Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.
—William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
“WE HAVE TO go there now!”
Seymour blinked. “Go where, Pen?”
“To Louis Kritzer’s apartment on Broad Street. You have to take me there, Seymour. It may already be too late.”
The mailman was obviously perplexed by my urgent plea.
“Why? Because Kritzer signed this letter? We don’t even know what this note means, Pen.”
“But I do know what it means. Some of it, anyway.”
I told Brainert and Seymour about my visit to Reverend and Mrs. Waterman. About how Norma began attending the alcohol and drug abuse group at the church, how she began to give inspiring talks, and how someone had secretly recorded those talks and put them on social media.
“Which Louis Kritzer confessed to doing,” I concluded.
“Yeah,” Seymour replied. “And he hinted that the recordings would open a whole can of whup-ass, too.”
“No, Mr. Kritzer said that they might lead to the truth,” Brainert countered. “Whatever that truth might be.”
Yeah, said Jack. And damn the consequences, which tells me Mr. Kritzer believes there will be some.
“We’ll have to ask Louis Kritzer to explain things,” I said. “But we have to find him to do it, before someone else does.”
“Whom are you referring to, Pen?” Brainert asked.
I reminded them about the muddy footprints at Dorothy Willard’s house. Then I told them what it might mean if the man who made those prints made the ones around the trailer, concluding with a question.
“What if that man decided to visit Kritzer on Broad Street?”
Brainert nodded. “Pen is right. Let’s go.”
“Whoa, hold on,” I replied. “Someone has to stay here in case Norma returns.”
Brainert moaned. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You guessed correctly, Brainiac, so you win the prize.”
“Prize?”
“Sure. You get to camp out here while I drive the only set of wheels among us to a place only I know. And Pen is coming along because she’s the only one who knows the whole story and can ask the right questions.”
Maybe not the only one—
Quiet, Jack.
“That makes you the third wheel,” Seymour concluded. “And because we don’t need a spare tire on this trip, you’re going to make yourself useful by waiting for Norma the Nomad to return home.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “You’ve got a phone. The signal is decent—”
“But, Pen,” Brainert shot back, his tone verging on the hysterical. “What if the man with the big feet returns?”
“He won’t,” Seymour assured him. “He obviously got what he came for, whatever that was. And if he came for Norma, she’s clearly long gone. But here’s a plan, just in case. If he shows up again, run into the woods.”
“That sounds suspiciously like no plan at all,” Brainert groused.
“I think Seymour’s right,” I said. “Bigfoot is unlikely to return here. To pass the time, I suggest you check out the stuff in Norma’s trailer. There’s a stack of bundled-up paper beside the typewriter. Take a look.”
Brainert folded his arms and stared accusingly at me. “That would be snooping, Pen.”
Mother Machree! Jack cried.
“Yes, Brainert,” I replied. “It would be snooping. Why do you think we’re here?”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Seymour and I were back on the highway. We turned around at the next exit and after that the mailman kept his foot on the gas pedal all the way back to Quindicott.
While Seymour drove, I used my phone to call up Norma’s YouTube videos. Together, Seymour and I listened to them, starting with an insightful one about how we see ourselves . . .
“So who are you?” Norma began. “Are you who the world says you are? And by world, I mean your world. Your crowd, your group, your friends, your co-workers, your family members. And that bigger bunch. Those cultural judges whose ways of measuring human value and community status change with the times and the fashions.
“Let me put it another way . . .
“When I was a little girl, I went to a carnival. I saw clowns, jugglers, games of chance—and a fun house filled with frights and gags and mirrors.
“One mirror stretched me skinny as a stick. Another blew my body into a fat balloon. There were mirrors that made me feel tall and others that made me look small. One distorted my head; another split me in two.
“I stayed in that room of reflections so long that when I came out, I felt almost dizzy, and a little lost, forgetting who I actually was.
“That, in a nutshell, is what today’s world is doing to many of us. Seeing ourselves only in the fun-house mirrors of our jobs, our relationships, our social media, can sometimes be so distorted—even toxic and twisted—it can make us unwell. That’s why we need to close our eyes, stop searching for ourselves in these misleading reflections, and learn how to look within . . .”
We listened to more videos, and I could see why Norma’s talks had gone viral. She was wise and caring, with sharp, uplifting insights, and her love of literature showed. She often quoted favorite poets and writers.
“ ‘Finish each day and be done with it,’ ” Norma proclaimed with gusto. She clapped her hands, wrung them together, pretending to wash them, then flung her arms wide and grinned.
“So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in a letter to his daughter in 1854. ‘You have done what you could,’ he said, ‘some blunders & absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them. As fast as you can! Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.’
