Whistling In the Dark (6 page)

I pretended not to notice and reached for another delicious meatball in red sauce.

Then these words came shooting out of her little body—because really, Nana Fazio could almost be considered a midget—and she marched over to our side of the table and slapped Johnny across his shoulders with her belt. “You don’ talk like that. Thas the little girl’s mama, you don’t say nuthin’ about her mama dyin’,
capisce
?” Nana shouted at Johnny in this voice you could never imagine would come out of someone so small. “You goombah!”

It went library quiet ’cept for the
drip drip
of the kitchen sink and a faraway lawn mower. And then from outta nowhere, Troo looked up from her plate and started singing, “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera sera.”

All eyes went to Nana Fazio with the belt in her hand. They were all probably thinking like I was that Troo had just taken her life into her hands. Nana leaned down real close to Troo and I thought she was gonna put the hex on her or smack her like she had Johnny, but instead, she looked at Troo with her black olive eyes and said, “You, you kid, you lika Doris Day?”

Troo cleared her throat and said, “Actually, I think Doris Day is the best thing since sliced bread.”

Nana slowly, slowly smiled. Now I knew where Fast Susie’s pointed eyeteeth came from. “Me, too,” she said. “I lika Doris Day, too. You and your
sorella
can eata here whenever you wanna, as much as you wanna.” Nana reached across me and dug the big silver spoon into the white bowl and slapped three juicy meatballs onto my plate.

What a genius my sister was!

 

Troo wanted to sleep over in the Fazios’ attic that night and I couldn’t disagree with her. The last time we went home, the door was locked. Besides that, Troo and me both knew if Nell caught us she would force us to have one of those Toni perms that we both thought made you look like you just got off the boat.

Red light, green light was called off because it looked like it was gonna rain again, so we spent most of the night listening to Fast Susie tell us stories in the attic that had no light except for a dirty bare bulb way high up in the ceiling.

Fast Susie was sitting cross-legged on the stained gray mattress, facing me and Troo. “So then, after the grave robbers dig up those dead bodies, they take them over to Dr. Frankenstein’s castle in a little three-wheeled wooden cart.” She was using this voice she had that was husky. “And it begins to rain and the grave-robbin’ men are ugly and skinny and cough all the time and are drunk with dirty hair.”

Thunder rolled past the attic window and made it shake, and then a few seconds later there was pitchfork lightning that I could see perfectly, and it reminded me of our farm.

I looked over at Troo. She was rubbing the arm that had gotten broken in the crash and was hanging on to Fast Susie’s every word.

“And then Dr. Frankenstein puts the body on this black table in his lavatory and he gets a saw to cut the bodies aaall up!”

The lightning flashed again and lit up the whole attic, which was full of boxes and suitcases and the thing I was keeping my eye on. This body that had no arms or legs and was standing over in the corner next to the window. Fast Susie said that Nana used it to make clothes on.

“And then”—Fast Susie made her voice drippy with creepy—“and then, Dr. Frankenstein sewed all these dead body pieces together and made this monster. . . .” She waved her arms around. “And Dr. Frankenstein put this monster down on this other table and hooked all these gadgets up to him and then lightning hit the castle and electricity came into the gadgets and went into the monster and Dr. Frankenstein yelled out, ‘It’s alive. It’s alive!’ ” Fast Susie jumped up and started walking around with her arms stiff in front of her and chased me and Troo, who screamed, and I did, too, until somebody yelled up from downstairs, “Shut the hell up, we’re tryin’ to sleep down here.”

After the Frankenstein story, Fast Susie showed us her bosoms and told us we would both get them too and, holy smoke, would the boys ever like us a lot! She said we could touch them if we wanted to. I didn’t. Later Troo told me they felt like a water balloon but warmer.

When the rain started pelting the window, I tried to fall asleep, but that attic heat felt like a too-heavy blanket laying all over me and all I could think about was that Frankenstein monster murdering the three of us while he grunted, “Me . . . me . . . me . . . like you.” Boy, that Fast Susie could make a story sound so real. I got the sweatiest I had ever gotten, hearing that monster’s clunky shoes creaking on the attic steps. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I rolled off that stinky old mattress and decided that even if Hall was snoring drunk, I needed to get home.

