“I understand that, Riley. In fact—”
The door to Mr. Chen’s office flew open, struck the wall with a solid whack, bounced back and would have slammed shut again had Mr. McGruder not stopped it with one hand. He stormed in, his face set in fury.
Mr. Chen regarded him calmly. “Bob,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you. Riley, wait outside while I have a word with Mr. McGruder.”
Gladly. I didn’t want to be in the same room with the man. I reclaimed my spot on the bench and listened, along with everyone else in the office, to Mr. McGruder’s rant, which Mr. Chen’s door did little to muffle, let alone mute. He denounced my lack of spirit and complained that it was undermining him and giving the other girls a reason to slack off, and what was the matter with girls anyway, some of them looked like skeletons and none of them wanted to break a sweat, you had to threaten them with laps to get them to do anything. Ms. O’Shea glanced at me. One of my fellow benchees, a slouching girl, stared openly at me and refused to stop, even when I gave her a pointed What’s your problem? look. She snickered in response.
Mr. Chen’s door opened again, violently, and Mr. McGruder erupted from the small office like a lava plug from a volcano. He scowled at me as he swept past. Mr. Chen crooked a finger at me.
“I believe we’ve come to a compromise,” he said when we were back in his office.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m not saying you did. But I need to keep the peace around here, and Mr. McGruder feels strongly that the competitive spirit is a key component of an athletic education.”
“In other words, either I cave in to his idea of sport or I’m doomed to run laps for the rest of my high school career?”
“Not at all. I said compromise, and I do mean compromise. I’m confident that once you and Coach get to know each other, all will be well. Now, due to an unfortunate illness, Coach’s assistant has been sidelined temporarily. I have suggested—and Coach has agreed to—a replacement. You. Coach will have the opportunity to teach you about the competitive spirit. And you will have the opportunity to air your point of view.”
“Or you could just tell him to leave me alone unless I actually do something wrong.” It was hardly a bold suggestion, but Mr. Chen rejected it outright.
“You show up for two weeks, and then it’s over. Think of it as an exercise in understanding the other person’s point of view. That’s often the first step in the peaceful resolution of any dispute. And you never know, you might actually learn something. Apparently we have a shot at the finals again this year.” Mr. Chen paused. “At least, we did before Ethan—” He broke off. “The prevailing feeling among the team members is that they should give it their all and make it to the finals as a tribute to Ethan. Maybe you could help lift team spirit.”
I could have argued. This exercise in mutual understanding sounded like punishment to me, and I had done nothing wrong. But I didn’t want to be picked on for the rest of the year either.
“Do you think it will make a difference? He’ll leave me alone?”
“If it doesn’t, you come to me and I’ll deal with it.”
“Football is that important, huh?”
Mr. Chen shrugged. “I don’t understand it either, but yes, around here it is. Report to practice after last period.”
FOUR
“That’s not fair,” Charlie declared later that day. “You should complain to Mrs. Dekes.” Mrs. Dekes is our school principal. She is also my English teacher’s sister.
“You’re just jealous because Riley’s going to be around all those totally ripped athletes,” Ashleigh said.
“I am not.” Tellingly, Charlie’s face turned red. “You’re missing the point. Riley didn’t do anything. What right does Mr. Chen have to punish her by turning her into a gofer for Coach McGruder?”
“So you don’t mind if she hangs around with the football team?”
“That has nothing to do with it.” Charlie was sticking to his story.
I slammed my locker door. “I just want to get this over with as smoothly as possible. So I gotta go. If I’m even one second late, Mr. McGruder will probably make me do laps with the team.”
I shouldered my backpack and hurried out to the athletics field. I needn’t have worried about being late. Nothing was happening. The team had assembled in full football gear, but they were standing around watching Coach, who was locked in what seemed to be a dispute with Detective Martin while Aunt Ginny looked on.
“They’re not going anywhere,” Coach said to Detective Martin. “They’ll all be right here in two hours’ time. I won’t let them leave. Come back then and talk to them.”
“Sorry, Coach,” Detective Martin said. “This is a death investigation. The sooner we finish our questioning, the sooner we can wrap it up and the sooner Ethan’s family can get the answers they’re looking for.”
“This is a scheduled practice. Ethan would have wanted it to go on. Right, fellas?” Mr. McGruder looked at the players, who mumbled and nodded.
“We’ll be as quick as we can,” Detective Martin said, “but we have to be thorough.” As he stepped away from Mr. McGruder, he spotted me, but he didn’t say anything.
Mr. McGruder saw me too.
“It’s about time,” he said.
“I’m right on time.” I checked my watch. I was.
“On time around here is five minutes early.”
What a grouch! I looked pointedly at the team. They had lined themselves up loosely along the outer edges of the field, ready for questioning. In their bulky football gear, most of them dwarfed Aunt Ginny. She was working her way down the line, sorting them out, telling some to stand to one side and dismissing others back to Coach.
“Terrific,” he muttered. “She’s sending me all the rookies.”
