Project Sweet Life (9 page)

Needless to say, Curtis said this last part without any irony whatsoever.

The following Monday I was eating a late breakfast of leftover Cap’n Crunch pancakes when my mom asked when I was leaving for work.

“Uh, I have the day off,” I said. According to my “schedule,” I didn’t really have the day off. But I was getting tired of lying to my parents, and for some reason this lie-within-a-lie seemed somehow less serious.

As my mom was sorting through recipes, I noticed the front page of the newspaper. It had a big story:
Local woman receives reward for capturing bank robbers
.

Mildred Shelby
, the article read,
the 76-year-old woman
who provided the information leading to the July 11th arrest of two robbers of the University Place branch of Capitol American Bank, received her just reward yesterday—a check for one hundred thousand dollars, given by the bank’s national headquarters, in accordance with a long-standing policy to thank those who thwart robberies.

It was the very end of July, almost three weeks after we’d solved the mystery of the bank robbers, and the lady who had taken the credit for it was finally getting her reward. There was even a photo of the old biddy smiling and accepting the check just outside the bank branch.

I brought the newspaper with me to the bomb shelter.

“She did it!” I said. “She finally got the reward money.”

We were back to having furniture—a couple of folding chairs lifted from Curtis’s garage and a lumpy, ratty couch that had been cast off by a house six blocks away and carried by us all the way to the bomb shelter just the day before.

“Who did it?” Victor said. “Who did what?”

I flung the newspaper at him. “Mrs. Shelby.”

Victor didn’t even glance at the newspaper. “Who’s
that?” he said, sitting back against the couch. It squeaked like a dying pig.

“The woman who took credit for our solving the Capitol American bank robberies!” I said.

Curtis, on the other half of the couch, said, “Bank robberies? What bank robberies? I don’t know anything about any bank robberies.”

Even now, Curtis and Victor were still pretending the fiasco with the bank robbers had never happened.

“Look,” I said, “you can ignore this all you want. But the fact is,
we
solved that bank robbery.
We’re
the ones who put the pieces together, and
we’re
the ones who almost got ourselves killed! Mrs. Shelby just happened to overhear us talking. Sure, she called the police, but anyone could have done that. And the only reason she got the reward was because she lied and didn’t tell anyone what we did. That hundred-thousand-dollar reward is rightfully ours—and she’s living
our
sweet life with it!”

Neither Curtis nor Victor said anything. They just sat there on the couch staring stubbornly in opposite directions. Meanwhile, I stared stubbornly at
them
.

Finally, Victor said, “I feel something.”

Aha!
I thought. I had finally lit a fire under Victor’s
butt. Now maybe we’d
do
something about the fact that Mrs. Shelby had basically stolen our money.

Curtis looked over at Victor. “What do you feel?”

“I’m not sure,” he said hesitantly. “But…”

Suddenly Victor leaped up off the couch, slapping himself on the chest and thighs.

Wow!
I thought. I really had lit a fire under Victor’s butt!

“Saint Pestilencia!” he swore. “This couch has
fleas
!”

“It does not,” Curtis said. “A couch can’t have—”

But then Curtis lurched up from the couch, shaking and scratching himself all over. Just watching them flail and jerk made me itch too.

“Do you think we’d have a couch with fleas if we’d gotten that reward money?” I said. “These fleas are Mrs. Shelby’s fault! Those are
Mrs. Shelby’s fleas
!” I didn’t like hitting Curtis and Victor when they were down, but I figured I had a point.

Finally, when Curtis and Victor had slapped and shaken all the fleas off, Curtis reached for the newspaper article. He shook it for more fleas, then read it.

“That
is
our money,” he said at last.

“I know!” I said.

“So let’s go ask her for it,” he went on.

I don’t know what I had expected Curtis to say, but this wasn’t it.

“For the money?” Victor said. “Oh, like
that’s
really going to work.”

“Why not?” Curtis said. “
She
knows she didn’t really solve that bank robbery, and she knows that
we
did. So I say we go talk to her.”

