Edenville Owls Read online

  EDENVILLE OWLS

  Robert B. Parker

  EDENVILLE OWLS

  SLEUTH

  PHILOMEL

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by The Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2007 by Robert B. Parker.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America. Design by Katrina Damkoehler.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parker, Robert B., 1932–

  Edenville Owls / Robert B. Parker. p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Bobby, living in a small Massachusetts town just after World War II, finds himself facing many new challenges as he tries to pull together his coachless basketball team, cope with new feelings for his old friend Joanie, and discover the identity of the mysterious stranger who seems to be threatening his teacher.

  [1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Basketball—Fiction. 3. Teachers—Fiction. 4. War—Fiction. 5. Prejudices—Fiction. 6. Coming of age—Fiction. 7. Massachusetts—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.P2346Ede 2007 [Fic]—dc22 2006034533

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0063-6

  For Joanie Hall of Swampscott

  EDEDNVILLE OWLS

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  THE radio in our living room was about four feet tall. It was made of dark wood. It had legs and a lot of ornate carving that made me think about church. We used to sit in the living room every night and listen to it. My father would often read while we listened, but my mother and I mostly sat and looked at the radio. I sort of always wondered why we did that.

  I remember we listened to stuff like One Man’s Family and The Kraft Music Hall. But mostly I remember events. I was really little when we gathered around to hear about some king who was quitting to marry some woman who was American. Everybody seemed shocked, but it seemed like the right choice to me. I mean, if he loved her….

  All my life I listened to President Roosevelt on the radio. I remember actually thinking he was in his den, sitting by the fireplace while he had his fireside chats with us. Nearly all my life I had listened to the war news on the radio. Germany invades Poland. Japs bomb Pearl Harbor. Allies invade Normandy. Germany surrenders. Japan surrenders.

  Then in April of 1945 President Roosevelt died. And in September of 1945 the war ended. So when I entered the eighth grade that fall, right after Labor Day, while the Tigers were playing the Cubs in the World Series, everything seemed to have changed.

  CHAPTER 1

  AT Center Junior High School we played six-man football in the fall, and regular baseball in the spring. But we had no gym, so we didn’t have a basketball team until seventh grade, when my friend Russell and I decided to start one. Nick said he’d play. And Billy, and Manny. We wanted to call ourselves something kind of tough: the Tigers, or maybe the Wolverines. But when Russell and I went to New Bedford to buy the jerseys, all they had were yellow ones with a picture of an owl, so we became the Edenville Owls instead.

  We hitchhiked to most games wearing our Owls uniforms under our clothes and taking turns carrying the basketball. Sometimes an adult would pick us up and give us a lecture about the dangers of hitchhiking, but no one paid any attention. It was the way we traveled. When we weren’t playing we hung out together. Play pinball at Spag’s Spa. Sit on the benches outside the Village Shop at the top of the wharf and listen to the jukebox through the screen door. Sometimes we fished for scup and blowfish off the dock. Blowfish weren’t good to eat, but if you rubbed their stomachs they’d blow up and you could skip them across the water. We hung around together so much that people just began to call us the Owls. My mother told me no good would come of hanging out with them. But most of the kids liked us. Except the jerks.

  In the eighth grade our teacher was new. Last year’s teacher had been fired, everyone said, because she was a drunk. All the grown-ups told us that wasn’t the case, but grown-ups tell you a lot of junk. We hoped it was true, and after a while, we kind of remembered her being drunk. This year’s teacher was named Claudia Delaney. She wrote it on the blackboard the first day. Not just Miss Delaney, but the whole name, Claudia Delaney.

  The Owls were sitting where we always sat, in the back seat of each of the five rows. I was in the middle between Russell and Nick. I had a copy of Black Mask Magazine in my lap and was reading it below the desk so Miss Delaney couldn’t see it. As she stretched to write, her skirt pulled tight.

  “Ming!” Russell said beside me.

  I looked up. Russell nodded toward Miss Delaney.

  “Hubba, hubba,” I whispered.

  Miss Delaney turned around.

  “Do you five boys always sit back there?” she said.

  “Yes,” Nick said.

  “You would be the Owls,” Miss Delaney said.

  “Hoot, hoot,” I said.

