Текст книги "Summer Morning, Summer Night"

Автор книги: Raymond Douglas Bradbury

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

This was the third night. Mr. Widmer thought of going over, of breaking the glass in the firebox, of setting fire to the porch of Miss Bidwell’s house, and of causing the firemen to roar up. That would bring her out, right into the old man’s arms, by Jupiter!

But wait! Ah, but wait.

Mr. Widmer’s eyes went to the ceiling. Up there, in the attic—wasn’t there a weapon there to be used against pride and time? In all that dust, wasn’t there something with which to strike out? Something as old as all of them—Mr. Widmer, the old man, the old lady? How long since the attic has been cleaned out? Never.

But it was too ridiculous. He wouldn’t dare!

And yet, this was the last night. A weapon must be provided.

Ten minutes later, he heard his wife cry out to him:

“Tom, Tom! What’s that noise! What are you doing in the attic?”

AT ELEVEN-THIRTY, there was the old man. He stood in front of the step-less house, as if not knowing what to try next. And then he took a quick step and looked down.

Mr. Widmer, from his upstairs window, whispered, “Yes, yes, go ahead.”

The old man bent over.

“Pick it up!” cried Mr. Widmer.

The old man extended his hands.

“Brush it off! I know, I know it’s dusty. But it’s still fair enough. Brush it off, use it!”

In the moonlight, the old man held a guitar in his hands. It had been lying in the middle of the lawn. There was a period of long waiting during which the old man turned it over with his fingers.

“Go on!” said Mr. Widmer.

There was a tentative chord of music.

“Go on!” said Mr. Widmer. “What voices can’t do, music can. That’s it! Play! You’re right, try it!” urged Mr. Widmer. And he thought: Sing under the windows, sing under the apple trees and near the back porch, sing until the guitar notes shake her, sing until she starts to cry. You get a woman to crying, and you’re on safe ground. Her pride will all wash away; and the best thing to start the dissolving and crying is music. Sing songs, sing “Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve, the years may come, the years may go,” and sing “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” and sing “We were Sailing Along on Moonlight Bay,” and sing “There’s a Long, Long Trail Awinding,” and sing all those old summer songs and old-time songs, any song that’s old and quiet and lovely; do that, and keep on doing that; sing soft and light, with a few notes of the guitar; sing and play and perhaps you’ll hear the key turn in the lock!

He listened.

As pure as drops of water falling in the night, the guitar played, soft, soft, and it was half an hour before the old man began to sing, and it was so faint no one could hear; no one except someone behind a wall in that house, in a bed, or standing in the dark behind a shaded window.

Mr. Widmer went to bed, numb, and lay there for an hour, hearing the faraway guitar.

THE NEXT morning, Mrs. Terle said, “I seen that prowler.”

“Yes?”

“He was there all night. Playing a guitar. Can you imagine? How silly can old people get? Who is he, anyway?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mr. Widmer,

“Well, him and his guitar went away down the street at six this morning,” said Mrs. Terle.

“Did he? Didn’t he come back?”

“No.”

“Didn’t the door open for him?”

“No. Should it?”

“I suppose not. He’ll be back tonight.”

She went out.

Tonight will do it, thought Mr. Widmer. Tonight, just one more night. He’s not the sort to give up now. Now that he has the guitar, he’ll be back, and tonight will do it. Mr. Widmer whistled, moving about the store.

A truck drove up outside the store, and Mr. Frank Henderson climbed out, a kit of hammers and nails and a saw in his hands. He went around behind the truck and took out a couple of dozen fresh-cut, new pieces of raw, good-smelling lumber.

“Morning, Frank,” called Mr. Widmer. “How’s the carpentry business?”

“Picking up this morning,” said Frank. He sorted out the good, yellow lumber and the bright steel nails. “Got a job.”

“Where?”

“Miss Bidwell’s.”

“Yes?” Mr. Widmer felt his heart begin the familiar pounding.

“Yes. She phoned an hour ago. Wants me to build a new set of steps onto her front porch. Wants it done today.”

