“What about other kids? What do they say about him?”
“Haven’t you interviewed his friends, Aunt Ginny?”
“A few of them. Before Josh took over. I’ve been trying to get hold of his girlfriend—”
“Serena Dobbs.”
Aunt Ginny perked up. “You know her?”
“I know who she is, but don’t get excited. She’s the kind of person everyone knows, but only a select number of people are actually admitted to her inner circle.”
“Sounds just like your mother,” Aunt Ginny said.
“Really?” My mom had died when I was a baby.
“But in a nice way,” she added hastily. “I used to envy how easily she made friends.” She banished the past with a shake of her head. “So I take it you’re not part of Serena’s inner circle.”
“Not even close. But you know where she lives, right?”
“Her parents are protective to the point of obstructive. From what I’ve been able to gather, Serena broke up with Ethan. Part of the problem that led to the breakup was Ethan’s behavior. Everyone we spoke to told us he’d changed in the week or so before he died. He had something on his mind, but he never talked about it. The next thing you know, he’s found dead after falling from a rooftop terrace surrounded by a four-foot-high steel railing with plexiglass inserts bolted to it, making it demonstrably impossible for his fall to have been the result of an accident—”
“So you’re saying he had to have jumped on purpose.”
“We haven’t ruled it out. We haven’t ruled anything out.”
“Except accident.”
“Except accident involving only Ethan.”
She had my full attention.
“But it still could have been an accident—is that what you’re saying? Like, say, if he was fooling around with someone up there or something like that?” I tried to picture how that would have worked. “Maybe that’s why whoever was up there with Ethan hasn’t come forward yet.” I glanced at my aunt. “No one has, have they?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe they’re afraid to. Maybe it really was an accident, and they’re afraid they’re going to get blamed for what happened.”
“Not coming forward isn’t helping whoever you saw—assuming there really was someone up there. It raises a lot of questions.”
“Do you think someone pushed Ethan?”
She looked evenly at me. “As I told Dr. Crawford, we haven’t ruled out anything yet. And we won’t be able to until we complete our investigation.”
“Do you think Serena knows something?” I asked.
“I would have to interview her before I could answer that question.” She stood up. “I have to get back to work.”
“I talked to one of the guys on the football team. You and Josh spoke to him too. He was on the roof that day.”
“Everyone was on the roof that day.”
“Everyone?”
“Let’s just say there was more than one person up there that day, although apparently not at the time Ethan fell. At least, that’s what we’ve been told.”
“You think someone is lying?”
She slipped on her jacket and ignored my question. “What were you doing at football practice anyway?”
“I’m helping Coach McGruder for a few days.”
“Good god, why? I swear that man is the biggest Neanderthal on the planet.”
“You know Coach?” I asked. She’d never mentioned him.
She stiffened. “It’s a long story.” She zipped her jacket. “I’ll probably be late. Don’t wait up for me.”
By the next day, everyone seemed to have slipped back into their normal routines. If anyone noticed an Ethan-Crawford-shaped hole in the fabric of the school, no one mentioned it. Charlie seemed more or less back to his regular self and was still indignant about the agreement I’d made with Mr. Chen.
“If it gets Coach off my back, it’s worth it. And who knows, I might learn something.”
“About football? It’s about time,” Ashleigh said. She was a staunch supporter of the school team and therefore critical of my almost complete lack of knowledge of the sport.
“About Ethan,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“Someone was on the rec-center roof when Ethan fell.” Or was pushed, accidentally or on purpose. Or jumped. “Maybe someone on the team knows something. Maybe I’ll hear something.”
“Why are you getting involved in it?” Charlie said. “Why don’t you leave it to the cops?”
“I want to help if I can. What’s wrong with that?”
“You want to help because of how you felt about Ethan.”
What was wrong with him? “I want to help because someone I knew—and you knew—is dead.”
“Riley.” Ashleigh touched my arm.
Charlie glowered at me and stalked away. Clearly, I was wrong about him. He wasn’t back to normal. Something was bothering him. Something to do with Ethan.
Baseball had been Jimmy’s game. He used to listen to it on the radio late at night when he was a kid, tuning to any station he could find that was broadcasting a game. Apart from local league games, which he’d loved to watch in whatever town he was playing, radio was the only way Jimmy followed baseball. I don’t know if he ever sat in the stands at a major league game. I know I never saw him watch one on television. But on countless summer and fall nights when he didn’t have a gig, he’d lean back in his seat on the bus or prop himself up against pillows in bed and listen, a faraway look in his eyes as he visualized the plays the announcer was describing.
So I guess it’s no surprise that baseball was also my game. I could bat okay. I was a great catcher. And boy, when I played pickup games with the band and the crew, I was a champion base stealer. At least, I used to think I was. Now, when I look back, I can’t help thinking the guys had let me rob them blind. I was a little kid and the only female among a busload of guys, some of them missing their own kids back home. One thing was for sure though: I never watched football. I didn’t even have a firm grasp of the rules. That made football practice boring for me. Or it would have if it hadn’t been for Coach.
