#4 Seeing and Believing (Mike & Riel Mysteries)

by Norah McClintock

  “It’s for Sal.”

  “Is Sal planning to climb Everest and somebody forgot to tell me?” I was kidding around, but Rebecca didn’t even smile.

  “It’s Sal’s big dream,” she said. “Not climbing Everest. But getting away. Imogen says he talks about it all the time. What he really wants to do is backpack around the world. You know, like that English woman who walked all the way around the world.” I’d never heard of that woman. “Sal wants to do something like that.”

  “He does?” Boy, that was news to me.

  “According to Imogen,” Rebecca said.

  “How come I never heard about that?”

  Rebecca just shrugged. I followed her up to the counter to pay for the magazine. It really bothered me—how come I didn’t know about Sal’s big dream? How come Sal had never mentioned it to me? It made me think. Things had changed a lot since I went to live with Riel. I had less time to hang out—Riel made sure of that. I paid more attention to my homework. I had a part-time job. And, for the past couple of months, I’d been spending more time with Rebecca than with almost anyone else.

  Things had changed a lot more for Sal. His father was sick, which meant that Sal had to put in way more hours working than I did. He took his schoolwork more seriously than I did—without anyone pushing him. We didn’t hang out as much as we used to. I watched Rebecca fish her wallet out of her purse and scrambled in my pocket for some money to give her. She waved it away with a smile.

  “Sal’s my friend, too,” she said.

  That’s when it hit me—what the biggest change had been. Sal and I both had girlfriends now. I had Rebecca, and he had Imogen. I spent a lot of time with Rebecca. I talked to her—girls like to talk. I told her stuff that I would never tell Sal, mostly because he’d probably think it was sappy. Rebecca never thought anything was sappy. Sal probably talked to Imogen. He probably told her things he didn’t tell other people. He’d told her about his big dream. He’d told her how he felt about what had happened in the convenience store. Who knew what else he had told her?

  Sal was sharing a hospital room with a really old guy who was either asleep or maybe in a coma, it was hard to tell which. We had to go past the old guy to get to Sal, and the guy never moved, not even when I knocked into a chair near the end of his bed and its feet made a loud scraping noise.

  Sal was lying in his bed, which was rolled up a little at the head. His eyes were closed, even though Imogen was sitting on a chair beside him. She was holding his hand. I had never seen a girl holding Sal’s hand before. It was a whole different way of looking at him.

  Imogen didn’t smile when she saw me. She said Sal’s name in a soft voice, and Sal opened his eyes. He had some bad bruises on his face and a big cut on his lip that looked painful. There was a bandage on his right hand and more bruises on his arm. Detective Canton hadn’t been kidding. He had been badly beaten.

  Sal looked at Rebecca, who asked him how he was feeling and gave him the magazine. He smiled when he saw what it was—but it was a crooked kind of smile, like he was trying not to move the part of his lip that was cut. He thanked her. He looked at me, too, but just for a second. Then he turned away, which was how I knew that he was still mad at me. Part of me wanted to walk out of the room. I mean, what was the point of being there if he wouldn’t even look at me, never mind talk to me? But I stayed, mostly because of what Rebecca would have thought if I left.

  I walked around to the other side of the bed where he was looking.

  “Hey, Sal,” I said. “I heard what happened.”

  He didn’t turn away from me this time. He looked right at me and said, “Yeah, I bet you did.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  “The cops talked to me,” I said.

  That got his interest. “Yeah?” he said.

  “They thought Vin must have told those two guys about you—you know, your name and where they could find you.”

  “Right,” Sal said. “Vin.” He put a spin on Vin’s name, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  “I told them that couldn’t be it,” I said. “Vin doesn’t know the two guys who were in the store, so he couldn’t tell them anything.”

  “Right,” Sal said again. It was turning out to be his favorite word. I was starting to get angry.

