by Eli Easton
Was desegregation a good idea? I don’t know. You tell me. Write the essay.
Yeah. Fishbinder was smart all right. I thought about the “eyewitness account” of the shooting he’d had me turn in. Was he really just being a supportive teacher offering me an extra-credit assignment? Or was he trying to suss out what I’d seen and heard?
“Gordo’s got American History with Fishbinder?” I asked. My voice sounded so calm. I was proud of that fact. “’Cause I have him last period, and Gordo isn’t in my class.”
“Yeah. I think he’s got it second period.”
“Do you know what he did to get detention?”
“Said he failed a quiz, so he had to sit in there during Lunch A and write an essay. I dunno. It sounded a little off when he told me? Like, he made a big deal out of it. This was three or four days before the shooting.”
Okay, that didn’t ring true. I’d never heard of Fishbinder letting someone make up for a failed quiz.
“Has Gordo ever said anything about Fishbinder? Does he talk about him?”
“No! He’s just a teacher!”
“Okay! Chill.”
God, I’d forgotten what a drama queen Cameron was. But his answer made me think. Fishbinder was “just a teacher.” So how could he and Gordo have pulled off something so big together? I mean, it wasn’t like Fishbinder would stroll up to me and say, “Hey, Brian. I was thinking about shooting up the school. You in?” Why would he trust Gordo with something like that? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I couldn’t dismiss the idea either.
“Why would Gordo have done that? Is he having trouble at home or something?”
Cameron snorted. “Always. He’s an only kid, and his dad is MIA. Gordo never even met the guy. His mom’s a manager at Target, and they don’t get along so good. He used to spend a lot of time at my house. But last summer he changed. He wasn’t hanging around all the time, and if I asked him where he’d been, he’d just say ‘busy.’”
Cameron gave me a pleading look. I’d never seen him look less than arrogant, but at that moment he looked like a scared little kid. “What if he did it, Brian? For real? I can’t even sleep or eat, I’m so fucking worried. What if he killed all those people? And what if I get blamed for it too?”
I stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Right. We need to talk to Gordo.”
Chapter 31
Brian
I DROVE us to Gordo’s place, which was only about five minutes away. I’d never been there. My family wasn’t rich, and our two-story brick house wasn’t much fancier than Cameron’s split-level. But Gordo’s neighborhood was crap. It was in an area of old apartment buildings surrounded by asphalt and concrete. The building he lived in with his mom was a single-story unit in a block of four. I parked on the street.
“So what’re we gonna say? If he did it…. Fuck. I still can’t believe this.” Cameron sounded nervous. Which was weird since it was “just Gordo.” But maybe I’d dismissed Gordo too much.
“We can say….” I thought about it. “We can say you and I ran into each other at Arby’s where we used to go with Jake. And we patched things up.”
The fast-food place had been Jake’s favorite. The memory made my stomach ache with a sudden flash of missing Jake hard. If Jake were with us, he’d be the first one to confront Gordo and Cameron. He was always the leader of our group.
But Jake wasn’t here. He wasn’t here because they did that to him, took his life from him. The shooters. And if Gordo had any part in that, I had to know.
“Yeah, he’ll buy that,” Cameron said. “And then what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Cam. We feel him out, I guess. If we think he did it, we’ll go to the cops.”
“We can’t! I can’t prove I wasn’t the other guy!”
“Just… one thing at a time. Okay?” I gave him a hard look. “We have to figure out what’s going on. Am I right?”
Cameron sighed and got out of the car.
We walked up to the door.
Someone had tried to make the place look homey. There were bright plastic flowers in pots outside and a gold mat at the door that said, “It’s a Beautiful Day!” The cement stoop was clean and tidy.
Cameron checked his phone again. “He’s still not answering me.”
“Maybe his phone’s turned off. Let’s just knock.”
When Cameron hesitated, I knocked on the door. It was opened by an older lady I figured was Gordo’s mom. She looked like him in the face, ruddy and plain. Her blonde hair was done up in an old-fashioned teased helmet on her head. She wore black slacks and a faded red sweatshirt with a Christmas tree on the front.
