Into the Dark

by Peter Abrahams

  Brucie’s eyes widened. He zipped it. The rehearsal went smoothly after that. Ingrid lost herself totally in Gretel’s fear. Today, for some reason, she could do fear effortlessly.

  On the way out, Jill said, “You were great today.”

  Ingrid felt herself beaming.

  Jill put her hand on Ingrid’s shoulder. “Holding up okay?”

  Ingrid nodded. Jill was about to say something else when Brucie sidled up.

  “Got a question, Bruce?”

  “Yeah,” said Brucie. “Who’s your agent?”

  Jill turned a little pink. “Why do you ask?”

  “Thought maybe it was time.”

  “Time?”

  “For me to get one too.”

  “I’ll tell you when,” said Jill.

  Mom drove Ingrid home.

  “Any news?” Ingrid said.

  “No.” Mom bit her lip almost the whole way.

  The Echo lay in the driveway. Ingrid brought it into the kitchen. Ty was at the table, working his way through a family-size package of potato chips, the garlic-and-onion-flavored kind, inedible in Ingrid’s opinion.

  “You’ll spoil your dinner,” Mom said.

  Ty answered with his mouth full, incomprehensible.

  Ingrid took The Echo from its wrapper, and there, below the fold, saw a photo of a man she recognized, a man with an eye patch. MEET CYRUS FERRAND, read the headline; and the subheads: THE WORLD WAR II BOYS FROM ECHO FALLS and FIRST IN A SERIES.

  “Where’s Grampy?”

  Ty, at the fridge, drinking OJ from the carton—a big no-no, but Mom, putting something in the oven, didn’t notice—said, “Playing with Nigel.”

  “He’s playing with Nigel?”

  “Out back.”

  Ingrid went out back, The Echo in her hand. The outdoor lights were on, illuminating Grampy and Nigel against a backdrop of the woods, already dark, and the evening sky above, still streaked with purple. Grampy didn’t notice her. He threw a tennis ball toward the woods and said, “Git.”

  Like that was going to happen. Nigel had no retrieving ability whatsoever, had never once brought back any object thrown for him. Instead, he’d just gaze into the distance, sometimes in the direction of the ball or whatever it was and sometimes not, until—

  But what was this? Nigel was on his feet, actually headed toward the tennis ball, lodged at the base of the nearest tree—quite a long throw.

  “Dillydallying,” said Grampy. “Pick up the pace.”

  Ingrid almost laughed out loud. Pick up the pace: as if Nigel—

  But Nigel began to run; not that ridiculous waddling drunken-sailor thing, but a real straight-line run, and far from slow. He grabbed the ball in one motion, no fumbling, and came running back.

  “Sit,” said Grampy.

  Nigel sat.

  “Give it up,” said Grampy.

  Nigel dropped the ball at Grampy’s feet.

  “Not like that,” Grampy said.

  Nigel picked up the ball, held it loosely in his mouth for Grampy to take it. Grampy took it.

  “Lotta work to do,” he said. He patted Nigel on the head, one quick pat, over and gone.

  Nigel wagged his tail, harder than Ingrid had ever seen him.

  “Grampy?”

  He turned. For a moment he looked so full of life, all rosy and having fun. Then it faded.

  “How did you get Nigel to do that?”

  “Do what?” Grampy said.

  “Retrieve.”

  “It’s in his genes.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. He’s half Lab, maybe more.”

  “Nigel?” Nigel looked nothing like a Lab to Ingrid.

  “But the rest of him’s trash,” said Grampy. “What you got there?”

  “The Echo,” she said, holding it out.

  “That rag?” said Grampy. “Wouldn’t waste my time.”

  “Yeah, but look—the World War Two series has started.”

  He took the paper, gazed hard at Cyrus Ferrand’s picture. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth, got harder and harder. He came to the end of the article and threw the paper in the snow.

  “Grampy—what’s wrong?”

  Grampy didn’t answer. He walked to the house. Nigel trotted after him, but Grampy didn’t notice. He closed the door in Nigel’s face.

  Ingrid picked up the paper, smoothed it out.

