Spyhole Secrets (9 page)

T
hat afternoon Hallie waited a long time at the library, but Zachary never showed up. By the time she got home it was already after four o’clock. There was so little spyhole time left she almost decided not to bother. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding the attic key in her hand, the reasonable side of her personality pointed out that there wasn’t much chance of anything happening in the Crestmans’ apartment in the next fifteen minutes. But the other side, the impulsive one, kept reminding her that she hadn’t seen the apartment or any of the people who lived there since she’d found out that they’d been written up in
The Irvington News.
And that there had been a divorce, at least, and maybe even a murder, in the family. In the end, the impulsive side won.

As she hurriedly climbed the stairs and crossed the attic, everything seemed the same as always. The same empty shadows and dry, dusty air. But somehow she had a sneaky feeling that something was
wrong. Wrong, or at least different. She was almost to the tower alcove when she did notice one small change: About halfway across the long, dark space, she saw what was obviously a new stack of trunks and boxes and even a few pieces of furniture.

She didn’t know why, but for some reason it really bothered her. She stopped for a moment to wonder and worry before she suddenly remembered something that explained the difference. Just that morning at the breakfast table, Mom had said that a new family was moving in to one of the second-floor apartments. So that explained it. The new stuff must belong to them. Nothing to worry about. That was what she told herself, anyway. Only there was a part of her that didn’t seem to be listening and kept right on worrying. And that turned out to be the part that was right.

There definitely
was
something to worry about. Hallie had no sooner reached the tower room and sat down on the old trunk than she was startled by a strange clicking sound, followed by a lot of other noises. Sitting on the trunk, frozen with surprise and fear, she began to realize what she was hearing. The grating click had been the attic key and the other sounds were voices and footsteps on the stairs. One of the voices belonged to Mrs. Crowley, Mrs. Moses Crowley with all her rules and commandments and her power to decide who got to live in the Warwick Mansion and who didn’t.

Afterward Hallie couldn’t remember how she got unfrozen enough to move at all, or how she managed to wind up in a heap between the trunk and the tower wall. But she apparently got there somehow. She did remember the rest of it fairly well.

Crouched down on the splintery floor behind the trunk, she heard the footsteps and voices becoming louder and clearer as they made their way across the attic. Most of the time it was Mrs. Crowley’s loud, raspy voice quoting some of the same rules she’d mentioned to Hallie and her mother. Rules about the kinds of things you were allowed to store in the attic and the things you weren’t, as well as the kind of people who weren’t allowed to visit the attic, like anyone who wasn’t a renter. And children. Particularly unaccompanied children.

Hallie crouched lower, her mind whirling helplessly. Spinning briefly into burning anger, a fierce, fiery resentment at being labeled a child. Anyone, even someone as dense as Mrs. Crowley, ought to be able to understand that no one could be a child again once they’d lost everything that had been good about their childhood.

But anger was only part of it. Only a small part. Mostly there was fear of what might happen to her if old Crowley found her hiding there in the attic’s tower room. What might happen to her, and to her mother too. What if they were kicked out of the Warwick Mansion, so that Mom would have to start
looking all over town again for the kind of crummy apartment they could afford to rent? Looking at awful places, worse even than the Warwick Mansion servants’ cell block. More run-down and worn-out and ugly and … The thought hit her hard: And it would have no blue-glass spyhole, and no hope of ever finding out what was happening or might happen to Zachary and Tiffany Crestman.

Crouching down even lower, she tried to condense herself into an even smaller space, to melt into the attic’s dusty shadows until she disappeared. Until there was nothing left to be discovered and denounced and thrown out of the attic for good and always.

Crowley and her new renters were taking forever. There were scraping noises, as if the newcomers were moving their things around, and over it all the high-pitched rasp of Crowley’s voice giving directions and quoting and requoting all the rules and commandments. At last the noises began to fade and the sound of footsteps retreated across the attic and finally down the stairs.

Hallie stayed in a tight little ball behind the old trunk until the faint clicking sound of the key turning in the lock drifted through the shadows and the attic was once again its old, silent self. As she slowly unwound herself and got to her feet, she surprised herself by whispering something she hadn’t said for a long time. “Thank you. Thank you.” She didn’t say out loud who she was talking to, but He was right
there on the tip of her tongue. Running on tiptoe, she headed for the stairs.

Safely back in her own kitchen with the attic key returned to its shelf, she was surprised and relieved to find that her mother still wasn’t home. And then surprised again to discover that it was only a minute or two after four-thirty. Which would seem to mean that the eternity she had spent hiding behind the trunk had actually only lasted somewhere around ten minutes. She was still standing there staring at the kitchen clock when her mother walked in carrying her purse and her heavy briefcase.

All Hallie said to her was “Hey, Mom. You’re home.” But there might have been something unusual about the way she said it, because Mom looked a little bit surprised. After she put all her stuff down on the kitchen table, she put her arm around Hallie’s shoulders and gave her a quick hug. “Right,” she said. And then in a tone that made it sound a little like a question, “And so are you?”

It was several days before Hallie could get up the nerve to visit the spyhole again. Days for the new renters to get settled in and stop taking up stuff to store in the attic, not to mention the time it took for Hallie to get over having to hide from Mrs. Crowley behind that trunk. Hiding was something she never wanted to do again, that was for sure. Not any kind of hiding, not any place. Not ever.

In the meantime, however, she did spend a lot of
time thinking about all the things she needed to learn about the Crestmans. Things such as what had been in the newspaper article and whether it concerned a divorce, or maybe something a lot worse. But now that the spyhole wasn’t a possibility, there was only one place to go to find out: the library. To the library to look for Zachary.

