The Battle of Bayport (10 page)

When we arrived home, there were Revolutionary War–themed plates of fish and chips waiting for us. Aunt Trudy had even wrapped them in newspaper like they do in England. She'd used delicate fillets of locally caught red snapper, lightly coated in a perfectly seasoned batter of her own concoction paired with a chip trio made from patriotically colored red, white, and blue potatoes.

It tasted as good as it looked. I didn't have much of an appetite, though. It had been an eventful day, and my brain was working overtime trying to sort it all out. We'd come up with our first theory to work with, but as Frank likes to remind me, in science an unproven theory is merely a hypothesis, and we still had a lot of other information to process as well if we were going to crack this case.

My thoughts wandered back to Jen and her blowup in the cafeteria. With everything else that had happened today, I'd been so focused on how it fit the investigation I hadn't really had a chance to think about how it made me feel. Now I did, and it stung. Especially how she'd told me to stay away from her. I had really liked Jen. It dawned on me that I didn't really know her that well. I could totally relate to her wanting to protect her brother, but how she'd gone about it showed a dark side. It's something I would have to come to grips with if I did manage to get back on her good side.

Not that that was likely to happen anytime soon. Not if she found out Mikey had gone behind her back to talk to us. His mixed-up kind-of confession had been bugging me all day.

I try not to judge people, and I don't just mean during an investigation, but in real life, too. Our dad always says that the best way not to misjudge someone is to not judge them in the first place. But before today I'd pretty much written Mikey off as a dumb, obnoxious jock without even giving him a chance. Okay, so maybe the dumb jock part wasn't so far off, but after listening to him pour his heart out to us outside the cafeteria, there turned out to be a lot more to the big, sensitive lug than I ever would have given him credit for. You kind of had to feel for the guy.

It was an odd thought to have about a murder suspect, and I had to be careful not to lose my objectivity—there's more than one way to misjudge someone, and Mikey could still be our killer. The murder had really shaken him up, though. He could have kept being angry at Don Sterling even though he was dead, like Jen had, but he hadn't. He sounded truly sorry the Don had been hurt, even though he had every reason to hate the guy for what he'd done to his family.

Mikey didn't just sound sorry, though. He also sounded guilty. There's a big difference between feeling guilty and actually being guilty, though, and I think that's what was bothering me so much. In Mikey's case, I didn't know which was which. His story didn't add up, not the way he told it.
What I did know was that he really seemed to believe he had shot the Don.

So had Mikey gotten revenge on the guy who put his father in jail? And was he just playing dumb to clear his conscience and/or misdirect our investigation? That's what the police would probably assume. I didn't think Mikey was smart enough to pull off such a complex crime. But continuing to underestimate a suspect is a good way to get fooled. I'd already had everything I thought I knew about both Griffin kids turned upside down once that day, and if you keep repeating the same mistake, you kind of deserve to get fooled.

So maybe he had done it. Or maybe he was having some kind of posttraumatic stress thing from witnessing a murder. As real as the reenactment had seemed to me, it would have taken on a whole other level of reality for Mikey. In his mind, he'd aimed at the Don and fired his musket, and the Don had ended up dead, so it must have been his fault. Even if you were shooting blanks, firing a real gun at a man who ends up shot dead at the same time had to mess with your head big-time. It would kind of be like willing someone dead. There were probably a lot of Colonial reenactors who had fired their muskets at the Don—Mr. Lakin had encouraged them to—and I wondered if there were other people struggling with guilt because of it too. I mean, what if it had been me? I fired a musket during the reenactment too. I had gotten lucky; nobody on the other end of my sights
had ended up with a hole in their chest. They could have, though. It was chilling to think about.

“Do you think there's anything to what Mikey told us?” I asked Frank.

“Hmm?” Frank looked up. He'd been staring at his plate, lost in his own thoughts too.

“Do you think Mikey really could have somehow shot the Don without knowing what he was doing?” I asked again. He thought about it for a minute.

