All for One (34 page)

“Who did it, Mandy?”

She stopped with the crayon and spread the waxy color out evenly with her thumb. “Telling isn’t nice, Charlie.” Her eyes came up from the picture, grim and rigid. “No one likes a tattletale.”

Twenty Nine

He knew something was wrong the moment he saw her drive up.

First of all, his sisters weren’t in the minivan, and that meant plenty in itself, unless God had decided to belatedly answer a prayer he’d sent up in anger some three years earlier after Connie and Bonnie had put his homework in the toilet. It was barely after three and where else would they be? They were almost always with his mom at this time.

Second, there was the way she was looking at him through the windshield. She was smiling, but not in a happy way. It was the kind of smile you put on when you didn’t want anyone to know you were anything but happy. Bryce knew that smile well. He was an expert at it, or had been once. Even though he was very young at the time he could remember the woman he called the adoption lady taking him to an office every few weeks, patting him on the head, and telling him to smile because some nice people were going to take a look at him and, if they liked him enough, they might just take him home for good.

He’d smiled so much like that that it took him a while to remember what a real smile was after some nice people actually did take him home for good. And now one of those nice people was giving him the same smile he was sure he knew better that she did.

And last, when he opened the door and got in, his mom didn’t say anything about his seatbelt. She just started to drive away. Before he even had the buckle in hand. She just drove away.

So he buckled up and said nothing on the short trip home. His mother paid inordinate attention to the turn signals and said nothing herself.
Too busy with the signaling and all, son. Sorry. Gotta be careful about these turns, you know.

When they arrived home his mother pulled into the driveway and stopped short of the garage, never even touching the opener clipped to the sun visor.

“I think I’ll park out here for now.” Caroline Hool stole a glance at her son, one too quick to serve any purpose but evasion. She turned off the car and said, “Let’s get inside. Your father and I—”

“Dad’s home?”

“Yes,” Caroline Hool answered, nodding at the steering wheel.

“Are the twins here?” Bryce asked calmly.

His mother shook her head. “Cathy Bowen is watching them for a while.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, Bryce?” she asked the side view mirror.

“Why won’t you look at me?”

‘Don’t be his friend. Make him feel alone. He needs to feel alone. It’ll be much easier that way.’ Caroline Hool sniffled.
For who? For who is it going to be easier?
“We’d better get inside, Bryce.”

His mom opened the door and pulled the keys from the ignition to stop the chiming. She was waiting by the front steps for him, and walked up behind him like some prison guard, staying right on his heels until he was in the living room.

His dad was sitting on the couch but stood when Bryce walked in.

“Go ahead and put your things in the chair, son,” Keith Hool directed his boy.

Bryce did, switching his gaze between his parents every second or so. He put his backpack down, and slipped his jacket off. When he was done his father motioned him over to a spot near the coffee table. Bryce stood there, his father sitting back down on the couch. His mother joined him there, leaving Bryce alone and upright, facing his parents like they were some kind of two person court and he was some kind of...

And then he noticed the wrinkled stack of papers on the coffee table, and the rumpled ball of his blue sweatshirt next to it. And he understood—evidence.

...criminal.

His heart did a quick dance in his chest.
They’re sending me back. They don’t want me any more. Just like that Jimmy Vincent. My parents don’t even want to know me any more. I’m going to go away somewhere.

He was both right and wrong.

“Bryce,” his father said, and looked his son straight in the eye. “Do you see what’s on the table here?”

“Yes, dad.” Dad. How much longer would he be calling him that?
‘Smile big, Bryce, and maybe we can find you a new dad.’

“Your mother found this part of your story when she was cleaning up.” Bryce stared at the sheets, wrinkles crawling the face of the top one. “She showed it to me along with the sweatshirt you were wearing on Halloween night. I was very...troubled by what I saw.” Keith Hool thought over his words again and said, “I am very troubled, Bryce. Your mother is too.”

