Valerie was the first to see me, and she ran over to me. “Is this true? Is all our money just … gone?”
“Look, Valerie …” A couple of people saw us talking and filtered over to me. “There’s not much I can do.”
“This was your idea, Cummings!” Valerie shouted into my face. “This whole bank thing was your brilliance at work. Now you’ve got 20 people here who are completely broke!”
“Listen … some people are having trouble paying off their loans. As soon as we get that money, we’ll be able to give you everything you put in.”
“And how are these people going to pay off their loans? They’re probably broke too. Right?” I was hoping that nobody would be able to think two steps ahead. I shouldn’t have underestimated Valerie.
“I—” I stuttered. “I’ll work this out. I just need to talk to Marcy.”
“You’d better work it out, Cummings! And you’d better do it fast or you’ll pay for this.” Valerie yelled at me as I moved past her.
I made my way through the crowd. A few people bumped me and a few more said some harsh things to me. I called out to Marcy to open the door. She unlocked it. I pried the door open against the weight of a couple of people leaning on it. I pushed them out of the way, slammed the door, and locked it behind me. Marcy was leaning against the back wall, petrified.
The noise outside was muffled, but still loud. I had to raise my voice for her to hear me.
“What happened? I thought we were going to keep this quiet.”
“I didn’t tell anyone. I was gonna yell at you for telling somebody.”
“I didn’t tell a soul.”
“Then how …” she started, but faded.
“Is there any money left at all?”
“Forty-seven tokens.”
“Where do you keep the money?”
“In a safe down here. I take it home with me every night. And I’m the only one who knows the combination.”
“Let me see your laptop.”
“Here.”
“Show me how to find out how much money is left.”
She punched a few keys, and I looked at the screen.
“Was there any time today when you left this laptop alone?”
“No. I was in here all day.”
“How about yesterday?”
“No.”
“You never took a break, you never ran an errand? Nothing?”
She thought for a second. “No, I … wait a minute. Yes, I guess I did leave it, but it was only for a minute or so.”
“What were you doing?”
“I went to help somebody put up a street sign. He needed me to hold it while he—”
“A street sign?”
“Yeah, it was a yield sign. I didn’t really understand why we needed one there, but this guy was putting it up.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t remember his name, but it was that guy who sued Nelson.”
“Jake?”
“Yeah, Jake. That’s who it was.”
I gritted my teeth. There was something going on here. Someone was trying to destroy the town, and I had a good idea who It was. The only problem was that I had no proof.
I remembered in history class when we learned about the Great Depression, which occurred in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The banks ran out of money and people lost all their savings. Unemployment was very high, so no one had any money to pay for anything. Businesses failed everywhere. If it was anything like what was happening in Kidsboro, the Great Depression was named well. A dreariness seemed to hang over the city like heavy fog. Half the citizens of Kidsboro lost their savings when the bank went under. A third got fired from their jobs. No one was buying anything; no one was selling anything. I didn’t catch very many people even smiling any more. A once-proud city was now just a couple of steps away from being a ghost town.
9
THE INVESTIGATION
THE ONLY WAY I COULD see us getting out of this depression was to figure out how to prove that Jake’s accident was a hoax. I got to work immediately.
I needed to find some place where those guys had slipped up. Something about their testimony in court that didn’t make sense. Something that couldn’t have possibly happened.
The first place I looked was the newspaper office. I asked Jill to show me the article that she ran about the accident. I knew there was an interview with Jake in there. I also asked to see the article about the trial. I took them both out and laid them side by side on the table, searching for something … anything.
As I flipped through the pages, Jill came over. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
Then I found it. “Look at this. Right here. Jake changed his story. In his interview with you after the accident, he said he was walking toward the bakery when the accident occurred. During the trial, he told everyone that he was going to the movie shoot. From where he was standing, that’s going in two different directions!”
“Are you sure?”
“Here.” I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and quickly drew a rough sketch of the town. “If he was walking toward the bakery,” I drew a dotted line to show the direction Jake was moving, “at that angle, if he went as far as he could go, he’d end up in the creek. The movie shoot was all the way over here.” I drew a circle to indicate where the filming was taking place.
“But how do you know he was walking from here?” Jill said, pointing to the spot where I’d written “Jake.”
“Well … didn’t he say that?”
“No. He never said where he was before the accident. He only said which direction he was going in.”
“But he said two different things. To you, he said he was going to the bakery. In court, he said he was going to the movie shoot.”
“No, he told me he was going toward the bakery. That’s just a direction. Going to the movie shoot means he was actually headed there—in whatever direction.” She was right. I looked down at the map and tried to figure out why she was wrong. But she wasn’t.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Huh?” I replied.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I guess I’m just frustrated with the verdict.”
“Do you really think Jake made it all up?”
