بخش 01 - فصل 08

2013 – 2014

By the time he was a high school sophomore, Pete Saubers had already figured out the next step: a good college in New England where literature instead of cleanliness was next to godliness. He began investigating online and collecting brochures. Emerson or BC seemed the most likely candidates, but Brown might not be out of reach. His mother and father told him not to get his hopes up, but Pete didn’t buy that. He felt that if you didn’t have hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you’d be pretty much fucked later on.

About majoring in English there was no question. Some of this surety had to do with John Rothstein and the Jimmy Gold novels; so far as Pete knew, he was the only person in the world who had read the final two, and they had changed his life.

Howard Ricker, his sophomore English teacher, had also been life-changing, even though many kids made fun of him, calling him Ricky the Hippie because of the flower-power shirts and bellbottoms he favored. (Pete’s girlfriend, Gloria Moore, called him Pastor Ricky, because he had a habit of waving his hands above his head when he got excited.) Hardly anyone cut Mr Ricker’s classes, though. He was entertaining, he was enthusiastic, and – unlike many of the teachers – he seemed to genuinely like the kids, who he called ‘my young ladies and gentlemen.’ They rolled their eyes at his retro clothes and his screechy laugh … but the clothes had a certain funky cachet, and the screechy laugh was so amiably weird it made you want to laugh along.

On the first day of sophomore English, he blew in like a cool breeze, welcomed them, and then printed something on the board that Pete Saubers never forgot:

‘What do you make of this, ladies and gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘What on earth can it mean?’

The class was silent.

‘I’ll tell you, then. It happens to be the most common criticism made by young ladies and gentlemen such as yourselves, doomed to a course where we begin with excerpts from Beowulf and end with Raymond Carver. Among teachers, such survey courses are sometimes called GTTG: Gallop Through the Glories.’

He screeched cheerfully, also waggling his hands at shoulder height in a yowza-yowza gesture. Most of the kids laughed along, Pete among them.

‘Class verdict on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”? This is stupid! “Young Goodman Brown,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne? This is stupid! “Mending Wall,” by Robert Frost? This is moderately stupid! The required excerpt from Moby-Dick? This is extremely stupid!’

More laughter. None of them had read Moby-Dick, but they all knew it was hard and boring. Stupid, in other words.

‘And sometimes!’ Mr Ricker exclaimed, raising one finger and pointing dramatically at the words on the blackboard. ‘Sometimes, my young ladies and gentlemen, the criticism is spot-on. I stand here with my bare face hanging out and admit it. I am required to teach certain antiquities I would rather not teach. I see the loss of enthusiasm in your eyes, and my soul groans. Yes! Groans! But I soldier on, because I know that much of what I teach is not stupid. Even some of the antiquities to which you feel you cannot relate now or ever will, have deep resonance that will eventually reveal itself. Shall I tell you how you judge the not-stupid from the is-stupid? Shall I impart this great secret? Since we have forty minutes left in this class and as yet no grist to grind in the mill of our combined intellects, I believe I will.’

He leaned forward and propped his hands on the desk, his tie swinging like a pendulum. Pete felt that Mr Ricker was looking directly at him, as if he knew – or at least intuited – the tremendous secret Pete was keeping under a pile of blankets in the attic of his house. Something far more important than money.

‘At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless thing? My time with you is short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?’

Some of the kids – Gloria was one of them – now looked lost, but Pete understood exactly what Mr Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, was talking about, because since starting the notebooks, he had read dozens of critical essays on John Rothstein. Many of them judged Rothstein to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, right up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roth. There were others – a minority, but a vocal one – who asserted that his work was second-rate and hollow. Pete had read a piece in Salon where the writer had called Rothstein ‘king of the wisecrack and the patron saint of fools.’

‘Time is the answer,’ Mr Ricker said on the first day of Pete’s sophomore year. He strode back and forth, antique bellbottoms swishing, occasionally waving his arms. ‘Yes! Time mercilessly culls away the is-stupid from the not-stupid. It is a natural, Darwinian process. It is why the novels of Graham Greene are available in every good bookstore, and the novels of Somerset Maugham are not – those novels still exist, of course, but you must order them, and you would only do that if you knew about them. Most modern readers do not. Raise your hand if you have ever heard of Somerset Maugham. And I’ll spell that for you.’

No hands went up.

Mr Ricker nodded. Rather grimly, it seemed to Pete. ‘Time has decreed that Mr Greene is not-stupid while Mr Maugham is … well, not exactly stupid but forgettable. He wrote some very fine novels, in my opinion – The Moon and Sixpence is remarkable, my young ladies and gentlemen, remarkable – and he also wrote a great deal of excellent short fiction, but none is included in your textbook.

‘Shall I weep over this? Shall I rage, and shake my fists, and proclaim injustice? No. I will not. Such culling is a natural process. It will occur for you, young ladies and gentlemen, although I will be in your rearview mirror by the time it happens. Shall I tell you how it happens? You will read something – perhaps “Dulce et Decorum Est,” by Wilfred Owen. Shall we use that as an example? Why not?’

Then, in a deeper voice that sent chills up Pete’s back and tightened his throat, Mr Ricker cried: ‘“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge …” And so on. Cetra-cetra. Some of you will say, This is stupid. Will I break my promise not to argue the point, even though I consider Mr Owen’s poems the greatest to come out of World War I? No! It’s just my opinion, you see, and opinions are like assholes: everybody has one.’

