Croak (6 page)

Lex didn’t know how to handle this. At school, not even the gym classes were coed, let alone the bathrooms. “I am no one’s ‘roomie,’” she replied nervously.

The boy took a step toward her. Lex jumped back, her contentious instincts kicking in. “Stop right there,” she warned. “I punch, I kick, and I feel compelled to warn you, I can bite harder than the average Amazonian crocodile.”

He smirked and leaned against the doorframe. “And I feel compelled to warn
you
that the bathroom we now share has a leaky ceiling,” he said, pointing up. “There’s an umbrella under the sink, if you’re going be in here for a while.”

“I mean it,” she continued, her voice rising. “I will kick your ass!”

“And the shower faucet sticks a little, sometimes you have to jiggle it.”

“Hey! Can’t you hear me?”

“I think the whole town can hear you.”

Lex sputtered. She was so confused. This was a girl who had once reduced the entire varsity hockey team to a chorus of high-pitched, hiccuppy sobs. She could understand Mort not being intimidated by her, since he was an adult, but this kid was just . . . well, a kid. His unflappability disarmed her, as did his stupid captivating eyes.

“Who are you?” she asked, still yelling.

“I’m Driggs.” He grinned and stuck out his hand. “It’s an absolute—”

“That’s a dumb name.”

“—displeasure to meet you.” He withdrew his hand, stepped past her into the hallway, then gestured back at the bathroom. “All yours.”

Lex watched him walk down the hallway and into the room with a The Who poster. “Wait,” she said, following him. “I mean, who
are
you? Why are you in my bathroom? What are you—”

The door slammed in her face.

A loud crash of drumming belted forth from within.

Lex pounded on Pete Townshend’s face for a few moments until finally, realizing that the kid was infuriatingly incorporating her knocking into the rhythm, she was forced to admit defeat. She slumped back to the bathroom, concluded her business there, and upon exiting into the hallway heard a rustle of newspaper from the kitchen.

“Time to go, Lex!” yelled Uncle Mort.

She found him sitting at the table. “Who’s the prick with the drums?” she asked.

“Driggs,” Uncle Mort said evasively, skimming a newspaper titled
The Obituary.

“Yeah, I got that part. Who is he?”

“My pool boy.”

Lex shut her mouth and spent the next few seconds fighting a strong urge to flip over the kitchen table in frustration. Uncle Mort looked at the clock on the wall. “Half the day’s over. You sleep okay?”

“Spare me the pleasantries. What’s the plan?”

“You’ll see.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Shortly.”

“Enough!” Feral in the way that only cranky, overtired youth can be, Lex pounded her fists on the table. “Enough of all this squirrelly, evasive bullshit. You’re not a farmer. You’re not an importer-exporter. And you sure as hell aren’t the almighty Angel of Death. So you better tell me why I’m really here, or I’m leaving. I mean it.”

Her uncle leaned back in his chair and scrutinized her. “Why
are
you here, Lex? I know, your parents made you come, but we both know you could have wriggled out of it if you really wanted to. Why give up a summer at home, free to go to the beach, explore the city”—he raised an eyebrow—“hang out with friends?”

A little bit of the fight went out of her. Lex’s eyes dropped to the linoleum. “I don’t have any friends.”

She was not proud of this. As much as she had tried to convince herself otherwise over the past couple of years, the empty hole in her life where her friends used to be felt like a tender bruise. They had abandoned her with good cause, of course, but it still hurt. And it had only gotten worse with time.

Uncle Mort leaned in. “Lex, the reason the things I told you last night are bothering you so much is because there is a very small, very ecstatic, very curious part of your brain that thinks there’s a chance this might all be true, that this is the moment your life is finally about to kick in. But the only way I can make that happen for you is if you agree to drop the theatrics from now on, try to keep the sarcasm to a minimum, and start acting like an adult about all this.”

The very small, very ecstatic, very curious part of Lex’s brain began bouncing around her head like a pinball. She studied him. All she had to do was behave?

“You’ll tell me today?” she asked.

“As much as we can squeeze in, yes.”

“And you promise full disclosure?”

“I promise,” he said, extending his hand.

She hesitated for a moment, then shook it. “Deal.”

“Ah, bribery.” He grinned at his niece. “Is there anything it can’t do?”

She fidgeted irritably. “So now what?”

