Dead and Gone

by Norah McClintock

  First U.S. edition published in 2014 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  Text copyright © 2004 by Norah McClintock. All rights reserved.

  Published by arrangement with Scholastic Canada Ltd.

  All U.S. rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

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  Front Cover: © iStockphoto.com/Katrin Solansky

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 11.5/15

  Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McClintock, Norah.

  Dead and gone / by Norah McClintock.

  p. cm. —(Mike & Riel : #3)

  Originally published by Scholastic Canada, 2004.

  Summary: A shallow grave … human remains … an unsolved murder from years ago … It looks like the past is coming back to spin Mike’s new life out of control. What’s making the usually cool Riel so rattled? And what does a beautiful but manipulative girl have to do with it all?

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2607–8 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2616–0 (eBook)

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Foster home care—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M478414184Dc 2014

  [Fic]—dc2

  2013017550

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 12/31/13

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2616-0 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-5103-2 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-5102-5 (mobi)

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Look at it as a chance to make a positive contribution to society,” Riel said after the judge gave me one hundred hours of community service for theft-under-five-thousand-dollars. And all for a box of cupcakes I took from a bakery delivery truck, but never even ate.

  I could have got away with probation pure and simple—stay out of trouble and it’s all good. No harm, no penalty. Could have, but didn’t. Oh, no. Riel just had to stick his nose into it. Had to give his opinion even though nobody asked for it. Had to talk to the judge, who turned out to be a friend of his from way back. Had to say he thought maybe a little “positive reinforcement” would be in order. Jeez, like he wasn’t hammering the lesson—“life’s lesson,” he called it—into my head every single day of my life.

  “I look at it as a chance to lose out on making money because now I have to work for free at the community center,” I said.

  “Remember that the next time you decide you want something for nothing,” Riel said.

  The deal was this: I reported to the community center after supper most nights and every Saturday morning. While I was there, I was supposed to do whatever I was told—mop, empty garbage, set up rooms for meetings, whatever. It meant that I had to get my homework done right after school most days, which really cut into my social life, not that it exactly sizzled.

  “If you pay attention and do what you’re told,” Riel said, “maybe at the end they’ll give you a reference that’ll help you get a job.” He was like that—always pointing out the benefits of an honest day’s work, when he wasn’t telling you that a job well done was its own reward, or something like that.

  Rebecca walked over to the community center with me the first day.

  “You realize I’m hardly going to be able to see you,” I said. “When I’m not working, I’m going to have tons of homework to catch up on.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess we’re just going to have to do our homework together.”

  Rebecca was easy to like. I guess you could say she was sort of my girlfriend, even though I hadn’t really kissed her. Not yet, anyway.

  I smiled at her, then turned and approached the reception desk and handed a letter to the woman behind the desk. She looked at it.

  “You want to see Mr. Henderson,” she said. She gave the letter back to me. “Down those stairs over there.” When she pointed, I saw she had those fake pasted-on fingernails. I don’t know how women can stand wearing those things twenty-four hours a day, or even why they think they look good. They don’t. They look like claws. “Take a left at the bottom,” she continued. “At the end of the hall there’s a door that says Maintenance. If he’s not there—” She shrugged. “He’s around somewhere, I guess. He’s the guy in blue work pants and a gray work shirt.”

  I glanced at Rebecca. She smiled and waggled her fingers at me in a little good-bye wave. I was on my own now.

  I did a tour of practically the whole community center before I found Mr. Henderson. He was around back, a guy with jet-black hair, standing just outside the door in work boots and a parka, watching a bunch of little girls learning to skate.

  “Mr. Henderson?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m supposed to report to you,” I said. I handed him the same piece of paper I’d showed to the woman at the reception desk.

  He took it from me without shifting his eyes away from the rink, then turned and walked—limped—back to the door. It was a pretty bad limp. He tilted so far to the right with every step that I thought he would fall over, but then he would sort of kick his left leg forward and he’d look solid again. He reached the door, held the paper open under the light, and read it. Then he handed it back to me.

  “Come on then.” He tugged open the door and led me up two flights of stairs to the top floor of the community center. “You know how to mop a floor?” he said, reaching for a key ring that was attached to his belt. He unlocked the door to a small utility closet that had a sink in it, and a mop and a bucket on wheels, and a bunch of other cleaning supplies.

  “Sure,” I said. “Soap, water, mop. Right?”

  Mr. Henderson didn’t look impressed. “Bucket goes in the sink,” he said, and waited until I got the point.

  I heaved the bucket up into the sink and turned on the hot and cold water taps. Mr. Henderson reached across me and shut off the cold.

  “Soap’s there,” he said, nodding to a big jug on the floor in the corner. “You put in a quarter of a cup.”

