The Summer We Lost Alice (4 page)

Alice doesn't look her mother in the eyes. If she did, she would be turned to stone. She's still in trouble for letting Boo dig in the garden. Aunt Flo's anger is not easily extinguished. Uncle Billy says that getting Aunt Flo over a "mad" is like trying to spit out a tire fire.

"She'll turn up," Uncle Billy says again. He squints down his glasses at the newspaper. "Says here it might rain tonight. Maybe we better not go fishing after all."

"No!" Alice says. Then she sees the grin on Uncle Billy's face. "Let me see that paper!"

She's up onto Uncle Billy's lap in an instant and they play keep-away with the newspaper. Alice is laughing and Uncle Billy is saying, "Paper? What paper? Oh, this paper? What do you want this paper for?" Then the tickling starts and Alice squeals and Boo leaps to his feet and starts to bark his big, booming bark and Catherine yells out that she's on the phone if nobody noticed. That's how it goes for almost a minute, squealing and barking and laughing, until Aunt Flo comes in and tells them to break it up, dinner's ready.

* * *

"Take off your thumb," Alice says.

We're at White Deer Lake, fishing with Uncle Billy. We'd set off right after dinner in Uncle Billy's pickup truck with the spotlight on the side. We'd driven out of town and into a patch of trees where a
spot was waiting for us. Boo wanted to come in the worst way, but I could see already that it was a good idea to leave him at home. He'd probably be splashing in the water and scaring all the fish.

It's dark like no dark I've ever seen. Even the stars are different from what they are in Wichita. The sky seems overflowing with them,
like they could spill out and rain sparkles on your head. There's a broad swathe of stars that I know is the Milky Way, which, in Wichita, is just a candy bar.

Uncle Billy bait
ed my hook with one of the worms Alice dug out of the garden. He showed me how to put on the weight and bobber. He knelt behind me and helped me cast. I was horrible at it, of course.

"You'll catch on," Uncle Billy said. Once our lines were in the water we sat back and waited
. That's when Alice told Uncle Billy to take off his thumb.

"You ever see somebody take off his thumb?" Uncle Billy asks me. I shake my head no. He lays down his fishing rod, cups his left hand over his right thumb, and he lifts it up, carrying his thumb with it. I have never seen anything so amazing in my life. He puts his thumb back, opens his hands and wiggles the thumb.

"Good as new," he says.

"How'd you do that?" I ask
. He replies with a wink. I look over at Alice. She's grinning from ear to ear.

I'll bet she could take off her thumb, too, if she wanted.

I think about thumbs while we fish, which is mainly sitting and not doing anything. The silence is comforting because you don't have to come up with anything not-stupid to say and there's really no way to mess up sitting there with a fishing pole. At this moment, I'm as good a fisherman as anybody in Meddersville. My mind drifts. I think about thumbs. I know that there's no way to take one off without ripping out muscles and tendons and spilling a lot of blood, but I've just seen Uncle Billy do it. It must be a trick, but how did he do it? I can't figure that. My mind drifts.

Pretty soon I look over and see Uncle Billy fishing with his eyes closed, and snoring. Alice and I smile at one another
. I can hear the gears grinding in her head. What can we do while Uncle Billy's asleep, that isn't
too
wrong but that we'd never do under
proper adult supervision
? (That's a phrase Alice used once. She got it from a pack of firecrackers.)

While we're looking at one another and smiles are creeping across our faces, we see headlights not far away, a car driving
up to the lake. It drives slowly, the headlights bouncing because the ground is rutted. Sometimes they light up the ground and sometimes the trees. It's a police car, but the lights on top aren't flashing. If it was an ordinary car we'd think that somebody else was coming fishing, but a police car in the dark of night, that's weird.

We look at Uncle Billy
. At the exact same instant, we let our poles drop to the ground. We run to investigate.

We run through the willows and oaks and scrub brush that line the
lake. When we get close to the police car, we hunker down and walk slow, like Indians on TV. If we had face paint, we'd darken our eyes and put stripes on our cheeks, it was that kind of a sneaky thing we were doing.

We creep around as silent as snakes until we can see the police car real clearly. There's nobody inside that we can see. They've already gotten out. They've left a spotlight on, pointed toward the
lake. We can't see anybody. Alice is about to sneak up closer when I hear something near the edge of the lake. It's somebody crying.

We get down on our hands and knees and crawl over to the
sound. My heart is beating hard. I would have gone back but Alice leads the way, fearless. I follow like a duckling follows its mother. I'm ready to turn and run and scream at the top of my lungs at any moment, no matter what anybody thinks, if anything happens. I'm not going to be one of those people who stands there going "Uh, uh, uh" while the psycho killer chops them up with a machete. If I'm going to die, I'm going to make some noise first.

We get to the last bit of scrub brush before the edge of the
lake and we see who's crying. Even in the near-dark we can see the police uniform. Alice nudges me and I almost yell.

"That's Sheriff Morse," she says. "What the hell's he doing out here? And why's he crying?" I haven't heard Alice curse before so she's pretty surprised.

Sheriff Morse clasps his face in his hands and keeps on sobbing. He's all hunched over, crouching in the mud beside the lake like his legs have given out on him, the sobs coming out of him like he's throwing them up. I've never seen a grownup cry before, although I've seen my mother with tears flowing down her cheeks, but even then she smiled up at me and said, "Hi, Ethan." What Sheriff Morse is doing is something else. Watching him is like watching somebody bleed to death, the blood flowing out between their fingers and there's nothing they can do to stop it. I tug at Alice's shirt.

