The Shadow Year (26 page)

Mary started running before I did. Jim's screams for help sparked me to action. I got to where he was slowly being pulled over the edge in the same instant Mary did. He was struggling to pull himself back. We started stamping the pale wrist and hand, the arm. Finally I jumped up as high as I could and came down on it with both feet. There was a snapping sound that echoed across the rooftop, followed by a high-pitched cry of pain. The icicle grip loosened, and Jim pulled his ankle free.

We didn't notice that White had grabbed the edge with just the fingertips of his opposite hand, but Mary did. She stepped up and finished the job with a single stamp of her foot. We heard the thud below and a wheeze of stale air pushed from his lungs. Stepping closer to the edge, we looked over and saw him lying flat on his back, his coat spread out like wings behind him, his hat next to his head. I could see that his eyes were open and that he was watching us. Jim leaned over the side and spit on him. Mary did the same, and he never moved or called out.

Jim shoved me. “Get going,” he said.

We went down the ladder, Jim first, me last, and Mary in between us. Once we got to the ground, I said, “What happened to Ray?”

Mary shook her head.

“I don't know,” said Jim. “He's gone.”

Before I could ask, “Was he a ghost?” Jim said, “We have to hurry. We gotta get home and call the cops.” He started walking fast around toward the front of the building. “The courtyard will hold him for a while, but he's tricky,” Jim called back over his shoulder.

We were passing through the front gate of the school, Jim
up ahead, and I turned to Mary and asked her if she, too, had seen Ray pass through Mr. White. The thought of it still made me giddy.

It was a few moments before she nodded and quietly said, “Right through him.”

When we got home, the front door was locked. White must have locked it behind him after he'd entered. Jim went in through the cellar window in the back, and we waited for him on the front stoop. While we were standing there, the lights went back on, and I knew that Jim had been at the cellar fuse box. Even before he could open the door for us all the way, I saw George scurrying around his legs, looking no worse for wear. Neither my mother nor my father was home yet. We went into the kitchen, and Jim picked up the phone and dialed. He waited for an answer, and Mary and I stood still and held our breath.

“Somebody's breaking into East Lake School. Check the courtyard,” he said in a voice deeper than his own. Then he hung up quick. As soon as the phone was on the hook, we all started laughing. I laughed so hard my eyes watered, and so did Jim's and Mary's.

Mary went to the refrigerator, took out the Velveeta cheese, and cut a big hunk off the end. She threw the orange wedge to George, who caught it in midair with a snap of his jaws.

It was over. I knew because most of my fear left me the same way the crazy energy went out of my mother—all at once, like a balloon deflating. A few minutes later, we heard the sirens coming down Willow. Two cars sped by, flashing red, as we watched from the front window. I knew that the neighbors would leave their houses and walk over to the school as they had the night Tony Calfano shot out the windows, but we let the curtain fall back into place and turned on the television. No one said a word.

Nan and my mother arrived home. They told us Pop had
had a stroke and that he'd be in the hospital for a while. It was late, but my mother poured two glasses of wine for her and Nan. She thanked us for being so good, and we were sent to bed. We told them nothing.

I lay awake till my father got home, and I heard the mumble of talk coming up from the dining room. George climbed aboard. I fell asleep thinking of Charlie, Ray, Barzita, along with other ghosts, slipping through the backyards of Botch Town.

The cops called early the next day and asked my mother to have my father bring me down to the station on Saturday to look at some mug shots. They told her that they'd caught a man they thought might be the guy who had tried to grab me at the stores. When she told me about the phone call, she asked if I was up to going over there, and I nodded.

On Saturday morning the police station was as quiet as Krapp's library time. The same police officer who'd spoken to Pop and me was there to meet us. He showed us to the same wood-paneled back room with the portrait of President Johnson and the flag. Lying on the table was a row of black-and-white photos of men, from the chest up, staring straight out.

“Sit in front of the pictures there,” the cop said to me.

I did, and my father pulled up another chair so he could sit next to me and rest his hand on my shoulder. From the time we had gotten out of the car to when we got back in it and drove away, I felt my father's hand on my shoulder.

“Show me,” said the cop.

I scanned down the row of faces, and before I even got to it, I saw it out of the corner of my eye, shining brighter than the other photos. I put my finger right down in the center of Mr. White's forehead and looked at my father. He smiled.

“Bingo,” said the cop. “Godfrey Darnell, wanted for mur
der in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and who knows where else.”

“Will he have to go to court?” my dad asked, pointing to me.

“Not for a while,” said the cop. “Darnell will probably be extradited to another state to face charges there first. He's a nut—kills people for, I guess, fun. Mostly kids, but adults, too, when he senses they can't defend themselves. I'd be surprised if he doesn't get the chair. Nobody knows how many people he's killed.”

And nobody found out that day either. I kept my mouth shut about Charlie and Mr. Barzita. After we were done at the police station, my father took me to a new hamburger place over in Babylon, Burger King. We sat near the waterfalls in Argyle Park and ate our burgers. “You did very good today,” he said.

I nodded.

“What do you think of this hamburger?” he asked. “It's just a cold onion sandwich with mayonnaise.”

I agreed with him, even though I really liked it.

A few nights later, after my father had gotten home and gone to bed, a loud bang woke me from a deep sleep. I heard a commotion from below, and I ran down the steps to find out what had happened. The voices led me through Nan's open door and along the hallway to her bedroom. My father was there in his work pants and shoes but no shirt. My mother had on her robe, and Nan was sitting straight up in bed. Jim was there, too, sticking his pinkie finger into a hole in the wall just above the dresser. Everyone was looking in the other direction, though, at the sliding wooden door of the closet. There was a hole there, too.

