All for One (26 page)

Lights...

So innocent they all were. But this simply had to be done. It simply had to.

“Everything is going to be all right,” Mary began. “You have to believe me about that. You have to trust me.”

Glances bounced among the council, then in near unison they nodded to their teacher.

Mary cleared her throat and straightened in her chair.

“Detective Ashe spoke with me a few evenings ago. He asked me to talk to you about what happened.”

Michael’s head tipped toward the floor.

“So,” Mary went on, “we need to discuss this.”

*  *  *

The marinara sauce bubbled at a fast simmer, spitting red drizzle over the lip of the pan. Dooley dumped a handful of sliced mushrooms in and stirred with a long wooden spoon, keeping his distance. His white shirt had survived thus far.

He dipped a finger quickly into the sauce and even more quickly pressed it into his mouth as just how hot the marinara was became painfully apparent. “Damn.”

When the phone rang he was sucking hard on the finger, cooling it and tasting his creation. Just about right, he decided, and turned the burner to low before answering. “Hello.”

“Detec... Dooley?”

He turned away from the stove and put a hand behind his neck. It pinched at muscles suddenly, instantaneously turned to granite. “Mary. Hi.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Dooley said, puffing with a huge breath. “I’m okay. I was just making myself some dinner.”

“What’s on the menu?”

“Pasta with a marinara sauce. I threw some mushrooms and olives in.”

“It sounds tasty. Are you eating alone?”

Dooley pulled a narrow fistful of dried linguine from a tall jar and slid it into a pot of frothing water. “Yeah.”

“You probably have an actual dining room,” Mary joked.

“And not a piano in the whole house,” Dooley answered. He pulled the long cord across the kitchen and leaned against the oven. It warmed his back while his garlic bread heated. “Did you get a chance to—”

“I wanted to thank you again for staying Friday night,” Mary said in an evasive spurt. “You got more than you bargained for. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve had a rough couple of weeks. A bad dream isn’t anything out of the ordinary.”

“Still...”

“Still, nothing. All right?”

After a second Mary said, “You’re a good person.”

“Well...”

“And, in answer to the question I know you’re politely refraining from asking, yes. I talked to them. All but Elena.”

“Why not her?”

“Because she’s very fragile right now. I couldn’t question her. The others are good enough for now.”

“And they said?”

“They asked if they could think about. I told them that I had to give you an answer tomorrow.”

“So they said they’d think about it,” Dooley observed. “Interesting, Mary. Don’t you think?”

“Stop.”

“For a bunch of kids that had nothing to do with Guy’s death,
that
is telling in itself.”

Mary was quiet for a second. A tea kettle started to whistle in the background. “I did what you asked. Don’t ask me to judge them like you are.”

Dooley listened to the kettle quiet beyond Mary’s breathing. “You’re right.”

“They said they’d talk to me after school tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to have them thinking that I’m eagerly running right to you to rat on them. Come by my place later. We’ll talk then. You can help me pass out candy to the trick-or-treaters.”

“The inevitable can’t be delayed,” Dooley observed soberly.

“If it’s inevitable it will happen anyway.”

Foamy water crept to the top of the pasta pot and curled over the sides, hissing as it trickled onto the burner. Dooley stuck a spoon in and stirred it to a more mellow boil. “What time?”

“About six?”

Dooley nodded at the stove, marinara spitting and the water billowing steam. “Okay.” Behind, the doorbell chimed. Dooley held the phone between his ear and shoulder and dumped the pasta into a colander in the sink. “Someone’s at the door. I’ve gotta go.”

“Tomorrow at six.”

“Yeah.” He set the empty pot aside and moved the faucet over the colander, turning on the cold water to rinse the noodles and stop the cooking process. “Mary?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you. I know it was hard to do what you did.”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she told him, her voice softened with a deep, true sadness. “Goodnight.”

“Bye.”

Dooley hung up the phone as the bell chimed again. He left the marinara simmering and went to answer it.

The silhouette on the inlaid glass gave away his visitor even before he’d opened the door.

“Hi,” Karen said, that curious look on her face that Dooley had never been quite able to pin down. Smile? Apology? Pity?

“Karen.”

She wore a long black coat, and from beneath it she artfully withdrew a bottle. “A ninety-two Crescent Valley pinot.” One corner of her mouth tweaked sourly. “It was wasted on the lamb.”

“Not good, eh?”

“You know how they say rattlesnake tastes like chicken?”

“They say everything tastes like chicken,” Dooley half corrected his ex.

“This lamb tasted like rattlesnake.”

Dooley chuckled lightly.

“The wine was the high point of the evening,” Karen revealed. She held the bottle out and Dooley took it. “I keep my promises.”

“I take it then you didn’t get lucky?” Dooley asked, veiling his odd pleasure in the obvious better than he’d expected he could.

