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Chapter 7

1935

Lucy loved the garage—at least the loft of it, all quiet and dimly lighted and private. There wasn't any place private in the house anymore, not even her hidey hole in the attic, since Aunt Marian and the baby had come to live with them.

Lucy tried to like the baby, she really did. It would have been easy to love the little boy, if Aunt Marian had just let her hold him once in a while, if she had just let her play with him, if she wasn't always telling her to be quiet or still so she wouldn't bother him.

If Papa hadn't liked the baby better than he liked her, and Aunt Marian better than he liked Mama.

Lucy felt guilty for thinking that, just like she felt guilty for not really liking her little cousin. It wasn't his fault. But was it hers? Had she done something that made her papa not love her?

It was all right, she told herself. She had Mama to love her, and Mama was better than Papa and Aunt Marian and Cousin Joseph all put together.

And now she had Walter, too.

Walter sat in the desk beside her at school. He was new this year. He didn't have a papa to buy him new clothes or shoes and sometimes he looked like he was hungry, but he didn't make fun of her when she couldn't spell words or make the reading behave and he wouldn't let the others make fun of her either.

She didn't think he was going to have a Thanksgiving dinner, and she knew Papa wouldn't let her invite him and his mother to theirs, but Mama had made an extra pie for her to give to them. Just as soon as he got here. Just as soon as she showed him the secret she had hidden in the loft over the garage.

Papa kept the garage locked, even when his big, new car wasn't in there, but he didn't know about the two boards at the back, under the window, he didn't know that she came in here whenever Aunt Marian got just too bossy to stand, and he didn't know about the mama cat and the kitten upstairs in the loft.

Papa was gone now. Lucy didn't think he'd come home all night. Maybe he wouldn't come home. Would Mama make Aunt Marian leave if he didn't? She'd heard her grandpa talking once—more than once—telling Mama it was her house, that she didn't have to be a servant to any white man. Mama had always hushed him when she saw Lucy, so Lucy wasn't too sure what Grandpa meant—not about the white part, but about the servant. Wasn't Mama just doing what mamas did?

Lucy hopped up and down, stomping her feet. Her coat was warm, and the garage walls kept out most of the wind, but Mama wouldn't let her wear overalls except when she visited Grandma and Grandpa, and her legs were cold. And if Walter didn't get here soon, everybody else would be here and she wouldn't be able to show him the mama cat and kitten.

She heard a two-note whistle outside and looked out the window. Yes. There was Walter coming through their secret place in the hedge. Lucy inched the first board to one side and answered his whistle, and in a moment Walter squeezed through into the garage.

"Wow," he said. "This is big. Almost as big as a barn."

"It used to be a barn—well, a stable, anyway," she told him as she led him to the ladder in the corner and up to the darkened loft that created a ceiling over half of the building. She couldn't really remember when, that was when she was a real little girl, but Mama had told her it was, and that was why there was still some hay up in the loft. "I wish it still was. I'd sure like to have a horse."

"In town?" Walter asked. "Could you do that now?"

Lucy nodded. "Out here. If my papa would let me. Grandpa told me."

Walter scuffed his already worn shoe in the dry, loose hay scattered across the floor. "Bet you'd have a whole lot of friends if you had a horse."

Lucy might not be real smart, she'd heard Papa tell Mama she wasn't, but she knew why Walter hung his head and kind of shriveled away from her. "They wouldn't be real friends," she told him. "Not like you. And you'd always be my best friend."

He didn't look real convinced. "Promise?"

Lucy nodded.

"Blood brothers?"

"Ah, Walter, we don't do things like that." At least she didn't think they did. None of her cousins from her mama's family ever told her if they did. Hunting for words that were for now as slow in coming as they always were when she was trying to read, she pushed aside a stack of old feed sacks. The mama cat looked up and gave a welcoming twitch of her tail but didn't try to raise up on the injured leg Lucy had cleaned and bandaged. She was yellow and scrawny, not at all like Mama's fat tabby. Quickly Lucy checked the dishes of food and water, then petted the cat. The kitten was getting braver every day. It crept toward her. Lucy curled her fingers gently around the wiggling, mewling little ball of yellow fluff and pulled it out of the shadows. "And besides," she said, offering her treasure to Walter, "I'm showing you my best secret even without that."

"I don't care," he told her, obstinately stubborn as she had learned he could be. He gave the mama cat a comforting pat before he tickled the tiny little kitten on the belly and under the chin, and she saw his smile dart out of hiding for only a moment. He shrugged and pulled out a scratched-up pocketknife. "I been thinking about it, and I want us to make an oath that we're always going to be best friends. And I figure the best way to do that is to share blood. That way when Harvey Skinner tells me I don't have any right to butt in when he's giving you a hard time, I will, too, have."

