The Postcard (15 page)
I heard the words. I couldn’t believe them. My heart did. I started blubbering.
“Nicky, look. Fang — he went nuts about it. Blamed himself. He’s gone ‘off,’ they say. He’s wrapped the Order around her so tight nobody sees her anymore. They make hugger-mugger midnight trips to clinics. Not just here. Europe, Asia, too. As tough as it was to see her before, it’s impossible now. She lives a captive in his compound, if you call it living. She’s in that dark castle he calls the Towers.”
“I know the place,” I said. The image of prison grounds came to me. A prison with Marnie locked inside.
“Nick, a small army patrols the grounds. No phone. No friends. Just doctors, surgeons. You couldn’t get to her if you wanted to.”
“It’s far beyond wanting to,” I told him.
He looked at me for a long time. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll help you. It won’t be easy, but what are friends for? I’ll snoop around. Heck, maybe I’ll even find out something. Golly, I still can’t believe you’re here. You escaped. You made it back!” He was near to crying now.
“I’ll need better papers,” I said.
“Sure, sure. Jeanette will help,” he said, wiping his face with his bare arm. “She always loved you. You’re staying here, by the way. I’ll make up the extra bed. Nick, we need to celebrate. In secret, of course.”
I smiled. “Later. First, can I use your typewriter?”
He grinned now. “Still the same old Nick, no matter what you look like. You got some story, I bet.”
“Not for the magazine, though. Not yet. And I’ll need some postcards.”
“Sure. If the post office is still doing its job, she’ll know about you.”
“Thanks.” Doyle had been my friend since I wrote my first mystery. He’d be my friend until my last.
My new identity kept me able to move around without Oobarab on my tail, but Doyle was right. There was no getting close to Fang’s tower-topped castle of black stone. It was crawling with thugs. The place was tighter than a drunk on payday.
The one chance I saw was that when the gossip press got a bit too hot about not seeing her, Marnie went out on carefully controlled occasions with a small battalion of nurses. But even that didn’t work. For the next eight months, I sent her postcards, visited tourist spots all over town, took them in alone, and came home alone.
As much as he could, Doyle went out, mostly at night, and scouted and searched and scrounged. He’d even taken to wearing all black, from crepe-soled shoes to a slouchy black beret. Month after month passed, and I tapped away, writing it all down.
“Black beret!” I said. “My gosh, it’s the same guy! I saw him. We both saw him at Brent’s Funeral Home!”
Dia nodded over and over. “And the postcards Nick sent were the ones we found at the bungalow. The ballfield, Webb’s drug store. This is so unbelievably cool!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, “but wait. Is the Towers the same as the Awnings? It’s like the kitten becoming a tiger. That can’t be real.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe it doesn’t matter. Does it matter?”
The car slowed and Mr. Martin pulled into their driveway. We took a break while the meat loaf made its way around the table and we talked about things. I told them about my father being Mr. Fixit with the house, skipping the little bit about why he fell from the ladder, and something about Mom traveling from place to place like a Ping-Pong ball. It did the trick. They frowned, then they laughed. After supper, Mrs. Martin had a class to go to, so she left first, then Dia and I helped her father clean up. When we were finished, I followed her to her room. We sat on her floor pillows and kept on reading and didn’t stop until the end.
My new face had bought me time to scout and plan, but I knew that sooner or later I’d have to break cover. It turned out to be later. The web Fang had woven around Marnie was as impenetrable as a Chinese wall. When she was hauled off to some secluded clinic, the trail went cold altogether, as if she no longer existed. I could do nothing but wait for her to surface again. It finally happened in the spring of 1952, four years after my return. Four interminable years.
“Next month Blaine’s going to transport his fatness to the capital at Tallahassee,” Doyle told me one morning as I peeled myself off a cot soaked with sweat. “Bigwigs from all over. Swindling land from the poor unwashed, I suppose. The usual. He’ll be there three or four days.”
“Tallahassee,” I said, remembering my father and the real estate battle so long ago. It had hurt a lot of people, as it turned out, my father among the rest. “And the Order?”
He wagged his head. “There are more of them guarding Marnie than the Japanese did Saipan. With some new recruits, I hear from the street. But like the best of us, when the boss is away. . . . At least you’ll know she’s there in the black house, and he’s not. You only have those few days to make it work.”
That month was the slowest ever. Truman went to Europe, met every official and his family, came back, toured South America, signed some laws, had a fishing vacation, tried to end that mess in Korea, couldn’t manage to, played some piano, and decided to give it all up and go back to Missouri. It was that long.
