by Mark Zubro
“That was cool, but it was years ago. Do they still care?”
“Some cops have long memories.”
“If there was a killer, wouldn’t they have had to plan ahead to bring all this stuff?”
He said, “Precisely.”
I saw a lot of problems with his theory. Maybe the little stuffed animal was somebody else’s. Or the footprints had been made days before by a gang of teenagers out drinking, or even by the cops themselves as they investigated. Possibly Kyle had ripped off the step stool from a house nearby.
One of the favorite places for teenagers to do some illicit drinking is out in the orange groves. Especially younger teens with no place else to go. It’s not a bad place to do a little necking and sometimes much more, although I can’t tell you about that from my own experience.
I had a couple beers out here once with a bunch of guys when I’d just turned fifteen. Everybody laughed and carried on and pissed on an orange tree.
I looked at Bill Singleton, but he seemed preoccupied with memories of his own. It was late and I was hungry.
After the silence dragged on a few moments, I said, “I have to leave and get home to supper.”
He removed his butt from my car, patted my arm, and replied, “If this was murder, we can’t let it go.”
“You should tell what you know to the cops.” I moved to my car door and swung it open. The dome light came on and shed a bit of light on the car interior and maybe a foot in each direction outside.
“Why don’t you come with me when I do?”
“I’ve got school tomorrow.”
“It’ll wait until after.”
I hesitated and then thought, why not? The guy was a real reporter, not for some half-baked school newspaper. I mean the Clarion’s okay, but this was the real thing.
So I agreed to meet him at his paper at four o’clock.
I hopped in the car, but before I began my ritual with the stereo system, I watched Singleton shuffle to his vehicle. In the cool air, I heard his keys jingle, the door open, saw his interior light turn on, a brief pause, the car started, he shifted gears, and pulled away.
While I fumbled with my iPod searching for something soothing for the ride home, I heard another faint jingle.
Whirling right and left, I checked in all directions, even glancing in the back seat of the car. I strained my ears to listen, but heard nothing except the normal night sounds of the orange groves. I hesitated to turn on the car.
Reaching for the headlight switch, I thought I heard the soft fall of footsteps. I checked for Singleton’s car, but it was long gone. The noises weren’t close, but near enough to send shivers up and down my spine.
I admit I was scared. I feared to take another three hundred sixty degree look around. What if the footsteps came up on me while I turned the wrong way? What if they’d done something to my car, and the engine wouldn’t start, and I was out here with a killer? Singleton’s deductions didn’t seem so wild at that instant.
The black night could have hidden somebody waiting at the rear of the car, or even now creeping up to grab the door handle.
I didn’t want any more encounters with strangers, either guilty murderer or innocent stroller. I shoved the key into the ignition and turned it. The motor roared to life. I flicked on the lights, jammed the car in reverse, tore backward until I got to the road, jammed my foot on the brake pedal, released it, swung the steering wheel, pulled the gearshift into drive, and raced out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Monday 6:30 P.M.
When I got home, it was just after six thirty. Mom was going nuts. My grandmother, her mother, was due in three days. Grandma Princesca never visits during the holidays, but the week after. She always arrives on Thursday and leaves the next Monday.
This is deliberate. My grandma is not fond of holidays. She says the hassle and tension and emotion are too intense. She shows up at our house the week after New Year’s, if she isn’t traveling somewhere exotic. Last year she took a boat trip up the Amazon River.
She gets me and my sisters presents and stuff, mostly U.S. Savings Bonds. They’re actually kind of cool. I’ve set mine aside for years as a kind of college fund bonus.
She drives my mom totally bonkers like I said. Grandma’s got opinions. She only states them when asked. If someone makes that mistake, Grandma gives hers in great detail, using logic, and basing them on research. One instance was legendary in family lore but happened before I was born. It was back when Grandma still hosted holiday dinners. One of her brothers was being particularly loud, obnoxious, and self-important.
Grandma asked him nicely to quiet down. He turned to her and ripped into her with insults and claims of her misdeeds in the past, and demanded to know what he had ever done that was so wrong.
That was a mistake. Grandma sat at the head of the table and gave him, in the sweetest, calmest tones, chapter and verse a detailed list of all the stupid things he’d ever done. He screamed and raved back at her. She sat calmly at her place. He rushed out of the room, out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Later he tried to claim she’d been out of control and had gone nuts.
The rift in the family exists to this day.
Mom worries about her. I’m not sure why. Grandma’s memory is fine, and she’s independent. She’s retired and never complains about money problems. I know when I was little, Mom tried to guilt Grandma into coming on the exact holidays. Grandma threatened to not come at all.
When I got home, Mom was vacuuming and cleaning as if Grandma would come and begin counting dust motes as if each one would tell against my mother’s ability as a mom, housekeeper, and human being. No matter how many times my grandma says she doesn’t care how clean the house is or anything else, Mom still goes crazy.
That she gets crazed sort of proves Grandma’s point about holiday tension. Mostly at these times, we stay out of Mom’s way. Dad used to rebel, but I think he gave up the fight. He pitches in with the cleaning and tries to stay late at work.
