Dead End in Norvelt (26 page)

“Romantic,” I said, “wow. Now that’s the way to go!”

“Not romantic,” she disagreed. “To me it would be romantic if Antony properly fell on his sword and kicked the bucket and Cleopatra escaped and lived a lovely life sailing along the Nile without him and his big ideas ruining her kingdom. She was better off without him.”

I knew what she was getting at. It was time for Spizz to fall off his tricycle and onto his sword and leave her alone to live the new life she wanted in Florida with her sister. But I didn’t think Spizz was going to just fall on his sword.

When we returned to Miss Volker’s home I sat down at my desk, as I had all summer. I raised my pencil and Miss Volker fell back into an easy chair.

“Mrs. Droogie,” she started up, and already her voice sounded tired, like a cold engine that didn’t want to turn over. She paused and took a deep breath and began again, and this time her engine sputtered to life. “Mrs. Droogie was a lovely woman and lived a long and satisfying life. She loved her family, her community, and her country and in return she was loved and respected by all who knew her. As a child she was a violin prodigy who at the age of eleven played with the New York Philharmonic. She went on to perform with the world’s greatest symphonies, but by the age of twenty-three she set down the violin and never picked it up again. When asked why she quit she replied that one day she realized she was only playing to please her parents and that she really didn’t enjoy it. Instead, she retreated to Norvelt where she married Mr. Droogie, who was best known as a clown at children’s birthday parties and was famous for his sense of humor—and Mrs. Droogie became famous for her laughter. They were a perfect couple.”

I waited for Miss Volker to continue but she had run out of gas and slumped back into her chair. “That’s all I have to say,” she said. “Mrs. Droogie was a lovely woman who proved that you don’t have to do what your parents want or what your boyfriend wants for you to be happy. You just have to be yourself, for there is no love greater than self-love.”

“I’ll type this up,” I said dutifully, and then I asked something that had been on my mind for a long time. “Miss Volker, now that all the original Norvelters are dead, doesn’t that mean you have to marry Mr. Spizz like you promised him?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she replied with a wry smile. “And I realized that I failed to inform that bonehead of one key fact—I’m an original Norvelter too. So I guess he’ll just have to wait until I drop dead to marry me. Like I said, his alphabet soup only spells out D-U-M-B.”

“Well, I don’t think he’ll be very happy about that,” I said. “Because he already left you a little gift by the back door.”

Instantly her face stiffened. “Go get it for me,” she snarled. She looked even more tired. “I expect it’s more mouse bait.”

I went out to the porch and retrieved the box of chocolates and the note and brought them to the living room.

“Read the note,” she instructed.

I pulled the tape off the package and opened the envelope.
“As God intended, it is just the two of us left in this Garden of Eden. Marry me. —E. Spizz.”

There was a knock at the door.

“To quote Cleopatra,” Miss Volker sang out, “‘The enemy is at the gate.’ Believe me, if I had a snake I’d use it on him. Now go answer it.”

It was Spizz. “Gantos boy,” he bellowed. “Figures you’d be here.” He stared down at me as if I were a piece of gum he might scrape up.

“I was just leaving,” I said to him, and stepped onto the porch. I hadn’t gone far when I heard his foghorn voice holler out, “Hello, good-lookin’. Looks like we’re the last two old birds at the party.”

I knew she was about to let him have a piece of her mind and I didn’t want to hear it. I had heard enough already. I took the obituary down to Mr. Greene.

He was wiping ink off his hands with a rag. “I told you there was something suspicious going on,” Mr. Greene said, feeling pretty proud of himself and puffing up a noxious cloud of cherry tobacco smoke, which burned my eyes. “We’ll know soon enough if someone has been killing those old ladies.”

“Or not,” I added.

“How much do you want to bet? I say that Miss Volker killed them,” he declared as he pulled out his wallet.

I pulled out my two-dollar bill. “I say she didn’t,” I replied.

He took my money and his and put them in a desk drawer. “Winner takes all,” he said, puffing excitedly.

“Takes all,” I repeated, then walked straight home. I was exhausted.

