I glanced up at Mr. Henderson. He watched her climb out of the pool. Watched her teammates surge around her, smiling, congratulating her. Watched her grin and turn and wave to the cheering section in the bleachers. Watched her walk across the deck and disappear through the door into the change room. Watched a few more seconds, his eyes on that door like maybe he was hoping she’d come back. But she didn’t. Then, one after another, his hands came away from the glass. He straightened up and shook his head, the way you do when you’re sort of dazed. Then he turned away. I waited a minute and then went back to work.
By the time I had finished mopping the hall, emptying my bucket, and tidying the utility room, the swim meet was over. The girls were all filing into one of the big activity rooms where pizza and cookies and juice and pop had been set out. They chattered away like a flock of birds. Girls—they never seem to run out of stuff to talk about. Or laugh about, either. They crowded into the room. The ones who had been swimming—you could tell which ones they were because most of them had damp hair, like they couldn’t be bothered to dry it completely—all had backpacks, with their swim gear inside, I figured. They dropped their packs and coats near the door and headed straight for the pizza. The other girls, the ones who hadn’t been in the pool, mostly went for the juice and the diet pop and maybe nibbled on a cookie.
I saw the blond girl drop her backpack on the top of the heap. She was with a group of girls, all damp-headed. Her hair was down over her shoulders now, which made her look even prettier. She and her friends headed right over to the boxes of pizza.
Then someone yelled.
Something crashed.
More people yelled.
There was an explosion of giggles.
Juice pooled on the floor, spreading out over broken glass. A couple of girls apologized over and over to one of the adults, a coach or a teacher, who was looking around, annoyed, for something to clean up the mess. I said I would take care of it. I ran down the hall to get my bucket and mop, a garbage bag, and a pair of work gloves. By the time I got back, almost everyone had stepped away from the spill. One of the adults had squatted down and was picking up pieces of broken glass. She looked relieved to see me with my work gloves and mop.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I just shrugged. It was no big deal to me. I picked up the glass, most of it big pieces, and mopped up the juice. I was just getting the last of it, everybody pretty much ignoring me by then, all the girls eating and talking, all the adults relaxed now that the meet was over, when I looked over at the door. Mr. Henderson was there. He was holding a backpack and zipping up one of its pockets with one hand. It looked like the blond girl’s backpack. He dropped it back onto the pile of stuff at the door and glanced around, like he was checking to see if anyone had seen him. I ducked my head and pretended to be engrossed in what I was doing. When I looked up again, he was gone.
One of the adults—a teacher, I think—clapped her hands and called for everyone’s attention. It took a while for the girls to settle down. But they finally did. They sat on the chairs that I had set out, all of them with their backs to the door. I trundled my bucket and mop across the room. I paused at the door, thinking about the blond girl and the way Mr. Henderson had been looking at her, thinking about him with her backpack, zipping up one of the pockets. Why had he been watching her? What had he been looking for? I glanced at the backpack sitting there at the top of the heap. Then I looked over my shoulder at the rows of chairs, each one with a girl in it, all of them looking in the opposite direction. They would never notice—at least, that’s what I told myself. I turned a little, reached out and snagged the backpack. I held it in front of me where no one in the room could see it while I pushed my mop and bucket out into the hall. I shoved the bucket down the hall a few paces, then stopped and unzipped the pocket I had seen Mr. Henderson zipping up. The only thing in it was a shiny black leather wallet with a silver star dangling from the zipper. I glanced around, checking to make sure no one was watching me. The girls in the meeting room were clapping. A few were cheering. They were handing out the swim meet medals.
I opened the wallet. Whatever else Mr. Henderson had been doing, he hadn’t been stealing from the girl. There were three twenties in the money compartment—three!—plus a ten and some fives. I was definitely doing something wrong with my life. It was like every girl I ever ran into had way more money than me. The wallet also had a zippered compartment and a bunch of slots where you could put credit cards or ID cards. There were two cards in the slots: a student transit pass and a debit card. Each card had the girl’s name on it—Emily Corwin. She went to Holy Name Girls’ School. She was in ninth grade, which surprised me because she looked older. Especially, it turned out, when she was mad.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, startling me just as I was fiddling with the zippered compartment. “That’s mine!”
She had come out of nowhere—she must have used transporter technology to get there, because she hadn’t made any noise at all. She reached out, grabbed the dangling silver star, and jerked the wallet away from me. She grabbed the backpack from me too. “I’m telling,” she said. She sounded like she was in second grade now instead of ninth.
“It’s all there,” I said. Part of me wanted to smile, to show her how harmless I was. But she might be the kind of girl who would mistake a smile for a smirk, who might think I was trying to put one over on her, and then she’d tell for sure. And if there was one thing I didn’t need, it was more trouble. Let the word get back to Riel that I had been caught going through a girl’s wallet and I’d probably be grounded for life.
“I didn’t take anything,” I said. “Honest.”
“Honest?” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding.” She held out the wallet, which she was still holding by the silver star. “Open it,” she said. “Show me.”
Anything to keep her from yelling for a teacher.
