The kid next to him said, “If he’s really any good, the locker stuff shouldn’t bother him.”
“Well, either way,” said the first, “whoever’s been doing it oughta be strung up on the school flagpole.”
Jack didn’t like the sound of that.
“Gotta be more to it than rigging his locker,” Jack said.
“Yeah? What else is different? Unless he’s throwing the game, and he’d never do that.”
“Right,” Eddie said. “Never.”
“No way,” Jack added, and meant it.
Carson Toliver might have a dark, ugly side, but one of the things he would most want in this world was victory over NBR. So what was happening?
Jack looked at the lone figure standing at the corner of the stand.
Levi? He kept talking about “talents”… could he…?
Nah.
While Eddie hit the refreshment stand again, Jack spent the remainder of halftime mulling ways to convince Levi to leave Toliver to Jack. The mood of the SBR crowd was dark. A couple of shoving matches started between South and North kids but were quickly broken up. Jack hadn’t come up with anything by the time the Badgers and Greyhounds returned to the field.
“Okay, Carson!” Eddie yelled. “Do it! Show ’em what ya got!”
But all Toliver had was more of the same. And Levi kept tracking every pass with his binocs. SBR fans wailed as Toliver threw another interception, his third of the game.
As the offense came off the field, the coach pulled his quarterback aside and spoke to him. Whatever he said threw Toliver into a rage. He pulled off his helmet, grabbed it by the face mask, and began smashing it against the bench. He kept it up until it cracked, then started walking off the field. The coach grabbed him and shoved him toward the bench, where he sat with his head in his hands.
Jack suspected what had happened, and that was confirmed the next time the offense took the field: Toliver remained on the bench.
Levi turned and started to walk away.
“Be right back!” Jack said as he leaped to his feet and started down through the crowd.
“Bring me some popcorn!” Eddie called after him.
Jack caught up to Levi by the school.
“Where you going? The game’s not over.”
“Yeah, it is.” Levi slowed his stride but didn’t stop. “We lost.”
“What do you think of Toliver’s passes? Pretty weird the way they went off course.”
“Wind can do strange things to a football.”
“Except there’s no wind.”
Levi shot him a sidelong glance. “Maybe it’s a haint. If he thought he had one after him before, he’s probably sure of it now.”
“Haint?”
“Yeah. You know … a ghost.”
Oh, right. Toliver had asked Mrs. C about someone being haunted …
And then a beautiful idea hit Jack, perfect, complete in every detail … a way to tighten the screws on Toliver and keep Levi in line.
“You said you had blood…?”
13
One of the things about living in a small town was that people tended to know their neighbors, maybe too well sometimes. Everyone knew something about what everyone else was doing. And they recognized strangers. No outsider could cruise the streets without being noticed. As a result, folks tended to be lax about security. The Tolivers were no exception.
Jack led Levi through the orchard to the rear of the Toliver house. The place was dark. Jack checked the garage—empty. The parents were at the game, watching their son. Jack remembered Carson’s window from Monday night. A twist of Levi’s penknife popped the screen out of its groove, and the unlocked window lifted easily.
A part of Jack screamed that this was crazy, but he’d done crazier things, so he didn’t listen, and didn’t hesitate. They had to get in and get out ASAP. No telling how long they had.
Jack went through first, and took the mason jar of blood Levi handed through the window. He checked out the room as Levi clambered through.
“Look,” he whispered. “A mirror. Perfect.”
“For what?”
“For leaving a message.”
“Why’re you whispering?” Levi said, a nervous laugh nibbling at the edge of his voice. “Ain’t no one here but us chickens.”
“That’s true, but I’ll keep whispering, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t mind ay-tall. Okay, how ’bout we write, ‘You got piney blood on your hands!!!’ That’ll spook him.”
Remembering the KISS rule, Jack shook his head.
“Nah. Let’s just make it ‘Blood on your hands’ and leave it at that. If he really does have blood on his hands, he’ll know what it means. If not, the rest won’t matter. But if you put ‘piney’ in there, he’ll start looking at the pineys in school.”
“Good thought. You want to write it?”
Dip his finger in clotted deer blood. Uh-uh.
Jack handed back the jar. “Um, no. You do it.”
“Hopin’ you’d say that.”
Levi unscrewed the top, stuck his finger in the jar, and went to work. When finished, he stepped back and surveyed his work.
“What y’think?”
Even in the dark room, the message of the glistening letters was clear.
BLOOD
ON
Your
HANDS
“Yeah, that’ll do. Let’s get out of here.”
They climbed out, lowered the window, fitted the screen back into place, and retreated to the orchard.
“What do we do now?” Levi said.
“We find ourselves a spot where we can see without being seen, and we watch what he does when he sees the message.”
Jack had told Eddie he was leaving early. Mr. Connell was supposed to pick them up after the game and Jack didn’t want anyone getting all worked up because they couldn’t find him.
It turned out to be a short wait before Carson and his folks pulled up in their respective cars. Jack could hear raised voices, arguing about something.
“Give me the binocs.”
