"Bad Monkeys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ruff Matt)

Nancy Drew, Reconsideres as a Bad Seed

IT WAS THE FALL OF 1979. I WAS fourteen years old, and I’d been sent away from home to live with my aunt and uncle.

Where was home?

San Francisco. The Haight-Ashbury. Charlie Manson’s old stomping grounds.

Why were you sent away?

Mostly to keep my mom from killing me. We’d been fighting pretty much nonstop all that year, but towards the end of the summer things got especially bad. You know, physical.

What did you fight about?

The usual. Boys. Drugs. Me staying out all night with my friends. Plus there was my brother. My dad had taken off a few years before, and to support us my mom was working twelve-hour days, which she hated, and so I was supposed to watch Phil, which I hated.

How old was Phil?

Ten. Smart ten, I mean he knew enough not to drink Clorox or set fire to the apartment. Plus he was a really internal kid, the kind where if he had a book to read, he’d sit quiet for hours. Which is one reason I resented having to watch him: there was nothing to watch. It was like babysitting a pet rock. So what I’d do instead, a lot of the time, I’d take Phil out and park him somewhere, go off and do my own thing, and come back later and pick him up. And if my mom got home before us, or if it turned out she’d tried to call in from work to check on us, I’d just make up some story about how I took Phil to the523e zoo—and Phil, he’d back me up, because I’d threatened to sell him to the gypsies if he didn’t.

That worked out OK for a while, but eventually my mother got wise. One time I didn’t bring Phil home until nine o’clock at night, and she knew the zoo wasn’t open that late. Then this other time, I got caught shoplifting at a record store, and by the time I talked my way out of it, the library where I’d left Phil was closing. One of the librarians found him in the stacks and reported him abandoned.

It was after that that my mother and I really went to war with each other. She started calling me her bad seed, saying I must have gotten all my genes from my no-good father. Looking back on it now, I don’t blame her—in her shoes, I’d have done some name-calling too—but at the time, my position was “Hey, I didn’t ask for a little brother, I didn’t volunteer to be deputy mom, and if you think I’m a bad seed now, just wait until I get busy trying to earn the title.”

You say the fights turned physical.

Yeah. Slaps and hair-pulling, mostly. I gave as good as I got—we were about the same size—so it wasn’t like abuse. More like scuffling. She had more anger than me, though, and every so often she’d escalate to weapons: belts, dishes, whatever was handy. And like I say, I gave as good as I got, but long-term, that wasn’t a healthy trend.

What about your brother? What was your mother’s relationship with him like?

Oh, she loved Phil. Of course. He was the low-maintenance kid.

Did she display affection towards him?

She didn’t throw plates at him. Beyond that, I don’t know, maybe she kissed him on the forehead once in a while. I wasn’t jealous, if that’s what you’re asking. The only thing that bugged me about their relationship was having to hang around for it. She expected me to help mind Phil even when she was home, which struck me as totally unreasonable. We had a bunch of fights about that.

Was it one of these fights that led to you being sent away?

No. That was a different incident. Phil was involved, but it wasn’t really about him.

What happened?

It was kind of funny, actually. There was this big vacant lot across from our apartment building that some hippies had turned into a community garden. You could sign up for a plot of ground and raise vegetables or whatever. My friend Moon had some marijuana seeds, so we decided to try growing our own pot there.

In a public garden?

Not the brightest scheme ever, I know. But you have to understand, we’d only ever seen pot in baggies before, so we had no idea how big the plants got. We figured, it’s a weed, and weeds are small. We thought we could grow bigger plants around it as cover, and then harvest it before anybody noticed what it was.

So I signed us up for a plot, but under Phil’s name. The garden was one of the places I used to leave him; he didn’t care about plants, but he liked animals, and there were these stray cats there that he could play with. That’s what he was doing, herding cats, the day our marijuana patch got raided.

You’d think the hippies would have been the first to spot it, but it was a beat cop. The guy’s name, I swear to God, was Buster Friendly. Officer Friendly’s vice detector went off as he was walking past the garden one afternoon, and the next thing you know he had every adult in the place up against the fence, and he was waving the sign-up sheet in their faces, wanting to know which one of them was Phil. Then Phil came up and tugged him on the sleeve, and the officer asked him, “Are those your marijuana plants, son?” and Phil said yes, but without me right there whispering “gypsies” in his ear, he wasn’t a very convincing liar, so it only took about ten minutes for Officer Friendly to get the real story out of him. Ten minutes after that, I came back from Moon’s house to pick up Phil and got nabbed.

Did the officer arrest you?

He took us back to the police station, but he didn’t book us. He ran us through the Scared Straight routine: showed us the holding cell, introduced us to some of the losers they had locked up in there, told us some horror stories about how much worse the actual jail was. Once I realized he wasn’t actually going to do anything to us, I wasn’t impressed, but I pretended like I was, because I figured I might need this guy in my corner once my mom showed up. So I called him “sir” a lot, and tried to come off like a little rascal instead of a little bitch.

Eventually my mom got there, and she went right for me, no preliminaries. By this point I had Officer Friendly halfway liking me, but he still needed me to learn a lesson, so if my mother had just smacked me around a little he would have let it go. But she was in full fury, screaming about the bad seed, and she started, like, throttling me, and then I lost my cool and started fighting back, and it turned into this big drama scene, with cops running in from other rooms to help pull us off each other. After they got us separated they called in a social worker, and we had this three-hour encounter session, during which my mom made it clear that if they sent me home with her, she wasn’t just going to send me to bed with no supper, she was going to drown me in the tub. So they had to come up with a Plan B.

What finally happened, my mom agreed to see a shrink for anger management, and in exchange she got to take Phil home. I stayed at the police station while Officer Friendly went with them to pick up a couple bags of my clothes, and then he drove me out to my aunt and uncle’s place in the San Joaquin Valley. It was the middle of the night by now, and it was at least a hundred-mile drive, but he insisted on taking me himself. So at first I was thinking, wow, he really bought my little-rascal act. And so I kept it up, kept playing him, until at one point I was in the middle of this completely bogus story about my mother, and he gave me this look, and I realized: he sees through me. He knows I’m bullshitting him, but he’s cutting me this huge break anyway, not because he’s stupid but because he’s a decent guy. So that shut me up for a while.

Were you grateful, or just embarrassed?

Both. Look, I know what you’re thinking: absent father, and now here’s this male authority figure going out of his way for me, blah blah blah, and there is something to that. But also, him being smarter than I figured, that was a change in plan.

I mean, I had no intention of staying with my aunt and uncle. The way I’d already worked it out in my head, I’d let Officer Friendly drop me off, I’d spend the night, get some breakfast, maybe steal some cash, and take off. Hitchhike back to S.F. and see if Moon’s parents would let me crash at their place. But now it turned out Officer Friendly had a brain, so of course he knew I was planning to do that.

We were almost there when he said to me: “Do me a favor, Jane?” And I said, “What?”, and he said, “Give it two weeks.” And I didn’t have to ask, give what two weeks—he definitely had my frequency. So instead I said: “Why two weeks?” And he said, “That should be enough time for you to cool down. Then you can decide whether you really want to do something stupid.” That pissed me off a little, but not as much as I would have expected, and I said, “What are you, my foster dad now?” and he said, “Is that what it’s going to take?”, which shut me up again for a few seconds. Finally I said, “Twenty bucks,” and he said, “Twenty bucks?” and I said, “Yeah. That’s what it’s going to take.” But he shook his head and said, “For twenty bucks you’ve got to give it at least a month.”

