Here Today

  And now, apparently, one of Marie’s Bad Things had happened. Ellie’s neighbors were peering at the Witch Tree. Ellie stood up on wobbly legs and looked at it herself. She saw that the knothole, the face of the witch, was a loud lavender color, and that drips of paint ran down the trunk of the tree.

  Everyone was talking at once.

  “This must have happened last night.”

  “Did anyone hear anything?”

  “The tree is ruined.”

  “No, it isn’t, dear.”

  “Can you get paint off of a tree?”

  “I think it’s spray paint.”

  “Should we call the police?”

  “I’m so sorry I disturbed everyone.”

  Ellie stepped back from the tree, back, back, back until she was in the Levins’ yard.

  “Ellie? Are you okay?” Holly joined her, cradling Pumpkin in her arms.

  Ellie nodded.

  “Who do you think did it?” asked Holly.

  Ellie shrugged. “Whoever does all these things. Someone who hates us.”

  “Monsieur Lauchaire is going to get some paint thinner or something,” Holly reported as Pumpkin crawled up to her shoulders and settled himself around her neck.

  “Is it okay to put paint thinner on a tree?” asked Ellie.

  “I guess. Monsieur Lauchaire seems to think so. Gosh, Miss Woods is madder than a hornet.”

  Ellie looked across the yard at Miss Woods in time to hear her say, “… ought to have their heads examined. They have no respect for life. If I ever get my hands on them …” And then, “What’s wrong with people?”

  By lunchtime, the residents of Witch Tree Lane had resumed their weekends, but their mood was glum. Monsieur Lauchaire had scrubbed gently at the knothole with a rag soaked in something very smelly, and his cloth had turned purple, but the witch’s face was still a faint violet color, and would remain that way for several years.

  Miss Woods called the police, and was fit to be tied when the sergeant she spoke to said she was welcome to come down to the station to make a report, but that he didn’t have time to drive all the way out to Witch Tree Lane to look at a purple tree.

  “I ought to have him arrested,” Miss Woods said that afternoon as she and Miss Nelson and Ellie and Holly sat on the ladies’ front porch. “I could make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “Oh, now,” said Miss Nelson.

  “Elizabeth, this is serious,” Miss Woods went on. “Because when people do these kinds of things, well, it isn’t the things that matter so much as why they do them. And they do them because they want to frighten us. They might as well come burn a cross in our yard.”

  “Dear!” yelped Miss Nelson. “Please.” She inclined her head toward Ellie and Holly, and Ellie shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. Next to her, Holly tightened her grip on Pumpkin, who was sitting in her lap. “Now you’ve scared the girls.”

  “Well …” was all Miss Woods would say.

  Ellie’s gaze drifted toward the defiled tree and the familiar old face.

  That night Doris was jubilant. During the afternoon, while Ellie had sat shivering on the ladies’ porch, Doris had gone into town for a meeting about the Harvest Parade. When she returned, she was the most cheerful she’d been since she’d gotten the callback for the Circus Girl audition.

  “Just think!” Doris had exclaimed as the Dingmans sat down at their kitchen table for a supper of macaroni and cheese. “In two weeks I’ll be riding through Spectacle as our Harvest Queen. It’ll be my crowning moment.”

  Ellie giggled.

  “What?” said Doris, looking at her sharply.

  “You said your ‘crowning moment.’ Get it? Crowning?”

  Doris frowned.

  “It’s a pun. Because you really are going to be crowned the Harvest Queen. So it’s literally going to be your … never mind, Doris. It’s great. You’re going to be great.”

  Doris brightened. “I’m going to have my hair professionally done on Saturday morning. Early. Oh, and that reminds me. I have to make an appointment for the final fitting of my gown.”

  “Aren’t you going to be cold wearing a gown outdoors in the middle of November?” asked Albert.

  “Oh, no, hon. I’ll be wearing a stole.”

  “A fur stole,” Ellie added when she related this conversation to Holly the next afternoon. They had closed themselves into Ellie’s bedroom, needing a moment of privacy. When Holly said nothing, Ellie repeated, “Fur. Fur, Holly. From some poor dead animal, but Doris doesn’t care about that…. Holly? Holly? Yoo-hoo. Earth to Holly.”

