The Rightful Heir (9 page)

T
HE ONLY THING
on Benjamin's mind the whole next day, besides the bus ride with Jessica Howell, was getting
back the collar. School dragged on, but after hours and hours of waiting he saw that the ending bell was finally one hour away from ringing.

Social studies was at least somewhat interesting. Mrs. Dyer was an energetic middle-aged lady who always tried to spice up the lesson. Formerly a kindergarten teacher, she decided she needed a change and took on more mature students, although she still treated her seventh and eighth graders like kindergartners.

Entering the classroom Benjamin saw a huge box, covered in aluminum foil, resting on a sheet of plywood over two sawhorses. A strange, foil horse's head stuck out the front of it. Someone had drawn a horse's face on it with colored markers. The students took their seats when the bell sounded, every set of eyes glued on the box in front of Mrs. Dyer's desk.
“Neeeeeeeigh! Neeeeeeeiigghh!”
They stared at the sound.

“Hey! Did that sound just come from that box?” a girl whispered to her friends.

“Neeeeeeeiigghh!”
En masse they rose from their desks and approached the crude
horse
. Some touched it, some kept their distance. Then all of a sudden,
POP!
Mrs. Dyer jumped out as the flaps flew open. The children screamed in surprise as she grabbed a fat boy named Christopher and held a cardboard sword up to
his neck.
Flash!
The students turned to see Mrs. Webster snapping a photograph of Mrs. Dyer in action.

“That'll be a good one!” Mrs. Webster laughed as she left the room.

“And
that
, my little children, is how the Trojan Horse trick happened!” There was applause as Mrs. Dyer took a bow. Benjamin honestly hated to hear the ending bell ring. He found the story of the Trojan Horse quite fascinating. But he had a very important chore after school.

The school bus bumped along. Jessica Howell's intoxicating shampoo filled his lungs as Al hit every pothole in the road. When she got off, Benjamin did his thing (prompting Al's comment) and watched the Watermelon Queen pick up the tan pug with one black foot. “I'll see you tonight!” Benjamin said confidently under his breath.

When they reached his house he raced in, told his mom “hello” and “good-bye,” and got his bike, leaning against the garage. He pedaled north, past Jessica's house, until he saw the high water tower, which he'd walked by weeks before with Roscoe and Clementine, and turned left onto Hopkin's Switch Road. It took only a minute to spot Mrs. Crane's. Just as his mom had said, it was the only house around. And a rickety old house at that.

Old, chipped, faded white paint peeled off every rotted board of its two stories. A white car in front of a small shed was in worse shape than the house beside it. Junk of every sort was crammed up to the opening of the shed. And sure enough, the half-acre front yard might as well have been called a jungle. The wildest and strangest weeds raised their heads high over the tall fescue grass as they claimed their lordship in the overgrown yard. Lucky for Benjamin, four towering cedar trees scattered around the front yard had managed to kill the grass under them with their fallen needles.

Benjamin rode his
bike to the shed and rested it on the ground.
What a dump!
He scanned the junk heap and frowned, then sighed when he spotted a push mower that looked like a wheel of rusty metal blades on a stick. He ran up onto the porch and immediately his foot cracked a loose, moldy plank almost in half. Walking carefully to the front screen door, he could smell a skunk close by. He looked down and saw a hole at the edge of the porch big enough for an animal to crawl into. He hoped the skunk was not underneath him.

He looked through the screen, although half of it hung down. A TV show hummed in the background, a soap opera from the sound of it. He spotted the back of an old lady's blue-gray hair, full of pink curlers, in a chair.

“Um…hello?” Benjamin said through the screen. There was no reply. “Mrs. Crane, it's Benjamin Biggs. My mom called you yesterday.” The boy coughed loudly, then grabbed the door handle and wondered whether he should go inside uninvited. He waited half a minute, then opened the unforgiving door, its bottom scraping the floor. He walked in, one eye on the back of her head, the other looking around him.
She must have collected all this old junk for over a thousand years!
A dusty, stuffed, and mounted owl that glared at him…a black and white Cheshire Cat wall clock, whose eyes moved back and forth with every tick…old metal magazine stands with hundreds, maybe thousands of magazines that only old ladies read. An oak china hutch with lime green and white plates and bowls took up a whole wall. To complement the room was a smell Benjamin could only compare to a nursing home.

He cleared his throat as he walked in front of the old lady. “Hi, Mrs. Crane. I'm here to mow your—” Benjamin not only stopped talking but altogether stopped thinking. Old Mrs. Crane was in front of the TV, eyes rolled back and mouth half open,
sitting just a little
too
still.

