"You have three Jaguars registered to you, Craig, including the one you've been doing some work on. But only two are accounted for. Where is the third?"
"I don't know."
"Pardon?"
"Two weeks ago the lock on the barn was broken, and one was missing. The keys are in a lockbox right inside the door; that was broken as well. Maybe ... Billy ... when he was talking to me that day, I don't know. The box was open. He could have seen the keys were there."
"And you didn't report this theft? Why?” Jake asked.
The man leaned forward, hands on his forehead. “Because I was worried it was Billy who came back and took it. He was too interested in the cars, too insistent. I just kept hoping that it would turn up somewhere."
"And you would what? Say you had forgotten to report it?"
"I don't know what I was going to say,” the man said, the tone of his voice changing, growing less tremulous suddenly. He looked across the room like he was in a daze. “Perhaps that ... a man in my position, living alone ... society doesn't...” He looked straight at Jake. “I just am happy with the way I live my life. I like kids, and I like math, but...” The man shrugged. “Seeing Billy there, in the barn, it scared me."
I jerked forward, looked at Jake but said nothing.
As Jake said: “Did it scare you enough to make you do something?"
"Yeah,” the man said, “I told him to get the hell out and go home."
"You should have reported the car stolen, Mr. Earnshaw."
"I know."
Jake turned now, looked over at me. I had promised to remain silent, seated in the corner of the room, but was Jake now regretting his decision to let me remain? Nothing this man had said could legally be used against him, and yet I knew there was enough here now...
Jake looked back at Mr. Earnshaw, said, “Craig, I want you to contact your lawyer. You and he, or she, need to report to the Falmouth P.D. and tell them everything you just told me. Can you do that?"
"I didn't do anything to the boy,” Mr. Earnshaw insisted, his voice shaking.
"I know,” Jake said, but there was no conviction in his voice. “We just need to get all this sorted out and this is the only way to do it."
* * * *
"Billy Dawber had been fingerprinted in a school safety program when he was six. His fingerprints were on the lockbox,” Jake said to me the next morning.
"Jake...” I felt I would explode—I was so full of questions.
Jake knew it, too; he waved me silent, and then over to a chair at the Wenlows’ kitchen table. It was a hectic time of day in the Wenlow household. Mr. Wenlow was already out the door, which left his wife busy getting seven kids—only two of which were her own—off to school. But somehow Jake had charmed her enough to give us this quick ten minutes. She had even made Jake a cup of coffee before shooing the younger kids, with their cereal bowls and plastic cups, out of the kitchen and into the living room.
"Herbie—” I knew by the way Jake said my name he had a lot to say, so I shut up. “—after he talked to us, I contacted Ben Barrows over at the Falmouth P.D. Ben immediately put Craig Earnshaw under twenty-four-hour observation.” Jake paused, as though considering how much more to tell me. But how could he keep me out of any of it now? He couldn't. “A warrant was issued late last night; the barn and house were searched. The lockbox tested for fingerprints, which as I said, had Billy's on it. Craig Earnshaw's computers were seized. He has a laptop and two standard machines. Right now there are police officers specially trained in computer investigation checking them out."
He sighed, took a sip of coffee, surprised by how good it was. He raised his eyebrows and took another sip. “Also, an APB has been issued for the Jag, which it is now being assumed that Billy stole."
"Assumed,” I echoed doubtfully.
"It is possible that Earnshaw did give in to Billy and take him for a drive. It's also possible that Earnshaw invited Billy to his house, and not that Billy showed up on his own. Craig Earnshaw could have broken the lockbox, then hidden that Jag somewhere himself. There are a dozen more ‘possibles,’ as we both know. At the moment we are keeping all options open, hoping for the best and yet remaining realistic."
"So where is Billy?” I asked. “In the worst possible scenario you can imagine."
Jake just gave me a long, cool look. “Do I have to say?"
I swallowed hard. “Find the Jag, and you'll probably find..."
Jake nodded.
