The Battle of Bayport (6 page)

“Doesn't look like there's much here,” I said, feeling let down as I flipped through some random invoices and a museum display case catalog.

“Oh well, it was worth a shot.” Frank turned to go, and I turned to follow when my light glinted off something white in the debris behind the desk.

I moved a couple of small boxes where some loose papers had gotten wedged. They must have fallen there unnoticed when Mr. Lakin relocated offices. The first sheet was a past-due home electricity bill in Mr. Lakin's name. I felt kind of guilty looking at Mr. Lakin's personal stuff and flipped quickly to the next item. It was another past-due bill, and I was about to skip past that one too when I caught a glimpse of the dollar amount at the bottom of the invoice. I did a double take and blinked my eyes a couple of times, but the number didn't change.

“Frank, I think you should see this.” I called my brother over, and his mouth dropped open.

$87,000. That was how much money the Lakins owed Bayport Memorial Hospital for ongoing medical treatment of Mae Lakin. I had a vague notion that Mr. Lakin was married, but I hadn't known his wife was sick.

“I don't think I feel right looking at this, Joe,” Frank said.

“I know, me either, but it could turn out to be relevant to the case if Mr. Lakin was having money trouble. We don't know what information is going to be important yet. We might even find something that can help clear him,” I reasoned with Frank.

He sighed his consent. “What's next?”

I flipped the page. Now, this was strange. It was a letter from the NYPD Pension Fund addressed to Rollie Lawrence Lakin. Frank and I exchanged a curious look. I read the letter aloud in a hushed voice.

Dear Mr. Lakin,

I regret to inform you that your appeal has been denied. Upon further review, it has been determined that your wife's condition is not covered under the disability and pension health plan you received upon leaving the department.

I am truly sorry and wish there was more we could do to help. I understand that you were wounded in the line of duty some years ago, and the New York Police Department and the City of New York are deeply grateful for your heroic service as a member of the mounted police unit.

I stopped reading. You don't ever really think much about your teacher's personal lives. Or even that they have them. They're supposed to be kind of like scholastic vampires, who just climb into big school lockers after the day ends and only come back out to teach when the bell rings the next morning. The idea that they could actually have relationships, life crises, and secret pasts just didn't fit into the equation. It looked like I was going to have to come up with a new equation, though, because there was suddenly a lot about our history teacher that didn't fit. Mr. Lakin's wife was sick, he owed a ton of money for hospital bills that
weren't covered by his insurance, and, apparently, before he was a teacher, he had been a policeman. That was the real kicker. You could have told me he'd been an astronaut or a lion tamer or an astronaut lion tamer and I wouldn't have been more shocked.

“Did you know Mr. Lakin used to be a cop?” I asked Frank. From the stunned look on my brother's face, I figured the answer was no.

“I just assumed he'd always been a teacher,” he said quietly.

Mr. Lakin was a Bayport High institution. He'd been there for at least thirty years. He'd even taught our dad. It was hard to imagine the old guy in the tacky suit as a young man in a policeman's uniform.

“He wasn't just a police officer, Joe,” Frank said reluctantly.

“I know,” I said before finishing Frank's thought. “He was a police officer who also rode a horse.”

“That would have been where he learned how to ride.” Frank started to say more, but stopped.

“He also would have learned how to shoot.” I added the part Frank didn't want to. “The reenactment wouldn't have been the first time he fired a gun from horseback.”

And just like that, the idea that Mr. Lakin could have hit Don Sterling from a galloping horse with a pistol seemed a lot less crazy.

I
WAS PRETTY TIRED BY
the time Joe and I dragged ourselves into school the next morning. We'd made it off the
Resolve
unnoticed, but we weren't any closer to solving the mystery, and I don't think either of us got a lot of sleep that night. Not with everything that went down after the reenactment. We'd witnessed one of the town's most prominent people murdered in front of us during a make-believe Revolutionary War battle, one of our favorite teachers had a shocking secret past and might be the prime suspect, and, oh yeah, I'd almost been pulverized by a gun-wielding commando. You try getting a good night's sleep after that!

