“Matthew! Have you heard? Isn’t it awful?! I’m going out with the search party now. I’ll speak to you later! Okay, darling?”
She didn’t wait for an answer and the door banged shut. I watched her hurry to join the group and link her arm in Sue’s as they headed down the road toward town.
A van pulled up, and two men went around the side of Mr. Charles’s house carrying some electrical equipment and some plastic pipes. I went back to my room.
One of the men was putting a black cylinder into the middle of the pond while the other walked to an outdoor socket on the patio and plugged it in. The pump began to hum, and after a few seconds water began to gush out of a long blue pipe onto the flower bed where it puddled in the bone-dry earth. Within minutes the pond was empty, and one of the men took his shoes and socks off and rolled up his trousers before stepping down into the dirty sludge. As he raked about in the mud I wondered if he’d find the dead chick that Teddy had thrown in there.
“Stop! Stop! What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?! There’re fish in there! You’ll kill them!”
Mr. Charles was running down his yard, waving both of his fists in the air. He’d changed clothes and was wearing a white vest over some pale blue trousers. A forest of gray hair smothered his shoulders.
“Who said you could do that? I didn’t give permission for you to touch my pond!”
The man on the lawn spoke to him quietly. It was obvious without draining it that Teddy wasn’t in the pond, so I can only assume they were looking for clues.
Mr. Charles ignored the man and went into his shed and came out carrying a large black bucket, which he filled from an outside tap. He then struggled with it toward the empty pond as the man in the sludge stood waiting with something scooped in his hands. I saw a sliver of orange as he dropped the fish into the bucket and Mr. Charles crouched down to inspect it.
“There are five more in there, you know. And I want every one out alive!”
Mr. Charles was really shouting now. The man on the lawn put a hand on his shoulder as he tried to calm him down, but Mr. Charles shrugged him off. He went back to the patio and began to fiddle with a yellow hose that was on a wheel fixed to the side of his house. The man in the pond scooped out two more fish as Mr. Charles marched back down to the garden with the trigger of the hose in his hand as it unraveled behind him. He stood there, aiming the hose at the pond, and waited.
Ten minutes later the pond had been fully searched, with only one more fish making it into the bucket. The men gathered up their equipment and headed back to the front of the house, shaking their heads.
Without a word Mr. Charles pulled the trigger on the hose, and a sharp blast of water hit the plastic pond liner. He stood there, motionless, until the pond was full once more.
At 6 p.m. I watched as two sniffer dogs ran excitedly around the neighborhood, their tails circling madly. They looked like they were onto something, only to turn around and head off in a different direction. They stopped and sniffed at a lamppost outside Penny and Gordon’s house as Frankie yapped frantically from the window of number three. Melody’s arms appeared briefly around the net curtain as she lifted the dog out of sight. The handlers directed them around the cul-de-sac as they searched each yard, and then they headed down the alleyway toward the graveyard.
The computer made a trumpet sound and an email appeared on the screen.
To: Matthew Corbin
From: Jake Bishop
Subject: Old Nina Took Teddy!!!
Old Nina’s got him. She’s a witch. She’s probably baking him in a pie right now!!!!
Jake
I stared at the message. Apart from the occasional yells of abuse, I hadn’t really had much to do with Jake Bishop lately. In fact, this was the first contact I’d had with him without him calling me a freak or a weirdo for about two years. I wasn’t really sure what to say.
To: Jake Bishop
From: Matthew Corbin
Re: Old Nina Took Teddy!!!
Of course she’s not a witch! Did you see anything?
Matthew
I looked back over my notes. Jake had sped off on his bike after Old Nina had pointed her finger at him when he was hassling Melody. That was the last I knew about his whereabouts.
To: Matthew Corbin
From: Jake Bishop
Re: Old Nina Took Teddy!!!
The only thing I’ve seen is your stupid gawping face staring out of that window of yours. What do you do up there all day exactly?
I deleted the email without answering.
Even I found it hard to believe, but Jake and I had once been best friends. Mum got to know his mum, Sue, when they realized they were living one house apart and both expecting babies around the same time; me at the end of October and Jake at the beginning of November.
They began having coffee together, and when we would both kick at the same time, they used to joke that we were trying to talk to each other. I arrived on my due date and Jake apparently fidgeted constantly, driving his mum mad, until he was born ten days later. Sue used to tell that story every time I saw her.
“He was so keen to meet you, weren’t you, Jakey? Ten days he had to wait though! Ten days before he could meet his new best friend.”
Our mums carried on meeting up while we laid in our bouncy chairs, apparently babbling to each other, but then, over the weeks, Sue realized that something wasn’t quite right with Jake. I thrived and outgrew my onesies, whereas he struggled to put on any weight and his skin was constantly red and sore. After months of hospital visits, the doctors discovered that he had a ton of allergies. Not long after that Jake and Leo’s dad left, leaving Sue alone and on constant alert in case her son came into contact with anything deadly.
When we started school it became clear that for his entire education he was going to be haunted by a bright yellow medical bag that followed him wherever he went. The other kids were fascinated at first.
“What’s in that bag, Jake?”
“How many needles are in there?”
“Is it really true that you could die if you ate the wrong thing?”
But after a while the novelty wore off and Jake’s allergies and raw skin made him a target. He turned up at birthday parties with his own specially prepared parcel of food, his mum terrified that a stray nut might have accidentally brushed against the cheese sandwiches and he’d go into anaphylactic shock. As soon as the adults were out of the way, the snide comments would start.
“You eating your baby food again, Jakey-boy?”
I’d give him a smile. Not quite sticking up for him, but at least letting him know I wasn’t siding with them, and anyway, I’d already started hanging around with Tom more, so we weren’t as good friends as we used to be.
Things got worse for him in fifth grade when the whole grade went on a trip to a London museum. As we filed onto the bus I saw there was an empty seat next to Jake, as usual. The understanding was that if you sat too close to him, then you could catch his scaly skin. I’m pretty sure nobody actually believed this, but no one was brave enough to say that.
“Matt! You can sit here if you want,” Jake said, his eyes pleading with me as I edged down the aisle. Tom was already in the backseat, beckoning me over.
What I should have done was dive into the seat beside Jake and prove to everyone that it was fine. There really wasn’t anything contagious about him.
But I didn’t.
“Sorry, Jake. I said I’d sit with Tom.”
I kept my face blank and carried on walking.
Everyone was chattering with excitement as we pulled onto the highway when our teacher, Mrs. Chambers, suddenly heaved herself up out of her seat, making the bus tilt to the left.
“Oh my God! Driver, turn around! I’ve forgotten Jake’s medical bag.”
A united groan rumbled around the bus as we returned to school and waited for Mrs. Chambers to heave herself down the steps, get herself to the school office, unlock a filing cabinet, clamber back onto the bus, and throw the despised yellow bag into an overhead locker.