“I will.” She gave me a quick glance, and then she walked out of the
office with the umbrella.
I don’t think I had drawn a breath during that entire exchange. Now I
pulled one in, and I shivered as the air burned my lungs.
“Now, Cory,” Mayor Swope said, “where were we? Oh yes: the man across the
road. How’d you come up with that?”
“I… I…” The green-feathered hat was in a closet ten feet from me. Mayor
Swope was the man who’d worn it that night when the floodwaters had raged in
the streets of Bruton. “I… never said it was a man,” I answered. “I just said…
it was somebody standin’ there.”
“Well, that was a nice touch. I’ll bet that was an excitin’ mornin’ for
you, wasn’t it?” He reached into another pocket, and when his hand came into
view there was a small silver blade in it.
It was the knife I’d seen in his hand, that night when I was afraid he
was going to sneak up behind my dad and stab him in the back for what he’d
seen at Saxon’s Lake.
“I wish I could write,” Mayor Swope said. He turned the blade around. On
its other end was a blunt little piece of metal, which he used to tamp the
burning tobacco down in his pipe. “I’ve always liked mysteries.”
“Me too,” I managed to rasp.
He stood up, rain pelting the windows behind him. Lightning zigzagged
over Zephyr, and the lights suddenly flickered. Thunder crashed. “Oh my,”
Mayor Swope said. “That was a little too close, wasn’t it?”
“Yes sir.” My hands were about to break the armrests of my chair.
“I want you,” he said, “to wait right here for a minute. There’s
somethin’ I want to show you, and I think it’ll explain things.” He crossed
the room, the pipe clenched between his teeth and a scrawl of smoke behind
him, and he went out into the area where Mrs. Axford’s desk was. He left the
door ajar, and I could hear him opening the drawer of a filing cabinet.
My gaze went to the closet.
The green feather was in there. So close. What if I was to pluck it from
its hat and compare it to the green feather I’d found on the sole of my shoe?
If the feathers matched, what then?
I had to move fast if I was going to move at all.
The filing cabinet’s drawer closed. Another opened. “Just a minute!”
Mayor Swope called to me. “It’s not where it’s supposed to be!”
I had to go. Right now.
I got up on rubbery legs and opened the closet. The reek of mildewed
cloth hit me in the face like a damp slap. But the coat and the hat were there
on the floor, nudged up into a corner. I heard the drawer slide shut. I
grasped the feather and tugged at it. It wouldn’t come loose.
Mayor Swope was coming back into the office. My heart was a cold stone in
my throat. Thunder boomed and the rain slammed against the windows, and I
grasped that green feather and jerked it and this time it tore loose from the
hatband. It was mine.
“Cory? What’re you doin’ in—”
Lightning flared, so close you could hear the sizzle. The lights went
out, and the next crack of thunder shook the windows.
I stood in the dark, the green feather in my hand and Mayor Swope in the
doorway.
“Don’t move, Cory,” he said. “Say somethin’.”
I didn’t. I edged toward the wall and pressed my back against it.
“Cory? Come on, now. Let’s don’t play games.” I heard him shut the door.
A floorboard creaked, ever so quietly. He was moving. “Let’s sit down and
talk, Cory. There’s somethin’ very important you need to understand.”
Outside, the clouds had gone almost black, and the room was a dungeon. I
thought I could see his tall, thin shape gliding slowly toward me across the
Persian carpet. I was going to have to get through him to the door.
“No need for this,” Mayor Swope said, his voice trying to sound calm and
reassuring. It had the same hollow ring as Mr. Hargison’s false voice. “Cory?”
I heard him release a long, resigned sigh. “You know, don’t you?”
Darned right I knew.
“Where are you, son? Talk to me.”
I didn’t dare.
“How’d you find out?” he asked. “Just tell me that.”
Lightning flickered and hissed. By its split-second glare I could see
Mayor Swope, white as a zombie, standing at the center of the room with pipe
smoke drifting around him like a wraith. Now my heart was really hammering; a
spark of lightning had jumped off something metal clenched in his right hand.
“I’m sorry you found out, Cory,” Mayor Swope said. “I didn’t want you to
get hurt.”
I couldn’t help it; in my panic, I blurted it out: “I wanna go home!”
“I can’t let you do that,” he said, and his shape began moving toward me
through the electric-charged dark. “You understand, don’t you?”