  I measured and poured. When the bucket was three-quarters full, he told me that was enough. Good thingQ—I almost got a hernia lifting the bucket out of the sink again. He took me out into the hall. He said that when I finished mopping each hallway, I should empty the dirty water and refill the bucket with clean hot water and another quarter cup of soap. “Don’t walk back over the wet floor,” he said, then, “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  He watched me for a minute. Then he grabbed the mop from me and demonstrated what he called the proper technique. He handed me the mop and watched me again. He demonstrated two more times before he finally shook his head and muttered, “I guess that’ll have to do.” Jeez, and I thought Riel was fussy. “If you do the job right, it should take you an hour,” he said. He started to limp away.

  “Mr. Henderson?”

  He turned slowly, like it was an effort. Everything about him was slow and deliberate—the way he had carefully read the paper I had handed him, the way he had climbed the stairs, the way he had watched me handle the mop before pulling it away from me and showing me the right way to hold it and move it.

  “After I’ve finished here,” I said, “then what?”

  “If you�
�ve done it right, you go down to the second floor and mop that. If not, you do it over.”

  Terrific. “How do I know if I’ve done it right?”

  His small brown eyes drilled into me, making me feel like I’d asked the world’s stupidest question. “I’ll tell you,” he said.

  I mopped the third floor of the community center twice that night. When I told Rebecca about it the next day, she said, “Look on the bright side. You only had to do the second floor once.” She grinned at me, her eyes amused, her copper hair like fire in the morning sun. I think that’s what I liked about her. She always sounded like she was on my side.

  Riel was like that too. He tried hard to make sure I knew he cared what happened to me. He worked at it when, really, how could I not know? If Riel didn’t care, why would he have offered to take me in, to be a foster parent to me, when I had no place else to go? He wasn’t related to me. I’d barely known him when I moved in with him. Sometimes I thought I still didn’t know him all that well. He was a serious guy. He worked hard at being a teacher, sitting at the dining room table almost every night, either preparing his lessons or grading tests and papers. He cooked supper almost every night too, and on the weekends he was teaching me to cook.

  “It’s something you need to know, Mike,” he said, “so you don’t end up eating junk food the rest of your life.”

  So far he’d showed me how to stuff and roast a small chicken, how to make black bean burritos with green chili, and how to throw together a sweet potato and mushroom casserole. I’d never admit it to him, but it was kind of fun.

  After my first week at the community center, Riel asked me how it was going.

  “If you need a guy with a mop and a bucket, I’m your man,” I said. “The guy I work for, Mr. Henderson, he could start the Church of How to Mop, he’s that religious about it.”

  Riel said, “So I guess I can expect no more rush jobs with the kitchen floor or your bathroom.”

  Riel could start his own church: The Brethren of the Germophobes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You heard of tennis elbow? I think I have mop elbow.”

  “That’s all you do? Mop?” He sounded disappointed.

  “Sometimes I get to sweep. I squeegeed some windows Wednesday night. Last night I got to set up tables in a room. Why?”

  “I thought maybe they’d give you something a bit more interesting to do. You know, maybe work with kids or something.”

  “By the time I’m done there, I’ll have my cleaning technique nailed down,” I said. “But interesting? I don’t think so.” I reached for the potatoes. “Mr. Henderson is a lot like you. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. If at first you don’t do it the way he told you to, do it again.”

  “Sounds like a guy I could get along with.”

  I doubted it. Yeah, Mr. Henderson and Riel both seemed like they were into that cleanliness-godliness thing. Yeah, they were both serious. Yeah, they were both kind of quiet, too. But with Riel, you got the idea he wasn’t just into clean, he was into clean living. He worked hard. He got really excited about history and got a buzz from getting kids excited about it. The extent to which he kicked back: he had a beer. Sometimes he had it while he was making supper. Sometimes he had it after he had finished grading papers or preparing lessons or whatever he was doing. But that’s all it was—one beer.

  Okay, if Susan came over—Dr. Susan Thomas, his girlfriend or maybe just his friend, I wasn’t really clear on that and hadn’t got around to asking—he would open a nice bottle of wine and have a glass or two. And maybe he had a drink when he and Susan went out, I don’t know. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t hang out in bars. He didn’t do anything that made you think, okay, now I see where it is, the crack in that Mr. Clean image.

  Mr. Henderson was different. Yeah, he waged the battle against dirt like he was a four-star general, ordering me to attack first this front, then that one. Other than that, though, he and Riel had nothing in common. If Mr. Henderson was interested in anything except the never-ending war on grime, it was news to me. He hardly ever spoke—to me or anyone else. He was always in the background, working and watching whatever was going on at the community center. Mostly he watched the girls. He watched the little girls on the rink out back who were learning how to skate and do figure eights. He watched the high school girls who trooped in and out of pilates and yoga classes. He watched the girls who participated in swim meets at the community center.