Mr. Widmer stood looking at the carpenter’s hands, at the hammer and nails, and the good fresh clean lumber. The sun was rising higher every minute now and the day was bright.

“Here,” said Mr. Widmer, picking up some of the wood. “Let me help.”

They walked across the brick street and over the lawn of Miss Bidwell’s house together, carrying the planks and the saw and the nails.

THE PUMPERNICKEL

MR. AND MRS. Welles walked away from the movie theater late at night and went into the quiet little store, a combination restaurant and delicatessen. They settled in a booth, and Mrs. Welles said, “Baked ham on pumpernickel.” Mr. Welles glanced toward the counter and there lay a loaf of pumpernickel.

“Why,” he murmured, “pumpernickel...Druce’s Lake...”

The night, the late hour, the empty restaurant—by now the pattern was familiar. Anything could set him off on a tide of reminiscence. The scent of autumn leaves, or midnight winds blowing, could stir him from himself, and memories would pour around him. Now in the unreal hour after the theater, in this lonely store, he saw a loaf of pumpernickel bread and, as on a thousand other nights, he found himself moved into the past.

“Druce’s Lake,” he said again.

“What?” His wife glanced up.

“Something I’d almost forgotten,” said Mr. Welles. “In 1910, when I was twenty, I nailed a loaf of pumpernickel to the top of my bureau mirror...”

In the hard, shiny crust of the bread, the boys at Druce’s Lake had cut their names: Tom, Nick, Bill, Alec, Paul, Jack. The finest picnic in history! Their faces tanned as they rattled down the dusty roads. Those were the days when roads were really dusty; a fine brown talcum floured up after your car. And the lake was always twice as good to reach as it would be later in life when you arrived immaculate, clean and unrumpled.

“That was the last time the old gang got together.” Mr. Welles said.

After that, college, work and marriage separated you. Suddenly you found yourself with some other group. And you never felt as comfortable or as much at ease again in all your life.

“I wonder,” said Mr. Welles. “I like to think maybe we all knew, somehow, that this picnic might be the last we’d have. You first get that empty feeling the day after high-school graduation. Then, when a little time passes and no one vanished immediately, you relax. But after a year you realize the old world is changing. And you want to do some one last thing before you lose one another. While you’re all still friends, home from college for the summer, this side of marriage, you’ve got to have something like a last ride and a swim in the cool lake.”

Mr. Welles remembered that rare summer morning, he and Tom lying under his father’s Ford, reaching up their hands to adjust this or that, talking about machines and women and the future. While they worked, that day got warm. At last Tom said, “Why don’t we drive out to Druce’s Lake?”

As simple as that.

Yet forty years later, you remember every detail of picking up the other fellows, everyone yelling under the green trees.

“Hey!” Alec beating everyone’s head with the pumpernickel and laughing. “This is for extra sandwiches, later.”

Nick had made the sandwiches that were already in the hamper—the garlic kind they would eat less of as the years passed and the girls moved in.

Then, squeezing three in the front, three in the rear, with their arms across one another’s shoulders, they drove through the boiling, dusty countryside, with a cake of ice in a tin washtub to cool the beer they’d buy.

What was the special quality of that day that it should focus like a stereoscopic image, fresh and clear, forty years later? Perhaps each of them had an experience like his own. A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father’s picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time.

Was that how the final picnic had come about—with each of them knowing that in a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another, or, if they met, saying, “We’ve got to have lunch sometime!” but never doing it? Whatever the reason, Mr. Welles could still hear the splashes as they’d plunged off the pier under a yellow sun. And then the beer and sandwiches underneath the shady trees.

We never ate that pumpernickel, Mr. Welles thought. Funny, if we’d been a bit hungrier, we’d have cut it up, and I wouldn’t have been reminded of it by that loaf there on the counter.

Lying under the trees in a golden peace that came from beer and sun and male companionship, they promised that in ten years they would meet at the courthouse on New Year’s Day, 1920, to see what they had done with their lives. Talking their rough easy talk, they carved their names in the pumpernickel.

