The Yearbook (4 page)

Marky.

Who was
Marky?

Mark Rosenthal? As a kid? Impossible. For one thing, his grandmother is Jewish, not Greek.

Maybe the kid was me. I sure felt close to him, and I do call my grandmother Yiayia. But she’s in Greece, and nothing else in the dream happened in my life. It wasn’t even my house. Nothing looked right. The TV was kind of a strange, long shape, and the clothes were some ugly style I’d never seen.

Hmm, maybe Marky was an alien.

The dream fragments were breaking up now, like a radio station in a car speeding too far from the signal. Last night’s reality shoved itself back into my mind.

Or was Gumby a dream, too? I hoped so. Desperately.

“Are you okay in there?”

My mom was outside my door. Her voice was thick with early morning grogginess.

“Fine,” I replied.

She took that as an invitation to come in. In her robe, flannel nightgown, and bare feet, she seemed small and fragile. She hardly ever looks that way, and it was kind of refreshing. “Hi, sweetie. You had a nightmare, huh?”

“I guess.” I plopped my head back on my pillow, trying to look as if I needed to go back to sleep.

The truth? I was wide awake and flying.

“David …”

My mom has about seven hundred ways of saying my name. This was Number 359: the
suspicious
“David.”

“Your pants in the sink? They’re full of mud and grass.”

This threw me a little, because I thought she’d been upstairs sleeping the whole night. “Oh, sorry,” I said.

“You had a little
outdoor
proofreading?”

“Mom … I’m tired.… It’s Saturday.”

She let out a sigh and stood up. “Look, David, I know you’re not a boy anymore. But as long as you live in my house, you follow my rules. One: Come home when we agree, or call if you’re going to be late. Two: Don’t do anything …
foolish
you cannot take a man’s responsibility for.”

A man’s responsibility!
Suddenly, in her mind, I’d turned into every mom’s nightmare. My Son the Stud. I wanted to burst out laughing and say, “Thanks for the compliment!” I didn’t know who was the worse wishful thinker, her or me.

“I didn’t, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“All right … if you say so.”

As she shuffled back out of my room, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “Mom!”

She turned around. “Uh-huh?”

No.

I couldn’t tell her. It was too gruesome. She’d get hysterical. She’d call the cops. The school. The FBI. And what if I
had
dreamed the whole thing?

“Nothing,” I said.

She gave mea weird glance and left. I caught a glimpse of my digital clock: 5:28.

I got dressed quietly. No way was I going to sleep. I also had no intention of sitting there thinking about Gumby. I had to get my mind off it …
him.

No one had proofread the yearbook the night before, but Mr. Brophy had told Mr. DeWaart it could be done early this morning. I didn’t know what time Someday My Prints Will Come was open, but I’d find out.

And I would take the overland route to get there, as far from the Ramble as I could go.

“Aaagh! Someone hold me up! I’m seeing things!” Mr. Brophy said, clutching his heart and staggering backward on the print shop’s front steps. His gray, shoulder-length, aging-hippie hair fell across his pasty face.

He was joking, I assumed. But on this particular day, that particular kind of joke made me nervous. I smiled to humor him.

“It’s … it’s
a high school senior awake before noon on a Saturday!”
he gasped.

“Hey, some of us have to work hard,” I managed.

Mr. Brophy put his key in the front door. “Yeah, to make up for the other slobs, huh? Come on in. I have the mechanicals laid out for you. The photos aren’t pasted down yet, but you’ve got them marked on the back, right?”

“Right.”

“Matching pictures to names is something I can do pretty well,” he said. “It’s the names themselves that get me. My eyes cross after six letters.”

I followed him in, feeling queasy, thinking about what lay in the river a few hundred yards away. I vowed not to say a thing about it. If Gumby was a dream, I’d forget it eventually. If he was real,
somebody
would discover him. There would be an explanation, and I’d be able to forget the whole thing.

I went through the motions of proofreading. I vaguely remember correcting a few last names and skimming over some quotes, poems, and captions. But my concentration was shot. The letters on each page seemed to swarm like ants. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could do.

On my way out, I saw Mr. Brophy racing around the shop. Employees were straggling in, and machines were whirring. “Thursday okay?” he shouted.

“
This
Thursday?” I asked. “To print them
and
bind them?”

