“I might as well,” she said sadly. “It won’t be long before I won’t be able to show my face anywhere in town. Everyone will be whispering behind my back, talking about how it was my mother who robbed her own business and got sent to jail.”
“No one will be whispering behind your back,” I said soothingly. I knew she was right, though. If her mom was convicted, the gossip would take a long time to die down. “Anyway, I don’t think everyone goes to jail on their first conviction.”
That reminded me of something that had been lurking in the back of my brain and had almost been buried under other things. I told Betts to hold on, I had to ask her mom something else, and I’d be right back for our walk.
Mrs. Thompson was in the back of the house, sitting in the dark in the sunroom they had recently built just off their living room. It’s made of rounded Plexiglas that looks out over their backyard, which showcases a fantastic flower garden. In the night, though, it’s almost spooky, especially if there’s any wind to make the trees that surround the yard sway against the sky. All the bushes and shrubs that are so lovely in the daylight hunch there like goblins and monsters, with craggy arms reaching out to grab you.
Anywhere else in Little River the street lights would be enough to illuminate the yard a bit more, but their place is on the edge of town, at the end of a dead-end street, and the light just doesn’t reach back that far.
Mrs. Thompson seemed almost in a trance, sitting there all alone. I wondered where her husband was and how this was affecting him. Did he have moments of doubt about his wife’s innocence? And how would it feel to be on the verge of seeing your whole world turn upside down?
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said as softly as I could, so as not to startle her.
It didn’t work. She half jumped from her seat and turned to me. My eyes had adjusted to the dark enough by then to allow me to see that her face was kind of crumpled looking.
She cleared her throat. “Yes?” she asked.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I just thought of something else I wanted to ask you. Have there been any unresolved problems at NUTEC that you can think of? Anything unusual that’s happened lately?”
“Such as?” Mrs. Thompson rubbed her forehead with her fingertips as though she was trying to nudge information loose.
“I don’t know, exactly.” And I didn’t. I felt like I was just floundering all over the place. “Anything where things just seemed amiss.”
“There was something a bit odd that happened few months ago,” Mrs. Thompson said slowly, “though I don’t see how it could be related to the robbery. We had a big meeting with some executives from head office. There were a number of us doing presentations — Joey, Debbie, Darla, James, and I. The program designers were demonstrating some new software, Darla was doing project analysis, I was doing a managerial report, and James had done up a financial report with projections for future profits and such, based on our output and potential at the time.
“Anyway, I went first, then Darla, and James was up next. Only, when he went to pass out the copies of his report for them to follow along with, it was missing. We’d all put our presentations in there an hour or so before the meeting, on the desk in the corner by the filing cabinets. It seemed that they were all still there, but when he picked up his stack, it was just a bunch of garble instead of the actual report.”
“That’s odd,” I said.
“Oh, that wasn’t the worst of it.” She shook her head, remembering. “We looked high and low while the executives sat there waiting, and then James found his report copies.”
She drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “They were in my briefcase, leaning against the wall under the desk.”
“What made him look there?” I asked.
“He happened to notice the case was bulging, even though I’d emptied it when I’d put my presentation out earlier.”
“How did they get in there?”
“Well, I suppose someone did it as a joke and then didn’t want to admit to it when they realized how much trouble it had caused. We looked like fools in front of the executives. But there was nothing actually taken — especially of value, like the program that was stolen last month.”
She reached for a tumbler sitting tidily on a coaster on a nearby. “Why did you want to know that?” she asked after taking a sip.
“I just wondered,” I said lamely. It wasn’t like the two things were related. What I’d mainly hoped to gain from the question was some idea of office dynamics, but the story she’d told me hadn’t even given me that. Mrs. Thompson was probably right. Someone had been pulling a practical joke without stopping to think of the possible ramifications. Naturally, once that person saw what havoc was caused, they wouldn’t be eager to claim responsibility.
I was right back where I started.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The first thing Betts did when we set out on our walk was apologize for how she’d acted a bit earlier. It wasn’t a traditional kind of apology, but then friends have their own language about those things.
“It’s been pretty weird here,” she said, her eyes downcast.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Anyway, what I said earlier…”
“I know,” I said.
She flashed me a kind of shaky smile and we just kept walking and never mentioned her borderline attack on me again.
“How are things between you and Derek lately?” I asked when we’d walked in silence for a little while.
“Fair to middlin’, I guess,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh,” she smiled, a real one this time. “That’s an expression my dad uses a lot.”
“I never noticed.” Truth is, her dad is kind of shy, so the conversations I’ve had with him have been pretty limited.
“It means so-so.”
“Oh.” Old people sure say strange things. And they complain about us!
“We’re going out tomorrow,” she went on. “Me and Derek, that is.”
I started to say “Derek and I” automatically, but stopped myself in time. My folks have this annoying habit of always correcting every little grammatical mistake I make. I never thought it would get to this point, but I notice myself automatically doing it in my head when someone else says something wrong.