B
eginning the very next day after her close call in the attic, Hallie began to be the East Irvington library’s most faithful visitor. Every single day after school she took the short detour that brought her to the library’s big blank facade, climbed the steps, and went in. And once there, even though Zachary obviously wasn’t, she usually hung around until almost four-thirty, hoping he might show up. She tried to find library-type projects to do so as not to arouse the suspicion of anyone who might be wondering what she was up to. Like Mrs. Myers, for instance.

The first project that she really got into was looking up some of the books that had been her favorites back in Bloomfield, where she had always won all the awards for reading the most books. A few of them, on rereading, seemed childish and boring, but some others were just as good as she remembered, or even better. As if there were things an older person could get out of the story that a little kid might miss. And
when she got tired of reading fiction, she decided to read up on some of the ancient civilizations they’d been learning about in social studies.

She also began to get better acquainted with Mrs. Myers. Hallie knew Mrs. Myers had considered her a world-class pest, and for a while the feeling had been mutual. But things began to change when Hallie started getting interested in ancient civilizations, and it turned out that Mrs. Myers was too. Either Mrs. Myers just liked people who were into ancient civilizations, or else Hallie’s unstarching technique worked on librarians as well as it did on stuffed shirts.

But still no Zachary. Hallie was really getting tired of worrying about what might have happened to him and his sister when, on a Friday afternoon, there he was again, trudging into the reading room wearing the same state-of-the-art backpack and the super-clunky lug-soled shoes. Hallie surprised herself by wanting to rush over and grab him and… and she wasn’t sure what. Hug him, or maybe just give him a good hard shake.

She didn’t do either one, of course. Instead she just went on hiding behind some bookshelves. He had settled down at his usual table and was taking some books and papers out of his backpack when she walked over and pulled out a chair.

“Well, look who’s here,” she said. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

Zachary looked up, stared for a minute, and then,
very solemnly, said, “I have to talk to you too.” He looked over at the checkout desk before he went on, “Maybe not here, though.”

Hallie agreed. There was no use getting Mrs. Myers all worked up again. Not after she’d just started to calm down. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe out in front of…” She had been going to suggest sitting on the library’s front steps, but on second thought she began to change her mind. Sitting out on the front steps with a dorky-looking eight-year-old, where everyone who walked by…

Zachary got up and started collecting his books and papers. “Come on,” he said. “We can pretend we don’t know each other.”

She grinned, thinking,
Smart kid—smart
psychiatrist
kid.

So they wound up sitting at one end of the wide marble steps, close enough for each of them to hear what the other one was saying but far enough apart to make it look as if they weren’t together. Zachary reached over and handed her a book. “Here,” he said. “If you see anyone you know, pretend to be reading. I will too.”

Yeah, smart kid.

“Okay,” Zachary said while Hallie was still getting settled, “okay. What I want to know is, how
did
you find out what our last name is?”

Hallie grinned at him. “Well,” she said, “I told you once, and you didn’t believe me.”

“I know.” Zachary nodded. “I still don’t. People can find out lots of things by dreaming, I guess. But mostly things about themselves. Not stuff about other people, like their last names. I didn’t read anything about how you could find out other people’s last names by dreaming about them.”

“Okay, you got me.” Hallie grinned. “I didn’t dream it up. Actually I found out—” She paused and then, watching Zachary closely, she went on, “I really did find out there was something about your family in the paper, though. Just like you said.”

Zachary nodded, but not the least bit triumphantly. “I thought so,” he said. Then he looked away, hiding his face. Hallie could only stare at the back of his fuzzy head as she strained her ears to hear what he was saying. “Yes, it was in the paper,” he whispered. “But it wasn’t true. Not all of it, anyway.”

Forgetting about pretending they weren’t sitting together, Hallie scooted closer. “What wasn’t true?”

“The part about…” His voice was even fainter now. “The part about them hitting each other. She wasn’t the one my dad hit.”

Hallie leaned closer. “Who …,” she began, and then stopped. She couldn’t see his face, but judging by the sounds he was making and by the way his shoulders were moving, she was pretty sure he was crying. She was just deciding not to ask any more
questions, at least not right away, when he began to talk. His voice was shaky and full of tears as he said, “My dad didn’t hit my mother. The paper lied about that. The only one he hit was her lawyer.”

Hallie scooted again and put her hand on his shoulder, but he pulled away. “Don’t,” he said. “Somebody might see you.” Then he jumped up and ran down the stairs.

Late that night Hallie got out her List of Facts and, sitting cross-legged on her bed, she got ready to jot down all the things she had just learned. At the top of the second page she carefully printed a heading.

Hallie read over what she had written, but when she got to that point she stopped. According to Zachary… Suddenly she stopped reading and sat
perfectly still for a long time, thinking about what Zachary had said and how miserable he’d sounded when he’d said it. Then she ripped out the page. She didn’t know why exactly, except that she was remembering something that had happened just a week after her father died.

Right after the freeway accident, Ellen had insisted on taking Hallie to talk to the school counselor, even though school was out for summer vacation. While they were talking, the counselor wrote a lot of stuff in a big notebook that she tilted up so Hallie couldn’t see what she’d written.

Hallie had hated Ellen that day for thinking she was helping when she should have known there was nothing anybody could do and there never would be. But she’d hated the counselor even more, with all her careful questions and sneaky note-taking.

So she wasn’t going to write down any more notes about Zachary and his family. But that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying to find out what might be going on in the Crestmans’ apartment, and why Zachary had been crying about it.