“Come back, you moron.”
But he didn’t. The stupid jerk got all the way to the big rock before Ingrid caught up with him. He’d come to a stop, was just standing still, almost alert-looking, sniffing the air.
“Move an inch and you’re dead,” Ingrid said.
The dog turned his head backward in her direction, one of those weird angles dogs can do.
“I mean it,” Ingrid said.
A man stepped out from behind the rock. He was very big, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest. The dog saw him and wagged his scruffy tail.
“Just who are you planning to kill?” the man said.
Ingrid backed up.
“I wasn’t—” she began.
And then someone else stepped out from behind the rock, someone in an Echo Falls Pop Warner jacket, someone she knew.
“Ingrid?” said Joey Strade.
“Hi,” Ingrid said.
“Hey,” said Joey. He rocked back and forth a little.
“Manners,” said the big man.
“This your dog?” Joey said.
“Kind of,” said Ingrid.
“Manners means introduce me to your friend,” said the big man.
“Oh yeah,” said Joey. “Ingrid, my dad.”
“Nice to meet you, Ingrid,” said Chief Strade, holding out his hand.
Ingrid shook it, the biggest hand she’d ever seen in her life.
Joey gave the dog a pat. The dog did his head-pressing thing with Joey. “What’s his name?” said Joey.
Why were all questions suddenly so hard? “Nigel,” Ingrid said.
“Nigel?”
“Yeah. He tried to get away, sort of.”
“You should put his tag on,” said Chief Strade. “In case he does it again.”
“It’s in the laundry,” Ingrid said. Chief Strade gave her a close look. “The collar, I mean,” said Ingrid. “Very dirty. Dogs, et cetera.” Shut up, for God’s sake.
“Got a little shiner there,” said Chief Strade.
“Huh?”
“Over your right eye.”
Ingrid’s hand went to it involuntarily. That hurt. “I fell,” she said. “Chasing this stupid…chasing Nigel.”
Chief Strade was still giving her that close look. He had a big nose, big chin, big ears, but his eyes were small, half hidden by the kind of heavy brow ridges Neanderthals had. “You live near here, Ingrid?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Ingrid, waving vaguely.
“Whereabouts?” said Chief Strade.
Before she had to answer, a crackling sound came from his jacket pocket. Chief Strade took out his police radio and said, “Strade,” moving away a little.
Ingrid’s eyes met Joey’s. They both looked away.
“Nice dog,” Joey said.
“Uh-huh,” said Ingrid.
“Nigel?”
“Right.”
“How’d you come up with that?”
“Something wrong with it?”
“No,” said Joey. “It…um…”
Over by the rock, Chief Strade was saying, “Separate cells.”
“Like, fits him,” Joey said. “The way he looks.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ingrid, watching Chief Strade. “What are you guys doing here?”
“My dad’s actually working,” Joey said. “I’m just tagging along. Something weird happened last night.”
“Oh?”
“Remember the woman who got killed?”
“Katherine Kovac,” Ingrid said.
Joey gave her a quick look, a little like his dad’s, but Joey was much better-looking, didn’t have that Neanderthal thing going on. “Yeah,” he said. “Some guy broke into her house down in the Flats. I guess he made a lot of noise, because there were like two or three calls to the station. Sergeant Pina chased the guy into the woods. My dad was hoping maybe he dropped something.”
“Did he?” said Ingrid, trying to sound casual. Sergeant Pina umped Little League and Babe Ruth baseball, also girls’ softball from time to time, including back when Ingrid still played. He was a good ump, made an effort to keep all the kids relaxed, was great at learning their names and remembering them. Hers, for example.
“Not that we found,” Joey said. “But my dad thinks whoever did the break-in was probably the killer.”
“Why would the killer do that?”
“Lots of reasons.” Joey said.
“Like?”
“I don’t know,” Joey said. Chief Strade was coming back. “Why would the killer do the break-in last night?” Joey said. “Ingrid wants to know.”
“Does she?” said the chief. “Good question. We’re about to find out.”
“What do you mean?” Joey said.
“We got them,” said the chief.
“Them?” asked Ingrid before she could stop herself. What them?
The chief gave her another look, but quicker this time; he was in a hurry.
