* * *
By Wednesday, Fat George had been declared missing by his parents and Sergeant Bradley of the Sleepy Lake Police Department. Having received orders to pursue the boy’s case to a satisfactory conclusion, the police officer dropped by Matthew’s school to see Mr. Pebblestone and interview some of the kids and teachers. Of particular interest to him was when Fat George was last seen, and whether he’d confronted anybody with a threat before he disappeared. The second question became pertinent when the sergeant came to an unfavorable conclusion about the missing boy’s character and behavior, and of course Matthew was singled out as the bully’s latest opponent, immediately going into a closed-door session with the police officer.
When it was over, no one could tell how Matthew had reacted to questions posed to him because Bradley immediately left in his squad car and the boy returned to his class without revealing much. However, a new rumor had been quietly spreading through the length and breadth of the school’s buildings ever since the SLPD sergeant ‘picked up’ the adopted kid for ‘questioning.’ Fanned by the embers of Mary Ann’s associates, this story was rapidly bringing cold fear into the hearts and minds of the younger children. Fat George was missing because he’d been killed! Matthew was the killer and the body must be lying somewhere in the lake if only the police would carefully look.
Nobody wondered how such a shallow lake could hide such a fat boy. They only repeated the story because it was sensational and smoothly fitted into the longer one Mary Ann had been feeding their minds with all this time.
Matthew quickly figured out this bizarre story when the younger kids started calling him ‘The Killer’ and keeping their distance from him. His classmates had even gone to the extreme by pushing his desk and chair to the wall before everyone else’s and falling silent whenever he came into the classroom. Even Anderson had mouthed the word ‘killer’ in his face when he tried to make up by asking the African-American boy what time it was. They now feared him, but he knew they were still chiding him behind his back.
Murmuring and giggles always came from all around him whenever he sat in class minding his own business, and now, someone laughed out loud far behind him. The culprit had a scrawny stature and wore hand-me-downs an older brother supplied him with. Rupert. Mary Ann’s associate and Fat George’s sidekick. The boy’s father was the town butcher and his mother sold tulips in Sleepy Lake’s open market. Some said his father often abused him back home and this was why he molested younger kids in school, although Matthew’s present interest in him was not due to this particular story. He’d been instrumental in spreading the false rumor of his master’s death to the higher classes and Matthew knew this.
His name deserved to be in the black book.