  MEET CYRUS FERRAND

  THE WORLD WAR II BOYS FROM ECHO FALLS

  FIRST IN A SERIES

  ANOTHER ECHO EXCLUSIVE

  “It was a war for survival,” says Cyrus Ferrand. “We all did our duty.”

  Major Ferrand is one of those John Wayne–style heroes who don’t like to talk much about themselves. Now resident in the Caribbean, but Echo Falls born and bred, he is one of five surviving men of our town who went off to fight in World War II. Three of them—Myron Sidney, Major Ferrand, and Aylmer Hill—were all on Corregidor, a strategically important island off Manila in the Philippines, when it was captured by the Japanese in May 1942.

  “We put up a hell of a fight,” says Major Ferrand, “but without air cover against the Japanese bombardment it was hopeless.”

  History buffs will remember that the surrender was just the beginning of the nightmare for the Corregidor survivors, who ended up on the notorious Bataan Death March. Even so long after the event, the Death March is not a subject Major Ferrand will talk about.

  “Time is a great healer,” he says.

  How did the war change him? “We all grew up pretty fast,” he says. He adds that lifelong friendships were formed, although he has not kept up with Mr. Sidney or Mr. Hill. Major Ferrand, a one-time racer on the ocean yacht circuit, describes himself as a “retired investor” and says he lives “very quietly now. It was all long ago.”

  Next week: Myron “Boom Boom” Sidney.

  What had got Grampy so angry-looking, or if not anger, some other emotion that had made his eyes go so hard? Ingrid reread the article and couldn’t come up with anything. She could almost hear the voice of Sherlock Holmes. You did not know where to look.

  She went back inside. No one in the kitchen but Nigel, lying by the water bowl in his usual splayed-out way. Ingrid gave him a long look. “What other tricks do you know?” she said.

  No response.

  “Ingrid,” Mom called downstairs. “Can you run the laundry?”

  “What about Ty?”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “WHAT ABOUT TY?”

  “He’s out taking Nigel for a walk.”

  “No he’s not.”

  “Can’t hear you.”

  “NO HE’S NOT.”

  “He’s not? TY! TY!”

  Silence.

  Ingrid went into the laundry room. Dirty clothes were piled high in the plastic hamper. She opened the washing machine. Also full of clothes, but these were all damp and twisted up, meaning first she had to throw them into the dryer. She opened the dryer. Oh, no. Full of clothes too, but all dry. If they’d been wet, she could have just pressed the start button and called it a day, standard 99 Maple Lane procedure in a backed-up-laundry situation. Now she had to empty the dryer, fold all the jeans, shirts, T-shirts, skirts, pair up the socks, lay everything neatly in hamper two. After that came tossing the damp clothes from washer to dryer, and only then, what seemed like an hour later, could she actually “run the laundry,” which probably sounded like nothing to a beginner, more play than work.

  Ingrid was no beginner. Was there anything more tedious than this? The same repetitive thing, over and over, the only difference being that for the first time, some of the clothes were Grampy’s. Like Dad and Ty, Grampy wore boxers, not briefs. Was that a family thing? She found herself wondering what Joey wore. Her mind wandered a bit after that, and she almost missed something in the chest pocket of one of Grampy’s shirts. A mistake like that could mean laundry-room disaster. Once Dad’s fountain pen had somehow slipped by and—

  What was this
thing anyway? Some kind of ticket stub? She removed it from Grampy’s pocket. Not the long skinny ball-game kind or the tiny movie kind: this stub, red and black, was for parking. At the top it said, New York City Mercy Hospital.

  Ingrid slipped it into her own pocket. A very strange moment in the laundry room—now she really could hear Holmes, as though he were there, speaking in Basil Rathbone’s voice. I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.

  Why couldn’t she be smarter? She needed to be smarter, and fast.

  fourteen

  DATA. IT COULD come in the form of information, things you heard and saw. For example, take the creepy-looking guy who’d snapped her picture, or maybe hers and Nigel’s. Mr. Borum had seen a prowler matching that description around his shed, back when he’d still owned the dairy farm. Were those two links in a chain? If so, it was hard not to connect them to Grampy’s shed, a perfect spot for watching the dynamite caper without being seen. Was that a third link, a third link in a chain that led to the identity of the anonymous tipster? Ingrid couldn’t prove it, but she knew. That mudded-out license plate might as well have read: GUILTY.

