Dooley Takes the Fall

by Norah McClintock

  Dooley looked at Mr. Rektor now and said, “I’ll get my uncle to write a note.”

  Mr. Rektor said, “The only way I’m going to believe your uncle has excused you from school to go to the funeral of a boy you didn’t know is if your uncle walks in here in person and tells me.”

  Right.

  On the way home from school, Dooley stopped by his uncle’s dry-cleaning store, the original one three blocks from his uncle’s house, not the uptown store that his uncle had opened later. When he told his uncle what Mr. Rektor had said, his uncle reached for the phone.

  “If you call him, he won’t believe it’s you,” Dooley said. “He’ll think it’s me or one of my friends.”

  “You have friends now?” Dooley’s uncle said, making a joke. “Tell you what, I’ll go in tomorrow and give my permission to his boss, the principal. And while I’m at it—”

  “I’m the one who has to be there every day,” Dooley said. “I’m the one he’s going see go by in the hall and try to find something wrong with.”

  “Fine,” his uncle said, putting down the phone. He looked Dooley over. “You got something decent to wear to a funeral?”

  Dooley said, sure, he had the pants and jacket that he had worn to court that last time. His uncle shook his head and asked him what was the matter with him, couldn’t he see how much he had grown? He called to Carla, who managed the store for him, and said he was leaving and he’d check in with her later. He said, “Come on,” and took Dooley to a menswear store where he picked out a pair of good pants, a dark jacket, a shirt, and a tie and told Dooley to try them on. When Dooley came out of the change room, his uncle said, “It always pays to look like you care.” Dooley wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he had to admit that he looked pretty good in the mirror.

  The church was packed. The girls who had been crying in school were crying again in their pews. So were some of the adults, including a girl that Dooley recognized from the video store. She’d been coming in maybe every other week and she always rented something interesting—not the latest Hollywood crap, but something British or from some other country. Subtitles didn’t put her off the way they did most of the customers. On top of that, she was great to look at—lively brown eyes, like coffee with just a splash of milk, and hair the same color, only glossy. She had creamy white skin and full pink lips, and was nice and slim, but not flat-chested like some of the really skinny girls. She had kind of a husky voice for a girl. The name that came up on the computer when Dooley scanned her membership card was Helen Manson, but that was her mother—at least, that’s what the girl had told him. So far she hadn’t told him her name. He was pretty sure she didn’t go to his school—he would have noticed if she did. But she must know Mark Everley, otherwise why would she be at his funeral? She walked past where he was sitting—which was at the back of the church—and took a place right up front, next to a woman who was sobbing. The girl put her arm around the woman. He heard someone behind him whisper, “That’s Mark’s mother and his sister.”

  Dooley saw her again when she and her mother, arm in arm, followed the casket down the center aisle of the church. He didn’t go up to her and her mother afterward, like some people did, including some guys he recognized from school, one of whom was Eddy Gillette. He’d seen the other guys with Everley in the past and figured they must be his friends. One of them, a guy Dooley had heard referred to as Landers, was, in Dooley’s limited experience, as much of an asshole as Everley had been.

  Dooley didn’t hang around outside the church when the funeral was over or go to the cemetery, either. Instead, he went back to school, handed in the note his uncle had written for him even though his uncle had spoken to the principal in person, and reported to English class.

  Five

  Dooley was walking past the school office on Wednesday after school, heading for the exit, when Mark Everley’s sister appeared. She was pale and her eyes were glassed over, like she hadn’t been sleeping well, if at all. She looked fragile but still beautiful. She glanced at Dooley, started to dismiss him, and then looked at him again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But don’t I know you? You work at the video store, right?” Dooley nodded. “It’s funny to see people where you don’t expect to see them,” she said. “Do you go to school here?”

  “Yeah,” Dooley said. Then, because she looked so pale and because it seemed like the right thing, he said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Not really,” Dooley admitted. “I’m new here. But I heard what happened.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t go to this school, do you?” Dooley said.

  She shook her head. “I just came to drop this off.” She held up an envelope. “Mark had a lot of friends. They’ve been great—coming to the funeral, dropping off cards for my mother. They filled the church with flowers. You should have seen it.”

  So she hadn’t noticed him at the funeral. Well, why would she? She’d had other things on her mind. Now he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want her to walk away, but he couldn’t think of anything that would make her stay.

  “Well,” she said, “I’d better go. I guess I’ll see you around the video store.”

  He realized, as she walked toward the office, that he still didn’t know her name. He considered going after her, but abandoned the idea when he saw Mr. Rektor, the A-to-L vice principal, come out of his office and stride to the counter to greet her. As he did, he glanced out at Dooley with the same distaste that he always had on his face when he saw Dooley, as if he were telling Dooley: I know you, and I know it’s only a matter of time before you screw up and I can get your ass out of here. When he turned back to the girl, though, he was all smiles. Well, why not? Then someone else went into the office. It was a guy Dooley had seen at the funeral. His name was Rhodes. He was tall with blond hair—a good cut—blue eyes behind sharp-looking glasses, and jeans that looked like they’d been pressed if they hadn’t been dry-cleaned. Rhodes laid a hand on Mark Everley’s sister’s shoulder, which told Dooley that he must know her pretty well. Dooley wished he knew her well, too.

