by Steven James
“That’s sweet of you, really, but I’m already pretty wet.”
Time passed, flitted between them. And then it just came out. “The homecoming dance is tonight,” Daniel said.
“I heard.”
“Are you going?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I um, maybe I could . . .”
She took care of that wisp of hair he’d been wanting to brush aside. “Yes?”
“I mean, if you wanted to, we could, you and I . . . that is, I mean unless . . . maybe—if you’re not doing anything?”
“Are you asking me to the dance, Daniel Byers?”
Oh, man.
“Um . . . Yes.”
“Huh.”
“We could meet there, if you want?”
She looked past him toward the woods and he thought that it was definitely a bad sign, that she was going to tell him thanks, but no, thanks.
But she didn’t. Instead, she gazed back at him again through the rain. “That’d be nice.”
Yes, yes, yes!
“Really?”
“Sure. Yeah. Do you have my number?”
He shook his head. “No.”
She gave it to him. “Call me this afternoon.”
“I will.”
Then she tucked her head deeper beneath her hood and walked briskly across the parking lot toward a trail that led to the closest neighborhood, which was really just a cluster of a dozen or so homes off a dirt road that skirted the forest surrounding the lake.
Once Daniel was in the car, he called Kyle to let him know what was up with Stacy. His friend congratulated him on being brave enough to ask her.
“I knew you had it in you.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Actually, no, I didn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to say.”
“Okay.”
Kyle didn’t even bring up the topic of how weird he thought Stacy had been acting last night. “Maybe you guys can hang out with Mia and me afterward?”
“I’ll ask her when I talk to her this afternoon.”
“Cool.”
Then Daniel left for his dad’s office to give him the glasses and tell him that he thought Emily Jackson might not have died accidentally after all.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
The sheriff’s department was located next to the courthouse on Main Street.
The county didn’t have enough extra money lying around to hire a full-time officer to sit in the lobby checking the handful of visitors who entered throughout the day, so there wasn’t any security person posted at the entrance.
Instead, a part-time receptionist a couple years older than Daniel sat behind the counter. He’d met her before: Shawna. She was chewing a colossal glob of gum, busily texting someone.
She glanced absently at him as he entered, finished blowing a bubble that splattered across her chin when it popped, then said, “Here to see your dad?”
“Is he in?”
She nodded toward the hall. “Doing some paperwork.” Her attention had already shifted back to her phone, texting with one hand while salvaging as much gum as possible for another bubble with the other.
When Daniel reached the end of the hall he found the door ajar.
His dad’s office was nondescript, with a couple of chairs and a sprawling gray metal desk that’d been there as long as Daniel could remember. Papers lay strewn across it, with an intimidating pile of files waiting in the in-box. A shelf packed with policy manuals stood between the window and the locked gun case.
Gun culture in Wisconsin is different from a lot of areas in the U.S. Here, especially in this part of the state, it’s expected that you own a gun, that you hunt, that you have firearms on hand and readily available to protect your family, or, in this case, the community at large. It wasn’t a big enough department to have an extensive gun vault, so his dad stored the assortment of rifles and shotguns right there in his office.
Daniel gave the door a slight knock, entered. “Hey, Dad.”
He looked up from his work. “Dan. How’s it going?”
“Good.” He took a seat in the stiff chair facing his father’s desk.
Gesturing toward Daniel’s drenched clothes, his dad said, “Got caught in the rain, huh?”
“Yeah. Out by the lake.”
“The lake?”
“Lake Algonquin.”
He looked at Daniel curiously. “Really?”
“Yes.”
Daniel sorted through how to explain what was on his mind. “Listen, I need to talk to you.”
“Sure.”
Just tell him. See what he says.
“Actually, it’s about Emily Jackson.”
“Okay.”
“I . . . um . . . I think she might not have died by accident.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think maybe she was murdered.”
His dad put down his pen. “Murdered.”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think that?”
Daniel set the glasses on the desk.
“What are those?”
“Emily’s glasses.”
His father studied them, but refrained from picking them up. “How did you get them?”
“They were in the sand near the inlet where she was found.”
“Why did you go out there?”
“I wanted . . .” He ended up using the same word he’d used with Stacy. “Closure.”
“So you found these on the beach?”
“Yes. Near the woods.”
“Kids go out there to party all the time. What makes you think these were Emily’s?”
When his dad said were instead of are it just reminded Daniel again that Emily was gone and was not coming back, which only served to make this even harder to talk about.
“She had them on in the photos that were at the front of the church at the funeral. And I remember seeing her wearing ’em at school.”
“But they might be someone else’s who wears the same style.”
“I mean . . .” Daniel hesitated. “It’s possible, but—”
“Dan, the coroner did an autopsy Sunday night. There’s no reason to believe that Emily Jackson was murdered.”
