13 Hangmen by Art Corriveau

froze in horror. He fingered the entire length of the chain. He patted his shirt. He checked hispants pockets. He stooped forward and began searching the sidewalk for whatever he’d lost. Tony seized his chance. He tiptoed behind Hagmann’s back and ducked into the curiosity shop next door.
    â€œHello?”
    The place appeared to be completely empty.
    â€œSarah?”
    No answer. He wandered over to the wall of books.
Secrets of the Lost Civilization of Maya. Quantum Mechanics for Better Living. Hatha Yoga and You. White Witchcraft Made Easy.
He wondered, not for the first time, if Mildred Pickles—whoever she might be—was a complete lunatic. Then he reminded himself: He had just spent half the morning hanging out with his dead great-uncle.
    A whole section of the bookcase suddenly opened. Tony had to jump out of the way to avoid being flattened like a cartoon character. Sarah wafted out of a narrow passageway containing a rickety staircase that led up to the floor above. She was eating a piece of sushi from a bento box with a pair of purple chopsticks. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Want a shumai dumpling?”
    â€œI’m good,” Tony said.
    â€œSo how did it go with the pawcorance? Was my hypothesis correct?”
    â€œNot a hundred percent,” Tony admitted. “I was definitelyable to reconjure Angelo with the ball cap. But then we tried to conjure this other kid named Solly with the arm-patch number from his Red Sox uniform. He never turned up.”
    â€œHow old was Angelo in 1939?” Sarah asked. “Exactly, I mean.”
    â€œThirteen,” Tony said. “And a day. Why?”
    â€œAnd how old was this Solly you were trying to conjure?”
    Tony shrugged. “Twenty? He didn’t live in the house after that. His family sold it when he was twenty-one, as soon as he joined the team.”
    â€œFollow me,” Sarah said. She led him over to the slate counter. Setting the bento box aside, she reached for a gigantic leather-bound book resting on the spiral—
The Compleat Numerologist—
which was already open to the first page of Chapter 13. “It struck me—after you left this morning—that your anomaly was probably triggered somehow by the interaction of the numbers thirteen and nine,” Sarah said. “So I decided to brush up on some basic numerology. I’m pretty convinced your pawcorance can only connect thirteen-year-olds to each other.”
    Sarah explained: The number thirteen had
always
been troublesome when it came to time. That’s because there were thirteen lunations—full moons—to a solar year, and so far no culture in the history of humankind had ever been able to divide a year into a nice neat thirteen-month calendar withouta few pesky minutes and seconds left over. The twelve-month Gregorian calendar used today was totally inaccurate. When you did the exact math, a year was 365.2422 days long. Almost a quarter of a day had to get lopped off at the end of most years, with an extra day added back to February—a leap year—every fourth year. (Same was true of the Jewish calendar, by the way, even though it was actually based on the thirteen lunations; the Sanhedrin still had to add the occasional leap month to sync everything up.) The Aztecs had probably come the closest with an eighteen-month calendar of twenty-day weeks, cycling over fifty-two years. But even
they
had had extra time left over—which, they believed, was responsible for that tiny bit of chaos in ordinary existence they called
change
. “In other words,” Sarah concluded, “I think the number thirteen is an anomaly in itself. It probably keeps time marching forward—causing change as it does so—but, in the process, also creates anomalies in the space-time continuum.”
    â€œFor thirteen-year-old boys,” Tony said.
    â€œOr girls,” Sarah said. “Just because you’ve only