“Pulled himself together?” I said.
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “From where I was standing in the storeroom, I could see him pretty good. I saw the look on his face when the jumpy guy pulled the gun. He was really surprised. He was like me, I think. He was in shock.”
So Vin hadn’t been in on it. Sal was wrong. Vin wasn’t a liar or a killer.
“I was still standing back there. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. You ever seen someone get shot? I was shaking all over. And then this other guy came in, and he saw Cecilia and then he saw Mr. Lee. He went over to Mr. Lee, and do you know what I heard Mr. Lee say to him? He said, ‘Did they take my box?’ Picture it,” Amanda said, her voice shaking with anger. “Say you come into a place and you see Preppy lying on the floor. You can see she’s shot, and then you get shot, but you’re not dead, you can still say something when someone comes in. What’s the first thing you’d say? You’d ask about her, right? But not Mr. Lee. It was like he didn’t care about her at all. All he cared about was his box of money. So as soon as that guy went outside—I think he went to call the cops—I grabbed Mr. Lee’s box, and I went out the back way. Nobody saw me.”
“Were you going to give it back?” Rebecca said.
“When I took it, I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just wanted to get back at him, you know? So I took it and I ran. Later, after I calmed down, I thought maybe I should call the cops. But then I thought, what if Mr. Lee saw me? What if he thought I had something to do with what happened? He would, you know. He’d tell the cops I was involved. And with the trouble I’ve been in, they’d never believe me if I told them why I took that box. They’d never believe anything I said.”
I knew what that was like.
“Even if Mr. Lee didn’t see me, he’d make trouble for me if I returned the box,” she said.
“You could have dropped it off anonymously,” Rebecca said.
Good point.
Amanda glowered at her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I could have. But I started thinking about Cecilia, about how hard she worked and how she never got to do what she wanted to do. Then I heard the cops had arrested a guy and I got scared all over again. What if the guy they caught tried to lay it off on me—you know, I saw this girl, I bet she took the box? So I waited. Nothing happened. I didn’t hear anything about someone seeing me in the store—until you showed up. So I figured I’d be okay. I could use the money to do what Cecilia wanted.”
“You keep saying that,” Rebecca said. “What are you talking about?”
“Shopping,” I said. “She’s talking about shopping. You’re going to send the stuff you bought to Mrs. Lee’s sisters, aren’t you?”
Amanda looked at me like maybe I wasn’t a complete idiot.
“When Mr. Lee died, I figured I was in the clear for sure.”
“But what about the guys who did it? Didn’t you want them to get caught?”
“Sure,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be the one to ID them. The cops would ask me how I knew and what I was doing there, and that could open up a whole can of worms. I can just imagine how their lawyers would make me look. Besides, the cops already arrested one of them. I figured he would eventually cave and give up the other two.”
“But the person they arrested is my friend,” I reminded her. “How could he cave? You said yourself how surprised he looked. He doesn’t know who those guys are.”
I noticed then that Rebecca was frowning at Amanda, but in a different way now, not in the way she had been before when she was making it clear that she didn’t like Amanda. No, this was different.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
Rebecca looked across the table at Amanda, who had a different look on her face now, too.
“When we caught up with you, you said we were making a big mistake. What did you mean?” Rebecca said.
Amanda leaned back in the booth, looking at Rebecca now like she was more than an airhead preppy. Then she turned to me. What was going on?
“You said you wanted to clear your friend, right?” Amanda said.
“We just did,” I said. “You said he came into the store before those other two guys. That’s exactly what Vin told me and what he told the police. He said he just went into the store to buy himself a Coke. You said he came in and went to the cooler where the pop is kept. Vin said he was stunned when he saw one of the guys holding a gun. You said the same thing—that he seemed really surprised when he saw the gun. He said he turned around and saw the guys with the gun. He said he couldn’t believe it. He said after the shooting, he was practically in shock. You said that’s what it looked like, like he was in shock. He says that’s why he ran. He wasn’t thinking. He was scared. He said you could tell the police exactly what you just told me, and it would prove that he didn’t have anything to do with it. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Amanda stared at me for a few seconds. Then she said, “If he came into the store to buy himself a can of Coke, and if he didn’t know those two guys, how come your friend took three cans of Coke out of the cooler instead of just one?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
What I wanted to do was give her back her lockbox and tell her to get out of there. Tell her to send the stuff she’d bought to Cecilia Lee’s sisters so that at least one good thing would come out of the whole mess. And let Vin take his chances with what they already had on him. Let him rot, for all I cared.
What I did when I was finally breathing normally again was ask Rebecca if I could borrow her cell phone.
“You calling the cops on me?” Amanda said.
“Not yet,” I said. I called Riel. He said he’d just got home. I told him where I was and asked him if he could come over. I guess he must have picked up on something in my voice because he sounded concerned when he said, “What’s going on, Mike?”
I said I’d tell him when he got here. I said, “It’s important.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. Just like that, no more questions. That, right there, was why I was glad I lived where I did and why it mostly didn’t bother me that he was on my case all the time about homework and chores.
