Kindred Spirits (9 page)

“What we need to know,”
Adam says, “is which of these city councilmen’s kids would have been teenagers
or older in nineteen thirty-four.”

“Well, now, let me
see...” Granny looks down her nose through her glasses. “Eugene Portwood
would’ve been seventeen or eighteen back in thirty-four. He died a few years
back. His brother run a big story about him in the paper.”

“What was he like?” I
ask.

“I
didn’t know much but his name, he was so much older than me,” Granny says. “But
everybody always said the Portwoods was good folks.” She looks back down at the
list. “Now Harold Buchanan Jr., he’s about the same age as Eugene Jr., but he’s
still alive. You’d probably know him if you was to see him, Miranda. He was on
the City Council for years himself, and his boy, Harold III, is a state senator
now.”

“What’s he like?” I ask.

“I couldn’t tell you,”
Granny says. “Like most folks in this town, he always took off running the
other way when he saw me coming.”  She traces a line down the list with her
gnarled index finger. “Now Bobby Bradley is a year or two younger than me, so
he was pretty little when it happened. His brother, Bill Jr., would’ve been
fifteen or sixteen. And Bill Jr. was a mess, let me tell you. Always getting in
trouble for things like painting dirty words on the walls in the high school or
tying tin cans to some old dog’s tail. I can’t say I ever cared much for Bill.
Of course, there’s a big line between pranks such as his and murder.”

“Is he still alive?” Adam
asks.

“He is,” Granny says. “He
retired from the hardware store over in Morgan a few years back.

He’s a crotchety an old coot
as you’re ever likely to meet.” She looks back down the list. “Now Floyd Silcox
Jr. moved off years ago, and I never heard what happened to him. I’d be
surprised if he was still alive, though. He was always a sickly type, even as a
youngun. His ma used to come to my ma to get remedies for his breathing
troubles.”

“How old would he have
been in nineteen thirty-four?” I ask.

“Fifteen or sixteen,”
Granny says, “but weak as the little feller always was, I doubt he would’ve had
the strength to pull the trigger.”

“So,”
I say, “I guess our main suspects are Eugene Portwood, Harold Buchanan, Bill
Bradley, and maybe Floyd Silcox if his health got better.”

“Hm,” Adam says, “I
wonder if Bill Bradley and Harold Buchanan are listed in the phone book.”

“Why?” Granny says. “So
you can call them up and ask them if they killed a couple of ladies in nineteen
and thirty-four?” She reaches out and grabs my hand, then Adam’s and holds them.
“Listen, younguns, I think this has gone far enough. There’s somebody out there
who don’t like you digging all this dirt back up I don’t know who it is, but I
know he don’t like it. And I know he ain’t somebody you’d want to cross. I know
finding out all this stuff has been exciting, and I know you feel like figuring
it out is gonna right a wrong that was done seventy years ago. But maybe it’s
too late to right that wrong.”

“But maybe it’s not,” I
say. “What about clearing Charlie T’s name? That would mean a lot to his
family. And what about the spirits of the Jameson sisters? Maybe once Charlie T
is cleared, they can be at peace.”

“That’s another thing
that worries me,” Granny says. “The spirits of the Jameson sisters. Have you
ever stopped to think that they might not be good spirits? Maybe getting
murdered turned them all bitter and mean...old Mildred was pretty bitter and
mean to start with. Maybe they’re just pretending to need your help so they can
lead you to danger.”

“Man,” Adam says, “that’s
sure gonna make me feel safe in my bed tonight.”

“Well, if safe is how you
want to feel,” Granny says, “then you ought to give up this whole business.”
She looks hard at Adam and me with her dark, sharp eyes that always remind me
of a crow’s.

“Now I want you’uns to
promise you’ll think about what I said.”

“I
promise,” I say.

“I promise,” Adam says,
too.

But as soon as we’ve
excused ourselves and gone outside, Adam whispers, “I’ll check to see

if any of those guys are
in the phone book.”

“Okay,” I say, “but don’t
call anybody without me.”

I know that if Granny says we’re in danger, then we’re in
danger. But I also know that I can’t stop now. Giving up now would be like
getting woken up from a really exciting dream by the buzz of the alarm clock,
when you know it’s going to drive you crazy because you’ll never know how the
story ended.

