From Above

by Norah McClintock

  “You’re making it out to be a big thing,” Theroux said. “I helped a couple of guys who asked me for help. That’s all.”

  “Is that what you told Ethan?”

  “One of the kids saw me at the gym. He asked me. It’s not like I was pushing anything. I told him that. I was doing a favor for a couple of kids, and I don’t need any hassle because I just came off suspension at my last job and—” He broke off abruptly.

  “You killed Ethan.”

  “It was an accident. We struggled. He fell.”

  “Then why didn’t you come forward?”

  He stared at me.

  I had no idea what he intended to do, and I didn’t intend to stick around to find out.

  I glanced in one direction and took off in a completely different one. Theroux grabbed me before I had gone more than a few steps and almost wrenched my arm out of its socket.

  He pushed me ahead of him to his car and dragged my bike behind him.

  This was my last chance. I remembered what Aunt Ginny had told me to do if I was ever in trouble. Don’t ever go quietly with anyone who means to harm you. Fight back. Most attackers don’t expect it, so take advantage of the element of surprise. Bite, claw, stomp, scream. Get away if you can. Run.

  I grabbed the thumb of the hand that gripped me and yanked it back as far as I could. At the same time, I stomped down as hard as I could on one of his insteps.

  He let out a ferocious roar, but he let go of me and my bike.

  I jumped on my bike. It was too far to ride back to town, but maybe I could make it to somewhere else safe.

  The scrapyard.

  I pedaled as fast as I could.

  It wasn’t long before I heard a car engine behind me.

  I stood up so I could push harder, and I kept going. I didn’t look back, not even when the police car pulled up alongside me.

  Theroux nudged his car against me. My bike wobbled, but I didn’t fall. Not right away.

  He nudged me with the car again. This time my bike fell sideways, and I crashed into the ditch. I lay there, dazed, as the cop car ground to a halt. I heard the car door slam. He was coming back.

  I struggled to my feet and ran away from the road, heading for the trees.

  I heard cursing behind me. I didn’t look back. I kept running.

  Something zinged past me. A bullet? Was he shooting at me?

  Don’t think about that. Don’t think at all. Just run. Don’t stop.

  Don’t stop for anything.

  I made it into the trees.

  I heard footsteps thundering into the brush behind me.

  I kept running, leaping over tree roots, dodging low-hanging branches, zigzagging to stay out of his sight but heading now toward something up ahead, toward the glorious sound of dogs barking.

  My lungs were burning. I felt like I was going to throw up. I’d never run so fast for so long. I’d never had to.

  I spotted something ahead—a fence. I started screaming as loudly as I could. “Help! HELP!”

  I heard a gunshot. Another bullet whizzed past me and exploded into a tree, sending shards of bark ripping through the air.

  I was almost at the fence. Mr. Maracle’s two pit bulls were already hurtling themselves against it in anticipation.

  Right behind them was Mr. Maracle, shotgun in hand.

  “Help me!” I screamed. “Someone is shooting at me. Help me.”

  He raised his shotgun and aimed it right at me. I froze.

  “Down,” he said.

  I threw myself to the ground, and a shotgun blast echoed in the woods around me. I stayed down until I saw a pair of boots beside my head.

  “You can get up now,” Mr. Maracle said. He reached down and pulled me to my feet. “I’m not altogether certain, but I think I just took a shot at an officer of the law.”

  “I can explain,” I said.

  “You’d better do just that.”

  SIXTEEN

  Theroux wasn’t dead, but he was wounded. He was taken away in an ambulance under the guard of another police officer.

  Aunt Ginny and Detective Martin showed up. Aunt Ginny hugged me and looked me over to make sure I was all right. Then she yelled at me for taking matters into my own hands when I should have talked to her. She calmed down when she realized that I had been at the police station—and when she found my envelope and note to her in Officer Theroux’s patrol car.

  Andes arrived home in his dad’s pickup truck. I’m not sure, but I think he might have driven away if his father hadn’t gotten to the truck first. I found out later that he was afraid of how his dad would react to the news that he’d been taking steroids.

  Aunt Ginny had us all taken to the police station: me, Mr. Maracle and Andes.

  Detective Martin interviewed me. Aunt Ginny took care of Andes and his dad. I had to go over my story twice and then endure Detective Martin’s questioning on every single point. He studied Mike’s photograph. He studied the pieces of the jacket and listened carefully to everything I said about it. This time he took notes—lots of them. He also recorded my interview.

  I wasn’t let go until after midnight. Only then did Aunt Ginny fill me in on what had happened, but not before she lectured me again for taking matters into my own hands.

  “Some of the players were taking steroids,” she said. I’d already figured that out. “Officer Theroux was supplying them, making a bit of cash on the side. He knew someone who knew someone. He claims it wasn’t as if he had to force the players to take them. That’s what they think they have to do to get ahead. Ethan found out. According to Andes, Ethan tried to talk the players out of taking the drugs. It led to a lot of tension on the team. Bob—I mean, Coach McGruder—started to give Ethan a hard time because of his attitude.”

