Light from a Distant Star (5 page)

“No.”

“How come? You’ve got such a nice voice. The other day you were singing and I thought it was the radio, I did.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much. That’s so nice!” She sighed. “Sometimes I think people should just sing instead of talking.”

“Yeah!” Nellie laughed. “That way there’d never be any fights, would there? Like politics. I mean, everything’d just sound funny, like—”

Saying she’d better go in and get ready, she stood up and opened her door.

“Thank you,” Nellie called up just in case someone had warned Dolly against getting stuck in a conversation with her. “Thank you for talking to me. For taking the time. That was very nice of you.”

Turning, Dolly glanced back with that watery weariness her eyes always seemed so full of.

For a few days after that, she avoided Nellie, hurrying in and out of her apartment, head down. So Dolly did think she was a weird pain in the ass, which was all right because she was. But it was a weirdness some adults, at least, could relate to. Maturity, they called it, which even she knew it wasn’t. Her peers either liked her or they didn’t, which, she understood on some level, was more a test of their mettle than hers.

B
UCKY HAD BEEN
coming by a lot. For the past few days, every time he skidded into the driveway it was on a different bike. Some were his grandparents’, he said, and some, people just gave him because they were sick of them. Sounded reasonable enough to Nellie and Henry. Everyone they knew had more money and more stuff than they did. So when Bucky got the idea for the bike business, they eagerly cleared out the front of the barn. No one had parked a car in there for years
and their mother was glad they were keeping busy. After a childhood in the junkyard, she hated clutter. Benjamin was the saver, the Peck family pack rat.

Their first day in business they sold two bikes, ten dollars each. Eric Strasser and Kenny Brown were their first customers. Bucky had wanted twenty-five apiece, but ten was all they could come up with. He had met them at the park after riding around looking for customers. Bucky kept ten and she and Henry split the other ten. With the next few days so rainy, business was way off. They had three bikes left. One was a bright yellow-and-black Mongoose that Bucky said was worth at least a hundred dollars. Because no kid Nellie knew walked around with that kind of pocket money, she made three signs describing the bikes, the prices, and their address. She hung one in the park, one on the Stop & Shop bulletin board, and one on the big community affairs board in front of the town hall. The next day Bucky showed up with another bike. It was a red Tonino Lamborghini Toro mountain bike. A price tag dangled from the handle bar: $385.

“You stole that, didn’t you?” she said as he wheeled it up the ramp into the barn.

“Jesus, no! What the hell? You think I’m a thief or something? My grandfather, he just never took it off, that’s all.” He ripped the tag off, then pedaled down the driveway on his own bike to look for customers. She’d never met his grandparents but knew they were retired. She wondered what someone that old would be doing with such a cool bike.

Hours later Bucky returned with a teenager. Jimmy Clemmons, a boy in Ruth’s class. He was interested in the gleaming Mongoose. Henry had just finished waxing it. A hundred twenty-five, Bucky told him.

“You gotta be kidding,” Jimmy said.

“No, that’s it. I told you, one twenty-five and no haggling.”

Jimmy walked around the bike. He squeezed the gears and brakes. He squatted down and checked the chain, then stood up and swung his leg over the seat. Gripping the handlebars, he stared at Bucky.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said.

“What?” Bucky stared back at him, and in the heat of the musty
barn, she and Henry glanced at each other, then looked away, past them, out over the dandelions growing through the cracked asphalt driveway. Suddenly they knew, too. They were trapped, but in what they weren’t exactly sure. But it was criminal, and so were they.

“I’ll give you seventy-five,” Jimmy said. “And no questions asked.” He smirked.

“We have to go in now.” Before money could change hands, she grabbed Henry’s good arm.

“A hundred,” Bucky said as they hurried out of the barn.

Inside the house they stood close and watched from the window. They spoke in whispers though no one was home, only them, and next door, Dolly, who was probably still sleeping.

“We could get arrested,” Henry whispered, his gentle lisp returning with fear or nerves. Both, this time.

“We didn’t take them—he did,” she whispered back.

A sickening streak of yellow sent Jimmy Clemmons pedaling down the driveway into the street. Bucky was at the door. She opened it but wouldn’t let him in.