The hairs on the back of his neck pointed straight out and a freezing shiver climbed his spine. “Um…M-Mrs. Crane?” the scared boy barely got his words out. He wanted to clap his hands in front of her face to see if she was alive but was too afraid. Instead, he watched her to see if she was breathing at all. She wasn't. Her arms rested stiffly on her bulbous gut over a pile of lottery scratch-off tickets that had fallen on the lap of her gray sweatpants.

Benjamin started to panic. “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” He scanned the room for a telephone but didn't see one…only the faded yellow walls of the kitchen through the walkway in the corner.
Oh, this can't be happening!
He ran in and checked the walls, the rusted stovetop by an old refrigerator that hummed unusually loud, and a folding table covered with old newspapers and lottery tickets. No telephone. It took a second before he looked down at the warped green linoleum floor that folded along the edges. He smelled old canned cat food and saw a little brown bowl of it rotting next to his shoe. And next to that was a not-yet-rotting, stiff-as-a-board, dead Siamese cat.

Benjamin instantly took off for the front door and kicked it open, the phone forgotten. He jumped off the porch, ignoring the two steps the old lady had used millions of times…when she was alive. He stopped to catch his breath when the jolt of adrenaline wore off, there in Mrs. Crane's front yard.

Looking down the road in both directions, he hoped to see some sign of a house nearby. There was nothing but pasture and trees. He heard a strange noise behind him and jumped, hoping it was just his imagination and not Mrs. Crane coming back to life as a zombie. Trying to ignore it, he went to his bike and pulled it upright. He heard it again.
What was that?!
He didn't feel like being brave and going back inside, but he called out with a shaky
voice, “M-Mrs. Crane, is that y-you?”

Ruff!
Benjamin gasped. It came from the porch. He walked over to the hole. Two little eyes looked up at him. “The dog!” He'd completely forgotten his reason for being there. Finding an old lady dead in her chair made you forget just about anything.

Benjamin leaned over. Jonah whimpered and retreated from him in fear. “It's okay. I won't hurt ya. Come here, boy.” He held out his opened hand in the hole to let the dog smell it. The head came forward and the sunlight showed Benjamin the dog's hideous features. “Oh man, you are one ugly mutt!” The dog quickly withdrew. “Hey, I'm sorry. Come back!” Benjamin started whistling and snapping his fingers, all the while glancing at the screen door in fear. “Come on, boy. Come here!” The head again
peeked out, and as it moved forward a little more, there it was— Pugsly's collar. “Come here!” Benjamin snatched Jonah by the neck with both hands, pulling him out of the hole carelessly.

Jonah kicked and yelped as his claws scratched Benjamin's arms. The boy struggled to undo the belt clip fastened around the sickly neck. “Just hold on. Stop scratching!” He finally got it undone, dropping the dog to the porch.

“That's my collar! Give it back!” Jonah shouted angrily.

“No!” Benjamin replied as he looked the collar over.

“Give it—” The confused dog tilted his head awkwardly. “Did you say ‘no'?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“H-How can you understand me?”

The curious little dog followed the boy off the porch. Benjamin walked up to his bike and turned it around to face the road. “This collar is property of the kingdom and it belongs to King Pugsly's son, not you!”

“Where are you going?” Jonah ran up beside Benjamin's bike.

“Home.” Benjamin gave a few hard pushes on his bike pedals as adrenaline once more rushed through his scared body.

“Wait! Where is this kingdom?” Jonah watched Benjamin head down the driveway. “Hey! Did you hear me? Where is this kingdom?!” He stood by the shed recounting the words the boy had just spoken. “King Pugsly's son?” His eyes shifted around, looking down at the rocks on the weed-covered driveway. “King Pugsly?…Pugsly…Pugs—” Jonah gasped as he took off toward the road, reaching it just in time to see the boy turn the corner and head right. Benjamin disappeared quickly behind the hedge tree row. But Jonah kept running, never looking back at the decrepit old house where the cat and old lady, who had treated him badly his whole life, were dead from the rattlesnake attack he had eluded earlier that afternoon.

CHAPTER SEVEN

B
ENJAMIN PEDALED
as fast as he could down the road. He didn't bother to look over at Jessica Howell's yard for the pug. Mrs. Crane was dead and he was the only one who knew it. He shivered as he pedaled harder and
harder. His tired mind tossed around crazy thoughts. He didn't know what happened to people who discovered a death.
Will I go to jail? Will I be in trouble?
He wasn't paying any attention and soon found himself at his mailbox. He was up the driveway in seconds, then remembered how his mom felt about Pugsly's collar. He slipped it off his wrist and shoved it in the front pocket of his jeans. Jumping off his bike, he let it fall beside the garage and raced inside the house. Panting, he opened the door and shouted, “Mom?! Dad?! Are you home?!”