#5 Dead Silence (Mike & Riel Mysteries)

by Norah McClintock

  After she talked about that for a while, she started asking me about school and which options I was taking and what I thought I was going to do after high school. She said she wanted to be a marine biologist; she said biology was her all-time favorite subject, which surprised me. I’d never figured on any of Teddy’s friends doing anything serious, for sure not marine biology. The whole time she was talking, I kept looking up at the house and wondering about Annie and what she had seen. I wondered if the cops had talked to her and, if they had, what she had told them. After a while, a couple of girls got up and started dancing. Then more girls got up and danced. Some of them dragged boys to their feet. The boys mostly just shuffled around, although there was this one guy—he was really into it and, boy, could he move. Soon almost everyone was on their feet.

  Meghan pulled me up and started to dance around in front of me, but I don’t dance much. I’m not good at it, and I feel stupid doing it. But Meghan didn’t seem to notice. She could have been dancing with anyone or no one, I don’t think it would have made any difference to her. So while she twirled around, I slipped over to Teddy and said I needed to use the can. He nodded toward the house.

  “You sure it’s okay?” I said.

  “Sure I’m sure,” he said.

  I jogged up the slope and back down the other side and let myself in through the sliding door that Teddy had come out of. I found myself in a big room filled with leather furniture and lined with bookcases and CD towers. There was a fireplace on one wall and the biggest flat-screen TV I had ever seen on another. But there was no Annie. At least, I didn’t see her at first. Then I heard a little sound, like sniffling, coming from the other side of the room, and I froze. Maybe it was her. But what if it wasn’t?

  I tiptoed toward the sound. There was definitely someone there, and she was definitely crying. I hesitated.

  Finally, “Are you okay?” I said.

  She must have been curled up in one corner of the couch, because all of a sudden her head popped up. It was Annie. She took a quick swipe at her eyes with a tissue, and at first it looked like she was going to yell at me. But I guess I wasn’t who she expected, because she looked from me to the sliding door behind me and then back to me again.

  “I came in to use the bathroom,” I said. “I heard something. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me while her eyes filled with tears again.

  “Are you okay?” I said again.

  “I keep thinking about him,” she said. “About Sal. He was in my chemistry class.”

  “Someone told me you were one of the first kids in the alley,” I said.

  Tears ran down both cheeks. She wiped them away, but more kept coming as she nodded.

  “I keep seeing him lying there,” she said. Her lips started to tremble. “He was looking up. He was looking right at me.”

  I felt myself shaking. I told myself that the more I talked about it, the longer it was going to take for all those terrible thoughts and all those awful pictures in my head to finally go away. But she had been there. I had to ask her. I had to know.

  “Did you see anything else?” I said.

  She was staring off into space. If you ask me, she was still seeing it.

  “The knife,” she said. “I saw the knife. It was lying there right beside him.”

  “The knife?” I said. I knew Sal had been stabbed. But this was the first I’d heard that whoever did it had left the knife in the alley beside him.

  “It was big,” she said. “The blade must have been this long.” She showed me with both hands. “It looked like a switchblade, but a big one, with a black handle that had a skull and crossbones on it and some numbers.”

  “Numbers?”

  “Three sixes or three nines. I guess it depends which way you hold it. And there was another mark on it. An X. It looked like someone had scratched it into the handle.”

  “And it was lying beside him?”

  “Right beside him. I saw it, and I took out my phone. It was just automatic, you know? I forgot that that woman had run down the street and that there were all those cops there. So I took out my phone and I called 911. And then other people started coming into the alley, and I was afraid someone was going to touch the knife, so I covered it with my scarf. B—” She broke off abruptly.

  “But what?” I said.

  She looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said. “I already talked to the cops.”

  “But they haven’t arrested anyone yet,” I said. “So if there’s anything you maybe forgot to tell them—”

  “I told them what I know,” she said. “I covered the knife with my scarf even though—” She stopped again.

  “Even though what?” I said.

  Nothing. She wouldn’t even look at me now.

  “What made you go into the alley, Annie? I heard that woman was screaming when she came out of there. Weren’t you afraid?”

  The question seemed to startle her. “What?”

  “What made you go into the alley? Did you hear something? Did you see something?”

  Her eyes got sharp, and tears stopped leaking out of them.

  “You live with Mr. Riel,” she said. “I heard he went back to being a cop. You live with a cop. Is that why you’re asking me so many questions? Are you working for the cops or something?”

  “No.” Jeez, why would she say something like that? “No, nothing like that. But, Annie, if you know anything you haven’t said …”

  She looked me directly in the eyes, and if you ask me, she was thinking about it. She was thinking about what I was saying. She opened her mouth to speak, and I held my breath. I was sure she knew something. I was sure she was going to tell me.

  Then I heard something behind me—it was the glass door sliding open. Annie’s eyes skipped from me to the door, and her whole body tensed up. I turned and saw Bailey step inside. He scowled at me and crossed quickly to where Annie was sitting.

