The preliminary hearing was scheduled for the next day at ten a.m. Everything about the courthouse seemed as if it had been designed to make Griffin feel small — the massive stone building, the towering marble columns, the security checkpoint, where uniformed guards directed visitors through a metal detector, like at an airport.
Police officers were everywhere, along with judges, jurors, lawyers, and people on trial, some even in handcuffs.
“I don’t belong here,” Griffin said to his parents. In the soaring atrium, his voice sounded high-pitched, like a four-year-old’s.
“You don’t have a thing to worry about,” his father replied grimly. “You didn’t take that Super Bowl ring, so all you have to do is tell the truth.”
Dad was trying to sound upbeat and positive, but when he went off to ask directions to courtroom 235, he looked like a man marching to his own execution.
At last, they located the right room. Their lawyer was already there — Dalton Davis of Davis, Davis, and Yamamoto. He looked like Griffin felt — very dark and very serious. Together, the four of them spent the longest forty-five minutes of Griffin’s life on a hard, wooden bench, waiting their turn to appear before the judge.
It wasn’t much like the legal dramas Griffin had seen on TV. There was no prosecutor, no witnesses. In fact, the only other people there were Judge Koretsky herself and a stenographer with lightning fingers who typed every single word, including ahem and stomach gurgles.
Judge Elaine Koretsky was an incredibly compact woman, probably in her midfifties. Despite her small size, though, she radiated power and a no-nonsense attitude. She spent a few minutes glancing at papers in a file folder before turning her attention to Griffin. “Why don’t you tell me your version of what’s happened here?”
“Well,” Mr. Davis began, “as I hope we’ve established —”
“I’d prefer to hear it from Griffin,” the judge interrupted.
It was the umpteenth time Griffin had told this story. He should have had it letter-perfect by now. But he began to falter as he watched the judge’s deepening frown.
When he was finished, she asked the one question he had no answer for: “So how did your retainer wind up inside the locked case where the ring used to be?”
“I can’t explain it,” he admitted, his face crimson. “I only know I didn’t put it there.”
The judge was not unkind, but her words fell like bombs. “You are convincing, but so is the evidence against you — especially in view of your past pattern of behavior.”
“Griffin has never been convicted of a crime,” Mr. Davis put in quickly.
“Maybe not,” she returned, “but he’s a regular trivia question in the police department quiz bowl league. I’m setting a hearing date for October twenty-ninth. If that ring should happen to turn up before then, it would make all our lives a lot easier. Especially yours, Griffin.”
Griffin could only shake his head.
“In the meantime,” Judge Koretsky went on, “I’m notifying the school district that you are being removed from Cedarville Middle School. Until this matter is resolved, you will be attending the JFK Alternative Education Center.”
Griffin was aghast. “You mean Jail For Kids?”
The judge glowered disapprovingly. “It’s not jail. I’ve seen jail. You don’t want to see it, too. JFK is the alternative program for secondary school kids in the county. Its students are there for various reasons — educational, social, behavioral, and legal.”
Mr. Bing stood up. “What happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
The judge smiled. “That still counts. This isn’t a sentence. I think it’s a good idea to take Griffin out of the atmosphere where his problem is percolating.”
“What about all my friends?” Griffin protested.
“Perhaps you could use a rest from them as well. And vice versa.” The crack of the gavel made it official. “We’re adjourned until October twenty-ninth.”
8
Even Ferret Face, peeking out from Ben’s collar, wore a woebegone expression.
Griffin and Ben, best friends since kindergarten, stood on the corner, waiting for the JFK bus to shatter their unbroken streak of attending the same school.
“Jail For Kids,” Ben mourned. “I never thought one of us would have to go there. Alcatraz, maybe, but not JFK.”
His attempt at humor got not even a smile from Griffin. “I can’t believe this! It’s so unfair! The whole point of living in America is so this can’t happen to a person!”
They were joined at the bus stop by another JFK student, obviously a high schooler. He was six foot four with a full beard and a tuft of chest hair emerging from his shirt. Short, slight Ben felt the sun blocked out by the sheer bulk of him.
The newcomer regarded them without much interest. “New victims?”
“Just him!” squeaked Ben, pointing at Griffin.
The towering high schooler gave Griffin a onceover. “I’ve got zits bigger than you.”
“It’s a mistake,” Griffin mumbled. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Yeah — me, neither. I was innocent. All six times.”
Griffin and Ben each took a step back and nearly tumbled off the curb into the road.
Ben leaned close to his friend. “You know what’s the weirdest part of all this? How your lost retainer ended up where the ring was supposed to be. Have you thought about that?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve thought about nothing but. That’s why nobody believes me — because they can’t understand how it could have happened if I didn’t do it.”
“Well, how could it have happened?”
“I was framed.”
Ben just stared at him.
“You know — framed! Set up! Railroaded! Whoever stole that ring found my retainer and planted it in the display case so I’d get the blame.”
Ben was wide eyed. “But who?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” said Griffin. “But I will. That’s a promise.”
Both were amazed when a regular yellow school bus rattled up to the stop.
