I didn’t have a direct line into James’s inner circle of rejects, but I knew Shelly, who knew Tim, who knew Thorndyke. By sports practice that afternoon, I heard that James had left campus suddenly and was due back by dinner.
Apparently Headmaster Crudgeon had personally approved James leaving for Boston. A proctor was visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that afternoon, and agreed to take James and return him in time for study hall.
James was dropped off at the Boston Public Library, but only for show. He walked eleven blocks through sweltering heat to reach the reflecting pool at the center of an old church and a bunch of office buildings.
James took the elevator to three different floors because he couldn’t remember which floor he wanted, and Interpol, the international police force, didn’t put its name on the building’s directory.
He wasn’t exactly shown a warm welcome. First of all, he was an unchaperoned kid. Second, he had no identification beyond a school identification card. But he also had Detective Superintendent Colander’s business card in his pocket, and that convinced the receptionist to make a call. It was longer than the other calls James had seen her make from the cushioned bench where he waited. A lot of talking and listening, interspersed with suspicious glances in James’s direction.
At last, an Asian lady met James and offered him something to drink on their way to the man’s office. James requested orange juice. After three other suggestions, he settled for bottled water.
“You may go in.” She knocked lightly and pushed open the door. The lady left to fetch his bottled water.
James stood still in the doorway.
“Hello, James. How can I help you?”
“I’m sorry,” James said, “I think I have the wrong office.” He stared at the plaque on the man’s desk.
DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT COLANDER
The man’s black head was shaved bald. He looked younger than Hildebrandt but older than Crudgeon. He wore wire-rim glasses, a brown suit with a green tie, and an expression of open curiosity.
“I’m looking for the other Detective Colander,” James said.
The man smiled widely. “And when you find him, I hope you’ll introduce us. I’m from Denmark, James. My father, obviously also a Colander, had one brother, and he was killed in the Afghanistan conflict. He was with the International Red Cross. He’s the only other male Colander I’ve ever met. Other than my father.” Another of those smiles. “I’m told you’re in possession of one of my business cards. May I see it, please?”
James walked tentatively into the small room, remembering it well. He and I had sat on the chairs currently pushed against the wall. James volunteered the card. It matched a stack of others held in a plastic stand. The man examined it carefully.
“That’s mine, all right, though he added a direct number by hand.”
“Private number, he said.”
“How exactly did you come across it, James? Please, sit!” It was a command.
James sat. “I . . . ah . . . I was here. With . . . I still don’t understand: Where is Detective Colander?”
“Now you’re worrying me. Are you feeling well?”
“Yeah. Sure. Fine. But . . .”
“I am Detective Colander. This is my office. What exactly are you telling me?”
Embarrassed, James did what Father had instructed him to do: he asked to see the man’s official identification. Had he ever done that with the Colander he knew? he wondered. He couldn’t remember ever asking. The detective seemed impressed that James would make such a request. He came around the desk and sat next to James. This Colander was a big man. Close up, his eyes loomed large and full of care.
“There’s a law, James. A very important law. It’s called impersonation of an officer. Are you familiar with what is meant by impersonation? Someone taking the place of a police officer?”
James nodded.
“You understand that if this is a dare or part of some kind of practical joke or—”
“It isn’t! I promise you. He isn’t you. You aren’t him. I came here—”
“Yes?”
“Never mind. I’m so confused.”
“Impersonating an Interpol officer results in jail time, James. Do you understand?”
“He said he was you.”
“Then you must help me find him. He must be arrested and charged.”
“I don’t know how to find him,” James said. “I mean, the phone number, I guess.” James checked his phone’s calendar and guessed at a date. “I think he brought me into this office on that date. I have a witness. My sister was with me.”
“This office? I was on paternity leave on that day. A baby girl. Our second. My assistant, whom you’ve just met, would have been here. What time was it?”
James couldn’t think. They’d been in the library. Colander had taken them here. Lunch hour? he wondered. He said nothing. It was all too overwhelming.
“You didn’t call to set up an appointment with me. Today, I mean.” The man suddenly sounded like a detective.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I knew you’d see—he would see me.”
The big man nodded. “And you say you’re in summer session at Baskerville Academy?”
“Yes.” James glanced at his watch and lied. “Oh, gosh. I’ve got to meet my ride!” He apologized for the visit.
Detective Colander tried but failed to get more out of James.
“If we don’t talk now, we’re going to end up talking at your school,” Colander said. “You don’t want that, now, do you, James?”
“I guess not. I don’t know. I guess it’s okay—”
James, in the midst of a complete meltdown, was trying to figure out who the other man might be, and more importantly, what that man had to do with Father’s death. Everything and anything James had told the fake Colander now gained importance. James mumbled another apology for leaving, which he hadn’t done yet. Then it occurred to him to stand up and try to leave. Would the man stop him?
Colander called out, practically begging James to stay.
