by Lisa Bullard
I thought about that a minute. “Okay, I won’t ask you to fill in the blanks in the family soap opera. I guess it’s not really my business. But I gotta tell you—Iz is right about my family having money. At least my stepfather seems to have a whole big bunch of it—and I’m not exactly living happily ever after.”
Iz had reached shore. Kenny cut the motor back even more, and the two of us sat in the boat and watched her climb up the ladder, up the dock, up the sloping yard, and into Kenny’s house. She never looked back.
Kenny waved his hand in the direction Iz had vanished. “I’m just saying, keep your head down and you’ll be safer around her. It’ll be all right; you’ll see. She never stays ticked in the end.”
Even as he said it, Iz was hurrying back down the dock toward us. She looked as if she’d worked off her anger; in fact, she looked a little freaked.
“What’s the matter with you now?” Kenny asked.
She gave me a scared look and kind of hugged herself. “Trav, I think you better get over to your grandma’s house. There’s a sheriff’s car sitting in her driveway, and my little sister says the deputy was over here asking where you were.”
CHAPTER 8
For, like, a minute after Iz told me about the sheriff’s car, I completely froze; all I could focus on was this series of film clips playing across the Trav’s-Head Cinema—outtakes from every show I’d ever seen where the cop comes to the door to deliver the news that somebody’s croaked. Who was dead? Gram? Ma? Then somehow, without really knowing how it happened, I was standing in Gram’s kitchen looking at her and this big dude in a uniform sitting at the table with coffee mugs and cookies in front of them.
“Is something wrong with my mom?” I had to push the words out past an invisible hand that was around my throat, choking me.
“Your mother is fine,” said Gram. Her face had its usual unreadable expression and she didn’t look as if she’d been involved in a five-cow pileup or any other kind of emergency.
The guy got to his feet. “You’re Travis?” he said, only it wasn’t really a question. “I’m Deputy Anderson. Why don’t you sit here so we can have a little talk.”
He towered over me, making it clear I didn’t have much of a choice. I sat on the edge of the chair across from Gram, and he sat down at the head of the table, where he could keep his eyes on both of us.
Gram spoke up. “Deputy Anderson and I have been discussing—”
But he interrupted her. “Thank you, ma’am—I can take it from here.” I had been waiting to see if he was good cop or bad cop, but it seemed as if he had everything mixed up. Interrupting an old lady put you in the bad cop camp, right? But then sticking the “ma’am” in there kind of muddied the water.
Deputy Dude kept on talking. “I got a call after lunch from Mr. Svengrud down at the Big Store. Said you’d been in today spending a bit of money.”
Far as I could tell, there weren’t any hidden question marks anywhere, but it was clear he expected an answer from me.
“Uh—yeah?” I couldn’t resist turning my answer into a somewhat snotty question even though I was pretty sure that was a Taser on his belt. I mean, was it against the law to spend money around here?
Deputy Dude tossed me a look that convinced me to dial it down a notch. “Where else did you spend money in town today?”
“I bought some stuff for Gram at the grocery store, and I stopped for some burgers at the café and a soda at the gas station,” I said.
He nodded after each place I mentioned, and I noticed he was making marks in a little notebook. What was going down here? Had the good people of Cowpoke decided to run the son of a bank robber out of town on some trumped-up shoplifting charge or something?
“Well, Travis . . .” Deputy Dude paused really long, like he was giving me time to confess to an ax murder before slapping the cuffs on me.
That barfy feeling from earlier was taking over my guts again; whatever was left of the pancakes, the burgers, and the caffeine was slamming around my insides, wrestling to see what would make it out first. I clamped my lips together, and I guess the deputy took that as the prisoner’s refusing to narc, because he settled his big, beefy forearms onto the table and leaned in toward me to drop his atomic bomb.
“Looks like somebody was in town today spending money that came from that bank burglary a few years back. The one that the FBI figures your father was involved in.”
There was dead quiet in the kitchen while I watched the mushroom cloud explode across that screen inside my skull.
Sometime after the explosion, I realized Deputy Dude was still talking. “And I want to be real careful here about not jumping to conclusions, but the fact is, turns out you spent money every place the cash turned up. So I need to ask you—”
Gram surged to her feet. For a minute I thought she was going to latch on to Deputy Dude’s ear and yank him right on out of her kitchen, but instead she nabbed the plate of cookies out of his reach and stood glaring at him.
“Kyle Anderson!” she said, and you could hear a rattlesnake shaking its tail behind each word. “If you’re insinuating—”
“Mrs. Stoiska—” He tried using his long-arm-of-the-law voice, but it was obvious that Gram was going to win this round.
She talked right over him. “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.” She limp-marched over and put her hand on the doorknob. “Every penny that Travis spent in town today came out of my pocket. It was my money. If you’re accusing me of something, I’ll call my lawyer so we can talk about the matter further. But my grandson is off-limits. The boy hasn’t done anything wrong. And I’d like you to leave my home.”
