by Barry Lyga
And why would there be? The sheriff, she realized, didn’t really take this seriously. His first step should have been to call the other people who’d contributed to the time capsule. Well, he definitely hadn’t called her dad, and a quick hop into her QSA group text told her that he hadn’t called anyone else’s parents, either.
He had obviously been humoring her when he’d promised to investigate. He thought the whole thing was just a joke, so he’d probably just handed off the knife and the note and the cloth to a deputy who had it filed away in the evidence room in one of those dusty, old cardboard boxes you see on cop shows all the time. And it would sit there for another thirty-five years, a different sort of time capsule, and no one would ever know what had actually happened.
But people needed to know. People deserved to know. Somewhere out there, a family was missing a piece of itself. She knew how that felt, vicariously if nothing else. Just from her dad’s expressions, from the way her mom had said Both of you.
It had happened to another family, too. A loved one had disappeared thirty-five years ago, and they didn’t know why or how. They had the right to know, didn’t they?
Just don’t say anything about the knife or the note, okay?
That was what the sheriff had said. Those were his exact words. Elayah had a very good memory for what people said—it made taking notes in class pretty much redundant—and she knew that Liam’s dad had been very specific. She was allowed to talk to the paper, just as long as she didn’t say anything about the knife or the note.
Her dad had a saying: Sometimes you just gotta kick the mule if you want it to kick back.
It was a pretty stupid saying. As far as she knew, her dad had never even seen a mule. And, like, why would you want a mule to kick? But whatevs. The point still stood.
Liam’s dad wasn’t going to do anything about the murder unless he was compelled to.
So.
Elayah: hey there I wanted to add something to the story. is that cool?
It took a while for the response to come. She whiled away the minutes playing Bold-or-Dash! on her phone.
Rachel: like what?
She chose her words carefully.
Elayah: we found something. I can’t tell you what because the police are investigating.
This time, the response was nearly instantaneous.
Rachel: Police? What did you find? I can update the story.
Elayah folded her lower lip in against her teeth and worried it back and forth a bit. She had already figured out exactly what to say. Had already written it, in fact, in her Notes app. She copied and pasted her response in and hesitated not even the slightest bit before pushing Send.
Rachel did not, in fact, update the story that night. She posted a new one instead.
Police Investigating Evidence Unearthed from Time Capsule!
The lede was as good as it could get in local news, she figured:
Four teens who dug up a thirty-five-year-old time capsule this morning found more than just the music and amusements of their parents’ generation. They also found evidence of a crime.
Not bad.
From there, the article quickly summarized the earlier piece, along with a link back to it, then got to the nitty-gritty:
“I can’t say much,” said Elayah Laird, who led the group that excavated the capsule, “but there was evidence of something pretty horrible in there. We know what you did. And now the police know, too.”
We know what you did. That hadn’t been a part of her original text. Rachel had texted her back and asked, What would you say to the person who put this evidence in there, if you could talk to them?
And Elayah had thought about it and figured We know what you did was pretty neutral. But seeing it in black and white, it suddenly seemed threatening.
Furthermore, she hadn’t expected Rachel to use her name—they hadn’t discussed it—but oh well, there it was.
When pressed for more information, Laird demurred, stating that she had been asked to say nothing of the specifics of the evidence.
The Canterstown Sheriff’s Department did not respond to our request for comment. We will update this story if that happens.
Elayah nodded to herself triumphantly. There. Now let Liam’s dad ignore the knife. He would have no choice but to take it seriously.
Now she could sleep.
She thumbed off her phone, turned out her light, and rolled over, secure in the knowledge that things would be different in the morning.
And woke up in the dead of night, suddenly, completely.
There was the pressure of another body on her bed, the heat of someone behind her, a slender, sharp line of metal at her throat, and then a soft whisper in her ear:
“Don’t scream.”
1986: MARCUS
Try that one,” Marcus said, pointing.
Jay sighed heavily and shrugged Marcus off. Marcus gritted his teeth and counted to five in his head. He didn’t have the patience to count to ten, which he knew was sort of the point, but he just couldn’t make himself do it.
“I have a system,” Jay said. “I’ll get it.”
There were twenty-one keys on the ring that they’d duplicated, with no way to tell what key opened what lock. As a result, the five of them loitered quite conspicuously outside the school, huddled together in the gloaming of the parking lot lights. It was early October, and the air had yet to chill. They’d chosen the door on the east side of the school because it had the least exposure to the road, but Marcus knew that the police often used the parking lot to turn around or take a quick break during their nightly patrols. He told Jay this.
Jay shrugged. “I’m not worried about the police.”
Jay was in the Civil Police Corps, a countywide organization of teens who planned on becoming cops someday. Once a week and for two weeks in the summer, he dressed in a cut-down police uniform and drilled with the local sheriff’s office. When someone ran away from home or didn’t come back from a Sunday hunting trip in the woods, the CPC was called in to support the police in the search and rescue.
Marcus thought it was a joke, but he knew Jay took it very, very seriously. And it was one thing for whiter-than-white Jay Dearborn to stand in the headlights of a Canterstown sheriff’s cruiser, quite another for Marcus and Antoine to do the same. But there was no way to explain that to Jay.
