The Man in the Woods Read online

  Helen stared at the words on the page. “It’s all … correct,” she said after a moment.

  “Sublimely correct,” said Sister Ignatius, removing her elegant spectacles and placing them deep in a recess in the mysterious folds of her habit. “A-plus work. No student who ever passed through the doors of my classroom who spelled and parsed his grammar as poorly as that ever punctuated like an English professor. Correct form of address, colon, spaces after commas and full stops, parentheses, and even a hyphen placed at the syllable break. What a pity you’ve squeezed the last drop of attention from our noble police force, because there is an educated mind behind that dreary note. He was just a little bit too well educated to convince a teacher. Good-bye, my dear child.”

  Chapter 6

  ARMED WITH HER HUMMEL figurine drawings, which Aunt Stella said were just adorable and which made Helen a little sick, and her football player drawings, which Helen was truly proud of, Helen raced down to the Whaler office at Monday’s three o’clock bell. She peeked around Jerry Rosen’s partition.

  Jerry’s telephone kept ringing. Freshmen pattered in and out with booster tag receipts and sophomores with copy for the next week’s ads. Helen wondered if she would ever feel a part of all this. Her privileged position on the Whaler, as an indirect result of Mr. Bro’s blackmailing Jerry, had not helped. Everyone was still a stranger to her. At last Jerry noticed her. “You do it right this time?” he asked.

  “I hope so,” answered Helen, feeling very much in the way.

  Jerry stood and yelled, “Barry! Barry, where are you? This office is too crowded,” he added. “Let’s look at your drawings where there’s some room.”

  Jerry and Beverly, phlegmatic and snapping her gum as usual, stared at the drawings which Jerry placed on an empty desk. At least ten other people milled around the desk, looking at Helen’s Hummel drawings. Barry was playing poker in a corner, and he seemed annoyed at the idea of leaving the neat stack of nickels he had won. Several voices said, “Super! Really excellent,” but Jerry paid them no attention. “Barry, what do you think?” he asked.

  At this moment, with everyone looking on and complimenting her, Helen decided to place her football player pictures on the desk as well. More compliments were muttered. Jerry’s telephone kept ringing. He looked over his shoulder in irritation at it and instructed Penny Parker to pick it up. “If it’s the compositor,” he yelled, “tell him I’m dead. Tell him he has to remake those plates because it was his fault and he knows it. Barry, come over here,” he went on. “Take a look at this little German doll.”

  “How are the football players?” Helen asked confidently.

  “They’re okay,” said Jerry, and Helen’s heart rose expectantly. “But there’s too much expression in the faces. Bev, get copies of these drawings. White out the faces and draw ’em in right.”

  “But … but you can’t do that!” said Helen. “You can’t have one person draw the body and another person draw the face.”

  “It isn’t the football look,” Jerry replied seriously. “You won’t sell booster tags with football players looking like they just saw Frankenstein.”

  “But that’s how they look!” Helen protested. “That’s just what their faces do look like when they’re catching the ball or kicking or passing. They grunt and groan and put everything into it, and their faces do look like that.”

  “Don’t whine,” said Jerry. “Bev, take care of these drawings. Barry, how about this German music box picture?”

  Barry picked up his nickels. Sauntering over to the desk, he jingled them in his hand and said, “Better, but still too much expression in the eyes. I think Bev is going to have to do it. Mr. Perry can’t wait much longer.”

  “Pay me, Barry,” said Beverly.

  “You know Mr. Perry has to have the drawing free, Beverly,” Barry argued. “Be a team player, Beverly.”

  “Phoo to you, Barry de Wolf,” said Beverly, and Helen admired her courage because she would have given the earth at that moment to say the same thing. Instead she collected her drawings and, telling herself sternly that this was the worst possible moment and that she should keep her mouth shut, said, “Jerry, I have an idea!”

  “You have a lot of ideas,” Jerry answered, backing toward his office door.

  “May I just tell you what it is?” Helen kicked herself inwardly for the urgency in her voice.

  “Friendly Jerry listens to everyone,” he said, rolling up a wayward sleeve just so.

