Melody Burning (14 page)

“I promise.”

Boy, is this place BIG. Plus it feels all courtlike and scary, and I see cops bringing in these two sweaty fat monsters in handcuffs with torn up T-shirts. One of them has blood on him and looks like he could eat the Incredible Hulk for din-din, which maybe he just finished doing.

I push the door open and there are these benches with kids sitting on them, and there is a big Latina beside her hunched-over daughter, who is crying, and Mom has a defiant look on her face, like her girl had to have been picked up by mistake or something. I hope that is true, but I bet it isn’t.

I go up to a desk where there is a lady in uniform. She has a gun. Everybody in uniform here has a gun and a billy club. This is not a nice place in any way.

The lady is writing. She keeps writing. If I was a taxpayer, I’d be outraged.

“Ma’am, I am trying to locate a boy who was brought in last night.”

“Family?”

“That’s the thing—we’re not sure. We read that he’d been taken from the Beresford and was unidentified.”

She looks up. Now I wish I’d worn a nun’s habit, not this ridiculous getup.

“Oh, man,” she says. “Melody McGrath!”

Silence falls. I feel the eyes on me, all of them in the room. It’s as still as the air before a storm.

“You know him, Miss McGrath? Because we got no ID on him.”

“I may know him.” I feel like a bird that has just discovered it is in a cage.

“Oh, hey, can you sign this for my son?” a guard asks. He has a napkin, which I sign with his Bic.

“He went into the system,” the lady at the desk says. “He’s at, um—actually, I shouldn’t tell you this if you’re not family.”

“We don’t know. If he’s autistic, he might be.”

She gives me a this-is-weird look, then goes into bureaucratic mode. “They took him over to Willamette. The charges didn’t go with him, so he’s gonna get fostered.”

I tell her thank you and turn and give two more autographs. The girl who was hunched over watches me with the most incredible longing, and I know what’s in her mind: “If only I was you.”

Back in the car, I tell Julius, “He’s at Willamette.” Then I ask, “Do you know where that is?”

“Silver Lake. But it’s a camp. They have visiting hours at those places.”

“Will you take me?”

“If your mom allows it, sure.”

“Then forget it. Because she won’t.”

“You have your live run-through tomorrow. When it’s over, we can do a detour.”

“She’ll be in the car.”

“She’ll be in the limo. I’ll come separately.”

He can be such a doll, but when I really think about it, what will they do for me at Willamette that didn’t happen at Westview? They’re not going to help me. Going to these places isn’t the way to succeed, here.

“Thanks, but let’s just forget it.”

At home I lie back on my bed and think. He is in there. I am out here. He has to be very scared and confused. I mean, he doesn’t know much of anything.

What if I could identify him for them? Find out his name?

Maybe he has a place on the roof. That night he found me up there, he hid back in the shadows near the water towers.

One second later, I am in the hall with my flashlight in hand. Julius is probably downstairs in his room watching me on a camera and saying to himself, “Doesn’t this kid ever stop?” Since I got caught with the boy, he has orders to check on my every move. (The hatch into the crawl space is gone, plastered over while we were in rehearsal.)

I go to the stairs and up to the roof.

It’s big and beautiful and easy to imagine that you’re on a magic carpet flying above this astonishing sea of lights. The Beresford is fifty stories tall and on a hill, so I think it’s about the highest building in downtown.

I look for his place. It has to be small and well concealed.

Up close, the air-conditioning towers are massive, and there is a humid, old-water smell to them. I’m not sure how building air-conditioning works, but up close this is really impressive and daunting. Could I get hurt getting too close? Is it electric? But no, it’s full of falling water.

Back here, this is where he came out of, definitely.

I shine my light along the opposite wall, which must be some kind of storage or equipment room. I see nothing . . . until I do. There, down there, is a long crease, black. Looks like a shadow until I go closer. Shining my light in, I can see that it’s like a low, narrow hatch. There is no handle, so I pull at it but I can’t get a grip. I push, but it doesn’t move inward. Then I slide my fingers along the edge, which is so fine that without the flashlight I never would have seen it.

I push the top edge. Nothing. Then the bottom edge. It levers out a little at the top. I pull at the exposed sliver, and it comes down.

To see in, I have to lie flat on the roof. I shine my light into this very small chamber. It’s maybe seven feet long, three feet deep, and three feet high. It’s like some kind of shelf with a cover on it. Could have been a space for drills and things.

I’m highly claustrophobic, but I slide in anyway and look around. There are clothes stacked up at the far end, neatly folded. There are three bottles of water, an Evian and a couple of Poland Springs. There’s a half-empty bottle of fruit punch Gatorade. On the wall, there’s a picture of a woman. It’s color, an old snapshot, tiny and wrinkled like it came out of a little boy’s pocket, which I’m sure it did. She is thin, with blond hair like his. Standing beside her in the sunlight of another time is a happy-faced little boy, and I know with total certainty that it is him.

I can see a story here, of loss and abandonment, and although many of the pieces are missing, I can also see the tragedy of it, the little boy deserted during his father’s murder, too scared to ask for help but smart enough to make this crazy, impossible place his home.

Looking at his little bit of stuff—the few clothes, the threadbare blanket—and thinking of his deep, pleading eyes, I know I am falling for him in a big way.

What I cannot see, though, is any sign at all of who he actually is. No name scrawled on the picture, no souvenir with an address on it, nothing.

It’s so sad and so incredible. I turn over and grab his blanket, and I can smell him in it—the sadness of a boy alone. And I cry and I cry and I cry.

