Hush My Mouth (18 page)

“We do have some rough footage from another site last night,” Quint said, his ponytail swaying with his movements, “but I didn’t have time to edit it.

“Sometimes you just shoot blind and see what turns up. Too dark to see at all clearly what happened out at the railroad track.”

“Railroad?” I asked.

“Mm-hm,” Colin said. “The train light that comes without a train. Quint here may be the only person who’s stood his ground on the track to film it. He’s a plucky guy.”

He clapped his friend’s shoulder. “We’ll just have to study it, see what we have. I’ll be glad to come show you, when we get finished,” he said to Melvin. He clearly didn’t assume I had money to invest in his ghoster pilot.

“What about the crybaby bridge?” I asked. I knew Rudy would rather they didn’t mess around the overlook above Moody Springs.

“Haven’t checked it. Haven’t had time to do any validating research on that yet.”

I glanced at my watch. We’d reached my morning quota for fun. “I’ve got to go. Special invitation from my niece to eat lunch with her today. Can’t miss that. Grammar school cafeteria food. Mmm.” I tried to approximate lip smacking.

Melvin gave me a look that said
traitor
as I excused myself.

Lunch with Emma’s computer camp was an unprecedented honor. It turned out they’d invited parents today, especially those who used computers in their jobs. I was Emma’s parental stand-in. Fortunately I didn’t have to talk about my career, just show up and eat corn dogs and yellow cling peaches.

Emma looked up from her computer and gave me a gaptoothed grin when I appeared in the doorway.

“Class,” the teacher announced. “It’s time for lunch. Let’s line up.”

To me, she said in an equally slow, stern tone, “We were to meet the parents in the cafeteria.”

Emma shot me a commiserating smile, not too embarrassed to claim her errant “parent.”

“Hey, kid,” I said when she joined me in the hall. “I’m sorry about last night.”

She looked puzzled a minute, then nodded. “That’s okay.”

“It was work. I completely forgot.”

“They don’t even keep score, you know.” She looked no more concerned about my lapse than she was about me being scolded by her uptight computer teacher.

In the cafeteria, we picked up our box lunches and sat at the long, munchkin-short tables. Emma sat beside me silently studying the other kids like a red-haired Jane-Goodall-in-training. Did she sit and stare every day? Or was she looking at her life through my eyes? Knowing Emma, age seven going on seventy, she spent every day studying them because it made no sense to try to interact with this life-form.

The noise level in the cafeteria drowned out any attempt at conversation, so I joined Emma in staring at her campmates as they spewed food and chattered incessantly at me and Joel’s dad, an insurance salesman who made sure I had his card. I didn’t reciprocate.

Emma could never be bothered with learning names, but I quickly realized she had an alarmingly accurate talent for description. Truth be told, they were a strange bunch. One little black kid—the most normal kid I saw—had his hair twisted in little balls all over his head, which explained the nickname Knothead. Emma had told me about a girl who looked like Frankenstein, which I thought was a mean thing to say. Not so. As soon as I spotted the little girl with straight black hair, flat face, and deep-set dark eyes in skin so pale it had the luster of a frog’s belly, I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from laughing.

Joel proved to be fascinated by me—just as he obviously was with Emma. But equally obvious, he was afraid to talk to her, so I became the bull’s-eye target for much of his lunch and all of his bad jokes. His dad egged him on by laughing, a peculiar hyena snort. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and felt a sudden, intense kinship with Emma. Not wanting to inadvertently encourage Joel or his dad, I too mostly sat and stared, and periodically scooted my squat little chair away from the line of fire. Didn’t anyone teach these kids to chew with their mouths closed?

Had my grammar school class been like this? I didn’t remember it like this at all. I remembered Rudy and L.J. and my best friend who’d moved away the next year. I hadn’t met Cissie Prentice until third grade; she’d been a boy-crazy flirt even then. I remembered myself as exactly the same person I was today. I wasn’t aware that anything inside had changed. I looked down at Emma with an odd sense of déjà vu.

