Sticks and Stones

by Michael Hiebert

  Why haven’t I thought of it before? Now that she did, it brought her back to almost two years ago, when she took down the Cornstalk Killer. Why hadn’t the building tweaked that memory when I first saw it?

  Everything seemed to be passing by her unnoticed. What was going on? She usually ran on gut instinct. Well, this time around, her gut wasn’t doing her or anyone any good.

  Her bottom teeth pushed hard against her top. Something about those thirty-nine suspects from Grell had her on edge. Tommy didn’t fit with them. His name should be on that list. And surely Duck would’ve remembered the scar. After seeing his reaction to the photo lineup, there was no way he’d ever even heard of Tommy before then. And how did Duck fit into everything? He knew about the holdback. Someone either really did tell him or he was part of the bigger picture.

  The bigger picture. Was that what Leah wasn’t seeing?

  It was four-thirty when Leah sat down at her desk. Chris was there today, so Dan was relegated to a chair at the coffee table. It was either that or a seat in the interview room. She gave him the choice.

  “Hey!” Dan said. “Either of you guys want coffee? Just made a fresh pot! Yummy, yummy coffee.” He held the half-filled pot up above his head as the coffee inside sloshed from side to side.

  Leah just smiled at him. It was like putting him at the kids’ table on Thanksgiving.

  CHAPTER 54

  My mother wasn’t home yet, at least I hadn’t heard her come in. Carry and Jonathon were in the living room watching television. The set was so loud, I could hear it from way down here in my room, and my door was even mostly closed.

  As far as my mother knowing I went through her files, she seemed okay about it now. I think she was only mad for a couple of hours. As usual, it was the right decision to do it behind her back. She would never have told me I could read them if I’d asked her, and almost always the punishment wasn’t near on as bad as I thought it would be.

  The stack was still on the counter. I had figured once she knew I was reading them that she’d take them in to work, but she told me she had two copies of everything so she could work from home just as easily as from the station, and, besides, I had already finished going through them. She didn’t seem too concerned with me making another pass if I decided to.

  Of course, I had known my mother wouldn’t approve of me reading all about a real serial killer. She no doubt thought it might somehow affect me badly to read all the details of how the victims were killed and then moved to a secondary scene where he did even more stuff to their dead bodies. Thinking back to it, I realized I had sort of skimmed over the really bad stuff. I wondered if maybe my mother was right. Maybe I really shouldn’t have looked through all those files and reports.

  Oh well, too late now.

  Anyway, once I’d started I couldn’t stop. Something about it all fascinated me in a way nothing had before. I felt like those reports and stuff had a long, invisible arm that reached out with an invisible hand that grabbed me by my shirt and tugged me toward the kitchen every time I found myself home alone. Even the more boring stuff that didn’t talk about blood or death or any of that still really interested me.

  I liked reading about all the clues and I especially liked it when I found something that my grandpa scribbled down. It was almost like he had come back from the grave to spend some time with me at the kitchen table, telling me all about one of his biggest cases.

  I looked around my bedroom, realizing how much I still missed my grandpa. I missed him even more than I missed my pa, but I think that was on account of my pa dying before I really got a chance to know him. I barely remembered what he looked like, and I suspected the memories I could find with him were more than likely from the shoe box full of his pictures that my mother gave me and not real memories from back when I was two.

  For the first time ever I wondered if maybe I was lucky my pa died when he did and that he wasn’t a big part of my life, because then I would probably miss him as much as I missed my grandpa and that might be too much missing for me to take.

  I thought about Noah Stork from my mother’s file and wondered how much he missed his son Harry, even though Harry might’ve killed all those folk and did those horrible things to their bodies. I bet his pa probably still loved him and missed him. I didn’t know for sure. Did you stop loving people when you found out they did terrible, awful stuff to other people?

  Maybe.