Levi handed them over, saying, “Okay but don’t hog ’em.”
Jack raised them to his eyes. “We’ll see what he does, then move on. We don’t want to get caught when the cops show up.”
“Why’ll the cops come?”
“If you found a message written in blood on your bedroom mirror, wouldn’t you call the cops?”
“Nope. Pineys don’t call cops. Cops don’t pay us no nevermind anyhow.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s not right.”
“That’s why we got piney justice.”
Jack saw the bedroom light up and focused through the window. He watched Toliver step into the room, freeze, and then half fall against the dresser before the mirror. It looked as if his knees had given out on him. With his hands braced on the dresser, he stared at the mirror, then straightened and ran from the room.
Jack lowered the glasses and handed them to Levi.
“He saw it, he’s spooked, he’s gone to tell his folks. Time for us to disappear.”
“Wait a second,” Levi said, raising the glasses. “We got time before we gotta skedaddle. I want to see what his folks do. Maybe they know about it. Maybe they’re in on it.”
Jack was about to say that they didn’t know for sure if there was anything to this “piney blood” thing in the first place, but decided not to bother. Levi seemed to have complete faith in Saree’s “talent.”
“Hey, he’s back!” Levi said. “But he’s alone. And guess what he’s doing.”
He handed Jack the binocs. Jack looked and saw Toliver spraying the mirror with what looked like Windex and wiping away the blood.
He felt a chill settle across his shoulders as he lowered the glasses.
“He didn’t tell his folks … he’s not calling the cops … that means…”
“Yeah,” Levi said. “He’s guilty. He does have blood
on his hands.”
Jack couldn’t see any other conclusion.
“Yeah, but whose?”
SATURDAY
1
“Why so glum, chum?”
Jack looked up from his bowl of Cap’n Crunch and found his father staring down at him from the other side of the kitchen table. He was wearing his steel-rimmed reading glasses and had the morning paper folded under his arm. Mid-morning sunlight bathed the backyard beyond the screen door behind him.
Jack had slept in—the first uninterrupted night’s sleep since Tuesday. He’d almost forgotten how great it felt to wake up rested. But that didn’t soften Toliver’s reaction to the blood, or help open his lock. He couldn’t tell Dad about those, so he chose the most obvious.
“We got killed last night. Bummer.”
“The football game? Glad to hear this.”
Jack nearly choked. “That we lost? You’re glad?”
He laughed. “No, just glad you care. Good to see you getting involved over there, school spirit and all that.”
Jack twirled a finger in the air. “Rah. Rah.”
“I’m serious, Jack. We’ve discussed your loner tendencies before and how I think you’ll regret it later on if you give in to them. You know what I mean, so I don’t see any need to open the subject again.”
That was a relief. Dad’s heart-to-heart talks, though rare, usually made him uncomfortable.
“Your high school years can be some of the best of your life. Trust me, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. I’m glad to see you’re into the Badgers.”
Jack didn’t respond. What could he say to that? Besides, his head was filled with too many other matters.
How to explain Toliver’s rotten performance, and the weird behavior of his passes? Not that the guy hadn’t needed a comeuppance, but the rest of the school had been rooting for a win. A lot more people than Carson Toliver had been disappointed last night.
“Any plans for the day, Jack?” his mother said as she entered the kitchen.
Yeah, he thought. I’m going to waste more time trying to find a way around that spiked-and-glued lock.
Maybe he should just forget Toliver’s challenge and let him have his locker victory Monday morning. Looked like it was going to work out that way anyway. He’d hit a wall on that lock.
But he said, “Just have to finish weeding the beds at the Lodge, then cut the Bagleys’ lawn. Mister Rosen said he’d need me for only a couple of hours today.”
For nap time, most likely.
“Well, you’ll be on your own for lunch, I’m afraid. Kate will be out with Jenny Styles most of the day, and your father and I will be shopping in Cherry Hill for a new suit.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “Be still, my heart.”
Jack knew he hated shopping, especially for clothes.
“Oh, stop it, Tom. You need a new suit. You wear one every day. Actually, you could use two new ones.”
“Jane, I trust your taste implicitly. Why don’t you go and—”
“Don’t be silly. A suit has to be fitted.” She turned to Jack. “We’ll be back about four. We’ve got leftover chicken in the fridge.”
Jack nodded absently. He’d just thought of something: Dad’s lockbox.
He kept it in the top of his bedroom closet. Toward the end of the summer Jack had fixated on it after he’d heard Mr. Bainbridge’s “Deadeye” remark. He’d been convinced then that his father had been some sort of ace marksman and that the box had to contain memorabilia—medals, papers, secrets—from the war Dad would never talk about. He’d tried and failed to pick its little lock a number of times. Starting high school, the pyramid quest, and then the Cody Bockman thing had distracted him, but now he was being handed a golden opportunity.
He still had the lock-picking kit. He could take another stab at opening that little box while Mom was dragging Dad from store to store.
First he had to finish up at the Lodge.
2
“So, have you given any thought to our conversation yesterday?”
