13 Hangmen (10 page)

“Of course not!” she said.

He felt himself turn beet red. “I should probably just go,” he said.

“Dude, chill!” Sarah said. “I'm not doubting your word. I'm just saying there's no reason why Mildred's pawcorance would work. I told you, they mark
sites
. We're at least fifty miles from Worcester, where this one was found.”

The kettle whistled. Sarah shut off the gas and reached for one of the canisters. She placed four scoops of dried leaves in the teapot, then filled it with boiling water.

“But mine must have been moved too,” Tony said. “It's now a shelf in the attic of the house I just moved into.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Sarah said. “You can't rule out the possibility it was actually found at the site where your house was built, got turned into a shelf, and is therefore still more or less in its original location. A hypothesis which is supported by your claim it still works. Or am I missing something?”

Tony shook his head.

“Sugar?”

Tony nodded, figuring anything would taste better sweeter. She placed a cracked bowl on a tray alongside the steaming teapot and two cleanish cups. Tony followed her back to the main shop. She set the tray on the spiral of the countertop and poured out two cups of yellowish-looking liquid. She dropped a cube of sugar into one and handed it to Tony, telling him to park himself on a stool that looked worryingly like a stuffed rhinoceros leg. He took a hesitant sip. To his surprise, the tea was refreshing, sort of tingly and nice. Meanwhile Sarah slumped with her own cup onto the sort of lounging sofa Cleopatra might have liked. “What was your question, again?” she said.

“How to conjure Angelo back,” Tony said.

Sarah frowned. She blew on her tea. “How old are you?”

“I just turned thirteen,” Tony told her. “Yesterday.” He wondered how old
she
was: fifteen? sixteen? It was a little hard to tell.

“Interesting,” she said, not bothering to wish him a happy birthday. “And what were you doing just prior to this Angel dude's appearance?”

“Sleeping,” Tony admitted.

“You didn't do anything to the pawcorance?”

Tony told her about running his finger around the spiral the night before, getting a static shock, hearing a boy's voice, placing Ted Williams's cap over the spiral before going to bed, and waking to find Angelo asleep beside him.

“In the present?” Sarah said.

“Angelo thought he was still in his own room in 1939,” Tony said.

“Interesting,” Sarah said again. She set her cup down on the counter and headed for the wall of books. She ran her finger along a row of tomes until she found the one she was looking for. She showed Tony its gold-stamped cover:
Of My Amazing Exploites in the New Worlde
. “Myles Standish,” she said, settling back onto her sofa and leafing through the book's yellowed pages. “Militia captain for the Plymouth Colony. He was the first Englishman to explore the Shawmut Peninsula—now the city of Boston—which was already inhabited by a band of the Massachuset tribe. The band's sachem, Chickatawbut, welcomed Standish with a feast of lobsters and boiled cod. Chickatawbut promised to share this peninsula with Standish
on one and only one condition. Do you know what that was?”

Tony shook his head. Of course he didn't! But he was used to these sorts of leading questions; Michael always asked them before launching into a bit of history.

“On condition that Standish's Pilgrims
never
settle near their sacred Spiraling Stone,” Sarah said. “Do you know why?”

Tony shook his head again.

“Because that was where the tribe's thirteen-year-old braves held their vision quests,” she said, throwing up her hands as though the answer were obvious. She then began to read a somewhat long and boring passage out of the book. It was written in a way that made the whole thing sound to Tony like Shakespeare. But he finally got the general upshot: When a boy was close to manhood—when he had lived thirteen winters and was seeking to be called a brave—he would begin his vision quest by placing an object on the carved spiral of the stone altar. This talisman needed to represent the animal totem he'd already been assigned by the tribe's sachem: a hawk feather, say, or a bear claw or porcupine quill. He then waited for a guide from the spirit world—usually an ancestor of that same totem—to appear to him in animal form. Sometimes this occurred the first night, sometimes it didn't; the conditions needed to be exactly right. Which is why the boy had the whole following year to keep trying.

