The Mostly True Story of Jack (9 page)

Wendy reached down and grabbed a rock. Anders snatched it away. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. Wendy snorted and sighed. She turned toward Jack, crossed her arms, and looked him up and down. Jack felt as though he was being x-rayed. Wendy’s wide eyes narrowed and sharpened into two bright black points.

“All kinds of surprises today, I guess. You’ve got more guts than I thought,” she said with a slow nod. She paused, as though deciding carefully what she should say next. “Sorry you had to see that little display.” She glared at the receding lights of the squad car. “I wish I could say
it was out of the ordinary, but I can’t. It’s Avery’s town, you see. Avery’s cops and teachers and buildings and… everything else. This isn’t… a
nice
town. I wish it were.” She took a step backward. “Anyway, we’ll probably see you around.”

Jack didn’t move from the step as he watched the three kids walk away.

He went inside and, without saying hello to either his aunt or his uncle, retreated to his room and shut the door. Sighing, he sat heavily at the desk and took out his notebook.

How
, he wrote,
is it possible that an actual conversation with kids my age makes me feel lonelier than ever?
He stared at the page for what seemed like an hour, trying to find an answer.

He never did.

At supper, Jack was silent while his aunt and uncle chatted happily about things that Jack couldn’t imagine caring about. Clive turned to Jack and smiled. “You met our Frankie, then? And Wendy and Anders?”

Jack couldn’t take his eyes off his dinner. He peered into the lump of noodles and cream and canned fish that seemed to quiver on his plate like a living, disembodied brain. The whole thing had been sprinkled over with
crushed-up potato chips and something else that looked like chips but smelled strongly of onions. Jack wondered whether it was supposed to be food. He assumed it probably was, but sometimes you never can tell. Gog and Magog looked up expectantly, balancing on their hind legs. They looked like they could swallow the whole plate in one gulp. Suddenly, Jack really loved those cats.

“Yes,” Jack said quietly. “I met them. Wendy. She’s kind of…” Jack searched for the word.

“Prickly, yes,” Clive said. “Not entirely a bad thing.”

“They’re the nicest kids in the world,” Mabel said. “And brave.”

Jack tried the noodles. They tasted like paste. He winced.

“You think that’s an unlikely descriptor for your new friends?” Clive looked at him, and Jack could have sworn the man’s eyes were twinkling.

“No—it’s just—you see, they’re not—” Jack’s voice faltered and sputtered out. Should he start with “No, it was just the awful casserole” or “No, they’re actually not my friends”? Either way, he wasn’t going to look very good. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“There’s a lot of things a person can be in this world, boy,” Clive said very seriously. “Or in any world, really,” he added with a wink. “Brave is as good a thing to be as any. Will you pass me some more casserole, my
love?” he asked Mabel, who blushed. “It’s absolutely perfect.”

When they weren’t looking, Jack fed his to the cats.

That night, Jack rolled and sweated in his sleep. All night, he saw eyes in the walls. All night, he saw a woman running across a field of young corn. Her hands were green; her face was green; her hair was yellow and sweet like corn silk. She hid a small boy behind a house, and then she was a house—a house with sleepy windows and a grinning mouth.

Jack woke with a start and got out of bed. The house was silent, as though it were holding its breath. A glass of water sat on the desk, its sides sweating with condensation. Jack grabbed the glass and drained it in four large gulps. He wiped his mouth with his pajama sleeve and realized that he was roasting hot. It was
never
this hot in San Francisco in the summer.

He took off his pajama top, used it to wipe off his damp face, neck, and torso, and tossed it onto the floor. He sat down at his desk and began to draw. Without meaning to, he drew a picture of a girl, hair wisping about her eyes, at her ears, and away from her neck. Her head tilted upward and her mouth was opened, as though calling out to someone. In each hand, she held a star. Next to
it, he wrote
Wendy Underground
. Lying back down, Jack fell asleep at once.

When he woke the next morning, he had no memory of the time he’d spent drawing. When he finally noticed the picture as he tied his shoes, he was so confused that he tore the page out of his notebook and nearly threw it in the trash. On closer inspection, though, he couldn’t help but notice that it was a very good likeness. And despite the fact that Jack was terrified of her, at least in the drawing she was—Jack faltered—well, not
ugly
anyway. He folded the picture, knelt down beside his bed, and slipped it into the pages of
The Secret History of Hazelwood
. The windowpane rattled and the floorboards hummed, though the morning was still and the house was quiet.

He tried calling his mother, but the lines kept crossing. A man from a sewer company answered the phone first. Then a lady from the City of Toledo Morgue. Then a child speaking a language that Jack did not know. None of them could hear Jack talking, and they hung up on him. He tried calling his father, but the line was disconnected.

Jack leaned back in his chair, rubbing his nose under his glasses with one hand and thrumming his fingers against the book with the other. The walls shivered slightly, and tiny cracks appeared on the plaster next to the window.

“I’m not going to read it,” he said out loud. The floorboards shook, the table wobbled, and the glass of water fell with a crack on the floor. Jack held the book to his chest, slowly scanning the room. He took a deep breath. “Um,” he said, “I might read it.”

The floors calmed, the windows soothed, and the house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

Jack opened the book.

