“The Order told me to, and I gotta.”
“Wait, who’s Ooba —”
In one of those moments that stay with you no matter how long you live, I saw his trigger finger tighten ever so slowly. “Oh, gawww —!”
There was a deafening boom, and Curtis flew up into the air, screaming. It seemed like he went away in different directions at the same time. Something wet splashed my face, my eyes; my head fell back; I was out.
I was shaking all over. The slatted light from the blinds was cutting across the pages now. I couldn’t go on, for right where my fingers held the page his name was written in the margin in the same blue ink as before. Emerson. Beside it was a date: July 14. On the top of the next page was his name again, written in pencil and traced over a few times with black pen, then blue pen until it was pretty thick. There were two dates there. Septem. 2, 1947, and Novemb. 5. I quickly flipped through the rest of the pages, but that was the last mark my grandmother made.
I didn’t know what that meant. I kept on reading.
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Day?” The man laughed. “Try year, my lad. It’s been nearly eighteen months since you were discharged into my care. And that, after a year in the Army hospital.”
He tossed me a newspaper.
I read the date through my bandages. “1947!”
Turns out, after the blast on Saipan, I had been in a coma, then in and out of consciousness for quite a while. Infection after infection in between bouts of hallucination and delirium kept me in beds and bandages for thirteen months. When the Army needed my cot for some sap worse off than me, they booted me out, mummy-faced, half crazy, half dead. Without knowing it, I’d been laying up in a flea-ridden hotel near the Singapore harbor run by an old Englishman named Harrow who’d taken pity on me. It was a third-floor walkup in a fifth-rate joint with a bed, a desk, a typewriter, and what sounded like a rat the size of a terrier living rent-free inside the walls.
Harrow had been a doctor, first in London, then Madrid, then Bombay, before he finally switched careers and became a drunk. He was the only Harley Street man in all of Congo for a time, where he sometimes counted his wages in donkeys and elephants and pack dogs. Whatever his past, he still knew a thing or two about face wounds, and he was a regular expert with anesthesia. He had a whole cabinet of the stuff.
It wasn’t a bad place, after all. Every morning I woke to a fat orange sun, mad parrots squawking in the street markets, and Harrow’s tales of village doctoring. Every day I worked on writing this story. And every morning, noon, night, and each second in between, I thought of Marnie.
Whenever I closed my eyes, her face was there. It almost struck me as funny that here I was with maybe no face at all, and all I could think of was her’s. But love is like that.
One hot afternoon, the first time I refused my daily anesthesia, Harrow put down the tray and said, “Well, then, old fellow, I think it’s time. Shall we see how mangled you are?”
I looked up from the typewriter.
“Singapore is scary enough,” I said. “You sure —”
“I have to,” he said grimly. “A little matter of a prescription I wrote for a local . . . well, let’s call him a businessman. The fellow had a bad reaction to it. Killed him. I hear his family is taking a stroll here now.”
I tensed. “Maybe they’re just shopping for answers?”
“I think we’re rather beyond the answer stage now,” he said. “They’re shopping for something else. And since I’ve grown fond of my head, I’m taking it to Hong Kong. But there’s a steamer in port that might interest you. It’s heading for San Diego in a day or two. Last time I checked, that’s in the States. Besides that . . .” He paused.
“What?”
He breathed heavily. “Nineteen years in Singapore has taught me a fair amount of the Malay and Tamil dialects. But one word they use I’ve never heard before.”
A shiver went up my neck. “Not . . . Oobarab?”
He smirked. “So you speak the same language. They talked of some ‘Secret Order.’ Didn’t sound like a welcoming sort of club.”
I closed my eyes and tried to follow the train of connections. From the Everglades to Japan to Singapore, from Fang to Curtis to a local gang of killers. “Then we’re both on borrowed time.”
“Yes, Nicky, I believe so.” He looked at his watch. “Now, come. Let’s take a look, eh?”
He closed the blinds and the room went purple. He unfolded a mirror from his pocket and stood it on the desk. I noticed that either the parrots had stopped chattering in the street or everything had gone quiet in my head.
I stared into the mirror as he unwound my bandages slowly and gently. When he pulled the last damp swath off, my breath caught in my throat, and I screamed.
The parrots started cackling again.
— Jan. 1947
Continued in Chapter III
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I stopped reading. My pulse was going a mile a minute.
So . . . he lived? This is so unbe —
A sound came from the stairway.
I swear my heart died right then and there. I froze where I sat, trying not to make a sound. Someone was coming for me, walking down the hall right now. I crawled silently into the bathroom and squeezed the door shut.
Someone entered the room. I could hear the crunch of plaster dust on the floor as the steps made their way one by one to the window. They turned. Another crunch.
I was shaking, sweating, shaking, soaking wet. Please, no, no.
The bathroom door swung open.
“Ahhhh!” I screamed.
“Oh, could you not? I’ve just spent an hour with shrieking kids.”
“Ahhhh!” I screamed again, then slumped down to the tiles. It was Dia, the lawn mower girl. “What the holy —”
“That’s nice language.”
“What are you doing here?” I said.