“Did Angelo remind you of an animal?” Sarah asked, glancing up from the book.

Tony nodded. Angelo's thick glasses
had
made him look like a cross-eyed owl.

“You said you placed a cap on the spiral,” Sarah said. “Did the cap mean anything to Angelo?”

“He had just gotten it from a famous ballplayer,” Tony said.

“How did
you
come by it?” Sarah said.

“He sent it to me himself when he was an old man,” Tony said. “For my thirteenth birthday, just before he died. Come to think of it, the kid version of Zio Angelo told me he also set that cap on the spiral before going to bed.”

“Interesting,” Sarah said.

“You think I had a vision quest?” Tony said.

“Not really,” Sarah said, sipping her tea.

“Oh,” Tony said. “Well, what
do
you think?”

“That ancient cultures developed rituals like the vision quest to explain naturally occurring phenomena at certain sites whenever certain atmospheric conditions came into play,” she said. She strode back to the wall of books. This time she pulled out a relatively modern-looking volume. She opened it to a dogeared page. On the left-hand side was a bunch of crudely drawn spirals.

“Petroglyphs found at prehistoric sites throughout North
America,” she said. “Anthropologists have narrowed their meaning to three possibilities: the universe itself, a portal to the spirit world, or the coiled nature of time. The Massachuset language, a dialect of Algonquian, had no word for
time
before the arrival of Europeans. Nor did they have any concept of past or future. For them, everything happened—birth, manhood, marriage, death—in one long, never-ending
now
.”

“You've totally lost me,” Tony said.

“Ever heard of Hermann Minkowski?” Sarah said.

Tony shook his head yet again.

Sarah took him over to a round wire birdcage that was hanging from the ceiling. “In 1909, Minkowski proposed a radical new notion of time called the block universe theory. He imagined time to be spatial, existing all at once as plot points in a three-dimensional sphere—a gigantic, cosmic version of this cage—
not
a progression of events plotted along a two-dimensional line.” Here she pulled the ribbon out of her hair and tied one end of it to a random wire of the cage. “Minkowski theorized it might be possible for one era to communicate with another—his explanation for ghosts and spirits—if certain atmospheric conditions forced two different points of the sphere to connect.” She opened the cage and pulled the ribbon through its center. She tied it at another random spot on the opposite side. “In such a time anomaly, both moments might, in theory, take place simultaneously in a
given location.” She ran her finger along the entire length of the purple ribbon, then twanged it for good measure.

“So you think my pawcorance is a time anomaly?” Tony said.

“It's just one hypothesis,” Sarah said. “Let's say static on the spiral is a signal the conditions are right for a thirteen-year-old to make contact with someone from another era. Let's also say that
who
—Angelo, for example—is determined by the object you place on the spiral. In this case it's the ball cap, because it is meaningful to you both, and exists in 1939 as well as 2009. Let's say the voice you then hear confirms you've chosen the right object. All you would need to do is wait for Angelo to place his cap on his spiral for an anomaly to open in the space-time continuum, and
bam!
, you're both inhabiting the same spot, simultaneously. Follow?”

Tony nodded uncertainly.

“But let's say time does indeed march on outside the anomaly. And the second either of you leaves the room—
bam!
—you find yourself back in your own era.”

“But Angelo disappeared when we were both still in the room, right after my dad took the cap off the spiral,” Tony said.

“Makes total sense,” Sarah said. “By removing the connecting object, your dad broke the connection.”

Which was when Tony suddenly remembered why he was actually there: To conjure Angelo back so he could prove his
dad's innocence by ruling out a weird DiMarco family obsession with 13 Hangmen Court as a motive for murder. “You think all I need to do is put the cap back on the spiral?” he said.

“What have you got to lose?” Sarah shrugged.

Tony gulped the rest of his tea. He stood. He told her he would go straight home and give it a try. She told him to stop by again, let her know how it all went. Tony hesitated at the door. “How did you get so smart?” he said.

“I read a lot of books,” she said. “Obviously.”