Their companion was amused. “What were you expecting? A prison transport?”
With a last desperate look at his best friend, Griffin followed the bearded high schooler aboard.
The door slapped shut, and the vehicle roared away, leaving Ben on the sidewalk, awash in guilt. At this terrible moment, all he could think of was how grateful he was that he wasn’t the passenger en route to Jail For Kids.
The John F. Kennedy Alternative Education Center was housed in the old Cedarville Public Library and served 187 students from the seventh through twelfth grades.
It would be wrong to say that every single kid was a juvenile delinquent. There was a variety of students with special needs, and some who simply had trouble getting along in regular school. But for the most part, the rumors about this place were true. It was the dumping ground for the worst of the worst in the county.
Griffin had expected to hate it. He just hadn’t expected to hate it this much. He was the youngest, and the smallest, and the weakest — although there were no bullying problems at JFK. The teachers were tougher than the students, and they seemed to be everywhere, like spies. He witnessed a fistfight on day one. Before the first punch landed, there was a teacher on each combatant, pulling them apart. It was almost like the faculty knew what you were going to do even before you decided to do it.
Classes were a joke. The teachers cared only about keeping order, and the students didn’t care about anything at all. At any given time, a third of them were asleep. The only question ever asked was “Can I go to the bathroom?”
If I’m stuck here for long, I’m going to end up stupid….
That thought was replaced by an even darker one. If he was convicted of stealing the Super Bowl ring, then JFK would be Disney World compared with the juvenile detention center that awaited him somewhere.
When did life suddenly become such a nightmare?
&
nbsp; It didn’t really matter that they weren’t teaching anything, because he was far too uptight to concentrate. He had to stop this runaway train. He was The Man With The Plan! He had better use this free time to work out a strategy to clear his name.
He opened his notebook to a blank page — they were all blank — and jotted a title across the top:
OPERATION JUSTICE
OBJECTIVE: To find out who FRAMED me.
List of SUSPECTS:
(i) …
Suddenly, the paper was ripped out of the notebook. The next thing Griffin knew, a paper airplane was sailing across the room toward the teacher.
Without thinking, he was up and chasing it through the aisle. Two people tripped him as he ran, but somehow he held it together, grasping frantically at the missile. No one must find evidence that he was working on a plan. He was in enough trouble already.
His foot came down in the wastebasket. The wipeout would have been spectacular, but the teacher caught him with one hand and the airplane with the other. It got a halfhearted cheer from the class — by far the greatest show of enthusiasm Griffin had seen all day at Jail For Kids.
Like most of the JFK faculty, Mr. Huber was 10 percent teacher and 90 percent prison guard, hard-muscled and tough. He hauled Griffin’s foot out of the garbage, dropped the crumpled paper airplane in its place, and uttered a single word: “Sit.”
“But I was just —” As he scanned the room, Griffin realized he had no idea who had done this to him.
“Sit,” the teacher said again.
He didn’t dare work on his plan now. So he shifted his mind into neutral and listened to the lesson for the remainder of the period. He remembered it from fifth grade. Maybe fourth.
At least there was one thing to be thankful for: No one had noticed the contents of the page that had become the paper airplane.
Or so he believed.
“Hey, Justice,” came a voice from behind him in the hall.
Griffin kept his eyes straight ahead and hurried toward his next class.
“Yo — new guy. I’m talking to you.”
Oh, no. Griffin turned around to face a squat bulldog of a boy, shorter than he was, but outweighing him by at least thirty pounds. The kid resembled a sawed-off bodybuilder with a neck like a tree stump and a crew-cut cement block for a head.
“Pardon?” asked Griffin, not wanting to start anything with this mass of brawn.
“Operation Justice — what’s the story?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Griffin stiffly. He wasn’t about to waste words on the person who had stolen his paper and sailed it across the room.
“I’m talking about how you got framed,” the boy insisted. “You and everybody else here. Think about it — a whole school for people with problems, but nobody really deserves to be here. They were all framed, just like you.”
Go away, Griffin prayed, focusing his eyes on a spot on the wall over the expansive shoulders.
The big stranger fell into step behind him. “Now take me, for instance. I’m the only inmate who actually belongs here. Everything on my record is totally true. I’m a bad person. What can I do?”
You can go away and leave me alone, Griffin thought. But he was too intimidated to say it.
The boy jumped in front of him. “Sheldon Brickhaus. My friends call me Shank — or they would, if I had any.” He grasped Griffin’s hand and squeezed with crushing force.
“Hey, that hurts!”
Shank grinned and tightened his grip. “Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”
“Griffin. Griffin Bing.”
“Good to meet you, Griffin Bing.” Shank held on for a good ten seconds longer.
When Griffin finally got his hand back, red and throbbing, he mumbled, “I have to get to English now.”
“English? Great. I’m going to the same class. There aren’t a lot of middle school kids here. I bet we’ll be together all day.”
“Probably,” Griffin agreed, trying to keep a mournful note out of his tone.
What was worse than being ripped from your life and dumped into a place where you didn’t know a soul?
Answer: Making “friends” you didn’t want.