James put one foot in front of the other. He passed the lady carrying his bottle of water. Neither of them said anything to the other. James kept walking.
Impersonating an officer.
Lies.
Murder.
James had been tricked from the very beginning.
CHAPTER 49
RETURNING TO THE MAKERSPACE MADE ME uneasy, given the last time. Despite having nothing to worry about, I was on edge. I was there to work with Ruby Berliner on the photograph of Mother and Father on the street. Using Ruby’s artistic skills and my knowledge of photography, we turned the face in the car into an enlarged image on one of the computers.
At this level of magnification, the old photograph turned into a bunch of dots. It reminded me of some of the artwork that hung in the hallways of the art department—weird abstract art that I didn’t understand. But Ruby saw shapes where I only saw the dots. Using an electronic sketch pad and stylus, she added her own at a furious pace. It was almost like a woodpecker pecking at a tree. Her dots joined the others, forming shapes, heightening colors, extending lines. She moved the image right to left and up and down, continuing to peck away on her pad, adding more and more dots.
“How long is this going to take?” I asked.
“Hang on. I’m kinda busy here,” Ruby said.
“It’s just I don’t see exactly what you’re doing.”
“I’m doing what you asked me to do.”
“Right, but what I asked you to do was to try to make the face more real, since it’s basically just a blob.”
“Was a blob,” Ruby said. “Let me work here, Moria. Go do something else or get me a tea from the Tuck Shop.”
Annoyed with her, I headed over to the Tuck Shop. I wolfed down a Milky Way to settle my nerves. I wasn’t a big fan of anxiety eating, but it worked. I got Ruby the tea and headed back over.
There w
as a worker with a wheelbarrow and a rake off to my right. He was hunched over a bed of flowers doing something or other, when he happened to look in my direction. But he didn’t happen to look anywhere. He did it on purpose, at least that’s what I thought, because it was the same guy from the Vanilla Bean. Talk about a panic moment. I needed another candy bar, and fast.
I stopped so sharply, some of the tea spilled out of the sipping hole in the cup’s plastic cap and burned my hand. I also stared right at the guy, and for all I know, my chin was down around my waist somewhere. I’m sure I looked like a complete moron and about as subtle as a duck doing ballet. He looked. I looked. He went back to his flowerbed work. I struggled to force my paralyzed legs to move one foot in front of the other and continue walking as if nothing had happened. But boy, had it happened.
This guy was either spying on me or under orders from James to protect me. Either way he was scaring me.
Making things even weirder, the only person who could clarify this for me was James, and I wasn’t about to ask him for anything. I couldn’t forgive him for the way he’d sacrificed Lexie. So selfish. So cowardly.
Juggling the tea to open the door to the makerspace, I stole another look in the direction of the gardener. His back was turned toward me; it was as if our little encounter had never happened, as if he was just a gardener and I was just a student. But I knew differently. I knew something strange was going on. It was yet another Sherlock moment, me wishing desperately my friend would appear and have answers to all of my questions and solutions to all of my problems. How many friends did I have like that? I wondered. One. And he was presumably still washing dishes or cutting carrots, or mopping floors at the Vanilla Bean, and I had to pretend he didn’t even exist.
Ruby was still at it, hunched forward to the screen, her right hand pecking. She had found a rhythm, comfortable now with the method. She worked with confidence.
I set down the tea.
She grabbed hold of it and spun it to her lips without taking her eyes off the screen, that right hand of hers dropping dots to fill in the space in the enlarged photograph, all of it at such an extreme enlargement that I still had no idea what she was doing.
“So, you ready?” she asked.
“That’s funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“Don’t forget you owe me your dessert tonight and tomorrow night.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“And you know we’re talking about apple pie and ice cream tonight.”
“A promise is a promise.”
“Okay,” Ruby said, “remember, this is only half the face, so there’s more to do.”
“No problem.”
She made the image smaller and tighter. The orbs took shape: a part of a cheekbone; an earlobe; an eyebrow. All at once, a head appeared, or half a head was more like it. She had been working on the left side of the face, which had been the brighter half in the photo. Where once there had been a vaguely recognizable blur, there was a face. I suppose I must have gasped or coughed or made one of those unexpected noises, because she turned her head violently in my direction.
“You like it?” she asked.
“No . . . I mean, sure, I guess. I mean I like what you did, how you did this. I don’t even get how you did this.”
“But you don’t like it.”
“I don’t like him,” I said, my heart somewhere up near my chin.
There was no mistaking the man in the car across the street watching my parents.
A younger Mathias Hildebrandt.
CHAPTER 50
WHEN I RETURNED FROM THE MAKERSPACE, Lexie stood just inside my dorm room, pale as ash, her lower lip trembling.
I invited her inside and she sat down on the bed. Her knees shook like Jell-O. People tell you things by the way they move. By the things they do, and don’t do.
I asked her what was wrong.
