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THE ONE-LEGGED MAN

I really enjoyed reviewing your new book. I thought the mystery of who killed Mary Bede was suspenseful, especially when Nick broke into the cabin and nearly got caught. I also enjoyed reading about baseball because I like to play baseball. The dialog was often very funny especially when Nick was talking to the reader about parents, baseball, and dating girls.

--Andrew Miller, age 13

I enjoyed reading this book because it was filled with suspense and with all the things teenagers have to deal with on an everyday basis. I could relate to Nick and I respected his passion for baseball. This is another great Robert Holland book!

--Michelle E. Gilmore, age 13

Chapter One

Me, Nick Rivers

Adults are crazy. I don't mean crazy like locked away in a bad-brain bin crazy, but just sort of like some of their wires get crossed once they have kids to deal with. The reason I know this is because we had a section on genetics in biology and the teacher made it clear that people haven't changed in a long, long, long time. So that means that when adults were kids they acted the way kids do now, which also means that their problems started when they stopped being kids and started thinking of themselves as adults.

What happens is that they start taking everything seriously. My dad is a good example. Everything is a crisis. One bad grade and he starts frowning and lecturing, and while I could live with furrowed brows and a pout, the lectures are unbearable. Does he think I don't know I screwed up? I know I screwed up. I'm supposed to screw up. I'm a kid! It's in my contract. But do I get any credit for knowing anything? Forget about it. He just goes on and on, lecturing away about how I'm not taking my future seriously, wasting time with a lecture when I could be playing video games.

What is the future anyway? Nothing more than what happens when you wake up in the morning. By afternoon it's history. It's done with. The future is what clothes you put on that day, what happens with your friends that day. Anything beyond that and you need a fortune teller.

My mother doesn't lecture at all. She doesn't have to. She just sighs and wonders aloud where they went wrong. Solid gold guilt. It's enough to make me puke. And there's nothing you can do about it except leave, and they know that's not really an alternative because you can't do that without a job and a car and someone to cook for you and take care of your laundry and stuff like that. I mean, figure it out. Video games go for around sixty-four bucks a pop and there's no way I can get a job that would keep me in rent, gas, insurance, food, clothes, shoes, and video games.

Of course, I could do everything they want and then the lectures would stop and the guilt trips would end, but then I wouldn't be me. I'd just be a walking-around-zombie who was only what other people thought I ought to be. I don't know what you think about that, but I can tell you, I am an independent human being and it is my right to live like one.

Well, that's the way my thinking has gone for a long time. The only trouble with thinking that way is that it depresses me and there is no point in being depressed. You miss too much. Like when I was on Ritalin. I missed a lot then, which was why when I was ten I stopped taking it. They thought I was taking it, but I just hid the pills and then after about a year without any complaints from my goofball teachers about being too aggressive and too loud and too talkative and not being able to sit still in class, I dumped the whole bag of pills on the table one day and told my mother that I wasn't taking any more drugs.

What could they say? They had to agree, especially after I pointed out that getting people used to the idea of using drugs to solve their problems was a bad idea and would probably lead to them to start taking other drugs, like marijuana and stuff like that. I was, of course, careful not to mention that alcohol is a drug, because adults get very grumpy when you mention that. They just can't live with the idea that a martini with three olives is a drug. It's a martini, dammit, and there's nothing wrong with a martini (or two) after a hard day at the office. Have you ever tasted a martini? Try a sip and tell me that isn't a drug. It has to be. Drugs taste bad. Like cough medicine. Or try this one. Scotch. That ranks right up there with liver as far as I'm concerned. Beer's okay though. I've tried beer. Everybody I know has tried beer. It's the beverage of choice, like Pepsi or Coke. It depends on what kind of a kick you want, caffeine or alcohol, take your pick. The only problem with beer is that if you drink too much, or if you drink even a little and drink it too fast, you wind up puking and then the next day you feel like you've got the flu, so my advice in this is don't drink. And, of course, only the dumbest jerk in the world drinks and then drives. You could lose your license that way.

Before I get too far into this, maybe you ought to know something about me. First off, my name is Nick Rivers and I think I'm pretty cool, but I suppose there's some disagreement about that, especially from my older sister Beth who is eighteen and in her first year of college. Couldn't have happened soon enough. It was like having two mothers; one who attacked me for not being cool and one who nagged me to pick up my room so I'd be successful in the future. I told you adults are crazy. I have a second sister, Lizzie, who is ten and is perfectly nice most of the time.