They all roared at that, young ladies and gentlemen alike.

Mr Ricker drew himself up. ‘I may give some of you detentions if you disrupt my class, I have no problem with imposing discipline, but never will I disrespect your opinion. And yet! And yet!’

Up went the finger.

‘Time will pass! Tempus will fugit! Owen’s poem may fall away from your mind, in which case your verdict of is-stupid will have turned out to be correct. For you, at least. But for some of you it will recur. And recur. And recur. Each time it does, the steady march of your maturity will deepen its resonance. Each time that poem steals back into your mind, it will seem a little less stupid and a little more vital. A little more important. Until it shines, young ladies and gentlemen. Until it shines. Thus endeth my opening day peroration, and I ask you to turn to page sixteen in that most excellent tome, Language and Literature.’

One of the stories Mr Ricker assigned that year was ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner,’ by D.H. Lawrence, and sure enough, many of Mr Ricker’s young ladies and gentlemen (including Gloria Moore, of whom Pete was growing tired, in spite of her really excellent breasts) considered it stupid. Pete did not, in large part because events in his life had already caused him to mature beyond his years. As 2013 gave way to 2014 – the year of the famed Polar Vortex, when furnaces all over the upper Midwest went into maximum overdrive, burning money by the bale – that story recurred to him often, and its resonance continued to deepen. And recur.

The family in it seemed to have everything, but they didn’t; there was never quite enough, and the hero of the story, a young boy named Paul, always heard the house whispering, ‘There must be more money! There must be more money!’ Pete Saubers guessed that there were kids who considered that stupid. They were the lucky ones who had never been forced to listen to nightly arkie-barkies about which bills to pay. Or the price of cigarettes.

The young protagonist in the Lawrence story discovered a supernatural way to make money. By riding his toy rocking-horse to the make-believe land of luck, Paul could pick horse-race winners in the real world. He made thousands of dollars, and still the house whispered, ‘There must be more money!’

After one final epic ride on the rocking-horse – and one final big-money pick – Paul dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage or something. Pete didn’t have so much as a headache after finding the buried trunk, but it was still his rocking-horse, wasn’t it? Yes. His very own rocking-horse. But by 2013, the year he met Mr Ricker, the rocking-horse was slowing down. The trunk-money had almost run out.

It had gotten his parents through a rough and scary patch when their marriage might otherwise have crashed and burned; this Pete knew, and he never once regretted playing guardian angel. In the words of that old song, the trunk-money had formed a bridge over troubled water, and things were better – much – on the other side. The worst of the recession was over. Mom was teaching full-time again, her salary three thousand a year better than before. Dad now ran his own small business, not real estate, exactly, but something called real estate search. He had several agencies in the city as clients. Pete didn’t completely understand how it worked, but he knew it was actually making some money, and might make more in the years ahead, if the housing market continued to trend upward. He was agenting a few properties of his own, too. Best of all, he was drug-free and walking well. The crutches had been in the closet for over a year, and he only used his cane on rainy or snowy days when his bones and joints ached. All good. Great, in fact.

And yet, as Mr Ricker said at least once in every class. And yet!

There was Tina to think about, that was one very large and yet. Many of her friends from the old neighborhood on the West Side, including Barbara Robinson, whom Tina had idolized, were going to Chapel Ridge, a private school that had an excellent record when it came to sending kids on to good colleges. Mom had told Tina that she and Dad didn’t see how they could afford to send her there directly from middle school. Maybe she could attend as a sophomore, if their finances continued to improve.

‘But I won’t know anybody by then,’ Tina had said, starting to cry.

‘You’ll know Barbara Robinson,’ Mom said, and Pete (listening from the next room) could tell from the sound of her voice that Mom was on the verge of tears herself. ‘Hilda and Betsy, too.’

But Teens had been a little younger than those girls, and Pete knew only Barbs had been a real friend to his sister back in the West Side days. Hilda Carver and Betsy DeWitt probably didn’t even remember her. Neither would Barbara, in another year or two. Their mother didn’t seem to remember what a big deal high school was, and how quickly you forgot your little-kid friends once you got there.

Tina’s response summed up these thoughts with admirable succinctness. ‘Yeah, but they won’t know me.’

‘Tina—’

‘You have that money!’ Tina cried. ‘That mystery money that comes every month! Why can’t I have some for Chapel Ridge?’

‘Because we’re still catching up from the bad time, honey.’

To this Tina could say nothing, because it was true.

His own college plans were another and yet. Pete knew that to some of his friends, maybe most of them, college seemed as far away as the outer planets of the solar system. But if he wanted a good one (Brown, his mind whispered, English Lit at Brown), that meant making early applications when he was a first-semester senior. The applications themselves cost money, as did the summer class he needed to pick up if he wanted to score at least a 670 on the math part of the SATs. He had a part-time job at the Garner Street Library, but thirty-five bucks a week didn’t go far.

Dad’s business had grown enough to make a downtown office desirable, that was and yet number three. Just a low-rent place on an upper floor, and being close to the action would pay dividends, but it would mean laying out more money, and Pete knew – even though no one said it out loud – that Dad was counting on the mystery cash to carry him through the critical period. They had all come to depend on the mystery cash, and only Pete knew it would be gone before the end of ’14.

