Tell

by Norah McClintock

  Tell

  Norah McClintock

  orca soundings

  Copyright © 2006 Norah McClintock

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording or by any information storage

  and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McClintock, Norah

  Tell / Norah McClintock.

  (Orca soundings)

  ISBN 1-55143-672-8 (bound) ISBN 1-55143-511-X (pbk.)

  PS8575.C62T44 2006 jC813'.54 C2006-903260-2

  Summary: When David’s stepfather is murdered, he knows

  more than he is telling.

  First published in the United States, 2006

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006928470

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing

  programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada

  through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the

  Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia

  through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design: Doug McCaffry

  Cover photography: Firstlight

  Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  09 08 07 06 • 5 4 3 2 1

  To Willie and the rest of them

  Chapter One

  It was Saturday night when the cops came to our house. Actually, it was 2:00 AM, so technically that made it Sunday morning. The doorbell rang twice before I heard my mother’s slippered feet shuffling along the upstairs hall and down the stairs. I pressed the mute button on the tv remote and listened through my bedroom door to muffled voices in the front hall below. I heard my mother wail. It was a terrible sound, like an animal being tortured.Her voice got higher and higher and she said, “No, no, no” over and over, louder and louder. I got up off my bed and went downstairs.

  There were two people in the front hall. They were cops. One of them was a woman. She was trying to steer my mother into the living room where she could sit down. My mother was crying. She kept saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”

  “Mom?” I said. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  The two cops looked at me. The female cop managed to get my mother seated on the couch in the living room. The male cop introduced himself. “I’m Detective Antonelli,” he said. “I’m afraid we have some bad news.” He paused and looked at me.

  “David,” I said. “I’m David.”

  “We have some bad news, David. It’s about your father.”

  “You mean Phil?” I said. Detective Antonelli gave me a look. “He’s not my father,” I said. “He’s my stepfather.”Then, because I knew how it would look if I didn’t ask, I said, “Is he okay? Did he do something?”

  My mother was sobbing in the living room.

  Detective Antonelli pulled me aside. When he spoke, he kept his voice low.

  “Is there anyone else in the house, David? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Any other relatives staying with you?”

  I shook my head.

  “What happened?” I said. “Where’s Phil?”

  “I’m afraid he was shot and killed a couple of hours ago,” Detective Antonelli said.

  “What?” I said. “How? Why?”

  “We’re not sure about all the details. It looks like it might have been a robbery.” He was looking closely at me now, probably because it was so late and I was still wearing jeans and a T-shirt, not pajamas. “Did you just get home, David?”

  “I was watching tv up in my room,” I said. “I guess I fell asleep.” I turned to look at my mother in the living room. The woman cop was talking quietly to her. My mother was shaking her head and moaning softly. I looked at Detective Antonelli again. “I should see how my mom is,” I said.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions first, if that’s okay,” Detective Antonelli said. He was talking softly and being polite. But I had the feeling that he would ask his questions even if I said it wasn’t okay. “Why don’t we step in here?” he said. He nodded toward the dining room, which was across the hall from the living room.

  We went inside and sat down at the dining room table.

  “When was the last time you saw your stepfather?” he said.

  “What?” I don’t know what I had been expecting him to ask me, but it sure wasn’t that.

  “I mean, was he home today?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But he went out at some point?” Detective Antonelli said.

  “He left right after supper,” I said. “He went to play poker with some friends.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “At Jack’s place,” I said. I explained that Jack Tower was a friend of Phil’s.

  “What about you and your mother?”

  I stared at him. Why was he asking about us?

  “Was your mother home all night?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Were you home with her?”

  I had to fight the urge to turn to look at my mother again.

  “I was out for a couple of hours,” I said.

  “Where did you go?”

  I shrugged. “Just out, you know? Walking around.”

  “Were you with friends?”

  Geez, why was he asking about me?

  “No,” I said. “I just like to walk around. I think better when I’m walking.”

  He kept staring at me, like he was waiting for me to say more.

  “I write comic books,” I said. “With a friend of mine. He draws the pictures and I write the stories. I was trying to think up a new story.”

  “When exactly were you out?” he said.

  “I left the house around 8:00,” I said. My mother would be able to back me up on that. “I got back around 10:30.” My mother had been asleep in bed when I got home. Based on past experience and on the fact that she’d been on her feet from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 at the supermarket where she worked as a cashier and then had made supper for Phil and me when she got home, I figured she must have crashed out around 9:00. She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone for sure exactly when I had got home. “Why?” I said. “You don’t think my mother had anything to do with it, do you?”

  “We’re trying to trace your stepfather’s movements this evening, David.”