  “Sorry,” said Holly. “I was thinking about Mick. And how much I hate him.”

  Ellie slid off of her bed and sat cross-legged on the floor opposite Holly. “What did he do now?”

  “He’s just such a pig. He lies around our house wearing boxers and undershirts and nothing else and criticizes Mom when he finds the tiniest dust bunny on the floor. And then he’ll ask her to do something like sew a button on his pants, only he doesn’t ask, he orders. He walks up to her in his disgusting ratty undershirt and hands her the pants and says, ‘These need to be fixed.’ I have never heard him say please or thank you. And he only calls me ‘Kid’ or ‘the kid.’”

  “Maybe he never watched Captain Kangaroo,” said Ellie.

  The door to the room burst open then and Marie bounded in, followed by Rachel and Domi. “We’re going to play house!” Marie announced. “Do you want to be our babies?”

  Ellie smiled. “Well—”

  “We were just leaving,” said Holly, jumping to her feet.

  “Darn,” said Marie.

  “But how about this: One of you could be the mother,” said Ellie, “and the other two could be her twin babies.”

  “Oh! Yes! I claim to be one of the twins!” cried Rachel.

  “And I am the other!” said Domi. “And our names are Pauline and Paulette.”

  “No, Annie and Frannie,” said Marie.

  Ellie and Holly escaped from the bedroom.

  “Let’s go over to my house,” said Holly. “Mick’s not there.”

  Outside, a wind had sprung up. It sent dry oak leaves rattling down Witch Tree Lane, and Ellie had the sudden thought that the warm weather was over and chilly November was here after all.

  “Look, there’s Pumpkin,” said Ellie as she and Holly ran across the Majors’ lawn. A small bundle of orange fur was sprawled on the front stoop. “Isn’t it a little cold for him to be sleeping outside?” she asked.

  Holly didn’t answer. She stopped a few feet from the stoop and stared at Pumpkin. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  Pumpkin was lying on his side, feet stretched delicately away from him. His mouth was open, and so were his eyes, staring ahead. Ellie saw that he was panting, that his sides were heaving, and that a bit of foam had formed at the corner of his mouth.

  Holly let out a shriek and then another and another.

  The door to the Majors’ house burst open. “Girls?” said Selena. And then she saw Pumpkin. She knelt beside him for a moment.

  “What is it? What happened?” cried Holly.

  “Maybe he was hit by a car,” said Ellie.

  “No,” said Selena slowly. “I think he’s been poisoned. I’ll call the vet.”

  Ellie watched what happened next as if from a great distance; as if Holly and Selena and Pumpkin were putting on a play and Ellie were sitting in the last row of the theater. She watched Selena dash back into the house to make a phone call. She watched Holly sit on the stoop and cradle Pumpkin in her arms. She watched Selena return a few minutes later with a box lined with a blanket and lay Pumpkin carefully in it.

  “Dr. Tierney will meet us in his office,” Selena told Holly.

  Then Ellie, who had backed away from the stoop, watched in silence as the Majors’ car screeched out of the driveway, turned the corner, and disappeared down Route 27.

  Pumpkin had been poisoned. He died that night at the vet’s office. H
olly couldn’t stop crying, and Selena didn’t make her go to school on Monday.

  On Monday afternoon, after two bus rides with out Holly, during which Ellie had sat Allan in her lap and hugged him tightly, Ellie dragged herself to the Majors’ house. Selena’s car was gone, and Ellie found Holly staring at the television set, which wasn’t turned on.

  “Hi,” said Ellie.

  “Hi.”

  “I’m sorry about Pumpkin.”

  “I know.”

  “Dad said we have to keep Kiss indoors now.”

  Holly nodded.

  “Does Dr. Tierney know how Pumpkin was poisoned?”

  “No,” replied Holly. “He said he could have eaten something, like fertilizer from someone’s garage, but he wasn’t sure. I can’t really see Pumpkin doing that, though.”

  “Me neither. Holly? This is a really terrible thought, and I hope you won’t get mad at me …”

  “What?”

