Dodging and Burning Read online

  At night, though, in the vicinity of Glade’s Dine-In, there was life. As the three of us passed the diner in the Prescotts’ car, I could see people inside huddled around the bar, laughing and carrying on. I even caught a whiff of buttery roasted chicken. I must’ve been hungry, because it smelled delicious. As we turned the corner, the diner’s door swung open and a man and woman spilled out onto the street, her hand in his, both tipsy from beer or moonshine, both giggling and falling into each other. Call it girlish stupidity, but I wondered if Jay might ever hold my hand like that, pulling me out into the night.

  We drove deeper into town, circling a more residential neighborhood. We eventually parked in the shadow of an old oak, far away from a streetlight, and set out on foot, searching the maze of streets.

  Jay knew where to find the house, generally speaking. He had chatted up his grandmother and asked if she knew Lily Vellum, keeping it casual, he told us, so as not to raise her suspicions. She didn’t know Lily, but she knew of the Vellum clan. Both families had been bigwigs in Haden County society years ago. The Vellums had been the politicians and the Greenwoods, the business folk. Letitia had explained to Jay where the Vellum home was, although she wasn’t sure the Vellums still lived there. The Depression had been as rough on that family as it had the Greenwoods.

  “Up there,” Jay said, and pointed.

  The house sat high on the hill at the end of Jitters Rock Drive, lording its four chimneys, its fancy Victorian curlicues, and its wrought iron weather vanes over the smaller, one-story homes on either side of the street. Its bay window glowed orange, peering down at us like the open eye of a drowsy watchdog. I didn’t like it, not one bit. It reminded me of the haunted houses from storybooks.

  Jay nodded toward the car parked at the front gate. Somebody was home. Moving from tree to tree like some silly Warner Bros. cartoon, we crept past the house and up a side street, hoping to sneak up on it from the rear.

  “We shouldn’t trespass,” Bunny said, stopping in her tracks. “Wouldn’t he be in his rights to shoot us?”

  “We came all this way,” Jay said.

  “I don’t want to be shot, thank you very much.”

  “Nobody’s getting shot.”

  “We should just go home.”

  “Stop pretending you’re above being curious.”

  “I’m not above anything. I just—”

  He looked at her and she, him. His long eyelashes threw thin, spider-leg shadows across his cheeks. I felt cut off from them.

  “What?” she said, with a puff of exasperation.

  He placed his hand on her forearm, squeezing it a little, and said, “I’ll watch out for you.”

  She seemed flustered at first, even embarrassed, but his touch calmed her. She twisted sluggishly away from him.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s pray the man doesn’t have a gun.”

  We trudged up a dirt road that dead-ended at a wall of blasted limestone, the Basin Coal Company’s deep scar on the side of the mountain. To the right was a long gravel driveway, which snaked along the limestone and behind the houses. A screen of humidity blurred the moon, weakening the light and making it difficult to see. Every few feet, the trees seemed to grow thicker and the buzz of insects louder. We followed Jay through tall grass and into a bramble of blackberry bushes that tore up my arms and my thin cotton blouse. It felt like the beginning of a fairy tale—Beware what lurks in the woods!

  Bunny caught her hair on a briar and let out a cry. “I don’t want to be here!”

  “You’ll be just fine,” Jay said, his voice cool and soft. He fumbled around in the darkness and freed her hair. There was something both familiar and distant about how those two were behaving toward each other, like everything they said was in a secret code.

  Once we found the Vellum place, we leaned on the fence that ran the perimeter of the property. Jay spotted the silhouette of a man in the kitchen window and called our attention to it. He asked for the binoculars, and I handed them to him. He whispered, “That’s him,” then passed the binoculars to Bunny, and in turn, she handed them to me.

  I found it difficult to focus the lens. Blobs formed into shapes of things then slipped back into clouds of light. Eventually, I saw Frank Vellum. He was a tall, proper-looking man with gray hair, a slick mustache, and ferrety black eyes. If he’d had a top hat and black cape, he could’ve been Professor Moriarty. He was sitting, chatting with someone who was out of sight.

  “I’m going in for a closer look,” Jay said.

  “No,” Bunny whispered.