  “But you said it was a robbery,” I said.

  “It looks like it might have been a robbery,” Detective Antonelli said carefully. “He was found about half a block from an atm machine. We have reason to believe that he had just withdrawn some money.”

  “Then probably someone saw him take out the money and robbed him,” I said. “You hear about stuff like that happening all the time.”

  Detective Antonelli’s expression was impossible to read.

  “We didn’t find a wallet,” he said. “We identified him from a utility bill that he had in one of his pockets. We didn’t find any keys, either. Does your stepfather have a car?”

  I nodded.

  “Did he take it when he went out tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  He asked me about the car. I described it and gave him the license plate number. Then he asked me about Jack. I gave him Jack’s address and phone number.

  “You don’t t h in k Jack
shot him, do you?”

  He didn’t answer the question directly. He just said, “We like to be thorough.”

  Across the hall, my mother was still quietly sobbing.

  “I should see how she is,” I said.

  Detective Antonelli nodded. I went into the living room, sat down on the couch beside my mother and put my arm around her. She sagged against me, still crying.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told her. I sure hoped I was right.

  Chapter Two

  A parade of people came to the house all day to tell my mother how sorry they were about what had happened and to drop off food. They drank so much coffee that my mother sent me to the store to buy more. When I got back, I found her in tears— again. She was crying this time because Detective Antonelli had telephoned her and asked her to come down to the police station to answer some more questions about Phil.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. I figured it was the least I could do.

  “We found your husband’s car,” Detective Antonelli said after he had showed us into a small interview room. “It was parked up the street from where he was found. We also found his wallet and keys. I know this must be hard for you, Mrs. Benson, but it would really help us if you would take a look at his personal effects and tell us if anything is missing.”

  My mother agreed, of course.

  Phil’s personal effects were:

  (1) His wallet, which had been emptied of money, but which still contained his credit cards and his id. Also inside the wallet was a picture of my mother. She was wearing shorts and a tank top, and she looked nervous sitting at the end of a dock. There was a cottage in the background.

  (2) His watch, which was about ten years old and was nothing special. It had a leather strap. It wasn’t hard to figure out why whoever had killed him hadn’t bothered to take it.

  (3) His wedding ring. It was a plain gold band and was engraved on the inside with his initials and my mother’s initials.

  (4) A slip from an atm machine that showed he had withdrawn five hundred dollars on Saturday night.

  (5) A brand-new deck of playing cards. The seal hadn’t been broken.

  (6) A lighter and two cigars. Phil liked to smoke cigars when he was driving or when he was playing poker at one of his buddies’ places—if the buddy’s wife or girlfriend allowed it.

  (7) A key-ring chain with a fake-gold letter P attached to it, along with his house keys and car keys.

  “We found the keys a couple of blocks from where we found the wallet. They were both found in opposite directions from the car,” Detective Antonelli said. He frowned, as if this was some kind of problem. “Maybe whoever robbed him planned to take the car but changed his mind. Maybe he couldn’t find the car. Or maybe he didn’t see your husband drive up, so he didn’t know that he had a car with him.”

  My mother’s eyes widened. “Do you think that whoever killed Phil saw where we live, you know, from the driver’s license in the wallet? Do you think he’s planning to break into the house while we’re at the funeral? I’ve heard that people do that. They rob the houses of people who are already grieving.”

  “I think if that were the case, he would have kept the keys,” Detective Antonelli said.

  My mother continued to look worried. She stared at Phil’s key ring and started to cry again.

  Detective Antonelli nudged a box of tissues closer to her.

  “Is there anything that you can think of that might be missing?” he said.

  My mother nodded as she wiped at her tears with a tissue. She blew her nose.

  “The picture of Jamie,” she said. Jamie was my kid brother. “Phil always has a picture of Jamie with him.” I wondered if she noticed that she had said “has” instead of “had,” as if Phil was still alive.

  “Jamie?” Detective Antonelli said.

  “My other son,” my mother said. She got all choked up again as she explained that Jamie had drowned when he was eight years old. That was nearly six years ago now, when I had just turned ten.

  “Phil has a picture of him,” she said. “It’s in a little gold frame attached to his key chain. He says he carries it because he never wants to forget Jamie.”

  Me, I was the opposite. I wished I could forget what had happened, but I couldn’t. Instead I had replayed every detail of it in my mind every night for a couple of years. I still saw it a few times a month, like a movie, as clearly as if it were yesterday.

  “Where is it?” my mother said. “Where’s the picture of Jamie?”

  Detective Antonelli frowned again. “Whoever took the keys may have taken the frame. Is it real gold?”

