No, I never wanted that. That hadn’t stopped it from happening, though.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sal said, releasing his hold on my lock. “I wasn’t looking for anything.” He spun the dial a few more times. “Except maybe can I have my English notes back?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” I took the lock into my hand and was surprised when Sal turned his back so that I could dial my combination in private. Jeez, Sal was a good guy. Responsible. If Riel really got to know Sal, he’d love him. “You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I don’t want to be tempted.”
“Yeah, but I trust you.” And I did. It was true. I trusted Sal 100 percent. Which was funny when I thought about it. If you asked me who’s your best friend, it was a no-brainer. I’d say Vin. Vin and I went all the way back to kindergarten. Only now, the way things were turning out, I wasn’t so sure. But when I had changed locks, Vin had pestered me for the combination, in case of emergency, he said. And the next thing I knew, I was in class without a history book. Sal, though? Sal didn’t even ask for the combination. I looked at his back, yanked on the lock until it gave, and thought, Maybe Sal is my best friend now. Maybe things have shifted that much.
“So, did you bring it?” Sal said as he turned around.
Jeez. “No, I forgot.”
“But you said you’d bring it.” Sal was looking better now. He seemed a little more back to normal, and not just because his eyes weren’t all watery and bloodshot. He seemed back to normal because he was giving me a hard time for not bringing the money to buy a ticket to the school dance.
“I forgot. I’ll bring it tomorrow,” I said.
“What if they sell out?”
There was a limit to how many kids could attend school dances. You had to buy a ticket, and when the tickets were all gone, you were out of luck.
“It’s Monday,” I said. The dance wasn’t until Friday.
“Tickets sold out on Monday for the last dance,” Sal said. The last dance had had an actual band instead of recorded music. I figured maybe that was why it had sold out so fast.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll bring it tomorrow for sure.”
“Now,” Sal said. “You gotta get the money now.”
“But I don’t have it.” Jeez, hadn’t I just said that? For some reason that I didn’t understand, Sal was desperate to go to this dance. He was just as desperate to drag me along with him. It had to be a girl. A girl he had it bad for but hadn’t told me about yet. I tried to think of who it could be, but drew a blank.
“Fine,” I said. “This is such a big deal to you, you lend me ten bucks?”
“I don’t have that much money,” he said.
So what was I supposed to do? If I could figure out how to pluck ten dollars out of thin air whenever I needed it, well, life would be a whole lot different, right?
“Ask Riel,” Sal said.
I shook my head. Riel was funny about money—especially about me asking for money when that was the whole point of me having a job. But it wasn’t like I’d be asking him to give me money. It was only a loan, ten bucks. I could pay him back when I got home. And the money wasn’t for anything Riel would disapprove of. It was for a school dance. School dances contribute to school spirit. School spirit is a good thing. Riel is as big on school spirit as he is on school sports.
“Okay,” I said.
“Ask him now.”
“O-kay,” I said.
I tried the staff lounge first. I knocked on the door and asked politely when—who else?—Ms. Stephenson answered. It just had to be Ms. Stephenson. It couldn’t have been Mr. Korchak, my music teacher, who actually seemed to like me. Ms. Stephenson seemed only too happy to tell me that Riel wasn’t there.
I tried Riel’s classroom, but he wasn’t there either, and the room was locked. I could have quit then. I’d tried, right? But Sal was going to pop an artery if I didn’t produce ten bucks and buy a dance ticket by the end of the day.
Maybe Riel was outside. Riel was also very big on outside.
But, no, he wasn’t there either.
Now I was really baffled. He had to be somewhere. One thing about Riel, he was 100 percent responsible. When he was supposed to be at school, he was at school. But where at school?
I tried the gym. Then the office. I peeked through the window in the door to the auditorium. I didn’t see Riel, but I was willing to bet serious money that the briefcase that was sitting on the stage was his. Curious—where there’s briefcase, there’s teacher—I pushed open the door. The auditorium seemed deserted. I stood at the back for a moment, quiet, listening, and finally caught the hum of a voice. A masculine voice, coming from up near the stage. Riel? If so, what was he up to?
I crept up the aisle—which was easy in sneakers—until Riel’s voice became clearer.
“It was the right thing,” he was saying.
What was the right thing? Who was he talking to?
“But it was in the paper,” another voice said. A woman, maybe. Maybe a girl. Her voice quavered. “It took me four whole days to tell my mother. Then my mom and dad argued about it, you know?”
Argued about what? Who was Riel talking to? And why were they talking in here, of all places? Why not out in the open? Why not in Riel’s classroom?
“My mom, she wanted me to call the police right away. My dad was dead against it. He said, what good would it do, especially if I didn’t see anyone clearly enough to identify them? He said, what if one of them saw me clearly, though? He really scared me, Mr. Riel. I mean, what if he’s right? What if those kids I saw were the ones who killed that boy? And what if they saw me? I mean, it says in the paper the police have a witness who saw kids in the park. What if one of them recognizes me and thinks I know something?”
So, she was the one.
