And now he was to the side of me and came in on the attack. He tried to wrap his arm around my throat in a choke hold. He’d be able to knock me out in about three seconds like that.
I couldn’t let it happen. Quickly, I slipped underneath his arm just the way he’d always shown me. Then I tried to push him to the side so I could make an escape route to the door.
Before I could, he snapped his elbow back into my chest and then snapped a backhanded fist into my face. He could’ve broken my nose with that, but he hit me in the cheek instead because he was trying not to hurt me too badly. It stung plenty, though—and he followed it up with a left-handed blow to the belly that knocked the wind out of me.
All the same, I tried to fight back, tried to throw a right over his punch into the side of his head.
Mike ducked the punch so fast it was as if he’d disappeared from in front of me. Another punch hit me in the belly—a right this time, much harder. I gasped out air and nearly doubled over. Then Mike was behind me.
He chopped me in the back of the neck. He could’ve killed me with a blow like that, but his control was pinpoint perfect. He hit me just hard enough to send a burst of pain shooting through my head and white sparks exploded in front of my eyes.
My knees buckled and I went down. I had just enough sense left to drop to my shoulder and roll. I leapt to my feet again, throwing my hands on guard just the way Mike had taught me. But to be honest, I was dazed. If Mike had come after me then, he probably could’ve finished me off pretty easily.
But he didn’t attack. He just stood where he was in the middle of the dojo. He shook his head and stroked his mustache in that way he did when he wanted to hide a smile.
“That was pretty good, chucklehead,” he said. “I guess I taught you well. You almost had me for . . .”
I broke for the door. Mike should’ve known better than to start talking. It’s always the best time to make a move—he taught me that.
I was out of the dojo and through the foyer. I was at the door, reaching for it, grabbing it—when Mike caught up to me.
But I was waiting for that, ready for it. The second I felt his hand on my collar, I changed direction as suddenly as I could. I braked on the balls of my feet and spun around. I knocked his hand off me with my left forearm. I shot my open hand at his chest, just trying to push him back. I could’ve aimed for his throat, but I didn’t want to hurt him any more than he wanted to hurt me.
I shouldn’t have worried about it. The blow never landed anyway. Mike knocked it away with a left cross-body block and whacked me on the side of the head with his right. It was another blow that could’ve been a lot worse, but Mike kept his hand open so it was more of a slap than anything else. Still, it rattled me, stunned me—and the next moment Mike had my arm twisted behind me and forced me away from the door, back into the dojo.
He let me go, giving me an extra shove so I went stumbling a few steps away from him. I turned around, breathing hard. Mike just stood there, blocking the way out of the dojo, waiting to see if I would try to get past him again.
I didn’t. What was the point? I knew I couldn’t beat him. He knew every move I knew and some I didn’t. And he knew them all a lot better than I did, maybe better than I ever would.
He stroked his mustache again. “I’ll tell you something, Charlie,” he said. “You’re the best student I ever had.” I was glad to see he was breathing kind of hard himself, though nowhere near as hard as I was. “In fact, you’re one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some good ones. Another five years, a little more real-life, maybe some military training, you might even be able to take me. But not today.”
I nodded. I knew he was right. I bent forward, resting my hands on my thighs, trying to catch my breath, trying to shake off the pain in my gut and the daze in my head.
The phone had stopped ringing now. I noticed the alarm bell had stopped ringing too. The alarm company must’ve turned it off on their end. They were probably calling the police now. Another two or three minutes and I’d hear the sirens again, see the flashing lights again. I’d have no way to escape this time.
I had only one chance left. If I couldn’t find the right strike to knock Mike out of the way, then I had to find the right words, the right argument, that would make him see why he had to let me go. I had to convince him. And I had to do it now.
“Mike,” I said, thinking even as I spoke, searching desperately for the words and the reasoning. “Listen, okay? Just listen to me.”
“I’m listening. You have until the police get here.”
“You said you figured I was framed, right?”
He nodded. “That’s right. You must’ve been. There was so much evidence against you, there were only two possibilities. Either you were framed or you were guilty. And I know you weren’t guilty.”
To be honest, I didn’t know whether he was right or not, whether I was framed or guilty or whether there was some other explanation altogether. But I did remember what Beth had told me. How she’d described the day I was arrested and what the evidence against me was and so on.
“Some of the traces of blood they found were on my clothes, remember?” I said. “The clothes I was wearing the last time I saw Alex.”
“Yeah, I remember. So?”
“So I gave those clothes to the police myself. I had them at home and I turned them over as soon as they asked for them. No one touched them except for me and the police.”
Mike made an impatient gesture with his hand. “So what?”
“Well, how’d the evidence get on my clothes, Mike? How’d the blood get on them?”
“So what’re you saying? That you’re guilty?”
“Maybe. Like you said: guilty or framed. And if I was framed, then it must’ve been the police who framed me.”
Mike’s eyes went wide. “What? Oh, come on!”
“No, listen. Listen. They were the only people who had the clothes, right? Them and me. Who else could’ve put Alex’s blood on them?”