I'm sixteen. I've got my license but I don't have a car because we've already got two cars. I'm pretty sure Dad could afford to get a car for Beth and one for me, but he's "morally opposed" to spending that much money on kids. It's a point upon which I'm not sure he and Mother agree. He takes his car and goes to work and she taxis the rest of us all over town, grumbling each way about having to drive us everywhere. Both Beth and I have been saving money for years. I cut lawns and shovel snow and even use the snow thrower on the tractor to clear four driveways. But even for all of that I've only got about three thousand saved and that includes Christmas presents from both sets of grandparents, so I'm guessing here that I'll be all the way through college before I have enough money for a car.

Here's some more information about me. I'm almost five foot eleven, I've got blue eyes, light brown hair (straight), and I weigh one hundred and sixty-five pounds. I'm now the starting shortstop for my high school baseball team, and I'm a pretty good hitter, but at the start of the season I was riding the bench. I'm a good enough student and I'm getting better. I do best in math and science, but I also do well in English, as you can tell from the high quality of the writing you are reading. My teacher doesn't like it, though, too chatty, she says. Screw her. She thinks J.D. Salinger is a good writer and he only wrote the dumbest book I ever read, and I read a lot. Tolkien is my favorite. There is nothing like The Lord of the Rings and there never will be. I read it at least once a year and I've been doing that since I was nine.

I've got two good friends, Ronnie Lathrop, and Paul Hunter, and I'm really, really good at video games. Nobody can beat me, at least anybody I know or anybody who hangs out at the arcade at the mall. Any game. You pick it and you'll find my name at the top. As you can see, all the stuff I do, along with fishing and hunting (which I'll be starting this fall) is not the stuff girls think is cool. But let me tell you what I know about that. Girls don't think anything boys do is cool unless it means they are paying attention to girls. Probably that sounds a little cynical but I've been male my whole life and I've got sisters on either side of me and I've spent a lot of time listening, which turns out to be a pretty good way to learn about people.

And that idea leads to what this book is all about because it was by watching and listening that I first noticed Mr. Bede who lives up the road from us. We live sort of in the country in a section of town where there are still some farms and the houses are pretty well spread out. Most of the people live in subdivisions.

As it turns out, Mr. Bede's house sits on a hill and I can see it from the window in my room, and I have this monster telescope that I got two Christmases ago. Then one night, by accident, I happened to focus on Mr. Bede's house. Through the windows I saw him making something ... something big, but all I could tell was that it was big and made from metal of some kind. I must've watched for an hour and all he did was put things together and then take them apart and put them together again.

What struck me was that he was doing this in what should have been his living room, and we all know what a living room is. That's where nobody lives. It is kept like a museum or maybe a furniture store window. You can't sit on the furniture in your regular clothes, you can't take a soda in there. Weird. Totally weird. Not that anyone wants to go into a living room anyway because there's nothing to do in there. No TV, no books, nothing. Only adults go into living rooms. Enough said.

But there was Mr. Bede working in his living room like it was some sort of metal shop. I could see some big machines there, but I didn't know what they were.

Before that I had never thought much about Mr. Bede. He was just a neighbor who had a lot of junk in his yard that my mother complained about all the time because it looked pretty messy, even by my standards, which according to my mother borders on basic dump. But hey, does it make any sense to put stuff in drawers? All you do is take it back out. I'll bet in a lifetime, you'd waste a couple of months just opening and closing drawers and closets. I pile my socks in one place, underwear in another, jeans and tees in another. I know where everything is and I can tell at a glance when my supply is getting low and that's when I lug the dirty stuff down to the laundry.

But anyway, the next night at dinner, I asked about Mr. Bede.

"That awful old man!" my mother said. "He's a disgrace! Somebody ought to make him clean up his yard, at least."

"But nobody will," Dad said.

"Of course not. They're all scared of him, with all his fancy degrees and the fact that his family has lived here for three hundred years. Maybe I ought to start a campaign."

I assumed from the tone of the conversation that he must have broken all ten commandments and then thrown in a couple of extra just to make sure he'd got it done right, because there's nothing like breaking rules to drive adults wild, even if the only rules you break are the same ones they break.

"Wow," I said, "pretty strange guy, huh?"

