Blood Trail

by Nancy Springer

  “Your skin’s an organ, just like your heart or your lungs—”

  “It is?”

  “Yeppers. And it responds … well, for starters, it puts out sweat, right?”

  It sure did. I was sweating already.

  “I have to establish a baseline first,” he said. “We’ll run a trial strip, okay? I want you to close your eyes and think of a number between one and five.”

  Whatever. I chose the number two. I sat there with my eyes closed thinking two and feeling him inflate the cuff on my arm.

  “Okay,” I heard him say, “I want you to answer ‘no’ to each question, all right? In other words, I want you to lie. Here we go.” A pause, then he asked. “Of the number you chose between one and five, was it number one?”

  “No.”

  Another pause.

  “Of the number you chose between one and five, was it number two?”

  “No.”

  He went on till five, then said, “Okay, you can open your eyes. Was it number two?”

  “Yeah, it was!” I gawked at him. It was just a stupid trial, for God’s sake, not a real lie, and I hadn’t felt myself sweat or anything.

  “Do you want to see?” he asked.

  I looked at the graph paper. He had marked the numbers on the edge. At number two, all four lines jumped.

  “There’s your physiological response,” he said. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Yeah. Fascinating. Uh-huh.

  “Okay, now that I have an idea of your normal response, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes again.…”

  He asked easy questions at first, like, was my name Jeremy Matthew Davis? Yes. Was I seventeen years old? Yes. Questions like that, and then he eased into the real questions. Was I friends with Aaron Gingrich? Yes. Had we gone bike riding the day Aaron was murdered? Yes. And so on, everything I had told the first detective.

  “Did Nathan answer the third phone call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he identify himself as Nathan?”

  “No.”

  “Did you recognize his voice?”

  “Yes.”

  “At that time, did Nathan say Aaron was not home?”

  “Yes.”

  “To the best of your knowledge, was the time of that call approximately 5:15 P.M.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who killed Aaron Gingrich?”

  “No.”

  “Did Aaron tell you who he was afraid of?”

  My heart lurched. “No.”

  “Jeremy, is there anything pursuant to the death of Aaron Gingrich that you are not telling me?”

  “No.” Sweating.

  “Okay. You can open your eyes.” He deflated the cuff on my arm. “Do you want to take a break before we do it again?”

  Yeah, I sure did. I could see the last couple of questions on the graph paper, my lines jumping practically off the edge, but he didn’t say a word about it. He didn’t say anything after I came back from the bathroom, either, just hooked me up and we did it all over again. The exact same questions. I started sweating before he even got to the one …

  “Did Aaron tell you who he was afraid of?”

  I tried to say no, but I knew it was no use. I bent over in my chair and hugged my head in my hands.

  The detective said, “Jeremy?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  I think he shut off the machine, and then, I swear to God, he hunkered down in front of me and put his hands on top of mine—his hands felt warm. He said, “Open your eyes, son. Look at me.” I did, and I saw nothing in his face except sympathy. “Just spit it out,” he said. “Who was Aaron afraid of?”

  “Nathan,” I whispered.

  “What, exactly, did Aaron say?”

  By then I understood what a polygraph machine was for. After he got the whole story out of me, he nodded, stood up, and started to take the tubes and stuff off me. He asked, “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

  “Because Nathan didn’t do it! He couldn’t have!”

  “That’s for the investigators and the jury to decide, son, not you or me. What you’ve done is called withholding evidence, and that’s a crime under the law. I’m not going to file charges against you, but I could.”

  Not even trying to be smart, I said, “Honest to God, I really don’t care.”

  He eyed me, then nodded as if he understood. “Start caring again,” he said. “Have you been beating up on yourself, son?”

  “Huh?”

  The word hurt. Huh, hell, pay attention, Aaron would have said.

  The detective said, “Have you been telling yourself you could have saved him?”

  What the hell, did this guy have ESP? I stared at him, and I guess he saw the answer in my face. He nodded.