“I … don’t know.”
“What have you heard? What makes you think he’s lying?”
I looked her straight in the face. I knew I could trust Jill, even more than Scott. I couldn’t tell her everything, but I had to get my town back. “I just think he is,” I told her.
“Why? Did he say something? Look at you in some weird way? What?”
“I just have this feeling …”
“That’s not good enough!” she suddenly lashed out. I jumped. “What’s going on with you, Ryan?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? You call a city council meeting to nominate Jake to be a citizen. We’ve never heard of the guy, yet you tell us he could be a real asset to our community. None of us really goes for it, so you ask us to trust you. So we do. We vote him in. I figure he’s got to be a great guy if you nominated him, but you never introduce him to any of us. I never even see you with him. And now, you’re telling me you think he’s lying. But you have no reason to believe that. You just think he’s lying. Now tell me the truth, Ryan. Is this guy a real asset to our community or is he a liar?” She was standing with her face six inches from mine, glaring into my eyes.
“He’s a liar.”
“Then why did you make him a citizen?”
“Jill …” I pulled out a chair and sat down. I didn’t know what to do next. She closed her eyes and knelt down next to me.
“Are you in trouble?” she asked. “Because I’ve never known you to lie to anybody, much less your friends … so something must be seriously wrong here. Did he threaten to beat you up?”
“No.”
“Cause if he did, you know yo
u’ve got Alice.”
“He didn’t threaten to beat me up.”
“Then what?” I turned away from her. She grabbed my chair and turned it forcefully around so that I was looking right at her.
“Ryan …” she said quietly. “I’m your friend. And when you ask me to trust you, I do. Every time. You’ve never given me any reason not to trust you. But now you need to trust me.” She took my hand between both of hers and held it tightly. I was completely comfortable with her. I always had been, since the day I met her. I had no trouble trusting her with my secret, but this wasn’t about trust. It was about putting her in danger. They had told us at the shelter that telling who we were would not only put us in danger, it would put everyone we told in danger too.
“Okay. I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on because … well, I just can’t. But I will tell you that he’s threatened me with something and I think he’s trying to sabotage the city.”
“Why?”
“Because of something I did to him a long time ago. He wants to get me back.”
She smiled slightly. “Okay. That’s a good start. At some point I’d like to know the whole story, but I understand if you don’t want to tell me everything. Now … what do you want me to do?”
“I’m looking for proof that Jake—and maybe Max—staged the accident in order to win all that money.”
I told her the whole story about how Max had taken all his money out of the bank, then sometime afterward, Marcy had gone to help Jake put up a street sign—possibly so Max could get in the bank and look at the computer files. Jill thought it sounded fishy too.
We spent the afternoon in my office, looking through the articles and photos from the crime scene and the trial. One picture caught my eye. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something was wrong. It was a picture of the damaged car. I snatched the Kidsboro map off the table and laid it alongside the picture. Jill peered over my shoulder. Suddenly it hit me.
“I’ve got it. Okay, the car was coming from this way, right?” I said, making a straight line with my finger on the map.
“Right.”
“And Jake was walking this way.”
“Right.”
“So look at the way the car is crushed. You can plainly see the shape of a foot.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s backward. If he ran into it head-on, the heel should’ve landed on the front of the hood, right?”
“I see where you’re going,” Jill said. “This car is crushed like Jake came up from behind it.”
“Exactly. And look at how much the car has been damaged. If the car simply tripped him, Jake would’ve fallen off quickly and his full weight never would’ve been on top of the car …”
“But this looks like somebody just stomped on it.”
“That’s it. You think this’ll hold up in court?” I asked.
“Not a chance. The car could’ve made a sharp turn right when it came up on Jake, plus he could’ve turned his body. But this is a start. We need more evidence.”
The discovery had given us our second wind. We were onto something, and nothing could stop us now. We hurried back to the newspaper office.
“Listen, Jill.” I stopped. “If we do find something, and we take this back to court … you have to do it. Jake can’t know that I had anything to do with this.”
“Gotcha. I’ll do it.”
Late that afternoon, we decided to take a look at the crushed car. We checked first at the police station, because we figured since it had been evidence for the trial, Alice would have it. But Alice told us that she had given it back to Nelson once the trial was over, because he wanted to put it back together. So we walked to Nelson’s, hoping he hadn’t begun repairing it.
When we got there, we were shocked to discover that Nelson Motors was up and running again. Nelson was inside with his designer, looking at a picture of what would be their next model. Jill and I exchanged confused looks. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Nelson glanced up at us, then motioned for us to follow him outside. We did. “Someone donated some money to us,” Nelson said. “We’re back. We’ve got eight more cars to build, and I think I can pay off the investors and my employees with the profits.”
“Who donated the money?”
