Magian High

by Lia London

  “This is Kincaid Riley,” he said, beaming at the reporter. “But you already know him.” He turned to me. “How are the patients doing?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t get in. Police have to interview them first.”

  “Oh!” said Sheldon with I thought was overplayed surprise. “They haven’t testified yet?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Have you?” asked the reporter.

  I hadn’t expected that, but I figured this was my big moment to nail Jack and save Curry. Drawing a deep breath, I said, “No. I had left the park before the police came.”

  “You fled the scene of the incident?” she asked, with an edge to her voice. She pushed the microphone close to me, and I worried that I’d already blown it. I decided to go for one little lie. “Actually, I took off after Jack Bagler. I didn’t want him to get away.”

  Zing! I had her full attention.

  “Jack Bagler? Any relation to Mrs. Bagler, the school district Superintendent?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And what was his involvement in the attack?” she asked, all flowery now. So I told her, and I left nothing out, only fudging on the bit about trying to find him and failing. I also referenced past harassing we’d received at his hand.

  “And wasn’t there something involving him at your own home with a large party?”

  Before I could answer that, Sheldon jumped in. “I think there was a more recent one than that,” he said. “Didn’t he burn a threat into your porch step last night?”

  That caught me off guard. “You saw that?” I think he realized that he may have revealed a close relationship between him and our family, but I hoped the reporter wouldn’t pick up on it. I forged ahead. “Yeah, that showed up last night after the attack at the park. I don’t know for sure that it was Jack, but he was the only other person that wasn’t still at the park, and I don’t know who else would have it in for me.”

  At that moment, the cameraman almost yelped, and he swung around to face the front entrance just as the glass doors hissed shut behind none other than Mrs. Bagler herself. The reporter was beside herself with glee. “Will you excuse us please? We’ll contact you directly if we have any further questions.”

  As she and the cameraman bustled after Mrs. Bagler, Sheldon said, “This’ll either be spectacular or catastrophic,” he said. “Hurry, let’s get up the back way.” We went back up the stairwell, flying more quickly than the elevator could have taken us, and arrived on Elizabeth’s floor just as Amity traded places with a cop. Sheldon dodged behind a potted tree until the door closed again.

  “Not good. That’s one of Bagler’s boys,” he muttered.

  “Psst! Amity!” I whispered as loudly as I dared.

  She turned and saw us, eyes bright with triumph. With a little wave of Froodles, she gestured for us to follow her, and we ran after her towards the elevator.

  “C’mon. Hadley’s down one level,” she said, punching the button.

  “Did you get a good recording?” asked Sheldon.

  “Golden,” she said beaming. “This’ll make up for any cover-up going on downtown,” she beamed.

  The elevator bell dinged, the doors slid open, and Mrs. Bagler stepped out with her head down, bumping into Amity and sending her sprawling to the floor. Froodles slid across the floor and landed at Sheldon’s foot. In the flicker of an eyelash, he picked up the doll and Flash Jumped somewhere. It took me a beat to follow suit, and I wasn’t sure if I’d been seen. I had to Flash Jump two more times—hard to do around all the nurses and carts—before I found Sheldon down one flight outside one of the patient rooms. He signaled to me with the stuffed unicorn.

  “Your turn, Kincaid,” he said, handing me the doll. “See what you can find out from Hadley, and I’ll go back and check on Amity.”

  “Knowing her, she helped Mrs. Bagler up and introduced herself as Emma Louise Hillbilly or something,” I said. “Amity can take care of herself.”

  “They’ve never met face-to-face?”

  “Nope, but Amity’s seen her on TV. I’m sure she’ll handle it fine.”

  “I hope so. I’ll be back!” He turned and walked quickly towards the stairwell, and I slipped into the patient room.

  A dividing curtain was drawn around the bed, so I called, “Hadley? You decent in there?”

  I heard a grunt and a shuffle of cloth. “Kincaid, is that you?”

  Peeking around the curtain, I saw Hadley from behind. He was pulling a shirt over his head. When he turned around, I actually gasped. One of his eyes had a patch over it. “Whoah, are you going as a pirate tonight?”