Right before the bell is
about to ring, I run up to Adam at his locker. His hair is sticking up funny,
and his eyes look puffy, but that’s not unusual for him in the morning. “Hey,”
I say, “did you find anybody’s name in the phone book?”

“Yeah,” he says, but he
doesn’t sound excited like I thought he would. “Bill Bradley and Harold
Buchanan are both in the phone book. But that’s not the main thing on my mind
right now.”

“Well, then, what is?”

Adam opens his locker,
takes out an envelope, and hands it to me. “This is.”

The envelope is addressed
to Mrs. Pat So. Mrs. So’s name and address have been typed, and there is no
return address. I take the paper out of the envelope. The letter is just one
typed sentence:
 Mind your own business.

I don’t even bother
unwrapping my sandwich at lunch. I’m too upset to eat.

“Mom won’t help us
anymore,” Adam says. “She says she has to think of Dad and his job and our
family that we have to find a way of fitting into this community. She says she
can’t afford to do anything that might make the people in Wilder turn against
us. I told her that in that case, we’d better figure out some way to stop being
Asian, but she didn’t think that was funny.” He looks down at his tray. He
hasn’t touched his lunch either.

“I understand what she
means, I guess. If she makes enemies here, nobody will want your dad to be
their doctor.”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “And
she doesn’t want me making enemies either. She told me to forget about the
Jameson murder, that I ought to be spending more time on my schoolwork and less
time trying to change something that it’s too late to change.”

“But
what about the spirits in your house, the weird noises and the hand prints?
Doesn’t she at least want to fix that?”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Mom
has convinced herself or maybe she let Dad convince her that there aren’t
really any spirits. She says the sounds were probably just the mice in the
attic, and the weird feelings she had were just because she hasn’t adjusted to
the move yet. And the handprints... well, maybe she just hasn’t found the right
kind of cleaner to remove that stain.”

I put my uneaten sandwich
back into my lunch bag. I’d offer it to one of the poor kids, but nobody will
take food from the witch girl. “Do you think she really believes all that?”

Adam is quiet for a few
seconds. “I think she really wants to believe it because the only other choice
is to be afraid.”

A terrible thought pops
into my head’so terrible I almost can’t make myself say it. “Adam, does your
mom want you to...stop being friends with me?”

“Oh, no,” Adam says. “Mom
likes you. She thinks you’ve gotten a little too caught up in the whole Nancy
Drew thing, but she still thinks you’re a nice kid. She says you’re welcome to
come over any time to play games or watch movies. She just wants us to give up
this...obsession, she calls it.”

I look into Adam’s eyes
and then into his mind and see that it’s just as full of questions and ideas
about the Jamesons as mine is. “You don’t want to give up, do you?” I say.

“No,” Adam says. “Not
when we’re so close to an answer. But I also don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Well,” I say, “we’ll
just have to be extra careful then.”

This
afternoon we’re pretty well covered because I told Mom I might be going over to
Adam’s house after school, and he told his mom he might be coming to my house.
For once, I’m grateful that my family doesn’t have a phone.

“So,” Adam says, as we
walk toward downtown, “what’s the plan?”

“I thought we might go by
the Wilder Herald office and see Roy Silcox,” I say. “Maybe ask him a few
questions about his brother.”

“What, like did your
older brother ever strike you as the cold-blooded murderer type?”

“Oh, I think we can be a
little smoother than that.”

The lady at the front
desk at the Herald office looks up at us through cat’s eye glasses that were in
style back when my mom was a little girl (I know this because there’s a picture
of Mom when she was younger than me wearing glasses just like this lady’s).
“Are you kids selling something for school?” she asks.

“No, ma’am,” I say. “We’d
like to talk to Mr. Silcox.”

“Well, Mr. Silcox is a
busy man.” The lady’s hair looks like a hard gray helmet. A pencil sticks out
of it like an antenna. All of a sudden she yells back to the office, “Roy!
There’s some kids here to see you! You want to talk to them?”

“Send ‘em on back,” a
man’s voice calls.

“Third door on your
left,” she says.