She grimaced when she saw us. “Gordon’s not here. Sorry, Cameron.” She eyed me as if wondering who I was, but she didn’t ask.
She started to shut the door. I stuck my hand out to hold it open. “Hi, Mrs. Stahler, I’m Brian Marshall, a friend of Gordo’s.”
She looked me up and down. “Hello, Brian. Like I said, Gordon’s not here.”
“Do you know where he is? It’s kind of important.”
Her expression grew annoyed and she looked from me to Cameron and back again. “He didn’t tell you? I’d have thought he’d brag to high heaven about it. Then again, Gordo does like to be secretive.” Her mouth thinned to a bitter grimace. “He won a trip. Some contest online. You’d think they’d provide a ticket for a parent too. He’s only seventeen. But there wasn’t one. So I let him go. Not like I can afford to send him on a lark like that.”
I glanced at Cameron. “Um. That’s nice. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“After New Year’s. The second, I think it was. He gets a four-day trip, and I get to work my patootie off, as usual. I’ll let him know you stopped by.”
She started to shut the door again. My hand was still on it, holding it in place. “Sorry to impose, but, um, Gordo borrowed a book of mine, and I really need it today. Would you mind if I checked his room?”
She frowned suspiciously. “Gordo isn’t much of a reader.”
“It’s a schoolbook,” Cameron said, finally getting with the program.
“Well, all right. But hurry up about it. I only have a few hours before my shift, and I’d like to relax.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Stahler,” Cameron said with a smile. “We won’t be long.”
He went past her into the apartment, and I followed. He headed down a hallway and entered the last room on the right.
The bedroom was rank, funky, and dank-smelling, like old socks and BO. Ye gods. It was also trashed, though not necessarily more than my own room had been at times. There were clothes lying around, the covers were half off the bed, and there were dirty dishes.
I closed the door. Cameron turned to look at me. “Now what?” His brow was sweating despite the cold day, and he seemed extremely uncomfortable.
“Do you buy that shit about winning a trip?” I asked in a whisper.
“Fuck no.”
“So where is he?”
Cameron made a face as if to say, hell if I know.
“He didn’t tell you anything? When was the last time you talked to him?”
Cameron wiped his brow. “Today’s Sunday? Two days ago. Friday night. I texted him to see if he wanted to go out. Here.” He fished his phone from a pocket and brought up the text window. He handed it over.
I was surprised he’d let me see their exchange. I guess Cameron really was worried. I scrolled through their text messages. Several of their past exchanges had gone the same way—Cameron asking Gordo to do something and Gordo saying he was busy and not saying why. A little ways back, Cameron had asked: WTF is going on? Why are you so busy all of a sudden? You seeing a chick?
And Gordo had replied: I got a life besides you, you know. Important friends. Important biz.
I handed Cameron his phone. “Yeah, that’s not suspicious at all. Come on. Let’s search and see if we can find anything.”
“Gordo would kill me.”
Anger spar
ked inside me. “Yeah, well, I think he nearly killed me. So you can do what you want, but I’m looking.”
I began searching his room, which was easier said than done—I had no idea what I was looking for. It was gross, but needs must. I moved a few piles of clothes. In my peripheral vision, I saw Cameron start to search too.
The blinds were drawn on the window, which was fine by me. On the window ledge was a big glass jar half full of coins and bits of paper. I picked it up and shook it. It was mostly pennies and nickels, pocket change. But there were lots of small tabs of paper in there too, as if they’d been dumped into the jar along with the coins. I stuck my fingers in the narrow neck of the jar and pulled one out.
It was a white tab with perforation on the top. A single word was printed on it in black: WORTHER’S.
Worther’s? It didn’t ring a bell. Didn’t look like a movie or concert ticket stub. There were a bunch of identical white tabs in the jar, though, so whatever it was, Gordo did it a lot. Something about the tab was familiar, like I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t remember where.