I understood. My legs responded first; they propelled me across the
Persian carpet toward the way out, and my lungs snagged a breath and my hand
gripped the green feather. I don’t know how near I passed to him, but I got to
the door unhindered and tried to twist the doorknob but my palm was slick with
cold sweat. He must’ve heard the rattle, because he said, “Stop!” and I could
sense him coming after me. Then the doorknob turned and the door opened and I
shot through it as if from the barrel of a cannon. I collided with Mrs.
Axford’s desk, and I heard the photographs clatter as they fell.
“Cory!” he said, louder. “No!”
I caromed off the side of the desk, a human pinball in motion. I went
into the row of chairs, striking my right knee on a hard edge. My lips let out
a cry of pain, and as I tried to find the door into the hallway it seemed that
the chairs had come to malevolent life and were blocking my way. A cold chill
skittered up my spine as Mayor Swope’s hand fell on my shoulder like a spider.
“No!” he said, and his fingers started to close.
I pulled loose. A chair was beside me, and I shoved it at Mayor Swope
like a shield. He stumbled into it, and I heard him say “Oof!” as his legs got
tangled up and he fell to the floor. Then I turned away from him, frantically
searching for the door. At any second I expected a hand to seal itself around
my ankle, and that hand to draw me to him like the tentacle of the
glass-bowled monster of Invaders from Mars. Tears of terror were starting to
burn my eyes. I blinked them away, and suddenly my hand found the cold knob of
the door that led out. I twisted it, pushed through, and ran along the
storm-darkened corridor, my footsteps ringing on the linoleum and thunder
echoing through the halls of justice.
“Cory! Come back here!” he hollered as if he really thought I might. He
was coming after me, and he was running, too. I had the mental picture of
myself beaten to a pulp, my hand cuffed to Rocket, and Rocket tumbling down,
down, down into the awful netherworld of Saxon’s Lake.
I tripped over my own flying feet, fell, and skidded on my belly across
the linoleum. My chin banged into the bottom of a wall, but I scrambled up and
kept going, Mayor Swope’s footsteps right behind me. “Cory!” he shouted, fury
in his voice. It was surely the voice of a crazed killer. “Stop where you
are!”
Like hell, I thought.
And then I saw dank gray light streaming through the cupola over the
staircase and I started running down the stairs without even holding on to the
railing, which was enough right there to cause my mother to go white-haired.
Mayor Swope was puffing behind me, and his voice was losing its steam: “No,
Cory! No!” I reached the bottom of the staircase, and I ran across the
entrance lobby and out the front door into the chilly rain. The worst of the
storm had already swept over Zephyr, and now squatted above the hills like a
massive grayish-blue toad-frog. I got Rocket unlocked, but I left the chain
hanging. I pedaled away from the courthouse just as Mayor Swope came through
the door hollering at me to stop.
The last thing he hollered—and I thought this was strange, coming from a
crazed killer—was “For God’s sake, be careful!”
Rocket flew over the rain-pocked puddles, its golden eye picking out a
path. The clouds were parting, shards of yellow sunlight breaking through. Dad
had always told me that when it rained while the sun showed, the devil was
beating his wife. Rocket dodged the splashing cars on Merchants Street and I
hung on for the ride.
At home, Rocket skidded to a stop at the front porch steps and I ran
inside, my hair plastered down with rain and my hand gripping the soggy green
feather.
“Cory!” Mom called as the screen door slammed. “Cory Mackenson, come
here!”
“Just a minute!” I ran into my room, and I searched the seven mystic
drawers until I found the White Owl cigar box. I opened it, and there was the
green feather I’d found on the bottom of my shoe.
“Come here this instant!” Mom shouted.
“Wait!” I placed the first green feather down on my desk, and the green
feather I’d plucked from the mayor’s hatband beside it.
“Cory! Come in here! I’m on the phone with Mayor Swope!”
Oh-oh.
My feeling of triumph cracked, collapsed, cascaded around my wet
sneakers.
The first feather, the one that had come from the woods, was a deep
emerald green. The one from the mayor’s hatband was about three shades
lighter. Not only that, but the hatband feather was at least twice as large as
the Saxon’s Lake feather.
They didn’t match one iota.
“Cory! Come talk to the mayor before I get a switch after you!”
