Prologue
The girls didn’t blame me at the time and all these years later they still don’t, but I’ve never quite forgiven myself for instigating what happened during the summer the three of us were eleven. And I never forget.
Of course, not everyone in town has as many years under their belts as I do. Whenever the summer of ’60 comes up in conversation, someone not old enough to know better is bound to pipe in, “Time to let bygones be bygones. Water under the bridge. What’s done is done.” But there’s going to come a time when they, too, will understand that the border between now and then is much more like a cobweb than a brick wall and when the past comes to haunt it doesn’t ask our permission to do so.
Memory is a shallow grave and it doesn’t take much to resurrect the feel of his hands squeezing the life out of me, the sound of Frankie’s leg snapping in two, and Viv’s scream. A warm breeze ruffling oak boughs on a moonless night or the late train rumbling down the tracks or a dog barking two streets over can be all it takes to bring back the long-ago summer evil paid a visit to our small town and took our young lives as we knew them as a souvenir.
Chapter One
God only knows why my best friends and I loved getting the hell scared of out of us every Saturday afternoon at the Rivoli Theatre or the Starlight Drive-In after the sun went down, but we spent most of our childhood covered in goose bumps and jumping halfway out of our skins.
The radiated ants from Them! sounded an awful lot like cicadas. And after we saw The Fly, the three of us strained to hear one calling, “Help me … please, help me.” The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose main character was a doctor—like my father—who discovered his neighbors were being systematically replaced by soulless alien duplicates grown in pods scattered around his small town—like ours—had the girls and I spying into our neighbors’ windows for weeks to ascertain whether any of them had been similarly afflicted. But it was The Tingler that almost did us in. Unbeknownst to us, the owner of the theatre had fastened a vibrating device called the Percepto! beneath the seats, and when he activated it at just the right time, it felt like that alien parasite had crawled off the silver screen and into our little spines and we ran out of the emergency door screaming and swatting at each other’s backs.
But while every day back then might’ve felt like an anything-can-happen day, to the best of my recollection, which, if I do so say myself, remains remarkably sharp for a gal on the dusky side of her sixties, our lives were pretty ho-hum. Except for the arrival of a reclusive widow who most of the kids in town believed to be a practitioner of the dark arts, juvenile delinquents who admired one another’s muscles in Founder’s Woods, and the occasional escapee of Broadhurst Mental Institution, nothing much out of the ordinary occurred in Summit, Wisconsin—a town deemed so unremarkable at the time that a popular travel brochure left the “Points of Interest” section blank—until the record-breaking heat showed up.
Box fans began flying out of Mike Hansen’s hardware store so fast he’d begun talking about retirement up North. Husbands returned home with five o’clock shadows to drink bottled beer that wouldn’t hold a chill while their wives prepared cold cuts instead of the usual meat and potatoes. For kids seeking relief from the heat, there was the creek and a community pool, backyard sprinklers, and ice cream at newly air-conditioned Whitcomb’s Drugstore, but only if you were lucky enough to nab one of the seats at the fountain counter before some other sweaty pint-size Lutheran or Catholic did.
Of course, I know now that heat wave was a harbinger of the horror to come, but we had no hint of it when that summer started up. Other than getting released from St. Thomas Aquinas School a week earlier than usual because the soaring temperature had made the nuns and the classrooms uninhabitable, the first day of our three months of freedom began the same way all the rest of them had.
Frances “Frankie” Maniachi, Vivian “Viv” Cleary, and I—Elizabeth “Biz” Buchanan—spent the morning playing four-square and jumping double Dutch over at Grand Park. When the church bells clanged twelve, the two of them waded into the creek to catch bloodsuckers and continue their bickering, and I rode home only semi-hoping that upon my return I wouldn’t find that one of them had drowned the other.
* * *
There were quicker ways back to Honeywell Street, but I took the long way that afternoon. I wanted to pass by the cemetery where my mother had been laid to rest.
I never got the chance to know her, but my father remained devoted to her. He never took off his wedding ring, and he kept a picture of her in the pocket watch that he checked often, as if he was lost in time and was using her face as a compass. With my tawny, straight hair, light blue eyes, and the slight gap between my front teeth, I was the spitting image of her, and a day didn’t go by that I wished I weren’t.
When Aunt Jane May found me crying into my pillow late one night, I’d broken down and confessed, “I bet every single time he looks at me he wishes I died instead.”
“Hogwash,” she’d said with a dismissive shake of her head.
“Then how come he barely talks to me?”
Her eyes grew shiny, but she scolded back the tears. She wasn’t against showing emotion, but she could be penurious with it. “Your father is the strong, silent type, is all. And if you repeat this I’ll deny sayin’ it, but I suspect he feels real bad about not being able to save Gus’s life and depriving you of a mother.” She slapped her thighs and got up off the side of my bed. “Ya want to know more—come to me. Now say your prayers and go to sleep.”
So she’s the one who’d told me that my parents met at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1947. Newly anointed Doctor of Medicine Lionel Dwight Buchanan and freshly minted teacher Augusta Elizabeth Mathews fell in love at first sight. Almost as if the two of them knew they’d live happily, but not ever after, they tied the knot just half a year later. And nine months to the day after they returned from their honeymoon, my father picked up his very pregnant wife’s older sister at the train station.
Jane May Mathews, a registered nurse by profession, had traveled from the family home in Louisiana to help care for the newlyweds’ bouncing bundle of joy for a few weeks, but when an infection claimed her younger sister’s life shortly after she gave birth to me, her visit turned out to be a permanent one. My mother’s funeral took place the same day I was baptized.
Aunt Jane May ruled our roost from that day on, and during the summer months when Frankie and Viv spent most of their time at our house, they fell under her jurisdiction as well. The kitchen was her command center and that’s where I found her after my ride back from Grand Park that afternoon. Like a sea captain christening a ship before sailing off on a grand adventure to an unknown land, baking peach pies was my aunt’s way of smashing a champagne bottle across the bow of summer, and I was expected to be her first mate.
“You’re late,” she said when I came through the squeaky, back screen door of the house. “Wash your hands.” After I did so and got situated on my kitchen stool, she launched into one of her lectures. “You girls are old enough now to keep in mind that the hideout isn’t just a place to cook up your wild schemes. It’s a memorial to your mother built with your father’s blood, sweat, and tears and it’s about time you treated it as such.” This had come out of the blue and when I didn’t respond quickly enough for her liking, she added, even more prickly, “At the very least, the first night you spend up the tree this summer should be treated like an auspicious occasion.”