Riel didn’t jump right in with an answer, which didn’t surprise me. Sometimes when you asked Riel a question—a serious question, not a have-you-seen-my-math-book question—he would just look at you, like he was the one who had asked the question and now he was waiting for you to answer it.
“But I couldn’t just say nothing, could I?” the girl said. I was sure it was a girl now. A student at this school. Maybe even someone I knew. “I mean, my mom’s right, right? You have a duty to come forward, right?”
Another few heartbeats of silence. Then, “You did the right thing, Rebecca.”
I ran through every girl I knew. There were no Rebeccas.
More silence. Then, “It’s just that … ” Silence. “They killed a kid, Mr. Riel.” More silence. A whole long stretch of it. And this time it was Riel who broke it.
“It’s not always easy doing the right thing,” he said. “If you’re worried about anything, if you feel something isn’t right, if you get scared, you can call the police. The detective you talked to gave you his card, didn’t he? If anything comes up, you call him. Or come and see me. And next time, I think it would be okay if you saw me in my classroom.”
I heard a scraping sound. Chairs, maybe. Maybe they had been sitting down and now they were getting up. I started to back away from the stage.
The girl appeared just like that—now you see her, now you don’t. She stepped out onto the stage. Maybe she’d been planning to jump down off it, but she froze when she saw me. I recognized her immediately. She was the girl I had seen in the alley the day that I’d run into Vin. The girl with the fat beagle. She wasn’t giving me the same look as she had that day, though, like I was something nasty to be scooped up off the street. Instead, she looked scared. She had a long, slender neck—I don’t know why I noticed that, but I did—and her head turned on it as she glanced back at Riel, who was coming out onto the stage to retrieve his briefcase. Riel frowned when he caught the expression on her face. “Mike, what are you doing here?” he said. Then he nodded at the girl, a little gesture that said, it’s okay, nothing to worry about, off you go.
Rebecca—I wondered what her last name was—jumped down off t
he stage and landed without a sound. She hurried up the aisle to the door without looking at me. When she got to the door, she stopped and peeked out, head moving right, then left. Only then did she push her way out into the hall.
“Is she the one?” I said. I tried to sound casual, like it was no big deal, so that there’d be more of a chance that Riel would answer.
Riel made a lot more noise than Rebecca when he jumped down from the stage—ba-bump.
“Were you eavesdropping?” he said.
I shook my head. Deny, deny, deny. “I was looking for you, that’s all,” I said. “I need to borrow ten dollars for a dance ticket.”
Riel’s gray eyes drilled into me.
“Okay,” I said. What was the point? It was obvious he knew. “Okay, so I heard some of what she said. But I wasn’t eavesdropping. I mean, I didn’t come in here to spy on you or anything.”
“That’s good,” Riel said. “Because anything Rebecca said to me was said in confidence. And I would hate to have that confidence betrayed. It would reflect badly on me. You hear me, Mike?”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Then, I couldn’t help myself: “She didn’t recognize anybody?”
“I said she spoke to me in confidence,” Riel said. It was all he said. Well, fine. Time to change the subject.
“So,” I said, “can you lend me ten dollars for a dance ticket? I’ll pay you back when I get home.”
Riel dug his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a couple of fives. “You didn’t see Rebecca here and you didn’t see her talking to me, right?”
“Sure,” I said. Whatever.
I was standing outside the west entrance of the school when Rebecca Whatever-her-last-name-was came through the door at three thirty. I hadn’t been looking for her. I had just come outside, the way any normal kid does when the final bell of the day rings. I had seen Vin standing there, probably waiting for Cat, and I had stopped to tell him about what had happened at the candy store, about getting fired. Vin thought that was pretty funny. He was laughing when Rebecca came out the door.
It was pure coincidence that I happened to be there. If I hadn’t spotted Vin, I would have kept walking. I would have been halfway home by the time that door opened. But the way Rebecca’s eyes widened, the way they bugged right out of her head and the wild way she scanned the schoolyard behind me looking for—what? friends? protection? witnesses?—told me that she didn’t think it was an accident that I was there. I backed up a few paces, to put distance between myself and her, and felt like throwing up my hands, surrendering, to show I meant no harm.
“Hi, how’s it going?” I said, trying to sound friendly. What was with her, anyway? Why was she treating me like I was the entrance to a dark alley in a lonely part of town at two in the morning?
Her legs beat triple-time, like windshield wipers in a major downpour, as she blew past me.
“What’s with her?” Vin said.
She was scared, that’s what was with her. She had looked at me like she was staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. I wanted to run after her and tell her to calm down, tell her I wasn’t going to do anything to her, relax.
“Yeah,” said a voice behind me. A girl’s voice this time. “What’s up with her?”
It was Cat. I didn’t know how long she had been standing in the doorway. She smiled at me. At least, I thought it was a smile.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next day after school, I went into every store on Gerrard Street and on Danforth where I thought I might have a shot at a job—candy stores, video stores, doughnut shops, the McDonald’s down near Coxwell, even the Italian supermarkets—to drop off a resume and maybe talk to someone, an owner or a manager. I wasn’t exactly greeted with lots of enthusiasm. But then, I hadn’t expected much. When I ran out of resumes, I headed home.