“You’re late, Donovan” was the first thing he said to me.
I checked my watch. By real-world standards I was four minutes early. In Coach’s world I was one minute late. I didn’t bother to argue.
“Tires.” Coach nodded at the cart that sat at the edge of the field.
“I’m going to need help,” I said.
Coach scowled. “For the love of…” He blew his whistle and shouted something that sounded like “Tonka.” This turned out to be a football player as massive as Andes and Munster. “Get that cart over to the other side of the field so this little lady can set up,” Coach ordered him.
Without breaking stride, Tonka jogged to the cart, braced his hands against the back of it and pushed it effortlessly across the grassy field. He resumed his place on the field, leaving me to scramble to the top of the heap and start throwing down tires. I was dragging the last one into place when the team descended on me to run the course.
The guys in the front—the starting lineup—had no problem. I think they could have run that course blindfolded. The rookies were another story. A few of them miscalculated where to put their feet and landed on the sides of tires. Most of them caught themselves before they fell. One big guy with more fat than muscle on him crashed to the ground. From the howl of derision that went up, I gathered it wasn’t his first time. Coach ordered him to the back of the line to try again.
You know how some people can take a good ribbing and not let it faze them? Well, the rookie wasn’t one of those people. Coach had him in his sights for the rest of practice, yelling at him—Faster! Slower! Pattern, pattern, pattern!—rattling the poor guy. Every time he made a mistake, which was roughly every time he attempted a practice move, Coach blew his whistle and called him an idiot or a klutz or asked him how long he thought he’d last with
the team if he kept up the way he was going. The other rookies looked both terrified and grateful at the same time—terrified that they would make a fatal mistake and be subjected to the same treatment as their poor teammate, and grateful that their colleague was sucking up all of Coach’s attention so that the odd time one or other of them messed up, Coach didn’t notice.
The guys on the starting lineup were as bad as Coach. They hooted and hollered every time the rookie made a mistake. Then I heard Munster say, “Coach has it in for that guy the way he had it in for Crawford.”
I knew what it felt like to be picked on by Coach. So had Ethan, by the sound of it. I waited for Munster to say something else, but he was distracted by the sudden appearance of Serena on the sidelines. Munster nudged Andes, who broke from the field and jogged over to her. Coach’s whistle cut the air in protest.
“Sorry, Coach,” Andes called back over his shoulder. “I just need a minute.” To Serena, he said, “Are you okay?”
Maybe she said she was, and maybe she wasn’t. I couldn’t tell. She didn’t stop to talk to Andes. She breezed past him and came straight at me.
“Why?” she demanded. “Why was he spending so much time with you?”
“Serena.” I had to back up because she’d come so close to me. Too close. I could smell her minty-fresh toothpaste. “Hi.”
“Why?” she said. “Why you? What did you do to him?”
What did I do? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He kept ditching me to go off and do something, but he never told me what, not even when I asked him. Then I started seeing him with you.”
“He talked to me a couple of times, that’s all.”
“A couple of times? More like a couple of times a day!”
“That’s not true.”
“What about his phone? Why did he get a new phone?”
“What?” What was she talking about?
“They found a cell phone on the roof. The SIM card was missing. They say it was Ethan’s phone. It had his fingerprints on it. But his father found his phone at home. He hadn’t turned it on in days. Why? Why did he need another phone? What did you two talk about?”
We two?
“Serena, I never talked to him on the phone. We never texted either.”
“He must have said something.”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“I’m sorry. He didn’t.”
Tears welled up in her eyes.
“He just asked me a bunch of stuff about me and my aunt, that’s all. He wasn’t interested in me,” I said.
“Right. He ditches me to hang out with you, but he’s not interested in you.”
“Honestly, he wasn’t.” At least, he never said he was.
She stared at me. Her voice was quieter when she asked, “Did he seem depressed?”
“He was quiet. But I don’t know what he was usually like.”
“Something was bothering him. He was upset. I know he was. But he would never talk about it.” Tears dribbled down her cheek. “Was it me?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he spent so much time with you.”
“We talked three or four times, that’s all.”
Her face hardened again. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not, I swear.”
Andes appeared behind her and slipped an arm around her shoulders. She flinched and spun around, furious. When she saw who it was, she relaxed.
“Is everything okay?” Andes asked.
“I don’t understand.” She wiped her tears, but they kept flowing. “I don’t understand what’s going on. They’re saying it wasn’t an accident. What does that mean? If it wasn’t an accident, what happened? What was going on with him? He usually told me everything, but all of a sudden he got so quiet and withdrawn. I should have known something was wrong. I should have done something.”
Andes held her while she cried. “Coach was giving him a hard time,” he said. “He was off his game.”
Serena pulled away just far enough so that she could look up at him. “See? I should have noticed that, but I didn’t. And he didn’t tell me. I should have known. I should have done something.”