Cameron was looking at stuff on a wobbly desk in the corner. There were stacks of magazines, some books, and a pile of clean, folded clothes. There was an open space where a laptop might go, but no laptop in sight.
Cameron picked something up from behind the stack of clothes. It was a framed photo. He stared at it, and I saw him swallow. “Shit, Brian. Holy shit.”
“What?” I walked over, still holding the tab of paper in my hand.
He turned the frame so I could see.
It was a recent selfie of Gordo and an older man. They were at a river fishing. Gordo held up a worm with a teeth-baring grin. In the background, the older man sat in a lawn chair with a fishing pole. He wore sunglasses, but I recognized him.
I took the photo from Cameron’s hand and held it close, studying it. “Fishbinder,” I said. It came out as a whisper.
“That fuck! That fucking fuck!” Cameron hissed eloquently. He fisted his short hair and paced a step or two.
“Gordo never told you he was spending time with him?”
“Hell no! Bet Fishbinder told him not to. And look at that picture! That was taken in the summer. Last summer. No wonder he started disappearing all the time. Oh God, Brian.” Cameron’s voice was high and squeaky he was so panicky. “What if Fishbinder’s been, like, brainwashing him or whatever? Gordo… he’ll do anything you tell him to do. He’s so desperate to be liked and he believes, like, the last thing he was told.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I had always sensed Gordo was a weather vane with a loose screw. That had never seemed so frightening before.
“What if they really did it? Oh, man, I’m gonna puke.” Cameron stopped pacing and leaned over, hands on his knees, face green.
I should have been freaking out like Cameron was. I should’ve been the one puking, given what I’d seen, what had happened to me. But a deep, skin-tingling sense of calm, clear, focused purpose came over me.
I couldn’t afford to be emotional, because this was huge. This was too important to fuck up. It’s like that moment in the movies where the hero finds the evidence and you’re screaming at the screen—Go to the police! Tell someone! It was like driving a car to the hospital when your best friend is dying in the passenger seat. I had to be one hundred percent focused right now. Because this was so much bigger than me, and I had the ball. It was my responsibility to get it to the end zone.
“Keep searching,” I said. “We need more evidence. A fishing photo isn’t enough.”
“Dude,” Cameron whined, still breathing hard.
“Search, asswipe!”
He did, looking around again halfheartedly. I put down the photo and noticed the paper tab in my hand, the one from the coin jar. I looked at it and held it up for Cameron to see. “Any idea what this is?”
He squinted at it. “No. Where’d you get it?”
“There are a dozen of these in that coin jar.”
I took out my phone and googled it. Worther’s. Missouri. The results sent a wave of ice up my spine.
Worther’s was a shooting range in St. Louis. That’s why it looked familiar. When my dad and I had gone to the shooting range in Silver Falls, there’d been a little scorecard you could take from the front desk. The end had a perforated tab. Only the name of the range had been different.
“Gordo doesn’t have a car, right?” I asked, my voice sounding weird.
“No, why?”
I showed Cameron the phone. “I guess we know where else Fishbinder takes Gordo.”
Mrs. Stahler opened the door and gave us an unhappy frown. “Are you still here? Come on, boys. I need to get on with my day.”
Cameron stared at her with a look of horror. Poker-faced, he was not.
“Yeah, sorry. We were just leaving,” I said. “I didn’t find the book. I’ll text Gordo about it later.”
I grabbed Cameron’s sleeve and pulled him from the house.
It felt good to get into Landon’s Volvo. It reminded me of him, smelled like him. I needed that touch of comfort right then.
“What the hell do we do now?” Cameron asked. His face was ashen. He shivered and wrapped his arms around his chest. I started the ignition and turned up the heat.
I wanted to talk to Landon. I’d never wanted something so bad in my life. But Landon was probably in rehearsals or whatever. He had his own shit going on today. Besides, I wanted to present him with something concrete, something I could prove. Or at least a complete theory.