We spent the rest of the ride haggling. A part of me was thinking, this is ridiculous, but in spite of myself I was warming up to the guy, so it was a serious haggle. In the end we settled on twenty-five dollars, plus I promised that if I did decide to run away when the month was up, I’d call him first to give him a chance to talk me out of it. Getting me to agree to that last part, that was a sharp move.

How so?

Well, he’d gotten me to like him, right? As much as I liked any adult at that age. But at the same time, I wasn’t stupid either, I knew in his job he must deal with hundreds of kids, most of them a lot more screwed up than me, so who knew if he’d even remember me in a month. And if I did call him up, and he said “Jane who?”, I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy that. But a deal’s a deal, so the only way for me to not call him was to either not run away, or wait until things got bad enough that I’d feel OK about breaking my word.

So that’s how I ended up at my aunt and uncle’s place. How I ended up staying there.

They lived in Siesta Corta, which is Spanish for “wake me if anything happens.” It was a wide spot on the road between Modesto and Fresno, with everything a truck driver or a migrant fruit-picker could ask for: a gas station, a general store, a diner, a bar, a fleabag motel, and a Holy Roller church. My aunt and uncle ran the general store.

What sort of people were they?

Old. They were my aunt and uncle on my father’s side. My father had been fifteen years older than my mother, and my aunt was his older sister, so to look at her you’d think she was my grandmother. My uncle was even older.

Was it awkward for you, staying with your father’s sister?

Not really. My father was completely out of the picture at this point; he’d cut ties with the rest of his family the same time he walked out on us. And my aunt wasn’t anything like him. She’d been married to my uncle and living in the same house since the end of World War II.

How did they feel about you coming to live with them?

If there’d been some other option, I don’t think they’d have volunteered to let me stay with them as long as I did, but they never complained about it.

So you got along with them?

I didn’t really have a choice. They were the most nonconfrontational people I’d ever met: you couldn’t pick a fight with them if you tried. And it’s not that they didn’t have rules, but their way of getting you to behave was to make it impossible for you not to.

Like my uncle, right, he was the kind of guy who liked to have a glass of whiskey before he went to bed. I thought that was a pretty good idea, so the second night I was there, I snuck into his study after he went to sleep and helped myself. And I didn’t take much, but the thing about guys who drink every day, they know exactly what’s left in the bottle they’re working on, and if the level is off by even a quarter inch, they notice.

Now, if my mom had caught me drinking, especially her stuff? She’d have been in my face about it in two seconds flat. My uncle never said a word—but the next day, I passed by the study and heard drilling inside, and that evening when I went to fix myself another nightcap I found a brand-new lock on the liquor cabinet. A big lock, fist-sized, the kind you can’t pick.

They were like that with every bad thing I did. They never lectured me; they assumed I knew right from wrong, but if I insisted on doing wrong, they found some way to lock out that choice.

One morning my aunt asked me if I’d like to come help out at the store. Normally there’d have been no chance, but I was already so bored that I said OK. At the end of the day she gave me fifty cents, which seemed pretty cheap for eight hours, even if I did spend most of that time flipping through magazines. Next day, same deal. The day after that, I bailed out around noon, and instead of waiting to get paid I swiped a couple dollars from the till. Then that night before bed, I went to put the two bucks into the drawer where I kept my other wages and my Officer Friendly money, and instead of the twenty-six dollars that should have been there, I only found twenty-four. It was obvious what had happened, but I pulled the drawer out anyway and shook it upside-down, just in case the rest of the money had gotten stuck somehow. A single quarter fell out.

Your pay for the half-day you’d just worked?

Right.

Did you say anything to your aunt?

What would I have said? No fair stealing back what I stole from you? Anyway I had to hand it to her, keeping a step ahead of me that way. And no energy wasted on yelling. It seemed, I don’t know, efficient.

But it was also frustrating. If I haven’t made it clear already, there wasn’t a lot for me to do in Siesta Corta, and once you took away the stuff I shouldn’t be doing, life got really dull really fast.

The low point came about ten days in. My aunt and uncle didn’t own a TV—of course they didn’t—but they did have a lot of books in the house, and one day in desperation I started rooting through their library. Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I wasn’t illiterate, and I wasn’t allergic to books the way some people are, but still, on my list of preferred leisure activities, reading anything more demanding than Tiger Beat ranked somewhere down around badminton and pulling taffy. But there I was, on a perfectly good Friday afternoon, curled up in an easy chair with a Nancy Drew mystery in my lap.

I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be a Nancy Drew fan.

I wasn’t, really. I was a Pamela Sue Martin fan. She was the actress who played Nancy Drew on television—had played her, until she got kicked off the show for being a troublemaker. She was one of my role models. On TV she was squeaky-clean, but in real life she had a reputation for being a bad girl who wouldn’t take shit from people. She’d been in Playboy, and done R-rated movies—just that year she’d starred as John Dillinger’s girlfriend in The Lady in Red. So because of Pamela Sue Martin, I had this image of Nancy Drew as a sort of closet bad seed, cooler than she had any right to be.

The book turned out to be strictly G-rated, but I got sucked into the story anyway, and by the time I came up for air, most of the afternoon had gone by. Which freaked me out when I realized, because, you know, sitting in the same spot for hours, barely moving, that’s the kind of thing Phil would do.

You were worried about turning into your brother?

Yeah. I know it sounds comical now, but at the time? That really was a panic-inducing thought for me. So I got up right then, went and got my money, and made a beeline for the highway.

What about your promise to Officer Friendly?

Well, I wasn’t really going to run away. It was more like a test run—kind of a hitchhiking feasibility study. Turned out to be good timing, too, because while I was standing there by the roadside, I spotted something really interesting.

It was a girl, about my age. Mexican, but with a cigarette in her mouth, which marked her as a member of my tribe. She was sitting out next to the diner, along the wall where they kept the dumpsters. She’d gotten a bunch of empty produce crates and built them into a sort of hunter’s blind, and she was hunkered down in there with a pile of green rocks. Then I got closer and saw that the rocks were actually oranges. The girl had a homemade slingshot, and she was using it to fire these unripened oranges out across the road.

At cars?

That would have been cool, but no, across the road, at the gas station on the other side. There was a guy over there, Hispanic like the girl but older, eighteen or nineteen. He was supposed to be minding the pumps, but what he was actually doing was taking a late-afternoon nap. Or trying to; every time he started to nod off, the girl would cut loose with another orange.

She didn’t try to hit him directly; that would have given the game away. Instead she aimed for the gas-station roof, which was made out of tin. Each orange would make this big thunderboom when it hit, and the guy would jolt awake and come running out from under the roof overhang just in time to get beaned by the orange rolling down. Then he’d stand there rubbing his head and shouting up at the roof, daring the orange-thrower to come face him like a man.

