During the next few minutes, as more and more buses emptied, the hallway became packed in both directions. Jack wished Weezy were here.
“Hope you’ve got your five bucks ready.”
Jack turned and found Eddie squeezed in behind him.
“How’d you get here?”
Eddie made a face. “The Weezster. First she’s gonna go, then she’s not gonna go, back and forth, back and forth. Finally it got so late we missed the bus, so my mom drove us.”
“‘Us’? You mean she’s here?”
He jutted his chin toward the other half of the crowd on the far side of the locker. “Right over there—the Bat Lady herself.”
Jack looked and found her right away—a small island of black in a sea of color. He caught her black-lined eyes and gave her a grin and a little salute. Her face remained grim as she responded with the slightest nod. He could tell she was wound tighter than a magneto coil.
Eddie nudged him. “About the five bucks?”
Jack didn’t want to cheat Eddie out of his money, so …
“I’m canceling the bet.”
“Hey—”
“I thought about it and you’re right.”
“That Carson’s got him beat?”
“Yeah, or maybe the guy’s given up bothering him. Either way, nothing’s gonna be in that locker.”
A kid standing in front of them half-turned their way.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “Too bad.”
Eddie frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“After the way he blew the game, I hope there’s a can of yellow paint waiting to tip on him.”
Hmmm … Jack thought. A little anti-Toliver sentiment. Interesting.
“There he is,” Eddie said, pointing. “The man himself.”
Jack looked, and sure enough, here came Carson Toliver, carrying a duffel bag. He was pale, with baggy, bloodshot eyes, but putting on a game face for his audience.
“He doesn’t look so hot,” Eddie said.
It’s called hungover, Jack thought. And in Toliver’s mind, it’s called haunted.
And on the subject of haunts or “haints,” where was Levi?
Jack scanned the crowd but couldn’t spot him.
“Happy Halloween, everybody,” Toliver said in a slightly hoarse voice.
He dropped the duffel in front of the locker and grabbed the lock. He bent to inspect the shackle hole and the keyhole, then turned and showed a sickly grin to the crowd.
“Just as I left it—spiked and glued up the wazoo.” If he expected a laugh, he didn’t get it. “I guess the jerk knows when he’s beaten.”
“Too bad NBR didn’t,” a voice called.
More anti-Toliver sentiment. Was he feeling something like what he’d put Weezy through?
“Okay,” he said. “I deserved that. I’d like to apologize for my performance Friday night. I was sick and didn’t realize it until too late.”
“You still don’t look so hot.”
Toliver gave another sickly grin. “Better than I felt Friday night, believe me. I apologize for not taking myself out of the game before it even started. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
This earned a smattering of applause and even some cheers. Jack tightened his fists and closed his eyes. The guy knew how to work a crowd. He was winning them back. Give him more time and he’d have them in the palm of his hand.
“What about the locker?” called another voice. “How are you gonna get in?”
Another smile, a tad more real. He figured he’d won this battle. “Didn’t you ask me that on Friday? Don’t worry—I’ve got it covered.” He squatted and unzipped the duffel. “Time for the grand opening.”
He removed a long-handled bolt cutter and held it up to another round of cheers. With two quick snaps he severed the shackle, and the lock clattered to the floor. Then with a flourish like a magician opening a box to reveal that his vanished assistant has reappeared, he bowed and yanked open the door.
A moment of stunned silence as the crowd saw the inside of the locker, then a chorus of shouts and screams as they pushed and tripped over one another in a rush to get as far as possible from the bloody and partially flattened possum roadkill swinging by its ratlike tail from the top shelf.
Jack remembered wondering as he’d hung the poor dead possum in the locker if maybe he was overdoing it. But this was the swan song of Operation Toliver and he needed a grand finale. Had to go out with such a bang that if Toliver ever mentioned “Easy Weezy” again the words would drown in a sea of memories about spiders and snakes and marbles and “doing the Carson” and roadkill and the Mystery Marauder Carson Toliver could not keep out of his locker.
Toliver’s dramatic bow had moved his line of sight away from the locker. When he noticed the reaction he looked up. And when he saw the possum, he fell backward to land on his butt, where he stayed staring in mute, openmouthed horror at the dead creature above him.
And now Jack stared too because he’d just noticed a pink hair band around the thing’s neck.
Where had that come from?
Then the possum’s tail slipped free and it tumbled to the floor, landing with a sick splat! Jack heard a retch and another splat as a girl near the front blew breakfast.
Yep, he’d overdone it.
He felt bad for her. She wasn’t the target—just the guy she’d been cheering for a second ago.
But Jack couldn’t take his eyes off the hair band. Where had it come from? It hadn’t been there at two A.M. Someone else must have gotten into the locker after him. But how? And who?
He looked around for Levi, and finally found him, but his face was as surprised as those around him. No question, he was seeing the possum for the first time too.
Still on the floor, a wild-eyed Toliver whimpered and scrabbled backward like a crab. When he finally regained his feet he pushed violently through the crowd and ran full tilt down the hall, wailing like the hounds of hell were after him.
