The Book of Joby (57 page)

A hand shot up across the circle, it’s owner a lean boy with straight, shiny dark hair, liquid brown eyes, and a shy, quicksilver smile. Joby nodded at him.

“Do you still have that book?” the boy asked.

“Actually, I do.”

“Charlie brings books for us to read out loud in class,” said a small girl with wide doe eyes and a cloud of wavy brown hair. “Could we read yours?”

“I suppose so,” he said, wondering at the way everyone kept referring to Mr. Luff as Charlie. Teachers had never been called by their first names when he’d been in school.

Joby was immediately barraged with more questions having nothing whatsoever to do with English. Where was he from? What had his high school been like? What were his favorite movies, music, sports? Was he married? Did he have a girlfriend? So much for his prepared statements. Some of
their questions, like why had he come to Taubolt, required carefully incomplete answers, of course, but soon Joby began to relax and enjoy the banter of his soon-to-be students.

“What about you guys?” he said at last. He looked at the boy who’d first asked about his book. “What’s your name?”

“Ander.”

Ah,
Joby thought. So this was Ander of the secret conversation he’d overheard on the headlands. “And what’s your favorite subject, Ander?”

“Surfing.” Ander grinned. “But I like writing stories and poetry a lot too.”

“That makes two of us,” Joby said. “Writing, I mean; I’ve never surfed.” He turned to the doe-eyed girl who’d asked if they could read his book. “And you?”

“My name’s Autumn. I like botany and music.” She smiled shyly. “I play flute.”

He remembered her name as well from the headlands tryst.

Joby recognized the strawberry-haired girl next to Autumn. “I think we met,” he said bashfully.

“Rose told me how freaked you were,” she smiled, “but it was no big deal. We get spied on by strange men all the time, don’t we, Rose.” Judging by the giggles this elicited, the story had clearly circulated. “I’m Bellindi,” she said, “if you don’t remember.”

“Hey, I really didn’t hear a thing!” Joby fibbed. “I swear!” Turning quickly to a butter-haired boy beside Bellindi, Joby asked, “What about you?”

“I didn’t hear a thing either,” he said with exaggerated innocence. “Honest!”

Everybody laughed again, as Joby honored his quick wit with a wry smile.

“I’m Jupiter,” said the boy. “My best subject’s ornithology.” A new round of giggling left Joby sure he’d missed some inside joke.

“You like birds then?” Joby pressed, hoping for a clue.

“Some of them are my best friends,” the boy said brightly, drawing more suppressed mirth from the others.

“Uh-huh,” said Joby, deciding to cut his losses and move on. “And who are you?” he asked a short, fire-haired boy with devilish eyebrows next to Jupiter.

“Nacho,” the boy answered with a taunting grin.

“Interesting nicknames you guys have,” Joby said. “Is anyone here just named Bob?” With surprised expressions, three boys sitting in a row across from him raised their hands in unison, eliciting the loudest burst of laughter
yet. “Ooookay,” said Joby, “we’ll get to you guys in a minute, but back to Nacho, first. Got a real name, Nacho?”

“That’s it!” Nacho protested. “What my mama gave me.”

“Oh,” Joby said, unconvinced. “Got a last name then, or is it just Nacho?”

“Mama,” said the boy, clenching laughter behind his grin, “Nacho Mama.”

The back of Nacho’s head was immediately slapped by a tall, freckled scarecrow of a boy with tousled black hair sitting next to him.

“Hey! Watch it, Sky!” Nacho snapped, whirling to frown at the boy.

“You behave then, monkey boy.” Sky grinned. “Can’t you see we got company?”

Sky,
Joby thought. Another name from the mysterious headlands conversation.

“Ignore junior here.” Sky smiled lazily at Joby. “His last name’s Carlson, not Mama, and he’s our perpetual freshman. He’s goin’ for the school record in broken rules.”

“Hey!” Nacho protested with exaggerated dignity. “I can test the limits of appropriateness without breaking the mold of propriety.”

Wondering what the heck that was supposed to mean, Joby only realized their whole conflict had been a joke when the two boys performed some secret handshake and began to laugh.

As all this had been going on, Joby had noticed the trio of Bobs whispering and smirking at one another between furtive glances at himself. One of them was the swarthy kid who’d worn his shirt as a turban the day before. The second wore a backward baseball cap over wavy blond hair and the face of a mischievous cherub. The third had dark eyes, pale gnomish features, a thick lower lip, and short-cropped, curly black hair.

“How about you three?” he asked them. “Larry, Moe, and Curly, I presume?”

Seeming not to get the reference, the blond boy adopted a comically serious expression, and said, “I’m Cal Bob.” He pointed to the gnomish boy on his right. “This here’s Cob Bob,” then to the Indian boy on his left, “and this’s Swami Bob.”

“Cal Bob, Cob Bob, and Swami Bob,” Joby said dryly. “You’re related then?”

Cal nodded soberly. “Brothers.”

Joby nodded. “The family resemblance is remarkable. And what are you guys’ into? School-wise, I mean.”

They glanced at one another, then turned to him with uncannily identical deadpan expressions and said in perfect unison, “English.”

“I’m doomed,” Joby moaned theatrically.

“Hey, relax, man,” said Cal. “We like you.”

“How reassuring,” Joby drawled.