According to Fast Susie, Frankenstein couldn’t run very fast because his legs belonged to two different people, so I figured I could outrun him because of my long legs. That was one thing Daddy always said, that I was really good at running. “You fly like the wind, Sal.” That’s what he said.
You fly like the wind
. I felt bad about leaving Troo behind, but if anyone could keep her safe it was Nana Fazio, who would take her belt to anybody for just about any reason, including Frankenstein. So I snuck down the Fazios’ attic steps and out their back door into the alley, carrying my tennis shoes in my hand, being as sneaky as I could.

Music was almost always going on day or night on Vliet Street, no matter what. But that night, after the storm moved away, it was black and quiet except for the crickets and that dumb dog that belonged to the Moriaritys that always seemed to be barking two streets over. I went back through the Fazios’ yard and past the Latours’, who were their next-door neighbors. And just for a second I thought I saw something moving around in the Latours’ yard. Something was over there. I looked away real quick and then back again real quick, but everything seemed okay. Just a swing on the play set getting pushed around by the wind. But behind me, the bushes that grew over the Spencers’ back fence were rustling like something had gotten in there with them. Like Frankenstein. I got so scared to be alone in the dark without Troo that I started to walk faster. And then I thought of disappearing-into-thin-air Dottie Kenfield and dead Junie Piaskowski and what Mary Lane had said about Sara Heinemann being missing, and maybe it wasn’t one of her big fat lies after all, so I walked even faster. There was a
hushing
sound in my ears that was so loud I could barely hear the footsteps that had come up behind me. But they were there all right. So was the shadow that the garage light made look long. And I shoulda turned around and seen who it was right then and there. Or I shoulda run back to the Fazios’. But I didn’t. Because I got sorta frozen with fear like I always did on the high dive up at the pool because, like Troo always told me, when God handed out bravery I musta been in the bathroom.

I was pretty sure I knew who was following me. It was the guy that I secretly thought all along was the murderer of Junie Piaskowski. I’d thought it since the day they found Junie, but I didn’t tell anybody because they would just cluck their tongues and say something about my imagination and so it just wasn’t worth it. Everybody talked about how he especially liked little girls. That was who was coming for me. Officer Rasmussen.

I started to run and I could tell by how fast his feet were thumping that he was running, too. I got goin’ so fast I almost fell over and I was almost home but I could tell by his breathing he could just reach out and grab me, but then I heard him stumble and say, “Shit.” I ran through the Kenfields’ gate and rolled beneath those pricker bushes they had next to their garage. He was right behind me. The gate creaked open, then slammed shut. I heard his footsteps, first on the path and then on the grass. He came right up to where I was hiding. If I wanted to I could’ve reached out and touched his argyle socks, pink-and-green ones that I could see in the Kenfields’ back porch light. The socks were in thick black shoes with a spongy bottom that you could buy up at Shuster’s. I could hear him breathing in and out, in and out. And finally, softly singing, “Come out, come out, wherever you are, Sally.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I woke up underneath the Kenfields’ bushes the next morn ing, kinda surprised I’d fallen asleep. My arms were covered in scratches and had bled a little so I licked my finger and cleaned them off and thought God would have done a better job if he had made blood taste like Three Musketeers bars. And then I remembered Rasmussen chasing me down the alley and my heart began beating like an Injun tom-tom right before they attacked the cowboys in all those western movies.

Mrs. Kenfield was up and about, hanging wash on her clothesline. Should I just roll out and say, “W hy, good morning, Mrs. Kenfield. Need any help?” No. She might ask me, “What the heck are you doing under my bushes?” And since I wasn’t a very good fibber, like Troo was, I would tell her about being chased by Rasmussen and then she would just shake her head at me and say in a voice that pained my heart, “Oh, Sally, not again.” Just because last year, trying to be charitable, I told her I thought that her husband was a spy because he sure did act like one, all secretive and stern, sitting out on the porch swing every night smoking, which I figured had something to do with waiting for a sneaky spy package to be dropped off. So I knew that if I told Mrs. Kenfield about getting chased, she would run right over to the hospital and tell Mother I wasn’t working on controlling my imagination. So I just laid there and said Hail Marys until she stuck her laundry basket under her arm and went inside the house.

