Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER EIGHT

I woke up underneath the Kenfields’ bushes the next morn ing, kinda surprised I’d fallen asleep. My arms were covered in scratches and had bled a little so I licked my finger and cleaned them off and thought God would have done a better job if he had made blood taste like Three Musketeers bars. And then I remembered Rasmussen chasing me down the alley and my heart began beating like an Injun tom-tom right before they attacked the cowboys in all those western movies.

Mrs. Kenfield was up and about, hanging wash on her clothesline. Should I just roll out and say, “W hy, good morning, Mrs. Kenfield. Need any help?” No. She might ask me, “What the heck are you doing under my bushes?” And since I wasn’t a very good fibber, like Troo was, I would tell her about being chased by Rasmussen and then she would just shake her head at me and say in a voice that pained my heart, “Oh, Sally, not again.” Just because last year, trying to be charitable, I told her I thought that her husband was a spy because he sure did act like one, all secretive and stern, sitting out on the porch swing every night smoking, which I figured had something to do with waiting for a sneaky spy package to be dropped off. So I knew that if I told Mrs. Kenfield about getting chased, she would run right over to the hospital and tell Mother I wasn’t working on controlling my imagination. So I just laid there and said Hail Marys until she stuck her laundry basket under her arm and went inside the house.

Who was I supposed to tell about a guy named Rasmussen who liked to wave at you when you walked by his house and gave you this sweet smile that made him look like he’d lost something and was about to ask you if you’d help him find it? Who do you tell if that guy was also a cop? I was sure Rasmussen was a murderer. He just had that murderous look to him like all the bad guys do in the movies. Acting all nice and such but really not nice in their heart.

Should I tell Hall that Rasmussen had come after me? But I couldn’t remember when I’d seen Hall for about the last week. Should I tell the other cop that hung around the neighborhood, Officer Riordan? He was a swell guy, but Willie O’Hara told me that Rasmussen was Officer Riordan’s boss. No. I’d tell Troo. Being a Troo genius, she would know what to do.

I crawled out from under the bushes and walked to the front of the Kenfields’ house and looked down the block. Ambulance lights were flashing like crazy in front of the Latours’ and two men were wheeling somebody down the front steps. Mrs. Ruthie Latour was groaning and praying. Her husband, Bill, had his arm around her waist. A bunch of the Latour kids were just standing around watching like the rest of us. One of the littler ones was crying.

Troo was sitting on the sidewalk with Fast Susie, eating fritters that Nana musta made them for breakfast. Fast Susie tore off half of hers and gave it to me when I came up next to her out of breath.

“What’s happening?” I asked, stuffing the puffed dough into my mouth. Ohhhh… that was good. Still warm. “Who is that?”

“It’s Wendy,” Troo said. “Where you been anyway? We gotta get goin’. It’s Ethel day.”

“Last night I got…” I started to tell her what’d happened with Rasmussen, but then I stopped because my breath was taken away. The sheet that was covering Wendy was streaked with blood.

I liked Wendy Latour even if she was a Mongoloid. She was so sweet with her straight black hair and that goofy smile and her funny way of talking, like she’d been adopted by the Latours from another country, probably Mongolia.

The whole neighborhood was quiet, until with a loud metal sound the ambulance men slid Wendy in and got ready to take her away to St. Joe’s. I was about to ask those men if they had any news about Mother, but they peeled out and were already halfway down the block.

I pulled Troo up and we said bye to everyone and walked home and sat on our front steps. I was a little shaken up by the surprise of not only seeing an ambulance up close like that, but of seeing someone I knew inside it. I’d even forgotten about going to see Ethel over on Fifty-second Street.

“Do you know what I think?” I said.

“What?” Troo was laying back on the steps, looking up.

“I think it was Rasmussen who hurt Wendy.”

Troo didn’t say anything for a minute, but then pointed up to a cloud and said, “Look, Sally, it’s a horse,” and started laughing. She thought it was hilarious that I liked horses. I never told her it was because of Sky King and his Flying Crown Ranch.

“Knock it off, Troo,” I said. “This is serious. I think Rasmussen did something to Wendy and I think-”

Troo sat up and cut me off. “You gotta stop thinkin’ like that. Remember what Mother said about working on your imagination? Cops don’t do stuff like that. They have to swear on the Bible not to do bad things.”

