“A few reasons. The wound, primarily. Had to have been delivered by someone standing, someone probably between five-six and five-eight. We tried to get Barrows to admit he could stand up, which he never did, but the real clincher came when he tried to sign his statements. The guy has phenomenally weak hands; he can hardly hold a pen.” She thinks about the cartons of yogurt she used to open for him. My God, she thinks, he’s right.
“Did he tell you the whole story?”
“That he left them alone there? Yeah, basically. It’s like this guy did all the sinister stuff—the planning and prepping—and then left them alone long enough for someone else to come along and do the dirty work.”
“Does it seem strange, that all these people were out in the woods that morning?”
“No, actually. There’s two footpaths, one from the road and another, less obvious, from the middle school. On any given day, we’re guessing seven to ten people on average might come through there. Kids come down from the middle school. They’re not supposed, but they do. You probably heard we found the missing boy, and that’s where he was. In the woods.”
She hasn’t heard. In the last five hours, she hasn’t turned on the news. “And…?”
“And he’s fine. I’m going over to talk to him right now. So far, he’s not saying anything about why he was there. But we’re figuring, odds are, it’s got to be related.”
After she hangs up, she turns on the news to a reporter standing in front of the local hospital where Chris has been brought. She describes his condition as fair, dehydrated but stable, after a twenty-four-hour absence in which he eluded a townwide search to find him. “The school and these woods are nine miles from his home. Local authorities are currently investigating how he made it so far from his house without being seen, and how he could have remained so close to school personnel the whole day and still escaped detection. So far, we have little information to go on, except that he was determined to stay hidden and he did.”
That night she lies in bed, picturing the path Matt Lincoln described, leading from the middle school into the woods. Maybe she has all along been scared of the wrong things—of menacing strangers and the faces from her unresolved past—when the greatest danger is really the inevitable future: Adam growing up and going on to middle school, where the world will move at a less forgiving pace and those who can’t keep up will suffer the consequences. She thinks about Morgan and the fire he started, his strange determination to solve a murder that has, for almost a week, stumped everyone else. Suddenly, she remembers an arrangement, made with the middle school guidance counselor for Morgan to bring a boy named Chris over. Is it possible Morgan knows this boy? She keeps coming back to his confidence that he could solve this case, and she wonders: Why would he be so certain of that unless he knows something the rest of them don’t?
When Morgan wakes up, he can hardly believe his eyes: Cara is standing in his room, staring down at him. At first, he thinks he must be dreaming, and then he looks around the room, sees that it’s almost nine o’clock. His mother must have decided he doesn’t have to go to school today. He feels like finding his notebook, writing it down: Surprise Number Seven From My Mother: School isn’t necessary after you’ve spent an evening afraid your son is dead. Come to think of it, there’s also this—Surprise Number Eight: She let Cara in.
“I’m sorry to wake you up, Morgan, but I have to ask, how well do you know Chris?”
He sits up in bed. “We have PE together. And that group I told you about. Sometimes we eat lunch together, but that was only twice. I don’t know if we’ll ever eat lunch together again.”
“Do you think it’s possible he could have killed Amelia? I keep wondering how he stayed in those woods all night, not scared of the killer, unless maybe he was the one who did it?”
Morgan can’t believe she’s asking him this. It’s amazing, really. All last night after they learned where Chris had been found, he’d wanted to talk about it with someone, but his mother refused. She wanted to pull out scrapbooks and talk about the good old days before all their problems started. (“Remember this?” she kept saying. “Remember when we went to Gettysburg? That was fun.”) Now Cara is here, asking him the questions he’s been asking himself. “I considered that, actually, but I don’t think so. I have a different theory.” He reaches under his bed for his notebook and realizes this is the first time someone who isn’t a relative has been in his bedroom, seen his stack of notebooks. “My theory is that Chris knows who did it, but feels like if he says anything, they’ll kill him because—well, they probably will.”
“Someone in your school?”
“I have a list here, actually. Of everyone I ever saw or heard about bullying Chris.”
He has a lot of lists, unfortunately, and it takes him a while to find the right one. As he flips through pages, she looks at the headings of some of the others: Possible Suspects: School Employees. She reads one name and raises her eyebrows. “Mrs. Tesler, the principal?”
“I have my reasons. The important thing is to rule out no one.”
Finally, he finds it. People Who Bullied Chris. It’s fourteen names long.
“Wow,” Cara says. “That’s a lot of names.”
“Some of them are people who made fun of him behind his back. They’re just mean, not cruel.” To Morgan, this is an important distinction. Mean people use words, cruel people use other things.
“Did you ever see anyone bully him?”
Morgan nods. Suddenly he’s afraid Cara will ask him, specifically, what he saw.
“Physically try to hurt him?”
He nods again. He hasn’t told anyone what he saw because he’s been trying so hard, for so long, to forget it—the sticks jabbing at Chris, how one went into his knee and another stabbed him in the waist so hard he buckled over and his glasses fell to the floor. How one of the boys, wearing black motorcycle boots, stepped on the glasses. Morgan has tried very hard to put these details out of his mind.
