After Frankie shook her head to my question about whether Jimbo had shared any extra information about Hopper getting moved to Broadhurst, Viv couldn’t leave well enough alone. “You sure he didn’t tell you something about that kid killer?” she taunted Frankie. “You sure you’re not holdin’ something back?”
I tried to cover up the edginess in her voice by chirping at Frankie, “Your turn! What do you wanna do this summer?”
Frankie wouldn’t holler over the radio like I’d been. Raising her voice wasn’t her style, unless Viv pushed her too far. But when she tilted her head toward the glossy pictures of the movie monsters taped on the wall, I knew what she meant, and I said, “Number two—see scary movies.”
“Monsters are fine,” Viv said, like she was above that sort of thing now. “But I need as many pointers as I can get if we’re gonna find out who Aunt Jane May is trotting hotly with. Write down spying on her and seein’ more romance movies, Biz.”
Soon after Viv’s breasts began to bud (a recent development) and she’d grown a few red hairs down there, she went full-out boy crazy. She dragged Frankie and me to a couple of those mushy movies and had begun to see love everywhere. She was sure Aunt Jane May was sneaking out of the house at night to meet a “tall, dark, and handsome mystery man” and she’d been bugging Frankie and me to follow her for weeks. Of course, we’d told her, “No dice,” and tried numerous times to explain that even if she was right and Aunt Jane May did have a suitor, we couldn’t risk getting caught spying on her, but would Viv listen? No, she would not. Once that girl latched onto something, it was like trying to remove lint from a black velvet dress.
While I’ll admit to being hopeful, I wasn’t stupid. I knew I’d reached a fork in the road and that neither path would deliver me to my intended destination. If I didn’t write down on the list Spy on Aunt Jane May and See romance movies, Viv would throw a fit. If I did write her requests down, Frankie would get hot around the collar because romance of any kind, but especially watching smooching on the big screen, made her want to vomit into her Cracker Jack box, as Viv well knew.
When the two of them butted heads like this, I’d learned over the years that nothing I’d say would convince them to back down, so I did the only other thing I could think of to keep things on an even keel. I faked a yawn, lowered the train lantern, and told them, “Holy cow, I’m beat, aren’t you? Let’s figure out the rest of the list in the morning. I made up a story in honor of tonight. You ready?”
One of the few things they could agree on was how much they loved falling asleep to one of my stories, so when all I heard was the bullfrogs croaking in the sliver of Grand Creek that ran behind the hideout, the Harris’s dog barking two streets over, and the late train rumbling down the tracks, I thought the excitement of the day had finally gotten to them and they’d drifted off.
Relieved and grateful that we’d made it through the sleepover without any major upheaval, I rolled over and was about to do what Aunt Jane May had asked of me, when Frankie’s voice came out of the darkness with a demand.
“Get up, Biz,” she said. “I want to add something to the list.”
And all I wanted to do was commemorate my mother by breathing in the lingering scent of the pink and white peonies she’d planted along the backyard fence to welcome me into the world and think about how my father’s saw and pounding hammer must’ve covered up the sound of his tears when he built the hideout at her behest.
But ignoring Frankie wasn’t an option. She’d toe me in the back until she reached my spine if I didn’t slide the paper out from under my pillow and say, “Make it quick.”
Like the howl of a werewolf, the high-pitched buzz of a flying saucer, or the sound of beating bat wings warned us of impending doom in the third row at the Rivoli every Saturday, when I looked up and saw her lovely mouth twisted into a malicious grin that night, I knew Frankie was about to do something I really wished she wouldn’t, and how right I was.
“Put down that I dare Viv to talk to Audrey Cavanaugh,” she said.
It takes your brain a few seconds to register an injury and that’s about how long it took before Viv gasped like it was her last, and I said, “Aww, Frankie. What’d you have to go and do that for?”
Summit prided itself on what most of the Germans in town called Gemutlichkeit and the rest of us called friendliness, but when Audrey Cavanaugh moved into the old Jasper house down the block from us, she wouldn’t play along. She didn’t show up at Mass or the Harvest Festival or the lighting of the Christmas tree in the town square, nor did she RSVP any of the invites to the coffee klatches the Ladies Auxiliary held around town every afternoon.
Predictably, our new neighbor giving the town the cold shoulder set the gals gossiping, but just about nothing could get children’s tongues wagging faster than a mysterious stranger showing up a few days before Halloween. Quicker than you could say, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” word got out among us that Audrey Cavanaugh was a witch, so you better watch out. If you got caught in her talons, she’d chop you into little pieces and toss you into the stew she needed to partake of once a month to sustain her supernatural powers, the scope of which varied depending upon the descriptive powers of the kid doing the telling.
Name-calling, shoving, and Indian burns were par for the course, but daring Viv to talk to the Summit Witch? It was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen Frankie do. And the most confusing.
Because even though she kept her feelings well hidden, I knew that she loved Viv more than she did me. I’d catch her looking at her sometimes in a different kind of way. And by the light of the moon, I’d seen her press her cheek against sleeping Viv and breathe in her exhales and tenderly stroke her hair. And I was pretty sure she purposely agitated Viv into arm wrestling just so she could hold her hand.
“Have you lost your mind?” I asked Frankie, because she knew darn well that the mere mention of a witch, a kid lugging around a broomstick on Beggar’s Night, or even Aunt Jane May dabbing witch hazel on her skeeter bites scared Viv down to the bone, and I mean that quite literally. Because it wasn’t the owner of a gingerbread house in the Black Forest or a hag offering a poisoned apple to a beauty that had far surpassed her own that’d traumatized her. It was her own flesh and blood.
Somewhere along the road to dotage, her grandmother, Esmeralda, had gotten it into her superstitious, zealous head that Viv was possessed by the evil spirit of one of their ancestors— a gal by the name of Bridget who’d been found guilty of practicing witchcraft in County Tipperary in the 1800s and was subsequently burned alive in the town square. Granny Cleary had recently taken to keeping a bottle of holy water strapped around her waist and she’d jump out at her granddaughter and douse her in it every chance she got. And whenever Viv stepped out of line—exactly as often as you’d think a kid like her would— anyone within a block of the Cleary house could hear that pipe-smoking shrew yelling at the top of what was left of her wee lungs, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, remove your evil curse from this child! Be gone with you, witch! Be gone!”
When Frankie didn’t respond to my scolding, I tried to appeal to her softer side. “Look at her.” I pointed across the hideout at Viv, whose normally pale face had gone whiter than her Holy Communion dress. “Please take the dare back.”