“I hate to stop all this,” Bridget said, “but I’m afraid we’re out of time. Thank you so much for coming down this morning, Joby.”

“My pleasure,” Joby replied with a quick bob of his head. “It was fun.”

“Don’t forget to bring that book,” said Ander as they all got up and started heading for class.

“Don’t forget your lunch money,” said Nacho with a leering grin.

“Don’t listen to Nacho,” said Sky. “There’s no cafeteria.”

“Richard!” Nacho retorted.

“Ognib.” Sky grinned, chasing Nacho into another classroom.

“Why don’t you come around at lunch,” Bridget said, smiling. “I’ll introduce you to Ariel and Pete, and we can talk about next week. The kids obviously like you, so unless they’ve managed to scare you off, you’re in.”

“Me? Scared?” Joby smiled. “What’s to be scared of?” He grinned, hoping those weren’t famous last words.

“That’s all he said?” Hawk asked, brushing locks of dark auburn hair up out of his fog-colored eyes. “Just heard you and stopped to listen?”

Rose nodded, along with several others, their attentive silence broken only by the swish and gurgle of surf outside the cave, and the tinkling spatter made by tiny rivulets dripping from the algae-covered ceiling onto wet, gray stones and gravel.

The kids had all kinds of hideouts around Taubolt; different places for different times and purposes. Today they’d gathered in one of the many sea caves that riddled the headlands around Taubolt to discuss the growing swarm of mysteries surrounding their new teacher, Joby Peterson.

“How did he hear anything outside a closed ring,” Bellindi insisted. “Stopped and stared like we’d put out a sign or something! How accidental can that be?”

“So, he’s of the blood and doesn’t know it yet,” said Sophie. “Hawk didn’t know it either when he first came, remember? Lots of people don’t.”

“He knows what he did, all right,” Nacho said. “Look how tweaked he got about it when he saw Rose on Christmas. I say he’s a spy.”

“A spy for who?” the honey-haired girl protested.

“I don’t know, Ray,” Nacho complained. “Whoever we’re all hiding from.”

“Maybe Bellindi or I just kicked one of the stones out of place without
noticing,” Rose said. “It’s not like we were being super careful. It was hardly dawn. We never thought there would be someone out there.”

“But there was, and neither of you noticed,” said Cal. “How’s that work?”

“And what about the earthquake, and that storm the night he got here?” Vesper asked, as if the matter hadn’t been discussed a hundred times already.

“Doesn’t prove nothin’.” Sky shrugged. “We’ve been through all that.”

“Everyone knows it weren’t no natural storm, though,” said Cal. “It’s the bad thing comin’, ain’t it, Swami!”

“It might be,” Swami replied, tossing pebbles toward the cave mouth without looking at any of them. “But I don’t think it was him either. That’s not what I got.”

“Do we trust him then?” asked Jupiter. “You know what Jake says.”

“Yeah,” Otter agreed. “Pleeboles ain’t to know a thing!”

“He’s not a pleebole,” huffed Rose. “He lives here now. He’s probably not even an ognib. Mrs. Lindsay likes him, and so does Jake, I think.”

“Seemed nice enough to me,” Ray concurred, prodding large green anemones closed with a wand of iridescent brown kelp.

“He’s hiding something,” Nacho insisted. “I can tell a snarker when I see one.”

“Snarkers see snarkers wherever they look,” Jupiter teased.

Nacho wrinkled his face in offense.

“Why would Bridget hire him if he were dangerous?” asked Cob.

“I think he’s gonna matter,” Swami said, turning to look at them, “but . . .” He shook his head, and went back to throwing pebbles. “But not in any bad way.”

“Well it wouldn’t hurt to try an’ flush ’im out a little, would it?” Nacho pressed. “We could lay some kinda trap, and see if he goes for it.”

As he said this, three figures rose smoothly from the water at the cave’s mouth and crept in toward the gathering. Hawk and the others facing the cavern mouth struggled not to smile as the central figure put a finger to its lips.

Flanked by his two best friends, Blue and Tholomey, Ander crept up behind his sister, raised the abalone shell he’d been carrying, and tipped it out over her head, pouring a thin cascade of frigid salt water onto her hair and face.

“You foam-headed freak!”
Sophie shrieked up at her brother, trying without much success to keep from laughing with the rest now that the fright had passed.

“Tide’s comin’ up, you know.” Ander smiled. “You’d all better go soon, ’less you’re gonna swim out of here with us.”

The thought of swimming out with Ander’s crew made Hawk’s heart ache with envy. If only his father had run off earlier, he thought bitterly, maybe he’d have come to Taubolt sooner, and learned the kinds of tricks Ander and the others took for granted.

The new Sykes-Mundi Building, twenty stories of odd angles in gray-mirrored glass just outside of downtown proper, was a critical success architecturally and a prestigious reflection on its corporate tenants. Floors eighteen and nineteen currently housed the Los Angeles offices of West Meridian Timber Products, the corporate alias of Robert Ferristaff, who sat gazing out the windows of his corner suite wondering how much better the twentieth-floor view might be, when his assistant, Larry Bruech, knocked perfunctorily at the half-open door and entered with a single black folder in hand.

“I think you’ll want to see these,” Bruech said, laying the folder on Ferristaff’s expansive, gleaming, granite desktop.

Ferristaff swiveled around and opened the folder to find a small assortment of very old black-and-white photographs.