  Dooley saw Everley’s sister again a lot sooner than he’d expected and not at the video store, either. She was in his face the next afternoon when he started down the front steps after school. Yesterday, she had looked tired and sad. Today she looked pissed off.

  “You’re Ryan Dooley,” she said, turning his name into an accusation that Dooley wanted to deny.

  “Yeah,” Dooley said cautiously. It sounded like she was mad at him for something.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you were the one who called the police?” she said. She was definitely mad at him, and shaky too. Dooley detected a tremble in her voice. “You spoke to me yesterday. Why didn’t you mention that you’re the one who saw what happened?”

  “I didn’t exactly see it,” Dooley said. He heard the door open behind him and stepped a little to one side so that whoever was coming out could get by him.

  “But you were there,” she said, still worked up, as if she suspected that he had committed the crime of the century and she was angry that she couldn’t prove it. “You found him.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Dooley said.

  Her coffee-brown eyes were hard on him. “I want you to tell me what you saw. Everything.”

  Everything? Dooley thought about Mark Everley’s glassy doll eyes. He thought about the way his neck was twisted and the stuff that had been leaking out of him.

  “There’s really nothing to tell,” he said, talking softly even though she had been practically yelling at him. After all, she had just lost her brother.

  She glanced over his shoulder now, and Dooley remembered that he had heard the door open behind him, but so far no one had come down the steps past him. He turned. Vice principal Rektor was standing two steps above him, his face pinched as if a bad smell was coming off Dooley. Dooley met his eyes.

  “You getting all this
?” he said to Rektor.

  Rektor didn’t budge.

  Dooley touched Everley’s sister’s and nudged her down the steps away from the vice principal. She didn’t resist. Instead, she glanced around.

  “There’s a place over there,” she said, nodding across the street. “I’ll buy you a coffee.” She had calmed down a little and sounded businesslike instead of hostile, so Dooley said okay. He would have said okay even if she was still worked up. He’d never had coffee with a girl like her.

  He sat across the table from her in a booth at a place opposite the school that was jammed with kids at lunchtime and was pretty much deserted the rest of the time. A bored-looking waitress with fake two-inch fingernails slid a mug of coffee in front of each of them and a little bowl filled with plastic containers of cream and milk between them. Dooley dumped two packets of sugar into his coffee. The girl—Dooley, embarrassed, finally asked her name; it was Beth—didn’t put anything in hers. She didn’t even touch it.

  “So?” she said. “Can you tell me what you saw?”

  “How did you know I was there?” Dooley said.

  “The detective who’s investigating Mark’s death,” —her voice caught a little when she said that word —“asked me if I knew you or if Mark had ever mentioned you. When I asked him why, he said because you’re the person who found him.”

  He wondered if Graff had told her anything else about him. “And?” he said.

  “And what?” she said.

  “Did you say you knew me?”

  She shook her head. “He asked me if I knew Ryan Dooley. I said no. I didn’t make the connection until last night. I went to the video store to return some DVDs and I heard a girl—she works there, too—talking to some other girl, and she said the name Dooley.” Dooley wondered if she meant Linelle. “So I asked her if she meant Ryan Dooley. And she said yes. Then I described you, and she said, yeah, that was you, and she told me what school you went to. Mark’s school. That’s when I figured out it was you.”

  “Everyone just calls me Dooley,” Dooley said.

  “You were there,” she said. “Tell me what happened, what you saw.” She stared across the table at him with those dark coffee eyes until he had no choice.

  He told her where he had been (strolling down the path in the ravine), what he had seen (her brother, going over, only the way he said it was, “I saw him fall”), what he hadn’t seen (anyone or anything else up there on the bridge)…

  “What?” she said, leaning forward a little, peering at him, frowning.

  “What?” he said. Why was she looking at him like that?

  “There’s something you’re not telling me. I can see it in your eyes. It’s okay. I can handle it.”

  “There’s nothing,” he said, careful to keep his eyes blank and his face neutral. But it wasn’t easy because no sooner had he said he hadn’t seen anyone else on the bridge than he wasn’t sure that was true. He couldn’t remember seeing anyone, but something niggled at him and he wondered if maybe there hadn’t been someone or something else up there, someone or something that he hadn’t fully registered because he had been focused on the body falling off the bridge.

  No, he decided. No, he’d been straight and sober. If he’d seen something else, he would have remembered it. He was just second-guessing himself now because he wished there was something he could tell this girl, something that might make her feel better or, at least, not so bad.

