Around eleven-thirty I started paying attention to who was coming and going on the street so as not to miss when Brian and his family returned home. I knew he planned on washing his beat-up old Chevy Fleetmaster that afternoon, and I wanted to be on the scene to give him a hand.
I kept a low profile when I saw Boyd Fenton coming down the street. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, but I didn’t want him to have anything over me. I tried to go back to the genealogy charts, but a moment later, I looked up and saw him in conversation with a woman in a floral summer dress, maybe in her mid-twenties. She wore a pillbox hat with enough of her hair tucked under it that I couldn’t tell the color.
I couldn’t make out everything they were saying, and as he answered her questions, Boyd kept pointing to the Tarkington house.
The woman thanked him and moved on. I tried to get a better look at her. There was something familiar, like the feeling I’d had the week before when I went with Brian, Chuck, and a couple of their girls to see The Curse of Frankenstein. The guy playing the mad scientist was the same one who would one day play the creepy admiral in Star Wars, and I was the only person on the planet who knew.
Fifteen minutes later, when the Maxwell family returned from their weekly religious topping-up, the woman was still on the street. I saw her approach Brian and his mother and sister as they got out of the “sloppy jalopy” as he called his car. He took the photograph that I had seen her showing to several other people, but shook his head and turned away. A little too fast, I thought. Grandma and Aunt Judy also looked at the picture, but their head shakes seemed more genuine.
For half an hour more, the woman stayed, asking questions of all the church-returners, car-washers, and hedge-trimmers on the street. When she finally wandered off, I hadn’t turned a single page in my book. I was sure that if I could see the soles of her shoes, I’d find a few grains of flour on them.
When Brian came out to wash his car, I cased the street for a while, then put my baseball cap on, brim low, and casually walked across to him.
He laughed as he saw me. “You’ll never make a spy, hobo boy,” he said, tossing me a sponge.
“Did she say who she was?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Kind of funny. Where’d you say that orphanage was you lit out of?”
“Downtown.”
“What street?”
“I was only there a couple of months.”
Brian took a long look, but then he shrugged and gave me small squirt of the hose. “Whatever you say. Hey, she said your name’s Kenny.”
“Jimmy’s what my mom called me. My middle name is James.”
“Get washing, James. But maybe wash from here in the shade. We don’t want the neighbors getting a good look at you.”
Brian put his friends on alert, and a couple said they’d seen the woman as well. This made me more interesting, and by the time we all met that night in the baseball diamond to hang out, all the better hangouts being closed on a Sunday, Chuck had invented several stories to explain my identity. I was a Russian spy, Marilyn Monroe’s secret love child, a criminal mastermind, the runaway kid of a war criminal. He amused us trying to fit together a story that made every single one of those true.
I smiled, but couldn’t keep from wondering what he would have said if he’d known the much stranger truth, that I was the son of his best friend, that just three years from now he’d be best man at Brian’s wedding, and two years later, he’d become my godfather.
When we got back to Brian’s house, he told me to give him a few minutes to get some noise going in the house so there was no chance anyone would hear me sliding down the chute. “But don’t hang around long,” he said, eyeing the street, “unless you wanna get pinched.”
I didn’t want to get pinched, but nor did I want to go back to the coal cellar. What was I doing here, waiting until someone gave my dad a concussion the way my grandmother said it happened? The appearance of this woman and whoever she was with made things serious all over again.
Three fence hops brought me to the Tarkington house. I entered as quietly as I could and stood before the mirror. I pushed my hand inside and felt the downtime chill. If I took out that doorstop, I could possibly never go back. But at the same time, didn’t I know I was going back? I was going to meet Rose, wasn’t I? Luka was going further back.
I knelt and touched the spoon. If Luka and I got further back, that surely meant that Anthony helped us again. Either that or it meant that I wasn’t about to take the doorstop out.
Which would mean Luka couldn’t get back here.
I groaned aloud in frustration.
“What was that?” came a voice from upstairs.
“I don’t know,” said a quieter voice, a woman’s.
“Hello,” said the first voice. “Is there anyone there?”
I didn’t move.
“Hello,” said the man’s voice again. Then a little lower, “I’ll go check it out. Probably just some local kids. Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Kenny?” said the woman’s voice. “Is that you?”
Three
Think fast, I told myself. They had come through the mirror. They could only have come from the past. If I went through …
“Honey,” said the woman’s voice, “maybe I should go down. We don’t want a repeat performance of last time.”
“Okay. I’ll be right up here if you need me.”
“That’s fine. Kenny? I’m coming down to talk to you. It’s me—”
If I had stayed just a moment longer, I would have heard her name, but by the time her foot creaked on the top step, I was already pushing my way into the mirror. I’ve always wondered what would have been different if I had just heard her name.
I took the doorstop with me as I went. As desperate as I was to get out of there and close the mirror before anyone followed me, I paused in the Silverlands to make sure I wouldn’t be stepping out into a long fall or a watery grave. I couldn’t see anything, but when I stuck my hand through, I felt only air, and, crouching, I could touch the familiar wooden floor of the carriage house. I wrapped the string around my hand, wished for luck, and pushed the rest of the way out into a humid 1947 night.
Assuring myself that no one was in the carriage house, I felt my way down the darkened stairs, and made my way to the front door, just in time to see a flashlight emerge from the mirror. Either they were able to get into the mirror without me or they had pushed in before I left. I wanted to run straight to the trees at the edge of the creek, either lose myself in there or run along the path that led to the bluffs. Manse Valley was wide. While they were searching, I could work my way back to the mirror.
But no. It was dark. That would keep me safe enough. In the meantime, I had to know what was going on. I willed myself to hold still outside the carriage house door, pressed against the wall.
“Kenny?” said the woman’s voice again. She had come through the mirror. So they both had access? “This is all going to be a little shocking to you, I think. Are you there? We think you know a lot about what happened in the past that we don’t. We can help each other.”
Then the man’s voice. “He’s not coming. Probably gone by now.”
“The place down by the creek?”
“Who knows? You must know it better than anyone.”
The woman shrugged. “Ancient history. To him, it’s just a while ago.”