She just stared at this corner, all totally proud. Mr. Ames had been rocking in his chair. He stopped midrock and said, "Sylvia, I would not be putting you through this if I thought the Richardson boy killed your son."
He twisted around in his swivel chair when she didn't respond, and he laughed awkwardly. "I wouldn't put you through this if I thought Christopher was ... no longer with us."
A tear fell over her eyelashes, but she wiped it away almost as soon as it dropped. She glared at Mr. Ames. "I know what you think. You think this is another Digger Haines reenactment," she said. "You think my son, like Digger, is out there. And you're afraid if I don't stop pointing the finger that I'm going to end up suicidal like Bob Haines."
"No one has ever proven that Bob Haines committed suicide," Mr. Ames said quickly. "No one knows where he is today. But, yes, Sylvia, I think that ..." He trailed off and stared at his desk clock like he was agonizing inside.
I realized this was only the second time I'd heard anything about Digger Haines, yet Mrs. Creed knew about it, and as soon as she mentioned it to Mr. Ames, he knew it right away, too. It was like this big secret story all the grown-ups seemed to know about, but no one talked about it. Mrs. Creed squirmed uncomfortably.
"I don't plan on winding up dead, Glen. I have better ways to cope," she said quickly. "I would love to think my son is out there. Do I look like the morbid type who would prefer to think the worst in an awful case like this? Not at all, Glen. There's only one problem with your theory. My son could not have written that note!"
"What makes you so sure?" he asked.
"I know my son. My son was happy. My son had a very good life. And he was happy." She said that part twice, like, for emphasis. "And if he didn't write that note, what's the conclusion, Glen? Somebody else wrote the note!"
I shuddered, reminded of some ancient schoolteacher cackling at a kid in class. Mr. Ames cleared his throat, but before he could think of something to say, Ali piped up.
"I don't ... I just don't think he could be so happy watching everyone in his class go to dances and parties, and he wasn't allowed."
Mrs. Creed stared at Ali like she was crazy. "Chris was allowed to go out! We offered to drive him to the dances! I even signed up to chaperone the dances, before he said he wasn't really into them. How could I object to the very dances I offered to chaperone?"
This woman was an enormous stone wall. I wondered what she would make of it if one of us shared a bright question like, Do you think your offering to chaperone had anything to do with Chris not being into it? or, Hey, great! What's better than driving to a dance with your mom, going in with your mom, and leaving with your mom?
"My dad chaperoned a couple of dances," Ali started out casually, "in, like ... sixth grade."
If Mrs. Creed got it, she didn't keep it. "I know my son! I also know that quintessential powder keg some people lovingly call the boondocks! I was raised down there, don't forget. I was a boon once."
I remembered hearing a few times over the years that Mrs. Creed was raised in the boondocks and that she'd had a hard life. But it never struck me as anything important. This time my eyes stuck on her as I watched her mouth move.
"They're not the victimized, misunderstood little darlings you make them out to be sometimes, Glen. My father was a drunkard. He used to tie me up with ropes and hang me upside down from the tree outside my bedroom window. After all the beatings I took as a kid, don't try and talk to me about any boon being incapable of murder."
"Don't you think you're generalizing a bit?" Mr. Ames asked quietly.
"Not about Bo Richardson. Are you forgetting what Mr. Richardson did to my Christopher last year?"
Mr. Ames sighed. I shifted around some more, and Ali was sucking air in and out like there was no tomorrow. This felt all wrong, but there didn't seem to be too much to say. I didn't need the graphic detail about Mrs. Creed being hung out with ropes to dry. It gave her some unfair advantage, in my mind.
"Pushing him over the bleachers is bad, Sylvia, but it doesn't amount to plotting a murder and covering it up," Mr. Ames said. "I've had problems with Bo Richardson, but he takes care of a lot of younger children at home, and he's got a good and responsible side as well. Don't forget, I've had problems with Chris, too, Sylvia. And I've also given him every possible break."
