Edgewood Series: Books 1 - 3 (3 page)

Some of the girls fussed and made idiotic comments. A few pulled out their phones even though it was against school rules. I’m not sure if they were posting to Facebook or texting or what, but it seemed pretty insensitive to me. When Mrs. Schroeder and Mr. Specter helped Mallory to her feet, everyone clapped like they would for an injured player getting up at a sports event. She looked unsteady, and the adults decided she should get checked out by a doctor. “I think I just got lightheaded,” Mallory protested. “I didn’t eat breakfast this morning and my blood sugar is low. I’m probably fine.”

I didn’t think she could be fine, not the way her head smacked against the floor like a dropped cantaloupe.

“It’s best to get it checked out,” Mrs. Schroeder said in a soothing way, easing Mallory toward the door. Emily gathered up Mallory’s things and followed along like the suck-up she was. They were barely out the door when the bell rang and class was over.

That night, out of habit more than compulsion, I left the house around midnight and did my usual route, thinking about Mr. Specter’s class as I walked. So weird that he’d brought up the astronomical event I’d seen the night before. How was it that he knew about it but it wasn’t mentioned on the news or anywhere online? I wasn’t about to say what I knew in class, even with his bribe. Extra credit, big deal. Like that would make me confess to being out in the middle of the night. And there was something odd about the way he asked, too. He wanted the information a little too badly. Suspicious.

I was still thinking about this during my nighttime walk when I got to Old Edgewood. One of my first stops was a house where a really old lady lived. She had to be ancient, eighty-five or so. The drapes were always open, so I could see her clearly through the window. She slept sitting up in a recliner, but sometimes she shuffled around using a walker. Mostly she watched television, but she never looked interested in what was on. No one was ever with her: no nurse, no family members. She seemed pretty frail to be alone. I looked up her address online and got a name. Nelly Smith, that was her. Even though it was the middle of the night, I never saw her in a bathrobe. It must have been cold in her house because she always wore sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt (usually decorated with birds or ladybugs).

None of my grandparents were living, so I started to think of Mrs. Smith as Grandma Nelly. I thought about going back to her house in the daytime and offering to run errands for her, or maybe getting her groceries. But in the morning I felt differently. I didn’t really know her, after all. Maybe she was mean or crazy. I mean, why didn’t she have family or friends looking after her? If she was a lovable old lady they’d be there, right?

That Wednesday I rested next to a tree in Mrs. Smith’s front yard, like I always did, pressing my back against the rough bark. I heard a truck rumbling in the distance. The front porch light was on, but inside the only source of illumination was a floor lamp in the front room. She wasn’t in her chair, but that wasn’t unusual. Nelly Smith was elderly, but she wasn’t dead yet. Maybe she went to the bathroom or to the kitchen for a snack. I waited for what seemed like a long time, but there was no movement in the house. Odder still was the fact that her walker stood next to her chair. I’d never seen her without it, not in all my weeks of visiting her yard.

I almost wrote it off—almost left to go to my next stop, but something made me stay and creep closer to the house until I was on the front porch looking directly into the front window. I had a view of the whole living room—the television still on, the recliner upright, and Nelly Smith lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.

I don’t know how long I stood on Nelly Smith’s porch peering through her window. Thirty seconds, ten minutes, forever? My breath caught in my chest and I felt my heart accelerate: buh-bum, buh-bum, buh-bum. She wasn’t moving and I couldn’t tell if she was breathing, but that didn’t mean she was dead. Still she was old and obviously not in great shape, so the dead thing was a real possibility. I shifted my weight and looked around the neighborhood, unsure what to do. Flag down a passing car? Knock on a neighbor’s door? And then what? Doing any of these things would lead to questions about who I was and why I was far from home on a stranger’s porch in the middle of the night. Even to me it sounded suspicious.

I lifted my hand to press the doorbell and then let it drop to my side when I realized how stupid that was. Like I’d ring the doorbell and Nelly Smith, who was either dead or stroked out, would rise up when she heard it, come to the door, and assure me that she was fine, really, just resting on the floor. What was I thinking?

