Shadowmaker (8 page)

My impatience vanished, and I answered, “You looked great.”

“Could I come over tomorrow afternoon with my journal?”

“Sure,” I said. “Did you write something in it since Mrs. Walgren handed it back?”

“No.”

“You’ll have to write something. I know. Write about the carnival. Try to focus on how you felt about the lights, the music, and the crowds.”

After an instant’s thought her eyes brightened. “I will. That’ll be easy to write about. See you tomorrow!” She slammed the car door and ran up the walk to the front door of the small bungalow. I waited until the door closed behind her, then pulled away from the curb.

In my rearview mirror I noticed a car without lights move out into the road. Nervously, my heart beginning to pound, I pressed down on the gas pedal, and shot ahead, eager to get home.

It wasn’t until I rounded two curves and reached a straightaway that I could look back and see that no one was
following me. I decided I was getting paranoid. Just because someone had forgotten to turn on his headlights was no reason to jump to the conclusion that he was after me.

Even though I tried to think rationally and calm down, as soon as I had parked the car in the garage I ran toward the house as though something were chasing me.

I burst through the door to find Mom still at her computer. “I thought you’d be in bed,” I said, and locked the door.

Mom blinked, looked up, and said, “I decided while I was waiting up for you, I’d read over the first few chapters of my novel, and I began thinking about rewriting one of the scenes, and the next thing I knew …” She laughed, hit the
end and save
key, and turned off the computer. “You stayed longer than you thought you would, so you must have been having a good time.”

I nodded. There was no point in going into my reason for leaving the carnival later than I’d planned. I babbled on about the kids I’d met and what we did until Mom gave a humongous yawn. “You’re tired, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I bet you are too,” Mom said with a smile. “Do you want anything to eat, or are you ready for bed?”

“Bed,” I answered.

Mom put an arm around my shoulders. “What you did for Lana Jean was very nice. Did she have a good time at the carnival?”

“I guess. In her own way,” I answered. “By the way, she’s coming over tomorrow again so I can help her with her journal.”

“Fine,” Mom said, and paused. “Maybe the two of you could … work on her journal in your bedroom?”

“I guess you could hear us on the porch,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Mom said. She gave my shoulders a little squeeze and her eyes crinkled as she added, “The story’s going well, Katie. I feel good about taking time off to write my novel.” She paused and the smile disappeared. “On Monday I should get the information I requested about the Hawkins brothers’ company.”

I let out a long, impatient sigh. I couldn’t help it. “Mom, I think you’re crazy to start investigating toxic waste around here, but if it’ll save time I’ll help you find out whatever you need.”

“I think it’s better that you stay out of it, Katie,” Mom said. “In fact, I just wish there was a relative I could send you to.”

“No,” I said firmly, hoping to stop her from thinking in that direction. She might discover an elderly great-aunt and ship me off, and it would take even longer to get back to Houston. “Mom, no matter what, I’m staying right here with you. And nothing bad is going to happen. I know it.”

It was the next morning, after church services, that we heard about the murder.

The people who’d learned about it were so full of the news they even included Mom and me in the telling. Short, lumpy-jowled Belle Dobbs, who managed the drugstore, clutched Mom’s arm and leaned close. “The murder victim was one of the carnival hands, according to the sheriff. Otis
Cantrell—you know who Otis is. He has that used-car lot on the highway to Corpus. Anyhow, Otis was out in the woods behind the carnival lot early this morning, and practically fell over the body. Like to scared him to death.”

“You said the man who was killed was a carnival worker?” Mom asked. I could see Mom’s investigative-reporter side emerge.

Belle nodded vigorously, then rolled her eyes and let her voice drop. “Shot right in the chest,” she said.

“No one heard the shot?”

Belle’s younger sister, Sudie, a somewhat plumper copy of Belle, elbowed in, shocked excitement in her voice. “One of the carnival people told Sheriff Granger he thought he heard a car backfire somewhere around eleven-fifteen to eleven-thirty, but with the noise at the carnival—the motors on those rides make an awful racket, don’t you think?—no one heard anything. No one even missed him until all the people had gone and it was time to lock things up. He wasn’t a regular—more a drifter who joined them just a short while back. The owner thought he’d quit without so much as a word, but that didn’t seem so strange.”