“Driving home,” Mr. Welles said, “we sang ‘Moonlight Bay’.”

He remembered motoring along in the hot, dry night with their swim suits damp on the jolting floor boards. It was a ride of many detours taken just for the hell of it, which was the best reason in the world.

“Good night.” “So long.” “Good night.”

Then Welles was driving alone, at midnight, home to bed.

He nailed the pumpernickel to his bureau the next day.

“I almost cried when, two years later, my mother threw it in the incinerator while I was off at college.”

“What happened in 1920?” asked his wife. “On New Year’s Day?”

“Oh,” said Mr. Welles. “I was walking by the courthouse, by accident, at noon. It was snowing. I heard the clock strike. Lord, I thought, we were supposed to meet here today! I waited five minutes. Not right in front of the courthouse, no. I waited across the street.” He paused. “Nobody showed up.”

He got up from the table and paid the bill. “And I’ll take that loaf of unsliced pumpernickel there,” he said.

When he and his wife were walking home, he said, “I’ve got a crazy idea. I often wondered what happened to everyone.”

“Nick’s still in town with his café.”

“But what about the others?” Mr. Welles’s face was getting pink and he was smiling and waving his hands. “They moved away. I think Tom’s in Cincinnati. He looked quickly at his wife. “Just for the heck of it, I’ll send him this pumpernickel!”

“Oh, but—”

“Sure!” He laughed, walking faster, slapping the bread with the palm of his hand. “Have him carve his name on it and mail it on to the others if he knows their addresses. And finally back to me, with all their names on it!”

“But,” she said, taking his arm, “it’ll only make you unhappy. You’ve done things like this so many times before and...”

He wasn’t listening. Why do I never get these ideas by day? he thought. Why do I always get them after the sun goes down?

In the morning, first thing, he thought, I’ll mail this pumpernickel off, by God, to Tom and the others. And when it comes back I’ll have the loaf just as it was when it got thrown out and burned! Why not?

“Let’s see,” he said, as his wife opened the screen door and let him into the stuffy-smelling house to be greeted by silence and warm emptiness. “Let’s see. We also sang ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’, didn’t we?”

IN THE morning, he came down the hall stairs and paused a moment in the strong full sunlight, his face shaved, his teeth freshly brushed. Sunlight brightened every room. He looked in at the breakfast table.

His wife was busy there. Slowly, calmly, she was slicing the pumpernickel.

He sat down at the table in the warm sunlight and reached for the newspaper.

She picked up a slice of the newly cut bread, and kissed him on the cheek. He patted her arm.

“One or two pieces of toast, dear?” she asked gently.

“Two, I think,” he replied.

THE SCREAMING WOMAN

MY NAME IS Margaret Leary and I’m ten years old and in the fifth grade at Central School. I haven’t any brothers or sisters, but I’ve got a nice father and mother except they don’t pay much attention to me. And anyway, we never thought we’d have anything to do with a murdered woman. Or almost, anyway.

When you’re just living on a street like we live on, you don’t think awful things are going to happen, like shooting or stabbing or burying people under the ground, practically in your back yard. And when it does happen you don’t believe it. You just go on buttering your toast or baking a cake.

I got to tell you how it happened. It was a noon in the middle of July. It was hot and Mama said to me, “Margaret, you go to the store and buy some ice cream. It’s Saturday, Dad’s home for lunch, so we’ll have a treat.”

I ran out across the empty lot behind our house. It was a big lot, where kids had played baseball, and broken glass and stuff. And on my way back from the store with the ice cream I was just walking along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden it happened.

I heard the Screaming Woman.

I stopped and listened.

It was coming up out of the ground.

A woman was buried under the rocks and dirt and glass, and she was screaming, all wild and horrible, for someone to dig her out.

I just stood there, afraid. She kept screaming, muffled.

Then I started to run. I fell down, got up, and ran some more. I got in the screen door of my house and there was Mama, calm as you please, not knowing what I knew, that there was a real live woman buried out in back of our house, just a hundred yards away, screaming bloody murder.

“Mama,” I said.