“I guess curiosity shops don't get so busy,” he said.

“People aren't all that curious,” she said.

Judging by the echo of their voices, the twins and Julia were still moving furniture down in the mother-in-law room. Mikey was complaining how it was too nice a day outside to be sanding floors. Tony tiptoed up the staircase. He didn't want them to know he was back yet. He should still, technically speaking, be on that History Mystery Tour with Michael. He grabbed Ted Williams's cap off the brass knob of the bedpost as soon as he'd closed himself into his room. He took it over to the slate shelf. Before setting it on the spiral, though, he hovered his palm above the concentric rings. He could definitely feel the crackle of static electricity again, which—if Sarah's hypothesis was to be believed—meant Angelo was probably in
his
room,
back in 1939. Tony closed his eyes and listened carefully. Yup, he could hear the faint echo of Angelo's voice:
I must have been having a nightmare.

Steeling his courage, he set the cap on the spiral.

“Oh no, not you again!”

Tony whirled around. Angelo was standing near the dresser, buttoning the jersey of a Red Sox uniform.

“I can't believe you made me crawl under the bed, then left me there!” he said.

“Sorry about that,” Tony said.

“Well, what do you want?” Angelo said.

“I think I know what's going on now.”

“Glad somebody does,” he said.

“What if I told you today's date
isn't
May 6, 1939—at least not for me—” Tony said, “but July 11, 2009?”

“Here we go again,” Angelo said, sighing.

“What if I'm
not
some random thirteen-year-old named Tony. What if I'm actually your future great-nephew, the kid you'll suddenly decide to leave this house to seventy years later?”

Angelo laughed.

“And what if one of your last acts alive when you're totally ancient will be to send me Ted Williams's cap and tell me to
give it the place of honor up in this room—the spiral on this shelf—so that I'll conjure you?”

“What the heck for?” Angelo said.

“To avenge your death?” Tony guessed.

Angelo held his hands over his eyes. He shuttered them open and closed. “Cuckoo!” he said.

“I'm kind of serious,” Tony said. He told Angelo about his chat with goth-chick Sarah at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. He explained about pawcorances and Algonquian vision quests and Minkowski's block universe theory. He described Sarah's hypothesis about how the time anomaly worked.

“Cuckoo!” Angelo said again, bending to tie his shoe. “Listen, whoever you are, I gotta go. I've only got a few minutes to change into my uniform and wolf a sandwich before I head over to Fenway for today's final game against the Tigers.”

“But I'm not lying,” Tony said. “I swear I'm your nephew.”

“There's no way that can be true,” Angelo said. “I'm an only child.”

“Not for long,” Tony said. He told Angelo what Michael had told
him
over pizza: that Angelo's mother, Isabella, would soon marry Antonio DiMarco, her new boarder, and have a baby boy named Guido—Angelo's half brother and Tony's future grandfather. “I'm Tony DiMarco,” he concluded.

The color suddenly drained from Angelo's face. “Antonio DiMarco asked Mama out at breakfast this morning. To the movies, to see
Gone with the Wind.
She said yes. I couldn't believe it. Papa's only been gone a year.”

“Antonio is actually the reason I conjured you back just now,” Tony said. “I was wondering if you had any idea whether he
really
likes your Mama, or if he's just hoping to marry her and adopt you so he can get his hands on this house.”

“I barely know the guy,” Angelo shrugged. “He's fresh-off-the-boat Italian. But I'm liking him less and less by the minute. What makes you think he's after the house?”

Tony saw no choice but to come completely clean. “The police hauled my dad down to the station on suspicion of murdering you. Your lifelong best friend claims he saw Dad forcing you to sign this house over to me an hour or so before you died. He says the DiMarco family has been obsessed with owning Number Thirteen since Antonio was a boarder here.”

“Which lifelong best friend?” Angelo said.

“Benedict Hagmann,” Tony said. “He lives next door at Number Fifteen.”

“Are you kidding?” Angelo said. “I
hate
Benny Hagmann. He's probably my worst enemy in the whole world!”