  “Well, you don’t think that Mick …”

  “Poisoned Pumpkin?”

  Ellie nodded.

  “No,” said Holly. “I really don’t. I don’t like Mick. And he doesn’t like me very much. And he didn’t like Pumpkin, either. But I don’t think he killed him.”

  Ellie nodded again. “You know,” she began.

  “Yes. I do know,” Holly replied.

  And Ellie realized that Holly did indeed know exactly what Ellie was going to say. That if Pumpkin hadn’t accidentally eaten poison, and if Mick hadn’t poisoned him, then someone else, a stranger, must have set out the poison.

  It was another of the Bad Things, only this time Ellie didn’t think it could be called simply a Bad Thing, because it was so very horrible.

  It seemed to Ellie that all that week the people of Witch Tree Lane kept to themselves. Selena cancelled several of her cleaning jobs so she could be at home with Holly more often. Mrs. Lauchaire and Mrs. Levin, who worked part-time, stayed home several afternoons as well. Even Doris stayed home more than usual. After school the children played indoors; no more tromping around up and down the street in a pack.

  By Friday, Ellie was tired of being cooped up, playing house with Marie. “Come on, Kiss,” she said. She fastened Kiss’s leash to her collar and pulled her toward the front door. Kiss, who was used to running free, planted her feet firmly on the floor and rocked backward.

  “Come on,” Ellie urged her. “We’re going to take a walk.”

  Kiss allowed herself to be tugged out the door and down the street to the ladies’ house.

  “Ellie!” Miss Nelson greeted her as she peeked through the front door. “And Kiss. What a nice surprise. Come on inside.”

  Ellie sat at the ladies’ kitchen table, Kiss at her feet, while Miss Nelson bustled around and prepared afternoon tea.

  When it was ready, Ellie and the ladies drank from china cups and ate tiny chocolate-covered biscuits. The ladies were quieter than usual, and Ellie, feeling pressed to come up with a topic of conversation, said, “How long have you lived on Witch Tree Lane?”

  “Nearly twenty years,” replied Miss Woods.

  “Twenty years!” exclaimed Ellie. Somehow, she had never given much thought to what Witch Tree Lane had been like before she lived there. Now it occurred to her that other families had lived in her house, and in Holly’s. She did remember, vaguely, other families who had lived in the Levins’ and the Lauchaires’ houses. But she couldn’t even recall their names. She remembered a small boy—something had been wrong with him. What? Something with his heart. And she remembered a little girl who had a pet turtle that lived in a bean-shaped plastic bowl with a tiny plastic palm tree that offered no shade. And an older boy, a teenager, who zoomed up and down Witch Tree Lane in a car that made a lot of noise.

  “What was our street like then?” asked Ellie. “Twenty years ago?”

  “Oh, my, when we first moved here it was much different,” said Miss Nelson. “For one thing, we were the only people on the street. Your house, and the other three, were built a couple of years after we’d settled in. So for two years the street was very, very quiet. Well, it’s always been fairly quiet, I guess.”

  “Except for when that hideous Ronnie Marvel lived here,” said Miss Woods.

  “Was he the boy with the noisy car?” asked Ellie.

  “Yes. I’m surprised you remember him.”

  “He used to honk and wave and yell things to Doris as he drove by.”

  Miss Woods rolled her eyes. And Miss Nelson said, “No one has manners anymore.”

  “Manners!” cried Miss Woods. “It’s gone way beyond not having manners. People have no respect. This is a world full of hate.”

  “Oh, now, dear …” Miss Nelson’s voice trailed off.

  “That’s why we’re thinking of selling our house.”

  “Selling your house?” Ellie looked at the two old faces across the table from her. She set her teacup down and reached for Kiss, gulped in air.

  “This is not the same little corner of the world it used to be,” said Miss Woods. “There’s a lot of judgment in this town. A lot of frightened, ignorant people. And when you take fright and add it to ignorance, you get hatred. That’s a very unattractive equation.”

  “But, but …” sputtered Ellie.

  Miss Nelson reached across the table and took Ellie’s hand. “We’re not sure we’re going to sell the house. We’re just thinking about it.”

