Truth and Lies

by Norah McClintock

  “You want to tell me how come, when you say you were here, we have a guy who swears he saw you walking near the park?” Detective Jones said.

  Relax, Mike, I told myself. This isn’t as bad as it seems. True, this is where I have to admit that I lied to Riel. But that’s okay. I can handle that. There’s a big difference between being caught in a lie and being a serious suspect in a killing.

  “Tuesday?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Detective Jones said. He sounded like he recognized my question for what it was—a stalling tactic. “I’d like you to account for your actions on Tuesday, from the time you left school.”

  I sneaked a look at Riel, whose face betrayed no emotion. “Well, I went to work,” I said. “At the candy store, you know?”

  Detective Jones shook his head. He didn’t know. I told him the name of the store and Mr. Kiros’s name too, in case he wanted to check. Detective Jones wrote down what I said.

  “Then I came home,” I said. I had taken the long way home, the way that led through Jen’s neighborhood and along her street. Call me a loser, but I had been hoping to catch a glimpse of her. I knew it was crazy. I knew she didn’t want anything to do with me. But I couldn’t shake her loose from my mind. From my heart. So I walked down her street and I spotted her with her friend Ashley. They were walking together up the path to Ashley’s house. Ashley was carrying some rolled-up pieces of poster board. Jen was wearing her backpack and carrying the little suitcase that she used when she was sleeping over at a friend’s house. But I didn’t tell Detective Jones that. I didn’t want Riel to know I was so pathetic that I still had a thing for Jen. Besides, it didn’t have anything to do with Robbie Ducharme.

  “Then I had supper and cleaned up and did my homework. Then I went to my room,” I said.

  Detective Jones waited. I felt Riel’s eyes on me too, like lasers, probing me.

  “Then, I don’t know, I couldn’t sleep,” I said and gave a little shrug. The idea I was trying to convey was: it’s no big deal, stuff like this happens every day of the week to all kinds of people. I focused on Detective Jones and tried not to think about the expression on Riel’s face. “So I decided to take a walk.”

  Riel shifted on the couch beside me, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You couldn’t sleep?” Detective Jones said. “You want to tell me about that?”

  I shrugged again. I had never worked so hard at trying to seem casual. “It happens sometimes. You know, since Billy … ” I let my voice trail off. Detective Jones knew all about what had happened to Billy. He had been involved. “Sometimes when it happens, when I start thinking about Billy, I just turn on the TV,” I said. “But, I don’t know, Tuesday night I just had to get out of here.” I wondered what Riel would think of that, whether he’d be hurt or offended. “So I got dressed and I—” I dared a half-glance at Riel, looking in his direction but not looking directly at him, not wanting to confirm what I thought he might be thinking. “I left the house,” I said. I tried to imagine the expression on Riel’s face—was he shocked, was he disappointed, or was this pretty much what he had figured? Not that it mattered. The bottom line was: I had lied to him. Now, because he knew I had lied, I murmured, “Sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for, Mike?” Detective Jones said.

  I didn’t answer right away. Riel knew. That was enough.

  “Mike?” Detective Jones said again.

  “I got dressed,” I said again. That much was true. “I left the house.” Also true. “And I took a walk.”

  “Where did you walk?”

  “Over to my house.” My house. Like I had ever owned the place. Like I still did. But I didn’t. I never had. Neither had Billy. It had just been the place where we lived.

  Detective Jones glanced at Riel. Riel didn’t say anything.

  “Go on, Mike,” the detective said.

  I looked down at the white and black rug on Riel’s living room floor.

  “I just stood there for a while, looking at the place.” It was something I had done a million times since I’d moved in with Riel. “I just stood there, you know?” Stood there and remembered. My mother, the smell of supper cooking, Billy, the screen door with the ripped screen, the fridge that always held a dozen past-best-date jars of pickles and mustard and relish and sauerkraut—Billy loved to pile mustard and sauerkraut on his hot dogs—but that never seemed to hold any real food. Nothing you’d recognize from the Canada Food Guide that they made you memorize at school.

  “How long were you there, Mike?”

  “I don’t know.” Forever. Never. Some time in between.

  “Then what did you do?”

  Okay, now I could look Detective Jones in the eyes because now I had nothing to worry about.

  “Then I walked around,” I said. “I—I guess I might have walked down past the park. It’s half a block from my house.” There, I had said it again. My house.

  “So you were at the park that night?”

  “Yeah.” Better to admit it, right? “Yeah, I guess I walked by it.”

  “Did you see anyone else at the park?”

  I shook my head.

  Detective Jones was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed, looking relaxed. Far more relaxed than Riel. He had a notebook on his lap and a pen in his hand, but he had only made a few notes. He didn’t say anything now. He seemed to be waiting for me to speak. What did he want me to say? I held my tongue while he twirled his pen.

  Finally he said, “What time did you leave here, Mike?”

  “I dunno.” Not true. I knew exactly. I knew to the minute. “Maybe eleven.” I said eleven because Riel had told me he’d heard me—he’d either heard me leave or heard me return. Either way, he’d heard me and he had probably already told Jonesy, so there was no point in lying about when I had left and when I’d got back.