Deputy Dude walked over to the door. It was clear from the way his face tightened up that he thought Gram’s story was plenty fishy. But finally he lifted his hat for a moment, tilted his head toward Gram, and then settled the hat back down with a tap.
“Just doing my best to try to make things easier for you and the boy, Mrs. Stoiska,” he said. “Because soon it could be out of my hands; how it all plays out from here will depend on the FBI. The two of you may be in for a few hard questions from them.”
He looked over at me. “I understand that your grandma wants to protect you. But the fact is, there’s been no sign of that money for fourteen years. Then you show up, and two days later some of the money turns up, too. If you know anything, it could save you a lot of trouble if you tell me before the big guns get here.”
He turned and nodded one last time to Gram. “You know how to find me if either one of you has any more to say on the subject. And for now it would be best if your grandson stays a while longer rather than head right back to California. I think it’s likely we’re going to need to talk to both of you again soon.”
Then he walked out of Gram’s kitchen.
CHAPTER 9
As Deputy Dude walked out the door, the world switched over to slow motion. Gram lifted her hand and started walking back to me, but she seemed to be battling gravity with each move she made. She opened her mouth and sounds came out, but they were the grown-up speak of the old Charlie Brown cartoons, all “wah wah wah” noises instead of actual talking. I felt my face push against the thickened air to shake my head at her, and then I hauled my body out of my chair and back to my room, where I could close the door and be alone.
In the room where my father used to sleep.
After a while I guess my brain rebooted. Random thoughts started to drift around in my head, trying to form some kind of pattern. But it was like an all-black thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle: there were way too many pieces and none of them fit together just right. When I was a kid and I couldn’t get puzzle pieces to fit, eventually I’d just pound one in where it didn’t really belong. But no way I was jigsawing this mess together just by pounding at it.
I’d come to Minnesota looking for answers, and instead I just had piles of new questions. What I wanted more than anything was to talk it all through with somebody who knew me deep down. I took out my ce
ll and stared at it. Ma? No way. She’d just refuse to talk about my father all over again.
I really wished it were as easy as texting Jason Kalooky. I could use a whole keyboard full of those little frowny faces to translate all the crappiness across the two thousand miles between us. But at the start of summer he’d shipped off to a wilderness survival camp to fight grizzlies or something—the kind of place where they outlaw cell phones. I had seen him only a couple of times since Christmas anyway, since Ma had hauled me kicking and screaming all the long way to my new stepdaddy’s house. But even though we were in different towns and different schools now, Kalooky and I still texted all the time and also met up online to do some gaming.
Now that he was offline, I didn’t really have anybody to talk to. It wasn’t as if I’d been able to make a bunch of friends when I showed up at a new school midway through seventh grade. Everybody had already staked out his territory; being friendly to the new guy was too big a risk.
So with no one to call, I just lay there on an old Minnesota Vikings comforter, looking at the ceiling while Deputy Dude’s words played tag inside my head. They always chased one another back to the point where he’d said I had to stick around so I could have another little chat with him or the FBI. I suddenly realized that the only thing worse than being trapped someplace you suddenly want to escape is knowing that even if you do get out, you have no place better to go.
That stupid walking catfish, man—does he even stop to think before he trots on out of his pond? What if he never finds water again?
At some point there was a knock, and I heard Gram’s voice outside my door. “Travis, dinner’s ready.”
“I’m not hungry,” I called back, which was a lie, of course, because even though my stomach still had some of that pro-wrestling action going on, I was pretty much always hungry. But I just couldn’t talk to her right then; this dark suspicion, this thought about Gram, was squirming its way into my brain like one of those hungry parasitic worms, and I needed to face it before I faced her.
There was quiet on the other side of my door and then Gram spoke up again. “All right. I know how upsetting this must be for you. I’ll let you have some time to yourself. I’ll put your plate in the refrigerator in case you want it later.”
And maybe her saying “later” was all it took, because my brain finally hit hibernation mode and I somehow fell asleep.
I woke up feeling like something inside my stomach was clawing for food. I picked up my cell to check the time: 3:23 A.M. I moved through the dark house as quietly as I could, got the plate of dinner out of the fridge, and nuked it in the microwave. Then I grabbed a fork and creaked open the back door, heading outside to the end of the dock to sit where I could swing my bare feet down over the edge. A busy breeze drifted its fingers under my nose; the lake smelled like secrets. Waves licked up against the rocky shore, and somewhere close by, a cricket violined his legs.
You almost could have thought it was an okay place to be.
I had just finished eating when the air shifted in that way that tells you somebody is hovering, even though you didn’t really hear anything. I looked around and saw Iz standing behind me, outlined in stars.
“If you’ve come to push me in, you might as well get it over with,” I said. “Feel free to hold my head under water too—you’d probably be doing me a favor.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “And then I looked out and saw you down here. Can I sit?” She shifted from one foot to another.
I shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
She plopped herself down next to me, and I measured how much closer my toes were to the waves running up under the dock than hers were.
“Trav, that word you would have called me earlier if Kenny hadn’t stopped you—I deserved that,” she said. “I’m sorry I was such a you-know-what.”