“And it isn’t only Wendy,” I kept on. “Last summer, I saw Rasmussen with Junie Piaskowski at the Policemen’s Picnic. They were flying a kite together. And then she got murdered.”

“You are so queer. That’s what everybody does at the Policemen’s Picnic, hangs out with cops. Rasmussen was just being nice to Junie.”

Too nice if you asked me. I’d watched the two of them together. Rasmussen smiled at Junie in a certain kind of way. And his hand was on her shoulder. Something was definitely up between ’em and it wasn’t only the kite.

“He came after me last night,” I said.

“Who?”

“Rasmussen.”

“Your imagination,” Troo said, fooling around with the string she kept in her shorts for when she got bored.

“And he had on pink-and-green argyle socks and he said my name and I had to fall asleep under the Kenfields’ bushes and… that wasn’t my imagination.” I showed her my scratches and muddy butt. “It’s not like when I thought the devil had gotten into Butchy’s brain. And it’s not like when I thought that Mr. Kenfield was a spy. It’s not like that at all.”

Troo looped the string around her fingers into a cat’s cradle and said like she had a bad taste in her mouth, “Is it like the Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

“Cut it out.” I counted on Troo to believe me. But I swear, it seemed sometimes that I loved her a lot more than she loved me. I didn’t bring up what Mother said to her about working on her charitable works and I could’ve. Maybe I should’ve. I darn well wanted to.

Troo breathed in deeply just like Mother did, like it was the last bit of air that was left on the planet Earth and she wanted it all for herself. “You know how Wendy wanders off sometimes and they find her at the zoo or down at the creek and that one time over on North Avenue at the record store dancing around?”

She was using her explaining voice, which wasn’t one of my favorites.

“Well, that’s all that happened,” Troo said. “Wendy wandered off and maybe fell down and hit her head or something in the Spencers’ root cellar.”

I nodded, not because I was going along with this idea but because I didn’t want to get in a fight with her.

“Remember that time Wendy came to our house and ate that stick of butter out of the refrigerator when Mother was in the bathtub?” Troo threw her head back and giggled.

I started to cry.

“Awww… c’mon.” Troo swatted me on the arm. “Wendy’s gonna be fine. Don’t be so dang sensitive.”

That’s what Mother always said. That I was too dang sensitive, and that and a dime could buy me a cup of coffee, which was too bad for me since I couldn’t stand coffee.

Troo held the cat’s cradle up to my face. It was just this white string she got off a bakery box, but by holding it around your fingers and moving it around it turned into something completely new and beautiful.

I pinched two of the string’s edges and brought them into the middle.

“You’ll see,” Troo said. “Wendy’ll be back home lickety split, runnin’ around without her clothes on again.”

Wendy did that. Forgot to put her clothes on sometimes and then got out of the house when Mrs. Latour was looking after the other twelve kids, and there Wendy’d be on the playground swings sportin’ her birthday suit. So one of us would take her home and Mrs. Latour would shake her head at her daughter and Wendy would say, “Thorry, Mama.” And then she’d give her mama a big hug and not let go because Wendy loved to hug anything, but especially her mama, and for some reason… me, Thally O’Malley.

Troo took her turn on the cat’s cradle, lifting it off my fingers into a diamond shape.

No matter what Troo said, I knew that Rasmussen had somehow hurt Wendy. There was just something about him that seemed so suspicious. Like how he was extra polite to everybody, not like any of the other fathers or brothers that lived in the neighborhood except for Mr. Fitzpatrick, who owned Fitzpatrick’s Drugstore, who was also a very polite man. Seemed like all the other men on the block were always mad about something until they had a couple of beers in them, and then some of them got madder and some of them got nicer and would start singing “Danny Boy” or “Be Bop A Lula” and try to put their hands all over their wives’ heinies.

So maybe last night Rasmussen got mad because I had hidden from him under the Kenfields’ bushes and he ran back down the alley and saw Wendy during one of her wanderings and pushed her down the Spencers’ cellar stairs and maybe even tried to murder and molest her. It would be all my fault if sweet and silly Wendy Latour never wanted to give anybody a hug again.