I like Grandma Princesca. She’s funny and irreverent and bawdy, but not so much in front of Mom. Mom gets all funny if Grandma swears. Grandma laughs at her.
My twin sisters were at the sink dragging out the chore of doing dishes. The work always took them extra-long because one or the other usually had a phone, thumbs twirling over the keys. I presumed they were texting some boy or a girlfriend about some boy. I could understand the impulse.
Danielle and Jennifer are thirteen. The twins like me to chauffeur them around, but I don’t do it so much since one of their girlfriends developed this mad crush on me last summer. She started sending me notes and flowers. Mom and Dad thought I should spend less time driving the twins to all their games, parties, and competitions, which was a huge relief to me.
My mom and dad don’t hassle me a lot. I haven’t missed a curfew since I was twelve. I still enjoy doing things with them on occasion. My dad gets a little too excited about the slightest mistake I make during baseball games: a fielding error, a strike out, a base-running mess up. Off-season he’s pretty reasonable. He’s an assistant hospital administrator at Riverside Community Medical Center. Mom’s an assistant manager at Blooms for You, a flower shop near the Tyler Mall. That job keeps her busy with long hours so she’s not around to get in my face, which she doesn’t do much anyway.
They were pretty interested when I told them I was meeting with a real reporter. I gave them a severely edited version of why. They seemed to accept it. I rarely gave them reasons not to trust me, and I can cash in on that goodwill once in a while when I cut a few corners on the truth. Hanging around with a known reporter was a whole lot better than announcing I was starting into a drug rehab program. Parents have it tough these days. Mine were luckier than most. I was only gay, not an addict.
After I nuked some leftovers, I did some homework and made a few calls. I told Jack about the weird experience with Bill Singleton. Jack was surprised the reporter was taking me with him to talk to the cops.
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br /> “He’s gotta have more of a reason than he told you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It might be exciting.”
I told him about everything I’d learned, although I found myself editing out some of the gay stuff about Kyle. I hate when I do that. I don’t like keeping secrets. I wanted to just say to Jack, “Oh, by the way, I’m gay,” and he’d say, “No problem,” and we’d still be best friends.
I also edited out some of the stuff about how scared I’d been after Singleton left, no need to be overdramatic.
At the end of our conversation I speculated. “If he was murdered, maybe one of the kids at school did it.”
“Don’t get obsessed with this thing,” he said.
“Think about it, a murderer roaming the halls.”
“I thought you wanted to be a reporter, not make up stories.”
“I could do both.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tuesday 7:30 A.M.
The next morning I caught up with Darlene outside her locker before first period. I told her about what happened in the orange groves. I didn’t tell her about those last moments of fear. She seemed mildly impressed that I was hanging around with Singleton.
She also had several more suggestions for working on the article, starting with that I try talking to Kyle’s other teachers. “And try to follow up the gay angle,” she said. “With all the reports out that a gay kid will be more likely to try committing suicide, it might be an angle. And that ‘It Gets Better Project’ being in the news might be something to look into, if he was gay.”
“How do I find out for sure if he was gay?” I asked.
Was it the look she gave me, her posture, or something else? Whatever it was, at that moment I guessed she knew I was gay. All she said was, “Ask questions, same as you would with any story.”
The natural defensiveness about my sexual orientation brought forth the feeble objection, “I’m used to doing sports reporting.”
“More to life than sports.” She eased her locker shut carefully and turned to me. “I’m not sure about this murder angle though. It’s more than I’d want to get into. Although, hell of a story if we broke it.”
“Trumble would never let us print it.”
“That isn’t a problem, yet.” As she turned away she added, “And don’t forget to try and talk to Frank Boyer.”
I barely paid attention to my morning classes. I had people to talk to and the big meeting with Singleton after school. Who can pay attention to seventeenth-century English poetry at a time like that?
During the day and after school, I managed to catch four of Kyle’s former teachers.
First, I ran into Mr. Delahanty, the gym teacher. I’ve been in several of Mr. Delahanty’s gym classes, plus he is the baseball coach. He likes me, always makes me captain of whatever team. Still, Delahanty is a remarkable asshole for many reasons. Besides coaching baseball, he is one of the assistant coaches for the football team. He went to bat for Frank Boyer to keep him on the team. Delahanty’s interference helped keep Boyer in school longer than he should have been. Delahanty wanted a winning team, but we never did have a winning team with Boyer. He got too many penalties. His bullying worked when he could be sneaky. When he was up against guys equally as strong on a playing field, he tried resorting to playing dirty. He got caught often enough. But sports were king and the coaches, if not god, were tough to fight against. Between his wealthy parents and his enabling coaches, Boyer had stayed in the presence of normal teenagers far too long.
Delahanty put a hand on my right shoulder, squeezed the muscles, then said, “He wasn’t a real man like you. Definitely a fairy. I’d have liked to kick Kyle’s butt. That’s what he needed, somebody to get him to stop feeling sorry for himself. Kid had sick notes half the time, getting him out of class. Couldn’t do a sit up. Couldn’t run ten feet. A wimp and a f —” He caught himself and finished, “Not a real man. Sorry he’s dead and all, but he was a mess.” He’d never met Kyle’s parents and didn’t know about any connection between Kyle and animals, nor had he ever heard of Kyle complaining to the administration. Delahanty added, “He’d never say anything about me. I get a little excited sometimes, but I don’t mean what I say.”
