At least we can agree on that.
"Does he bite? Can I pet him?"
"He won't if you're gentle."
I hold Steven out to her, and Amber gingerly puts her hands around him and lifts him up.
"He's heavy. Hello Steven!" She says to him. “I love his eyes! Big brown eyes. You're a handsome boy aren't you?"
Suddenly I feel a bit weird. I can't really explain it. It's like – It's not jealousy, or anything like that. It’s just, the way she’s going all soft over Steven. I kind of wish she was saying that to me. I shake the thought away, it's ridiculous. I sit down at my desk.
"What were you doing? Downstairs? Didn't I tell you he's a murderer? He's dangerous, and you want to have dinner with him?"
"Yeah but you didn't tell me he was hot."
I feel that strange thought again. Steven picks up on it, and shuffles awkwardly.
"Hey, it's alright baby," Amber soothes him.
I look away, then turn to my stereo. I switch it on, then I turn it up loud even though the song is some rapper or another. Amber looks up, questioningly.
“I never had you down as a hip hop fan.”
“I’m not. I just don't want Tucker to hear what we're talking about."
"Oh. OK. Well anyway, you're having dinner with him."
"Yeah but I have to."
"Well?" She shrugs. "And anyway, what kind of a murderer makes veggie lasagna?" She asks the question in her cutesy voice, but more to Steven than to me.
“Hey little birdy man? Not a very scary murderer that’s what…” So I have to talk to her quite sharply to get her attention back.
"Amber. It is possible for someone to be a murderer and also a good cook. The two attributes are not mutually exclusive."
Amber ignores me, stroking Steven’s plumage. But then she very carefully she puts him down so that he stands on the carpet watching her and offering up one of his feet like I taught him.
Amber plays with him for a while, taking his foot and shaking it like she’s saying hello.
"So anyway, Sherlock,” She says at last. “What’s gonna happen now with your SIM card?"
Thirty-One
I reach into my pocket and pull it out, folded it into a square of paper so I don't lose it. I put it on the desk and look at it for a moment.
Amber watches me. Anticipation etched into her face. Her eyes shining with the thrill of it.
I reach into my other pocket and pull out my phone. I check it for messages, then when there aren't any, I press the button to power it down. While I'm waiting for that I open my drawer and root around for a bit until I find an electrical screwdriver. As soon as the phone screen has gone black I carefully prize the back of my phone, then slide my SIM card out of the slot. I replace it with Tucker's, then fit the phone's back case into place again.
"Is that it? That's all you have to do?"
"It's because he's on T-Mobile," I start to explain, even though I told her all this at school. "All the phone's data gets stored on the card, so the network will think it's his phone."
"OK, OK. How long do you reckon the police will take to start tracking it?"
I hesitate, because I don't actually know this.
"They might have some sort of alert set up, so that they know the moment it gets switched on." I consider this for a second. "Or they might not. I'm not sure."
I still have the phone in my hand, but I don't turn it on. I'm not sure why I don't.
"Seems a shame in a way. He's quite a cool guy. And, you know, he's pretty buff." Amber gives me a look to tell me she's joking. Or at least I think she's joking.
"Well go on then. Aren't you gonna turn it on?"
I swallow carefully. And then I press the button to power on the phone.
Nothing happens at first. The phone loads, and it's weird because it still looks like my phone. The photo it shows is my usual one, a dead oarfish I found on the beach the other day, but when I go to contacts, all my numbers aren't there, and instead there's lots of names I don't recognize. Amber is leaning in close to me, so that she can see the screen too. I can smell her too, and feel her hair brushing soft against my face. I hold the phone a bit further away, so she doesn't need to lean so close.
"Check the messages," Amber says, moving closer again.
"OK."
This time I don’t lean away.
But when I check what she says, they're all my messages. A couple from Dad, and then lots from Amber herself.
"How come..." Amber begins, but I know what she's going to say.
"It's because the messages get stored on the phone once they've been delivered." I tell her. "They wait on the network until they get delivered, but then they just stay on the phone. Otherwise the telephone base stations would fill up. They might even explode."
"Oh." She sounds confused by this, but then she brightens. "How about the photos?"
I shake my head at once. I'm not actually sure of the answer, but I'm definitely not showing Amber my photos.
"So what do we do then? Just wait?" She sits back on my bed and crosses her legs.
It's funny really. I've never had anyone else in this room. Obviously Dad has been in here, and I suppose Tucker has too, but not when I wanted him too. And maybe when the police searched the house, when they were looking for Dad, they must have been in there. But other than that, there's never been anyone else in my room. And now there's a girl. A girl who's sixteen years old. I don't know why, but that thought keeps coming into my head. I risk a glance at Amber, I don't know why it feels like a risk suddenly. She's leaning over my bedside table, poking at my starfishes.
"Urgh," she says, and screws up her nose. I'd never noticed before, but there's something really interesting about the shape of her nose. I can't stop staring at it.
Then suddenly she moves away from me and goes to the window. It's a relief, at least, I think it is.
