How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 9

  The students were all silent. Mirabelle held the message as though it were the first copy of the Torah. Their reverie was broken when a boy named Michael Ashton ventured, “Mr. Knightly. How do you have the message?”

  “I don’t. It’s a copy. I know, so unfair! You feel cheated! But don’t. I took a photograph of the exhibit when I toured Washington, and then I typed it up for dramatic effect and put it on Herman here. Herman, I think we can all admit, isn’t a very good name for a war pigeon, to be honest. Can you imagine pointing at the sky and shouting, ‘Here comes Herman! We’re all saved!’ I can’t. And I’m the one who just said it! Luckily, there’s no war. Herman here has never heard a noise louder than a car horn and has never faced anything more dangerous than limp lettuce and raindrops.”

  The windows all began to rattle. A wind was picking up outside. Mr. Knightly looked at the windows with some dismay.

  “Speaking of which,” he said, “it’s getting windy out there. We’re going to have to hurry in case there’s a storm. Because today we’re going to release Herman from the loft that I put on the roof and send him to the eleventh grade class at Marblehead High School north of Boston, more than one hundred and twenty miles away from here. I’m including a note that says, ‘Looks like a big storm is coming!’ Who’s with me?”

  They thought he was joking. Mirabelle spun her new sapphire ring around and around on her middle finger in nervous excitement, an excitement that had carried over from the thrill of the heist to her mad run through the streets of Hartford to the thrill of Mr. Knightly’s lesson—both tragic and soaring.

  Mirabelle was feeling good.

  James Bianchi must have sensed Mirabelle’s mood and misunderstood its source and meaning, because he placed his hand on her thigh as the other students slid off their desks and started to walk outside.

  Mirabelle had made the modest mistake of making out with James after the Christmas dance last year. It had started off sweetly enough with his soft lips and closed eyes, his hands resting on her shoulders as if she were a statue of Venus (with arms). But after the tip of her tongue touched his and created a wave of pleasure in them both, his hands filled with lead and dropped immediately away. Mirabelle thought he had shorted out like a cheap lamp bulb, but she was wrong. His hands had gone right to her ass. The squeeze made Mirabelle open her eyes and retract her tongue. When she did, she found that his eyes were already open.

  It was like looking into an octopus.

  So, she bit his lip.

  Hard.

  James had yelled and grabbed his face. He started calling her names she didn’t deserve, and his eyes became hostile and threatening. Instead of stepping back and recoiling, Mirabelle had shifted her weight forward and closed ranks on him, almost daring him to try something. From her new battle stance, her eyes took in all the light, and her sensations all the details. That was how she felt the drop of his blood drip from her own lip and fall into her outstretched hand. James watched her lick the rest of the blood from her lips and then smile. Mirabelle wondered if she was a vampire because she felt charged and electric and his blood tasted sweet.

  “Sorry, Jimmy,” she said, not sorry. “You startled me.”

  James Bianchi turned wordlessly and staggered away down the hallway toward the boys’ room. Mirabelle had gone back to the dance and spent her time swinging with Katy Fisher to the school band playing a decent rendition of Benny Goodman’s “Swingtime in the Rockies.”

  * * *

  Mirabelle looked down at James’s hand loitering on her thigh now. What did he think he was doing? It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t a sign of affection; he hadn’t said a direct word to her since he had stopped bleeding back in December. Was he making a pass at her in the middle of biology class?

  People’s motivations didn’t make a lot of sense to Mirabelle. What she understood best was what she liked and what she didn’t like. And this she didn’t like.

  James looked at her.

  She looked at him.

  He smiled a smarmy smile, and so Mirabelle smiled back and stuck a pencil in his ear.

  James spun off toward the display cabinet filled with animal parts in jars and smashed into it, knocking over a squirrel fetus in formaldehyde as Mirabelle scampered away—free of consequences, of guilt, of history—to catch up with the rest of the class on the roof, where the wind was bashing the door against the concrete wall outside.

  The students there were laughing and raising their arms like wings as Mr. Knightly let go of Herman, who soared into the sky with the speed of a soul that had been too long from heaven.

  Storm

  THE GUST THAT LIFTED Herman skyward was indeed becoming a storm. Out on the coast far south of the school, boats were blissfully unaware of the weather coming in because the newspapers had been wrong. In the late morning, adventurers had sailed out for leisure or fishing in Long Island Sound. On the Atlantic side, they entered the open waters of the New York Bight.

  By two in the afternoon, however, the weather had changed. And by four o’clock on September 21, 1938, New England was facing a hurricane.

  Not that Sheldon knew this at first.

  He was walking home from school when the first drops of rain came down. Not straight down, though. They whipped at his face like tiny razors.

  The last time he had been soaked was when he walked back from the crash, and he wasn’t in the mood to do it again. It wasn’t the water that bothered him, it was the emotions that overtook him and made him tear up. Pulling his schoolbag closer, Sheldon broke into a jog as the sun failed and the sky became as black as a moonless night. A wind picked up that was violent.

