The next day at school, I couldn't stop hearing rumors about Jamie McLean and her suddenly absent husband. As soon as I heard a group of cute chicks talking about it outside the gymnasium after lunch, I was ready to rock despite any previous reservations. Everyone at Salem Junior High, especially the girls, will want to hear all about how we stormed up the stone stairs of Loring Manor and launched our own investigation right there, just us and our flashlights.
Nick caught this vibe, too. He wanted so bad to be a real tough guy and not just another kid from a Boston suburb. It had seemed like he had been yearning for street cred since the third grade; and busting onto some real rich guy’s property and trying to dig up a murder victim? Yea, that's pretty legit.
Chaz on the other hand never gave two shits about what anyone thought of him, so I was surprised to learn that he was more fired up about the plan than the day before.
“You guys pussy out yet, or are we still goin’ up the steps to find that corpse?” Chaz said, walking up to my locker with Coop waddling behind him. Nick and I shared a set of lockers, with his being on the bottom and mine on the top. Every Friday he would threaten to “shank” me so he could take the top from me as we hustled to grab our coats and hit that sweet weekend pavement.
“We’re still down, Gamble,” Nick said, standing up and slamming his midget locker. “You got a plan?”
“Not yet,” Chaz admitted as he made eye contact with me. “But we’ll work on that today. After school meet up in back of the soccer fields. You got any butts, Nicky P?”
“You know it.”
We slapped skins and started to split up. Chaz let Nick and Coop walk away before he started to walk with me towards my American History class.
“You’re gonna be late for gym again,” I observed, not wanting to get into our planning routine before class, as it usually involved a lot of my thinking and planning on my part, with him egging me on to be ‘less of a pussy’ and ‘tougher than a bag of lettuce for once.’
“Fuck gym,” he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure no teachers heard him. “I want to make this happen. Before it was just to scare Coop and show him that he’s an idiot, but now I want to go up there and see what’s what. If we don’t, some other group of kids will. Gloucester kids, or Marblehead jackasses, I don’t know. I just want to do this ourselves. We always talk like we’re the shit; well, let’s fucking prove it for once.”
He didn’t bother checking to see if anyone had heard him swear that time.
“Mr. Gamble!” Mrs. Adler shrieked from her open classroom door across the hall. All four feet, eight inches of her came flying at my best friend; her face was a cross between a pit bull and a witch doctor channeling the dead. She had been a Navy officer in her twenties, and here in the halls at Salem Junior High, thirty years later, that toughness and discipline had only sharpened over time. I cowered from the scene as she grabbed hold of Chaz’s ear by sliding into my own classroom for the next period, which was luckily across the hall from Mrs. Adler’s.
“Yo!” Chaz yelled as she began to usher him to the stairwell and down to Vice Principal McCarron’s office. “On the hill! After school!” His voice got further away as he was led down the stairs by the Admiraless of SJH, the way a cartoon character’s shouts slowly dissipate after they fall off a cliff. “After detention…” I heard him add, far away and trailing off. I imagined Mrs. Adler giving him a hard nudge in the ribs after he had the audacity to try and make after-school plans while he was her prisoner. Chills went down my spine.
Last period went by slow. I listened to McHugh drone on about how messy things were in the 1840’s as the country attempted a hard transition. In my head, I was at Loring Manor. Not in it, yet, but around it. I was across the street from the house, regarding the steps, the massive front porch, the strange pillars that had a Greek or Roman quality to them. Inside, someone was waiting. I didn’t know who they were and they sure as shit didn’t know who we were – who I was, actually, since I was alone. The darkness of the windows seemed to reach outwards, somehow creating an effect that was the complete antithesis of shining. I reached one foot off the curb and into the street; off the safety of my sidewalk, towards the big stone steps.
After school, we circled up on the Hill behind the school that overlooked the soccer fields to wait for Chaz to get out of detention. We huddled behind a row of tall bushes that shielded the grounds of the school from the residential neighborhood adjacent to it. This is where Chaz and Nick liked to smoke their Lucky Strike's out of the view of the teachers and the lamer kids who were known to snitch to get on Vice Principal McCarron's good side.