  “Probably you couldn’t have done a damn thing,” he said. “When you’re in my business, you see that trying to be a hero doesn’t stick it. They say hindsight’s 20/20 but really most of the time it’s a liar. Wishful thinking.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. So don’t you put yourself down, son. You’re just a good kid, doing your best, like most of us. I want you to remember that.”

  He made it sound like an order. I nodded.

  “You got to take care of yourself,” he said, “because things are going to get worse before they get better.”

  chapter seven

  He was right about that.

  Close to midnight the phone rang. I was actually sleeping, too, damn it. Whenever anybody phones late, it’s usually for me, so I stumbled out of bed. Actually, I was hoping it was Dad, calling late because he keeps strange hours. I barged into the brat’s room, where she was lying like a lump upside down on her bed, with her head where her feet should have been, and I grabbed her phone. “ ’Lo?”

  It wasn’t Dad. A man’s polite voice said, “Is this Jeremy Davis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You goddamn liar, you ought to be shot.” It was so sudden, the way his voice turned from polite to hateful, I just stood there stunned like he’d really put a bullet in me, which was stupid. I mean, I should have known something like this might happen. It’s impossible to keep anything to yourself in Pinto River. That detective had to tell other cops, and the way this town works, he might as well have used a megaphone. Of course everybody knew. And now they were taking sides, and everybody who was friends with the Gingriches hated me. I half hated myself.

  The guy on the phone snarled, “No, shooting’s too good for you, lying snitch. As if that poor family don’t have trouble enough already. Ain’t you got no decency?”

  Apparently all the decent people of Pinto River just absolutely knew that some outsider killed Aaron.

  The guy told me, “I hope the psycho who killed that poor boy does you the same way.”

  I dropped the phone like it was a timber rattlesnake, but I could still hear the guy shouting. My lump sister must have heard too, because she rolled to the edge of her bed, snagged the phone off the floor, said into it, “Get a life,” and hung up. “Jeez,” she said.

  The phone rang again. From Mom’s room came her sleepy, grouchy voice. “Jeremy, who the—”

  I hollered, “Mom, you answer it!”

  “Just let it ring!” Jamy yelled.

  “What?” As the phone kept ringing, Mom showed up at the bedroom door, pulling her bathrobe on. “Who?”

  I didn’t know how to explain, so I picked up the phone and handed it to her. It was the same guy. I could hear him from where I stood. Mom’s face changed, and she said, “Sir, I am going to call the police.” But he just got louder. Mom hung up on him and pulled out the phone jack. She looked at me. “What’s he talking about?”

  She’d asked me at supper how the polygraph went, but I’d just rolled my eyes at her and asked her to pass the ketchup. Didn’t want to talk about it. Now I mumbled, “My guess is, I was in the late news.”

  Jamy said, “Huh?” and sat up staring at me.

  Mom said, “For w
hat?”

  “For what the damn lie detector made me say, damn it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Aaron said—” I could barely get it out. “That day—when Aaron said he was scared—I asked him what was the matter, and he said—” I couldn’t go on.

  “He said what?” Jamy demanded.

  Mom told me, kind of like the detective, “Jeremy, just take a deep breath and spit it out.”

  I whispered, “Nathan.”

  For a minute Mom and Jamy just stared. Then Jamy said, “Oh … my … God.”

  And Mom did something I never expected. She walked over and hugged me.

  I didn’t want anybody touching me. I yelped, “Mom, get off.”

  She stood back. “I was just thinking of the Gingriches,” she said, her voice wavery. “Those poor people, they’ve lost a child, and … and they might lose another …”

  The Gingriches. Memories. Mrs. Gingrich baking snickerdoodles for Halloween, handing me a plateful warm out of the oven and saying, “Jeremy, sample these for me, would you, and see if they’re any good?” Knowing darn well I’d eat every one of them. Then Mr. Gingrich coming in and saying, “Eat up, son. How did practice go today?”

