Summer of Night

  At that moment, Dale realized that the game they'd been playing hunting for Tubby Cooke and following Roon and the others around was finished. At least as far as he was concerned it was over. It was silly and it was going to get someone hurt.

  There weren't any mysteries in Elm Haven-no Nancy Drew or Joe Hardy adventures with secret passages and clever clues-just a bunch of assholes like C. J. and his old man who could really hurt you if you got in their way. Jim Harlen had probably already broken his arm and stuff because of their stupid sneaking around. Dale had gotten the feeling that afternoon that Mike and Kevin were tired of the whole thing too.

  Much later, Lawrence sighed and rolled over in his sleep, still clutching Teddy but releasing Dale's hand. Dale rolled over on his right side, beginning to drift off. Beyond the screens on the two windows, leaves rustled on the big oak and crickets played their mindless tunes in the grass. The last of the evening glow was long gone from the window, but a few fireflies sent signals against the blackness of branches.

  As Dale dozed off, he thought he could hear his mother ironing in the kitchen downstairs. For a while there was no sound in the room except for the regular breathing of the two boys. Outside, an owl or a dove made swallowing sounds. Then closer, in the closet in the corner, something scrabbled and clawed, paused, and then scratched a final time before falling into silence.

  THIRTEEN

  Duane McBride had convinced his Uncle Art that Wednesday would be a good day to drive in to the university library-Art had spent most of his money over the years on books but still liked to visit a 'decent library' now and then-so the two left shortly after eight that morning.

  What Uncle Art hadn't spent on books he'd put into his car-a year old Cadillac-and Duane could only marvel at the battleship-sized grandeur of the thing. It had every option known to Detroit technology, including an automatic headlight dimmer with a ray-gun-shaped sensor rising from the dash like something Duane's Old Man would have designed. Uncle Art drove with three fingers on the bottom of the wheel, his heavy body comfortable in the cushions.

  Duane liked his uncle. Art had one of those florid, rounded faces that combined with the kind of mouth which always seemed to be on the verge of a smile so as to give people the idea that he was amused by something just said or about to be said. Usually, with Uncle Art, that was true.

  Art McBride was an ironist. Where Duane's father had fallen into bitterness and disappointment in his failure to get ahead, Uncle Art had cultivated an ironic resignation which he leavened with humor. Duane's Old Man tended to see conspiracies and cabals-in the government, in the telephone company, in the Veterans Administration, in the more prominent families in Elm Haven-while Uncle Art felt that most individuals and all bureaucracies were too cretinous to manage a conspiracy.

  Each brother had failed in his own way. Duane's father had watched his businesses fail due to poor planning, terrible timing, and management techniques which never included efficiency amongst all the manic energy he poured into them. Added to that, the Old Man invariably would insult whatever individual or organization was indispensable to the success of the venture. Uncle Art, on the other hand, had gone into business only a few times-had made and spent his profits on his three wives, all deceased-and had decided that business simply wasn't for him. Art worked at the Caterpillar plant near Peoria when he needed money. Although he had degrees in engineering and business administration, he preferred the assembly line.

  Duane had decided that a tendency toward ironic resignation and the ability to handle responsibility didn't necessarily go together too well.

  "What bit of esoterica are you seeking in the Bradley library?" asked Uncle Art.

  Duane pushed his glasses up on his nose with his middle finger. "Oh, just some stuff I wanted to know and couldn't find in Oak Hill."

  "Did you try the Elm Haven library? Finest depository of knowledge since the Library of Alexandria."

  Duane smiled. The one-room 'library' on Broad Avenue was an old joke between them. It held about four hundred books. Uncle Art's library ran to over three thousand volumes. Duane would have searched there for information on the Borgia Bell, but he knew the library well enough to know that Art had very little on the Borgia era.

  "Did I say expository of knowledge?" continued Uncle Art. "I should have said depository. Good thing for you, keed, that I'm currently laid off."

  "Yes," said Duane. Uncle Art spent a good part of the year laid off as demand for assembly-line workers waxed and waned. Art didn't seem to mind.