  Detective Jones made a note in his notebook.

  “So at eleven o’clock on Tuesday night, you left the house, is that right?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “And you went straight to your old house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You remember the route you took, Mike?”

  I nodded again. I remembered every detail of Tuesday night.

  “You want to tell me?”

  I described a route that would take me more or less directly from Riel’s house to the house where I had lived with Billy and, before that, with my mother.

  Detective Jones made more notes.

  “And what did you do when you got there?”

  I glanced at Riel. I’d already answered that question. Why did I have to answer it again? Riel nodded brusquely. The message: just do it.

  “I just stood outside. I—” Make it sound good. “I was just thinking about Billy, that’s all.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then, from there, where exactly did you go?”

  Jeez, so many questions. Questions that I had already answered.

  “I walked around,” I said.

  “Do you remember where you walked?”

  I looked down at my knees. Where did I walk? Okay…

  “Around,” I said. “Over to Greenwood, down to Queen, then along Queen—”

  “Heading east or west?”

  “East,” I said. Why not?

  “Then, I dunno, up Coxwell, along the park, home.”

  “And you got home at what time?”

  “Two,” I said. “I got home around two.”

  Detective Jones wrote down all of that.

  “Did you go into the park?”

  “No. I just walked by it.”

  “You didn’t go into the park?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone in the park when you walked by?”

  “No.”

  “No one at all?”

  “No one.”

  Detective Jones looked me over, looked at my face closely, probably trying to decide if he believed me. Looked at my
hands too, which I was holding on my lap. For a minute I thought he was going to ask me about them. But apart from a scab on one knuckle, they were pretty much back to normal. He leaned back in his chair. The hand holding the pen relaxed. “Is there anything else you want to tell me, Mike?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything at all. Anything you think might be important.”

  I shook my head. There was nothing. “Can I go now?” I said.

  “Sure,” Detective Jones said.

  I stood up. Detective Jones stayed in his chair. He was going to talk to Riel, I realized. The two of them were probably going to talk about me. I headed for the kitchen. Maybe from there I’d be able to hear what they said. But before I got halfway there, Riel said, “Go up to your room, Mike. Get a start on your homework.”

  It was an order, I knew, not a suggestion.

  When Riel came upstairs after seeing Detective Jones out, he did pretty much what I expected him to do. He stood in the door to my room, his hands hanging at his sides, peering at me with a big frown on his face, like he’d just discovered that a stranger was living in his back bedroom and he was wondering where he’d come from and what the best way was to deal with the situation. He looked pretty much the way I expected he’d look too—angry, suspicious, disappointed. The anger didn’t bother me much. People who got angry didn’t usually stay angry. Eventually they calmed down. It took some people longer than others to shake off their anger, but they always did. Always.

  Suspicion and disappointment, though, those were different. When people caught you in one lie, they couldn’t help it, they started wondering how many other lies you had told them, how often you had betrayed their trust, how big or how little those lies were and what it said about them that they had believed you. And disappointment—well, disappointment is worse than anger, because when a person is disappointed in you, it’s because they expected better. They actually had confidence in you. They were in your corner. They knew you were a good person. So when it turned out that you weren’t so good after all, that you hadn’t lived up to their expectations, the disappointment they felt was really disappointment on your behalf. Their disappointment meant that you had failed.

  I glanced at Riel when he first appeared in the doorway. Then I ducked back down to my math textbook. Go and do your homework, Riel had said. So, okay, I had come up here and I had taken out my homework books. But I couldn’t make myself concentrate. Not when I knew what was coming. And now that it was here, I couldn’t make myself face it. I just couldn’t look at Riel.

  Seconds ticked by and still Riel was silent. I knew exactly what was going on. He was waiting for me to say something. Probably to apologize. Definitely to explain.

  “I’m sorry,” I said without looking at him. I don’t think I had ever been sorrier.

  Nothing. Riel was still there. I could sense his presence. But I couldn’t read the expression on his face unless I looked at him and, I couldn’t believe it, but I was scared to do that. I was scared to look at Riel again. Scared to see that suspicion and that disappointment again. But I had to, didn’t I? I couldn’t sit there like a coward, like a baby, with my head down, pretending I was doing math—like anyone was going to believe that!—when really what I was doing was wishing Riel would tell me, Hey, it’s no problem, stuff happens, right? So I forced myself to look up. It was the hardest thing I had done in a long time. And then, maybe because of that wounded look on Riel’s face, I got mad myself.

  “It’s not your fault, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Riel said. He couldn’t have sounded more surprised if I’d just produced a birthday cake, complete with lit candles, and started singing.

  “Anything I do, it’s not your fault,” I said. “In case you’re worried that your friends will think it is.” I was thinking about Detective Jones. He and Riel knew each other back from when Riel was still a cop.

  Riel seemed to consider this carefully. He considered it for so long that I knew it had been a mistake to say it.

  “Actually,” he said, with a kind of scary calm, “worry isn’t exactly the emotion that I’m experiencing right now.” His eyes locked onto mine. “In fact,” he said, talking slowly, slowly, like the words rattling around in his mind were a pack of wild dogs and he had to keep a firm leash on them, otherwise they’d rip me to pieces, “I’m a little more concerned about you than I am about me.”

