The Rumor Collector

By the time I was twelve, I had collected one hundred and thirty-five rumors.

I kept them on three-by-five index cards and in an old metal recipe box my grandmother no longer wanted. Every rumor got its own card, written in my neatest cursive handwriting, because serious collections deserved serious record keeping.

Some were ridiculous. Some were terrifying. Some were so juicy they simply had to be true.

I believed every one of them.

Well… almost every one.

I’d wanted to be a detective ever since I saw an advertisement promising an official junior detective badge for only 25 cents and three cereal box tops. Since Mother refused to let me send away for it, I settled for becoming the town’s rumor collector instead.

Every Sunday, after church, I would retrieve my box of rumors from its hiding place, cleverly tucked up into the bed's wooden frame through a rip in the mattress ticking.

I always smiled knowing that I had made a card for that rip too.

It read:

Rip in Shelby’s mattress, reported to have been torn by Mr. Biggly, our cat. I had hand-drawn a small eye on the back of the card. Several times I saw Mr. Biggly on his back pulling himself around underneath the bed and disappearing up into the wooden frame through a rip his antics had made. If it was a good enough hiding place for our cat, it was a good enough hiding place for my box of rumors.

On Sundays after church, I carefully went through the cards, marking in updates or speculations as needed.

My stubby fingers would pull out the first tattered card.

On the front was written:

Mrs. Whitley poisons neighborhood cats.

Henry saw her feed them and swore they had fallen over and stopped moving before she carried them away. “Who knows what she is doing with them,” he had urgently whispered to me across the lunch table.

The back of the card was blank except for a small eye too.

Next card:

Mr. Crowley buried gold beneath his chicken coop.

Alex watched him dig there one night, and heard him drop in cans of coins.

None of us was quite brave enough to go dig it back up yet, so the back of the card was blank except for the eye as well.

Next card:

Widow Maxine chased children with an axe.

Three kids claimed to have been chased. I noted the names of the three kids who swore she had chased them, but the card had no proof either, just the eye drawn three times, one for each eyewitness.

My finger fanned over the top of the cards, riffling them; they felt mysterious, important, and deliciously mine.

At twelve years old, I thought I was collecting rumors and hoping to prove them.

The trouble with rumors I would discover much later was that they almost always contain one tiny grain of truth buried beneath a bushel of misunderstanding.

My best friend Ashley’s mother was more supportive of her desire to become a detective, even buying her Nancy Drew comics and a subscription to the Calling All Girls. I considered myself lucky to be Ashley’s friend, and her secretary of the rumors.

That summer I finally got proof of one of the biggest rumors in town!

You see, Ashley’s and her mom befriended the new neighbors who moved in two streets over from us. They were witnesses to the craziest marital fight the neighborhood had ever seen. They were trying to deliver a Welcome Basket to the couple, but when they walked up, the husband was getting pushed out onto the porch with nothing on but his tighty-whities by his wife. Ashley said the wife was throwing all sorts of things at him, screaming and carrying on, and they had to duck a flying black leather shoe themselves.

It was quite a spectacle!

The rumor was that the husband slept out on the lawn that night.

I pulled the card up, proud of my first proven rumor, which now had to be moved behind a tab card that said TRUTH in big capital letters because it wasn’t a rumor anymore.

Attached to the back of the card was a cut-down Polaroid photo of the above-said husband sleeping on the lawn. Granted, it was a very large lump underneath a dog blanket, but that had to be him.

Ashley had walked their dog early in the morning, purposely passing the new couple’s house and hoping, as she put it, to see the scene of devastation again.

So of course she took a picture!

That was the only absolute proof I had gathered so far on any card, but the whole summer was about to stretch before us, as the last week of school was almost over.

The most worn cards in my file belonged to Miss Pinkerton, our school librarian. She became my greatest rival not just because of how she looked but because the rumors kept flying in! I had four cards pinned together just on her alone. I had thought about copying them onto fresh cards, but the dog-eared, smudged things had become a work of art all on their own.

How did she get away with all the things that she did?

And somehow, it felt like she knew about my rumor box.

I was sure she glared at me more than she did any other student, and she called me out for whispering in the library more than anyone else.

It wasn’t true. Winnie not only whispered more but talked outright.

Miss Pinkerton looked like she had wandered straight out of a haunted house and accidentally taken a job among books instead of ghosts. She wore old-fashioned dresses with petticoats that belonged in the book Little House on the Prairie, and her gray hair was wound into such a tight bun it seemed to pull every wrinkle upward until her eyebrows looked permanently surprised.

