Colin Fischer (12 page)

“Oh,” Colin said. On one hand, professional basketball players were presumably experts in shoe dynamics and durability. On the other, they tended to wear the shoe of whichever manufacturer paid the most endorsement money. In the end, Colin fell back on practicality. “I’m not a professional hoops player,” he explained. “I just take gym.”

Defeated, the salesclerk disappeared to the back room to retrieve the requested shoe in Colin’s size, while Mrs. Fischer thumbed through racks of 100 percent cotton T-shirts and shorts. Colin took the time available to him to watch the flow of the traffic through the mall. The walkway was sculpted and landscaped to suggest a narrow canyon. The doors and display windows were even designed to evoke Anasazi cliff dwellings.
¹²

Colin mentally cataloged the different subgroups within the space—speed-walking senior citizens, mothers with toddlers at the indoor play area, bored teens lounging in knots. It reminded him of his high school’s cafeteria and how it, too, used geography to sort its inhabitants into smaller units. Unfortunately, the scuffle between Wayne and Eddie just before the gun went off scrambled those different social groups together, making it nearly impossible to narrow down the origin of the weapon.

From this vantage point, Colin had an excellent view of the entrance to a large department store. In spite of the high-quality people-watching opportunities it offered, he disliked this particular store. Cosmetics and perfumes were positioned near the front, forcing Colin to walk through a fog of fragrances every time he entered or left.

A slender, blonde female form stood at the cosmetics counter, her back turned. Colin considered the shape of her back, and for a moment he perked up in hope that it might be Melissa. Then the girl turned to show her mother the melon-colored lipstick she’d just applied, and Colin sank. The girl was not Melissa, but Sandy Ryan.

“Colin?” his mother asked. It took him a moment to realize she had finished buying the shoes and gym clothes and was ready to go. In spite of his mother’s insistence that it be used efficiently and that there was
never enough of it, Colin was increasingly convinced that time was entirely subjective.
¹³

They headed out just as Sandy and her mother exited the department store with a bag of cosmetics. A brief and unwelcome exchange of pleasantries seemed inevitable. Sandy’s mother and Mrs. Fischer had known each for many years. Colin knew the only way to avert social catastrophe would be for the two women not to see each other, and lacking a readily available distraction, that seemed an unlikely outcome. Accepting this, he prepared for the ensuing awkwardness by opening the bag containing his new shoes and staring at them as if they were bugs under a very large magnifying glass.

“Susan Fischer!” Sandy’s mother squeaked.

“Allison Ryan,” Mrs. Fischer replied.

“Terrible what happened at school, isn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t get me started…”

Sandy shifted from foot to foot, looking around as though she had no idea her mother was engaged in this conversation. She blushed, obviously
EMBARRASSED
. Colin surmised this was motivated at least in part by
a well-documented need for teenagers—especially girls—to pretend their parents and their parents’ friends don’t exist as social animals. However, it was impossible to be sure. Colin reached for his Notebook.

As he flipped to a blank page and glanced up, Colin made direct but unintentional eye contact with Sandy. The sensation was alarming and physically uncomfortable, like all the blood in his limbs was draining from him at once. Colin looked away, nonetheless aware that Sandy’s adolescent awkwardness had blossomed into outright
HOSTILITY
.

It hadn’t always been this way. Once, when they were young children, Colin and Sandy were almost friends. They went to preschool together. Their mothers drove them back and forth each day, each in turn. One afternoon, Sandy’s mother was caught in traffic, and Mrs. Fischer helpfully brought Sandy home to play with Colin. Colin invited Sandy to his room, where he announced they would complete the suspension bridge he had been building entirely out of Legos. Colin’s mother was thrilled.

All was quiet for an hour. Mrs. Fischer had just begun to entertain visions of a budding friendship and regular playdates, when a piercing scream shattered the peace that had settled on the house. She pounded up the stairs and threw open the door to find Sandy asleep on Colin’s bed, lying in a puddle of her own urine. The scream had come from Colin, whose
carefully ordered space had been violated in a most horrifying way. The carpool ended shortly thereafter.

“Whoever it was, I hope they find him,” Sandy’s mother said. “I hope they try him as an adult, put him in a dark hole, and throw away the key.”

“Why does there have to be a key?” Mrs. Fischer agreed.

“Actually,” Colin said with a frown. “I’d like to go back and try the compression tops. I think I’d find the pressure on my long nerves calming.” He studiously avoided looking at Sandy. It was as if he and his mother were the only people in the mall.

Mrs. Fischer sighed heavily, then offered Mrs. Ryan a wan smile. “Gotta calm those nerves,” she said.

“I hear you,” Mrs. Ryan agreed conspiratorially. “But I prefer wine.”

“Later, Allison,” Mrs. Fischer said with a smile, turning with Colin back toward the athletic store.

“Call me sometime,” Mrs. Ryan said. “We should get the kids together.”

“Ugh,” Sandy said behind them. It was the closest she and Colin had come to a real conversation since they were four years old. They moved in different circles now, even if the bed-wetting incident didn’t hang over them every time they met. It occurred to Colin that any social map he might have constructed as a toddler in preschool would look very different from the one he imagined now. Indeed, the labels, connections, and groups he identified—his
whole taxonomy—might be entirely mutable. The insight reinforced Colin’s conviction that he needed an efficient, physical method of tracking it all.

“Mom,” he said, “could we stop by the arts and crafts store on the way out?”

