It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  “That’s for sure,” said Will. They were laid out on the black leather couch with the dogs, the Lab’s hot, fragile muzzle resting on Will’s thigh.

  “It’s supposed to be in the Palisades,” said Ruby, “but I don’t believe it for a minute. It looks like Florida or someplace. See those palm trees? There aren’t any palm trees in New Jersey.”

  Will looked at her quizzically, then had a faint recollection of a “Palisades” nearby. “I think it’s supposed to be the Pacific Palisades,” he said. “It’s in California.”

  Ruby flushed and muttered, “It’s still stupid.”

  “East or west,” said Will gallantly, “they’re a bunch of amateurs.”

  “Yeah,” said Ruby, giving him an interested, sideways, newly measuring glance.

  At that moment one of the contestants hid some high-profile jewelry in a jar of peanuts. What to do with the extra nuts? Stuff them in your mouth, of course.

  During the next commercial break Ruby said, “I guess you know about jewel heists and all that.”

  Will shrugged. “Whoever set this up couldn’t rob his own grandmother,” he said, although his single brush with the law had been the year before, when he’d brought a can of Mace to school to defend himself and had been suspended for carrying a weapon.

  “The two of us could really do something,” said Ruby. “About Neil Culp, I mean.”

  “Mmm,” said Will, beginning to stroke the dog’s black head, figuring he’d let the whole subject float on by.

  “We could break into his house,” said Ruby in a low voice. “We could take Snowbelle! That’s his cat. I’m sure she’d rather live with me.”

  Will’s hand paused in midair. “Who exactly is this guy?” he asked sharply.

  “Oh, you know,” said Ruby, backtracking, startled by his reaction. “He’s a big criminal.” She lowered her voice still more, as if Pat would have paid any attention even if she’d been around. “It’s all his fault that my father is in jail.”

  As soon as the show was over, she made Will take her to a diner where certain kids from her school hung out. “They’re afraid of me already,” she explained, “because of my father. But they’ll really be afraid of me once they see you.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  A lot of the things Will had done recently had ended wrong side up, and it was hard to tell beforehand which ones would. It would be easier if, say, doing forbidden stuff always turned out badly. But there was no clear pattern. Sometimes it was the punishment that was the fun.

  Not that Lemuel spent much time telling Will what to do. The closest he’d ever come to suggesting a rule was the previous summer, when Will had first come to live with him. They were watching baseball in the living room. Lemuel had his feet up on a wooden crate in which one of his fans had shipped him an ancient car horn in commemoration of some endless drive in Road Kill. Now it was covered with randomly folded newspapers. Lemuel said, “You didn’t let your mother down, did you?”

  Will did not take his eyes off the TV.

  “Because the only thing you have to remember is, never abandon a woman in need.”

  It was enough to make you gag, this nonsense straight out of one of the Bud Caddy novels. What did Lemuel think he’d done when he left his family (i.e., Will and his mother)? And how could Will have let down his mother with his stepfather standing in the way? Lemuel had been drinking all night; his once neatly trimmed beard had become more and more erratic, as if straw had started to poke out of a scarecrow; he was lucky to be upright. Still, he seemed to have guessed at certain of Will’s secret lapses or evasions. For a long moment all that kept Will tethered was an image of the stadium on the television. He knew that sometimes you could do the wrong thing—the truly awful, sickening thing—when you thought you’d settled on the right.

  But then Lemuel said, “I don’t care if you drink beer here as long as you don’t drink it all up,” and the creepiness passed, and soon the two of them were just sitting around watching baseball again. Will even fetched his father another can of beer, although he declined one for himself.

  Will could tell that Ruby did not think her father was innocent, exactly. But that evidently did not make him guilty. And it was obvious that this man Culp must be worse. “He tricked my dad,” said Ruby before dinner one cold dark evening. “He tricked him and he took all the money and now he lives like a king while my dad is in jail.”

  Ruby was picking at her white paper napkin as if it were skin.

  “When he takes my dad’s place,” she said, “we can all go to Six Flags. They have a ride there that twists you upside down.”

