Edenville Owls

Chapter 20

I was alone, standing out of the light, near some bushes, in front of Miss Delaney’s house when the man came again. He parked his car and got out and walked up to the door and rang the bell. In a minute Miss Delaney let him in and the door closed behind them and everything was quiet.

I felt helpless, like a little kid.

Figure it out. You’re smart. Figure it out.

I walked slowly around the house. Maybe there was a way to get in. If I got in, I could hide and maybe listen to them next time the man came to talk with Miss Delaney. Miss Delaney lived upstairs. Old Lady Coughlin lived downstairs. She had some kind of little furry black and white dog with a sharp nose and thin legs. As I walked around the house, the dog started yapping and Old Lady Coughlin came to the back door and looked out. I stopped stock-still in the shadow of some bushes and she didn’t see me, and after a minute she went away. I kept moving around the house, staying in the shadows and behind bushes. In back of the house there were two porches, one above the other, one on the first floor and one on the second. Above the second-floor porch was a window. Probably to the attic.

Back out front, I looked at the man’s car and had a thought. No one was on the street. I walked toward the car and looked at the house. I didn’t see anyone in the windows. I tried the car door on the passenger side. It was open. Nobody locked up much in Edenville. I opened the door, opened the glove compartment, and took a peek. The car registration was in a small leather wallet in the glove compartment. I took it and closed the glove compartment, closed the door, and ran like hell.

Under a light on the wharf, I opened the registration. His name was Oswald Tupper, and his address was 132 County Road in Searsville, which was the next town north of Edenville. I always carried a pencil stub and a little notebook in case I saw something I needed to write down. I took them out, wrote down the name and address, put them back in my shirt pocket, and threw the wallet with the registration into the water. It floated for a while, bumping with the little waves against the foot of the wharf, and then, as the water soaked in, it sank.

I walked up to the bandstand and sat in the dark with my hands in my pockets and my collar up. Searsville was just up County Road a few miles. I could ride my bike there. Across the harbor I could see the lights from Edenville Neck. I was too far to see anything except the lights. But I liked them. I liked looking at the lights of ordinary people, while I was alone, mysterious, outside, in the night.

There was a big old empty house on Pearl Street, with the windows all boarded up. Last summer the Owls decided it would be a perfect spot for a clubhouse. So I climbed up a telephone pole and jumped to a small second-floor roof, and crawled in an open third-floor window. I had to hang from a rafter and drop into the darkness to get in. Afterward it scared me to think about it. What if they had ripped out all the floors? I would have fallen three stories. But they hadn’t, and I landed on a solid floor. The other Owls were impressed.

I went to the first floor and opened the back door from the inside and everyone came in and we hung around in there for a while. But pretty soon we decided it was kind of boring in there and we left and never went back. We really just liked breaking in, I guess.

What was I doing? I was fourteen years old, and I was sneaking around in the night spying on a couple of adults, even though Miss Delaney had made me promise not to. I must have been reading Dime Detective too much. I looked around the dark, empty bandstand. It was a school night. Joanie would be home. She wouldn’t be coming down here in the dark. What did I think I was going to do? I was going to save Miss Delaney. And how did I think I was going to do it? I didn’t know yet. But I knew I was going to do something.

I’d have to figure it out.