The first thing I saw when I came through the door and glanced into the living room, halfway to dropping my backpack on the floor before remembering that Riel would chew me out until I picked it up again and put it where it belonged, was a pair of boots. Boots belonging to someone who was sitting in an armchair angled away from the door. Boots on feet at the ends of legs wearing a business suit. Not Riel’s boots. Riel had company.
“Mike, is that you?” he called from the living room.
“Yeah.”
“Come in here a minute.”
I stepped into the doorway. Riel was sitting on the couch. Opposite him, in a high leather armchair, was a man I had met back before I moved in with Riel. He was a cop. A homicide detective Riel called Jonesy.
“Mike, you remember Detective Jones?”
Yeah, I remembered him.
“He wants to talk to you.” Riel’s eyes were fixed hard on me. What was that about?
Detective Jones swung up out of his chair. He was taller than Riel, bulkier, a large and ominous presence. But he was smiling.
“Come on in, Mike,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Why was he being so friendly when Riel was looking so—what? Worried? Was that what it was? I sat down on the couch next to Riel.
“John tells me you’re doing better in school,” Detective Jones said.
I glanced at Riel. “Yeah, I guess,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “I hear you got a new history teacher too.”
Uh-huh. Was I really supposed to believe that Riel had called me in to give Detective Jones a rundown on my life at school? What next? Was he going to ask for my opinion on Mr. Danos, my new history teacher? Mr. Danos was due to retire next year. Not a minute too soon, if you ask me. The guy wasn’t anywhere near as enthusiastic about history as Riel was. I used to think that Riel was too enthusiastic for a subject that wasn’t just as dry as dust, it was dust. I didn’t realize, until I was transferred into Mr. Danos’s class, that too little enthusiasm is definitely worse than too much.
“Detective Jones is investigating Robbie Ducharme’s death,” Riel said.
A-ha. I looked at the detective with new interest. Detective Jones was on the job. Okay. But what was he doing here? Comparing notes with an old colleague?
“He wants to ask you some questions, Mike.”
“Me?”
Then, before I knew it, Detective Jones was telling me, since I was a juvenile, that he had to caution me. Did I understand what that meant? He said it was standard procedure. He told me that I had the right to have Riel present, as my guardian, while I answered his questions, and that I had the right to counsel too, if I wanted it. He asked me, Did I understand that, did I know what right to counsel was? He didn’t accept a nod of my head either. He made me explain it to him.
Just to be perfectly clear, I asked, “Am I in trouble?” A stupid question, I knew. Stupid because even a first-grader could figure out that when a homicide detective is cautioning you, that should be your first clue that all is not well in your own little corner of the universe.
“That depends,” Detective Jones said. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “You want to tell me where you were last Tuesday night, Mike?”
What? Why was he asking that? What was going on?
“I was here,” I said, glancing at Riel.
“All night?”
That’s what I had told Riel when he’d asked me the day after Robbie Ducharme had been kicked to death. I wanted to look at him, but I didn’t. Instead I looked right at Detective Jones and said, “All night.”
“You sure, Mike?” Detective Jones had pale blue eyes. They were focused 100 percent on me. They didn’t waver even for a second.
Was he asking me about Robbie Ducharme? Was that what was going on? So what if it was? No one had seen anything. And since no one had seen anything, there was no point in making myself look worse than I usually looked.
“Yeah,” I said. Was it my imagination or did my voice sound higher than normal? “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Because, you know, Mike, we’ve been pulling out all the stops on this Robbie Ducharme thing. You knew Robbie, didn’t you?”
; “Not really,” I said. “He was in my math class. I never hung around with him or anything. I don’t think you could say I knew him, not the way I know my friends.” Which was true.
“Lots of people knew Robbie and didn’t know him,” Detective Jones said. “Funny, huh?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t understand what he was getting at.
“We put out an appeal to the public,” Detective Jones said. “You’ve heard of Crime Stoppers, right?”
Who hadn’t?
“We got a lot of calls,” Detective Jones said. “One of them was a man who’d been out of town for a couple of days. When he got back, he was watching TV. He saw the Crime Stoppers segment on Robbie Ducharme and he called the number. He said he’d been on his way home that night from a friend’s house and was walking by the park. He said he saw a kid on the street near the park late at night. The same park where Robbie Ducharme was killed.”
I had to fight to keep from squirming under the steady gaze of Detective Jones’s pale blue eyes. Where was this going?
“He gave us a pretty good description,” Detective Jones said. He peered hard at me now. “We had him go through the yearbooks of some of the schools in the area, to see if he recognized the kid.”
Jeez, I whispered to myself, don’t let this be going where I think it’s going.
“And, what do you know,” Detective Jones said. “He picked out someone.” The pause that followed was so long that it qualified as torture. “He picked out your picture, Mike. Says he’s positive you were the kid he saw.”
I didn’t dare look at Riel. I didn’t dare look at Detective Jones either, except that I had the feeling that if I didn’t, he’d think I was guilty of something. So I made myself meet his eyes. I made myself look surprised. I made myself—tried to make myself—look like I had done nothing wrong.
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