  Pat bustled in. When she’d showed up at intensive care, Will had thought she was in the wrong room. She was too glossy-looking to belong in the country, and although she was old, she looked nothing like the old women in the Berkshires—women, that is, who taught school, who shopped at the supermarket, or who came out of his friends’ houses late at night to berate them for missing their curfews. The lives of those women were over. You could tell that Pat was still centered in the whirlwind of hers. “What could the dogs have gotten into?” she asked, with that slightly clumsy energy of hers. “They are not at all well.”

  “Neil Culp must have poisoned them,” said Ruby.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s very likely,” said Pat, diverted by this entertaining new possibility. “But I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “When we get my dad out,” said Ruby, “my horse can greet him by whinnying and licking his hand.”

  Will looked back sharply and swiftly at Pat, but she’d noticed nothing out of the ordinary about Ruby’s phrasing. Instead she asked, “What horse is that, honey?” You couldn’t claim that her voice held any particular surprise, since she always sounded like that—as if she’d just gone over a big bump in the road.

  “You told me I could have a horse this year if I still wanted one as much as I did last year,” said Ruby.

  “Really?” said Pat. “Wasn’t that two years ago?”

  “Then I’ve wanted a horse for two whole years. I should probably get two of them.”

  “But, honey, I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Pat an octave higher.

  Will could see her mind starting to spin like a hamster wheel, filling up with words, but Ruby forestalled them with a “Pl-e-e-e-ease.” She drew it out like gum; the initial resistance was followed by a weak string that finally snapped. “It’s only right,” she said, her flat black eyes fixed on her mother.

  Will was used to this tone of voice now. Ruby wanted a horse the way she wanted justice. She was greedy for justice. She demanded a horse. You couldn’t distinguish between the cravings.

  Let Pat deal with her wheedling, thought Will; then he wouldn’t have to. But Pat was slippery. In a transparent attempt to avoid further entreaties, she suggested that Will take Ruby to the Red Barn for ice cream after dinner. Actually what she said was “I have an idea! Ice cream in February! Wouldn’t that be marvelous! It’s really better in the winter months, because that’s when you need the extra animal fat in your diet. I’ve found that often received wisdom is just plain wrong, and something else is going on entirely. Did you know that chocolate makes you feel loved?”

  Will didn’t mind. He took the Touareg because it had the best heater, and he left it going full blast as they idled in front of the barn-red building with the crossed white boards.

  “She shouldn’t tell me she’s going to get me a horse if she isn’t going to,” said Ruby, her pink tongue smoothing an arc around the ball of ice cream.

  Will, who was more of a biter, consumed a chunk of his cone as he resettled his left arm around the steering wheel. “Mmm,” he said.

  “It’s not right.”

  “This is good ice cream,” said Will.

  “Yeah,” she said, showing a gleam of little pointy teeth like an animal’s. “I got into that weird stuff but then I realized there was nothing like an ice-cream cone.”

  �
�Weird stuff?” said Will cautiously. “What weird stuff?”

  “Not—” she said, coloring. “I mean here!” she practically shouted. “Stuff that isn’t ice cream! Like fizzes! And soft serves! Mistos!”

  If she was going to get freaked out so easily, she shouldn’t wear a shirt that was barely held together on top by a leather shoelace, especially considering it was about twenty degrees out. Oh, he knew she had a crush on him; Pat hadn’t been far wrong. You’d think that this would give him some leverage with her, though, and it didn’t seem to.

  “I wonder if we could get both of them,” said Ruby. “Neil Culp and Riley Gibbs.” Her pronunciation of the two names reminded Will of the way his mother had spoken the names of the lawyers when she finally divorced Lemuel. They became the whole outside world.

  “I thought you wanted a horse,” said Will.

  Ruby narrowed her keen black eyes. “I outgrew horses long ago,” she said scornfully. “I only want what’s right.”

  Will basked in the heat whirring from the dashboard. Maybe greed always infused a crusade; maybe action was necessarily propelled by narcissism. Maybe both impulses stemmed from the same deep wiry root. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be.