She never smiled.

Not even once.

Especially not in my direction.

Instead, she paced the library with her hands folded behind her back like a prison guard making rounds, just more bent over. Whenever our whispers grew into giggles, those eyebrows would lift just a fraction more, and silence spread through the room faster than the smell of fresh school cinnamon rolls on Friday mornings. We all suddenly became very interested in reading.

On the back of her rumor card, I had drawn a witch’s hat, a broom, and more little eyewitness eyes than any other cards in my collection. There were almost too many rumors about Miss Pinkerton, and I was ready to believe them all!

Miss Pinkerton hated children. (especially me)

Miss Pinkerton could hear whispering through brick walls.

Miss Pinkerton went into the boys' bathroom!

That one was the best rumor of all. I’d even drawn 4 little eyewitness eyes after it.

On the last day of school, just before the final bell, the evacuation alarm screamed through the building.

My friend Ashley and I were in the library, pretending to study while making plans for the weekend. We had two whole days together before her mom dropped us off at summer church camp on Monday morning. All our camping gear was already packed at Ashley’s house. The only thing I had brought to school was my rumor collection, tucked safely inside my book bag beneath my math book where no adult would ever think to look.

The alarm kept shrieking. “Leave everything!” a teacher called.

Books slammed shut. Chairs scraped across the floor; we spilled out of the library and into the hallway with the rest of the school, our book bags forgotten beneath the table.

Outside, teachers counted heads while we stood in crooked lines holding hands in the field.

Then I remembered.

My rumor box.

I tugged on my teacher’s sleeve, “My book bag! I need to get my book bag!”

“No, Shelby,” she shouted over the shrieking alarm, “we can’t go back in.”

“But it’s important! It’s more important— than important; it’s like life or death!”

I was practically wailing; she had no idea.

Miss Pinkerton would gather every forgotten bag before anyone else even thought about it.

She would unzip mine. She would lift out the dented recipe box.

Every single rumor.

Every drawing, every little eyewitness eye!

I stopped asking.

If she didn’t already hate me, she would now…

There are moments in childhood when you suddenly understand you’re in trouble and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

This was one of mine.

My life was over, all because the school cafeteria had a gas leak.

Summer vacation officially began that afternoon.

Mine started with a stomachache.

I was afraid to call home. Would Miss Pinkerton call my parents? Would she read every card before she called? Would she think I was a terrible person?

I felt like a terrible person.

I kept seeing her bent-over frame in my mind, seeing her surprised eyes swing around and stare at me, in my dreams.

The camp nurse thought I was homesick. She kept offering me peppermint tea and crackers. I couldn’t very well tell her I wasn’t homesick at all.

I was rumor sick.

Ashley tried her best to distract me. We caught frogs. She loaned me her newest comic books. She even wore two life jackets in a canoe because she was convinced one might fail. I laughed exactly once that week.

When camp ended, my mother arrived with a car full of boxes instead of room for my camping gear.

"We're going to Grandma's," she said.

"Just for a while?"

She shook her head.

"For good."

I spent months collecting everyone else's stories. I never thought my own would become the top rumor in town that summer.

Somewhere between the divorce, Grandma’s spare bedroom, the loss of my friends, a brand-new school, and learning what lawyers were, my rumor box disappeared from my thoughts.

For years afterward, now and then, I’d wonder what became of that little dented Rumor box. Usually while packing another box, or studying for college, or finding an index card tucked away in a recipe book.

My lips would twist a bit in sadness; a sigh would escape. My rumor-collecting felt so tarnished now; the excitement long fizzled. As an adult, "there were bigger fish to fry", as Grandpa always had said.

Life would get busy and years would go by.

On a lark, one summer, I drove past my old elementary school, since I was in town on a work trip for a newspaper I worked for.

The old oak tree was so much bigger than I remembered. The playground equipment had been upgraded to colorful plastic tubes, slides, and swings set in shredded red bark.

My heels clicked on the hallways, loud and heavy. I smiled at myself; not a child anymore, despite how small I felt inside the closer I got to the library. The library windows were decorated with book covers, and the door was open.

Taking a breath, I stepped in.

A new librarian sat at Miss Pinkerton’s old desk. Sadness and relief passed in equal measure; what had I expected?

“Do you know what happened to Miss Pinkerton?” I asked the woman, after explaining I used to attend years ago.