  Everyone laughed, including Miss Dela
ney.

  Billy was always scared of teachers. And Manny was a Cape Verdean colored guy and was very careful about everything. Mostly Russell and I and Nick were the ones that talked.

  “I’ve heard about you,” Miss Delaney said.

  “We’re not so bad,” I said.

  “Oddly enough,” Miss Delaney said, “that’s what I heard.”

  Some of the girls giggled. None of us liked that too much. We wanted people to think we were pretty bad. Miss Delaney went to the board and wrote: “The boy walked to school.”

  “We’ll start this morning,” Miss Delaney said, “by reviewing some of the basic rules of grammar that you might have forgotten over the summer. What are the subject and the verb of this sentence?”

  All of us groaned.

  “I don’t like it either,” Miss Delaney said, “but we have to be able to speak the language.”

  I put up my hand. She nodded at me.

  “We can already speak the language,” I said. “How come we got to speak it a certain way?”

  “Manners, mostly,” she said. “Like table manners, and appearance. It’s mostly about other people’s impression of you.”

  “What if you don’t care about impressing other people?” I said.

  She smiled.

  “It’s sort of a matter of freedom,” she said. “As long as you know how to speak the language, you can choose the way you want to speak it,” she said. “But if you don’t know correct English, you can only speak what you know.”

  She was different. Most teachers got annoyed with me when I asked questions like that. Sometimes I was really trying to figure it out. Sometimes I did it to annoy them. Miss Delaney didn’t get annoyed. She gave me a serious answer. And she was very pretty too.

  CHAPTER 2

  IT was cold and raining on a Saturday morning, the first week of October, so the Owls took the bus to Eastfield for a practice game against the high school JV team. Russell had arranged the game. He was kind of bossy, and did all the arranging.

  It was about a five-mile ride to Eastfield High School. We sat in the back of the bus. Edenville didn’t have a high school, so we’d be going to Eastfield ourselves in a couple of years.

  “Listen to this,” Russell said. “You know how the state tourney decided to include JV teams?”

  Nick said, “So there’ll be the regular high school tournament and a JV one?”

  Russell nodded.

  “Well, there’s a slot from each region for an independent team.”

  “In the JV tournament?” Billy said.

  “Yeah. I guess they didn’t have enough JV teams.”

  “And,” I said, “the high school coaches like to have kids playing before they get to high school.”

  “Development program,” Manny said.

  He was a very quiet guy. Probably had to do with being a colored guy with mostly white guys. Maybe it was just how he was. But when he did say something, it was usually not a dumb thing.

  “So I signed us up,” Russell said.

  “For the state tourney?”

  “Sure,” Russell said. “We win our region and we go to Boston Garden.”

  “Boston Garden?”

  “You think we can make it to Boston Garden?” Billy said.

  “You got me at center,” Russell said.

  “Oh boy,” Billy said.

  “Hey,” Russell said, “you’ve seen my pivot shot.”

  Russell stood and demonstrated in the back of the bus. The bus driver saw him in the rearview mirror.

  “Sit down, kid,” the bus driver said.

  “I guess he doesn’t want to see your pivot shot either,” Nick said.

  Russell grinned and made a little head fake and sat down holding the basketball on his lap.

  “Everybody will see it at the Garden,” he said.

  Russell was six foot one in the eighth grade, but he wasn’t too well coordinated, and he didn’t have very good hands. Still, he was taller than most kids our age. It helped him get rebounds and he scored a lot on put-backs.

  The high school JVs were already doing a layup drill when we came out of the locker room. The gym smelled like floor wax and disinfectant. It had a big echo-y quality. There were stands all around the gym. No one was in the stands, but they were impressive anyway. What would it be like in Boston Garden? The Owls began to shoot around a little. We couldn’t really do a layup drill with two lines even if we knew how. There weren’t enough of us. There were eleven guys on the high school JVs, and they had a coach. And the high school coach himself was there too. The nervous feeling was in my stomach. The varsity captain was there with the varsity coach, and he agreed to referee. We lined up for the tip the way we always did. Russell at center. Nick and Manny at the forwards, Billy and me at guard. Billy had a pretty good set shot. And I usually brought the ball up.