Lucy looked at the knife and shivered. It wouldn't do to let anyone, even Walter, know she was afraid. But she was. Oh, yes, she was. "You mean cut each other? Like in the movies?" She dragged her head slowly from one side to the other and held the kitten closer. "I don't think so. Mama would be real mad if I got blood on my clean dress."

"Come on, Lucy." He opened the knife and held the blade against his finger. "It would only be a little bitty cut, it's not like we're going to cut open our arms or anything—"

"Hush!" Lucy twisted away from him and the sight of the knife. Something scarier than that was getting ready to happen. "Someone's coming."

"We've got to get out of here."

Lucy heard the scrape of the padlock. "It's too late," she said, dropping to her knees in the hay and scooting back from the edge. "Quick. Get back here, out of sight."

It wasn't her papa's car. Instead of the big black Buick, a new but unbelievably muddy pickup truck that she recognized as belonging to Tom Jackson backed into the garage. Three men, her papa, Mr. Jackson, and someone she didn't know, got out of the truck and pulled the garage doors shut, sliding a board through the braces to keep them shut, and walked to the back of the truck.

Quickly Papa pulled the baskets off whatever was wrapped up in a big piece of canvas and tugged the canvas away.

Silence. Utter silence.

And they were too far back from the edge to see what kept her papa and Mr. Jackson and that other man so quiet. She and Walter shared a questioning look. She put the kitten to one side and quietly, stealthily she and her best friend slithered to the edge of the loft to look down.

Oohh.

Lucy pressed her lips together and prayed she hadn't let that moan escape.

A man lay in the back of the truck, all crumpled, surrounded by what looked like a whole lot of Papa's treasures, and covered in that metal that Papa always threw away when Mr. Jackson brought some to him. But this was different. It wasn't all green and mangled and stuck together. It glowed, and there were designs on it, strange drawings of the big birds she had seen in some of the shells Papa had sometimes had out on his desk, and cats, big cats like she had never seen before. And it covered him from the top of his head right down to his feet.

Then Papa reached into the truck and picked up something and moved something else, and she saw that the man wasn't a man—well, wasn't still—

She felt that funny sound trying to get out of her again when she saw that beneath the copper he was just bones. White bones. Bones that seemed to her to gleam with as much life as the copper. But not to her papa she guessed, because he tossed what looked like an arm bone to one side while he looked at the metal and then snatched up a—a what?—a statue and turned it from side to side.

"Didn't I tell you I did good?" Mr. Jackson asked. He reached into the back of the truck, too, and raked up a double handful of those round shell things Papa got so much money for when he sold them, put them down and lifted up two big shells—really big shells—that looked like dippers or gourds or pots, and turned them over and spilled out the beads Papa called pearls.

Papa put the statue down. He was trying to look like he wasn't impressed, but Lucy knew better. She'd seen him look like that sometimes when Grandpa would be talking about how much coal they were taking out of the mines on the land he had bought next to his allotment.

"It will take some time to move all this," Papa said. "If I even can. I know where it came from, but some folks might question it, except for the regular stuff, since I doubt anybody's seen anything quite like—

"What about the other one? The one you couldn't get. Did he have these copper plates all over him, too?"

"Nah," Mr. Jackson told him. "Just that big feather cape I told you about. And piles of stuff like these beads and shells and pipes. But it was broken. All broken. I ain't never seen so much unbroken stuff at one time before."

"Neither has anybody else," Papa told him.

"And they just let you walk out of there with it?" Now her Papa had his disgusted tone of voice, the one he used when he told her how bad her teacher said her reading was. That one. Had Mr. Jackson done something wrong, too? Was that why Papa was trying to make him feel bad?

"Hell, no, they didn't just let me walk out of there. I told you how we got it. And you were there, so don't think you're going to be able to weasel out of being part of it. If someone else just happens to figure out what I've done, I figure they'll be able to figure out who I did it with."

"I'm not trying to weasel out, Jackson. I'm just trying to be fair about what it's worth, and I'm afraid we won't know that until I manage to move it."

"Until you—Oh, no," Mr. Jackson said. "I'm not leaving this with you, so you can just forget all about trying that. You take it, all of it, now, and pay me for it like we talked about."

"It's Thanksgiving Day. The banks are closed. Where do you expect me to get any kind of serious money?"