"I wish I had a view like this," she says. "You can see all the way to the end of the beach." She pushes the drapes out of the way so she can see better.
She half turns to me, still facing the window, but twisting her head and neck towards me. It means her chest is side on to me, and I can't help but notice how her blouse is pulled taut over her boobs. I hadn't really noticed that she really had boobs before, I mean I had, but I hadn't thought about them. I don't know why I'm thinking about them now.
I try to stop thinking about them.
"Did they?" She says.
"Did they what?"
"Did they close off the caves? Because of what happened to you?"
"Oh." I shrug. "I don't know."
She gives me a funny look, a kind of half smile, and again I notice how it makes her face look interesting. Kind of pretty.
"Billy? Are you alright? You look weird again."
"No, I'm not… I’m fine."
I turn away at once, but I notice I can still see her in the reflection of my computer screen. She turns away from the window, a bounce in her step. Her boobs bounce too. I wish I could stop looking.
"Well come on then."
"Come on where?"
"Downstairs. Lasagna will be ready. Bring the phone."
Thirty-Two
Dinner is really odd. Tucker has set three places, and put glasses and a jug of water on the table. Then he offers us beer again, and Amber says yes, and gives me this innocent look as he gets it for her from the refrigerator. When we're both sitting down he pulls out a big tray of lasagna from the oven, and I have to admit it looks really good, all the cheese on the top is bubbling and crispy from the heat. He sets it in the middle of the table and then serves some to Amber first, then me, and then to himself.
It is really good. It's probably the best vegetable lasagna I've ever had, and that's a bit annoying, because it's one of the things I cook sometimes too.
"Mmmmm, this is, like, this is just amazing! Mr…" Amber says when she's tried it, not saying his second name even though she knows what it is, because I told her.
"It's just Tucker." He says. "The secret is you gotta pre-bake the eggplant. Get it good and tender."
"It's delicious. I wish my step dad could cook like this."
Tucker's eyes flick onto Amber.
"Step dad?"
"Yeah, my real dad died."
I remember Amber mentioned this once before. I don't know why she's bringing it up again.
"I'm sorry," Tucker says. Then he goes on.
"What happened?"
Amber doesn't answer right away. She actually sounds a bit strange when she does answer.
"Pancreatic cancer. Four years ago. Then my mom remarried, and they've had a new baby, so they don't have much time for me."
"Shit," Tucker says. Then he thinks for a little while.
"Cancer's a fucking bitch."
This time Amber doesn't reply, but after a moment she nods.
I don't say anything all this time. I'm thinking that we can maybe eat and then go outside. I could tell Tucker we need to fly Steven, or that we have to finish the work we were doing, but then Amber opens her mouth again.
"So you're like... You're like Billy's uncle or something?" She looks up into his face, her eyes round. She even flutters her eyelids a little bid.
"Kinda. Billy's dad and me were buddies growing up." He hesitates a moment. "You know anything about what happened to Billy?"
"Yeah, he's told me." Amber says, like she wants him to go on. But he doesn't.
"Well then you know it ain't so easy to talk about." Tucker sucks air through his teeth, like he wishes he could say more. Then he gives her a smile. There's a silence for a moment.
"What about you? You're not in his classes or nothing? You look a lot older..."
Amber seems delighted by this. "No I just... I decided to help him out, a few weeks back, with this project."
"Uh huh?"
"Yeah, we're working on it together." She turns to me. "Aren't we Billy?"
I wonder what she expects me to say to this, it's probably not a great idea to explain to a murderer on the run that we're actually private detectives. But in the end I'm saved from saying anything when there's a loud beeping sound from my pocket. It's a message coming into my phone. Only it isn't my phone anymore. Both Amber and Tucker look at me, expectantly, but I guess for different reasons.
I decide I’m best off pretending I haven’t heard anything. "Yeah, it's for biology," I say, a bit too loudly, and then to cover that I quickly make something up.
"We're doing a count of grey seals out by the headland. Their numbers keep falling so we're gonna monitor them." I actually did do this, so I can talk for ages on it if I need to.
Tucker finishes chewing a mouthful of food. "Uh huh." He says when he's finished.
"Yeah. There's about a hundred at the moment. Or fifty breeding pairs," I go on. And that's true as well. "They have their pups later in the year, in October usually, so maybe the numbers will go back up again. I hope so because they're a sign of the overall health of the oceans."
Tucker nods seriously, then his face brightens. "Say. I saw a whale earlier today. Out in the bay."
"Really?" This is actually quite interesting. "Do you know what type?"
"I dunno, it was a way out. I just saw the spout and maybe half its tail."
"Fluke."
"What?"
"If you saw only half its tail, then that's a fluke," I explain.
"What you saying?" Tucker sounds a little bit angry, like I'm accusing him of something, so I have to explain again.
"Whale's tails are made up of two halves. Each is called a fluke." People are always getting that wrong.
"Oh," Tucker says. And then my phone with his SIM card beeps again. And as soon as it finishes it beeps again. So I guess two more messages have come in. Putting the new SIM in must have reset the phone to its standard message settings, because the notification message is super loud.
