Sanctuary (6 page)

“Not nothing,” Douglas said. “Tell me.”

I told him. I didn’t want to. All right, I did. But I shouldn’t have. Douglas has never been what you’d call well. I mean, he was always the one the other kids picked on in school, at the park, wherever. You know the kind. The one they call Spaz and Tard and Reject. I had spent much of my young adulthood pounding on the faces of people who’d dared to make fun of my older brother for being different.

And that’s all Douglas is. Not crazy. Not retarded. Just different.

When I was through, Douglas, who knows the truth about my “special ability”—but not about Rob; no one knows the truth about Rob, except for Ruth who is, after all, my best friend—let out a big gush of air.

“Whoa,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Those poor people,” he said, meaning the Thompkinses.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ve seen the daughter,” he said, meaning Tasha. “At the store.”

“Really?” Somehow I could not picture shy, pretty Tasha Thompkins, always so conservatively dressed, in Underground Comix, where Douglas worked.

“She’s into
Witchblade
,” Douglas elaborated. He seemed really concerned. I mean, for Douglas. “What did it look like, anyway?”

He had thrown me. “What did what look like?”

“The symbol,” Douglas said, patiently. “The one on Nate’s chest.”

“Oh,” I said. I went over to his desk and drew it, not very expertly, on a pad of paper I found lying there. “Like this,” I said, and handed it to him.

He took the pad and studied what I had drawn. When, after a minute, he continued to squint down at it, I said, “It’s supposed to be a gang symbol, or something. It only makes sense if you’re in the gang.”

“This isn’t a gang symbol,” Douglas said. “I mean, I don’t think so. It looks familiar.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Because you’ve probably seen it before, driving under the overpass. Somebody spray-painted it there.”

“I never go by the overpass,” Douglas said. Then he did something really weird. I mean weird for Douglas.

He got out of bed and started pulling books off his shelves. Douglas has more books—and comic books—than anyone I know. Still, if you wanted to borrow one, and took it down off the shelf and forgot to mention it to him, Douglas would notice right away it was missing, even though there are maybe a thousand other ones that look exactly like it right there on the shelf beside it.

Douglas is one of those book people.

Seeing that he was going to be occupied until well into the night, I left. I doubted he even noticed. He was way too absorbed in looking things up.

In my own room, I undressed quickly, slipping into my pajamas—a pair of fleece warm-up pants and a long-sleeved tee—with lightning speed. That is because my room, which is on the third floor, is the draftiest room in the house, and from Halloween until Easter it is freezing, in spite of the space heater my dad had installed.

I don’t mind the cold, however, because I have the best view of anybody from my bedroom windows, and that’s including Mike, whose view into Claire Lippman’s bedroom is what caused all that trouble a few months ago, when he decided to drop out of Harvard because he and Claire were in love. My view, which is from some dormer windows high above the treetops, is of all of Lumbley Lane, which in the moonlight always looks like a silver river, the sidewalks on either side of it mossy banks. In fact, when I’d been younger, I used to pretend Lumbley Lane was a river, and that I was the lighthouse operator, high above it… .

Whatever. I’d been a weird kid.

That night, as I undid Rob’s watch, which he’d given me a few months earlier, and which I wore like an ID bracelet, (much to the bewilderment of my parents, who thought it was a bit odd that I went around with this bulky man’s watch weighing my hand down all the time), I didn’t look down at the street. I didn’t pretend Lumbley Lane was a river, or that I was the lighthouse operator, guiding tempest-tossed ships safely to shore.

Instead, I looked across the street, into Tasha Thompkins’s bedroom window. The lights in her room were still on. She had probably heard the news about her brother by now. I wondered if she was stretched out on her bed, crying. That’s where I’d be, if I found out either of my brothers had been killed. I felt a wave of grief for Tasha, and for her parents. I didn’t know anything about gangs, but I thought that whoever had killed Nate couldn’t have known him all that well, because he’d been a nice kid. Smart, too. It was a waste. A real waste.

