Rumor Has It

Every morning on their way to school, Jack Davis and Lucy Cunningham-Schultz pass the house at the corner of Greentree and Linwood, and every morning a boy sits in the top window and watches them go by. Lucy says he gives her the creeps. Nobody seems to know anything about the family: the mother goes to the grocery store and will not talk to anyone, the father is hardly ever seen, and the boy never comes out or goes to school. At lunchtime the two of them ask Alice Pringle, who is supposed to have gone into the house once. Alice admits she only made it to the front porch, selling cookies for the school band, before she ran for her life. Then the stories pile up. Someone has heard the father is part of the mafia or a terrorist. Alice's brother Peter, out delivering papers before sunrise, has seen the father come out the back door at exactly 4:30 in the morning, two or three times a week, carrying a big bag over his shoulder - a bag that looked like it had something in it, maybe even a body - and throw it into a van. Jack decides the boy must be sitting in the window as a lookout. Everyone promises to keep quiet, since telling might warn the family and put the snitch in danger.

Lucy becomes so frightened that she refuses to walk past the house at all, especially after Jack passes along a fresh chain of rumors from kids at school: a neighborhood cat that disappeared through the family's fence, a father who checks brainy science books out of the library, and Jack's own guess that the bundles carried out at night are experiments, just like Frankenstein. At Whit's End, Mr. Whittaker tells them the family is named Kirban and moved in about six months ago. He does not know them himself, but he gets the impression they are very private people, and he tells Lucy not to get nervous about people just because she does not know them. Jack hears it differently: if even Mr. Whittaker knows nothing about them, something bad must be going on, and he is going to find out what.

Then one morning the boy is not in the window - because he is at school. The teacher introduces a new student, John Kirban, and the class recognizes the boy from the window at once. At lunch John sits eating all by himself while the whispers continue around him. Lucy feels sorry for him and says somebody should at least talk to him, but nobody does.

Later, Connie Kendall comes to work late and tells Whit about a strange experience: she found a little boy sitting on the curb crying. He told her that no one at school would talk to him, that everyone stayed away from him, and that his father was right - he never should have gone. When they work out that the boy must be John Kirban, Whit questions Lucy and finds that everybody has been talking about the family while nobody has ever actually met them. Rumors and gossip, he says - nothing good comes from them. He asks Lucy for a big favor: go to the Kirbans' house in the morning and walk John to school. Lucy nervously tries, but Mr. Kirban tells her to go away, because John is not going to school today or any day anymore.

Jack, meanwhile, has his own plan. Before dawn he and Peter Pringle stake out the house with walkie-talkies, and Jack sneaks behind the trash cans near the van just as the porch light comes on at 4:30 and the father appears with his big package. A stray cat gives Jack away, Mr. Kirban catches him, and Jack starts hollering for the police. When an officer arrives, Jack insists he look in the van. Mr. Kirban points out that a search warrant is customary but agrees to open the bag anyway - and inside is a carpet. He is a carpet maker, practicing an old trade handed down from generation to generation, and he hauls his carpets to a warehouse in Connellsville when it opens at six in the morning. The officer apologizes, admires the carpet enough to ask to buy it, and takes Jack to the station to call his parents.

Back at Whit's End, Whit explains what the rumors got wrong. The Kirbans had bad experiences in the last couple of towns where they lived, and people sometimes mistake privacy for sneakiness. The mother is not rude; she does not speak English very well, and rather than try to communicate and fail, she did not try at all. John never went to school because his father, besides being an excellent carpet maker, is a teacher with a state license to teach his son at home. But John used to watch Lucy and Jack walk to school every day and wanted to go with them, and his father was afraid the other children would hurt him for being so different - which is exactly what happened. Then Lucy walks in with a new friend to introduce: John Kirban himself. John greets Whit and Connie warmly and remembers Connie as the one who tried to cheer him up. When Whit teases Lucy that he heard she was deathly afraid of this boy, Lucy has the answer ready: "You can't believe everything you hear, Mr. Whittaker." Whit tells her she is exactly right.