I watched this happen like five times, and each time, I fell a little more in love with the girl. I kept moving closer to her hiding place, too, until I was right on top of her. “Jeez,” she finally said, “crouch down or something if you’re gonna be there. He’s not that dumb.”

I joined her in the hunter’s blind. She gave this big sigh, like she didn’t really want company, but then she offered me her cigarette pack. I went to take one and realized they were candy cigarettes—so, maybe not a member of my tribe after all. But I took one anyway, just to be friendly.

“So is that guy your brother?” I asked.

“My stupid brother,” she said. “Felipe.”

Her brother was Phil, too?

Yeah. Weird coincidence. And not the only one: her name was Carlotta. Carlotta Juanita Diaz. “I’m Jane Charlotte,” I told her, and she nodded like she already knew that, and said, “You’re staying with the Fosters.”

“For now,” I said. “What about you?”

“I’ve always lived here. My parents came up from Tijuana when Felipe was a baby.”

“Your family owns the gas station?”

“And this place.” She jerked her thumb at the diner. “And my dad’s a deacon in the church.”

“Wow,” I said. “Important people.”

“Yeah, we’re the kings and queens of nowhere, all right.”

Across the way, Felipe had settled back into the lawn chair he was using for a cot. Carlotta handed me the slingshot. “Remember,” she said, “aim high.” I did, and I did manage to hit the roof, although instead of rolling back the orange popped up over the peak and fell down the other side. No matter: Felipe jumped up just the same, and this time, instead of going back to his siesta, he ran inside the gas-station office. When he reappeared a moment later, he was dragging an extension ladder.

“So Carlotta,” I asked, “how long have you been out here doing this?”

“You mean like today, or just in general?”

“This is a regular thing for you?”

She shrugged. “There’s no movie theater in town, so I gotta make my own fun…Here we go.”

Felipe had gotten the ladder set up and started climbing. Carlotta waited until he was on the roof, then used one last orange to knock the ladder away. Game over.

“So,” she said, “you want to get ice cream?”

Carlotta’s parents both worked in the diner. Her mother ran the cash register and waited tables. Her father managed the kitchen—although Se#241;or Diaz’s management consisted mainly of sitting around, reading the Bible and the sports pages, and occasionally yelling at the cooks for not moving fast enough.

“Hey you!” he called, as Carlotta led me in the back door. “Where have you been?”

“Walking to and fro on the earth,” said Carlotta, with a nod to the Good Book in her father’s lap. The crack earned her a scowl that could have come from the Old Testament God Himself.

“That’s not funny, Carlotta. Your mother has been looking for you. She needs help out front.”

“Yeah sure, in a minute,” Carlotta said. She ducked into the walk-in freezer, leaving me alone with Jehovah.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jane.”

Se#241;or Diaz cleared his throat like he was going to spit. He started to return to his Bible study, then looked up again and gave me this long, thoughtful stare.

“You’re the new girl,” he finally said. “At the Fosters’.”

“Yeah, that’s me. The new girl.”

“You’ll be staying with them a while?”

“Looks like.”

“So you’ll be going to school here, then.”

I hadn’t given it any thought, but of course he was right. The prospect didn’t thrill me. “I guess so.”

He nodded. “And how are you planning to get to school?”

“I don’t know. I guess…Is there a bus?”

“Ah! A bus!” He waved the idea away. “Why would you want to take a bus to school?”

“Well…”

“I’ll tell you something—Jane, is it? — the school bus here, it’s not very good.”

“No?”

“No. I would never let my daughter take the bus. We drive her to school. You could ride along with her, if you’d like.”

“I could?”

“Yes. In fact, I think that would be an excellent idea.”

It sounded like an OK idea to me, too, but there was obviously a catch. “Well,” I hedged, “of course I’d have to ask my aunt and uncle first…”

“Oh, I’m sure they won’t object. You just let me talk to them. Here!” He stood up, and dusted off the stool he’d been sitting on. “Here, sit down, relax! Would you like some ice cream?”

Later, Carlotta told me what was up. The previous spring, she’d been kicked off the school bus twice for fighting, and after the second time, the driver refused to let her back on without a written apology. But Se#241;or Diaz wouldn’t hear of it: “He wanted the bus driver fired, you know, for violating my civil rights? But the superintendent wouldn’t do that, so now my father wants to send me to a private school, only he wants the superintendent to pay for it. So we’ve got this lawsuit, but until we win, I’ve still got to go to the public school.” But not by bus. Instead, Carlotta’s mother would drive her to school in the morning, and her brother would pick her up at the end of the day. “Which is OK, except it means a lot of waiting, especially in the afternoon. Felipe can’t leave the gas station before somebody else takes over for him, and some days that’s not until five or six.”

“So you’ve just got to hang out at the school until then?”

“Well, I don’t have to—I could walk back, it’s only like two miles—but my father gets real mad if I do that. He says it’s too dangerous, especially now, with the death angel.”

“The who?”

Most newspapers referred to him as the Route 99 Killer—an anonymous somebody who’d been traveling up and down the highway for the last year, grabbing kids out of rest stops while their parents were distracted—but a couple of tabloids, noticing that he only took boys, had given him a new name.

“The Angel of Death,” Carlotta said. “Like the one in Egypt, who killed the firstborn sons? And I told my father, ‘Hey, I’m not a boy, what do I have to worry about?’ but he said, ‘What if the guy makes a mistake? You think once he gets you in his car and sees you’re a girl, he’s just going to let you go?’”

Which explained why Se#241;or Diaz wanted me riding along with his daughter: he figured with someone to keep her company, she’d be less likely to get bored and go for a stroll along the roadside. Plus, of the two of us, I was definitely the more butch-looking, so if the worst happened, chances were the Angel would take me.

Se#241;or Diaz sounds like a great humanitarian.

Eh, you know. Parents. I couldn’t really bring myself to be offended. Anyway, this is going to sound twisted, but it was kind of exciting, thinking about the danger. I mean that’s one reason people believe in the bogeyman, right? It makes the dark more entertaining.

And it’s not like I thought we were ever actually going to run into the guy. If I had any doubts on that score, they disappeared the minute my aunt and uncle said OK to Se#241;or Diaz’s offer. I had to figure if there was any real risk, they’d have made me take the bus.

Instead, first day of school, my aunt got me up extra early so I’d be ready when Carlotta’s mom came by. That was the only time I had second thoughts, when my bedroom door banged open at five a.m. Half an hour later I was in the car, and by quarter to six Carlotta and I were in front of the school, eating candy cigarettes with a handful of other early birds.

Around six-fifteen the school librarian showed up. She let us into the building and had us come upstairs to the library until classes started. Then after final bell, we went back up there and killed time until Felipe came with his pickup.

Did the school library have Nancy Drew?

A full set. The Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, too. Carlotta was nuts about the Bobbsey Twins, which I never got—she really was a strange girl in a lot of ways.

What about your classes? What were those like?

Boring.

Did you make any other friends?

Not really. I tried to find a bad crowd to fall in with, but Carlotta with her sugar Pall Malls was the closest thing to a real j.d. that the place had to offer. Most of the other kids, I don’t want to say they were dumb hicks, but they were dumb hicks. So I stuck with Carlotta, and we made our own fun.

And did this fun include amateur detective work?