“What do you think I run here? A bunch of Benedictine monks with quills? I do everything in-house — and you guys ain’t the only school I’m doing. I’m like an accountant at tax time. I need to get you out of the way for the crunch, that’s all.”

“Thursday would be great,” I said.

He rummaged around a pile of papers and pulled out an envelope small enough to hold a yearbook photo. “This is the weird shot. You want one copy for each absentee, right?”

“Yep,” I said.

Mr. Brophy gave me a sly half-grin and shook his head. “You guys are sick, man. Worse than we were at your age.”

“They had photographs back then?”

“Out!” Mr. Brophy picked up an X-Acto knife and held it like a dagger. “Out, brazen child!”

I ran from the shop, surprised I had any sense of humor left.

Over the weekend, no one said a thing about a body. I listened to the local news each evening and kept my ears open in town.

On Monday morning, as I approached Wetherby High, I noticed three police cars parked in front.

Inside the lobby, students were gathered near the office doors of our principal, Mr. Dutton. I could see Ariana, Smut, and a friend of theirs named Monique Flores.

Monique is blond, wispy, smart, and very emotional. (When she found out she was class salutatorian, she burst into tears of disappointment.) Ariana and Smut were on either side of her, arm in arm, as if they had to support her.

“What happened?” I asked them.

“Rick Arnold’s …
missing
,” Monique said gravely, between sniffles. “The police are talking to Mr. Dutton about it.”

“His parents are in there,” Ariana added. “They’re hysterical.”

“Wow,” I replied. “When did they notice he was missing?”

“They’ve been looking since the weekend,” Smut said. “But they didn’t want to make a big deal about it. You know Rick. They figured he hitched down to Vanderbilt to camp out at his brother’s college dorm. He does that sometimes.”

“And he didn’t?” I asked.

Smut shook his head. “They’d have known by now. They think either he hitched with some wacko kidnapper, or he’s hiding out around here.”

“Did they mention anything about him, like what he was wearing?” I asked.

Ariana looked me in the eye. “Black shirt and black pants. Why?”

That confirmed it. I pictured the face in the Ramble and mentally filled it in with a skull and some cheekbones.

Gumby was Rick Arnold.

And I was the only one who knew where he was.

The door to the principal’s office swung open, and a stocky, youngish policeman stepped out.

“Uh, please disperse,” he shouted. “Come on, let’s decongest the egress.” (I never have understood why cops talk like that. This guy sounded like a taxidermist who took a wrong turn.)

I looked beyond him and caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold inside the office, their faces streaked with tears.

I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I stepped forward, staring at the policeman. He looked at me as if I were approaching the President of the United States with explosives strapped to my body.

“Move along, pal,” he said with a steely glare. “Ain’t you got homeroom?” His fingers instinctively perched near his billy club.

That
I understood. I froze in my tracks as he disappeared back into the office.

W
HACK!

The door to the yearbook office, heavy and wooden and stained with decades of student fingerprints, slammed shut.

I’d thought I was alone. I was sitting at Mr. DeWaart’s long desk, trying to calm my jitters. Even though the yearbook was finished, the desk was still piled so high with papers, a sneeze would bury anyone within five feet of it. At that point I found it the most comforting, private place in the school.

Until I looked up and saw Ariana.

She was staring at me with a mixture of annoyance, suspicion, and rage.

In a moment, my mind flashed with a ridiculous idea. She and Smut had killed Rick.

“So …” My voice was like sandpaper. I had to swallow before going on. “Three more days till the shipment, huh? Do you think Mr. Brophy will come through — ”

“You
know
something,” Ariana interrupted.

I stared at her, slack-jawed.

“Come on, David, you can’t lie to me. You really had no idea Rick was missing until this morning?”

“No! I found out from you, remember?” I lied beautifully. If we were in a movie, I’d have won an Academy Award.

“Then why was your first question ‘How long was he missing?’? And why did you turn the color of plaster when I mentioned the clothes he was wearing?”

“Did I? Clothes? I don’t remember that. …”

Whoops, forget it. My Oscar was flying out the window.

“Talk, David. And talk fast. First period begins in five minutes, and you never know who’s going to pop in here for a morning chat.”

I took a deep breath. I had to tell someone.

“Okay,” I said. “But I think you should sit down.”

Ariana’s eyes didn’t waver from me as I slowly told her everything. (Well, everything except the part about the Chevy with the steamy windows.)