Bryce’s eyes stayed fixed on the wrinkles, some carved into the page like tiny valleys, others rising like the knife-edge ridges of miniature mountain ranges. For a second a childish fantasy gripped him and he saw himself living in the wild, roaming real mountains and real valleys, sleeping in caves or hollowed-out trees. Making fires from deadfall, because that was the smart way to make a fire. Because dead wood burned best. His dad had taught him that. His dad had tried to teach him a lot.

“We want you to do something,” Caroline Hool said.

Pack?
Bryce wondered. It wouldn’t take long; whatever he had they, the Hools, had given him. He could leave everything behind. Everything but the things inside. The things that you never saw, but you felt. Those things were rocks deep within right now. Rocks that, somehow, had come alive as simple reminders of their presence. Rocks that throbbed now. Throbbed like organs, alive like his heart or some other piece of vital flesh, pounding instead in protest. Bryce looked at his father and mother. ‘
They taught you right and wrong. I’m that big rock. Conscience.
’ Or, ‘
You don’t make fun of people because of who they are, or what they look like, or lots of other things. You don’t tease PJ. You feel for her. I’m that rock next to your conscience. I’m empathy.
’ It was only a second’s time after his mother told him they wanted him to do something, but in that brief span Bryce felt all that the people who had become his parents had given him. He felt the weight of it. The value.

Maybe like never before, or ever again.

“What do you want me to do?”

Keith Hool motioned to the hall and tried to look stern. “We want you to go to your room.”

Huh?
“My room?”

“Yes,” Keith Hool confirmed. Now he pointed that way. “You’ll understand.”

Bryce looked to his mom for an explanation, but she had looked away.

“Go on, Bryce,” his father said.

Bryce’s gaze turned toward his room first, then his body. He started down the dim hall, glancing back once to find his mother collapsed onto his father’s lap, his arms around her. His feet settled into the carpet softly with each purposeful step and he heard a muffled whimper behind. His mother, he knew.

She’s crying. Why?
He had stopped right outside his room, the door shut. He wondered if all his stuff was boxed up or something, and they just wanted him to see it rather than tell him directly. But then why was his mom crying?

Bryce turned the knob and pushed the door. It swung in until fully opened, smacking lightly against the bookshelf tucked into the corner. He could see the whole room, all his things where they should be, nothing packed as if to be sent away. No, he could see everything, including the man sitting in a chair by the window. The kiddie catcher.

“Hello,” Dooley said, looking away from the gray outside.

Bryce stared at the detective for a moment, then his head turned slowly to look back down the hall, toward the living room where his mother’s whimper was now a sob buried against his father’s chest.
They’re turning me in...

“Don’t be mad at them, Bryce.” Dooley waited for the burning eyes to turn his way. They soon did. “They’re not doing this to get you in trouble.” He motioned for Bryce to come in.

Stiffly, Bryce entered, feeling alien in his own room. He stopped at the side of the bed farthest from Dooley and glared at him.
Real parents wouldn’t do this.

“They asked me to come here so you won’t get in trouble.”

Bryce nodded doubtfully. “Sure.”

“They care about you.”

“Yeah,” Bryce agreed, nothing behind what he spoke. Just plain old sound.

“I’m going to tell you three things.” Dooley stood from the chair and walked to the far end of Bryce’s room, to the long, deep shelf that served as desk and depository for items large and small. Books. Half an egg carton, its depressions filled with rich, dark soil that buds were just emerging from. A lamp. Two dozen or so plastic army men piled together. Pens. Pencils. Dooley picked a bright yellow number 2 up and twirled it in his fingers. “One, your parents love you. They’re not abandoning you because of this.”

Bryce watched the detective sideways. There was a hitch in his breathing now, tweaking air in and out in little spurts. He could still hear his mother in the living room. Just barely, but enough. She was sniffling now.

“Two,” Dooley went on, dropping the pencil and moving along the shelf, “I don’t think you killed Guy.”

Bryce’s head turned fully toward Dooley now, facing him. The anger drained from his eyes. The burning was gone, replaced by a warmth that made him blink quickly and sniffle himself. He drew a sleeve across his upper lip and swallowed hard.