Not deliberately. You’re talking about the janitor, right? Me getting wise to him, that was mostly an accident.

What happened?

The school was only running at about sixty percent capacity, so to save money, an entire wing of the building had been closed down. The closed wing was officially off-limits, but of course that was just an invitation for students to try and break in; Carlotta and I had already talked about getting a crowbar from the gas station so we could go exploring.

Then one afternoon I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the janitor open up one of the connecting doors that led into the closed wing. He went inside and pulled the door shut behind him, but I didn’t hear him relock it. It seemed like a golden opportunity; I almost ran back to the library to get Carlotta, but then I thought about it a little more and realized that it was maybe more than one kind of opportunity.

See, one thing I was definitely missing in Siesta Corta was dope. And it was making me crazy, because I was in the middle of goddamned farm country, and I knew people had to be growing it. But nobody would tell me who. Carlotta was no help; the only controlled substance that ever passed her lips was communion wine, and not much of that. I had higher hopes for Felipe, but when it came to drugs he turned out to be even more straitlaced than his sister. The one time I tried to raise the subject with him he just gave me the evil eye.

You thought you might have better luck with the janitor?

Sure. I mean, four o’clock in the afternoon, the guy goes into an abandoned part of the building. What for? Not to mop floors. And he wasn’t carrying any tools, so he couldn’t be doing repairs. So what’s that leave?

Any number of things, I’d imagine. But I take it you were hoping for vice?

You bet I was. And we’re talking about a young guy with long hair and a Jesus beard. So what kind of vice was he likely to be into?

But it wasn’t what you thought.

No, actually, it was what I thought. It’s just, it was also more than what I thought.

Past the connecting door was a long hallway lined with empty classrooms. The janitor was in the last room on the left, but halfway down the hall I could already smell the pot. Good stuff, too—he obviously knew the right people. So I tiptoed down there, trying to work out how to play this. I figured I could either go in casual and friendly—“Hey, can I get a hit off that?”—or I could be a hard-ass and threaten to turn him in if he didn’t give me his whole stash.

Which approach did you decide on?

I couldn’t make up my mind. I didn’t know the guy at all, right, so I had no idea how easily he’d scare, or share. And meanwhile—I was standing right outside the room, now—I started hearing these monkey noises.

Monkey noises?

Yeah. Literal monkey noises, I thought at first, like maybe he had a pet chimp in there with him. Farfetched, I know, but who can tell with pot-smokers? So I took a peep around the doorframe to see what kind of sideshow I was about to burst in on.

The janitor was over by the windows. He had a telescope set up, and his face was mashed down over the eyepiece like it had been glued there. His left arm was curved above his head, like this, holding a joint in the air, and his right arm was curved down towards his waist, like this, holding…Well, I couldn’t see exactly what he was holding, for which thank God, but from the way his elbow was pumping it wasn’t hard to guess.

As for the monkey noises, that was actually two sounds in one. He was grunting, of course, but also, to sort of brace himself, he’d pulled a pupil’s chair up sideways behind him and planted his butt on the armrest, and the feet of the chair were going squeak-squeak-squeak in time with the grunts: voil#224;, instant chimp sounds. Which, all things considered, wasn’t too far off the mark.

So I’m watching this, and I’m like, yuck, but at the same time, I still really wanted some dope. I definitely had the goods to blackmail this guy now, but the idea of confronting him in the act was too gross to contemplate, so I decided to wait him out and see if he’d leave the roach behind when he was done with his business. That was something Moon and I used to do at her parents’ parties, go around collecting leftovers out of the ashtrays and recycling them into bong hits. It was a great way to get high without actually having to talk to any freaks.

I hid in another classroom across the hall and prayed for a quick finish. The monkey noises got louder—they were more gorilla than chimp towards the end—and then there was a bang as the desk fell over, then silence, and then, very faint, the zip of a zipper. And then footsteps, going out and down the hall, not running but hurrying, like he’d suddenly remembered an appointment he had to get to.

When I was sure the coast was clear I came out of hiding. I was out of luck on the dope: he’d left something behind, all right, but it wasn’t marijuana.

I took a look through the telescope to see what he’d been spying on. I was expecting the girls’ locker room, something like that, but the guy’s tastes turned out to be weirder than I’d thought. The telescope was aimed at this little picnic area about a quarter mile south of the school. It was nothing fancy, just a turnaround by the side of Route 99 with some wooden tables and a tire swing. The place doubled as a make-out spot, and on a Friday or a Saturday night I suppose there’d have been plenty to keep a Peeping Tom interested, but at the moment the only people there were this tourist family: Mom, Dad, two boys, a golden retriever, and an RV plastered with Disneyland stickers.

I didn’t see the attraction. I mean, there’s no accounting for perverts, but this family just didn’t strike me as, you know, masturbation material. So I was trying to puzzle it out—was it the mom that turned him on? Was it the dog? — when I heard a door slam. And I’m like, oh crap, he’s coming back, but it wasn’t the door in the hall, it was the school’s front door. I looked out the window and saw the janitor down in the parking lot. He walked over to this brown van, got in, started up the engine…and just sat there, idling.

Then after another minute I noticed smoke wafting out of the driver’s-side window: the son of a bitch had fired up another joint. That got me mad, because I was already thinking of it as my dope, so I started sending out mental vibes to any of Officer Friendly’s country cousins who happened to be in the area, begging them to drive by and bust this guy.

Well, of course that didn’t happen. But who did drive by, a few minutes later, was the family in the RV. And no sooner had they passed the school than the van’s taillights finally winked out; the janitor pulled onto the highway right behind the RV and started following it.

Was that when you began to suspect that the janitor was the Angel of Death?

No. The guy was a creep, obviously, but at that point I was still thinking voyeur, not psycho killer. I figured he was tailing them because he wanted to whack off some more—or maybe he was hoping to steal some panties, or a chew toy.

Then the next morning, I went out to catch my ride and Se#241;or Diaz was driving the car, which had never happened before.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Is it the Rapture?”

“The death angel,” said Carlotta. “He grabbed another kid yesterday, right outside Modesto.”

Modesto was north, the same direction the RV had been headed. That should have been enough to start me thinking, but the lightbulb didn’t go on until Carlotta said: “Get this. He didn’t just take the kid this time. He killed the kid’s dog, too.”

“Dog?” I said. “What kind of dog?”

“I don’t know, a big one I guess. They think the dog tried to protect the kid, so the angel, like, gutted it.”

“What about the boy? Did they find his body yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

Carlotta looked excited. “You’ll see.”

A half mile out from school, we hit a traffic jam. This was something else that had never happened before—the road was usually empty at this hour—but when I saw the flashing lights up ahead, I immediately understood.

“The state police found him around two in the morning,” Carlotta said. “Mrs. Zapatero from the motel was coming back late from visiting her sister and saw them roping off the crime scene. She said the kid was laid out on one of the picnic tables, like a human sacrifice.”

As we got closer to the turnaround, Carlotta and I rolled our windows down and leaned out, hoping to catch a glimpse of the corpse. Se#241;or Diaz yanked us back into the car and gave us each a swat on the head. “Show some respect!” he demanded, adding, to Carlotta: “You see why I don’t want you walking?”

