The Shadow Club Rising (18 page)

I really did want to nail Jodi Lattimer to the wall for what she had done, but as the officers approached, I knew there was no chance of that.

"Jared Mercer," Deputy Lattimer said. "I should have known." He looked at the bunch of kids who were trying hard not to shiver. "What happened here?"

"The tugboat fell," I told him. "The wind blew it loose. We saw it fall."

"How come you're all wet?"

"Polar Bear Club," Alec quickly answered. "We read about them in the news—you know, people who go swimming in the middle of winter. We thought we'd try it."

"It sucked," added Tyson.

Deputy Lattimer studied Tyson for a moment. "Haven't I seen you with my daughter?"

"It won't happen again."

"Good."

He asked a few more questions, but in the end, he took the whole thing at face value. We were just a bunch of kids doing something stupid on Presidents' Day. I know I should have felt bad looking him in the eye and telling him something completely untrue, but I had been a good kid and I had been a bad kid, and both had taught me a thing or two. Such as "honesty is the best policy," except when it's best to lie. Having seen firsthand the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children, I knew this was not the time or place for the truth about his daughter.

He offered to shuttle us all home, but there were few takers, as it was better to be cold and wet than show up at home in a police car.

Once he had gone, the rest of us left for warmer places, no one talking as we made our separate ways home. I lingered with Tyson and Alec for a little, taking some shelter from the wind behind a boarded-up tackle shop.

"Did you really have to give me mouth-to-mouth?" Alec asked.

I cringed at the memory. "I had to make it look realistic. Believe me, it was no great pleasure."

Tyson held his arms across his chest as a gust of wind added to our chill. "You think your mom will have something good for dinner?" Tyson asked.

I laughed. To my mom even Thanksgiving came out of a box, and today was only Presidents' Day. "What do
you
think?"

Tyson sighed. "Probably pizza or takeout."

I turned to look at what was left of the tugboat. Its pilothouse was still above water, but I knew it would completely submerge, come high tide.

Then I looked at Alec, still swollen from the beating he had suffered. What do you say to a kid who, two hours ago tried to kill you, then almost got killed himself? "You wanna come home with us, Alec?" I asked. "Hang for a while?"

"Not really," he said. But he was soaked, the wind was still blowing, and as he looked up the road, I could tell he was thinking how much farther away his home was than mine.

"Sure, maybe for a while," he said.

Because sometimes it's like they say, "Any port in a storm."

Random Acts
of Violets

MY ALARM WENT went off the next morning, chirping its evil shrill call, and after I hit the snooze button half a dozen times, Mom came to roust me out of bed. I rose to a typical morning—the only hint that anything out of the ordinary had happened were the bruises and muscle aches I had earned the day before.

Tyson was already at the breakfast table, inhaling a bowl of Corn Pops. Dad was mumbling to himself in his standard ritual of searching for his misplaced car keys.

After what happened, you'd think the world would just stop on its axis, but Tuesday came with such dull normality, it was enough to make a person sick. The sun, at least, had the common courtesy to hide its face behind a blanket of clouds for most of the day.

School wasn't much different; classes rolled at their typical snail's pace, and although I saw many of the kids who had been there the day before, none of us made eye contact.

I stopped by Mr. Greene's office before second period. I didn't know quite what to tell him. He deserved to know the whole story, but I wasn't up to reliving it. By the look of him, he wasn't up to it either. He looked older today. Well, maybe not older, but a bit more world-weary, as if his body and spirit no longer felt like fighting gravity. I wondered if I had that look, too.

"You'll be happy to know that the Shadow Club finally took a silver bullet, chased with a stake through the heart."

Mr. Greene eyed me with a suspicious mix of emotions. Then he said, "Brett Whatley has disappeared. Does that have anything to do with your silver bullet?"

"Yes, and no," I told him. "Brett ran off when he found out he had killed Alec Smartz."

Greene showed confusion, rather than shock. "But I just saw Alec a minute ago—"

"Exactly."

Greene stepped forward, about to ask something, but took a deep breath, reigning in his own curiosity. "Thank you," he said. "You'd better go, or you'll be late for class."