C
HAPTER 14

O
n the third night of his captivity, Beresford was watching TV in the rec room at Willamette when he saw something that really scared him: a shot on
CSI
of a time bomb. It had a digital timer wired to three waxy, bright red sticks that looked like candles. For a moment he was confused, trying to recall where he’d seen this before. Then he remembered—there had been something that looked very much like it in the space where he’d hidden between two of the tanks in the Beresford’s fuel storage area.

Before he could stop himself, he jumped up and cried out. He immediately stifled the sound, but not before a ripple of suppressed laughter filled the room. The other kids hated him. They called him “the vampire” or “zombie boy.” He dropped back into his seat, but his mind was racing and his breath came in gasps.

He’d been focused on the kids since he arrived, on trying to figure them out. But this discovery devastated him. He had to get back to the Beresford. Somehow, he had to escape.

There was no point in telling the staff. They’d just think it was another one of his crazy attempts to get out.

He sat like a stone, staring at the TV but not seeing it. He needed a plan. Since his attempt to get out through the ductwork at Westview, they had kept him on tight lockdown, so he was in his own tiny cell at night. There was no way out—he’d explored every inch of it.

Sometimes kids got to go with their families on weekend nights, and maybe there was some sort of opportunity. He approached Mr. Lopez, a monitor on duty.

Finally Mr. Lopez looked up from the magazine he was reading. “Yeah?”

“Can I go to the Melody McGrath concert tomorrow night?”

“Whaddaya know, it talks! You ain’t got a family to be signed out to, and with an escape attempt in your record, no judge would give you a home date anyway, even if you had one.”

“My name is Beresford McGrath. I told everybody that.”

“So ain’t it strange that your momma, Mrs. McGrath, has no idea that she even gave birth to you? You can’t just make up an identity, kid. An identity comes with a birth certificate and parents who know who you are—and a school record. You ain’t got none of that. What you do have is a placement hearing coming up, so you got a court appearance Tuesday.”

Beresford returned to his seat. He had to get back—that was all there was to it.

He knew that this place wasn’t all one building, and when you went from building to building, you were outside. They watched you, though, every minute, and anyway the rec room where he was now was in his dorm, so he wouldn’t be going out tonight.

Mr. Lopez was looking at him. Why? What was he thinking? He could never tell if somebody was mad or not. He didn’t know how to tell. It was easy to insult people here, and maybe he’d insulted Mr. Lopez. But how?

“Hey, kid.” Mr. Lopez nodded for him to come over, so Beresford went back to the desk.

“If you got a pass, where would you go? Just to that concert?”

At that moment, the bell rang and all the kids got up, suddenly very disciplined, heading for the wings of the building where the sleeping areas were. You could get a demerit for being slow on the bells.

As they congregated in front of the door to the boys’ wing, waiting for it to be buzzed open, Beresford felt a hand slip around his waist. He jumped away and whirled around, but the faces of the kids behind him were all blank.

Could they get into his room? They hit the door and rattled it whenever they got a chance. Only the staff had keys, but what did that mean around here? The kids really ran the place.

Beresford went into his room and closed the door. With the familiar loud buzz, all the doors locked.

In the silence that fell, the situation hit him so hard he had to gasp for breath. There was a bomb in the Beresford. Who might do this he could not imagine, but it was there, no question. When would it explode?

He had to get out of here
.

He paced back and forth, back and forth, slapping the door, slapping the narrow window, back and forth, back and forth.

Beresford thought about all the dogs and cats he comforted, the people who needed him, even mean old Mrs. Scutter—especially her, the way she was always falling asleep with lit cigarettes. He thought of Melody asleep in her apartment way up at the very top, and realized that when the explosion came, all the people on the top floors would be cut off and trapped.

He paced for a long time, he had no idea how long. Time was always kind of a surprise to him. He’d known night and day—but mostly night—in the crawls and chases where he’d lived. Sometimes on the roof he’d seen the sun, which was always disturbing because of how hard it made it for him to hide.

Finally, he felt sleepy and thought it was time to find a vacationer or go to his place on the roof—and then he remembered where he really was. He cried out, stifling it instantly with his fist.

Beresford lay down on the incredibly soft bed, then, as he had on all the nights he’d been here, took the blanket to the floor so he could sleep without feeling like he was falling. Melody had an even softer mattress. How could she stand it?

He lay staring up at the ceiling, at the faint reddish light that kept the room not quite dark. That was another thing he didn’t like here. It was never totally dark. He was best in total darkness, even climbing and moving through the crawls. It was what he was used to. He could navigate just by sound and touch.

He must have fallen asleep without realizing it, because a sound woke him up. The door went
bzzt
! Hardly any buzz at all.

Was it morning? No, the window was black. He sat up. Why would they be opening the doors now? He stood and grasped the door handle. Gently, he pulled and pushed, but the handle did not turn. So maybe he’d dreamed it.

The door burst open. Four hooded figures came in and pushed him up against the far wall. As they did, he shouted in surprise.

“Shaddup! The bulls ain’t comin’. The bulls gone deaf tonight.”

One of the figures was Rufus the Butcher, a gang guy. In his hands was a length of wire.

Beresford had not used his real strength against them before, but he had to now, he saw that immediately. As Rufus raised his fists, the wire taut between them, Beresford shrugged off the two boys holding him, lifting one of them and throwing him into the ceiling. The boy hit hard, crashing to the floor in a heap of ceiling tiles.

“Jesus!”

Beresford waded into them, swinging his arms, hammering them. Strong as they appeared, to him they were like paper. A lifetime of climbing had turned his muscles to iron.

He grabbed Rufus by his T-shirt and landed the hardest punch he could throw right in the middle of his stomach. With a huge gasp, Rufus shot backward out the door and into the far wall, then slumped to the floor.

The other two started to run, but he caught up with them in the hall and hit their heads together, dropping them both. The one he had thrown into the ceiling was still knocked out on the floor of his room.