  Jay grabbed the top of the fence, about four feet high, and pulled his body up like it was nothing. He teetered on the edge of the wooden slats and dropped into the backyard, grunting as his right foot hit the ground. He crept up to the window and peeked in. Bunny situated herself close to me—practically on top of me—and watched over my shoulder as I watched Frank Vellum, who seemed to be explaining something, his hands moving up and down and back and forth like he was directing a band. Although his voice began as a murmur, the more he gestured, the louder he became. I was able to make out a word or two, names and pronouns—Lily. Billy. They. To me. He said “to me” twice. He seemed angry.

  I guessed that he meant How could they do this to me? But was he talking about Billy and Lily? What had they done?

  Then a woman stepped into sight. I couldn’t place her at first, but then it dawned on me. “I know that lady!” I said a little too loud. “I’ve seen her at the store. It’s Mr. Hersh’s wife.”

  Bunny gasped and said, “Bernice Hersh? Really?”

  Bernice positioned herself behind Frank while he was ranting and raving. She was wearing one of those tight, high-necked suits so popular in the 1940s, and her red hair was tidied up into a swirl. She began rubbing Frank’s shoulders, easing his temper, her fingernails brushing against his neck. I’d once overheard Mama say that Bernice had something of a reputation. When Bernice ran her index finger up Frank’s neck and around his ear, he fidgeted and stood up. She was flustered for a second, pressing her lips together and massaging her lipstick, like she wanted to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere. Then she collected herself and said something. He walked away from her and she followed him, both of them moving out of sight.

  Jay motioned to us. He was going to try another window around the corner of the house.

  Bunny shook her head and whispered a shrill “No!”

  I gave her an angry, shut-your-mouth-now look, and when I glanced back at the spot where Jay had been crouching, he was gone. I searched the shadows for him but saw nothing. I searched all the windows of the house. Nothing.

  “Where did he go?” Bunny said. “Where is he?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  She snatched the binoculars away from me, jerking the strap over my head. “Do you see him?” Her head darted back and forth like a chicken.

  What would a private dick do? What would C. C. Steele do? I thought. I can handle it. Keep cool—nothing fazes me, nothing. Cool as they come. I stared down the darkness at the side of the house and readied myself for the next move, a regular Sam Spade in saddle shoes.

  And then Jay flew out of the shadows, flashing through the night, his feet pounding the earth as hard as they could, and, despite his bad leg, he flung himself over the fence like a crazed deer. “He saw me!” he yelled. “Run!”

  And that is exactly what we did. We ran through the grass and the blackberry bushes, Bunny hissing at the thorns like a rabid cat. We ran between the trees and down the road, kicking and crunching the gravel. We ran, forgetting to breathe, our bodies screaming at us. We ran until we hit the car. Literally. Hands, arms, and legs bounced off the metal. Jay jumped in the back seat, I hopped into the front passenger seat, and Bunny, her forearms scratched and bleeding from the briars, fell into the driver’s seat. She fumbled with the keys and started the Olds, the motor flaring to life. She put the car in gear and pulled out, headlights swiping their claws at the bug-infested night. We screeche
d down Jitters Rock Drive and bolted past Glade’s Dine-In, the smell of roasted chicken still high in the air, the car not slowing until we hit the town limits.

  Jay’s bad leg had to be shooting bullets. His breathing was labored, he was coated head to toe with sweat, and his face was red and tortured.

  We were quiet.

  Bunny rolled down her window, and the cool mountain air soothed us. She locked on Jay in the rearview mirror and said, “What were you thinking? You can’t just run away from us without an explanation! That’s not fair.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did he really get a good look at you?”

  “Take me back to the farm … and I’ll tell you all about it,” he said, massaging his leg. “If we’re going to … do this right … we need to establish a base of operations.” His eyes were tearing from the pain.

  “Base of operations!” Bunny echoed. “Oh no. This fool’s errand is over. Over.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, gritting his teeth and sucking in his breath. “You want to know what happened to Lily as much as Cee or me … You’re hooked. I know you.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt. Look at you. I mean, my God.”