  Data could also be an object, like the parking stub she’d found in Grampy’s shirt. Sherlock Holmes was great at seeing big meanings in little things. Take how he knew from some scratches on Watson’s shoe in “A Scandal in Bohemia” both that Watson had been getting himself very wet lately and that he had a careless servant girl. Little things with big meanings: Alone in her room that night, the house quiet, Ingrid examined the parking stub under her desk lamp.

  The parking stub was square, about two inches by two inches, with perforations at the bottom where the end had been torn off. New York City Mercy Hospital was printed in white letters at the top. Then came an address: 23 East End Avenue. After that, in tiny print, were lots of parking garage rules. Ingrid made her way through them all. They mostly added up to the garage not being responsible for anything. What would Holmes have seen? Ingrid didn’t know.

  She flipped the stub over. On the back was a map of East End Avenue and surrounding streets; Ingrid saw that the East River flowed nearby. Putting that together with memories of her two trips to New York, she felt pretty sure that New York Mercy Hospital was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. What else? She stared at the back of the stub. There was an inky smear in the middle, hard to read, as though the printer had been jolted or something. Not exactly a printer—maybe more like a stamper. Yes, one of those stamping machines they had in parking garages. You stuck the ticket in the machine on the way into the garage, then gave it to the clerk on the way out, and the clerk stamped it and told you the amount. And therefore…

  Ingrid bent over Grampy’s parking stub, squinted at the blurry print. In: 11:05 A.M., Tue., Feb. 11. Out: 10:17 A.M., Sat., Feb. 15.

  Sat., Feb. 15? She turned to her computer, brought up the calendar, double-checked. Yes: the day she and Joey had snowshoed on the old Indian trail, ended up finding the body of Harris Thatcher. And Grampy? He hadn’t been home at first, but then had appeared in dress pants, his suitcase in the kitchen. So that added up. But way more important than that was Tue., Feb. 11. Ingrid’s heart started beating very fast, like she’d been running a long race. Tue., Feb. 11 was the day of Mr. Thatcher’s murder, according to the medical examiner. When, exactly? Ingrid couldn’t remember. She went to The Echo’s site—a dinky little site with a shaky video of the falls—and found the article: between noon and 3:00 P.M.

  Grampy, or someone with the parking ticket, had checked into a New York City parking garage at 11:05, fifty-five minutes before the beginning of the medical examiner’s time period. Grampy, or that someone, had been hundreds of miles away on the day of the murder.

  Maybe not hundreds. Ingrid went to MapQuest, checked the distance from Echo Falls to New York City Mercy Hospital: 112 miles. How long did it take to drive 112 miles? A couple hours, probably, maybe more in heavy traffic. She tried to imagine ways the ticket holder could have parked in the hospital garage, hurried back to Echo Falls by some other means of transport in time to kill Mr. Thatcher before 3:00 P.M., then return to New York and have the ticket stamped out on Saturday. More like the kind of thing that happened in second-rate movies, but possible. Possible if you were really clever at being sneaky. Not Grampy.

  And therefore? Therefore right in the palm of her hand she was holding evidence—hard and unshakable—of Grampy’s innocence. She jumped up, on her way to spread the news, to shout it through the whole house. But at her door she paused. Grampy knew he was innocent. Even if he’d somehow forgotten the parking stub, there were probably lots of ways he could prove he’d been in New York at the time of the murder. He hadn’t done so. Why not? Was it conceivable he’d engineered some second-rate movie scheme after all? Ingrid remembered one of Holmes’s most important sayings, from The Sign of Four: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  So where was she? Ingrid wasn’t sure. She wavered at the door. Another question lurked in the background, maybe the biggest: What was Grampy doing at New York City Mercy Hospital in the first place? Ingrid moved back into her room. She slid the parking stub into an envelope and stuck it under some papers in her top desk drawer.

  The next morning it was snowing, not hard but maybe enough. Ingrid switched on Roxy 101, caught the school closings. Glastonbury closed, Windsor closed, Cheshire two-hour delay, South Harrow closed, Simsbury closed, Echo Falls open. Echo Falls open? She couldn’t have heard right.