*   *   *

I didn’t know what to do but try to distract myself by reading while waiting for the autopsy report. I looked over all my books but every one of the histories reminded me of Miss Volker.
The Crusades
,
The Magna Charta
,
The F.B.I.
,
Women of Courage
,
Custer’s Last Stand
—I could just hear her voice behind each book, linking the past to the present and the present to the future. But what was her future? That question was why I couldn’t read a word, because I was looking out the window and toward her house and trying to read her mind. I wanted to sneak back down there and snoop but I was still grounded.

Police cars had been coming and going. Spizz’s tricycle was parked by her back porch. Men had been carrying boxes and bags out of her house and loading them into trucks and driving off. Mom wouldn’t let me call her, so my only hope was that Miss Volker would call me. And so I waited.

*   *   *

When the telephone rang I ran for it and picked up the receiver. “I’ll be right there,” I cried out to Miss Volker.

Only it was Mr. Spizz. “Gantos boy!” he hollered so loudly I could smell his breath through the phone. “I got some bad news for you.”

“Is it about Miss Volker?” I asked nervously. “Is she okay?”

“She asked me to call you and let you know that the police have arrested her for
murder
—they say she killed all those old ladies.”

“She did not!” I shouted. “How could she have done it?”

“Poisoned them,” he said slowly. “Heartlessly.”

“That cannot be true,” I stated.

“Mrs. Droogie was full of poison. The police have proof it was your
girlfriend
who did it,” he said quickly.

“What proof?” I shot back.

“They found 1080 all over the chocolates at Miss Volker’s house,” he barked. “She must have been giving them to the old ladies.”

“She was poisoning the mice in her basement with the chocolates you gave her,” I shot right back. “She hated those crummy chocolates. She gave the old ladies Thin Mints.”

“Don’t be so smart-alecky! They found 1080 in the Thin Mints too,” he snarled.

“So what. A lot of people use 1080,” I said as calmly as possible. “That doesn’t mean anything. You use it. And Mr. Huffer uses it.”

“We use it for pests,” he said, getting wound up. “Not for people. We don’t cook with it or sprinkle it on cookies or serve it on chocolates.”

“Maybe it was the Hells Angels,” I suggested. “Miss Volker said they brought a curse on the town.”

“That phony curse was just a way of covering her tracks in advance of murdering those ladies herself. Believe me, I know how she operates. She says one thing when she means another.”

“I guess that means she won’t marry you?” I surmised. “Even though she said she would.”

“I’m the one asking the questions,” he said in a steely voice. “Did you help her? She can’t use her hands so she must have had a murder accomplice.”

“I didn’t do a thing,” I said, standing up to him. “I don’t even believe she did it.”

“Well, the police might want to talk with you next,” he said. “So you better get your story straight and tell the truth.”

“Then I can tell them that you were the last person to touch the food before serving it to the old ladies,” I reminded him. “You probably murdered them.”

“I’m a police officer,” he said with authority. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to accuse me of murder.”

“You made me buy you the 1080,” I said.

“The police were informed that you bought it for Miss Volker,” he replied smoothly. “They found it at her house.”

“Anything else you lied about?” I asked.

“Only you would know if someone is lying,” he boomed out. “The police are with her now. They put her under house arrest and I have to stand guard.”

“You better not hurt her,” I warned him. “She’s old.”

“She may be old but she’s a cold-blooded killer,” he howled, and hung up.

I went back to my room and sulked a little bit as I looked over my collection of obituaries. It seemed impossible for someone like Miss Volker, who loved people, to turn around and hurt them. And I felt pretty rotten for thinking that she might have wanted to kill me too.

After a while Dad walked in and put his hand on my shoulder. “I just heard about Miss Volker,” he said, and shook his head at the mystery of it. “And I know you are worried about her, so I’ll give you something to take your mind off her. I’m going to fly to Florida in a few days to look for work. I was going to stay and move more empty Norvelt houses to West Virginia, but now the police want to keep them here while they investigate the old-lady deaths, so we can’t even sell our house. This is a good time for me to go, and you can keep busy by helping your mom out.”

“Am I still grounded?” I asked.