“And say what?” Victor said. “‘Give us your hundred thousand dollars’?”

“No,” Curtis said. “I know she wouldn’t do that—and we don’t need it all anyway. I say we ask her for seven thousand dollars. Just what we need for Project Sweet Life.”

“It’ll never work,” Victor said. “We already know exactly what kind of person she is from the fact that she didn’t speak up before. She won’t give us a cent.”

“So what?” I said, warming to Curtis’s idea. “Even if she doesn’t give us any money, at least we’ll be able to confront her and say we know the truth.”

Victor considered it.

“
Fleas
, Victor,” Curtis said. “She has us sitting in a couch infested with fleas!”

At that, even Victor nodded. “Let’s go see Mrs. Shelby.”

It was easy to look up Mrs. Shelby’s address online. She lived nearby, so we rode our bikes over there. The house was a modest two-story with a row of fish-scale shingles up in the gable and a flat-roofed carport rather than a garage off to one side. The sides of the front porch made up a wooden trellis on which a spindly-looking clematis grew.

We parked our bikes just outside the little picket fence and walked right up to the door.

It took her a long time to answer. The door creaked open, and the little old lady from the greasy spoon stared out at us. She had white hair and smelled of rosewater.

“Yes?” she said in her frail sweet-little-old-lady voice. She hadn’t recognized us yet.

We didn’t say a word, just looked at her.

She looked at us.

And then she smiled, an evil little twitch at the corner of her mouth. Her face changed too, right before our eyes. Her crow’s feet suddenly got deeper, and her nose became more beaked.

Oh, she definitely recognized us!

“What do
you
want?” she said, but it wasn’t a real question. It was a taunt.

“You know what we want,” Curtis said evenly.

“No,” she said. “I honestly have no idea.”

“Money. Part of the reward. Not all of it. Just seven thousand dollars.”

She kept looking at us.

We kept looking at her.

Then she laughed, an evil cackle.

“You’re joking, right?” she said.

We were sort of taken aback, not by her words so much as the harshness of her laugh.

“We’re not joking at all,” Curtis said, recovering his cool. “You know what really happened that day. You know that reward money isn’t really yours.”

“Oh?”

“Please, Mrs. Shelby!” I said. “It’s only fair.”

She looked at me, and her face got very serious.

“In that case,” she said, “let me give you something that is worth even more than seven thousand dollars.”

This got all of our attention. “Yes?” I said.

“It’s a piece of advice: The world ain’t bloomin’
fair
!”

With that, she slammed the door in our faces.

None of us said anything for a second. Then I said, quietly, “Well, that was very frustrating.”

“What a witch,” Victor said. “You’d never know it by looking at her, but that woman is truly a witch.”

“Forget it,” I said. “Forget her. I’m sorry I even read that newspaper article. Let’s go back to pretending that whole thing with the bank never happened.”

But this time, we couldn’t forget. The three of us barely said anything that afternoon, even when we rode our bikes over to Chambers Creek and hiked the greenbelt that ran alongside the stream. I knew we were all thinking about Mrs. Shelby and the hundred-thousand-dollar reward, even in the quiet cool of that pine-scented forest.

Sure enough, Curtis finally stopped on the trail and said, “I can’t stop thinking about it!”

“Me too,” Victor said.

“Me too,” I said.

“That hundred thousand dollars is rightfully ours,” Curtis said.

Victor and I both nodded. I had a notion that Curtis was going somewhere with this. But it didn’t scare me like his ideas sometimes did. On the contrary, it excited me.

“So…” Curtis said. “Why shouldn’t it
be
ours?”

Victor glanced at the forest around us, at the lush ferns and ripening salmonberry bushes. We were alone as could be.

“What are you saying?” Victor whispered. “That we should steal it from her?” But he didn’t sound horrified like I might have expected.

“Not all of it,” Curtis said quietly. “Let her keep most of her blood money. But what’s to stop us from taking a small part of it? That’s only fair, don’t you think?”

