Truth and Lies (21 page)

I said sure, because I had enough to think about too.

Sal was sitting on the front steps when I got there. He stood up when he saw me and came down the walk toward me.

“How's your dad?” I asked.

“He's in the hospital,” Sal said. He looked terrible.
His face was pale, and he had dark circles under his eyes. His hair was standing up in a hundred different directions. “Psych ward.”

“Did they arrest him?”

Sal shook his head no. “But he's not allowed to leave the hospital until the doctors say he can.” He glanced back toward the house. “My mom was crying all night.” Sal's lip trembled, and for a moment I thought he was going to start to cry too, which would have been okay with me. “Hey, Mike?”

I waited.

“What you did? Thanks. I was afraid the cops were going to storm the streetcar or something. I was afraid they were going to shoot him.”

“I knew your dad would never hurt anyone, Sal,” I said.

And then, jeez, there it was. Sal was crying. Not blubbering, but he was definitely leaking tears and wiping them away with the back of his hand. I didn't say anything about that. Instead I said, “You going to school today?”

He shook his head.

“Want me to bring your homework?”

Sal nodded, but I knew from the spaced-out look in his eyes that he was nodding by reflex, not because he actually cared.

“I'll come by later, okay?” I said.

He nodded again.

I noticed the red hair—how could I not notice it burning like fire in the morning sun?—before I registered that it was
her
hair. Rebecca was standing on a corner a couple of blocks from school. She kept looking around, as if she was waiting for someone. Then her eyes locked onto me. Well, that was that. Now she was going to turn and flee in the opposite direction for sure. I didn't understand why she reacted to me the way she did, but I didn't have to be pulling straight As to figure out that she didn't like me.

So I was surprised when she walked straight toward me, looking at me the whole time, like
I
was the person she had been waiting for. Or maybe someone was coming up behind me and Rebecca was walking toward
that
person. I glanced over my shoulder. There was no one behind me. When I turned back, she had stopped in front of me.

“Hi,” she said. She was looking me over. She peered deep into my eyes again. I noticed that her eyes were dark brown, with little sparkles of gold in them.

“Hi,” I said.

I glanced around, looking for that hidden camera or that group of girls who had dared her—
Betcha don't have the nerve to go and talk to the bad boy
. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary—well, besides Rebecca standing right there in front of me, staring into my eyes.

“I heard what you did on that streetcar,” she said. “With that man who was sick.”

The man who was sick
. She hadn't said
the crazy man
or
the violent man
or
the man with the hammer
. She had said
that man who was sick
. She'd said it as if she understood what had happened. It made me look at her with new interest.

“I thought about it all night,” she said.

I was doing a little thinking of my own.
Why is she talking to me?

“I don't get it,” she said.

Get what?

“It was a good thing to do,” she said. “Not everybody would have done that.”

“I didn't want anyone to get hurt,” I said.

“That's what I don't get.”

I started to get a bad feeling about where this was going.

“So I don't get how you could help that man the way you did,” she said, “and also be involved in what happened in the park.”

“
What?”

“I saw,” she said.

I felt myself go cold all over. The bright sunny morning turned chilly and dark.

Jeez
, I thought—
her, too?

I knew Vin's schedule cold, so it was no big deal to scoot from music to Vin's computer class, which was two classrooms down, and grab Vin just as he was coming out the door. He looked surprised to see me.

“I gotta talk to you,” I said.

“Yeah, sure,” Vin said. “We'll hook up at lunch.”

“I gotta talk to you
now
.” I nodded toward the stairwell. “Come on.”

“What about class?”

“This is important, Vin. Way more important than whatever lame class you have next.”

“Yeah?” Vin said. “Even if it's Cop Boy's class? In fact—” He gave his head a little nod, and I saw Riel down the hall, talking to another teacher. Riel saw me too.

I grabbed Vin by the arm and dragged him toward the stairwell. I led him down to the ground floor and out behind the school.

“Jeez,” Vin said, “this better be important. Riel knows I'm here, so if I ditch his class he's going make me write an extra essay or something.”

“You have to tell them, Vin.”

“What?” Vin looked confused. I could imagine the questions popping into his head.
Tell who? Tell them what?

“You have to tell the cops exactly what happened in the park the night Robbie Ducharme died,” I said.

Vin stared at me. Then he laughed. “This is a joke, right?” he said. “You're jazzing me, right, Mike? Last I heard, some guy said he'd seen you near the park that night.” He seemed to think that was funny. “And the cops were here with a search warrant yesterday. They were going through your locker.” He stopped and looked at me. “Everything's okay, isn't it, Mike?”

