The Amulet

CHAPTER ONE-2

Anna’s pace slowed as much as legally possible without being labeled a Peeping Tom as she looked into those win­dows, telling herself that if a woman went around showing everything she owned, people couldn’t really be blamed for looking, could they? For Anna, the same thing applied when it came to window-peeping. After all, who but a show-off would light up the inside of his or her house like a Christmas tree, and leave the drapes or shades up? It was as if those people were saying to Anna, Look, garbage picker, at the things you won’t ever have, no matter how many castoffs you grub out of Dumpsters and garbage cans.

And despite the imagined insult implied by the showy, well-lit windows, Anna willingly went along with it, eagerly looked at what others apparently sought to rub her face in, for it was the only way she could keep herself sane—keep herself from getting like her mother, who thought that the world was limited and bleak as the four walls that surrounded her come the end of each working day.

Her sneakered feet shuffling through light mounds of frost-backed leaves, and moving lightly over the ribbons of dried dead grass bisecting the slabs of concrete below, Anna stared at walnut Colonial living room ensembles; at plump, plaid sofas surmounted by grouped picture frames in artful configurations; at tasteful ceramic ginger-jar lamps positioned next to daring open staircases; at kitchens whose appliances all matched, the refrigerators bearing all-one-theme sets of mag­nets; at wall-mounted collector’s plates and full sets of old fine china in big dark wood cabinets. The people in those lit rooms acted as if they were oblivious to the street beyond.

Anna had seen things that would have gotten her arrested if one of the cops been driving past just as she had her head turned in the direction of some of the homes. The people who performed those acts in the spotlight seemed to taunt her: We can do what we wish, and no one will ask us where the skeletons of our great-grand-mothers are buried.

Anna knew her peeping was wrong, despite the apparent invitation to look that the bare glass presented. But she also knew that these people could be wrong, too, calling out things she and her Ma already knew, already wondered about them­selves, though no answer was to be forthcoming, even after the passing of fifty years and more. Anna never knew if they’d taunted the old lady; she wouldn’t admit the sky was blue if you held her eyelids open with pliers and forced her to stare up at the heavens, let alone admit to Anna or her mother that she, too, had been greeted almost daily with that rote cry.

At any rate, if any of the cop cars ever were to stop her, Anna had the perfect retort ready: “Just looking for Granny, Sir.”

TWO—First Kill

Arlene Campbell let the Dumpster lid slam down, aware of the racket she made, but regally beyond it. With a sense of humor most of the citizens of Ewerton would have found astonishing, considering the image they had of her as a spare old crone in ratty head scarves and cheap Sears running shoes, Arlene privately dubbed herself duchess of the Dumpsters, queen of Ewert Avenue, the dowager of debris.

True, if any of the lowlifes who cruised the streets, party-hardying and tossing full beer cans out passenger win­dows whenever a squad car rolled past in the other direction, were ever to call her any such name, Arlene Campbell wouldn’t hesitate to take down their license numbers and phone in a complaint after she had walked home. But nothing of the sort ever happened.

Sometimes, Arlene wondered if it was the ghost of her Don that kept the hoods’ mouths shut—Don, with his steel brush butch, and his BB-shot eyes surmounting jowls that flapped like an old woman’s breasts. “Old tittie cheeks,” his co-workers used to call him; Arlene had heard them, but never had the heart—or sheer courage—to repeat the sentiment in Don’s presence. Bad enough that those fellows had to work under him.

And Arlene remembered how he’d bark and b***h at the kids who spent the summers painting the curbs and crossing lines of Ewerton’s asphalt-and-gravel patched streets yellow, some of the same kids who spent their Friday and Saturday nights whooping it up in the shoddy over-the-store apartments on Wisconsin and Ewert, with the w****s who lived there, and then cruised the streets for hours afterward, shouting and slamming on the brakes ten feet after the stop signs.

If they can make all that noise and nothing is done, I can drop the Dumpster lids. Arlene thought as she started for the IGA. When she saw the white squad car slowing down by the Dumpsters, she hesitated. She’d seen the Von Kemp boy’s rather small head and narrow shoulders in silhouette as the car had passed her earlier that morning. She knew that Sheriff Sawyer only kept him on because he was somehow very distantly related to Stu Sawyer’s wife Val, but nepotism wasn’t enough to forgive idiocy, in Arlene’s opinion.

Arlene ducked into a shadow between two scabby, silver­ street lamps and watched the squad car stop, its lights on that Sudek girl, the one Arlene had tried to make friendly conversation with years ago, only to be rebuffed, not that she actually held it against the child. Arlene Campbell had lived long enough in Ewerton to know how it could warp the perceptions of those less favored in the townspeople’s eyes. Faintly, from a distance, she heard garbled voices, and caught the word “Granny.”

