Spyhole Secrets (8 page)

T
wo important things happened in the next few days. The first was that somebody finally showed up again in the spyhole apartment. Hallie had been there for at least a few minutes on every school-day afternoon, but no one was ever there. It was almost as if Zachary and his family had suddenly moved away, leaving the bleak, bare-looking apartment looking even more lonely and desolate. But on Thursday, when Hallie’s attic time was nearly over, there she was again. Rapunzel.

It was another very hot day. Rapunzel was wearing a scoop-necked T-shirt and a short denim skirt, and her heavy hair was tied back off her neck. She burst into the room suddenly and immediately darted right to the window. Then, just like before, she stared down toward the avenue. But this time something had changed about her face. It took Hallie a moment to realize that it was mostly her eyes that looked different, red and wet-lashed and surrounded by dark
smudges that might be bruises—dark, smeary bruises around both of her tear-wet eyes.

Standing there at the window, so close Hallie almost felt as if she could reach out and touch her, the poor tragic Rapunzel stared at the avenue below, pressing her cheek to the glass. Her lips were moving, saying something—the same word, over and over again. Then she turned around and ran out of the room.

Hallie stayed at the spyhole awhile longer, trying to move her own lips in the same way. Trying to find out if Rapunzel could have been whispering “Tony, Tony, Tony.”

That was it, all right. That was exactly what she’d been saying. Sitting there on the trunk, sweating in the dusty, airless heat, Hallie thought about the poor imprisoned princess and her forbidden love. She practiced saying “Tony, Tony, Tony” over and over again in a despairing voice. She stayed there quite a while, pretending to be a poor tragic princess, wishing her hair were long and blond instead of short and brown. She might have stayed even longer if it hadn’t been for the heat.

The second more or less important development happened the very next day, when Hallie left school a little bit later than usual because she happened to run into Erin and Jolene on her way out of the building.

They both squealed when they saw her, and Erin yelled, “Hallie, where have you been? We’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh yeah?” Hallie slowed down. “What’s up?”

Erin giggled some more before she said something that sounded like “We need to ask you something.”

It was hard to know for sure because at the same moment Jolene was giggling and saying, “You know, for our gossip column.”

Hallie was in a hurry but she stopped to listen. The gossip column in the weekly school newspaper had been Jolene’s idea, but Hallie had agreed to help with the writing, because, as Erin put it, “you’re the best writer in our whole class.”

But when Hallie asked what they wanted her to write, they said they only wanted to ask her a question for a poll they were taking.

“Okay. So what do you want to ask me?” Hallie said.

It turned out that the question they were researching at the moment was—giggle, giggle, giggle—who else in their class was in love with Jason Johnson, besides both of them.

Hallie said she didn’t think she could be much help on that one, except that she herself wasn’t, so they could cross her off their list. It was easy to see that Erin and Jolene were disappointed. Hallie thought of adding that personally, she thought Jason Johnson was a conceited jerk, but she decided against
it. She finally managed to get away by saying she had to go because she had an important errand to run on her way home.

The errand Hallie had in mind was one she’d been doing every day lately, which was checking the library to see if Zachary was there. So far there had been no sign of him. And today after spending so much time with Erin and Jolene, she almost didn’t bother to stop. But in the end she did, and there he was at his old spot, surrounded by his usual stack of books. Hallie felt a breath-catching relief to see the funny little nerd sitting there looking the same as always—followed by an urge to tease him a little to get even with him for making her worry. She picked up a book to pretend to be reading before she pulled out the chair across from him, sat down, and whispered, “Hi. How’s the witch-doctoring business?”

He looked up quickly and then, without smiling at all, he said, “Oh, it’s you. I’ve been wanting to see you.”

Hallie grinned. “Well, that’s a coincidence. I’ve been wanting to see you too.”

Still not smiling, he tipped his head to one side and solemnly asked, “Why?”

Hallie laughed out loud. “Hey,” she said. “You said you wanted to see me first, so I get to ask why first. Why
did you
want to see
me?”

He nodded. “All right. I wanted to see you to ask you some more questions about dreams. Sometimes dreams are very important.”

For a split second Hallie didn’t know what he was talking about. Then she remembered how she’d told him about dreaming a kind of Rapunzel story about his big sister. “Oh yeah,” she said, “about my dreams.” She paused and then went on cautiously, “You mean my dream about Rapunzel?”

He nodded and then shook his head. “About my sister,” he said. “About Tiffany. I wanted to know how you could be dreaming about someone you didn’t even know, so I’ve been looking on the Internet to find out about psychiatrists who study dreams. I found out about psychiatrists like …” He picked up a couple of the books and showed them to her. One of them was
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
by Carl Jung, and the other was
The Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud.

“Wow,” Hallie said. “Can you understand that stuff?”

Zachary stared at one of the books and then at the other. “No,” he said, frowning thoughtfully. “Not yet. But I’m going to.”