  "Seriously, what're you hunting for?" Uncle Art turned off the air conditioning and touched a button to lower the window. Warm, humid air rushed in. Art ran a hand through his short hair; he had lustrous white hair, wavy and full, Duane remembered from the few times Uncle Art allowed it to get long. Usually he wore it in a crew cut as he did now. Duane remembered when he was little, when Art was returning from one of his year-long trips after the death of his third wife, and the four-year-old had confused his then-bearded uncle with Santa Claus.

  Duane sighed. "I'm hunting for some stuff on the Borgias."

  Uncle Art blinked interest. "Borgias? As in Lucrezia, Ro-drigo, Cesare… that bunch?"

  "Yeah," said Duane, sitting up taller in the cushions. "You know much about them? Or did you ever hear about some bell they had?"

  "Uh-uh. Don't know much about the Borgias. Just the usual stuff about poisoning, incest, what bad popes they made. I'm more interested in the Medicis. Now there's a family worth reading about."

  Duane nodded. They'd been heading southeast down the Hard Road-now merely thought of as the state highway-from Elm Haven, and were now descending into the valley of the Spoon River. The cliffs were about a mile apart, the hillsides so thick with trees that they overhung the road here, then opened out into rich bottomland with soil so black from frequent floods that the corn grew a foot higher here than in the fields around Elm Haven. The only structures in sight were a few corncribs and the metal highway bridge crossing the river itself. On the bridge, a narrow catwalk ran out to a corrugated steel, silo-shaped tower-no more than four feet in diameter-which dropped to its own concrete pilings thirty feet below. Duane knew that it held only a cramped spiral stairway down to a highway department storage area down at the river's level.

  "Remember when you and Dad used to threaten to leave me in there if I didn't quit asking questions during the ride to Peoria?" said Duane, gesturing toward the corrugated metal tower. "You guys used to say it was a prison tower for blabby kids. You said you'd pick me up on the way home."

  Uncle Art nodded and lit a cigarette from the car lighter. His blue eyes squinted toward where mirages rippled on the narrow road ahead. "Still applies, kiddo. One more question and you're gonna spend more time in a prison tower than Thomas More."

  "Thomas who?" said Duane. He was feeding Uncle Art the straight line. They were both big Thomas More fans.

  "Now there's a man!" began Uncle Art and launched into one of his monologues.

  They reached Highway 150 and turned east toward the tiny town of Kickapoo and then Peoria. Duane settled back into the Cadillac's deep cushions and thought about the Borgia Bell.

  Dale, Mike, Kevin, and Lawrence had left town just after breakfast that morning, headed east for the wooded hills behind Calvary Cemetery. They drove their bikes through the cemetery itself-Mike glancing toward the padlocked door of the storage shed but saying nothing to the other kids-and left them by the back fence. They crossed the pasture into the thick woods and a quarter of a mile later came to the strip-mined quarry they called Billy Goat Mountains. Here they climbed and shouted and threw dirt clods for an hour, before stripping off their clothes and swimming in the one shallow pool there.

  Gerry Daysinger, Bob McKown, Bill and Barry Pussner, Chuck Sperling, Digger Taylor, and a couple more guys arrived about ten o'clock, just as Dale and the others were getting back into their clothes. The Fussner twins started shouting and the rest of the invaders began throwing dirt clod
s-Mike, Dale, and the others had been careful to circle around to the east side of the quarry before swimming-and both sides exchanged insults and clods across the water before the newcomers broke into two groups and began running around the weed-choked edges of the cliffs.

  "They're trying to flank us," said Mike, zipping up his jeans.

  Kevin threw a dirt clod that fell ten yards short of the north cliff. Daysinger screamed something nasty and kept running along the edge, occasionally stopping to pull a rock out of the ground and throw it their way.

  Dale hurried Lawrence into his sneakers. He threw a clod… not a rock… and had the pleasure of watching Chuck Sperling have to duck.