“Couple of lowlifes who live on the same street,” he said. “They left a bottle in the alley out back with prints all over it. We think they used it to smash the window on the back door. Their prints are inside, too. As for the night of the murder, their stories don’t add up, not one little bit.”
“So what’s going to happen?” Joey said.
“Booking them on murder one,” said the chief, “soon’s we get to the station.”
“Murder one,” said Joey; his body made a little motion, almost a shiver, in his Pop Warner jacket.
Chief Strade turned to her. “Better get some ice on that eye.”
ten
INGRID WENT BACK in through the slider and up to the kitchen, Nigel following. Ty was doing homework at the table. Homework. Did she have any this weekend? She kind of thought so.
Ty looked up. His gaze went right to her eye. He looked worried—was he thinking bye-bye to that Rolls-Royce or Maserati due on his sixteenth birthday? Nigel spotted a bagel half under the table—sesame—darted across the floor, and scarfed it up.
“His name is Nigel,” Ingrid said.
“Nigel? How do you know?”
“Because I named him.”
“Nigel? That’s the dumbest—”
Mom came in through the door that led to the garage, carrying two pizzas from Benito’s.
“Ingrid! What happened to your eye?”
Ingrid looked at Ty. She let a nice long pause go by, building suspense like a Hollywood pro. “I fell,” she said at last.
“You fell?”
“Playing with Nigel. I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
“Who’s Nigel?” Mom said.
“The dog, Mom,” Ingrid said, still watching Ty. “That’s the name we gave him, Ty and me.”
“Nigel?” Mom said.
“It was Ty’s idea, but I like it too.”
Mom turned to Ty, surprised. “‘Nigel’ was your idea?”
Ty’s face went through a bunch of expressions, all comical from where Ingrid sat. “Yeah,” he said.
“Ty was really psyched about it,” she said. “Weren’t you, Ty?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell Mom where you got the idea.”
He was kind of squirming now. This must have been how it felt to be a grand inquisitor in the Spanish Inquisition: pretty damn good.
“Where I got the idea,” Ty said. He gazed down at Nigel licking sesame seeds off the tiles. “He…looks like a Nigel. Like, it fits him.”
Mom bent down, getting a good close-up of Nigel. “You know something, Ty? You’re absolutely right. It’s perfect.”
Her gaze shifted to Ty, seemed to be seeing him in a new light, as though she’d spotted some previously hidden talent.
Mom opened the pizza boxes—a large pepperoni, olive, and garlic, and a medium arugula and goat cheese. “Someone call Dad,” she said.
“He’s not back yet,” Ty said.
“From where?” said Mom.
“He had to go to the office,” Ty said.
Mom lost track of what she
was doing for a moment, as though hearing some distant sound, then finished serving out the pizza.
There were still two slices of the pepperoni when Dad came back, taking off his leather coat and saying, “Hi, everybody. That looks good.” He sat down opposite Ingrid. She waited for that piney smell to waft her way, but it didn’t.
“You had to go to the office?” Mom said.
Dad nodded. “Ten-o’clock meeting tomorrow. Tim’s gotten interested in electroplating technology for some reason. There isn’t one company in the whole sector I’d put a dime into but—”
Ingrid stopped listening. Murder one. The killers, those two drunks in the alley, were in jail, their fingerprints all over Kate’s place, their stories not adding up. And she had the red Pumas. So it was over, right? There was nothing to tell anybody ever.
Except: The man who’d broken into Kate’s house, ducked under the police tape, and stood over the bed had been so quiet, whereas the drunks were noisy. Plus she hadn’t smelled any alcohol. But weren’t those just two tiny impressions she could have easily gotten wrong? And what did they add up to anyway compared to Chief Strade’s expertise? A feeling of relief should have been washing over her at this very moment. But it wasn’t. Ingrid would have given a lot to know if one of those men in jail owned Adidas sneakers spattered with green paint.
“Ingrid? I asked you a question.”
Ingrid looked up. Dad was talking to her.
“What happened to your eye?”
“I fell. Out playing with Nigel.”
“Nigel?”
Ingrid pointed under the table. Dad looked down.
