Come Sit By Me (9 page)

“You got ‘im,” North said. “Beginner's luck.”

I practically ran over to where it had fallen, and there it was, lying on the ground. I stooped over to get a better look. I had taken off both of its legs, and you could see its bloody insides. But the eyes were still open, shiny and black.

The next thing I knew North was slapping me on the back. “Not bad. I thought you'd flinch when you pulled the trigger,” he said.

I didn't tell him I actually had flinched. I was looking at those black eyes. A feeling of power started to rise up in me from someplace. It surprised me.

A second ago, the turkey had been alive. Now it was dead. I did that.

I felt blood rushing through my head, behind my eyes. This was what it was like to kill. Cale had felt this way.

Only…a turkey wasn't a person. If I had killed a real person, everything I was feeling now would be way more intense. You would feel so powerful that you would be like the king of the world. No matter how much people made fun of you.

WE DIDN'T
SHOOT
any more turkeys that day, although we saw a few. Hitting them wasn't as easy as it first seemed. We took them both back to North's house, where he gave them to the family cook. As a reward, she heated up some meat from a turkey the Colonel had shot a few days earlier. It was different from the kind of turkey Mom used to cook at Thanksgiving. A little tough, and it had kind of a strong taste.

Of course there was the idea that somebody had actually killed this stuff that we were eating. Went out into the forest and took the life from it. Added that life to our own.

Made me want to do it again.

North told me I ought to get my own shotgun.

“My dad would never allow that,” I told him. “What do they cost, anyway?”

“New ones, a nice Browning, around 700 dollars. A Stoeger would run half that, if you didn't care what you were using. But there's a gun store out on the highway between here and Susquehanna where the guy would sell you a used one for a lot less.”

“I'd need to get my dad to buy it for me,” I said. “I'm only seventeen.”

North grinned. “Not from this guy. That's where Caleb bought his, and he was fifteen. No ID, either.”

I blinked. I had thought nobody knew where Cale had gotten the guns. And I'd only heard one other person call him Caleb—that weird guy Seese who all but admitted he was Cale's friend. “How'd you know that?” I asked as casually as I could.

“Oh, I don't know,” North said. “I think it was in the papers. Anyway, where else would he have gotten them?”

It turned out that the Colonel had in fact called my Dad. “I hear you've been hunting,” Dad said when I got home. His voice indicated that he wasn't too upset that I had neglected to mention that fact when I left, so I relaxed a little.

“Yeah,” I said. “North is showing me how to be a country boy.” That was a little dig at the fact that Dad had wanted to leave the city, and I hadn't.

“His father says he feels you've been well disciplined,” Dad told me. “I guess my use of whip and chains has been effective.”

“He was in the military,” I explained.

“What exactly were you hunting?” he asked.

“Just turkeys,” I said casually.

“Did you get any?”

“A couple. North says I could do better with practice, if I, you know, had my own shotgun.” Hint, hint.

“Next year you'll be in college. I hope you'll get into one that doesn't require you to carry a gun.”

“If I didn't need it any more, I could give it to Susan,” I suggested.

Dad gave me a dirty look. “Don't press your luck,” he said.

At school on Monday morning, Seese was waiting for me at my locker. He was as creepy as ever. “I was wondering if you'd let me look inside,” he told me.

“Inside?”

“In the locker.”

“There's nothing of Cale's in there,” I said. “The police must have taken everything, and then the janitor or somebody wiped it clean. And painted it. Anyway, my stuff is in there now.”

“Would it kill you to just let me take a look?”

I remembered what Susan had said about kids coming down here to take a look at the locker because they knew who had it before me. I didn't want to become a tourist attraction.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“I'll let you know if I see it,” he said.

“You swear?”

“Yeah, sure. I'd need to make a copy.”

I opened the door of the locker and stepped aside. It was still early in the year, so there wasn't a lot of accumulated junk. Seese peered inside and asked me if he could move my coat. I stepped in front of him and removed it.

He ran his hands over the walls of the locker, and then moved stuff aside so he could do the same for the floor and the top of the little shelf. He peered inside and looked at the ceiling of the locker, and then the inside of the locker door. I began to realize what he was looking for, and I saw that he had missed the one place where he would have found it.

Seese brushed some dust off his hands and shook his head.

“Find it?” I asked. It was clear he hadn't.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Now you gotta tell me what you were looking for,” I told him.

“Well, I didn't find it,” he said.

“Yeah, but I let you try.”

He shrugged. “Caleb's grandmother was blind.”

“I heard that.”

