The Mostly True Story of Jack (15 page)

“You’ve got bad wiring, I think,” he had told his aunt
and uncle before they left. “It’s a miracle we haven’t gone up in flames. Or been crushed by the roof.”

Clive and Mabel smiled mildly, and Mabel kissed him on both cheeks.

“Jack, honey, I think it would be best if you didn’t answer the door while we were out,” Mabel said.

“When has anyone come to the door?” Jack asked. And now that he thought about it, it was rather odd. The only people who had visited since he arrived in Iowa were him and his mother and Wendy. But Wendy came in through the window. Didn’t Clive and Mabel have any
friends
, Jack wondered.

“And, additionally, son,” Clive added, “I think we’d like you to stay close to home. No more night wanderings. Your mother wouldn’t forgive us if—”

He shook his head. “My mother wouldn’t notice.” And before they could respond, he turned, hurried back upstairs, and shut the door of his room to keep out the bird and the cats.

The windows were open wide as the sun went down and breezes blew in—hot, heavy, and sweet—in waves. The vines outside the window had completely broken through the screen and had tumbled into the room, spreading in all directions on the wall. They snaked across the floor under the bed and sketched shapes along the ceiling. Jack supposed he should do something about it, but he liked the growing green in the room. It made the house’s strange quirks seem more…
normal
, somehow.
He leaned back on his pillows, opened Clive’s book on his lap, and laid his notebook next to him on the bed.

Clive wanted me to read the book
, he wrote in his journal.
And I did. Mostly. And after what I saw today… well, parts of it might not be… completely made up. But what does this story have to do with me? Professor Avery—a grandfather to Mr. Avery? a great-grandfather?—obviously, being a scary bully runs in the family. But I’m nobody.

Jack shivered and itched. It was getting worse, the itching, and while he never saw any bumps or rashes, his skin was red all the time from his constant rubbing. He looked down at the open book. It was another page from the Reverend’s diary, this one dated 1854.

Jack hunched his shoulders, his eyes straining to read the fragile lettering in the half-darkness. He could hear his aunt and uncle returning—their slow footsteps, their murmuring voices. The sun, having only just set, wrung out color and dying light across the wide, cloudless sky. The room was still hot, and Jack paused every once in a while to fish out an ice cube from the glass on the windowsill and rub a cool slick across his forehead, on the back of his neck, and up and down his arms. San Francisco, he knew, would be cool and foggy and damp, and he wondered why he had never appreciated it before.

Is it possible that this story is—
He stopped his pencil. He couldn’t bring himself to write
true
. He gripped the pencil in his fist and pulled it away from the paper, as though it might write of its own accord. He slammed the book shut and dropped it with a thud on the ground. The floorboards vibrated with the impact and hiccuped under his feet.

“You should be nicer to that book,” a voice said right behind him. “It’s delicate.” Jack jumped. He felt his voice snatch in his throat. He turned around. Wendy sat on the sill of the opposite window. Her hair was unbraided and fell lightly down her neck. Her face was reddened and hot. She balanced her elbows on her knees and leaned forward. “What’s with the vines?”

Jack’s voice turned to sand in his mouth. “Nothing,” he managed to sputter. “How long have you been watching me?”

Wendy shrugged. “A while.” Jack walked over to the
window and looked down. It was sickeningly high—at least for climbing. An orange-and-pink rose bush climbed up that side of the house on a white trellis. The air smelled sweet and heavy and good, and whether it was from the rose bush or from Wendy herself, Jack couldn’t tell. He felt his breath constrict in his chest and took two quick steps back while nervously rubbing the back of his neck.

“Are there any thorns?”

Wendy showed him her hands. They were scratched and bleeding. “Yep,” she said. “I want to show you something. Your aunt and uncle are downstairs in the kitchen, so the front door’s out. Want to try to climb down? It’s pretty easy.”

Actually, he was pretty sure he
couldn’t
climb down, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit that. Besides, he might be fine. And anyway, Wendy didn’t even wait for him to answer. With half a grin and a sigh, she leaned out into the night and swung her body over the edge.

Jack watched in horror. Wendy’s arms and legs swished and pulled as she neatly negotiated her way to the ground. He sighed, gulped, and eased his body out the open window. Halfway down, he somehow wedged his foot in a particularly tight knot of thick, old vines and, with a panicked squeak, fell butt-first into a pile of grass clippings.

“Nice,” Wendy said.

“Do I even need to remind you that it wasn’t my idea to climb out a window in the middle of the night?” Jack said, standing up and brushing the grass off his shorts,
rotating his ankle a few times to make sure it wasn’t broken.

“It’s not the middle of the night.” Wendy took his hand and started walking. “It’s barely dark.” Jack followed obediently, the image of Clayton Avery’s blackened eyes still vivid in his mind. Wendy, he decided, was not the type of girl he wanted to tick off.

The stone that Frankie had given him rested heavily in his pocket and felt warm against his leg. Why, exactly, it was warm, Jack did not know, but there was no one but Frankie he could ask about it, thanks to his promise, and any conversation with Frankie—well, who knew when or if that kid would open his mouth again?

They stopped at a pale green house with two porches and a low, gently sloping roof. “This is my house.” Wendy released his hand and shoved her own into her back pockets.

“Oh,” Jack said. “It’s really”—he struggled for a word—“homey.” He nearly slapped his forehead.
Honestly, Jack
, he admonished himself silently.
Be less lame.

