"Jump!" screamed Dale and Lawrence in unison. Mike and Harlen fell free the last six or eight yards, landing hard and rolling in the deep sand.
Above them, the descending form of Dr. Roon was suddenly tugged upward as the rope jerked tight around its wrist. He threw his free arm out in the last second before he struck the overhang of the burning eave, was dragged above it, and disappeared into the firestorm, looking for an instant like a thrashing insect on a string being tossed into the flames of a campfire.
Dale and Lawrence rushed forward, arms raised against the heat, and dragged Mike and Harlen out past the playground equipment, into the ditch on the edge of School Street. The four of them watched as Kevin and Cordie made a wide circle of the burning, collapsing school to join them there.
Without warning, the streetlights and houselights of Elm Haven snapped on. The children huddled together, Cordie ripping the last of her dress into strips and wrapping them around Mike's bleeding hands. None of them thought it odd that she stood there in her gray slip, nor that Kevin was barefoot and bleeding, nor that the other four boys looked like chimney sweeps in sooty rags. Suddenly Lawrence started giggling and they all laughed until they cried, holding each other and pounding each other on the back.
Then, as the laughter died away before it turned to tears, Mike was whispering something, tugging Kevin close. "You heard somebody stealing your dad's truck," he gasped between coughs. He had inhaled too much smoke. "You called us on our toy walkie-talkies, we tried to catch up to it. We thought we saw Dr. Roon driving. Then it hit the school and the fire started."
"No," said Kevin dully, rubbing his temple,"that's not the way it happened…"
"Kevin!" said Mike, grabbing the boy's sooty t-shirt with a bloody hand and shaking him.
Kevin's eyes cleared. "Yesss," he said slowly. "Someone was stealing dad's truck. I went out to chase him."
"We couldn't catch up," said Dale.
"Then the fire started," said Lawrence. He squinted at the blaze. The roof had fallen in completely now, the belfry was gone, the windows had burned away and the walls were falling in. "And boy did it start."
"We don't know who or why," coughed Mike, sagging back onto the grass. "We tried to get the guy out of the truck and we got all messed up like this. But we don't know anything else."
Two distinct sirens began to wail-the civil defense siren on the bank warning of a tornado that had already passed, and the higher, shriller siren on the volunteer fire department half a block south. Headlights appeared on Second Avenue and Depot Street and they heard the sound of heavy trucks approaching. People appeared on the sidewalks and street-corners.
Supporting one another in clusters of twos and threes, their shadows thrown far across the playing fields by the rising flames of the burning building, the six children walked back toward the welcoming lights of the houses where some of their parents waited.
FORTY-TWO
On Friday, August 12, 1960, the Echo communications satellite balloon was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral.
That afternoon, Dale and Lawrence and Kevin and Harlen and Mike rode their bikes out to Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's where they hiked the back pastures and spent hours digging for the lost Bootleggers' Cave back along the creek. It was very hot.
Cordie Cooke appeared shortly before dinner and watched them dig. Her family had moved back to their home along the Dump Road, and kids in town had commented on how much time she spent with Mike and the others these days.
The digging was slow. Harlen's new cast had come off almost two weeks earlier, Kevin's smaller cast a week after that, but both boys favored those arms and all of the boys except Harlen had healing scabs on their palms. They handled the shovels and spades carefully.
Amazingly, just before dinnertime-Dale's and Lawrence's folks' station wagon had just pulled in the drive a quarter of a mile away and honked at them-Mike's shovel broke through into darkness.
Old, cool air swept out of the ten-inch hole they had opened into the hillside. Always optimistic, Lawrence had brought a flashlight along. They widened the hole a bit and played the flashlight beam inside.
It was no mefe gopher hole. An entrance shaft littered with dusty bottles and other hasty filler material appeared to open to a wider, deeper space beyond. The boys could see dark wood that might have been a crate or the edge of a bar. A dark curve was certainly an old tire, possibly a wheel still on a Model A entombed there just as Uncle Henry had always said.