  Oh, my God.

  It hit me like a rock, what I’d done to them. I guess I’d been kind of hoping the Gingriches wouldn’t have to know.

  Mom said, “Jeremy? You okay?”

  I whispered, “They’re going to hate me.”

  Mom sighed, then said quietly, “Probably. But you had to tell the truth. You should have told the truth to start with.”

  The brat butted in. “That’s really what Aaron said? He was afraid of Nathan?”

  “Yes, damn it! Shut up!”

  “Jeremy!” Mom hushed me. “Shhhh.”

  But my stupid sister didn’t shhhh. She kind of squeaked, “Oh, my God, what if Aardy … Oh my God, I’ve got to talk with her.” Like she hadn’t been leaving messages on the Gingriches’ answering machine for a couple of days?

  “You can’t, honey.” Mom sounded very tired.

  “But what if … what if she saw something, or she knows something.…”

  Mom said sharply, “Jamy, don’t even go there.”

  “But what if she’s scared?”

  The kitchen phone started ringing.

  “Shut up,” I whispered.

  Mom said, “I’ll get it. I’ll pull the plug, I mean. Jamy, honey, there’s nothing you can do for your friend. I’m sorry. Don’t think about it anymore tonight. You either, sweetie.” She looked at me. “It’s no use worrying. Just try to get some sleep.”

  Yeah. Right.

  I heard every noise the rest of the night, including the newspaper hitting the door at five in the morning. At which point I muttered, “Damn it to hell,” got out of bed, and headed downstairs. I made coffee, got the paper in, and started reading it to see what, exactly, people were saying about me. I still couldn’t quite handle watching the news on TV but I could read the damn paper. And there I was, front page news: “Friend Implicates Gingrich Brother.” Oh, just great. Lovely. The Gingrich family had issued a statement through their lawyer saying the police investigation was a farce and calling for an attorney general’s investigation and apprehension of the real killer. Nathan had been taken in for questioning. There was a picture of Nathan and his father and a lawyer going into the police station, but not hiding their faces under their jackets or anything. Nathan had a fresh buzz cut and he was staring straight ahead.

  I didn’t know my mother was behind me, reading over my shoulder, till she said, “It’s not the first time they had him in for questioning.”

  I jumped. “Huh?”

  Huh, hell, pay attention. Aaron’s voice in my mind. I had to close my eyes.

  Mom was saying, “Nathan’s the chief suspect, I think. They questioned him before.”

  “That’s stupid! He couldn’t have done it.” What I meant was, not the Nathan I knew.

  “I’m just telling you.”

  “It’s some kind of weird coincidence. A mistake. Somebody told Aaron a lie or something.” And I’d repeated it and made it worse, and now the police were looking the wrong way while the real murderer was still out there.

  Mom said, “We all believe what we have to, Jeremy.” Whatever that meant. I didn’t ask; she didn’t say. She pulled yesterday’s newspaper off the top of the fridge, laid it in front of me, and got herself coffee.

  There must have been three or four different articles about the murder in each paper. “I don’t want to read all this stuff,” I said.

  Mom sighed. “It wouldn’t hurt you to read for a change.” But then she sat down across from me and said, “When they searched the house, they found some very graphic images of violence in his room. Printed off the Internet, maybe.”

  So what? Nathan had always liked horror movies, gory posters, that kind of thing. “That doesn’t mean—”

  “I know, but it makes you wonder.”

  “Did they find, um—”

  “Drugs? No. Not a trace of drugs anywhere in the house.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Jeez, what was it with old people and drugs? “Did they find, you know, the knife—”

  “The murder weapon? Yes. A bayonet. Thrown into the sump hole in the basement.”

  “Was it, like, a hunting knife or what?”

  “They won’t say.”

  “Where’d it come from? The house?”

  “Won’t say.”

  “Fingerprints on it?”

  “They won’t say that either.”