And yeah, okay, he had spent some on himself. Not a huge amount – that would have raised questions – but a hundred here and a hundred there. A blazer and a pair of loafers for the class trip to Washington. A few CDs. And books. He had become a fool for books since reading the notebooks and falling in love with John Rothstein. He began with Rothstein’s Jewish contemporaries, like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Irwin Shaw (he thought The Young Lions was fucking awesome, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a classic), and spread out from there. He always bought paperbacks, but even those were twelve or fifteen dollars apiece these days, unless you could find them used.

‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ had resonance, all right, bigtime resonance, because Pete could hear his own house whispering There must be more money … and all too soon there would be less. But money wasn’t all the trunk had contained, was it?

That was another and yet. One Pete Saubers thought about more and more as time passed.

For his end-of-year research paper in Mr Ricker’s Gallop Through the Glories, Pete did a sixteen-page analysis of the Jimmy Gold trilogy, quoting from various reviews and adding in stuff from the few interviews Rothstein had given before retreating to his farm in New Hampshire and going completely dark. He finished by talking about Rothstein’s tour of the German death camps as a reporter for the New York Herald – this for years before publishing the first Jimmy Gold book.

‘I believe that was the most important event of Mr Rothstein’s life,’ Pete wrote. ‘Surely the most important event of his life as a writer. Jimmy’s search for meaning always goes back to what Mr Rothstein saw in those camps, and it’s why, when Jimmy tries to live the life of an ordinary American citizen, he always feels hollow. For me, this is best expressed when he throws an ashtray through the TV in The Runner Slows Down. He does it during a CBS news special about the Holocaust.’

When Mr Ricker returned their papers, a big A+ was scrawled on Pete’s cover, which was a computer-scanned photo of Rothstein as a young man, sitting in Sardi’s with Ernest Hemingway. Below the A+, Mr Ricker had written See me after class.

When the other kids were gone, Mr Ricker looked at Pete so fixedly that Pete was momentarily scared his favorite teacher was going to accuse him of plagiarism. Then Mr Ricker smiled. ‘That is the best student paper I’ve read in my twenty-eight years of teaching. Because it was the most confident, and the most deeply felt.’

Pete’s face heated with pleasure. ‘Thanks. Really. Thanks a lot.’

‘I’d argue with your conclusion, though,’ Mr Ricker said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together behind his neck. ‘The characterization of Jimmy as “a noble American hero, like Huck Finn,” is not supported by the concluding book of the trilogy. Yes, he throws an ashtray at the television screen, but it’s not an act of heroism. The CBS logo is an eye, you know, and Jimmy’s act is a ritual blinding of his inner eye, the one that sees the truth. That’s not my insight; it’s an almost direct quote from an essay called “The Runner Turns Away,” by John Crowe Ransom. Leslie Fiedler says much the same in Love and Death in the American Novel.’

‘But—’

‘I’m not trying to debunk you, Pete; I’m just saying you need to follow the evidence of any book wherever it leads, and that means not omitting crucial developments that run counter to your thesis. What does Jimmy do after he throws the ashtray through the TV, and after his wife delivers her classic line, “You bastard, how will the kids watch Mickey Mouse now?”’

‘He goes out and buys another TV set, but—’

‘Not just any TV set, but the first color TV set on the block. And then?’

‘He creates the big successful ad campaign for Duzzy-Doo household cleaner. But—’

Mr Ricker raised his eyebrows, waiting for the but. And how could Pete tell him that a year later, Jimmy steals into the agency late one night with matches and a can of kerosene? That Rothstein foreshadows all the protests about Vietnam and civil rights by having Jimmy start a fire that pretty much destroys the building known as the Temple of Advertising? That he hitchhikes out of New York City without a look back, leaving his family behind and striking out for the territory, just like Huck and Jim? He couldn’t say any of that, because it was the story told in The Runner Goes West, a novel that existed only in seventeen closely written notebooks that had lain buried in an old trunk for over thirty years.

‘Go ahead and but me your buts,’ Mr Ricker said equably. ‘There’s nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument. I imagine you’ve already missed your bus, but I’ll be more than happy to give you a ride home.’ He tapped the cover sheet of Pete’s paper, Johnny R. and Ernie H., those twin titans of American literature, with oversized martini glasses raised in a toast. ‘Unsupported conclusion aside – which I put down to a touching desire to see light at the end of an extremely dark final novel – this is extraordinary work. Just extraordinary. So go for it. But me your buts.’

‘But nothing, I guess,’ Pete said. ‘You could be right.’

Only Mr Ricker wasn’t. Any doubt about Jimmy Gold’s capacity to sell out that remained at the end of The Runner Goes West was swept away in the last and longest novel of the series, The Runner Raises the Flag. It was the best book Pete had ever read. Also the saddest.

‘In your paper you don’t go into how Rothstein died.’

‘No.’

‘May I ask why not?’

‘Because it didn’t fit the theme, I guess. And it would have made the paper too long. Also … well … it was such a bummer for him to die that way, getting killed in a stupid burglary.’

‘He shouldn’t have kept cash in the house,’ Mr Ricker said mildly, ‘but he did, and a lot of people knew it. Don’t judge him too harshly for that. Many writers have been stupid and improvident about money. Charles Dickens found himself supporting a family of slackers, including his own father. Samuel Clemens was all but bankrupted by bad real estate transactions. Arthur Conan Doyle lost thousands of dollars to fake mediums and spent thousands more on fake photos of fairies. At least Rothstein’s major work was done. Unless you believe, as some people do—’

Pete looked at his watch. ‘Um, Mr Ricker? I can still catch my bus if I hurry.’