Finally, the night came. I went there just after sunset. Doyle’s street talk was on the money. The Towers had closed in on itself. The bungalow on the far corner of the estate was dark, empty. Marnie was in the mansion.
Climbing the big tree was easy. I’d done that sort of thing dozens of times. Watching nothing happen was the hard part. Hour by hour I felt the moss go damp around me. From midnight to three I watched eighteen goons patrol the grounds on horseback and in Jeeps. Then it happened, what Doyle had told me. Three guards went off duty for a half hour, leaving only six watching the back of the house.
It was the work of five minutes to jump down from the tree on the inside of the wall, dash across the grounds, and start up an arbor next to the house. Before I got to the top, the popping sound I knew so well broke on my ears. The blue sedan, looking more like a jalopy than ever, screeched up the long drive and twirled in the gravel like a pretzel. Something was going on, and it wasn’t good. Not good for Marnie. I needed to find her. I needed to do it now.
I reached an upper-story window high under the main tower, crawled under a ragged black awning, and slipped inside. The room was empty. I listened at the hall door. No sound there, either. Then someone squeezed it open from the hall. I dived into the shadows, and there he was.
A man — I thought he was a man. The eyes, sunk deep in their holes, were red and glazed; the brows were gone. He was new to me. One of the Order’s new recruits? He had the broadest shoulders I’d ever seen. They filled the door opening. His arms were as thick as palm trunks, but his waist was impossibly teeny, like a debutante’s on prom night. He wore a suit of blue tights and red boots. Fetching.
Slowly catching the silver light before him was a blade with a slight curve to it. A Turkish throwing dagger. Oobarab’s toy of choice.
Ha! Here I was, noticing his get-up, and there he was, planning to kill me.
Was he talking? No. It was the chirping of Skull’s annoying bird perched on the doorframe, its giant eyes staring into the shadows, as if to help Small Waist see into them.
Should I bolt? Could I get past him? Should I take him on just as we were? These thoughts flashed through my head one after another. Good thing my brain was having trouble turning over. In those few seconds I noticed that the Turkish blade wasn’t his only weapon.
In his left hand was a gun so much larger than any gun I’d ever seen, it looked like a cannon. When I considered the size hole it would put in me, I started to ooze sweat like the fat man.
“Hey, boy?” the man whispered, as if calling a cat. “Hey . . . you gonna die now?”
I hated to be rude, but sometimes a question stumps you, and you just don’t answer. I didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
He did, though. Scanning the shadows, he said, “You there? Eh? Falcon? You ready ta breashe your lassht? Falcon? You ready ta die? Call it quitsh? Go kaputshki?”
“Not so much,” I blurted out from the darkness of the room.
“Shut your lip!” he snarled. He fired at the sound of my voice. Blam! The window exploded behind me. I was on the move, though, and dodged the bullet, skidding flat and silent on the carpet behind a brocaded love-seat.
“Didn’t get you, did I? Well. Shoon. Shoon.”
He had kind of a boring style of threatening that I would have taught him how to do properly, except for that gun. It was a deadly piece of machinery I didn’t want to be on the wrong end of. He could squeeze off a few rounds before I made it halfway out of the room.
And then what? Never see her again, never see her, never see my love ever again in this world?
There was a creak in the hall, and he twirled in his red boots. “Ahh . . .” I heard him mumble to the hallway. “Shorry, Missh.”
“What is it?” said a soft voice.
I nearly leaped out of the shadows. My heart did and went straight for her. Marnie!
“Intruder, Missh,” he grunted. “But I’m taking care of ’im. You go back to your wing now, Missh. Ain’t shafe for you here in thish part of the houshe.”
The creak came nearer. “An intruder?”
Marnie’s voice! There was pain in it, but something else, too. She knew it was me in there. She knew. It was all I could do not to jump out of the darkness right then and pull her out of that chair and hold her to me! Eight years since I saw you, Marnie! My Marnie!
Only before I could move, she spoke again.
“Fine. Send me a postcard when it’s safe to come out.”
“Eh? Missh?”
“They’re taking me now to see some elephants,” she said.
“Eh?” Tiny Waist repeated.
“Nothing, Stimp.” She creaked away down the hall.
“Mad ash a bat,” the man muttered to himself.
