Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (26 page)

Jack’s cheeks grew warm at that, and he’d managed to parry the conversation away from himself until Max arrived. He’d never met the tall Swede, but Jack was instantly struck by the man’s resemblance to his granddaughter, especially their unusual green eyes. The four of them ended up eating together, and it was strange for Jack how comfortable he felt around them all. He actually managed to hold up his end of the conversation, answering questions about swimming scholarships and what did he think of the upcoming high school wrestling team. Strange how well he fit in, considering he’d never met either man before and every time he stole a glance at Mercedes—

—his mental train completely derailed.

Her love for her grandfather was obvious. Sitting across from her, Jack could feel it, almost warm against his skin. He was admittedly a little envious of the total attention she gave Max whenever the older man spoke, but it was understandable. She almost seemed to be the kind of person who was more at home with adults than people her own age. And both Max and Mr. Lyons returned her attention, listening actively whenever she spoke. With their eyes and rapt expressions, they showed Mercedes that center stage was hers, and she glowed for it.

Here was a lesson worth remembering. He’d only known her a day–less, really--but Jack was certain he was seeing another, more relaxed Mercedes. Last night, earlier at the side of the pool, and especially yesterday afternoon, she’d kept her distance, almost imperceptibly, from everyone around. There was a certain abruptness, if not outright coldness to her, even when she was smiling that glorious smile. She had a still, sad thing like a stone held tightly inside somewhere that she only released in the honesty of the older men’s attention.

It was at that moment Jack knew that he’d never have noticed the sadness without the contrast he’d stumbled upon, like a photographic negative, in Mercedes’ admiration for her grandfather. He was surprised at his insight, and suddenly more grateful than ever to the old gentleman.

There’s a lot more to Mercedes than meets the eye, he had thought, looking back and forth between the girl and her chuckling, big-jawed Grandpa Max.

*

10PM

A whole lot more than even she realizes, he thought again under the watery yellow light, rummaging through his duffel bag for his pool keys. Nothing. Jack shook the bag, tumbling the books inside against one another hollowly. No jingling clatter of keys.

Jack bit off an expletive, then shrugged. Not like this hadn’t happened before. He took a quick look around. The moon was already setting, and the park below was empty of life. A car glided by on the street bordering the park, its headlights washing the trees with dusty light, and then the night was his alone.

This portion of the pool building was built against the slope of the hill; by virtue of that steep slope, the entrance and wooden deck stood a good 12 feet above the grass at the base of the building. Jack lowered his bag to the deck, then stepped up onto the top rail, arms hesitantly out for balance. If he did this quick, he wouldn’t have a chance to think about how far up he was.

Jack turned and grabbed the lip of the roof, reaching for a firm hold before swinging himself up and over the eaves. The roof was flat and sloped slightly back towards the pool; if it had been peaked, Jack doubted he’d ever have discovered this secret entrance. Serves Gessner right for making him clean the skylight every spring.

He loved this. Creeping along the roof, which had finally cooled down and now only served to absorb his footfalls, Jack felt like a thief, or better yet, a spy. Near the skylight, tethered to an exhaust vent, lay a loose coil of rope, thickly knotted at regular intervals. Jack wondered as he gathered up the cord if spies or secret agents had the time to plan for such contingencies as misplacing their keys.

He reached the mullioned skylight and swung it up on its anodized aluminum hinge, then dropped the rope into the dark, empty space below him.

Jack held tightly to the line as he lowered himself through the vent, breathing only when he felt solid flooring beneath him. He sighed and sat heavily into one of the wide, overstuffed couches. Jack smiled against the darkness. If not for a slight problem with heights, there was still time for him to run away with the circus when it next came to town.

He coiled the rope again, then tossed it up through the skylight. Later, probably tomorrow morning while Gessner was still fixated on his daily two-hour coffee break, Jack would close the overhead window by tapping gently on its hinge with a telescoping dust broom.

Kate and the other two college girls who worked at the pool loved to see him lurching around with the dust broom, anyway. They got a special, practically vindictive pleasure out of watching the
boys
do the housecleaning. Jack didn’t care; the girls kept the lounge looking good, toning down the stale, black-and-yellowing-white posters of lifesaving techniques by adding half-a-dozen potted plants with thin, frothy leaves to which Jack had never bothered to learn the names.

He retrieved his bag from the deck and flipped on the reading lights he’d installed in the lounge. A trip to the fridge the city had donated, and Jack had a carelessly thrown-together pastrami sandwich from his brown paper bag of supplies. He briefly considered turning on the radio, but he had studying to do and had never felt comfortable trying to learn while music was playing. Something about introducing new knowledge to his brain cells along with the weekly top 40 bothered him. Jack liked to concentrate fully on things. He’d read once that Einstein had kept a closet full of identical suits because he didn’t want to waste any brainpower on unnecessary decisions, like, does this tie go with these socks? Jack was no Einstein (he snickered at the thought), so all the more reason not to confuse his mind with DJ lingo-bingo as he held ideas up to the inquiring light of his meager wits. Wouldn’t want to imprint the wrong stuff.

He selected the more comfortable of the two worn couches, then carefully arranged the night’s reading material on the cushions around him and took a bite out of the sandwich. Good thing you could never max out a library card, he thought. He’d spend fifteen minutes apiece on each book before deciding if it was worth his time, then go back at the end of two hours and read until he felt sleepy. Not like he had anywhere else to go. Mercedes had gone off a few hours earlier with her cousins to shop in Lewiston, an hour’s drive down the river and the biggest town in over a hundred miles. Jack smiled as he imagined her expression upon seeing the Lewiston mall. You could throw a frisbee from one end of the “mall” to the next.

