Trial by Fire (15 page)

The woman eyed me skeptically. “Deirdre Parker? Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but—”

“Deirdre isn’t in today.”

“Do you know how I could reach her?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “For bank business, you can reach her here.”

In other words, she wasn’t going to tell me. I would simply have to come back again.

THIRTEEN

I arrived home just as Aunt Ginny was getting into her car to go to work.

“Don’t use the washing machine,” she said. “There’s a leak somewhere.”

I knew that already. I was the one who had told her.

“I put in a service call. Someone’s coming to look at it. I left a key.”

“Will you be home tonight?” I asked.

“If I am, it’ll be late. Don’t wait up for me.”

I was definitely rooting for her being late. It would make things easier for me.

I made something to eat. I watched
TV
. I checked online for directions to the go-kart
park and decided when I should leave.

My phone pinged. A text from IT.

Retrieved info from drive. Will clean up & email prob tmrrw.

I replied with thanks. Ten minutes before I was ready to go, my cell phone rang.
This time it was Ashleigh.

“Do you want to find out what Maddy called Mike about?” she asked breathlessly.

“Where are you?”

“At the end of your driveway. Grab your bike. Let’s go. You don’t want to miss them.”

I grabbed my bicycle lights and ran outside. Ashleigh was waiting for me at the end
of the driveway. We rode single file, Ashleigh in the lead, up the road and away
from town. It was a hot, sticky summer night. Ashleigh set the pace. It wasn’t long
before my T-shirt was soaked through.

Ashleigh raised her hand to signal a stop. She dismounted and switched off her lights.
I did the same.

“It’s over there.” She pointed to bright lights in the distance. “We’ll leave our
bikes here and go in the back way, where the snack bar is.”

We stashed our bikes in the bushes. Ashleigh detached one of her bike lights and
focused it on the ground.

“Stick close,” she said.

We made our way slowly along a partly overgrown path through scrub and brush. Twice
I tripped on roots sticking out of the ground. Once I fell and skinned my knee. We
kept going until Ashleigh held up her hand again.

“There it is.” She pointed at a rectangular structure looming ahead of us. Light
shone through its windows. “That’s the kitchen. Mike always brings out the garbage
at the end of his shift.”

I stared at her. “How do you know that?”

“Taylor and I have been out here with Maddy before. She always wants someone to go
with her for moral support.” She broke off, grabbed my arm and yanked me down to
the ground, a finger pressed to her lips to signal me to keep me quiet. “Maddy’s
here,” she hissed.

I started to raise my head for a look, but Ashleigh held me down.

We crouched in the bush. Light suddenly flooded the area behind the snack bar. A
door clattered shut.

“What’s so important?” a voice said. Mike.

“Jonathan told me that girl asked you where you were the night of the fire. He said
she accused you of starting the fire and that the cops were going to question you.”
That was Maddy.

“Yeah? So?”

“So I wanted to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about. I said you
were with me.”

“You talked to the cops about me?”

“Not the cops. The girl. Riley. She asked about you, and I told her we were together
and there was no way you had anything to do with the fire.”

“Why’d you do that?” Mike sounded far from relieved, never mind grateful.

“Because I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“This is none of your business. Jeez, Maddy, why did you have to go and complicate
things?”

“Complicate things?” She sounded stunned. “I was just trying to help.”

“I don’t need help.”

“But Mike—”

“I don’t need help, I don’t need your alibi, and I sure don’t need you messing around
in stuff that has nothing to do with you. And where’s my jacket? I’m tired of asking
you for it.”

“It’s in my locker at work.”

“I want it back.”

“But you gave it to me.”

“I
loaned
it to you one night when you were whining about being cold. It’s my football
jacket. I want it back.”

“But I thought we were—”

“You thought we were what? We’re friends, that’s all. But we’re not going to stay
friends if I have to keep asking you for my stuff.”

“We’re more than friends,” Maddy said. “Remember when we—”

“Friends. Period.”

“Come on, Mike. After everything I’ve done for you—”

“What? What have you done for me except stick your big nose into my business? Stay
out of it. I mean it.”

“But Mike—”

There was another flood of light. Someone must have opened the door to the snack
bar.

“Wait, Mike—”

“Leave me alone. Just leave me alone, okay?”

The light dwindled to a sliver and then vanished altogether. I heard the click of
a lock. Then silence, followed by sniffling. Maddy was crying. The sound faded along
with her footsteps. Ashleigh led the way back to our bikes.

“What do you think that was all about?” she asked when we got there.

I’d been thinking about it the whole way back. “I’m not sure. You?”

“It sounds to me like Maddy was lying when she told us she was with Mike the night
of the fire.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“Why do you think Mike didn’t want her to alibi him?” Ashleigh asked. “You think
it’s because he had nothing to do with the fire? Or do you think there’s another
reason?”

“I don’t know.” A person doesn’t need an alibi if he hasn’t done anything wrong. “Maybe
he already has an alibi. He told me he was with friends.”

“Like Maddy.”

“He didn’t say Maddy. He didn’t say friend. He said friends, with an
s
.”

