Jasper Lilla and The Wolves of Banner Elk

by C. S. Thompson

  “That’s amazing, Jasper.” She looked at me like I looked different to her. “You could find the cure for cancer.”

  Riley was real excited that I might be able to do something like that, and for the first time, I got excited too. Wally had been real excited when he read my test results, and Mom and Carol had been excited at dinner when he told them all about it. But to me it was scary. What if I can’t do it? Or worse, what if I do something and it makes people worse? No one had ever expected anything from me before, and then all of a sudden I’m supposed to cure cancer.

  Looking at Riley looking at me right then made me forget how scary it was. There was a chance I could do it. And it would be incredible if I could do it. I was finally enjoying the thought that I could do something special, and then she said something that took me to another scary place.

  “My father would do anything to find a cure for cancer.”

  I looked at her innocent face, and all I could think was, There are people who think he’d do anything, including murder Dr. Dietrich, to bury a cure for cancer. I hadn’t thought about Dr. Dietrich’s death for a while, and I really didn’t want to think about it with Riley looking at me, but I couldn’t help it.

  I tried to make the thought go away, but that didn’t work. It was like the way you look at an accident as you drive by. You know you don’t want that picture in your head, but you can’t keep yourself from looking.

  Pulling my phone from my back pocket, I quickly tapped on it and said, “A text from my sister.”

  “What’s up?” asked Riley.

  “She wants to know if I fed Kitty this morning,” I lied. There was no text from Carol.

  While I pretended to tap out my reply, Riley looked at her watch and said, “Oh my, I’m late.”

  “For a very important date,” I added, hoping she’d enjoy the literary reference.

  “The White Rabbit,” she grinned, pointing at me as she stood.

  “What are you late for?”

  “I got a job over at Mountain Grounds Coffee and Tea Company in Banner Elk. It’s just Saturdays.” She hooked her backpack over her shoulder. “Today’s my first day. Come see me later if you’re not doing anything.”

  “I might just do that.” I was definitely doing that.

  * * *

  Consumed with the wolves, I hadn’t thought about Dr. Dietrich’s death since school started, but as soon as she left I thought about it again.

  Thirty-Nine

  The Security Office

  On Monday, Leona only had five blue slips for me. The last one was to go back to the small lab. The note said, “Sniff.”

  Standing in front of Leona’s desk I held the “Sniff” note out in front of her.

  She looked at it with one eyebrow raised, then smiled without looking at me.

  “Sniff,” I said. “That’s my errand?”

  “Dr. Beery said he wanted you to smell some samples.” She shrugged. “You must have the magic nose.”

  The next-to-last blue slip was for security, but there were no instructions. Blue slips usually directed me to pick something up at an office or pick something up for an office. Mostly I picked something up in one place and took it to another.

  I held that note out to Leona next.

  “Mr. Cormac said he wanted to help you settle into your new spot,” Leona told me after she glanced at the blank note. She looked up at me. “He was being nice.”

  I looked closer at her, expecting the same tone as when she was poking me about my magic nose. She was serious. Aiden Cormac was being nice. That was an idea I had never considered. He was weird.

  * * *

  Aiden Cormac wasn’t in the security office when I got there. No one was there. I took the opportunity to look around, despite the I’m-not-supposed-to-be-here feeling in my stomach. I kept expecting one of them to show up and say, “What are you doing here?” I knew the blue slip in my hand would be my answer if such a question came, but that was no comfort to my stomach.

  Their office was huge. It was laid out with long tables, on top of which was electronic surveillance equipment. The tables were placed in a mazelike manner so that when anyone entered they had to walk from the door in the right corner to the wall in the left corner. That’s what I did. It’s as far in their office as I’d ever been. I stopped and listened for some sign of life. Hearing none, I called, “Anyone here?”

