The Amulet

CHAPTER ONE-1

CHAPTER ONEMonday, October 19, 1987

ONE—Anna (1)

Clawed leaves skittered before Anna Sudek’s sneakered feet as she walked down Ewert Avenue, crossing from the shabby residential section into the business district. The brittle oak, maple, and elm leaves thinned as Anna passed the first of the rough-siding and shake-shingle-roofed businesses on the left­ hand side of the street. Soon, she found herself walking down a dimly lamp lit, cracked, and pitted cement sidewalk as queasily luminescent and lightly pocked as the thin vestiges of the last quarter moon above her.

Despite their now dead state, Anna missed the rustling of the wind blown leaves. Ewert Avenue at 2:30 in the morning was a hollow, wind-sucking discarded bottle of a place, a length of quiet emptiness enclosed by the overhangs of two- and three-story brick and frame offices and stores. The comparative silence was broken only by the lonely, rusty scree of the illuminated revolving clock/ thermometer mounted on the corner of the tan brick Savings and Loan building. The bright yellow dots against black numerals indicated that the temper­ature was a brisk thirty degrees, but Anna knew that the wind chill made it much colder.

Over at the intersection of Ewert and First Avenue West, a Mountain Dew can clunked against the sewer grating; the sound was overloud, tinny, ringing in the predawn quietude.

Kneeling down to pick up the empty pop can, Anna saw movement out of the corner of her eye—a chunk of darkness, breaking free of the dimly lit alley behind her side of the street—and huddled against the flaking yellow-painted sloping curb, bottle-bug green can clenched in her gloved fingers, until the moving darkness resolved itself into a brisk-walking sneakered figure clad in a navy pea coat and layered babushkas.

Anna saw just how tense she’d been when she dropped the can into her plastic mesh bag—the swirling red and green Mountain Dew logo was crushed beyond legibility. As she continued down the avenue, now walking in the middle of the street, Anna scolded herself. Great going. Now I’m freaking out over old lady Campbell. If some yahoo creep bastard came up behind me, I’d roll over and spread ’em wide without being asked to.

In the distance, Anna could hear Mrs. Campbell opening one of the Dumpsters in back of the Ewerton Bakery. “s**t,” she muttered. Usually Anna made it to the bakery first, especially on Monday mornings. Sunday night was when they threw out the last of the leftover pastries and stale bread, and sometimes the paper tubes of hardened decorating frosting Ma liked so much. As Anna neared the bakery, the sounds of Mrs. Campbell rooting around in the Dumpster, ripping open white plastic bags of crumb-encrusted baking parchment and bent foil baking pans, became clearer.

Anna made a diagonal shift to the east, toward the IGA which had its own in-store bakery. While it didn’t usually throw out as many baked goods, there was a chance that she’d at least find a frosting tube or two. Anything to get Ma out of her mood, Anna told herself with an unconscious frown, as she reached Wisconsin Street, where the large brick-fronted supermarket was located. It was close to Sixth Avenue East—only a block from the law enforcement building.

Not that the cops or sheriff’s deputies were any problem (they were long used to seeing one of the Sudek women—occasionally both of them—out dumpster diving, and some of the friendlier officers even honked and waved in passing, but Anna never really felt comfortable with the thought that Ewerton’s finest were watching her grub around in Dumpsters for lid-popped jars of pasta sauce, or half-rotted tomatoes and onions. She had gone to school with too many of them, and it galled her to think that they were secretly smirking at her in the wire mesh and crackling radio confines of their cop cars, no doubt thinking over their steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee from the café over on Third Avenue West, Looking for Granny’s body, Sudek?

Anna didn’t think her supposition was paranoia; she’d heard that taunt over and over during her twenty-nine years—in the sandbox at Ewerton Elementary, as she searched her locker for a missing Algebra B book, and as she surreptitiously peered in an EHS trash can in search of almost-blank notebooks tossed out at semester’s end. And several of the nitwits who’d uttered those words had become deputies, patrolmen, and meter maids since graduation. Ma had heard the same jibes, but she had been able to laugh them off.

Setting down her black mesh bag next to the first dented and paint-flaking white dumpster behind the IGA, Anna thought as she raised the cracked and misshapen black plastic lid, with the embossed clench-fisted gorilla logo on it, I wonder if Ma had that sonic-boom laugh when she was at EHS…if she only knew that the more they hurt her the louder she gets. Ripping open the first plastic garbage bag after feeling the outlines of baking pans inside, Anna extracted the foil pans, faintly slimy with cold, moist cake residue. Bending down, so that she was hidden from view just in case any early worker opened the loading doors, Anna pulled the plaid shopping bag out of her mesh bag, and pushed the first two inside. Ma may have liked the old baked goods the IGA pitched, but Anna thought the pans were more valuable. Washed and cut into strips, then stuffed into her scavenged cans, they added weight to her weekly load of aluminum­—sometimes as much as an extra two pounds.

And that extra dollar or eighty cents of can money (depending on the going price per pound) often meant two more cans of food for the cats. Ma kept threatening to throw both of them out the door, but then she’d get over her latest rage and go on a cat food-buying binge, using the money they’d earmarked for their own food.

Having put the pans in her plaid bag, Anna stood up and leaned over the Dumpster again, pulling out pans, a few Mountain Dew and Diet Coke cans, and a clear plastic bag of raw, pale yellow sweet dough. (She’d fry that off for the birds, come winter.) But there was nothing else edible in the bag—not even so much as a wrinkled bit of parchment dotted with cookie crumbs.