  Will didn’t read any of his father’s books until long after the divorce. Once he had, certain scenes kept popping into his head: Bud Caddy hiding a runaway under his bed, Bud Caddy forced to shoot his friend through the heart, Bud Caddy’s tail-lights disappearing over a hill. Soon the bed, friend, and tail-lights all seemed to belong to Lemuel. They became the key elements of his other life, the one he’d come from and then slipped back into when he left the family. Sometimes Will envied this other life, sometimes he hated it, but it had always been as real to him as the side of the room he didn’t happen to be facing at the time—until he actually moved in with Lemuel and saw him watching TV in his undershirt.

  Wouldn’t it be funny if this other sort of life, which was hard and glorious and free, did not belong to Lemuel, but Will. He pushed the exposed ice cream into the cone with his tongue.

  CHAPTER

  25

  “Follow me,” whispered Ruby.

  She obviously didn’t recognize this as the title of Lemuel’s first book, which was good. But Will had been overtaken by doubt since the cold night they’d gone for ice cream, and her words set his teeth on edge. He covered by affecting an even greater lassitude than usual. “Where now?” he said lazily, his eyes half closed.

  He was sprawled on the futon in the sunroom, which normally wasn’t used much. Will didn’t know why—maybe because it was on the third floor, at the end of the hall, away from everything; maybe because of the disconcerting skylight set into the roof; maybe because the thick-leafed plants looked vaguely like man-eaters. But since Pat’s friend Virginia had appeared early in the week, Ruby had tended to drift in here to get away from her.

  “Wait till you see this,” said Ruby from the doorway, beckoning.

  Will hoped she would produce nothing more than an uninteresting drug or even a faddy and expensive drug substitute, like clove cigarettes. (What a middle schooler in Hart Ridge would have access to, he had no idea.) But he feared she’d taken a new step in her revenge against Culp.

  “You won’t believe it,” said Ruby. Outside the library, she carefully placed her finger on her lips, snuck a peek round the door frame, and then pointed with the top couple of joints of this same index finger. Will had to look twice to see what Ruby was trying to call attention to. Virginia was sitting in one of the club chairs reading. She was also poking herself hard in the thigh with the sharp end of a pen. Out in the hall, Ruby began to imitate her, again with the finger. Will turned on his heels.

  The dislike between the two of them was kind of gross, really. It was true that Virginia sometimes looked as if she were going to break in half right in front of your eyes, but Will knew she wouldn’t, and it was Virginia’s plainspoken dourness that he respected. You had to make room in this life for scary stuff, which wasn’t going anywhere; it was here to stay.

  Oddly Pat could be as spooky around Virginia as her daughter was. Pat handled her old friend more carefully than you would a normal person. So that night, when Virginia rose to do the dishes and Pat did not try to stop her or tiptoe around the subject in any way, he knew that something was up.

  “I have something to tell you,” said Pat. She was practically jumping out of her chair, eyes bright, hands clasped with restless excitement. “Virginia and I are going to check out a wind farm tomorrow.” She glanced from Ruby to Will, evidently searching for a corresponding enthusiasm. “You’re going to thank us someday. It’s about time we harnessed the energy of the wind. I was thinking I would set up a fund for the LinkAge victims with the profits! Can you believe it? Me? Who would have thought? It’s all here, in stuff I got off the Internet. I always print everything out. I hate reading a screen. I just can’t get used to it. Do you have your own computer, Will? You should. That’s the only way to really learn how to use one. You have to fool around with it a lot. I have some of the cutest photos of wind farms. I hate to tell you what they remind me of. I may sound a bit raunchy. And such a crop of them!”

  Ruby narrowed her eyes. “How long will you be gone?” she asked.

  “It’s in upstate New York,” said Pat, “so we’re going to fly up tomorrow night to get an early start the next day. But we’ll be back before you know it.”

  Ruby gave Will a significant look and said, “What time tomorrow?”

  Will frowned. He knew he should not be as irritated as he was. It was a sign of nerves. He started to yawn, but remembered that his father had told him that yawning was also a sign of nerves. His mouth snapped shut. Then he was reminded of something else his father said: Keeping your hands in your pockets was an indication that you had something to hide. Will immediately took out his hands and crossed them over his chest. He started up the stairs that way. He was not sure that he intended Ruby to follow him, but she did. At the second floor, he started to follow her.