  “Meghan said you were in here,” he said. His voice was soft when he talked to her, but when he looked at me again, his eyes were as hard as granite. He glowered at me and then turned to Annie again. “Are you okay?” he said gently.

  She started to cry again. She said, “I want to go home.” Bailey sat down beside her, put an arm around her, and pulled her close. She let him.

  “Annie, he was my best friend,” I said.

  “Annie doesn’t want to talk to you,” Bailey said. “Do you, Annie?”

  She answered his question by wrapping her arms around him. Bailey stared at me for a moment. Then he turned back to Annie, and they sat there with their arms around each other. There was no way she was going to talk to me now.

  I left the house and went back to the fire. The party had really livened up while I was gone, and no wonder. Someone was passing around a bottle. When it got to me, I hesitated. Part of me wanted it. Part of me thought that maybe if I drank some of it, I would forget stuff that I didn’t want to think about and I would feel better. Maybe I would, too, for a little while. But the stuff I didn’t want to think about, the things I wanted to forget, would be gone for an hour or two at the most. In the meantime, I would get into trouble with Riel. To be honest, part of me didn’t care about that. Part of me was still tempted. But there was a whole other part of me, the part that admired Sal for the way he always handled things, even when they were hard, and that said, no, doing something stupid is doing something stupid, no matter how you look at it. Besides, I didn’t need any more grief in my life. So I shook my head, and the guy who was holding the bottle passed it to the guy on the other side of me, who turned out to be Teddy. He took it and grinned at me and took a big swallow.

  “I gotta go,” I said.

  “The party’s just getting started.”

  I hesitated. “Teddy, about what you saw at my locker…”

  “Don’t worry, Mike. I said I wouldn’t tell, and I won’t.�
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  I got home before either Riel or Susan. I went straight up to my room and got ready for bed. Then I lay there, staring at the ceiling and seeing Sal’s face.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Riel was in the kitchen when I finally got out of bed the next day.

  “You working today?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “How about coming outside when you’ve had something to eat? You can help me clean up the yard.”

  You could hardly see the grass out back or out front anymore. It was covered with leaves. I said okay. I ate some cereal, grabbed a jacket, and went outside. Riel was cleaning the flowerbeds. He had told me most of the flowers were already there when he bought the house. The same with the raspberry bushes. But it meant he had to spend a lot of time taking care of everything, and he made me help him. When I went outside, he gestured to a rake leaning up against the fence. I started raking all the leaves into a big pile. When I had finished, I used the rake as a shovel and shoveled the leaves into huge brown paper bags so that they could be picked up by the city. By the time I had finished, Riel had done everything he wanted to in the flowerbeds.

  “Come on,” he said. “It won’t take long to do the front.”

  The front yard was a lot smaller than the backyard. “I talked to this girl who went into the alley that day,” I said.

  “What girl?”

  “A girl from my school. She was the first one to go into the alley after that woman came running out. She saw Sal. She said she saw the knife.”

  Riel didn’t say anything.

  “Why do you think whoever did it left the knife there?” I said. I had been thinking about that ever since Annie told me about it. “Why didn’t they take the knife with them?”

  Riel still didn’t say anything. But that was okay because I had more to say.

  “If Sal got killed because of what happened on the sidewalk, if someone chased him into the alley or something like that and then stabbed him, it would be a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing, don’t you think? And it was a cool day, but not cold enough for people to be wearing gloves. So if someone stabbed Sal just like that, in the heat of the moment, there would be fingerprints on the knife, wouldn’t there?”

  “What are you trying to say, Mike?”

  “If there were fingerprints on the knife, couldn’t you just take fingerprints off everyone who was out there that day and compare them to the fingerprints on the knife?”

  Riel looked at me for a moment before he said, “You’re assuming there are any unidentified fingerprints on the knife.”

  “Knives can be traced, can’t they? This girl who saw the knife, she described it to me. It sounds like the kind of knife you’d remember if you saw it. Why don’t the police let everyone know what the knife looks like and ask if anyone recognizes it?”

  “If they thought it would help, they might do that,” Riel said.

  “Why wouldn’t it help? Why don’t they just ask the newspapers to publish a picture of it?” Wait a minute. I looked at him. “You said I was assuming there are any unidentified prints on the knife. What do you mean? That there were prints on the knife and you know whose they are?”

  “Mike, you know I can’t—”

  Right. He couldn’t tell me anything.

  I took the rake and another big brown paper bag and went around the front to rake the leaves there. Riel followed me, but he didn’t say anything.

  When I came downstairs the next morning before school and glanced at the newspaper that was open on the table, my stomach did a flip. Sal’s face was staring out at me.

  “Did they make an arrest?” I said.

  Riel shook his head.

  “The police are appealing to parents,” he said.

  “Parents?”

  “Parents of kids who go to school in the area. It’s in the newspaper, and it’ll be on TV today, too.”

  “What do the cops expect parents to do?”

