Raymie Nightingale (13 page)

They went together back into Building 10, where Louisiana was shouting. “Give him back, give him back, give him back to me!” while kicking the metal desk.

The woman with the sandwich didn’t seem upset or even particularly surprised at what was happening. Louisiana stopped kicking the desk and started beating it with her baton. This seemed to unnerve the woman a tiny bit. Probably no one had ever beaten her desk with a baton before. She put down her sandwich.

“Stop that,” she said.

The baton hitting the desk made a hollow, reverberating noise. It sounded like a broken drum heralding the announcement of the death of a king.

“I will stop it. Just as soon. As you give me. Back Archie!” shouted Louisiana.

Raymie thought that it was maybe the bravest thing she had ever seen, someone demanding back something that was already gone. Watching Louisiana, Raymie felt her soul lifting up inside of her, even though the entire world was dark and sad and lit only by a single lightbulb.

“You were supposed to take care of him,” said Louisiana to the lady.
Bang.
“You were supposed to feed him three times a day”—
bang
— “and scratch him behind the ears”—
bang
— “just the way he likes.”

Bang, bang, bang.

From behind the closed door, the terrible howl rose up again.

Louisiana stopped beating the baton against the desk. She stood and listened, and then she bent over and put her hands on her knees and started taking in big gulps of air.

“She’s going to pass out now,” said Beverly to Raymie. “When she does, you grab her hands and I’ll grab her feet, and we’ll carry her out of here.”

“I am not,” said Louisiana. “Going to. Pass out.”

And then she toppled over sideways.

“Now,” said Beverly. Raymie picked up Louisiana’s hands and Beverly picked up her feet, and they carried her out of the Very Friendly Animal Center and laid her down under the small defeated tree.

Louisiana’s chest was rising and falling. Her eyes were closed.

“Now what?” said Beverly.

Raymie flexed her toes. She closed her eyes and saw the single lightbulb swaying back and forth. It wasn’t bright enough at all. The lightbulb was too small for that terrible dark room.

There wasn’t enough light anywhere, really.

And then Raymie remembered Mrs. Sylvester’s candy-corn jar. She saw it glowing in the late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the window of Clarke Family Insurance.

“We can take her to my father’s office,” said Raymie. “It’s not far.”

“What is happening?” said Mrs. Sylvester in her little bird voice. “What is going on, Raymie Clarke? Why are all of you girls soaking wet? Is it raining?” Mrs. Sylvester turned her head and looked at the sun shining through the plate-glass window of Clarke Family Insurance.

“We had to take her through the sprinkler,” said Beverly, “to, um, revive her enough so that she could walk here.”

“Take her through the sprinkler?” said Mrs. Sylvester. “Revive her?”

“They’ve got Archie, and they won’t give him back,” said Louisiana. She raised her fist in the air and shook it. And then she said, “I feel like maybe I should sit down.”

“Archie is her cat,” said Raymie. “She fainted.”

“Someone took your cat?” said Mrs. Sylvester.

“I really want to sit down now,” said Louisiana.

“Of course, dear,” said Mrs. Sylvester. “Go ahead and sit down.”

Louisiana sank to the floor.

“Who took her cat?” asked Mrs. Sylvester.

“It’s complicated,” said Raymie.

“It smells good in here,” said Louisiana in a dreamy voice.

The office smelled like pipe smoke, even though Raymie’s father did not smoke a pipe and neither did Mrs. Sylvester. The man who had owned the office before, an insurance salesman named Alan Klondike, had been the pipe smoker. The smell had lingered.

“Raymie?” said Mrs. Sylvester.

“These are my friends from baton-twirling class,” said Raymie.

“Isn’t that sweet,” said Mrs. Sylvester.

“Oh, my goodness,” said Louisiana. “Is that candy corn?” She pointed at the jar on Mrs. Sylvester’s desk.

“Why, yes, it is,” said Mrs. Sylvester. “Would you like some?”

“I’m going to lie down for just a minute,” said Louisiana, “and then when I get up, I will be ready to eat some candy corn.” Louisiana went slowly from a sitting position to a lying-down position.

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Sylvester. She wrung her hands together. “What in the world is wrong?”

“She’ll be fine,” said Beverly. “It’s just the thing with the cat. Archie. It’s got her upset. Also, her lungs are swampy.”

Mrs. Sylvester raised her plucked eyebrows very high on her head. The phone rang. “Oh dear,” she said.

“You should go ahead and answer the phone,” said Beverly.

Mrs. Sylvester looked relieved. She picked up the phone. “Clarke Family Insurance,” she said. “How may we protect you?”

The sun shone in through the plate-glass window. The window had Raymie’s father’s name on it — Jim Clarke — and the letters of his name made shadows on the floor.

Raymie sat down next to Louisiana on the sun-faded carpet. She felt light-headed. She didn’t think that she would faint, but she felt strange, uncertain.

Beverly crouched down, too. She said to Louisiana, “Get up. You can have some candy corn if you get up.”

Mrs. Sylvester was still on the phone. She said, “Mr. Clarke isn’t available, but I’m sure that I can take care of that for you, Mr. Lawrence. However, right now, there is something of a situation here in the offices of Clarke Family Insurance. Would tomorrow work for you? Wonderful, wonderful. I thank you so much. Yes. Mmmmm-hmmmm. Thank you for calling.”

Mrs. Sylvester hung up the phone.

Raymie closed her eyes and saw the single lightbulb from Building 10 swaying back and forth. She felt very tired. So much had happened. So much kept happening.

“I feel better,” said Louisiana. She sat up. “Can I have that candy corn now?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Sylvester. She took the lid off the jar and held the jar out toward Louisiana. Louisiana stood up. She put her hand deep into the candy corn.