In other words, Mrs. Creed should lighten up on Bo due to the fact that so many teachers and principals had to break up fights, thanks to Chris's obnoxious streak.
"Well, it's not my fault that other children saw my son as an easy mark." She shrugged it off. "And need I remind you ... there is a boon, sitting in the Steepleton lockup, who confessed to extortion in my son's disappearance."
I blocked all bad thoughts out of my mind and repeated what I had said in the cafeteria. "I made the phone call, Mrs. Creed. That's the truth."
"Oh no, it's not." She stared at me, so sure, so unshakingly confident. She even broke into a snotty laugh like I was oh-so-stupid and didn't get anything over on her for a minute.
I went on in frustration. "Mrs. Creed! Bo knew you were mad because he pushed Chris off the bleachers last year. He was afraid you were going to accuse him of this, just because of the bleachers thing. He wanted to go into your house to see if he could find evidence of what really happened. I made the phone call so that he could get the evidence, so he wouldn't go to jail, and so everybody who counts on him could have a chance at not going down the tubes with him. It was me. I did it. That's the truth."
She stared at me like a corpse. I could not read her thoughts to save my life.
Ali cleared her throat. Her voice still shook, and I wanted to throttle her for her voice shaking, because we needed some strength to fight this woman's unblinking sureness. "And Mrs. Creed ... I was with Bo when we moved that file onto the computer disk. We got it from the library. It was already in the library's files. All we did was move it. I swear to—"
"Now, you listen to me!" Mrs. Creed was up and hovering over Ali's face so fast it looked like a military maneuver. Mr. Ames stood up, but she kept right on, almost nose to nose with Ali. "You people can sit here and tell your lies until hell freezes over. I do not care what you say, or what your agenda is. I care about one thing: taking that boondock kid who destroyed my life and making sure his life gets destroyed next."
She draped her handbag over her arm and straightened up stiffly. "Thank you for this most enlightening conversation, Glen. About chaperoning dances and curfews."
This sucks! my brain screamed.
But her exit line to us was, "Bo Richardson is going to hang."
It took a minute for her choice of words to sink in. My Psych teacher would definitely have called that a Freudian slip. A fire lit in my ribs, and I jumped up. I went to shout at her that hanging an innocent kid wouldn't erase her own childhood hangings. But by the time I found my voice, she was already gone.
"She's the criminal, Mr. Ames," I blasted. "She doesn't break into houses, she just breaks into lives! And steals them! Between her and the cops..."
I trailed off because of how he was staring into space. I noticed for the first time how tired he looked.
"Digger Haines was my friend," he said, so softly you would have thought he was talking to the wall and not to us. "Digger was my friend, and I guess I should have known that at some point it would happen again; it had to happen again."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He sighed. "Only that nobody learned a lesson. Nobody stopped believing that other people were more guilty than they were. Why do people have so much trouble seeing their own faults but such an easy time seeing everyone else's?"
I didn't answer because I knew he wasn't really asking me. It was just a question that he put out there. But a truth struck me. Mrs. Creed would rather believe her own son is dead than believe she is at fault. I would never have imagined that a human being was capable of so much denial. By the tired look on Mr. Ames's face and his last comment, I figured he must feel that she's not the
only person out there capable of that. He was thinking of a few others, maybe Digger's dad, Bob Haines, and maybe even our own chief of police.
Nineteen
My mom was trying to cheer us up as she made dinner. She said the DA's office was having the computer disk shipped to a company in Silicon Valley, in California. The company had special technology that could determine what activity actually happened on the disk. They could determine if Chris's note on the disk was either a "save" or a "move," and on what day that activity took place. If the activity was a "save," that meant Bo had something to do with creating or editing the note. We knew that wasn't true. If they could prove the activity was nothing more than a "move," then it would support Bo's story, she said.
"The problem is, we can't get the DA's signature until tomorrow. The shipping alone will take twenty-four hours, which will put us into the weekend. And they don't do analysis on the weekends," Mom said. "They won't have a diagnosis until Monday, at the earliest. Tomorrow they're sending Bo to the juvenile-detention facility in Egg Harbor, just for safekeeping."