  Dirt clods and rocks were raining around them now, splashing in the shallow pool and kicking holes in the dunes of dirt behind them. The invaders had reached the far side of the quarry and were closing in from the north and south. But the woods started twenty feet beyond the quarry and went on for miles.

  "Remember," said Mike,"if they get you they've got to actually hold you down before you're captured. You break away, you can keep going."

  "Yeah," said Kevin, glancing toward the woods. "Let's go, huh?"

  Mike grabbed the other boy's t-shirt. "But if they do get you, you don't tell them where the camps are or what the call signs are. Right?"

  Kevin made a disgusted face. Jim Harlen had ratted them out once-they still couldn't use what had been Camp Five because of that-but none of the others had ever talked, even though it'd meant a fistfight once between Dale and Digger Taylor.

  The attackers were close enough now to believe that their pincers movement might work. Clods whisked through the air and crashed into underbrush. Lawrence took aim, reared back, and fired a clod that hit Gerry Daysinger hard enough -even at thirty paces-to cause the older boy to sit down hard and let loose with a string of curses.

  "Camp ThreeV shouted Mike, telling them where to try to meet up in thirty minutes after they lost the attackers. "Go!"

  They went, Dale trying to keep Lawrence with him as they crashed through the underbrush into the dense woods, Kevin and Mike turning south toward Gypsy Lane and the ravine where Corpse Creek ran under the slate cliffs, Dale and his brother running hard toward the creek that ran north of the cemetery and the hidden pond that lay along the southern edge of their Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's property.

  Behind them, the Fussner twins, McKown, and the others shouted and bayed like fox hounds on a hunt. But the forest had a lot of new growth here, saplings and shrubs and weeds and thickets and batches of poison ivy, and everyone was too busy running and hunting or running and eluding to take time to throw clods.

  Running hard, occasionally tugging at Lawrence as they took a sharp turn off some old trail or up a hill, Dale tried to keep ahead of the pursuers while keeping a map in his mind, figuring out how to double back to Camp Three without running right into the band behind them.

  The hills echoed to the shouts of capture and aggression.

  The library at Bradley University wasn't the best-the school specialized in education, engineering, and business, after all-but Duane knew his way around it and soon found some information on the subject. He moved from card catalog to microfilm and back to stacks while Uncle Art sat in one of the easy chairs in the main lounge and caught up on two months' reading of various journals and papers.

  There really wasn't that much prime stuff on the Borgias, and less about any bell. Duane had to skim through all the surface stuff before getting his first clue. It was a minor note in a long passage about the coronation of popes: It was a shock to the Italians and a surprise to even his Spanish kinsmen when His Excellency Don Alonso y Borja, Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of Quattro Coronati, was elected Pope at the age of seventy-seven in the Conclave of 1455. Few disputed that the Cardinal's primary qualifications were his advanced age and obvious illness; the conclave had need for a caretaker pope and no one doubted that Borgia, as the Italians had civilized his rough Spanish name, would be just that.

  As Pope Calixtus III, Borgia seemed to find renewed energy in his position and proceeded to consolidate Papal powers and to launch a new Crusade, the last as it turned out, against the Turks holding Constantinople.

  To celebrate his papacy and the ascendancy of the House of Borgia, Calixtus commissioned a great bell to be cast from metal mined in the fabled hills of Aragon. The bell was eventually cast. Legend has it that the iron was culled from the famous Coronati Star Stone, possibly a meteorite but certainly a source of the highest quality material for Valencia and Toledo metalsmiths for some generations past. It was displayed in Valencia in 1457 and was sent to Rome in a stately procession which tarried for further exhibition in every major city in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Tarried for too long, as it turned out.

  Calixtus's triumphant bell arrived in Rome on August 7, 1458. The eighty-year-old Pope did not appreciate it; he had died in his shuttered rooms late the night before.

  Duane searched the index and skimmed the rest of this particular book, but there was no further mention of Calixtus's bell. He made a quick trip to the card catalogue and returned with notes to find books that mentioned Pope Calixtus's nephew, Rodrigo.

  There was ample information on Rodrigo. Duane scribbled quickly, glad that he'd brought along several of his small notebooks.