“She liked him to read to her.”

“Right.” I wasn't going to tell him the name of the book, if that's what he was looking for.

“But she'd been blind a long time, and she had learned Braille.”

Braille. Right. Why hadn't I thought of that earlier?

“So she taught it to Cale?” I said.

“Kind of. He told me once that it would be cool to send messages in Braille, because it just looked like a lot of little dots, and unless somebody guessed what it was, they couldn't read it.”

I was struggling not to show my excitement. I casually shut the locker door, and said, “Well, you didn't find anything in there that looked like Braille.”

“Or felt like it,” he said. “Because the dots are usually raised so that the blind person can read them with her fingers.”

“You're assuming that Cale wanted to send a message,” I said. “Maybe killing seven people was the message.”

Seese shook his head. “You didn't know him. That was why he was always writing on his laptop. He told me once that he wanted to explain himself to himself.”

“But maybe not to you or anybody else,” I said.

Seese shook his head. He was stubborn. “I know that whatever is on that USB drive would explain a lot.”

“But nobody knows where it is,” I said.

“Right. But he must have left some clue, some way to let people find it.”

“Or maybe he erased it, or the cops took it, or he threw it away,” I said.

“If the cops had it, they would have released the information on it,” Seese replied.

“Or not. They didn't have an obligation to release it.”

“You weren't here. Everybody wanted to know why he did it. They had psychologists come in and talk to everybody, because they thought we were in shock. And that was one question they always asked us, if we knew him, if we had heard him ever threaten violence. Shit, there were even TV shows about it.”

“I saw some of them,” I said. I would have paid more attention to them if I'd known my dad was going to move us out here.

The first bell rang and we went off to class. With Seese around, I couldn't look inside my locker again. It didn't matter. I knew where Cale's message was. Still, it was a struggle to sit there and listen to Ms. Hayward discuss
The
Odyssey
while I was dying to go back and check out the bottom of the shelf in my locker.

It was probably a good thing that I had to wait because that allowed me to think it through. I'd need a flashlight to see what the marks on the bottom of the locker shelf looked like. That ran the risk of attracting attention. The best way to get a look at those marks would be to take a piece of paper, tape it to the shelf, and then use a pencil or something to make an impression of it. A rubbing.

When would be the best time to do that?

I couldn't do it at noon. The halls were filled with people. Between classes was just as bad, because a lot of people went back to get the books for their next class.

So it had to be after school. That was a long time to wait, but I told myself I didn't want to attract any more attention.

I got through the morning, and took my books back to the locker. I was tempted to run my hand along the bottom of the shelf, just to feel the marks, but I decided I already knew they were there. I went to lunch and North waved me over to his table, where there were a lot of other jocks.

North wanted to sort of display me to his friends. He joked about how I became a man with him on Sunday. “He killed his first big game,” he said laughing. “Got one on the very first try.”

“Bear?” said one of his friends, a guy everybody called Hack. I don't know if that was his first name or last name.

“Smaller,” said North.

“Mountain lion,” suggested somebody else.

Well, you get the idea. They finally got it down to turkeys, which caused general hilarity. I don't know why, since it was North who suggested we hunt turkeys.

After the jokes died down, Hack said, “Yeah, but you know what else this guy did?”

“What?” asked North, ready for more fun.

“He's the one that caused them to hire a guard for the cemetery at night.”

General booing and jeers from the table.

North looked at me. I just shrugged. How could I deny it?

“They caught him describing a grave,” Hack said.

North looked puzzled. I think I must have too.

“You mean desecrating, dumbass,” somebody finally said.

“Whatever,” said Hack. “He broke into one of the Crappers' coffins.”

“No, I didn't,” I said.

“Well, you did somethin', I heard,” said Hack. “'Cause Bonnie Flatley says you were in Brennan's office with a cop, and right after that they hired this guard. And now nobody can go parking there.” He looked around with a grin. “Everybody's sex life is totally
ruined
.”

Mine too
, I wanted to say. But instead I tried to defend myself. “The guard was there before I did anything,” I said. “That's why I got caught.”

“You really broke into a coffin?” another guy asked. “Was it like in that movie where the guy has sex with dead bodies?” He looked like he wanted to ask if it felt good.

“All I did was climb on a statue,” I explained. “Somebody else broke into the coffin.”

“Why were you climbin' on a statue?”

I stopped to think. The truth would sound even worse here than in Ms. Brennan's office. “I was drunk,” I said.

That was a totally believable answer. They went on ragging me for a while, but I had convinced the group that I was a good ol' boy, like them.