“I saw something once. Where these kids were doing stuff with sticks,” he whispers. He shakes his head; he doesn’t want to say any more. “The day it happened, I set the fire.”
In his mind, it made sense: a crime had been committed and someone should be punished. His mother believes certain things are simple. If people are mean to you, you tell a teacher. She doesn’t understand about repercussions. That telling on people means they torture you more. They sit behind you on the bus and melt the straps of your backpack with a lighter, or else they pull hairs out of your head one by one. Sometimes they trip you in the bus aisle or make you give them your arm so they can write in ballpoint pen I’m a Fag on the pale underside where the skin is thin and it really hurts. He’s told no one these things because he wants to pretend they happened to someone else, which seemed possible when he saw what they did to Chris, how his nose was bleeding by the time he crawled over to his glasses and tried to put them back on, how the blood and the snot made lines across his face, and then he saw that Chris had wet his pants which made him remember doing the same thing during the arm-writing episode, which made it seem possible—he can’t explain exactly—that none of it was real.
It’s confusing, though, because the harder he tries to forget, the more he can’t remember what’s happened to him and what’s happened to Chris. He can’t tell Cara all this because, really in the end, there aren’t the words to explain how complicated middle school is.
“Can I take this list?” she asks softly. “Maybe this will help Chris. He needs some help, and this could be a start.”
Morgan nods, but he doesn’t look up, because if he looks up he might cry. He doesn’t want to tear the list out of the notebook, so he finds a piece of paper and copies it over.
“Why don’t you put a star by the names of the ones who seemed like the biggest problem,” she says and he can do this. As long as he doesn’t have to say anything, he can write down the names, and star what he knows.
Overall, Chris is pretty happy with himself. True, he
said too much to the teacher, but he only told her one story and it wasn’t the whole one or the real one, which means, for now, he’s safe. It was hard to stay quiet with her because she had a nice face, and was crying when he looked up from his hole, which made him wish she was one of his middle school teachers so he could make friends with her and maybe eat lunch in her classroom and play checkers afterward, the way he did with Mrs. Montgomery in fifth grade, before his life got complicated by everyone hating him so much.
In the hospital, he figures out that not talking to the police is surprisingly easy: he pretends there is glue on his mouth and if he says anything, his lips will tear off.
“Can you tell us what you were planning to do with the hole?” the detective asks him. “Because it’s a gorgeous hole. A lot of work.”
Yes it was, he doesn’t say.
“Kind of like you wanted to bury something, maybe?”
Yes.
“Or somebody?”
Maybe. Chris has seen how easy it is to do. How it takes no time. How you just have to be careful afterward and clean up better, not leave a body lying there for anyone to find.
“What was your plan, Chris? You must have had a plan.”
No plan.
“You were out there by yourself, all night long. You must have known people would be worried and looking for you, right?”
Well sure. My mother, of course. He knew she would cry and worry about his asthma inhaler, which he forgot to pack. But he also thought: If everyone is worried, then the one who matters will come looking. This was the only way.
“I have a feeling this has something to do with Amelia Best. Can you nod, maybe? Just tell me, yes or no, does this have to do with the little girl? Did you know her? Or see her, maybe?”
Chris has seen how easily it can happen. How you don’t have to be particularly strong. You only have to be angry and take people by surprise.
“The girl who died, Chris. Amelia. Did you ever see her at all?”
He can’t see her now, but he can hear her voice. It’s like it’s inside his head, telling him what to do. There’s a man, she said, I need to find him.
“Do you know who killed her? Did you see it?”
Chris thinks it’s interesting how no one believes he did it. Someone like me, it’s not possible. Because they don’t understand it is possible. If someone is pushed far enough, he’ll do what he has to. The detective keeps talking, which makes Chris do an old trick: he stares so hard at the man’s lips moving that he can’t hear a single word he says.
After the detective leaves, his mother cries on his bed for a while and his father does his nervous blinking at the TV, which is tuned to news because Chris isn’t going to unglue his lips, even long enough to say, “Remote, please.” His parents seem to think the news is fine to watch, though his mother is on it, holding a plastic ziplock bag with his asthma inhaler in it. On TV, she says she’s the happiest mother in the world to have her boy back, safe and sound, though looking at her now, crying on his bed, Chris has to wonder. He shakes his head. The only thing that matters is what they say at the end: “At this point, the boy has refused to answer all questions from authorities about the period of time he spent missing.”
If I’m watching this, Chris thinks, he is, too. He’ll think I’m amazing, doing all this for him, because he’ll have no clue.
“Here’s the list,” Cara says. “I know it seems silly, fourteen names of middle schoolers, but I swear Matt, I think this might be something. It’s clear that Morgan was fixated on the murder, and maybe Chris was, too. Morgan came into our life because he wanted Adam to help him solve it, but I’m honestly thinking he might already know more than he’s letting on.”
“Like what?”
“That he’s witnessed certain things. That he’s seen a capacity for this kind of violence. He’s got lists and lists of suspects—these ludicrous lists, the principal, half the teachers at the elementary school, the nursing staff—but buried in there are some names he obviously wants us to have, but can’t bring himself to say out loud.”