“Pretty unlikely,” he said through a mouthful of red snapper. “I mean, a musket ball didn't accidentally fall down his barrel, and real episodes of temporary amnesia are about as rare as gold coins. And even if he did black out for a moment during the reenactment, he still would've had to bring a musket ball with him, right? It's hard to imagine someone doing that without it being premeditated. I guess he could be lying to us, but it would be hard to prove without more evidence or an actual confession. We'll talk to him tomorrow and see if his story changes.”

We were at another dead end. I stabbed at Aunt Trudy's Revolutionary War–themed red, white, and blue fries with my fork and thought about Aunt Trudy under her red, white, and blue sun umbrella at the reenactment. Ha! Actually, it was a double “Ha!” I laughed at the image of Aunt Trudy and then had an “aha!” moment—she'd been shooting video of the reenactment! I'd had a hunch Aunt Trudy's meal would lead to some sort of revelation.

In all the excitement of the past day, we'd forgotten all about it. It wasn't likely to break the mystery open or anything—whatever Aunt Trudy caught in the video would have happened in plain sight of a few hundred people, and the police probably already knew about it—but it was still worth watching to see if it shook anything loose. I ran the idea past Frank.

“Beats sitting around and feeling useless!” Frank agreed cheerily.

“True. And maybe it'll at least help us rule out Mikey's crazy theories.”

We got the video from Aunt Trudy and watched it full screen on the computer. The angle was pretty wide, so we got an overview of the field without a lot of close-up detail. Even when she zoomed in, the image still captured a big chunk of the action, but there was also a lot you couldn't see, and the people we wanted to watch weren't always in the frame. We tried to focus on Mr. Lakin and Mikey along with Amir, Mr. Carr, Pete Carson, Rob Hernandez, and the other suspects on our list. I took notes as we watched, breaking down the reenactment into moments of action we could refer back to.

Mr. Lakin looked on proudly in his general's uniform, his saber and pistol swinging from his belt as Bernie handed out muskets to the Colonial militia. Mr. Carr gave a dramatic salute to Mr. Lakin when he got his weapon. Mikey was the next suspect to get his musket. Mr. Carr went over to say something to Mikey after he got his gun, but there was no
way to tell what. It looked like they were going over some detail of how to load the musket. Then the camera panned away from Bernie and Mr. Lakin handing out the muskets and went over to the British side.

A few minutes later, Mikey and Amir were back in the picture, palling around before the battle. Mikey was laughing and gesturing wildly with both hands as he told a joke or something. As the reenactment got ready to start, the infantrymen formed a drill line, and Mr. Lakin made a show of doing inspections. He straightened Amir's lapel and took Mikey's musket to examine it before handing it back and moving on to the next soldier.

Then the chaos started. The first cannon went off, and the whole field got real smoky real fast from all the shooting. With so much going on, it was hard to follow all the action. Knowing what happened next, I almost turned away when Mr. Lakin charged forward on his horse and Don Sterling collapsed. There were so many guns going off at the same time, there was no way to tell from watching the video who'd fired the real shot, and it was too hazy and far away to see if Mikey had done anything unusual when he loaded his musket. The shot could have come from Mr. Lakin's gun or Mikey's. It also could have come from Amir's, Mr. Carr's, Pete's, or a lot of the other militiamen as well.

Frank had that pale look about him again, and I knew he had the same queasy feeling I did. What we'd just watched wasn't for show. A man had really been shot.

So far, watching the video hadn't answered any questions. All it had done for the investigation was make the investigators feel ill.

“I'm going to catch a quick nap and then we can reconvene to come up with a strategy for the evening.” Frank took a deep breath, collapsed on the couch, and started snoring pretty much instantly. As beat as I was, I was way too amped to sleep. I pressed play one more time instead.

A couple of minutes later, I paused and hit rewind. Mikey stood on the baseball field, palling around with Amir before the reenactment, gesturing with both hands open. It wasn't what I saw that caught my eye, it was what I couldn't see.

Mikey's gun.

Amir was still holding a musket, but Mikey wasn't. He must have put it down somewhere off screen, because the gun wasn't anywhere in sight. That's when it hit me. Maybe Mikey had been right.