“What do you mean?”

There, his eyes shifted away from mine. Now I knew for sure something was wrong.

“Did they find anything?” he asked.

“There was nothing to find,” I said.

I saw a flicker of something—what? relief?—on his face.

“I don't get it,” I said. “We were friends. Best friends. At least, I thought we were.”

“We
are
friends,” Vin said. His smile was a little shaky. “What's the matter with you, Mike?”

“I found something in my locker,” I said. “And you're the only person who could have put it there.”

Now Vin really did laugh. Except it was a kind of nervous laugh. “Yeah, right,” he said. “There's only about a hundred people who know how to get into your locker.”

“I changed the combination,” I said. “Remember?”

“Yeah. And right away you told me the new one. I bet you told Sal and—”

“You know Riel,” I said. “You know what he's like. My math book disappeared from my locker right after I started living with him, and he went ballistic. I must have heard ten different lectures—
long
lectures—about how he expects me to be responsible, keep track of my stuff, how if anything gets lost, I have to pay for it. So I got a new lock and I promised I wouldn't tell anyone else the combination.”

“Yeah, but you did. You told me.”

“You're the only person I told,” I said. “And I only
told you because you were desperate to get your hands on my French book because you'd left yours at home. And because you were my best friend.”

Vin's smile vanished. “Are you saying you think
I
put Robbie's watch in your locker?”

I shook my head. Ten years. That was how long I had known Vin. And for almost that whole time, we had been inseparable. We had gone to the same schools, were in the same classes all through elementary school and junior high. We spent long summer days and cold Christmas holidays together. Up until a few months ago, we hung out together after school almost every day. We liked the same kind of music, the same movies, the same video games. In ten years, you think you know a person. You think nothing they could do would ever surprise you.

“I never said anything about Robbie's watch,” I said.

Vin's face sagged. He shook his head.

“You can either go to the cops yourself and tell them, or I will,” I said.

A threat. Vin hated threats. They made him angry, made him fight back, made him try to get even. He straightened up. Some of the old Vin fire started to burn in his eyes.

“You're going to go to the cops about
me
?” he said. “They've already questioned you—what?—twice, three times. And now you're going to tell them you found Robbie Ducharme's watch in your locker and you think someone
else
put it there? You really think they're going
to believe that, Mikey? You think if you tell them I put it there, I'm going to say, Yeah, I did it; I did something I didn't do?”

“
Did
you put Robbie's watch in my locker?” I said.

For a moment he just looked at me. He was still looking at me—looking me straight in the eyes—when he shook his head.

“But Cat asked me if I knew the combination,” he said. “And I gave it to her. I didn't know what she was going to do, honest.”

“But you knew the watch was there. You just said so.”

“She told me. After the cops were here.”

Probably like she told him, after, that she'd lied to the cops about seeing me with Robbie.

“But we're such good friends that you didn't tell me?” I said.

He looked down at the ground for a moment. When his eyes met mine again, I could tell he was sorry. He looked nervous and scared and sad, like something bad was going to happen and he was afraid what it might be and he wished he could go back in time and change it all.

“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“But instead you let Cat set me up.”

“She knew about you and your locker,” he said. “Everyone knows your combination is no secret.”

“So she decided, why not pin the blame on me?”

“No, Mikey—” Vin said.

“
No?
Jeez, Vin, do I look stupid?”

“I mean, no, she didn't think you'd actually get nailed for it. She said with your connections, you'd get a good lawyer.”

By connections, he meant Riel.

“She said a good lawyer would say you didn't put Robbie Ducharme's watch in your locker, but that someone else did. Anyone could have put it in there, Mike, the way you hand out your locker combination. She said anything else the cops have, it's all circumstantial. She said by that time, though, the cops might never be able to figure out exactly what happened.”

“And if I tell them what you just told me, that Cat put it there?”

“She'll just deny it.”

“But you'll back me up, right?” I said. “Since you're my best friend.”

He looked down at the ground again.

“You told Cat what I told you about Rebecca, too, didn't you?” I said. “Did you tell her to threaten Rebecca, too?”

Nothing. He didn't even look at me.

“Well, it didn't work,” I said. “She was scared for a while.” In fact, she'd been terrified for a while. “But she's not scared enough to stay quiet anymore. She's going to tell the cops that after she first talked to them, she did recognize one person coming out of the park that night. She's going to tell them about the threats she got too. The ones that made her afraid to go back and tell the cops more. Funny thing that she only got threatened
after I told you about her. Her name was never in the paper. The cops never said who she was. You're the only person who knew, Vin.”