“Don’t stand there with the ice cream,” said Mama.

“But, Mama,” I said.

“Put it in the icebox,” she said.

“Listen, Mama, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.”

“And wash your hands,” said Mama.

“She was screamin’ and screamin’...”

“Let’s see now, salt and pepper,” said Mama, far away.

“Listen to me,” I said, loud. “We got to dig her out. She’s buried under tons and tons of dirt and if we don’t dig her out, she’ll choke up and die.”

“I’m certain she can wait until after lunch,” said Mama.

“Mama, don’t you believe me?”

“Of course, dear. Now wash your hands and take this plate of meat in to your father.”

“I don’t even know who she is or how she got there,” I said. “But we got to help her before it’s too late.”

“Good gosh,” said Mama. “Look at this ice cream. What did you do, just stand in the sun and let it melt?”

“Well, the empty lot...”

“Go on, now, scoot.”

I went into the dining room.

“Hi, Dad, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.”

“I never knew a woman who didn’t,” said Dad.

“I’m serious,” I said.

“You look very grave,” said Father.

“We’ve got to get picks and shovels and excavate, like for an Egyptian mummy,” I said.

“I don’t feel like an archaeologist, Margaret,” said Father. “Now, some nice cool October day, I’ll take you up on that.”

“But we can’t wait that long,” I almost screamed. My heart was bursting in me. I was excited and scared and afraid and here was Dad, putting meat on his plate, cutting and chewing and paying me no attention.

“Dad?” I said.

“Mmmm?” he said, chewing.

“Dad, you just gotta come out after lunch and help me,” I said. “Dad, Dad, I’ll give you all the money in my piggy bank!”

“Well,” said Dad, “so it’s a business proposition, is it? It must be important for you to offer your perfectly good money. How much money will you pay, by the hour?”

“I got five whole dollars it took me a year to save, and it’s all yours.”

Dad touched my arm. “I’m touched. I’m really touched. You want me to play with you and you’re willing to pay for my time. Honest, Margaret, you make your old Dad feel like a piker. I don’t give you enough time. Tell you what, after lunch, I’ll come out and listen to your screaming woman, free of charge.”

“Will you, oh, will you, really?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’ll do,” said Dad. “But you must promise me one thing?”

“What?”

“If I come out, you must eat all of your lunch first.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Okay.”

Mother came in and sat down and we started to eat.

“Not so fast,” said Mama.

I slowed down. Then I started eating fast again.

“You heard your mother,” said Dad.

“The Screaming Woman,” I said. “We got to hurry.”

“I,” said Father, “intend sitting here quietly and judiciously giving my attention first to my steak, then to my potatoes, and my salad, of course, and then to my ice cream, and after that to a long drink of iced coffee, if you don’t mind. I may be a good hour at it. And another thing, young lady, if you mention her name, this Screaming What-sis, once more at this table during lunch, I won’t go out with you to hear her recital.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Lunch was a million years long. Everybody moved in slow motion, like those films you see at the movies. Mama got up slow and got down slow and forks and knives and spoons moved slow. Even the flies in the room were slow. And Dad’s cheek muscles moved slow. It was so slow. I wanted to scream, “Hurry! Oh, please, rush, get up, run around, come on out, run!”

But no, I had to sit, and all the while we sat there slowly, slowly eating our lunch, out there in the empty lot (I could hear her screaming in my mind. Scream!) was the Screaming Woman, all alone, while the world ate its lunch and the sun was hot and the lot was empty as the sky.

“There we are,” said Dad, finished at last.

“Now will you come out to see the Screaming Woman?” I said.

“First a little more iced coffee,” said Dad.

“Speaking of Screaming Women,” said Mother, “Charlie Nesbitt and his wife Helen had another fight last night.”

“That’s nothing new,” said Father. “They’re always fighting.”

“If you ask me, Charlie’s no good,” said Mother. “Or her, either.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dad. “I think she’s pretty nice.”

“You’re prejudiced. After all, you almost married her.”

“You going to bring that up again?” he said. “After all, I was only engaged to her six weeks.”

