Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (36 page)

“Well, do you know of anyone called Alva that he once knew?”

“Alva Pierce. I hadn’t thought about her in years. It was front-page news at the time, though.”

She knew! I almost dropped the tray, which wouldn’t have mattered, because it was Mr. Graham’s and he still hadn’t come back from the Hereafter for spaghetti and Jell-O, but still it would have been a mess to clean up, and suddenly I felt I needed every minute of extra time I could manage. “Was Alva his wife, then?” I asked, trying to sound polite and casual about it.

“No, dear, his sister. Such a sad thing. People did wonder if it was murder—” She looked up at me then (or maybe Mr. Graham tipped her off) and she realized that she was about to talk scandal to a twelve-year-old kid. She smiled at me and said, “Well, never mind, dear. It was a long time ago, and I expect you have a good many meals to deliver.”

I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to talk her into finishing the story, so I went back to delivering dinners, but my mind was going ninety miles an hour, trying to figure out another way to find out about Alva.

“You seem preoccupied tonight, young man.” It was Mr. Lagerveld, who was a really nice guy, even if he didn’t care too much for the food. I could tell he was in no hurry to get to his spaghetti. He had been a college professor years ago, and I liked to talk to him anyhow. I was thinking:
If I can just word the question right, maybe Mr. L. can help me
.

“I have to do some research,” I told him, as I set his tray down on the table, and rustled up his silverware. “It’s for school. It’s about something that happened around here about sixty years ago, and I don’t know how to go about finding the information.”

“Sixty years ago? The Great Depression?”

I shook my head. “A local thing—like a person got kidnapped, or something.” I was guessing about the time and the event, but I thought I had the general idea anyhow.

“Have you tried looking in the newspapers?”

“How would I find a sixty-year-old newspaper? They’d fall apart, wouldn’t they?”

He sighed. “No wonder my students couldn’t do research. What do they teach you these days? How to feed your hamster?”

“We use encyclopedias to look up stuff, but there wouldn’t be anything local in the
Britannica
.”

“That is correct. So you need newspapers. So you go
to a library, and you ask the nice librarian for the microfilm. You see, they put old newspapers on microfilm, so they won’t fall apart when grubby-handed kids use them to do history reports.” He sounded gruff, but he was grinning at me, and I think he suspected that what I wanted to find wasn’t an assignment for school.

“Microfilm. The public library will have papers from sixty years ago?”

“I hope so. Our tax dollars at work, young man. Good luck with your investigation. And if you ever have a question about geology—that I can help with.”

I had to wait until Sunday afternoon to see if Mr. Lagerveld was right about the microfilm. Since I didn’t have a date to go by, I knew I was going to have to scroll through about ten years’ worth of newspapers to see what happened to Alva. I just hoped Mrs. Graham was right about the story being front-page news.

Mom was delighted to take me to the library for a change, instead of to the video store, which is my usual Sunday afternoon destination. I told her I’d be a couple of hours getting material for my report, and she gave me a dollar’s worth of change for the photocopy machine and went off to the grocery store, happy in the knowledge that her kid had suddenly become so studious. I hated to disappoint her. I’d try to score a few A’s on the old report card to bolster her faith in the new me. Meanwhile, I had to find someone named Alva.

While I was waiting for Sunday to roll around so that I could check the microfilm newspapers, I had tried to figure out a way to narrow down the search time to the smallest possible number of years. I looked up Mr. Pierce’s age in his record file. He was seventy-five. That meant that he was born in 1920. But Mrs. Graham remembered the case, and she was only seventy-one. I figured that she had to have been at least seven years old to
remember a local tragedy—which meant that 1931 was the first year I planned to search. Mr. Pierce would have been eleven years old. I didn’t know if Alva was his younger sister or an older one.

The librarian was very helpful. She showed me how to use the microfilm machines, and she showed me where the reels were kept, all carefully labeled by month and year. I started with January 1931 and flipped through day by day, reading the headlines of each front-page story. An hour and a half later I was in June of 1932, and there it was:
LOCAL GIRL MISSING: BELIEVED LOST IN WOODS
. There was a drawing of a pretty girl who looked about eight years old. The story said that Alva Pierce had followed her big brother Francis into the woods, where he was playing with two other boys. They ran off and left the little girl, telling her to go back home. When they came out of the woods at suppertime, they discovered that little Alva had not returned home. The boys, their parents, and the whole neighborhood searched the woods, calling for the little girl, but she was not found. I kept checking the newspapers, day after day, to see what happened to Alva Pierce. One day they brought in dogs. Another day they questioned everybody who had used the nearby road that day. After a week, the stories got smaller and smaller, and they were no longer on the front page. Finally the stories stopped altogether. Alva Pierce had never been found.

“Well, now you know,” said Kenny Jeffreys, when I showed him the articles I photocopied from the microfilm newspapers. “Mr. Pierce was responsible for his sister getting lost in the woods, and he still feels guilty about it after all these years.”

“It’s because they never found her,” I said. “I’ll bet he still wonders what happened to her.”

“Poor old guy,” said Kenny, loading the last of the
towels on his trolley. “Well, gotta go now. Too bad we can’t help Mr. Pierce.”

“I’m not ready to give up,” I said. “I looked up the patch of woods that Alva got lost in back in 1932.”

“Dream on, kid,” said Kenny. “If no one has found that little girl after sixty-something years, I don’t think your chances are all that good.”

“I’m not giving up yet. I got a topographical map of the woods—the librarian suggested it. And I have one more person that might be able to help.”

