Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kenfield’s Five and Dime had to be the best store in the whole wide world. It even smelled good because it had this case with a glass window full of tons of candy, like little wax bottles full of red liquid and pastel buttons on white paper and B-B-Bats and off to the side a little machine that made fresh popcorn all day long.

The wood floors were a wavy dark yellow color and the aisles were skinny but full of things that Mrs. Kenfield musta collected over the years and then sold to people. She was the nicest one of the Kenfield family. And, of course, Dottie was nice when she was still around and hadn’t disappeared into thin air. Mr. Kenfield was a sour man. Mother said he was that way because he never got over what happened to Dottie. When I asked her, “By the way, whatever did happen to Dottie?” Mother gave me one of her do-you-smell-dog-poop looks and said mind your own beeswax.

Kenfield’s even had a pet aisle where Troo and me had bought a turtle once that we called Elmer, and there were garden seeds and pencils and bars of Ivory soap. All the ladies in the neighborhood would come to shop at the Five and Dime with brush curlers in their hair so they would look good for their husbands when they came home from the factory, so sometimes the store also reminded me of a beauty parlor.

We walked down aisle three and found the boxes of Kleenex stacked on top of one another. Troo was keeping her eyes peeled for when Mrs. Kenfield got busy with Mrs. Plautch, trying to help her select some new hot pads for her kitchen. Troo had a way with Kleenex flowers. This summer, she was going to snitch the bobby pins she’d need to make the flowers out of Nell’s Future Hairdresser Kit, which Hall had paid for and said would be a good trade for Nell since everybody had hair, like everybody had feet. Hall had taken her up to Yvonne’s School of Beauty and enrolled her last week. Nell came home with a pink hatbox full of scissors and pins and combs and, of course, her favorite, permanent rods and papers and the solution that smelled like death warmed over. Worse, even, than Dr. Sullivan’s breath. That was smart of Nell, to ask Hall to enroll her when he was shnockered.

I watched Troo sneak a box of Kleenex under her shirt, and then we left by the back door that slammed hard enough for Mrs. Kenfield to take notice and call out, “Hope your mother is feeling better, girls.”

Taking that Kleenex made my conscience feel bothered, so when we got out in the alley I said, “We gotta take that back. It’s not right to steal.”

“Aw, quit being such a goody-goody. The Kleenex is a consolation prize because our mother might be dying. A consolation prize like they give those women on those game shows that Helen used to watch when she ironed. Remember that?” It made me so sad to think of Mother that I wasn’t able to say anything else about the Kleenex.

On the way back home, like Troo promised, we stopped at the park lagoon. I’d brought my fishing pole. I never caught anything, but I liked to fish once a week next to the willow tree in the shade. I have this picture of my daddy and me fishing when I was about three years old out at this lake near the farm. His hair is blown by the breeze into these two little horns. Mother said he looks devil-may-care in this picture, which I thought was a pretty funny thing to say.

“Hall must think Mother’s gonna die,” I said, scrounging around in the lagoon mud for a worm and finally finding one.

Troo had found an old Kroger bag in the trash can and stuck her Kleenex in it and now she was sitting on the bank dangling her feet in the water. That girl just loved to go barefoot and never worried about stepping on a rusty nail again, which I really admired. “Hall who?” she said.

Troo hated to talk about any kind of dying and always changed the subject like that. I changed the subject back because I needed to know what she thought.

“Hall must think Mother’s gonna die or he wouldn’t be gettin’ some from Rosie up at Jerbak’s and getting so darn drunk.” I took a bobber out of my pocket and slipped it on my line. “Since he and Nell are the only ones that get to see her, maybe he’s right.” I dropped the line into the lagoon right into the center of some willow leaves. I could see myself in the water. My face was swimming about a foot away from my body.

Troo splashed with her feet and made me disappear. “Well, you know what Doris Day says, Que sera, sera. That’s French, you know.”

Troo was just doing some of that whistling in the dark. I bet deep down in her heart she missed Helen as much as I did and I’d been missing her so bad. All of her. Even her yelling and her warbly singing but especially the way she looked on Sunday morning in church when she was all dolled up and the best-looking woman in the Communion line. Her white dress pressed with sharp creases and her matching white high-heel shoes. Her great hair caught at the back of her neck in a gold barrette. I even missed that sad look she gave me when she thought I wasn’t looking. And the smell of her breath and the feel of her cool freckled hand on my forehead.