  “I want to enter the Whaler’s contest for the best story. It’s a true story, Jerry. It’s about the Punk Rock Thrower.” Helen gulped hard and kept going. “You see, I was there, Pinky Levy too, the day the last accident happened….

  “I saw it in the paper,” said Jerry. “Both of you guys are getting good citizenship awards. So write it. I have no objection.” He began backing away again.

  “But that’s not it,” said Helen. “I don’t want to write about being a good citizen. I want to write about Stubby Atlas and whoever tipped off the cops. I can prove that the Post-Dispatch lied and covered up the fact that Stubby worked at Perry and Crowe this summer. Mr. Perry didn’t want that in the papers because he thought it would hurt the store’s image. So his brother didn’t print it. That’s … that’s fraud! Or something. There was someone else in the woods too, Jerry—I followed him. Anyway, if you like—”

  “I don’t like it,” said Jerry. “Barry! Where are you? Barry, will you please tell Nancy Drew here what will happen to the Whaler’s advertising money if she starts spreading stories about Mr. Perry lying in the press.”

  Barry looked up from his cards. “He’ll take his ads out of the Whaler pronto,” said Barry.

  “Look,” Jerry went on with false patience, “I don’t know why you want to cause so much trouble for the Whaler.”

  “I don’t want to cause trouble … Helen answered.

  “The Whaler isn’t the Police Gazette,” said Jerry.

  “Trouble,” said Barry. He put his cards down. Jerry steered Helen into a corner. Barry followed. Across the room Beverly was flirting with a freshman, giggling and making a fish mouth at him.

  “First of all,” Jerry said, his eyes on Beverly, “you’ve got to get it into your head that this is a conservative, respectable newspaper. We want a state journalism award this year. We’re not going to get it with left-wing cartoons, and we’re not going to get it with stories about—”

  “Let me talk to her, Jerry,” Barry interrupted. “Look, she’s going to cry if you keep at her. Just cool your jets, okay?” Barry sat and crossed his legs. “Helen,” he said. “Is that it? Helen or Ellen?”

  “Helen,” said Helen.

  “Okay, Helen. Now, look. I work at Perry and Crowe part time during the school year, full time in the summer. Believe me, I know about this junkie, Atlas. He tried to rob the store this summer.”

  “I know that,” said Helen. “The police told me.”

  “What else did the cops tell you?”

  “Not much except he threw those rocks to get revenge against Mr. Perry, who fired him.”

  “That’s right. Now, first of all, Mr. Perry is a very tough old bird. If we attack him, he will take his ads out of the Whaler and see to it that a lot of other town businesses do too. But that’s not the point. The point is, if you start writing about this maniac, this doped-up wacko, Atlas, the wrong people might see it, and they might think you know more than you actually do, and they might come after you. Did you ever consider that? Somebody might say, Hey! What did this girl see? What does she know? Stubby and his pals and his old man’s pals play very rough. Just please don’t get yourself into this. I knew Stubby. He worked down in the loading garage. The guy is a hopeless criminal.”

  “I went to school with him at St. Theresa’s. Sort of,” said Helen. “When I was in second grade, some boy was torturing the class guinea pig. Stubby saved the guinea pig. I remember that.”

  “And what did he do to the boy?” asked Barry. “B
reak his arm?”

  Helen swallowed hard. “Almost,” she admitted. “But—”

  “Ellen,” said Barry.

  “Helen,” said Helen.

  “Sorry. You ever see The Godfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want people like that even knowing you exist? I saw plenty of Stubby’s friends this summer. They used to wait across the street for him to get off from work. One of them had greasy hair down to his butt. Filthy T-shirt cut off around the middle. He wore a bone twisted in his hair. A bone! Said it was human, but it wasn’t. He had a little knife this long, and he could get it out of his pocket in about a fiftieth of a second.”

  “I get your point,” said Helen.

  “Good,” said Barry.

  The Whaler office was buzzing frenetically. One of the members of the football team came in and clowned around with Penny Parker. He knocked a bottle of soda on the floor, and someone yelled, “Heads up!”

  Beverly took Helen down to the drafting room. She snapped her gum loudly at each step. “Rejection is never easy,” said Beverly.

