Later(15)

“She can,” I said, because it was simpler than telling him all of that.

“Who is that other woman?” Mr. Thomas asked, pointing at Liz.

“That’s my mother’s friend. Her name is Liz Dutton.” Liz looked up briefly, then lit another cigarette.

“Are she and your mother fucking?” Mr. Thomas asked.

s“Pretty sure, yeah.”

“I thought so. It’s how they look at each other.”

“What did he say?” Mom asked anxiously.

“He asked if you and Liz were close friends,” I said. Kind of lame, but all I could think of on the spur of the moment. “So will you tell us The Secret of Roanoke?” I asked Mr. Thomas. “I mean the whole book, not just the secret part.”

“Yes.”

“He says yes,” I told Mom, and she took both her phone and a little tape recorder out of her bag. She didn’t want to miss a single word.

“Tell him to be as detailed as he can.”

“Mom says to be—”

“I heard her,” Mr. Thomas said. “I’m dead, not deaf.” His shorts were lower than ever.

“Cool,” I said. “Listen, maybe you better pull up your shorts, Mr. Thomas, or your willy’s gonna get chilly.”

He pulled up his shorts so they hung off his bony hips. “Is it chilly? It doesn’t feel that way to me.” Then, with no change in tone: “Tia is starting to look old, Jimmy.”

I didn’t bother to tell him again that my name was Jamie. Instead I looked at my mother and holy God, she did look old. Was starting to, anyway. When had that happened?

“Tell us the story,” I said. “Begin at the beginning.”

“Where else?” Mr. Thomas said.





13


It took an hour and a half, and by the time we were done, I was exhausted and I think Mom was, too. Mr. Thomas looked just the same at the end as when we started, standing there with that somehow sorry yellow sash falling down over his poochy belly and low-slung shorts. Liz parked her car between the gateposts with the dashboard light blipping, which was probably a good idea, because the news of Mr. Thomas’s death had begun to spread, and people were showing up out front to snap pictures of Cobblestone Cottage. Once she came back to ask how much longer we’d be and Mom just waved her off, told her to inspect the grounds or something, but mostly Liz hung in.

It was stressful as well as exhausting, because our future depended on Mr. Thomas’s book. It wasn’t fair for me to have to bear the weight of that responsibility, not at nine, but there was no choice. I had to repeat everything Mr. Thomas said to Mom—or rather to Mom’s recording devices—and Mr. Thomas had plenty to say. When he told me he was able to keep everything in his head, he wasn’t just blowing smoke. And Mom kept asking questions, mostly for clarification. Mr. Thomas didn’t seem to mind (didn’t seem to care one way or the other, actually), but the way Mom was dragging things out started bugging the shit out of me. Also, my mouth got wickedly dry. When Liz brought me her leftover Coke from Burger King, I gulped down the few swallows that were left and gave her a hug.

“Thank you,” I said, handing back the paper cup. “I needed that.”

“Very welcome.” Liz had stopped looking bored. Now she looked thoughtful. She couldn’t see Mr. Thomas, and I don’t think she still totally believed he was there, but she knew something was going on, because she’d heard a nine-year-old boy spieling out a complicated plot featuring half a dozen major characters and at least two dozen minor ones. Oh, and a threesome (under the influence of bulbous canary grass supplied by a helpful Native American of the Nottoway People) consisting of George Threadgill, Purity Betancourt, and Laura Goodhugh. Who ended up getting pregnant. Poor Laura always got the shitty end of the stick.

At the end of Mr. Thomas’s summary, the big secret came out, and it was a dilly. I’m not going to tell you what it was. Read the book and find out for yourself. If you haven’t read it already, that is.

“Now I’ll tell you the last sentence,” Mr. Thomas said. He seemed as fresh as ever…although “fresh” is probably the wrong word to use with a dead person. His voice had started to fade, though. Just a little. “Because I always write that first. It’s the beacon I row to.”

“Last sentence coming up,” I told Mom.

“Thank God,” she said.

Mr. Thomas raised one finger, like an old-time actor getting ready to give his big speech. “‘On that day, a red sun went down over the deserted settlement, and the carved word that would puzzle generations glowed as if limned in blood: CROATOAN.’ Tell her croatoan in capital letters, Jimmy.”

I told her (although I didn’t know exactly what “limbed in blood” meant), then asked Mr. Thomas if we were done. Just as he said we were, I heard a brief siren from out front—two whoops and a blat.

“Oh God,” Liz said, but not in a panicky way; more like she had been expecting it. “Here we go.”

She had her badge clipped to her belt and unzipped her parka so it would show. Then she went out front and came back with two cops. They were also wearing parkas, with Westchester County Police patches on them.

“Cheese it, the cops,” Mr. Thomas said, which I didn’t understand at all. Later, when I asked Mom, she told me it was slang from the olden days of the 1950s.