  Ty was in the bathroom; Ingrid knew from the sound of water splashing all over the place. She knocked on the door.

  “Ty? Is there school?”

  “Why else would I be up, you moron?”

  The bus was late. Big surprise. All over central Connecticut kids were tucked safe and sound in their beds. Only in Echo Falls, for some reason, were they expected—

  Ingrid saw Mia outside her house a couple blocks away, a tiny figure behind a snowflake curtain. She walked up the street. Mia was facing the other way, didn’t see her.

  “Hi,” Ingrid called.

  Mia jumped; not a jump, maybe more like she’d been jolted by electricity. She turned. “Oh my God. You scared me.”

  Ingrid raised her hands like claws, made a monster face. Then she noticed how pale Mia’s own face was; plus red-rimmed eyes and dark circles under them. “Something wrong?” she said.

  Mia’s eyes met Ingrid’s, then shifted away. She looked almost embarrassed about something, but what sense did that make? Ingrid was trying to think of what to say next when Mia’s face crumpled and she burst into tears.

  “Mia?”

  “Oh, Ingrid.” Mia stumbled forward, bumped against Ingrid, almost falling. Ingrid held her.

  “What is it?”

  “This is my last day.”

  “Your last day?” Ingrid felt Mia’s tears on her own face.

  “I’m going back to New York,” Mia said. “To live with my father.”

  “Today?”

  “He’ll be here after school.”

  “But why?”

  Mia sobbed, shaking in Ingrid’s arms. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You’re the best friend I’ll ever have.”

  “But why now, in the middle of the school year?” Ingrid said.

  “That part’s okay,” Mia said through her tears. “I’m going back to my old school.” She kept crying.

  “We’ll still be friends,” Ingrid said, her own voice choking up. “And there’s nothing to be sorry about. I just don’t understand why.”

  Mia backed away, wiping her face on the sleeve of her jacket. “Oh, God, Ingrid.”

  “Oh, God, what?”

  But Mia just shook her head. The bus appeared, coming slowly down Maple Lane. Mia’s eyes widened. “Do I look like I’ve been crying?”

  “No,” Ingrid said. A total lie. “Don’t worry—it’s only one hund
red and twelve miles.”

  “What is?”

  “From here to the east side of Manhattan.”

  The bus pulled up. “That’s where my dad lives,” Mia said.

  “Perfect,” said Ingrid.

  Mia laughed, just a little bit. “How do you know the mileage?”

  The door opened. “Morning, petunias,” said Mr. Sidney.

  Being at school on what should have been a snow day made everyone grumpy, teachers too. All except Mr. Porterhouse in gym, who was practically bouncing up and down with positive energy.

  “Let’s shoot some hoops,” he said. “Two half courts, five on five, subs rotate in, captains Stacy, Carlos, Matt, and Anna, choose ’em up, boy girl boy girl, let’s go.”

  Ingrid ended up on Carlos’s team, third pick, which was just about right. Basketball was not her sport: that ball, so huge and unmanageable, and the hoop so high. But she loved running, and there was lots of that. Whenever the ball came her way, she passed it immediately to Carlos and he took care of the rest. Carlos was probably the best athlete in the school—Ty said the Red Raiders football coach already knew about him—and made the game seem easy. Like right now, the way he dribbled around Joey, Anna’s first pick, like he wasn’t there, and went in for an easy layup, almost touching the rim. After that he came racing back on defense, said, “Nice pass, Ingrid,” then stripped the ball from Joey and passed it to her. She passed it right back the way she always did, and Carlos somehow dribbled the ball through Dustin Dratch’s legs and took it in for another easy two.

  “Nice pass, Ingrid,” he said, backpedaling up the court faster than most of the others could run forward. “You’re first pick next time.”

  Joey came dribbling up the court, his chin stuck way out. Carlos glided over to cover him. Joey crashed into Carlos, and they both went down. Mr. Porterhouse blew the whistle.

  “On you, Joey. That’s a charge. He had position.”

  Joey looked real mad all of a sudden, his face red and swollen in a way Ingrid had never seen. “No, he didn’t.”

  Mr. Porterhouse blew the whistle again. “That’s a technical. Shooting two, Carlos.”