I did have one other potential source of help. I took out my phone.
“Who are you talking to?” Cameron asked worriedly.
“It’s cool, just chill,” I said, typing.
“Don’t you fucking get me into any more trouble,” Cameron warned.
“I won’t.”
I texted Detective Mike.
Brian: If two people were alone in a room at the time of the shooting, they could be the shooters right? Give each other an alibi. Especially if they were a teacher and a student, ’cause no one would suspect them working together. Have you guys checked that?
Mike: Who are you talking about?
Brian: Mr. Fishbinder and Gordon Stahler were alone in a classroom in B-Wing. They were the only two in there the whole time. Right?
There was a pause. I wasn’t sure if Mike had decided to block me or maybe pinpoint my location by satellite and come arrest my ass for bothering him on a Sunday. Maybe—I hoped—he was checking what I said.
Mike: That doesn’t mean they’re the shooters.
Shit. Was that verification? Had the two of them been alone?
Brian: Listen. I know Gordo Stahler. He hung out with Fishbinder outside school—fishing, shooting range. He talked a bunch of weird shit. I really think they’re the shooters. Fishbinder’s classroom is in B-Wing. B106, I think. I bet they changed into black clothes in the classroom, then came out of that room instead of entering B-Wing from outside.
There was a long pause. Then typing.
Mike: You got it wrong, Brian. That room was barricaded from inside when PD cleared building. Footsteps etc at end door. Shooters def came in that way just like we’ve said in every press conf. Now please stay out of this. If you want to come in and talk to me tomorrow, call and make an appt.
“Well?” Cameron asked when I let the phone drop into my lap.
I’d been brushed off. I hadn’t convinced Detective Mike to do squat. But what if he was right? Was I totally off base?
I thought about what he’d said—Shooters def came in that way.
“We’re going to the school,” I said.
Chapter 32
Brian
“WHAT ARE we doin’ here?” Cameron asked as we pulled into the empty south parking lot. “The building’s gonna be locked, genius.”
“We don’t need to get inside.” I unhooked my seat belt and opened my door.
I don’t know why I felt such a gripping sense of urgency, like disaster
loomed. Landon was off in New York doing his national TV show, and we were in that dead zone that stretched from Christmas to New Year’s. I should be pigging out and watching movies, or maybe doing my PT exercises, trying to get my strength back. Instead, I was hanging out with Cameron, of all people, texting with a cop who wanted nothing to do with me, and trying to track down The Wall shooters. But it felt imperative to do this, right now. I had to finish this thing. I couldn’t fumble this chance.
We circled A-Wing to get to the emergency exit door at the far end of B-Wing. The wind had gotten arctic cold. The grass was stiff with frost because it hadn’t warmed up enough to melt it. It was after three, I figured, the winter sky dull as lead.
Cameron trailed behind me. “Where are we going?”
I didn’t bother to answer, just kept walking.
As we approached B-Wing, I scanned the classroom windows. “American History’s on the other side. Come on.”
The back of the school had a forgotten feeling, even when school was in session. The blank classroom windows of B-Wing and C-Wing looked out over a huge cornfield. There was a bit of spotty lawn. A service driveway snaked around C-Wing and went to a loading dock in the center of the main building, usually closed and shuttered. And that was all. No one hung out back here, not unless they were trying to sneak a smoke.
The corn was down now, leaving a stubble of frosty yellow bristles that stretched out for acres. In the far distance you could see a farmhouse and barn that were hidden for most of the year by crops. The wind came across the fields and sliced right through me like Michael Myers on a rampage.
Cameron stuffed his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. He bounced up and down. “Fuck, my ’nads’ll fall off. What do you think you’re gonna find out here?”
“I need to take a look at Fishbinder’s windows.”
I counted off classrooms in my head as I walked the length of the wing, peering inside. The blinds were pulled up, and I could make out desks as I passed. I saw Fishbinder’s neat, clean print on a blackboard. He’d listed a chapter to read and an essay topic for the break.