When I dared to walk into the kitchen, I saw that my mother’s face was as
red as a strangled beet. She said into the telephone, “No sir, I promise you
Cory doesn’t have a mental condition. No sir, he doesn’t have panic attacks,
either. Here he is right now, I’ll put him on.” She held the receiver out to
me, and fixed me with a baleful glare. “Have you lost your mind? Take this
phone and talk to the mayor!”
I took it. It was all I could do to utter one pitiable word: “Hello?”
“Cory!” Mayor Swope said. “I had to call to make sure you’d gotten home
all right! I was scared to death you were gonna fall down those stairs in the
dark and break your neck! When you ran out, I thought you were… like… havin’ a
fit or somethin’.”
“No sir,” I answered meekly. “I wasn’t havin’ a fit.”
“Well, when the lights went out I figured you might be afraid of the
dark. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself, so I was tryin’ to get you settled
down. And I figured your mom and dad wouldn’t want me to let you try gettin’
home in that storm, either! If you’d gotten sideswiped by a car… well, thank
the Lord it didn’t happen.”
“I… thought…” My throat choked up. I could feel my mother’s burning eyes.
“I thought… you were tryin’ to… kill me,” I said.
The mayor was silent for a few seconds, and I could imagine what he must
be thinking. I was a pure number-one nut case. “Kill you? Whatever for?”
“Cory!” Mom said. “Are you crazy?”
“I’m sorry,” I told the mayor. “My… imagination got away from me, I
guess. But you said I knew somethin’ about you, and you wondered how I’d found
out, and—”
“No, not somethin’ about me,” Mayor Swope said. “Somethin’ about your
award.”
“My award?”
“Your plaque. For winnin’ third place in the short story contest. That’s
why I asked you to come see me. I was afraid somebody else on the awards panel
had told you before I could.”
“Told me what?”
“Well, I wanted to show it to you. I was bringin’ your plaque in to show
you when the lights went out and you went wild. See, the fella who engraves
the plaques misspelled your name. He spelled Cory with an ‘e.’ I wanted you to
see it before the ceremony so you wouldn’t get your feelin’s hurt. The fella’s
promised to do your plaque again, but he’s got to do some softball awards
first and he can’t get to it for two weeks. Understand?”
Oh, what a bitter pill. What a bitter, bitter pill.
“Yes sir,” I answered. I felt dazed, and my right knee was really
starting to throb. “I do.”
“Are you on… any medication?” the mayor asked me.
“No sir.”
He grunted quietly. That grunt said, You sure ought to be.
“I’m sorry I acted a fool,” I said. “I don’t know what got into me.” If
he figured I was crazy now, I thought, just wait until he saw what I’d done to
his hat. I decided to let him find that out for himself.
“Well,” and the mayor gave a little laugh that told me he was finding
some humor in this mess, “it’s been a real interestin’ afternoon, Cory.”
“Yes sir. Uh… Mayor Swope?”
“Yes?”
“Uh… the plaque’s okay as it is. Even with my name spelled wrong. You
don’t have to get it fixed.” I figured this was penance of a sort; every time
I looked at that plaque, I’d remember the day I shoved a chair at the mayor
and knocked him down.
“Nonsense. We’ll get it changed for you.”
“I’d just as soon have it the way it is now,” I told him, and I guess I
sounded firm about it because Mayor Swope said, “All right, Cory, if that’s
what you really want.”
He said he had to go get into a bathtub full of Epsom salts, and then he
said he’d see me at the awards ceremony. When he hung up, I had to face my
mother and explain to her why I’d thought Mayor Swope was going to kill me.
Dad came in during this explanation, and though by all rights I should have
been punished for my foolishness, my folks simply sent me to my room for an
hour, which was where I was going to go anyhow.
In my room, I looked at the two mismatched green feathers. One bright,
one sober. One small, one large. I picked up the Saxon’s Lake feather and held
it in the palm of my hand, and I found my magnifying glass and examined the
feather’s rills and ridges. Maybe Sherlock Holmes could’ve deduced something
from it, but I was as confounded as Dr. Watson.
Mayor Swope had been the man in the green-feathered hat. His “knife” had
been his pipe-cleaning tool. This feather in my hand had nothing to do with
Mayor Swope’s hat. Did it have anything to do with the figure I thought I’d
seen standing at the edge of the woods, or the dead man at the bottom of the
lake? One thing I knew for sure: there were no emerald-green birds in the