  “I told you everything,” he said. “Like I said, I just happened to glance up, that’s all.” She was still peering at him, her head tilted to one side now, her lips tight. She wasn’t satisfied, but Dooley didn’t know what he could do about that. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “They think he jumped,” she said. “Either that or he was on drugs or maybe he’d been drinking and he did something stupid and he fell. But they won’t know that for sure until they get results from toxicology, and they told me that could take a while. They won’t even tell me what that means, how long a while is. What do you think?”

  At first he thought she was asking him how long he thought it would take to find out what her brother was doing before he went off the bridge, if he’d been doing anything at all. But, no, that didn’t seem to be it.

  “I can’t say,” Dooley said. “I didn’t know him, so I have no idea what he might have been thinking or doing.” He looked across the table at her. According to the newspaper, Mark Everley had been two weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday. Dooley wondered, was she his older sister or younger sister? You couldn’t tell with some girls. They looked eighteen or nineteen and then they turned out to be fourteen or fifteen.

  “When you got to him,” she said, meaning her brother, “was he wearing a backpack?”

  “Backpack?” Dooley said. Finally, a question he could answer without thinking about how to put it. “No.”

  “You’re sure?” she said. “Because he always had it with him. Always. But the police said it wasn’t there when they got there.”

  “I’m sure,” Dooley said. She kept right on staring at him. “Maybe he left it up top,” he said.

  “They looked up there when they were trying to find out what happened. They didn’t find it.”

  “Did he have valuable stuff in it?”

  “His digital camera,” she said. “I guess that’s valuable. He was always taking pictures. Always. He had some notebooks in there, too. He writes stories.” Dooley wondered if she even noticed that she was saying it like he was still alive. “Some of them are pretty good. So are his pictures.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have the backpack with him that night.”

  She shook her head impatiently. Right. She’d just said that he always had it with him.

  “Maybe he took it off before,” Dooley said, careful not to say before what. “And maybe someone came along before the cops got there and took it.”

  “I could see him taking it off if he jumped,” she said. “You know, so the camera wouldn’t get broken. But I can’t see Mark jumping. It wasn’t suicide. He wasn’t sick or depressed. He had no reason to kill himself.”

  “So it must have been an accident,” Dooley said. He could see why the cops were thinking drugs or alcohol. Everley would have had to be leaning pretty far over the guardrail to fall accidentally, and why would he do that unless he wanted to fall or he was completely out of it?

  “If it was an accident,” she said, “he would have had his backpack on him when you found him.”

  “If you don’t think it was an accident and you don’t think he did it on purpose—” What did that leave? “You think he was pushed?”

  “I know he didn’t jump. I also know that if it was an accident, he would have had his backpack on him when you found him.”

  Dooley chose his words carefully when he said, “Maybe someone took the backpack off him afterwards.”

  “You were the first person there,” she said, her eyes steady on him, reminding him of the way his uncle sometimes looked at him, wondering what he’d been up to, probably thinking the worst. “You said you saw him fall. You said you ran right to where he was and you kept an eye on everything while a kid went and called the police. You said that, right?” She even sounded like his uncle. He wondered again what, if anything, she had heard about him. Did she really think he would strip a dead guy of his possessions?

  “Yeah,” he said. “I saw him go over.” She flinched. “But I didn’t see him the whole time he was lying there. I couldn’t. I was too far away. I didn’t see him again until I got close a couple of minutes later.”

  She digested this.

  “So,” she said, “you’re saying that someone else could have seen him fall and could have got to him before you did and that person could have seen him lying there either dead or dying and, instead of doing anything to help him, that person could have stolen his backpack?”

  He was amazed how calm she was—angry, sure, her jaw twitching with indignation, but overall composed—when she said this. />
  “It’s possible,” Dooley said. “There are some strange people who hang out down in that ravine.”

  She leaned back in the booth now. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him for even a second. She was giving him the same look he got from every social worker, court worker, youth worker, corrections officer, judge, prosecutor, and probation officer who had ever read his file, like it was all his fault.

  “You said he had a digital camera,” he said. “There’s plenty of people who’d steal something like that.”

  She cocked her head to one side and studied him, as if she were wondering if he were one of those people.

  “The camera, okay,” she said finally. “But the whole backpack?” Her eyes drilled into him. “A person who would steal from someone who was lying there like that, that person is no better than an animal,” she said.

  Dooley said he agreed. He said he understood how she felt. But what he was thinking was, it wasn’t as if Mark Everley was going to need his backpack or his camera or his stories anymore.

  Six

  By the end of the week, things at school were back to normal. Kids were carrying on, outwardly at least, as if Mark Everley had never existed, and Dooley was back to remembering why he had never liked school. Reason number one was standing right up there at the front of the class—Dooley’s math teacher, droning out the rudiments of calculus, sounding like he one hundred percent didn’t gave a crap if anyone was listening or understood what he was saying. Reason number two: having to cram your head full of shit you knew for a fact you were never going to use, like, say, calculus. But the blue-ribbon winner, reason number three, was all the assholes. In Dooley’s experience, your average high school had a higher asshole-to-solid-citizen ratio than your average youth detention center. The only difference was, most of the high school assholes weren’t violent.