So Doyle was right. That horrible chair. The creak of the wheels. My heart beat for her. She was dying in Fang’s clutches. She couldn’t breathe in his stranglehold. I had to get her out of there. But judging from the sound of four, five sets of footsteps thumping down the halls now, and the air-gulping roar of Malkin the tiger, that wasn’t the time or place.
Before they crowded into the room, I dived through the open window frame, ripping the awning and breaking several tiles — crash! I rolled across a lower roof and dropped into the bushes. Before I knew it, the tiger had leaped out the window after me, and a small army was chasing me across the lawn, firing madly.
I ran just as madly, climbing over the stone wall like a lizard, and tearing down the sidewalk beneath the moss-draped trees. I gasped in huge breaths and almost choked. I could hear the sound of cloaks swishing in the night, and the musical thoop of daggers being drawn out of their leather sheaths and thrown. I nearly took one in the arm, but it struck a tree behind my head. Stimp lurched out of the shadows now, too. He growled a word — “There!” — and that cannon of his went off again. The thunder of the shot woke the dead only as far as Tampa. Before the smoke cleared, I dashed behind an early-morning milk truck, clung tight, and escaped.
When I heard the popping engine and screeching tires I knew why all the fuss. The blue sedan was racing away from the house. The Secret Order of Oobarab had taken her away, just like she said. “To see some elephants.” Oh, Marnie! My Marnie!
“It might be days, weeks, years,” I said to the lonely night. “But I won’t ever stop.”
With one last look at the castle, the growling of that sedan fading in my ears, I tried to imagine her angelic face, her eyes, but all I saw were Fang’s bloated cheeks. When I tried to imagine her voice, all I heard was the creak-creak-creak of her rolling chair.
“You can’t do this to her!” I shouted to the dark.
And that was it, right then. No longer for me, but for Marnie herself, I needed to find her. Life was empty until then. I needed to find her. Free her. Save her. Love her.
Nothing else mattered.
—May 1952
Dia and I were stunned and silent. It was a long time before either of us spoke.
“This is not the end of the story,” I said. “No way is it the end. We have to know what comes next. I have to know what happens. What do we do now?”
She was quiet, leafing through the pages, stacking them on her desk, leafing through them again. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I gotta think about it. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have an idea.”
I read one line over and over.
No longer for me, but for Marnie herself, I needed to find her.
And it happened to me, too. Sure, I needed to know what happened to Nick and Marnie. Why was Fang hiding her? What accident crippled her? Why was he keeping Nick away so fiercely? Did Nick find her? Did he save her? But more than that, Dad needed to know. He needed to know about his mother, and maybe his father, and I had to follow the story to the end in order to tell him. Dia was right. I think she was right. It didn’t matter whether Emerson Beale was making things up. That’s what stories were. Things made up. It was still true. It was true, and I believed it.
When I finally refocused my eyes, I found myself gazing at the rolled-up clothes scattered on Dia’s floor.
She followed my gaze. “Jeez, you perv, get out of here!”
I didn’t know what to say, so I left without saying anything except a laughing sort of, “Tell your mom great meat loaf. Bye to your dad. I love those mal . . . mal . . .”
“Malangas. It’s a tuber. Get out!”
I trotted to my house, thinking how strange Dia was. She was always snapping at me — and the names! What was
with
that? But I didn’t care. It was the way she was. Dia was Dia. She was, I don’t even know what.
My cell phone rang jarringly on the quiet street.
“Dude, you are not going to believe this,” Hector said when I answered. He waited for me to say something.
“Believe what?” I said. “What is it?”
He made an excited noise with his mouth. “That word you told me about.”
“Oobarab. What did you find out?”
“I Googled it, and guess what it means?”
My heart skipped. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
I stood quietly on the sidewalk. It felt as if the whole story began to crumble in front of me. I felt betrayed. “Nothing?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
It all seemed to tip the other way now. “Fine. He’s changing things, anyway,” I said. “A little kitten became this big growly tiger. A nice white house turned into a dark black castle. He’s making it up. It’s not true. So, okay. Oobarab doesn’t exist. It’s just a word, just a story. I guess I never expected it to be real. Dia and I hit a dead end, anyway —”
“Except,” he said, then paused again.
“Except?”
“Well, try it,” he said. “Try searching Oobarab on the Net. Dude, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl!”
“I don’t have a connection at my house. Tell me, okay?”
He made another noise, as if he could barely wait to tell me. “So, I key in the word, right? Man, I wish you could see this. And out of the whole Web, only a half dozen results come up.”