  Helen had gotten Barry’s point all right. It was just like the nuclear waste trucks. Barry and Jerry and Beverly wouldn’t give two hoots if one of the trucks smashed up and contaminated four million people so long as it didn’t hurt them or their precious Whaler. Jerry and Barry didn’t want her to write her story because it might lose them some advertising money. If she got hurt, as Barry so seriously tried to convince her was likely, the only thing he and Jerry would care about was that she might be traced to the Whaler and they might not get their stupid award.

  As they went into the drafting room, Helen sank the heels of her palms deeply into her eyes, pushing back any tears that might have crept out.

  Beverly opened a small bottle of typewriter correcting fluid. “This’ll only take a minute,” she said, very much like a nurse. Helen handed her the five football player drawings. Beverly held the miniscule brush between two perfectly manicured and pink-polished fingernails. With one neat swipe each of opaque white paint, the faces on Helen’s drawings disappeared. “Sign them,” said Beverly. “Here’s a Rapidograph.”

  “Sign them?” asked Helen, looking at her precious faceless drawings miserably.

  “Sure. I’ll just draw in the faces when the photostats come back. You’ll get to have your signature on all our new booster tags. Won’t that be nice?”

  Because tears had welled up in her eyes and she couldn’t say a word in argument and didn’t dare cry, Helen scrawled her name on the bottom of each drawing. Unreadably.

  Beverly looked. “Oh, you can sign better than that!” she said encouragingly and whited out all the signatures. “Now, sign it nice and clear and legible so everybody can read it and know it’s your drawing!” Beverly looked at Helen as if Helen had turned into a real live human-size caterpillar.

  “Heaven’s sakes!” she exclaimed. “Don’t cry! Professionals don’t cry. Here. I’ll sign them for you.” Very neatly Beverly wrote Helen Curry under each picture. “Pinky!” she yelled into the pressroom at the back. “Get stats of these, will you?”

  Beverly took her mirror from her purse. She applied some coral-mist lipstick, which matched her nails, and sauntered up the stairway. As quickly as she was gone, Pinky emerged from the pressroom muttering his usual blasphemy.

  “Don’t you dare laugh at me, Pinky Levy,” Helen sniffed, wiping her eyes with a Kleenex, “or compare me to your awful sister just because I have human feelings!”

  “I wasn’t going to,” said Pinky in complete amazement. “Beverly Boone’s the biggest airhead who ever wiggled her fat behind. But crying won’t do any good.”

  “I can’t help it,” said Helen. “She’s a senior, and she’s beautiful. I can’t say boo to her.” Trying hard not to, Helen broke into fresh tears. “That know-it-all Jerry Rosen made her change my drawings. He said I can’t write my story because the Whaler will lose advertising money. That’s all they worry about. And that jerk Barry de Wolf turned down my Hummel drawings again, and he went on like a priest about how somebody out of The Godfather might pull a switchblade on me if I wrote the story. All he’s trying to do is not embarrass Mr. Perry, his boss, and all he cares about is what the New Bedford businessmen think. He wouldn’t bat an eye if somebody strangled me so long as it didn’t affect the advertising money for his silly, boring, hideous Whaler!”

  “Helen,” said Pinky.

  “Caterpillars,” said Helen. “That’s what they want. Caterpillars and in-depth studies of birds and … and look at this … the lead editorial this week about littering in the school parking lot.”

  “So quit,” said Pinky. “If you hate it, quit.”

  “No,” said Helen. She didn’t quite know why. The only reason she could think of was that she liked being with Pinky in the pressroom every day, but she certainly wasn’t going to say that. She wondered if Sister Ignatius had been right. By Monday you’ll think you’re in love with him, she had observed.

  “Sister Ignatius, at the convent, said something interesting,” said Helen after a moment.

  “A nun?” asked Pinky.

  “Don’t you dare criticize Catholics,” Helen growled at him. “She had a very interesting thing to say about the tip-off note. I showed it to her.”

  “What?” asked Pinky.