2
“Aw, man,” Eddie said, looking a little shaken after Toliver was gone. “This is creepitacious. It’s like supernatural. How’d anyone get past that lock?”
“Maybe they took the door off,” Jack offered, trying to sound as perplexed as Eddie. He’d considered and discarded the door-removal solution as impossible days ago.
“How? The hinges are on the inside.”
“Oh … yeah. I guess it’s going to remain a mystery.”
At least Jack hoped so.
“The other mystery is who’d do something so crummacious to Carson.”
Jack shrugged. “Someone who doesn’t like him, I guess.”
“Well, duh. Thanks for the news flash.”
Shaking his head and grumbling, he stalked off toward his first class.
Jack turned back toward the locker and found himself face-to-face with Weezy.
“‘Easy’ who?” he whispered.
She nodded. “You were right.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “You?”
Oh, crap.
He gave her an are-you-kidding? look. “What? A lowly frosh like me messing with Carson Toliver? I’d have to be crazy.”
Her gaze bored into him. “I suspected you were behind it. In fact I was almost sure you were behind it. It’s the kind of thing you’d be so into.”
She knew him. God, how she knew him.
“Well, yeah, it’s exactly the thing I’d have loved to do. You know, give the creep his comeuppance. But…” He shrugged. “You know.”
“I was watching you,” she said. “If there was anything in the locker, I wanted to see your reaction. If you’d known what was coming, I’d have been able to tell.” She glanced back at the dead possum on the floor. “But you looked as shocked as everyone else.”
True—but his shock was because of the hair band. Where in all of creation had it come from and how had it got around the possum’s neck?
“Well, I was. Too bad I canceled my bet with Eddie.”
/>
“Yeah. You’d have earned an easy five.” She looked at him. “Just as well it wasn’t you, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Because then I’d have to consider you my knight in shining armor.”
Whoa. Not that that would be terrible or anything, but … whoa.
“Again, why?”
“Because if it was you, you’d have done it for me, right?”
“Uh, right.”
“And that would have changed things between us.”
Jack swallowed. “I kind of like things the way they are.”
She smiled. “Me too.” She looked at the locker again. “I still can’t figure out how anyone got past that lock without cutting it off or boring into the locker, and neither happened. What gives? I can’t imagine.”
Jack could.
The solution had been so simple he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it earlier.
“Only the Mystery Marauder knows.”
She was staring at him. “You’ve got this funny look on your face. Are you sure you had nothing to do with—?”
The bell for first period rang.
“Gotta move,” he said, giving her a little wave as he moved off.
Talk about being saved by the bell.
Instead of heading for class, he detoured toward the boys’ room to lock the window for the last time. As he entered he sensed someone following him. He turned and found Levi Coffin staring at him with wonder in his mismatched eyes.
“You got a talent,” he said, pointing a long, spidery finger. “Ain’t no doubt about it. I thought maybe you could think a lock open, but—”
“Think?”
“Yeah. You know, just think about pushin’ the innards around so’s everything’s lined up and bang, it’s open.”
“I wish.”
What was he talking about? Magic?
“But ain’t no amount of thinking was gonna open a lock with all that glue gunkin’ up its innards. So how’d you do it? What’s your talent?”
“I don’t have any talent. I swear.”
Levi stared at him. “Maybe you just don’t know about it yet, but you got one.”
Maybe he’s right, Jack thought.
Maybe it was simply not quitting. Maybe it was just hanging in there and looking at a problem every which way until he found a solution. Maybe his talent was seeing a solution where other people didn’t.
Like Toliver’s lock. The simplest thing, in hindsight. He’d removed it by sawing through the shackle, just as he’d done on the test locks at home. After putting the roadkill inside—on the way to the school he’d kept an eye out for a suitable specimen and hadn’t been disappointed—he resecured the locker with the leftover identical padlock he’d bought at Spurlin’s. Then he’d tacked it and glued it just as Toliver had. The result was indistinguishable from the original, which presently was lying in the weeds and brush somewhere off Route 206.
Nothing magical about that.
“You plannin’ any more larkin’ on that boy?”
Jack shook his head. “Don’t think I can top this one.”
“I don’t reckon you can neither—except maybe findin’ whose piney blood is on his hands. Your talent good for that?”
Jack didn’t want to get into what he and Weezy had witnessed last night.
“I’ve got no talent, Levi. I’m just a regular kid.”
Levi stepped back toward the door, shaking his head. “No you ain’t. You ain’t regular ay-tall. But if that’s the way you wanna play it, fine. But while I’m looking for a hurt piney, I’m gonna figger out what your talent is. And when I do, you’re gonna tell me how you did that lock.”
No, Jack thought. I’m never telling anyone.
3
“Guess what?” Eddie said as he plopped down next to Jack in the caf.
Two thick ham and cheese sandwiches, four big chocolate chip cookies, and two containers of milk filled his tray. His headphones hung around his neck.