Marcus had tried once.
“You think the police here are racists?” Jay had hooted. “You remember that one time there was a Klan rally over in the old March field?”
As though Marcus could forget.
“The sheriff had cruisers parked at the property line all night to make sure nothing got out of hand,” Jay said. “Would they do that if they were racists?”
And that had been that. Jay had a way of speaking that tended to shut off further debate, whether you agreed with him or not.
Jay was okay for a white kid, Marcus thought. A little too into the cop stuff, but Marcus remembered that as a child, even he had wanted to be a policeman at one point. The idea had obsessed him, until one day—he must have been about seven—his father sat him down out on the old wooden steps of the porch that hung off the back of their house.
Pops had leaned in and pried open his mouth, showing Marcus a sore-looking gap about halfway back. At that point, Marcus himself was missing two teeth, which he understood to be a part of the aging process, plus a way of getting twenty-five cents from the tooth fairy. But he didn’t know adults lost teeth, too.
“Marching down in Baltimore, about ten years ago,” Pops said without preamble, staring into the middle distance as though it were the past. “Police came, of course. Always expect that. Sometimes it got rough; sometimes it didn’t. No way to tell which it would be. It was never about us, mind. It was always them. Who’s feeling it? Who’s giving the orders? Who’s ignoring the orders?”
Pops sighed and massaged his temples. “Took a nightstick to my face. I felt that tooth come out. It rattled around in my mout
h for a second; then I spit it out when he got me in the gut with that stick. Beat the hell out of me, but I was the one who spent the night in jail.”
Marcus didn’t know what to say.
“You want to be police,” Pops said, “you go on and do it. Bet you’d be a good one. And we need good ones. But just know who you’ll be working with and what it’s about.”
And then he’d put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder, squeezed tight, and kissed him gently on the forehead. Marcus didn’t cry until later that night, when he was alone in bed while Antoine was brushing his teeth. He hid his tearstained face against his pillow until the lights went out.
Even now, he couldn’t watch T.J. Hooker like the other guys did because he knew, deep down, that old Captain Kirk could easily be the guy who knocked Pops’s tooth out of his face if someone gave him the order. Miami Vice was different—those guys didn’t wear uniforms, and they seemed tight for a Black guy and a white guy. Plus, their boss wasn’t white.
He was a little uncomfortable following Jay’s lead, but Jay had been leading them all around since they were kids. It was just a natural pattern for them.
“Just hurry, okay?” he said now to Jay.
“Ah, yassa, Kingfish!” Jay said in his very best Amos ’n’ Andy voice.
Marcus and Antoine exchanged a glance. Once, that glance would have communicated volumes to Marcus, but recently… recently he’d felt closed off from his twin. People always thought that twins had some kind of telepathy or ESP, but Marcus had never been willing to go that far. Still, he and Antoine had always been able to read each other’s moods, their expressions not transparent, but at least at a level of legible translucency.
Now, though, Antoine had gone opaque. When Marcus looked at him, he saw only himself, reflected back, mute and stony.
“Got it.” Jay’s voice was a hushed whisper of excitement. This was the moment they’d been waiting for since Dean borrowed Mr. Grimm’s keys a second time… and handed them off to Brian, who raced home during lunch and made dupes on the key grinder his dad kept in the garage.
“Wait.” Dean reached over between Marcus and Antoine and grabbed Jay’s wrist before he could haul open the door. “Do you think there’s an alarm?”
The five of them pondered this, eyes flicking to one another. Dean, clearly concerned. Antoine, still a blank. Jay, nostrils vibrating with exhilaration. Brian, twitching his jaw muscles in anticipation. Marcus wondered if his own expression accurately reflected the counterbalancing combination of outright terror and utter electricity racing through his nervous system at the moment.
“Who would want to break into school?” Brian pointed out.
This was true.
Dean released Jay’s wrist and let him tug at the door. Marcus half expected the door not to open—it couldn’t be this easy to break in, right?—but the door pulled out just as though the morning bell had rung.
They all looked at one another, grinning. Even Antoine. It was nice to see.
“Let’s go find that pool,” Jay said with a glint in his eye.
The pool. The Canterstown High swimming pool. Spoken of in whispers, passed down through word of mouth from senior classes to juniors, spreading through the student body like pink eye.
Legend had it that when the high school was built, it counted among its gymnastic accoutrements a swimming pool, for use in phys ed. But an obscure regulation decreed that all schools in the county must have equal access to the same facilities. Since only Canterstown High had been built with a pool, this meant that other students in other schools would be at a disadvantage.
The pool was already built, so the solution had been simple: Close it off and don’t let anyone in. Depending on whom you’d heard the story from, details varied. Some said, for example, that the pool was actually under the gym, which had a retractable floor.
Marcus had heard that one. He’d also heard that the pool lay behind a stout, locked door in the basement. That made a lot more sense, but he hoped the retractable-floor story was true. That would really be something to see.
He slipped into the building right after Jay, holding the door open for Antoine and Dean. Brian came in last, closing the door almost tenderly. Given that Brian was built like a John Deere, such delicacy was comical. No one laughed, though.