“I knew that was a gunshot,” said my father. He and Nan laughed.

“The gun must have just gotten too old,” said Nan.

“
You
won't,” said my mother, “if you keep that thing loaded.”

It wasn't until after they started talking about how Pop was doing in the hospital that I noticed the crystal Virgin that had held the holy water lying in shards on top of the dresser. The bullet had shattered it. There was a light blue puddle on the wood and water stains on the wall. I left when Nan started crying. Mary passed me in the hall and waved. I went through our dining room to the kitchen and let myself out the back door. As soon as I stepped away from the house and looked up, I smelled a trace of autumn in the cool air. That gunshot was like a screen door slamming shut, a kind of Times Square celebration.

The Shadow Year was over. I could feel it slide out of my head like the splinter from my thumb, leaving an empty space where it had been.

We fell into one of those normal years, where light and dark mix gently and nothing is clear. There were so many things I didn't understand, so many questions I had. Mr. White was creepy, but at least he was real. What was Ray? No matter how many times I tried to get Jim to talk about it, he wouldn't. “Leave me alone,” he'd say, and shut his door. He stayed in his room all the time after school, playing guitar and napping. We didn't hang out together anymore. He grew slower, quieter, and gained weight. One afternoon I found the photo he'd had Mary take of us in front of the shed. I shoved it under his closed door, thinking he'd come out, but he didn't. That night, when I went up for bed, I saw the photo lying on the floor outside his room. I picked it up and saw he'd written
“Shhhhh”
on the back in red pen.

Mary lost all her weird number powers and somehow became normal all of a sudden. I could never figure out if it had just happened or if it had been her decision. She broke out of Room X in the first two weeks of the new school year and wound up with Krapp, who'd been demoted to teaching fifth grade. Sometimes she and I would sit behind the forsythia and whisper about what had happened. One time I asked her why she thought Mr. White read the Perno Shell books. She said, “He was probably studying how kids thought.” The next time I
spoke to her about the connection with the books, though, she changed the subject to Krapp.

I understood that Jim and Mary were both trying to tell me it was better to forget. I fought it for a while, but on the night before school started again, I took my notebook that held all the information of our investigation and wrapped it three times in waxed paper. After tying the bundle tight with kite string, crisscrossing it length- and widthwise, I left my bedroom, crept down through the sleeping house, passed my mother, unconscious on the couch, passed the bottle standing open on the kitchen counter, and went out into the night. The crickets were singing, the trees were rustling, there was a moon and so many stars. I walked past the picnic table and beneath the cherry tree and went all the way back by the shed. At the trunk of the giant oak, I knelt and shoved the book into a hole amid the tree's exposed roots, burying it deep underground. Then I brushed off my hands and tried my best to forget. The next day I started junior high.

My mother drank, my father worked, and Pop finally returned from the hospital able to talk out of only one side of his mouth. Nan put him through his paces every day, lifting his legs, making him squeeze a rubber ball. “She's trying to finish me off,” he'd say. He died on a cold, rainy day just before Thanksgiving, and at the private, family-only ceremony at Clancy's the morning he was buried, I saw him in his coffin, facedown without a shirt, as he'd requested. A week later we learned that Godfrey Darnell had hanged himself in prison.

Years passed. Jim and I went our separate ways. Mary got married and had kids. Too much to tell, and then one evening at the end of summer while I sat visiting with my mother and father out at the picnic table, having a smoke and a beer, they started talking about the neighbors—who was left from the original crew who were there when they'd first moved into the house on Willow. There weren't many, so they reminisced about the ones
they'd seen come and go. It was like they were digging into their own Hall of Fame. After a while the Halloways came up.

“Mister was a real bastard,” said my mother.

“Big on the belt,” said my father.

“Not just the wife but the kids, too,” said my mother, flicking her ash.

“A coward,” said my father.

“Mrs. Restuccio told me that after they moved to Philly and the older boy was killed, he changed. Found God.”

“Found God,” said my father, and he barely laughed.

“What do you mean, ‘the older boy was
killed
'?” I said.

“Murdered,” said my mother. “They found him in a Dumpster in an alley in South Philadelphia with a broken neck. It happened a couple weeks after they moved there. I don't think they ever figured out who did it. Everyone thought it was the old man for a while, but he'd been at work for sure when it happened.”

I felt the exact sense of emptiness I had when Jim and I stood in Mr. White's garage for the first time and saw the bottles of Mr. Clean. I made a mental note to call Mary and tell her, but I never did.

At the end of summer that year, I read in the newspaper that some kid fishing at the lake back in the woods had brought up Charlie Edison's remains. The police made a positive identification using dental records, and the speculation was that he'd been murdered by Darnell. Still, they weren't sure, and there was some mystery involved in the fact that the police had thoroughly dredged the lake when Charlie'd gone missing. I, of course, knew the truth of how things had happened. Ray had told us that White threw the body in the lake
after
the dredging. I'd have come forward to clear it all up, but how do you explain to the cops that you got your information from a ghost?

Only days after I read that news, I found a letter in my mailbox. It was made out in red ink with no return address. I almost
tossed it into the can, thinking it was some organization begging money for kids. Instead I let it sit for a few days. Then one night when I was drinking alone in my apartment's small kitchenette, I picked the letter out of the stack of mail on the table. Putting down my cigarette, I opened it. Inside, there was nothing but a thin rectangle of cardboard. I pulled it out and, recognizing it immediately, dropped it on the table. Softee's eyes stared up at me, and when I eventually closed mine, I was back in Botch Town, peering in every window, searching for something I'd lost.