  I overheard one of the players say that Coach gave Ethan a hard time.

  “Did Coach know about the steroids?”

  “He says he had suspicions, but the players involved denied it. Then Serena discovered steroids in Ethan’s sweatshirt and found out about McGruder’s background. She suspected him of killing Ethan. Andes knew it wasn’t true. He tried to talk her out of saying anything, but she was adamant.”

  That was what Ashleigh had overheard at the grocery store. Andes had been telling Serena that something wasn’t a good idea. He hadn’t wanted her to go public with accusations about Coach. But Serena had been determined. She held Coach responsible for Ethan’s death.

  “But Coach wasn’t involved,” I said.

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Ethan found out that a cop was supplying the players.”

  “Apparently.”

  “That’s why he started hanging around me and asking all those questions about cops. He was trying to decide what to do. I think he was afraid that if he went to the police, they would close ranks around one of their own instead of doing the right thing.” I shook my head. “He tried to deal with Theroux on his own, didn’t he?”

  “Theroux isn’t talking yet. But we think so, yes. We have Theroux’s cell phone records. He made a lot of calls to a number we haven’t traced yet.

  “Ethan’s second phone, the one with the missing SIM card.” I bet Theroux had destroyed it.

  “Too bad Ethan didn’t trust us,” Aunt Ginny said. “If he had, he’d still be alive.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “At the moment, Officer Theroux has been charged with manslaughter and attempted murder, among other things. That could change, depending on where the investigation goes. If, as he claims, he was acting alone, just supplying a few players, that’s one thing. If he was part of something bigger, well, that’s another. Given what we have against him, I’m sure he’ll cooperate.”

  “And the players who were using steroids?”

  “That I don’t know. I imagine that will be up to the school and their parents. Come on, Riley. It’s been a long day. Let’s go home.”

  Coach McGruder was waiting in the lobby. He approached us, looked at me a
nd cleared his throat.

  “I, er, I wanted to thank you…that is, I wanted” His face turned crimson. “What I mean is, well, I misjudged you. And, well, as far as I’m concerned, the slate is clean.” He looked at Aunt Ginny. “And I want to apologize to you too,” he said.

  Huh? I swung around to Aunt Ginny.

  “Apology accepted,” she said.

  Coach nodded and opened his mouth to say something else but nothing came out. He nodded and left the station.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Aunt Ginny.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s something. Aunt Ginny. He’s been giving me a hard time since he first laid eyes on me. And you warned me about him, remember? What’s going on?”

  “Really,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Aunt Ginny…”

  “Okay. I ticketed him my first day on the job. He was parked in a handicapped zone. He gave me a hard time. Then he asked me out, and I gave him a hard time. I guess you could say we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “You should have told me,” I said.

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  I thought about it. “Probably not. In a weird kind of way, getting stuck working for Coach couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

  Aunt Ginny looked skeptically at me.

  “It put me close to the football team,” I said. “If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been able to help Charlie.”

  “I like to think we would have been able to handle things without your interference,” Aunt Ginny said.

  Who knows. Maybe she was right.

  Charlie showed up at my house the next day before school to thank me for believing him. He dug something out of his pocket—my missing four-leaf clover.

  “If you want it,” he said shyly.

  “Of course I want it.” I clipped it to my backpack where it belonged.

  Ashleigh was waiting for me in front of the school. “To walk you to your locker,” she said.

  “I don’t think I need an escort anymore,” I told her. I had a feeling everything was going to be okay between Mike Winters and me from now on.

  “Are you still Coach McGruder’s gofer, or are you free after school?”

  “Coach let me off the hook.”

  “Great,” Ashleigh said. “So now you’re free, let’s do something fun.”

  “She’s already doing something fun,” Charlie said. “She’s helping me buy a new jacket.”

  Ashleigh raised an eyebrow. “In that case, I’d better come too. You need all the fashion help you can get.”

  NORAH McCLINTOCK is a five-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction for young people. She is the author of more than sixty YA novels, including books in Seven (the series), the Seven Sequels and the Secrets series. Norah lives in Toronto, Ontario. For more information, visit www.norahmcclintock.com.

  AN EXCERPT FROM

  TRIAL BY

  FIRE

  NORAH McCLINTOCK

  978-1-4598-0936-9

  ONE

  “Riley!” Aunt Ginny thundered. “Didn’t I ask you to break down these boxes?”

  I poked my head out the kitchen door and found Aunt Ginny in the middle of the veranda. Except for a narrow pathway from the door to the steps, it was filled with empty cardboard boxes and twists of newspaper that I had used to pack fragile items like dishes. In my defense, when it came time to move, I was the one who’d done the packing—all of it, including Aunt Ginny’s bedroom, which, by definition, included Aunt Ginny’s most personal items. She was too busy finishing up the paperwork on her open cases to help me.