Mrs. Cooper, Kyle’s history teacher said, “Tragic to die so young.” I asked about Kyle’s grades. “He didn’t turn in a lot of his assignments. I tried to give him extra help, but there isn’t a lot of time.”
Mrs. Latterer, his Spanish teacher said, “I don’t really think it’s appropriate to talk about students with another student.”
Mrs. Truax, perhaps the youngest teacher in the school, taught Kyle biology. She said, “Some days he’d light up and shine with almost brilliance, but he did only two of the required projects this semester, and he barely passed the tests, but the projects he did do were beautiful.”
She opened a nine-foot-tall storage cabinet in the back of the room and pulled out a twenty-four inch by thirty-six inch piece of cardboard. “Kyle did this as background for a project on mammals.” She turned it toward me.
Tons of multihued green foliage with about a million different kinds of animals looked out at the viewer from all angles.
She said, “He must have spent hours drawing these perfectly to scale.” She pointed to a row of ugly rodents at the bottom of the picture. “Even these are flawless.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I tried talking to him about it. I praised it to the sky. I made the mistake of bragging about it to the class. I think they resented him doing something so beautiful.”
“Did he ever take art classes?”
“I asked him. He said, no. I looked it up, and he hadn’t. I don’t know how he learned to draw so well.”
I mentioned that somebody thought he worked with animals someplace. I’d asked the other teachers the same thing but none of them had known. Nor had they heard of him ever complaining to anyone about how he was treated.
Mrs. Truax said, “I can’t say he ever mentioned anything, although now that I think about it, one day the last week before vacation, I found a brochure on the floor after school. No name on it. I remember it because it was the first day all year that I only found one piece of trash on the floor at the end of a school day. It was from a pet store in the Brockton Arcade. Maybe that was his.”
CHAPTER NINE
Tuesday 3:07 P.M.
Jack couldn’t make today’s workout after school. Mostly we did running and some hitting and fielding fundamentals on Tuesdays and Thursdays and did heavy workouts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
He couldn’t make it because Jack’s dad is nuts. A raving, loony, drunken brute. Jack is too big to be hit or abused now, and he doesn’t talk about it much. From the few hints he’s given, I think his dad used to beat him. I knew Jack hated his dad. His parents have been divorced for five years. He lives with his mom only on alternate weekends and summers. She lives in town so it isn’t a big problem for his school or social life.
His mom is worse, but in different ways: falling down drunk most weekends, bringing home a variety of boyfriends that she starts to have sex with while Jack is in the room. When she starts, he’s the one who gets up and leaves.
His dad wanted Jack home for some reason. It could have been as simple as his dad was furious that Jack didn’t carry out the trash in precisely the way he wanted. Or Jack had missed a blade of grass when he mowed the lawn. The guy was a raver. Jack avoided him as much as possible. But if his dad issued a command then Jack had to be home. Jack couldn’t wait to graduate and get out of town. I think if he could find a university on the other side of the planet that would let him play baseball, he would go there.
I wondered if Kyle had left any more projects or interesting items around school. I stopped in the central office. The secretary, Marjorie, from yesterday, gave me a warm smile. After reassuring her that I was unharmed by yesterday’s office drama, I said, “I’m still trying to find out information about Kyle.”
She told me, “He was so sad.”
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Not really.” She sighed, nodded toward Mr. Ashcroft’s office. The door was open, but no one sat behind the desk. “I’ve been around here a long time. I know sad when I see it. That poor boy.”
Somebody once told me that one of the reporter’s greatest tricks was silence. I tried it.
She went on. “I only saw him cry once.” She took a tissue from the box on her desk, dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “It was when he was a freshman. He was having trouble with the other kids. He came in here with a black eye. I got him some ice. He wasn’t crying then. When he came out of Mr. Ashcroft’s office, that’s when he was crying.”
“Why?” I asked.
She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “The poor kid. He came to ask for help. Mr. Ashcroft did nothing. I know he did nothing because he came out of his office after Kyle left and made fun of him. It was terrible. Terrible! That poor boy. Just picked on and picked on.”
“That’s so sad and so not fair.”
“I know,” she said. “There wasn’t anything I could do.”
“I wish I could find something to do to help him.”
“You’re writing that article. You’ll do a nice job. I asked a few people about you after yesterday morning. They say you’re a nice boy.”
I blushed and told her I was interested in knowing if Kyle’s locker had been cleaned out or if any of his other stuff was still around.
“The janitors brought in two small boxes. One was from his gym locker. It had a few smelly T-shirts. I told them to throw them out. The other was just books and notebooks from his hall locker. The family hasn’t called asking for them, so I thought I’d save them, although it’s mostly schoolbooks. The police hunted through it. I think they were searching for a suicide note. I don’t think they found anything.”