  The shame that I felt was like sharp-toothed little animals gnawing at my insides.

  “Have I ever been other than completely honest with you, Mike?” Riel said.

  I thought about all the time I had known Riel. He always told the truth, even when it was unpleasant or it hurt. Maybe when it came to riding me about my school-work or my job or keeping my room clean, he treated me like a kid who needed a firm hand. But in everything else, he treated me like an intelligent human being—he never talked down to me, never took the attitude that I couldn’t possibly understand, and he never, ever lied to me.

  I shook my head.

  “So how come you lied to me about the other night?” Riel said. “How come you didn’t just tell me how you were feeling? How come you didn’t tell me that you’d gone out?”

  The best I could do was offer a slow, rolling, ashamed shrug and a lame, “I thought you’d be mad.”

  “Anything else you want to tell me, Mike?”

  I had to look directly at him now. I had to if I wanted to win back his trust.

  “No,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Robbie Ducharme,” I said. “I swear.”

  Riel looked me over carefully. Finally, he gave a little nod. He glanced at his watch.

  “Supper’s going to be a little late tonight,” he said.

  I watched him turn and head back down the hall. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, then I heard him rattling pots in the kitchen. I wondered what he was thinking. Wondered what he believed and what he suspected. Wondered, too, why I hadn’t had the good sense to just stay put that night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Two days later, when I went by to pick up Sal before school, I was surprised to see Vin standing on the sidewalk in front of Sal’s house. I was surprised, because Vin hadn’t been hanging around with Sal and me much lately. But I wasn’t blown-out-of-the-water shocked because, after all, Vin lived on the next street over from Sal. You could see the back of Sal’s house from the back of Vin’s. At least, you could in winter, when the trees had lost their leaves.

  Vin spotted me when I was still a couple of houses away. He gave a wave and started up the sidewalk toward me. He had a funny look on his face—not funny as in amused, but a strange expression, a mixture of disbelief and something that might have been worry. I wasn’t sure.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “You kidding?” Vin said. “Up until maybe twenty minutes ago, there were five cop cars here. Five!”

  I glanced up at Sal’s house. The place was small, with a wooden porch that needed a paint job and a weed patch out front where there should have been a lawn. The San Miguels didn’t own the place. They rented it. And they sublet the top floor to an old couple. It helped them to cover their own rent, Sal said. I couldn’t imagine five people living in a house that wasn’t any bigger than the one I used to live in with Billy, and that was a whole lot smaller than Riel’s. Or maybe Riel’s just seemed bigger because he had hardly any furniture and no clutter at all.

  Sal’s house was quiet. So were all the other houses up and down the street. It was hard to imagine that there had been any cop cars there, let alone five.

  “What happened?” I said. I had an idea, but I wanted to find out what Vin knew.

  “It was his old man,” Vin said. “He got into some fight with the neighbor. My dad knows the guy. Says he’s a real jerk. The guy says Sal’s dad went after him with a pair of hedge clippers.”

  I glanced up at the house again
and wondered where Sal was. The five cop cars must have drawn a lot of attention when they pulled up. There wouldn’t be much chance of keeping it a secret this time. If Vin knew, then a lot of other people knew, too. People would be talking about it. Kids at school would be buzzing—Hey, did you hear about Sal’s dad? Sal’s crazy dad?

  “Did they arrest him?” I asked.

  “They took him away in handcuffs. Sal’s mom was crying and trying to talk to them, but it all came out in Spanish. What’s the matter with the professor, Mike?” Vin always referred to Sal’s dad as the professor. And even Vin thought it had to be hard for a guy to go from teaching Spanish literature and poetry in a university to cleaning office buildings. “Is he sick?”

  I just shrugged. I’d made a promise to Sal. I wasn’t going to break it, not even for Vin.

  “Sal still home?” I asked.

  Vin nodded. “Poor guy,” he said. “If you ask me, his dad’s really flipped. I heard someone say the reason there were five cop cars is that Sal’s dad wouldn’t put down the hedge clippers when the cops told him to.”

  Jeez, I thought. That was serious. Cops didn’t like it when you were threatening someone with a weapon and refused to put it down. I looked at the house for a third time and thought about how scared Sal must have been when it was happening.

  “I’d better go see how he is,” I said. “You coming?”

  Vin looked at the house too, his eyes big, like he thought the place might be haunted. He shook his head. “I gotta pick up Cat,” he said. Then, “Hey, Mike, that new girl, what’s her name, the one with the red hair?”

  “Rebecca?”

  Vin grinned. “Yeah. Rebecca. She’s kind of cute if you like that red hair and freckles thing. I saw that look she gave you the other day. What’s going on? You finally find someone to replace Jen?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. I thought for a moment about which was worse—the look Jen would probably give me if we ever met face-to-face again, or the look Rebecca had given me when she came out of the school the day before yesterday. To get a glare from Jen would be worse, for sure. I cared what she thought. I didn’t even know Rebecca.