Whenever I did fall asleep, I kept having this nightmare that Joe and I were caught high up in the
Resolve
's tallest
mast during a massive thunderstorm. Each time it was the same awful dream. A huge wave would crash against the ship, knocking Joe off the mast. I'd grab him, but he'd start to slip from my hands, and I then I'd wake up not knowing if I saved him or not. Ugh. I was glad it was morning.

It wasn't a big surprise that the whole school was buzzing about Don Sterling's murder. There were all kinds of crazy rumors and conspiracy theories flying around. Mr. Lakin was at the center of a lot of them too. Some people were even saying the police had already arrested him. Mr. Lakin disproved that one himself by walking down the crowded hall right before the first-period bell. It was like somebody hit the mute button on the whole school. Everybody shut up all at once and just stared. Even some of the teachers. There were some hushed whispers and murmuring, and Amir even yelled out, “Good shot!” Mr. Lakin just kept his eyes down and headed straight for his classroom.

More than anything else, it was the revelations we'd discovered in Mr. Lakin's old office aboard the
Resolve
that really had me unsettled. His personal and financial lives were in turmoil, and his service as a mounted policeman meant that it might not have been such an impossible shot for him after all. I didn't know how the pieces fit, but they all looked like part of the same puzzle.

Joe and I were going to have to find a way to subtly question him about Don Sterling's death, and I really wasn't looking forward to it. I usually loved my afternoon AP history
class, especially now that we were deep into analysis of the Revolutionary War's expansion from a localized Colonial uprising into a world war involving the Spanish and French. It was my last period of the day, and a lot of times I'd hang out at Mr. Lakin's desk after class, going into more detail about the lesson. Not today. Today we weren't going to be talking about history. I was going to be asking him about some very current events, and I didn't think either of us was going to enjoy it very much.

Time was ticking—most murders that aren't solved in the first forty-eight hours are never solved at all—so Joe and I were going to have to make the most of our investigation, even though we were stuck at school. Mr. Lakin wasn't our only lead inside the halls of Bayport High. The Hardy boys' reputation as amateur detectives is pretty well known around Bayport, and a lot of kids just automatically figured we were on the case. That made it hard to keep a low profile, which is how we normally like to operate. People were peppering us with questions, but we were playing dumb (which is easier for Joe than it is for me) and only worrying about the Bayport High kids who might be relevant to the mystery.

As soon as both Joe and I had a free period, we sat down in the cafeteria to go over our notes and eat some lunch. I opened my case file notebook to the pages labeled “Potential Suspects” and “Possible Material Witnesses,” and we started running down the names.

Our hippy-dippy drama teacher Mr. Carr and our troubled
classmate Amir Kahn both made the “Potential Suspects” list. Mr. Carr had played a Colonial officer in the reenactment. He'd been pretty bitter about the Don and his deep pockets beating him out for the lead role in the last Bayport Players stage production. Every kid who'd had a class with him had heard his rant on the capitalistic corruption of artistic integrity in the local theater.

Amir had been an infantryman, and both his parents had lost their jobs when Sterling Industries pulled the plug on the furniture factory. He'd had a really hard time of it since the layoffs, sliding from academic all-American to detention.

Calvin Givens was another classmate who made the list. He hadn't participated in the reenactment, so he wasn't really a suspect, but he did have a distinct dishonor that no one else shared: He was Don Sterling's stepson, making him a “Possible Material Witness” we most definitely had to talk to. We were probably going to have to wait to interview him, though. I doubted we'd see him in school the day after his stepfather's murder.

We'd just gotten started breaking down each person of interest on the list when I noticed Joe's face go slack. I looked up and saw why: Jen and Daphne had just walked in the cafeteria door.

“Oh man, I totally forgot about our date at the diner last night,” Joe said, putting his face in his hands.

I had forgotten too, but then again, I had a lot less to lose than Joe did. It's not like Daphne would have missed me. I
really wanted things to work out for Joe and Jen, though, so I hoped she would forgive the date flake.

