The three of us downed only our fair shares of the root beer and peach pie she’d set in the tin bucket that was affixed to the tree. We took polite turns reading Nancy Drew’s The Sign of the Twisted Candles. They weren’t sore losers when I told them, “Colonel Mustard killed Miss Scarlett in the library with the candlestick.” And when I reminded them that we were supposed to write down what we wanted to do that summer, there was no arguing about who’d be the scribe. Viv had begun dotting every “i” with a heart, Frankie was overly committed to her slant, but I planned to be a writer when I grew up and believed that good penmanship was important and had the Palmer medals to prove it.
Even though I very much liked the idea of us honoring my mother’s memory, I didn’t count on that happening in the way Aunt Jane May wanted it to. I was an inordinately hopeful child, some might say pathetically so, but expecting the other “Tree Musketeers”—we began calling ourselves that after we began spending our summers in the boughs of the backyard oak—to remain somber and respectful for an entire evening? That was a fool’s mission. If I could just keep the peace, I thought, I could congratulate myself on a job well done, and with that end in mind, I smoothed a piece of paper down on the hideout floor, picked up my favorite no. 2, and suggested a summer adventure I was sure all three of us would have no problem agreeing on.
“Number one,” I announced, “visit Broadhurst and try to sneak into the Chamber of Horrors.” We’d ridden our bikes to the mental institution on the edge of town the previous summer and wouldn’t dream of giving it up. “I heard they might be bringin’ Wally Hopper in.” I looked up at Viv swaying her narrow hips to “Cathy’s Clown” coming out of our aquamarine transistor radio. “You know anything about that?”
Viv cupped her ear and yelled, “What?”
I turned the radio down, but she bent over and cranked it back up.
“The kid killer,” I shouted. “Did you hear anything about him getting moved to Broadhurst?”
Her mother, Fiona Cleary, owned the only beauty parlor in town and the gals talked so loudly under those dryers that Viv heard all the latest rumors floating around, or acted like she did. It was sometimes hard to tell Viv’s fact from her fiction, but in the looks department she was exactly as advertised. She reminded me of a matchstick, lean like that, with dark, red hair that her mother kept in a pixie cut, which was in keeping with her personality. She couldn’t sit still for long, slept with her green eyes half open, had the temperament of a leprechaun whose gold had been stolen, and lied effortlessly, convincingly, and with pleasure. She was also a master at coming up with risky plans, and whenever the three of us found ourselves in hot water, she was our mouthpiece.
Viv stuck her fists on her hips and asked me, “Where’d ya hear that about Hopper?”
Realizing my mistake too late, I mumbled, “After Mass yesterday,” and tried to change the subject. “I really like that blouse you’ve got on. It brings out the color of your—”
“Who was spreadin’ that rumor?” Viv said. “Which gal?”
I didn’t want to tell her, but along with keeping our promises and other sacred oaths, complete and timely honesty with one another was one of the Tree Musketeers’ most important rules, so there was no getting out of admitting that I’d heard that juicy tidbit come out of the mouth of the gal Viv saw as her gossip rival. “Evelyn Mulrooney said it.”
“Oh, for crissakes, you dumb chump.” Viv hawked a loogie through one of the windows. “How many times do I gotta tell ya that even if that so-and-so acts like she knows everything that’s goin’ on in this town, she doesn’t know shit from Shinola!”
I glanced behind me to see if Frankie would come to my defense, but she was concentrating on creating one of those paper fortune tellers and in her own little world, in more ways than one.
Unlike Viv and me, Frankie wasn’t born in Summit and she wasn’t all white. Her Caucasian father was never spoken about, but whoever he was, he was one smart cookie and she took after him. She and her mother, Dellatoria “Dell” Martin, had moved to town from Milwaukee nine years ago after Dell had been hired by my other next-door neighbor, Salvatore Maniachi, to keep house and help care for his crippled twin sister, Sophia. Of course, the Maniachis knew that Dell and Frankie were a package deal, and they welcomed the lovely three-year-old into their home and their hearts. But not everybody in Summit would be as generous. A “colored” maid was one thing, but a “mulatto” child living on our side of the tracks? That was verboten back then. So when the town busybodies got around to asking who the little girl with the year-round tan, beige eyes, and wavy dark hair belonged to, Salvatore Maniachi told them Frankie was an orphaned relative. I wasn’t so sure the small but dedicated group of Germans in town who believed the whiter someone’s skin was the better fell for that lie, but Frankie was such a close match to the Maniachis’ Mediterranean coloring that everyone else in town seemed to. Far as we knew, anyway, nobody except those who’d take that secret to the grave knew for sure that the beauty and brains of our threesome was passing herself off as a “bambina,” and if anyone ever did find out—there’d be hell to pay.
I nudged Frankie’s bare foot with mine. “Did Jimbo say anything to you about Hopper?”
The same way Viv stayed on top of gossip at her mother’s beauty parlor and I learned about the healing arts from my aunt and my father, Dell’s cousin, Jimbo, who’d moved to town the same time she and Frankie had, would give us behind-the-scene information about the goings-on at the mental hospital. Mostly Jimbo, who was an orderly up there, shared stories about the criminally insane patients who were confined at Broadhurst because we begged him to and he was a pushover where we were concerned. Like the killer known as the “Blackjack Scalper,” who’d stabbed a couple of gals in Kenosha twenty-one times and fashioned wigs out of the hair he’d cut off by the roots. But he told us gory details about other Wisconsin killers, too. Like Ed Gein, the “Butcher of Plainfield,” who’d murdered all those poor gals near our state capitol, upholstered his furniture with their skin, and fashioned bed posts out of their skulls. And soon after Wally Hopper got charged for ending the lives of the young Gimble sisters in Milwaukee, Jimbo had us on the edge of our seats yet again.
“After Hopper got caught, he told the police that he’d murdered those little girls, but it wasn’t his fault,” Jimbo told us on the sagging porch of his Mud Town house, the spot where he did his best telling after the sun went down. “He said that someone made him do it.”
In the tradition of all world-class storytellers—I learned my trade at the feet of a master—Jimbo knew how to build tension. He paused so long that I had to ask, “Who’d Hopper say made him do it?”
He took the last swallow of his long-neck beer and rolled the brown bottle across his brown forehead. “That man believes Michael the Archangel commanded him to strangle those little sisters.”
Now, Jimbo’s stories could usually raise the hair on the back of our little necks, but that night the girls and I rode our bikes back over the railroad tracks like we were getting chased by the minions of hell and heaven. We slept in a puppy pile for the next week, telling one another whenever the hideout creaked in the wind or a coon knocked down a garbage can, “Quit bein’ such a titty baby. Nobody’s gonna murder us and blame it on a saint. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen in Summit, right?”