* * * *
It was in all the local and Boston newspapers the next day, as well on the television news. Even CNN had a brief story on the teacher taken in for questioning with regard to the missing teen. People love those stories, I guess, and by afternoon the next day there were news trucks parked up and down the street outside my high school.
Fifteen-year-old Billy Dawber, foster child, honors student, math freak, and Jag lover, was missing with suspicions focused squarely on a well-known, and up till now, well-respected math teacher and department chair. You could read all about it in the papers. You could read how Mr. Craig Earnshaw had protested his knowledge of Billy Dawber's whereabouts, and that, though he had admitted that Billy had come to his house two weeks earlier professing an interest in the teacher's three Jaguars, that was the only connection he had with the boy outside of school.
And a tenuous connection it was, indeed. Craig Earnshaw was brought in for questioning three times by the Falmouth P.D., and all three times he was sent courteously on his way. He consented to a full search of his property, his barn, his cars, his home. His friends and family were all questioned. But they found nothing. Nothing.
All they had was a missing teenage boy and a nervous unmarried teacher, a notebook full of calculus problems and images of Jaguars that connected the two. So the bloggers got busy and the editorials were full of people making all kinds of crazy speculations. The heat was on, and innocent or guilty—or just frazzled and confused, which was the image the harried math teacher presented to the reporters who came to his door—shortly thereafter, Craig Earnshaw requested a leave of absence. With the recommendation of the school superintendent, it was quickly granted by the town school board.
As for me, those were strange days. I seemed to be walking the corridors of the school with a gray cloud over my head. Nobody bothered me. No one stood in my way. No one said anything to me. But they looked. I felt the eyes on the back of my head. As I walked to my locker, or to class, or to lunch, heads turned and people spoke softly to one another. My reputation had finally settled in and taken up sordid residence in the halls of Falmouth Park High.
Passing out chemistry exams, Miss Strangis's eyes lingered on me a little longer than they did anyone else. When I left school in the afternoon, Dr. Morgans stood in the open door, hands on his hips, watching me until I left his sight.
In gym class, the gym teacher tossed me a volleyball when it was my serve, then stared at me. It was only a few seconds, but it was longer than he stared at anyone else. You would have thought they had a killer in their midst, and the killer was me.
As for the greasy-haired kid and his gang, they watched me, too, nudging each other as I walked by, books under my arm. I met their eyes briefly and they quickly turned their heads, though I heard one of them murmur, “Death Kid."
Yeah, great, that was me, Death Kid.
"Shout it!” I said. It was the fourth day of this nonsense. I spun around, opening my arms out, then dropping them. They just looked at me. “Shout it out. Yeah, that's me. Death Kid. Say it. Shout it!"
But just silence, as one, then a second, then all of them turned their heads away from me, shaking them. I swore under my breath, turned back around, and went to lunch.
I sat on the curb outside the Wenlows’ house with my head in my hands. I hadn't wanted supper, hadn't wanted company, hadn't wanted anything. The Wenlows had been strangely calm through all this, suffering the occasional reporter or news team with something that was quite close to grace. In fact, Mr. Wenl
ow even came out to the road to make sure I was all right, and after assuring himself that I was, left after squeezing my shoulder.
Or maybe they were hoping I was involved in something terrible and huge and sordid, something they could use to their benefit.
Nah, that was a rotten thing to even consider. I folded my arms on my knees, wishing I had a smoke, a couple of pills, anything at all that would take the edge off what had been a pretty lousy two weeks. Because I found myself wishing—more than almost anything else—that Billy would just come walking down the road, laughing at us all.
"He's just a runaway,” I found myself saying out loud. “That's all. He hated it here. He...” I turned my head to look back at the garage, over which had been the room I had so briefly shared with him. “But why didn't he take his clothes, his books, his things? It's like he just walked out as if..."
"As if he were going to come back later."
I looked up at Jake, standing over me.
"Yeah,” I said. “He didn't run away, did he?"
"Kids do take off and leave everything behind, but the other times Billy took off, he took a bag."
"But you know, if you were going to run away—” I felt sort of sick as I talked. “—would you finish your homework? I don't think I would."
"Let's take a walk and talk,” he said.