“I'm sure she'll understand,” I assured him, hoping I was right. “I think yesterday's plans probably went off the rails for just about everybody after the Don turned up dead.”

We were about to find out whether Jen understood. She was headed straight for us. I could sense Joe tensing up next to me. As Jen got closer to our table, she burst into a big smile, and Joe let out a big sigh of relief.

“Hey, Jen,” he said, returning her smile with a goofy grin of his own.

“Hey, guys,” she said. “We missed you at the diner last night.”

“Oh, yeah, well, um, I, it, uh . . . ,” Joe fumbled for something to say. I decided to step in to try to save him.

“Things kind of got a little crazy yesterday, you know, with all the excitement after the reenactment,” I said, trying not to go into too much detail about the specific nature of our excitement.

“You think we could get a rain check for tonight, maybe?” Jen asked Joe.

Joe smiled. “Definitely. That would be awesome.”

“Hey, so everybody is saying that you guys were the ones who discovered the body. Is it true?” Daphne asked me, all excited. She was actually talking to me. That was a first. I guess she wasn't mute after all. The juicy gossip must have cured her.

“You guys are, like, detectives, right? So you're totally investigating the murder, yeah?” Daphne sped right ahead without even waiting for an answer. “Oh my God, that is so cool!”

Okay, so maybe I did have a chance with Daphne after all. Sometimes being an amateur detective has its perks.

Jen didn't seem to share her friend's excitement. At all. Her smile had vanished entirely.

“Why are you even bothering? It's not like anybody really cares that Don Sterling is dead,” she said coldly. It was the first time I'd seen Jen Griffin be anything but sweet.

Joe was totally caught off guard too. He actually looked hurt. Joe is a fun-loving guy, but he takes our investigating seriously, and the girl he dug had just dismissed it as a waste of time. This was a side of Jen neither of us had seen before. We had known that something had gone down between Don Sterling and Jen's dad, but we didn't have any of the details. Whatever it was, she obviously didn't have any sympathy for the Don's plight.

“Come on, Daph, let's go. We have study group,” she ordered Daphne.

“Oh, um, okay.” Daphne seemed just as surprised by her friend's behavior as we were. “We'll see you guys later, yeah? Good luck with the investigation!”

Jen grabbed Daphne by the arm and was about to drag her away when she saw the page on the table labeled “Potential Suspects.” I tried to casually close the notebook, but she'd
already seen everything she needed to. The fifth name down was Mikey Griffin. Her brother.

“You leave my brother alone!” she yelled at Joe, loud enough that people at some of the other tables looked up to see what was going on. She realized she was causing a scene and flushed with embarrassment. She lowered her voice, trying to keep it calm, but the edge was still there when she started talking again.

“My brother didn't have anything to do with it. If you go around calling him a murderer, he could lose his football scholarship. Sterling already did enough damage to my family when he was alive. Don't you dare let him mess things up more. Leave Mikey out of it. Just stay away from him.”

It wasn't a request.

“But, Jen, we—” Joe started to protest.

Jen quickly shut him up. “And you can stay away from me, too, while you're at it.”

S
HELL-SHOCKED. THAT'S ABOUT HOW
I felt after Jen reamed me out about our investigation and stormed off like I had just stepped on her favorite puppy.

“I guess that means our date is off for tonight,” I said to Frank as I watched Jen drag Daphne behind her out of the cafeteria. Daphne gave us a weak smile and shrugged her shoulders in confusion as the cafeteria doors slammed shut.

“Well, that was . . . unexpected,” Frank said with his usual flair for understatement.

A slap in the face would have been unexpected. Jen's sudden outburst felt more like a bombshell. It had simultaneously managed to turn both my love life and our case on
their heads. I had been worried about Mikey's name coming up and maybe messing things up with Jen and me—I was used to our detective work getting in the way of my love life for one reason or another—but I hadn't expected this. Jen's reaction to our investigation into the Don's murder was . . . well, suspicious is what it was.