  No one answered. I went a little farther into the next aisle. That aisle led me all the way back to the right wall. I peeked around that corner to find a large space set up like a hotel lobby. There were three huge, overstuffed couches and another three huge, overstuffed chairs. They were set up in a circle, with each chair placed to the right of a couch that it matched. The three matching couch-and-chair sets did not match each other. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were three desks sitting side by side against the left wall. The desk farthest to the right had a pile of jackets on it. The other two desks didn’t look used at all.

  I don’t usually notice how a room is decorated. I’m more of a that’s-cool or that-looks-comfortable kind of guy, but I looked at the furniture and thought, Someone walked into the furniture store and bought the first three sets they saw. I looked around some more. There was no art on the walls, no pictures of family on the desks, nothing I’d have expected.

  I crossed the room and plopped down in the middle of the couch facing the front of the room. The couch smelled salty.

  “Jazz-barr,” said Aiden Cormac from behind me.

  I jumped up and spun around, holding my chest. I had chosen that particular couch so that I wouldn’t be startled when they came in. So much for that plan. There wasn’t a door at the back of that room. I’d have seen a door. It was an opening around a corner. From the angle I had surveyed the room, I hadn’t seen the opening. I was seeing it now.

  I watched as Aiden, followed by Duncan Maddox and Quinn Weylin, strolled in wearing blue jeans, dress shoes, and golf shirts buttoned all the way up. The smell of Axe, which was faint in the room before they entered, was still missing. Their hair was wet, and they smelled of chlorine.

  “Swimming,” I announced.

  Aiden Cormac tapped the side of his head near his right eye. “You are observant, Jazz-barr. I see this the first time I meet you. This is goot.” To the others he added, “He will make good security man, yes?”

  Duncan Maddox took a second to respond. “Of course,” he said and sat down in one of the chairs.

  Quinn Weylin took longer to respond. He walked over so close to me that I had to look up at him. Weylin was not as tall as Aiden Cormac, but was the next-tallest of the group. “He’s too short,” he observed. “We give him small jobs.” He clapped his hands on either side of my shoulders and laughed. “I make joke.”

  Mr. Cormac snorted a laugh. “Do you hear that, Gavin? Quinn says Jazz-barr should get the small jobs. Do we have any small jobs for Jazz-barr?”

  “Goot with computers, are you, Jazz-barr?” asked Quinn.

  “Of course,” answered Gavin for me. “Right, Jazz-barr?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. I was a little dizzy. Until that very moment I had never heard any of them speak except for Aiden Cormac and once with Graham Crocker. They were being friendly. They were joking. I was so thrown by the whole inconceivable scene that I would have agreed to almost anything.

  “Sit,” ordered Mr. Cormac.

  I sat back down where I was. The one they called Malcolm sat next to me.

  Mr. Cormac stood outside the circle, leaning on the back of the chair facing the couch where Gavin and I sat. “You are one of us now, Jazz-barr.” He spread his arms out. “This is our circle. You can see we are relaxed here.”

  I nodded.

  “What you see here,” he continued, “and what you hear here goes no further. Understand?”

  Immediately I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “In here you can call me ‘Aiden,’” he informed me.


  “Aiden,” I struggled to say. It did not feel natural, but it didn’t seem like I had a choice.

  “I am Duncan,” said Duncan Maddox.

  “Duncan,” I repeated a little more naturally.

  “Quinn,” said Quinn Weylin as he slapped me on the thigh.

  “Quinn,” I said. This time I spoke more boldly, which made Duncan laugh and slap my thigh again. It was a little painful to be his friend, but I was starting to enjoy myself.

  “What do we have here?” asked Gavin Lee. He and Malcolm Fergus had just entered through the front door. They were dressed the way I had always seen them dressed, in tight, European-cut suits and white shirts buttoned to the top. The smell of Axe was back, too.

  “This is the third time you dogs went to swim without us,” complained Gavin Lee.

  “We call him ‘Gavin,’” Quinn told me.

  Gavin looked at me and sniffed. He was a touch shorter than Duncan but was the stockiest of the group.

  “And we call him ‘Malcolm,’” said Quinn.

