She was about to leave when Ben reappeared wearing an anorak similar to Mindy’s. It was part of the town uniform, one for every season. Perhaps they both wished that if they dressed normal-weather appropriate, they might bring it to pass.
“Follow me,” he said.
They walked in silence to the edge of the school grounds. Voyages occupied a ten-acre campus near the river that snaked through the southern edge of the valley. Though it was one of the older schools in the district, several substantial endowments from alumni meant that the low collage of buildings looked freshly built. The classrooms were sunny and large, the class sizes small, and the facilities incomparable.
Peter and Mindy were able to send Carrie and Angus there only because her father had set up a trust that got funded by his insurance when he died. There was enough for private high school and college for both kids, so they fulfilled her father’s wish despite their fear that the kids might feel out of place surrounded by children from much wealthier families.
Was that the reason all this was happening? Mindy wondered. Was Angus being singled out because his parents lived on one of the “flat” streets, where the houses were built in the last twenty years on a relatively modest scale? Because they didn’t have a ski chalet in Vail and were perfectly content with their bargain-priced passes to the aging Peak?
Ben came to rest at a picnic table that overlooked the river. He stooped to pick up a cigarette butt.
“The kids are lucky that portable DNA test never got approved,” he said.
At first Mindy thought he was joking, but then on second thought, he probably wasn’t.
“What’s up?” he asked as he folded himself into the table.
Mindy sat opposite him. Normally she would have hemmed and hawed, but the mixture of anger and terror coursing through her made her direct.
“I’m worried Angus is mixed up in the fire.”
“Because of the story in the paper this morning?”
“That, and other things.”
“The suspect can’t be Angus. If Phillips identified him, surely you’d know about it?”
Mindy’s fears ebbed and then grew. Sensible Ben should be right. Only he didn’t know what she knew. And he wasn’t looking her directly in the eye.
“You know who it is, don’t you?” she asked.
“No, no. Elizabeth couldn’t tell me.”
“Elizabeth? What does she have to do with this?”
“She’s been investigating the fire. You didn’t know?”
“No. I . . . You know we’re not talking, right?”
“Yes, of course. I just thought that everyone knew she was . . . Forget it. Why do you think Angus might be involved?”
She explained about the messages she’d found, how she’d been able to get into Angus’s Ask.fm account. She showed him the printout of the most recent exchanges she found between him and his “friends.”
Ben’s eyes narrowed as he read them, two red spots appearing high on his cheeks.
“That little . . . This is not good.”
“That’s why I brought it to you.”
“Why me? Why not take this directly to the principal?”
“You’ve always been nice to Angus. And, honestly, you probably know as much about him as I do these days.”
“Why do you say that?”
She motioned toward the pages. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s been going on all year. The . . . bullying, I guess you’d call it. And I had no idea. We had no idea.”
Tears splashed down her face onto her anorak.
“Hey, now, don’t cry. That’s what teenagers do, right? Keep things from their parents.”
“But I knew something was wrong with him. I knew and I didn’t do anything. Have you noticed him acting strangely in any way? Is he . . . Do you think he could have started the fire?”
“Whoa. Wait a minute. Back up. Those messages are just Tucker stirring the pot. There’s nothing here that shows that Angus did anything. Was he even out of the house that night?”
Mindy hung her head, looking at the tips of her shoes between the slats on the picnic table. One of the most basic things she always thought she’d know about her son was his precise location at all times. But she couldn’t turn away from the truth of her answer.
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 21
The Good Son
Elizabeth
Deputy Clark and I drive out to Voyages after lunch. I call Joshua Wicks on the way, using the cell number Judy tracked down for me after she vanquished her latest Scrabble opponent.
“Wicks,” he says in a deep baritone. Though it almost sounds fake, this is his natural speaking voice, one more likely to belong to Andre the Giant than an eager, small-town reporter.
“This is Elizabeth Martin from the prosecutor’s office. I’d like to—”
“I remember you. And I can’t reveal my sources.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“But you were about to.”
“Mr. Wicks, you must know that writing a story like that is going to raise questions.”
“That’s exactly why I wrote it.”
“But how did you know to write it? What makes you so sure it’s true?”
“Are you questioning my journalistic integrity?”
I want to remove the phone from my ear and smash it into the dashboard.
“I’m simply trying to figure out what’s going on. This is a delicate investigation, and if someone’s giving you information they shouldn’t be—”
“Here’s a tip. Free of charge. If you want to keep things secret in this town, don’t conduct interviews in full view of numerous witnesses.”
He slams down the phone, but it’s a satisfying noise. So it’s not such a big mystery, after all. He spoke to someone at the shelter—surely not Honor Wells—and learned that John Phillips had pointed the finger at Tucker. Then he assumed that armed with that information, we’d do the right thing and question the kids who might be involved.
And here we are about to do that very thing.
Does one ever know if they’re the chicken or the egg?
When we arrive, the vice principal, Janet Kores, is there to greet us at the front entrance. Ben has class right now, and it’s not like we’d let a teacher sit in on the questioning. We had to let their parents know, of course, a process I was sure was going to derail the whole thing because of the flood of angry calls to Rich. But he must’ve put his foot down with his sister, Honor. Doing this all quietly is in everyone’s best interest, for now.