He gave a wave of his hand, made a dismissive noise. “Nice try, Charlie, but that’s nuts. That doesn’t make any sense at all. I know a lot of the cops in this town. They’re straight-arrow, every one of them.”
“You can’t know them all.”
“No. But enough. It’s a good department.”
“Then I must be guilty,” I said. “You said it yourself. Either I was framed or I’m guilty. If I was framed, it had to be someone on the police force who did it. Or at least it had to be someone who could get to the evidence while it was in police custody. Maybe it was the prosecutor or someone in his office. I don’t know. But it had to be someone like that. Someone in authority.”
For a moment Mike didn’t answer, and a little flutter of hope went through me. I could see the logic of it working on him. It was working on me too. I hadn’t really thought it through before, but now that I’d said it, it did make a certain amount of sense, didn’t it? If I wasn’t guilty, then where did the evidence come from? Blood on my clothing. Fingerprints and DN A on the knife. If I wasn’t guilty, how could it all get there?
“I never even owned a combat knife, Mike,” I said, thinking out loud. “How could it have my fingerprints on it and my DN A? If I was framed, it had to be by someone in power, someone who could get at the evidence and at me.”
When I stopped speaking, we were both silent again. And in the silence, I heard them: the sirens. Off at a distance somewhere, but coming fast. Mike heard them too. We both glanced in the direction of the door.
“Mike, listen,” I said. “Either I’m guilty or you may be giving me over to the very people who set me up in the first place.”
“I’m telling you,” Mike said, “the police wouldn’t do that. I know them . . .”
But he didn’t sound as sure as he did before. I kept pressing.
“You don’t know all of them. It would only take one. Or the prosecutor. Or someone like that. And that means I’m dangerous to someone, someone
in authority, someone who knows the truth. If you let them put me back in prison, you may be putting me just where they want me, just where they can get at me.”
“You don’t know that,” Mike said—but again, he didn’t sound so sure.
“You said I broke out of prison before my lawyers could even appeal,” I pressed on. “I don’t remember, but maybe I did it because I had to. Maybe I knew that if I stayed in prison, I wouldn’t live long enough for an appeal.”
He looked at me and I looked back. We were both thinking it through. We were both realizing it made sense.
And all the while, the sirens were growing louder. That sound like baying dogs getting close to their prey. It made me sick inside. The police would be here any minute now.
“Mike, please,” I said. “Just think about it. If you let me go, at least you know I’ll be free to defend myself. If you send me back to prison, you might make me a sitting duck; you may be putting me right where they want me.” Mike actually nodded slightly. I couldn’t fight him, but my words were getting through. “If you think I’m guilty, turn me over,” I said. “But if you think I was framed, you gotta let me go. You gotta let me try to prove it. Someone— someone on the inside—is my enemy. If you think I’m innocent, you’ve got to let me go.”
Mike just went on standing there, went on looking at me. Another second went by and then another. The sirens were much louder now. I thought the cops must be almost at the mall. There was no more time . . .
“You’re innocent,” said Mike then—now he was the one who was thinking out loud. “There’s no question you’re innocent, not to me. Some things you know because you can prove them. But another man’s heart—that’s something you have to take on faith. I have faith in you, Charlie. I know you’re no killer. And if you really think you have to keep running in order to stay alive”—he turned aside, leaving a path to the door—“then go.”
There was no time to say all the things I wanted to say to him, to give him all the thanks he deserved, not just for this, but for everything, all through the years. There was no time to say any of it. Choked up, I gripped his shoulder once as I went past him.
Then I was out of the dojo. Through the foyer. At the door.
“Godspeed, chucklehead,” I heard Mike say behind me.
I braced myself and stepped out into the night.
The sirens came closer and closer. At last, I saw the flashing lights of the police cruisers converging on the mall. I saw two cars come screeching to a halt in the parking lot in front of the dojo. I saw a uniformed officer step from each of the cars and I saw the two of them go running to the dojo door.
I saw it all in the rearview mirror of Rick’s red Civic. Because by then, I was driving away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Real True America
Back at the Ghost Mansion, I tried to sleep. Maybe I did sleep a little. I don’t know. Mostly I lay awake, staring into the dark, wrapped in my sleeping bag against the cold that came in at the windows.
It wasn’t the spooky creaking of the old house that disturbed me. It wasn’t the scrabbling of the mice in the walls. It wasn’t the moaning of the autumn wind in the trees outside or the leaves rattling through the graveyard there or even the thought of the mourning woman, cowled and staring blank-eyed into nothingness.
The ghosts of the haunted house didn’t scare me anymore. It was reality that was terrifying. It was my own racing thoughts that wouldn’t let me rest.
I kept going back over what I’d said to Mike. I kept thinking about what Beth had told me, about the day I was arrested. I had come to her that morning on the path by the river, she said. I had told her about all the evidence there was against me.
“How could that happen?” she’d asked me.
It was a good question. How could it have happened? How could Alex’s blood have been on my clothes? How could my fingerprints have been on the knife that killed him?