  Helen took the folded Xerox copy from her pocketbook and flattened it out under the drafting light. “See this?” Helen pointed with a pencil. “If you just read it through, it looks as if some awful mush-brained idiot wrote it. Spelling, grammar, everything’s just terrible. But look at the punctuation. It’s perfect. No idiot wrote that note, Pinky. Somebody very well educated, trying to disguise himself as an idiot, wrote it, but he forgot to mess up his punctuation marks.”

  Pinky stared at the note. He didn’t speak for a minute. “Never was any good in English,” he said at last, “but I see what you mean. Funny. I took the note over to my Uncle Max. He’s a printer. Lives over in Dartmouth. I was curious about the typeface. He said he’d never seen anything like it but couldn’t tell what it was without seeing the original.”

  Pinky drummed his fingers on the drafting table. Helen stared at the inky nails. She felt suddenly as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Pinky asked, folding up the note.

  “You mean—”

  “The guy in the woods. The one you chased. It wasn’t Stubby. They got Stubby for throwing the rocks, and he did throw them, but the other guy, he was watching Stubby. He tipped off the cops. All he wanted was Stubby out of the way. He didn’t give a hoot if the lady or the kid died. He just walked away whistling, and then he dropped this note in the squad car and the cops picked up Stubby right away. You know,” Pinky went on, “Barry’s right. You shouldn’t write that story.”

  “Oh, everybody’s always warning me,” said Helen. “Barry sounds just like the cops and Sister Ignatius and Aunt Stella.”

  “Look,” said Pinky, “I know Barry’s a big windbag. But you should listen to him. He’s right. He’s a real girl scout, and he advertises his College Board scores all over the school, and he washes his dumb Buick every two days, but he’s right. Whoever was in the woods that day might not like to think you’re curious about him. He might get scared. And then he might decide to scare you!”

  “Pinky,” said Helen, “call him a cub scout but not a girl scout. That’s a male chauvinist pig remark.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Pinky.

  “And you never will,” said Helen.

  It took Pinky most of an hour to clean up his press, but he let Helen help him without once warning her not to get her fingers caught in the rollers.

  As Pinky let Helen off his motorbike at the very end of Prospect Avenue, Helen, who had been trying to think of a good insult all the way home, said, “Men have been responsible for all the wars in history. If women ruled the world, there’d be peace.”

  “Yea
h?” said Pinky. “What about What’s-her-name in England? And that Dragon Lady in India? And the one from Israel who died? With the frizzy hair.”

  “You leave Golda Meir’s hair alone!” said Helen. She waved to Pinky, who sped off. Walking the rest of the way to the house, she mulled over this brand-new idea. It had never occurred to her that in the history of the world anyone with frizzy hair had ever done anything successful.

  She decided that afternoon she would write a letter to Jenny Calhoun, who also suffered from frizzy hair but had a sympathetic mother who styled it nicely. She would tell Jenny this amazing fact about Golda Meir. It meant there was hope for both of them.

  “Hi, Aunt Stella!” Helen yelled, dropping her books on the hall table.

  No answer.

  “Aunt Stella? Aunt Stella, what’s wrong?” Aunt Stella was sitting on the button-plush settee. Her teacup rattled in her saucer as she put it down.

  “What is it, Aunt Stella?”

  Aunt Stella indicated something on the coffee table between a toby jug and a bisque ballerina. “I’ve called your father, and he’s coming home right away,” said Aunt Stella. “What is the meaning of this, Helen?”

  On the table was an ordinary gray plastic tape cassette. Strung through one of the spool holes was a piece of twine, and strung on that was her silver locket.

  “Go ahead, open the locket,” said Aunt Stella.

  Helen opened it. Inside was the photograph of her mother all right, but the eyes had been pierced out with a needle. The eye sockets were blood-red. Her mother’s smile was ghostly, grotesque. Helen closed the locket immediately. She felt very unsteady.

  “Play the tape,” instructed Aunt Stella.

  “Did you play it yet?” asked Helen.

  “Well, of course I did. The minute I saw that envelope lying under the mail slot.”

  Helen picked up the envelope. Only her name was on it. She ran her finger over the letters. They were slightly raised, like printing on a wedding invitation.