The Creek (7 page)

“But he was a mess,” Penny said.

Benji shrugged. “He makes up a lot of stuff. He went hunting with me and the guys this one time….”

Mr. Albright was a big hunter, Penny knew. The Albrights’ den had stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls—deer, elk, even a cute little fox.

“This was before his parents got divorced,” Benji continued. “Anyway, he wouldn’t shoot this rabbit, and his dad yelled at him, and Zachary started crying and stuff, and so Mr. Evreth shot the rabbit. Then he gave it to Zachary, who told everybody he’d killed it. But I’d seen the whole thing.”

“I don’t know,” Penny said. “Caleb
is
back. What if he, you know, put traps back here? Like he did before?”

Benji gave her a cocky look. “That’s why I’m teaching you how to shoot, right?”

“Right,” she said in a hollow voice.

“Come on, don’t worry. I’ll look after you,” he said, and winked.

They had reached the old springhouse. There was a bull’s-eye target pasted to its crumbling side.

“Now this is a real gun, even though it shoots BBs. You can really hurt someone with them, so you have to be careful, okay?” And then he handed her the BB gun reverently.

Penny gripped it gingerly, slightly afraid. “Do you
know some kids named Susie and Jeffy?”

“Kids? From this neighborhood?”

She nodded.

He shrugged. “There was a Jeff, I think, but he was a lot older. Like Toby’s age, maybe.”

“Oh,” Penny said. That was a dead end.

“Why?”

“Nothing.” Penny took a deep breath. “How do I hold this thing?”

He positioned the gun in Penny’s arms, standing behind her with his hand over hers on the trigger. She could smell the scent of peanut butter rising from his skin, and something else, something distinctly boyish. He steadied her shoulder as she looked down the barrel. His cheek was warm against hers, and she felt a funny tickle in her spine, the same exact feeling she had when she got to the good part of a book.

“Okay?” he asked, twisting slightly to look at her, his eyes dark.

“Yeah,” she breathed, fixing her eyes firmly on his. He blinked in surprise and then his lips were hovering over hers, their noses bumping, their lips brushing together, a tantalizing whisper. She stood still for a moment as he moved his lips against hers
experimentally, the bubble-gum taste of them, and then, as if suddenly remembering where they were, she pulled away.

Penny hefted the gun and aimed, narrowing her eyes at the target as if that would make her heart stop pounding. The barrel gleamed faintly in the dappled light from the trees. She was thankful she had something to do, to take her mind off what had just happened.

“Where do I look?” she asked shakily.

“Just line up the sights,” he instructed, all business now.

She squinted hard, narrowing her eyes.

Benji backed away. “Go for it.”

Penny took a deep breath and shot. The gun jumped slightly and bumped against her chin.

“Ow! That hurt,” Penny said, rubbing her chin. “Did I hit anything?”

Benji surveyed the bull’s-eye. It was perfectly clean.

Penny sighed. This was going to take some time.

“Don’t hold it by your chin,” he suggested.

“I figured that one out myself, thanks,” she said sourly.

Benji said earnestly, “Look, try it again and pretend that there’s someone you hate there.You know, like—
I don’t know …” he said, his voice trailing off.

Like Caleb,
she thought to herself.

She raised the gun and looked down the barrel, and suddenly he was there, as if conjured, glaring at her, taunting her, his eyes dark and cruel, like he couldn’t wait to get a piece of her, lure her into the woods and hurt her like he had Zachary Evreth. He pulled a long hunting knife out of the leather case on his belt and caressed the shiny point with one long, greasy finger, running it along the edge of the sharp blade. Without warning he lifted his arm, blade in palm, and threw the knife right at her.

She hissed and fired reflexively.

Benji inspected the target.

“Well?” she asked.

Benji smiled approvingly. “Now you’re getting it.”

The house was quiet when Penny got home, hot and sweaty from shooting practice.

“Mom?” she called into the warm house. The kitchen felt like a steam bath. Something was definitely wrong with the air conditioner. She wandered around, grabbing a cookie, pouring herself a glass of juice. The note was sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.