Mr. Drexler watched Jack weed the foundation beds along the Lodge’s front.
“A little.”
Mr. Drexler smiled. “Excellent. Conclusions? Opinions? Expansions? I’m all ears.”
After batting this around with his father and Kate last night, he felt more comfortable continuing with it. Because he’d remembered some things Mr. Kressy had said in class.
“This Mover-and-Moved situation … it sounds wrong.”
“Wrong? As in incorrect, or immoral?”
“Immoral, I guess.”
“How could it be immoral? It’s nature, it’s woven into the very fabric of existence.”
“But nobody has a right to control other people.”
“Ah, but they have, and they do. Right and wrong do not enter into the Mover-Moved equation. It’s all merely a question of which you were born to be.”
Mr. Drexler seemed to be enjoying this. Jack wished he could feel the same. He readied his big question, inspired by Kate.
“What if you refuse to be either?”
Mr. Drexler gave a full-fledged grin this time, showing teeth as white as his shirt.
“Surely you’re not thinking of autonomy! That’s pure fiction. Everything is determined.”
Jack refused to buy that.
“I don’t have to play. I can step off the chessboard and refuse to be a Mover or be Moved.”
“So you can. But free will is an illusion.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Jack, a truth that a few people have suspected and even fewer have accepted: Even the Movers are being moved.”
He straightened and paused, as if to let that sink in.
“Should you manage to escape the board and onto the table—not at all an easy feat, I assure you—you need to realize that the table itself is being moved; and if you jump down to the floor, that the floor is being moved. Ultimately it all works back to the Prime Movers.”
“Prime Movers? What are they?”
“No one knows. No one will ever know. But they’re there. And we’re their property. No one moves the Primes. Sometimes you can have a say in which of those Primes moves you, but you are moved nonetheless. One way or another, we are all ultimately among the Moved.”
Jack stared at him. He’d never heard this view of the world before, and didn’t like it. He couldn’t, wouldn’t buy into it.
“How do you sleep at night, Mister Drexler?”
“Very well. Extremely well. Because, through the Septimus Order, I have become privy to what your girlfriend calls ‘the Secret History of the World.’”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jack said, but Mr. Drexler ignored him.
“I have seen how existence works, I know where the battle lines are drawn, and I am comfortable with the side with which I am aligned. So yes, I sleep well at night.” He leaned closer, his eyes bright. “But what of you? How will you sleep knowing what you now know?”
“Just fine. Because I don’t know anything more than before. This is all just talk, just opinion.”
“Ah, but opinion based on secret truths, truths to which you may become privy in the future. The easy way is through the Order. The other way is through experience, and that can be most painful.”
He gave a quick, two-finger salute, then turned and strolled away, swinging his cane as he walked.
Jack tried to concentrate on the weeds, but he kept picturing a chessboard, and himself as a pawn someone was moving around.
He hated the picture, and knew he’d be seeing it again as he tried to get off to sleep tonight.
3
With the Bagleys’ lawn done, Jack had some time to himself before he had to show up at USED. He scarfed down the leftover chicken, then grabbed the lock-pick set and bounded upstairs to his folks’ bedroom. After Jack’s birth back in 1969, the house had needed another bedroom. So his folks had finished off the attic, turning it into a master bedroom suite, and leavi
ng a first-floor bedroom to each of the three kids.
He found his father’s metal lockbox in its usual place on the top shelf of his closet. He reached up and dragged it out, but this time a few papers it had been sitting on slid out with it. He took a quick glance at them—some kind of old bills—and set them on the bed. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor and opened the pick set. He was inspecting the selection of tension rods when he heard a car in the driveway.
Kate? She was supposed to be out with her friend.
He rose, padded to the window, and peeked out.
What? Oh, crap! His folks were home, and already halfway to the door!
He leaped to the lockbox and fumbled it back onto the shelf just as the back door slammed. He heard their voices as they came through the kitchen. They were hurrying, and now they were coming up the stairs!
Jack couldn’t get caught up here with a lock-picking kit. But he had nowhere to go except the bathroom, and that was out of the question. The only safe hiding spot was under the bed. He dropped to his knees and was about to slip under when he noticed the papers on the bedspread. He snatched them and took them into hiding with him.
A heartbeat later he heard his father say, “I swear, Jane, we must be getting senile.”
“I know,” she said. “How could we forget?”
Jack watched their feet walk by the bed.
“Well, in our defense, we made the date weeks ago.”
“Yes, but I’ve had it written big as day on the calendar. And I always look at the calendar. How could I have missed it?”
“We’re not late yet. There’s still time.”
Time for what? Jack wondered as he lay on his belly, barely breathing.
He watched his father kick off his shoes, saw his slacks hit the floor. He could see his mother’s feet stepping out of her dress.
What were they undressing for?
His father’s feet approached his mother’s. They stood toe to toe.
“Hey,” he heard him say softly. “Jack’s gone.” He heard a kiss. “Why don’t we—?”
“We don’t have time for that.”
Jack’s stomach clenched. They weren’t talking about sex, were they? No-no-no!