Over a lunch eaten out on the library steps, I would chat with the librarian, Mr. Weston. He was a veteran of the first World War, a guy who had been a farmer before he went off to fight in a trench in France, and came back wanting to be a librarian. “They shoot bullets at you long enough,” he once told me, “you figure out what you want in life.” As far as he knew, I was a kid who had messed up in school last year and been assigned a couple of summer research projects. He showed me the newspaper archives in the basement, and left me there for two or three hours reading and looking.
Pretty soon, I trusted him enough to show the strange, large coin from Luka’s box. “I’m supposed to find out what happened to this guy,” I said, showing him the name “Clive Beckett” stamped into it.
“He’s dead is what happened to him,” said Mr. Weston.
“How do you know that?”
He took the outsized coin from my hand. “Dead Man’s Penny. They used to send these out to the families. More like a plaque really. Grim. People used to put them on the walls. My mother got one of these for my brother, Steven. Sure, I’ll help you look into it.”
In the mid-afternoon, I would pack everything up, drop my backpack down the coal chute, hop a few more fences to the Tarkington house, and check my scattered flour for footprints.
On a Friday near the end of August, I made a chilling discovery: two sets of footprints. They hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. I could follow them all the way to the front door, and when I peeked out a window, I could even see a few white marks down the front path.
I felt I needed a wall at my back. Better yet, Luka. She wouldn’t be scared by this. Neither would I if I could only have her with me. I shivered. It was January all over again. Someone had come through the mirror, two someones, and I had no idea who. My heart hammering, I told myself to calm down. I went back to the living room where I had left the mirror and took a closer look at the footprints. One was definitely bigger than mine, the other about the same size. No patterns in the treads. There were a lot of scuffed prints, but that didn’t tell me anything. I too would have spent a little time shuffling my feet and looking around if I came out into this abandoned house.
Anthony’s doorstop, the string joining a spoon on this side to another in 1947, was still there.
Someone had come through the mirror.
The enormity of it stayed with me the rest of that day and all through the weekend.
On Sunday, as soon as everyone left for church, I slipped out, dusted myself off, slung my backpack onto my shoulder, and started hunting for an unobtrusive place to spend the morning. After some deliberation, I settled on the space between two of Brian’s across-the-street neighbors, both of whom were on vacation. An azalea bush shielded me from the street, but enough light got in that I was able to sit back and read some genealogy books Mr. Weston had recommended. I wasn’t satisfied with the story so far regarding the death of Clive Beckett in his teens during the first World War, and these books contained lists and diagrams with details about marriages, births, and deaths. Could Beckett have had a kid brother? He would have had to be a lot younger, but maybe it was possible.
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
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.”
