“Okay, well, Stephanie’s coming at ten, so be sure to be dressed and ready for her when she gets here.”
So far we have two suspects, Ben and Mac, written down in Hannah’s notebook and nothing else. We haven’t even found out one thing on the TO FIND OUT list. That’s not going to be enough to bring Mama home in time before the fireworks. I need to do better investigating.
I guess I could start right now.
“Uncle Donny?” I ask, making the crumbs from my Pop-Tart into a happy face.
“Yes?”
“Do you know a special friend of Mama’s named Ben?”
Uncle Donny’s eyebrows go up. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” he says. So that means yes. “Where did you hear about Ben?”
Teddy doesn’t think I should say where it was, so I just shrug. “Was Ben nice or was he scary?”
Uncle Donny looks at me for a minute. “Well, he wasn’t scary. Did somebody tell you he was?”
“Was he more nice or less nice than Mac?”
“Boy, hard to choose,” says Uncle Donny, rubbing his eyes. It does not sound like he thinks it’s hard to choose. “I’d have to say he was nicer than Mac. But a bear with a sore head is nicer than Mac.”
This is called interrogating a witness.
I want to ask where Ben is now, but Uncle Donny stands up and puts his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t want you to worry about old troubles, Aoife,” he says. “It’s a beautiful summer day, and time is fleeting. How about you go upstairs and take that shower, huh?”
I wish there was a way to explain to Uncle Donny that it may be the old troubles that are keeping Mama from being here and enjoying the day, too.
I’m not supposed to take a shower by myself, but Uncle Donny sits on the toilet seat while I splash around. I’m barely finished getting dried off and dressed when the doorbell rings. I hear Uncle Donny open the door and hurry to get dressed.
“Stephanie, thanks for coming,” says Uncle Donny. “Come on inside. We’ve got, uh, Pop-Tarts.”
I come downstairs and Uncle Donny looks me over. I did my hair all on my own, but it still isn’t staying in the ponytail, and we haven’t done laundry, so I’m out of clean shorts. “Well, I think you look good enough for God, anyway,” he says. “Okay, Stephanie, time to hit the road, huh?”
Stephanie didn’t bring her bike today, so we walk together with Teddy dragging his feet behind us, and she has to slow down so we can keep up. I’m impressed because she can walk while she’s looking at her phone, and she never trips over anything and she doesn’t get lost.
“Where’s your mom been lately?” asks Stephanie, as we walk.
“She is working very hard right now,” I say politely, which is maybe or maybe not a lie.
“At least your uncle seems cool.”
I nod, because he is cool, although I wish he wouldn’t always wake me up in the middle of the night. I think about Mama, being sad and extra confused and not even able to call us on the telephone. I know I need to help. So I take a deep breath and do a brave thing. “Can I ask you a question, Stephanie?”
She glances over. “Maybe,” she says.
I am thinking about Hannah’s notebook. “You know my brother’s friend that you talked about yesterday?”
“I told you to get over that stuff,” she says.
“I know, but I just have a question about his friend. I just want to know his name. I promise I won’t ask anything else. Please.”
She is quiet for long enough that I think she’s not going to answer.
“Please?” I say. “I promise I will keep it a secret.”
“Edward,” she says at last. She looks so sad. “His name was Edward.”
Edward.
A horn honks. We’re standing in front of the church, and when I look up I realize there’s a familiar truck parked outside—a rusted red pickup with a flag painted on the back.
“Hey, Alfie. You’re late!” says Mac, rolling down the windows as we walk up. “I’d almost given up on you … Were you just going to keep God waiting?”
Mac gets out of his truck and closes the door. I remember Hannah saying we would know he was the murderer because he would come and try to kill me. I take a giant step backwards, closer to Stephanie.
“Hey there, Stephanie,” he says, nodding to her. They’ve met a few times before. “Listen, I need to talk to Aoife for a little bit. Is that okay?”
My heart is pounding. I want to tell her not to go, but it doesn’t come out. Stephanie checks her watch and looks up at church, like she’s not a hundred percent sure what to do.