Except for North. When we were carrying our trays back to the counter, he asked me, “What statue were you climbing on, anyway?”

“The angel,” I said without thinking.

“Caleb used to like that statue,” he said.

I didn't ask him how he knew.

THAT AFTERNOON,
I stayed after class to work on the newspaper. My mind wasn't on the story I was supposed to be writing because I could hardly wait for everybody to clear out of the hallways so I could get to my locker. “Do you want to let Kyle cover the game this Friday night?” Terry asked me. Kyle was a freshman who had filled in for me while I was grounded.

I hadn't thought about Friday. I had hoped to hook up with Colleen again, but she didn't respond to my Facebook messages, nor to messages I left on her cell. She never answered when I called. I tried to talk to her at school, but she was always with a bunch of other girls, and I didn't want to get shot down in public. I'd start to feel like Cale must have.

If North wanted to, he could hook me up with Colleen again, but then there was the problem of where we would go to make out. Since I had ruined everybody's sex life by making the cemetery off limits.

“Do you know where kids are going to park now?” I asked Terry. I know, what was I thinking? It was just that she was the only other person there.

“What did you say?” Terry asked.

I realized my mistake. “Nothing. Forget it.”

“I'm supposed to tell you where you can drag some cheerleader and screw her tiny brains out?”

Oh. I didn't know she cared.

I started to say I hadn't actually reached the screwing part yet, but decided I didn't want to share that information.

“You know,” Terry said, “she wouldn't go anywhere with you if it wasn't for North.”

She
. OK, I guess Terry had been paying closer attention to me than I thought. And it didn't help that what she said was likely true.

“I'm sorry,” I said. Though I didn't exactly know what I was apologizing for. “Look, Kyle can cover the game. He's a good writer, and you can edit his story, or I can. I can finish this other article at home, so I'll see you later.”

Before I left, I took a sheet of plain white paper from the computer printer. I had swiped a wide-pointed pencil and some masking tape from the art room earlier, so I figured I was all set.

The corridor with my locker was completely deserted. No curious freshmen. No tourists who wanted to see the locker.

I opened it up and taped the paper to the underside of the shelf. Nice and flat. I had to bend over and back into the locker to use the pencil, and I couldn't really see what I was doing. I wished I had a flashlight. Just to make sure, I would have to cover the entire surface. Shouldn't take long.

“What are you doing?”

I tried to stand up, and bumped my head on the shelf.

Shit. It was Terry.

“Nothing,” I told her.

“Yeah, well you looked like—listen, I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry,” she said. “I had no right to tell you who you should go out with.”

“O.K., thanks. No harm done,” I said, rubbing my head. Actually, I thought there was going to be a bump, but I wanted her to go away.

“What were you doing?” she asked, stooping over to see what was under the shelf. There was a reason why she was the editor of the newspaper—not just because she was the smartest person in the school, but also the biggest snoop. Not counting Susan.

I pushed the door closed, which was completely the wrong thing to do. Now she knew I was hiding something.

“Did you find something?” she asked. “Does it have anything to do with Cale?”

I was either going to have to come up with a story good enough to fool Terry, or tell her part of the truth and play dumb. The thing is, smart people are always ready to believe anybody else is dumb, so I chose the second option.

“There were some dents in the metal,” I said. “I don't think they mean anything.”

“Let me see,” she said.

“You can't really see them,” I said. “You'd need a flashlight.”

She pulled out a set of keys that included, wouldn't you know, a small penlight. “Open it up,” she said.

There wasn't much else I could do, unless I was willing to strangle her and hide the body in my locker. I worked the combination and opened the door. She leaned over backwards with the flashlight. Her shirt rode up and I could see her belly button. It was an innie. I considered stroking her softly below the waist to distract her, but knew that would just get me in more trouble.

“So you're making a rubbing of it,” she said. “Good thinking.” She stuck out her hand. “Let me have the pencil you were using. I'll finish it.”

A few minutes later, we were looking at the paper. “See, it's nothing but a bunch of marks,” I said. “Completely meaningless.”

“They're not random marks,” she said. “They're in some kind of geometric order.” She turned the paper, looking at it from each of the four sides. “You know what this must be?” she said suddenly. “It's Braille.”

I tried to discourage her. “I thought Braille had to be raised,” I said, “so a blind person could feel it.”

“Don't be stupid,” Terry replied. “The arrangement of the dots is what makes it Braille. I'll bet you knew it all along.”