Did you tell Se#241;or Diaz about the janitor?

No. I know I should have, but I was pissed at him for hitting me. Besides, telling what I’d seen meant explaining how I’d happened to see it, and I didn’t think he’d appreciate the part about me looking to get stoned. I needed time to come up with a sanitized version of the story—one that would stand up to questioning.

Meanwhile, I decided to ask some questions of my own. When we finally got to school that morning, I quizzed the librarian about the janitor. She didn’t know much. His name was Whitmer, Marvin or maybe Martin, and like me he was new; she’d heard he’d worked at another school before this one, but she couldn’t say where.

“So you wouldn’t know whether this other school was also by the highway?”

“No, dear.”

I thanked her and sat down. Then Carlotta started interrogating me: “What are you so interested in the janitor for?”

“It’s nothing,” I told her.

“Like hell it’s nothing. Hey, I’m not stupid like Felipe.”

“OK, it’s not nothing. But I’m not ready to talk about it.” I didn’t think Carlotta would care about the dope—at least, not enough to give me shit for it—but she would care that I’d gone into the closed wing without her.

Of course, now she was mad at me anyway: “What do you mean you’re not ready to talk about it? Since when do we keep secrets?”

“Carlotta…It’s not a secret, exactly, it—”

“You asked about the highway,” she said. “You think the janitor had something to do with that kid who got killed?”

Good guess; maybe there was something to the Bobbsey Twins after all. “Yeah, I do.”

“But why would you think that? What happened? Did you see something?”

“I told you, I’m not ready to talk about it…Look, Carlotta, I promise I’ll tell you later, OK? But first…I need your help with something. I want to search the janitor’s van after school today, and I need you to be my lookout.”

Now, I came up with this purely as a way of stalling, but when I thought about it, I realized it wasn’t a bad plan. If I did find incriminating evidence in the van, I could turn the janitor in for that, and forget about the other thing.

Wouldn’t you still have to explain your decision to search the van?

Well, that was the beauty of it: if I found proof that the janitor was a serial killer, people would be so excited they’d accept pretty much any explanation. At that point I could just say I had a hunch, and even Carlotta would probably buy it.

So after final bell that day, instead of going back to the library, we went to the lobby and waited for the other students to leave. Not long after the last of them had cleared out, the janitor passed through, pushing a cartload of garbage bags towards the rear of the building.

“What do you think?” I asked Carlotta, once he was out of earshot.

“I think this might not be such a smart idea, Jane. What if he really is the death angel? If he catches you—”

“He won’t. You just stay here, and if you see him coming back, stick your head out the front door and yell something.”

“What should I yell?”

“Anything but my real name.”

The teachers had all taken off too by now, so aside from the librarian’s Volkswagen, the janitor’s van was the only vehicle left in the lot. It was a utility-style van, with no windows in the rear side panels; the windows in the back doors were small, and tinted so you couldn’t see in. Add a little soundproofing, I thought, and it’d be perfect for kidnappings.

Its doors were all locked, but like Nancy Drew I’d come prepared: during lunch period, I’d stolen a coat hanger from the closet in the teachers’ lounge. I slipped it in at the base of the driver’s-side window and fished around until the lock button came up.

The inside of the van smelled like cleaning products. I was struck right away by how tidy it was. I mean I guess it’s no surprise that a janitor would be a neat freak, but still: the dashboard was completely clear, with none of the crap that usually collects there, and there wasn’t a scrap of trash on the floor or under the seats. Even the ashtrays were empty. There was nothing in the glove compartment but the van’s registration papers.

The back of the van was a similar story. The floor was covered with a blanket that looked like it had just come out of a washing machine, and there was a gray metal toolbox stowed away neatly in one of the back corners. Other than that, I couldn’t see so much as a stray gum wrapper.

Did you look inside the toolbox?

Yeah. I almost let it be—it seemed obvious now that the janitor wasn’t the kind of guy to leave body parts lying around—but I decided I’d better be thorough.

The blanket crackled when I stepped on it. I crouched down and lifted up a corner; underneath it was a double layer of plastic sheeting. Then I lifted that up, and found a set of luggage straps, pre-positioned for easy bundling.

I smoothed the blanket back in place and turned to the toolbox. It was padlocked; my coat hanger was no help here, but I had a couple different-sized paper clips, too, and one of them did the trick. I slipped off the padlock and lifted the lid.

And? What was inside?

Tools. A pair of handcuffs, for starters; a fat roll of electrician’s tape; gloves. Also four sets of pliers, three ice picks, and a loop of piano wire.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: a hunting knife. It was a foot long, with a jagged-edged blade. Like the pliers and the ice picks it was shiny clean and smelled like it had been soaking in detergent, but when I took a closer look at it I saw that there was a hair stuck to the handle. A golden hair. I couldn’t tell whether the hair was from a person or a dog, but I was pretty sure the police would be able to.

“Got you,” I said, and that’s when I heard footsteps outside the van.

For a moment I hoped it might only be Carlotta, bored with sentry duty and come to help me search, but then I heard keys jangling and knew I was in trouble. Dumping the garbage must have been the janitor’s last chore for the day; instead of coming back through the building afterwards like I’d expected him to, he’d walked around the outside, bypassing my lookout.

As he fumbled with his keys, I packed the knife away in the toolbox and got ready to make a run for it. But when I reached for the back-door handle to let myself out, the handle wasn’t there.

The janitor opened the driver’s door. I froze. I was totally exposed; there was no way he wouldn’t see me.

Then Carlotta called out from the front steps of the school: “Guadalupe!”

The janitor paused with one foot in the van and looked to see who she was yelling at. That bought me an extra few seconds. I did the only thing I could: moved up into the blind spot directly behind the driver’s seat and made myself as small as possible.

The janitor slid behind the wheel. I crossed my fingers that he’d hang out for a while, maybe give Carlotta a chance to start lobbing oranges onto the van’s roof, but not today: quicker than you can say “Guadalupe!” we were on the road. The janitor drove north again, away from Siesta Corta.

I couldn’t see out, so I passed the time by staring at the toolbox. Although I’d closed the lid, I’d forgotten to latch it, and every time we hit a bump it threatened to fly open and dump its contents. Also, I’d left the padlock lying in plain view on the blanket; I kept waiting for the janitor to notice it in the rearview mirror and pull over to investigate.

After we’d gone about fifteen miles, he did pull over. I raised my head up as high as I dared, trying to get a sense of whether we were coming into a gas station or some other place where people would hear me if I screamed. It didn’t look like it. It looked like we were in another roadside turnaround.

The janitor set the parking brake and killed the engine. He didn’t get out. He rolled his window down, dug around in his pockets for a moment, and lit a joint.

Today I didn’t begrudge him. Let him smoke all the dope he wanted; as long as he didn’t come in back and kill me, I’d be totally cool with it.

I listened to the cars buzzing past on Route 99. Come on, Officer Friendly, I thought. Get your vice detector working… There was a lull in the traffic, and I heard a new sound: voices.

Voices approaching the van?

Voices off in the distance. Boys’ voices, shouting, excited, like in a playground. Then I heard a wooden crack! and I thought, ball field, and I thought, oh shit.

