The Creek (2 page)

“One of you kids get that,” Mrs. Carson ordered, her attention firmly fixed on Baby Sam.

Penny leaped up to get the phone. “Hello?”

She held out the cordless phone. “It’s Mrs. Bukvic, Mom,” Penny said. Mrs. Bukvic lived across the street and was Amy’s mother.

Her mother sighed and said, “All right, bring me the phone.”

Penny sat back down and pretended to pay attention to her eggs. Her mother was trying to spoon some gross-looking food into Baby Sam’s mouth at the same time as she talked to Mrs. Bukvic.

“Hi, Betty Ann,” her mother said in a bright sort of voice, wedging the phone between her ear and shoulder. “Yes, it’s chaos here, as usual. How are things at work?” A pause and then, “You saw who? Caleb Devlin?”

Penny met Teddy’s eyes across the table. It
had
been him after all!

The stories flashed through her mind—the ones that were whispered on playgrounds at recess, between innings at softball games, at the bus stop before school. None of the kids knew all the exact details, but legend had it that Caleb was responsible for more than one mysterious death in the neighborhood. As if by some unspoken agreement, the parents refused to discuss it.

Their mother was saying, “Really, Betty Ann, I just can’t believe all that spooky stuff,” her voice trailing off into a whisper as she realized that Teddy and Penny were listening. “Let me call you back later, after I put the baby down. Okay? Great. ‘Bye.” Their mother switched off the phone and put it on the table, looking at Teddy and Penny.

“Uh, Mom,” Penny asked in a careful voice, “did Mrs. Bukvic say that Caleb was back?”

Her mother gave her a long look. “Penny, don’t let your superstitions run away with you. He’s just a boy.”

Penny shook her head firmly. “No way, Mom. Caleb’s really bad. Everyone says so.”

Teddy nodded in agreement. “Yeah, Mom, everybody knows that.”

Her mother shook her head, her straw-colored hair, long like a teenager’s, gleaming in the warm
kitchen light. At thirty-two, Mrs. Carson was younger than the other moms, and she was cool, as much as a mom could be cool.The kids who had working mothers, like Mac, jostled to hang out at the Carson house after school and drink the root beer floats she made. Her mother’s coolness was elevated by the fact that she sometimes played video games with them, and was pretty good at the driving ones.

“Yeah,” Penny said, pressing her point. “He must have done something for them to send him away.”

But her mother was already back to trying to feed Baby Sam. She elaborately flew a spoon of strained peaches toward the baby’s mouth, swooping it like an airplane. “I think Caleb got into a really bad fight with some boy,” she said distractedly, as if it was no big thing, as if being sent away to reform school was something that happened to kids every day.

“I knew it,” Penny said, feeling vindicated.

“Penny, it was a long time ago. And he was just a young kid then. Lots of boys get into fights.” She winked at Teddy. “Even you, young man.”

The ghost of a smile appeared on Teddy’s solemn face.

Her mother leaned forward and pushed the spoon gently against Baby Sam’s lips, but he just gave her a
gooey grin, mouth firmly shut. Nothing was getting past this kid.

“But, Mom, Caleb’s really dangerous!” Penny said.

Her mother looked at the baby in frustration, sat back, and pushed the hair off her forehead, clearly at wit’s end. “Do you remember when we were living in Philadelphia and that boy pulled a gun on us when we were doing the laundry?”

Penny nodded. They had been in the small, steamy Laundromat down the street from their third-story walk-up apartment. Her mother had been folding her father’s underwear when a skinny boy with a red knit cap had held a gun to her back and demanded all her money, especially quarters. Penny had wondered if he’d wanted quarters so that he could play pinball in the pizza parlor down the block.

“Now,
that
was dangerous. Nothing like that happens here. That’s why your dad and I decided to move here,” her mother said in a reassuring voice, absently stirring the baby food in the jar. “This is the suburbs, Penny.”

“But, Mom,” Penny insisted.

“People get spooked by the littlest things out here because it’s so safe. You have nothing to fear. It’s all silly talk.” Her mother expertly pushed a spoonful of
baby food into Sam’s mouth. The baby promptly spit it out, the chunk landing with a distinct wet splat on the tray table.

“But—” Penny said.

“Sam!” her mother cried.

“Mom!”

