WE STOPPED RUNNING AFTER three blocks. Clutching hands; we sat on a park bench along the Ramble.
For a long time we couldn’t talk. Ariana rocked slowly back and forth, her eyes focused blankly on the sidewalk.
My head throbbed. The chalky smell was in my nostrils again. I sat forward, massaging my temples and breathing deeply.
Ariana finally turned to me, her eyes bloodshot and her teeth chattering. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t … know.” Each word was like a fist to the head. I gasped.
“David, are you okay?”
I nodded, then whispered, “I’ll deal with it.”
Ariana moved aside. “Lie down.”
I did as she said. She looked down at me, her eyes now full of concern. “I’m sorry,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve been so upset, I didn’t even ask you about your accident.”
“What accident?”
“Oh, my lord, amnesia.” She began speaking slowly, as if to an infant. “I found you in the basement of Wetherby High School. Do you know where that is?”
“Well, yeah …”
“Good. Now, I think you may have a concussion, David. Do you have blurred vision?” She held up three fingers, like a Boy Scout salute. “How many fingers?”
I returned the salute. “On my honor, I will do my duty to God and country, and obey the Scout code …”
Ariana’s face went blank. Then she scowled at me. “Very funny. You know, we have a serious situation here.”
I was already feeling better, until I started to laugh, which was like inviting Arnold Schwarzenegger to sit on my head. “I don’t have amnesia,” I said, speaking slowly, “at least not completely. I went to the basement to look for The Delphic Club meeting place.”
“You what?”
I told her everything I’d learned about Reggie Borden and the strange 1950 deaths. I described the rumors about the underground groups, and I told her my suspicions about The Delphic Club meeting in the basement.
Ariana listened closely, softly stroking my hair and nodding. “That feels so good,” I said. “You have soft hands.”
She laughed. “Soft hands? Stephen says my hands are like a truck driver’s.”
“He’s lying. You could be a masseuse — or a painter or a pianist.”
“Please. I’m much too practical. You need to be a dreamer for those things.”
“You’re not?”
“Uh-uh. Just the opposite. I discovered there was no Santa at the age of three, by stringing gum across the chimney. When the gum wasn’t broken the next morning, I had my proof.”
I sat up. “You didn’t!”
Ariana nodded. “When I lost my first tooth I didn’t put it under my pillow for the Tooth Fairy. I put it in a glass of Pepsi to see if it would decay.”
“And … ?”
“It did. To a little pebble.”
My pain was melting away — and so was the wall that had always been between Ariana and me. We were talking a lot, probably to avoid thinking about the Sewer Thing. But we were one now, united with a knowledge that no one else shared. And no matter what the outcome, we would carry this with us for the rest of our lives.
I smiled at her. Her eyes became moist. “Oh, David,” she said, “what are we going to do?”
I didn’t know whether she meant do about us or do about the foot in the sewer pipe.
But it didn’t matter. I drew her close to me, and she didn’t resist. I closed my eyes and gently opened my mouth.
The warmth of her kiss bathed me. The events of the past few days flew away, and I knew in my bones that Ariana and I belonged together.
When our lips parted, she rested her head on my chest. I felt so lucky. I wanted this to last.
But I started thinking about Smut.
“Uh, Ariana,” I said, screwing up my courage. “When I was looking for the meeting place, I saw Stephen and Monique. You were right about them, you know. They were … well, kind of hanging all over each other.”
Ariana stiffened. She let go of my hand and sank back into the bench. “What?”
“You know, arm in arm.…”
Ariana looked disgusted. “Is that what this was all about, David? You were just spying on Stephen? Trying to get me to like you?”
I tried putting my arm around her. “No! That’s not it at all. I … I didn’t mean to upset you.”
She edged away. “I’m not upset,” she said with a strange calmness. “Why should I be upset? I mean, classmates are dying, corpses are swimming in our water system, there’s a hole under the school, our yearbook was sabotaged, you’re busy checking out forty-year-old Communist conspiracies, and my boyfriend is seeing someone behind my back. What’s the big deal?”
“Ariana— ”
With a choked sob, she got up from the bench and ran toward her house. “Leave me alone.”
I followed at a sprint. “I know how you must feel, but — ”
She spun around. Her eyes were murderous. They froze me in my tracks. “You don’t have a clue how I feel, David. But I see through you. And I think what you’re trying to do is sick.”
“I don’t understand — ”
“I’m sorry I ever asked you to be on the staff. You’ve spent two months staring at me, but I never thought you’d stoop to this. You leave my private life to me!”
“But —but — ”
I sputtered as she disappeared around the corner. Her footsteps echoed hollowly in the bleak evening.
David Kallas, Master of Tact.
I stood there until my ears became numb with the wind. Then, slowly, I headed home.
My body tensed as I approached the construction site. Smoke was billowing from it now, and I craned my neck to see inside.
The smoke was seeping out of the pipe, escaping upward through the junk in the rotted-open part.
The shoe was gone, of course. But where?
I sat at the edge of the hole. I had seen a foot disappear into a pipe. I had to make sense of it somehow.
I asked myself a basic question: What does a pipe do?
Carry fluids.
How do the fluids move?
From a higher to lower position … from higher to lower pressure.
So, an object in the pipe — say, a body — would move for the same reasons a liquid would.
Okay, so maybe we had not seen the Foot of the Living Dead. Maybe it had been your garden variety corpse moving to the laws of physics.
Gee, what a relief.
I climbed down into the hole. Using my hands, I cleared out the junk I could see, taking care not to reach into the pipe. Then I lowered my head to look inside.
A billow of smoke rushed around my head, and I came face-to-face with a pair of small eyes.
“Agggh!” I bolted upright.
Footsteps skittered down the pipe, toward the Ramble.
A rat. No big deal. It must have felt worse than I did.
I let my heartbeat settle, then asked myself another small question:
What happens to the contents of a pipe?
They are carried to a dumping place, which in Wetherby is usually the Wampanoag River.
I ran into the Ramble before I had the opportunity to think about what I was doing. Rain had started, and my feet slipped off slick, wet branches.
I found my way to the boulder near the drainpipe. This time, no fuzzy head poked its way out of the water. I leaned out over the river and saw nothing but the gaping black circle of the pipe and some refuse underneath.
As I stood up, the rays of the setting sun caught a shiny object in the muck near the pipe. I walked over, reached in, and pulled out a gold high school ring.
The name RACHEL GREEN was carved on the inside.