That evening I took Mr. Lagerveld his Salisbury steak, and before he could ask if it was Roy Rogers’s horse, like he always did, I said, “Remember how you said I could come to you if I ever had a geology question?”

“I don’t do term papers,” he warned me.

I pulled out my newspaper articles and my photocopied map of the woods. “Look at this, Mr. L. This was my library project. A little girl got lost in these woods sixty years ago, and they never found her. If you were going to look for her, where would you start?”

He put on his reading glasses and studied the map, and the fine print at the bottom that told where it was, and he muttered to himself some. Finally he said, “Strictly speaking, this is geography, but I think I can help you out. People looked a couple of days in these woods and didn’t find her?”

I nodded.

“Did they try the caves?”

“What caves?” I looked at the article. I didn’t remember anything about caves.

“Look at this analysis of the land. Limestone. Creek nearby. Of course there are caves. But the opening might be too small for an adult to notice. Low to the ground, maybe. A little girl would find it easily enough.” He took off his glasses and glared at me. “Please note that I am
not advising you to go caving alone. Remember what happened to that little girl.”

“No problem,” I said. “I know just the person to take with me.”

Saturday morning was sort of cold and drizzly, but Kenny would have been complaining anyhow, because he hated to get up early on Saturday, and he was missing a trip to the movies with his friends, and about a dozen other gripes, but he agreed that I ought not to go alone, and he was curious about the little girl’s disappearance. So, with a lot of grumbling, he picked me up at my house at seven
A.M
. and told my mother we were going hiking, which was almost true.

The house that had belonged to the Pierce family was in ruins now, but it was still there, so we parked the car in the yard, and set off on foot from its backyard. That’s the way Francis and Alva would have gone. We had knapsacks with food, rope, and flashlights, and Kenny had brought a shovel in case we needed it, but he said I had to take turns with him carrying it.

The woods hadn’t changed much in sixty years. It was still a rural part of the county, thick with underbrush, and easy to get lost in. I stayed close to Kenny, and tried not to think about snakes.

We followed the creek, examining boulders, ridges, and any kind of land formation that might hide an opening to a cave. Since it was early March, I thought we might have a better chance of finding a cave than the searchers would have had in June, when summer plants had covered everything with vines and grasses. We walked around for hours, getting our boots muddy, and snagging our trousers on brambles and old bits of barbed wire.

Finally, I sat down to rest near the stream, wishing I’d packed two more sandwiches in my knapsack. As I leaned back, putting one arm behind me for balance, I
slipped and fell flat on my back. My arm had sunk into the ground.

“Kenny! Bring the shovel!” I yelled. “I think I found it!”

After all these years, mud had filled up most of the entrance, but Kenny and I took turns digging like mad, and soon we had an opening big enough for me to fit into.

“I don’t like the idea of you going in alone,” he told me.

“At least you know where I am,” I said. “If I get in trouble, you can go for help.”

I tied the rope around my waist, took the flashlight, and wriggled through the muddy opening, and into the darkness. “It’s okay!” I yelled back to Kenny.

The cave was too low to stand up in, so I inched my way along, keeping the beam of the flashlight trained at my feet, so that I wouldn’t tumble into a pit. I hadn’t gone more than about ten feet before the light showed a flash of white on the ground in front of me. I crept forward, shivering as a trickle of water ran down the neck of my shirt, and I reached out my hand and touched—a bone. I dug a little in the soft mud, and found more bones and a few scraps of cloth. There was a large boulder near the bones, and I think it must have fallen, either killing the person, or pinning them down so that they could not escape. This was Alva. She had found the cave and had been trapped there, without anyone knowing where to look for her.

I made my way back out as quickly as I could. I hadn’t thought about cave-ins until I saw the boulder beside those tiny white bones. “She’s there,” I told Kenny, as I gasped for fresh air. “Now we have to tell the police, I guess.”

A couple of days later, I was back at work, and Mom had finished yelling at me for being a daredevil. As I took the meal tray in to room 226, I saw that Mr. Pierce was
asleep, so I stopped at the desk, and set a newspaper down on top of the empty typewriter. It was open to the front page story about Alva Pierce being found after all these years. The search and rescue team had recovered the body, and she was buried now in the little church cemetery next to her parents. I thought Mr. Pierce would be glad to know that his sister had been found.

I did wonder, though, when I got to Mrs. Graham’s room to deliver her two dinners. She took her dinner, and set the other one down in front of her late husband’s empty chair. Then she said, “Young man, I thought children were not allowed in Northfield except at visiting hours.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “but I work here. Remember?”

“Not you!” she snapped. “Mr. Graham tells me that he distinctly saw a little blond girl going into room 226 just now. Didn’t you, dear?”

Whatever he said, I didn’t hear it.

Laura, who is six years old, came up with the idea for the story by listening to her big sister’s boyfriend talking about his job at a nursing home. Spencer, age seven, figured out how to find out what the man would be typing by putting paper into the typewriter, and Laura decided that the mystery would be that the man’s sister had gone missing as a little girl. Spencer worked out what happened to the little girl, and how to go about finding her after all these years. Sharyn McCrumb, Spencer and Laura’s mom, did most of the wording. She would read drafts of it to Spencer and Laura, and they would suggest changes, and make sure that not too many big words
were used. Finally, they came up with a story that everyone was happy with. Laura is especially pleased with the ending.

“G
ERDA!
K
AY’S GONE!
”