Her mother was frantically wiping up the baby food, a harried look on her face. “Listen, you two, people like to gossip, especially in small towns. They say bad things about other people. But that doesn’t always mean they’re true.You can’t believe everything you hear. Mrs. Devlin is very sick, and I’ll bet Caleb is just home to visit. I really don’t think his family needs to hear anything like this at such a time. So I don’t want to hear either of you spreading rumors about Caleb Devlin, all right?” She spoke too fast, her voice high, the way it always sounded when she was about to lose her temper.

“But even Mrs. Bukvic knows that Caleb is bad!”

Her mother sighed heavily. “Well, Mrs. Bukvic isn’t your mother, and I am. Got it?”

Baby Sam, sitting in his high chair, kicked his feet, diverting their mother’s attention back to the task at hand.

“All right, now. Let’s get your little brother fed
before he wastes away to nothing,” her mother said in a determined voice.

Penny thought that was pretty unlikely. Baby Sam resembled a plump pink piglet.

“Come on, now, be a good baby,” her mother begged. Baby Sam opened his mouth a crack, and her mother quickly shoved a spoonful of peach baby food into his mouth.

“Good baby!” Mrs. Carson clapped. She turned to Penny and Teddy and hissed, “Clap, you two. We have to encourage him.”

Penny and Teddy rolled their eyes and clapped, and Baby Sam, amused, smiled broadly.

“Good baby!” their mother said like a cheerleader.

Baby Sam hiccuped once and then, incredibly, barfed down the front of his bib and clean duck-yellow snuggly suit, across the short tray table, and all over the front of their mother’s white T-shirt, leaving a kaleidoscope of peach baby food and something that was green and smelled like old peas.

For a moment everything was quiet, and then Teddy broke the silence.

“That,” he said in awe, “was really cool.”

P
enny stepped out of the house. At that same exact moment, Amy Bukvic stepped out from her own front door across the street.

Amy was fourteen, a year and a half older than Penny, and she was wearing a pair of tight jeans and a top that accentuated her burgeoning chest. Her auburn hair was arranged in a deliberately casual style that brushed across her face, making her look mysterious and grown-up.

“Going to play with the boys?” she asked in a mocking voice.

Penny didn’t know what to say. That was exactly what she was going to do.

“Uh, yeah. Want to come? We’re gonna—”

Amy held up a finger. “Wait, don’t tell me.” She pretended to think very hard. “You’re going to build
a fort in the woods?”

“Right,” Penny said awkwardly. “Want to come?”

Acres of undeveloped woods ringed the houses of Mockingbird Lane on both sides, and it was here that the kids of the block built a tree fort every summer. Two years ago, Amy had helped with the fort herself. She had painted one of the walls pink, much to the boys’ collective dismay. Still, it had been fun.

Amy laughed. “You couldn’t pay me to play with those dirtball boys in the woods. When are you gonna grow up, huh, Penny? You’re so stupid.”

Penny felt tears prick at the back of her eyelids, felt the way her chest got tight. “I’m not stupid,” she said in a shaking voice.

Amy yawned widely and adjusted a lacy bra strap, as if she was too bored to respond.

“I’m not!” Penny whispered.

“Get lost,” Amy said with casual cruelty.

Penny turned and fled back into the house.

The creek curled and twisted like a lazy snake through the woods, and like a snake, it was deadly in places, with high cliffs overlooking the thin thread of muddy brown water and sharp stones. Elsewhere, it opened into broad flats that were filled with dry,
smooth stones, where the water swelled from bank to bank after a hard rain.

This year, it had been decided that the fort would be built on a stretch of low embankment overlooking the creek less than a hundred yards from the back of Mac’s house. The creek wound behind the left side of Mockingbird Lane, as you faced the cul-de-sac—the side Mac’s and Penny’s families lived on—before shooting off into the depths of the woods, where its banks grew increasingly steep and treacherous. A bunch of older boys had built a fort on this same location several years back, and it had been well known as a favorite place for make-out sessions. Rumor had it that Caleb Devlin had taken over the fort before being sent away.

The original support beams were still there, stretched perilously between three pine trees, almost fifteen feet up, hanging over the edge of the creek. It was every mother’s nightmare. The appeal was undeniable.

Penny stood there, looking at the beams high in the trees, wondering how much it would hurt if you fell from such a height. A lot, she decided.

“We need lumber,” Benji Albright said. Benji, who had sandy hair, a freckled face, and a huge gap between
his front teeth, was a scrapper, the first to dive in, to break a tooth, to bloody a nose. Both he and Mac had been in Penny’s homeroom, and it had seemed like the year had been one long fistfight.