I really didn’t want to die, you know? But I didn’t think I could just sit quiet if the janitor started with the monkey noises again. If it came down to that, I thought I was probably going to have to bash him over the head with the toolbox.

But he kept his fly zipped. Maybe he was worried this spot was too public, or maybe he was storing up images for later. Whichever, he just sat and watched, and smoked—first the joint, then half a dozen cigarettes.

Finally he’d had enough, and got moving again. He drove another three or four miles up the highway before turning off on a side road. The road was in bad shape, and the toolbox lid started jumping again—and just to make things more exciting, we were going uphill, so the blanket kept sliding underneath me. I had to hook my hands under the bottom of the driver’s seat and hang on.

We made a last turn, onto gravel, and pulled into a garage. The janitor parked and got out. My adrenaline level spiked as he walked to the back of the van, but he continued around to the passenger’s side without stopping, jangling his keys. There was a hum of an electric motor as the garage door rattled shut, followed by more key jangling, and the squeak of another door opening and closing. And then, incredibly, I was alone. He hadn’t even come close to discovering me.

I crawled back to the toolbox and got the knife. I thought about taking everything, but I didn’t want to overload myself without knowing how far I might have to run. I figured the knife was the most important piece of evidence, not to mention the most useful if I happened to get cornered.

I got out of the van on the passenger’s side and looked for the button that activated the garage-door opener. I couldn’t find it, but on the wall right where you’d expect the button to be, I saw a small metal panel with a keyhole in it. I whipped out one of my paper clips and with a couple deft moves managed to break off the tip in the keyhole.

Shit. A quick check of the garage door confirmed that I’d need superstrength to open it by hand. I thought seriously about trying to crash the van through it, but it looked sturdy enough to withstand a collision, and anyway, my j.d. skill set didn’t extend to hot-wiring.

I was going to have to sneak out through the house. Worse, now that I’d jammed the garage-door opener, I was going to have to do it soon, before the janitor decided to go out to dinner or another Little League game.

I went and pressed my ear to the house door, and when I didn’t hear heavy breathing on the other side, I tried the knob. I expected it to be locked, which was going to create additional problems, but I guess the janitor wasn’t a total security fanatic after all. The knob turned, and I opened the door a sliver.

Water was running somewhere in the house. I opened the door wider, and the running-water noise resolved itself into the sound of a shower.

I couldn’t believe my luck. I didn’t believe it: as I slipped through the door, I held the knife at the ready.

I found myself in a little alcove equipped with a washer and dryer. The alcove opened into a kitchen. To my left as I came out of the alcove was another doorway; it led into a bedroom, which led, in turn, to the bathroom with the shower. I hovered at the bedroom doorway, listening.

The janitor was definitely in the shower stall; I’ll let you guess how I knew that. My nose wrinkled in disgust, but at the same time I relaxed, sure that I was safe now for at least the next few minutes.

Relief made me stupid. Instead of beating it for the front door, I started snooping around, opening drawers and cabinets. I was over by the pantry, trading glances with the Trix rabbit, when the phone on the kitchen table rang.

I reacted as if a burglar alarm had gone off. I dropped the knife in a panic, and snatched at the phone before it could ring a second time.

The shower kept on running. I raised the phone to my ear.

“Hello?” I said.

There was a pause, and a series of sharp clicks, and then a man’s voice said: “Jane Charlotte.”

It was the janitor, of course; he’d tricked me. All this time he’d been stringing me along, letting me think he hadn’t noticed me. The sounds in the shower stall must have been some sort of recording, meant to lull me into a false sense of security. The game was over now, though, and in a moment he’d tell me to turn around, and he’d be standing right behind me, and then I would die.

But what the voice on the phone said next was: “You don’t want to be messing around in there, Jane. He’s a bad monkey.”

Then the voice broke up in a screech of static—or maybe it was me who screeched—and the next clear thought I had I was outside, running screaming for the road.

Two state police cars were pulling up in front of the janitor’s house. Felipe’s pickup truck was right behind them, with Felipe, Carlotta, Se#241;or Diaz, and the school librarian all jammed into the cab together.

A cop got out of the lead car, and I ran straight into his arms, shouting: “He’s the Angel of Death! He’s the Angel of Death! The janitor is the Angel of Death!” The cop grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to get me to tell him what had happened, but I just kept on shouting: “He’s the Angel of Death!”

The other cops drew their guns and advanced on the house. They were almost at the front door when the janitor came out, still damp from the shower, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. I’d started to calm down a little, but when I saw him I lost it again, screaming “Bad monkey!” and scrambling around to the far side of the police cars.

The cops pointed their guns at the janitor and told him to put his hands up, and he did. He was smooth. Instead of looking scared he acted bewildered, like he was this totally innocent guy who couldn’t imagine what the police were doing on his property.

They handcuffed him. “Come on now,” the lead cop coaxed me. “It’s all right, we’ve got him. Talk to me.” So I started babbling about the hunting knife, and eventually he nodded and said, “OK, just stay here,” and went inside the house.

The Diazes formed a protective huddle around me. “Are you OK, Jane?” Carlotta said. “Did he hurt you?”

I shook my head. “Just scared me out of my wits is all…But it’s fine now.”

Only, it wasn’t fine. I started figuring that out as soon as the cop came back with the wrong knife.

“Is this it?” he asked, holding out a scrawny little steak knife with a five-inch blade.

“No,” I said. “I told you, it was a hunting knife. It was big.”

“Show me.” He took me back inside with him. The hunting knife had disappeared; when I pointed to the spot on the floor where I’d dropped it, the cop said, “That’s where I found this,” and held up the steak knife again. “Are you sure this isn’t it?”

“Of course I’m sure,” I said, annoyed. “The janitor must have hidden the real knife before he came outside.” Then I remembered the toolbox: “Wait a minute…This way!”

I led him into the garage and around to the back of the van. “In there,” I said. “You’ll probably need his keys…” But the van’s back doors were unlocked now. The cop pulled them open.

“So,” he said, “what am I supposed to be looking at?”

The back of the van was empty. No blanket, no plastic sheeting, no luggage straps, no toolbox.

“Damn it!” I said. “He must have hidden this stuff, too.”

“What stuff?”

“His kidnapping equipment.”

“Equipment, huh?” The cop’s expression changed, in a way I didn’t like. “And you think he gathered up this…equipment…and hid it away just as we were arriving?”

“The stuff was here before, and now it’s gone. So yeah. What’s your problem?”

“No problem. It’s just, he must have been moving awfully fast, don’t you think?”

“Look, I’m not making this up.”

“I didn’t say you were making it up. Why would I think you were making it up?”

I should have just shut my mouth then. The thing was, he was right—the janitor would have had to move quickly, which meant he couldn’t have hidden the stuff very well. I’m sure I could have found it.

But the cop was giving me the same I-see-through-your-bullshit look that Officer Friendly had—only not, you know, so friendly—so not only did I keep on running my mouth, but I immediately brought up the one subject you never mention when you’re trying to get somebody to believe you.

“Take a whiff,” I said.

“A whiff?”

“Inside the van. Smell it.”

He leaned in and sniffed. “Air freshener?”

“Pot.”

His eyebrows went up. “Marijuana?”

“The janitor smokes it.”