“Where’re you guys going?” I asked instead.
“Probably the theatre. There’s not much else to do, especially with the Scream Machine being closed.”
She was right. The most popular spot for teens to hang out in Little River had just been sold, and the new owners had closed it for renovations. I must admit it was more than due for a facelift, but it was still strange not to be able to pop in there for gossip and greasy food. Now there was talk that it was going to be changed from a soda shop into an elegant little diner. If that were true, there’d be one less place for us to go, which didn’t leave many options, believe me. No one seems to care very much about whether we have things to do in our free time.
“What show are you seeing?” I asked, drawing my thoughts back to our conversation.
“I dunno. Some stupid action show, most likely. Derek wouldn’t agree to go if it was a chick flick.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Greg will go to them with me, but I don’t ask anymore, because the last time we went to see a romance I heard his father ask him what he was doing that evening, and he said ‘penance.’”
Betts giggled at that but quickly grew serious again.
“I wish I had the same kind of relationship with Derek that you have with Greg,” she said wistfully. “You guys get along so great.”
“Not always,” I admitted, though it’s nice to have people think that. “We argue once in a while.”
“Yeah, only your definition of an argument might not be the same as mine,” she said. “When’s the last time you two yelled at each other and said mean things?”
“Well, we don’t argue like that,” I said, “but we don’t agree on eve
ry little thing, either. Disagreement is disagreement, however you express it.”
“We express it,” she said, “in pretty terrible ways sometimes. It seems that lately, instead of having a good time together, all we do is fight.”
“I imagine you’re really stressed out these days, with everything that’s going on,” I pointed out. “Maybe that’s affecting your relationship with Derek.”
“I don’t think it’s that,” she sighed. “Like I told you before, he never does anything thoughtful or romantic anymore.”
“Do you fight about that?” I asked.
“Maybe a little,” she admitted.
“Well, fighting about it isn’t likely to make it better,” I commented. “Anyway, when’s the last time you did something thoughtful or romantic for him?”
“For him?” She sounded truly astonished at the idea. “He’s the guy. He’s the one who’s supposed to do that stuff.”
“This is the twenty-first century!” I said. “Things have changed. It all works both ways. Or at least, it should.”
“So you think I should…” She trailed off, hesitated a few seconds, and then turned to me questioningly. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he likes. I don’t even think it really matters what it is, so much as the fact that you did something special.”
“Well, what kind of stuff do you do for Greg?”
“Well, for example, I dropped a little handmade invitation at Broderick’s one night, asking him to come to my place after work. When he got there I had a candlelight picnic set up in the backyard. He liked that a lot. Another time I got his dad to let me in his room when he wasn’t home and I left a bouquet of helium balloons that I’d written mushy stuff on tied to his headboard.”
Betts seemed impressed with the ideas, but her mood turned sour again pretty quickly. “That works with you two because Greg does things like that for you all the time too. Derek never does.”
“Yeah, but someone has to start that kind of thing. I’d never have thought up the stuff I planned if it wasn’t for the fact that Greg did special things for me first. If you still like Derek enough to try to make it work between you, then you might have to make the first move.”
“What if I do something like that and he thinks it’s stupid and makes fun of me?”
“I guess if it really matters to you, you’ll take that chance.” I honestly couldn’t see him reacting that way, but I wasn’t about to come right out and say so. If I were wrong, I’d never hear the end of it.
“You know what scares me?” Betts said suddenly.
“What?”
“I keep changing my mind.”
“About Derek, you mean?”
“Well, Derek right now. But it’s been this way with every guy I’ve ever gone out with.” She sighed. “I like them a lot and then later on I don’t even know if I like them any more.”
“How can you not know if you like someone?”
“That’s the weird thing. Some days I think I’m still crazy about a guy, and others I couldn’t care less if I never saw him again.”
“And that scares you?” I was having a bit of trouble following her train of thought.
“Yeah. Because, what if that keeps happening to me later on? What if it happens to me after I’m married?”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” I said, but I didn’t know if I really meant it. Betts has always been pretty flighty.
“Why not?” She turned and faced me with a challenging look, like she was daring me to say the wrong thing.
“Because, you’re still, uh, young,” I said, trying to sound like I had some idea what I was talking about. “So right now you’re just finding out what you want, you know, in a guy. And by the time you’re old enough to make a big decision like that, you’ll have it all sorted out.”
“But what if there’s one person out there who’s meant for me, like a soul mate,” she said, “and I never find him because I haven’t even figured out my own feelings?”
“You believe in soul mates?” I was surprised about that, but mostly I wanted to avoid answering her question.
“Maybe. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I think there could be more than one person you could love and be happy with, though I can’t imagine feeling the way I do about Greg with someone else.”
Betts’s attention was already drifting, though, and I could tell that she was thinking about what I’d said a few moments earlier and not terribly interested in my comments about Greg.