That set Ali into one of her messes. My mom was rambling something about Bo being a juvenile, that they could keep him like that without actually charging him—something. I was trying to keep a long fuse, but Ali's crying all the time was getting me a little crazy.
"Mrs. Adams, I'm afraid of him being near Chief Bowen." Ali told how Bo blurted out Chief Bowen's affair with Mrs. McDermott to Renee. "I'm afraid Chief Bowen will do mean things to Bo for telling his kids. Things that have nothing to do with Chris Creed being gone."
I didn't know what to say. I was way lost on this business of Mrs. Creed taking her life out on an innocent kid.
After dinner I went up to my room and just lay there vegging. The whole thing was reminding me of this Bible story Leandra told me one day. The Bible stories she learned in her childhood were scarier than the ones they taught in my church. Ours were about Jesus loving all races and kids, and nice stuff like that. In her church, they told kids what could happen to you if you died a heartless snob. This rich guy had died, and gone to hell because he had been all heartless to the beggars and poor people. When he got there he pleaded to God that he wanted to appear as a ghost and tell his relatives to clean up their act. God said to him, "Even if you went back as a ghost and told the truth to their faces, they would not believe you."
I had thought that was a far-fetched story, until now.
There were blank spots where I must have dropped off to sleep that night without realizing it. But I would come out of them and look at the clock when I did. No more than half an hour ever passed.
Friday I never set foot in the cafeteria. And Leandra never came up to my locker or stuck her head in any of my classes before the bell. I guessed she knew it was over, and I just couldn't get up enough feelings to care. Somehow I got through classes and football practice. I got tackled a lot.
I was definitely ready for some decent news, something to pick me up, when I got home. I noticed that there was a message on my answering machine and wondered if it was from Leandra—or Alex, who hadn't called me since our fight with Renee in front of the Wawa. The phone call I made two nights earlier had been completely forgotten.
I pushed the button. "Hi, I'm Isabella. You forgot to leave your name, so this message is for whoever called me. Yeah, you can come over anytime. I'm here this weekend, except Saturday day ... My mom's taking me to the mall."
My mom's taking me to the mall. I remembered seeing Chris at the mall with his mom a few times, despite how the rest of us went with our friends. Sounded like Isabella and Chris were two of a kind. I stared at the answering machine and listened to the message a couple more times. Something about the sound of her voice made me curious. I guess I had expected her to sound really shy and hesitating. Creed had written shyness around her every move. She just sounded like a friendly person who was nice.
And she had misunderstood me. I had said I just wanted her to call, not that I wanted to come over. But all of a sudden that sounded like a really good idea. I needed to get out of this town.
I told my dad Ali and I wanted a change of scene, and we wanted to go eat and walk on the boardwalk. He dropped us off in front of Chris's uncle's restaurant around dinnertime. I watched his car drive away, before steering Ali up to the boardwalk. Neither of us was very hungry.
"This was a great idea," I said. It felt awesome to get out of the woods for a while.
"You look better." She grinned at me. "Past couple nights, I thought you were getting suicidal yourself. Did anyone ever tell you that you get too emotionally involved in things?"
"No," I said. I didn't think I'd ever had anything to become emotionally involved in before.
She was laughing. "Remember the time in third grade when we had that field trip to the wax museum?"
"Yes, and shut up," I said, remembering. They had this one exhibit called the Chamber of Horrors, and it had these wax guys in various torture maneuvers that had gone on throughout history.
"Some of us kept going back and going through again and again, but you refused to go after the first time." She giggled.
I shuddered. "I don't actually see the thrill of staring at a guy draped over a giant meat hook. Or a bloody, decapitated body hanging off a guillotine."
"We thought it was funny." She laughed again. "You wrote a poem for class the next day called ... some big word."
"'Inhumane,'" I mumbled. "Seemed like a big word back then."