Hallie was opening her mouth to say “Yeah, I’ll bet,” when she suddenly gulped and shut it again.
Wow
, she was thinking,
he said “Tiffany.” So her real name is Tiffany.
For just a split second she felt disappointed. The name wasn’t right. Rapunzel shouldn’t have a faddish modern name like Tiffany. It ought to be something with a fairy-tale sound to it, like Aurora or Elsbeth.

But at the same time, she felt good about making such an important discovery. Triumphant even. So triumphant she forgot to watch what she was saying. “Tiffany,” she murmured. “Tiffany Crestman.” The moment she said “Crestman,” she remembered that it had been the librarian who let Zachary’s last name slip. Zachary had never told her, had refused to tell even when she came right out and asked him. And sure enough, he was giving her a narrow-eyed stare.

“You said
‘Crestman,’”
he said. “How did you know our last name?”

Hallie cast about frantically for a good answer and came up with a pretty unbelievable one. “I—I don’t know,” she stammered. “I guess it was a part of my dream.”

Zachary’s eyes got even narrower. “You dreamed our last name?”

Swallowing a smile, Hallie nodded firmly. “Yes,” she said. “I guess I must have. How else would I have found out what it was? I mean, you wouldn’t tell me.”

Zachary got out a notebook and pencil, opened the notebook to a new page, and smoothed it down carefully. “Okay. Tell me about the dream,” he said. “The one that had ‘Crestman’ in it.”

“Well, all right. The Crestman dream.” Hallie rolled her eyes, trying to look as if she were deep in thought, when what she was really doing was looking for some way to change the subject—or for somebody
who might change it for her. Like the grumpy old man who had made them stop talking, or maybe Mrs. Myers. There was no sign of the old man, but the librarian was a definite possibility.

Raising her voice to an unlibrarylike pitch, she went on, “I had that dream just last night. I was dreaming about this tower where the princess lives and down at the bottom of the tower was a knight in armor.”

“A knight?” Zachary asked. “On horseback? Was the knight on a horse?”

Hallie shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember a horse. But I was in the dream and I went up to the knight and asked him if I could see the princess, and the knight had this magical scroll with a lot of names written—”

Someone tapped Hallie on the shoulder. She looked up to see Mrs. Myers bending over her and whispering, “Could you two keep it down a little?”

“Oh, okay. We’re sorry,” Hallie said. But inside she was saying
Whew! Just in time.
And it really was. She hated to leave before it was her turn to ask questions, but she knew she’d better cool it for the time being. Her Crestman dream was definitely getting out of control, and she had a feeling Zachary knew it.

She was standing and picking up her book when Zachary reached out and took hold of it. “Wait,” he mouthed. Then he tore off a part of the page he’d
been writing on and handed it to her. On the page in fat, primary-grade cursive he had written
I DON’T THINK SO
.

Hallie gave him an indignant frown, but he didn’t frown back. Instead he just went on looking at her with his strange superfocused stare. After a minute her frown started changing into a grin. Turning the page over, she wrote
OKAY, YOU WIN. I DON’T THINK SO EITHER
.

Zachary smiled, grinned actually. He nodded and she nodded back. Then she grabbed the paper again and wrote
OKAY
.
HOW DO
YOU
THINK I FOUND OUT?

At first Zachary only shrugged and shook his head. Then his smile disappeared and his funny, pointed face suddenly scrunched into a pitiful hangdog look that reminded Hallie of Zeus when he was feeling really unhappy. After he’d stared accusingly at Hallie for a long moment, he bowed his head until Hallie couldn’t see his face and began to write. Began to write slowly and stiffly as if he could hardly make the pencil move across the paper. It took a long time and it was, as Hallie noticed impatiently, even more impossible to read his wobbly cursive letters upside down than it was to read them right side up. When he finally finished writing, he sat staring at the paper for a long time before he slowly turned it around. What it said was I
THINK YOU READ IT IN THE NEWSPAPER.

Hallie glanced at what he had written and wrote READ WHAT?

Zachary took it back.
OUR NAME
he wrote.
IN THE NEWSPAPER
.

Hallie grabbed the paper and wrote
WHY? WHY DO YOU THINK

But before she finished writing she realized that Zachary was gone.

H
allie left the library feeling disappointed and frustrated. She’d finally found Zachary again and talked to him, but she’d come away without learning very much. It wasn’t until she was almost home that she began to ask herself why it mattered so much. Why exactly had she spent so much time looking for Zachary, and why did she need to know the answers to the questions she had been planning to ask him? After all, the weird little kid had nothing to do with her. It was, she decided, nothing more than simple curiosity. She was just curious about Zachary, and the rest of his family, too.

About Rapunzel—oops,
Tiffany—in
particular. Tiffany and her boyfriend, that is. She had to admit she was more than a little curious about them. Who wouldn’t be? Who wouldn’t want to know why a gorgeous teenage girl would stand at the window looking down at the street with bruised red eyes whispering “Tony, Tony, Tony”? And why would she
hang up the phone so quickly when she obviously thought it was Tony calling?