“I need to talk to this policeman. Calendar.”
“Colander,” I corrected. “He’s with Interpol. He’s not really a policeman. More like . . . I don’t know.”
“I need to speak to him.”
“O-K,” I said. “I thought we were a team.”
“We are.”
“So why aren’t you telling me more?”
Lexie looked at me. Her eyes were glassy. Her lip continued to tremble. She was crying inside.
“It’s about James. I need to talk to him about James.”
“Hello? I’m his sister! What about me?”
“I can’t,” Lexie said.
“But . . .” I felt hurt. “Seriously?”
“He’s your brother.”
“I’m aware,” I said. I thought I might stop her lip from moving if I made a joke. It didn’t work.
“It’s hurtful,” she said. “Really, I can’t.”
“Lexie, now you have to! I’ll never stop thinking about it.”
She hung her head. Shook it side to side.
“You have to,” I said more forcefully. I knew she didn’t have to. I crossed my fingers.
“I caught him in my dad’s office.”
“James?”
“After we sailed. Just as he was leaving. He went down to get something he’d forgotten. When I got down there, he was in my father’s office.”
“He’s like that. He explores everything.”
“I didn’t think anything about it.”
“Lexie?”
“My dad was hit by that car three days later.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I shouldn’t have told you. Please. The detective.”
“Colander.” I shivered, recalling him showing up at the Bean. “He told me he thinks James is hiding stuff about Lowry.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Lexie sounded angry.
“I . . . I guess not.”
“Please,” she whispered. “I need to text Colander.”
“Yeah. OK. I’ve got his number. But don’t accuse James of stuff. Tell him the stuff if you have to, I guess. But this is James we’re talking about.”
“I know.” She nodded. “There must be an explanation.”
“There must,” I said. But I heard in my own voice how uncertain I was.
CHAPTER 51
“LISTEN, YOU BEING A TECH NERD AND ALL, I need to ask you something,” James said to Claudette. He’d stopped her in the hallway between classes. Wearing tight clothes only made her look thinner. Her legs were way longer than James’s, but about the thickness of his forearms. Behind her back, other girls claimed she had an eating disorder, though James made it a rule not to believe rumors.
“You don’t have to be so charming,” she said, deeply sarcastic.
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not, which only makes it all the worse. You pay me. I get it. You treat me like you’re my boss. I get it.”
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“Of course you do,” Claudette said. “How else do you mean it?”
James thought about it. Too long. She snorted.
“Just as I thought,” she said. “So, what’s the assignment? And I want double what you paid me last time.”
“I’ll give you a twenty-five percent raise. No more.”
“Double or nothing.”
He appraised her partial squint, tight lips, and flaring nostrils. “Agreed,” he said. He needed this handled.
Her face didn’t so much as twitch.
He’d copied the long string of numbers, colons, and letters that had flashed on the Beacon Hill security video. 00:11:B6:C4:99:6A. “Does this mean anything to you? A code, maybe? A serial number? Is there a way to look up that format of numbers?”
“It’s a MAC address.”
“You mean like an Apple Mac? A computer?”
“Yes, but no. MAC: media access control number,” she said, as if James were the stupidest kid in the world. “It’s like a serial number, but different. It’s like your house has a mailing address. So does your co
mputer. Like that.”
James explained the flashing red number he’d seen on the security video. “If it’s like a house address, can you look it up?”
“Yeah. I mean I can’t look up where it was on a particular night, only where it is now, if that matters,” she said.
“I’ll take anything.” He passed her the paper with the address. “Just do it fast. And as long as we’re at it,” James said, “are you as good with audio as you are with video?”
“Try me,” she said.
“Check your email. I’m going to be sending you some audio files to reassemble. If you do it right, I’ll pay you triple.”
“You’re a real charmer, James.”
CHAPTER 52
SURPRISED BY HOW LITTLE MONEY IT TOOK TO win favor, James continued to spread around some of his cash. That included paying students who constructed the sets for the school plays. James had a little drama of his own planned.
The set designer and the stage crew were already working on the summer play. It had a small cast and three sets. Secretly building another set wouldn’t be any trouble, only cost, and James had the money to pay them and buy the supplies. His mission was to create a little magic.
He showed the set designer a bunch of photographs.
“Has to look like this—exactly like this.”
“This plain? No big deal. I get it. We can do that.”
“Seriously—exactly like this,” James said.
“I said I got it.”
“Two nights from now. And I need the auditorium’s blackout curtains in place and some special lighting.”
“I can get Tim Wormser for the lights. No problem, I’m telling you.”
James promised the kid more money if it all worked out.
A few minutes past lights out, sitting in front of his closet full of computer screens and displays, with Thorndyke looking over his shoulder, James replayed a recording from a hidden video camera inside Hildebrandt’s apartment. The man was speaking into the phone. All sorts of things were swirling around James’s busy brain: Colander, Hildebrandt, Father’s murder.
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