  Sometimes, like last night, he acted funny. While I was setting up chairs and tables in one of the big meeting rooms—something about a swim meet on Saturday—I spotted him in the hall outside the pool. He was standing by the door, looking at what was posted on the wall. When I went down there to ask him what he wanted me to do next, I saw he had his finger on one of the papers taped to the wall. He jerked it away when he saw me, like I’d caught him at something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. But I couldn’t see it on his face when he turned to me. Usually when you catch someone with their hand in the cookie jar, they have a guilty look on their face. But not Mr. Henderson. He looked the same as always, no expression you could read on his face, no expression in his dark brown eyes.

  “You set up a hundred and twenty-five chairs?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Five tables, three along the back, two up front?”

  Jeez, like I was so stupid I couldn’t have got that right. I nodded again.

  “You put up the banner?”

  Banner? “What banner? You never said anything about a banner.”

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll go get it.”

  While I waited, I glanced at the papers posted on the wall. They were lists of kids who were going to be in the swim meet—all girls. Mr. Henderson had been looking at lists of girls’ names. See what I mean? I was pretty sure that if Riel met Mr. Henderson, they wouldn’t hit it off. But it didn’t seem likely that they would meet. Riel had his life, and I had mine. And right now mine was long on grind and short on fun, thanks, mostly, to Riel, who had thought maybe they would give me something interesting to do for my community service order, maybe work with kids.

  Someone hadn’t done his homework before he stuck his nose into my business.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had never hung around much at the community center, but boy, it sure seemed like the rest of the world was there—all the time. There was something going on every night of the week. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, karate club, dance socials for older people—much older people. Art classes, fitness classes—weights and step and kickboxing. A cooking club every other Tuesday for low-income mothers, where they cooked together and swapped recipes. Even a homework club for kids who wanted to do their homework together or who needed help but didn’t have anyone at home who could give them a hand. And, of course, there was swimming. The community center had a huge swimming pool, and besides classes there were competitive and synchronized swim teams that practiced regularly. Swim meets were held on a lot of Saturdays. There was always something going on. Always something to see.

  Like girls in bathing suits. I like girls in bathing suits as much as any guy, I guess, which is one reason why, the first Saturday I worked at the community center, I stopped and looked through the window that ran the whole length of the pool. There were dozens of girls in there—girls on the deck in bathing suits, most of them Speedos because they were racing, but looking great in them all the same, and girls on the bleachers, cheering on the teams from their schools. Catholic kids from an all-girls school. Some private-school girls too, which was the second reason I had stopped. My eyes swept the deck and the bleachers, wondering if Jen was there. She wasn’t. The last reason I stopped: Mr. Henderson.

  There’s a wall of windows at one end of the third-floor corridor. From there you can look down on the pool. Mr. Henderson was up there, watching behind the glass. If it hadn’t been for Thursday night, I might not have given him a second thought. It was a swim meet. You just naturally wanted to look, a
nd if there was a race just starting, you just naturally wanted to see who would win. You got involved.

  But there was something about the way Mr. Henderson was watching, his hands pressed against the glass, staring hard at the girls down in the pool and around it. Today he was staring at one swimmer in particular. A blond girl who looked about my age. Slender, but not skinny. Strong-looking in her navy blue Speedo. She was twisting her ponytail up as she approached the racing platform at one end of the pool. She pulled on a bathing cap and stepped up onto platform number two and stood there, working her goggles down over her cap, looking back at some other girls in navy blue Speedos. Her teammates. She never once looked up to the third floor, never once saw Mr. Henderson watching her. If she had, she probably would have got mad. A guy my age gawking at her—and, okay, it was a good thing Rebecca wasn’t there, because this girl was really great looking—that was one thing. But an old guy like Mr. Henderson?

  Then I thought about the list of names posted outside the pool. I thought about Mr. Henderson running his finger down that list, like maybe he’d been looking for someone. I wondered if it was the girl he was staring at now.

  Eight girls stood on the racing platforms and adjusted their goggles. Eight girls crouched in a racing pose, ready to launch themselves into the water when the whistle blew. Eight girls, but there may as well have been only one as far as Mr. Henderson was concerned. His eyes never left the slender blond girl in the second lane as she flew forward, first in the air, then slicing through the water, then moving—boy, could she move!—down in her lane. Front crawl, right arm hooking up and then cutting into the water, left arm, right arm. She had a nice, steady stroke—even I could see that. She pulled out ahead of the other girls in the first few seconds and stayed out front, reaching the far end of the pool first, doing a little somersault-in-the-water turn and then heading back down the pool before anyone else did their turn. She won the race easily, to loud applause and shouts from one section of the bleachers—the girls from her own school.