  Suddenly I was happy that nobody I was close to was a serial killer. I thought about my mother and what would happen if I found out she had been just shooting folk for no reason. Would I no longer love her? I didn’t think I could ever not love my mother, no matter what she did. But maybe if she had been a serial killer, it would make missing her all the worse, because I would have to force myself to just remember the good things and that would be a lot of work, especially at night when I was lying by myself in bed.

  I wondered why my mother wasn’t in yet. I guessed this new Stickman case was to blame. It came into her life and now it took all her attention trying to solving it. That’s what my mother was like.

  I would say one thing: Having Dan here was starting to wear on me. I knew my mother loved him and all, but he was one of the most irritating people I think I’d ever met. I was sure Carry would even agree with me on that point.

  Carry was miffed because she wasn’t allowed in the living room after eleven at night since Dan was sleeping in there, which was a dumb reason, really, because I didn’t think Dan went to bed until it was morning. I based this fact on having heard him a number of times when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. One time I heard him rustling paper. Another time he was humming or something. And I could always see the faint glow of lamplight shining into the dining room if I looked down the hall and through the kitchen.

  I could tell Carry didn’t like the situation. She complained about it practically every night. She even complained about it when she didn’t have to, like last night, when I went around the house telling everyone I was going to bed.

  My mother and Dan were sitting at the kitchen table discussing something important, probably related to the Stickman case. I knew it was important and something she didn’t want me to hear about on account of how quiet they were talking and how they completely stopped when I emerged in the kitchen from the hall.

  “I’m goin’ to bed,” I had said.

  Dan held up his hand and pointed at me with his index finger while his thumb pretended to be the gun’s hammer. “Have a good one, poncho,” he’d said. I had no idea what “poncho” meant. Probably just another one of those dumb things he was always saying. His stupid jokes really got on my nerves sometimes, but I put up with them for my mother’s sake.

  “Come give me a hug,” my mother said, and I walked to the other side of the table and wrapped my arms around her neck. “Sleep well,” she said.

  Then I walked into the living room to make sure Carry and Jonathon knew I was going to bed, too.

  Jonathon sat at the far end of the sofa with his arm up across the back and Carry was somehow sprawled across him and most of the rest of the couch with her back pressed hard against Jonathon’s chest. From where I stood, it looked incredibly uncomfortable. “Let me guess,” Carry said when she saw me. “Mother wants you to tell me it’s eleven o’clock and Jonathon has to leave and I have to get out of Dan’s precious bedroom.”

  I shook my head. “I just came in to tell y’all I’m headin’ to bed.”

  “Why do I care if you’re going to bed?” Carry asked.

  “Good night,” Jonathon said, like a normal person.

  “Are you goin’ to start coming out of your room to let everyone know when you’re ’bout to go pee? Seems like the next logical step,” Carry said.

  I shook my head again. “Nope. Just when I’m goin’ to sleep.”

  “You’re strange.”

  “I’m just glad he didn’t come in to tell you it’s eleven,” Jonathon said and smiled. As awkw
ardly as possible, he wrapped his arm around her neck and pulled her back. She lifted her head and Jonathon kissed her forehead.

  I didn’t think I would ever understand the point of dating someone. It just made you do stupid things that looked dumb to everyone around you.

  Far as I could tell, Dan pretty much stayed up all night. I would have guessed this even without waking up and hearing him based on the fact that he never got out of bed before two in the afternoon. Well, sometimes he did, but not on most days. Like today. He got up at pretty near exactly two today. Nobody I knew slept until two in the afternoon, except last year when Carry spent the majority of her summer break sleeping.

  I don’t think Carry minded having to leave the television at eleven, though, because eleven o’clock was also the time when Jonathon had to go home. I got the feeling she didn’t like doing stuff without him anymore, television-watching included. When school got out for summer break, my mother alerted Carry to the new summer rules, one of which was an extension in time before Jonathon had to go home each night. While school was in, he had to leave by nine. Now that school was out, he could stay until eleven.

