range. And I was close to one of the many access points on the extensive system of bike trails that networked across the DC area, so that was nice.

However, I was warned by numerous coworkers and neighbors that the area was notorious for petty crime and break-ins of both the vehicular and the apartment variety, news that I absorbed with keen if dismayed interest, living as I did in a ground-floor flat. Luckily, I had taken the precaution of owning a crappy, cheap old Toyota, which I kept unlocked, a public service much appreciated by the dozen or so career criminals who anonymously rooted through my car and, finding nothing of value inside, left it largely unmolested during the 11 months I lived there.

I did have a bad scare regarding an apartment break-in, in the wee hours of one early spring night. It was growing hot again, and I had fallen asleep with the windows open. At around 2:30, I was awakened by a clattering in the kitchen, the sound of a window shifting squeakily in its aged frame. Instantly, my adrenal glands swelled to the size of footballs and sloshed a bathtub’s worth of adrenalin into my bloodstream. I snatched my trusty cricket bat from underneath the pillow—I had taken all those warnings not just to heart, but to bed—and stepped into the hall.

The kitchen doorway was to my right. After much mental self-talk of the emboldening nature, I finally sprang into the kitchen, bat raised high…and saw nothing, except the window canted slightly in its frame, the dingy, threadbare curtains fluttering listlessly.

He’s behind you, a voice in my head hissed.

I whirled. Opposite the kitchen stood a small coat closet, its door slightly ajar. Trembling, every hair standing on end, I edged to the door, nudged it open with the cricket bat.

There, in the shadows of the closet, I saw the broad shoulders of a man.

I let out an involuntary and embarrassingly effeminate scream, then brought the cricket bat down on the intruder’s shoulder. There was a satisfying visceral crack—as of wood breaking—when I shattered the burglar’s collarbone and he collapsed to the floor. I emitted two more piercing shrieks, just for good measure, at the lifeless form on the carpet. I may also have tinkled a little, but with that carpet, who would have known? I turned on a light.

Only then did it occur to me to wonder why the burglar was wearing my overcoat. And what he was doing without a head. Or body.

As it turned out, an errant gust of wind had merely knocked a glass into the kitchen sink—that was the sound that woke me up. I had attacked my own overcoat, resting innocently on the wooden hanger I’d stolen from a hotel long ago.

Three weeks later, I moved out.

By this time, Her Lovely Self, then known as my fiancée, had found a job in Washington and we were just a few weeks away from getting married. She found us a one-bedroom apartment (on the third floor) at a nice place over in Alexandria. It was, on its small scale, very much like the place she recently found for us—a well-tended community with a pool and various amenities, and none of the, um, character I had managed to find in all the apartments I’d lived in. But that was okay. It was the end of an era for me—the close of my life as a Single Guy—and I welcomed the change this new rental wrought in my domestic life, much as I welcome it now.

So we are settling in to our latest rental. Thomas, ever sensitive to changes in routine, has had some trouble sleeping in his new digs. But the other night, as I was checking on the kids, I noticed he was already fast asleep, but had something sticking out from under the covers—the wooden handle of my trusty cricket bat, almost the last remaining possession of my Single Guy days. He hardly needs it—the biggest crime in our neighborhood is residents failing to sort their recycleables. Plus, we have Blaze now, who prowls the apartment at night and sleeps in the hallway to the kids’ rooms.

Just the same, on the way back to my own room, I took a moment to close the door of the coat closet. Thomas tends to let his imagination run away with him in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t want him to be startled by my overcoat.

And besides, this apartment has all-new carpets.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead

In Which We Load the Trunk...

2010-08-12T13:14:00.000-04:00

So I’m moving again.

Sadly, that preface must also serve as my four-word apology for being absent from here for so long. When I was a kid, moving--which we did a lot--always struck with the suddenness of an environmental disaster. That’s how it seemed to me anyway. One day you’re sprawled on the blue shag rug in your bedroom, lazily pushing your Batman action figures out onto Lake Shag, where Mike Power, the Atomic Man and GI Joe are stranded in their amphibious vehicle, unable to restart the engine because your Big Brother nibbled off their little kung-fu grip fingers (not that Batman’s any help because he’s got two big blue oven mitts for gloves, but never mind). Next day, you’re standing on a bare wood floor, Lake Shag rolled in a corner, Mike Power and GI Joe are trapped somewhere in a gulag of stacked Mayflower cartons, and your mother is screaming at you in the distance, as though a tornado or a tsunami or killer bees were on the horizon and closing fast.

Actually, mostly Mom yelled at us to “Load Your Trunks!” My brother and I each had a sturdy little metal footlocker, complete with lock and key. Our parents had told us to pack into them only the most special possessions that we couldn’t bear to have lost or broken in a move. It was one of the wiser parenting decisions they made, as it forced us early to take responsibility for our stuff, to make discriminating (and often hard) choices about what was most special to us. And to get us used to the idea of a nomadic lifestyle.

Our parents had given one to my brother. Mine was more special, because we had found it in a crawlspace of the first house I can remember living in. It was a thing of great mystery, hidden way in the back of the eaves, a drab green box, locked tight. Dad had carefully picked the lock with a paper clip and a toothpick (a feat that impressed me then and impresses me still) only to find inside a few pennies, a coverless comic book (Donald Duck) and--you guessed it--the key. But I loved that trunk. Dad cleaned it up, painted it shiny black, and gave me the key on a keyring I still carry in my pocket. When moving time came around, I always packed that trunk with the same things: a short stack of my favorite comics, my Batman action figure (and his Batmobile), my favorite personal accessories (at first, it was usually just a baseball cap or a favorite t-shirt. Later, I would include my fastest tennis shoes, Boy Scout-issue shorts with their awesome pockets and clips, and my Mobile Crime Lab from my Boy Detective days), my lucky arrowhead, and my baseball glove. Packing the trunk was the longest part of any childhood move, and it usually took less than 20 minutes.