She made a face. “I figured since shuffleboard was canceled, we could play canasta. I even brought cards!”
It didn’t compute. “What are you talking about?”
“I followed you, Barney! It’s St. Petersburg. I’m under eighty. What else was there for me to do?”
“What the . . . okay, first, how did you know I was here? And how did you even get here?”
She smiled over-sweetly. “I asked Daddy to follow your bus. You were being all weird, not talking to me and slinking off to the bus stop, looking over your shoulder. You’d make such a lousy spy, by the way. So I told Daddy, and we followed. He’s always up for stuff. We saw you get off and come in here. He said it wasn’t safe for you, so I said I’d get you out. He trusts me. I had to search every floor to find you.”
“Wait. How could your father just do that?”
“Do what?”
“Drop you off in the middle of downtown all alone?”
She rolled her eyes up. “Come on. I’m not dumb. I know downtown. Besides, he’s parked right out front. Plus, I have a cell phone right here if I need it” — she tapped my pants pocket with her shoe, my pocket! — “which I don’t, because there are two of us now.”
I looked up at her a long time with what I guess was a blank look. Only after a while did it strike me that because she was there, my lying to Mrs. K was back to bending the truth. Dia and I were together. We just hadn’t come together. It wasn’t the hospital, of course, but it was somewhere. I guess I grinned to myself about that, but it was the wrong thing to do. Dia must have thought I glimpsed the outline of her bathing suit under her T-shirt (which I guess I did) and she spun around quickly toward the door.
“So . . . what’s for room service?”
I staggered to my feet and followed her into the main room. “The hotel is condemned. They don’t have —” I stopped. “Wait. What about the kids?”
“What kids?”
“The kids you were babysitting?”
She jumped. “Oh my God! I left them in the pool! They can’t swim. Nooooo!”
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I panicked. “Are you crazy!”
She gave me another look. “Yeah, because I do that. I follow weirdos to condemned hotels when I’m supposed to save little kids from drowning. Their mom is with them, Einstein. I only went over to help her blow up the pool for them. Yeah, if you can believe that. ‘Help her.’ I blew the whole thing up while she stirred lemonade in the kitchen. By the time she came out all perky I had lost a lung. Then I came here. All right, Popeye?”
“It’s Jason.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, running her fingers along the plaster dust of the window sill. “But, look. We all know why I’m here. Why are you here? What do you have there? And finally, why are you here?”
I couldn’t think of any reason not to, so . . . I told her . . . everything.
I showed her the magazine. I told her about Grandma. Her boyfriend who supposedly died in Japan. The phone call. The hotel. The real estate agent. My dad’s accident. The postcard. The little hole. Even my father’s lawyer friend who also supposedly died in Japan.
It must have sounded confused and jumbled up and backward all the way until I showed her the grate on the bathroom wall and the envelope I had found. I blabbed through it in about three minutes. She stood there the whole time with her mouth hanging open. I finished with the word, “Oobarab.”
“I get it,” she said. “I really do. This weird guy writes a weird story in which he mentions a weird clue in a postcard and then goes missing. And suddenly your grammy gets a postcard. And suddenly you find more of the weird story.”
“But I think there’s a real mystery here,” I said. “Emerson Beale is supposed to be dead by the time Grandma gets the postcard. But he didn’t die like the editor’s note in the magazine said he did. These pages tell how he actually survived —”
“Wait,” she said, “the real guy or the fake character?”
I frowned. “Well, both, I think. He was wounded and his face changed and he lived and wrote this story. And the guy who died in the story is really alive and is someone my father knew!”
I had the feeling I was saying everything twice so that she would understand, but I finally ran out of words.
She was down on the floor now and looking first at the magazine, then at the pages of Chapter II one after another. It was a minute or two before she spoke. Finally, she said, “Whatever these pages are, your grandma knew they were hidden here in this hotel. She obviously came back to them a few times. She wrote on the pages at different times and in different color inks.” She tapped the pages. “She came here a lot. To reread this story.”
“Okay.”
“So then you’ve gotta wonder . . . why?”
“Why?” I repeated. “Because she liked him. Emerson Beale.”
“Not that. I mean why is the story still here? If the postcard actually was a clue, which it was, and she found the story here and read it a bunch of times, which we know she did from her dates on the pages, then why didn’t she just take the story with her? Why did she keep it hidden here? And why could we still find it here sixty years later?”
I frowned. I hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know. But besides, I found it.”
She wagged her head for a little while. “So okay, I don’t know why it’s still here, either. But I think . . . maybe . . . I have to . . . go to the bathroom.”
“What?”
“I said I have to —”
Thump.
We froze. Someone was coming. Someone real, this time. Not a lawn-mowing babysitter. The blood in my veins went ice cold.
“Please tell me that’s your dad,” I whispered.
Thump.
“About that,” she said, shaking her head. “I sort of lied. He’s already gone to work in Tampa.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Shhh!”
“Oh my gosh —” I swallowed my words. I snatched the pages back, stuffed them into the envelope, and put it in my backpack.
Scrape. Thump. Scrape. Thump.
“Limper!” she said.
“Who’s Limper?” I asked.