“The cops only want to speak to the guys who knew Crawford,” one of the braver newbies said. The only thing most of them knew about Ethan was his reputation. Mr. McGruder cleared his throat noisily, consulted his clipboard and started them on laps while he waited for the detectives to finish with his starting lineup.
The rookies ran through a stringent series of calisthenics—jumping jacks, burpees, crunches and push-ups—and finished with a brisk relay through old tires to hone agility. By the time they had finished, all but three team members had joined in, and Mr. McGruder reluctantly started a full practice, grousing that he didn’t really see the point because his star players were still tied up with the cops when they should have been “giving it their all for Crawford and making this team a winner.”
Ten minutes before the end of practice, the three remaining players, including Andes, reported to Coach, who, for his part, shot an evil eye at Aunt Ginny, who had questioned the fullback at length. The look didn’t surprise me. Coach struck me as just the kind of guy to have a negative attitude about female police officers. Aunt Ginny was used to that though. Her only response to Coach’s glare was to glance at me, a quizzical expression on her face.
Coach finally dismissed the team and sent me to load the practice tires onto the cart that was used to transport them while he talked to the three players who had missed practice.
As I trotted over to the tire obstacle course, I heard him ask, “What did they want?” I slowed down, hoping to hear the answer, but Coach noticed and saw me look back over my shoulder. “What are you waiting for, Donovan? Get a move on. Those tires aren’t going to roll themselves back to the equipment locker.”
I got a move on. The tires weren’t so much heavy—maybe twenty pounds each—as they were awkward and bulky. And there were a lot of them to get onto a small cart, which meant I had to stack them carefully. That became more and more difficult the higher the stacks became. I was struggling with them when Coach dismissed the remaining three players. He checked my progress, shook his head in disgust and dispatched one of the players to me.
“Coach says you need a hand,” he said. He was massive—a good head and shoulders taller than me
and twice as wide even without all his padding.
“I’m Riley,” I said.
“Yeah. I heard. Munster.” He grabbed a tire and flung it expertly onto the top of one of the piles.
“Huh?”
“Munster. That’s my name.” He swung another tire into place. “Well, really it’s Matt. Matt Mason. But everyone calls me Munster, you know, on account of that old TV show and how big I am.”
“Kind of like Andes, right?” I said.
He nodded, flipped the last few tires effortlessly onto the cart and positioned himself to push the cart across the field to the school.
“You want to grab the front and steer?” he said.
“Sure.” I threw my backpack onto the top of the pile and grabbed the front of the cart. Munster pushed and the cart jerked forward, almost knocking me over.
“So,” I shouted back over my shoulder, “what did the cops want?”
“They had a bunch of questions about Crawford. You knew him, right?”
“Sort of.” I had to trot to keep ahead of the cart and steer it toward the school. “What did they say? Do they know what happened?”
“If they did, they didn’t say. You know cops. They never say.”
I wondered what kind of experience had taught him that.
“You want my opinion? I don’t think they think it was an accident.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They asked a million questions, that lady cop especially. She’s like a pit bull. She kept asking the same things over and over. Guys from the team hang out up there, right? Are some guys there more than others? Did Crawford go up there a lot? Were you up there that day? What time were you there? When did you leave? Did you see anyone else up there? Was anyone else up there when you left—besides Crawford?”
“What time were you up there?”
Munster grinned. “It’s true what they say about you, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re nosy.”
There was no point in denying it. “You were up there, right?”
“Yeah. At lunchtime. That lady cop grilled me about it. Did you have any beefs with Crawford? Did anyone else? What kind of beefs? Did they work it out? How did they work it out? Did anyone ever threaten anyone else? On and on.” He looked evenly at me. “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Ethan, and I don’t know who did.”
We reached the rear entrance to the school basement. I opened the door and jumped aside to allow Munster to shove the cart through. I followed him as he maneuvered it around a tight corner and down a long hallway.
“Done.” He straightened up and stretched. “Time to hit the shower.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said it’s time to hit the shower.”
“No, I mean to the cops.”
He eyed me with amusement. “What’s it to you? Is all that talk about you and Ethan true? I heard he started hanging out with you after he dumped Serena. Who started it, him or you?”
“Nobody started anything. He just showed up at my locker one day and introduced himself.”
“He had his eye on you from the first day of school.”
“He did?” That was news to me.
Munster looked me over from head to toe. “I guess I can see why. Did you two get all hot and heavy?”
“No!” I felt my cheeks burning. “For your information, nothing happened. I didn’t even know he’d broken up with Serena at first.” I didn’t find out until after she’d given me the evil eye a couple of times, and then it was Ashleigh who had enlightened me. “He just wanted to talk, that’s all.” And most of that talk had been about me—stuff he’d heard about me, questions about the different things I’d gotten mixed up in, questions about Aunt Ginny.
“That’s Crawford. A real talker.” He turned to go.
“Matt?”
“Munster,” he said. “Everyone calls me Munster.” He seemed proud of the name.
“Okay, Munster. What did you tell them?”
“The cops?” He grinned again. “Let’s just say I answered all their questions.” He waved his hand in a goodbye salute and loped down the corridor and out of sight.