  “Jeez, Sal, I already told you—”

  “Hey, Mike,” Rebecca said softly. Her message: Calm down. Take it easy.

  “I never talked to Vin after he got arrested that time. I never went to see him when he was locked up,” Sal said. “And you told me you didn’t go and see him either.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t go this time, either,” Sal said.

  Oh. He’d heard about my visit to Vin—maybe the cops had told him.

  “I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since last fall. So I never told him what happened with my dad,” Sal said, his voice a perfect match to his hard, cold eyes. “I never told him that my dad lost his job and that my mother had to sell the house. I never told him that we had to move in with my mother’s sister. I never told him my aunt’s last name. My mom didn’t tell anyone, either. She was too embarrassed.”

  He was practically yelling the words at me now. I wondered if he’d managed to wake up the old guy in the next bed, but I couldn’t tell because of the curtain between Sal’s side of the room and the old guy’s side.

  “So, Mike, how did those two guys that Vin doesn’t know—that he just happened to be in the store with when it got robbed and then just happened to run out of the store after—how did they know where to find me? Vin didn’t even know where to find me—unless someone told him.” His eyes were directly on mine now. I think if he hadn’t been so badly beat up, he would have been all over me, trying to hurt me.

  “You think I had something to do with it?” I said.

  “You went to see Vin,” Sal said. “Because he’s such a good friend of yours, is that it? Because you’ve known him forever. Isn’t that what you said? You’ve known him since kindergarten. Me you’ve only known since fourth grade. How long you know a person, that’s the most important thing to you, right, Mike? Not whether that person is honest or a liar, not whether that person does the right thing or the wrong thing, right?”

  “I never said anything to Vin about you,” I said. “And he never asked.” What was that I saw in his eyes? Not anger this time—at least, not for that split second. No, it was more like he was hurt. Hurt that Vin hadn’t asked about him. “If he knows where you live now, he didn’t find out from me.”

  The two girls were silent. Imogen was staring at me like she wished I’d crawl into the nearest garbage can where I belonged. Rebecca was looking watery-eyed at Sal, like she felt sorry for him.

  “My mother wants me to stay out of it,” Sal said. “She doesn’t want me to talk to the police anymore. She doesn’t want me to testify at the trial. She’s afraid if I do, those two guys will kill me. I’m not kidding, Mike. That’s what she said to me. Stay out of it or they’ll kill you. She thinks it’s like that here. She doesn’t trust the cops, Mike. Not after what happened back home, and for sure not after what happened to my dad.” Sal’s father had been tortured before Sal’s family fled Guatemala. And last fall, when Sal’s father had a breakdown and was acting violent one night, it looked for a while like the cops were going to shoot him. I couldn’t blame Sal’s mother for how she felt. But Sal—that was another story.

  “And the whole reason I’m in this position,” he said, “not just in this bed, but in this position, with the cops telling me what I should do and my mother telling me what I should do, both of them saying different things—is because of Vin.”

  “He swears he didn’t rob that store,” I said. I was looking at Sal, but I saw Imogen out of the corner of my eye. I bet the minute she left the hospital, she’d be telling everyone all about Sal’s disloyal so-called friend Mike McGill.

  “I have a cracked rib,” Sal said.

  “I heard.”

/>   “The doctor here says I have to rest. He says I should stay home from school for a few days.” He opened his eyes, and I saw that there were tears in them. Imogen squeezed the hand that wasn’t bandaged. “He said for sure I wouldn’t be able to work for a while. You know what that’s going to mean for my family, Mike? They need me to be working.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Imogen was still holding Sal’s hand. I guess I was glad about that. I was glad that Sal had someone he could talk to, someone who seemed to care about him the way Rebecca cared about me. Rebecca took my hand. She told Sal she hoped he would get out of the hospital soon. She said that if he wanted her to, she would lend him her notes from history class. Rebecca and Sal were both in Riel’s class. I used to be, too, but Ms. Rather transferred me out when I started living with Riel. Imogen told Rebecca it was okay, she had a friend in the class who was going to photocopy her notes for Sal. Rebecca flinched when Imogen said that—I think it was the way she said it that bothered Rebecca. Then Sal said, “Thanks, Rebecca. I appreciate the offer. Really.” He was showing me that he didn’t blame Rebecca for anything, not even for sticking with me. He was showing us all what a great guy he was.