I turned and headed for the door, but just before I left he said, "Be vigilant, Jared."

I turned back to him. "Excuse me?"

"Stakes and silver bullets don't always take," he said. "Be vigilant."

I left, closing the door quietly, taking with me an uneasy vertigo left by Greene's advice.

The next day Brett Whatley stumbled out of the woods two towns away and headed straight for the nearest police department, where he tearfully confessed to having killed Alec Smartz.

When they called the Smartz home to inform the parents of this awful crime, Alec answered the phone, casting serious doubt on Brett's claim.

"Brett just kept sobbing and sobbing," Alec told me. "He couldn't believe I was alive. He didn't even ask how. 'You're the best, Alec,' he says, 'I love ya, man!'"

"He actually said 'I love ya, man'?"

"Swear to God—and then he tells me he's my slave for life."

"You gonna take him up on it?" I asked.

"I don't know. Maybe just long enough to have him clean out our garage."

Apparently our silver bullet had pierced Brett's brain and turned him into a repentant puppy. I knew it would set the mood for the other club members as well, but I wasn't satisfied. There was still more to do.

Mr. Greene had been right—killing the Shadow Club wasn't good enough—because then it would become legend, the way it had before. Its memory would loom larger than life, enticing others to invoke it again. No, the Shadow Club needed a different fate. That's why I went to the mall and ordered a whole bunch of denim caps to replace the ones lost at sea in the tugboat plunge. In school I found each of the kids who had been there and shoved a hat into their hands, telling them exactly what I expected them to do and exactly when I expected them to do it. And although none of them wanted any part of it, many of them reluctantly took the hats and agreed. That's how I found myself the leader of the Shadow Club again.

The following Saturday morning, the bitterly widowed and lately deflowered Hilda McBroom awoke to a commotion on her lawn. What she found was a whole bunch of kids wreaking havoc in her recently murdered garden. She stormed outside, cordless phone in hand, no doubt ready to call 911, which she probably had on auto dial.

"Who are you kids? What are you doing here? Haven't you made enough mischief yet? What else do you want from me, blood?"

I stepped forward. "That's a lot of questions, Mrs. McBroom."

She wagged an arthritic finger at me. "I know you! You're that Mercer boy, aren't you? The one who caused all that trouble!" She turned to Cheryl. "And you! You're that Gannett girl—you're just as bad as him."

"We understand you've been having some problems with your garden," Cheryl said.

I pointed to my hat. Denim, with the letters TSC in bright orange across the face. "We're the Tree and Shrub Crew," I told her. "No garden goes unplanted. That's our motto."

Moose SanGiorgio rolled up with a wheelbarrow overloaded with winter-clipped rosebushes. "Hi, Old Lady. Where do you want these?"

"Leave my garden alone," she said. "I don't want any Tree and Shrub Crew!"

"Tough luck," shouted Brett Whatley from across the yard, "because you've got us, whether you like it or not." Brett's offer of perpetual servitude had apparently extended beyond just Alec. He didn't just turn over a new leaf, he flipped that sucker and pinned it for the count. Although he no longer dared to claim any leadership position, his take- my-help-and-love-it attitude helped to define us now.

There were more than twenty kids working away in Mrs. McBroom's garden. Many were members of the new Shadow Club—but the club's original members were there, too. Darren, Abbie, O. P., all of them. The new members showed up to redeem their guilt, and the originals showed up because I asked them. Of course the originals had complained.

"Why do
we
have to do it?" Jason had said.
"We
didn't do anything bad this time."

So I told them they didn't have to come, but I'd like it if they did. I guess I must still carry some clout, because they all showed up.

As for the rosebushes, they came from our own yards, along with other flowering shrubs that would bloom a full spectrum of color, come spring. If any of our parents were annoyed by it, once they knew where the plants were going, they kept their complaints and their questions to themselves.

Mrs. McBroom paced on her porch with a combination of disbelief and horror as she watched us replant her garden, threatening every five minutes to call the police, until finally she gave up and came out to direct us, telling us exactly where she wanted each plant to go.