Who
was
I supposed to tell about a guy named Rasmussen who liked to wave at you when you walked by his house and gave you this sweet smile that made him look like he’d lost something and was about to ask you if you’d help him find it? Who do you tell if that guy was also a cop? I was sure Rasmussen was a murderer. He just had that murderous look to him like all the bad guys do in the movies. Acting all nice and such but really not nice in their heart.

Should I tell Hall that Rasmussen had come after me? But I couldn’t remember when I’d seen Hall for about the last week. Should I tell the other cop that hung around the neighborhood, Officer Riordan? He was a swell guy, but Willie O’Hara told me that Rasmussen was Officer Riordan’s boss. No. I’d tell Troo. Being a Troo genius, she would know what to do.

I crawled out from under the bushes and walked to the front of the Kenfields’ house and looked down the block. Ambulance lights were flashing like crazy in front of the Latours’ and two men were wheeling somebody down the front steps. Mrs. Ruthie Latour was groaning and praying. Her husband, Bill, had his arm around her waist. A bunch of the Latour kids were just standing around watching like the rest of us. One of the littler ones was crying.

Troo was sitting on the sidewalk with Fast Susie, eating fritters that Nana musta made them for breakfast. Fast Susie tore off half of hers and gave it to me when I came up next to her out of breath.

“What’s happening?” I asked, stuffing the puffed dough into my mouth. Ohhhh . . . that was good. Still warm. “Who is that?”

“It’s Wendy,” Troo said. “Where you been anyway? We gotta get goin’. It’s Ethel day.”

“Last night I got . . .” I started to tell her what’d happened with Rasmussen, but then I stopped because my breath was taken away. The sheet that was covering Wendy was streaked with blood.

I liked Wendy Latour even if she was a Mongoloid. She was so sweet with her straight black hair and that goofy smile and her funny way of talking, like she’d been adopted by the Latours from another country, probably Mongolia.

The whole neighborhood was quiet, until with a loud metal sound the ambulance men slid Wendy in and got ready to take her away to St. Joe’s. I was about to ask those men if they had any news about Mother, but they peeled out and were already halfway down the block.

I pulled Troo up and we said bye to everyone and walked home and sat on our front steps. I was a little shaken up by the surprise of not only seeing an ambulance up close like that, but of seeing someone I knew inside it. I’d even forgotten about going to see Ethel over on Fifty-second Street.

“Do you know what I think?” I said.

“What?” Troo was laying back on the steps, looking up.

“I think it was Rasmussen who hurt Wendy.”

Troo didn’t say anything for a minute, but then pointed up to a cloud and said, “Look, Sally, it’s a horse,” and started laughing. She thought it was hilarious that I liked horses. I never told her it was because of Sky King and his Flying Crown Ranch.

“Knock it off, Troo,” I said. “This is serious. I think Rasmussen did something to Wendy and I think—”

Troo sat up and cut me off. “You gotta stop thinkin’ like that. Remember what Mother said about working on your imagination? Cops don’t do stuff like that. They have to swear on the Bible not to do bad things.”

“And it isn’t only Wendy,” I kept on. “Last summer, I saw Rasmussen with Junie Piaskowski at the Policemen’s Picnic. They were flying a kite together. And then she got murdered.”

“You are so queer. That’s what everybody does at the Policemen’s Picnic, hangs out with cops. Rasmussen was just being nice to Junie.”

Too nice if you asked me. I’d watched the two of them together. Rasmussen smiled at Junie in a certain kind of way. And his hand was on her shoulder. Something was definitely up between ’em and it wasn’t only the kite.

“He came after me last night,” I said.

“Who?”

“Rasmussen.”

“Your imagination,” Troo said, fooling around with the string she kept in her shorts for when she got bored.

“And he had on pink-and-green argyle socks and he said my name and I had to fall asleep under the Kenfields’ bushes and . . . that wasn’t my imagination.” I showed her my scratches and muddy butt. “It’s not like when I thought the devil had gotten into Butchy’s brain. And it’s not like when I thought that Mr. Kenfield was a spy. It’s not like that at all.”