"I don't know about you guys, but all this talk about Old Man McLean all dead and bloody is really pumping me up," Nick said. "The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Hot chick marries old dude with lots of money. She thinks hey, it'll give me an easy out in life. She don't have to work, she gets access to all the finest shit, and soon enough he'll be gone anyway and she'll have it all for herself. Hell, she can put up with the old man for a while if she gets a free ride out of it. But not so fast; he ends up being more of a burden than she expected. He's so rich he don't have to work neither, so he's around all the time. He tries for a while to keep up with Jamie's party lifestyle but ends up dragging behind, and since he has all the money, he's calling the shots. If the Old Man's not going out to party, Jamie's funds are limited. She only has what he'll give her. So she gets pissed; decides to cut out the middle man. Now, the party never has to stop - she just has to cover it up. Considering they got that big old house and close to no contact with the outside world - at least the one that us normal people live in - it would seem like she's home free."
"So I guess it's up to us," I said, matter-of-factly. I still felt partially stuck in the daydream from history class.
"I don't know guys," Coop started. "I don't really think we could find anything anyway. I mean, we're not cops or anything like that. How would we know where to look?"
"Relax Coop," I replied condescendingly, even though I have less than a sliver of an answer. "As long as we get up there, it'll be worth it."
"Exactly!" Nick exclaimed with the enthusiasm I’d been counting on from him to make my lame answer feel more legitimate. "We'll just tear the place up!"
Coop shook his head and kicked away a pile of dead leaves that were at his feet. "Even if she did do it, I don't think we'd have any luck at all up there. It'd just be a scary time where we'd probably get caught for trespassing again. My dad'll never let me hear the end of it."
"Oh fuck you, pussy," Nick sneered. "At least you won't get hit. Every time the cops drive me home I take a hiding that you could never handle." This was probably true, although at the time we all dismissed as typical Nick Peabody tough talk. We didn't want to think about someone we knew so well actually getting beaten by their dad, so we chalked it up to bullshit. That was probably a mistake on our part.
“You never get hided, Peabody,” Chaz spat out as he climbed the grassy side of the hill up to our little alcove. “But I sure as hell will for saying ‘fuck’ in school again.”
“I do too get hided!”
“Chaz,” I said, “how was detention?”
“It was fine, but they made me write some bullshit essay about the ‘proper tradition’ of Salem schools and how my language was a determinate to that.”
“Detriment,” I corrected him.
“My way sounded better,” he said with a straight face. “So, you guys come up with anything yet?”
“No plan,” Coop said, sounding defeated and exhausted. “They just want to go in guns blazing and dig up any damn spot we see.”
“Is that our plan?” Chaz asked, looking to me and then to Nick. I shot Coop a dirty look and Nick spat on the ground.
“Our plan,” Nick started, “is to go up there to Loring Manor, and to look around, and to either find a dead old rich guy, or to take something that proves that we tried. And then, we tell everyone except for our teachers and our parents.”
“Or the cops,” I add, making eye contact with Chaz, who has a bad habit of thinking he’s better than officers of the law.
“Or the cops,” Nick allows, handing Chaz a cigarette. “That, gentlemen, is what we’re gonna fucking do. Any god damn questions, pussies?”
The guys finished their cigarettes as shot the shit about curfews and sleepover arrangements that we could lie about to our parents, and we walked down the hill and off towards our houses. Nick split off towards The Point, and Coop got picked up at the corner of Wilson and Jefferson by his mom like always. Chaz and I were left to trek back down toward Wisteria Street, where we had both lived our whole lives.
"Are you really excited about all this?" Chaz asked me.
"Kinda," I said, trying to act cool and level about it. "It'd be pretty badass to find out the truth for ourselves. Even if the Old Man is alive, we'll be the ones who have the eye witness account of it. We'll know the real story before anyone, and that's pretty boss."
"You've always been all about the stories, man," Chaz said with a chuckle. He was always giving me shit about how much I loved telling stories. For someone who brushed everything off, I guess it was weird to see someone who had an overwhelming need to dramatize everything for any audience that would have it.
Suddenly Chaz looked sad. This confused me at first, considering we had just been laughing. Then I remembered what he was going home to.
"Wanna come over for a bit?" he asked. “I don’t feel like starting homework yet.”
