“You could stick it in a condom and put it up your, you know, junk,” Desiree said. “I saw that on television.”
“I’ve got a much better plan. I’m going to do what real people do. But maybe it’s not such a bad idea, having him digging up the place. I mean, I didn’t bury it. He’s not going to find it by getting down in the dirt and knocking the trailer off the blocks. If he causes another plumbing problem, maybe my mother will kick him out.”
“I don’t think so,” Desiree said.
“I don’t think so, either,” Haydee said. “Do you ever think about it? What it would be like to be, you know, somebody else? Maybe somebody like Dr. London.”
“Nobody is like Dr. London,” Desiree said. “She’s weird.”
“Yeah,” Haydee said. “I know.”
“She’s even weird for a professor.”
“I know,” Haydee said again.
“And I was just saying, about the digging. It doesn’t have to have been Mike looking for your stuff. I mean, you know, the place is haunted, and that kind of thing. Maybe it’s the ghost of that guy that got killed there—”
“Ghosts don’t dig holes in the ground,” Haydee said, “and besides, nobody knows if he was killed there or anywhere. They don’t even know that he’s dead. And that was a long time ago. The police have already dug the hell out of everything. You’d have to be an idiot to go digging around our place now.”
“Yeah,” Desiree said.
Haydee saw a break in the traffic just a little way up the road. She turned her head the other way and saw a break there, too. There were no cars coming down the long curving entryway, either. If they got the light, they’d be able to get across. She grabbed Desiree by the arm and said, “Get ready.”
It was just then, at the very last second, that Haydee looked up at the billboard right on the other side of Mattatuck Avenue and thought she saw something, something moving up there, swaying back and forth in the nonexistent wind.
Then the light changed and the traffic stopped and they ran. They ran with their backpacks banging against their backs. They ran as fast as they could.
You had to cross Mattatuck Avenue when you had a chance to, or you didn’t cross at all.
2
For Kenny Morton, the idea of spending his time writing English papers at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College was ridiculous, and he would never have agreed to it if he didn’t think his mother was about to have a nervous breakdown.
“She just wants us all to be normal,” Kenny’s sister, Suzanne, said, when their parents were first pushing Kenny to go to school. “She just wants us all to be the way we would have been if Chester hadn’t disappeared.”
“Even if Chester hadn’t disappeared,” Kenny said, “I wouldn’t be going to Mattatuck–Harvey and studying English. What am I doing this for? Can you tell me that? Why am I bothering? It’s not like I’m not making a living.”
“And there’s that, too,” Suzanne had said. “Why do you do that? Don’t you know how much it hurts them that you’re not going to go into the business? And why wouldn’t you go into the business?”
The business was Morton Rubbish Removal, and Kenny had nothing against it except the obvious. His father wasn’t about to give him any serious responsibility when he was only eighteen, and he wasn’t going to give it to him now, when he was twenty-two. That was not how Kenny’s father did things.
“She wanted all of us to get an education,” Suzanne had said.
And now, four years later, with the light beginning to fade a little outside the living room windows, Kenny was standing in the hall with a stack of books and a state of mind so foul, he was ready to kick something.
The books were something called Current Issues and Enduring Questions and The Everyday Writer. Kenny didn’t think he needed to be told how to write stuff. He wrote a perfectly good business letter, and he was even better at working out a cost benefit ratio, and nobody had had to teach him either in school. He had a deal set up in Crayfield for Saturday that was going to net him over ten thousand dollars if he handled it right. He had an appointment for Wednesday that meant taking a vintage Model T out on Route 7 just to show some guy it could run. He had work to do, and the work paid him. He did not need to waste his time writing a two-and-a-half-page paper comparing and contrasting high school and college.
Mark was in the kitchen with their father and mother. There had been a lot of low murmuring all day. Kenny thought if he had to do this crap, he might as well get on with it and do it.