Mr. Jackson smiled, but it was not a smile Lucy would like to see aimed at her. "I expect you to get it from that safe in your office. The place where you keep the money you don't want the taxman or your wife to know about. And I think I'll just go along with you to make sure you don't try to send anybody around to pay a surprise visit on me or my boy."

Papa had a safe in his office? With money in it? Was that where it all was? She'd heard her grandpa ask her mother once what happened to all of Papa's money so that he never had any extra to spend on his family. Nobody knew. But Mr. Jackson did. How?

Unless it was just a guess, and a wrong one at that.

She hoped her papa would tell him he didn't have a safe and that he wasn't going to buy the dead man in the truck. She hoped her papa hadn't already done something real wrong, like helping to steal the dead man in the first place.

Her papa stood up real tall. He looked at Mr. Jackson first and then at the dead man in the truck for a long time. Finally he nodded his head, just once. "Come on then," he said.

The third man, the one Mr. Jackson had called his boy, stayed in the garage with the truck, keeping her and Walter trapped in the loft. Walter looked at her while the man locked the doors back, and she could see the worry and questions in his face.

She shook her head, wanting to tell him not to worry, that they'd get out just as soon as Papa finished his business. She wanted to tell him to be quiet because she knew her papa would be real mad if he caught them watching what he was doing today. It was wrong. Real wrong. And nothing anybody could say to her would convince her it wasn't. But it was a big secret that she knew they all had to keep or something real bad would happen to all of them.

She felt the soft brush of fur against her cheek and reached out to catch the kitten before it fell off the edge of the loft. A little hay slithered down, dropping into the back of the truck. Mr. Jackson's son didn't see it though. He was staring at the door. Until he turned and went back to the side of the truck and looked in at the dead man.

He had his papa's nasty smile. Lucy saw that as he stuck his hand into the pile of treasures and pulled out a small carved piece and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

The growl seemed to come from everywhere.

She felt Walter jerk to attention at her side and clutch her hand. But he didn't say anything. Maybe he couldn't. She sure didn't think she could.

What was it? And where was it?

Mr. Jackson's son looked around, nervous like, then shrugged and, trying to act like he wasn't as scared as she was by the sound that shouldn't have been there, reached back into the truck for another piece and stuck it in his pocket, too. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe he didn't hear it. Maybe he just felt them watching him as he stole that stuff from the dead man.

It was inside the garage. Downstairs, under the part the loft covered. And it was not mad, not yet, but getting there. The kitten Lucy clutched in her hand heard it, too, and its little ears flattened back and the fur rose up on its neck. Walter's hand tightened on hers.

Mr. Jackson's son grabbed a third piece of the treasure and eased his way to the doors, looking around a little, even up toward the loft before he scooted outside and slammed the doors shut behind him. Lucy heard the bar go across outside just as the cat—it had to be a cat, a big cat, maybe more than one—downstairs growled again. Over the pounding of her heart, and Walter's because she could hear that too, she heard the sound of restless pacing and then—silence.

The kitten relaxed in her grasp and began purring. Walter released her hand, slowly, and pulled himself closer to the edge so he could hang his head over and look back into the part of the garage beneath them.

He jerked back with a nervous laugh and scrambled to his knees. "There's nothing down there."

"What do you mean there's nothing down there?" Lucy put the kitten down, crawled forward, and peered over the edge and into the corners. "I heard it. You heard it. Even the kitten heard it."

But there was nothing there. Only a pile of tires and tools in the corner and a bunch of old harness and tack hanging on the wall. And the man, the dead man, gleaming and glowing with the warmth of copper, jumbled and hurting and all alone in the truck.

"We've got to get out of here," Walter whispered. "While we can."

She didn't seem able to move.

"Come on, Lucy!" He tugged at the collar of her coat, pulling her back from the edge. "They'll be back after a while, and maybe that thing will be, too."

He pulled her to her feet and half pushed, half carried her to the ladder. "Hurry!"

"Wait!" No matter how much she wanted to run, she paused long enough to put the kitten back, safe with its mama.

She scrambled down the ladder, not believing until she looked around that the cat or whatever it had been was really gone. Walter scrambled after her and took her arm, tugging her toward the window and the loose boards at the back of the garage. But she couldn't go. Not yet. Digging her feet into the dirt of the floor, she stopped. Walter turned to see why.

She couldn't leave him. Not that way. There wasn't much she could do about him being all jumbled up like that, but she climbed up on the sideboard and reached in and put his arm back with the rest of him, only shivering a little when she touched the bare bone. When Walter saw what she was doing, he took a deep breath but climbed up to help her.