“A person who limps! Let’s beat him!”
“Beat him?” I said. “Are you nuts?”
“I mean in a race, you dork! Do they hit invalids in Boston?”
Before I could answer, she dragged me out to the hallway, and we ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
And I mean we ran. We climbed out a side window and jumped onto the fire escape just as the work crew poured out of the coffee shop.
“Hey! You kids! Get offa that. It’s not safe!” they shouted when they saw us on the stairs. The rusty stairs quivered as we went down and began to pull away from the wall. We managed to scramble to street level before anything happened and dashed into a side alley — a cut-through! — blocked by the fence. We tore off down a back street and didn’t stop for three and a half blocks. Dia said she really had to go to the bathroom now. She lurched into a store, and I followed her. It was a flower shop.
Breathless, scanning out the window for any signs of the workmen, I saw a police car drive by. It was going slow. The same officer as before was inside. One of the workmen was hanging out the car window, gawking up and down the street. I ducked behind a big bouquet of flowers and peeked. I watched the tail end of the car continue through the next light. I should have relaxed, but my brain was still racing.
What did I get myself into?
Spanish music jangled on the radio. The only word I heard was colibri . . . colibri which made me wonder if Oobarab was a Spanish word, though it didn’t sound like it. Then I thought of the word libro, which I knew was book in Spanish, and I thought of co libro, which might mean a book written by two people or about two people, and I thought about the story in my backpack right then and wondered: if Emerson Beale did live, did it mean maybe he and my grandmother . . . got together? It still almost didn’t matter because we were talking fifteen years before my dad was born.
The woman behind the counter smiled at me and said something fast in Spanish, when Dia came out of the back room.
“Whew!” she said. “That was close.”
“No kidding,” I said. “The police just drove by.”
“No, I mean me. Man!”
“Policia?” said the woman at the counter, suddenly interested.
Dia laughed — it was like a bell chiming in that tight flowery place. She said something apologetic in more quick Spanish. The counter lady shrugged and sat back on her stool.
By that time, the streets looked pretty clear of police, so we left the shop. We walked the side streets and got farther away from the hotel.
“Okay,” I said finally. “There was somebody else in there with us. Not the workers. Someone else.”
“Someone who limps and is not very fast,” she said. “Which was lucky for us because you run like a girl.”
I looked at her. “What?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I used to also.”
I breathed out. “Anyway, somebody knew we were there. And they were after us.”
“After you,” she said. “Or the story.” She tapped my backpack.
The whole mystery — if it even was a mystery — was as muddy in my mind as the swamp on that magazine cover. I tried to get it all out loud. “Let’s forget everything else and suppose that my grandma and Emerson Beale are Nick Falcon and Marnie Blaine. Or the other way around. And Nick or Emerson, or whoever, is forbidden to see her. Fang is this bad guy who is like Grandma’s father, but not exactly, because he probably didn’t actually have abnormally long teeth. He sends his goon guys to get rid of him.”
“Uh-huh, because that happens,” she said.
“Whatever. It’s in the story. Besides, my dad said her father actually didn’t like him. But in the story there’s some kind of secret outfit that works for Fang, and they kidnap Nick.”
“The Secret Order of Scooby-Doo,” she said.
“Oobarab.”
“Only Nick escapes,” she went on. “He’s i
n World War II, and he gets wounded. But he doesn’t die. But everybody thinks he does.”
Is that how it went? It was bothering me that the story was blending into real life. I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. I looked down at the postcard.
“Okay, look. Say Emerson — the real guy — does get hurt in battle. On the island of Saipan, like the magazine says. But instead of dying, he ends up with a doctor, and his face is changed. He looks different.”
“But your grandma doesn’t know,” said Dia, getting into it more and more. “Because how could she? The magazine said he’s dead and everyone thinks he is.”
“Which is why he sends her this postcard,” I said. “She already knows it’s got a clue in it, because he told her he used the idea in his stories. She goes to the hotel just like we did, finds the story, and now she knows what happened. She knows that Fang’s bad guys kept Nick away from her, and she knows her boyfriend is still alive!”
Dia was quiet for a while. “Except for the fact that we’re totally mixing up real life with the story, that sounds about right.”
“You think so?”
“I just thought of something,” she said. “Your grandma keeps the story hidden in the hotel and doesn’t take it with her because her father might find it. I bet that’s it. But why do the dates she writes in the margins stop? Did she stop coming to read the story?”
I didn’t know. It was too much to keep in my head. I suddenly felt stumped, stopped. “He writes that the story continues in Chapter III. But the postcard only led to the hotel. What if the card is the only clue that survived?”
Dia looked at me. “Let me see it again.”
I gave it to her. She flipped it to the back side and grinned. “The postcard had one clue for your grannie, but it has two for us.” She read the card aloud. “Sixteen-thirty Beach Drive Northeast. Sounds like an address to me. What is it?”
“Where she lived, I think,” I said. “Her father’s house.”
Dia’s face lit up. “She lived there? With Fang? Is the house still there?”
I shrugged. “I’m not from around these parts.”
“The library will tell us,” she said. “Let’s find the house. That address, Henry, is another clue.”