  Sheldon was only two blocks from home, but the spectacle of Hartford under the onslaught was so intense that he stopped under a blue and white awning by a grocery store to watch. Three women and two businessmen had already taken shelter there.

  “The newspaper said nothing about a storm,” said a man in a black suit and wing tips.

  “Nope,” muttered one of the women.

  The rain was now pounding down so hard that cars were pulling over, their drivers unable to see out of the windshields. The shower was turning into a stream, and the stream into a river over the black asphalt of the street as it ripped through the city center as if poured from a bucket.

  Rainstorms in New England were not unfamiliar. Usually, in Sheldon’s experience, the heavier the storm, the shorter it lasted. But this time was different. The wind was bending the trees across the street at impossible angles until one of them snapped. The adults all gasped, and the three women went inside, away from the windows.

  He could have gone inside too, but Sheldon decided to run. Clutching his schoolbag against his chest, he was drenched in an instant; his soggy shoes slapped their way down the street and up the steps to the Corbins’ town house.

  The hurricane of 1938 had hit.

  * * *

  Dripping wet, Sheldon removed his shoes and walked into the center of the living room, where he stared out the giant bay window at the chaos outside. The giant oak tree that had been blocking the view of the street with its thick leaves had lost one of its main branches. Sheldon stepped backward from the maelstrom and bumped into a dining-room chair, which he sat on; he stared at the storm as though it were a newsreel from the front of a war.

  This was supposed to be a day to plan out his investigation, solve the mystery of who killed his father, and then plot his revenge. As Sheldon could best reckon it, Nero Wolfe would have made a list of all the companies that bought pelts in Hartford and then he’d have sent Archie Goodwin out to interview them all and ask whether they bought from the Krupinski brothers. “The blue Ford Model 51,” he’d have said to shake up their memories. “Shiny. Not new, but new for them. Had their names stenciled on the side like they were something. You know the one.”

  Would anyone answer these questions from a kid? How does a twelve-year-old get adults to talk about adult stuff?

  It felt hopeless. How does a
kid get things done in this world?

  Sheldon stood and trailed water across to the kitchen, where he found some cookies in a glass jar and helped himself to three. He returned to the chair and watched the storm while crunching the small nuts in his molars. And . . . were these pieces of chocolate? He’d heard about these; Lenny had been going on about them. Some woman who ran the Toll House Inn got the idea of putting chocolate in cookies, and it appeared in the papers, and now the country was going wild. Toll House cookies they were calling them. Mirabelle must have heard about this and given it a go.

  They were good. Very good.

  Sheldon sat there, sopping wet, eating cookies, and watching pieces of wood fly past the window while the rain came down in an epic torrent.

  What if ?

  What if he made a list of shops that sold fur items like coats and gloves and such? He could probably learn that from newspaper advertisements and even the phone book, no need to be a gumshoe. And then, instead of being disappointed that he wasn’t a grown-up, he could walk in and say, “Hey, my uncles are the Krupinskis from Massachusetts. I got a message for the man who buys their stuff.” If the owner looked confused or said that he didn’t know them, Sheldon could move on. On the off chance someone said, “Yeah, what’s the message?” he could say, “Yeah, they were arrested for arson and they’re going to be in jail for a while, so you might need to buy from someone else.” And then he could look carefully into their eyes and see if that was surprising. Maybe one of them would say, “Arrested? Aren’t they supposed to be dead? My guy was supposed to run those bastards off the road,” and Sheldon would say, “Which guy was that?” And the boss would say, “Oh, that was Reggiano Grana Padano. Yeah, he drives everyone off the road for the right price if I tell him to,” and then Sheldon would say, “Where is he? I want to meet the guy.” And the boss would say, “Oh, he’s down at the Irish bar pretending he’s Irish. If you take the gun your cousin stole from McCullen, you can probably pop him right there.” All this would be great news, and Sheldon could shoot the guy he was talking to, because he’d been the one who ordered the hit in the first place, and then he could head down to the pub, pop Grana Padano after saying, “Remember me, asshole? I’m back,” which would put the whole thing to rest before The Lone Ranger went on the radio later tonight. That is, unless all the power lines and radio stations were out by then, because this storm was looking crazy-ass crazy.

  Chocolate in the cookies. It was genius, really.

  Abe and Mirabelle burst into the house as Sheldon was finishing his fourth, which, now that he had company and self-insight, might have been at least two too many.

  “Hi,” he said to them.

  Mirabelle was laughing with her hand pressed against the wall for balance, but Abe looked more serious. He said, “Power lines are down everywhere. I saw three cats in trees, and then I turned around and there were two.”

  Mirabelle stopped laughing. “Where did the cat go?”

  “After your pigeon,” said Abe.