And what about Alex? What had he been involved in? Who had he known? Why had he been going to see Mike and why did he want his friends to keep it secret? Who could have killed him if I hadn’t?
It was still dark outside when I got up, but I could hear a few birds twittering and I knew that dawn was near.
I crawled out of the sleeping bag. I stood bouncing on my toes and hugging myself, shivering in the cold. When I warmed up a little, I sat cross-legged in front of the laptop Josh had left for me. I turned it on.
I had to use the computer sparingly. Josh had given me two batteries, but with no electricity in the house there was no easy way to recharge them. I figured I’d get about four hours of use from them all told.
I went to work. I called up a search engine and started looking for the site called something like Real True America—the site Mike had seen Alex looking at when he was at the library.
It wasn’t easy to find. It took me nearly forty-five minutes of trying different combinations. It turned out what I was looking for was not a site, but a page on a site that had a harmless-looking title like “A Student’s Guide to American History.”
The page was headlined: “Real True America: Debunking the Myths, Getting the Facts Straight.” There were a lot of links on the page, but I only had to go to a few of them before I realized what they were. Basically it was a list of every bad thing that had ever happened in this country, everything people had ever done wrong. You know the stuff: slavery and some of the unfair attacks on American Indians and so on. Some of it really was bad and some of it only looked bad when taken out of its historical context. And there was none of the good stuff at all. Nothing about the Constitution and the way it preserved and protected the freedom God gave people to do and think and become whatever they could. Nothing about the fact that America’s influence had brought that freedom to places where it had never been and protected it in places where it was under attack. There’s so much about this country that is unique in history and great for humankind. But none of that was there. It was only about the bad stuff people do, which happens in America just like it happens everywhere else.
It’s easy to make something sound bad if you only tell one side of the story. That’s what they did here.
So this was the sort of stuff Alex was looking at. I scrolled through it quickly, keeping track of my battery meter as it got lower and lower. I was about to turn the computer off, when I found a link that said, “The Great Proposition.” It sounded important, so I hit it and was taken to another page.
This is what it said:
For too long, America has sought to impose its way of life on the rest of the world. It’s got to stop. Americans have got to learn that the so-called “Truths” they hold “self-evident” aren’t really truths at all, but just cultural perspectives, which might be different somewhere else. Concepts like “liberty”—which can lead to unfairness—or freedom of speech—which allows people to say offensive things—or “rights” given us by a “Creator” to such selfish goals as “the pursuit of happiness”—these may seem good to you, but who’s to say they are good for everyone? To believe in any absolute truth is oppressive. Absolutism is the meat of tyrants. Real morality is always relative to situations and cultural traditions.
I caught my breath as the last words seemed to leap out at me from the monitor. I remembered those words. I remembered when Mr. Sherman had spoken them to me in class, almost exactly as they were written there on the page. Had he read it here?
Or had he written it?
The moment the thought occurred to me, it made a kind of sense. I didn’t know whether Mr. Sherman and Alex had ever talked to each other, but if they had, I could really see Sherman filling Alex’s head with a lot of the ideas that seemed to confuse him just before the end. That didn’t mean Sherman was some kind of villain or something. He was entitled to his opinions just like anyone. But it might mean that he knew a lot more about how Alex had gotten killed than he let on.
I remembered something else too. I remembered how Beth had told me that Mr
. Sherman was my friend during my trial, that he stuck with me and believed in me and talked to me all the time. That hadn’t made a lot of sense to me when she said it, but what if he’d been trying to sell me the same ideas he’d sold to Alex?
As I sat there, staring at the words, trying to figure out what it all meant, a noise came out of the computer’s speaker. It was kind of like the sound of a door opening— a signal that one of my friends had come online. In one corner of my computer, there was a list of my friends: Beth, Josh, Rick, and Miler. It was Beth who had just signed on.
I clicked on the webcam symbol and waited to see if she would turn on the camera Josh had given her. A moment later, there she was, her face filling the monitor. She was wearing a bathrobe and her hair was in tangles, but she was pretty anyway, and her eyes were smiling and sweet. Suddenly the Ghost Mansion didn’t seem so bleak and empty.
I saw her look over her shoulder as if she was worried her parents would come in and see me on the screen. She leaned into the machine and spoke in a low voice as if she didn’t want anyone to hear.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I hoped you’d be there. Are you all right? Did you get any sleep? Did you have enough to eat?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t worry so much.”
She gave a wry little laugh. “You can’t have that wish, Charlie. I worry a lot.”
I smiled. It was actually kind of nice to have her worry about me. “I was just looking at some stuff, trying to figure some things out.”
“How’s it going? You find anything?”
“I’m not sure. You remember you said Mr. Sherman was my friend during the trial.”
“Uh-huh. He was great. He talked to you almost every day. You know, trying to keep your spirits up and everything.”
“You ever hear any of our conversations?”
I could see her thinking about it. She shrugged. “Not really. Nothing important anyway. But I remember you guys had lunch a bunch of times during the trial and took a couple of drives together, just the two of you.”