The boys started digging away at the hole, enlarging it, tossing clods and stones downhill toward the creek, when suddenly they stopped as by silent consensus. Cordie looked up from where she was sitting in the shade across the creek. Her new jeans from Meyers' Dry Goods looked crisp and stiff on her. She brushed dust off her saddle shoes.
Mike pulled the shovel back and looked at the other four boys. "It's real," he whispered. He set the shovel down and rubbed his lower lip. "But there's no hurry, is there?"
Kevin leaned on his short spade and ran a hand through his crew cut. The scar on his temple near the hairline was small and white and almost invisible. "I don't see why there should be any hurry," he said. "It's been there thirty-some years. It can keep."
Dale nodded. "Uncle Henry really wouldn't want all those people and reporters and tourists and stuff swarming around here. Not now. Not with his back still healing and all."
Harlen folded his arms. "I don't know," he said, looking from face to face. "There might be something valuable in there."
Lawrence shrugged and grinned. He had been clawing wildly at the dirt, working hard to open the entrance tunnel wider. Now he pushed some of the dirt back in place. "Don't you get it, Jim? It'll always be there. It's not going anywhere. If the stuff is worth something now, think of how much it'll be worth if we come back in a few years and dig it up." He started pushing more earth back over the foot-wide opening. "It'll be our secret," he said, grinning at them and setting his glasses higher on his small nose. "Just ours."
They worked to conceal the tunnel with as much effort and enthusiasm as they had shown in finding it. They filled it in, tapped the dirt down, returned heavy stones to their original places by dragging them back uphill, set sod and bushes back in place, and even moved a root back that they had laboriously pulled aside. They stood back to admire their handiwork for a moment-it looked raw now, but in a week or two it would be grown over again-by autumn no one could tell that they had ever dug here.
Then they started up to the house for dinner.
Mike paused on the cow path up the hill and looked at Cordie, still sitting on the opposite hillside and stripping leaves from a branch. "Coming?" hesaid.
"Boys," she said, shaking her head. "When God didn't have no more parts for smart, he made dumb."
They waited in the long shadows of the hillside while she crossed a log across the creek and climbed to catch up.
The investigation into the strange events of the week of July 10-16 had gone on visibly for weeks and were still going on, although elsewhere and out of sight and at a much less urgent level now.
The central event turned out to be the disappearance of Mr. Dennis Ashley-Montague and his servant. When the limousine was found at Bandstand Park long after midnight on the night of the fire, abandoned, the Free Show projector still throwing a blank rectangle of white light onto the side of the Parkside Cafe, the Sheriff's Department, the Oak Hill police, and eventually the FBI had become involved in the manhunt. For weeks, FBI men in tight black suits, skinny black ties, and polished black Florsheims had been seen walking the streets of Elm Haven, hanging around the cafe, and even drinking Pepsis in Carl's and the Black Tree-'blending in' and picking up local gossip.
There was enough local gossip.
There were a million theories to explain the theft of Ken Grumbacher's truck, almost certainly stolen by Dr. Roon, the former principal, the fire, the grave-robbing of several bodies from Mr. Taylor's funeral home, and the disappearance of Elm Haven's patron mill
ionaire. Rumor had it that forensic experts had found not just the bones of Dr. Roon and the missing corpses in the collapsed ruins of Old Central, but had found the shards of enough bones to make one think the school had been in session when the building burned. Some days later, word in the barbershops and beauty salons was that tests had shown that many of the bones were old, quite old, and more theories centered around the strange behavior of Calvary Cemetery's former groundskeeper and the school's custodian, Karl Van Skye. Mrs. Whittaker had it on good authority from her cousin in the Oak Hill police department that Mr. Van Syke's gold tooth had been found in a charred skull amidst the ruins.