Janet’s nearing fifty. She’s tall and wiry; she and her partner, Helen, recently went to Maine to get, as she put it, “legally married.” Five years ago, that would’ve cost Janet her job; this year, she got a nice gift from the senior class and a small write-up in the Daily. Sometimes progress really does happen.
The fact that Ben’s not there and Janet is, the nervous look on her face, the stares and whispers and turned heads in the hall—none of this surprises me. What does surprise me is who they’ve decided we should interview first: Angus Mitchell.
“What’s he doing here?” I ask Janet when I catch a glimpse of a miserable-looking Angus sitting between his parents through the glass panel in the classroom door. He’s grown almost as tall as his dad, and he’s wearing his dark-red hair cropped short. Angus’s hair color is one of the things that Mindy and I used to laugh about because it was so much closer to my own than hers or Peter’s. Sometimes when we were together, people thought he was my son.
“Some information has come to light . . . His mother approached us, actually.”
“Mindy?”
“You know that kid?” Deputy Clark asks me.
I watch Mindy and Peter through the glass. Mindy’s face is so red she looks sunburned, a sure sign she’s in distress. Peter is harder to read. When I knew him, he was always a happy guy, but now there are deep lines burrowed into his forehead.
“I used to
be friends with his parents,” I say.
“That going to be a problem?”
“No, it’s fine.” I turn back to Janet. “What did Mindy tell you?”
“I think it’s best if you hear that directly from Angus.”
I rub my hands over my face. I am in no way ready for this.
“Shall we go in?” Deputy Clark asks.
All three of them startle at the squeak of the door. I introduce Deputy Clark as we take a seat in front of them, and I’m hoping the formality of the process will cover the awkwardness of our first conversation in a year being under these circumstances. Mindy speaks to me in clipped sentences. Peter is slightly warmer.
Deputy Clark pulls out a mini-recorder and sets it on the desk.
Mindy eyes it nervously. “Is that . . . necessary?”
“Well, ma’am, it’s standard procedure.”
He lets that information sit there, waiting for an objection. Right now they’re talking to us willingly. They could stop this interview, say no to it being taped, whatever they want to do. But there’s the power of authority—and a million TV cop shows—working against them. They’ll agree to the tape for the same reason they’ll answer our questions: because they believe that if they tell us their story, things will work out.
After enough time has passed for them to register an objection, Deputy Clark starts in with the preliminaries: name, location, time, those present.
“Now, son,” he says to Angus. If this wasn’t all so serious I’d laugh at this guy, who’s all of nine years older than Angus, referring to him as if he could be his progeny. “We hear you might know something about how the fire got set. That true?”
“I don’t know anything.”
Peter’s face clouds with anger. “Angus, we’ve talked about this.”
Mindy puts a protective hand on his back. “Come on, honey. Tell them about the messages.”
Angus stays silent.
Peter blows out an exasperated breath. “This is ridiculous. The kid you really need to be talking to is Tucker Wells.” He holds his hand out, and Mindy puts a set of folded papers in it. “Look at this. He’s been harassing my son about the fire, not to mention bullying him all year. He’s clearly trying to cast blame on someone else for his own actions.”
He thrust the papers at me. I read through them. They’re from a messaging service I don’t recognize and contain a list of questions and replies between Tucker Wells, Angus, and a third person ending on Tuesday morning about an hour after, if I remember correctly, the first article appeared in the Daily about the fire. Did Angus start the fire at John Phillips’s house? reads a question posed at 9:23 a.m. by mothertucker. Suck it, Tucker! said willowmaker21 soon after. You’ll regret that, wrote mangledangus a few minutes later. The earlier messages went back through the weekend, and mainly involved Tucker taunting Angus about a girl named Willow—Angus’s girlfriend, presumably.
“We’ll be speaking to Tucker later today,” I say. “But tell us, Angus, have you ever been to Mr. Phillips’s property?”
He nods slowly.
“With Tucker?”
Another nod.
“Anyone else?”
“Just some other guys.”
“Angus!” Peter says. “This is not the time to be protecting anyone.”
Angus turns his head toward Peter as he mumbles something.
“What?”
“I said, they’re my friends.”
“They most certainly are not your friends. Is that what you really think friendship is? Is this?” Peter takes the pages from me and waves them under Angus’s nose. Never in all the years I’ve known him have I ever seen Peter close to this kind of angry.
“I get it,” I say, holding up a finger to Peter as I pull my chair closer to Angus’s to make the conversation between us. “You don’t want to feel like you’re snitching. But nobody’s going to get in trouble if they didn’t do anything. I promise.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Hey, Angus,” I say, putting two fingers under his chin and bringing his face up so we can make eye contact. “Remember those cake pops I used to make?”
Most of his face is a blank, but I catch a blink of a smile.
Cake pops.