Wendy ignored the comment. “Follow me. It’s over here.” They cut across the yard and scrambled under the tangled branches of the hazel trees to the edge of the field. The corn was supple and young and moved gracefully in the light breeze. The papery leaves whispered as they touched. Jack rubbed the back of his neck.

“What am I looking at here,” he asked, “besides corn?”

She ignored him. “When I was little, Frankie
disappeared. No one knew where he was or what happened to him. My mom sorta froze up. She’d sit on the porch and stare out, and she wouldn’t look at anyone or talk to anyone….” Wendy sniffed and rubbed away a few stray tears with the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said.

Wendy waved his words away. “The thing is, right after he vanished, I started seeing this little kid in the corn.” She pointed to a young oak tree a hundred yards off to the right. “That’s where I saw him first. But he looked strange. He was little—real little, like a baby, but he wasn’t shaped like a baby. He was shaped like a kid, just shrunk down. And his hair was rustley and green, like leaves.”

Jack snorted, though he instantly regretted it when Wendy rounded on him, her face sharp and hot and livid.

“That’s what I
saw
. I’m not saying I could explain it, or that I even believe it half the time. Anyway, he was wandering around and crying. Even when I couldn’t see him, I could hear him crying.
All the time.
No one else could. I tried to tell my mom, but she was hopeless. My dad just got mad. And we had every cop in Iowa stomping around our house, and I tried to tell them too. They were useless.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. The story of the lost boy made him deeply sad for some reason.
Poor kid
, he thought. “So what happened?”

“I don’t know. I finally told your aunt when she came
over with a bunch of casseroles and school clothes for me. Later she came back with your uncle, and he asked me all kinds of questions. It made me happy that
someone
was asking about it—that someone believed me.” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffled a little. “See, it was like everyone had forgotten about Frankie. The cops stopped coming. My mom stopped talking about him. And even when I
asked
, people would go all cross-eyed, like they didn’t know what I was talking about. And I was seeing that little kid in the corn more and more. It was like he was taking Frankie’s place.”

Jack’s arms erupted in goose bumps, and the hair on his head stood out so straight, it felt like each strand was about to launch into the air. He
knew
this story from somewhere. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“So, Clive and Mabel came over with weird cameras and books and other equipment. They said they were taking readings, whatever that meant. They came by every day to check on my family. They talked about Frankie over and over until my parents agreed that he really had existed. They told me to do the same. Then they found my brother. I don’t know how—they just somehow knew where to find him. But, you know, he was…” Her voice trailed off.

“Broken,” Jack said.

“Yeah.” Wendy sniffed.

“What about the other boy?” Jack asked. “The one in the corn?”

“I never saw the lost boy again.”

Wendy put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. The sky was fully black now, and the milky moonlight lit Wendy’s dark hair. She looked beautiful, Jack thought. She dropped her hand.

“I was just little, you know.” Wendy crouched down and hugged her knees. She kept her eyes on the smooth stretch of farm in front of them. Jack sat down next to her, half expecting to hear a child crying in the corn. “So I thought all kinds of funny things. I don’t know if half the stuff I remembered was a dream. But I thought that the kid in the field took my brother, or if he didn’t do it himself that maybe he was responsible for it. So one night, before Frankie was found, I chased the lost boy into the field and threw a rock at him. He just caught it, and, as quick as blinking, he disappeared—and not just that. It was like a door opened up and roots of the corn slipped all around him and gathered him up and took him away. Like I said, I was just a dumb kid and thought all kinds of weird stuff. But I swear that’s what happened.”

“You threw a rock at the little boy?”

Wendy shrugged. “I was little too. I threw a rock at Clayton Avery in first grade once, and he never went underground. Anyway, when you came here, I thought…” She looked at the ground. “It’s stupid, but I thought that you might be… well…” She swallowed and turned her face to Jack. “I thought that you might be able to tell me who hurt my brother. And mostly I wanted to know if it
was you, if you were the one I should blame. I just… I thought that maybe you were actually—”

“But I—” Jack began, starting to panic. “I mean, I’m not—”

“I know, Jack. I
know
. Don’t worry. I know you’re just
Jack
. And you’re a good person, and I’m glad that you helped us today, and what I’m trying to say is, well, I’m sorry I thought you were, you know…”

“Yeah,” Jack said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Don’t mention it.” His skin itched uncomfortably, as though it was flaking off. He willed himself not to scratch.

“Anyway, this town is weird enough as it is. It’s nice to have a friend who’s, well, a normal person.” She said this with emphasis, as though just by saying it, she could
will
it into being. She leaned over and kissed him very lightly on the cheek. She then gasped, pulled away, and ran into the darkness.

A
LL THE NEXT DAY
, J
ACK COULDN’T GET
W
ENDY’S STORY
out of his head. Granted, her parents were probably right that she had made up the kid in the corn—she was little, after all. Still, Jack could feel that kid’s loneliness as though it was his own.

If there really was a kid out there, why would he be wandering around during the exact same time that Frankie went missing?
Jack turned the questions around in his head, but couldn’t find any answers.

Mabel knocked on the door and brought in a basket
of clean clothes. The leafy tendrils in the room had grown even more during the night, but if she noticed, Mabel didn’t mention it. She stepped over the vines, laid the basket down on the bed, and gave Jack a long, hard look, pressing her fingers to her mouth.

“Jack, honey, are you all right?” She laid her hand on his forehead. Her fingers were cool and light, and though he wasn’t about to say so, just the sensation of someone touching him made Jack so happy he thought he might cry.