“Go on ahead, I’ll take care of her,” says Mac, waving her off.
I always thought Stephanie was so grown up. But when Stephanie nods and turns towards the stairs, I think she might have just been pretending all this time. Because she does what the real grown-ups say, just like me.
“So listen, kid, I’m thinking we need to catch up,” says Mac, when she’s gone. “C’mon, you don’t want to go hang out with a bunch of stuffed shirts, do ya?”
I don’t know, but I shake my head. “I’m supposed to go to Bible study,” I say.
I don’t want to get broken into a billion little pieces. But I also told Hannah I would try to find out Mac’s last name so she can look him up on the Internet, and this might be my big chance. I remember the bells ringing in the church, and promising to take up the mantle. Joan of Arc would definitely want to interview Mac about my brother.
Teddy is playing mother-may-I on the church steps, ignoring both of us, so he’s no help.
“I bet God will understand,” Mac says.
“That’s exactly what Uncle Donny says!” If Mac was the kind of guy who murdered kids, I bet he wouldn’t talk just like Uncle Donny, right?
Mac laughs shortly. “I bet he does. So whattaya say, you ready to blow this popsicle stand?”
He doesn’t seem like he’s trying to kill me. It’s scary, but I take a deep breath and climb up into the front seat of the truck, because Mac doesn’t have a proper car seat either. And Teddy climbs up right behind me. “Where are we going?” I ask.
“It’s a surprise,” says Mac. “You like surprises, don’t you, Alfie?”
“I think I do,” I say.
Mac drives faster than Mama. He turns on the radio and sings along to the songs, and it sounds good even though I don’t know any of the music. It’s not Taylor Swift like Hannah likes to listen to. It’s a man with a low, hissing voice.
I wonder if Mac drove my brother Theo away in this truck before he killed him. Maybe Theo was sitting right where I am now.
Blessed Joan, please don’t let Mac be the suspect. But if he is, at least let Mama still come home.
We get on the highway and the truck starts to shake.
“She doesn’t take well to these high speeds,” says Mac, taking a cigarette out of his pack. Mama doesn’t let him smoke inside, but I guess a car isn’t really inside.
While he’s driving, Mac lights the cigarette with a silver lighter, kind of like the one Hannah stole from her grandmother, but fancier. This time I’m watching more closely, and I see that he pushes down on a little lever to make the fire come out. For a minute I forget to be scared.
“Aren’t you afraid it will burn you?” I ask.
“Your buddy Mac has been lighting cigarettes for a long time,” he says. He puts the lighter down into the space between the seats, and I can see there’s a picture of a bird on it, and there are letters underneath: U-S-M-C. Is that for his name?
Well, I am supposed to be interviewing the suspect. I take a deep breath. “Mac, are these your initials?” I show him the letters on the lighter so he knows what I’m talking about.
Mac glances over but then looks back at the road. “Put that down,” he says. So I do. He clears his throat. “That’s nobody’s name. It’s for the Marine Corps. You know what a veteran is?”
“It’s a doctor for animals.”
Mac frowns. “A
veteran is someone who served his country in the military,” he says.
This is not what I wanted to talk about. “Is Mac your whole name?” I ask. “Like, is it your first name or your last name?”
He glances over again. “You don’t know that?”
I shake my head no.
“John MacMillian Corey, at your service. Mac to my friends.”
I can just imagine Hannah writing that down in her notebook, and I know I made the right choice to get into the truck with Mac, even if he might be a murderer.
He clears his throat. “We’ve always been good buddies, right kiddo?”
Teddy shrugs when I look over at him. “I think so?”
Mac takes an exit off the highway and swings between the lanes to make a turn. “We have, right from the start. So that’s why I thought I could ask you the straight story about your mother. You know me and her are good friends, right?”
“You’re special friends,” I agree.
“Right. So, I tried to ask your uncle Donny about her, but I’m thinking the person I really need to talk to is you. Do you know where she is?”