After a while, the front door to the Hoadley—I mean, Thompkins—house opened, and Dr. Thompkins, looking much older than when I had seen him earlier that evening, came out, wearing his coat. He followed the sheriff’s deputies to their squad cars, then got into one. I knew he was going to ID the body. At the front door, his wife stood watching him. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was crying, but I suspected she was. Two people stood on either side of her. Nate’s grandparents, I assumed.

Above them, I saw a curtain move. Tasha was standing in her window, looking down as the squad car with her father in it pulled away. I saw that Tasha’s shoulders were shaking. Unlike her mother, she was definitely crying.

Poor, shy, yearbook-committee-and-
Witchblade
-loving Tasha. There was nothing I could do for her. I mean, if I had known when his father had come over that Nate was in trouble, I might have been able to find him. Maybe. But it was too late, now. Too late for me to help Nate, anyway.

But not too late, I realized, to help his sister. How I was going to do that, I hadn’t the slightest idea.

All I could do was try.

Little did I know, of course, how my decision to help Tasha Thompkins was going to change my life. And the life of just about everybody in our entire town.

C H A P T E R
6

T
he next day, when Ruth told me some kid from her synagogue was missing, I didn’t make the connection. I had a lot on my mind. I mean, there was the whole thing with Nate Thompkins, of course. I hadn’t forgotten about my promise to myself that I was going to try to help Tasha, if I could.

There was something else, though. Something I’d dreamed about that had been, well, pretty disturbing. Not as disturbing as having your brother left for dead in a cornfield, but still wicked strange.

“Are you listening to me, Jess?” Ruth wanted to know. She had to talk pretty loudly to be heard over the Muzak in the mall. We were hitting the post-holiday sales. Hey, it was the Friday after Thanksgiving. There was nothing else to do.

“Sure,” I said, fingering a pair of hoop earrings on a nearby display rack. And I don’t even have pierced ears. That’s how distracted I was.

“They found his bike,” Ruth said. “And that’s it. Just his bike. In the parking lot. No other sign of him. Not his book bag. Not his clarinet. Nothing.”

“Maybe he ran away,” I said. The earrings, I thought, wouldn’t make a bad Christmas present for Ruth. I mean, Hanukkah present. Because Ruth was Jewish, of course.

“No way Seth Blumenthal is going to run away before his thirteenth birthday,” Ruth said. “He’s supposed to be having his bar mitzvah tomorrow, Jess. That’s what he was doing at the synagogue in the first place. Having his last Hebrew lesson before the big ceremony on Saturday. The kid is due to rake it in. No way would he take off beforehand. And no way would he leave his bike behind.”

This finally got my attention. Twelve-year-olds do not generally abandon their bikes. Not without a fight, anyway. And Ruth was right: She’d pulled in roughly twenty thousand dollars for her bat mitzvah. No way some kid was going to run away before making that kind of dough.

“You got a picture of him?” I asked Ruth, as she worked her way through a Cinnabon she was carrying around. “Seth, I mean.”

“There’s one in the temple directory,” she said. “I mean, it’s a shot of his whole family. But I can point him out for you, if you want.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Soon,” Ruth said to me. “You better take care of it soon. There’s no telling what might have happened to him. I mean, that gang might have gotten him.”

I rolled my eyes. I actually had to keep a eye out, because I’d spotted my mother and Great-aunt Rose—horror of horrors—going into JC Penney, and I wanted to be sure to avoid running into them. I was fairly certain that if Great-aunt Rose hadn’t been visiting, there’d have been no way my mom would be at the mall the day after one of her neighbors found out their kid was dead. But I suspected since the neighbor in question was the Thompkinses, my mom hadn’t dared risk a sympathy visit, since Great-aunt Rose would have insisted on coming along. And knowing Rose, she’d have started in about the darkies, or something equally appalling.

She was leaving on Sunday. Which might as well have been forever, it seemed so far away.

“If I get a piece of his clothing,” Ruth was asking me, “could you do that thing? You know, that thing you did with Shane? And Claire? Where you smel—”

She broke off with a cry of pain as I reached up and seized her by the back of the neck. She was so surprised, a piece of Cinnabon fell out of her mouth.