  As we were walking out of the room, I heard Imogen say, “You should stay away from him, Sal. He’s bad news. Just listen to him—he still believes Vin, not you. He’s on Vin’s side.”

  I glanced at Rebecca to see if she had heard. She tightened her grip on my hand, but she didn’t say anything. We left the hospital.

  Rebecca wanted to stop for coffee on the way home. There was a place on Danforth that she liked, a little café where you could get latte that comes in great big bowls. Rebecca ordered that. I ordered hot chocolate. We sat near the window, and Rebecca stared through the glass while she sipped her coffee. She didn’t say anything for the longest time. Then she closed her eyes.

  I’d been thinking about what Sal had said—about guys waiting for him at his house. If you ask me, he’d made the case that Vin couldn’t have had anything to do with it. First of all—and, boy, I was getting tired of pointing it out to everyone—Vin said he didn’t know the guys who had robbed the store. Second, as far as I knew, even if Vin knew that Sal had moved (and I wasn’t sure he did), he didn’t know where Sal lived. So how could he have told two guys where to wait for Sal to beat him up? The thing that killed me was that Sal thought he had the answer to that—I’d told Vin. Jeez, it was like he thought I was in it with Vin. I glanced at Rebecca. I wondered what she was thinking about. I wondered what she thought about what Sal had said.

  “Rebecca?” I said.

  “Mmmm?” Her eyes were still closed, like maybe she didn’t want to look at me anymore.

  “Rebecca, are you okay?”

  “I’m visualizing.”

  “Visualizing what?” Maybe visualizing life without me.

  “You know sometimes when someone asks you a person’s name—a movie star or something, you know, What’s the name of that guy who was in that movie with Tom Cruise? And you know you know the guy’s name, but you can’t think of it—and then it comes to you at four in the morning. It’s been rattling around in the back of your brain for hours and hours, but it’s only when you’re not thinking about it that, pop, all of a sudden there it is, the guy’s name, flashing in your brain like a neon sign.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said slowly. What was she talking about?

  “I’m visualizing that girl.”

  “The girl from the store?”

  “The girl from the funeral. I’ve been trying to clear my brain so that maybe I could see something about her that would help us. What did you think I was thinking about, Mike? Dumping you?” She opened her eyes and smiled at me. When Rebecca smiles, it’s like the whole world is clear blue skies and sweet, warm sunshine.

  “So,” I said, “did you see any visions?”

  “Bright orange.”

  “Orange?”

  She nodded. “That girl we saw at the funeral. She had a bright orange shirt or something in her bag. Did you notice?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I did.”

  “Rebecca,” I said, keeping my voice soft and gentle so that she wouldn’t think I was criticizing, “I bet there must be a million people in the city who have orange shirts.”

  “It had a name tag on it.”

  “What?” Okay, now that was useful information. “What was the name on it?”

  “When I close my eyes I see bright orange and I see the corner of something square with a pin on the back of it, like a name tag.”

  First it was a name tag. Now it was like a name tag. I was starting to understand how I must have sounded to Riel.

  “So you’re not sure it was a name tag?” I said, trying to be careful that I didn’t come across like I doubted her or was being negative.

  “I’m sure it was a name tag, Mike. I just couldn’t see the front of it.” She turned her brown eyes on me full force. “She has a job, Mike. She works someplace where she has to wear a bright orange T-shirt.”