  This summer Carry seemed happier than all the others I could remember. Jonathon brought her happiness with him when they met. I was glad to see her smiling so much. She even treated me better now that she had a boyfriend. She rarely yelled at me or anything, and I couldn’t even remember the last time she called me “ass face.” All in all, Jonathon made things easier for everyone. Besides, I liked him, too. He always got excited when Dewey would tell him about one of his lame inventions, only it wasn’t that fake excited thing that adults usually did. Jonathon actually seemed really excited, like he wanted to help me and Dewey build whatever Dewey had drawn. Even I never got that excited about any of Dewey’s inventions—mainly on account of them hardly ever working.

  I got off my bed and left the memories of going to sleep last night on my pillow. Leaving my room, I walked down the hall to the kitchen, hearing the television louder than ever.

  That big stack of folders still loomed, this time from the edge of the kitchen table. Part of me wished I hadn’t gotten through them so fast so I would have some left to read now. I was just about to flip through a few when Carry appeared.

  Quickly, I snatched my hands back away from the files. “Hi, Carry!” I said. “How are you doin’? Why are you out here? I mean, um, instead of, you know, in there?” I started off talking fast, but by the end I was stammering and slowing down like cars passing a really bad accident on the freeway. Everyone always looked because they’d just spent an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic and they figured that was worth at least a good two-minute look at the car wreck.

  Carry stood there staring at me. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Nothin’,” I said really quickly, accidentally glancing at the folders sitting on the table, beckoning to me.

  “You’re just weird,” she said.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “Still at work, I guess.”

  I glanced out the window. The sun had already fallen behind Mr. Farrow’s house, and the sky had a purple band across it. “Isn’t she late?” I asked. “Did she phone?”

  Carry narrowed her eyes at me. “Why would she call? She’s not, like, thirteen or anythin’.” Carry started going through cupboards. I had no idea what she was looking for, but she stopped when she found the Kool-Aid packets. She pulled out three. “Jonathon!” she hollered out to the living room. “What kind of Kool-Aid do you want? Grape, lime, or orange?”

  She waited, but instead of yelling back, Jonathon walked into the kitchen. He was wearing pajama pants.

  “Are you spending the night?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. Carry did. “No, he’s not spending the night. What’s wrong with you? Where would he sleep? Dan has to have his living-room alone time so he can get drunk and do word-search puzzles.”

  Jonathon laughed.

  “Why is he in pajama pants?”

  “Because they’re comfortable. He leaves them here.”

  It was weird talking about Jonathon as though he wasn’t right there in the room.

  I thought over what Carry said about Dan. “Does he really get drunk? Dan, I mean. Does he?” I asked. This didn’t sound like a good thing to me. I wondered whether my mother knew.

  Carry just looked at me a second and then said, “Duh.”

  “How do you know? You aren’t allowed in the living room once he goes in there to work.”

  She set the Kool-Aid packets down on the counter beside the white jug and walked over to the closet on the other side of the kitchen table. “Well, if the smell the next day didn’t prove it, these would probably be a dead giveaway.”

  As she pulled open the closet, I saw a black garbage bag slumped on the floor beside all of our galoshes. “What’s that?” I asked. The bag was far from being full and the top folded in on the rest, so I couldn’t see inside.

  Carry found the opening and gathered it all into her grip, then lifted the bag onto the kitchen table across from where my mother’s files, reports, and notes about the Stickman case all sat neatly stacked. My mother had obviously finished going through them, too, as she used to keep her place by setting a ninety-degree break between the stuff she’d read and the stuff still to go.

  As Carry set the bag down on the table, it responded with a few loud clunks. “Take a look,” she said.

  I walked over and opened the bag just as Carry turned on the light above the table. Inside the bag were a bunch of empty bottles, all with the same label. I pulled one of them out and looked at it under the light, reading the label out loud. “Jim Beam. Kentucky straight bourbon. The best bourbon since 1795.” Fourteen more bottles rolled around the bottom of the bag, hitting one another with more clunks as I counted them.