  Maybe it was those black animal eyes of hers, or her teeth biting into her lower lip like a frightened little kid, or the wrinkle of concern just above her nose. I don’t know. But whatever it was, Bunny’s expression at that moment struck me as real, like there was a heart under all that primp and polish. It’s strange to say now, but right then and there, I liked her.

  “I’ll be fine,” Jay said, touching her shoulder over the car seat.

  “We need to make a plan,” Jay said. “Decide on some rules.”

  The converted sun porch’s glass peeked through the draped fabric, reflecting the candles we’d just lit. The room felt brighter and more welcoming at night than it had during the day.

  Jay poured himself a drink and offered Bunny a sip, but she waved it away. I wanted him to offer me some, but he didn’t. Instead, he cocked his eyebrow, gave me a sly look, and said, “First of all, we need some secret way to communicate with one another.”

  I thought about how you had taught me to use lemon juice as invisible ink and how we nearly burned down the house trying to decode the message with a match. “What are we going to do?” I said.

  “What about use a telephone, like most civilized people?” Bunny said.

  “No, we don’t want anyone figuring out what we’re up to,” Jay said.

  She was about to respond, but he held up his finger, shushing her. He kneeled in front of his bed, easing through the pain of his sore leg, and began rummaging under it. He pulled out a small book and dusted it off.

  “Have you heard of a cipher?” he asked, and flipped to a page of the book with lines of numbers and letters and unfamiliar symbols. “The military encrypts messages so the Nazis and Japs can’t read them. We could do the same.”

  He handed me the book, and I stared at the sea of code and pretended I understood what he was talking about.

  “Look,” he said, “we can do something simple. Say, B equals A, C equals D, and on like that for the entire alphabet.”

  Then he wrote—

  XF XJMM LFFQ B TFDSFU

  “Translate it,” he said.

  Both Bunny and I worked on it, but Bunny was quicker and, wouldn’t you know it, blurted out the answer—“WE WILL KEEP A SECRET.” She seemed so pleased with herself. “It’s just simple substitution,” she said. “You gave us the pattern.”

  “Okay,” Jay said. “Here’s another cipher clue and encryption.”

  He wrote—

  A - 4

  and then—

  FYRRC ERH GISPE

  Bunny and I stared at it, breathing loud, thinking hard. We both scrawled some ideas on paper, my twelve-year-old mind moving lightning fast but not making much progress. After a few frustrating seconds, I glanced back at the original cipher and had a thought. All the letters of the message were four letters further down the alphabet than the original letter. So, A - 4 = W. I quickly began to decipher it, set on proving myself to Jay. FYRRC became BUNNY, and ERH became AND, and GISPE was my name. I held up the paper, and Jay congratulated me.

  “Why are we doing this?” Bunny grumbled.

  “We’ll leave an encrypted note with its cipher clue at a designated hiding place in the woods. I know an old tree with a hollow trunk near the pond that will do the trick. Each day, we’ll leave notes as a way of communicating and calling meetings. We’ll use my room as a base of operations.”

  “This is just too much,” she said.

  “I like it,” I said, giving her an angry squint.

  Jay grinned. “But our group needs a name, a club name. What do you think, Cee?”

  My stomach fluttered with nervousness. I’d been given a very important task. I scanned the books scattered across the picnic table; titles like The Thin Man and Death on the Nile and Poison in Jest jumped out at me, but nothing inspired me. I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the cot, Jay’s collection of bottles, the photos of the soldiers tacked above his pillow, and his Purple Heart glimmering in the weak light of the room. “What about the Purple Hearts?” I said, before I’d really thought about it.

  “Is that appropriate?” Bunny said.

  “What’s your favorite color?” he asked me.

  “These days, blue, I guess.”

  “Well, what about the Blue Hearts?” Jay said. “Purple is an ugly color.”

  I nodded, a little embarrassed.

  “The Blue Hearts Club it is,” he said.

  Bunny made a show of looking at her dainty gold wristwatch and said, “Mother will be worried.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened at the Vellums’?”

  “Okay, what happened?” she said, cocking her hip. “Tell us.”

