The Boneshaker (9 page)

Which made perfect sense. Miranda, for instance, said once that she didn't like Old Tom's looks, but that was just snobbishness because he was old and poor and threadbare. Even Doc Fitzwater, with his monocle and alligator cane and his face like cracked desert earth,
looked
strange, but nothing about Doc put hairs up on your neck.

Something about Dr. Limberleg and his crew wasn't quite right.

The door jangled open, and Natalie flattened herself against the cabinet. Skirts swished.

"Afternoon, Miss Albert," Mr. Finch called to the swishing lady.

Natalie peeked around the cabinet. No one was facing the door. She crept out of her corner into plain view and pretended to read a big framed document on the wall by the door while she waited to be noticed.

The words printed on the old-fashioned brown paper looked official, like a university diploma,
HIPPOCRATIC OATH,
it said at the top. For a moment Natalie forgot the discussion she had overheard and tried to work out what
Hippocratic
meant, and whether it had anything to do with hippopotamuses, and why on earth anyone would involve them in any sort of oath. The beginning line didn't help much:
First, do no harm.

"Natalie!" Mr. Finch's voice brought her back to attention. "When did you come in?"

"Right after Miss Albert," she lied.

The two men exchanged a look. Natalie could tell that they were disturbed to see her appear out of nowhere. She thought hard, and then, for lack of anything better to do, pointed to the wall.

"What's
Hippocratic
mean?"

It worked. Miss Albert laughed, and the two men exchanged another look, this time one of relief.

"What can I do for you, Natalie?" Mr. Finch asked, dropping a box into a bag for Miss Albert.

"Dad sent me for vitamins."

Mr. Finch frowned. "Vitamins?"

"I don't know what he's talking about either," Natalie said with a shrug, "but he said to come here and ask for Annie Minks's vitamins. He's working on a wheel for Dr. Limberleg or he would've come himself."

Mr. Finch tapped his fingers on the counter and eyed the dispensing cabinet. Natalie folded her hands together to keep from fidgeting. Had he guessed she had been hiding behind it?

"Did your father say why he thought your mother needed vitamins today?"

Natalie shook her head. Mr. Finch came around the counter and strode to the cabinet. She peered into it along with him when he opened it, trying to guess what kind of vitamins her mother took that she'd never noticed before.

Mr. Finch hesitated. He looked down at her, then over at Mr. Tilden. "I think I know which ones he means," the pharmacist said at last. "I'd better take them over myself to be sure."

"If Mr. Finch is going to go see your dad himself, how about coming back to the general store with me, Natalie?" Mr. Tilden asked. "You left something there this afternoon, remember?"

Reluctantly, Natalie followed Mr. Tilden out of the pharmacy and down the porch steps. "Hippocrates was a doctor in ancient Greece," the grocer said after a moment's silence. "He had very high expectations for anyone who learned how to heal people, and the Hippocratic oath is a promise doctors make to behave according to his ideals, and to always use what they know to do good rather than harm."

"That's what it said, right at the top. 'First, do no harm.'"

Nearly everyone they passed on their way to the center of town was talking about the medicine show. Even the drifter with the pale eyes and the tin lantern turned one of Dr. Limberleg's cards over in his dusty fingers.

"I hear their last stop was in Pinnacle," a woman sweeping her porch said to a neighbor.

"Did he say anything about the flu?" the neighbor asked. Mr. Tilden tensed. He paused to re-tie his shoe, which looked secure enough to Natalie.

"He said they'll give a whole presentation on it. Tomorrow morning, when the fair opens."

"Can you imagine if Doc was here?" Both women laughed. The grocer stopped fiddling with his shoelaces. When he stood up he seemed to have relaxed a little.

Out in front of the general store the kids were talking, too.

"Natalie!" Ryan balanced on one side of a watering trough and waved a scrap of paper at her: another one of Dr. Limberleg's calling cards. "They're going to have films, too," he shouted, "real moving-picture films!"

"Who said?" Natalie jogged ahead of Mr. Tilden to where her friends clustered in the shade of the porch. "Dr. Limberleg?"

"No, another fellow. One with a funny walking stick."