That had been the same year L.J. took to smashing me up against the brick bathroom wall for fun and sport. I guess Aunt Letha’s right: People don’t change, they only get more so. That didn’t bode well for Joel, Frankenstein, or even Knothead.

I pulled out of the teachers’ lot at school with a better appreciation for how underpaid teachers are, and with some amazement that Emma loved school enough to spend part of her summer in computer camp.

I parked outside the Law Enforcement Center’s employee entrance and rummaged around in the back floorboard for my hiking boots. From the usually quiet street that bordered the parking lot, I heard a familiar buzzing sound. Donlee Griggs on his scooter. His six feet seven inches topped with a ludicrous round, glowing orange helmet lent a circus-clown air to his balancing act on the tiny scooter.

Where was his girlfriend? Without her matching pumpkin head smashed into the small of his back, he looked . . . alone.

With my car door open, I sat sideways in the seat and finished tucking my pants legs into my boots and tying the laces as Rudy, dressed today as a civilian, ambled down the exterior steps to join me in the parking lot.

“That’s quite a fashion statement,” he said. “Something you learned while you were off in Greenville?”

I made a face and swung my legs back in the car.

“You ever been to Pun’s junkyard?” I said. “You’re going to wish you weren’t wearing those spit-shines you got on.”

“You’re telling me you know all about junkyards?” Rudy climbed in the passenger seat, reluctantly consenting to ride with me only because neither of us wanted to make this appear an official visit.

“Restore and maintain a classic car, you learn a lot of things. I’ve spent enough time out there that he agreed to let us come play in one of his cars.”

I’d tagged along with my dad over the years when he went out looking for parts. Pun knew more about what had gone into refurbishing the Mustang we were riding in than anyone other than my dad.

Pun’s junkyard sat on the edge of town, mostly hidden by a twenty-foot-high barrier of red tips and the natural swell and fall of the land. As I drove through the rusty chain-link gate, we could see the fields spread out before us as if they’d been planted to produce a bumper crop of rust and shiny chrome and rainbow colors.

I got out to greet Pun, who stood in the door of the battered lean-to that served as his office.

“I hauled it ‘round yonder.” He pointed down the dirt-and-grass track, then crooked his thumb to the left. “In front of a dirt bank. So stray shot won’t fly around.”

“Thanks.”

“What’cha doin’ with that one with you?”

He pointed a greasy knuckle toward my windshield and Rudy.

“Protection,” I said.

He snorted. “Never heard tell’a somebody wanting to shoot out win-der glass for the heck of it. So whatever you want to call it. Keep him away from my cars.” Again with the knuckle.

He turned without waiting for a response.

I folded myself back into the car, popped the clutch, and drove away before glancing at Rudy.

“So why didn’t you tell me you and Pun have bad blood? What’s that all about?”

Rudy’s turn to snort. “We’ve had to come execute administrative warrants a few times—somebody junking a new car to collect insurance or stripping a stolen car.”

“Pun chops stolen cars? No way you’re telling me that.”

“No. But all junkyards end up with stuff—just like pawnshops do. We gotta check it out. Pun, he’s got to take it personally.”

“If I’d known hanging out with you was going to disgrace me with my only connection for keeping this forty-year-old car running, I wouldn’t have invited you to my party.”

“That could’ve been a blessing. This isn’t my idea of the ideal party spot.”

We were winding our way along a weedy aisle of debauched car carcasses, headed toward a hillside that had been bulldozed flat on one side to make room to stack cars.

“So when are you letting me in on what you’ve got planned?”

I stopped beside a gray Honda, the hood and engine missing, the upholstery torn.

“We’re going to put a bullet in a head and see which way the glass shatters.”

Thursday Afternoon

The Civic coupe Pun had towed into position for me had met its demise when someone rammed its front end into an accordion shape. Just as I’d asked, he’d situated it with the driver’s window parallel to the red dirt bank.