By the time I finished, she was grimacing as if she’d just bit into a hunk of moldy bread. “This isn’t like some late April Fool’s thing, is it?”

“I wish, Ariana.”

She let out a breath and buried her face in her hands. “If you’re telling the truth, David, you’re a coward. If you’re not, you’re a nut case. I’m not sure which one I believe.”

“I’m not a nut case.”

“And I’m not a coward,” she replied, looking up. “If you don’t go straight to the police, I will.”

Her eyes were firm and frosty. “Don’t,” I said softly. “I’ll go.”

Ariana stood up and headed for the door. “Good luck, David.”

After a moment I went into the hallway. The police had left Mr. Dutton’s office, but they were gathered by their cars outside. I recognized Chief Hayes, a tall, gray-haired black man solemnly barking orders to a younger cop.

“Chief Hayes!” I called, stepping out the door.

“ ’S’my name,” he mumbled over his shoulder.

“I — I can show you where Rick Arnold is.”

He turned to face me, with what might have been a tic of interest in his stony expression. “Get in my car.”

I obeyed. He did some last-minute ordering around, then climbed into the driver’s seat. “What’s your name, kid,” he said, starting up, “and where are we going?”

“David Kallas,” I replied. “And … the Ramble, near Cass and River View.”

Chief Hayes’s face remained unmoved. But his hand yanked the automatic shift straight past Drive and all the way to L2. Murmuring a curse, he flicked it back up again. “You … saw the missing person in the Ramble, son?”

“Yes.”

“Am I correct in assuming, since you say this person is still there, that he is not presently alive?”

I felt absurdly guilty. I think if he’d asked me to confess to the murder, I’d have done it. “Yes.”

The car screeched away from the curb as he said something under his breath. I believe it was “Lord, have mercy.”

I was seized with violent chills as Chief Hayes parked by the Ramble. He noticed right away.

“You don’t have to come with me, you know,” he said. “As long as you give me the location of the body.”

“Okay,” I replied, but I was shaking so badly, it came out more like
Kuh.
“T-to the left of — of the car p-path.”

“Near the big drainpipe?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Stay here. Take deep breaths and put your head between your knees. If you feel sick, for God’s sake, get out of the car.”

Chief Hayes wasn’t going to win points for sensitivity.

I watched him plod into the woods. I figured he must have been about sixty, but he was still a bull of a man. He had a slight limp, which somehow made him look tough and heroic.

Chief Hayes was gone about a half-hour, I think. When he came back, he looked as if he’d aged ten years. His taut, wary features had gone droopy like a basset hound’s, and his eyes were glassy.

Neither of us said a word as he plopped into the front seat. He stared at a spot just above the steering wheel.

“I — I didn’t do it,” I said weakly.

Chief Hayes nodded. “I know.” He took his radio mike from its holder and put it slowly to his mouth. “Sergeant Kinsman, do you read me?”

“Yeah, Chief,” a voice crackled back.

“We have located a male corpse matching the description of the Arnold boy.”

As he gave the details in a dull monotone, he rubbed the back of his left hand against his eyes. I noticed a wet sheen along his thumb when he pulled his hand away.

If I didn’t think such a thing was impossible, I’d be convinced Chief Hayes was crying. He slammed the mike down after he was done and muttered something about hay fever.

Another cop car arrived in minutes. Chief Hayes went out for a conference, then came back in and started the car.

He pulled away from the curb jerkily and nearly rammed into a road construction site barrier. Then he ran a stop sign on Cass, only to slam on the brakes and curse. I’d have offered to drive, but I was afraid he’d throw me in jail for asking. Instead, I settled back and was thankful we weren’t in a high-speed chase.

Eventually we arrived at the police headquarters, a squat, yellow-brick building in the same Late Eyesore style as the rest of downtown Wetherby. Chief Hayes led me inside. His office was at the end of a dim, tiled hall. Inside, a rotating fan swept past file folders stacked on a row of metal cabinets. Jutting triangular corners of paper razzed us like small white tongues in the breeze. Chief Hayes sat behind a wooden desk covered with papers and an old computer. I sank into the torn green cushion of a chair opposite him. I noticed a chunk of wood was missing from the lip of his desk on my side, about the size and shape of a bite mark. I couldn’t imagine what jail must be like if
this
was the police chief’s office.