"So?" Miranda said. "It isn't as though nobody's ever seen a film before."

The boys paused to give Miranda twin looks of shock and disgust, then burst into loud protestations.

"It isn't as though we get them every day, either—"

"It's been
ayear at least,
Miranda!"

"—in the cities they have
four a 'week
sometimes, and all we got last year was—"

"Four a week! Four a week,
do you know how many that means we missed?
"

"—was that Keystone Kops one—"

"Yeah, and I only got to see it four times before—"

"All right, all right, FINE!" Miranda bellowed. Ryan and Alfred glowered and wandered a few paces away to discuss her lack of culture in lowered voices. "But what about the rest of it? You don't have a carnival with just films."

"Well, it's not a carnival, for one thing," Natalie informed her. "It's Dr. Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show."

"She's right. Says so right here." Miranda deflated as Ryan held up the card (directly in front of Miranda's nose and with maybe a little more flourish than was strictly necessary) to show her that Natalie knew what she was talking about. Natalie, who hadn't had a good look at one yet, plucked it out of his fingers and squinted to read.

DOCTOR LIMBERLEG'S NOSTRUM FAIR
AND
TECHNOLOGICAL MEDICINE SHOW

***

Jake Epiphemius Limberleg
,

DOCTOR OF MEDICAL SCIENCES, EMERITUS
PROPRIETOR AND DIRECTOR OF
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Welcome to your very good health

"So I guess they'll have medicine stuff." He shrugged and turned to Natalie. "What about when you took him to your dad's shop? Did you find anything out?"

"They're snake oil salesmen," Natalie said authoritatively. It merited a hiss of breath from the kids around her, although probably only because it sounded so sinister. "Dad says they might be frauds. We have to wait and see."

Before anyone could respond, Mr. Tilden called from the porch, "Come inside a minute, Natalie."

She trotted up the stairs after the grocer, who went straight to the side with the patent medicines to retrieve something from behind the counter. While Natalie waited, she studied the collection of oddly shaped bottles on the wall and read again their even odder names: Cathartic Nerve Food, Spartan Vegetable Panacea, Wintergreen Catholicon...

Then she was staring at a frenzied bee in a jar. "Your
...associate
Alfred left this behind. The bee was concerned, but I explained to it that some business had called you away temporarily," Mr. Tilden said. He followed Natalie's eyes to the medicines on the wall and looked back at her again, eyebrow raised.

Natalie pointed past him at the patent medicine wall. "That sign wasn't there before, was it?"

Mr. Tilden glanced at the sign over his shoulder:
WE SELL PATENT MEDICINES BUT DO NOT ENDORSE THEM.
"No, it wasn't."

"Snake oil salesmen." She shook her head knowingly. "Anyhow, thanks for watching the bee for me." Natalie wrapped her arms around the jar and headed for the door. Then she heard the twang of guitar strings on the porch. Her heart sped up. It was Old Tom Guyot.

S
HE SHOVED OUT THE DOOR
with the jar in her arms. Old Tom sat on the steps with his guitar on his knees. Before she could figure whether or not she ought to be a little afraid of him, Tom turned and spotted her staring.

"What's that you got?"

She tried to look as if she hadn't just been deciding whether or not to scoot closer for a better look at the man who'd met the Devil. "Got a bee."

"Lessee." She took a step closer and held the jar out at arms' length. He peered through the glass. "Sure wish I had a bee," Tom said at last.

"Well ... it's for sale."

"No foolin'!" Tom leaned forward for a better look and rubbed his lined cheeks with his fingers. "What's a bee like that one cost?"

"Fifteen cents."

Tom looked from Natalie to the bee and back again. "Well, that's fair."

"
Really?
"

"Well, sure. It's got six legs. Five cents a pair." Then Tom sighed. That kind of sigh always meant:
I can't,
or
Not today,
or
Sure wish I could.
Natalie's shoulders slumped a little.

"I'd certainly like to have that bee, but I haven't got much folding money these days." Tom looked sadly at the jar. "That your
last
bee?"

"Yessir." It was her
only
one, so it wasn't exactly a lie.

"Well, then I guess..." He gave Natalie a thoughtful look. "What do you think about a trade?"