O
N THE FAR END OF
M
AIN
S
TREET STOOD THE
G
RAIN
Exchange and Trust building. It was a long, muscular building, standing squarely in the center of Main Street, flanked by two prettily maintained, though rarely visited, plazas. Its limestone face had been meticulously carved with symbols of the agricultural economy—corn, wheat, livestock, and apples. There were images of growing trees and broad shoulders and industry. Upon closer inspection, however, one could see the hidden likeness of a sleeping woman—so hidden, in fact, that her face
could only be seen on a slant or with a casual flick of the eye. She hid in the leaves of the trees, in the shade of the corn, and sometimes among the animals—but she vanished when viewed head-on.

Like the college and the Avery house, the Grain Exchange and Trust also had been built by Mr. Avery’s great-grandfather, whose portrait hung in most of the rooms. Each room had its own staff of well-groomed workers who performed tasks for the Office of Savings and Loan, the Office of Real Estate, the Office of Farm Development, the Office of Auctioneers, and the Office of Progress. It was in these offices that small fortunes of local farmers and merchants were calculated, housed, divided, and systematically squandered, while the Avery fortune swelled and bloated like an overripe fruit.

For the past four years, however, the fortunes of farmers stayed steady in their accounts as the Avery fortune, though still massive, began to shrink at its edges. People told stories of the terrible rages and even the tears behind locked doors. No one mentioned these rumors to Mr. Avery. No one at all.

Mr. Avery arrived just before sunrise, without his briefcase and on foot. He had several scratches across his face, a large bruise under one eye, and an arm resting comfortably in a sling. He knew that he would not have to remark upon any of his injuries. No one would ask him.

His attempt to remove the boy from town seemed pathetic to him now—both desperate and laughable.
Still, if he could avoid performing the swap… if he could prevent Her from taking his only… Mr. Avery shuddered, forcing the thought off. His face sweated prodigiously, but he did not wipe it away. And he ignored his underlings as they offered their meager morning greetings. He prided himself on his ability to aggressively ignore underlings.

Mr. Avery threw open the doors of the Grain Exchange and Trust and stomped across the opulent (though fraying) red carpet to his office at the end of the hall. Framed in the leaded-glass window of the polished oak door was Mr. Perkins, hunched at a desk before a ledger book, sweat dripping from his arched brow. He had already been hard at work for well over an hour, Mr. Avery knew. Mr. Perkins was punctual.

“
Perkins!
” he roared.

Mr. Perkins dropped his pencil on the floor. He stood quickly and shoved his right hand deep into his pocket, tightly gripping something inside. “Yes, sir,” Mr. Perkins said, shuffling papers with his left hand and scanning the floor for his pencil.

“You have an assignment. I want you to get some information on that boy at the Fitzpatricks’. Follow him if you need to. Keep an eye on him. Wear something inconspicuous. And take notes. I want to know what he knows. I hope I am understood,” he added dangerously. No one, ever, wanted to be accused of misunderstanding Mr. Avery.

“But, sir,” Mr. Perkins began in a quavery voice. “The boy. He isn’t—” Unconsciously, Mr. Perkins pulled a small length of braided rawhide from his pocket and pressed it against his cheek. He held on for dear life.

“Don’t ask questions,” Mr. Avery snapped. “And don’t let yourself be seen. I will be leaving town in an hour. I shall return in a few days and will expect a full report.”

He knew his meeting with the governor would be successful. The governor was… an impressionable young man. But first Mr. Avery had research to do. He was closing in on an answer… he could
feel
it. And if his suspicions were correct—or even
marginally
correct—then he would require the use of the Fitzpatrick house. He was certain, with a little legal wrangling, that he could possess the strange house at the edge of town, mysteries and all, by the end of the week. Two weeks, if the Fitzpatricks made things difficult. Best to assume two.

“No, sir—I mean, yes, sir,” Mr. Perkins said, tripping over the wastepaper basket as he hurried to retrieve his rain jacket and umbrella, two things he carried every day, whether it was forecasted to rain or not. The door moaned sadly as he pushed it open and closed with a brittle slam.

Mr. Avery watched the hesitant profile of his assistant through the glass until his silhouette was swallowed in the bright mouth of the door, and the old man was alone. On his desk sat two small pictures. The first was from an instant camera and had been glued onto a piece of paper with some arrows and words scratched around the edges.
Original position of subject
, with an arrow pointing to an empty space in front of the Fitzpatrick house.
Subject remains?
with another arrow pointing to a boy-shaped shadow on the ground.

Mr. Avery sighed. “I need more time,” he whispered. His hands trembled as he reached for the other picture—this one a very small photograph of his wife and son—his only son. His father had told him to have two, that it would be easier that way. Mr. Avery shook his head. He didn’t want
easier
. He just wanted his boy. He closed his eyes, pressed the small frame to his heart.

He could still feel the icy waves in the wood, coming faster and colder than before.

And though he wasn’t there to see it, he knew that on the outside of the building, the limestone eyes of the sleeping woman in the stone slowly slivered open.

T
HAT SAME MORNING
, J
ACK AWOKE AT FIRST LIGHT
. D
ESPITE
the early hour, he could hear the clank and slurp of Clive and Mabel’s breakfast dishes and the low hum of their conversation.
Don’t they ever sleep?
Jack wondered.

The Secret History of Hazelwood
lay open on his chest. He glanced over the page that he had read the night before. While some of the book was made from the diaries of Reverend Weihr, most of it was written by Clive. This particular page—the one that had put him to sleep—was about the stealing of souls.