I’m excited to know something Mac doesn’t know. “Mama went to the hospital,” I say. “She’s confused, but they’re going to explain things to her so she can come home.”
Mac is quiet for a while after that, smoking his cigarette. He holds it out the window when he’s not breathing it in, so it doesn’t smell too bad. The stink of smoke and old leather seats are what I always think of as Mac smells, even when he hasn’t been around in a while.
“What happened?” he asks me. “Can you tell me?”
I play with my hands for a minute, thinking. “Well…” Here is the church. “We went to the mall,” I say. Here is the steeple. “Mama was driving the car.” Open it up, and see all the people. I lift my hands, wiggling my fingers up so that Mac can see the people, too.
“Go on,” says Mac.
So I tell him the whole story, and this time I don’t get nearly as upset as when I told it to Uncle Donny. I think I’ve told it enough times now that it’s just a thing that happened—plus now I know that if I solve the mystery, Mama can come home again. But I don’t tell him that. I know how to keep a secret, just like a grown-up. Mac doesn’t say anything when I’m done.
“And I opened the phone!” I add, proud. “I opened it all by myself because Dr. Pearlman didn’t know the password.”
Mac flicks on his blinky signal and pulls off into an empty parking lot. There’s nobody around, and the cement is all broken up with weeds. It’s very quiet. If I was going to murder someone, I would think this is the kind of place I’d do it.
“That must have been … real scary,” says Mac, slowly.
I nod my head.
Mac hits the steering wheel with both hands and says a really bad word.
My heart knocks against the inside of my chest, and it hurts. My hands are shaking. They don’t stop, even when I fold them together in my lap like I’m praying.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was talking out loud to Teddy, and it made her upset.” Teddy comes to crawl into my lap. He’s scared too, but at least we’re together.
“It’s not that,” says Mac.
But I’m still sorry.
“You said she got a phone call?” asks Mac. “Do you know who was calling her?”
That doesn’t seem like what a murderer would say right before he murders someone, right? I take a breath. “What phone call?”
“You said right before she flipped—before she started yelling—you said she got a phone call.”
I guess it’s true that she was on the phone when she came out to the van to drive me to the mall. “I don’t know who it was,” I say, which is true. “I just know she didn’t want to talk to them.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I heard her say she had to go, but she didn’t really.” We could have waited longer to go get shoes.
Mac clears his throat. “So with your mom … gone, for now, I guess it’s just you and your uncle, huh?”
And Teddy. I nod.
“And what the hell would have happened to you if your uncle hadn’t been around, huh?”
“Hannah says they take away kids and put them in Children’s Prison,” I say.
“Ex-act-ly,” says Mac. “Children’s prison, just so. It’s not a good state of affairs, Alf. Didn’t anyone in the hospital ask about your daddy?”
“They did, and I said I was found under a cabbage patch,” I explain. “Because that’s what Mama always says.”
Mac groans. “You’re lucky you didn’t end up in the madhouse, saying that,” he says. “Look, kiddo, everybody has a father, okay? You, your mom, even the baby Jesus had a father. That’s just the way it is. Even I have a father, the sonofabitch.”
I do not know what that means, sunnufabish, but it doesn’t sound good.
“Does Theo have a father?” I ask.
Mac frowns. “Who’s talking about Theo? I’m talking about you, Aoife.”
But I’m talking about Theo.
“Listen, Aoife, I didn’t bring you here to explain the facts of life,” says Mac. “I came to talk to you about something, uh, really serious.”
That sounds just like what Mama said before she started talking to Theo. Aoife, I want to talk to you about something important. But she never told me what it was.
“Okay?”
Mac starts up the truck again and pulls out onto the road. “Now I have made … I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I know that. To be honest, Alf, lots of times your mom hasn’t been able to count on me when it really mattered. I know I’ve been kind of in and out of your life. That’s what I’m trying to talk to you about.”