I felt a little tug on my line but brought it up too fast and discovered the worm was gone. “Darn,” I said, and turned to Troo, who was bending over the water and making faces at herself. That’s when I saw him. Rasmussen. He was parked across the street, staring at us from the window of his squad car. When he knew I’d seen him, he drove off suddenly.

“Did you see him?” I jumped up and pointed down Lisbon Street. “That was Rasmussen. He was watchin’ us.”

Troo looked but you couldn’t barely even see the car anymore. “That wasn’t Rasmussen. And even if it was, why would he be watchin’ us anyway?” She slipped her tennis shoes back on and then crawled into the deepness of that weeping willow tree. It was one of Troo’s favorite summer places. She loved the way she could sit in there and nobody could see her but she could see them, and how when the sun landed just right on those leaves they reminded her of those beaded curtains they had over at the Peking Palace, where we got chicken chop suey once last winter after Hall sold a lot of shoes in one day. Troo had lit up an L &M. The smoke was wiggling out through the willow branches.

I sat down on the bank and threw my line back in even though I didn’t have a worm. I started thinking about the fish down there and what my red bobber must look like to them, floating above them, watching them like Rasmussen had been watching us.

“Oh God. Oh sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Troo yelled, crawling out from under the tree. She had a tennis shoe in the palm of her hand.

“Holy cow,” I whispered. Troo set the shoe on the ground and poked at it with a stick until it flipped over and you could see somebody had stitched a little pink butterfly near the heel. “It must be Sara’s. Look at that blood. We should tell somebody.”

It occurred to me that maybe Rasmussen hadn’t been watching us. Maybe he’d been waiting for us to leave, because right before he fell asleep last night he remembered this shoe with the little butterfly on the heel that he had left behind when he’d murdered and molested Sara. He’d come back for it. The laces were still tied. And the blood spots made a kind of connect-the-dots pattern.

“It’s definitely Sara’s,” I said, inspecting it.

“How do you know that?” Troo asked.

“Whose else could it be?”

“Aw, c’mon. It could be anybody’s. Like…” She couldn’t think of anybody’s name so instead she just stood up and flicked the willow leaves off her shorts. “It’s probably just mud anyways.”

I was sure we needed to call the police. But that would mean Rasmussen would show up, and wouldn’t that be just hunky-dory for him? Here I was, the girl who he was trying to murder and molest, poking at the bloody shoe he’d been looking for. It would be a two-fer for him.

Then I had an idea. Me, not Troo, who usually had the ideas since she was so outgoing and a genius. I put the shoe down next to the lagoon bank, setting it upright so it looked real sharp, like the ones up in Shuster’s window. Then I walked to the firebox and said, “I’m gonna pull this thing.”

The wind changed direction and the sweet smell of chocolate chip cookies came floating in on the breeze, which was making little swirls on top of the lagoon. Troo closed her eyes and breathed in the smell and said, “You better not. Remember how mad they got the last time?”

I’d pulled this exact same fire handle last summer right around this time. And boy, were those firemen steamed when they found out there was no fire. I’d done it cuz Mary Lane said she’d give me a dime if I would and, after all, she was our best friend.

“I’m gonna pull it so somebody finds this shoe,” I said. “It’s a clue. Like in Cinderella. Ready?”

I yanked the little black handle down and Troo grabbed her Kroger bag and we took off across the street and hid behind a garage. About three minutes later the sirens were wailing down Lisbon. We watched as the firemen jumped off the truck and looked around for the smoke. Then one of the guys took his fireman’s hat off and threw it on the ground and said loud enough for us to hear, “Those goddamn kids. That’s the third time this month.” But just like I planned, he saw the shoe next to the lagoon and then called over another short fireman, who picked it up, and they got back into the truck and drove off. For a second there, I thought the fatter one saw us and I picked up Troo’s hand to hightail it out of there.

Now somebody had that shoe who might think it could be Sara’s, and thank goodness that somebody was not Sally O’Malley. That was a big relief because I had enough other things to worry about. Like staying two steps ahead of Rasmussen.

We took the shortcut home through the Von Knappens’ backyard, and when we turned the corner to head down Vliet Street I saw something that I wished I hadn’t. Right then I knew I had a lot more to worry about than I’d originally thought. In fact, I knew right then that Troo and me were, like Hall said all the time now, “Up the Shit Creek without a paddle.”