Out of the Cold (16 page)

“How about a cup of tea?” my father said.

I slipped on my boots and my coat. “Show me where that alley is?”

“Robyn, it's nearly midnight. Whatever's there is going to stay there, believe me.”

“Please, Dad? If the ring is there, I don't want to take the chance that someone will find it. It could be important. You don't have to go with me if you don't want to.” But I sure hoped that he
would
want to. “Just tell me where it is.” I buttoned my jacket and pulled on my gloves.

My father sighed and stood up. “You are so stubborn,” he said. “Sometimes I don't know who you remind me more of—your mother or me.”

He pulled on his snow gear and got a couple flashlights out of a drawer. We trudged down the street to the alley the two police officers had described and spent nearly an hour hunting through the trash cans, discarded boxes, and scraps of litter. I found my blusher. My father found my lip gloss. But we didn't find the ring or the photo.

  .    .    .

After a nearly sleepless night, I met Ben the next morning. He was waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of a modernlooking building in one of the most upscale parts of the city. The weather hadn't changed. It was still bone-shatteringly cold out. I had a hat pulled down over my ears and a thick wool scarf wrapped around my neck and chin. I stared up at the glass-and-steel structure.

“
This
is Ashdale Academy?” I had heard of it, but I had never seen it.

“What were you expecting?” Ben asked. “Gothic towers and ivory-covered walls?”

“Something like that,” I admitted. I'd at least been expecting something a lot older. “My dad must have made a mistake. He said that this school used to be called St. Mark's.”

“It did.”

“Well, there must be more than one. The school I'm looking for was around at least forty or fifty years ago.” If Mr. Duffy had gone there, it would have been much, much older than the school I was staring at. “This place looks like it was built way more recently.”

“It was,” Ben said. “This building was supposed to be an addition to the original St. Mark's.”

“Supposed to be?”

“There was a fire,” Ben said. “Shortly after the new wing was built.”

“A fire?”

“They had to knock down the old building completely. Expand the new addition. My father helped to raise the money for it. What are we doing here, Robyn? You said you had a lead on Mr. Duffy.”

When I'd talked to him the night before, I had imagined presenting him with the photo and the ring. But they were long gone. All I could do was tell him about them instead.

“Great work,” he said. “Can I see them?”

“I'm afraid not. They were stolen.”

His eyes widened. “Stolen?”

“I was mugged last night.”

“
Mugged?
Were you hurt?”

I turned my head and pulled down my scarf so he could see the bruise on my face.

His eyes widened even more. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.” At least I was
by then
. I had thought I was fine at my father's last night, too, after the police left. But I'd had trouble falling asleep. I tossed and turned and twisted the sheets into knots. I kept thinking about that knife.

“Did you call the police? Did they catch the guy who mugged you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But no, they didn't. Not yet, anyway.”

“You think the ring means that Duffy used to go to St. Mark's?” he said.

It was hard to imagine. “Maybe. Or maybe somebody important to him did. But he told Aisha that he didn't want to lose the ring or the picture, so they must have been valuable to him.”

I shivered as a gust of wind hit me.

“Do you think we could go inside?” I asked.

Ben nodded. He led the way up the walk and rang a bell beside the front door. I peered inside. The school looked deserted except for a man who was mopping the floor just inside the main doors. He looked up when he heard the buzzer and came and opened the door for us.

“Hi Pete,” Ben said, standing aside to let me go in first.

“Ben, didn't they tell you?” Pete said, grinning at him. “School's out for the holidays.”

“I'm here to pick up the toys for the toy drive,” Ben said.

Pete gestured to a huge pile of cardboard cartons stacked to one side of the lobby.

“I'll go get a dolly,” he said. “It'll go faster that way.”

“Thanks,” Ben said. “I'll meet you back here in a few minutes. I need to talk to Mr. Thorson. Have you seen him?”

“Who do you think packed all those boxes?” Pete said. “He's in the office.”

“Come on,” Ben said.

