Boys Life

what’s the connection between a man who lives here and a man who lived somewhere far away?”
    “The sheriff would like to know that, too.”
    “Sheriff Amory’s a good man,” Vernon said. “Just not a good sheriff. He’d be the first to admit it. He doesn’t have the hound-dog instinct; he lets the birds fly when he’s got his paws on them.” Vernon scratched a place just below his navel, his head cocked to one side. Then he walked to a brass wallplate and flicked two switches. The room’s lights went off; tiny lights in some of the toy houses came on. The trains followed their headlights around the tracks. “So early in the morning,” he mused. “But if I was going to kill somebody, I’d have killed them early enough to dump them in the lake and be sure nobody was coming along Route Ten. Why’d the killer wait until almost dawn to do it?”
    “I wish I knew,” Dad said.
    I kept playing with the levers, the dials illuminated before me.
    “It must be somebody who doesn’t get home delivery from Green Meadows,” Vernon decided. “He didn’t think about the milkmen’s schedules, did he? You know what I believe?” Dad didn’t answer. “I believe the killer’s a night owl. I think dumping the body into the lake was the last thing he did before he went home and went to bed. I believe if you find a night owl who doesn’t drink milk, you’ve got your killer.”
    “Doesn’t drink milk? How do you figure that?”
    “Milk helps you sleep,” Vernon said. “The killer doesn’t like to sleep, and if he works in the daytime, he’ll drink his coffee black.”
    The only response Dad gave was a muffled grunt, whether in agreement or in sympathy I didn’t know.
    Mr. Pritchard returned to the darkened room to announce that dinner was being served. Then Vernon turned off the trains and said, “Come on with me, Cory,” and I followed him as Dad went with the butler. We walked into a room with suits of armor standing in it, and there was a long table with two places set, one across from the other. Vernon told me to choose a seat, so I sat where I could see the knights. In a few minutes Gwendolyn entered, carrying a silver tray, and so began one of the strangest dinners of my life.
    We had strawberry soup with vanilla wafers crumbled up in it. We had ravioli and chocolate cake on the same plate. We had lemon-lime Fizzies to drink, and Vernon put a whole Fizzie tablet in his mouth and I laughed when the green bubbles boiled out. We had hamburger patties and buttered popcorn, and dessert was a bowl of devil’s food cake batter you ate with a spoon. As I ate these things, I did so with guilty pleasure; a kid’s feast like this was the kind of thing that would’ve made my mother swoon. There wasn’t a vegetable in sight, no carrots, no spinach, no Brussels sprouts. I did get a whiff of what I thought to be beef stew from the kitchen, so I figured Dad was having a grown-up’s meal. He probably had no idea what I was assaulting my stomach with. Vernon was a happy eater; he laughed and laughed and both of us wound up licking our batter bowls in a sugar-sopped delirium.
    Vernon wanted to know all about me. What I liked to do, who my friends were, what books I liked to read, what movies I enjoyed. He’d seen Invaders from Mars, too; it was a linchpin between us. He said he used to have a great big trunk full of superhero comic books, but his daddy had made him throw them away. He said he used to have shelves of Hardy Boys mysteries, until his daddy had gotten mad at him one day and burned them in the fireplace. He said he used to have all the Doc Savage magazines and the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books and the Shadow and Weird Tales and boxes of Argosy and Boy’s Life magazines, but his daddy had said Vernon had gotten too old for those things and all of them, every one, had gone into the fire or the trash and burned to ashes or been covered in earth. He said he would give a million dollars if he could have them again and he said that if I had any of them I should hold on to them forever because they were magic.
    And once you burn the magic things or cast them out in the garbage, Vernon said, you become a beggar for magic again.
    “‘I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,’” Vernon said.
    “What?” I asked him. I’d never even seen Vernon wearing shorts before.
    “I wrote a book once,” he told me.
    “I know. Mom’s read it.”
    “Would you like to be a writer