  Malcolm nodded at me, and then, turning to Aiden, he began, “We caught. . . .” Malcolm hesitated and glanced back at me. “We caught him heading into the forest again.”

  I could feel the room go serious. I didn’t know who “him” was, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to know who “him” was, either. Whoever “him” was, he was very important to Aiden and the rest of the circle. Speaking of the circle, I was also pretty sure I wasn’t really in it.

  Forty

  The Next Week

  For the rest of that week, my routine was to run the blue-slip errands, go to the small lab, and if there was any time left I’d finish up in the security office. At the lab I’d smell one test tube and then three jars to see if what was in one of the jars fit with what was in the test tube. So far nothing matched. It was the same foul-smelling purplish liquid in the test tube each day. Wally hadn’t told me what he was looking for, and I hadn’t asked. All I knew was that he would only expose me to a few things at a time, so as not to overwhelm me. I was hoping we’d move on from this test tube to one that smelled better.

  When I went back to the security office on Tuesday, Gavin Lee and Duncan Maddox were the only ones there. They had suits on, so the atmosphere was back to normal: weird. Gavin was sitting in front of a television monitor watching something in the warehouse. Duncan was sitting in front of a laptop computer, which he closed when I approached.

  “Good day, Jazz-barr,” said Duncan.

  I nodded at him and said, “Good day. Do you have anything for me to do?”

  “Not today,” he said. “You come relax now. You come back tomorrow.”

  That is what I did for the last half hour of my shift. I relaxed—or “lounged” is a better word for it, because I don’t think relaxing in the midst of all those weirdos is possible. I lounged on their couch until it was time to go home. Had Leona had anything else for me to do, she’d have called me there.

  Friday was the next time I made it to the security office. On Tuesday I made a run to Office Depot, and on Wednesday I had a pickup at the post office. No one was there when I got there on Friday. The laptop Duncan Maddox had hidden when I came in on Tuesday was in the same spot, and this time it was open. It wasn’t turned on, but it was open.

  I stared at the blank screen, but I kept my distance. I wanted to turn it on. I took a deep breath through my nose. The smell of Axe was faint and without chlorine, which I took to mean I was alone. “Anyone here?” I called out.

  No one answered. I looked at the lounge area, reassuring myself that I was truly alone, then I stepped up to the computer and turned it on. While I waited for it to come on I had second thoughts. That’s when it dawned on me that since there were cameras everywhere there might be one on me right then. A surge of fear passed over me. When the screen finally lit up revealing the name of its owner and a prompt for a password I forgot all about my fear. I took one look at the screen and shut it as quickly as I could.

  I didn’t know how they got it or what they were doing with it, but that computer belonged to Franz Dietrich.

  * * *

  “You have to bring it to me,” said Wally when I told him I had found Dr. Dietrich’s laptop. “I’ve looked all over this place for that computer.”

  “I can’t just take it,” I told him. “They’d know it was missing, and they’d know it was me. Besides, it wouldn’t do you any good. It’s password protected.”

  Wally’s face lit up. “But I’ve got something they don’t have.” Chuckling like an annoying Santa Claus, he added, “You.”

  “Me? What am I supposed to do?”

  “Not just you, Jasper, all of us. If Franz Dietrich is like most of us, then he probably used something meaningful to him as his password. And we know him,” explained Wally. “At least you, your mom, and Carol knew him.”

  Figuring out Dr. Dietrich’s password wasn’t my concern. If that was all there was to it, we could just ask Mrs. Dietrich or Arlene, her daughter. But someone was going to have to type that password in under Aiden Cormac’s nose. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of getting caught messing around in that office.

  * * *

  Our last conversation about it was Sunday evening after Aunt Maggie had finished cleaning up. Mom was on her way to a book festival in Maine, so it was just Wally, Carol, and me. There was half an apple pie, which Carol cut into thirds and was nuking them in the microwave. I got out the vanilla ice cream, but Wally had scoop duty because Carol said I made the scoops too big.