I pulled my cell phone out of my hoodie pocket. Damn. My battery was dead. I was looking down at it when I noticed the doormat beneath my feet. It was one of those brown bristly types that usually say “WELCOME.” This one, however, said “GO AWAY.” The old woman had a sense of humor, anyway. Under different circumstances I would have laughed.

On impulse I stepped aside, leaned over, and lifted the mat. Aha—a key. Didn’t Ms. Smith know that putting a key under the mat was like inviting criminals into your home? Luckily, Old Edgewood wasn’t known for break-ins.

I picked up the key, opened the screen door, and unlocked the front door like I lived there. I tucked the key back under the mat before opening the door. “Mrs. Smith?” I called out before stepping over the threshold. Man, was I in trouble if she thought I was breaking in. Not likely since there was no response. Cautiously I went in, crossing the room to Mrs. Smith’s body. She was curled up on her side, a cordless phone on the floor next to her head. I knelt down and put my fingertips against her neck, not knowing what the hell I was doing, but recalling something I saw in a movie in seventh grade. Her skin was cold to the touch.
Please God,
don’t let her be dead. I have a big test tomorrow and I’m so tired. I really don’t need this right now.

I moved my hand closer to her throat but couldn’t find a pulse. Oh man, this was terrible. “Mrs. Smith,” I said, “I’m Russ Becker. Just hang on. I’m going to call for help, okay?” No answer, but saying the words made me feel better, like someone was in charge. I picked up her phone, stood, and dialed 911. I heard my own voice say, “I need someone to come right away.”

“Russ, you look terrible,” my friend Justin said, when he’d caught up to me at my locker the next day at school. “Smoking all that crack is catching up to you.”

“Get it right. I don’t smoke crack anymore,” I said, playing along. “It’s meth all the way now, and I’m not stopping until my teeth rot in my head.” I bent down to unload my backpack.

“Whatever you’re doing, it can’t be good. You look half dead.” His voice took on a more serious tone. “You’re not still roaming around at night, are you?”

“Just now and then,” I said, “when I have trouble sleeping.”

Justin was the only one I’d told about my late-night walks. He’d been worried when I told him, saying I really should go back to Dr. Anton and beg for sleeping pills. “Dude, that’s his job to push the pharmaceuticals. Tell him you need it.” He wouldn’t shut up about it and kept bringing it up until I finally told him I had it under control.

“Did you have trouble last night?”

“Nope, last night I slept like a baby,” I said, slamming my locker shut. In fact, I hadn’t slept at all. After running all the way home, I’d lain awake in bed as jittery as if I’d downed a four-pack of Red Bull.

I kept replaying the whole thing in my mind, the way I picked the phone off the floor and called for help. I was standing next to Mrs. Smith’s body, talking to the operator when I felt a tug on the bottom of my jeans. I jumped a little—anyone would have—and told the 911 lady, “She’s coming around. She just moved.”

“Good,” she said calmly. “Just stay with her and keep talking to me. Help is on the way.”

I squatted down next to her, the phone still up against my ear. I patted her arm. “It’s going to be okay. They’re sending an ambulance. It’ll be here soon.”

She gave me a wide-eyed stare. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she said, her voice raspy. “I didn’t want to come back.” Confused, clearly.

I stayed by her side until I heard the ambulance pull up in the driveway, and then I set the phone on the floor and went out the door to meet them. Something about the way the two men exited the vehicle, one carrying what looked like a large toolbox, spooked me. Going through my head were the words,
You’re not supposed to be here
.

My flight instinct kicked in then, and without thinking, I took off, running past them into the darkness. One of them yelled, “Hey!” as I went by. I never looked back.

I only slowed when my own house was in sight. Quietly, I eased my way through the back door and up the stairs, careful to skip the creaky step. My house was a bungalow, one bedroom down, two up. My parents’ room was on the first level, which gave me the upstairs, complete with bathroom, all to myself. My friends thought it was cool that I had my own space. I didn’t think too much about it, except when I was coming and going and wondered if they could hear me on the stairs.