I didn't feel like telling her the whole truth, because she was laughing already. But my mom had picked me up from school because the trip made us miss the school bus. I couldn't stop thinking of those torture victims, and by the time we were halfway home, my stomach had had enough. My mom had just gotten a new car, and I remember her reaching into the backseat, all frantic, and dumping out this pair of shoes she had just bought so I could have something to heave in. I heaved into a shoe box.
"I always wondered what they did with all those bloody wax figures when they closed that place," I muttered to Ali. "I wonder if that wax guy is still hanging over a meat hook in some other wax museum..."
"At any rate, I liked your poem." She smiled. "It was sweet."
I couldn't remember the poem, but it was good to see her smiling. It gave me hopeful thoughts, like maybe Isabella would know where Chris was, and that he was alive and okay.
We walked about six blocks, then turned. The houses on the beach block in Margate were pretty huge. They were even older and even bigger than the homes in Steepleton, but the yards were really small.
I had heard stories that the girls in Margate could generally be a good time. There was lots of money floating around, but the parents weren't all glued to one another like they were in Steepleton. It was more of a city than our little historic "towne," and supposedly there were more drugs running around, more parents taking more vacations without their kids, more divorces. That made for good parties. When juniors and seniors at Steepleton got their driver's licenses, they started going to parties in Margate on the weekends. But I supposed there were a number of families like mine, and that this Isabella was from one of them or she wouldn't have been like Creed described her.
We started up the walk, and I looked at the house number I'd scribbled down to make sure it was right. The lawn was small, and the hedges needed cutting really bad. The doorbell was hanging by a wire. I looked in one window and saw kind of a laundry mountain on the dining room table, with folding chairs all scattered around but no real chairs. It didn't look much like my house. It looked kind of bare and undecorated inside. I knocked on the door. After a few moments I heard footsteps and saw a pile of laundry with legs in jeans coming toward us.
"Hi!" the voice behind the mountain said. "Back door! Front door's broken."
We went around to the back door and waited. About a minute later a girl in baggy jeans came to the door. She wore one of those tops that came just below her boobs, so her whole stomach showed. She had about a hu
ndred long braids in her hair, with beads and feathers and all sorts of stuff on the ends. She pushed open the door, blowing smoke over our heads, from a cigarette in the hand she pushed with. She was cute, despite the hair, but looked old—about nineteen. Isabella's weird big sister that Creed described in his diary, I decided.
"Hi, I'm Torey. This is Ali."
"Come on in," she said, without even asking what we wanted. Very friendly family.
I walked past her into the living room. It looked real lived in, and the furniture was kind of falling down.
"We're looking for Isabella Karzden," I said.
"I'm Isabella." She looked from Ali to me, huffing on that cigarette. It stopped me cold.
"You're Isabella?" I said. This girl was smoking. She was so unshy and so artsy looking. I could not imagine what in the hell attracted this girl to Creed. Ali rescued me.
"Torey called a couple nights ago. We know Chris Creed."
"Oh, that's you guys!" She laughed. "Sit down. Here."
She pushed a bunch of clothes and coats off the couch with her arm, and they landed in a pile on the floor. "Sorry about the mess. My dad refuses to hire a housekeeper, and my mom lives in Philadelphia now. He pays her a huge alimony, which is why we're minus a housekeeper, probably. I don't ask questions, I'm just the token offspring. My mom shows up on Saturdays to take me to the mall. I wonder if you can buy a housekeeper at Macy's."
I remembered her mall statement on the answering machine and shook my head in dizzy disbelief. It's amazing how things can be so different from how they sound.
"You guys want a beer? Bunch of kids are coming over later. We can have the party before the party if you want."
"Sure." Ali smiled, rescuing me again.
Isabella disappeared into the kitchen, and I just knew something was horribly wrong here. I thought maybe we had the wrong Isabella Karzden. Ali was laughing.
"What's so funny?" I asked.
"Oh my god" was all she said, but she looked like she was putting something together.