That nonsense again. The Alvin Miner case had been the talk of Ewerton’s lowlife population for much too long—ever since Arlene could remember. The silly questions the other children had asked little Lucy ever since it happened (the questions little Arlene Weiss herself had asked, even though old Arlene Campbell conveniently forgot uttering them), and kept on asking long after Lucy wasn’t so little anymore.

“Where’s Granny?”

“What happened to Granny?”

“Seen Granny lately?”

“Find some more of Granny anywhere?”

Childish, spiteful questions that remained unanswered, and thus kept curiosity alive and thriving, especially among those who refused to give up puerile curiosity. Morbid curios­ity, some might call it.

Not wanting to listen, even at a distance, to what that Von Kemp trash was saying to the Sudek girl, Arlene walked back Wisconsin Street and began peering in the piles of boxes behind the businesses there, in hopes of finding something as good as the cast-off boot trees she’d picked up behind Happy Step Shoes, or the big box of dress patterns she’d found behind the clothing and fabric store on Fourth Avenue East this past summer.

Nothing.

From its nest somewhere above the novelty­ secondhand store an owl hooted—a low, reverberating sound that almost always made Arlene lose control of her bladder for a few dribbling seconds. Silly, it’s only a bird—a dumb animal. How much harm is it going to do you? Have to watch out for the two-footed beasts, she thought, getting out of the alley and crossing over to Ewert Avenue.

Still no luck. Banging down lid after lid, Arlene found herself walking to the point where Seventh Avenue West and East met in one long, unbroken street, close to the new ugly law enforcement building and the rusted railroad tracks be­yond. Past the abandoned Soo Line tracks (oh, North Central used them on occasion, but Arlene didn’t consider a train made up of an engine and two boxcars really using the tracks) was the Sash and Door to the west, and a smallish patch of woods bisected with the fairground road directly north.

Kids used those woods for drinking, and what came after. And that meant cans. Arlene usually left those to the Sudek girl (payment for letting Arlene have first pick of the bakery), but she knew for a fact that the Sudek girl never ventured into the woods, or anywhere beyond the railroad tracks, after daylight saving time ended. If I were her age, and had a bosom like hers, I wouldn’t go in the woods now, either. But who wants a flat old biddy—Don Campbell’s old biddy, at that?

There wasn’t much light out this way. The last street lamp was a block behind her, and even though the law enforcement building (police, sheriff, and jail) was lit in the front, the building was facing away from the woods, so Arlene fumbled the little flashlight scavenged last summer from behind Norm Hibbing’s novelty shop out of her jacket pocket and thumbed it on.

The small batteries inside offered only a rancid circle of light, but combined with the faint moonlight above, Arlene could see well enough to move forward without tripping. As she crossed the slanting railroad tracks, something emerged from the woods to her left—something dark and small and scissors-legged, with eyes that flared green-gold when it passed through her flashlight’s weak beam.

A cat, she began to think, until a minor but disturbing point crossed her mind. Eyes are in the wrong place—at least, one is. But by the time she’d realized what was wrong, the animal—cat, skunk, small dog, whatever—was gone, lost in the high grass near the abandoned depot to the northeast.

Arlene told herself she was too old, too tough, and too practical to be letting herself get all riled up over a silly animal, and kept on walking forward, into the woods, casting her flashlight about as she moved. The sallow beam picked up the glint of a Coors can—no, two Coors cans—and the shed skin of a rubber beneath. Arlene recoiled as her fingers brushed against the slightly sticky pinkish latex, still faintly body­-moist. Through the twist-limbed trees, most still adorned with withered leaves, she could see the streetlights on Ewert Hill to the east, where all the fancy old houses were. Few people lived out that way anymore, but the fact that there were houses and lights beyond gave her a mild sense of security. And the law building behind her helped, too.

Aiming her light downward, reading the play of shadow and flickering light with all the intensity of a palmist studying a client’s hand, Arlene looked beyond the shadows cast by the fallen leaves, to the deeper places below—places where things dropped became things lost, waiting to be found.

The woods were only a couple of blocks long where they were bisected by the road, but to Arlene’s left they were much deeper, thicker, and noisier. She could hear subtle rustlings—snaps and low squelching sounds she hoped were animal in origin. She had no idea how some pair of lovebirds might react to being discovered out here, in mid-thrust, as it were. Maybe it’s some of those boors who drive up and down my street at midnight, waking me up when I’d rather sleep, she thought petulantly, like the Arlene Weiss of old. A deliciously nasty thought came to her, nurtured by too many years lived under Don’s callused thumb: Suppose she were to sneak up on a couple and shine them like a pair of deer?

Her ribbed rubbery soles searching out secure footing below, Arlene followed the direction of the almost inaudible squelching, taking care not to let her bags make too much noise as they grazed the lower branches of the trees that surrounded her. For a second, the thought that she was close to the place the where the strange animal had emerged from the woods made her pause, but the prospect of having some harmless fun, of turning the tables on at least two of those little shits who broke her sleep many a night, kept her going. And that cat, dog, or whatever had flitted by so quickly that the odd shine could have been anything—a tag—