"Let's go," I say. I expect her to glare at me and say, "No, let's get closer." But she's shaken up, too. She doesn't know what to make of this, of seeing the sheriff in his uniform sitting in a heap, crying like there's no tomorrow.

She doesn't say a word, but she shoves past me and we creep away until it seems like we're in the clear. Then we get to our feet and run like the dickens back to where Uncle Billy is still asleep, his back to a willow, dreaming some dream that makes him smile.

* * *

We fish until midnight. We catch a few fish but throw most of them back because they're too small. "Everybody gets to make a few mistakes when they're young," says Uncle Billy. "If they keep biting the hook after they've got a few years on them, it's their own fault."

We pack up and head home with a couple of fish big enough to have known
better inside a foam ice chest. We don't say anything to Uncle Billy about seeing the sheriff. I don't know how it would have gotten us into trouble but you never know.

"Generally speaking," Alice says (I don't know any other kid who says "generally speaking"), "when you see a grownup do something you don't understand, it's best to keep your mouth shut about it. Maybe it'll turn out to be nothing at all. But if it's
something
and you saw it, whoa boy, look out!"

Aunt Flo is still awake when we get home. We can see her shadow on the curtains in the front window as we drive up. I guess she hears the car in the driveway because her face, all pinched and worried, appears in the window. I don't understand the look on her face, like we were getting back from hunting tigers and we're lucky to have gotten back alive, and not just fishing. She
peers out at us from behind the curtain like a nosy neighbor. I hear Boo inside the house, barking like mad. Pretty soon Aunt Flo opens the door and Boo is all over us, barking and jumping on us so much that it's hard to get to the front door.

Aunt Flo
hurries us inside like it was about to rain poison. She chatters, fussing over us and asking me how I liked fishing and exclaiming over the fish we caught. That is so unlike Aunt Flo, even though I hardly know her, that it unsettles me. Alice notices, too, but she knows what it means, apparently, when her mother talks too fast about nothing in particular. I figure she'll clue me in when the time is right.

"Bring those fish into the kitchen and help me clean them, Bill," she says.

"What, now?" says Uncle Billy. His face looks like she'd just told him to paint himself purple.

"Now," says Aunt Flo. "You kids run upstairs to bed."

We start upstairs. Aunt Flo and Uncle Billy disappear into the kitchen with Boo on their heels, his nose following the cooler of fish. Alice halts halfway up. She gestures for me to be quiet. We tiptoe back down the stairs and take up positions just outside the kitchen door.

"Did they find her body?" Uncle Billy says.

Alice silently mouths the name "Perla Ingram" to me.

"Just her Girl Scout uniform, at the truck stop.
All of her clothes. Just lying there in a heap."

"That poor girl, after all she went through. I don't know why fate picks on some people like that."

"It was no chance accident, Billy. Whoever molested that girl wanted to shut her up."

"It doesn't make any sense, Flo. She hasn't said a word about it for a month.
Everybody all over her, poking and prodding, and still not a word. I don't know why she'd start now. That psychiatrist said she probably didn't even remember. She's got it blocked out."

"Memories come back, over time," says Aunt Flo. "A man who'd do that to a young girl, he wouldn't think twice about killing her, just on the chance that she'd speak out one day."

"Well, she's with the Lord now, Mama."

"It's a damn shame, that's what it is. If this was the city they'd have caught him a month ago and thrown him in prison. Sheriff Morse
...
hff
! You might as well put the cat on the case. Or old Boo."

"He's only human, Flo. He does what he can. Cases like these go on for years. You can bet he's taking it hard."

"You wouldn't think that way if it was your own daughter. You'd be screaming bloody murder if it was Catherine or Alice who was murdered."

"Now, Mama.
There's no body. We don't know for sure."

"You know it's true."

"Well, maybe so, maybe so. But still—"

"I practically came to get you, thinking of you out there in the dark with those kids and some maniac on the loose. Promise me no more night fishing until this
... this
asshole
is caught, Bill!"

Alice and I whip our heads around and look at one another with our mouths hanging open. We can't believe she just used that word!
This one so utterly un-Flo-like word chills me more than all the talk of murder.

"I hardly think there's any call for that," Uncle Billy says. "We can't hide under the covers just because—"

"Promise me!"

"All right, Mama, all right."

"Promise!"

"I promise."

"And you'll help me keep an eye on Alice and the boy. Don't let them out of our sight for an instant!"

"Of course."

"I mean it, Bill!"

"I promise, Mama."

We hear chairs scraping on the floor. Alice grabs my arm and runs for the stairs. We scurry into the bedroom and dive onto the bed.

"Did you hear what he said, about keeping an eye on us every instant?" she says.

"Uh-huh."

She puts her hands behind her head and stares up the ceiling, pouting.

"This summer just got a whole lot less fun," she says, "all because of Perla Ingram."

"And the maniac," I say.

"Yeah," she says, "him, too."

I WANT TO
buy a present for Alice.

Aunt Flo and I are in the dime store. It's been more than a week since
Perla Ingram disappeared and her clothes found in the alley.

Her disappearance and presumed murder are all anybody talks about. Everybody has a theory. Everybody thinks it was the same person who did something else horrible to her a month ago, but they don't agree on who that is. The sheriff's department is saying it was a "transient," which is what they call bums. But that would be weird, that somebody would just wander through and hurt a girl and then wander through again a month later and kill her. Everybody thinks it's somebody in town, a local, and that has them scared out of their wits. They can't make any sense of it, that somebody they all know and live with and who goes to the same church as them might be a killer of little girls.

After they're through talking about who killed Perla, they talk about Mr. and Mrs. Ingram and the rest of the Ingram kids.