Solerno's stayed closed for two weeks. According to Old Man Solerno, he would never set foot in the place again. His days as a restauranteur had come to an end. Naturally, when the place came back to life the next Sunday afternoon, Solerno was furious. Tipped off by an anonymous phone call, he arrived at his restaurant to find about two dozen kids making an absolute mess in his kitchen.

Like Mrs. McBroom, he threatened to call the police on us. Like Mrs. McBroom, he never actually dialed. Under protest, he sat down at one of his own tables, and we served him about fifteen different dishes—our parents' favoriteItalian recipes, which we had practiced cooking at home. "What's-a this all about?" Solerno asked, almost afraid to try the food.

"We're The Solerno Committee," I told him, pointing to the initials on my hat. "Your food stinks, so we thought we'd change your menu and convince you to open up again. After all, this town wouldn't be the same without Solerno's."

He called me a lousy rotten punk and crossed his arms as plate after plate was set before him. Finally the aroma of fresh garlic and basil weakened him, and he tried one dish. We must have done a good job, because he moved on from the first plate to the second to the third, sampling them all. Some of them he tried three and four times. Finally he separated them into two categories. He pointed to the ones to his left. "I add-a these to my menu, eh?" Then he pointed to the ones to his right. "These other ones, they make-a me puke."

He tasted the ones he liked once more. "Need-a more salt," he said.

The next Wednesday morning, five of the pudgier members of the Shadow Club went knocking on Garson Underwood's door just as he was about to leave for his morning jog. According to their report, here's how it went:

"We're here to go jogging with you," they told him.

He laughed, thinking it was some sort of joke, but when they didn't leave, he began to wonder what was going on.

"We want to get into shape," one of them said. "And since we knew you jog every day, we thought we could jog with you. Because, as you can see from our hats we're Tired of Sitting on the Couch."

From what I heard, he was distrustful of the whole thing—what with vandals in town destroying his car—but he must have sensed some sincerity in the kids, because he took them with him on his morning jog. At last report, he still jogs with them every morning, and has taken to wearing his own TSC hat, because he, too, is Tired of Sitting on the Couch.

Pretty soon word began to get out that some creepy bunch of juvenile philanthropists were making the rounds in town, striking when least expected. It was sort of good-deed terrorism, dumped on unsuspecting victims whether they wanted it or not. I figured if the Shadow Club was only capable of acts of aggression, why couldn't those acts be aggressively good? No one seemed to make the connection that these were the same kids who had caused the trouble a couple of weeks before. I guess it's true that once people see you in one light, it's hard for them to see you in another. This time it worked to our advantage.

"When is it going to stop?" Cheryl asked.

"I hope it doesn't," I told her.

There were still a hundred things left to do. Solerno's and Broom Hilda's garden were just drops in the bucket, but that was all right. Hatred and violence, I knew, could be habit forming—but so could acts of kindness—and just because the Shadow Club had its origins in small-town terrorism didn't mean it couldn't redefine itself. It took vision. It took
vigilance,
as Mr. Greene had said—never turning a blind eye, always being aware of the danger. Vigilance not just for today, but tomorrow, and every day after that. A long-term goal.

Me, I've always been a goal-oriented person, the finish line always in my sights. True, I had always been a sprinter, but perhaps it was time to become a distance runner. If I could pace myself, I knew I could pace all of them—all of us—who wore the hat. It wasn't exactly a Boy Scout hat, if you know what I mean—there was still quite a lot of Shaditude in the things we did—and that seemed to satisfy even the angriest outsiders who had gravitated to the group. But we couldn't reach everyone. And I knew that
those
were the ones to be careful of.

That's why I mailed the package.

I had wrapped the package, and it sat on my desk for days before I decided to actually mail it.

"What's that?" Tyson asked, stepping into my room. "A letter bomb?"

"Thermonuclear," I told him, handing it to him.

"Amazing how small those things are getting." He looked it over, then tossed the small package back to me. "Do me a favor, don't detonate it tonight. I'm taking Maria Nixbok to the Gazilliaplex."