Mr Ricker did that funny yowza-yowza thing with his hands. ‘Go, by all means go. I just wanted to thank you for such a wonderful piece of work … and to offer a friendly caution: when you approach this kind of thing next year – and in college – don’t let your good nature cloud your critical eye. The critical eye should always be cold and clear.’

‘I won’t,’ Pete said, and hurried out.

The last thing he wanted to discuss with Mr Ricker was the possibility that the thieves who had taken John Rothstein’s life had stolen a bunch of unpublished manuscripts as well as money, and maybe destroyed them after deciding they had no value. Once or twice Pete had played with the idea of turning the notebooks over to the police, even though that would almost surely mean his parents would find out where the mystery money had been coming from. The notebooks were, after all, evidence of a crime as well as a literary treasure. But it was an old crime, ancient history. Better to leave well enough alone.

Right?

The bus had already gone, of course, and that meant a two-mile walk home. Pete didn’t mind. He was still glowing from Mr Ricker’s praise, and he had a lot to think about. Rothstein’s unpublished works, mostly. The short stories were uneven, he thought, only a few of them really good, and the poems he’d tried to write were, in Pete’s humble opinion, pretty lame. But those last two Jimmy Gold novels were … well, gold. Judging by the evidence scattered through them, Pete guessed the last one, where Jimmy raises a burning flag at a Washington peace rally, had been finished around 1973, because Nixon was still president when the story ended. That Rothstein had never published the final Gold books (plus yet another novel, this one about the Civil War) blew Pete’s mind. They were so good!

Pete took only one Moleskine at a time down from the attic, reading them with his door closed and an ear cocked for unexpected company when there were other members of his family in the house. He always kept another book handy, and if he heard approaching footsteps, he would slide the notebook under his mattress and pick up the spare. The only time he’d been caught was by Tina, who had the unfortunate habit of walking around in her sock feet.

‘What’s that?’ she’d asked from the doorway.

‘None of your beeswax,’ he had replied, slipping the notebook under his pillow. ‘And if you say anything to Mom or Dad, you’re in trouble with me.’

‘Is it porno?’

‘No!’ Although Mr Rothstein could write some pretty racy scenes, especially for an old guy. For instance the one where Jimmy and these two hippie chicks—

‘Then why don’t you want me to see it?’

‘Because it’s private.’

Her eyes lit up. ‘Is it yours? Are you writing a book?’

‘Maybe. So what if I am?’

‘I think that’s cool! What’s it about?’

‘Bugs having sex on the moon.’

She giggled. ‘I thought you said it wasn’t porno. Can I read it when you’re done?’

‘We’ll see. Just keep your trap shut, okay?’

She had agreed, and one thing you could say for Teens, she rarely broke a promise. That had been two years ago, and Pete was sure she’d forgotten all about it.

Billy Webber came rolling up on a gleaming ten-speed. ‘Hey, Saubers!’ Like almost everyone else (Mr Ricker was an exception), Billy pronounced it Sobbers instead of SOW-bers, but what the hell. It was sort of a dipshit name however you said it. ‘What you doin this summer?’

‘Working at the Garner Street libe.’

‘Still?’

‘I talked em into twenty hours a week.’

‘Fuck, man, you’re too young to be a wage-slave!’

‘I don’t mind,’ Pete said, which was the truth. The libe meant free computer-time, among the other perks, with no one looking over your shoulder. ‘What about you?’

‘Goin to our summer place up in Maine. China Lake. Many cute girls in bikinis, man, and the ones from Massachusetts know what to do.’

Then maybe they can show you, Pete thought snidely, but when Billy held out his palm, Pete slapped him five and watched him go with mild envy. Ten-speed bike under his ass; expensive Nike kicks on his feet; summer place in Maine. It seemed that some people had already caught up from the bad time. Or maybe the bad time had missed them completely. Not so with the Saubers family. They were doing okay, but—

There must be more money, the house had whispered in the Lawrence story. There must be more money. And honey, that was resonance.

Could the notebooks be turned into money? Was there a way? Pete didn’t even like to think about giving them up, but at the same time he recognized how wrong it was to keep them hidden away in the attic. Rothstein’s work, especially the last two Jimmy Gold books, deserved to be shared with the world. They would remake Rothstein’s reputation, Pete was sure of that, but his rep still wasn’t that bad, and besides, it wasn’t the important part. People would like them, that was the important part. Love them, if they were like Pete.

Only, handwritten manuscripts weren’t like untraceable twenties and fifties. Pete would be caught, and he might go to jail. He wasn’t sure exactly what crime he could be charged with – not receiving stolen property, surely, because he hadn’t received it, only found it – but he was positive that trying to sell what wasn’t yours had to be some kind of crime. Donating the notebooks to Rothstein’s alma mater seemed like a possible answer, only he’d have to do it anonymously, or it would all come out and his parents would discover that their son had been supporting them with a murdered man’s stolen money. Besides, for an anonymous donation you got zilch.

Although he hadn’t written about Rothstein’s murder in his term paper, Pete had read all about it, mostly in the computer room at the library. He knew that Rothstein had been shot ‘execution-style.’ He knew that the cops had found enough different tracks in the dooryard to believe two, three, or even four people had been involved, and that, based on the size of those tracks, all were probably men. They also thought that two of the men had been killed at a New York rest area not long after.