"You're popular tonight ain't you Billy?" Tucker says.
I don't reply, it's just occurred to me that maybe Tucker's SIM card holds the notification that Tucker has chosen for his messages. If so he might recognize the noise my phone keeps making.
Before I finish that thought another message comes in.
There's another silence.
"You sure you don't want to look at that? Could be your old man," Tucker says. So obviously then I do have to look. I slide my eyes over to Amber, hoping she can think of some excuse, but she's just smiling at me brightly.
So I have to pull the phone out of my pocket, and really carefully using my other hand to shield the screen so there's no way Tucker can see it, I glance at it. You don't get to see the whole messages, but it tells me four messages received, all of them from the same person. And what I can see of them, they're pretty weird.
"It's not Dad, I say, and slip the phone back, and as I do so it beeps again.
I eat the rest of my food as quickly as I can, but I can’t go upstairs until Amber stops talking. She’s on about her dad again with Tucker, and they keep talking right up till all the plates are washed and dried.
Thirty-Three
What the hell happened? Where are you?
That's the first message. It comes from a guy called Vinny. It was sent a week ago. It doesn't look like Tucker answered it.
We need to talk. Call me.
That's the second message. Sent a day later. Then the next one says
I ain't mad. I just need to know where you are.
Then there's a whole load more, all saying the same sort of thing. I show them to Amber, who's super excited.
"Who's Vinny?"
"I don't know."
"Why did all the messages come in now?"
"I told you. They get stored on the network until they can get delivered.
"That's so awesome. Do you think the police will have tracked the phone by now?"
"I don't know."
"What are you going to do now?"
"I don't know."
We wait for a few moments, and then Amber gets up and goes to the window, like she's expecting the police might turn up at any second, but of course they don't.
"Is there any way you can tell if the police have tracked the phone yet?"
I think for a moment.
"No."
"So is there anything you can do, now, to alert them?"
Again I shake my head. "I don't think so."
"Do you even still want to?" Amber asks then. "I mean. Are you sure he's definitely a murderer? He seems a really cool guy."
I look at her, a bit annoyed by this.
"Do you want to read the articles about the man he killed?" This shuts her up a bit and she comes back to the bed and sits down. Then she looks at her watch.
"I probably have to get back soon."
I don't reply to this. I'm still a bit annoyed.
"Why don't you phone him? He could probably tell you."
"Phone who?"
"This Vinny guy. He seems to want to contact Tucker pretty bad. Hey -" she hesitates, and turns around to face me. "Maybe he actually is the police. Or his probation officer or something. That would make sense, from how the messages sound."
I read them again, trying to see what she means. I'm not convinced.
"I'll call him, if you like,"
This is such a stupid idea I don't even consider it. But I do think of something else.
"We could text him back. Ask him what he wants? Maybe he'd tell us something more that way?"
Amber bites her lip, thinking this over.
"Go on then," she says.
"What do we say?"
It takes a bit of discussion, but in the end we settle on writing this:
What do you want?
I know that looks simple, but it's actually deceptively clever. It doesn't reveal anything about who we are, but it forces Vinny, whoever he is, to tell us something about what he wants. And just in case Vinny is Tucker's probation officer, which still seems unlikely, it will also alert him to noticing
that his phone is back on, so that the police can track where he is.
I explain all this to Amber while she fiddles with the phone, but as I do so I begin to wonder if it's such a good idea after all. We actually don't know anything about who this Vinny guy is, or what he wants, and we're kind of messing in Tucker's business, and maybe we shouldn't do that. I'm wondering how to say all this to Amber interrupts me.
"Done. Message sent."
"What?"
She throws the phone down on the bed and shrugs.
“It’s done.”
So that's kind of that.
Then Amber stares at the phone, like she's waiting for something to happen right away, which obviously it isn't. I turn away and open my laptop, which I took upstairs with me this time. I turn it on, and type the password again, to stop it recording, then pull up the list of keywords Tucker has used.
"What you doing now?" Amber asks, leaning in close again.
I start to explain how it all works, how I downloaded SpyCatch and Keylogger Free, but I can sense Amber losing interest. "So it's just like spying on someone's internet search history?"
I hesitate. "Not exactly no..."
"I do that with my step dad all the time. He's so bad at deleting his search history. He gambles on this poker site. And sometimes he browses porn sites, He really likes Asian girls. So I've no idea why he's with my mom."
I don't know what to say to this, so I show Amber the newspaper pages on the robbery at the jewelry store in Hounds Beach.
"Shit," she says when she's finished reading them. "That is pretty bad."
I feel a bit better at this. Downstairs she was acting like he was Bruce Willis in Die Hard.
"Has he looked at anything else since then?"
"Hmmm?"
"Has he used your computer since then? Have you recorded him looking at anything else?"
"Oh." It's quite hard to answer this. I've used my laptop myself since installing the spyware, as well as leaving it out as a trap for Tucker, so his pages are mixed up with mine. Even so, I go to the list and we both lean in to look. I sort the results by time of day, selecting only the times when I was at school.
The Lornea Island Detective Club Page 14
