The Shadow Year Read Free Page B

the design.
    â€œIt’s from a sneaker,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” he said.
    â€œI think it’s Keds,” said Franky.
    â€œWhat does that tell you?” asked Jim.
    â€œWhat?” asked Franky.
    â€œWell, it’s too big to be a kid, but grown-ups usually don’t wear sneakers. It might be a teenager. We better save this for if the cops ever come to investigate.”
    â€œDid your dad call the cops?” I asked.
    â€œNo. He said that if he ever caught who it was, he’d shoot the son of a bitch himself.”
    It took us about a half hour to dig up the footprint, carefully loosening the dirt all around it and scooping way down beneath it with the shovel. We went to Nan’s side door and asked her if she had a box. She gave us a round pink hatbox with a lid that had a picture of a poodle and the Eiffel Tower.
    Jim told Franky, “Carry it like it’s nitro,” and we took it into our yard and stored it in the toolshed back by the fence. When Franky slid it into place on the wooden shelf next to the bottles of bug killer, Mary said, “One.”

As God Is My Judge
    Nan made lunch for us when the fire whistle blew at noon. She served it in our house at the dining-room table. Her sandwiches always had butter, no matter what else she put on them. Sometimes, like that day, she just made butter-and-sugar sandwiches. We also had barley soup. Occasionally she would make us chocolate pudding—the kind with an inch of vinyl skin across the top—but usually dessert was a ladyfinger.
    Nan had gray wire-hair like George’s, big bifocals, and a brown mole on her temple that looked like a squashed raisin. Her small stature, dark and wrinkled complexion, and the silken black strands at the corners of her upper lip made her seem to me at times like some ancient monkey king. When she’d fart while standing, she’d kick her left leg up in the back and say, “Shoot him in the pants. The coat and vest are mine.”
    Every morning she’d say the rosary, and in the afternoon when the neighborhood ladies came over to drink wine from teacups, she’d read the future in a pack of playing cards.
    Each day at lunch that summer, along with the butter sandwiches, she’d also serve up a story from her life. That first day of our investigation, she told us one from her childhood in Whitestone, where her father had been the editor of the local paper, where the fire engines were pulled by horses, where Moishe Pipik, the strongest man alive, ate twelve raw eggs everymorning for breakfast, where Clementine Cherenete, whose hair was a waterfall of gold, fell in love with a blind man who could not see her beauty, and where John Hardy Farty, a wandering vagrant, strummed a harp and sang “Damn the rooster crow.” All events, both great and small, happened within sight of a local landmark, Nanny Goat Hill.
    â€œA night visitor,” she said when we told her about the footprint we had found and preserved in her pink hatbox. “Once there was a man who lived in Whitestone, a neighbor of ours. His name was Mr. Weeks. He had a daughter, Louqueer, who was in my grade at school.”
    â€œLouqueer?” said Jim, and he and I laughed. Mary looked up from counting the grains of barley in her soup to see what was so funny.
    Nan smiled and nodded. “She was a little odd. Spent all her time staring into a mirror. She wasn’t vain but was looking for something. Her mother told my mother that at night the girl would wake up choking, blue in the face, from having dreamed she was swallowing a thimble.”
    â€œThat wasn’t really her name,” said Jim.
    â€œAs God is my judge,” said Nan. “Her father took the train every day to work in the city and didn’t come home until very late at night. He always got the very last train that stopped in Whitestone, just before midnight, and would stumble home drunk through the streets from the