“The glasses are broken, Dad. And I found them up the beach away from the water. If she was fighting with someone, they could have gotten knocked off. Maybe that’s how they got broken.”
“Fighting with someone.”
“Yes.”
Daniel doubted that bringing up the vision of Emily’s ghost at the funeral asking him to find the glasses was going to help his case, so he kept that to himself. “Besides, the water level hasn’t risen enough to have carried them that high up the beach.”
“How do you know that?”
“I checked the waterline. It’s too cold to go swimming. And if she fell in accidentally, how would she have had the foresight to take off her glasses beforehand and leave them there by the edge of the woods?”
His father was silent. “There are any number of reasons these glasses could be broken. They might not even be Emily’s at all, and who knows how long they were out there in the sand.”
“But if it’s even possible that they’re hers, that she didn’t die by accident, don’t you think you should look into it? Maybe search for fingerprints or DNA or something?”
He drummed his fingers against the desk twice. “Does anyone else know about these?”
“Just Stacy. She was out there with me.”
“Stacy?”
“This new girl at school. We’re going to homecoming tonight together. To the dance.”
“I didn’t know you had a date.”
“
It’s not officially a date, it’s just going to the dance.”
“Gotcha.”
“It’s sort of last-minute. I asked her this morning.”
His father thought for a moment. “Alright, listen: I’ll look into it. But I don’t want any rumors going around that Emily Jackson was murdered. Don’t bring this up to anyone. No texting. No tweeting. Nothing like that.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“And the same goes for Stacy. I don’t want her talking about this with her friends.”
Daniel was glad he’d already covered that with her. “I’ll make sure. Thanks, Dad.”
He leaned back in his chair. “So what’s your plan for the rest of the day?”
“Head home, I guess. Dry off. Grab some lunch. Probably work out. Hang out until the dance.”
“And your head, it’s feeling alright after last night?”
“Yeah, it’s good.”
“If you do work out, I don’t want you doing anything intense, not until you’ve given that head a day or two to recover.”
“I’ll be careful.”
A nod. “Well, I’m not sure when I’ll be back home. If I don’t see you before you leave for the dance, I want you back by midnight.”
“Right. No problem.”
Daniel waited for the rest—“No partying afterward. Don’t do anything stupid”—but his dad left that part unsaid. Apparently, he trusted that Daniel would know the ground rules by now.
“Okay.” His dad’s attention had gone back to the glasses, and as he spoke he seemed distracted. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Daniel left his father’s office feeling both encouraged and a little uneasy.
He was thankful his dad had agreed to follow up on all this, but just the fact that he was doing so told Daniel that there was a chance, even if it was only a slight one, that Emily’s death had not been accidental.
He tried calling Stacy to let her know how the meeting with his dad had gone and to remind her not to tell anyone about the glasses, but she didn’t pick up and it went to a generic voicemail, just telling him to leave a message. He told her to call him, and then texted her in case she wasn’t checking her messages.
Back at the house, while he was throwing some leftovers together for lunch, he got a text. Thinking it might be Stacy, he checked the phone right away, but saw it was just from one of the guys on the team, asking how his head was. He replied that he was fine.
A little later in the afternoon, while he was finishing lifting weights in the basement, his dad called and explained that he’d sent the glasses by courier to the FBI office down in Milwaukee.
It wasn’t something he was obligated in any way to share with Daniel, but putting things into play that quickly on a Saturday told him that his dad wasn’t fooling around; he really had taken Daniel’s concerns seriously.
He texted Stacy again, tried calling her. Nothing. He kept the phone close by, but an hour later, he still hadn’t heard anything from her.
Daniel thought back through their conversation at the lake and couldn’t remember if she’d specifically agreed to meet him at school tonight, or just agreed in a more general sense to go with him.
Regardless, she had told him to give her a call this afternoon. That much he remembered for sure.
At five, when he still hadn’t heard from her, he reassured himself that she must have meant that he was supposed to meet up with her at the dance.
That’s all it was.
A slight miscommunication.
Just something for them to clear up when they connected tonight at school.
As he considered things, he couldn’t shake the thought that there’d been a fight out there on the beach, a fight that had resulted in Emily’s death.
At least now the FBI was looking into the glasses.
He wanted to talk to someone about it, but he couldn’t bring it up to anyone.
Except for Stacy.
Well, he could do that when he saw her in just a couple hours.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
At seven, Stacy hadn’t returned his calls and hadn’t texted him back.
The dance started at eight.
She’d told him she lived near the lake but hadn’t said exactly where—although it had to be within walking distance, and it was most likely in that neighborhood near the lakeshore.
