by Vicki Grant
Lovely manners. It’s like that old proverb, I guess. You can give a man teeth but you can’t make him talk nice.
He stood there scratching and going, “Uh-huh... uh-huh...Large or medium? Okay. I’ll be ready. Don’t be late. People complain if it’s cold. And I don’t want complaints. Understood? And another thing. Hear from her yet? Did you leave that flyer at her place like I told you to?...Okay, okay. I’ll have to figure out another way to get to her. Maybe we should offer a low-fat special...Yeah? What now?...I told you! I got your money! It’ll be here!”
He swore and slammed the phone down.
I didn’t know what was going on. Was Chuck running a pizza parlor out of here or something? Sounded like he was taking an order. That would explain the boxes, at least.
This was getting weirder and weirder. On top of everything else, was Chuck the genius behind Railroader’s choo-choo-chewy crust? Was there nothing this man couldn’t do?
He left the room. I started breathing again. I figured he wouldn’t be back for a while. If Chuck was making pizza, he was going to have to get cracking. Other than the boxes, it didn’t look to me like he had anything ready.
I expected him to head into the kitchen, but he didn’t. He went back into the living room and sat down out of sight again.
A good ten minutes must have passed. I heard a couple of squeaks and a few bodily noises (if you know what I mean), but that’s all. He might have been cutting the cheese, but it wasn’t mozzarella.
There was a knock.
Chuck got up, opened the door, and I knew right away it was a Railroader’s Pizza delivery. I recognized the smell. (I consider myself a bit of an expert. I was pretty sure I even knew what kind of pizza it was: all-dressed with anchovies. I’d smelled it plenty of times before. It was Biff‘s favorite. It was the one he always got when he didn’t feel like cooking. Personally, I hated it. I could never manage to pick all the anchovies off. There were always a couple I missed, lurking under the pepperoni, just waiting for the right moment to ambush my poor unsuspecting taste buds.)
Chuck mumbled something to the guy at the door, then walked back into the living room. I figured he was getting his wallet or something. I was sort of surprised when he bent down and opened one of the clean pizza boxes he had stacked all over the place.
I was even more surprised to see that he’d put on big yellow oven mitts to do it. What did he need oven mitts for? The boxes couldn’t have been hot. Neither could the pizza. I couldn’t remember the last time we ordered take-out pizza and it was still warm by the time it got to our place.
Chuck’s back was to me, so I couldn’t see exactly what he was up to. I heard the shush of delicious crispy dough against fresh cardboard. It seemed weird, but I was pretty sure he’d just slid the pizza into the new box. He dropped the old box on the floor. It popped open, empty.
Chuck went back to the door and started ragging away at the delivery guy. “No! Not like that! Watch it! Watch where you put your hands! Careful with the box!” The guy must have wanted to pound Chuck. I mean, it was just a pizza! Chuck was acting like Picasso himself had whipped it up or something.
Chuck gave the guy one last dig, then slammed the door and clicked all the locks shut.
What was going on? Why did he give the pizza back to the guy? Why did he put it in a clean box? Chuck sure wasn’t what you’d call, like, fastidious or anything.
No kidding.
He walked into the room and stopped right beside the bed. Believe me, those were not the toenails of a fastidious person. I’ve seen groundhogs with cleaner toenails.
I heard him stretch. He yawned. He fiddled around with something for a second. Then his shirt landed on the floor. There was a grunt and a zzzzzip, he gave a little wiggle and his pants slid down his legs. He stepped out of them.
I knew what was coming next. I braced myself.
He dropped his underwear and, as I predicted, flicked them under the bed with his toe. They skidded to a stop, still warm and steaming, just in front of my face. If I’d stuck out my tongue—which, believe me, I wouldn’t do—I could have touched them. All I could think of was the bubonic plague.
Chuck hopped into bed like some seven-year-old all excited about his new Superman sheets. The mattress gave way and I was pinned to the floor. It’s amazing he didn’t hear my skull crunch.
My worst nightmare had come true.
From what I could gather, Chuck slept in the nude.
chapter 28
Prosecutor
In criminal law, the government lawyer who charges and
tries a case against a person accused of a crime.
The good thing about being stapled under a bed by a huge man is that it gives you time to think. I mean, there wasn’t much else I could do. I couldn’t fidget. I couldn’t chew on my hangnails. I couldn’t even breathe too deeply. (My lungs worked okay. I was just terrified of inhaling the guy’s boxers.)
Suddenly stuff was becoming really clear to me, not least the value of good personal hygiene.
Chuck Dunkirk was definitely Duncan Charles. He knew Ernest Sanderson.
He was a scientist, so he also knew what would happen if you put an explosive substance on a fire.
In other words, it wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t some Good Samaritan making some bad decision on the spur of the moment. Chuck killed Ernest on purpose.
Why? That’s what I couldn’t figure out.
Chuck rolled over and I could feel my bones crumbling like a handful of cornflakes. I wished I’d drunk more milk when I had the chance.
I thought of that university video taken in the lab.