“Eighty bucks!” He was still counting crumpled bills. “Here, ten each.”

Keep it, she told him. And he had to get his stolen bikes out of their barn.

“C’mon, Nellie, quit being such a bitch. I didn’t steal those bikes. They’re my grandfather’s, I told you. Here.” He held out the money, but she shut the door.

The minute he left, they ran to the park. She ripped the sign off the tree. Next they went to the supermarket, took down that sign, then hurried to town hall. But the sign she’d so securely tacked and taped to the community affairs notice board was gone. Only a scrap of yellow paper under the thumb tack remained.

Bucky not only didn’t take the bikes out of the barn but the next day added one more, without telling them.

T
HE
H
UMBOLDT HOUSE
on their left was the oldest one on the street, and the nicest. They hardly ever saw Miss Humboldt and her brother.
They were shy people, “skittish,” her mother said. With their driveway on the far side of the house, they could drive straight into their garage, then enter their house, undetected—by the Peck children. For that’s how they perceived them: as two very suspicious people. The beauty of the tree house was its perch over Dolly’s apartment, and the unobstructed view it allowed over the Humboldt’s fence and tall hedges. Nellie and Henry could see down into their deep backyard, half of which was wooded and at its far end abutted Chestnut Street. Theirs was the biggest lot in the neighborhood, almost two acres, according to Benjamin.

Tenley Humboldt kept two gardens, the larger plot, flowers, and the other, vegetables, where he’d be first thing in the morning, weeding and watering before the high heat of day. Then, in late afternoon, he would meander through the rows, pausing to pinch off fading blossoms and unwanted stems, dropping them into a blue bucket caught in the crook of his arm like a purse. It wasn’t until the haze of early evening that Louisa would appear from the French doors onto the brick patio in her wide-brimmed straw hat. She stretched out on one of the fancy iron chaise longues. Her brother followed with their drinks and crackers on a shiny black tray. He set the tray on the table between them and sat down.

High above, peering through a slit in the tree house boards, Henry whispered, “Look, her seat, it’s almost touching the ground, she’s so fat.”

“I wonder what kind of cheese that is.” Stomach growling, Nellie adjusted the binoculars.

“There’s hardly any left, she’s eating it all.” Henry had the old pair of binoculars, bigger and stronger.

“He always gets more,” Nellie said, and sure enough, Tenley rose from his chaise longue and went into the house.

He was a slight man, surely half his sister’s width, but it was the long ponytail halfway down his back that particularly fascinated Nellie. Tenley was the same age as her father, but never seemed to work. He didn’t have to, her mother told them at dinner. Clearing his throat and straightening his shoulders, her father picked up the narrative. The Humboldt family was one of the oldest and richest in Springvale.
Railroad money, Benjamin said, eager to spur his children’s interest in local lore. Right after the Civil War, Thomas Humboldt laid the first tracks on the line from Springvale to New York City. A few years later he committed suicide and his son, Thomas junior, sold the line to the Boston and Maine.

Ruth was kicking Nellie’s foot. Henry was busy transferring broccoli into the paper napkin in his lap. Only their mother seemed to be listening.

“Look,” Ruth whispered, flashing her palm below the table. The handwriting Nellie saw on the pink Post-it note was her sister’s.

Ruth made that “can you believe it?” face, then excused herself; she had to go to the bathroom, her cue for Nellie to follow, but it seemed so disloyal. Benjamin had reached the Great Depression in his tale of the Humboldts. “The town’s only hospital was about to close. Lack of funds. But it was Gerald D. Humboldt, great-grandson of Thomas, who not only secured the bond but gave a good deal of his own money to keep it going. He was an eccentric man, largely unremembered today, but if you drive out Crown Road to where the original spring runs …”

Sandy had gotten up and was quietly clearing the table. Henry’s hand slipped into his shorts pocket, broccoli transfer complete. Nellie could hear the impatience in Ruth’s overhead pacing. But how could she leave to hear news of her sister’s other father? Benjamin’s usually calm, deep voice pitched higher with confidence and excitement. It was this transcendence that she loved. No one else was like him. No one else could make her feel so centered and, still, so alive. His eyes gleamed and his hands flew as facts and dates swarmed him like startled bees. So much to tell. So much he knew and was desperate to share. With them.