But Rapunzel/Tiffany wasn’t the whole story. There were a lot of other questions that Hallie wanted answers to. Questions about Zachary and his long-legged, angry-faced father. And now there was a new and even more mysterious question: Why would Zachary think she’d learned his last name by reading something about it in the newspaper?

What exactly had been in the newspaper, she wondered? What had the Crestman family done that reporters would have been interested in writing about? Thinking back to the angry scene she had watched from her spyhole, it occurred to Hallie that right at that particular moment something pretty awful might have been about to happen.

That night, after she’d finished her homework, she had some new stuff to add to her List of Facts. For instance:

At first, the library did look like her best bet. It seemed to Hallie that she’d read about detectives
looking stuff up in old newspapers. But as far as she could remember, the stories didn’t tell how they went about doing it. Especially if they didn’t know the exact date of the edition they were looking for. You might ask the librarian, of course, but probably not if you were a kid. And especially not if your local librarian already thought you were a real pest.

Hallie went to sleep that night without solving the newspaper problem. But the following Monday morning she stumbled on what might turn out to be the answer. An answer source that was always full of information. Her name was Erin.

It was lunch hour, and Hallie was eating at the same table with Erin and Jolene as usual. Erin had been carrying on about the results of the poll to find out how many girls in their class were in love with Jason Johnson.

She jumped up once and hurried across the room, and when she came back she opened a little notebook and wrote in it, a name with a number after it. “See that?” She was pointing to the number. “I just got Allison Anderson. That makes thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight.” Hallie laughed. “How can there be thirty-eight? There are only thirty people in the whole class, and half of them are boys.”

“Oh, it’s not just a class poll anymore. We’re doing, like, the whole school,” Jolene said.

“Yeah.” Erin’s blue eyes glittered with enthusiasm. “And then we’re going to do McPherson Middle
School too. And then maybe all the other schools in town.”

“Okay, okay,” Hallie said. “If anyone can do that, it would have to be you. After all, your mother knows everybody in—”

“Yeah, like, in the whole city.” Jolene got up from the table and took some coins out of her pocket. “Excuse me, everybody, I’m going to get some apple juice. Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a minute.”

But Hallie had stopped thinking about the Jason poll. What she was thinking now was that if anybody knew why the Crestman family had been mentioned in the local newspaper, it would have to be Erin Barlow.

“Everybody in Irvington.” Erin finished Hallie’s sentence for her. “Well, it’s true. My mother knows everybody in Irvington, and now that she’s on the city council and everything, she gets to meet important people all the time. Like last week, when—”

“Okay, okay,” Hallie interrupted her. “So what do you know about some people named Crestman?”

“Crestman?” Erin frowned. “I don’t remember hearing about—”

“They were in the paper,” Hallie said. “There was something about them in
The Irvington News.
Something bad, maybe. Like …”

Erin’s eyes had gone glittery again. “Like murder, maybe?” she asked.

“No. I don’t think it’s
that
bad,” Hallie said. “Just
something you wouldn’t want people to read about. If it were your family, I mean.”

Erin wrinkled her forehead and narrowed her eyes. She nodded slowly a few times before she said, “Oh yeah, I think I remember. I think that was the name of the man who robbed the National Bank. And he shot someone too. Like maybe a guard or something. Yeah, that was his name. Crestman.”

Hallie couldn’t help gasping. Her mind was racing. She felt shocked, horrified, and then, watching Erin’s jittery eyes, suddenly suspicious. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Erin nodded confidently. “Yeah, I’m sure. Crestman. That was his name. It was in
The Irvington News.”

Right about then Jolene came back with her apple juice. “Crestman?” she asked. “Are the Crestmans in the newspaper again? What is it this time?”

“You know the Crestmans?” Hallie asked.

“I don’t know them, but a man named Richard Crestman used to work where my dad did. But then this Crestman guy’s wife got a divorce and there was like a big fight over who was going to get to keep the kids and the house. Stuff like that.”

“That must be it,” Hallie said. “Was it in the paper?”

Jolene nodded. “Yeah. My dad was reading about it in the paper when he told us about this guy he kind of knew from work.”

“When was that?” Hallie asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Not long ago.” Jolene was looking at Hallie curiously. “Why do you want to know about the Crestmans? Do you know them?”

Hallie shook her head. “No, not really. I just heard someone talking about them. He said they lived somewhere around here. Do they? Do you know where they live?”

Jolene shook her head. “Don’t ask me. Somewhere in Irvington, I guess.”

Erin was poking Jolene impatiently. “Come on, Jolene,” she kept saying. “Let’s go poll Mr. Hardison’s class.”

As they started off Erin looked back over her shoulder. “I still say there was a murder. My mother knows all about it.”