Property Condemned

-2-

They pedaled through dappled sunlight, sometimes four abreast, sometimes single file when the trail dwindled down to a crooked deer path. Crow knew the way to the Croft place and he was always out front, though he liked it best when Val Guthrie rode beside him. As they bumped over hard-packed dirt and whispered through uncut summer grass, Crow cut frequent, covert looks at Val.

Val was amazing. Beautiful. She rode straight and alert on her pink Huffy, pumping the pedals with her purple sneakers. Hair as glossy black as crow feathers, tied in a bouncing ponytail. Dark blue eyes and a serious mouth. Crow made it his life’s work to coax a smile out of her at least once a day. It was hard work, but worth it.

The deer path spilled out onto an old forestry service road that allowed them once more to fan out into a line. Val caught up and fell in beside Crow on the left, and almost at once Terry and Stick raced each other to be first on the right. Terry and Stick were always racing, always daring each other, always trying to prove who was best, fastest, smartest, strongest. Terry always won the strongest part.

“The Four Horsemen ride!” bellowed Stick, his voice breaking so loudly that they all cracked up. Stick didn’t mind his voice cracking. There was a fifty-cent bet that he’d have his grown-up voice before Terry. Crow privately agreed. Despite his size, Terry had a high voice that always sounded like his nose was full of snot.

Up ahead, the road forked, splitting off toward the ranger station on the right and a weedy path on the left. On the left-hand side, a sign leaned drunkenly toward them.

That was all of it. The rest of the sign had been pinged off by bullet holes over the years. It was a thing to do. You shot the sign to the Croft place to show that you weren’t afraid. Crow tried to make sense of that, but there wasn’t any end to the string of logic.

He turned to Val with a grin. “Almost there.”

“Oooo, spooky!” said Stick, lowering the bill of his Phillies ball-cap to cast his face in shadows.

Val nodded. No smile. No flash of panic. Only a nod. Crow wondered if Val was bored, interested, skeptical, or scared. With her, you couldn’t tell. She had enough Lenape blood to give her that stone face. Her mom was like that, too. Not her dad, though. Mr. Guthrie was always laughing, and Crow suspected that he, too, had a lifelong mission that involved putting smiles on the faces of the Guthrie women.

Crow said, “It won’t be too bad.”

Val shrugged. “It’s just a house.” She leaned a little heavier on the word “just” every time she said that, and she’d been doing that ever since Crow suggested they come out here. Just a house.

Crow fumbled for a comeback that would chip some of the ice off of those words, but, as he so often did, he failed.

It was Terry Wolfe who came to his aid. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Val, you keep saying that but I’ll bet you’ll chicken out before we even get onto the porch.”

Terry liked Val, too, but he spent a lot of time putting her down and making fun of whatever she said. Though, if any of that actually hurt Val, Crow couldn’t see it. Val was like that. She didn’t show a thing. Even when that jerk Vic Wingate pushed her and knocked her down in the schoolyard last April, Val hadn’t yelled, hadn’t cried. All she did was get up, walk over to Vic and wipe the blood from her scraped palms on his shirt. Then, as Vic started calling her words that Crow had only heard his dad ever use when he was really hammered, Val turned and walked away like it was a normal spring day.

So Terry’s sarcasm didn’t make a dent.

Terry and Stick immediately launched into the Addams Family theme song loud enough to scare the birds from the trees.

A startled doe dashed in blind panic across their path and Stick tracked it with his index finger and dropped his thumb like a hammer.

“Pow!”

Val gave him a withering look, but she didn’t say anything.

They rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, one, two, three, four. Dust plumes rose behind them like ghosts and drifted away on a breeze as if fleeing from this place. The rest of the song dwindled to dust on their tongues.

It stood there.

The Croft house.