Mom gave a little shiver and looked at me as though she was sorry she’d allowed me to go to the carnival. “Does the sheriff have any idea who killed the man?”

Belle stepped in front of Sudie, recapturing her place as head storyteller. “The sheriff’s interrogating the carnival people, and it wouldn’t surprise me none if the murderer hadn’t come to Kluney along with the carnival. We all know it couldn’t have been anyone from Kluney.”

A few others waylaid us as we walked to the car, each
repeating the basic facts of the story, with a few imaginative variations. It seems that the sheriff found lots of footprints around the body, which caused Bennie Lutz, head mechanic at the Shell gas station, to come to the conclusion that the victim was killed by a motorcycle gang.

Gibb Barker, Kluney’s bald-as-a-basketball postmaster, had heard that every one of the victim’s pockets had been turned inside out, everything taken, including identification. “It had to have been a pro,” he said, “come down here from Houston.”

As we drove home Mom murmured, “Poor man. He and another carnival hand probably got into a fight. It shouldn’t take the sheriff long to find the culprit.”

I felt creepy, thinking about a murder taking place so close by. I couldn’t help but be glad that at the time the victim was getting killed, I was on my way home.

It was not the kind of day to dwell on a murder. The sea glittered with reflected sunlight, and the tall beach grass shimmered and shivered under a gentle breeze. I changed into shorts and ran barefoot down to the sand, letting the foam from the icy water trickle up to freeze my toes. Small, long-legged birds chased the wavelets up and back the hard-packed sand, and I watched them, trying to figure out what in the world they thought they were doing. I hadn’t done my warm-ups, but even so I went through the basic positions and a few light pliés; then with my arms behind me like wings, I danced a quick, stiff-legged movement up to the foam and back, mimicking the birds.

Mom’s call startled me, and I was even more startled to
see Lana Jean standing on the porch next to her. I’d forgotten that Lana Jean was coming.

As I reached the porch steps Mom said, “I’ve made a plate of ham sandwiches, and there’s potato chips and cookies and all kinds of soft drinks on the kitchen table.”

“Thanks,” I said, and took a closer look at Lana Jean. She was still wearing yesterday’s makeup. The foundation had turned a little orange, and there was a faint smudge of mascara under both eyes. At least she had combed her hair.

She smiled at me happily and held out a spiral notebook. “I remembered it this time.”

“Let’s eat first,” I said. “Then I’ll help you with your journal.”

We munched our way through heaping plates of food before Lana Jean said, “I don’t know why Mrs. Walgren doesn’t like what I write in my journal. We’re supposed to tell what we feel about things, and I do that.”

I took a last slurp of my Coke and collected the dishes, tucking them inside the dishwasher. Mom was already typing away on her keyboard, so I motioned to Lana Jean. “Come on. And bring your journal. We’ll go over it in my bedroom.”

I turned to page one and began reading. Lana Jean had written about seeing Travis at a football game. “He climbed up the bleachers to the top, and as he passed me I think he saw me looking at him, so I smiled.”

Skipping the rest, I went on to the next entry, which was also about Travis, as was the next and the next.

Farther on, as I thumbed through the journal, I saw that
Lana Jean had mentioned Travis’s friends and their secret club, Blitz.

“This is all about Travis!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t write about anything else!”

“Don’t yell at me,” Lana Jean complained. “I did what you said. This morning I wrote about the carnival.”

I flipped to the last pages and read a detailed account of Lana Jean’s arrival at the carnival, looking for Travis, and spotting him at the shooting gallery. She included their conversation and then followed his trail as he and his friends left for some of the rides.

I couldn’t read any more of it. “You didn’t write about the carnival. You wrote about Travis,” I told Lana Jean.

“Well, Travis was at the carnival.”

“Why don’t you make a completely new start with your journal?” I asked. “Promise yourself you won’t write another word about Travis. Skip a page, then write a description of the carnival.”