In a way, getting up that morning was easy. I was already awake when my alarm went off. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus, but otherwise I was okay. I stumbled into the shower and felt a little better. Standing under a spray of warm water is a quick but short-term fix to most of life’s problems.

I decided that if I got through school without walking into any walls or dozing off, the day would be a success. Besides Justin’s inference that I resembled something you’d normally find in a septic tank, no one else noticed I was a wreck.

I was at my locker after lunch when Mallory came up next to me. “Russ Becker?” she said, sternly.

I closed my locker and slung my backpack over one shoulder. “Mallory, are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You clunked your head pretty hard when you had that seizure in Specter’s class.”

She waved away my concerns. “Oh that. Just a diversion. I was faking it.”

“Really? Why would you do that?”

“Why I did it isn’t important right now.” She leaned close to me in a seductive way, but her words were more accusatory than sexy. “Here’s the thing. I saw you last night.”

“Last night?”

“In the middle of the night. I live right next door to that old lady’s house and I saw you running away when the ambulance got there. What happened?”

My stomach lurched. What kind of eyesight did she have? It was dark and I was running very, very fast. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I know what I saw. I saw you.” She tilted her head to one side, waiting.

“You must have me confused with someone else.”

“So you’re saying it wasn’t you?”

“Nope, not me,” I said, trying to be nonchalant.

“I was eight feet away. I know it was you.”

“I have to get going or I’ll be late for class. See you later.” I stepped around her and staggered a little, the lack of sleep kicking my butt at last.

“We’re not done, Russell Becker,” Mallory called after me. “Don’t think I’m going to just let this go.”

I completely crashed when I got home from school. I left a note for my mom to find when she got home from work.
Mom,
Taking a nap. Wake me in time for dinner. Russ
.

If life were fair, I’d have been able to stay awake until ten o’clock and get a good night’s sleep like a normal person. But I was too tired. Life was so not fair.

Mom woke me by calling my cell. She never walked up the stairs if she could help it. Five minutes later, I sat at the table with my mom and dad, chewing on garlic toast and listening to them discuss their respective days. Nothing good ever seemed to happen at their jobs, at least nothing they ever mentioned.

At six o’clock, my mom turned on the small TV she kept on the kitchen counter. We always watched the news during dinner, a tradition that would have horrified my health teacher had she known. Apparently watching TV during meals is the primary cause of the breakdown of the American family. Not to mention that a person statistically consumes more calories watching a screen than conversing. All of America was going to become obese and disconnected from its loved ones, and it would be the fault of technology. According to Ms. Hadley, anyway.

We sat quietly through the newscast teasers: the promise of unseasonably warm weather, upcoming predictions for the local ball team, a man gets a life-saving kidney donation from a brother he’d never met, a local woman gets a most unusual visit. Blah, blah, blah. It’s always something.

I was only half-listening, my mouth full of spaghetti, when they got to the local woman story at the end of the forecast. The female half of the anchor team, Madeline Park, covered the story. “Yesterday, Nelly Smith of Poplar Drive in Old Edgewood had an unusual late-night experience.”

I sat up straight. The food in my mouth suddenly congealed and felt like wet cement.

Madeline Park kept talking even as I was having trouble breathing. “Mrs. Smith, who is eighty-six years old and lives alone, experienced a heart attack at approximately one a.m. this morning. Paramedics were dispatched to the home after receiving a 911 call from the residence. The call was placed by an unidentified man, who was not on the scene when they arrived. At the hospital, Mrs. Smith told our reporter that despite her door being locked, an unknown man entered her home and brought her back from the dead. Police say there was no sign of a break-in.”

Mom sprinkled Parmesan cheese on her noodles. Thankfully, neither she nor Dad were looking in my direction. I was sure my face would have given me away.

The news broke away to a shot of the Smith home. Across the bottom of the screen it said:
Local woman believes she died and was revived by a stranger in her home.
Then the shot switched to a reporter, Patrick Doolan, who stood in front of the house and repeated most of what Madeline Park had already said.