The Boys Start the War (3 page)

“D
id you
see
that?”

Wally crouched on the balcony beside his brothers and stared.

At first it seemed as though the two older girls were dragging a sack of garbage, and then he saw that it was the girls’ youngest sister. Dead!
Obviously
dead.

Wally looked wordlessly at Jake, his mouth hanging open.
They
had only thrown a few dead fish and squirrels and possums. The new folks were throwing people!

The boys couldn’t hear across the river, of course, but they had studied the small girl lying there on the sheet and she hadn’t moved a finger. Not a toe. The sisters were crying like crazy, and then, like a burial at sea, they’d dumped her in the river.

“I don’t believe it!” said Jake hoarsely.

“In the
river!”
said Josh.

They sat with their eyes glued to the spot in the water where the body had disappeared. The body sank way down and did not come up again, and the two sisters were walking slowly back up the hill toward the house, arms around each other, heads down.

“They must have weighted her down with stones,” breathed Jake.

Wally’s throat was so dry, he could hardly get the words out. “What—what do you suppose she died of?” The answer, at the back of his mind, was too awful to say aloud.

“The—the water wasn’t
that
polluted,” murmured Josh.

“We only took over one bag of dead stuff,” said Jake.

“Anyone with a grain of sense wouldn’t drink that water or swim in a river with dead animals along the bank,” Josh added.

But what if she didn’t know? Wally wondered. What if she hadn’t seen? What if she’d gone swimming one day farther down and the germs had been carried along in the current?

“M-maybe one of those dead squirrels had a disease,” he suggested finally.

“Oh, man!” Josh rested his head in his hands. “Mom’s going to have a fit.”

“Well, we don’t
know
that the dead fish and
stuff killed her, so we aren’t going to tell,” Jake declared hoarsely, and looked around at the others. “Okay? You got it? Not a word to
anybody!”

“We can’t even tell Mom the girl died?” asked Peter.

“No! Nothing! We’ll wait to hear it from someone else.”

Wally glanced over at Josh. He’d brought along his sketchbook because he liked to draw what houses and trees looked like from above, Josh drew things in his sketchbook that most guys never thought of drawing, but the page in front of him now was blank, and Wally was glad. He didn’t want any evidence of what they had seen from the roof. If the girl had died because of what the boys had tossed on their bank, then Wally himself was a murderer because it had been his idea in the first place. He took a deep breath as he and his brothers climbed back inside.

The boys were sitting soberly around the kitchen table, wondering who would find the body first, when their mother came in the back door.

“Good grief, is this how you’re giving to spend your last few days of vacation—just moping about?” She laid her car keys on the counter and opened the refrigerator. She had just thirty minutes to eat lunch and get back to her job at the hardware store.

“We’ve been busy—just taking a break,” Josh told her.

“Busy doing what?” Mother asked.

Wally saw Jake give Peter a warning look. “Just messing around,” Jake said.

As she passed out the sandwiches, Mother added, “I would have thought you’d be across the river by now, getting to know that new family.”

“Fat chance,” said Josh. “They’re all girls.”

“Really?” Mother looked around the table. “Somehow I had the idea there were boys.”

“So did we,” Jake told her.

“How many girls?” Mother asked.

“Two, now,” Peter answered. “I mean three.
Three
girls!” He looked quickly at Jake.
“Three
girls, all right. I counted.”

Mother studied him curiously.

“Well, at least they have children,” she said, chewing thoughtfully. “It could have been worse. It could have been a family without any kids at all. I’d go over and make friends with them, if I were you.”

“We will,” said Jake, “when the Mississippi wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.”

Josh laughed a little, and so did Mother, but Wally found it hard to smile at anything. Could you go to jail for planning a murder even if you didn’t know anyone was going to die?

After Mother went back to work, the boys walked down to the river and followed it as far as the bridge. But they couldn’t see a trace of a body—not bobbing about on the surface, not floating just
beneath it, not caught in the roots of a tree or snagged on the branches that sometimes clogged the channel. The muddy water of the Buckman River moved lazily on, gracefully parting to make way for a rock here and there, then coming together again in its slow meander around the bend under the bridge.

When Father came home from work, Wally and his brothers were waiting for him on the steps. Mr. Hatford was a mailman in Buckman, and the boys knew that if anybody died anywhere at air in town, their father was one of the first to know.

“Hi, Dad,” said Josh as Father came up the walk.

Mr. Hatford’s shirt was damp, and he mopped his face with the small towel he carried over one shoulder in hot weather. The first thing he usually did when he got home was shower, but today he could scarcely make it into the house because the boys were blocking the steps.

“How y’doin’?” he said, maneuvering around them and going inside. The boys got up and followed him.

“Anything exciting happen today?” Jake inquired.