Penny loved fresh corn on the cob. Grabbing a clean bowl from a cabinet, another cookie, and her glass of juice, she headed for the garage.

She walked through the laundry room, flicking on lights as she went. Mr. Cat’s bowl was full of food, and ants were starting to circle it. He hadn’t been home for days now.

The garage was dark and cool, and smelled strongly of gasoline and sawdust. She shucked the corn easily, daydreaming. There was something so soothing about shucking corn. Pulling back piece after piece of crisp green husk to reveal the tender golden corn inside. Penny liked to imagine sometimes that the corn cobs were pretty little dancers and that the husks were their elaborate costumes, their fancy tutus. She pulled a husk down halfway around an ear so that it looked like a girl with a skirt.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, mimicking an emcee. “Welcome to the corn ballet!”

The corn ballerina gave a rousing performance until Penny grew tired of the game and pulled off the husk. She tossed the perfect yellow ear into the bowl with the others.

Penny reached into the sack and pulled out another ear of corn, picking up the cookie with her other hand. She stuffed it whole into her mouth while she methodically ripped off the husks, staring dreamily into space. The corn felt a little squishy and smelled bad, rancid, so she looked down, expecting to see rotten corn. She saw something very different.

A dead rat was cradled perfectly in a spiral of corn husk, with green leaves artfully arranged around its dead body.

Penny started to shake. The rat’s eyes were open, the vicious little teeth bared angrily. Its brown-gray fur was soaked with something. She held her fingers up to her face, crumbs falling from her mouth. Her fingers were wet with blood.

She flung the rat away from her, hard. It hit the garage door with a dull thump and slid to the cold cement floor, leaving a bloody mark on the door. Penny fell to her knees, choking on the cookie,
coughing it out whole, hysterical, and then she felt that familiar horrible feeling in her chest, the way everything went tight, her stomach churning, her fingers tingling, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, there was no air and—

“Penny?” a voice said.

She flinched at the sound, whirling around.

“You okay, sweetie?”

Her dad, wearing his lab coat, was standing in the doorway.

That night, after dinner, Penny went looking for Teddy.

She found herself doing this often lately, keeping track of him. She had always been the one to keep an eye on him, but now there seemed even greater reason to make sure her little brother was safe. Especially after what had happened that afternoon.

Her father had stared at the blood-soaked rat for a long time before he said, in a curiously flat voice, “Looks like it just crawled in here to die. They come up when the creek’s dry.”

“It was
in the corn,
Dad!” Penny had insisted, white-faced and shaking.

“It was probably just hungry, and I’m sure that
corn smelled pretty good.”

Still, she couldn’t help but remember the way he’d eyed the lock on the garage door, and so she went through the laundry room, opened the door to the garage, and there was Teddy, sitting in the middle of the concrete floor, feeding Tom Ten.

On Mockingbird Lane all the box turtles caught and released were traditionally named Tom. Every once in a while, an empty shell would turn up in the woods with a painted number denoting which Tom it had been.

Teddy was hand-feeding the turtle little bits of lettuce. Tom Ten had been quite snappish when they’d first brought him home and put him in his new cardboard box with some grass. But as the days went by, he had grown bolder, and he would now eat out of Teddy’s hand and raise his head when someone came into the dank room.They’d had him for a while, and Penny was starting to think that maybe it was time to let him go. She knew that the longer you kept a turtle, the better chance it had of dying. Also, she was pretty sure that the fumes from the cars were not good for it.

“He’s really hungry tonight,” Teddy said enthusiastically.

“Yeah?” Penny asked, peering into the cardboard
box. It was seriously smelly. Tom Ten pooped a lot for a turtle, and the grass in the box was getting kind of putrid. “Here, let’s take him out.”

She reached in, picked up Tom Ten easily, and carried him out of the garage onto the front lawn. It was dark, but everybody had turned on their front lights. She placed him on the fresh-cut grass and his head lunged out of the shell, tasting freedom.

“I think we should maybe let him go,” Penny said in a gentle voice.

“Let him go?” Teddy asked with a whine.

“Look at him. He’s sick of living in that stinky box. Remember what happened to Tom Nine?”