“I thought you said the word doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. But you know what the top two results were?”
“Hector, I don’t know what the top two results were!”
“Backwards,” he said. “The results appeared backwards on my screen.”
I didn’t get it. “Backwards?”
“Backwards!”
I had never seen backwards results on a search. I couldn’t imagine what they would look like. “What does that mean?”
“It means, my sunstroked friend, that the
word
Oobarab is backwards. Oobarab means nothing. But turn it around and it spells
Baraboo.
”
He waited.
I listened.
“And?”
“And . . . Baraboo means something pretty incredible . . . especially for you down there . . .
right down there in Florida, dude!
”
“Like what?”
“Guess what it is. You never will. It’s so mind-blowing, so incomprehens —”
“Hector!” I said. “Will you just —”
Suddenly, my blood turned to ice. The two lights I had left on in my house were out, and the narrow beam of a flashlight was jerking around inside.
“Holy crow!”
“Dude? What’s going on?”
A shape moved past the windows in the Florida room.
“Hector, I’ll call you later,” I said, hanging up. I was terrified. I crept over to Mrs. K’s house. Her lights were on. I tapped on the door. No answer. I knocked harder. Still no answer.
“Thanks a lot.
Now
you decide to go out —”
When I heard my back door squeak, I ducked into her flower bed, wishing roses didn’t have thorns. Someone was outside now, and I could hear him moving away across my backyard. The bushes rustled. There was a distant squeak of a fence gate, a dog barking, then I heard a car start up and drive away from the next street over.
“What the heck?” I whispered. “A burglar?”
I couldn’t believe it. I might have been in the middle of a mystery, sure, but not
that
kind of mystery. A burglar? That was too real.
I didn’t move for a long time. I breathed huge gulps of air, but nothing else happened.
I knew if I called the police right away, my whole sketchy situation would be blown. Dad wasn’t there, Mrs. K wasn’t there. The police would take me to the station. They’d call Mom.
So what could I do? Even as I approached the house slowly from the side, I remembered all the times Hector and I had yelled at movie characters who investigate things they should have run the heck away from. I went still closer. I listened at the back door for another five minutes before doing anything. The door lock looked the same as the last time I saw it, but how could I tell if it had been picked? My cell phone was in my hand, already dialed to 9-1. Hearing nothing from inside, I twisted the knob and pushed in.
The door was locked.
Okay, this guy was either a good lock picker or he was just being polite, protecting my house against other burglars. I slipped my key into the lock and turned it. I pushed the door in a crack. Warm air came out at me. I stepped in. The house was dead quiet. I expected to see the place all torn up, but it wasn’t. It was messy, but I couldn’t tell if someone had been looking for something, if it were exactly the same as I left it, or —
weirdly
— if it were even neater than before. The boxes seemed stacked in a way that I didn’t remember. No. Maybe not. I didn’t know.
I checked Dad’s room first. His wristwatch lay untouched on his nightstand. I walked through every room, even popping my head into the attic crawlspace. All empty. When I turned back toward the kitchen, I heard a crackle of noise that made me jump.
“Emergency, can I help you?” said a woman’s voice.
“What?” I said to the dark.
“Hello?” the voice said.
I looked down. My fingers were clutched so tensely around my cell phone, I must have pressed the send button by mistake.
I put it to my face. “Hello.”
“Emergency. Can I help you?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” I replied. “I’m really sorry. I pressed 9-1-1 by accident. My phone is really sensitive.”
“Can I have your name and address please?” she said.
I got nervous and hung up.
Was this going to be a problem? Could they track me down?
I stood in the kitchen not moving for another few minutes, then walked three steps into the living room. Still shaking, I sat on the edge of the couch. “Okay . . . calm down . . .”
Hector had put a bug in my head and it kept flying and bouncing around. I called him back, but my call went to voice mail. Then I called Dia’s house, hoping she might still be awake. The machine picked up.
“Dia, hi. It’s me. . . .” I was going to add a name but couldn’t remember her latest one for me. “When you get a chance, search the word
Baraboo
on the Internet. Hector thinks it means something important.” I spelled it for her, then hung up.
I went over and knocked on Mrs. K’s front door again. There was still no answer, but her lights were out now so she might have come home and gone to sleep. That’s when I noticed a note tucked into the screen door. It read: “Jason, my key is where I told you. Lock the door behind you when you come in.”
Where you told me? Wait, what did you tell me? The mailbox!