“Really. You’d never guess that, looking at him.”

“Not to get high,” I said. “I mean, that too, but he smokes it to excite himself. Before…”

“Oh! Before he uses his kidnapping equipment, you mean…And you’re familiar with the smell of marijuana, are you?”

It was a fast trip downhill from there. The more skeptical he became, the more I talked—when he asked me what had put me on to the janitor in the first place, I actually told the truth, or at least enough of it to make myself sound like a complete idiot. “Monkey noises, eh? Well, I can see why you’d be suspicious of a man who made noises like a monkey…”

To complete my humiliation, he brought me back outside and asked Carlotta whether she knew anything about these monkey noises. “Monkey what?” said Carlotta.

“That’s what I thought,” said the cop, and told his buddies to turn the janitor loose.

My mouth wouldn’t stop running: “You’re letting him go?”

“You should be worried about whether I’m going to let you go,” the cop said. “If this gentleman wants to press charges against you for trespassing, I’ll be only too happy to run you in.”

But the janitor, still playing the innocent, said he didn’t want to press charges—he just wanted to know what was going on.

“Just a big misunderstanding, sir,” the cop told him. He shot me a look: “One that had better not happen again.”

The Diazes took me home. Se#241;or Diaz made me ride in the back of the pickup, which I didn’t particularly mind, since he and Carlotta spent the entire trip arguing in high-decibel Spanish; when we stopped at the school to drop off the librarian, she stumbled out of the cab looking pale and half-deaf. Then when we got to my stop, Se#241;or Diaz had a quieter conversation with my aunt and uncle. I didn’t need to listen in to know that I’d be taking the bus to school from now on.

After the Diazes left, my uncle told me that it “might be best” if I didn’t go by the diner or the gas station anymore, and my aunt added that they wouldn’t need my help at the store “for a while,” which I understood was her way of saying I was grounded. I got really mad, and started going on about how stupid it was that no one believed me, and how it wasn’t going to be my fault if the janitor killed another kid; but my aunt and uncle just shook their heads and left me alone to rant and rave.

It was Friday, so I had the whole weekend to feel sorry for myself. Monday was a little better; I got to sleep an extra hour and a half, which almost made up for having to take the school bus. I didn’t see Carlotta until second-period English. She ignored me during class, and afterwards I had to run out into the hall to catch up with her.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you, Jane,” she said. “My dad thinks you’re a bad influence.”

“I am a bad influence. It’s one of the reasons you like me.”

The joke fell flat, but at least she didn’t walk away. After a moment, she asked: “Did you hear about the janitor?”

“What about him?”

“He quit his job over the weekend. The librarian told me he called up the school superintendent on Saturday and said he was leaving.”

“Leaving as in moving away?”

“I guess so.”

“Well don’t you see what that means? He’s guilty! Even though the cops let him go, he’s afraid they’ll remember him next time a kid disappears.”

“Maybe,” said Carlotta. “Or maybe he’s afraid people will jump to conclusions when they hear the cops were at his place.”

“Carlotta, I swear, I didn’t make any of that stuff up.”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it? I mean, if he’s really gone for good.” She looked at me. “You should probably be careful until we know that for sure, huh?”

The thought had already occurred to me. Friday afternoon, as we were about to leave the janitor’s house, I’d caught the janitor eyeballing me. The cops were already in their cars, and Felipe was revving the pickup, and I looked over and saw the janitor standing in his front doorway, still in his underwear, staring at me. He’d dropped the bewildered routine and put a whole new face on.

A hostile face?

No. He didn’t show any emotion at all. He was just…intent. Like he wanted to make really sure he’d recognize me next time we met up.

It was good for a few weeks’ nightmares. In my dreams, he’d drive up to my aunt and uncle’s place after midnight with his headlights off, and sit smoking dope and looking up at my bedroom window. Sometimes he’d just sit there, thinking about how he was going to get even with me, and other times he’d get out and walk around the outside of the house, looking for a way in. One night I woke up in a sweat, sure I’d just heard a van driving away, and when I opened my window to look out, I smelled pot smoke.

I also dreamed about that voice I’d heard on the phone in the janitor’s kitchen. When I was awake I didn’t think about it so much—I mean, it’s not like I forgot about it, but it was just so weird, I sort of pretended I forgot about it. But it got into my dreams, and in my dreams, it wasn’t scary. I’d be like clutching this phone in the dark, petrified because the janitor was coming for me, and then the voice would say my name, “Jane Charlotte,” and there’d be this wave of relief, because somehow, dream logic, I’d know the voice was good, and it was on my side, on the side of all good people. And it was more powerful than the Angel of Death.

So I dreamed about this stuff for a few weeks, and then the dreams started to taper off. The janitor hadn’t come calling on me, nobody at school or in town had seen him, no more kids had gone missing, and while I still knew the guy was guilty, more and more it seemed like that was somebody else’s problem.

Then one evening my aunt and uncle drove down to Fresno to visit some friends of theirs. Originally I was supposed to go with them and catch a movie while they played bridge or whatever, but the day before, I’d gotten busted for cheating on a test, and after the school superintendent called home to narc on me, my aunt went from talking about “when we go out tomorrow night” to “when your uncle and I go out tomorrow night.”

They left around six. Storm clouds were blowing in from the west, and I was pissy enough to hope they’d get caught in a downpour. By seven the sky was overcast and lightning was flickering on the horizon, but there was still no rain.

I read a few chapters of Nancy Drew—I’d worked my way through most of the series by now, so I’d had to start rationing the books that were left—then ate the cold meatloaf my aunt had left me in the fridge. After I cleared my plate I sat back down at the kitchen table to work a crossword puzzle from the Fresno Bee. This was another Phil-type activity that you couldn’t have paid me to do back in S.F. But with no TV, a looming Nancy Drew shortage, and Se#241;or Diaz hanging up the phone every time I tried to call Carlotta, my entertainment standards just kept getting lower and lower.

It was a hidden-message crossword, which they did sometimes: certain of the clues were highlighted, and if you solved them and strung the answers together, they’d form a saying or a quotation, like RED SKY AT MORNING, SAILOR TAKE WARNING, or THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL US MAKES US STRONGER. Usually the special clues were hard enough that you had to finish the whole crossword to get them, but sometimes, like tonight, you could solve them directly.

The first highlighted clue, 1 across, four letters, was “Defunct Life magazine rival,” and I knew that was LOOK. The second clue, 9 across, five letters, was “Opposite of over,” or UNDER. The third clue—and this one was so easy I almost laughed—was a fill-in-the-blank, 13 across, three letters, “Winnie ____ Pooh.”

There was a rumble of thunder and the rain finally started. It was the downpour I’d wished for and then some, but instead of making me happy it set me on edge. I went down the hall to the front door, flicked on the front-porch lights, and spent a long time looking out, making sure that the hiss of the rain was just rain, and not tires creeping up the drive.

The next clue was the only one I didn’t get right off the bat: 20 across, four letters, “Where the NC gun is hidden.”

NC gun?

Capital N, capital C. I thought it might be a typo, so I moved on to the next clue, 24 across, four letters, “Tarzan’s girlfriend.” My scalp prickled a little when I saw that, but what really made my hair stand up was the last clue, 31 across, nine letters, “The loneliest Bront#235;.”