She had to touch the metal. Just like she'd had to touch it all those other times when Mr. Jackson brought some. This was different from all those other times. This was warm. Even though it couldn't be. Even though everything else in the garage was cold. Slowly she traced her fingers over one design—a cat, pacing, mouth open in an eternal growl.

She heard voices outside the door, and Walter tugged on her arm. She nodded. But before she left, she took the edge of the canvas and tossed it over the dead man. It only partly covered him, but when she reached for the other end of it, to toss it, too, Walter already had the corner in his hand. He looked at her, not smiling, then climbed into the back of the truck and finished the job of covering the corpse.

Maybe she would trade some blood with him, after all, Lucy thought. Anyone who knew her as well as he did, who knew without her saying anything that she couldn't go off and leave the dead man like so much trash, had to be worth a little pain, a little blood. But she had a feeling that what she and Walter had shared this day in the garage was worth a lot more than any oath would have been before—

Before what, she didn't get a chance to explore. The voices outside the garage were getting closer. Walter jumped from the back of the truck and held his hand out to her. She smiled, quick like, because there wasn't time for much else, and jumped down, too. Then they slipped out beneath the loose boards, hearing what Lucy thought sounded like the low warning growl of the kitten's mama, only bigger, coming once more from inside the garage. Because they couldn't leave the boards dangling open to tattle on their having been there, they slid them into position and ran together for their secret place in the hedge, just as the garage doors banged open.

Lucy whirled around. "Papa," she whispered. "Will it hurt Papa?"

Walter dragged her down into the undergrowth beneath the hedge. "Sshh. Listen."

But there was nothing to hear. Nothing but the muted sound of voices within the garage. Then she saw Mr. Jackson's son walk to the shed beside the henhouse and come back dragging two big barrels, returning again to the shed for packing crates.

"What are they doing?" Walter asked.

Lucy shook her head. Were they putting him in a barrel? Was that what—

Her papa came out of the garage and marched up to the back porch. "Ellie!" he called out. "Ellie, get out here now!"

Mama came out onto the porch, wearing her apron.

"I want you to go to the post office," Papa told her. "And then I want you to run over to McPherson's and pick up that book I lent him last week."

"Now? We have company coming in less than an hour. I have dinner on the stove."

"Marian will watch it," Papa said. "Take her Ford and go. And take Lucy with you."

Mama didn't like it when Papa talked to her like that. Now she stood up straight. "Lucy isn't here right now. And Marian can run your errands."

"Marian can't leave the baby. Just go. For once don't give me grief in front of my associates. Just go and get the mail and get the book so I can lend it to Jackson here."

She might not like it when he ordered her, but she always did what he said. Frowning, she took off her apron and stepped back into the kitchen, saying something, probably to Aunt Marian, before she went and got into Aunt Marian's spotless new Ford and left.

Aunt Marian came out of the house and said something to Papa that Lucy couldn't hear. Papa hugged her and whispered something to her. Aunt Marian laughed, and then Mr. Jackson and his son drove away in their dirty, empty truck, and Papa and Aunt Marian began hauling barrels and crates into the house.

"What do you suppose he told her?" Walter asked in a whisper.

"I don't know," Lucy said. "She never laughs. Never. Walter? Did they put him in those barrels? Did they break him up even more and stuff him in those boxes?"

"I don't know. Wait here while I go see."

"No—"

But it was too late to warn him to be careful. Walter crouched and ran for the back of the garage and pushed aside one of the boards to peek inside. He was there for a long time, quiet, and Lucy saw him kind of slump there until he turned and then not even trying to hide came back to the hedge and sat down heavily beside her.

"Well?" she asked when he just sat there saying nothing.

"Yep. That's what they did all right," he said, and his voice sounded strange. "Every bit of him and all the stuff that was with him is—is gone, out of sight, probably in the crates. Except for those long poles that were in the truck. Those are stacked up against the wall."

"But he's too big to fit in just one of them, unless . . . unless . . ."

"Yeah," Walter said. "I know."

"It's not right," she whispered. "It's not right to do that to someone!"

"Lucy, he's dead. He's been dead a long time."

"I don't care. Papa's wrong. Mr. Jackson's wrong. We've got to do something."

"We're just kids," Walter said. "Your papa isn't going to give him back just because we say to, and even if he would, who would he give him back to? So what are we going to do about it?" Walter asked. "What can we do? What will whatever it was that made that noise let us do?"

"I don't know." For the moment, Lucy admitted defeat. For a moment she believed all the things her teacher and her papa said about her being dumb or stupid. But she wasn't. She just couldn't read too good. Lots of folks couldn't read. That didn't mean she couldn't think. "I don't know," she repeated. "But there's got to be something."

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