“There’s some at the skeet range,” Mac said.

“How do we get it?” Benji asked.

“We steal it,” Mac said, like Benji was stupid.

“I don’t know,” Benji said.

“Well, I do, so shut up,” Mac said.

Mac was good at this sort of thing. Good at knowing when to sneak into the firing range to steal skeets, and when there were vacant houses in the neighborhood to explore. Last summer he had netted a huge box of pink bathroom tiles that had been left behind in a basement when a family up the block moved out. Not that tiles were good for much, but it was a score in any case. Petty theft was a skill.

Stealing aside, Penny was pretty sure that building a fort on the same spot as Caleb Devlin’s old fort was more than stupid, especially considering what she’d just heard at breakfast. It seemed like bad luck to her, like building on a haunted graveyard. Penny eyed the spot of the proposed fort warily. Dense limbs cast lacy shadows, and the air smelled green and mossy, with an undercurrent of decay from rotting wood. The ground
seemed darker around the trees, and there was something else, something she was having a harder time putting her fìnger on. And then it struck her.

There was nothing growing on the spot—no flowers, no wild ferns, not even the oniony sort of weed that grew everywhere in the dark, humid woods. Where were the birds? Why weren’t there any birds up in the trees? It didn’t make sense.

Unless, she thought suddenly, maybe the ghosts of Caleb’s victims were still here, lurking around, killing plants and scaring away animals. Bad things didn’t go away easily, Penny knew.

Penny was superstitious. She knocked on wood, always threw salt over her shoulder when it spilled, and never stepped on cracks. And other things, too. She never,
ever,
killed praying mantises, and she always carefully carried crickets outside when she found them in the house. She had learned these superstitions from her grandmother, Nana, who lived in Key West, Florida.

“Penny,” Teddy said, tugging her hand anxiously. “Tell them.”

Penny swallowed hard. “You guys, did you hear?”

“Hear what?” Benji said.

“Caleb’s back.”

It was hot out, so hot that their skin was slick with little beads of sweat, but Penny’s words caused them to shiver where they stood.

“What?” Oren Loew said, his voice a croak. Oren, who had just turned thirteen, was the oldest of the boys. The only Jewish kid on the block, and the most responsible, Oren was experiencing some mild embarrassment from his changing voice. Puberty had its tight grip on his throat, and his face was a rash of pimples.

“Says who?” Mac demanded, starting to go red, his voice full of anger. He was in a foul temper, but then, the dentist could do that to a person. “And where’s my magnifying glass?”

“I saw him myself,” Penny said in a solemn voice.

Penny was many things—an excellent shortstop, a good climber, a fair spitter, a girl—but she was not a liar.

“But do you even know what he looks like?” Mac asked, not convinced.

“I saw the tattoo. The skull tattoo on the back of his hand,” she said.

That shut them all up. They stared at each other in silence.

“Maybe it has something to do with his mom,”
Oren said thoughtfully, his thick black curls catching bits of light, making them look blue. Oren was like this; he reasoned things out. He was the one who could be counted on to talk everyone down when they got crazy ideas. “I heard my mom on the phone saying that Mrs. Devlin was really sick.”

“Caleb’s probably what? Seventeen now?” Benji asked.

“He was a grade behind Toby,” Mac said. Toby was Mac’s older brother, who was off at college. “And he was sent away when he was thirteen.”

Oren said, “Yeah, I remember. We were in Miss Simmons’s class.”

Benji nodded. “Second grade.”

It was little things like this that made Penny feel like she would never really fit in, these casual references to things in the past that seemed of great importance, that had become accepted history on the block. Like the time Benji had broken his leg in two places when he’d crashed his bike into a ravine, and the time Mac had rigged a remote-control model airplane with firecrackers so that it exploded right in the middle of the Bukvics’ annual barbecue. Penny knew these stories like she knew the stories of her own life. But they were borrowed memories.

The Carsons had moved to Mockingbird Lane from Philadelphia three years ago, and while the kids counted her and Teddy as part of the pack, Penny felt that she had to listen harder, try harder, so that her being here could one day be effortless. It was a constant source of worry to her. Her mom was always telling her and Teddy to think for themselves. But Penny knew that it was more important to fit in, and that fitting in generally involved agreeing with everyone else. She didn’t want to end up like one of those kids at recess who always sat off to the side, never picked for a game of kickball.