* * * *
"They look at me at school like they blame me. For Mr. Earnshaw, I mean, for what he's going through. They know Billy was my roommate, that the dean questioned me, that the police questioned me, and that it was me who fingered Mr. Earnshaw.” I sighed, ran my hands through my short hair. “And they all think he's innocent. I know they do by the way they look at me."
"Craig Earnshaw is very well liked and highly respected,” Jake said, almost in a detached sort of way. “From everything we can find on him, he's perfect. Not so much as a parking ticket in twenty years. As far as his conduct and reputation, it's unimpeachable. Not one complaint about his teaching or his behavior in class. If anything, he comes across as upstanding in every way: professionally, ethically, morally.” He paused to look at me, eyebrows raised. “But Falmouth P.D. has asked him to take a lie detector test."
"The people at school want him to be innocent, Jake, even though they know he might not be. Billy's prints were found on that lockbox. Mr. Earnshaw admitted Billy came to his house, asked for a ride in one of the Jags. And when the Jag went stolen, Earnshaw did nothing. He says he knew Billy had probably taken it, but...” I shook my head, felt sick again. “No, no, it doesn't add up. His story is too pat, Jake. It's fake. I know it's fake."
Jake just looked at me, eyes darkening, then he said, “You don't know how much we want to catch Billy Dawber tooling around in that big black Jag somewhere. Boston. New York. L.A. Anywhere, anywhere at all."
"I want that, too, but it's not going to happen,” I said. “That man took Billy for a ride, and something happened and...” I shuddered, shut my eyes, then, shoving my hands down into my pockets, walked quickly away from Jake, back toward the Wenlows’ house. “I don't want to talk anymore."
When I looked back a few minutes later, Jake had gone.
* * * *
I had the dream again, which I hadn't had since the day I last talked to Billy. They were there again, though, the dark shapes moving up and down, toward the train bridge across the canal. The water was dark blue, almost black, and the lights along either side of the Cape Cod Canal twinkled off their sleek, dark bodies. I was at the edge of the canal, my hands in the pockets of a slicker as I watched them move. Up and down, breaking the water, serpentine in shape, or rather...
One slowly reared its head and turned it to me. But I was frozen; I couldn't move my legs. And as I stood there, watching it, trying in the dream to convince myself that this was just a dream, I saw that the head wasn't that of a plesiosaur, or any kind of sea monster at all. It was the head of a jaguar, the animal, and its brilliant eyes were staring at me.
I turned and looked up the canal road. Along the other side were railroad tracks, woodland, then bogs and marshes. “I love the canal,” I heard myself saying. “Lots of nice trails out there, through the bogs and marsh. And the canal road. You can rollerblade there and nobody bothers you."
Nobody bothers you. Billy, the loner, the math freak, and Jag lover.
I awoke with a start in bed.
* * * *
I might have told Jake what I thought, but then I was tired of being the center of attention in issues that were not mine to begin with. So I hitched a ride out to Manamesset the following morning, regardless of the fact it was a Friday. I got dropped off at the post office and walked the half mile to the canal.
It was a bright, clear, sunny day, with just a touch of cold in the air and off the water. Along the canal a half dozen people were fishing, throwing in lines, though it didn't look like they were catching much of anything. One old fellow shouted up to me as I walked along the canal road: “Hey, kid, shouldn't you be in school?” But I ignored him.
* * * *
There are pieces of the truth, of what really happened. And they are scattered in different places, and different people own the pieces. Me, I owned a few of them. I just hadn't known it until that dream.
So I struck out off the canal road, which was blocked from regular traffic by a wooden barrier. I saw that the barrier had been moved and replaced, but anyone might have done that. So I hopped over the fence, headed off down a dirt road and toward the marshes and the abandoned cranberry bogs that laced the area along the southeastern edge of the canal.
It took me all morning, but I found Billy just before noon.
* * * *
There are two roads that run the length of the Cape Cod Canal, the one on the east side, the Cape side, runs through my old hometown, Man-amesset. It's really just a service road, accessible only to town workers and their trucks or the occasional maintenance crew. But it's also used by bikers, rollerbladers, hikers and so on. But that's in summer; in the early fall it's a quiet road and especially at night, it's long, dark, and peaceful.