  Hadley gave me a look of dry humor mixed with pain. “I wish. I took a few too many sparks to the eye, and—”

  “Couldn’t they heal it?”

  He shrugged and licked his lips, a gesture I knew meant he was holding back.

  “I’ll try,” I said, reaching forward. That’s when I remembered Froodles and the hidden camera. “But first—can I record you talking about what happened before the police get here?”

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Bagler’s in the building, and she’s going to try to control the spin on anything you say. Make the cops fudge the reports. They’ve already been—”

  “I…I dunno. I think I’ll give my statement to the police.”

  “But Hadley—”

  “No, Kincaid. I don’t want any more trouble. I’m…” He looked at me with his one good eye, and I saw the fear.

  Dropping Froodles on the bed, I hugged him tight. “It’s okay, Hadley. I get it.” I pulled back and slid the eye patch up. “Let me try…” With the heel of my hand gently resting over the eye socket, I closed my own eyes and concentrated—or I tried to—but instead, I thought about all the great times Hadley and I had growing up. I thought about how much he had helped me with my desegregation cause when it was probably just because he was loyal to me and Elizabeth. I thought about how he’d helped us escape the library. I thought about him scoping girls’ legs and falling off chairs. I thought about his laugh and his generosity, and how he’d thrown juice on Amity’s burning hair. I thought about how much I didn’t want him to be attacked by Punkers ever again. And then I thought about how much I wanted his eye to be healed. I realized that I had tears streaming down my face, and he did, too. We looked at each other for a long time, and then I let go. He blinked twice and then covered his good eye. With surprise, he exhaled a soft laugh. “Kincaid! You did it! It’s blurry, but I can see with it!”

  Footsteps sounded in the hall, and I heard a male voice ask a nurse if this was Hadley’s room.

  “Is that your dad?” I whispered.

  He shook his head. “No, he’s coming in half an hour. I—”

  “I’ve got to hide.”

  “In the bathroom,” he pointed.

  I grabbed Kelsey’s doll and Flash Jumped into the adjoining private lavatory and had almost closed the door when an idea hit me. “Hadley, just…tell them the whole truth. If they edit stuff out of the report, that’s okay, but I need to know.”

  He nodded solemnly, and I closed the door leaving only a small crack—big enough for Froodle’s foot.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Trick-or-Treating

  A little before dark, Amity and our family arrived at Sheldon’s home on a street full of shoebox-like houses with tidy yards. We all made ourselves comfortable sitting on the floor or stuffed onto the one long couch in his modest, but ultra-clean living room while he went into a back room. He returned with something white and fuzzy behind his back. Kelsey eyed it suspiciously. “That’s not a puppy for me, is it?”

  “Uh, no,” he said, bunching it up behind his back so that it fit into one hand. “But I hope you’ll like it anyway.” He brought the surprise forward and Kelsey unfolded it to find a fuzzy unicorn costume that looked like a giant Froodles. “To make up for the damage done to your doll?”

  Kelsey’s mouth fell open, speechless. She kept rubbing her face in the fur and making happy no
ises.

  “Aren’t you going to try it on?” asked Mom. “Then maybe Kincaid and Amity can take you Trick-or-Treating.”

  “Really?” She started jumping up and down. “Really? Really?” She dropped to the floor and began stuffing a foot into the costume.

  “Now, hang on,” said Mom. “Let’s go in the bathroom and shed a layer before you put this on. Mom picked up Kelsey, who still clutched the unicorn costume, and they disappeared down the hall. I realized Mom had been here before because she knew which of the closed doors to open.

  “Trick-or-Treating? Really?” asked Amity.

  “It’s a pretty low-key neighborhood,” said Sheldon. “A lot of Corporal kids come from around here, and they have a lot of fun with Halloween, but it’s safe. Besides, everyone knows I’m a cop, so they won’t mess with us.” He grinned, and his crooked tiled teeth were friendly and assuring. It seemed funny to remember that my first impression of him was an angry brick.

