Black House

size, and his eyes lose their horror-stricken glaze.

“Tell me what Ebbie did,” Jack says. “Just between you and me. I won’t tell him anything. Honest. I won’t rat you out.”

“He wanted Ty to buy more Magic cards,” T.J. says, feeling his way through unknown territory. “If Ty was there, he woulda. Ebbie can get kind of mean. So . . . so he told me, go downstreet and get the slowpoke, or I’ll give you an Indian burn.”

“You got on your bike and rode back down Chase Street.”

“Uh-huh. I looked, but I didn’t see Ty anywheres. I thought I would, you know? Because where else could he be?”

“And . . . ?” Jack reels in the answer he knows is coming by winding his hand through the air.

“And I still didn’t see him. And I got to Queen Street, where the old folks’ home is, with the big hedge out front. And, um, I saw his bike there. On the sidewalk in front of the hedge. His sneaker was there, too. And some leaves off the hedge.”

There it is, the worthless secret. Maybe not entirely worthless: it gives them a pretty accurate fix on the time of the boy’s disappearance: 8:15, say, or 8:20. The bike lay on the sidewalk next to the sneaker for something like four hours before Danny Tcheda spotted them. Maxton’s takes up just about all the land on that section of Queen Street, and no one was showing up for the Strawberry Fest until noon.

T.J. describes being afraid—if the Fisherman pulled Ty into that hedge, maybe he’d come back for more! In answer to Jack’s final question, the boy says, “Ebbie told us to say Ty rode away from in front of the Allsorts, so people wouldn’t, like, blame us. In case he was killed. Ty isn’t really killed, is he? Kids like Ty don’t get killed.”

“I hope not,” Jack says.

“Me, too.” T.J. snuffles and wipes his nose on his arm.

“Let’s get you on your way home,” Jack says, leaving his chair.

T.J. stands up and begins to move along the side of the table. “Oh! I just remembered!”

“What?”

“I saw feathers on the sidewalk.”

The floor beneath Jack’s feet seems to roll left, then right, like the deck of a ship. He steadies himself by grasping the back of a chair. “Really.” He takes care to compose himself before turning to the boy. “What do you mean, feathers?”

“Black ones. Big. They looked like they came off a crow. One was next to the bike, and the other was in the sneaker.”

“That’s funny,” says Jack, buying time until he ceases to reverberate from the unexpected appearance of feathers in his conversation with T. J. Renniker. That he should respond at all is ridiculous; that he should have felt, even for a second, that he was likely to faint is grotesque. T.J.’s feathers were real crow feathers on a real sidewalk. His were dream feathers, feathers from unreal robins, illusory as everything else in a dream. Jack tells himself a number of helpful things like this, and soon he does feel normal once again, but we should be aware that, for the rest of the night and much of the next day, the word feathers floats, surrounded by an aura as charged as an electrical storm, beneath and through his thoughts, now and then surfacing with the sizzling crackle of a lightning bolt.

“It’s weird,” T.J. says. “Like, how did a feather get in his sneaker?”

“Maybe the wind blew it there,” Jack says, conveniently ignoring the nonexistence of wind this day. Reassured by the stability of the floor, he waves T.J. into the hallway, then follows him out.

Ebbie Wexler pushes himself off the wall and stamps up alongside Bobby Dulac. Still in character, Bobby might have been carved from a block of marble. Ronnie Metzger sidles away. “We can send these boys home,” Jack says. “They’ve done their duty.”

“T.J., what did you say?” Ebbie asks, glowering.

“He made it clear that you know nothing about your friend’s disappearance,” Jack says.

Ebbie relaxes, though not without distributing scowls all around. The final and most malignant scowl is for Jack, who raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t cry,” Ebbie says. “I was scared, but I didn’t cry.”

“You were scared, all right,” Jack says. “Next time, don’t lie to me. You had your chance to help the police, and you blew it.”

Ebbie struggles with this notion and succeeds, at least partially, in absorbing it. “Okay, but I wasn’t really flippin’ at you. It was the stupid music.”

“I hated it, too. The guy who was with me insisted on playing it. You know who he was?”

In the face of Ebbie’s suspicious glower, Jack says, “George Rathbun.”

It is like saying “Superman,” or “Arnold Schwarzenegger”; Ebbie’s suspicion evaporates, and his face transforms. Innocent wonder fills his small, close-set eyes. “You know George Rathbun?”

“He’s one of my best friends,” Jack says, not adding that most of his other best friends are, in a sense, also George Rathbun.

“Cool,” Ebbie says.

In the background, T.J. and Ronnie echo, “Cool.”

“George is pretty cool,” Jack says. “I’ll tell him you said that. Let’s go downstairs and get you kids on your bikes.”

Still wrapped in the glory of having gazed upon the great, the tremendous George Rathbun, the boys mount their bicycles, pedal away down Sumner Street, and swerve off onto Second. Bobby Dulac