“The little brick pump house—now that was built by Gerald. He
deeded it to the town so that future generations could avail themselves of the purest, sweetest water in the state.” He thumped the table with both hands. “We should do that! Yes! What do you say, Sandy, should we start filling our own jugs again? You’re always saying we’ve got to save money, right? So why buy water at the supermarket?” He grinned. “So from now on, save the jugs!”

With Lazlo gone, they were his only forum, so Nellie nodded eagerly.

“We use tap water, Ben,” her mother said with quiet annoyance.

“Well, all the more reason then!” he proclaimed, then began a clattery search through cupboards for containers. So far, he’d found two plastic pitchers with lids and from the trash a gallon milk jug he was rinsing in the sink. “There. That should do it,” he said.

“Do what?” There was no mistaking the sting in her mother’s voice and yet her father didn’t notice.

“Come on, kids,” he said, handing Nellie the pitchers and Henry the jug. “Let’s take a ride.” He knew better than to ask Ruth, who considered herself long removed from such juvenile jaunts.

Neither of them wanted to go. The night’s plan was to move the bikes out of the barn, under cover of darkness. But they sat on the steps, waiting, shocked when their mother’s voice rose sharply from the kitchen. They seldom argued, mostly because with any disagreement their father would simply go silent, for days afterward slipping in and out of rooms like a mistreated animal.

She couldn’t bear to live like this anymore, she was saying. Last month their only income had been the little she’d brought home. Now she was faced with paying the store’s bills as well, out of household money. In two more years Ruth would be going to college and where on earth was that money supposed to come from? “You’ve got to do something, Ben. We can’t go on like this. It’s embarrassing.”

“I know. You’re right. You’re right. It’s my fault. I’ve gotten too bogged down on the research. I’ve just got to be more decisive instead of going off on tangents every—”

“No! Forget the damn book! I’m talking about the store, Ben. You’ve got to sell it.”

“I’m so close, Sandy. You have no idea how close I am. If you can just … just bear with me. Please. I’ve … I’ve … I’ve … even got query letters out.”

His nervous stammer infuriated Nellie. How could her mother do this to him?

“That’s great, Ben. But how’s that going to take care of this? A shutoff notice. Six months, that’s how far behind we are.”

“I’ll call Wally Miller. He practically runs the gas company.”

In her mother’s silence, she felt her father squirming with regret. Henry drove a stick deeper into the dry rot on the step’s riser. He groaned.

“There’s only one call I want you to make. Andy Cooper.” Her soft voice quivered, whether on the edge of tears, shame, or rage, Nellie couldn’t tell. “And I want you to tell him that you’ve made up your mind—”

“But—”

“And if you don’t, if you can’t do that for me and for your children, if you’re that self-centered, then you’re forcing my hand. And you know exactly what I mean. You do, don’t you?”

T
HEY RODE IN
silence. Nellie’s chest hurt. It felt as if she’d been holding her breath this whole way. The last half mile to the spring led down a bumpy one-lane road so overgrown by poison sumac and blackberry bushes that when they parked, they could only get out one side of the car. The knob to the pump house door was missing, so Henry climbed through the window to let them in. It wasn’t the expedition her father had envisioned. With blackflies around his head and enthusiasm strained, he read the plaque above the dripping spigot.

“This pump house is given to the citizens of Springvale in the communal spirit of good people looking out for one another. Gerald D. Humboldt.” He lowered his eyes and sighed.

They filled their containers with the cool spring water. They were all quiet but her father was also remote. The dank dirt floor smelled like skunk and muddied their shoes, and when they came out to the car, the front tire was flat, which took awhile to change. When they
got home, it was too late to move the bikes out of the barn. Nellie ran upstairs to her sister’s room. Ruth was so annoyed. There she was, with the most amazing news, and she’d had to wait all this time.

She had gone online at her friend Allie’s house and found her real father’s name. His telephone number was unlisted, but she finally had an address. In fact, she’d just written a letter. “Sounds ritzy, huh?” she said, reading the address as she wrote it on the envelope.