“s**t,” Anna muttered as she felt the rest of the bags on both sides of the Dumpster. They contained only regular trash. After fighting the town’s stray cats for the contents of Ewerton’s Dumpsters on a daily basis for the past seven years (and doing it catch as catch can during her high school and college years), Anna had developed a feel for what was worth scavenging and what wasn’t worth the effort of ripping open the slippery plastic bags. Even through gloves or mittens, her blunt fingertips (her peeling, brittle nails kept short thanks to a combination of a mediocre diet and two part-time cleaning jobs) knew what was packed into Dumpster bags. Anna supposed that in a half-assed way, her ability was a talent, no doubt inherited from her mother, who had been doing much the same thing ever since her father had taken off back in 1960.

And the old lady could have helped us out even then, Anna reminded herself as she softly lowered the wobbly plastic Dumpster lid and bent down to pick up her two bags. When she was about to straighten up, she saw moving beams of light cross her sneakered instep, then wash up over her knees

Praying that it wasn’t an IGA employee (once, a little putz of a stock boy had caught her grabbing some thawed pizzas out of a Dumpster full of once-frozen vegetables after the store had had that power failure in the frozen food section; he’d chased her for half a block, shouting, “Bring those back, thief! Scum! That’s store property!” but she did get even with the four-eyed blond squirt when she put a negative comment about him in the customer suggestion box inside the store, after she’d learned what his name was), Anna defiantly stood her ground and stared at the source of the headlights.

A blue horizontal-striped white car with the rectangular gumball machine on top. Sheriff’s patrol—just what she needed. Terry Von Kemp was on duty every other Monday—­Terry of the swinging greasy bangs and the open-lipped grin. Even before he rolled down the driver’s side window, Ann knew what was coming.

“You lookin’ for Granny, Sudek? After all this time, I’d think you could smell her out.”

“Weren’t you paying any attention in biology, Terry? Bodies decay down to bone in a few weeks—less, if the weather’s right. I figure fifty-some years would be enough to do it, no?” Anna shivered in her denim jacket, glad that it was a size too big for her. As familiar as the old jibe was, hearing it when she was trapped between a pair of Dumpsters and an idling patrol car, at three-something in the morning, was enough to set her teeth to rattling and her muscles to quivering. And being pinned in the glow of Terry’s high beams, like a moth, was unsettling, even if Terry was all threat and no action. He could always say the car just happened to accelerate.

Terry mulled that over, then said, “I don’t remember nothing like that in Mr. Naughton’s class. Maybe you’re thinkin’ of some art-fart course you took in college. Murder One, or—”

“That sounds more like something you would’ve taken in cop school—or is that joke about the law enforcement depart­ments out here true?” Nonchalantly Anna leaned against the Dumpster, planning the streets she would use going home to miss Terry on his usual patrol route, while Terry took his time nibbling that bait. Finally, the line jerked.

“What joke?”

“That they wait outside the school for delinquent boys in Wales with a stack of sheriff and police force applications?”

In the light of the car Terry’s face went red, and as he leaned over to do something with the ignition, Anna took off in a northwest direction, running over the abandoned spur tracks. She hit Seventh Avenue, then ran east to Dean Avenue, parallel to Ewert Avenue, her full bags banging and clanking against her a thighs, until she had to stop, gasping for breath. Damning that case of bronchitis she’d had as a child (her lung capacity was so low she hadn’t even been able to resuscitate Resusi Anne dummies in freshman health class), Anna wheezed her way down Dean Avenue, forcing herself to keep up the pace. Detour or not, she had to be home by four, and home was half a mile away.

In the distance, she heard Mrs. Campbell drop another Dumpster lid. The old bat acted like she owned the town, not caring who heard her, or whether or not anyone saw her. Maybe it doesn’t matter when her late husband was one of the City Crew workers…no little stock-boy fucker would dare call her “Scum!”

Not that Arlene Campbell had ever done anything to Anna. Why, Anna now supposed that the old woman had actually meant to be friendly when she’d first seen Anna Dumpster diving several years back, and said, “I see you walk alone, too.” But at the time, Anna had simply ignored her and turned down a side street, unsure of how to react. And these days, when they’d approach the same Dumpster from different directions, the most Mrs. Campbell would do was diplomati­cally mutter, “Age before beauty,” or some such nice-but­-barbed admonition, prior to planting herself in front of the Dumpster, hogging the bags within. But nevertheless, Anna detested the old bat.

I’m taking out everything Ma’s mother ever did to me on Mrs. Campbell, the college psychology professor voice in Anna’s head told her, but the college-grad-with-two-menial—jobs voice told the other voice, Mind your own f*****g business, okay?

Anna’s labored breath was ragged enough to be clearly audible over the crunchy scrabble of the leaves she was dragging her feet through. She glanced up at the occasional lit windows in the houses on either side of the street. The ones with the unlined curtains drawn or the flimsy shades pulled only captured her attention for a few seconds; she couldn’t see much more than tantalizing strips of flowered wallpaper; angled ceilings, an occasional headboard, or closet door hung with empty padded hangers. But some windows were uncov­ered, the light within spilling out in warm squares and rectangles across the frost-nipped lawns and c***k-veined gray sidewalks beyond.