She looked puzzled. “A description? Like what?”

“Like the music, for instance. Do you remember some of the tunes that were playing?”

“Not really.” Trying to be helpful, she added, “But there
was
music. I do remember that.”

“And there were strings of colored lights and lots of people. We stopped at the ring-toss booth. Do you remember what it looked like?”

Her forehead crinkled into furrows as she squeezed her eyelids shut. “There were prizes—little statues and teddy bears and stuff,” she said, “and people had to toss rings over them.”

“What color rings?”

“Red … I think.”

“That’s it,” I said. “Write about what you saw, and put in lots of sensory perception.”

“Lots of
what
?”

“What I mean is, tell how things smelled and tasted and felt and sounded, besides how things looked.”

Lana Jean sighed loudly. “I don’t know all that. This is going to be hard.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

“I’ll
get
a good grade?”

“Mrs. Walgren is going to like what you write.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it if you help me.” She snatched her journal out of my hands, and before I could stop her she ripped out all the pages she’d already written.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Starting over. Isn’t that what you said I should do?”

“You might need these. What if Mrs. Walgren wants to see the whole journal from the beginning of the semester?”

Lana Jean shrugged. “She already read this. She knows what’s in it.”

From the desk next to my bed I pulled out a pen and my journal—the one I was writing just for Mrs. Walgren.

“Don’t write in yours. You have to tell me what to write in mine,” Lana Jean insisted.

“I already told you.”

“You said
what
to write, not
how
to write it.”

“It has to be your own writing.”

“It will be. Just tell me what to say.”

I put my journal down on top of her torn-out pages and
helped her struggle through an opening paragraph describing the carnival grounds and how excited she was about being there.

She managed to write a paragraph about the ring-toss booth by herself, although she labored over it for twenty minutes.

She read it aloud, and I told her it was pretty good. It was an improvement over all that stuff about Travis.

“Am I through now?”

“You might want to say something about how carnivals make people feel.”

“How could I know that?”

“Okay, then write about how carnivals make
you
feel.”

“All carnivals, or just this one?”

We heard a car door slam and heavy feet stomp down the walkway. Sheriff Granger walked by, head down like a charging bull. The pounding of his fist on our kitchen door made us jump.

“Let’s go see why the sheriff’s here,” I quickly suggested. I scooped up everything we’d left on the bed and stuffed it into my desk drawer.

Lana Jean, journal still in hand, followed me into the kitchen where Mom was standing, facing the sheriff.

“I
got Harvey Boggs locked up,” Sheriff Granger told Mom. “Matter of him taking a couple of punches at his wife. He says it’s your fault.”

Mom’s mouth dropped open, but she managed to pull herself together and said, “That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know anyone named Harvey Boggs.”

“Harvey works for the Hawkins brothers.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t know him.”

“You know his wife.”

“No, I don’t.”

The sheriff pulled out a kitchen chair and thudded into it, even though Mom hadn’t asked him to sit down. “You were snoopin’ around the waste disposal plant, and the people there wanted to know why. Somebody seen you parked out on the road, near where Harvey and his family live. One
question led to another, until Harvey’s wife finally admitted to him that she’d come to see you.”

Anita!
I thought, and I cringed at the idea that her husband had hurt her.

“Does Mrs. Boggs need help?” Mom asked.

“Nope. She got whatever treatment Doc Foster thought she needed and went back home.”

Mom’s backbone grew even straighter, and she demanded, “What kind of cowardly man hits his wife?”

“A man who’s afraid of losin’ his job,” the sheriff countered.

“That’s no excuse.”

“If anythin’ happened to the Hawkinses’ company, there’d be plenty of unhappy folks around here out of work.”

“If the Hawkinses have disposed of waste products legally, then there’s no reason for anything to happen to their company.”

“Folks don’t know why you should stick your nose into their business. The Hawkinses are doin’ things right, and far as I know, get inspected regular.”

I remembered one of Mom’s articles exposing a crooked inspector. I wondered if she was remembering it too.