I unzipped the wallet again and held it open, showing her the ID cards.
“What about the money?” she said.
I held open the money compartment.
“Take it out,” she said. She had a bossy way of talking, but then, why not? She had the upper hand. “Show me.”
I took out the three twenties and the ten and what turned out to be three fives. Almost a hundred dollars.
“Okay,” she said. “Put everything back and zip it up again.”
When I handed the wallet to her, she took it by the star again and twirled it while she looked at me. The way she was standing, she seemed a little more relaxed, but her face was still hard and suspicious.
“See?” I said. “It’s all there.”
“For all I know, that’s only because you didn’t have time to take it. If I hadn’t spotted you on my way to the stage, maybe you would have stolen the money, put the wallet back, and taken off.”
My life was starting to flash before my eyes. Jeez, I should have just left it alone. I should never have touched her stuff, because the way it looked, Emily Corwin was going to tell on me. She was going to run into the room, find a coach or a teacher, and she was going to report me. For sure whoever she complained to would turn around and complain to the director of the community center, who knew I was here on a community service order and who would turn around and complain to my youth worker, who would tell Riel. I should definitely have left it alone.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.
“Really? So you have some reason to be going through my wallet besides the eighty-five dollars in it?”
She had light honey-colored hair, but dark chocolate eyes. I stared into those eyes and tried to decide which way to push the conversation. One, I could tell her the truth—that Mr. Henderson had been watching her, that he’d gone through her stuff first. But she’d probably think I was laying it off on someone else, on some old geezer no one had even noticed. And anyway, Mr. Henderson had been here longer than me. He was an adult. They were paying him. He wasn’t here on a community service ord
er. So who would they believe when he denied doing it? And I was pretty sure he would deny it, because no matter how long he’d been there, it wouldn’t look good, an old guy like him going through some girl’s backpack. Which led me to Two: I could give her another reason for going into her stuff, one she might actually believe.
“I saw you swim,” I said. “You’re good.” She had her arms crossed over her chest now, listening, maybe even interested. But I could see she wasn’t going to be an easy sell. “You were way out front right from the start. No one else had a chance against you.”
And there it was, like the first glint of spring on a solid-frozen lake—she started to thaw just a little.
“You swim?” she said. She looked me over, like she was wondering, did I have the right kind of body for a swimmer?
“Just barely,” I said. “But my best friend Sal was on the swim team at my school. I used to go to the meets—you know, cheer him on.”
“Sal’s a guy’s name?” she said.
So I told her that Sal was short for Salvatore, and where Sal was from, and that he had won the city championships in his division last year in freestyle and in butterfly. That impressed her.
“Butterfly’s tough,” she said.
I thought of offering to fix her up with Sal. Maybe that would make her forget she had found me going through her wallet. But with girls, you never know. Something like that might be just the thing to make a problem go away, or it might set her off, get her all insulted and mad-looking again. So instead I said, “I bet you do a good butterfly too, the way you move doing the crawl.”
“I do an okay butterfly,” she said, and I had the feeling she was being honest, not just modest. “But the freestyle’s my specialty. What school do you go to?” When I told her, she said, “Yeah, they’re good. The boys’ team is better than the girls’ team, though.”
Okay. If she said so.
She looked down at her wallet, which she was still dangling by the chain.
“Were you trying to steal from me?” she said.
“I just wanted to see who you were.” I gave her a bit of a smile, one that I hoped conveyed the idea that I thought she was kind of cute.
She seemed to consider my answer. “You couldn’t just come up to me and ask?”
I looked at the door to the activity room. I heard clapping again.
“There are a hundred and twenty-five girls in there,” I said.
“More like a hundred,” she said, “plus teachers and parents and coaches.” She smiled, not a full-force, allout megawatt smile, but at least she didn’t look like she was ready to turn me in anymore. “My name is Emily,” she said. “Emily Corwin.”
“I know,” I said, nodding at the wallet. I told her my name.
“Emily!” someone called from the door to the activity room. “Come on.”
Emily looked at me for a few seconds and then shrugged. “See you around,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Yeah,” I said. Mostly I was thinking, Never again. Never again would I do something that stupid, something that could land me in big trouble. It wasn’t worth the stress.
She walked away, her backpack slung over one shoulder, the wallet still dangling from her fingers. I watched her until she went back inside, then I waited a few more minutes to see if anyone was going to come rushing out, ready to report me. No one did. As I pushed my bucket down to the utility room and emptied it, I told myself that was the end of it. I rinsed and wrung out my mop. Then, I couldn’t help myself, I went back to the pool and looked at the lists of names that were posted on the wall. There were three of them. When I’d seen Mr. Henderson, he’d had his finger on the middle one. I looked at it now. There, near the top of the page, was her name: Corwin, Emily.
“You think it’s weird that an old guy is always looking at girls?” I said.
Riel glanced at me for maybe a nanosecond before turning his attention back to the TV.
“In a minute, Mike, okay?” he said.
I waited, half listening to what they were saying on TV.
“What was that all about?” I said when he finally hit the off button on the remote. “They found a body?”
