Trial by Fire (4 page)

“Mr. Goran lives alone, right?” she said. “No wife, no kids, right?”

“He has a son.”

“Does he live over there?”

“No. Is something wrong, Aunt Ginny?”

“Mr. Goran is in the hospital, but there’s a light on in his house.” She put down
the plate she was rinsing and headed for the living room. I followed and found her
on her hands and knees, looking for her shoes.

“It could be an intruder,” she muttered. “It’s been on the news that he’s in the
hospital. Maybe somebody decided to take advantage of that. I’m going to check it
out. Aha!” She held up one shoe.

“I’ll come with you.”

“You’ll do no such thing. This is police business.”

She found her other shoe, jammed her foot into it and grabbed her car keys, her badge
and her gun. I ran after her.

“It’s faster to cut across the yard,” I said. We had a long driveway. So did Mr.
Goran, and his was on the side of his property farthest from us.

“I don’t know what I’m going to find over there. I want to be prepared.”

I jumped into the passenger seat before she could stop me.

“Riley, I said no!”

“If you don’t hurry, the intruder will get away.”

She scowled as she turned the key in the ignition. “You’re staying in the car—or
else.” The car leaped forward, shooting gravel in all directions. She was about to
turn onto the road when a car, its lights extinguished, shot past us from the direction
of Mr. Goran’s place.

“He’s speeding,” Aunt Ginny growled. “And his lights are either nonoperational or
they’re out on purpose. Either way—”

“Do you think he’s the burglar?”

She cast another glance at the car—or, rather, at where the car had been. It was
already out of sight. She slapped the steering wheel in disgust and made the turn
for Mr. Goran’s. Two minutes later she was out of the car and on her way to the porch.
I rolled my window down so I could hear what was happening.

The front door was half open. Aunt Ginny approached with caution, her weapon drawn.
She was about to step inside the house when a man appeared. His hands shot into the
air when he came face-to-face with the gun, and Aunt Ginny said, “Police.”

His voice carried clearly in the still summer night. “I’m Aram Goran. This is my
father’s house.”

The son Mr. Goran was so worried about.

“Identification,” Aunt Ginny demanded. She kept her weapon pointed at him.

He reached for a pocket.

“Slowly,” Aunt Ginny cautioned.

Out came a wallet. He opened it and held it under the porch light for her to read.
As soon as she lowered her gun, I jumped out of the car.

“I saw a light on in the house,” Aunt Ginny said. “I thought maybe someone had broken
in.”

“Someone did break in,” Aram Goran said. “There was a car in the driveway when the
taxi dropped me off. At first I thought it must be my father’s. There was a light
on in the house, and the door was open. I went inside and called for my father. Someone
ran out of his study. He practically tackled me on his way out the door. Then he
took off in his car.” He bent his elbow slowly. “I may need an X-ray.”

“I think we passed him on our way here,” Aunt Ginny said. “Did you get a good look
at him?”

Aram shook his head. “He went by too fast, and the only light on was in the study.
Did you get his license plate number?”

I answered for Aunt Ginny. “No. And his headlights were off.”

Aram looked around Aunt Ginny at me. He was tall with dark piercing eyes and thick
black hair, and he was wearing a suit complete with tie, despite the heat of the
evening. He didn’t look anything like his father.

“My niece,” Aunt Ginny said curtly, sending a sharp look my way. “I’d like to see
the damage, if you don’t mind. Riley, get back in the car.”

Aram led her inside. I crept in after them. I wanted to know what was happening.
I felt terrible about Mr. Goran and what the police thought he had done. If I could
just convince Aunt Ginny…

Aram led her to the study, which had clearly been ransacked. There were papers everywhere.
All the desk drawers were open, their contents spilled onto the floor. Most of the
books had been ripped from the shelves. A smashed laptop computer sat on the edge
of the desk. Aunt Ginny was particularly interested in that.

“Whose computer is that? Your father’s?”

“It’s mine.” Aram looked ruefully at it. “Rather, it
was
mine. It made an ominous
sound when it hit the floor. It sounded even worse when I picked it up.”

“Picked it up?”

“I was carrying it when the man attacked me.”

“It wasn’t in a case?” Aunt Ginny asked.

“I was using it in the taxi. Work never seems to stop.” He sighed as he looked down
at the broken computer. “It doesn’t look good.”

But Aunt Ginny was already scanning the place with her detective eyes. “Does your
father keep anything of value in the house?”

Aram glanced around. “To be honest, I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve been
here.”

“But you must know if your father owned any valuables—jewelry, art objects…”

“I’m afraid not. I haven’t spoken to my father in a few years.”

Aunt Ginny studied him for a moment.

“Well,” she said finally, “there’s definitely been a break-in. I’ll take some pictures
and dust for prints. That way, we might catch a break if there are any similar incidents
reported in the area. But without knowing if anything was stolen, that’s about all
I can do for now.” She excused herself to get her camera and fingerprint kit from
the car.

While she was gone, I took a look around, beginning with the desk and ending with
Aram’s computer. He’d picked it up and was fiddling with it.

“It won’t start,” he said.

“Maybe it can be fixed.”

He looked skeptical and shook the computer gently to make his point. It made a rattling
sound that no computer should make. “As well, the screen is cracked. And it hit
pretty hard. I was going to get a new one anyway.”