It’s true that there were long times where we never saw Uncle Mac at all. Mama had other special friends, like Uncle Alex and Uncle Tim, who I don’t remember so good except that he smelled like popcorn butter. But they weren’t full-time real uncles like Uncle Donny, and they went away. And then Mac would come back and be Mama’s special friend again.
“I know she blames me for bailing on you guys when you were born, and—plenty of other things, too,” says Mac. “But I want to do better this time. Okay, kiddo?”
He’s looking at me like he’s saying something really important. But I don’t understand what it is. I still want to know where we’re going and what the surprise is.
“Aoife, I’m trying to explain to you … crap, I’m no good at this.” Mac puts out his cigarette in the ashtray in the middle of the car. He rubs his eyes. “This is harder than I thought. Your mom didn’t want to tell you this because she didn’t want to confuse you. And, ah, because I obviously haven’t been, uh, what you deserve. But you weren’t found in a cabbage patch, okay, Alf? You got an old man looking out for you.”
Teddy has fallen asleep and is snoring away in the back seat. “Do you mean God?” I ask. Because I knew that already. God is an old man, just like Santa Claus. And he watches out for us.
“Wha—no, Aoife, I’m talking about me, Mac. I’m saying I’m your father.”
That doesn’t really make any sense. “Like … like Father Paul is?”
“No! Not like Father Paul. Like your mom, only a dad.”
I don’t really know what to say. Theo and I never had a father before, and we’ve had Mac pretty much all along, so I’m not sure what this means.
“Oh. Okay,” I say, nodding.
“Just—okay? That’s all you’ve got to say?”
I don’t have anything else to say. I’m just hoping that Ben, 1998 will turn into what Hannah would call our top suspect. Because I don’t want my father to be the murderer.
“We’re here,” says Mac, gruffly.
I look up and realize we’re at the zoo. “I love the zoo!” I say, wiggling in my seat. I love surprises! “I wanna see the tigers, and the giraffes, and the bears!”
“C’mon, then,” he says, opening the car door. “We’d better hurry, if we’re going to se
e all of that.”
“The polar bears and the grizzled bears!” I say. “Mac, Teddy wants to see all the bears.”
“Yeah, yeah, we won’t miss a single bear,” says Mac, taking my hand as we walk across the parking lot. “Just don’t wander off in there, okay? I don’t want to find out you got eaten by an African wild dog.”
“I don’t wander off,” I say, wrinkling my nose—doesn’t Mac know that I’m a big girl now and I always behave?
“That’s right. You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Alfie. That’s why your uncle Mac—that’s why your … ol’ buddy Mac—is going to take you to the zoo, as a reward for being so good.”
We wait in line with the rest of the kids, a lot of whom are from the city and don’t know how to act. Mac and I comport ourselves with dignity, as Mama would say, and wait patiently until we get up to the man in the box. Mac buys us tickets and complains about how expensive they are. He’s on a budget, just like Mama and I are, not like Uncle Donny. Then we go in through what Mac calls the turnstile and we’re in the zoo! Teddy is dancing around and around because he loves, loves, loves the zoo, too.
“Look, they got seal lions!” I say, forgetting for a second to comport myself with dignity and yelling. “Can we see the seal lions, Mac? And then the bears?”
“Sure, we paid good money enough. We oughta see every flea-ridden animal in the joint,” says Mac. But he doesn’t sound mad for real, and he takes my hand as we go over to the animal house.
I know I can’t remember my whole life, but I’m pretty sure this afternoon is the happiest I’ve ever been in forever. We go see all the animals, and Mac buys us Dippin’ Dots, and then we get a hot dog each with just ketchup, no relish, no mustard. And we eat it the same way, with extra ketchup, because we both like ketchup.
Teddy has the best time ever, too, because he gets to see all his family of bears in the zoo. They look kind of fiercer than Teddy does, and they don’t wave back when I wave to them, not even when Teddy says hi, but sometimes bears are like that.
And Mac buys us snow cones, because it’s soo hot. And we both get cherry, which is my favorite. Murderers don’t take people to the zoo and buy them snow cones, do they?
All That's Bright and Gone (ARC) Page 10