Andy nodded, a strange chill going down his back.
Burke’s was a curiously boring place. Nothing but endless locker-lined corridors. The size of the lockers grew progressively smaller as the number of the floor increased. On the first floor, the lockers were the size of Andy’s bedroom. On the second floor they were the size of closets. On the third floor they were the size of the new clothes dryer in the basement. On the fourth floor they were only as large as a small suitcase. Andy looked around and Ellen and the storage company man were out of sight. A woman went around a corner and Andy could hear her opening a locker. In a moment the locker door slammed, there was a click, then the woman returned. She walked with her eyes to the front, aware of everything and pretending to notice nothing.
Andy was alone and he looked at the lockers near the door. They were stacked three to a column, and the top of the near stack had the number four thousand. The one next to it, four thousand and three.
Four-three-one-two.
Andy walked down the corridor, and at the end the top locker’s number was four-one-oh-two. He turned the corner into the next corridor and followed the numbers, the second corridor with a number of columns only stacked two high. In the third corridor, on the bottom, was locker four-three-one-two.
It looked like all the other lockers, but Andy knew there was something in there — something meant for him. He looked at the wheel of the combination lock, and for a second his mind went blank. Then he twisted the knob and stopped on the number eleven. He turned it right to the number three. Moistening his lips he turned it to the number ninety-seven and … nothing. It didn’t open. He pulled at the lock, hit it, then twisted the knob and tried again. Nothing.
“There you are,” said Ellen. Andy dropped the lock as though it were red hot and turned to look. Ellen was standing at the turn of the corridor. She held out a plastic tote bag. “I got what I came for. Let’s get going.”
Andy glared once more at the lock, turned away, and followed Ellen. Once in the car, Ellen pulled away from the curb and said, “Hey, Andy, how would you like to go on a picnic?”
The boy shrugged as he looked out of the window. “That’d be okay.”
“I have just the place: St. George’s Park. Have you ever been there?”
Andy thought on it and the name meant nothing to him. “I don’t think so,” he said, still looking from the window, wondering why he couldn’t open that lock. Everything fit. The address, the locker number, a combination lock, but the combination he knew didn’t work. Ithad to work, but it didn’t.
“What are you thinking about, Andy?”
“Nothing.”
“It looks pretty heavy to be a nothing.” Andy glanced at Ellen and saw that she was smirking at him. “I bet I know what you’re thinking about.”
Andy shook his head. “I bet you don’t.”
“You’re wondering why you couldn’t open that combination lock.”
Andy felt his lower jaw fall open.
Her smile very broad, she turned her attention to the traffic and said, “I know because I did the same thing you did, except I did it a couple of weeks ago. I took your numbers, found the storage company and found what was in locker forty-three twelve. When I emptied the locker, they changed the combination on the lock.”
There was a well of anger bubbling up inside the boy. There was no claim that he could think of to the locker’s contents excluding an overwhelming feeling that it belonged to him. He could see that Ellen knew that too. The plastic tote bag of stuff she had gotten from the locker was on the seat between them. Without asking for permission, he pulled the bag over and reached inside.
The first thing his fingers touched was a magazine. He took it out and looked at it.New Detective was the magazine’s name, and John Draper’s name was among those on the cover. He looked at the date and saw that the magazine was issued more than three years before he was born. He turned to the Draper story, “Blood’s Truth,” and read the inscription written there:
To Billy Stark,
You’re all finished. Rot in Hell,
John Draper
“This is your husband’s first story, isn’t it?”
“We weren’t married when that was published, but yes, that’s his first story. Do you remember it?”
“How? This is before I was born.”
“Andy, did you ever wonder why you can read?”
The boy frowned, thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ve always known how to read.” He put the magazine on the seat and reached into the bag. This time he came out with a wad of photographs wrapped with a rubber band. The photo on top was a black-and-white of a thin little boy with ragged clothes and very short hair. He had a serious expression and was standing in front of a decaying barn. The date on the snapshot was almost forty years ago. The boy removed the rubber band and looked at the writing on the back of the snapshot.
Me at two years old at the farm.
Hair short like that because of head
lice, I was told.
The next photo, also black-and-white, showed the same boy a little older standing between a middle-aged woman and a girl of about fifteen. They were on the broad front porch of a large New England town house. He couldn’t see it in the photo, but he knew that the post on the right going down the front stairs to the path had his sister’s initials carved into it. He turned it over.
Just before my third birthday at
Grampa Borden’s. The woman is
Mother. The girl is my half-sister,
Arlene.
He knew that both of them were dead. Mother of a respiratory illness, Arlene was a suicide.
Without looking at the rest, he put the photos back in the bag. As he replaced the photos, his fingers felt the cover of a book. He took the book out and opened it to the first page. It was one of those bound books filled with blank lined paper. On the first page were groups of letters.
bsgyi eouee grcat eiity fytuo
eniow tyfit deaho rwhio rohtw
stnur hofhh inual eaomu ouitw
owsao iubai fosre nnpek mtsih
mhtrt naeds fwedt ttepn moino
“Can you read that?” asked Ellen.
He leafed through the book and the entire thing was filled with similar columns of letter groups. He smiled as, in his mind, he tilted them, tilted them again, reversed and divided the letters into words. It was like those strange pictures that look like meaningless squiggles and specs, unless you focus through it and see the three dimensional picture within.
“I can read it.”
“Read it out loud,” asked Ellen.
Andy moistened his lips and began. “‘I wrote this to let you know who you were. I had a hard time putting in stuff because I hope this isn’t who you are now. I want you to be something different from me, but I don’t know what. I put down everything about my life I could remember, and I put down everything I did, including a couple things the cops don’t know about. I put down the facts, why I did what I did and how I felt about it.’”