  Ellie nodded, felt tears brewing, took a swallow of tea. “Dad says we have to keep Kiss indoors now. We can’t let her run around outside anymore. I know she thinks she’s being punished. It’s not fair.”

  “A lot of things aren’t fair,” said Miss Woods.

  Ellie looked outside at the darkening street. “I guess I’d better go home,” she said. “Thank you for the tea.”

  The weekend passed—a dull, slow weekend with a sky the color of steel and a wind that thundered down Witch Tree Lane and tore the last few leaves from the trees. Monday and Tuesday passed in the same fashion, except that Ellie had the distraction of school. In school, if she concentrated very hard on her math or her reading book or Mr. Pierce’s social studies project, she found that she could forget about Pumpkin, about the purple Witch Tree, about all the Bad Things and even the sparrows in the front row.

  And then on Wednesday evening the phone rang at the Dingmans’ house and a moment later Doris called, “Eleanor! Telephone!”

  Ellie ran to the kitchen, where Doris stood holding the receiver toward her.

  “It’s not Holly,” Doris whispered.

  “Hello?” said Ellie.

  “Ellie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, it’s Tammy.”

  “Oh! Oh, hi.” Ellie pulled a chair out from the table and perched on it. She could feel her heart start to pound and told herself not to be silly. Why was Tammy calling her? She had more or less ignored Ellie since learning that Doris had not been chosen as the Circus Girl. Tammy was probably calling about homework. Although … if she had a question about homework, why wouldn’t she call the other sparrows? Maybe she wanted Ellie to give her the answer to a math problem. Ellie was the best at math in their whole class, and everyone knew it. What should Ellie do if Tammy wanted an answer? She couldn’t give her an answer. That would be cheating. Maybe—

  “Ellie, listen, I want to tell you something and I don’t have much time. I’m calling everyone in our whole class tonight. Except Holly.”

  “Except Holly? Why?”

  “Because Nancy and Donna and Maggie and I decided that we should slam her.”

  “What—what does that mean?”

  “It’s something we used to do at my old school. You pick someone in your class and every time you pass that person in the hallway you slam into them. As hard as you can.”

  “You mean, to hurt them?”

  “Or to make them fall down or something. It’s funny.”

  “It doesn’t sound funny.”

  “Oh, come on, Ellie.”


  “But why did you pick Holly? Why do you want to slam her?”

  “Because she’s, you know … weird.”

  “And you’re calling everyone in our whole class?”

  “Yup. I just have two more people to go.”

  “Is everybody going along with this?”

  “Yeah. So you have to, too.”

  Ellie paused. “No, I don’t,” she said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “I don’t have to go along with it.”

  “But I just said that everybody else is.”

  “I don’t care. Holly’s my best friend. Why would I do something like that to her?”

  “Because she’s weird. And if you don’t go along with the rest of us, everyone will think you’re weird, too.”

  “They already think I’m weird.”

  “Well, maybe you could change that.”

  “I’d rather be weird than mean.”

  Tammy didn’t answer this, and Ellie did nothing to fill the quiet space. She twined the coil of phone cord around her finger and stared out the window. By the light of the lamppost in front of the ladies’ house she could just make out the shadow of the Witch Tree.

  “So you really won’t slam Holly?” Tammy finally asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay-ay,” replied Tammy. “’Bye.”

  Ellie hung up the phone without answering her. She waited for just a moment, breathing hard, then picked up the phone again and called Holly.

  “Do you think they’ll really do it?” asked Holly as she and Ellie stepped off the school bus on Thursday morning.

  Ellie sighed. “Yes.”

  “But do you think everyone will do it? Even Jimmy?”

  Jimmy Bush was an unfortunate boy in the second row who picked his nose and talked about nothing but war planes. Most of the kids in Ellie’s class left him alone; the sparrows weren’t interested in him because he wasn’t a girl. “I don’t know,” said Ellie.

  “Well, do you think they’ll just pick on me, like Tammy said? Or on you, too, because you wouldn’t—”

  “Holly, I don’t know.” Ellie felt cross with Holly, and knew she shouldn’t, which made her even more cross.