Jack mentally tore his mind away from the girl’s smile and stared at the books in front of him. Ugly.
Beginning Italian
, by Annalisa Lavecchia, Ph.D
. Italian for the Real World
–hey, that one came with a CD-ROM in a sleeve in the back. Cool. Too bad Jack didn’t have a computer
. The Gift of Fear
, by Gavin de Becker. The Insight City Guide’s book on San Francisco.
Strange Highways
by Dean Koontz. Odds were, he’d end up reading that one until he fell asleep. It sounded a lot more fun than
Tracing Your Scottish History.
Jack sighed. He’d also picked up a few books on comparative religion that no doubt would cost him a few dollars in overdue fines before he got around to them. You just couldn’t do everything now, could you?

“Best thing I can do is try,” Jack answered aloud as he hefted the first book. “Alright, Annalisa Lavecchia, Ph.D. You don’t scare me.”

—and Jack’s eyes opened at the grating breath of wood on wood, immediately noting the slight change in air currents that stirred the leaves of the plant a few feet from where his cheek rested on the open page of a book. He always came awake like this; he couldn’t explain it. One second’s worth of the sensation that he was swimming upward towards consciousness, then the next, fully alert.

A papery taste in the back of his mouth told him he’d been asleep at least a few hours, though darkness still pressed against the big windows that looked out on the pool area.

More wind now, lifting the pages of another open book on the floor, scattering a damp scent of —new-mown grass? —from the park below. Jack wished he could see around the corner of the lounge, into the darkened front. The cash register was up there.

A foot scraped against the front stoop.

Jack sat up.

There was a hinged section of the white countertop that ran the width of the reception area, right in front of the door. You had to unhook it and push it up to get into the pool’s main area, or to reach the cash register. Had he left the countertop down and locked? If so, he’d hear it squeak as it was pushed up. What an
idiot
I am, he thought, looking around sharply. Not a thing in sight he could use to defend himself.

Another whisper-thin footfall on the concrete floor. Up there in the dark.

Suddenly, Jack was sure, positive, that whoever’d broken into the pool would investigate the lounge. He’d fallen asleep and left the lights on. Idiot,
idiot
! With no cash in the register
of course
they’d come back and look around the corner, down into the lounge. Whoever it was had to already be able to hear his heart slamming away against his ribcage. This was bad.

He felt exposed. Paralyzed. Nothing around he could use as a weapon–wait, what about one of the trophies? Sure, they’d be big enough, and most had either a hard wood or a marble base. If he swung one of those–

But all the trophies were set up high on a shelf above the doorway between the two rooms, and what was worse, the shelf faced out towards the front counter. In order to get his hands on a potential weapon, Jack would have to enter the same room as the intruder, turn around, and jump up high enough to grab a trophy. Not likely. He licked his lips. But if the trespasser was busy trying to open up the till, with his back to the door, maybe Jack could pull it off.

He brought himself up short then, wondering if the intruder had a baseball bat.

Almost two years before, during Jack’s sophomore year, the body of a girl his age had been discovered on the local sheriff’s lawn. He shuddered thinking about it. The details of the autopsy had so captured the town’s collective morbid interest; no one living could remember such a monstrous crime. She’d been beaten with a baseball bat, raped repeatedly, and then dumped, broken, practically on the sheriff’s front stoop. Cecilia Montgomery had been alive, technically, when she was discovered the next morning, but died before she could regain consciousness. Jack and his best friend, Alonzo, had been on their way to lift weights early at school, had jogged past the policeman’s house in time to see the shrouded body being loaded into the coroner’s van by a solemn group of white-faced, thin-lipped, uniformed paramedics.

No one really knew Cecilia. Her family moved in right before school started, and she had been fairly shy. Both the boys had danced with her at the End of Summer Bash, and Jack had been particularly taken by her auburn hair, like a sheaf of dark fire, and her open, slow smile.

—that had been broken by an aluminum baseball bat. How could the police tell such things? Where was the justice in the fact that they could determine the exact weapon used but utterly fail to find any trace of the maniac who’d swung it? The police had all looked grim and ferociously busy for a few months afterward, and the parents of the town imposed an unofficial curfew which lasted almost the entire school year before Cecilia’s family moved away and it was forgotten.

There’d actually been some mention of the FBI, but the case slowly seemed to just go away. The only clue besides the body fluids typed B positive and A negative was the presence of wet red clay under Cecilia’s fingernails–clay found abundantly in any of over a hundred abandoned mines in the area.

The final conclusion deduced from the evidence was that the young girl had fallen victim to a couple of drifters unassociated with the town, a couple of psychopaths who’d picked the sheriff’s lawn and rosebushes by sheer chance.

Another idea, though unpopular, pointed an accusing finger at the college students returning in droves to any of the three universities within a hundred miles. Classes were scheduled to begin soon, and the highways were conspicuously full of out-of-state license plates. But ultimately, the authorities had nothing.

Jack and Alonzo had slowly walked the rest of the way to school that day shunted into a mute, impotent daze. Sure, the world was filling up with madmen perversely intent on chaos; yeah, the last few years before the turn of the millennium were turning out to be a barrage of howling senselessness, but that was T.V. That was CNN. Surely evil could not wander far enough off the beaten track to show up in Forge, Idaho. Surely.

But that had been the day Jack looked up the meaning of the word ‘misogynist.’ It had been the first time in his life he’d felt any sense of mission, of purpose. He’d been struck by a wild sort of idea, as he looked up from his suddenly meaningless homework and across the oak breakfast table at Alonzo’s house into his friend’s indignant black eyes, an idea that the two of them could someday make a difference. Jack had
never
been so pissed.

He felt a dim stirring of that anger now as he rose to his feet in the lifeguard’s lounge. He flexed his hands and prepared to move.