“I told you not to talk about that, remember?” I hissed at her. Over at Santa’s Workshop—the day after Thanksgiving was the day Santa arrived at our local mall—a bunch of moms looked our way, disapproving … probably because we were still young and weren’t saddled down with three whiny brats, but whatever. “The Feds are still following me around, you know. I bumped into Cyrus just last night.”

“Ow,” Ruth said, shrugging off my hand. “Leggo, you freak.”

“I mean it,” I said. “Just be cool.”

“You be cool.” Ruth adjusted her shirt collar. “Or try just being normal for a change. What is the matter with you, anyway? You’ve been acting like a freak all day.”

“Gee, I don’t know, Ruth,” I said, in my most sarcastic tone. “Maybe it’s just because last night I saw the mutilated body of the guy who used to live across the street lying mangled in a cornfield.”

Ruth curled her upper lip. “God,” she said. “Be a little gross, why don’t you?” Then Ruth looked at me a little closer. “Wait a minute. You aren’t blaming yourself over Nate’s death, are you?” When I didn’t reply, she went, “Oh my God. You
are
. Jess, hello? You didn’t kill him, okay? His little gang-bang buddies did.”

“I knew he was missing,” I said. Over at Santa’s Workshop some kid was screaming his head off because he was afraid of the mechanical elves building toys in the fake snow. “And I didn’t try to find him.”

“You knew he’d gone out for whipped cream,” Ruth corrected me. “And that he didn’t come back right away. You didn’t know he was being murdered. You couldn’t have known. Come
on
, Jess. Give yourself a break. You can’t be responsible for every single person on the planet who gets himself killed.”

“I guess not,” I said. I turned away from the sight of the mall Santa ho-ho-hoing. “Look, Ruth, let’s go home. You can show me that picture. So maybe if the bar-mitzvah boy really is missing, I can find him before he becomes crow fodder, the way Nate did.”

“Eew,” Ruth said. “Graphic much?” But she started heading toward the nearest exit.

Only not soon enough, unfortunately.

“Jessica!”

I turned at the sound of the familiar voice … then blanched.

It was Mrs. Wilkins. And Rob.

Just about the last two people—with the exception of my mom and Great-aunt Rose—I’d wanted to run into. Not because I wasn’t happy to see them. Let’s face it, when have I ever been unhappy about seeing Rob? That would be like being unhappy about seeing the sun come out after forty days and nights of rain.

But knowing what I knew now … what I’d learned overnight, as I slept, without consciously meaning to, and all because of that stupid picture I’d seen on Rob’s mother’s bedroom wall… .

“Hi, you guys,” I said, brightly, to cover up what I was really feeling, which was,
Oh, shit
. “Wow. Fancy meeting you here.” Again, among the most toolish of things to say, but I was trying to think fast.

Rob looked about as uncomfortable as I had ever seen him. This was on account of the fact that:

a)He was in a mall.

b)He was in a mall with his mom.

c)He had run into me there.

d)I was with Ruth.

Ruth and Rob are not among one another’s favorite people. In fact, I had only recently convinced Ruth to stop referring to Rob as The Jerk on account of him never calling me. Rob thought Ruth was an elitist Townie snob who looked down on non-college-bound people such as himself. Which in fact she was. But that didn’t make her a bad person, necessarily.

“Isn’t this funny,” Mrs. Wilkins said, with a happy smile. “I’ve been trying to convince Rob to let me take him to get measured for a tux for my brother’s wedding since … well, forever, it seems like. And today, when he picked me up after work, he finally agreed. So here we are. And here you are! Isn’t that funny?”

“It sure is,” I said, even though I didn’t think it was funny at all. Especially since Rob hadn’t said anything to me about having a wedding to attend. A wedding at which he might be expected to bring a date. Who by rights should be have been me. “I thought Earl was already married,” I said, to cover up my inner rage over Rob having never mentioned this before.