Five minutes later he walked into the restaurant. He spotted me right away. He said hi to Rebecca when he got to the booth. He looked at Amanda—at her short blond hair and the little scar near her eyebrow from where her piercing was. Then he looked at me.
“This is Amanda Brown,” I said. “She’s the girl Vin saw in the store.”
Amanda just nodded. Something had changed in how she was acting. If you ask me, she was a little ashamed.
Riel sat down in the booth next to Rebecca, who scooched over so that she was sitting as far away from him as she could. She was really going to have to learn to relax around him.
Amanda repeated her whole story. Riel didn’t interrupt her, not even when she got to the part about the Cokes, not even when she said, “He was surprised all right. I don’t think he knew what was going to happen. But you know something? When those guys ran out, he looked at the Cokes in his hand, and before he ran, he put them back in the cooler.”
When she had finished, Riel said, “Can you describe the guys who did it?”
She nodded.
“And you’d recognize them again if you saw them?”
“Yeah.”
Riel looked at me. “You know what this means about Vin, right, Mike?”
Boy, did I ever.
Riel turned back to Amanda. “If you tell them everything you told me, and if you describe the guys or can help the police identify them, and if you tell them that you know what you did was wrong and that you’ll return the money—”
“I already spent most of it on stuff for Cecilia’s sisters.”
Riel seemed to understand about that. “If you tell the police everything you told me and say that you know what you did was wrong and that you’re willing to make restitution, they might not go too hard on you. But you are going to have to tell
them. You want the guys who shot Mrs. Lee to be held to account, don’t you? You don’t want them to get away with it, right? Not if she was your friend.”
“I’ll tell them,” Amanda said. I think she had made up her mind even before I called Riel. Anyway, she didn’t have much choice now.
Riel asked Amanda how old she was. She said sixteen. He asked her if she wanted one of her parents to come to the police station with her. Amanda shook her head.
“My mom’s dead. And my dad wouldn’t be much help. I’m okay. I can handle it.”
Riel told her she could ask for a lawyer. He told her how she should do it. He offered to stay with her, but she said again that she could handle it. Finally he paid for our drinks, and we all got into his car so he could drive us to the police station, where Amanda told her story for the third time.
The following Wednesday night, when I got home from work, Riel and Susan were sitting on the couch. Susan had her wedding binder open in her lap and was talking about flowers. I could tell Riel wasn’t listening. He had one eye on the TV, which was tuned to a news channel. He always watched the news. I wondered if Susan was going to get annoyed with him again. When they got to the local stuff, they said that the police had made an arrest in the robbery and shooting at the convenience store, and they showed photographs of the two guys they had arrested. They were both older than Vin, both eighteen, so there was no problem about naming them and showing their faces. The pictures were only on for a few seconds, but that’s all I needed. One of those faces burned itself into my brain. But before I could say anything, the phone rang.
“You want to get that, Mike?” Riel said. I could see why he didn’t want to get up. He had his arm around Susan now, and she looked like she was snuggled in there nice and close.
I picked up the phone in the kitchen. It was Rebecca.
“I was just watching the news,” she said. She was breathing fast, like she was out of breath.
“Me too.”
“Did you see those guys, the ones they arrested?”
“Yeah.”
“I recognized one of them, Mike. From the video store.”
“Me too,” I said. “The guy they called Shane.” The guy with the mostly shaved head. “He came into that first video store we went to. He was watching you when you were talking to that first clerk.”
“He was?” Rebecca said. She sounded surprised.
“Isn’t that what you mean, Rebecca?”
“No. I meant the other guy. What was his name again?”
“They said his name was Richard.”
“Richard was in the video store where Amanda worked. He came out when we were talking to that clerk at the second store, the one who gave us Amanda’s phone number. He was with another guy. They both took off when the cop car showed up. You didn’t notice?” I remembered the two guys, but I hadn’t looked at them that closely. “And you’re saying the other one was in the first video store? You think that’s just a coincidence, Mike?”
I didn’t.
We talked a little longer—it was mostly me, telling her not to worry, the guys had been arrested, there was nothing they could do to us.
I’d just finished talking to Rebecca when the phone rang again. This time it was Vin’s mom. Right after that, the phone rang a third time.
“It’s for you,” I said, handing the phone to Riel. It was a woman. I wondered if it was Kate.
Riel’s whole face changed as he listened to what she said. But he didn’t say anything when he hung up. He just sat down again beside Susan, who had moved on now to table decorations. I could tell Riel wasn’t listening, but I wasn’t sure if Susan noticed.
Riel was in the kitchen when I came downstairs the next morning. He glanced at me as he stuffed papers into his briefcase.
“I have to run, Mike. You can get your breakfast and get to school on time, right?”
I glanced at the clock on the stove.
“It’s early,” I said.
“I have to make a stop on the way to school.”
“What about Susan? Is she still sleeping?”