  “What are you and Mom going to do?” I asked, trying not to tease.

  “Pass out candy here and review the recordings you two made. I’m going to be taking some notes so I can compare them with what shows up in the reports on Monday. If there are big enough discrepancies, I’ll be able to call out the corruption with hard evidence.”

  Kelsey pranced through at this point, pretending to trot like a pony. She had Froodles (who had a freshly mended hoof) stuffed into the neck of the costume, held in place by the zipper, and it made her look more like a fuzzy white rhino than a unicorn, but she was the happiest I’d seen her in ages. “Can we go? Can we go? Can we go?”

  Mom gave us the thumbs-up and Sheldon told us which blocks to go to for the best haul. As we headed out into the twilight, a few other teenagers and adults shepherded their goblins and princesses past. We saw a fair share of cowboys and zombies, too. Kelsey fell into a rhythm of walking with us to each driveway and then darting up the path to the front door while we waited and talked. Each time, I gleaned a little more information from Amity about the day’s events from her point of view. She was like a superhero, packing more work into one day than even Sheldon could have done in a week. At the elevator, she had, indeed, duped Mrs. Bagler, who had apparently been preoccupied with dodging the press. Amity had pretended that she was looking for her Uncle Clovis, and did the nice lady know where the radiology department was? The nice lady could only fake being nice for so long before she rudely told Amity to go ask someone else, but that diversion had given us the time we needed to get to Hadley. Amity had also lingered near the nurse’s station (presumably to ask about radiology) and had seen Mrs. Bagler debrief the cops when they came out of Elizabeth’s room. Then Amity had run back outside to find the reporter and managed to get her to film a few minutes on her version of the events of last night.

  “Even if they edit it down, I got Dad to record me at home on his laptop. I tried to word my testimony as close to the same as I could so that if they splice it down a lot, we can release the real version elsewhere and point up the cover-up as part of the story. I even called the whole Gel Ball gang to verify what stories they told, and Dad helped me make similar recordings of all of them.”

  “None of them were afraid?”

  “Not of the truth. They were mad. They want us all to be left alone.”

  “That’s great!”

  At the next house, she turned a more serious face to me. “Curry’s having a hard time. He really has no support at home, and by siding with us, he has cut himself off from everybody he knows or cares about. He’s not scared that they’re trying to scapegoat him, but he’s afraid for Rikki. He’s been feeling really alone this year even with her.”

  “He never had so many friends as he does now!”

  “Not real ones, that’s for sure. He’ll be okay.”

  At the corner, she suddenly remembered something good. “Guess what? I saw Miss Flinckey at the store.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, not really knowing what more to say.

  “Not as nice as how she was getting around.”

  “What? A new car?” I asked.

  “I saw her hovering.”

  “Hovering? As in flying?”

  “She called it ‘resting her feet’. Isn’t that great? I saw it.”

  “But how?”

  “Who knows? But I guess our little efforts to be kind to her are adding up!”

  ***

  “Miss Flinckey? We were just talking about you, but…what are you doing here?”

  Our school counselor sat next to Mom on the couch, and Sheldon sat on the coffee table facing them.

  “Honey, can you turn the porch light off?” asked Mom, her tone matching the concern on her face. “We don’t want any more Trick-or-Treaters right now.”

  I flipped the switch on the wall and closed the door. “What’s going on?”

  Amity ushered Kelsey into the back, whispering, “Let’s get you out of that hot costume and then we can count your candy.” She gave us a knowing look, and Sheldon nodded gratefully.

  “Hi, Kincaid,” said Miss Flinckey. “Sorry to intrude upon your fun here, but I found something I thought Detective Sheldon should know about.”

  Sheldon stood and passed me a large envelope. “It looks like the NMI has upped its construction schedule. They’ve been ordering all kinds of supplies for a school—odd if it doesn’t already exist.”

  “And the local chapter just appointed Mr. Petercriss as the principal of the new school,” said Miss Flinckey.

  “What?!”