Years ago, Mindy went through a no-white-sugar phase with the kids, and I made the mistake of bringing fully white sugar cake pops (like a lollipop, only cake) to their house for one of the kids’ birthdays. Angus was so upset when Mindy put her foot down and said he couldn’t eat it, I’d found a no-sugar version of the recipe online and brought a bunch over the next day. He must’ve been about eight or nine, and they kind of became our thing. Whenever he had a birthday or some special event, that’s what he wanted, and that’s what I made him.
“Angus?”
“Yeah, course.”
“Remember what I told you about them?”
He nods and there’s that blink of a smile again. Here and gone. Here and gone.
The thing was, the no-sugar versions kind of sucked. So I reverted to the original recipe without telling Mindy, figuring a bit of white sugar couldn’t hurt the kids twice a year. And once, when Angus was about eleven, I had him over to make them and he found out about the switch. He’d giggled and said, in this supersolemn voice, “I can keep a secret.”
“I can keep a secret,” I say now. “Forget everyone else. Just tell me. Were you and Tucker and the others at John Phillips’s house that night?”
His eyes dart back and forth like he’s checking for the exits, but after a moment he leans forward and whispers in my ear, “I already told you. I don’t know anything.”
Deputy Clark and I spend the next two hours in fruitless conversations with sixteen-year-olds, accompanied by their parents. At the end of it, what we can piece together is that: (a) Tucker and his friends did regularly hang out in John Phillips’s backyard. Tucker had a “hard-on” for Phillips, as one of the chattier boys told us, but nobody really knew why; (b) Angus Mitchell was sometimes with them and sometimes not, and nobody really understood why he hung around with those jerks because Angus was a nice kid and they treated him like crap; (c) Tucker had a thing for Willow and was angry she seemed to prefer Angus over him, but that (d) there was a rumor she’d finally made out with Tucker on Monday night, and maybe Angus had been there too, though that was unconfirmed.
Before tackling Tucker, our last interview of the day, I suggest a break to Deputy Clark, and I go seek out Ben.
I find him in the teacher’s lounge, grading papers. He has a steaming mug of tea by his right elbow, and a smudge of pen on the bridge of his nose. I want to wet my finger and rub it off, but Ben always hates it when I do that sort of thing, especially in public.
“Hey,” I say, sitting across from him. “I need your help.”
“Oh?”
“Could you stop that for a second?”
He puts his pen down. “I thought I couldn’t be involved.”
“Not in the interviews, but . . . Look, we’ve got Tucker up next and we’ve hit a roadblock.”
“What do you need me for?”
“I was wondering if there’s maybe something I could use that would give me an edge. Make him feel like I know something about him I shouldn’t.”
The door opens and closes behind us. A teacher I don’t know walks in, gives Ben a wave, and then retreats to the corner where the mail cubbies are.
“What kind of thing?”
“Has he ever said anything to you about Angus? Or about hanging out on John Phillips’s property? Maybe something that seemed innocent at the time?”
He rubs the bridge of his nose, and the pen mark gets worse.
“Nothing comes to mind. Maybe you should just ask Tucker what you want to know. Maybe he’ll surprise you.”
“You think that’s likely?”
“No. I do not.”
There’s a coughing sound near us, and I look up. The teacher who came in—twenty-five, fresh-faced, blonde hair in a bouncing ponytail—i
s standing at the end of our table.
“Hi,” she says, holding out her hand. “You must be Elizabeth.”
Her hand is slim and delicate in mine, which is still calloused and rough from my years working with heavy equipment.
“I am. And you are?”
“Stephanie. I teach English.”
I don’t look at Ben. I’ve never heard him mention anyone named Stephanie.
“How long have you been teaching here?”
She cocks her head to the side. “Three years now? Yeah, this is my third year.”
“And you teach with Ben?”
“Sure do. He’s been great at showing me the ropes.”
“Has he?”
“Couldn’t have made it without him. Say, were you two talking about Tucker Wells? Sorry, couldn’t help overhearing.”
“We were. Why?”
“Well . . . you’re the one investigating the fire, right?”
“That’s me.”
“This might interest you.”
She walks back to the cubby wall. Each teacher has a mail square and a deep drawer below. I watch her while she rummages around her drawer, then I turn to Ben. He’s lowered his head back to his papers.
I badly want to ask him what the hell is going on, who this Stephanie person is and why he’s never mentioned her, but now is not the time.
“Ah! Here it is.”
Stephanie walks a paper back to me. I can’t help but notice how her pencil skirt shows off her slim but curvy legs, and how the sweater she’s wearing makes her eyes stand out. Half the teenage boys must be in love with her. Does that go for my boy too?
She hands it to me. “This is something Tucker wrote in my class last spring after he switched out of Ben’s section after the . . . you know. Anyway, he never picks his work up, the little bugger, but this was actually quite good, though slightly gruesome.”
I look at the title. Fire Starter.
“From what I remember,” she says, “it’s about a kid who finds out he has an affinity for fire kind of accidentally—camping with his dad or something—and then he keeps building fires until one day, he goes too far and sets a town on fire. I might be getting some of the details wrong, but it’s definitely something like that.” She cocks her head to the side again, her ponytail swinging. “Funny,” she says. “I forgot all about it till just now.”
Smoke Page 15