  Once the attic door was shut behind them, Ruby prevented him from pulling the chain on the single naked bulb. She did not turn on the flashlight that lay in front of her. Instead they relied on the stripes that an outside floodlight cast through a side vent. They sat cross-legged on raw plywood at the top of the unfinished stairs. There was an odd sour underscent.

  “We’ve got to move tomorrow,” she said, “while my mom is away…”

  The words, borrowed from some movie, were self-important, irksome.

  “…if we want to hit the Culps before they flee the country.”

  Worse.

  She was sitting amid all the equipment they had accumulated over the last couple of weeks. In addition to the flashlight, there were several printouts of a satellite photo from Google Earth, two pairs of black leather sneakers without a centimeter of white; two pairs of black leather gloves, two black turtlenecks, two pairs of black pants—leggings for Ruby, sweats for Will—and a pair of black pantyhose that Ruby had cut in two. Will had willingly helped with the logistics of the purchases, but the apparently endless supply of cash Ruby got from Pat made their efforts seem unreal. Ruby was a child; she was playing.

  “What, exactly, do you want to do with this stuff?” he asked.

  “Get Neil Culp,” said Ruby.

  “Right,” said Will. “But how?”

  “I thought you were supposed to know what to do!” She, too, was querulous, as she always was when thwarted. “Can you cut a pane of glass?”

  Will frowned, glancing unconsciously at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Although they could both see that it was still closed, they were keeping their voices low. He began to roll up his shirtsleeves.

  “Just a small hole,” said Ruby, “so you can reach around and let me in one of the Culps’ windows. Or maybe you can cut a bigger one, so I could crawl in and then I could let you in the cellar door.”

  Will was discomfited by the far-fetched scenario. “We migh
t be able to just walk in,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Most burglaries are inside jobs, you know.”

  Ruby nodded, impressed with this expert knowledge.

  “But then what would we do?” said Will reasonably. “You couldn’t get into their computer.”

  Ruby shook her head. “Neil Culp and Riley Gibbs didn’t use a computer,” she said. “They passed notes.”

  Passed notes? As if they were in math class? “You’re kidding,” said Will.

  “My father said that Riley couldn’t even use a computer. Unlike my father, who could do anything. He was a whiz. There’s a plaque in his office that says so.”

  Will was barely listening. Until this moment he had been unable to remember exactly what had first excited him about Ruby’s plan. Now, once again, he was startled by an atom of happiness. Here was something that might be worth doing. Many, many things were not worth doing; whole weeks could pass that offered nothing more than the emptiest of possibilities, like his unrealizable hopes about a job. But Culp’s boss couldn’t use a computer! Whatever space he’d been taking up in Will’s brain suddenly dwindled. Will was familiar with this incapacity. Lemuel couldn’t use a computer, either. Will was no haxor or whatever those computer nerds called themselves nowadays, but he didn’t know how Lemuel had survived without him. The man couldn’t handle a download. And look at Pat’s excitement about the simplest search on the Internet.

  “Well?” said Ruby.

  Will had a brief vision of throwing her to the ground as bullets whistled overhead. “Let’s see one of those printouts,” he said.

  Ruby, who had been to the Culps’ estate once with her parents, pointed to one of the satellite photos. The polish on her little round circle of a fingernail was flaking. Along the river was a series of very long, narrow lots which made no sense until you realized the layout maximized access to the riverfront. Each of the houses dangled at the end of a long driveway as straight as a string.

  The lots were covered with trees, so Will did not expect to have any trouble approaching the Culp estate. He could park on the road, sneak up the driveway, and then creep around through the thick trees. He had always been comfortable in the woods, and his night vision was good. He might not move as noiselessly as an early Indian—a legendary figure he had his doubts about, anyway; there were too many brittle crackling leaves in the world, too many tiny, snapping branches—but it was easy for him to picture slipping through darkness. He still had Frank Foy’s letter folded in his back pocket. Although he had not showed it to Ruby, it might be useful. In it Foy reminded Pat of the placement of the single alarm at the Culp mansion. Evidently he’d expected her to confront Culp.