  “Fourteen bottles?” I asked Carry, who was back beside the counter where the juice jug and Kool-Aid packets waited.

  “That’s it?” she replied. “I’m surprised.”

  Jonathon leaned against the fridge, his arms crossed. He had yet to say a word. His lips made a thin line, not really smiling and not really frowning.

  “Isn’t fourteen bottles a lot?” I asked, still looking at Jonathon. Carry was being snarky. I could hear it in her voice.

  But instead of answering me, he looked across the kitchen at Carry. “I dunno,” he said. “What do you think, Carry? Is fourteen bottles a lot?”

  “Depends, I s’pose.”

  “On what?” I asked.

  “On who’s drinking ’em. I’m guessin’ for Dan, fourteen bottles is just ’bout right. I reckon there’ll be one more by the time I get up tomorrow.”

  “But,” I said, “isn’t . . . These are big bottles.”

  “Liter bottles,” Jonathon said. I had no idea what that meant or whether he was agreeing with me about them being big or not. He turned his head back to Carry. “How many nights has he been here so far?”

  Carry looked up. “Um, let me see.” She started counting silently on her fingers. When she got to three, she started out loud. “Three, four . . .” She kept going right up to twenty-seven. “Twenty-eight, if you count tonight.”

  “So he’s averaging half a bottle a night. I don’t know, Abe. You reckon that’s still a lot?” Jonathon asked.

  “Seems like it to me. You ever try some?”

  Jonathon smiled at Carry. I didn’t understand why.

  “Well,” Carry said. “Tell him. He asked you a question.”

  “Yeah, Abe. I have. Not a lot, but my grandfather sometimes gives me some.”

  “Could you drink a half a liter in a night?”

  Jonathon smiled wider and he laughed. “If I wanted to wake up in the ditch two days later, maybe. No, I get pretty smashed on two double shots.”

  Carry grimaced. “That’s how you drink it? Straight?”

  With a nod, Jonathon answered, “That’s how my grandpa does, so that’s how I do. He doesn’t let me have it
very often. I think I’ve drunk with him maybe three times. And to answer your question, Abe, yes, half of a liter a night is a lot. Especially if it goes on twenty-eight nights in a row.”

  I looked to Carry, worried. “Do you reckon Mom knows?”

  She laughed. “Who do you think is tryin’ to hide them in a black garbage bag in the kitchen closet?” She looked to Jonathon. “I’ll say one thing about my mother. She might be a good detective in the way she figures stuff out and finds things, but she’d make a terrible criminal. She doesn’t even know how to keep her boyfriend’s drinkin’ problem hidden. All this does is make it look like she’s ashamed of him.”

  “Maybe she is,” Jonathon said.

  Carry put her arms up in the air. “Well, it’s her issue. I’m not goin’ anywhere near it. Now, where was I?” She spotted the Kool-Aid packets and started picking them back up off the counter. When she had them all, she held them out in a fan to Jonathon. “Pick one. Grape, lime, or orange?”

  “First,” Jonathon said, “Kool-Aid doesn’t come in flavors. It comes in colors. They all taste the same.”

  “No, they don’t,” I said.

  “Yes, they do.”

  He was crazy. I told him so.

  “Okay,” he said. “Call me crazy, but they all taste the same to me.” He glanced back to Carry. His body hadn’t moved. His arms were still crossed. He still leaned against the fridge.

  “Well, just pick one,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.”

  “Then you pick one.”

  “I’m asking you to. Are you saying what I want isn’t important?”

  I couldn’t believe this was becoming such a big issue. I wasn’t sure whether they were serious or not. I half-expected them to start screaming at each other and then break up over stupid Kool-Aid packets.

  “Okay,” Jonathon said. “I pick the middle one. Green.”

  Carry nodded. “Fine. Lime.”