The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [62]
Doug Winn, who owned the AtoZ Market, began to notice that on days when items were mysteriously missing from the shelves, there was cash left on the countertop. He rigged a Polaroid camera with a string and left it by the register, set to flash if anyone broke in after closing. When it happened, he showed the photo to nearly everyone in town, insisting the image he’d caught was that of a monster. People laughed and said Doug had merely recorded the presence of an individual who’d thrown his hand in front of his face, startled when the camera’s flash went off. After a while things quieted down. The rumors faded and people got more interested in starting a petition requesting that a stoplight be put in at the corner of Highland and Main, where there had been three accidents in a single year. Folks stopped talking nonsense about monsters. Still, they locked their doors at night.
KATE WENT INTO the garden in the evenings in order to be alone. She wasn’t the same since the incident on the mountain. She had a secret, one she could hardly admit to herself. She had the urge to be away from other people, to banish herself from the future she’d always planned. The garden was old, and Kate’s aunt Hannah grew tomatoes and red peppers and watermelon and radishes. One day Kate filled a basket and told her mother she was taking it to the town hall as a donation to the food pantry. But when she got to the town hall, she kept on. She carried the basket along Route 17 and set it on the side of the road in the spot where Cal Jacob had disappeared. She waited there for quite some time. When the stranger didn’t appear, she walked home, disappointed.
Kate grew even more moody and dissatisfied. People in town seemed provincial and small-minded. Her third cousin, Henry Partridge, came from California to stay before he went on to Harvard. He was predictable and safe. He asked her to the movies, but even though he was a distant cousin, once removed, Kate wasn’t interested. At the end of August there was the Founder’s Day celebration. This year Lucy Jacob was playing the part of the Apparition. She forgot her lines and had to be coached from the wings by her mother and wound up in tears.
“You did fine,” Kate reassured Lucy when she went backstage after the play. “You were a better Apparition than I ever was.”
The stage was part of an open-air theater that was set up on the town green once a year. Cal Jacob was there, standing in the grass. He’d grown quieter since his runaway episode in the woods. When anyone addressed him, he shifted in his shoes and looked the other way. Now he waited to speak to Kate until the other children went off for cookies and punch. “There really is a monster,” he said quietly. He’d been wanting to talk to Kate for some time. He knew no one else would believe him.
There were rides set up beyond the green—a little Ferris wheel and a Whip and bumper cars. White fairy lights had been strung through the branches of the trees.
“There’s no such thing as a monster,” Kate told him.
Cal shook his head, stubborn. “He was.”
“No. That’s not what he was.”
“Okay,” Cal said. He had the jitters and was tapping his foot. Anyone could tell he wasn’t convinced. Kate put her hands on his shoulders.
“Listen to me,” she said. “He was just a man.”
THE NEXT TIME she brought a basket of food she also left a note. She ran home afterward, embarrassed, her face flushed with heat. She wasn’t herself anymore. She didn’t know what she was thinking or why she’d become so absorbed in searching out a stranger. Summer was fading and the dark came earlier now. Kate felt as though her fate had split in two on the day Cal ran into the woods. She could have gone in one direction, a life in which she might have been home reading, or at a sleepover with the other girls in town, or visiting her cousin in Cambridge. Instead, she came back to Route 17 again and again.
High school would