Ashley started to disagree, but Sid cut her off.
“And he’s probably pulling the prank of the year. He’ll spend the summer befriending us and then lure us to some secret Thrasher hideout so they can beat the tar out of us before school starts back up in the fall.”
Sid heard the explanation, weak and bordering on paranoid. He didn’t believe a word of it. The truth was, he didn’t want a third. Period. He liked Ashley and Sid as they were.
Ashley didn’t say more about it. She rattled on about the Huffy Pro Thunder until they reached his street.
“My mom’s making spaghetti tonight. Want to come over later?”
“I thought you were going to the Pinwheel,” she mocked.
Sid’s mouth fell open, but he clamped it shut. “I just didn’t want to go with him, okay?” He heard the whine in his voice and wished he could cut out his stupid voice box and just be one of those cool, silent guys you sometimes saw in noir films. They wore black trench coats and smoked cigarettes, and gorgeous women fell all over them even though they never spoke a word.
Ashley shook her head and Sid noticed a wistful look in her eye. “I’m cooking dinner for my mom tonight.”
“What? Can you even work the oven?”
Ashley glared at him. “Actually, smart-ass, I can. But I’m going to make tuna fish sandwiches, so I won’t need to.”
“Umm, I don’t think that’s called cooking.”
“Whatever. I’ll see you tomorrow, Sid.” She offered him a light punch in the bicep and turned left, cutting between a row of houses leading toward her house.
“Okay,” he yelled after her. “Call me early. Okay? Maybe we can take the camera out and look for, ya know…”
But she didn’t respond and as he watched her run off, and his throat constricted around his words.
20
“Mr. Wolf?”
A girl’s voice, as clear as if she’d spoken into his ear, flowed to Max out of the darkness.
He sat up in bed.
“Who’s there?” he asked, his mind suspended between waking and dreaming.
He squinted into his dark bedroom. He made out the silhouettes of his dresser and the chair next to his closet.
Had a student snuck into his house?
He fumbled for his bedside table, flipping on his lamp, and extinguishing the shadows.
No girl stood in his bedroom.
His eyes flitted over the dresser scattered with his wallet, keys, and a few quarters. Beside his dresser, the previous day’s clothes were draped over a chair.
He stood and shuffled to the door, looking down the dark hallway to the equally dark stairs. No sounds emerged, not even a breath broke the silence.
He slipped back into his room and closed and locked the door. As he walked toward his bed, something scratched at his window.
He jumped back, imagining a girl’s sharp fingernails clawing at the glass.
The scratching came again, and his heart galloped in his chest. He lunged to his lamp and flipped the light off, feeling exposed in the yellow beam.
In the cover of darkness, he peeled back the curtain, preparing for the face he expected to find pressed against his window.
His cat, Frankenstein, named after the scientist, not the monster, stood on his roof, paws pressed against the window pane. His yellow eyes glowed in the dark night.
“Jesus, Frankenstein,” he muttered, putting a hand on his chest and feeling the rapid thud beneath his palm.
Max opened the window, and the cat leapt inside, his black and white hair standing in a rigid arc from nape to tail.
The cat had been all that was left after his break-up with Cindy Montgomery two years before. She’d given him the kitten for the single Christmas they’d spent together. He remembered her confused and disappointed expression when she’d opened her own gift: a waterproof Timex watch. He’d realized later, after Jake elbowed him after Christmas dinner, that Cindy had expected a ring.
Frankenstein had outlived several of Max’s, short but not so sweet, relationships since.
“Something spook you?” he asked, kneeling to pet that cat.
Frankenstein leaned into his touch, but remained alert, his tail a streak of agitated fur.
As Max stroked the cat and the hazy fear of being awakened dissipated, he realized he recognized the voice who’d spoken to him from the darkness.
It had been the voice of Melanie Dunlop.
Max walked into the hallway, turning on lights as we went. He peeked into the spare bedroom, the bathroom, and finally, traipsed down the stairs into the living room.
A book lay on the living room floor. He grabbed it, not bothering to glance at the title and returned it the shelf. The house was empty.
“I dreamed it,” he sighed, retiring to his room and crawling back into bed.
Frankenstein curled into a ball and rested his head on his tail.
“Melanie Dunlop,” he whispered and then shook his head, thinking back to his conversation with Ashley and Sid from the day before. The ghost story had clearly planted a creep seed in his head, and he’d dreamed her voice in his room as a consequence.
Creep seeds were a term invented by one of his college professors during psychology 101 and referred to unnerving events of the day that later wove themselves into dreams.
Max’s experience at The Crawford House had definitely left a lasting impression, one he’d never made sense of. Though in the years since the incident occurred, he’d decided he’d made it up. Fear mingled with a powerful boy’s imagination produced the images Max saw that night. Nothing more.
He leaned over and flicked off the lamp, listening to Frankenstein’s purrs as he drifted back to sleep.
Sunlight filtered through the slants in his blinds when Max woke. He rolled over, mouth falling open, when he spotted the time: ten forty-three a.m. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept later than seven o’clock in the morning.
His feet tingled from the heavy ball of fluff curled on his ankles.
“Ok, Frankie, move it or lose it,” he murmured, wiggling his legs until the cat stretched, shot him an irritated look, and hopped down from the bed.
He followed the cat down the stairs and into the kitchen, stopping abruptly at the mess on the floor.
“What the…” he bent down to take a closer look. A trail of colorful cereal lay scattered along the linoleum.
He picked up a piece of the cereal and sniffed it.
“Fruit Loops,” he murmured, smelling the faint aroma of lemons.
Max stood and set the single yellow loop on his counter, eyeing it wearily.
He didn’t own a box of Fruit Loops. He stopped eating sugary cereal in high school when the football coach had told him he’d never make the team if he didn’t build some muscle, which meant protein. Max had started eating eggs for breakfast the next day. He never did play football.
By the time his body achieved the desirable physique of an athlete, Max had shifted his focus to the basketball team and considered the football players to be lunkheads who likely lost half a cup of braincells every game.
Frankenstein sniffed the cereal and then batted a loop with his paw, sending it skidding across the floor and under the kitchen table.
Max walked to the door and turned the handle. It wiggled, but otherwise stayed in place, the lock engaged.
He thought of the voice from the night before, the girl’s voice, Melanie Dunlop’s voice. Maybe she had run away and for whatever reason had broken into his house and dropped a handful of Fruit Loops on his kitchen floor.
“Like Hansel and Gretel,” he said out loud before shaking his head in disbelief. “Better take pictures of this, Frankenstein. Detective Welch will definitely want to see the latest clues I’ve discovered.”