“Once I’m gone she’ll need you to run errands and stuff,” he said. “I figure she’ll let you off the hook.”

“Well, what about my flight in the J-3?” I whined. “You promised to take me up.”

“I thought you turned that ticket in to go play baseball,” he replied.

“I did, but can’t we do it in secret?” I begged. “When she’s not looking.”

“Okay,” he figured, “but we’ll have to find a time real soon, and we can’t take off from the house because she’ll spot us and then we’ll both get into even more trouble.”

“I can sneak away and meet you in a field,” I suggested.

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and smiled secretly at some crazy thought he had. “That’ll work for me.”

27

Mom reached into the kitchen cabinet
and removed a small basket made of twigs. “This is my wild raspberry–picking basket,” she said proudly, and inspected it to make sure all the twigs were still woven in place. “I made it in this house when my mother ran the Girl Scout meetings in our basement. I got a badge for the best-made basket.”

“Was your mother the judge?” I asked, and looked her in the eye, then looked back at the basket, which looked like it had been woven by a raccoon.

“Don’t be a wise guy,” she reproached me gently. “Now I’m going out to hunt for raspberries in the woods up behind Fenton’s gas station. I’ll be back soon because I’m going to make a raspberry tart for Miss Volker to cheer her up. It’s just criminal that she is under house arrest.”

“Can you bake a pistol into that tart?” I asked. “She must be going insane down there with that creepy Mr. Spizz as her jailer. Just having to listen to him all day would make me want to take a shot at him.”

“Don’t you worry about Miss Volker,” Mom replied as she headed for the back door. “That machine gun she has for a mouth is more than enough to handle Spizz.”

She went off to the woods and I sat at the table and slowly paged through the
Norvelt News
. It was sad that all the Norvelt originals had now died and there were no more obituaries to write except for Mr. Spizz and Miss Volker, and they might just go on living forever as they promised each other. There wasn’t much to read about in the paper—in the Chat Line section a pet ferret had gotten stuck in the tailpipe of a car. The owners were asking for tips on how to get it out. Someone suggested that one person hold a butterfly net behind the tailpipe while another person start the car, which would allow the engine exhaust to blast the ferret out into the net. I’d love to witness that. And then I turned to the back page. As usual, I saved This Day In History for last:

August 14, 1935:
United States Social Security Act was passed (supported by our Mrs. Roosevelt), creating a pension system for the retired.

August 14, 1945:
Japan surrendered, ending World War II.

I didn’t get to the third one because at that moment I heard a rifle shot, followed by my mother hollering, “Jack! Jack!”

I ran out to the back porch. I didn’t see her but yelled out anyway, “It wasn’t me! I didn’t fire the rifle!”

“Come quick!” she shouted. I couldn’t see her though her voice was coming from behind the pony pen. I dashed down the steps and had just cleared the pen when suddenly a small deer crashed out of the underbrush and into our backyard. He had been shot in the neck and the blood was running swiftly from that small entry hole and down the golden curve of his fur, where it gathered brightly in the soft thatch of his heaving chest. He must have been dazed by the bullet because once he ran out into the open he just stood still, as if he wasn’t hurt at all and was only figuring out a safe place to hide. But there was too much blood for anything good to happen.

From the same path as the deer my mother came crashing out of the woods. She still clutched the empty basket in her hand as she glanced anxiously back over her shoulder to see what was moving from behind. When she turned her head and saw me she hollered out in a razor-sharp voice I’d never heard before. “Jack,” she ordered, “get the rifle and bring it to me. Now!”

I knew she didn’t mean my dad’s deer rifle, because that was locked up in a special cabinet. She meant the Japanese rifle. I stood there frozen for a second until I could just make out a man in the woods wearing a camouflage hunting outfit and a black ski mask. He stepped from behind a white birch tree and he had a dark rifle held up to his shoulder. It was aimed not at Mom but at the deer. Mom saw it too, and the first thing she did was step into the line of fire between the hunter and the deer, which was still dazed and bleeding and completely motionless except for the steady drops of blood ticking off seconds against the dry summer grass.