“You showed some sense when you broke it off.”

“Oh, you know Helen. Always stagestruck. Wanted to travel in a trunk. I just couldn’t see it. That broke it up. She was sweet, though. Sweet and kind.”

“What did it get her? A terrible brute of a husband like Charlie.”

“Dad,” I said.

“I’ll give you that. Charlie has got a terrible temper,” said Dad. “Remember when Helen had the lead in our high school graduation play? Pretty as a picture. She wrote some songs for it herself. That was the summer she wrote that song for me.”

“Ha,” said Mother.

“Don’t laugh. It was a good song.”

“You never told me about that song.”

“It was between Helen and me. Let’s see, how did it go?”

“Dad,” I said.

“You’d better take your daughter out in the back lot,” said Mother, “before she collapses. You can sing me that wonderful song later.”

“Okay, come on you,” said Dad, and I ran him out of the house.

The empty lot was still empty and hot and the glass sparkled green and white and brown all around where the bottles lay.

“Now, where’s this Screaming Woman?” laughed Dad.

“We forgot the shovels,” I cried.

“We’ll get them later, after we hear the soloist,” said Dad.

I took him over to the spot. “Listen,” I said.

We listened.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Dad, at last.

“Shh,” I said. “Wait.”

We listened some more. “Hey, there, Screaming Woman!” I cried.

We heard the sun in the sky. We heard the wind in the trees, real quiet. We heard a bus, far away, running along. We heard a car pass.

That was all.

“Margaret,” said Father. “I suggest you go lie down and put a damp cloth on your forehead.”

“But she was here,” I shouted. “I heard her, screaming and screaming and screaming. See, here’s where the ground’s been dug up.” I called frantically at the earth, “Hey there, you down there!”

“Margaret,” said Father. “This is the place where Mr. Kelly dug yesterday, a big hole, to bury his trash and garbage in.”

“But during the night,” I said, “someone else used Mr. Kelly’s burying place to bury a woman. And covered it all over again.”

“Well, I’m going back in and take a cool shower,” said Dad.

“You won’t help me dig?”

“Better not stay out here too long,” said Dad. “It’s hot.”

Dad walked off. I heard the back door slam.

I stamped on the ground. “Darn,” I said.

The screaming started again.

She screamed and screamed. Maybe she had been tired and was resting and now she began it all over, just for me.

I stood in the empty lot in the hot sun and I felt like crying. I ran back to the house and banged the door.

“Dad, she’s screaming again!”

“Sure, sure,” said Dad. “Come on.” And he led me to my upstairs bedroom. “Here,” he said. He made me lie down and put a cold rag on my head. “Just take it easy.”

I began to cry. “Oh, Dad, we can’t let her die. She’s all buried, like that person in that story by Edgar Allan Poe, and think how awful it is to be screaming and no one paying any attention.”

“I forbid you to leave the house,” said Dad, worried. “You just lie there the rest of the afternoon.” He went out and locked the door. I heard him and Mother talking in the front room. After a while I stopped crying. I got up and tiptoed to the window. My room was upstairs. It seemed high.

I took a sheet off the bed and tied it to the bedpost and let it out the window. Then I climbed out the window and shinnied down until I touched the ground. Then I ran to the garage, quiet, and I got a couple of shovels and I ran to the empty lot. It was hotter than ever. And I started to dig, and all the while I dug, the Screaming Woman screamed...

It was hard work. Shoving in the shovel and lifting the rocks and glass. And I knew I’d be doing it all afternoon and maybe I wouldn’t finish in time. What could I do? Run tell other people? But they’d be like Mom and Dad, pay no attention. I just kept digging, all by myself.

About ten minutes later, Dippy Smith came along the path through the empty lot. He’s my age and goes to my school.

“Hi, Margaret,” he said.

“Hi, Dippy,” I gasped.

“What you doing?” he asked.

“Digging.”

“For what?”

“I got a Screaming Lady in the ground and I’m digging for her,” I said.

“I don’t hear no screaming,” said Dippy.