Jack was still psyched from the locker-area show this morning. How could he not be? Every class had been abuzz with talk of the incident—either about Toliver’s over-the-top reaction or speculating on how the Mystery Marauder had gotten past that unopenable lock. Jack had been sorely tempted to tell them—or rather, presenting it as a theory of how it might have been done—but that would have been terminally risky, and in Eddie-speak, stupidacious.
Even the teachers got into the act. They’d heard about the roadkill in the hallway and kept asking what it was all about.
Jack swallowed a bite of his own sandwich and said, “You’re donating your Walkman to charity.”
Erik Burns, sitting across from them, laughed. “The headphones’ll have to be surgically removed!”
Eddie made a face. “Yuh, right. Guess again.”
“How about a hint?”
“Okay. Guess who left school before first period and hasn’t been seen since?”
“Toliver?”
“Give this man a prize.”
Jack took another bite and thought about how fitting it was that the guy who’d made Weezy afraid to show her face around school was now afraid to show his. Almost poetic.
“What goes around, comes around,” he muttered.
Eddie looked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
Matt Follette, sitting next to Erik, said, “Did you see him this morning—crawling away from his locker and then running like he’d seen a ghost? I mean, I know it was gross, but it wasn’t that bad.”
“He’s had a rough week,” Jack said, concentrating on his sandwich instead of looking at Eddie. “Maybe it all got to him. He’ll be back tomorrow, acting like king of the hill again.”
Eddie shook his head as he took a Godzilla bite of his sandwich and spoke around it. “I don’t know. I think the Locker Magician knocked his crown off.”
“‘Locker Magician’?” Jack laughed. “Is that what they’re calling … him.”
Oh, man—he’d almost said “me.”
“That’s what I’m calling him.” He shook his head. “I don’t know…”
“Don’t know what?”
“I got a bad feeling about this. I mean, him running off and not coming back.”
Jack felt a tingle of unease.
“Bad feeling how?”
“I don’t know … like something bad’s going to happen.”
Jack didn’t like the sound of that one bit, but he shook it off. Eddie was hardly a psychic. Anything but.
But Toliver had been acting unhinged last night. Jack hoped he wouldn’t do anything rash like run away.
Eddie’s words followed Jack the rest of the day.
4
“Well,” Jack said as he and Weezy walked up Quakerton Road, “how’d it go today?”
All around them, trick-or-treating Darth Vaders, Princess Leias, and Ewoks traveled door to door among the more traditional ghosts and witches. Jack had been dying to pull Weezy aside all day but never had the chance, and it wasn’t something they could talk about on the bus. Now, with Eddie a few paces ahead, lost in his headphones, he finally had the chance.
She shrugged. “Pretty good.”
Not exactly a rave review.
“No mention of ‘Easy Weezy’?”
She shook her head. “No. How could there be? All everyone was talking about was Carson-Carson-Carson.”
“Not even one snide comment?”
“Nope. In fact, no one even asked where I was—I mean, if I’d been sick or anything. It was like I hadn’t even been gone. In fact, it was like I hadn’t even come back.”
Jack couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed.
“Well, which do you prefer: all the attention last Monday, or all the inattention this Monday?”
She smiled. “Oh, today was better—definitely better. And it made me see some things.”
“Like?”
“Like who my friends are and who aren’t.” She hooked an arm thr
ough his. “And you’re definitely a friend. The best friend I have. Maybe the best friend I’ll ever have.”
Jack found himself strangely moved.
“Hey, Weez, I just—”
“No. It’s true. Neither of us makes friends easily. And I know I set myself up by dressing like I do, but you don’t care. You take me as I am. And I learned something else: No one is untouchable. Carson acted like he was and I bought into that. But he’s not. Someone—what did you call him?”
“The Mystery Marauder. Eddie calls him the Locker Magician.”
“Well, whatever his name and whatever his reasons, he showed everyone that Carson Toliver was just another kid, just like the rest of us. He’s not so tough, and he’s not untouchable. So that’s why I think I’m going to report him.”
“To who?”
“Whom.”
“I know that. To whom?”
“The police. He attacked me. I was ready to let him get away with that. Nobody should get away with something like that.”
Jack saw immediate problems.
“You’ll have to tell your folks you snuck out.”
“I know. And I know it will be my word against his, and because I have no proof, nothing will happen to him, but at least he’ll be put on notice. He’ll know a complaint against him is on file with the sheriff’s office, and he’ll think two or three times before he tries something like that again.”
“If he can find a girl to go out with him after today.”
She smiled. “And there’s that too.”
A sour note struck Jack.
“But aren’t you afraid of starting up the ‘Easy Weezy’ stuff again?”
She shrugged. “It was partly my fault it started in the first place. If I’d reported him Saturday night when I had a torn blouse and some scratches and bruises, none of this would have happened. I don’t think it’ll start up again—not after today.”
Jack hoped not. The main point of Operation Toliver had been to stop it.
5
“Jack?” his mom called from the kitchen. “See who’s at the door, will you?”
Jack walked down the hall from his room and into the living room. A man stood outside the screen.