Thankfully, Griffin still had his real friends. When Jail For Kids was mercifully over for the day, he gathered the team in his garage. They sat in the shadow of a dozen different versions of the Vole-B-Gone, which lined the shelves and cluttered the workbench.
Pitch frowned at the wire-mesh enclosures as Griffin ushered the team members inside. “No offense to your dad, but I think the birdcage has already been invented.”
“They’re not for birds; they’re for voles,” Griffin explained. “Every year, hundreds of orchards lose their crop thanks to vole problems.”
Savannah, the animal lover, regarded the traps disapprovingly. “I hope they’re humane. Just because you’re a pest, it doesn’t mean you should have to suffer.”
“Except for Darren,” Ben added. “Anyway, don’t worry about these traps. Griffin’s dad says no vole will go near them.”
Griffin cleared a space on the workbench and placed a sheet of paper where everyone could see it.
OPERATION JUSTICE
OBJECTIVE: To find out who FRAMED me.
List of suspects:
(i) Dr. Evil
Motive: worships the ring and hates me. Stealing it gets him exactly what he wants — the ring + me out of his hair. Also, has key to display case.
(ii) Darren Vader
Motive: notorious money grubber. Has talked about how much the ring must be worth. Also knew about retainer + as football player, has access to the school after hours.
(iii) Tony Bartholomew
Motive: believes the ring is rightfully his. Needs to blame me to distract from himself as a suspect.
(iv) Celia White
Motive: stealing ring proves that her columns about youth crime are true. Possibly eyeing better job at bigger newspaper.
“Wow.” Logan whistled, impressed. “Which one do you think did it?”
Pitch rolled her eyes. “If we knew that, they wouldn’t be called suspects, would they? My money’s on Vader. He’d sell his own mother for a buck!”
“Darren’s a saint compared to Celia White,” said Savannah with an expression of distaste. “A person who would call animal control on Luthor is capable of anything.”
Melissa agitated her head, allowing her beady eyes to emerge from behind her curtain of hair. “How are we going to find out which one of them is guilty?”
Griffin had thought they’d never ask. “I have a plan.”
Nobody wanted a plan. But Griffin was in trouble when he had done nothing wrong. He was going to get all the support they had to offer.
“All right, Griffin.” Ben sighed. “Lay it on us.”
Ferret Face buried his head under Ben’s shirt, as if he couldn’t bear to listen.
“It’s a sting operation,” Griffin announced.
“We’re going to use bees?” asked Logan, wide eyed.
“It means we trick the bad guy into revealing himself,” Griffin explained.
“Or herself,” Savannah amended, still thinking of Celia White.
“But how do we do that?” Pitch persisted.
“Why does anybody steal a valuable Super Bowl ring?” Griffin mused. “The suspects may have different motives, but there’s one common denominator: money. So all we have to do is pretend to be buyers. We send all four of them an anonymous e-mail offering big bucks for the ring. We set up a meeting, and whoever comes must be the guilty one.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Ben pointed out. “The suspects know us. Whoever comes to the meeting, the minute they spot us, meeting over. They’ll take off and we’ll never be able to prove they had the ring.”
“I thought of that,” said Griffin. “The meeting has to be at the courthouse where I had my hearing. There’s a metal detector at the front door, and there’s no way a big gold
ring is going to make it through without setting off the machine. So the guilty party will have to take the ring out of his pocket and pass it through the X-ray machine. Then we’ve got him.”
“Or her,” Savannah added.
Pitch looked surprised. “You know, Griffin, I always thought your plans were pretty lamebrained. But this is kind of smart. I mean, it could work.”
“It better,” said Griffin fervently. “I have less than a month to prove that I’m innocent.”
I am a serious buyer for the valuable object that has recently come into your possession. If you are interested in making a lot of $$$, meet me under the Blind Justice statue in the lobby of the Cedarville courthouse on Friday at 5:30 p.m. Bring the hardware for a SUPER deal.
“It’s perfect,” Griffin approved, making shy Melissa blush. “Have you got the e-mail addresses for the four suspects?”
She nodded, hands caressing the keyboard. “All ready to go. I’m sending it through a dummy server in Malta. There’s no way anybody could trace it. Even a computer expert would take years.” Her finger hovered over the mouse. “Ready?”
“Let me do it, Melissa.”
Griffin sent the e-mails himself. It felt important for him to start this plan personally, setting in motion the mechanism that would get him his life back. So far, things had just happened to him. He was a ping-pong ball, bounced around by forces he had no control over. Now he was fighting back, taking charge. It felt good.
The hardest part was waiting for Friday. Griffin moved like a zombie through the halls of Jail For Kids. His body may have been in this terrible place, but his mind was lost in the details of Operation Justice: Where should the lookouts be stationed with their walkie-talkies? What were the best vantage points from which a camera might capture the ring as the guilty party revealed it before the metal detector?
“Hey, Justice — over here!”
Griffin stood at the end of the cafeteria line, holding his tray at eye level so he could pretend not to notice Sheldon Brickhaus waving him over to a corner table.
Just keep walking. You don’t see him.