Margaret Brennan, the author’s first wife, had been interviewed in Paris not long after the killing. ‘Everyone talked about him in that provincial little town where he lived,’ she said. ‘What else did they have to talk about? Cows? Some farmer’s new manure spreader? To the provincials, John was a big deal. They had the erroneous idea that writers make as much as corporate bankers, and believed he had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away on that rundown farm of his. Someone from out of town heard the loose talk, that’s all. Closemouthed Yankees, my Irish fanny! I blame the locals as much as the thugs who did it.’

When asked about the possibility that Rothstein had squirreled away manuscripts as well as cash, Peggy Brennan had given what the interview called ‘a cigarette-raspy chuckle.’

‘More rumors, darling. Johnny pulled back from the world for one reason and one reason only. He was burned out and too proud to admit it.’

Lot you knew, Pete thought. He probably divorced you because he got tired of that cigarette-raspy chuckle.

There was plenty of speculation in the newspaper and magazine articles Pete had read, but he himself liked what Mr Ricker called ‘the Occam’s razor principle.’ According to that, the simplest and most obvious answer was usually the right one. Three men had broken in, and one of them had killed his partners so he could keep all the swag for himself. Pete had no idea why the guy had come to this city afterwards, or why he’d buried the trunk, but one thing he was sure of: the surviving robber was never going to come back and get it.

Pete’s math skills weren’t the strongest – it was why he needed that summer course to bone up – but you didn’t have to be an Einstein to run simple numbers and assess certain possibilities. If the surviving robber had been thirty-five in 1978, which seemed like a fair estimate to Pete, he would have been sixty-seven in 2010, when Pete found the trunk, and around seventy now. Seventy was ancient. If he turned up looking for his loot, he’d probably do so on a walker.

Pete smiled as he turned onto Sycamore Street.

He thought there were three possibilities for why the surviving robber had never come back for his trunk, all equally likely. One, he was in prison somewhere for some other crime. Two, he was dead. Three was a combination of one and two: he had died in prison. Whichever it was, Pete didn’t think he had to worry about the guy. The notebooks, though, were a different story. About them he had plenty of worries. Sitting on them was like sitting on a bunch of beautiful stolen paintings you could never sell.

Or a crate filled with dynamite.

In September of 2013 – almost exactly thirty-five years from the date of John Rothstein’s murder – Pete tucked the last of the trunk-money into an envelope addressed to his father. The final installment amounted to three hundred and forty dollars. And because he felt that hope which could never be realized was a cruel thing, he added a one-line note:

This is the last of it. I am sorry there’s not more.

He took a city bus to Birch Hill Mall, where there was a mailbox between Discount Electronix and the yogurt place. He looked around, making sure he wasn’t observed, and kissed the envelope. Then he slipped it through the slot and walked away. He did it Jimmy Gold-style: without looking back.

A week or two after New Year’s, Pete was in the kitchen, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when he overheard his parents talking to Tina in the living room. It was about Chapel Ridge.

‘I thought maybe we could afford it,’ his dad was saying. ‘If I gave you false hope, I’m just as sorry as can be, Teens.’

‘It’s because the mystery money stopped coming,’ Tina said. ‘Right?’

Mom said, ‘Partly but not entirely. Dad tried for a bank loan, but they wouldn’t give it to him. They went over his business records and did something—’

‘A two-year profit projection,’ Dad said. Some of the old post-accident bitterness crept into his voice. ‘Lots of compliments, because those are free. They said they might be able to make the loan in 2016, if the business grows by five percent. In the meantime, this goddam Polar Vortex thing … we’re way over your mom’s budget on heating expenses. Everyone is, from Maine to Minnesota. I know that’s no consolation, but there it is.’

‘Honey, we’re so, so sorry,’ Mom said.

Pete expected Tina to explode into a full-fledged tantrum – there were lots more of those as she approached the big thirteen – but it didn’t happen. She said she understood, and that Chapel Ridge was probably a snooty school, anyway. Then she came out to the kitchen and asked Pete if he would make her a sandwich, because his looked good. He did, and they went into the living room, and all four of them watched TV together and had some laughs over The Big Bang Theory.

Later that night, though, he heard Tina crying behind the closed door of her room. It made him feel awful. He went into his own room, pulled one of the Moleskines out from under his mattress, and began rereading The Runner Goes West.

He was taking Mrs Davis’s creative writing course that semester, and although he got As on his stories, he knew by February that he was never going to be a fiction-writer. Although he was good with words, a thing he didn’t need Mrs Davis to tell him (although she often did), he just didn’t possess that kind of creative spark. His chief interest was in reading fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern. He had gotten a taste for this kind of detective work while writing his paper on Rothstein. At the Garner Street Library he hunted out one of the books Mr Ricker had mentioned, Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, and liked it so much that he bought his own copy in order to highlight certain passages and write in the margins. He wanted to major in English more than ever, and teach like Mr Ricker (except maybe at a university instead of in high school), and at some point write a book like Mr Fiedler’s, getting into the faces of more traditional critics and questioning the established way those traditional critics looked at things.

And yet!

There had to be more money. Mr Feldman, the guidance counselor, told him that getting a full-boat scholarship to an Ivy League school was ‘rather unlikely,’ and Pete knew even that was an exaggeration. He was just another whitebread high school kid from a so-so Midwestern school, a kid with a part-time library job and a few unglamorous extracurriculars like newspaper and yearbook. Even if he did manage to catch a boat, there was Tina to think about. She was basically trudging through her days, getting mostly Bs and Cs, and seemed more interested in makeup and shoes and pop music than school these days. She needed a change, a clean break. He was wise enough, even at not quite seventeen, to know that Chapel Ridge might not fix his little sister … but then again, it might. Especially since she wasn’t broken. At least not yet.