  My mother nodded. “I bought it for him.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why the thief took it,” Detective Antonelli said. He asked my mother one last time if there was anything else missing. When she said no, he thanked us for coming in.

  I stayed home from school on Monday. More people phoned and came to the house. Later, I changed into a sports jacket, a good pair of pants (not jeans), a shirt with a tie (I had to borrow one of Phil’s), and regular shoes, not sneakers. My mother changed into a black skirt and a black top. She didn’t want to drive, which was probably a good thing because she kept crying, so we took a taxi to the funeral home for the viewing. My mother made me go with her to look at Phil,who was lying in a casket in his best suit. She stood there for a long time, staring at him, kissing him on the cheek a couple of times (don’t ask me how she could make herself do that) and crying. After a while, we sat down facing the coffin. Jack was there, dressed in a dark suit. He shook hands with everyone who came to look at Phil and to hug my mother. He thanked everyone for coming.

  Every time someone came up to my mother to tell her how sorry they were about Phil, she turned on the waterworks. I thought she would dry out, she was crying so much.

  People said the same things to me that they said to her: I’m sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine how you must feel, losing your father. He was such a great guy.

  “I wish people would stop calling him that,” I complained to my mother later, when almost everyone had left.

  “Stop calling him what?” she said.

  “My father. Phil wasn’t my father.”

  “He raised you from when you were eight,” she said.

  “But he wasn’t my father.”

  “Stop saying that,” my mother said. She was angry now and tears were gathering in her eyes. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met him. I don’t know how I would have managed to raise two boys on my own. Don’t you remember what it was like, David? Don’t you remember how hard it was before Phil came along?”

  Before Phil, my mother had been on welfare. We lived in a rundown apartment that had mice and cockroaches, leaky pipes, broken tiles in the bathroom, no air-conditioning, and elevators that never worked. I remember my mother used to cry all the time then too because there was never enough money and she never got a break from looking after Jamie and me.

  “Phil took good care of us,” she said and burst into tears again.

  I put my arms around her until she calmed down. I handed her some tissues, and she dried her eyes. I told her again that everything was going to be all right.

  Chapter Three

  I thought the viewing was bad. The funeral the next morning was worse. My mother didn’t just cry. She sobbed. Especially when Jack got up and spoke about Phil.

  Jack is a good guy, which is why I always had a hard time figuring out why he hung out with Phil. They played poker together almost every weekend, and every fall Jack and Phil and a couple of other guys went on a hunting trip together.

  After Jack spoke, a guy from Phil’s work, a trucker like Phil, got up. He said that Phil was a devoted family man and that he always talked about his family when he was away from home, which was basically from Monday to Friday, when he hauled a load of something halfway across the continent and a load of something else all the way back again. He said that Phil talked about his wi
fe all the time—and my mother started to bawl. He said that Phil always treated his two stepsons like they were his own flesh and blood, and he described how broken up Phil had been when the younger one drowned. He said that Phil carried a picture of Jamie on his key chain, that it was always right in front of him, dangling from his ignition, and that he’d lay it on the bar next to him after he finished driving for the day and was ready to hoist a cold one. He said that Phil was always telling people about Jamie and his other son, David. He said that’s the way he referred to me—as his son, not his stepson. He said Phil was proud of me.

  Yeah. Right.

  My mother was practically hysterical when they got ready to close the coffin. For a minute there, I thought she was going to crawl inside with Phil. She was sobbing and moaning. Tears were rushing down her cheeks. She was holding a wad of tissues that was all wet and clumpy from all the crying she had done. Jack had to hold onto her to keep her on her feet.

  From the church we went to the cemetery, where my mother cried some more. Then we all went back to our house, where a bunch of my mother’s friends were waiting with food for all the guests. After that it was kind of like a party—people talked about a lot of things besides Phil. My mother sat on the couch in the living room with a couple of her friends. She was pale and looked tired.

  “Tough day, huh, David?” Jack said. He had come outside on the back porch where I was sitting. He dropped down onto the top step beside me and took a swallow from the beer bottle in his hand. “How are you holding up?”

  “Okay, I guess,” I said. “I’m kind of worried about Mom, though. She hasn’t stopped crying in days.”

  “It’s scary for her,” Jack said. “She’s afraid to be on her own.”

  “She’s not on her own,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Jack squeezed my shoulder. “I know, David. What I meant is, she’s afraid to be on her own with no one to look after her the way Phil did. Maybe she’s afraid she’s going to end up the way she did after your dad went away.”

  I looked at him. That was a funny way to put it. After your dad went away, like he’d taken a trip instead of died.