The Homecoming (30 page)

“Did you see what make of car?”

“No. I got the license number. KT987Z. Do you know it?”

Kate went inside herself and came back.

“What you mean to say is, is it Alice Bayer’s license plate?”

“Yes, Kate. I think that’s what I mean.”

“I don’t know her license number. I know she drove a small blue car.”

She stopped, hoping for the right words to come.

“I guess we’ll have to call the police, won’t we?”

“Yes,” said Lemon, but gently. “I’m afraid we will.”

In many ways Rainey and Axel were just like any other kids who knew they were in major trouble with the parents. Although it was getting dark and they were hungry, neither boy could bring himself to grab an uptown trolley and go back home. Not just yet anyway.

They were riding the Peachtree Line. They had been riding it for hours, ever since they left Rainey’s mother’s house on Cemetery Hill.

The Peachtree streetcar was one of the old-fashioned navy blue and gold monsters that Niceville was famous for. Heavy as a tank, it lurched and clattered through the crowded downtown streets, heading east again for the Armory Bridge that crossed the river a couple of blocks south of the Pavilion.

The overheated car was packed with office workers going home at the end of a long day and a few kids from Saint Innocent Orthodox School—Axel and Rainey could pick out their dorky outfits from a mile away.

Axel and Rainey had their Regiopolis blazers folded up and stuffed into their knapsacks. Rainey, in the window seat, was staring across the river at the face of Tallulah’s Wall. Axel was tapping away at his iPad, which Rainey thought he probably shouldn’t do because maybe there was a way to trace where they were when it was on. That was why he had taken the battery out of his cell phone. Axel had told him that taking the battery out was the only way to shut off a Motorola phone. Axel knew stuff like that because his father used to be an FBI guy. Axel was feeling
pretty freaked out about his father being out on the loose. He didn’t want to run into him, but he didn’t want the police to shoot him either.

Life was complicated for both of them and there didn’t seem to be much they could do about it, so Axel was playing Grand Theft Auto and Rainey was staring out the window.

At this time of year the last of the setting sun always lit up the oaks and willows that lined the top of Tallulah’s Wall. They glowed now, a bright green, but the vine-covered face of the wall was in a deep purple shadow. There was still a big brown spot in the wall, where six months ago a guy had flown his plane right into it on purpose. Another suicide, just like Rainey’s dad.

Rainey looked over at Axel, who was sitting slumped down in his seat, looking sad and worried and tired. They had run out of talk a while back, their sense of a shared adventure had slowly died away, and now they were both just hungry and worried and sleepy.

Axel was a brave little guy and Rainey liked him—he had taken on Coleman Mauldar—but Axel really wanted to go home, and soon they’d both have to decide how to do that. Looking at his reflection in the window glass of the streetcar, Rainey wasn’t sure what kind of a state
he
was in.

He felt detached from the grown-ups around him, and from the bright lights of the shops and houses that were passing by on the other side of the glass, detached from the life of the city itself, as if it were a boring movie that he had to sit through because one of the Jesuits thought it would make better men out of them.

He mainly felt detached from Kate and Nick and from everybody else in the current version of his life. Axel was the only person he felt connected to, and even then he knew that Axel and he were very different.

For instance, Axel cared what other people thought and felt. Rainey knew that Axel was feeling guilty and sad and awful. Rainey understood in an intellectual way that this was partly because they had been caught out in a long string of lies and deceptions and getting caught at something sneaky usually made the person who got caught angry and sad and awful. Blowing off school would have to be paid for. Rainey and Axel both understood that.

But it had been fun while it lasted.

Gert the Lesbo had asked for notes and permissions and all that stuff. Axel had figured out how to work the computer—Axel was dead smart at
that sort of thing—scary smart—and the notepaper was right there in his mom’s desk.

So he and Rainey had been free to do whatever they wanted during school hours. All that was over now. They spent a lot of time in their fort down on Patton’s Hard, but Axel said the place creeped him out.

After that, for the most part, they had just gone back to his real home almost every day—except when Lemon was there working on the gardens. They watched television and searched the Internet on his mom’s computer and googled for dirty pictures and posted stupid stuff on Facebook and Twitter and ate whatever canned stuff they could eat without having to cook it.

But they had stopped going on Google News after Axel found all that stuff about what was supposed to have happened to Rainey when he was kidnapped.

It had sort of freaked them both out, but Rainey most of all. Rainey had no clear memory of that time, other than there was a mirror with a gold frame in Moochie’s window and when you looked into it sometimes you could see a farm inside a pine forest and there was a big horse named Jupiter.

Axel found an article on Google that said Rainey’s mother had committed suicide by jumping into Crater Sink. But they had never found her body, and Rainey knew in his heart that his mother wasn’t dead and that if he could only listen harder to the voices in the willows then he’d understand what the willows were trying to explain to him. If he listened carefully enough maybe the willows could help him understand why his father had committed suicide after Rainey had been found inside that grave. Even Rainey thought that his father shouldn’t have killed himself right when Rainey needed him the most. So it was very important for him to figure out how all these things happened, and why, and then he’d know what to do about all these people in his life.

Including Axel.

The streetcar clattered across Armory Bridge and began to climb up the long, winding streets that ended up at the roundabout on Upper Chase Run, where the streetcar would turn around and head back down and do it all over again.

They had been on the car now for three hours—two dollars got you an all-day ride if you wanted it—and the driver, a young woman with hazel eyes and a big friendly hello for all the passengers—was beginning
to pay too much attention to the two kids who never got off and who were always sitting in the last bench on the left at the back of the car.

Axel told Rainey that he could tell she was getting ready to do something adult about them.

They had about a half mile to go before they got to the roundabout again, which was set into the side of Tallulah’s Wall, right at the top of Upper Chase Run.