I need a plan, he thought, only that wasn’t precisely what he needed. What he needed was a story, and although he was never going to be a great fiction-writer like Mr Rothstein or Mr Lawrence, he was able to plot. That was what he had to do now. Only every plot stood on an idea, and on that score he kept coming up empty.

He had begun to spend a lot of time at Water Street Books, where the coffee was cheap and even new paperbacks were thirty percent off. He went by one afternoon in March, on his way to his after-school job at the library, thinking he might pick up something by Joseph Conrad. In one of his few interviews, Rothstein had called Conrad ‘the first great writer of the twentieth century, even though his best work was written before 1900.’

Outside the bookstore, a long table had been set up beneath an awning. SPRING CLEANING, the sign said. EVERYTHING ON THIS TABLE 70% OFF! And below it: WHO KNOWS WHAT BURIED TREASURE YOU WILL FIND! This line was flanked by big yellow smiley-faces, to show it was a joke, but Pete didn’t think it was funny.

He finally had an idea.

A week later, he stayed after school to talk to Mr Ricker.

‘Great to see you, Pete.’ Mr Ricker was wearing a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves today, along with a psychedelic tie. Pete thought the combination said quite a lot about why the love-and-peace generation had collapsed. ‘Mrs Davis says great things about you.’

‘She’s cool,’ Pete said. ‘I’m learning a lot.’ Actually he wasn’t, and he didn’t think anyone else in her class was, either. She was nice enough, and quite often had interesting things to say, but Pete was coming to the conclusion that creative writing couldn’t really be taught, only learned.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Remember when you were talking about how valuable a handwritten Shakespeare manuscript would be?’

Mr Ricker grinned. ‘I always talk about that during a midweek class, when things get dozy. There’s nothing like a little avarice to perk kids up. Why? Have you found a folio, Malvolio?’

Pete smiled politely. ‘No, but when we were visiting my uncle Phil in Cleveland during February vacation, I went out to his garage and found a whole bunch of old books. Most of them were about Tom Swift. He was this kid inventor.’

‘I remember Tom and his friend Ned Newton well,’ Mr Ricker said. ‘Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle, Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera … when I was a kid myself, we used to joke about Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother.’

Pete renewed his polite smile. ‘There were also a dozen or so about a girl detective named Trixie Belden, and another one named Nancy Drew.’

‘I believe I see where you’re going with this, and I hate to disappoint you, but I must. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden … all interesting relics of a bygone age, and a wonderful yardstick to judge how much what is called “YA fiction” has changed in the last eighty years or so, but those books have little or no monetary value, even when found in excellent condition.’

‘I know,’ Pete said. ‘I checked it out later on Fine Books. That’s a blog. But while I was looking those books over, Uncle Phil came out to the garage and said he had something else that might interest me even more. Because I’d told him I was into John Rothstein. It was a signed hardback of The Runner. Not dedicated, just a flat signature. Uncle Phil said some guy named A1 gave it to him because he owed my uncle ten dollars from a poker game. Uncle Phil said he’d had it for almost fifty years. I looked at the copyright page, and it’s a first edition.’

Mr Ricker had been rocked back in his chair, but now he sat down with a bang. ‘Whoa! You probably know that Rothstein didn’t sign many autographs, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Pete said. ‘He called it “defacing a perfectly good book.”’

‘Uh-huh, he was like Raymond Chandler that way. And you know signed volumes are worth more when it’s just the signature? Sans dedication?’

‘Yes. It says so on Fine Books.’

‘A signed first of Rothstein’s most famous book probably would be worth money.’ Mr Ricker considered. ‘On second thought, strike the probably. What kind of condition is it in?’

‘Good,’ Pete said promptly. ‘Some foxing on the inside cover and title page, is all.’

‘You have been reading up on this stuff.’

‘More since my uncle showed me the Rothstein.’

‘I don’t suppose you’re in possession of this fabulous book, are you?’

I’ve got something a lot better, Pete thought. If you only knew.

Sometimes he felt the weight of that knowledge, and never more than today, telling these lies.

Necessary lies, he reminded himself.

‘I don’t, but my uncle said he’d give it to me, if I wanted it. I said I needed to think about it, because he doesn’t … you know …’

‘He doesn’t have any idea of how much it might really be worth?’

‘Yeah. But then I started wondering …’

‘What?’

Pete dug into his back pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Mr Ricker. ‘I went looking on the Internet for book dealers here in town that buy and sell first editions, and I found these three. I know you’re sort of a book collector yourself—’

‘Not much, I can’t afford serious collecting on my salary, but I’ve got a signed Theodore Roethke that I intend to hand down to my children. The Waking. Very fine poems. Also a Vonnegut, but that’s not worth so much; unlike Rothstein, Father Kurt signed everything.’

‘Anyway, I wondered if you knew any of these, and if you do, which one might be the best. If I decided to let him give me the book … and then, you know, sell it.’

Mr Ricker unfolded the sheet, glanced at it, then looked at Pete again. That gaze, both keen and sympathetic, made Pete feel uneasy. This might have been a bad idea, he really wasn’t much good at fiction, but he was in it now and would have to plow through somehow.

‘As it happens, I know all of them. But jeez, kiddo, I also know how much Rothstein means to you, and not just from your paper last year. Annie Davis says you bring him up often in Creative Writing. Claims the Gold trilogy is your Bible.’