We switched on our bike lights.

“Mike said Madison had complicated things for him,” Ashleigh said slowly. “What do
you think he meant by that?”

“I don’t know.” But I was thinking about it. Had she ruined Mike’s plans for setting
up an alibi? He’d told me he was with friends. Had some of them agreed to cover for
him? Or was there something else going on?

“Maybe he really didn’t do it,” Ashleigh said.

Or maybe he didn’t do it alone, I thought. What if Mike and his father had set the
fire together? What if they’d been planning to alibi each other if they had to? Or
what if Ted was the arsonist, and Mike planned to alibi him if it came to that?

Except Ted had already told the other volunteer firefighters that he was at the cemetery
that night because it was his father’s birthday. And Mike had given me his alibi.

Maybe Ashleigh was right, and all Mike meant was that if Madison lied for him and
the police found out, it would make him look guilty of something. On the other hand,
it could mean that he was guilty but was afraid Madison’s lies would point the police
in his
direction. There were so many possibilities, and all I could say was, “I can’t
tell from what they said if Mike was involved or not.”

It was well past midnight by the time we got to my house, so I asked Ashleigh to
stay over rather than ride all the way back into town in the dark. She agreed and
texted her parents, and we went up to my room to settle in. It wasn’t long before
I heard Ashleigh’s breathing slow down. I lay awake on the other side of the bed
and stared at the ceiling.

Madison had said she wanted to help Mike.

Mike told her he didn’t need an alibi.

What did that mean?

Ashleigh woke me the next morning instead of the other way around. She had to get
to work.

“I’ll text you,” she said before she rode off.

Aunt Ginny got home a few minutes later and went straight to bed. I logged in to
my email to see if IT had sent me anything from Aram’s hard drive.

He had. He’d sent me a lot. I scanned through the file names and clicked on one of
the photos to make
sure they were retrievable. They were. They were all pictures
of the farm next door. Mr. Goran’s farm. He must have sent them to Aram, and he must
have done it in the past year and a half or so, because before that he didn’t live
here. If that was true, then it was also true that Aram
had
heard from his father,
despite what he’d told Aunt Ginny and me.

Curious, I clicked on a file called
Farm Finances
. It contained records from the
farm—what was planted, projected yield, actual yield, plans for the coming years,
expenses and revenues. Why did Aram have this information? I decided to check the
file of email that IT had recovered. That’s when I figured out that it wasn’t Aram’s
computer at all.

I ran into Aunt Ginny’s room and shook her awake.

Without even opening her eyes, she said, “Go away, Riley.”

“I need to ask you something.”

“Not now.” She rolled over.

I shook her again. “It’s important.”

She opened one eye. It shot daggers at me. “It had better be. I haven’t had a decent
night’s sleep since we moved in.”

“I need to speak to Aram.”

Both eyes opened and immediately narrowed. “What for?”

“I have to ask him something.”

“Details.”

“Please, Aunt Ginny, I need to talk to him for just a minute, but I can’t tell you
what it’s about. Not yet.” I don’t like thinking the best of people and finding out
the worst. I especially don’t like being lied to. It makes me angry. If I told Aunt
Ginny what I’d found, the chances were excellent that I would never be able to speak
to Aram. I didn’t want that. I wanted to look him in the eye and ask him two questions.
I wanted to see his face when he answered.

But Aunt Ginny said, “I don’t want you going over there, Riley.”

“
Going over there
? You mean he’s at home? I thought you arrested him.”

“He got lucky at the bail hearing, because of his father being in the hospital. The
judge made him surrender his passport. He’s not allowed to leave the county without
notifying the court. But you’re not to go over there, do you understand?”

I made a tactical surrender and said I understood perfectly. I left her and waited
thirty minutes,
until I heard her snoring through her solid-oak bedroom door. I tiptoed
downstairs and took the short way across the yard to Mr. Goran’s farm.

Aram answered the door on the second ring. He looked tired but otherwise the same.

“I’m surprised that aunt of yours let you come over here,” he said.

“I need to ask you something.”

“Come in.”

“Right here is fine. You lied about that computer.”

“Is that your question?” He ran his fingers through his already disheveled hair.
“I assume your friend was able to retrieve some information from the hard drive.”

“He was. Enough to prove that you lied to Aunt Ginny when you said the computer was
yours.”

“I see.” He didn’t argue with me or protest that the computer really was his. “And
you’re wondering why I said that.”

“It’s called tampering with evidence.” Or something like that. I was pretty sure
it was against the law. I was positive that Aunt Ginny would be outraged
if she knew
he’d misled her about who owned the computer found in Mr. Goran’s house and how it
had gotten smashed.

“Does your aunt know?” Aram asked.

I wasn’t about to answer that question, not when I still had a few of my own.

“Did you try to wreck your father’s computer?”

“No. It was broken when I got here. And if anything, I was trying to protect my father
until I knew more about what had happened.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I know you weren’t the one who tried
to destroy it?”

“Why would I do that?” He seemed genuinely perplexed.

“So that nobody would find anything incriminating on it.”

“Riley, what are you talking about?”