  The JV center got the tip even though Russell was taller. He sent it to a forward, who passed to the other forward, who passed it back for a layup. It wasn’t a good start and it didn’t get better. It wasn’t that they were so much better players. But they knew what to do with the ball, and what to do on defense. Our plan was mostly to have me bring the ball up, see if someone was open, or try to get the ball in to Russell so he could turn around with his famous pivot shot and shoot over the guy guarding him. Except every time I did get it in to him, one of the other guys on the JVs dropped back and they double-teamed him and he lost the ball a lot.

  Russell got six points. Billy got a couple of set shots. Nick drove by his man a couple times for layups. And Manny got a rebound and put it in. I got four foul shots and missed three of them. We lost forty-eight to seventeen.

  The high school coach came into the locker room while we were getting dressed.

  “You guys got a coach?” he said.

  “No,” Russell said.

  “You need one,” he said.

  “We can’t get nobody to do it,” Russell said.

  The coach shrugged.

  “Too bad,” he said. “You sure do need coaching.”

  It was still raining and cold while we waited for the bus across the street from the high school. The salty smell of the harbor was pretty strong. It was stronger than it was on nice days. I wondered why that was.

  “We’re awful,” Manny said.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “He’s right. We need a coach.”

  “I asked everybody,” Russell said. “Nobody’s got time to coach us, that knows anything.”

  “We’ll think of something,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Billy said. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”

  CHAPTER 3

  BILLY and I didn’t do our math homework. So we had to stay after school and do it and hand it in to the office before we could leave. I was finished with mine, but Billy was still working on his and I was looking out the second-floor window waiting for him. I saw Miss Delaney come out of the side door and walk across the school yard. A tall man came around the corner of the school and walked up to her. They stopped and faced each other. He had on a trench coat and a dark snap-brimmed hat, like businessmen wore.

  My God, did she have a boyfriend? I never thought about teachers having boyfriends. I mean, Miss Delaney was good-looking and all, but…it was embarrassing to think about.

  I watched them talk. He was nodding his head and she was shaking hers. He put his hand on her shoulder. She pushed it away. He put his hand on her shoulder again. He must have had a hard hold on her the second time. She tried to twist away and couldn’t. He leaned in toward her and she slapped him and he took hold of both her shoulders.

  I pushed open the window.

  “Hey,” I yelled, “let her alone.”

  “What?” Billy said.

  He jumped up and ran to the window.

  The tall man let go of Miss Delaney and turned and stared up at us. Miss Delaney went back inside the school and shut the door. I couldn’t see the guy very well bec
ause his hat was down over his eyes. And I was pretty sure he couldn’t really see us from that angle. He looked down at the door where Miss Delaney had gone in, and back at the open window, and then he turned fast and went around the corner of the school.

  “Holy hell,” Billy said.

  We ran from the study hall and down the second-floor corridor toward the auditorium, where we could look out the window in front. We almost ran into Miss McCallum, the math teacher.

  “Just what do you boys think you’re doing?” she said.

  “We thought we saw something going on out front,” I said. “We wanted to double-check.”

  “You can turn right around and go back to the classroom and finish your homework, or you’ll be double-checking in the principal’s office,” Miss McCallum said.

  Billy looked scared. I didn’t think I should tell Old Lady McCallum anything. I wasn’t sure why exactly, but I knew Miss Delaney wouldn’t want me to.

  “March,” Miss McCallum said.

  We went back to the classroom, and Old Lady McCallum sat at the front and watched us while Billy finished his math homework. I had to pretend I was doing my homework, or she’d have made me leave. And I didn’t want to hang outside in the cold waiting for Billy. You weren’t allowed to wait around inside the school without supervision. So I sat in the big silence and pretended to be calculating stuff while Billy struggled through the rest of his assignment.

  “When you leave here,” Miss McCallum said, “I want you to go straight down the stairs and out of the building. And no running in the corridors.”

  Billy said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  I nodded. We went out of the classroom and down the front stairs and out the front door. There was some wind. The flag was snapping on the flagpole in front of the school. On the other side of the wide front lawn, there was a robin’ s-egg blue Plymouth Coupe parked on the street. As we walked past it, Miss Delaney got out. She had on a plaid topcoat and a black beret.