  Riel pushed the newspaper closer to me. I read the article. It said that the cops were investigating Sal’s murder and that it was possible that a student or some students from my school were involved. It said if there was more than one student involved, there were probably different degrees of responsibility for what happened, and that parents should be alert to signs that maybe their child was involved. Then it asked a bunch of questions: The day it happened or the day after it happened, was your child being secretive about phone calls he or she made or received? Did your child have several friends over the night that it happened and did they lock themselves in your child’s room or the basement and did they act like they didn’t want anyone to hear what they were saying? Did your child change his or her clothes when they came home that day for no reason? Did you notice any unexplainable stains that might have been on their clothing in the laundry? Was your child unusually quiet?

  “It doesn’t mention the knife,” I said. “They’re asking all these questions. Why didn’t they show a picture of the knife or at least describe it and ask parents if they’ve ever seen their kid with a knife like it?”

  Riel didn’t say anything.

  “How stupid are the cops anyway?” I said, shoving the paper away. “This is the perfect time to ask about the knife.”

  Something about the expression on Riel’s face stopped me from saying any more. I thought about the newspaper article. I thought about what they were asking and what they hadn’t asked. I remembered what Riel had said yesterday—that I was assuming there were no unidentified prints on the knife that Annie had seen lying next to Sal in the alley. I had wondered what that meant. Now I thought I knew. There were fingerprints on the knife, and the police knew whose prints they were. They were asking parents all kinds of things about their kids and their clothes, but they hadn’t asked if they recognized the knife in the alley? Why not? I looked at Riel. They hadn’t asked because they already knew whose knife it was, the same as they knew whose prints were on it. I thought back to what Dave had asked me the very same day it had happened: Did you ever see Sal with a weapon of any kind?

  “The knife they found in the alley,” I said slowly. “It belonged to Sal, didn’t it?”

  Riel looked at me for a few moments before he said, “Yes.”

  “And the prints on it, they were Sal’s,” I said.

  Riel hesitated again but finally nodded.

  “So that knife wasn’t the one that killed him,” I said. That’s why the police didn’t describe it. It was Sal’s knife. And it wasn’t the murder weapon.”

  But what was that look on Riel’s face?

  “Was it the knife that killed him?”

  Silence.

  I felt sick.

  “Sal was killed with his own knife?” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” Riel said.

  “But how? Why?”

  Riel hesitated again. His expression was grim as he said, “This stays between you and me, right?”

  I nodded.

  “It looks like Sal was trying to defend himself,” Riel said. “From the prints on the knife and from the wounds … it looks like maybe he took the knife out to defend himself and whoever killed him turned the knife against him.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Wouldn’t there be fingerprints?”

  Riel handed me a butter knife and told me to stand up.

  “Hold out the knife,” he said, “as if you were trying to protect yourself.”

  I did what he said. He wrapped his hands around my hand and twisted the blade around so that it was pointed at me. I stared at it, then at him. I started to shake all over, imagining what had happened in that alley.

  “What was Sal even doing with a knife?” I said.

  Riel shook his head.

  “Teddy can be a jerk, but he’s not scary enough to make anyone carry a knife,” I said. At least, I didn’t think he was. Sure, he had been mad about seeing Staci and Sal together. But after what he’d told me in the schoolyard, I was pretty sure he hadn’t had anything to
do with what had happened to Sal. “It doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “I have to agree with you,” Riel said. “Sal was a good kid. He wouldn’t carry a knife unless he had a reason—a good reason. If we could figure that one out, maybe we would get somewhere.” He glanced at the clock on the stove. “You’d better get going. You’re going to be late for school. And Mike? I wasn’t kidding. You know you can’t tell anyone any of this, right?”

  “Yeah.” I looked down at the newspaper again. “Do you think this is going to do any good?”

  “It’s worth a shot.” He put his coffee mug into the sink. “I have to go.”

  Rebecca called that night to ask me how I was and to see if there was anything new. I wanted to tell her about the knife, but I had promised Riel I would keep my mouth shut. So instead I told her about the appeal that the police had made to parents.

  “I wish I hadn’t come on this trip,” she said. “I wish I was with you.”

  “You did the right thing,” I told her. “But I’ll be glad when you’re back.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. Then Rebecca said, “Mike?”

  “Yeah?”

  More silence.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It can wait until I get home.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “No. I think it would be better if I waited.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Did you meet a guy there?” I said. “A French guy?”

  “I’ve met lots of French guys,” she said with a little laugh. “But none of them are as cute as you. I miss you, Mike. I’ll see you Saturday morning. Will you come and meet the bus?”

  I said I would. And I felt better that she had asked me. But I still wondered what she wanted to say to me.

  The phone was ringing when I came through the door on Tuesday night after work. I thought it would be Riel, calling to tell me when he was going to be home.

  It wasn’t.

  It was a girl. Staci. She said she had to see me—right away.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Can you please just come?” she said. “It’s important.”