  “Well,” he replied, enjoying himself, “after I left you, I snuck around the corner of the house. I heard voices and tracked them to a window, which was a foot or so above my head. I listened for a few minutes. Bernice Hersh and Frank Vellum are definitely having an affair. I can confirm that. I decided to have a closer look, so I wedged my toes between loose boards and pulled myself up by the windowsill. Inside was dark, but I could see their silhouettes moving in the room and, most importantly, I could hear them. Bernice was trying to calm Vellum down by complimenting him and loving him up, but he wasn’t in the mood to screw—”

  “Jay!” Bunny said. “Not in front of Ceola.”

  Bunny was so prudish. I knew about sex at that age—the biological facts, anyway. What goes in where, that sort of thing. I thought it was some awkward medical procedure. It was what a married couple had to do to make babies. It certainly had nothing to do with finding a boy handsome and wanting to kiss him.

  Jay ignored her and went on with his story. “Frank kept muttering, ‘Damn Billy. Damn him to hell.’ He said it several times before the piece of rotten clapboard I was standing on broke, and I went down. I didn’t wait around, but I know he heard me and saw me. He didn’t know who I was, though. He yelled, ‘Come back here, Billy! You’re not going to get away with this!’”

  “Billy’s the boyfriend,” Bunny said.

  “Yes,” Jay said. “That’s significant. We need to focus on him next.”

  “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

  Fidgeting with her watch again, Bunny said, “I’ve got to go. My mother will have a fit. I’ll take you home, Ceola.”

  Jay had been hobbling around the room as he spoke and at this point, he was behind Bunny. He shook his head no, signaling to me what I should do. At first, I was confused, but the lightbulb went on, and I shook my head. “No thanks. I’ll walk.”

  Bunny stepped forward, about to argue with me, but apparently decided against it. She shrugged and said, “Fine, have it your way.” She turned to Jay. “Good night. And rest your leg.” She gave us both a suspicious once-over and
then left without another word.

  Once Bunny was out of earshot, Jay gestured for me to have a seat on his bed. “I’ve got something to show you before you go.” He opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and laid a black leather photo album in my lap. I thought of you. It reminded me of the creepy photo album Sheila finds in “A Date with Death.” “Look at it,” he said. I liked the attention he was giving me. I liked that this was just between the two of us.

  On the first page was a photo of you in a swimsuit, your legs dangling off the edge of a dock, probably at Culler’s Lake. You were smiling and squinting, having a good ol’ time. You were healthy and tan, like it was the end of a summer. The photo was natural, easy, and something about it, some little detail I couldn’t put my finger on—the life in it, I guess—made me sad, but I stayed stock-still. I wasn’t going to let on I was emotional, no way, not in the presence of a fellow hard-boiled detective.

  Jay turned the page, and there was another picture of you, and then another and another, some near the lake, others up by Hardy’s quarry. I picked up the album and started flipping through it, coming across more photos of you shuffled in with shots of Main Street, the mountains, the creek, the railroad crossing at Culler’s Mountain, and even strange shots of Bunny in a white dress.

  I stopped at an eight-by-ten of you reclining in the prow of a rowboat, hands tucked behind your head, your lanky arms flexed, your chest spread wide, emphasizing those sinewy muscles of yours. The photo bothered me. Your face was sly and impish, not a familiar expression. Your thin swimming trunks were wet and plastered to your skin, the waist tie all undone and the top button unbuttoned. I closed the album with a snap and handed it back to Jay, a little queasy. He took it and sat beside me on the cot, the mattress bowing with his weight, our arms touching.

  “I loved him very much,” he said, and flipped to the back of the album. “Here’s a photograph he took of me.”

  It was a picture of Jay in the buck. Can you imagine? His body was stretched out, catlike, on the very cot we were sitting on! His skin glowed like it had been dusted with phosphorescent powder, and his face was blurry like he was reclining behind a plate of frosted glass. All of this contrasted with the sharp focus on his midsection and his manhood, which lay a little stiff on one of his thighs. I felt dizzy and sick at my stomach. What shocked me the most when I saw him wasn’t that he was showing it to me but that it stirred feelings in me I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. All I could think about was his body and how I liked looking at it—at him. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about this, Robbie, but I need to say it to someone. They say the dead are the most forgiving. I hope it’s true in your case.