I scrambled up onto the cart to retrieve my backpack and went back outside to find my bike. That’s when Ashleigh texted me. Where r u? Come here now.
Where r u? I texted back.
Police station.
I jumped on my bike and found Ashleigh minutes later on the sidewalk in front of the police station. She wasn’t alone. A small crowd had gathered. Everyone was looking at the same scene.
FIVE
Three people stood outside the police station—Aunt Ginny, Josh Martin and a tall, thin man in a gray overcoat. I’d never seen him before. Ashleigh told me he was Ethan’s dad. He was the one doing the talking. He stabbed the air with his index finger while he spoke. The finger was pointed at Aunt Ginny.
Aunt Ginny’s face was unreadable. It was the face she showed to co-workers, citizens and wrongdoers. It was the impartial, ever-vigilant, ever-cautiously-suspicious face that Aunt Ginny seemed to think was needed in her job. Sometimes I wondered what people would think if they saw her the way I did when she was at home and safely out of the public eye. She slouched around in her pajamas, eating ice cream out of the container with a soup spoon when she was angry or frustrated. She sulked, silent and withdrawn, when she’d been assigned to a small case instead of a major crime. She kicked the furniture after most encounters with the chief of police, who stuck like a burr to the concept of chain of command, which meant that he generally addressed himself to Detective Martin, even when Aunt Ginny was right there with them.
Now Detective Martin held up a hand in a calming gesture. Ethan’s dad turned to him. His face was flushed. But he stopped stabbing his finger at Aunt Ginny and listened to what the detective was saying. The two exchanged more words before Detective Martin put his hand on Mr. Crawford’s shoulder and walked him to his car. Aunt Ginny watched them. I couldn’t even begin to guess what she was thinking.
“What do you think that was all about?” Ashleigh asked.
I wished I knew.
I headed home to start dinner. While the chicken baked, I watched the local news. Ethan Crawford’s death was the lead story.
“Dr. Timothy Crawford, father of the dead boy, has accused one of the detectives in charge of the death investigation of incompetence,” said a perky brunette news reader with impossibly aqua eyes. Dr. Crawford appeared on the screen.
“My son has died tragically,” he said. His face was gray and lined with grief, but his voice was sharp with outrage. “We—his brother and I—want to lay him to rest next to his mother. We want to mourn him. But Detective Virginia McFee is insisting that there is more to his death than a tragic accident. She is spreading lies about my son and suggesting things about him that are untrue. I have spoken to the chief of police. I have demanded that he take the matter in hand.”
Spreading lies? Aunt Ginny?
Cut to the chief of police, a portly, gray-haired man who had lived and policed in the region for his whole life. “When a young person dies—when any person in our community dies—suddenly and unexpectedly, our duty is to conduct a thorough investigation of the circumstances. We are doing exactly that in the Ethan Crawford case, and Dr. Crawford has my assurance that we will wrap this up quickly so that the family can find closure.”
His statement was vague. He didn’t mention Aunt Ginny. Had he reprimanded her? Had he removed her from the case?
It was nearly an hour before I had a chance to find out. I waited until Aunt Ginny had hung her jacket on the back of a kitchen chair and was digging into the plate of food I’d placed in front of her.
“You’re going to get indigestion if you don’t slow down,” I said as she shoveled chicken into her mouth.
“I have to get back to work,” she said. With her mouth full.
“Because of what the chief said?”
; Her fork, on a return trip to her plate to load up again, hovered in midair.
“He was on TV. On the news,” I said.
“Oh. What did he say?”
“That the investigation into Ethan’s death is going to be wrapped up quickly.”
Aunt Ginny shook her head angrily. “They hire you to do a job, and then they won’t let you do it.”
“What do you mean?”
No answer.
“Ethan’s dad was on TV. He said you were spreading lies about Ethan.”
“Did he?”
“Why would he say that, Aunt Ginny?”
No answer.
“Are you still part of the investigation, Aunt Ginny? Or did—”
“I don’t even know why Dr. Crawford is so upset. He demanded—and I do mean demanded; the man likes to be in charge—an update on the investigation, and I gave him one. I told him we haven’t ruled anything out yet, and that includes suicide. For some reason, that enraged him. His son is dead. You’d think he’d want to know what happened. Instead, he’s acting like he can’t wait to get him in the ground. And then Josh told him that he’s going to handle the case personally.” So that was what had been going on in the parking lot. “I’m still on the case, but I’m not supposed to do anything without Josh’s permission. He’s in charge.”
Aunt Ginny liked to be in the thick of things. She’d thought when she got hired that she would be handling important investigations. She is a detective, after all. She hadn’t counted on how much her job would be influenced by local politics and a web of local relationships in which she was regarded as an outsider. It all drove her crazy, and she wasn’t a patient person to begin with. I steered the conversation away from the chief.
“You don’t really think it was suicide, do you?”
“I never said it was. I said it hadn’t been ruled out. And it hasn’t.” She eyed me speculatively. “How well did you know this boy, Riley?”
“I didn’t. Not really. He is—was—a year ahead of me.”
“Did you ever speak to him?”
“A couple of times. But he didn’t talk much about himself.”
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