But her mailbox was empty. Why was it empty? Did she just write the note then forget to do what it said? I thought of pounding on the door, then of tapping on her window, but she would probably have called the police, if she even heard it, but I knew she took her hearing aids out at night. So I decided to go back home and just stay there. I’d already been burgled. What more could happen?
After two hours of walking around and doing nothing but listen to the faucet drip, I sank down on the couch, tired to my bones, and fell asleep. I woke up to the sound of the doorbell. It was morning. There was a policeman at the door, one I didn’t know.
Emergency had tracked me!
“You’re the boy with his father in the hospital, right?” asked the officer, consulting a small pad. His car idled on the street.
“Right,” I answered, shaking. “I was just going to see him.”
“Family Services said you weren’t home yesterday when they came?” he asked, glancing past me into the room. “Everything okay here?” He leaned into the room now, then looked at his pad. “You’re supposed to be staying with a Mrs. Kee . . . something; can’t read my own writing. . . .”
“My neighbor,” I said. “I’ve been next door since my dad fell.”
“You know, I don’t like this. It looks like you just woke up. Are you alone here?”
I shook my head. “No. I mean yes, but I came back here after breakfast, next door,” I said. My mind began to race. He started to push his way past me, so I opened the door wide. While he was looking around, I hit redial on my cell phone, waited for a chirp of an answer, then hung up.
“We’re packing things up,” I said. “And cleaning stuff. To sell it. That’s why it’s messy. To sell the house.”
“Uh-huh. And what about your mother?” He pulled his radio from his belt. “Is she down here yet?”
Okay. So what was Dia doing? Where was she? My cell rang. It was her.
“Hey, Roy,” she blurted out when I answered, “did you just call me?” Not waiting for an answer, she went on, “Whatever. Listen. I searched
Baraboo
— that was you, right? On the phone last night? Anyway, you know what I found?”
The policeman was looking right at me. I drew a blank and only managed to silently put my finger up, to show him I was listening.
“Fine, Jerome,” she said. “Baraboo is the name of a town in Wisconsin. If you’re thinking so what, try this. Barabaoo is where the Ringling circus started. Ringling, Kiddo! Knife throwers. Skeleton men. Giants? Trained tigers? Alligators? Parrots!”
I practically had a heart attack. I still said nothing.
“Did you have a heart attack, or are you listening?” she said. “Plus — here’s the second to biggest part — the huge Ringling house — a real giant castle — is in Sarasota about an hour from here! And you know what else? — here’s the
biggest
biggest part — your great-grandpa Fang was chums with the Ringling family. Ta-da!” She paused a second. “Joey? You there? Ronny? Bob?”
I gulped. “Uh . . . hi, Mom.”
“You freak!” she snapped from the other end of the phone. I imagined her in her room, sitting on the edge of her rumpled bed, her face smirking in the glow of the computer screen.
“Your mother’s on the phone?” said the policeman, moving his hand as if to reach for it. “Can I . . .?”
Dia whispered into my ear. “Hold on. Is someone there? I hear someone. Oh, my gosh! Is it . . . Fang? Mommy!” she yelled, “Fang’s at Billy’s house! Billy, blink twice if it’s him —”
“Not yet, Mom,” I said casually. “But the police officer wants to talk to you.”
“What? Are you insane?” said Dia. “I can’t talk to any —”
“Sure, Mom. Here he is.”
I handed the officer the phone and hoped for the best.
“Hello,” he said. “Mrs. Huff? This is Officer Perry. . . .”
I didn’t hear what Dia said on the other end, but his expression didn’t change. “I wanted to ask you — you are?” He began to nod. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. All right, ma’am, that sounds good. Please call us when you get here so we can . . . right.”
He handed me the cell, and it was over. He looked around at the rooms once more and wrote a few more notes on his pad. “So she’ll be here in the morning.”
“Right. My mom,” I said. “I can’t wait. I miss her.”
He leaned into both bedrooms. “So you haven’t been staying here alone, then?”
“I, uh, no . . .” That was when the doorbell rang. It was Dia. She was completely out of breath. This time she was being Dia.
“Hi,” she said brightly. “Everything okay? Did you sleep all right next door? Because if you didn’t, my mom and dad said you could use our guest room tonight, and here’s some stuff, if you need it.” She held out a disposable razor (
what?
) and a pink toothbrush, probably hers. “I didn’t know whether Mrs. K was tired of you or if you wanted to stay. Your mother’s coming down soon, right?”