Now moves take longer, and heavens are they time-consuming. Especially if you are living in one state, engaged in a prolonged house-sitting situation, while your actual house--the albatross formerly known as the Magazine Mansion--sits hundreds of miles to the west, empty and unloved. Also unsold.

This last little fact has weighed heavily on the mind of Her Lovely Self, whose father is quite possibly the greatest amateur realtor of the 20th century. This is a man who has sold every house he’s ever owned at asking price (or higher, if he got a bidding war started, which apparently he often did), usually within a few weeks of putting it one the market, but sometimes within a few days of just thinking about putting it on the market.

So, economic conditions notwithstanding, it’s come as something of a shock to my wife that our own house has been somewhat slow to move. It hasn’t helped that we had the misfortune of choosing a realtor who appears to have gone into semi-retirement shortly after taking our listing. Some weeks ago, we finally got fed up with his laziness and broke our contract with him. This coincided with the impending end of our sweet housesitting deal, and a lucky break finding a cheap rent in a nice apartment complex, which we will call home until we can sell the old place and buy a new home.

All of this necessitated a return trip to the Magazine Mansion, which we hadn’t seen in six months, not since we closed the place up for the winter. It didn’t look like the same inviting house I remembered leaving back in December. I wouldn’t have wanted to buy the place. The kitchen looked dark and small, the yard looked patchy and woebegone. Mud-encrusted footprints from a long winter of showings were embedded in the carpets. Something bad and leaky had happened to the dishwasher. The sheep were in the meadow, the cows were in the corn.

So it was a painful, exhausting few days of Extreme Makeover, the MM Edition, as we repainted, shampooed rugs, pruned hedges, and fired realtors. I had to fiddle with the water supply and in the doing of it discovered many impending plumbing problems worse than the dishwasher, although the dishwasher was pretty bad. Here’s a tip: If you think you can remove an old dishwasher and install a new one all by yourself, think again. Especially when it comes to jockeying the thing into position in a space under the kitchen counter that is precisely one-quarter of an inch too small for the new unit. Your fingertips will thank you for it later. Because you will still have all of them. Unlike me. Now I know how Mike Power and GI Joe felt.

And that was really just for openers. We got a new realtor--a real firecracker whom I dearly wish we’d met six months ago. He hit the ground running, showing the house twice within 72 hours of our signing him on. He also brought some realtor tough-love down on us, and made us realize that it was long past time to get our stuff out of the house and into storage or, as it will turn out, into our new rental pad.

In fairness, we managed to empty most of the living space of the house before we closed the place up last Christmas. But we had lagged in emptying our garage and, of course, the Incredible Basement of C.R.A.P. Our new realtor pointed out that when it came to selling points, storage was huge, and the fact that our house is the only one in its price range with a three-car garage was nullified by the fact that we had it partially filled with boxes. So we got a U-Haul and Thomas and I spent the hottest day of the year hauling boxes to an unventilated storage unit. While we were gone, Her Lovely Self divested us of the last of the Basement of C.R.A.P. junk, literally giving it away to neighbors and passersby. I think she went a little crazy that day, because she also started giving away our furniture. As Thomas and I returned, I saw three burly college kids hoisting our beloved sofa onto the back of a truck, along with my favorite LoveSac.

But I didn’t have long to lament their loss. I was too busy reloading the U-Haul with beds and furniture and my Emergency Stash of C.R.A.P., long hidden in the crawlspace over the garage. While Her Lovely Self was engaged in a distant part of the house doing loud things with a carpet shampooer, I smuggled the very last of my C.R.A.P. down into the garage and well into the back of the truck. It was, it must be said, a pretty small collection of stuff, the smallest it’s been in years: Just two Mayflower cartons of old toys, a plastic bin of assorted electronics, a bag containing the belt from the Mobile Crime Lab, and my last 27 boxes of comic books.

When I was done, there was just one thing up in the crawlspace: my old metal trunk, its shiny black finish long since scuffed off. I fished the old key off my keyring and opened it. Inside were a few old newspaper clippings, a handful of spare change, a Red Sox cap and the severed forearm of my old GI Joe, his maimed hand splayed on the floor of the trunk in a sad little five-knuckled wave. I hunched there for a moment under the eaves of the Magazine Mansion, sweat running off the end of my nose. Then I clambered down the ladder and returned with an armful of items such as I thought a young person might like to find. I dumped them all in, tossed in whatever loose bills and spare change I found in my pockets and then--what the hell--flipped the key in too, locked the trunk and shoved it into the deepest, darkest corner under the eaves.

It seemed like an appropriate offering to a house that has been good to me and mine, that had sheltered me after many illnesses and incidents of self-injury, that had welcomed me home after many a misadventure, that had seen the arrival in my family of the Éclair, and of Blaze before her. And that, last but not least, had witnessed the birth of this blog.

So I wish them well, whoever finds that trunk. I wish them many happy and healthy years in that house I once called home.

But mostly, I just wish they’d hurry the hell up and buy the place.

Yours,
From Somewhere on the Masthead