I followed him down the hallway to the school's offices. Like the rest of the school, they were silent and empty. Well, almost empty.

“Ben,” said the office's sole occupant, a smiling, bald-headed man dressed in gray slacks and a pullover sweater. He seemed as delighted to see Ben as Pete had been. “I put the toys in the lobby for you. Do you need help loading them up?”

“Pete's going to help me,” Ben said. “But thanks anyway, Mr. Thorson.”

Thorson's eyes moved from Ben to me. Ben took the hint and introduced us.

“Robyn and I were hoping you could give us some information,” he said. “Robyn found a ring that she thinks might be from this school—from when it used to be St. Mark's.”

“Hmm. May I see it?” Thorson said.

“I don't have it anymore,” I said. “It was stolen last night.”

“Oh?”

“But I can describe it,” I said. I told him everything I could remember about the ring. But it wasn't until I did a rough sketch of the crest on its face that he started to nod. He got up, went to the wall behind his desk, and removed a framed certificate.

“Did it look like this?” he said, pointing to the crest that was embossed on the heavy certificate paper.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Sounds as though it
was
a St. Mark's school ring,” Thorson said. “As I understand it, that was the ring from the time the school opened until it changed its name, and that's twenty years ago now. I started as headmaster here the same year.”

So my dad had been right after all. And if this was the right school, there was a chance that Mr. Duffy had been a student here. If he had, there would be records somewhere that could tell us something about him. Assuming, of course...

“Ben said the original school burned down,” I said.

“That's right. Quite spectacularly,” Thorson said. “A pity, too. The original building was over one hundred years old. We were able to incorporate some of what was left into the new building—a blend of the old and the new, bridging generations, as it were. Fortunately the new building was completed and renovations were just about to begin on the old structure, so we were able to carry on without missing a beat.”

“What about the school records?” I said.

“We only lost the old records—everything dating back more than ten years before the new school opened,” Thorson said.

My heart sank. “We were hoping there would be records on whoever the ring belonged to,” I said.

“How old was he?” Thorson said.

“Sixty, maybe sixtyfive.”

Thorson shook his head. “I'm afraid anything that dates from that era is long gone.”

“Was there a date on the ring, Robyn?” Ben said.

I shook my head.

“The St. Mark's school rings didn't have dates on them,” Thorson said. “The graduation rings, which did, were of a different design. From the description you just gave me, I'd say that what you had was a school ring, not a graduation ring. Every boy who went to St. Mark's received one. There must be thousands in existence. As I understand it, the design of that ring never changed.”

So no way to trace it to a specific graduating class, let alone a student
, I thought.

“What about the photo?” Ben said.

“What photo?” Thorson said.

“I had a photo of a boy,” I said. ”It looked like a school picture. It was stolen along with the ring. But I'm pretty sure I'd recognize the face if I saw it again.” That gave me an idea, but before I could say anything, Thorson shook his head.

“You're thinking that if you looked through old yearbooks, you might be able to find the same face. Well, I'm sorry, Robyn,” Thorson said. “But that won't be possible, either.”

“You mean there are no yearbooks?” Ben said, disappointed.

“Only Ashdale yearbooks. All the St. Mark's yearbooks are long gone,” Thorson said.

“Were they burned in the fire too?” I said.

“Water-damaged. In a separate incident, believe it or not,” Mr. Thorson said. “They were stored in the basement of the new school, this building you're standing in now. We had some problems with the pipes the first year. The basement flooded. Everything down there, including our collection of old yearbooks, was utterly destroyed. We were hoping some of our alumni would donate their personal copies so that we could rebuild our collection, but—” He shrugged. “I guess after a fire and a flooded basement, they didn't want to take any chances.”

“So there's no way we can find out who the ring belonged to?”

Thorson looked genuinely apologetic. “I'm sorry,” he said.

  .    .    .

I helped Ben and Pete load the boxes of toys into the van Ben was driving. Then Ben dropped me at the bus stop before delivering the toys to their next destination.