“Well, as far as I know, she retired; that was a long time ago,” she said softly, as if being quiet always proved mandatory in a library when not in session.

I leaned in, speaking just as softly, “I left something here when I was 12, after a fire alarm. I – I was wondering if Miss Pinkerton saved it for me?”

My face flushed a bit. Suddenly I was stammering, “I know it’s ridiculous; it’s been so long— but I just have to ask.”

I wanted to turn and leave knowing how impossible it was.

By then, my hands were sweaty, and tears welled in my eyes, threatening.

I looked away.

She asked my childhood name and said she would check the lost and found, as if people from long ago constantly came to the library looking for items they had lost. I was sure she was secretly smiling at my foolish request.

There it was: the Rumor box.

She set it on the desk in front of me and pulled the sticky note from it, with my name scrawled in Pinkerton handwriting. She tried to whisk off a bit of dust that had collected on the top of it with her fingers. Looks like it’s been here a while," she added with a smile, by way of apology.

All this time it had been in the back room. Who knows how many people had seen it, I thought, or maybe even read those cards. Maybe even her. Certainly, her I thought, looking carefully into her eyes.

Her smile betrayed nothing, but she suggested I could sit at one of the tables. My hands trembled a little. I couldn’t wait to open it, and the car seemed too far away. Picking a spot as far away from her as I could, yet still seem polite, I sat at a much-too-small table and creaked the metal lid open.

There they were.

All the cards written in my neat, precise cursive declaring each rumor.

Right away I noticed a new index card with “Misunderstandings” on its label tab, with a series of cards behind it. A page of lined notebook paper was folded and peeked out at the back of the box.

Dear Shelby, it said in Miss Pinkerton’s script, I’m so sorry about your family’s divorce and that you had to change schools. You might enjoy the East Coast. Hopefully you will find new friends and things to do, perhaps a new hobby?

The rest of her words blurred.

This librarian who hated children was hoping I would have a better life. After all these years, she had saved this box and had even written a letter.

She wasn’t angry; she was wishing me well.

Confusion and relief rocked back and forth in my mind.

She didn’t hate me. She didn’t tell my parents. She saved this, hoping I would return.

I pulled up a card from behind the “Misunderstanding” label.

Mrs. Whitley poisons neighborhood cats.

I flipped it over, and on the back, in her handwriting, it said:

Truth: Miss Whitley would, under a veterinarian’s direction, feed feral cats a sedative in the food so she could take them to the Veterinarian, and he would fix them to help keep the population of feral cats down in our town.

I gasped, covering my mouth with one hand and holding my chest with the other. Quickly, I glanced at the librarian, who seemed too busy herself with papers at her desk.

We never knew that our town had so many feral cats.

Quickly, I pulled up another card, scanning and flipping it over:

Widow Maxine chased children with an axe.

Truth: Maxine was in her garden on the other side from where the children were picking blackberries. She flew around the bushes when she saw a rattlesnake heading their way and was waving to make them leave. She had forgotten she still had the axe in her hand.

A pretty set of bow lips was sketched in the card's corner. The owner of the town’s hairdresser’s shop had heard the whole story from her and told everybody.

A low, long “Oh” came from my chest. She was trying to protect those kids.

And Miss Pinkerton was a great artist, I noted.

I had been so wrong.

Truth: Mr. Crowley was burying all his loose change. After he died, his wife told their son that his dad was still thinking they were in the depression and he didn’t at all trust the banks.

A small ear was cleverly drawn; written next to it was –“heard it from the son.”

Side note: I am glad you didn’t dig it up.

I reached for the last cards, the ones pinned together, skipping all the others.

The oldest ones.

The most worn ones.

The one with the witch's hat and all the little eyes.

Miss Pinkerton hates children, especially me, as its header.

My fingers hesitated.

I almost didn’t turn it over.

How could we all have been so wrong…part of me wanted to keep believing in the little girl who had written on the front of the card.

Slowly, I flipped the first card.

Truth: Children have always been my favorite readers.

They are curious and adventurous, asking wonderful questions. Although sometimes they stop asking too soon.

She had written so much more; each truth more plain to see than the next.

At the very bottom, she added:

And just so you know, little Timmy had been punched in the nose by Wally, and I followed him into the boy’s bathroom to help him stop the bleeding.

I heard from your teachers that you might become a writer one day. Writers notice things other people miss. I hope, if you ever come back for this box, you will discover that rumors are only the front side of most stories.

Always remember to turn the card over.

Miss Pinkerton