I
WAS WEARING MY REENACTMENT
costume in my dream, but that wasn't the cool part. The cool part was the cutlass clamped between my teeth and the rope in my hands as I swung across the bow of the
Resolve
to rescue Daphne from Mr. Lakin, who was dressed like a plaid-clad pirate captain. The Plaid Pirate Lakin propped his peg leg on top of a treasure chest and threatened Daphne with a metal-hooked hand. Daphne yelled out my name, and that's when the dream really got weird. Daphne sounded exactly like Joe!

“Frank!” she yelled in Joe's voice. “Wake up, dude!”

When I opened my eyes, the twist in my dream suddenly made a lot more sense. Joe really was yelling my name. Bummer.

“Can it wait, dude? I was having a really awesome dream,” I muttered, still half-asleep.

“What if Mikey shooting the Don was premeditated,” Joe asked excitedly, “just not by Mikey?”

That opened my eyes all the way. My Daphne-in-distress fantasy was going to have to stay a cliffhanger.

“What have you got?” I asked him.

“It's really been bugging me how sure Mikey seemed about somehow being the one who shot the Don. I mean, he sounded so sincere, but it didn't make any sense. How can you shoot somebody and just not remember it?”

“It would be a neat trick,” I agreed.

“Even neater if Mikey wasn't the magician,” Joe said. “I think there is a way Mikey could have been onto something with his crazy ideas about his musket being loaded, just not the way he thought.”

“I'm listening,” I said, now all the way awake.

“I went back and watched the video again, and there are a few times when Mikey's gun is either out of his sight or someone else has it. If Mikey wasn't the only one who had access to his musket before he fired it during the reenactment . . .”

“You think someone could have tampered with it?” I asked reluctantly. Joe was opening up a disturbing new door.

“I think it's possible, at least. There's nothing obvious in the video, but the opportunity would have been there. Everyone just assumed the shooter was working alone, but what if there was a second person involved? The shooter could have had an accomplice, or he could even have been set up.”

Setting someone up would be a huge gamble. It was almost too risky and callous to consider.

“What if they missed and hit the wrong person, or the killer miscalculated and the shooter decided to aim at someone else instead?” I said, hoping Joe was wrong. “Talk about cold-blooded.”

“We already know the killer has to be one cold, bold hombre to try to assassinate someone in public like that in the first place,” Joe pointed out.

“The Second Man theory,” I said, giving Joe's theory a name. We've found that classifying our theories sometimes helps us wrap our minds around a mystery and organize our thoughts, especially on a complex case like this one.

“If someone really was that devious and wanted to pick a shooter to take out Don Sterling for them, then Mikey Griffin would be a good bet,” I affirmed.

Joe nodded. “He said he was a good shot, and with his family's history with the Don, it wouldn't be hard to guess who Mikey was aiming at.”

“Mikey's not the only one,” I said. “A lot of people probably aimed at the Don. Mr. Lakin basically told them to.”

Not that people needed any encouragement. Even if they thought they were only shooting blanks, it would be hard to resist pretending to take a shot at the guy who'd messed up your life.

Our job had just gotten a lot harder. It was tough enough already just trying to figure out which gun had fired the
shot; now, even if we did, it might not be the real bad guy's. We didn't just have to look at who had motive, we also had to look at who had access to the guns of the people with motive. Joe was right about Mikey, though: If there was a fall guy, he was a good candidate.

Joe had flagged the spots in the video where Mikey put down his gun or when someone else had it. He skipped ahead from Mikey receiving his musket to Mr. Carr helping Mikey with his gun to musketless Mikey goofing around with Amir. Joe was right: Someone totally would have had the opportunity to tamper with Mikey's gun. Both Mr. Carr and Amir knew Mikey well enough to have his confidence, and both of them had the opportunity.

It was common knowledge that Mr. Carr hated the Don, and he had the acting skills to pull off a deception. He also had a flair for the dramatic and a love of old English plays with intricate revenge plots and leading men with guilty consciences. The pieces fit, but could our own drama teacher really have used one of his students to exact his revenge for him? He would have had the chance.