  They wouldn’t say this, they wouldn’t say that—I wished they wouldn’t have said I blabbed, then. Though my name wasn’t actually in the paper. But hell, there were people in Pinto River whose whole profession in life was to find out who did what and then tell anyone who hadn’t already heard. Everybody was going to know it was me.

  I didn’t want to talk anymore, so I pretended I was reading. I scanned a few articles. There was an editorial about how Nathan had no criminal record and no history of mental illness and did okay in school and distinguished himself on the debate team and belonged to a nice middle-class churchgoing family, the point being that kids like me who slept in on Sunday morning looked more like a murderer than Nathan did, I guess.

  Then there was an article where some guy tried to say what had happened in the Gingrich house. He said Aaron had put his bike away, then he’d no sooner walked in the door from the garage than he had come up against the killer with the knife. Then, according to the blood trail, Aaron had run to the front door, where he got stabbed some more trying to get out, and then he’d headed toward his room but he didn’t make it, and then … I couldn’t read about it anymore.

  I switched over to another article, this one about techniques of criminal investigation and all the gadgets the Pinto River detectives had borrowed from the state police and how the black light machine could see blood even after it was wiped up. Blood could never be totally washed away, it said. Even if you scrubbed it with bleach, even if you painted over it, even after years went by, there would always be some stain, some trace of a blood trail.

  I pushed the newspaper away. Mom got up for her second cup of coffee and plugged the phone back in.

  It rang.

  “Let the answering machine pick up,” Mom said.

  We both sat there listening to the phone ring. Three rings, four. Jamy bawled down in a sleepy voice, “Would somebody get it?”

  The machine got it, and it was a woman this time, her voice like poison. “I just want you people to know you deserve to die like that boy did. As if it ain’t bad enough without you spreading lies—”

  I said, “Yank it again, Mom.”

  She shook her head. “The stupid woman’s putting herself on tape for the police. And I do intend to call the police. We don’t have to put up with this.” She said to the phone, “Keep talking, honey.”

  I stood up and headed outside to get away Bad move. The minute I
closed the door behind me, old Mrs. Ledbetter across the street popped out, waved, and yodeled, “Yoo-hoo, Jeremy!” I figured she wanted me to do something for her, because the only time she usually yoo-hooed me was if she wanted me to mow her lawn or whatever. I sighed, waved back, and trudged on over there.

  She walked down her lawn to meet me, short and round and dressed brighter than her petunias in candy pink polyester with pink sneakers to match. “Jeremy,” she asked when I got close enough to talk to, “how are you doing?”

  “Um, okay.” I was kind of surprised, because she never usually cared how I was doing. I looked at her, and she looked back at me with pale old eyes kind of naked between lids without any eyelashes.

  “I realize you and Aaron were good friends,” she said.

  I wondered whether she knew Aaron used to say she looked like an Easter egg. She was trying to be nice, I could tell, but I didn’t want to talk. I just nodded.

  “Have the police told you anything?” she asked.

  Oh. Okay. Maybe Mrs. Ledbetter had feelings about what had happened but she was still basically functioning as a database, Pinto River Info Central. I shook my head and started to turn away, but she put out one of her little round paws to stop me.

  “Jeremy,” she told me, “I know you’re a nice boy, but some people just don’t think. Have they been giving you a hard time?”

  “Um, gotta go, Mrs. Ledbetter,” I muttered.

  I U-turned back into the house.

  Once I got the front door locked behind me I just leaned against it and closed my eyes. Mrs. Ledbetter meant to be my friend, but in my mind I could hear her on the phone right this minute, telling her buddies that she saw Jeremy Davis and he wouldn’t talk and he looked awful, all upset. And they would call people they knew and tell them—what? That they heard Jeremy Davis wouldn’t talk? By the time it got around town, some of them would be saying I had something to hide. Jeremy Davis looked awful? What’s that mean? Grieving? Or guilty?