Missing Pieces (9 page)

Chapter 34

I found Randy’s brother,
Derek, and bragged about the target on our mailbox. I hoped he would tell Randy. All the clues pointed to him, but I couldn’t limit my investigation to just one suspect, especially when I wasn’t sure. I decided to approach the meanest group at school, led by none other than Boo Heckler.

Ashley and I had a run-in with Boo, who had threatened us if we didn’t let him ride our ATVs. I had stood up to him, which felt good, and Boo hadn’t bothered us since.

He sat with a few friends in the shade behind the school. They’re all tobacco challenged. By the time kids get to be our age, everybody knows the dangers of smoking, but I guess Boo and his gang don’t care. They smell like ashtrays. It’s hard to even breathe around them.

Boo looked up like I was holding a fire extinguisher, threatening to put out their smokes. “What do you want, Timberline?”

“Got something funny for you. With all the mailbox bashing, we’ve painted a target on ours.”

Boo paused, took a puff, and looked at his friends. “I’m holding my sides.”

Everybody laughed.

Then I told as many people as I could who might have friends or relatives who could be the vandals.

And I hoped they wouldn’t come back until Friday night.

Chapter 35

When the final bell rang
I raced to the lunchroom and found Mrs. Garcia sitting on one of the tall kitchen stools by the garbage bins out back. Her back was to me, and I could tell she was crying by the way her shoulders shook. She turned when I put my backpack down. Her eyes were red and her face splotchy. You don’t think of grown-ups crying like little kids, but Mrs. Garcia looked like she was about four years old.

She wiped her face and blew her nose. “Tell me what you found out about Danielle.”

I told her what I’d read in the newspaper and she said, “You’d better sit down.”

I sat on my backpack in the smelly air around the garbage bins. You don’t find a lot of flies in our part of Colorado, but it looked like they were having a convention behind the school.

Mrs. Garcia watched a bus winding its way from the school into Red Rock. “She would have been seven now, finishing second grade.”

“How did it happen?” I said.

“Danielle was only a few weeks old when John, my husband, shipped out with the army from Fort Carson. I didn’t want to leave Danielle, but we needed the money. I worked nights when it was easier to get a sitter.

“A young woman in the neighborhood—a teacher named Tonya Zoloff—was pregnant and offered to watch Danielle for free. Said it would be good training.”

Mrs. Garcia wiped her eyes again. “While I was walking home from work at about 10 that night, I heard the sirens and saw the lights. When I saw smoke coming from our building, I could hardly breathe. Firemen were shooting water into our apartment.

“I raced upstairs, and one of the neighbors said, ‘There she is.’ Tonya was wrapped in a blanket, an oxygen mask over her face. I lifted the blanket, looking for Danielle, but she wasn’t there. That’s when I started screaming.

“I passed out and came to in the hospital. I found out the babysitter had fallen asleep on the couch after putting Danielle to bed. When she woke up, she smelled smoke and ran to Danielle’s room. When Tonya opened the door, she said it was like the whole room exploded. She was able to dial 911 from the kitchen and then ran outside.”

“She never got to Danielle?”

Mrs. Garcia shook her head and looked up, as if she could still see the scene. “I’ll never forget finally going home and seeing her room. I’d found a border with animals and Noah’s ark. It was so bright and cheery. But now her little crib was as black as coal, the walls torn up, plaster hanging, water damage everywhere. We had the funeral with no body.”

“No
body? How could that be?”

“The firefighters said Danielle must have been consumed. And because she was a newborn, there wasn’t even any bone tissue left.”

The whole thing creeped me out. I couldn’t believe they couldn’t find any trace of the baby, but if the firefighters said it was true . . . “How did the fire start?” I said.

“They said the electrical connection to the baby monitor was frayed and had probably sparked.”

“I’ll bet the babysitter felt awful.”

Mrs. Garcia nodded. “She moved away a few days later, and I haven’t seen her since. I think she just felt too bad. A month later my husband was killed in a roadside bombing. I was all alone.”

Mrs. Garcia leaned forward. “Ashley, I don’t think my baby died that night.”

Chapter 36

All the mailboxes on our road
had been fixed except one—and those people were on vacation. I hoped the news about my target mailbox had made the rounds.

When I got home, Randy’s truck was in the driveway. I saw a huge plastic bag in the backseat. It had red, white, and blue wrappers inside.

“What’re you looking at?” Leigh said as she and Randy walked up.

I just about dropped my backpack. “Oh! Uh . . . n-nothing. I m-mean, what’s in the bag?”

“My dad got me some fireworks,” Randy said. “Firecrackers and stuff.”

“Cool,” I said. “Got any cherry bombs?”

“Yeah.”

“How about sparklers?”

“Sure.”

Chapter 37

Mrs. Garcia held out a picture.
“This is my Danielle.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

“Every time I see a bus go by or those milk cartons with missing children’s faces on them, I think about my baby. I’ve been working at different schools the past few years, hoping, praying . . .”

“You’ve been looking for her?”

She nodded and stared at the ground.

“Why do you think she’s still alive?”

“The window was open,” Mrs. Garcia said. “The firemen said it was like that when they arrived. I never got to ask Tonya, but it was cold that evening and I’m sure she wouldn’t have opened it. I think someone took my baby and set the fire to make it look like she had been killed.”

I went straight to my room when I got home, lit my candle, and opened my diary. I wrote everything I could remember about what Mrs. Garcia told me, including the babysitter’s full name—I guessed at the spelling. Before dinner, I ran a search on the Internet but turned up nothing for Tonya Zoloff.

I knew it had to be hard for Mrs. Garcia to admit her baby was dead, but if there was a chance she could be alive, I had to help her.