A trade? "What kind?" Out of the corner of her eye she could see Ryan and Alfred watching curiously.

"Instead of three nickels, how about three questions?"

"I can ask you? What kind of questions? Any I want?"

"Sure. That's the only way it's fair."

"Okay, I'll trade." She sat on the step, plunked the jar down between them, and pretended to think.

There was, of course, only one subject she wanted to question him about, but it didn't seem right to ask, not just like that, not a man who was (almost) a total stranger. Maybe she could start with a harmless question—like maybe what his favorite color was—and work up to the big one.... And then she saw, hanging from Tom's wrist, a braided string with a shiny steel gear tied to it.

"That's one of the charms I made, isn't it?"

Tom laughed. "You know anybody else who makes decorations out of gears in these parts, Miss Minks?"

And with that, Natalie knew she could ask Tom Guyot anything. She took a deep breath.

"I heard you met the Devil at the crossroads." She said it fast, in case she lost her nerve, and tensed in case she was wrong and had to run.

But Tom didn't get angry. "Ahh," he said, the same way Natalie's mother had the night before. "I thought you might ask about that."

"My mother told me. Is it true?"

Tom smiled a little sadly. "You don't think your mama would lie to you, do you?"

"She would
never
lie to me, but ... well, the
Devil?
So it really happened?"

Old Tom nodded soberly.

"What did he look like? No, wait." It wouldn't do to waste her second question on something she wasn't sure she really wanted to know. "When you beat him, he owed you a favor, right? What did you ask?"

He grinned. "Now, that's a good question, and the answer is: I haven't collected the favor yet." He reached into the watch pocket of his old waistcoat with his long-fingernailed right hand. At the end of the chain fob, hanging just beside his old pocket watch, was a coin with a hole in the center. It was an odd green, like what happens to copper when you don't polish it, and the edges were raggedy, as if little bits of it had been snipped off with metal-cutting shears.

"What's that?"

"Don't rightly know, but I think it's the favor. Just showed up there on that old chain the next day."

Natalie looked at it mistrustfully. "Do you ... doesn't it bother you to carry it around all the time?"

"Can't help it. If I throw it away, I find it later in a pocket. Try to lock it in a box, it winds up inside my shoe. Figure I'm stuck with it until I trade it in."

"Well, why haven't you used it? It's been ages, hasn't it?"

"Just hasn't been anything worth using that favor up for. Hasn't been anything I've needed or wanted I couldn't get myself with a little hard work." He put the watch back in his pocket. Absently his fingers picked over the strings of the guitar, the long nails plucking them as neatly as the crown cap he'd used the day before. Natalie was so transfixed that she didn't even notice Mrs. Byron walk past and shoot her a look that suggested the old lady had a bad smell in her nose.

"Your dad does a lot of business from travelers losing wheels and tires out there in the Old Village, doesn't he?" Old Tom continued.

"Yes...." Only that afternoon, her father had correctly guessed which wheel Doctor Limberleg's wagon had lost, and that it hadn't been found. "And it's ... always the same one, isn't it? The front left wheel, and then it goes missing."

"Wonder why, ever?"

"I just figured it was a big stone or something that people kept on hitting."

Old Tom shook his head. "That'd make good sense, but the truth's something else again." He chuckled. "In fact, you might say I'm responsible for all those wheels and tires and even a mess of horseshoes coming off just there."

"How?" She didn't know if she had any questions left and waited to see if he would answer.

"The night I won my bet, that old Devil got so mad he off and left without speaking to me again. Just fine so far as I cared. I was pleased as punch to have kept life and soul, but the Devil's promise is binding, on you and on him just the same. So a year or so later, there I was, and a demon comes up to me in the street, polite as you please."

"In the street? In
Arcane?
"

"Right at the edge of town there, in fact, 'neath the water tower." Tom pointed down the lane to where the big wooden tower stood at the corner of Bard Street and Heartwood. "Walked right up and started talking. Well, he looked real enough to me, but people started staring pretty soon. Guess I looked like I was talking to myself, but what could 1 do?"

"He was invisible, but you could see him anyway?"