  “Honey, you need to sit down,” said Mom. I did, feeling shaky, and Sheldon and Flinckey explained that she’d been at a meeting for the local chapter of NMI when Petercriss’ appointment was announced. Since there hadn’t been any kind of discussion, or a vote or application process, she had grown suspicious, and when the meeting adjourned, she’d stayed after to ask about the break in protocol. However, the others had been in a hurry to leave, and she was left alone in the room. That was when she spotted an envelope that had fallen to the floor between the seats. She opened it hoping to discover who it might belong to and found order forms and receipts from the Bagler-Farrell Foundation.

  “None of this had been approved by the whole board of directors,” she said. “They were keeping us in the dark, and I can’t think why they’d do that.”

  “I’m confused,” said Mom. “How connected are NMI and the Bagler-Farrell Foundation?”

  Miss Flinckey sighed. “They’re supposed to be two different entities. The NMI is national with local chapters throughout the country wherever there is a high Mage population.”

  “And the Bagler-Farrell Foundation?” asked Mom.

  “That’s a private investment company,” said Sheldon, “who wanted to bid on a possible land deal to provide a school for NMI.”

  “Isn’t that a kind of conflict of interests? To be on the board for both?”

  “I didn’t know about the land deals,” said Flinckey. “I thought the Foundation would be using investments to earn money for seminars and scholarships. Things like that. I had no idea Mrs. Bagler was trying to get herself a real estate deal with a national institution.”

  “Wanna see my candy? I got thirty-two bags of Snuffles!” cheered Kelsey, entering with Amity.

  Mom’s eyes popped comically, and the room rippled with laughter. Kelsey took over the coffee table and poured out her bag of candy.

  Sheldon pulled me and Amity aside. “Any chance you want to come with me out to that property and see what kind of work they’ve been doing?”

  “Tonight?” asked Amity. “It’s Halloween.”

  “Good. Everyone will be distracted. And if a group of teens are going around together, it won’t seem out of place.”

  “A group of teens?” I asked.

  He gave me a hopeful look. “Think you can scrounge up a couple of your friends?”

  “Do we tell them what’s going on?” asked Amity.

  Sheldon thought about this. “Let’s
wait on that until they actually show up.”

  “How do we justify taking them out there?” I asked.

  Sheldon smiled. “You’re Kincaid Riley. Surely you can think of something.”

  “Is this the sting?” I asked.

  Sheldon shrugged. “It could be. Make sure their cell phone cameras work, huh?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Sting

  After waiting for fifteen minutes, we figured no one else was coming. I scanned the faces of my friends: Amity, Elizabeth, Curry, Max, Rikki, Noah, Kameko and polymer guy.

  “No Hadley?” I asked.

  “I…think he’s still recuperating. Emotionally,” said Elizabeth confidentially.

  “All right then,” said Amity cheerfully. “We ready for another adventure? We have found the most amazing location for a Gel-Ball game of epic proportions! If we can get pictures of it—you got cell phones?—we can make a slide show to present to Mr. Blakely and Mr. Whittle to see if they can get us cleared for one big school-wide game before they continue the building project.”

  “No risk of Punkers showing up?” asked Noah.

  “They’re all still in lock-up,” said Amity.

  “Except Jack,” said Rikki.

  “He won’t dare,” said Curry with quiet certainty. “He doesn’t have his guys with him, and he knows he’s been named. He’s probably home eating candy and trying to look innocent.”

  Everyone except me, Elizabeth and Curry piled into mom’s car. Mom said Amity could drive it, but only because Sheldon would be following behind. Curry, Elizabeth and I would fly to the site directly. As we headed out of town, taking it easy along the straight path over houses, Curry soared closer to me. “This isn’t about Gel Ball, is it?” he asked.

  I froze mid-air and actually dropped altitude before catching myself from hitting the top of a gas station. “How did—?”

  “Detective Sheldon’s beater car is following us,” he said pointing west a few blocks. Sure enough, I could see a car trailing several lengths behind Amity and the gang.

  “Good eye,” I said, regaining composure and resuming the journey.