However, he didn’t know what car she drove, so it wasn’t like he could just cruise the roads in the area looking for her car parked in front of a house or anything.
He and Kyle had poked around online to see if they could find out more about her, but had come up dry. So there wasn’t an address he could work from.
Daniel felt like if he left any more messages for her, it would have made him seem desperate. And driving around looking for her house would have definitely come across as stalkerish.
In the end, he couldn’t think of any way to get in touch with her, and when he called Kyle to tell him what was going on, his friend told him he should just show up at the dance and look for her there.
“Since you didn’t get a chance to talk to her this afternoon, she’s gonna assume you’ll meet her at school. I mean, since it came up in your conversation anyway, right? Make sense?”
“Unless I got the wrong number and now she thinks I changed my mind and don’t want to take her after all.”
“Did the texts go through?”
“My phone said they did.”
“Then maybe she changed her mind and is just ignoring you.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. Well, there’s only one way to find out what’s going on.”
“Show up at the dance.”
“Mia and I will meet you guys there.”
Daniel wanted to tell him about the trip to the lake and the glasses, and about how the FBI was even going to be involved, but knowing how important confidentiality with all this was to his dad, he said nothing.
Ty Bell and his buddies were loitering outside the school when Daniel arrived.
Smoking wasn’t permitted on school property, but they were being discreet about it and taking puffs only when no teachers or chaperones were passing by. From the smell of it, at least one of them was smoking something other than just a cigarette.
They leered at Daniel as he entered but said nothing. However, Ty dropped his cigarette butt to the ground and roughly stomped the life out of it with his heel.
There were two dances at Beldon High every year—homecoming in the fall and prom in the spring. In contrast to how formal prom was, homecoming was a lot more a come-as-you-are deal. A few people always dressed up, but most of the students didn’t bother.
The theme this year was “Under the Stars,” and the glee club had all these sparkling aluminum foil stars hanging from the ceiling throughout the school entrance and in the cafeteria, which was open in case students wanted to hang out there instead of dancing in the adjoining gymnasium.
Daniel found Kyle and Mia near the cafeteria’s doorway to the gym.
Mia was a slender, pale girl with straight black hair and a pierced lip and studded tongue. Under her jeans jacket, she wore a retro cutoff T-shirt that revealed her slim midriff and her pierced navel. Not typical fare for an autumn dance, maybe, but not unusual at all for Mia.
She had one arm tucked around Kyle’s waist. “What’s up, Daniel?”
“Mia, good to see you. How’s the book coming along?”
“Smokin’.”
Daniel had never met anyone who was trying to write a novel before, let alone someone his age who was doing it, but Mia was nearly as gifted at English as Kyle was, and that’s probably one of the things that attracted them to each other.
Her book was going to be a ghost story, which, given everything that was going on this week, Daniel found i
ronically appropriate.
When Mia saw how some of the girls were glancing toward Daniel, she said, “Lots of moths here tonight.”
He looked at her curiously. “Moths?”
“Yeah. And you’re the flame, Señor Quarterback.”
“Ah.”
“So where’s this Stacy girl?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll introduce you as soon as I track her down.”
Daniel wasn’t sure where to start looking for Stacy, but she wasn’t outside or in the cafeteria, so he figured she had to be in the gym.
Even though they’d lost the homecoming game last night, it didn’t seem to have dampened the mood of the dance too much.
Balloons and homecoming banners hung throughout the gymnasium. Last spring some kids had spiked the punch at prom, so even though there’d been talk about not having any at the dance tonight, a table had been set up near the bleachers and a clutch of chaperones and teachers stood close by to keep an eye on things.
Daniel had the sense that the people who would be into spiking the punch would just see it as more of a challenge with all the adults around and would still find a way to get booze into the bowls.
Coach Jostens was stationed with a few teachers by the table, scanning the crowd of students as if he were looking for someone. He acknowledged Daniel with a small gesture and Daniel replied in kind. Miss Flynn and Mr. McKinney stood talking with each other near some parent chaperones.
Mr. Ackerman, the photographer who’d been at the game, had a place set up in the corner to take the pictures of kids who wanted them professionally done. There was no line.
A few people, those who actually knew how to dance, were on the floor, but most of the girls were clumped up together along one wall. The guys had set themselves up along another.
Things would loosen up. They always did.
Daniel had no idea how dances used to go before cell phones, but lots of kids were texting and checking their messages to make it look like they were engaged with something, when they were actually either not into dancing, didn’t have anyone to dance with, or were too anxious to ask anyone onto the dance floor.
Sports were huge at Beldon High and nearly everyone recognized their local football star, Daniel Byers. Guys greeted him or stepped out of his way; the moths fluttered and flirted, especially when they saw he wasn’t with a girl. He tried his best to politely ignore them.