After a moment, Marcus’s eyes adjusted to the dark and he could barely make out the trophy case mounted on a nearby wall. The Steingard Trophy—“the Cup”—stood in the center on a shelf lined with purple velvet, its place of pride undisturbed since 1972. A slight smell of disinfectant lingered in the air.
“Now what?”
Dean gestured with a flashlight he’d brought along. Silvery and ridged for a better grip, it was about average size—a foot long and as big around as a Coke can.
“Not yet,” Jay said, brandishing his own extinguished CPC flashlight, this one a serious, sleek black cylinder of metal. “Wait until we’re away from the doors and windows.”
Using the weak spill of light from the parking lot and their own years of memory, they made their way down the hallway toward the cafeteria, where they finally lit up the flashlights. The cafeteria seemed somehow old and haunted in its emptiness, the tables rolled against the walls, the doors to the kitchen and the lunch line closed. Without the raucous noise of a hundred students and the dead-fried smell from the lunch line, the place felt funereal. Sepulchral.
“We should split up,” Brian suggested, hauling his own flashlight out. It looked tiny in his enormous paw. For five years, football coaches had done everything but drop to their knees and beg for Brian to go out for the team, but he had precisely zero interest in sports.
“I’ll take Antoine,” Dean said. “We’ll check out the basement.”
“I’ll go with you guys,” Marcus offered. “We can go through the gym on our way.” Those were the two best bets for the location of the pool.
“What does that leave us to do?” Brian asked, pointing to Jay and then back to himself.
“I have some ideas,” Jay said. The wavery yellow glow of the flashlight cast harsh shadows up the contours of his face, glimmering wetly in his eyes. But Marcus recognized the expression on Jay’s face, the vanguard of realization and ignition.
That look both thrilled and frightened Marcus. Or maybe the two were the same, in the end. Maybe fear and excitement existed on opposite sides of the same coin, bearing the same weight, displacing the same amount of air, and only chance determined which one landed faceup in any given situation.
“Okay,” Marcus said, a little doubtfully. “You ready?” He nodded to his twin, who could only be bothered to offer a half shrug in return. Damn, Antoine. What is with you?
JAY
Jay led Brian down the big, double-wide corridor that stretched from the cafeteria, past the auditorium, toward the main office.
“What are we doing?” Brian whispered. The painted cinder blocks that lined the empty halls carried that whisper and echoed it back to him. They were alone in the building. Why was he whispering?
Jay said nothing, simply raised the hand without the flashlight, hoisting aloft the ring of keys.
“I don’t get it.”
Jay sighed. Brian was a good guy, but he was the dumbest of the smart kids Jay had surrounded himself with. Which still made him smarter than a lot of the other kids in school and some of the teachers, but talking to Brian wasn’t like talking to Dean, for example. Dean got it. Instantly. Every time. Jay tolerated Brian’s presence in their group because Brian usually had access to pot.
So, with an air of forbearance, Jay rattled the keys. “We have every key to the building. We can do a lot more than just find a pool. We can go anywhere. But first we have to figure out which keys open which doors.”
Brian stopped dead in the middle of the hall. “I thought we were going to just find the pool.…”
“There is no pool, Bri. It’s just a rumor someone started years ago. I asked my dad.”
Jay’s dad was on the boa
rd of education. He would know.
“We have the keys to the kingdom,” Jay went on, trying each key in the lock to the main office door. “It’s a moral imperative to do something with them.”
“A moral imperative?” Brian shivered. “Man, this is illegal. Don’t you want to be a cop someday?”
Jay shrugged, his attention entirely focused on the lock and the plethora of key options before him, juggling the keys in one hand while keeping the flashlight focused on the lock with the other. “This is no big deal. We’re not hurting anyone. You guys are all under eighteen, right? It’s nothing. Stop worrying.”
The lock clicked. Jay pushed open the door and motioned for Brian to enter.
Brian shook his head.
“Fine. Stay out here. Alone.”
Brian folded his arms over his chest, then relented.
Jay grinned. He was a leader. He got his way. This was why he would be a great cop. Someday, he’d probably end up being sheriff of this town. And that would be a great day for Canterstown. Truly.
Brian sidled up to him. “Now what?”
Jay splashed the beam of his flashlight around the room. This was the outer administrative office (“Admin,” as it was called over the PA). Two secretaries sat here during school hours, pecking away at their electric typewriters, filing paperwork, and generally acting like too-stern grandmothers to all those summoned here.
A short corridor led to three other rooms, offices for the principal and two vice principals. Jay knew which one he wanted, but first…
He stepped around one of the secretary’s desks. MRS. WISTERN, said the nameplate. The desk wasn’t locked.
“Ever feel like skipping class?” he asked Brian, brandishing a yellow pad of hall passes.
“C’mon, man,” Brian said. “They’ll notice if you swipe that.”
Jay chuckled. “They’re not gonna notice. Anyway…” He ripped a half dozen passes off the pad and handed them to Brian, who took them, albeit reluctantly, and shoved them into his pocket. Another half dozen went into his own pocket.