Ten days after the fire, on the same day that wrecking cranes came to knock in the last of the charred brick walls, and bulldozers arrived to load the bricks into dump trucks and fill in the surprisingly deep basement of Old Central, word in the Parkside Cafe and on the party lines was that the FBI had made a breakthrough in the case. It seems that the 1957 black Chevrolet belonging to Justice of the Peace Cong-den had been seen on Grand View Drive, near Mr. Ashley-Montague's mansion, on the day J.P. was reportedly killed, four days before the fire in the grain elevator and five days before the Old Central fire and the disappearance of the millionaire. Mr. Caspar Jonathan ('C.J.") Congden was wanted for questioning by the FBI.
Jim Harlen may have been the last person to see C.J. in Elm Haven-Harlen saw the sixteen-year-old peeling rubber toward the Hard Road in his Chevy just after ten a.m. on the morning that the rumor of his being wanted for questioning came up. He did not return.
Kevin told the police, the Sheriff's Office, the FBI, and his father the story about he and Harlen awakening to the sound of the generator running and coming out just in time to see the truck being driven away. Neither boy knew for sure what made the driver swerve toward Old Central.
Several days after the fire, it was the sheriff who found pieces of metal in the wreckage with.45 caliber slugs in them. Kevin subsequently confessed that when he saw the truck being stolen, he had run in and grabbed his father's.45 and fired several shots after it. He didn't think that was what caused the driver to lose control, but he wasn't sure.
Ken Grumbacher shouted at his son for such irresponsibility and grounded him for a week, but seemed quietly proud of his boy's actions when discussing them with the other men over morning coffee or while transferring milk to the new bulk tanker. The truck had been adequately insured.
All of the other kids-except perhaps Cordie Cooke, who blended into the darkness later that night while the town was watching the fire department lose to the fire, and who was not seen again for more than a week-were questioned by parents and police. Mike's and Dale's and Lawrence's parents were shocked that their children had received burns and scratches in trying to pull open the jammed door of the truck before it exploded, trying to rescue the driver, whose identity they were not certain of. Jim Harlen stayed with the sheriff that Saturday night, and his mother was properly shocked and impressed by the report of her son's actions when she arrived home from Peoria the next morning.
Mike's grandmother, Memo, did not die. Instead she began showing marked improvement, and could whisper a few words and move her right arm by the second week in August. "Some old people, they put up good fight," was the prognosis of Dr. Viskes. Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke spoke to Dr. Staffney about finding specialists to oversee therapy needed for her full recovery.
The week after the fire, the boys started playing a lot of baseball again-sometimes ten and twelve hours at a stretch-and it was Mike who went to Donna Lou Perry's house to apologize and ask her to join them again as pitcher. She slammed the door in his face, but her friend Sandy Whit-taker began playing with them the next day, and soon after several of the more athletic girls showed up for the morning choosing of sides. Michelle Staffney turned out to be a fairly decent third baseman.
Cordie Cook did not play baseball, but she went for hikes with the boys and often sat silently with them while they played Monopoly on rainy days or just hung around the chick enhouse. Her brother Terence was officially listed as a runaway by the County Sheriff's Office and the State Highway Patrol. Mrs. Grumbacher took an interest in helping the Cooke family after it was determined that Mr. Cooke was gone for good, and several other ladies in the Lutheran Care Society made visits to the Cooke house with food and other items.
Father Dinmen came down from Oak Hill to say Mass only on Wednesdays and Sundays at St. Malachy's, and Mike continued as altar boy, although he thought he might quit in October when the new priest was scheduled to be assigned to the diocese.
The days passed. The corn grew. The boys' nightmares did not disappear altogether, but they became less troublesome things.
The nights grew slightly longer each day, but seemed much shorter.
Mr. and Mrs. Stewart had come out to Uncle Henry's for steak dinner, and they had brought the O'Rourkes and the Grumbachers. Harlen's mother arrived later with a gentleman friend whom she was 'seeing regularly' now. The man, named Cooper, was tall and quiet and actually looked a bit like the actor Gary Cooper, except that his front teeth were a bit crooked. It might have been why he rarely smiled. He gave Harlen a Mickey Mantle glove during the last weekend's visit and had smiled his shy smile when they shook hands. Harlen still wasn't sure about him.