  “Wally doesn’t expect you to steal it,” Carol said as she put the last slice on the table in front of Wally.

  “No,” I agreed. “He just wants me to cake the brode.”

  Wally looked at me like I had just made him eat asparagus.

  “He means, ‘Break the code,’” translated Carol. She was standing behind me, facing Wally.

  “I hope we break it,” said Wally, shoving a bowl across the table to me.

  I slid my bowl back across the table.

  “He wants his to swim in melted ice cream,” Carol told him.

  “We’re going to help you,” said Wally as he piled more ice cream onto my pie. After he put dinky scoops on his and Carol’s, he put the cover on the ice cream container and Carol put it back in the freezer.

  I must have been eating too slow or something because Wally asked, “What’s the matter, Jasper?”

  “‘What’s the matter?’” I repeated. It was a stupid question. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I’m stuck in the middle of the weirdest guys in the universe. Maybe it’s that they have a laptop that belongs to someone we know who might have been murdered. What are they doing with it anyway? Did you think of that? And what if Mom’s right? What if Dr. Dietrich was murdered? What if they did it?” All of that came streaming out of me so fast I didn’t realize that I had stood up while I was talking. I didn’t realize I was thinking about Dr. Dietrich’s death until I said it, either. I dropped back on my chair.

  “It’s okay to be afraid,” said Carol.

  I started to say, “I’m not afraid,” but there was no way I could say it without sounding stupid.

  Wally said, “I don’t know what those security guys are doing with Dietrich’s computer, but I’m hoping that his research data is still on it. It’s nowhere to be found, and that’s strange. It’s strange that his computer disappeared after his death.”

  “Could there really be something on that computer worth killing him over?” asked Carol.

  “Maybe,” answered Wally. He shook his head. “I can’t picture anyone so shallow that they’d thwart a cure for cancer, much less kill someone over it.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” observed Carol.

  “Yes, but a cure would be worth a lot of money, too.” He looked back at me. “All this is just speculation. Dr. Dietrich is dead, but we don’t have any proof that he was murdered, and if he was murdered we don’t know why. What we do know is that if—and I mean i
f—he was murdered, then it couldn’t have been the security guys who did it.”

  That perked me up.

  “They weren’t at Lion Pharmaceuticals when it happened.”

  Forty-One

  Back to Work

  Monday was a normal day, but I felt anything but normal. I had a list of pet names, birthdates, and favorite things to try as Dr. Dietrich’s password. Trying to get the password didn’t bother me at all. It was getting caught by Aiden or one of his guys that hung over me all day like a giant croquet mallet. Carol told me to just pretend I was trying to get online to check a homework assignment. Sunday I thought that was a good plan. But since I wasn’t going there on Sunday there was no chance I could get caught Sunday either.

  Leona had a normal-size handful of blue slips for me, so it wasn’t until 5:30 that I got back to the security office. It was empty when I got there, but I could tell by the Axe smell that they hadn’t been gone long.

  “Anyone here?” I yelled.

  No one answered.

  The laptop wasn’t where it had been the week before. It had been on a work table that lined the entrance to the office. Now it was on the first empty desk in the big open area at the back. I found it pretty easily, but that’s as far as I got. I stood over it, staring at it, until I heard a noise.

  It was just the phone ringing, but before I realized that it was only the phone, I had thrown myself over the back of a couch. I relaxed a little bit, but not much, when I listened more closely. The phone only rang twice. When it stopped I decided to add to my clever lie-on-the-couch ploy by pretending to read The Hobbit, which would have really impressed anyone who came in because I was reading it the hard way: upside down.

  Six o’clock came, and I hadn’t opened the laptop once.

  * * *

  Tuesday was an equally routine day. I got to the security office at about 5:40. Malcolm Fergus was the only one there.

  “Greetings, Jazz-barr, you have the office to yourself today. We’re off to the warehouse for a drill.” He patted me on the shoulder, laughed three times, and left.