  Mirabelle shook out her hair like a shaggy dog, kicked off her waterlogged leather shoes, and as she walked toward the stairs, she left behind wet stocking prints on the floor. She went upstairs to change. Abe wiped his face and dried his hair with a kitchen towel. “When did you get back?” he asked Sheldon.

  “A few minutes ago.”

  Abe had a mischievous look to him. He turned to Sheldon. “Want to throw a ball?”

  “You mean a baseball?”

  “On the sidewalk, away from the power lines. I want to see what’ll happen.”

  * * *

  For the next ten minutes, they comically tried to throw balls to each other with twenty feet between them while standing in knee-deep rushing water. They never caught a single one. The answer to Abe’s question was “you lose baseballs.”

  Something metal made a crashing and screeching sound down the street and they stopped to look.

  One car had skidded into another one that was parallel parked on the opposite side of their street, and was now sideways and stalled. Water and debris were building up on the driver’s side of the car, which was serving as a dam to the floodwater, which quickly rose until it covered the driver’s window. The man inside opened the passenger’s-side door and stepped out. Losing his footing immediately, he was knocked down again and again by the rapids until he finally reached a streetlamp and recovered his footing. Once on the sidewalk and out of the center of the road, he waded knee-deep through the water into the deli across the street and disappeared inside.

  Abe, who’d been watching the man, started looking around and noticed something else. “He’s not here.”

  “Who?”

  “The thug who’s been watching us from across the street. He’s not here.”

  Flood

  NATE WAS HOME BY SEVEN when the worst of the storm had moved north to Massachusetts. Nate instructed the children to place blankets over their bedroom windows in case the glass blew out. With no view outside, the house became a crypt. That night, Abe, Mirabelle, and Sheldon played poker on the living-room floor by candlelight. Their primary radio ran off the AC electric grid that was down, but Nate still had a battery-operated farm radio, the kind they had in Whately before the town had power.

  The radio played as they did.

  At 8:00 Sheldon insisted they listen to The Lone Ranger on WTHT, which met no objections. At 8:30, they tuned into Tommy Dorsey on WTIC, then Bob Crosby’s Orchestra back on WTHT at 9:00. George Olson’s Orchestra came on at 9:30, which bored them all, but The Greatest Man in the World broadcast at 10:00 on the same station so they left it on. After that, Nate told them to clear out and go to bed.

  Schools would be closed the next day; the radio had announced it. Nate opened a liquor cabinet and removed a bottle of Teacher’s Highland Cream and poured himself a tall whiskey.

  * * *

  In Sheldon’s half of the room, he sat across from Abe, who was stripped down to his tank top and boxer shorts. His knuckles were still scarred, the swelling in his eye was still fresh, and Sheldon could see the purple bruises on his forearms where he’d warded off blows from McCullen’s son and the other bastards who’d assaulted him. On his pinkie (now that his father was out of sight), he had slipped on the skeleton ring they’d stolen from the shop. In that getup, Abe looked like a silent killer. It made Sheldon wish he looked big and scary too.

  “I’m never going to find him,” Sheldon said to Abe.

  Mirabelle had given Abe a new watch also, a Zenith with a black face, a black leather strap, and white hands. He held it as if it were a small pet and wound it slowly; it sounded like a safe being cracked by a master thief.

  “Mustache man?”

  “No one’s going to tell a kid anything,” Sheldon said. “I thought I knew where to begin. But I don’t. Not really.”

  “Where were you going to begin?”

  “Find out who bought stuff from the Krupinskis. Find out who they screwed over. Follow the bread crumbs back to mustache man.”

  “You think he’s here in Hartford?”

  “Or Springfield. Lenny said he could be in Miami, though. Or Paris. That it was all in my head.”

  “He’s sort of right. I mean, yeah, mustache man’s probably around here, but he could just as well be in Boston or New York as Hartford so that’s not a good plan. Your problem is that you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope, Sheldon.”

  Sheldon’s feet twitched. They did this when he grew contemplative.

  “Think about it,” Abe added. “Who knows the business associates of the Krupinskis?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s like your brain is avoiding the answer. Let me ask you an entirely unrelated question. Who knows who all your friends are?”

  “I do.”

  “Who knows all your enemies?”

  “I do.”

  “Let’s try again. Who knows everyone the Krupinskis do business with?”

  Oh.

 
“The Krupinskis know.”

  Abe silently saluted him with two fingers from his bed.

  “The brothers are in jail,” Sheldon said. “Only Old Krupinski’s left and he won’t tell me nothing.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “Bruno.”

  “That’s a dog’s name.”

  Sheldon didn’t disagree.

  Abe placed his watch on his thigh and, reaching up with his right hand, opened the top drawer of his dresser and removed the revolver.

  “One of the reasons there are guns,” Abe said, “is to even things out between people who are big and strong and wrong, and people who are short and weak and right.”

  “Is that still loaded?” Sheldon asked. “My dad was really serious about unloading weapons we weren’t using.”