“Yeah, that’s cool,” she said politely. “Anyway, I think I’ll head back home now. I might think of some things to try with Derek, just to see if it makes any difference.”
We said good night and I headed home, weary from a long day and a longer week. I was suddenly very lonesome for Greg, and as soon as I got in the house I called him.
He was glad to hear from me, but the second time he caught me yawning, he laughed and said, “There’s something I want you to do for me.”
“Okay. What?”
“I want you to say good night and hang up the phone. Then I want you to go to bed, but first, make sure your curtains are open so you can see the sky while you’re falling asleep.”
“Why?”
“Because in ten minutes, I’m going out on the deck here, and I’m going to look at the moon. This way, we’ll be looking at it together.”
I said okay, said goodbye, changed, brushed my teeth, and crawled into bed just in time. It felt so peaceful and nice, curled up and looking languidly at the moon, knowing that, many miles away, Greg was looking at it too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The last thought that had crossed my mind before falling asleep the night before was how nice it was going to be to sleep in. It would have been, too, if someone else hadn’t had a different plan for the morning.
It started out with a rough tongue rasping the edge of my ear.
“Ernie! Stop it,” I hissed.
Ernie didn’t stop. I mumbled something unfriendly at him and ducked my head down under the comforter. He took this move as the beginning of a new game, one in which he butted me with his head and walked back and forth across my covered head.
As determined as I was to ignore him and go back to sleep, it wasn’t very long before his persistence had me fully awake. I knew it was unlikely that I’d get drowsy again.
“You’re a bad cat,” I muttered, crawling out of bed.
One thing about Ernie, he’s pretty resistant to insults. With no sign of rancour, he rubbed his cheeks against my legs and purred loudly.
I focused on my alarm clock and saw that it was just a few minutes past seven. With a groan, I washed up and made my way to the kitchen, while Ernie did his best to trip me — running beside me with his little prance and managing to get in front or too close a half-dozen times on the way down the hall.
“I thought cats were supposed to be graceful,” I grumbled. Ernie meowed loudly, pacing in front of his dish. He seemed uninterested in any discussion on his clumsiness.
“I should give you beef this morning,” I went on, getting a tin of food from the cupboard. “What would you think of that? Oh, I know you like fish the best, but I like to sleep in on Saturdays and you don’t care about that, now, do you?”
Ernie purred and meowed and looked impatient. What he did not look was repentant.
I plunked his dish back down after scooping a stinky blob of canned trout dinner in it, and he started gobbling like a furry black piggy.
I washed my hands for a second time and opened the fridge. Mom had made a big citrus fruit salad, in one of her endless attempts to get Dad to eat healthier. It had chunks of oranges and mandarins and grapefruit. I decided to have some of that, along with yoghurt and a piece of toast, but I changed my mind at the last second and reached for the eggs instead.
I beat an egg into a shallow bowl, added a bit of milk, and dipped a couple of slices of bread into it. Then I dr
opped them into a sizzling frying pan, added a sprinkle of cinnamon, and felt my mouth start to water at the smell.
Once I’d eaten my French toast, wiped the table, and put my dishes in the sink, I found the grouchiness had pretty well passed. I looked around for Ernie, who had eaten and disappeared in short order.
He was curled up in Dad’s leather chair in the living room — the chair he’s been told repeatedly not to get into. Any other chair, we tell him, and he goes straight to the one he’s not allowed in and tries to dig his claws into the surface. Luckily it’s pretty thick, and so far he hasn’t been able to penetrate it, but he still has to learn not to get up there.
I scooped him up and took him to my room. Now that he’d eaten, he was only too happy to flop down and settle in for a nap. I stroked his soft fur while he purred, loudly at first and then softer and softer until he’d sunk into kitty slumber-land, where he doubtless enjoyed dreaming about the next batch of bad things he could do.
I put my face against his velvety side, and in no time, I too had drifted back to sleep.
It was Mom who woke me the next time, although she didn’t do it on purpose. She’d started dusting in the entryway and knocked over the umbrella stand. The clatter reached my room and sent Ernie flying to the floor and heading for cover. I knew I’d find him in his now familiar hiding place, behind the toilet in the main bathroom.
Since the ruckus had woken me as well, I figured I might as well give up on sleeping any more. I went and coaxed Ernie from his hiding place and then carried him with me to talk to Mom.
“Did I wake you, dear?” she asked as we came into sight.
“More like you woke him and he woke me,” I said, nodding at the cat.
“You woke me, too,” came Dad’s voice behind me.
“Ah, none of you want to be sleeping the day away anyway,” Mom said cheerfully.
“I was up earlier,” I protested. “I even cooked breakfast and fed Ernie.”
“Cooked? Not with real heat?” Dad teased. “You didn’t actually turn a burner on!”
“French toast,” I said, in the tone you use to tell someone “so there!”
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