A few minutes later, Mrs. Fischer and Colin exited the mall. Danny slouched against an exterior wall adjoining the parking lot, talking to a pair of boys who appeared to be his own age. Colin did not know their names. “I thought I said meet us
inside
the west entrance,” Mrs. Fischer said. By
thought,
Colin knew his mother meant
did,
although he wasn’t certain she was recalling her own instructions accurately.

“You said
at
,” Danny protested as he loped over. “Here I am.”

Mrs. Fischer wasn’t used to back talk, and her suddenly narrowed, suspicious eyes indicated she was in no mood to get comfortable with it now. Colin once described this oft-used expression to Marie, who agreed it didn’t correspond neatly to any of the ones on Colin’s cheat sheet. They decided to dub it
MOM FACE
. The name had stuck.

“Danny is right,” Colin piped up, breaking the standoff. “
At
the west entrance could technically mean either inside or outside the doors.”

Colin’s mother laughed. Danny turned his head away, inexplicably
ANNOYED.
“Stop helping,” he said, and trudged off toward the car.

Hefting his bags of art supplies and athletic shoes, Colin followed. He puzzled over the meaning of Danny’s request. After all, Colin hadn’t been trying to help anyone—he was just pointing out the facts. Who the truth helped and how much was irrelevant.

Colin disappeared immediately
into his room, shoes and shirts under one arm, art supplies under the other. He had concluded that building an effective social map of West Valley High wasn’t just a matter of comfort and survival, but was critical to determining the actual owner of the gun that so explosively disrupted Melissa’s birthday party.

From his laptop, Colin accessed the high school’s website and printed out a class list, circling the names of students he thought were most relevant and interesting to the case. Nearly all of them had their own pages on social-networking sites, so Colin found their profile pictures and printed them out in turn. With the stack of photos before him, Colin tacked each one carefully to the cork board above his desk.

One photo was missing from the group: Wayne Connelly.

Colin leafed through his eighth-grade yearbook, looking for a physical photo of Wayne, but was stymied once more. Evidently, Wayne had been absent on photo day that year or he had skillfully avoided the photographer. With a thoughtful frown, Colin took a black triangle of paper and labeled it
WAYNE CONNELLY
. It would have to do.

With color-coded sticky tabs purchased at the art supplies store, Colin categorized the various students by their social, academic, geographic, and socioeconomic cliques. Lengths of colored yarn indicated connections between individuals and groups, further broken down by relationship type: friendship, romance, rivalry. Colin did this all in conscious imitation of the boards used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to track links between the members of Mafia families and other criminal conspiracies. He found the process almost as useful as the product—physical manipulation of real objects, even when they represented ideas or abstractions, helped Colin to think about them.

Colin regarded the final product with a frown. Its precision was marred by the paper triangle standing in for Wayne. The lack of a photo in arguably the most
important spot stood out in the field of smiling profile photos. Colin worried the visual effect could bias his analysis and so made a note to
find a more suitable representation.

As Colin crawled into bed, he saw that he had positioned his social map next to his photograph of Basil Rathbone. It gave the effect of Holmes himself pondering the mystery. Colin found this comforting and wondered what the Great Detective might say about it all. He was certain that Holmes would have solved the whole thing by now.

Then Colin eased into sleep, dreaming of fog and night and gaslit streets.

The next morning
, Colin stood on the blacktop of West Valley High in his new compression tops, slowly dribbling a basketball and thinking about lines.

He felt the lines on the basketball under his fingers as he rhythmically bounced it—two circles bounding the sphere like an equator and international date line, two ellipses covering the tiny planet’s north and south poles. On the blacktop itself, lines demarcated the borders of the half-court basketball arena. They had been repainted several times, the paint fading from endless hours of sun, rain, and teenage feet, but the new never quite aligned with the old. The imprecision of it bothered Colin greatly, as though the lines were merely suggestions and not hard boundaries, so
he tried instead to concentrate on the soothing metronome of the bouncing basketball.

“Hey Colin, isn’t it a little early for Halloween?”

Cooper and Eddie stood before him. Cooper had asked the question with a grin Colin couldn’t place. Colin was about to agree that indeed, October 31 was nearly two months away, when he realized Cooper was actually referring to the orange-and-black colors of Colin’s T-shirt. His question was therefore
rhetorical
, the recognition of which would have made Marie proud. She had drilled Colin for hours in the difficult art of distinguishing literal statements (“You look nice today”) from metaphorical, idiomatic ones (“You make a better door than a window”). This seemed to qualify.

“These are the school colors of the California Institute of Technology,” Colin explained. “I got this when I went with my father to an alumni event.”

Cooper and Eddie shrugged. Obviously, neither was familiar with the athletic history of Caltech.
¹⁴
However, since Cooper wore a USC Trojans jersey and Eddie a Notre Dame tank top, they could understand adorning oneself in a parent’s school colors.

“So anyway,” Cooper continued, “we saw you hit those baskets yesterday.”

As far as Colin knew, these last two sentences represented the most Cooper had ever spoken to him at one time in years. Did this mean they had developed a rapport? Colin hoped so. Cooper was friends with most of the participants in yesterday’s brawl and was therefore a potentially valuable source of information for the investigation.

“Thank you, Cooper,” Colin replied. “Could I ask you a few questions about—”

“The thing is,” Eddie said, abruptly cutting Colin off, “we were wondering if you’d play for us. Three on three.”

“Play what for you?” Colin had never been asked a question like this before.

Cooper laughed. “Basketball, short—
dude
. We want you to play on our team.”