Billy must have heard me that day and heard me altogether too well. It became obvious to me that he had driven out to the ranger station near the train bridge, which crosses the canal, moved the wooden fence, and taken a drive along the canal road in Mr. Earnshaw's black Jag. He must have done that two weeks ago, on that Saturday afternoon. His was the car—the black Jag—which had passed a motorist on the main road without its headlights on. Billy had been heading here, to the canal and the peaceful, dark road.
Unfortunately, he had left the canal road, struck out onto a narrow, unpaved dirt road that meandered through a wooded area, then struck out across marshland and grown-over cranberry bogs. It had been there, in the dark, that he had gone down a hill, banked left to avoid a tree, and driven into a kettle pond.
I had found the Jag, its front half in the water, its rear end sticking up out of it.
* * * *
After a brief, but thorough (according to Jake) investigation, Billy's death was determined to be due to injuries received when the Jag went into the water and hit a rock. Billy was found at the wheel, his neck broken, one hand still gripping the Jag's clutch.
I went to Billy's funeral, as did the Wenlows and Jake Valari.
By the middle of the next week the disappearance of Billy Dawber, foster kid from Falmouth, Mass, was no longer in the news, except for one small item on the front page of the second section of the paper.
NOTED TEACHER TAKES EARLY RETIREMENT
Mr. Craig Earnshaw, math department chair and instructor, coach and math team advisor, and 25-year veteran of the Falmouth Public Schools, has decided to retire from the public schools, citing “personal reasons.” Friends and colleagues lament the loss of what one called “a deeply committed and gifted educator.” Another colleague, however, admitted to this paper that “the unfairness of the accusations against Craig have made it impossible for him to keep working at the high school. Once a tea
cher has been accused of something this heinous, there is no way that teacher can ever return to the classroom. Even though Craig was totally exonerated of all wrongdoing, there are just too many people who have convicted him in their minds."
Over the next few weeks I was pushed against a locker several times, threatened repeatedly, and tripped in lunchroom. Girls spit at me. Kids muttered things at me under their breaths. My books were stolen during gym class; I found them in a urinal. There were other things too. The same teachers who had stared at me so inquisitively a few weeks ago could now barely look me in the eye.
Eventually Jake and the Wenlows intervened and I was transferred to a different high school. A new school. A start over. Another kind of running away.
Copyright © 2009 D. A. McGuire
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Department: REEL CRIME by J. Rentilly
Dominated by roaring special effects, recycled plotlines, and big-star posturing, summer at the multiplex is often a signal for moviegoers to check their brains at the door, their greatest mid-July pleasure arriving in an endless tub of popcorn and some over-cranked air conditioning.
This year, however, a trio of brainy—and brawny—genre films arrive with serious pedigrees: big movie stars, heavy-hitting filmmakers, and provocative premises. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine pulls back the curtain on The Taking of Pelham 123,Public Enemies, and Angels & Demons, three surefire hits for discriminating cinephiles.
* * * *
Denzel Washington as Lieutenant Zachary Garber in The Taking of Pelham 123. Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures.
* * * *
The Taking of Pelham 123 (July 24) Action maestro Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Man on Fire) reteams with an authoritative, taciturn Denzel Washington in this remake of the 1974 Walter Matthau-Robert Shaw thriller, based on John Godey's 1973 bestselling novel, in which a subway train is hijacked and its occupants held for ransom. John Travolta, who's surely in the middle of the worst year of his life after his son's unexpected death in January, plays Ryder, the Big Bad. The rest of his team? Well, a la Reservoir Dogs, they're named after colors. This bottlenecked, ticking-clock thriller, almost a stage play in conception, but a visual rush in Scott's sure hands, is certain to thrill intelligent audiences and adrenaline junkies alike. The only real question is: With the original so effortlessly thrilling and tres cool, why tempt fate with a remake? Nevertheless, we're there.
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