Pete supposed this was true, but he hadn’t realized how blabby he’d been until now. He resolved to stop talking about Rothstein so much. It might be dangerous. People might think back and remember, if—

If.

‘It’s good to have literary heroes, Pete, especially if you plan to major in English when you get to college. Rothstein is yours – at least for now – and that book could be the beginning of your own library. Are you sure you want to sell it?’

Pete could answer this question with fair honesty, even though it wasn’t really a signed book he was talking about. ‘Pretty sure, yeah. Things have been a little tough at home—’

‘I know what happened to your father at City Center, and I’m sorry as hell. At least they caught the psycho before he could do any more damage.’

‘Dad’s better now, and both he and my mom are working again, only I’m probably going to need money for college, see …’

‘I understand.’

‘But that’s not the biggest thing, at least not now. My sister wants to go to Chapel Ridge, and my parents told her she couldn’t, at least not this coming year. They can’t quite swing it. Close, but no cigar. And I think she needs a place like that. She’s kind of, I don’t know, lagging.’

Mr Ricker, who had undoubtedly known lots of students who were lagging, nodded gravely.

‘But if Tina could get in with a bunch of strivers – especially this one girl, Barbara Robinson, she used to know from when we lived on the West Side – things might turn around.’

‘It’s good of you to think of her future, Pete. Noble, even.’

Pete had never thought of himself as noble. The idea made him blink.

Perhaps seeing his embarrassment, Mr Ricker turned his attention to the list again. ‘Okay. Grissom Books would have been your best bet when Teddy Grissom was still alive, but his son runs the shop now, and he’s a bit of a tightwad. Honest, but close with a buck. He’d say it’s the times, but it’s also his nature.’

‘Okay …’

‘I assume you’ve checked on the Net to find out how much a signed first-edition Runner in good condition is valued at?’

‘Yeah. Two or three thousand. Not enough for a year at Chapel Ridge, but a start. What my dad calls earnest money.’

Mr Ricker nodded. ‘That sounds about right. Teddy Junior would start you at eight hundred. You might get him up to a grand, but if you kept pushing, he’d get his back up and tell you to take a hike. This next one, Buy the Book, is Buddy Franklin’s shop. He’s also okay – by which I mean honest – but Buddy doesn’t have much interest in twentieth-century fiction. His big deal is selling old maps and seventeenth-century atlases to rich guys in Branson Park and Sugar Heights. But if you could talk Buddy into valuing the book, then go to Teddy Junior at Grissom, you might get twelve hundred. I’m not saying you would, I’m just saying it’s possible.’

‘What about Andrew Halliday Rare Editions?’

Mr Ricker frowned. ‘I’d steer clear of Halliday. He’s got a little shop on Lacemaker Lane, in that walking mall off Lower Main Street. Not much wider than an Amtrak car, but damn near a block long. Seems to do quite well, but there’s an odor about him. I’ve heard it said he’s not too picky about the provenance of certain items. Do you know what that is?’

‘The line of ownership.’

‘Right. Ending with a piece of paper that says you legally own what you’re trying to sell. The only thing I know for sure is that about fifteen years ago, Halliday sold a proof copy of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it turned out to have been stolen from the estate of Brooke Astor. She was a rich old biddy from New York with a larcenous business manager. Halliday showed a receipt, and his story of how he came by the book was credible, so the investigation was dropped. But receipts can be forged, you know. I’d steer clear of him.’

‘Thanks, Mr Ricker,’ Pete said, thinking that if he went ahead with this, Andrew Halliday Rare Editions would be his first stop. But he would have to be very, very careful, and if Mr Halliday wouldn’t do a cash deal, that would mean no deal. Plus, under no circumstances could he know Pete’s name. A disguise might be in order, although it wouldn’t do to go overboard on that.

‘You’re welcome, Pete, but if I said I felt good about this, I’d be lying.’

Pete could relate. He didn’t feel so good about it himself.

He was still mulling his options a month later, and had almost come to the conclusion that trying to sell even one of the notebooks would be too much risk for too little reward. If it went to a private collector – like the ones he had sometimes read about, who bought valuable paintings to hang in secret rooms where only they could look at them – it would be okay. But he couldn’t be sure that would happen. He was leaning more and more to the idea of donating them anonymously, maybe mailing them to the New York University Library. The curator of a place like that would understand the value of them, no doubt. But doing that would be a little more public than Pete liked to think about, not at all like dropping the letters with the money inside them into anonymous streetcorner mailboxes. What if someone remembered him at the post office?

Then, on a rainy night in late April of 2014, Tina came to his room again. Mrs Beasley was long gone, and the footy pajamas had been replaced by an oversized Cleveland Browns football jersey, but to Pete she looked very much like the worried girl who had asked, during the Era of Bad Feelings, if their mother and father were going to get divorced. Her hair was in pigtails, and with her face cleansed of the little makeup Mom let her wear (Pete had an idea she put on fresh layers when she got to school), she looked closer to ten than going on thirteen. He thought, Teens is almost a teen. It was hard to believe.

‘Can I come in for a minute?’

‘Sure.’

He was lying on his bed, reading a novel by Philip Roth called When She Was Good. Tina sat on his desk chair, pulling her jersey nightshirt down over her shins and blowing a few errant hairs from her forehead, where a faint scattering of acne had appeared.

‘Something on your mind?’ Pete asked.