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t have gotten that one either, but it just so happened that we’d been reading Jane Eyre in class that week, and the teacher had given us the rundown on the whole sorry Bront#235; family, so I knew that the loneliest Bront#235; was CHARLOTTE. After Branwell and Emily and Anne all died, Charlotte was the one left over, the one left alone in the house, kind of like I was right now. And so if you added it all together, tonight’s hidden message was—

LOOK UNDER THE blank, JANE CHARLOTTE.

Yeah. And maybe it was because it shared a couple of letters with “blank,” or maybe it was because I was sitting with my back to it, but all at once I knew that the missing word was SINK.

My aunt and uncle’s kitchen had this huge sink—“Big enough to slaughter a pig in,” my uncle said one time, and he made it sound like that was more than a figure of speech. It had a big cabinet space underneath it too, and once when we were visiting a few years earlier, Phil crawled under there during a game of hide-and-seek and split his head open on the drainpipe. So between thoughts of pig slaughter and the memory of Phil with blood streaming down his face, I wasn’t exactly eager to stick my nose down there.

Of course I had to look. I told myself that it was just a coincidence anyway, there was no way that message in the crossword could really be intended for me personally. Maybe “Look under the sink, Jane Charlotte” was a line from Shakespeare.

So I opened up the cabinet, and there was nothing there but the usual assortment of under-the-sink junk, and I’m like, see, just a coincidence. But then I’m like, not so fast, if there is a gun, it’s not just going to be lying out next to the silver polish. So I felt up in the space between the wall and the back of the sink basin. And at first I was just touching air, but then I moved my hand a little and my fingers brushed something rough. A package.

It was rolled up in a piece of potato sack and tied up with twine. I brought it out into the light and unwrapped it. And there it was.

It looked like a toy zap gun. It was bright orange, with a puffy barrel, and it seemed to be made of plastic. It was heavy, though, and from the weight and the fact that it was slightly cold, I thought it might be a water pistol. But when I checked the base of the handle there was no rubber plug, just a flat plate embossed with the letters NC.

There were more markings on the side of the gun. Near the back of the barrel, right above the trigger, was a dial with four settings. One setting was labeled SAFE in small green letters; the next setting was labeled NS, in blue; the last two settings, both labeled in dark red, were CI and MI. The dial was currently set to MI.

I did the thing that you traditionally do when you’re a teenager and you find a gun, which was point it at my own face. The dark hole of the NC gun’s muzzle seemed more real than the rest of it, though, so I decided not to pull the trigger. Instead I looked around to see if one of my aunt’s cats was in the room. But the cats had made themselves scarce, and before I could choose something else for target practice, all the lights in the house went out.

For the first few seconds I was amazingly calm. Then lightning flashed outside and I turned towards the window above the sink, drawn by an afterimage of something that didn’t belong. When the next flash came I saw it clearly: out beyond the backyard, in the orange groves that ran behind the house, a van was parked with its headlights off.

Something big walked across the back porch, passing right in front of the window—I say something, but of course I knew who it was, and what he was here for. He went straight for the porch door, which was locked but flimsy, and banged on it hard, real hammer blows. I could feel it shaking in its frame. There was a pause, and then he started attacking the doorknob, rattling it like he meant to pull it off.

By this point I was practically shitting myself with fear. I still had the gun, but I’d gone back to thinking of it as a toy, and in another moment I would have dropped it in the sink and started running blind through the house.

Then the phone rang, a beautiful sound. The janitor immediately stopped rattling the doorknob. The phone rang again, and again, and I moved towards it, terrified that if the ringing stopped before I reached it the attack on the door would begin again. I racked my knee on a chair, and banged my side against the corner of the kitchen table, but I held on to the gun.

I answered the phone on the seventh ring: “Hello…?”

“Jane Charlotte.”

“I don’t know who this is,” I whispered, “but I need help. Your bad monkey is right outside my back door.”

“No,” the voice on the phone said. “He’s in the house.”

Down the hall in my uncle’s study, a board creaked.

“Now don’t panic,” the voice advised. “He won’t expect you to be armed. Just hold the gun steady in both hands…”

I hung up. From the phone to the porch door was about a dozen steps, but my feet didn’t touch the floor more than twice.

The door wouldn’t open, even after I remembered to unlock it. Something—one of the porch chairs, probably—had been jammed under the knob on the other side.

Behind me, another board creaked: he was coming down the hall. I whirled around and raised the gun, even as his silhouette filled the kitchen doorway.

The NC gun doesn’t make any noise when you fire it. I didn’t realize that at the time, though, because just as I pulled the trigger, the lightning came again, striking so close behind the house that there was no pause before the thunder. The kitchen filled up with sound and light, so bright that the janitor himself seemed to glow like a real angel, an angel with a flaming dagger in one hand and a sparkling wire halo in the other. I screamed, and he screamed too, and by the time the brightness failed he was already falling.

In the dark I heard his body hit the floor. I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger again, but this time there was nothing, not even a click.

The rain stopped. The thunder and lightning moved off, and after a while the power came back on. I could see him, then, sprawled on his back in the kitchen doorway, not moving. He was just a man now; his eyes were glassy, and he had a new expression on his face.

He looked surprised.

Now, this next part may be a little hard to believe.

Really.

You know normally, if you shoot an intruder in your house, especially a serial killer, the first thing you do afterwards is call the police.

Right.

Or just run like hell to the neighbors’.

Right.

Right. But I didn’t do either of those things.

What did you do?

I got sleepy. I mean, the guy was dead—I kicked him a couple times to make sure—so it’s not like notifying the cops was urgent anymore. And now that I knew I was safe, I just really felt like lying down for a while. I thought, my aunt and uncle will be home in a few hours, and we can deal with the aftermath then.

So I went upstairs to my room. I barricaded the door with my dresser—just in case—and lay down. I slipped the NC gun under my pillow. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, it was morning. My bedroom door was wide open, and I could hear my aunt making breakfast in the kitchen. I got up and went downstairs, and stood in the empty doorway where the janitor’s body had been.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” my aunt said. “Would you like bacon with your eggs?”

The porch door was open too, and I could see my uncle out back, walking around the remains of a lightning-blasted tree.

“Hold off on the bacon,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I ran upstairs and looked under my pillow.

The gun was gone too, wasn’t it?

Yeah. But there was something else in its place. A coin. A gift from the pistol fairy, maybe.

It was the size of a quarter, but thicker and heavier. It looked like gold. It had the same image on both sides, a hollow pyramid with a glowing eye inside of it, you know, kind of like the capstone from the pyramid on the dollar bill. Running around the rim of the coin was a three-word slogan: OMNES MUNDUM FACIMUS.

My Latin is rusty. Mundum means “world”?

Yeah. I got a Latin dictionary from the school library and worked it out. Omnes is “all of us,” and facimus, that’s “create” or “make,” so omnes mundum facimus is like, “We all make the world.” That’s how it translates; as for what it meant, though, that was trickier. It was a puzzle, see? A sort of aptitude test, like the hidden message in the crossword, only much harder, so it took me a lot longer to get it.

How much longer?

Twenty-two years.