Despite the front-end damage, the passenger compartment was intact, the right-side door worked, and the window glass was undamaged.

From the Mustang’s trunk, I drew out a plastic shopping bag and Exhibit One for our demonstration.

“What the hell?” Rudy stood, his hands on his hips, his mouth open, staring at the white foam head I’d stuck on a thirty-inch dowel nailed to crossed slats.

“Thought it would help us position the shot, if we had a
head. Other than mine.” I had a sore spot behind my right ear where the gun muzzle had hit me yesterday.

The head, intended as a wig model, could slide a few inches up and down on the dowel so we could get it into the right position. I was proud of my handiwork, despite Rudy’s derision.

I crawled into the passenger seat, wedged the ends of the crossed slats under the back of the driver’s seat cushion, and pushed the head down an inch or two, trying to approximate Neanna’s height by measuring it against my own.

I leaned back. “How does that look?”

“Like somebody’s got too much free time on her hands.”

I rolled my eyes. “About where her head would’ve been?”

He bent over with that awkward stiffness common in former high school football players gone to seed, his hands on his thighs. “Yep. ‘Bout there. So?”

“The gun.” I held out my hand for the gun Rudy was supposed to bring from the evidence room.

He held a fake suede gun case, but he wasn’t unzipping it.

“You plan to shoot the head.”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“To see what happens. To the driver’s window.”

Rudy was being purposely obtuse.

“Perfectly safe,” I said. “See? The dirt bank will stop the bullet.”

“Okay. But what are you going to do about the flying glass?”

From my plastic bag, I pulled two pairs of safety glasses I’d borrowed from Dad’s workshop.

He still just stood staring down at me. Finally, he cocked his head. “Get out. I’ll do it.”

My turn to stare. I gave in. What did it hurt to play along with Mr. Macho?

I climbed out, flipped the front seat forward, and slipped into the backseat.

He shook his head. That wasn’t what he had in mind, but he too decided to give in.

The Honda wasn’t as low-slung as my Mustang, but the passenger seat wasn’t as far from the dash or the roof, so it was a snug fit for Rudy.

“Miz Smarty, what about ear protection? This’ll be—”

I reached over the seat, presenting two bright yellow foam earplugs pinched between my fingers.

“Cheesh.” He took them, though, kneaded them into thin cylinders, and stuck them in his ears.

“You’d better close your door,” I said.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to turn a baleful gaze at me, but gave it up in favor of flipping down the visor and eyeballing me in the mirror.

“We want the conditions as close as possible, don’t we?”

Rudy slammed the door. He looked like a bear stuck in a refrigerator.

He grunted as he twisted in his seat and tried to place the gun muzzle behind the ridge indicating the mannequin’s right ear. He studied it a minute, then grasped the barrel and handed me the gun.

“You’d better do it. To get the right angle.”

I took the gun grip. “Like this?” I braced my arm along Rudy’s headrest and tried to mimic the impossible angle I’d tried yesterday on my own head.

“Yeah. Let her go.”

I gently squeezed the trigger, concentrating on not letting the muzzle shift.

The shot deafened me, even with the earplugs. I’d involuntarily closed my eyes.

The eerie white head leaned over in the seat, with only a small hole surrounded by a gray-black spatter of gunshot residue.

The window glass in the driver’s door also had a hole and was crazed into frosted glass, but it was still intact.

I looked at Rudy in his visor mirror. We both looked back at the window.

“So. What does that prove?” Rudy asked, his voice tinted with frustration.

“That cookies don’t always crumble the same way twice.” Disappointment and the metallic smell of burnt gunpowder left a sharp taste in my mouth.

I toyed with the idea of getting Pun to haul out another Honda, but I squelched that thought. I’d already pushed the bounds of propriety and goodwill.

“It was worth a try,” I said with a shrug in my voice.