‘Um … yeah.’ But she didn’t go on.

He wrinkled his nose at her. ‘Go on, spill it. Some boy you’ve been crushing on told you to buzz off?’

‘You sent that money,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’

Pete stared at her, flabbergasted. He tried to speak and couldn’t. He tried to persuade himself she hadn’t said what she’d said, and couldn’t do that, either.

She nodded as if he had admitted it. ‘Yeah, you did. It’s all over your face.’

‘It didn’t come from me, Teens, you just took me by surprise. Where would I get money like that?’

‘I don’t know, but I remember the night you asked me what I’d do if I found a buried treasure.’

‘I did?’ Thinking, You were half-asleep. You can’t remember that.

‘Doubloons, you said. Coins from olden days. I said I’d give it to Dad and Mom so they wouldn’t fight anymore, and that’s just what you did. Only it wasn’t pirate treasure, it was regular money.’

Pete put his book aside. ‘Don’t you go telling them that. They might actually believe you.’

She looked at him solemnly. ‘I never would. But I need to ask you … is it really all gone?’

‘The note in the last envelope said it was,’ Pete replied cautiously, ‘and there hasn’t been any more since, so I guess so.’

She sighed. ‘Yeah. What I figured. But I had to ask.’ She got up to go.

‘Tina?’

‘What?’

‘I’m really sorry about Chapel Ridge and all. I wish the money wasn’t gone.’

She sat down again. ‘I’ll keep your secret if you keep one Mom and I have. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Last November she took me to Chap – that’s what the girls call it – for one of their tour days. She didn’t want Dad to know, because she thought he’d be mad, but back then she thought they maybe could afford it, especially if I got a need scholarship. Do you know what that is?’

Pete nodded.

‘Only the money hadn’t stopped coming then, and it was before all the snow and weird cold weather in December and January. We saw some of the classrooms, and the science labs. There’s like a jillion computers. We also saw the gym, which is humongous, and the showers. They have private changing booths, too, not just cattle stalls like at Northfield. At least they do for the girls. Guess who my tour group had for a guide?’

‘Barbara Robinson?’

She smiled. ‘It was great to see her again.’ Then the smile faded. ‘She said hello and gave me a hug and asked how everyone was, but I could tell she hardly remembered me. Why would she, right? Did you know her and Hilda and Betsy and a couple of other girls from back then were at the ’Round Here concert? The one the guy who ran over Dad tried to blow up?’

‘Yeah.’ Pete also knew that Barbara Robinson’s big brother had played a part in saving Barbara and Barbara’s friends and maybe thousands of others. He had gotten a medal or a key to the city, or something. That was real heroism, not sneaking around and mailing stolen money to your parents.

‘Did you know I was invited to go with them that night?’

‘What? No!’

Tina nodded. ‘I said I couldn’t because I was sick, but I wasn’t. It was because Mom said they couldn’t afford to buy me a ticket. We moved a couple of months later.’

‘Jesus, how about that, huh?’

‘Yeah, I missed all the excitement.’

‘So how was the school tour?’

‘Good, but not great, or anything. I’ll be fine at Northfield. Hey, once they find out I’m your sister, they’ll probably give me a free ride, Honor Roll Boy.’

Pete suddenly felt sad, almost like crying. It was the sweetness that had always been part of Tina’s nature combined with that ugly scatter of pimples on her forehead. He wondered if she got teased about those. If she didn’t yet, she would.

He held out his arms. ‘C’mere.’ She did, and he gave her a strong hug. Then he held her by the shoulders and looked at her sternly. ‘But that money … it wasn’t me.’

‘Uh-huh, okay. So was that notebook you were reading stuck in with the money? I bet it was.’ She giggled. ‘You looked so guilty that night when I walked in on you.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Go to bed, short stuff.’

‘Okay.’ At the door she turned back. ‘I liked those private changing booths, though. And something else. Want to know? You’ll think it’s weird.’

‘Go ahead, lay it on me.’

‘The kids wear uniforms. For the girls it’s gray skirts with white blouses and white kneesocks. There are also sweaters, if you want. Some gray like the skirts and some this pretty dark red – hunter red they call it, Barbara said.’

‘Uniforms,’ Pete said, bemused. ‘You like the idea of uniforms.’

‘Knew you’d think it was weird. Because boys don’t know how girls are. Girls can be mean if you’re wearing the wrong clothes, or even if you wear the right ones too much. You can wear different blouses, or your sneakers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can do different things with your hair, but pretty soon they – the mean girls – figure out you’ve only got three jumpers and six good school skirts. Then they say stuff. But when everyone wears the same thing every day … except maybe the sweater’s a different color …’ She blew back those few errant strands again. ‘Boys don’t have the same problem.’

‘I actually do get it,’ Pete said.

‘Anyway, Mom’s going to teach me how to make my own clothes, then I’ll have more. Simplicity, Butterick. Also, I’ve got friends. Plenty of them.’

‘Ellen, for instance.’

‘Ellen’s okay.’

And headed for a rewarding job as a waitress or a drive-thru girl after high school, Pete thought but did not say. If she doesn’t get pregnant at sixteen, that is.

‘I just wanted to tell you not to worry. If you were.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Pete said. ‘I know you’ll be fine. And it wasn’t me who sent the money. Honest.’

She gave him a smile, both sad and complicit, that made her look like anything but a little girl. ‘Okay. Gotcha.’

She left, closing the door gently behind her.

Pete lay awake for a long time that night. Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life.