“Nigel,” he said. “Cool name.”
“Ty came up with it,” Mom said.
Dad beamed at Ty. Ty gave him an aw-shucks look so fake that the dumbest parents in the world would have seen through it; but not Mom and Dad.
“So we’re keeping him?” Dad said.
“Unless someone puts in a claim,” said Mom.
Dad tossed Nigel a piece of pepperoni. Almost casually, Nigel opened his mouth and caught it, like a smooth shortstop making a routine play.
That night Nigel followed Ingrid up to her bedroom, tried to climb on the bed. “On the floor,” Ingrid said, pointing. Nigel circled and circled, finally settled on a spot. Ingrid lay down, pulling Mister Happy in beside her. It had to be the two drunks. And she had the cleats back safe and sound, as though she’d never been in Kate’s house at all, the whole episode deleted. The seas rose around her. She slept. The little boat was not so snug anymore, but she slept.
When she woke up in the morning—“Ingrid! Don’t make me call you again!”—Nigel was on the bed and Mister Happy, somewhat gnawed, was on the floor.
“Bad dog.” But he was too warm and fat and cuddly to get mad at. “Don’t hog the pillow.”
“INGRID!”
“Mornin’, petunia,” said Mr. Sidney as Ingrid got on the bus.
“Morning, Mr. Sidney.”
Mr. Sidney checked the rearview mirror, his eyes barely showing under the bill of his BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA hat, and said, “Guy in the back—zip it.”
Ingrid sat beside Mia.
“Hey,” Mia said. “You’re wearing eye shadow.”
Ingrid had made up both eyes. A good solution—they now looked much the same—even though she was a little sketchy with makeup, having tried it only once or twice, and never out in the world. Ingrid batted her eyelids.
“Cool,” Mia said.
“Cool in da pool,” said Brucie Berman, somewhere behind them.
“Zip it, guy,” said Mr. Sidney.
Ingrid noticed that Mia’s own eyes didn’t look very happy. After their divorce, despite the fact that Mia’s dad had stayed in New York and never came to Echo Falls, he and her mom still managed to fight several times a week, usually on the phone but sometimes by e-mail. Mia knew that part because her mom wasn’t good on the computer and sometimes copied Mia by mistake, nasty messages popping up in her inbox. Ingrid was trying to find the right thing to say when the bus pulled into Ferrand Middle School.
Ms. Groome handed back the math quiz. In red at the top: an A. A? A! Ingrid had never got an A in math in her life. She flipped through—check mark after check mark, right to the end, where she’d left the extra credit problem undone. Wow. A breakthrough. She noticed that under the A, Ms. Groome had written “Please see me after class.”
Griddie the math whiz trailed after the other kids when the lunch bell rang, stopped by Ms. Groome’s desk for her pat on the back. “Hi, Ms. Groome,” she said. “You wanted to see me?”
Ms. Groome looked up. It was her first year in Echo Falls, but before that she’d taught in Hartford for a long time. Ms. Groome put down her red pencil.
“You got all the questions right,” she said.
“Not the extra credit,” Ingrid said, in the interest of modesty.
“Up till now,” said Ms. Groome, “you’ve been carrying a C plus.”
No denying that: It was what made the A feel so good.
“So,” said Ms. Groome, “this is unexpected.”
Exactly. They were on the same page. Surprises were nice. If you got A after A after A, the whole thing would get old pretty fast.
“Therefore,” said Ms. Groome, “I want you to tell me honestly whether this is your own work.”
A weird thing happened at that moment: Ingrid’s body understood what Ms. Groome was saying before her mind did. Her face went red, a bright hot red, and she had trouble getting her breath. “Are you saying I cheated?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Ms. Groome said. “I’m asking.”
“I didn’t cheat,” Ingrid said. Her face got hotter and hotter, probably making her look guilty when she wasn’t the least bit guilty.
“Mia is a very good math student,” Ms. Groome said. “On last Monday’s homework she got only one wrong, number thirty-seven. You got only one wrong as well, which rarely happens, even when you complete the assignment. The exact same problem, thirty-seven, the exact same error.”