Well, I could either pretend to be stupid or take credit for being smart. So I didn't protest when Terry sat down on the floor and looked up the Braille alphabet on her iPhone. She started to write letters above the combinations of dots on the paper. What else could I do but sit down and watch her?

It didn't take long for her to decipher the message:

LOOK WHAT SALLY IS READING.

I took a deep breath. It was what I suspected all along, but I didn't want to share it with Terry. Now she'd find some way to take credit for it.

But she surprised me. “Who's Sally?” she asked.

I realized that she hadn't been as obsessed with the cemetery as I had been. Probably she'd never even been there. She didn't have time to go anywhere and park with some guy. She was busy studying. I had told her about the angel, but not that it was standing over the grave of Sally Dennis.

“I guess some student,” I said.

“I don't know anybody named Sally in our class,” she said.

“Maybe some other class. Do you know the names of everybody who was going to school here then?”

She thought about it. “I guess not,” she said. “But I can find a list in the registrar's office.”

“Good. But probably you shouldn't tell anybody about this message just yet.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Why not?”

“Well, this doesn't have to be something that Cale put there. People have had this locker before him.”

“You don't really think that.”

“Sure I do. How long has the school been here? At least ten years, right?”

“I don't mean that. You're still trying to find out what made Cale shoot those people. And this is your clue. Who else would have left it?”

I shrugged. “Did he read any books by someone named Sally?”

“That's an idea,” she said. “Let's ask the librarian.”

Shit. Ms. Clement wouldn't tell me what books Cale was reading, but I'll bet she'd tell Terry. And I didn't like to hear Terry say “let's.” That meant we were now a team, a team on which she would be captain.

“See what you can find out,” I said. “I'm going home.”

“Home? What for?”

“I'm surprised that you ask. We've got a paper due in Ms. Hayward's class tomorrow.”

“Oh, I've already finished that. You shouldn't wait till the last minute.”

I fought back my annoyance. “Well, not all of us are perfect. I've got that article to write too, so you see if you can find out who Sally is and send me an email.”

I took my books, shut the locker, and went off. Terry stood watching me. I hoped she wasn't going to follow.

Good thing she didn't, because she was a better driver than I was.

I drove straight to the cemetery, wondering what I was going to do. I didn't think there would be a guard during the day, but if there was, I'd just pretend I was going to visit a grave or drive through without stopping.

When I went through the gates, however, I saw a car I recognized. It was Pastor Flegel's. After I parked next to it, I got out and looked around. There had been a hard rainstorm the night before and the rest of the leaves from the trees had fallen, along with a lot of branches. Flegel was walking around between the graves with a bag, collecting debris. I went over to talk with him.

“Hello, Paul,” he said. “I thought you had finished your community service.”

“Uh, yeah, actually I did,” I said. “But you know how it is, I sort of got to feeling responsible for the place. And I thought I'd drop by to see if there was any damage from the storm.”

Astonishingly, he believed me. “That's so nice of you,” he said. “I was thinking the same thing, but you know, I really am responsible for the cemetery, so it's my job.”

I nodded, trying to take a quick look at the statue.

He found a pair of work gloves for me and I followed him around. We picked up some leaves and put them in a plastic bag, and I carried some of the fallen branches over to the tool shed and put them in a pile. I didn't know what we were going to do with them, but it made the old man happy.

When we got close to the statue, I almost laughed out loud. A big, really big, branch had fallen and was resting right square on top of the book that the angel held. “Look at that,” I said. “We ought to remove that.”

Pastor Flegel surveyed the situation. “We'd need a long pole or something to get it down,” he said. “There are some rakes in the shed. They might do.”

“It would be better to use a ladder,” I told him. “Otherwise we could damage the statue.”

He agreed to this, and gave me the keys to the shed. Inside was a tall stepladder that was high enough for me to reach the book. I practically ran back with it, but realized that if I seemed too eager, he might get suspicious.

My heart was pounding by the time I got there. It really does at times like that. I set up the ladder. Flegel cautioned me to be careful, and I mounted the steps until finally I was about level with the book.

I reached out, grabbed the branch and tossed it to the ground. Then I looked to see what Sally was reading.

Nothing. The pages were blank, since the sculptor thought nobody was ever going to see them from up here.

At first I was disappointed. But then I saw somebody had chipped away part of one page. A wet leaf had fallen on it and nearly covered the damage. But I brushed it aside and saw that inside the hole was something wrapped in aluminum foil.

I reached over so far that I thought I might fall. Flegel called out to me to be careful, but I managed to pluck the thing from the hole. I knew from the way it felt what must be inside the foil.

A USB drive.