“You sit down and wait a while and you’ll hear her scream yet. Or better still, help me dig.”

“I don’t dig unless I hear a scream,” he said.

We waited.

“Listen!” I cried. “Did you hear it?”

“Hey,” said Dippy, with slow appreciation, his eyes gleaming. “That’s okay. Do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“The scream.”

“We got to wait,” I said, puzzled.

“Do it again,” he insisted, shaking my arm. “Go on.” He dug in his pocket for a brown aggie. “Here.” He shoved it at me. “I’ll give you this marble if you do it again.”

A scream came out of the ground.

“Hot dog!” said Dippy. “Teach me to do it!” He danced around as if I was a miracle.

“I don’t...” I started to say.

“Did you get the Throw-Your-Voice book for a dime from that Magic Company in Dallas, Texas?” cried Dippy. “You got one of those tin ventriloquist contraptions in your mouth?”

“Y-yes,” I lied, for I wanted him to help. “If you’ll help dig, I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Swell,” he said. “Give me a shovel.” We both dug together, and from time to time the Woman screamed.

“Boy,” said Dippy. “You’d think she was right underfoot. You’re wonderful, Maggie.” Then he said, “What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“The Screaming Woman. You must have a name for her.”

“Oh, sure.” I thought a moment. “Her name’s Wilma Schweiger and she’s a rich old woman, ninety-six years old, and she was buried by a man named Spike, who counterfeited ten-dollar bills.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dippy.

“And there’s hidden treasure buried with her, and I, I’m a grave robber come to dig her out and get it,” I gasped, digging excitedly.

Dippy made his eyes Oriental and mysterious. “Can I be a grave robber, too?” He had a better idea. “Let’s pretend it’s the Princess Ommanatra, an Egyptian queen, covered with diamonds!”

We kept digging and I thought, oh, we will rescue her, we will. If only we keep on!

“Hey, I just got an idea,” said Dippy. And he ran off and got a piece of cardboard. He scribbled on it with crayon.

“Keep digging!” I said. “We can’t stop!”

“I’m making a sign. See? SLUMBERLAND CEMETERY! We can bury some birds and beetles here, in matchboxes and stuff. I’ll go find some butterflies.”

“No, Dippy!”

“It’s more fun that way. I’ll get me a dead cat, too, maybe...”

“Dippy, use your shovel! Please!”

“Aw,” said Dippy. “I’m tired. I think I’ll go home and take a nap.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Who says so?”

“Dippy, there’s something I want to tell you.”

“What?”

He gave the shovel a kick.

I whispered in his ear. “There’s really a woman buried here.”

“Why sure there is,” he said. “You said it, Maggie.”

“You don’t believe me, either.”

“Tell me how you throw your voice and I’ll keep on digging.”

“But I can’t tell you, because I’m not doing it,” I said. “Look, Dippy. I’ll stand way over here and you listen there.”

The Screaming Woman screamed again.

“Hey!” said Dippy. “There really is a woman here!”

“That’s what I tried to say.”

“Let’s dig!” said Dippy.

We dug for twenty minutes.

“I wonder who she is?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder if it’s Mrs. Nelson or Mrs. Turner or Mrs. Bradley. I wonder if she’s pretty. Wonder what color her hair is? Wonder if she’s thirty or ninety or sixty?”

“Dig!” I said.

The mound grew high.

“Wonder if she’ll reward us for digging her up.”

“Sure.”

“A quarter, do you think?”

“More than that. I bet it’s a dollar.”

Dippy remembered as he dug. “I read a book once of magic. There was a Hindu with no clothes on who crept down in a grave and slept there sixty days, not eating anything, no malts, no chewing gum or candy, no air, for sixty days.” His face fell. “Say, wouldn’t it be awful if it was only a radio buried here and us working so hard?”

“A radio’s nice, it’d be all ours.”

Just then a shadow fell across us.

“Hey, you kids, what you think you’re doing?”

We turned. It was Mr. Kelly, the man who owned the empty lot. “Oh, hello, Mr. Kelly,” we said.