Mr. Silcox’s office is
small and cluttered with papers, half-empty coffee cups, and overflowing
ashtrays. Mr. Silcox is leaning back in the chair at his desk, his glasses
pushed up to rest on top of his bald head. His eyes look droopy, like he’s just
been woken up from a nap, which, I think, is what we’ve just done.

“Hello, young folks, come
on in and sit down,” he says. “You’ll have to excuse the mess. My wife comes in
here with a bulldozer once a month and cleans this place up, but that time of
month hasn’t rolled around yet.”

We sit down in the chairs
across from his desk. His tie, I notice, is untied and stained, and I can see
patches of his round white belly peeking between the buttons of his dingy
shirt.

“So,” he says, “what can
I do for you young people?”

I look at Adam, whose
lips are clamped shut. Clearly, I’m going to have to do all the talking. “Well,
sir,” I say, “we’re working on a project about the history of Wilder. And we
were wondering if we could maybe interview you.”

Roy Silcox chuckles.
“Figured an old coot like me might be able to tell you what you want to know,
huh? Well, I’m always happy to help out young reporters such as yourselves. Go
ahead fire away.”

“Okay,” I say, not sure
what to say next because I didn’t really plan out any questions. “What was it
like living in Wilder when you were a kid?”

“Well,” he says, chewing
on his cigar, “you kids would probably think it was right boring because you’ve
got all your ready-made entertainment now, TV and computer games and what have
you. But we didn’t have any of that, so we had to make our own fun playing
ball, fishing, riding our bikes all over town. And I’ll tell you what: we were
never bored. Me, my brother Eugene, the boys we ran around with’ we always had
something going on.”

He looks over our
shoulders for a minute, as though he’s looking into his own past. “Of course,”
he says, “back then it was different. The world wasn’t as dangerous as it is
now, and a little bitty town like Wilder wasn’t dangerous at all. Now parents
feel like they’ve got to keep their kids home where they can keep an eye on
‘em. But back then shoot, in the summertime, we’d get on our bikes after
breakfast, take off somewhere, and not come back till suppertime.”

“And
your mom didn’t worry?” I ask.

“No,” Mr. Silcox laughs.
“Course, she probably should have, given some of the stuff we were getting
into, but it was all innocent fun, really. And Ma knew that Wilder was a safe
place to run around in, that nobody would bother us.”

“So,” Adam says, finally
deciding to help me out, “there wasn’t any crime in Wilder back then?”

“No big crimes,” Mr.
Silcox says. “Maybe some old boy might get picked up for being drunk and
disorderly, or maybe some kids might get in trouble for vandalizing school
property, but that was about it.”

I figure now is as good a
time as any, so I say, “But wasn’t there a murder here back in the thirties?”

“Oh,” Mr. Silcox says.
For a moment, his mouth is clamped shut in a straight line, and I’m afraid he’s
going to tell us to get out of his office. But then he takes a deep breath and
says, “You want to know about the Jameson murder. Now that was a strange thing.
People couldn’t hardly believe such a thing could happen in Wilder. And to two
maiden ladies who wouldn’t hurt a fly! Why, Helen Jameson had taught me and
Eugene both in grade school, and she was such a sweet little thing. Her sister
Mildred was a little crotchety, but she was basically a good woman. Nobody
could figure out why somebody would want them dead. When it happened, Eugene
had already left home he’d quit school and joined the army. He was over at Fort
Campbell doing basic training. Ma sent him a newspaper clipping about the
Jamesons, and he wrote back saying he couldn’t believe such a thing had
happened in the quiet town he had grown up in. He said he didn’t know what the
world was coming to.”

As Mr. Silcox gazes at
some faraway moment from the past, Adam and I catch each other’s eye: time to
cross Eugene Silcox off our list. “Mr. Silcox,”I say, “did you know the boy who
got arrested for the murder?”

“I
knew who he was, but of course I wasn’t hardly out of diapers when it happened.
I knew Charlie T delivered papers and did odd jobs for folks. He seemed like a
nice, quiet boy. He never seemed like the type to kill somebody, let alone two
white ladies back when black folks were getting such a raw deal. The story went
that he was mad at the Jameson sisters because they’d hired some other boy to
do their yard work. But it seems like you’d have to have an awfully bad temper
to kill somebody over that.”