There was a flight of rickety wooden stairs that started at the end of Upper Chase, just past the roundabout. It zigzagged up the easy side of Tallulah’s Wall and ended up in a path that wandered around along the crest through all the old trees that lived up there.

The path ended at Crater Sink, but nobody ever took it that far, since Crater Sink had a reputation for being a place where bad things lived.

Although Axel, like every Niceville kid, knew all about Crater Sink, he had never actually gone there. For one thing, it was just plain creepy.

Rainey had visited Crater Sink only once, with his mother, on a kind of picnic. They had driven up there and laid out a brunch but his mother had gotten all twitchy about the way the trees were hanging down over Crater Sink and why there were so many crows all around and why even though it was a bright sunny day the water never showed any blue sky in it. The surface was always black.

So they hadn’t stayed, although Rainey often felt drawn to the place, especially now that he had found out that Crater Sink was where his mother was supposed to have jumped in.

They were rumbling slowly past the big mansions of The Chase, all of them sitting on top of their private hills behind their big stone fences. They went by 682 Upper Chase Road, a big wooden house with all sorts of turrets and stained glass and complicated woodwork hanging off it—Rainey thought it looked like it should be haunted. The house was dark and boarded up.

There was a black iron gate, chained shut, and a brass plate on the gate.

TEMPLE HILL

Rainey had looked it up after he’d heard a few of the guys at school talking about it. It turned out that Temple Hill was all about him. He nudged Axel out of his daze and pointed at the house.

“This house is all about what happened to me,” he said. Axel sat up, suddenly involved.

“That house? Whoa, it’s like a castle! Like a haunted castle. Totally cool!”

Rainey explained how it was the home of this rich old hag named Delia Cotton. According to the story in the
Niceville Register
, she had disappeared like
months
ago, and her handyman too, a guy named Gray Haggard, who had served in World War Two with Dillon Walker, Axel’s papa, who was a Big Deal up at VMI and he had
also
disappeared around the same time and guess what, Alice Bayer had been her housekeeper, and it all fit together, and there was even more, because Nick was the guy who had the Cotton case, which never got solved, and Nick was also the guy who got Alice Bayer the job running Attendance and Records at Regiopolis Prep.

Axel had followed this narrative with only half his mind—he was trying to get to the part in Grand Theft Auto where you got to see a naked girl—but the mention of Alice Bayer got his attention, because he had a terrible thought going around inside his head that Rainey knew something bad about her. He was looking up at Rainey while he talked and his suspicions were right there in his face but Rainey missed it.

He rolled on, enjoying the way the story was giving them both the heebie-jeebies.

Rainey had also found out—by sneaking a look at Nick’s casebook, which Nick always left on the desk in his office when he was off duty—that the mirror in Uncle Moochie’s window had once belonged to Delia Cotton for like a thousand years and that Delia Cotton had decided she didn’t want the mirror and she had given it to Alice Bayer, who had sold it to Moochie, and that was why the mirror was in the window of Moochie’s store for Rainey to see and get all hypnotized by it and disappear.

He stopped there, because the idea came to him that what had happened to Alice Bayer was just payback, and thinking about it like that was helping to make his guilty feelings go away. But he wasn’t going to admit anything like that to Axel.

They clattered past Temple Hill and rumbled around a bend that led up to the roundabout. Axel went back to his Grand Theft Auto game, and Rainey wondered where the mirror was now.

When he’d mentioned the mirror to Nick, he and Kate had exchanged a look that made him think that they knew where it was. Maybe he’d snoop around Kate’s house a bit, when that Eufaula girl wasn’t
around. Eufaula was always following him around like she expected him to steal the silverware or something.

But Rainey had learned a few interesting things pretty fast, these last weeks.

For instance, Rainey had figured out that the more you worked out ways to stop other people from making you feel guilty, the easier it got.

It was like Ninja mind control, and it made him feel tough and confident, not like a kid at all, and the more time he spent listening to the voices in the willow trees, the older and tougher he got.

They were finally at the roundabout.

“We gotta get off,” he whispered to Axel.

Axel looked up from his iPad and stared around at the station stop. It was dark now, and the streetcar was the only light.

“Maybe we should just stay on and go home.”

“We’re gonna, but we should take the next car, ’cause Nosy Pants is looking at us.”

Axel sighed and stuffed his iPad into his knapsack. He had finally managed to get to the naked girl part and he hoped he’d remember later how he had done that.

The driver had turned around in her seat to watch as they walked up to the front to get off.

When they got there she asked them if everything was all right but Rainey just said they had skipped school and now they were going to go home and face the music.

“Well, you’re such beautiful boys, I’m sure your folks will go easy on you,” she said, closing the door after they got down the stairs.

She waved as she worked the car around the turn. They stood and watched it rumbling and creaking off down the street until it was gone and they were standing in a pool of blue light from the lamppost overhead and beyond the light there was only the dark. Axel didn’t like this at all.

“Know what we should do, Rain? We should just turn on your phone and call for a taxi.”

“They’ll know where we are.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “This place looks different at night. I think I just want to go home. They’re not gonna like kill us or anything.”

“We’ll get grounded for a month.”

“I don’t care if they ground me for a year. Call a taxi or something. Mom’ll pay when we get home. I mean it, Rain.”

Rainey was staring up at the staircase. It had yellow lights set into the stairs so you could see your way if you wanted to go up to the top at night.

“Come on, Rain. Phone, will you?”

Rainey pulled out his cell phone, put the battery back in, and flicked it on. There were lots of calls, from Regiopolis, from Kate, from Kate, from Kate—there was even one from Lemon, and a text message.

He tabbed it and read it.

It had been sent about ten minutes ago. Axel read it over his shoulder. “See. They’re not pissed off. Just worried. Text them back.”

Rainey decided to reply.