Coach’s whistle shrilled again.
Andes squeezed Serena’s shoulder. Serena smiled wanly at him and watched as he trotted off to join the others on the field. She turned back to me. I didn’t know what to say. I needn’t have worried. She left without a word. I thought about what she had said. Ethan had been quieter than usual before he died. He’d apparently had something on his mind. But what? Did it have something to do with why he had died? And what about his sudden interest in me? What had that been about?
Practice was over, the tires had been transported back to their resting spot with the help of Munster (thank you, Munster), and I was back on the field, heading for my bike, when I spotted someone on the roof of the rec center. Detective Martin. I watched his head appear and disappear over the railing above me. If he noticed me, he didn’t say anything. He was too focused on what he was doing. By the time I was unlocking my bike, he was back at ground level, walking across the parking lot with Aunt Ginny. They stopped not far from where I was standing. I ducked down behind the nearest car so that I could hear what they were saying.
“Any luck?” Detective Martin asked Aunt Ginny.
“The guard is back in town, so I’m heading over to talk to him,” she said. “I spoke to the administrator. She says she sees kids going up and down the stairwell all the time. Not just kids from the football team either. All kinds of kids are in and out of that place every day of the week. And the day Ethan died, there was a regional swim meet. There were busloads of kids in there. Still, she’s agreed to come to the station as soon as her shift is over to look at pictures and see if anything jogs her memory. You?”
“Nothing much. You stick with the guard and the administrator. I have a few things to chase down.”
“Like what?”
“Just do your job, McFee, and I’ll do mine.”
I heard footsteps coming toward me and dove behind the car like a criminal. Nothing happened. No one called my name. No one said, “Aha!” When I finally came up for air, both Detective Martin and Aunt Ginny were gone.
SIX
The police car showed up at seven o’clock, driven by the police officer who had been first on the scene the day that Ethan fell.
“Detective Martin wants to talk to you,” he said.
I knew that already. He had called and asked me to come in.
We want to talk to you about Ethan Crawford, he had told me. I’m sending a car.
I was surprised Aunt Ginny wasn’t the one to call me. She had told me that Josh Martin was in charge of the case now, but it still puzzled me when I was ushered into an interview room where Detective Martin was waiting for me—alone.
“Have a seat, Riley,” he said.
I sat. Where was Aunt Ginny?
“I asked you to come in because I need to ask you some questions about Ethan Crawford. You’re not under arrest, nor are you a suspect at this time. Do you understand?”
Wait a minute! “Suspect? Suspect in what?”
“Do you understand, Riley?”
“Yes. But—”
“You are under no obligation to answer my questions, but I’m sure you want to help us get to the bottom of what happened to Ethan. I have to caution you, however, that if you do answer my questions, anything you say can be used against you in subsequent proceedings. Do you understand?”
Subsequent proceedings? What was going on?
“Do you understand, Riley?”
“I thought you said I wasn’t a suspect.”
“You’re not.”
“Then why are you talking about subsequent proceedings?”
The question seemed to annoy him.
“It’s procedure. I have to give you this caution. Now do you understand or not?”
“I understand, but—”
> “Furthermore, as a juvenile, you are entitled to have a parent, guardian or some other adult present when you answer my questions. Do you understand?”
I did. “My aunt Ginny…”
“Do you want me to call her in? You have the right to have her here. However, you should be aware that if you ask her to come in here as your guardian, she will have to be removed from this case. It would be a conflict of interest for an investigating officer to attend this interview as your guardian. As a police officer, her job is to determine the truth of this case. As your guardian, she has a duty to protect you and your interests. The two don’t necessarily coincide.”
I looked right at him, but his face was like a rigid plastic mask. It was impossible to make out what was going on behind it.
He had said I wasn’t a suspect. He’d read it from the paper he had in front of him. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t even sure what was going on. Did Detective Martin’s caution mean that the police had reached a conclusion about Ethan’s death? Did the fact that I wasn’t a suspect mean that suspects were being sought and, therefore they had concluded that someone had been involved in Ethan’s death? Detective Martin’s questions would give me a good idea what he was thinking. As for dragging Aunt Ginny into this, there was one thing I knew for a fact. If Aunt Ginny was pulled off the case—especially if it turned out to be a homicide case—on my account, there would be no living with her.
“I don’t need anyone with me,” I said.
“You’re declining your right to have an adult present?”
“Yes.”
He shoved a paper across the table. “Please read this aloud and initial that you understand what you’re signing.”
The paper outlined what he had already told me. After I’d initialed every clause, I signed at the bottom. He took the paper from me and tucked it into a file folder. He set that aside and pulled something out of his pocket. He slid it across the table to me. It was in a plastic baggie.
“Do you recognize this?”
“It’s mine.” The look of satisfaction in his eyes told me he already knew that. The item in the baggie was the green-and-gold four-leaf-clover charm that Charlie had given me, the one I’d attached to the loop on my backpack. “I’ve been looking for it. I lost it.”
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