It
did
seem only fair. She had basically stolen that money from us; how could it be wrong to take some of it back?

“How small a part?” Victor said.

“Oh, I’d say about the seven thousand dollars we asked her for,” Curtis said. “Or something
worth
seven thousand dollars. That seems about right.”

The moment Curtis said those words, time seemed to stop. Victor didn’t twitch nervously like I would have expected him to, and even the birds in the trees seemed to stop singing. Seven thousand dollars did seem appropriate. But this was clearly illegal—something we had all agreed Project Sweet Life would never do. Still,
while what we were planning was definitely illegal, it wasn’t necessarily wrong.

Lost in the stillness of the forest, we stared wordlessly at one another. Why would we even consider doing this risky, illegal thing? I could tell that we all wanted to do it—maybe even
needed
to. But why? There was something none of us was saying, something we were all feeling but that we didn’t fully understand yet.

At that point, all we knew for sure was that Mrs. Mildred Shelby had seven thousand dollars that was rightfully ours and that the three of us were going to get it from her by pulling off the perfect crime.

First, we needed to survey the scene. The next day, Tuesday, we rode back to Mrs. Shelby’s neighborhood. We locked our bikes several blocks away and walked down her street to look around.

“That’s it,” Curtis whispered, pointing to a tree in a neighbor’s yard.

We quickly scrambled halfway up the tree and carefully built something called a tree diaper. The branches of most fir trees are very elastic, and they grow in even rings around the trunk. You make a tree diaper, which
is a kind of tree house, by taking a row of branches and bending them upward, then tying them off with rope to the base of the next ring of branches overhead. Once you’ve fastened the branches in place, you’ve created a sort of pouch around the trunk—a “diaper”—with a space inside that you can crawl up into. Assuming you picked a mid-size fir with lots of foliage, the tree diaper, buried within the other branches, is completely invisible from the ground, and no one can see whoever’s inside. But once inside, you can see out fine. With the addition of a board or two to sit on, it makes the perfect viewing space.

“Three days,” Curtis said. “Studies show that’s the minimum amount of time it takes to get a sense of the rhythms and patterns of a person’s life. If everything is mostly the same for three days, chances are high that it will be the same on the fourth day too, which is when we’ll strike.”

“Impressive,” Victor said.

So for the next three days, my friends and I hid in that diaper, watching Mrs. Shelby’s house.

We watched hummingbirds feed on her dahlias while her cat stalked bumblebees on the front lawn. We spotted
two Frisbees, one red and one green, that had been lost on her roof. We saw how the postal carrier staggered under the weight of her daily mail, and how UPS never seemed to miss her house (for some reason, Mrs. Shelby got a lot of packages).

I admit I got bored after a while—so bored that I started spying on the rest of the neighborhood too. One woman did hair in her front room, for example, and there was a white plumber’s van parked in front of the house across the street that had a Zone 1 parking sticker on its back fender.

No one could see us in that tree, including any passing family members, so we could finally relax for the first time in weeks. And I had my two best friends to keep me company.

At the end of those three days, we had learned absolutely everything we needed to know to pull off our crime. So, on the evening of that third day, we simply untied the branches of that tree and—
presto
! It was as if our perfect hiding place had never even existed.

The next day, we struck.

It was a perfect summer day. The clouds of July were
but a memory, and the stifling heat of mid-August had yet to arrive. It was late afternoon, and both the light and the breeze were as gentle as the butterflies that fluttered in Mrs. Shelby’s flowers.

We didn’t dress in black, and not just because we weren’t going in at night.

“If we really want to be invisible to people,” Curtis had said the night before, “we need to wear a uniform of some sort. Studies show that people see the uniform, but they never notice the person wearing it.”

“Impressive,” Victor had said.

So we’d all agreed to wear the same thing: navy shorts, blue short-sleeved shirts, and baseball caps. And
presto
! We were teenage window washers. Even though none of us had ever been fingerprinted, we made a point to wear yard gloves, since who knew when we
might
be fingerprinted?