  There are more than two million people living in Toronto and who knows how many businesses.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Rebecca said. “Where? Where does she work?” She shook her head. “I’m sure of what I saw, but I’m not psychic.” She picked up her great big bowl of latte and took a sip. She was quiet while she finished it, and then she was quiet all the way home.

  Susan was at the house when I got back from the hospital. She was sitting on the sofa in the living room, not doing anything, which was unusual. Usually she was either reading or she had her binder open and was going over wedding details.

  Today she just looked tense. I wondered why. I thought about Riel and his secret conversations and meetings with the mysterious Kate.

  “Mike,” she said, standing up all of a sudden when I came into the room.

  Riel appeared in the door to the kitchen. He was wearing an apron and had a wooden spoon in one hand.

  “Did you see Sal?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s not going to be able to work for a while.”

  “That’s going to be tough on his family, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Riel was silent for a moment. Then he and Susan looked at each other. Susan seemed even tenser now. All I could think was, Uh-oh.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “I’m afraid Susan has some bad news, Mike,” Riel said. “Well, maybe that’s overstating it. Maybe it won’t matter.”

  I glanced at Susan. She shook her head.

  “I’m so sorry, Mike,” she said.

  Sorry? It didn’t sound good.

  “Sorry about what?” I said.

  Susan reached into the big purse she usually carried. It was on the floor at her feet. “About the videotape you made me,” she said, pulling out a videocassette and handing it to me. “I loaned it to Trish. She watched it. She enjoyed it, Mike. She said to thank you.” I looked at the cassette as I took it from her. It had a label on it now and a name I didn’t recognize—Jeremy. “The thing is, Mike—” She glanced at Riel.

  “It got taped over,” Riel said.

  “Taped over?”

  “Trish’s son taped over it,” Susan said. Her voice was as shaky as her smile.

  “It was an accident,” Riel said. “But, like I said, it’s probably no big deal. You were home that night. You had nothing to do with that robbery. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  I glanced at Susan again. I wished she looked as confident as Riel was trying to sound.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” she said again.

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

  Riel was still standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He studied me, as if he were trying to decide something. Then he dropped another bomb on me.

  “Vin’s mother called,” he said.

  I hadn’t spoken
to Vin’s mother since last fall. One time I stopped in at a grocery store to pick up some things that Riel said we needed, and I had seen her across the store in another aisle. I got out of there fast. It was lame, I know. I mean, I had known her as long as I had known Vin, which was practically my whole life. I should have gone to talk to her. But I didn’t know what to say.

  “Did she want to talk to me?” I said. I hoped she didn’t. I still wouldn’t know what to say.

  “She wants you to call Vin.” That explained the look on Riel’s face. “She said she saw him today, and he asked her to ask you if you could call him.” He fished into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. “If you decide to do it, this is the number. You call and identify yourself. You’re on the list.”

  “What list?”

  “Vin’s not allowed to get phone calls from just anybody. His parents can call. His lawyer can call. Anyone else has to be approved. His mother got you approved.”

  “But you said I should stay away from Vin,” I said.

  “I gave you some advice. I still think it’s good advice, but you have to make your own decisions.” He handed me the slip of paper. “Supper’s going to be a while.” He went back into the kitchen.

  I stared at the phone number. What did Vin want to talk to me about? Should I call him? If I did, would the cops find out?

  “John’s making mushroom risotto,” Susan said. I’d almost forgotten she was there. “You like risotto, Mike?”

  I told her I didn’t think I’d ever tasted it.

  “Well, then, you’re in for a treat.” She looked at the piece of paper I was still holding. “Are you going to call your friend?”

  Friend.

  I stuck the piece of paper into my pocket. “Maybe later,” I said.

  Maybe.

  “I really am sorry, Mike,” she said again.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Really. John’s right. I mean, I didn’t do anything.”

  “Of course he’s right,” she said. She patted the sofa cushion next to the one she was sitting on. “Come here. Let’s look at tuxedos while John makes dinner.”