“Breakfast first. We need to turn you into more of a sentient life form. Here.” He handed her a box of Life cereal. “It’s ironically delicious.”

Lex sat down, poured herself a bowl, and inhaled its contents in about thirty seconds. After gulping down the milk, she smeared a napkin around her face and stared at him expectantly. “Now what?”

“Patience, kiddo,” he said, not looking up from the newspaper, “or you’ll pass out before we even get there.”

“Get where?”

“The Bank.”

“The Bank? What’s at the goddamned Bank?”

“Lexington, we need to talk about this swearing habit of yours. Personally, I don’t give a shit. But it’s forbidden for the rest of the summer—that’s a direct order from your mother.”

Lex grunted. For all she knew, Uncle Mort had been forced to set up an intricate series of hidden microphones to relay every word directly to her mother, who would be waiting at home with a hefty swear bill upon her daughter’s return. “Fine,” she grumbled, impatiently tapping her spoon on the table.

“And another thing.” Uncle Mort grabbed the spoon from her hand and flung it into the sink. “This isn’t a vacation. It’s a full-time job with ten-hour days. From now on, you’ll be getting up at dawn.” He walked to the door and opened it. “Let’s go. You’re here to work, not sleep.”

Lex gave him a bitter look as she got up from the table. “Ten hours?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, holding the door open for her. “Time flies when you’re breaching the space-time continuum.”

***

Uncle Mort said nothing more as they hurried down the road from the house, a bundle of black fabric tucked under his arm. After five minutes they came upon the large field on the left, behind the Bank.

Lex stopped in her tracks. A handful of people stood in the field, spread out across the grass in groups of two. Lex tried to watch what they were doing, but Uncle Mort pulled her away. “Not yet.”

She stewed beside him as they reached Dead End, practically running in order to keep up with his long strides. His marked silence was ripping her insides to shreds. It was almost enough to make her grab the collar of one of the iced-coffee-sipping people bustling around the street and beg to be told what was going on, or why they seemed to be gawking at her in fascination, or, at the very least, where they had gotten their coffee.

They were just about to climb the steps to the Bank when a hefty, sunburned man clutching a wrinkled map tapped Uncle Mort on the elbow.

“’Scuse me,” he said in a friendly voice. “Can you tell me where the Happy Spruce Inn is?”

“Back the way you came,” Uncle Mort said. “Go for about twenty miles, then . . . I don’t know, hang a left or something. Can’t miss it. And you might want to hurry up, we’ve got a tornado warning on the radar.”

The man glanced at the clearly unconcerned pedestrians, then up at the cloudless sky. “Uh, okay. Thanks, buddy.”

Lex started to walk away, but Uncle Mort remained where he was and cleared his throat. The man screwed up his face. Then, in a flash of understanding, he dug into his wallet and handed Uncle Mort a crisp five-dollar bill.

“Enjoy your stay in the Adirondacks!” Uncle Mort said, shooting him a theatrical grin.

It melted off his face the moment he and Lex reached the Bank’s door. “I hate summer,” he told her. “Three simple rules for getting rid of tourists, Lex: lie, deny, and bleed ’em dry.”

A tiny knot of bells announced their entrance into the lobby, which looked less like a bank and more like someone’s fancy living room. Small and homey, it featured two fluffy couches, a mahogany coffee table, cheerful red curtains, and an information counter boasting an array of brochures for local attractions and hotels. An elegant Oriental rug ran the length of the room to the hallway beyond, and the air was noticeably permeated with clashing scents of potpourri, owing to the multitude of bowls dispersed throughout.

Lex crinkled her nose. “It smells like a candle store in here.”

“I know, it’s disgusting,” Uncle Mort said, poking at a pile of dried rose petals. “But it’s best not to fight her.”

“Who?”

“Good morning, Mort!” A plump middle-aged woman with tomato-red hair popped up from behind the counter, a blinding smile plastered across her face. She wore a peacock-blue business suit and a necklace of shiny pearls. A massive flower corsage took up half her chest. “And who do we have here?”

“This is my niece, Lex,” Uncle Mort said proudly. “Our newest rookie.”

“How marvelous!” The woman clamped Lex’s hand like a vise and shook it vigorously. “I’m so pleased to meet you! My name is Kilda!”

Lex looked to her uncle for help, but he had slipped off into the nearby hallway. She watched as he opened a door and began speaking to a man in a suit—a man who was staring directly at her.

