What Came From the Stars by Gary D. Schmidt Page A

during the current crisis, and he strongly recommended that if students were not driving with their parents, they should use the buses. Children should not under any circumstances be allowed to walk home alone, he wrote, even for short distances. And if they must walk, then he asked parents to form groups with chaperones.
    And that was how someone finally broke into Tommy Pepper’s house.
    Because while Tommy’s father drove to school to pick up Patty and Tommy, and while they stopped at one store for the Styrofoam balls that Tommy needed for his solar system project and stopped at another store for Patty’s new backpack—made of some vinyl-y stuff colored the brightest pink that the human eye can endure—and while they stopped at the A&P for a roasted chicken, macaroni salad, tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and a pineapple, someone entered their house.
    When Tommy and Patty and their father got back home, they didn’t have to open the door—which had been torn off and broken in two—to smell the rotten seaweed that lay all over the floors. One look and Tommy’s father pushed Tommy and Patty outside while he phoned into town. But Tommy saw everything in that one look: the thrown-down shelves, the overturned chairs, the emptied cabinets, the books opened and stained green, the piano pulled away from the wall, the walls with holes punched through to the framing.
    Tommy sat with Patty on one of the pine stumps while the policemen came and went, came and went. Patty leaned against him, her eyes closed so she didn’t see the lights on top of the police cars—all ten of them.
    But you can’t have that many police cars with their lights going crazy without someone seeing, and pretty soon James Sullivan with his not-Tom Brady-signed football and Patrick Belknap with his accordion strapped to his back were on the dune. Even Alice Winslow came up, and she sat on the sand and took Patty in her lap and tied her hair in braids.
    Tommy could almost not bear to watch them. He remembered.
    His chain was warm.
    He knelt down and swept the sand with his palms until it was flat. With two fingers, he dug around the smoothed sand, dragging up the darker sand into a frame around it. He looked again at Alice Winslow and Patty and he began to draw inside the frame, using only his two thumbs. On one side he drew Patty, sitting calmly in Alice’s lap, but a little younger than she was now, her head bent back a little, her smile. And beside her, on the other side, he drew Alice, leaning over Patty, working gently at her hair, intent.
    James Sullivan stopped twirling his not-Tom Brady-signed football. “That’s amazing,” he said. “Pepper, how can you do that?”
    Alice Winslow and Patty got up and came around to see the picture.
    “That’s you two,” said Patrick Belknap.
    “It’s Patty,” said Alice Winslow, shaking her head. “But not me.”
    And she looked at Tommy in perfect understanding.
    It wasn’t her.

    When Tommy and Patty went up to the house, Officer Goodspeed had his hat off and his hand up to the back of his neck. He was shaking his head. “I don’t think this could be Mrs. Lumpkin,” he was saying.
    “I’m not saying she did it herself,” said Tommy’s father. “She probably hired someone else to do it for her.”
    “She’s the wife of the lieutenant governor.”
    “She’s the ruthless wife of a ruthless lieutenant governor. Look—she’s the only one in all of creation besides us who wants this house. Why else would anyone come inside? There’s nothing that we have that anyone would want.”
    “Who knows why someone would vandalize a house?”
    “This isn’t just vandalism, Mike. Have any of the other houses been torn apart as completely as this one? Look at the studs.”
    “Mr. Zwerger’s, maybe.”
    “Anyone else’s?”
    Officer Goodspeed rubbed the back of his neck again.
    “I guess not,” he said.
    Officer Goodspeed drove down to Lumpkin and Associates Realtors, and when he came back up