“She’s at home. She didn’t stay over last night.”
“Oh.”
Riel paused to look at me.
“Mike, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Why don’t you meet me after school? We’ll go out, maybe grab a bite to eat, okay?”
I got a bad feeling.
“I can’t,” I said. “They let Vin out. I want to go over to his place to see him.”
Riel didn’t look happy at that. “You think that’s a good idea?” he said.
“I have to talk to him,” I said. “There’s something I have to ask him.”
Riel looked at me for a few moments. Then he said, “Okay.” He glanced at his watch. “I guess it can wait.”
When I took my seat in French class, I glanced over two rows at Imogen. Right away she looked down at her desk and didn’t look up again. As soon as class was over, she grabbed her books and almost ran for the door. I chased after her.
“Hey, Imogen,” I said. She was up ahead of me in the hall. Either she didn’t hear me, or she was pretending she didn’t. I walked faster. “Imogen.” I grabbed her arm, and she spun around. Her cheeks were red, and she didn’t want to look at me. “I just want to know how Sal is,” I said.
I had called his aunt’s place half a dozen times over the past few days, but every time I did, his mother said he couldn’t come to the phone. I even stopped by once. His mother had looked surprised when she answered the door. She told me that Sal was sleeping, but that she would be sure to tell him that I’d been by. But her eyes kept skipping away from me, which gave me the idea that she wasn’t telling the truth, and that the truth was that Sal didn’t want to see me or talk to me. She told me he should be back at school soon.
“How’s he doing?” I said to Imogen.
She didn’t tell me to get lost. She didn’t tell me that it was none of my business. She didn’t say anything at all. She just burst into tears. I was so surprised that I let go of her arm, and she ran into the girls’ bathroom.
“I guess you didn’t hear the news,” Rebecca said when I told her what had happened.
“News? What news? Sal is okay, isn’t he?”
“Sal and Imogen broke up,” Rebecca said. “Imogen’s been crying in the girls’ bathroom for two days now.”
That was news to me.
“What happened?” I said.
Rebecca just shrugged. “Imogen just said Sal dumped her. She didn’t say why—not that I heard of, anyway.”
“Oh.”
When I pushed the doorbell at Vin’s house after school, Vin’s mother answered the door. She said Vin had just gone to the store to get some milk. She said he had volunteered to do it, even though she used to have to badger him in the past when she wanted him to do an errand. She said she thought that was because he had been locked up for a while and now he couldn’t stand to be inside. She said he should be back in a minute and invited me in. While we waited, she talked to me.
“His lawyer says there’s a good chance they’ll drop most of the charges,” she said. “They believe him now that he didn’t have anything to do with the actual robbery or shooting, thanks to you finding that girl. He had some of the stolen money on him, and he knew it was stolen, so they’re saying they could charge him for that and maybe even with being an accessory after the fact. But it was only ten or fifteen dollars. And his lawyer thinks that, given what the police already know about the two people who did it, Vin can make a good case that he was scared to tell the truth—and he was scared, Mike. You’ve seen him. You know. That’s why he didn’t do the right thing.” She glanced at me. “Vin told me you were the only one who believed him. I can’t thank you enough.”
Vin came through the front door carrying a jug of milk, which he handed to his mother. He looked a lot better this time. He said it was great to be home again. Then he thanked me.
Right.
His mother
smiled at the two of us. Then she said, “Well, I’ll leave you two alone to talk.”
We went into the living room. I waited until Vin’s mother had gone upstairs. Then I said, “You lied to me, Vin.”
“I said I had nothing to do with it, and I didn’t,” Vin said. “You heard what that girl said. She said I looked more surprised than she did. And the reason for that, Mike, is that I didn’t know.”
“But you knew who the guys were. You knew the whole time. You could have identified them.”
He didn’t deny it. “One of them, Shane—not the guy who did the shooting but the other one—he’s friends with this guy I met from when I was in custody. I ran into them earlier that day. They were going to shoot some pool, and they asked me if I wanted to go with them. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I said sure. Afterward they wanted something to drink, some Cokes, so I volunteered to get them. They pulled over at this store they said they knew and I went in. That’s the only reason I went in. I was surprised when they came in after me. Turns out they pulled the car around behind the store just after I went in. They were thinking about robbing the place before they even came in. But I didn’t know. I’m not kidding you, Mike, no one was more surprised than me when they did what they did. Turns out that they’d heard the old guy kept a lot of money around. They were mad when the woman didn’t hand over more than she did.”
“You shouldn’t have run, Vin. You should have stayed and called the cops.”
Vin shook his head. “You don’t know these guys, Mike. They know lots of people. If I’d ratted them out, they would have got me for sure. Look what they did to Sal. There was no way I wanted to be the one to tell the cops who they were. Thanks to you, I didn’t have to. The girl’s the one who ID’d them. Not me.”
“You knew the girl saw them, didn’t you?”
“I saw her face in that mirror. She was looking right at them.”
Seeing and Believing Page 16