“I have a friend who’s a wizard with hard drives. If there’s anything recoverable
on yours, he might be able to retrieve it. Might be worth a try.”

He still looked doubtful, but finally he said, “I don’t think Steve Jobs himself
would be able to retrieve anything off this thing. But be my guest.” It took him
a few minutes to wrestle the hard drive out of the computer. He handed it to me.

“Mr. Goran?” Aunt Ginny called. “May I speak with you for a moment?”

He left to find her. I slipped the hard drive into my pocket and went out onto the
porch to wait.

A few minutes later, Aram came out and stood on the porch steps, where he stared
up into the star-filled sky. That was one benefit of living in the country. The night
came alive with stars and constellations that were invisible through all the ambient
light—the streetlights and house lights and lights from office buildings—in the city.

“I’m sorry about your father,” I said. “He’s been nice to us.”

“You know him?”

I told him how his father had welcomed us to our new house and planted a garden for
us. He smiled when I said that.

“My father was—is—always planting things. Flowers, fruit trees, vegetables. He loves
to see things grow.”

“What about you? Did you inherit his green thumb?”

“I have no talent for growing. I’m nothing like my father.”

“He told me he was worried about you.”

He nodded. “I work for an aid agency in Afghanistan. My father doesn’t approve.”

“My dad is working near a rebel-held area in Liberia,” I told him. “
I
don’t approve.”

He regarded me with new interest. Maybe he thought I would understand why he chose
to work in a danger zone. But I didn’t any more than I understood why my father chose
to do the same thing, and why he kept volunteering to stay on.

“I wish I could have been here sooner, but it took a while to make the arrangements,”
he said. “The hospital here tracked me down. My father had me listed as his emergency
contact, but the information was out of date. I spoke to his doctor. He says I may
have to make some hard decisions.”

“Did he tell you what happened?”

“When I stopped by the hospital, a policeman was there. He told me that my father
had been in a barn fire.” He peered through the darkness to where the barn had once
stood, replaced now by a burnt-out skeleton and a heap of rubble. “He said the fire
was set deliberately.”

I admit I was curious, but I just couldn’t make myself ask if the same police officer
had mentioned that Mr. Goran was the prime suspect.

Aunt Ginny emerged from the house with her equipment.

“I’ll file a report. I wish I could do more, Mr. Goran.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And please—it’s Aram.”

“It took him long enough to get here,” Aunt Ginny muttered as we drove back down
Mr. Goran’s long driveway. “The fire was over a week ago.”

“Mr. Goran’s son works in Afghanistan,” I pointed out. “Besides, he and his father
were estranged.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“His father told me.”

“Did he also tell you what it was about?”

“He said Aram blames him for his mother’s death.”

“Oh?” That caught Aunt Ginny’s interest. “Why? What happened?”

“She died of a heart attack. Mr. Goran told me his son thinks he worked his wife
too hard. But he says she wanted to work. She wanted to save the money to buy a farm,
and she never told him she had a heart condition. If he had known, things would have
been different.”

Aunt Ginny glanced at me.

“You’re a good kid,” she said—a first. “But you have to be careful with that.”

“With what?”

“Believing whatever people tell you. You barely know the man, Riley. So just because
he tells you something doesn’t make it true, not until you know he’s someone you
can trust. And even then…”

And even then, you couldn’t ever be sure that you really knew someone. That’s what
she meant.

Before I went to bed, I sent a text message to IT, who used to be one of Jimmy’s
roadies. The guys used to
call him “It” because he was the Mount Everest of men and
was reputed to have once carried an upright piano up two flights of stairs single-handedly,
although I never met anyone who had actually seen him perform this astounding feat.
IT preferred to think of himself as Mr. Information Technology, because he knew everything
there was to know about computers and had taken care of all the web-based technology
for Jimmy and the band. After Jimmy died, he’d started doing freelance tech support
for several other bands. If Aram Goran’s hard drive had anything retrievable on it,
IT would be able to recover it.

He texted me back immediately and said he’d take a look at it. I promised to ship
it to him the next day.

FOUR

After Aunt Ginny left for work the next morning, I painted another wall in my room.
I wanted to keep going, because I was impatient to unpack and organize my things.
But I had promised the doctor I would take it easy, so I took a break before tackling
the third wall. I ate lunch, packaged up Aram Goran’s hard drive and rode into town
to post it.

Riding a bicycle on a country road is trickier than riding in the city. Sure, there’s
less traffic in the country, and that’s good. But the cars and trucks that are on
the road zoom by, unlike slower-moving city traffic, and the road I was on was a
two-lane blacktop
with a straight two-inch drop from the pavement to the gravel alongside
it. That drop could throw a person off balance. I know that because when a truck
raced past me close enough to graze my shoulder, I panicked, swerved and ended up
slipping off the pavement. The gravel gripped my tires and almost stopped me dead.
I just missed ending up in the deep ditch that ran between the gravel and the field
on the other side. Also, it quickly became clear that people around here weren’t
used to sharing the road with cyclists. Two pickup-truck drivers and one other motorist
yelled at me, “Get off the road, you dumb kid.” I was relieved when I finally reached
Moorebridge’s town center.