Fame, maybe? Is that what he wanted? It clearly bugged Duncan-slash-Chuck that Ernest was getting all the glory. And that was even before the whole Gleamoccino thing hit. I mean, can you believe it? The guy was all put out because he wasn’t getting equal airtime on some bad promotional video that nobody was even going to watch.
How sad is that?
Was it plain old jealousy that drove Chuck nuts? Is that what happened to him?
Yikes.
Scary.
I promised myself I would never envy anyone ever again for having a nice skateboard or nice clothes or a normal mother. I didn’t want what happened to Chuck to happen to me. I pictured myself twenty years from now, all hairy and toothless and, you know, bloated by jealousy, walking up to Kendall and going hi and him going, like, “Who are you?” I mean, that’s what it must have been like for people who hadn’t seen Chuck in twenty years. He and Duncan didn’t even look like the same guy anymore.
It suddenly hit me.
I would have conked myself in the head if I could have moved my hand.
Like, duh. Of course! If you planned to kill someone, would you want to be recognized? Chuck didn’t want to look like Duncan! That’s why he left his teeth out. That’s why he grubbed himself up, let his hair and beard go, packed on the weight. That’s why he stole my video. He must have thought I was onto him.
Everything was falling into place.
And that’s why he did that whole publicity-shy thing too. He wasn’t humble—no news there—he was just being careful. He wanted to make extra sure no old lab buddy heard about Ernest Sanderson’s death on Inside Edition and saw past Chuck’s disguise.
He pulled up his hood, covered his face, laid low. It made him look good when he was still a hero—not wanting to take all the credit and everything—and it didn’t look that strange once he became a suspect either. Everybody hides their face on the way into court. Nobody wants their busdriver or their barista or their second cousin seeing them on TV and thinking they’re a criminal.
Chuck was lucky, too, that cameras aren’t usually allowed in Canadian courts. All anybody ever saw of him from the trial were those sketches they put on the news. No one would recognize him from one of those. No one would recognize their own mother from one of those.
But Shannondoah...That’s different. She was in the court. Chuck couldn’t hide hi
s face there. Had she recognized him? Is that why she was doing all that research? Because she’d figured something out about him?
Maybe.
Chuck started snoring away like Frankenstein with a sinus problem. I was just waiting for the old lady next door to start pounding on the wall again. (If that racket didn’t wake her up, nothing would.)
No, on second thought, I was pretty sure Shannondoah hadn’t recognized Chuck—for two reasons. One: The age gap. Shannondoah was probably still in diapers when Chuck and Ernie worked together.
And two: The whole trial would have been different if she had recognized him. I’m almost positive Shannondoah would have told the prosecution lawyer that Chuck wasn’t the do-gooding stranger he claimed to be. The lawyer would have no doubt brought that up in court. He would have sniffed around until he found out something that had happened between Chuck and Ernie—an argument, an iou, a missing sea louse, anything—and then the lawyer would have tried to convince the jury that that was Chuck’s motive for killing Ernest.
And if Chuck had a motive for killing Ernest, if he meant to kill Ernest, he probably wouldn’t have been charged with manslaughter. He would have been charged with murder.
Okay. So what did Shannondoah know then?
She knew something. Or, at least, she suspected something. What?
That note of hers I’d found. What had she written on it?
Frankly, when I’d seen it, I’d studied it more for her perfume than for her research. I tried to picture the paper, read it in my mind. There was something about flammability and fire extinguishers and e-mail and...what else?
Think. What else did I remember?
Blond hair. Green eyes. Big laugh.
That’s helpful.
Traffic court. She’d written traffic court, I was pretty sure of it.
Why?
What was it about traffic court?
Biff!
Did Biff run into Ernest at court? Is that what happened? Ernest had all those tickets from speeding down Spring Garden Road. Had Biff been on duty when Ernest appeared in front of the judge?
Maybe that was the connection between Biff and Chuck!
Did Biff tell Chuck that Ernest was there? Did Biff, like, stake Ernest out for Chuck? Make it easy for him?
Was that why he was staking out our place?
I remembered that dinner we had, that look that went between Biff and Chuck. It was funny at the time. Now it wasn’t funny at all.
Those guys had been in this together right from the beginning! Just the thought of it made my blood start to, like, throb. It was as if my head had turned into this giant pulsating blob or something.
It was so cruel. It was so mean. Biff had never loved Andy! He might never even have liked her. He’d just been using her. He must have seen her in court or something. He must have heard what a nut she was when it came to that do-gooder stuff. He must have known that all you had to be was some kind of poor oppressed person—some, say, uneducated janitor, for instance—and she’d take your case on, no questions asked.
I thought back to the first time we saw that article in the paper about Chuck. How had we noticed it? Had Biff brought the newspaper to the table? Had he kind of pushed it toward Andy? Was it a setup?
And why did they want Andy on the case so bad anyway?
Was there something about the case that would have scared off a, like, reasonable lawyer?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t think. I was so mad. I wanted to kill them.
I wanted to kill Biff most of all. He hurt Andy. He broke her heart. He did it on purpose! I didn’t care how big he was. I didn’t care that he was “an officer of the court.” That was my mother he messed around with. I started to think Andy was right after all. He was a bad, bad guy.