Benji, like Penny and Teddy, had kept Tom Nine in his garage. After several months of captivity, the turtle had somehow managed to overturn the box and had almost escaped when Benji’s dad backed over him in his Oldsmobile, smashing the turtle like a pancake.

Teddy’s face fell. “I guess so. But can I be the one to let him go?”

Tom Ten was already booking away from them in the grass.

“Sure,” Penny said. “Let’s do it in the backyard.”

Teddy grabbed up Tom Ten and they went around to the back, with Penny switching on the outside
lights as they walked.

When they reached the back lawn, Teddy put the turtle down. Tom Ten looked around, as if taking stock of his new environment, and then trucked away at a steady pace, heading deep into the dark woods.

“You think he’ll be okay in the woods?” Teddy asked, a little anxiously.

“Sure, he’s got a real hard shell,” she said, watching the painted number 10 glow faintly in the dark as the turtle moved through the grass.

Penny looked deep into the dark woods and secretly wondered if Tom Ten would be all right, or if by some horrible freak chance Caleb was back there in the thicket, just waiting to make turtle soup. She didn’t want to think about that.

“Look,” Teddy said, pointing to the night sky. “A shooting star.”

“Nah,” Penny said. “It’s probably just an alien.”

He looked at her and giggled.

They sat there on the patio and watched Tom Ten make his long journey until their mother called them in.

M
ac had come up with a plan to make some fast cash to buy fireworks for the Fourth of July.

“I really want to get Roman candles,” he said. “I know a guy I can buy them from.”

The parents refused to have anything more exciting than sparklers, insisting that the fireworks organized by the local fire department at a nearby park were perfectly adequate. But Mac, who had never been one to let grownups get in the way of his grand schemes, had been stockpiling fireworks forever—firecrackers, smoke bombs, bottle rockets—all purchased illegally. He kept his secret stash in a battered steel box tucked into the hollow of a tree. The tree itself was deep in the woods, far past the fort, situated on the edge of a high, treacherous cliff that overlooked the creek far below, so that even the most suspicious
father wouldn’t find it if he decided to check out their fort. The boys also stored their BB guns in the tree.

“We’ve got all these kids here every night for softball,” Mac had said. “Let’s have a haunted house and make ‘em pay to go through.”

“We can do it at my house,” Benji suggested.

However, Mrs. Albright had no intention of letting every kid in the neighborhood tromp through her house. “You can do it in the backyard,” she said firmly.

And so the haunted house idea was amended to a “haunted trail,” to be held the evening before Penny’s birthday party.

The kids set up the trail over two long days. Benji conned his dad into letting them borrow slabs of slate intended for a garden path, which they planted in the ground, like tombstones, and inscribed with chalk epitaphs such as “Rest in Pieces” and “Here Lies Skel E. Ton.” A rubber hand in the dirt in front of one of the tombstones gave the effect of a corpse clawing its way out of a grave. Mac planned to supply scary music—groans and moans and clanking—piped in from his older brother’s speakers. Oren painted Ping-Pong balls to look like eyeballs, for pelting at kids as they went through, and Penny made fake blood from
corn syrup and red food coloring.

They decided to charge fifty cents to go through, and to sell refreshments as well. The mothers were happy to help out, as they were under the impression that the kids were trying to raise money for new softball equipment. Penny’s mom made chocolate chip cookies, Mrs. Albright supplied festive little bags of popcorn, and Mrs. McHale baked a batch of oatmeal cookies.

Mrs. Loew contributed a bag of store-bought cookies, which the boys thought was lame; but Penny, who had overheard her mother talking on the phone with Oren’s mom, whispering about a divorce, figured that Mrs. Loew had better things to worry about than baking cookies.

“I certainly hope you kids aren’t driving Mrs. Albright crazy,” Mrs. Carson said as Penny and Teddy dug through the oversized hanging plastic garment bags where Halloween costumes and old clothes were stored.

Boxes and old junk were piled in the middle of the attic, where long strips of plywood flooring had been nailed down. Pink cotton-candy insulation extended beyond the flooring on all sides. Teddy stood at the edge of the flooring on the far side of the attic, looking like
he wanted to take a leap onto the fuzzy stuff.