Page 73 of The Reformatory

Robert shook his head. “No, sir.” He didn’t feel like he was lying—until he remembered the boy who’d floated above his bed at the infirmary.

Boone leaned close to him with the fierce look he’d had in his eye when he drove Robert through the smoky ghost fire. “You ever do see somebody like that—somebody who ain’t s’posed to be here, who makes your skin crawl—you be sure to let me know. Ev’rybody won’t see ’em… but you might. Hear? I know how to get rid of ’em.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small leather pouch. He laid it in his palm and displayed it to Robert as if it were jewelry, or a gun. The brown leather was frayed, the residue of gray powder at the pouch’s mouth.

“This sends ’em gone for sure—the way they was s’posed to be gone already,” Boone said. “You can help me find ’em. Finding ’em is part of my job, and I like to do my job well. You do right by me, you won’t have no worries in here.”

“Find… who?”

“Haints,” Boone said. “Don’t act like you ain’t seen none. You from Gracetown, ain’t you? I know who you is. I know yo’ people.”

Robert didn’t answer. He only nodded, hoping Boone wouldn’t bring up Papa. Or what the white woman had said about him.

Boone put his pouch away, buttoning up the pocket. “They all around here,” Boone said. “Like rats. They come mean and jealous ’cuz you still got life and they don’t. They lie. They whisper ‘run’ in yo’ ear just to see if they can fool you into dying. Then you stuck like them.”

That didn’t describe any of the haints Robert had seen at the Reformatory, but Boone wasn’t just trying to threaten him: he believed it. And Boone wanted to make a deal with him! Did that mean Boone would never send him to the Funhouse again? He wouldn’t tell Boone about Mama, of course. Or the floating boy in the infirmary. Or the ones in the Funhouse. But…

Robert pulled his parched lips apart. “I saw a… white boy… in the kitchen.”

Boone grinned. He patted Robert’s shoulder, excited. “When? Where?”

Robert told Boone about his first day in the kitchen and how he’d seen a white boy stirring a giant pot. He kept Blue and Redbone out of his story in case they might get in trouble, telling as little as he could. As Boone listened, he rubbed his pouch through the pocket’s thin fabric as if touching the place where it rested gave him pleasure.

“Hot damn,” Boone said. “Hot damn. I’ll get ’im today!”

“How?” Robert said.

“Long as it ain’t been more’n three days, you can draw a haint to a spot where he’s been. If I sprinkle my powder back where he was, he’ll come. And ’cuz of my blessing over the powder, he’ll be trapped. And he’ll shrink down to a pile of ash. A tiny li’l anthill.”

Boone was talking nonsense, except it wasn’t nonsense to Boone. He spoke as if he were telling stories he’d always known. Robert had heard about people who used powders and potions, even if Miz Lottie said it was foolishness. Boone grinned more widely than any man he’d ever seen, stretching his teeth from one side of his face to the other: Boone loved hunting haints the way Robert’s grandfather had loved hunting wild hogs, almost childlike. Robert was sorry he’d told on the white boy in the kitchen; it wasn’t his fault he’d had a knife in his back.

What if Boone’s powder touched Mama and her spirit got turned to ash? What would happen to her soul? Robert felt sick to his stomach, beyond tears.

“Maybe… I got the place wrong,” Robert said.

“Naw, boy, them big pots is up against the back wall just like you said. Only one place he could’ve been. You done good! Keep doing good like that and Boone will make life here easy. I get what I want, you can go back to the kitchen early.” Boone winked. “You can go back tomorrow. You and Redbone too. The warden’s real good to me when I bring him ash for his jar. I’m his Collector.”

Blue had been right: Robert never could have guessed how low a man Haddock could be. He wasn’t satisfied with beating and hurting boys who were alive: he hunted dead ones too.

20

The clock on Judge Morris’s desk was a shiny copper oddity that seemed to come to life in the bright light through the tall corner window. The face was embedded in the image of an old-fashioned carriage pulled by a horse beneath a driver holding a whip coiled in mid-lash. The clock’s muted ticking was the only sound as they waited. Everything in the office, it seemed, was made of wood and smelled like long ago.

The chamber was cramped. Only two wooden chairs sat before the regal desk, so Miz Lottie and Gloria were sitting while the men stood behind them, no one moving or fidgeting. Miz Lottie now wore gloves that matched her pillbox hat.

Silence was a clamp in the room. The judge’s secretary outside had said Judge Morris told them to go right in, but she had left the door wide-open, and the office felt fraught with waiting accusations of snooping and stealing. Gloria glanced at the headlines in the Gracetown Herald folded on the judge’s desk—“Cape Canaveral Preps for Launch” in one column and “Tensions Rise in Korea” on the other. Gloria had always found it silly that so much effort went into trying to send humans to space instead of learning how to get along on Earth. Rows of law books stuffed his shelves, brown with regimented black and red stripes across the spine, gilded with gold accents. The books’ order held a kind of beauty. These were the books of spells and incantations from John Dorsey’s mysterious world. The lawyer was so close behind Gloria that for the first time she noticed his pleasant cologne, an exotic scent she had never encountered in Gracetown. She was surprised, and a bit annoyed, at how much the scent pleased her. When John Dorsey’s stomach rumbled, Gloria smiled at their shared secret.

“Thought some of that chicken was for me,” John Dorsey muttered. He reached over Miz Lottie’s shoulder toward the chicken in foil she was holding in her lap.

Miz Lottie snatched the food out of his reach. “Shoulda had more’n sugar for breakfast.”

A voice broke into the room from the doorway. “Well—we’ve got a convention in here.”

Judge Morris had slipped in so quietly behind them that his tobacco-roughened voice startled Gloria. Chairs scraped the floor as Gloria stood up and helped Miz Lottie rise quickly to her feet. Mr. Moore and John Dorsey took off their hats.

Judge Morris turned his back to them as he hung his black robe on the wooden coatrack behind his office door. Underneath, he was wearing a wrinkled white shirt and black tie. His armpits were ringed with sweat.

“Tell you one thing,” Judge Morris said, as if continuing an earlier conversation, “whoever designed these dang robes wasn’t from Florida.”