“Interesting.” Matt Lincoln studies the list, frowning, one finger raised to his lips. “We’ve talked to some of these guys already. Randall Wu, Harrison Rogers, this Welton character. None of them terribly pleasant guys, I can tell you. You know, it’s funny—we had all three of them in for the arson investigation a few weeks ago, and we go to talk to them about the murder and they’re all full of attitude: ‘Anything happens in this town and you want to pin it on us.’ It’s like, boys, take a look in the mirror, at the boots and the chains, and take a wild guess why you’re being questioned.”
Cara stares at him. “They didn’t start that fire.”
“No, I know.”
“Why did you question them?”
“We thought we had an eyewitness. Someone claimed to have seen them there.”
“Who?”
“It was a telephone tip, but they had the clothing right. And it was corroborated by a second witness.”
“And both those tips were telephoned in?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Is it possible they were from kids?”
“Kids can make tips. They sometimes do.”
“But would you have a recording of them?”
“We’d have a record. Not a recording. Why?”
“Because I keep thinking the fire is connected to all this. Morgan saw some bullying and wanted to stop it somehow, or express his outrage, I don’t know. But he set the fire the same day he saw some particularly gruesome incident. It makes sense that afterward he’d call in a fake tip, try to get those kids in trouble for something, even if it wasn’t what they actually did.”
“Hmm.”
“And maybe Chris called in, too. And maybe they found out who was ratting on them.”
“But what does that have to do with Amelia’s murder?”
“Think about it,” she says, though the truth is, she doesn’t know. If they were angry at Morgan and Chris, why would they kill a girl from the elementary school, a girl they couldn’t have known because she only moved to town six weeks ago?
“Jesus Christ,” Matt says, slamming his pen down on top of his list. “I just thought of something.” He’s out of his chair, bent over to dig through a stack of file folders behind him.
“What?”
He finds a file, starts flipping through pages, flipping some more, shaking his head. “Idiot,” he mumbles to himself. “I’m an idiot.”
“What?”
He finds his piece of paper and pulls it out, lays it next to Morgan’s list with the three starred names. “This one,” he says, pointing to the second starred name. “Right there. Harrison Rogers. They call him Hare.”
Morgan’s mother thinks he should visit Chris, that if he wants friends so much, he should learn how to be one. He wants to tell his mother Chris is part of the whole problem. If I’m not careful, I’ll become exactly like Chris and I won’t even understand how it happened.
He doesn’t say this out loud, but his mother must hear what he is thinking.
“Don’t do that, Morgan. Don’t do to Chris what other people have done to you. You want some friends, this is how you start. You call him up. You say, ‘May I come over?’”
When Morgan calls to ask about visiting Chris, he talks to Chris’s mother, who sounds happy enough to have him come over. “Sure,” she says. “He’s talking again, thank God, just not about the woods. You ask about that, he’ll do a little zipper thing with his mouth. Just keep him on other subjects, and he’ll be all right.”
Which sounded fine to Morgan, but now that he’s here, it’s hard to think of anything else to talk about. Chris is lying in bed, even though, technically—or according to the TV reports anyway—there’s nothing wrong with him. Morgan wants to ask him everything that he’s not supposed to from what he’s heard so far: Did the knife really belong to you? What were you going to do with it? He knows what it feels like to stand alone in the wood
s and feel capable of doing anything at all, even breaking the law. What he really wants to ask is: Did you want to kill someone? Do you still?
Morgan thinks if he could get up the guts to ask Chris that, maybe he could tell him how he’d tried to get Harrison put in jail weeks ago. The problem with telling Chris is that it was a stupid idea, and it didn’t work. It would also involve telling Chris he saw him get beat up and wet his pants, which is a topic Morgan doesn’t feel like getting into right now. He’s afraid it might make him start crying or admit some of his own troubles along the same lines, his own day spent in wet pants, a sweatshirt tied around his waist, red lines down his arm where words had been.
Chris doesn’t seem particularly happy to see Morgan, but he also doesn’t seem unhappy to have a visitor. He sits up in bed, looks around the room. “You want to see my origami collection?” he finally offers.
Morgan can see it, on the shelf, rows and rows of folded figurines, some so small they look like wadded-up gum wrappers picked up off the street. Not really, he wants to say. Instead he points. “You did all these?”
“That’s right. On the far left is a giraffe, then a hippopotamus, an egret, a platypus, and a swan, of course. I design my own, which is really hard to do.”
And sort of pointless, Morgan thinks, when none of them look like the animals he’s named.
“I could teach you if you want. My mother says most people aren’t interested in origami.”
“I’m probably like that,” Morgan says. “Not so interested.”
“Yeah. That’s okay. What are you interested in?”
“I don’t know.” He almost says some of the old things: Civil War, trains, U.S. presidents, his quarter collection. Instead, he opts for this. “Mysteries, I guess.”
Chris surprises him. “Like what happened in the woods for instance?”
“That’s one.”
It didn’t work. None of it worked.
Chris was going to kill him and now he can’t, and finally he’s realized: Why bother not talking now, when it makes no difference what I don’t say?