I shrugged again, but that invisible hand that had been choking me since earlier in the day finally eased up a little and words jumped to my lips, ready to pour out. But I still wasn’t completely ready to admit what I was afraid might be true about Gram, so I let something else jump out instead—something that surprised even me.
“Do you think my father might still be alive?”
“You think he’s alive?” She said it real doubtful. Then her voice shifted and she went on. “Because his being alive would explain how some of the money is turning up now.”
I nodded. Then I swung my head around and looked at her hard. “I’m trying to get used to the fact that everybody in this town is up in everybody else’s business, but how exactly do you happen to know about the money turning up?” Then I added, “Not like you don’t seem to know a little too much about everything.”
“But you really think your father—” she started in again, but I cut her off.
“No. This time you’re going to answer my question. Tell me what you know about what happened today with the money.”
Iz leaned forward and peered down at her own toes. “Well . . . you know how when you were in the grocery store, you knocked over all those beans? The checkout girl is Kenny’s sister Kari. She said she didn’t introduce herself because you were already so embarrassed, but at dinner tonight she told this whole story about how they found some of the robbery money in the cash drawer and they called the deputy and everybody remembered you shopping there because of the beans and that’s why Deputy Anderson wanted to talk to you.”
I could feel the gravity pushing down against my shoulders. I took a deep breath and noticed the strawberry smell of Iz’s hair. But I didn’t want to get distracted by Iz smelling good or gravity or anything else, so I forced my mind back to the point and said, “Okay, start over and fill in the blanks this time. Every last detail.”
She started talking slowly, like you do when you know somebody doesn’t understand a whole lot of English. “Kari works at the grocery store. She saw you in there today, and sometime not long after that, Mr. Svengrud from the Big Store came over and asked her boss if he could check her cash drawer. Mr. Svengrud, he’s a bigwig around town—you know, always donating money to church and stuff—and he’s friends with her boss. So they looked through the bills in her drawer, and of course Kari was watching because she was worried maybe she was in trouble or something. And then Mr. Svengrud pulled out this certain stack of twenties. Only they were all the old-fashioned kind of twenties, you know, that look different than the ones now?”
She paused and I nodded.
“And Kari couldn’t figure out why Mr. Svengrud was so interested in them. She’s like Kenny, kind of—she doesn’t pick up on details.”
Iz paused so long this time that I had to say, “And?”
“And finally Mr. Svengrud pointed out how even though they were the old style of money, they all looked brand-new. Really, really fresh. No way they’d been in and out of people’s pockets for however long it’s been since the government changed to the new twenties. And Kari would never have paid attention to them herself, but Mr. Svengrud, he notices stuff like that. Plus he’s always been kind of obsessed with finding the robbery money. He’s out digging on the island or trolling with this really expensive underwater camera all the time.”
I could see now where this was headed. I inter-rupted her. “Probably what really happened is some geezer at the old folks’ home finally broke open his piggy bank. But this Svengrud guy and the local RoboCops think they’ve stumbled over the bank- robbery money? That’s stupid!” I said.
“No,” said Iz, “that’s not all. I had to Google it to understand, but there’s this thing called ‘bait money,’ and that’s what this turned out to be.”
“You people are big on bait around here,” I broke in.
Iz sighed real big and went on. “‘Bait money’ is money that banks keep alongside their other cash, only they write down the serial numbers of the bait money. Then, if a bank robbery happens and the bait money gets stolen along with the regular money, the police hand around lists of the serial numbers to the sto
res in the area. That way, if any of the money starts turning up, they can trace it to the spender.”
I thought about that for a minute. “You’re saying that Svengrud got this list, like, fourteen years ago and hung on to it for all that time? And he just happened to pull it out the day I turned up in town to spend some cash? Or maybe it was just a slower-than-normal day here in Manure-ville, so checking out serial numbers seemed like a fun thing to do.”
“Well, he has been really interested in the robbery all along.” She sounded a little defensive; maybe I needed to lay off the “manure” BS before she got ticked off again.
Iz kept on. “Some of the Big Store money was on the list, and he started checking with some of the other storeowners, to see if any of them had been paid in bait money too. Maybe he figured he’d be more likely to collect the bank’s reward if he could turn over lots of information to the cops. And when some of the money in Kari’s drawer matched the list, her boss asked her who’d been in shopping that morning, and she remembered you were there because of the beans. So when they called the deputy, they mentioned that maybe you had been the one who spent it . . .”
She stopped talking again, and I guess we were both focusing on what she’d said, piecing it all together. Then Iz kind of breathed out, real soft, “I guess everybody jumped to the conclusion that you had the money. But if you’re sitting here trying to figure it out, then you must not have it. Somebody knows where it is, but it isn’t you—right?”
I thought about how back in the olden days, before CNN, those big volcanoes used to take everybody by surprise, and when they’d dig up the village hundreds of years later, they’d find people trapped midmotion in lava. I think a big part of me had been statued in place since Deputy Anderson had left Gram’s house. My head had been on this big emotional merry-go-round, but otherwise I’d been frozen in time.