“Thank you,” she said to Mrs. Sylvester. And then she shoved the whole handful of candy corn in her mouth. She chewed for a long time. She smiled at Mrs. Sylvester. She swallowed. She said, “Do you think there’s candy corn at the county home?”

Mrs. Sylvester said, “I think that you should have some more, dear.” She extended the jar again.

Raymie looked around and saw that Beverly had opened the door to her father’s office and was standing and staring inside it.

Raymie got off the floor. She went and stood next to Beverly.

“This is my dad’s office,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” said Beverly. “I figured.” She was staring at the aerial photograph of Lake Clara that hung over Jim Clarke’s desk.

“You can see the ghost of Clara Wingtip in that picture,” said Raymie.

“Where?” said Beverly.

“Right there,” said Raymie. She stepped into the office and pointed to the far right-hand side of the lake, to the dark blur that was shaped like a lost and waiting person who had drowned by mistake, or maybe on purpose.

Raymie’s father had shown Clara Wingtip’s ghost to her when she was six years old. He had put her on his shoulders so that she was close to the photograph, and Raymie had traced the shadow of Clara with her fingertip. For a long time after that, she had been afraid to go into his office, afraid that Clara was waiting for her and that her ghost would pull Raymie into the lake, pull her under the water and drown her somehow.

“That’s just a shadow,” said Beverly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Shadows are all over the place. Shadows aren’t ghosts.”

The phone rang again. Mrs. Sylvester answered it. “Clarke Family Insurance. How may we protect you?”

“Has he called you?” said Beverly.

“Who?” asked Raymie.

“Your father,” said Beverly.

“No,” said Raymie.

Beverly nodded her head slowly. “Right,” she said. But she didn’t say it in a mean way. Raymie was standing close enough to Beverly that she could smell her, that strange combination of sweetness and grittiness. She studied the fading bruise on Beverly’s face.

“Who hit you?” she asked.

“My mother,” said Beverly.

“Why?”

“I shoplifted.”

“Why?” asked Raymie again.

“Because,” said Beverly. She put her hands in the pockets of her shorts. “I’m getting out of here. I’m going to live on my own. I’m going to take care of myself.”

Behind them, Louisiana was telling Mrs. Sylvester that her parents were gone.

“They drowned,” said Louisiana.

“No,” said Mrs. Sylvester.

“Yes,” said Louisiana.

“I’m not going to enter the Little Miss Central Florida Tire contest,” said Raymie.

“Good for you,” said Beverly. She nodded. “Contests are stupid.”

“I don’t care anymore,” said Raymie.

“Sure,” said Beverly. “I’m probably not going to bother doing the sabotaging, either. At least I’m not going to sabotage that contest.” And then in a soft voice, she said, “I feel pretty bad about the dead cat business.”

And at that point, Raymie felt everything — all of it — wash over her: Mrs. Borkowski, Archie, Alice Nebbley, the gigantic seabird, Florence Nightingale, Mr. Staphopoulos, Ida Nee’s sad-eyed moose, her missing father, Clara Wingtip’s ghost, the yellow bird and the empty cage, Edgar the drowning dummy, the single lightbulb in Building 10.

Tell me, why does the world exist?

Raymie took a deep breath. She stood as straight and tall as she could. She looked at the ghost of Clara Wingtip.

Which wasn’t really there. Which was only a shadow.

Probably.

Mrs. Sylvester held the door open for them as they left.

“Thank you for visiting,” she said.

“And thank you for the candy corn,” said Louisiana. “It was delicious.”

On the walk back to Ida Nee’s, Louisiana sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” twice in a row. When she started in on it a third time, Beverly told her to knock it off.

“Okay,” said Louisiana. “It’s just that singing helps me think. I have now made up my mind.”

“Made up your mind about what?” said Raymie.

“I’ve decided that they’re hiding Archie from me. He’s behind the closed door in that place. What we need to do is break into the Very Friendly Animal Center and unlock that door. And then we’ll find him. I know we will.”

“What?” said Beverly. “Are you nuts? Don’t you remember anything that just happened? The cat is gone. There’s nobody to break in and free.”

“We’ll wait until it’s dark,” said Louisiana. “And then we’ll break in and rescue him!”

“No,” said Beverly.

“Yes,” said Louisiana.

“The cat is dead,” said Beverly.

Louisiana dropped her baton. She put her fingers in her ears. She began to hum.

Raymie bent and picked up Louisiana’s baton.

“I’m not going back into that place,” said Beverly.

Louisiana took her fingers out of her ears. “Why do the Rancheros even exist if they can’t perform acts of bravery?”

“The Rancheros don’t exist,” said Beverly. “They’re only in your head.”

“They do exist,” said Louisiana, “because
we
exist. We’re here.”

“I’m here,” said Raymie.

“That’s right,” said Louisiana.

“And you’re here,” said Raymie, pointing at Louisiana. “And you’re here.” She pointed at Beverly. “And we’re here together.”

“Right,” said Louisiana again.

“Duh,” said Beverly. “Duh that we are all here. But none of that changes the fact that the cat is dead.”

The argument went on this way for a while — Beverly insisting that the cat was dead, Louisiana insisting that they would rescue the cat — but it stopped entirely when they got to the end of Ida Nee’s driveway and saw that Beverly’s mother was there and Raymie’s mother was there and Louisiana’s grandmother was not there.

And that there was also a police car in the circular driveway.

“The cops,” said Beverly.

“Oh, no,” said Louisiana.

Ida Nee was standing in front of her house talking to one of the policemen. She had outfitted herself with a fresh baton, and she was using it to point at things. She pointed at the garage door. She pointed at the kitchen door.