“For a while I thought we really were on to something there,” Ben said as I moved to let myself out. “Talk about bad luck, huh?”

“Well, it was worth a try,” I said.

I went back to my father's place. It was still early. Morgan wouldn't be up yet, so I planned to just chill until it was time to go out again. I had promised to help out at the shelter in the afternoon.

When I unlocked the door, I heard music coming from my father's office.

“Dad?” I dropped my coat and my bag on a chair and went to see what he was doing.

He wasn't in the office, but Tara was. She was working on my dad's computer, so immersed in whatever she was doing that she didn't even seem to notice that I was there. I knocked on the door to get her attention. She jumped and spun around in her chair as if I'd jabbed her with a pin.

“Robyn,” she said, her hand pressed to her chest. “You startled me.”

“I was looking for my dad,” I said. I stared at the computer screen and at the image that filled most of it. My mother's face. I crossed to the desk so that I could take a closer look. There was something weird about it—definitely my mom, but like no picture of her that I had ever seen. It just seemed off.

“Mac said he had to meet somebody,” Tara said. She glanced at her watch and seemed surprised. “No wonder I'm hungry.” She looked at me again. “I tend to get a little too involved in what I'm doing.”

“What
are
you doing?” I said. What I really meant: Why is my mother's face on the computer? Supplementary question: Whatever you're doing, why are you doing it in my father's office?

“I'm working on age progression. My computer crashed, oh, two weeks ago now. It's still in the shop, can you believe it? Anyway, your father was nice enough to offer me the use of his. Ten times better than my old hunk of junk.”

“Age progression? You mean, like the police do when they're trying to find some kid who disappeared years ago?”

“Missing kids, criminals at large, you name it.” She nodded at the computer screen. “I've been practicing on some photos your father gave me, pictures of people he knows.” She fumbled around on the desk until she found a photograph that I recognized instantly. A school picture of my mother, from when she was about ten years old. She showed me another photo—a geeky-looking Ted, age maybe thirteen or fourteen, which explained the image of him that I had seen on my father's computer earlier. I wondered where my dad had got the picture and if my mother knew that he had it. “I've been ageing them. Your dad has been able to tell me how well I'm doing because he knows what they look like now.”

“Are you a cop?”

“I'm an anthropologist. My area is human osteology. That's—”

“The study of human bones. I know.”

She nodded. “Thanks to one of my former professors, I've done a little work for the police. Identifying bones, giving the police some idea of how old they are, that sort of thing. I found it interesting, so I've been taking some courses. Age progression fascinates me.”

“Oh.” I looked at the image of my mother on the computer screen. “Um. You and my father. Are you—”

What was the right way to ask the question I had in mind?

Tara frowned. “Are we what?” Then a look of horror swept across her face. “You mean, are we... ?” She shook her head vigorously. “I'm in town to take a course, do some hands-on study with a forensic artist here.
The
expert in age progression and regression. Mac's been nice enough to show me around, and he offered me the use of his computer when mine crashed. But—”

She seemed mortified at the thought that I'd read more than that into the situation. “I mean, my God,” she said. “I've known him my whole life as
Uncle
Mac. It's hard enough to get used to calling him just plain
Mac
, let alone... ” She shook her head again.

“
Uncle
Mac?” I said.

“Your dad and my dad worked together.”

I looked at her with new interest. “Your dad's a cop?”

“He was,” she said. “He was killed in the line of duty twenty years ago.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

She shrugged. “I was seven when it happened. My mother completely fell apart. Your dad and some of the other cops who worked with my father used to come around to check on her, do things around the house for her, take my brother and me out.” She smiled. “I had more uncles than anyone I knew. And your dad was the nicest one. He always kept in touch with Brad—my brother—and me, even after Mom remarried a few years later and we moved across the country. I think that's one of the reasons I'm interested in this area of work—carrying on the family tradition. Brad didn't want anything at all to do with police work. He's a carpenter now.”