"Eccentric," Dad said.

"What do you know about him? What's he like?"

Silence.

"Do you know him?"

"What brought this up?" Mom asked in the tone of voice that made you understand that she suspected you had some hidden plan that could get you tossed into jail for the rest of your life.

"He's a neighbor and I just wondered about him, that's all." (There's a lesson here. I could've gotten mad and shot off my mouth and given them the "you never trust me" drill, but whenever Beth did that they only got more suspicious.) "I mean, you gotta admit he's different."

"He's different all right," Dad said.

"Well, what's he like?"

"We've never spoken to him," Mom said.

"I thought you knew everybody in the neighborhood."

"Except Mr. Bede," she said.

"Hank Johnson told me," Dad said, "that he's got a degree in mechanical engineering and a law degree, and a Ph.D. in physics, so I guess he's pretty smart. He's an inventor and Hank says he holds a slew of patents. The rumor is that he has a lot of money. He used to be married and he's got a couple of kids who are grown."

"That's all?"

"What else do you need to know?" Mom asked.

I shrugged. Shrugging is excellent. Here's why. It's ambiguous. Now there's a hot vocabulary word ... real SAT type stuff.

"He's not very friendly," Mom said. "When we first moved in here and I'd see him outside I used to wave, but he never waved back. Can you imagine! Why wouldn't he wave back?"

"Probably because he didn't know you," I said.

"That's no reason not to be friendly," Mom said.

My parents came from the Midwest where people spend half their lives waving and bobbing their heads and chatting. Here in New England, where I grew up, people don't go in for that sort of stuff. As long as nobody bothers you, you don't bother them. This attitude does not sit well with Mom, and for a long time I thought she was right because I saw no reason why you shouldn't be friendly with people. As I got older I discovered that it wasn't so much friendliness she was after as nosing into other people's business.

I didn't figure that out until I was about thirteen and we went out to visit my grandparents in Ohio and all they did was sit around gossiping about everyone. I hate gossip. It's not that I don't like hearing news about what's gone on, but I just want the headlines and not all the sneaky little remarks that some people think is conversation.

"Mr. Bede must be pretty smart," I said.

"Hank says his degree in engineering is from MIT and his law degree is from Harvard and his Physics degree is also from M.I.T."

"Whoa. Sounds like a genius to me."

"Just what is this all about?" Dad asked.

"Nothing," I said, because truly, at that point, it was merely curiosity. Of course, they didn't believe me.

"Well, just stay away from there," Mom said. "Anybody who can't at least wave is someone to stay away from."

You see? Absolutely nuts. People who wave all the time aren't in the least interesting. Nothing but bobbing heads in the back windows of cars. But a man who built machines in his living room, now, that was somebody I wanted to know more about.

I tried Ronnie's parents, figuring that because they had grown up in town, they might not be so hung up on waving. They weren't, but that didn't shut off the gossip spout. That took me by surprise because I'd thought only Midwestern people gossiped. Wrong. But then I'm wrong about a lot of stuff.

"There are some very strange stories about Augustus Bede," his mother said. Plenty of people in town think he murdered his wife, but the police never did anything."

"Maybe he didn't," I said.

"Oh, that's not what a lot of people thought."

"Why would he have killed her?"

"That's just the trouble. No one ever knew."

"What about their kids?"

"Two boys. Every bit as strange and smart as their father. I don't know where they are now."

Mr. Lathrop looked up. "They both went to M.I.T. One works at Boeing and the other one works for Microsoft."

"How do you know that?" Mrs. Lathrop asked, sounding as if there were some reason not to know that.

"Tom Gray told me."

"Why would he tell you that?"

Mr. Lathrop shrugged. He might be an adult, but at least he hadn't forgotten the essential principle of being a kid. When you don't want to answer, shrug.

"Is he mean?" I asked.

The question seemed to take them by surprise.

"He lives alone," Mrs. Lathrop said.

Ronnie laughed. "What difference does that make?"

"All the difference in the world," his mother said.

"Absolutely," Mr. Lathrop said.

Almost as good as a shrug, I thought.

After that, whenever I turned my telescope on Mr. Bede's house I thought about the stories and I wondered if the man I was watching was a murderer. Over and over I told myself that he couldn't be, if only because murderers went to prison or were executed, or at the least they stood trial. But none of that had happened to Mr. Bede.

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