Ingrid remembered copying Mia’s work on the bus Friday morning; had she done it Monday too? Possible. Was it cheating? Kind of. But not the same as cheating on a quiz. “I didn’t cheat on the quiz,” Ingrid said.
Ms. Groome gazed at her. Silence went on and on until Ingrid had to say something. “I don’t sit anywhere near Mia.”
“True,” said Ms. Groome. “And no one who sits around you got better than a B.” She rose, took Ingrid’s quiz over to the board. “If you didn’t cheat, is there any reason you couldn’t solve these problems again?”
“No,” said Ingrid. There was no other answer.
“Then why don’t we take number one?” Ms. Groome wrote on the board: “Factor the following quadratic polynomial: 4x2 + 8x–5,” and handed Ingrid a piece of chalk.
Ingrid stared at the problem. Four x squared plus eight x minus five. Vaguely familiar, but no answer jumped out at her. Worse, her mind refused to help. For some reason it started tossing up all kinds of irrelevant stuff, like Angelina Jolie, Elijah Wood, Shakespeare, Arabs. Algebra was an Arabic word. Al meant the in Arabic and gebra probably meant gibberish. Ingrid touched the chalk to the board, hoping something might happen. It didn’t.
“Well?” said Ms. Groome.
Ingrid turned to her. Ms. Groome had a broad, still face, almost like a piece of statuary, that could look you in the eye forever. Ingrid knew how important it was to look her right back but couldn’t quite do it.
“I didn’t cheat on the quiz,” she said, suddenly sure that her face wore the same mulish look she sometimes saw on Ty’s, not attractive, not innocent. Plus the eye makeup, which Ms. Groome seemed to be noticing at that very moment, no doubt thinking The kind of thirteen-year-old girl who wears eye makeup to school is the kind who cheats.
“I can’t prove you did,” said Ms. Groome. “Not without an honest admission.” She waited. Ingrid said nothing.
Ms. Groome laid Ingrid’s test on the nea
rest desk, wrote on it with her red pencil, handed it to Ingrid. The A was now an F.
“If you choose to appeal this grade,” said Ms. Groome, “speak to the principal.”
Ingrid sat next to Stacy on the bus ride home. She was telling her all about Ms. Groome when a police cruiser sped by, the word CHIEF in gold letters on the door.
“He’s a real jerk,” Stacy said.
“Who?”
“The chief. Joey’s dad.”
Ingrid’s heart started going, that quick tom-tom beat. “What makes you say that?”
“The DUI thing.”
Stacy’s brother, Sean, had been picked up for DUI a few months before. “But how was that the chief’s fault?” Ingrid said. “Wasn’t Sean drunk?”
“Point oh nine on the Breathalyzer,” said Stacy. “Know what the limit is? Point oh eight. The chief could have cut him a break.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Because he’s a hard-ass,” said Stacy. Stacy glanced at her. “Like Ms. Groome.”
Was Chief Strade a hard-ass? Meeting him in the woods, Ingrid hadn’t gotten that feeling. But it wasn’t going to matter—as long as the right guys were in jail.
eleven
THERE WERE NO more Prescotts in Echo Falls, hadn’t been for thirty years, but Prescott Hall still stood on a hill across the river from the main part of town. That side of the river had been rural until very recently: Grampy’s farm could be seen from the long gallery, if it hadn’t been closed off. Most of Prescott Hall was closed off—whole floors and wings, plus most of the back including the kitchen, pantry, and morning room, and all of the cellar, where the renovation was scheduled to begin, under the direction of the Echo Falls Heritage Society, of which Carol Levin-Hill was vice president in charge of acquisitions. The Heritage Society now owned Prescott Hall and had a ten-year plan to fix up the whole thing; Tim Ferrand was in charge of fund-raising and had already given one hundred thousand dollars of his own money.
Ingrid often heard her mother talking about all this on the phone, but it didn’t interest her very much. What interested her was the fact that some long-ago Prescott had married a wannabe stage actress and converted the ballroom into a beautiful theater that sat 300 people. Mahogany seats, red carpeting, polished oak stage, lovely red curtains decorated with gold-embroidered masks of comedy and tragedy: all this the home of the Prescott Players, Jill Monteiro, director.
Down the Rabbit Hole Page 8