  Then, when we got here, I did most of the unpacking. I hadn’t got rid of the boxes yet, but it was on my list.

  “Take care of it before I get back from work, will you?” Aunt Ginny said before trotting across the yard to her car. I surveyed the cardboard graveyard that was the back porch. It had never bothered me. I had spent most of my life moving around, especially when I was living with my dad’s dad, my grandpa Jimmy, we were often on the road with his band. But then Jimmy died and I had to go to live with relatives I’d never even met. My mom died when I was a baby. My dad? He turned into Albert Schweitzer, and if you don’t know who that is, maybe this is a good time to look it up. Dad’s a medical doctor with an international charity, and he spends almost all of his time overseas, usually in places that are too dangerous for a kid. He spent a lot of time in Darfur. Now he’s managed to get funding to set up a hospital in a remote area of Liberia. He emails me when he can.

  Going to live with Aunt Ginny (my mom’s sister) after Jimmy died was tough. But it was made a little easier by getting to know Grandpa Dan, Ginny’s dad. The two of them, plus my uncles Ben and Vince, were just starting to feel like a real family to me when Aunt Ginny got a job offer she felt she couldn’t refuse, even though it meant another move for me, this time to a small town.

  So now here we were, just the two of us, in a place where we knew no one and no one knew us.

  Look on the bright side, Riley, I told myself. There’s always a bright side; it just isn’t always what you expect. That’s what Jimmy used to say. One of the things anyway.

  And there was a bright side.

  My new room.

  So when Aunt Ginny left, even though I’d intended to do what she’d asked, I decided the boxes could wait. Besides, the evening seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of me. There was plenty of time. I would break down the boxes and stack them neatly after I took another look at my room.

  I loved it. It was huge—three times larger than Aunt Ginny’s study in our old place, where I’d slept on a pullout bed for more than a year. My new room contained a brand-new actual double bed (with head- and footboards, a huge improvement over the creaky old hide-a-bed in Aunt Ginny’s cramped second-bedroom-office) and offered a spectacular view of the rolling meadows and farmland surrounding the rambling Victorian farmhouse Aunt Ginny had rented. It also had high ceilings and gleaming hardwood floors. I was entranced by everything about it, except the color. The walls were a dull and grimy shade of off-white, like cream left out so long that it had crusted over. I’d cajoled Aunt Ginny into buying me some sunny-yellow paint. My plan was to start painting tonight. Maybe even finish painting tonight. Aunt Ginny wouldn’t be back until morning. And it was summer. There was no school to get up for. I could paint until dawn, if I wanted to.

  I pried the lid off one of the paint cans, dipped in a brush and applied a thick streak of yellow. It looked glorious, like the sun at noon, like daffodils, like summer. It didn’t take long for me to forget about the boxes, and begin to transform my poor Cinderella walls into the fair maiden who steals the prince’s heart. I didn’t stop until I had finished one whole wall, and I paused then only because I was dripping with sweat despite the gentle breeze that I felt whenever I stepped in front of my open window. I was thirsty too. I went downstairs to get a drink.

  I stood at the kitchen sink, gazing out the window while I ran the water until it got cold. There was an eerie brightness in the sky over Mr. Goran’s place next door. I filled my glass and took it out onto the back porch to see what was going on.

  Flames were shooting up into the sky over Mr. Goran’s property. It looked like his barn was on fire.

  I raced back into the kitchen, grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1. I reported what I had seen and gave the address and location as calmly as I could. “On Route 30, west of Moorebridge.”

  I slammed down the phone and raced outside again. Of all the places for a fire to break out, why did it have to be Mr. Goran’s farm?

  Mr. Goran! Was he home? Was he awake? Did he even know his barn was on fire? Was he out there now, trying to battle the blaze? Or was he frozen to the spot, flooded with memories and nightmares, unable to move?

  I ran across the lawn, scrambled over the fence and raced toward the blaze, yelling Mr. Goran’s name the whole way.

  Lights were on i
n his house, but if he heard me shouting, he didn’t answer. When I hammered on his front door, it swung open. I called him again.

  No answer.

  If the door was unlocked, that had to mean Mr. Goran was somewhere on the property. He had to be at the barn. I ran back to the barnyard and ground to a halt when I heard the scream. It was coming from the barn. I heard something else too. Banging.

  “Mr. Goran?” I shouted. “Mr. Goran, where are you?”

  “Help! Help me!”

  The voice was coming from inside the barn. I raced to the door and tried to pull it open, but the latch handle had been heated to scorching by the fire. I yelped and yanked my hand back. It had been burned. I wound the bottom of my T-shirt around my other hand and tried again. The latch wouldn’t give. It was stuck.