The kids ate on the deck over Uncle Henry's garage, eating their steak on paper plates and drinking fresh milk and lemonade. After dinner, while the grown-ups talked on the patio out back, the kids made for the hammocks on the south end of the deck and stared at the stars.
During a lull in their conversation about extraterrestrial life and whether kids on planets around other stars would have teachers or not, Dale said, "I went out to see Mr. McBride yesterday."
Mike put his hands behind his head and rocked his hammock out over the railing. "I thought he was moving to Chicago or somewhere."
"He is," said Dale. "To be with his sister. He's already gone. I caught him Tuesday, right before he left. The house is empty now."
The five boys and a girl were quiet for a moment. Near the horizon, a meteorite streaked silently. "What'd you talk about?" Mike said after a while.
Dale looked at him. "Everything."
Harlen was tying his shoe and still rocking in his hammock. "Did he believe you?"
"Yeah," said Dale. "He gave me all of Duane's notebooks. All the old ones with the stuff he'd been writing about."
They were silent for another period. The soft conversation from the adults somehow blended with the cricket sounds and noise from the bullfrogs down by Uncle Henry's pond. "I know one thing," said Mike. "I'm never going to be a farmer when I grow up. Too much work. Construction maybe, working outside's OK, but never a farmer."
"Me neither," said Kevin. He was still chewing on a radish. "Engineering school for me. Nuclear engineering. Maybe I'll serve on a sub."
Harlen swung his legs out over the railing and rocked his hammock. "I'm gonna do something that makes me a lot of money. Real estate maybe. Or banking. Bill's a banker."
"Bill?" said Mike.
"Bill Cooper," said Harlen. "Or maybe I'll be a bootlegger."
"Whiskey's legal," said Kevin.
Harlen grinned. "Yeah, but there are other things that aren't. People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid."
"I'm gonna be a big-league ballplayer," said Lawrence from where he sat on the railing. "Probably a catcher. Like Yogi Berra."
"Uh-huh," four of the boys said in unison. "Sure."
Cordie was also on the railing. She had been looking at the sky, but now she stared at Dale. "What y'all gonna be?"
"A writer," Dale said softly.
The others stared. Dale had never suggested anything of the kind before. Embarrassed, he brought out one of Duane's notebooks that he'd been carrying in his pocket." "You should read this stuff. Really. Duane spent hours… years… writing down this stuff about how people look and what they say and how they walk…"He paused, hearing how silly he sounded but not
caring. "Well, it's like he knew exactly what he was going to be and how long it'd take him to get ready to be it… years of work and practice before he could even try something as hard as a story…" Mike touched the notebook. "It's all in here. In all his books."
Harlen squinted at him, dubious. "And you're going to write Duane's books? The books he would've written?"
"No," said Dale softly, shaking his head. "I'll write my own stories. But I'm going to remember Duane. And try to learn from what he was doing… what he was teaching himself…"
Lawrence seemed excited. "You gonna write about all the real stuff? The stuff that's happened?"
Dale was embarrassed, ready to end this part of the conversation. "If I do, twitto, I'm going to describe just how big and flappy your ears are. And how tiny your brain…"
"Look!" interrupted Cordie, pointing to the sky.
They all raised their eyes to watch Echo move silently across the sky. Even the adults stopped in their conversation to watch the small ember of the satellite move between the stars.
"Gosh," whispered Lawrence.
"It's way up there, ain't it?" whispered Cordie, her face strangely soft and glowing in the starlight.
"Just where and when Duane said it'd be," whispered Mike.
Dale quietly lowered his head, knowing that the satellite-like the Bootleggers' Cave, like so many things- would be there tomorrow night and the day after, but that this moment, with his friends around and the night soft with summer sounds and breezes, and the voices of his parents and their friends just beyond the house, and the sense of endless summer days that August brought-that this moment was only for now and must be saved.
And while Mike and Lawrence and Kevin and Harlen and Cordie watched the satellite pass over, their faces raised in wonder at the bright new age now beginning, Dale watched them, thinking of his friend Duane and seeing things through the words that Duane might have used to describe them.