“Tell you what I want you to do,” said Mr. Kelly. “I want you to take those shovels and take that soil and shovel it right back in that hole you been digging. That’s what I want you to do.”

My heart started beating fast again. I wanted to scream myself.

“But Mr. Kelly, there’s a Screaming Woman and...”

“I’m not interested. I don’t hear a thing.”

“Listen!” I cried.

The scream.

Mr. Kelly listened and shook his head. “Don’t hear nothing. Go on now, fill it up and get home with you before I give you my foot!”

We filled the hole all back in again. And all the while we filled it in, Mr. Kelly stood there, arms folded, and the woman screamed, but Mr. Kelly pretended not to hear it.

When we were finished, Mr. Kelly stomped off, saying, “Go on home now. And if I catch you here again...”

I turned to Dippy. “He’s the one,” I whispered.

“Huh?” said Dippy.

“He murdered Mrs. Kelly. He buried her here, after he strangled her, in a box, but she came to. Why, he stood right here and she screamed and he wouldn’t pay any attention.”

“Hey,” said Dippy. “That’s right. He stood right here and lied to us.”

“There’s only one thing to do,” I said. “Call the police and have them come arrest Mr. Kelly.”

We ran for the corner store telephone.

The police knocked on Mr. Kelly’s door five minutes later. Dippy and I were hiding in the bushes, listening.

“Mr. Kelly?” said the police officer.

“Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

“Is Mrs. Kelly at home?”

“Yes, sir.”

“May we see her, sir?”

“Of course. Hey, Anna!”

Mrs. Kelly came to the door and looked out. “Yes, sir?”

“I beg your pardon,” apologized the officer. “We had a report that you were buried out in an empty lot, Mrs. Kelly. It sounded like a child made the call, but we had to be certain. Sorry to have troubled you.”

“It’s those blasted kids,” cried Mr. Kelly, angrily. “If I ever catch them, I’ll rip ’em limb from limb!”

“Cheezit!” said Dippy, and we both ran.

“What’ll we do now?” I said.

“I got to go home,” said Dippy. “Boy, we’re really in trouble. We’ll get a licking for this.”

“But what about the Screaming Woman?”

“To heck with her,” said Dippy. “We don’t dare go near that empty lot again. Old man Kelly’ll be waitin’ around with his razor strap and lambast heck out’n us. An’ I just happened to remember, Maggie. Ain’t old man Kelly sort of deaf, hard-of-hearing?”

“Oh, my gosh,” I said. “No wonder he didn’t hear the screams.”

“So long,” said Dippy. “We sure got in trouble over your darn old ventriloquist voice. I’ll be seeing you.”

I was left all alone in the world, no one to help me, no one to believe me at all. I just wanted to crawl down in that box with the Screaming Woman and die. The police were after me now, for lying to them, only I didn’t know it was a lie, and my father was probably looking for me, too, or would be once he found my bed empty. There was only one last thing to do, and I did it.

I went from house to house, all down the street, near the empty lot. And I rang every bell and when the door opened I said: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Griswold, but is anyone missing from your house?” or “Hello, Mrs. Pikes, you’re looking fine today. Glad to see you home.” And once I saw that the lady of the house was home I just chatted a while to be polite, and went on down the street.

The hours were rolling along. It was getting late. I kept thinking, oh, there’s only so much air in that box with that woman under the earth, and if I don’t hurry, she’ll suffocate, and I got to rush! So I rang bells and knocked on doors, and it got later, and I was just about to give up and go home, when I knocked on the last door, which was the door of Mr. Charlie Nesbitt, who lives next to us. I kept knocking and knocking.

Instead of Mrs. Nesbitt, or Helen as my father calls her, coming to the door, why it was Mr. Nesbitt, Charlie, himself.

“Oh,” he said. “It s you, Margaret.”

“Yes,” I said. “Good afternoon.”

“What can I do for you, kid?” he said.

“Well, I thought I’d like to see your wife, Mrs. Nesbitt,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“May I?”

“Well, she’s gone out to the store,” he said.