“I told Mrs. Blake I wouldn’t deliver her mail unless she kept her dog in the house,” Father said. “Almost got my pants torn off by that beast of hers. Other than that, no.”

“Anybody die?” asked Peter. Wally reached over and pinched his arm, but it was too late.

“Not that I know of. Why? Did I miss something?”

“I guess we’re getting bored,” Jake said quickly. “Nothing exciting ever happens around here.”

“Well, you could always go check out that new family,” Father suggested. “Mr. Malloy is the new football coach at the college, I hear, and they’ve got three daughters about your ages.”

“Did you meet them?” asked Josh.

“No, but I will before too long. Want me to say something for you?”

“No!” cried the four boys together.

Father smiled a little as he took off his shirt. “Okay, then. We’ll just let things develop and see what happens.”

What happens, Wally thought, is that someone’s going to find the body, and someone is going to ask questions, and
someone
—namely Wally himself—was going to jail. All because of two words. Two words!
Dead fish.
He swallowed, but it didn’t get rid of the rock in the pit of his stomach.

On the last two days before school started, it seemed to Wally that he and his brothers were up on the widow’s walk every waking moment, watching the new family through Mother’s field glasses. He
knew their name now: Malloy. Sometimes Mrs. Malloy came out to empty the trash. Sometimes Mr. Malloy drove off in his car. Once in a while Jake or Josh would catch a glimpse of the two older sisters, but the younger one was nowhere in sight.

“Do you suppose she’s
not
dead?” Wally asked hopefully. “Maybe they only thought she was dead, but the water revived her and she swam back to the bank.”

“So why haven’t we seen her around?” asked Jake. “Why do we see the two older sisters but we never see her?”

“She’s sick, maybe?” suggested Peter.

“No, she’s dead, all right,” said Josh. He had drawn a picture of what the youngest Malloy girl would look like after being dead in the river for several days. Wally wished he hadn’t drawn it, but Peter studied the picture with wide eyes.

If the Bensons were still here, Wally thought, they would have helped look for the body.
They
would have had some good ideas about where it could be. Then he remembered that if the Bensons were here, the Malloys would not be. What
would
he be doing if the Bensons were back?

Well, he decided, he and Bill Benson would probably have figured out by now what made the rows of little holes in the trunk of the pear tree. Sapsuckers, he had thought, but his friend had said bees. They had even been going to camp out all night and take turns watching, just to find out. Now
they never would. Now there were girls to watch instead.

Wally spent most of his time lying in the grass behind the house, staring up at the sky. Peter lay down beside him.

“Do you see that spiderweb, Wally?” Peter asked, pointing to the thin strands of silver spun between a forsythia bush and a lilac. “Do you suppose the spider spins the cross ones first or the down ones?”

Wally often wondered that himself. “I think,” he said, looking hard at the web, “that the spider sort of goes across and down at the same time—just drifts down hanging by a thread. Pretty clever, when you—”

“And if the thread breaks, splat!” said Peter delightedly, whapping one hand on the ground.

Wally sighed.

Usually there was at least
some
excitement connected with going back to school in the fall. This year Mother had bought them all new T-shirts and jeans, and Wally and Peter had picked out new sneakers as well. But the boys hadn’t put paper in their notebooks yet. They hadn’t even sharpened their pencils. The big question among the boys was what they would say to the girls when the two remaining Malloy sisters walked across the bridge the next day on their way to school.

Mother didn’t come home for lunch, so Jake
made beans and franks. “Why don’t we watch from an upstairs window tomorrow, and when we see them start across the bridge, we’ll time it so we get out to the road when they do. I just want to hear what they have to say about their sister,” he said.

“What if they don’t say anything?” Wally asked. “We don’t even know their names. We can’t just say, ‘Hey, so-and-so, how’s what’s-her-name?’”

“We could say, ‘How is the sister we saw rolled up in a bedsheet?’” Peter suggested. Josh shot him a disgusted glance, and Peter went back to lining the beans up in rows on his plate, then stabbing them three at a time with his fork.

The following morning Jake and Josh crouched at an upstairs window, watching the bridge. Peter, with his new lunch box, waited below.

Wally, however, was still dressing. As he put on his new sneakers, he realized that the treads were so deep, he couid probably roll up a tiny piece of paper and stick it in a groove without it falling out. If he ever had to carry a secret somewhere, and there was any danger of being searched, he could always wear a new pair of sneakers and—

“They’re coming!” Josh yelled.

Like a whirlwind the twins rushed downstairs; where Peter was waiting. With Wally bringing up the rear they all went outside.

The two older Malloy sisters, wearing jeans and long shirts down to their knees, were walking arm
in arm across the swinging bridge, leaning on each other, heads together, like two girls who had more sadness than they could possibly bear, Wally thought.

As they came closer, the Hatford brothers pretended to be looking down the road, at the sky, anywhere, in fact, except at the Malloys.