Chuck suddenly lurched up in bed, grinding me into the floor. He turned on the light. He groaned. He scratched. He leaned down hard on my head, then pushed himself up off the bed. (I was going to have a face like an angelfish by the time he was done with me.) He wandered down the hall, went into a room and closed the door. I heard water—at least I think it was water—running.
He was in the bathroom! This was my chance. I slithered out from under the bed and power-crept to the front door. I had my hand on the knob when I remembered the file. I could hear Chuck humming. I hoped he was in there for the long haul. I deked back to the card table and switched the folders.
I was halfway down the street before my heart caught up with me.
chapter 29
Stalking
Any repetitive approach behavior done by one party
that makes another fear for his or her safety.
Andy was sleeping like a baby when I got back. She hadn’t even noticed I was gone.
Biff, though, was another story. I peered out the front window. He was there again. I saw him move in the shadows.
That’s all I needed.
I picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1.
“We have a stalker,” I said.
I waited until the police came to arrest him. Biff seemed to argue with them for a while. Then they cuffed his hands behind his back. Just before they pushed him into the squad car, he looked up at the window.
I gave him a big thumbs-up.
One down, and one to go.
chapter 30
Patent
A legal document issued by a government to an inventor.
As the owner of the patent, the inventor has the right to
keep any other person from making, using or selling the
invention covered by the patent anywhere in the country.
The next morning I told Andy I was too sick to go to school. Usually I have to prove I just punctured a lung or lost a limb to get away with that, but this time she fell for it. I must have looked terrible. Near-death experiences can do that to you, I guess.
As soon as Andy left, I got to work. I found Shannondoah’s note in my jeans, ransacked the apartment until I scrounged enough money for lunch—as usual these days, there wasn’t a thing to eat in the kitchen—then raced down to the library.
Shannondoah said she was there every day. I hoped she meant it. We needed to talk.
Gamers. Homeless guys. The Old Tars Senior Citizens’ Book Club. All the usual suspects were there, but no Shannondoah.
I asked the librarian if he’d seen her. He squinted at me like I was moving in on his territory but finally talked. “She was just here a second ago. Said she had an appointment on Spring Garden Road. You could probably cat—”
By the time he said “—cher,” I was out the door.
Left to the courthouse, right for everything else.
I chose right. I saw the sun sort of ping off that blond hair of hers. She was a good block ahead but not covering much ground in those high heels. I started deking and dodging my way toward her through the pack of people heading downtown.
I got caught on the wrong side of the lights at Queen Street and she gained some ground on me. I really had to boot it when the Walk sign came on.
I hollered, “Shannondoah!” She kept going. I didn’t know if she heard me.
I hollered, “Shannondoah!” again, this time at the top of my lungs. She heard me. (Trust me. She heard me. People in Tibet heard me.) She turned around. She tilted her head and flashed one of those floodlight smiles of hers. She stopped and waited for me to catch up.
She gave me this naughty-boy look. She went, “Now, how did you know my name?”
I went, “Ah...”
Right. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. We’d never introduced ourselves. As far as I was supposed to be concerned, she was just some lady I ran into at the library.
Looking back, I realize I should have just said, “I recognize you from the paper” or something like that—but I didn’t.
I got myself all worried that she’d be suspicious if she found out I knew stuff about her. She’d put two and two together and realize I was Andy’s son. She wouldn’t talk to me any
more. She wouldn’t believe I was on her side.
I panicked. I was standing there with my mouth open, trying to think of other reasons a kid like me would know her name. I could only come up with one.
The worst possible one.
Next thing I knew, I was raising an eyebrow at her like I was some underaged lounge lizard and going, “I made it my business to know your name. You’re a very attractive woman.”
Normally, I guess, you wouldn’t want someone to laugh when you said a thing like that, but I was so relieved that she did. There was at least a chance she thought I was joking.
She went, “Why, aren’t you sweet! Now what are you doing downtown on a school day?”
Perfect entrée. “Ah...you left this at the library.” I handed her the note. “Thought it might be...important.” I pictured her opening it up and kindly explaining what each item on the list meant, one by one.
“Oh, thank you!” she said. “I was wondering where that got to.”
She put it in her purse and kept walking.
So much for the entrée. How was I going to bring it up now?
She kept chitchatting about the weather. It took me about a block and a half to mentally get as far as “There’s something I want to, you know...like, ask you...” when she suddenly stopped and said, “Well, it’s been nice talking to you. This is where I’m going.”
No, she couldn’t go yet. I had to find out what she knew about Chuck.
Do something, Cyril.
Do it now.
Now!
I went, “Oh yeah? Really? Funny. Me too.” I looked up and realized we were standing outside the Sensual You Beauty Spa.
She gave my shoulder a little slap and said, “Well, I’ll be! Aren’t you the new man? I couldn’t get my husband to try any of this girly stuff!”
Girly stuff. Okay. Not ideal but, whatever. I couldn’t let that stop me. I did a quick check around to make sure no one from school was looking, and then I headed in behind her.
It was one of those groovy-cool places where everything is white and shiny, and all the people who work there look like they should have their own TV show. Shannondoah fit right in.