“I’ll put it another way . . . the way I see things now—
“Your life is a book and every day a page is written. At the end of every day, I read my page and ask myself: Am I happy with this page? Is it truly mine? Or am I letting my fears write my book for me? Have the wailing worries of the world silenced the sound of my own voice?
“How about you? Are the wishes or criticisms of others writing your daily page for you? Because if they are, before long, it will be their book. Not yours.
“ ‘This day,’ ” Emerson wrote, “ ‘is too dear with its hopes & invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.’
“Close your eyes now and turn the page. Look at that beautiful blank page of tomorrow, just waiting for you to write your story. Smile as you consider the possibilities! What will you write tomorrow? What will your page be?”
As Seymour and I continued listening to Norma’s video speeches, it was clear that something had happened in her past. She often referenced the difficult journey of life and admitted in one of the videos of sinking into such a dark place that she became a substance abuser herself before fighting her way back to the light of recovery. But there was nothing to indicate that these talks were incendiary in any way.
What was this “Truth” that had obviously upset Mr. Kritzer? The videos didn’t tell us, other than affirming Norma had gone through a dark time in her past. I would have to ask Kritzer himself to explain the meaning of his letter when we found him.
Forty minutes after we “deserted” Brainert—his word—Seymour swung the rattly Volkswagen bus onto Broad Street. Located on the far edge of Quindicott, this boulevard lacked the charm of some of the nicer neighborhoods.
Formerly the home of several garages and a tire company, those automotive centers were empty shells now, though the semi-industrial ambiance remained. There were few trees, the houses were mostly Victorian, and not all of them were well-kept. I saw litter on the street and spied more than one car jacked up on bricks, along with old appliances and just plain junk—all of it cluttering narrow driveways between the houses.
“This is the place,” Seymour announced.
That’s an apartment house? Looks more like a funeral home, Jack cracked.
Jack wasn’t wrong. The building was an old gray Victorian, larger than most of the houses around it. Once a single residence, it had since been broken up into six different apartments—this according to Seymour, who stuffed mail every day into the burnished-steel lockboxes on the front porch. Seymour rang Kritzer’s bell several times, but there was no response.
I tried the front door. It was locked tight. I turned to the mailman for help. Seymour confessed he had never been inside.
“Sorry, Pen, I have keys to the postboxes, not the—”
He was interrupted by a teenage girl struggling to get her bike out the door and onto the street. She worked silently, earphones firmly in place. Seymour politely held the door open until she pedaled off—without even a thank-you.
“Kids today.” Seymour sighed.
“Get in there,” I commanded, giving him a gentle nudge.
The entranceway was as gray as the exterior. The wood-plank floor had been painted black. The place smelled of stale tobacco smoke and bad cooking. The dingy wallpaper was probably once white but had morphed into a putrid yellow that would have horrified Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But the worst part was the echoing racket coming from somewhere up the gray-green carpeted stairs.
“Somebody is watching television,” I said over the noise.
“Somebody ought to adjust their hearing aid,” Seymour snapped back.
“Why doesn’t anyone complain?”
Seymour shrugged. “I don’t know how many of these apartments are vacant. Half the mail I deliver here is addressed to ‘occupant’ or ‘current resident.’ ”
“Where is Kritzer’s room?”
“Apartment 4, Pen. It says so on the postbox.”
“I see 1 and 2,” I said, pointing to the doors on either side.
Seymour shrugged. “Up we go.”
I honestly couldn’t tell you if the stairs were creaky or not. The television was blaring so loudly it was impossible to hear anything else. Inside my head, however, things were different.
Brace yourself, the ghost suddenly warned.
I get that same feeling, Jack. Like we’re already too late.
Apartment 4’s door was half-open. And the noise was coming from inside that room.
I hesitated.
Not Seymour.
“Hey!” he bellowed, pounding on the door. “Anyone home? Like Ludwig van Beethoven, maybe?”
The door opened wider under Seymour’s onslaught. I peeked in and saw a worn green couch, a torchiere, and an old-fashioned tube television. The broadcast was an old episode of Barney Miller.
Seymour and I exchanged glances. This time I led the way, stepping slowly over the threshold and making darn sure someone wasn’t lurking behind that door.
A couple of more steps and I saw a pair of slippers lying beside the couch, then a pair of pajama-clad legs.
“Mr. Kritzer?” I called, approaching the faded green couch. I stepped around to face the man, but there was no face to face.
I stifled a scream. Seymour peered over my shoulder, then squealed like a little girl.
There would be no talking to Mr. Louis Kritzer. His face and the back of his head were gone, the gun that did the damage clutched in his dead white hand.