Nelson looked at the ground and spread some dirt around with his foot. He said quietly, “Max.”
I gave him a stern look. “I know, I know,” he said. “It’s probably a mistake. But what else was I going to do? I’ve got people all over the place who want their money back. I have a responsibility to them. Sure, I’ll probably have to be Max’s slave for a while … but at least I’ll be able to pay off my debts.”
I didn’t like the sound of that arrangement. We asked about the car. Nelson had already begun repairing it, so it was useless to look at it.
On our way back to the newspaper office, we noticed someone on the miniature golf course. Mark was watching four people play a round together. There was a big sign on the office door that read, “GRAND REOPENING.”
“You’re open again?”
“Sure. You wanna play?”
“No thanks. We’re on our way somewhere. I thought you had a lot of debts to pay.”
“Max took care of it for me.”
“Max?”
“Yeah, you know, I owed him most of the money anyway—for the wood to build this thing. But he told me to forget it. And get this: He even gave me some money to hire an employee since I have to go to swimming lessons in the mornings now.”
Jill and I exchanged looks. This was not looking good.
“I gotta tell you. After the trial, I kind of thought that Max was a jerk, you know? But he saved me, man. He saved the whole town.”
Max was now the town hero.
Within a week, all the businesses were back up and running. The bank was back too, since Max had paid off some of the loans that other people couldn’t pay. Many people were able to get their savings back. Everywhere I went, people were singing Max’s praises.
Max even gave Pete enough money to start filming again. With his investors breathing down his neck, and his sister Robin beginning to make demands of her own, Pete agreed to let the actors have everything they wanted. With everyone happy, Pete put Valerie and Kirk back in front of the camera.
That night, Pete opened up the movie theater with a special discount showing of Rocky. Twenty-four of Kidsboro’s 31 citizens filed in. Pete introduced the movie as a celebration of the rebirth of Kidsboro. Several people clapped, but the applause was slow and halfhearted.
During the movie, the laughter seemed a little forced; the sarcastic comments from the crowd were not quite as sharp as usual. The inspirational scenes in the movie didn’t make anyone sit up straight or bounce their knees.
It was almost as if everyone was scared to celebrate.
My fears began to be realized the next morning.
“What’s with this muffin, Sid?” I asked. I almost always had a muffin at Sid’s Bakery in the morning. This one was not up to his usual standards.
Sid rolled his eyes and lowered his voice. “I had to put extra cinnamon in it.”
“What do you mean, you had to?”
“He likes cinnamon.”
“Who?”
“Max, of course. He gave me a loan to start the business up again, so I kind of have to do what he wants. He told me to put more cinnamon in everything. So I did.”
“You put more cinnamon in everything?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“But he’s not going to eat everything.”
“Doesn’t matter. He told me he was making a business decision. And as he said, people like cinnamon.”
“But this doesn’t taste as good as it usually does.”
“No kidding,” Sid said.
“Did you tell him that?”
“He’s not an easy person to disagree with. I’m sure you’ve noticed that.”
“Yes, I have.”
Next,
I stopped by the newspaper office to see if Jill had come up with anything else.
“I saw something today that made me a little curious,” she said.
“What?”
“It may be nothing, but I saw Max and Barry together.”
“What were they doing?”
“Just talking. They were on the other side of the creek, like it was some secret meeting.”
“So?”
“I don’t think they’re friends. And they have nothing in common.”
“Right.”
“Except for the fact that Max was the lawyer for the trial, and Barry was on the jury.”
“You think Max bought him off?”
“I can’t prove it …”
“Jury tampering would be tough to prove. But I agree. That’s really strange.”
Jill sat down and bent her head over the mess of papers and photos she had scoured a thousand times before. “There’s something we’re missing,” she said. “I know there’s something obvious here, something that’ll prove our case without a doubt—but I just can’t put my finger on it.”
“I know how you feel. I can sense it too.”
We brainstormed awhile longer, and then I went home to rest my weary brain.
I dodged one of Nelson’s cars as I was coming back into town. As it passed me, it got stuck on a tree root. Its wheels turned furiously but without success. I was about to reach down and give it some assistance when I heard, “Don’t touch it, Ryan.” It was Nelson. He and an employee were standing 20 feet behind me. Nelson’s arms hung limply at his sides as if he had lost all hope in whatever he was doing.
“It just doesn’t work!” Nelson shouted. I had never seen one of Nelson’s cars get stuck. I walked over and joined them.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The new cars don’t work,” Nelson said. “We usually put four-wheel drive into all our vehicles. It’s a luxury, and if you’re going to use it on the street, you don’t need it. But when you’re in the woods, you’ve got to get over tree roots, leaves, rocks, branches, grooves in the soil. These things just don’t work out here without four-wheel drive.”
The Fight for Kidsboro Page 15