“They found some bones,” Riel said. “The guy who found them, a guy who was out hiking in the woods, called the police because he thought they might be human bones.”
“And are they?”
“Looks like it,” Riel said.
I’d got dragged on a couple of hikes last year at school. The first time I ended up with a blister on my heel. The second time it started to pour halfway through and I got drenched. Both times we were supposed to keep our eyes open for certain things—birds, birds’ nests, garter snakes, evidence of beaver activity. Mostly it was a big yawn. We didn’t see anything even half as interesting as human bones.
“So, what does that mean?” I said. “Some guy—or maybe it was a woman—was murdered out in the woods and buried in a shallow grave?” For some reason, whenever they found a body out in the woods, it was always in a shallow grave. I used to wonder why that was. Then I decided that the really smart killers, the ones who didn’t want their victims to be found, probably put a little extra effort into it and dug deeper graves.
“Nobody said anything about a grave, shallow or otherwise,” Riel said. He was very big on accuracy. Almost as big as he was on cleanliness and tidiness. “Nobody said anything about murder, either.”
“Yeah, but they found bones—”
“There are lots of reasons why you might find bones in the woods,” Riel said.
“Human bones?” I said.
“Could be they came from an aboriginal burial ground in the vicinity.”
“Is there an aboriginal burial ground in the vicinity?” I said.
“Not that I know of.”
Score one for Mike, for a change.
“Could be they belong to someone who settled up there a hundred and fifty or more years ago,” he said. “Someone who died and was buried. And maybe wild animals got to the grave, scattered the bones.”
“Maybe someone who settled up there a hundred and fifty or more years ago was murdered,” I said.
“It’s possible.”
A-ha! “So what are they going to do?”
“The police?” He shrugged, like it was no big deal, like he hadn’t been sitting there, glued to the TV, watching hard enough to get every detail. But once a cop, always a cop. Riel still took a big interest in the crime section of the newspaper and the crime stories on radio and TV. “They’ve already called in a forensic anthropologist who’s confirmed that they’re human bones. The next step is for the anthropologist to date the bones and tell the police whether they’re a couple of years old or a couple of hundred years old.”
“And how the person died?”
“Depends,” Riel said.
“On?”
“On how the person died. And on the state of the remains. A person who maybe had a heart attack and all that’s left is bones, I’m not sure they’ll be able to say for sure how that person died.”
“But a person’s whose head was maybe sawed off—”
“Jeez, Mike.”
“Or maybe hacked off. You know, maybe a hundred and fifty or more years ago.”
“Well, then it wouldn’t matter, would it?” Riel said. “Whoever might have done it would be in a shallow grave of his own by now, right? So,” changing the subject, “what’s this about an old guy looking at girls?”
“The guy I work for, he’s an old guy, older than you.”
“That old, huh?” He sounded partly amused, partly not-so-amused.
“And he’s always checking out the girls at the community center.”
“What do you mean, checking them out?”
“Looking at them. Watching the girls’ skating lessons. Watching the swim meets.”
Riel leaned forward. “And?”
“And what?”
“You asked me if I thought it was weird. Do you think it’s weird?”
> “I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t decide. “I mean, he works there. Maybe he’s just interested. Maybe he has kids of his own.” I didn’t know anything about him. “But there’s this one girl—I saw him look in her backpack when she wasn’t there.”
Riel leaned forward a little more. “Did he take anything?”
“No.”
“Did you report it?”
“Well, no.”
“Don’t you think you should?”
“Well, I guess, but …” But if I did, Mr. Henderson would deny it. And Emily wouldn’t be able to back me up because I had lied about why I had gone into her backpack, which was a whole area I didn’t want to get into with Riel.
“Talk to Teresa.” Teresa Rego, director of the community center. “She’s a good person. She’ll know what to do.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Do the right thing, Mike.”
The phone rang.
“You done your bathroom yet?” Riel said, moving to answer it.
“Not yet.” Jeez, I’d just gotten home.
“How about it, then? Get it done before supper,” he said, reaching for the receiver, picking it up, saying “Hi,” and then smiling. I knew that smile. It had to be Susan. “Just a sec,” he said. He covered the mouthpiece with one hand. “Get your bathroom done, then maybe call Sal. See if he wants to come over. You can order a pizza. I’ll give you money to rent a video. What do you say?”
“Going out with Susan, huh?”
There it was, that smile again.
CHAPTER THREE
“It says here maybe six or seven years,” I said. I held the newspaper out to Riel. “Those bones? It says they belong to a guy and they’ve been out there maybe six or seven years, that’s all. It also says the cops—”
He gave me that sharp look. Jeez.
“The police,” I said, “are looking for the rest of him. How do they know from a couple of bones that it’s a guy?”
“Depends on what they found,” Riel said. He took the paper from me and reached around me with his other hand for the coffeepot. The coffee he drank was grown in the rainforest and he poured organic milk into it, but it gave him a major hit of caffeine all the same. “With some bones, the pelvis, I think, and the skull, you can tell male from female pretty easily—if you know what you’re doing.”
Dead and Gone Page 2