Though fairly certain she hadn’t done anything to offend him, Lex could feel his foxlike yellow eyes boring into her own with a distinct animosity. Tall and gaunt, with permanent scowl lines etched into his colorless face, he exuded the air of someone who hated this earth and everything on it and would be much happier if it just broke free of its orbit and hurled itself into the sun.

Lex cringed.

Meanwhile, Kilda was still squawking out a welcome, and though Lex tried to ignore her, it soon became very difficult to do so. She had never met anyone whose every sentence ended in an exclamation point.

“I’m Croak’s director of tourism! And its public relations specialist! And to top it all off, its postmaster, if you can believe it!”

Lex thought the hysteria might never end, but at long last her uncle interceded to pry their hands apart. “No time to chat, Kilda,” he said. “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us. And you’ve got a lost Texan out there about to start asking for souvenirs.”

“Well, that won’t do!” Kilda hurried outside, her lipstick-smeared teeth flashing. “Off I go!”

Lex grabbed at her uncle’s sleeve. “What did I do to deserve that?”

“She’s a lot to handle, I know. But Kilda’s a genius in her field. You should hear the bullshit she can sell to all the lost backpackers we get here.”

“Who’s that man you were talking to?”

“Oh, that’s Norwood. He was checking you in for your first shift. I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”

She made a face. “No rush.”

“I mean, you were scheduled to have a brief orientation with him today, but you know, you needed your beauty sleep, so we don’t have time. Are you aware, Lex, that sloth is a deadly sin?”

She made a face at him, then glanced back at the hallway. She thought she could make out a bustle of activity behind the array of frosted glass tiles that lined its right-hand wall, but Uncle Mort ushered her out the front door too quickly for her to get a closer look.

“Wait, we’re done here?”

“Well, I was going to show you around upstairs as well, but—”

“No time. Sloth. I get it.”

“Deadly sin.”

***

People often think that trees are boring. These people have obviously never feasted their eyes upon the eerily fascinating Australian Ghost Gum tree, or
Corymbia aparrerinja,
under which Lex now stood. Uncle Mort had led her to the middle of the field behind the Bank and instructed her to stay still while he spoke into his Cuff. The people she had seen earlier were gone.

Lex, correctly of the opinion that trees are awesome, ran her fingers over the dead Ghost Gum’s trunk. Instead of a dark, rough bark, the surface was chalky and smooth. Its pure white color blazed in the radiant sunlight, while its crooked, gnarled branches stretched widely across the sky. No leaves adorned the limbs, but a single large nest sat perched atop the highest bough, as if it had been dropped there by a disoriented seagull.

“This is the Field,” Uncle Mort said. “The runway and landing strip, if you will.”

“Huh?” Lex asked futilely, knowing full well he wouldn’t clarify.

He didn’t.

Lex wondered what Cordy would have to say about all of this—the bizarre town, the confirmation of their estranged uncle’s lunacy, the fact that it was almost noon and she still hadn’t consumed a drop of caffeine. She started to make a mental list of things to tell her, in the unlikely event an Internet connection existed somewhere in the Land That Cable Forgot.

She poked her uncle’s shoulder. “Can I have some coffee?”

“You’re only sixteen, Lex. Try getting high on life.”

To keep from strangling him, she turned her thoughts to the weather. A series of fluffy, trout-shaped clouds dotted the sky. She didn’t feel the least bit hot in her black sweatshirt, despite the scorching sun. No breeze either—though she could have sworn she saw a nearby shrub rustling of its own volition.

“Okay, we’re all set,” Uncle Mort said, hanging up and looking at something behind Lex. “Ah, at least someone’s on time today.”

Lex turned around and gulped. Walking toward them was a girl, maybe a couple of years older than Lex, wearing a tight long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. She too carried a bundle of black fabric. Slender, tall, and toned, her limbs undulated as if only marginally attached to her body. Though her pale face was angular and serious, her eyes were light and thoughtful. Yet Lex was entranced more than anything by her hair, which was long and thick, with a slight wave to it, and absolutely, unmistakably silver.

Not gray, not white, but silver—as if it had been melted down from jewelry and stretched out into a waterfall of gorgeous, silky strands. Lex tried to tear her gaze away, but couldn’t. What was it with this place and crazy hair?