  The twenty-seven-year-old Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had been the prime mover in the ensuing Conclave of 1458. Not even remotely a candidate for pope himself, the younger Borgia had cleverly brokered the election of the next pontiff by engineering support for Bishop Aeneas Silvius Picco-lomini, who emerged from the conclave as Pope Pius II. Pius did not forget the young cardinal's help in his time of need, and the former Piccolomini made sure that the next few years were fruitful for young Rodrigo Borgia.

  But no mention of a bell. Duane speed-read two books and skimmed a third before he found the next clue.

  It was a history written by Piccolomini himself. Pope Pius II appeared to have been a born chronicler, more historian than theologian. His notes of the Conclave of 1458-notes forbidden by rules and tradition-showed in great detail how he had urged Rodrigo Borgia to support him and how important that support had been. Then, in a passage covering Palm Sunday of 1462, four years later, Pius described a magnificent procession given in honor of the arrival of the head of St. Andrew in Rome. Duane smiled at that; a celebration for the arrival of a head.

  The passage was chatty enough: All the cardinals who lived along the route had decorated their houses magnificently… but all were outstripped in expense and effort and ingenuity by Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor. His huge, towering house, which he had built on the site of the old mint, was covered with rich and wonderful tapestries, and besides this he had raised a lofty canopy from which were suspended many and various marvels. Above the canopy, framed by elaborate and decorative woodwork, hung the great bell commissioned by the vice-chancellor's brother, Our predecessor. Despite its newness, the bell was said to have been the talisman and source of power for the House of Borgia.

  The procession stopped before the vice-chancellor's fortress, a place of sweet songs and sounds, or a great palace gleaming with gold such as they say Nero's palace was. Rodrigo had decorated not only his own house for Our celebration but also those nearby, so that the square all about them seemed a kind of park full of the most riotous celebration. We offered to bless Rodrigo's home and grounds and bell, but the vice-chancellor attested that the bell had been consecrated in its own way two years before when the palace had been built. Bemused, we moved on with Our priceless relic through the reverent and celebrating streets.

  Duane shook his head, pushed his glasses higher, and smiled. The thought that this bell was sitting, forgotten, in the boarded-up belfry of Old Central was beyond belief.

  He checked his notes, wandered the stacks, pulled several more books from the shelves, and returned to his study carrel.

  There was more.

  Camp Three was on a hillside a quarter of a mile nor
theast of the cemetery. The woods were thick there, branches coming to within four feet of the ground in many places, and the shrubbery made walking hard going except on the few trails cattle and hunters had cut through the thickets. Camp Three looked like just another solid thicket of shrubs from every angle: a ring of bushes with multiple trunks the thickness of a boy's wrist, a tangle of branches overhead almost joining with the canopy of leaves from the trees. But if one got on one's knees at just the right spot and crawled through the maze of brambles and stems at just the right angle, the entrance to a truly wonderful place appeared.

  Dale and Lawrence arrived first, panting and looking over their shoulders, hearing the shouts from McKown and the others only a hundred yards behind them. They made sure no one was in sight, dropped to all fours on the grassy hillside, and crawled into Camp Three.

  The interior was as solid and secure as some domed hut, eight feet across in an almost perfect circle, the wall of shrubs allowing a few peepholes but providing complete invisibility from searching eyes outside. Some quirk of the slope settling-perhaps due to the stockadelike ring of shrubs itself-had provided an almost level floor of soil here where the rest of the hillside was rather steep. A low, soft grass grew within this ring, providing a surface as smooth as a putting green.

  Dale once had lain in Camp Three during a solid summer rainstorm and had remained as dry as if he were home in his own room. One snowy winter he and Lawrence and Mike had postholed their way through the woods and found Camp Three after some effort-the shrubs and woods here looked quite different without their foliage-and had crawled in to find the interior almost free of snow, the surrounding stockade of wooden stems as concealing as ever.

  Now he and his brother lay there gasping as silently as possible, listening to the excited shouts of McKown and the others as they crashed their way through the woods.