“Three,” Dooley said, his fingers tracing over the cool, checked surface of something half familiar on the shelf. Same landscape, different players. To some it was a game. To others it was a test of strength, a test of cunning. A test of wills. His eyes came up from the chess board and settled easily on Bryce, and he began again, “Three, I’m not going to ask you anything about Guy, or what happened to him.”

Bryce blinked the blur from his eyes and skeptically considered the detective. He shook his head and said, “That’s the only reason you’re here, to find out who killed Guy.”

“That’s right, but I’m not going to ask.”

Again Bryce wiped his nose with his sleeve. “So why are you here then?”

“Just to get to know you. Your parents thought it would be a good idea.” Dooley glanced down at the chess board. “We didn’t have time for a game the other day. How about now?”

Bryce sniffed deeply and looked nervously around. This was all too strange. Unsettling. He felt like he’d just been put in a bottle and shaken until up and down and right and left had little meaning. Add to that maybe right and wrong. Or loyalty and treachery. Or friend and rat.

Bryce watched Dooley bring the chair by the window over to the shelf, and pull out the one tucked into the hollow desk space where he wrote his stories in longhand. He thought of the story pages he’d tossed toward the wastebasket, and about knowing they had missed. And he thought about seeing them on the floor near the computer desk. And he wondered why he didn’t pick them up and tear them up and burn them all and flush the ashes down the toilet. He wondered it now, just as he’d wondered it then as he stared at the balled up ramblings that had invaded
The Sun Beam.

I knew she cleaned up after me. I knew she’d find them.

But
knowing
wasn’t the issue.

Bryce watched the detective, the man, the Kiddie Catcher, turn the two chairs to face each other next to the chess board. Watched him fiddle with the pieces, moving the pawns to their rank, placing the queen and king correct, the knights and bishops wrong. That could change the game. Change the game completely.

Maybe I wanted her to find them, and read them, and...understand.

“How about it?” Dooley suggested. He sat and spun the dark pieces toward the empty chair. “I’ll let you be smoke.”

“That’s checkers,” Bryce corrected.

Dooley nodded and pushed the empty chair out with his foot. “See how much I know. You’ll probably beat me in no time.”

Bryce stood there for a moment, staring at the misplaced pieces, thinking about the story, his parents, his sisters, his (real?) family, the Kiddie Catcher, and his...friends.

“Well?” Dooley said.

And suddenly it all seemed like nothing. Or he let it seem like nothing. And the Kiddie Catcher was just a detective, was just a man, was just a guy in his room waiting to play a game of chess. Acting like he just wanted to play a game.

“You’ve got some of the pieces wrong,” Bryce said, and went over to the board. He switched the knights and bishops and sat down and they began to play.

Thirty

She strolled haughtily past the jewelry case once, then back a second time, and finally stopped before the display of earrings glinting beneath the glass. Maybe some of them were diamonds— the really small ones, most likely —but Mandy knew, was quite positive, thank you, that the ones throwing off the shine like a roman candle threw sparks were umpteen carat fakes. All show, and that was all. She bent forward to read the tiny price tags of some and stood back up again with her nose crinkled, her pretty face swaying back and forth.

“Overpriced, overpriced, overpriced,” she said softly to herself, not wanting the sales lady helping a very old woman nearby to hear her. She wasn’t rude, after all. Just surprised that Gorton’s Department Store had the gall to charge that much for cheap, imitation jewelry.

Mandy had things much prettier than those at home.

She looked back toward the transaction unfolding between the old woman and the pudgy sales lady not far behind her in years. The sales lady was holding a pair of earrings, dangling in tandem from their stiff, dark velvet backing. Cheap earrings like the ones Mandy had just examined. Cheap and overpriced. But the old woman was eyeing them hungrily.

“They highlight the blue in your eyes,” the sales lady told her, holding them next to the woman’s cheek.

Blue my tiny little ass
, Mandy thought. The old woman had a long, red-tipped cane in hand, necessary because her eyes were fogged with cataracts, opaque— not blue —like a skim of nonfat milk on glass.

“Do you think so?” the old woman asked wantingly.

“Of course...
not
,” Mandy muttered to herself as she walked away from the jewelry counter. If she stayed any longer she would bust out laughing, and that would be rude. Funny as Hades, but rude.