“He was as dry as the lamb. Letterman started and I got these terrible cramps.” Her face contorted expertly and she pressed hard toward her ovaries. “Thank God he didn’t know my cycle.”

“And you women call it a curse.”

“Hey, I’ll take what I can get from it, baby.” She leaned to one side and peered past Dooley. “You have water running.”

“Just cooling down some linguine.”

Her eyebrows rose ever so innocently. “Linguine?”

Dooley smiled, his head shaking minutely. “I hope your cramp act wasn’t as thin as this.”

“Smells good,” Karen commented, her nose twitching.

“Hey,” Dooley began, his arms crossing and his face alight as if some brilliant idea had just come to him. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

Karen took off her coat, handed it to her ex, and pushed past. “Took you long enough.”

Dooley closed the door as she went to the kitchen and leaned over the marinara, testing its scent up close. From the front room he watched her, and she smiled back at him as she took an extra plate from the cupboard.

His head was filled with musings. Why was she here? Why now, after a less than perfect-
yes!
-date? The questions inherent in the expression she fancied had followed her into the house. The house they had once shared.

But another musing held equal with those initiated by his ex-wife’s surprise arrival, this one anchored not here, but to the east in a handful of homes in a quiet little town where all was apparently not so perfect as the inhabitants would have liked to believe. In the rooms of five children. In their heads, behind the lying innocence of their eyes.

What were they thinking about, Dooley wondered, now that he had taken their ally and made her his.

*  *  *

Caroline Hool knocked twice on her son’s door and waited. After a moment’s silence she twisted the knob and stepped in. “Bryce?”

Her son sat on his bed, his back to the door and his head hunched forward. His bony elbows moved in short, erratic jerks, driven by the action of his unseen hands. A muted, miniature symphony of beeps, clangs, and whistles was just perceptible.

“Bryce,” Caroline Hool said, stepping close, hoping that he’d hear her. When he didn’t she touched him on the shoulder. “Hon.”

Bryce shuddered and pulled his game’s earphones out as he looked back. “Jeez, mom.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“I know, but, jeez.” He switched the hand held video game off and spun around to face his mother. “What do you want?”

Caroline Hool reached out and put a hand on his forehead, then against the back of his neck. “Are you feeling all right?”

Bryce’s head fidgeted away from his mother’s well intentioned pawing. “I’m okay.”

“You hardly ate any dinner.”

“I wasn’t that hungry.”

Not hungry for stuffing? Caroline Hool mused to herself.
Right
. She checked his forehead again. “You don’t have a fever.”

“I told you I’m okay.”

“Your stomach doesn’t hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Bryce said, irritated that she was pestering him...and that he had to kinda lie. Physically he was fine, so it wasn’t a real lie.

“All right,” Caroline Hool acquiesced, her eleven year-old’s stubbornness triumphing this time. Triumphing, but not quashing that deeper unease that had been playing with her insides for three days now. She went to the door and closed it halfway before asking, “Are you going to come out in a while so I can measure the hem for your costume? Tomorrow’s the big day.”

“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” Bryce answered. His eyes had already gone back to the video game screen, black and empty as it was.

Caroline Hool nodded, but did not immediately leave. Her eyes held her son in a motherly contemplation. Worry. Fear. A desire to know, to magically know what the silly mistakes on those discarded pages really meant. Was it just his imagination gone into overdrive. With all the interviews, the police, the ludicrous suspicion it might just be that. It might just be.

It might just be, she decided. He would just needed some time to himself, some time regaling in a mindless video game to work through it. That was probably it.

She managed a smile as she quietly backed out of the room and closed the door.

Bryce stared at the blank screen as his mother’s footsteps trailed off toward the front of the house. Eyes fixed, head hung over the game.

A warm, salty tear dropped onto the dark, dead screen. And then another.

Twenty

Satan and a ninja stood with a werewolf and a lawyer and watched the princess get into her mother’s Volvo and be driven away from Windhaven Elementary. She glanced back at them as the car passed and lifted a small hand and waved.

Bryce scratched at the rough black material against his chest and silently envied Elena; this was all about her, really. Because of her. And she wouldn’t even be with them. She was free. Free from the knowing of
this
thing that they would now do. For her, really.

But that wasn’t completely fair, he knew. It wasn’t just about her. Mostly it was about each of them. A hundred percent him. A hundred percent Joey. A hundred percent PJ. Ninety percent for Michael because he’d already exacted a portion from Guy with that busted lip. That was worth twenty, and give back ten for the black eye. For Jeff, maybe a hundred and ten percent. He enjoyed this. It was like spitting at Guy after he was gone. Do whatever necessary to see that Guy ended up the only loser in this situation—unless someone else got in the way. Then they could lose, too.

The Volvo dragged Bryce’s gaze with it as it accelerated away. Away from them. Away from now. Away from what was to come.

Joey looked back through the main gate, past ghosts and grim reapers and two vampires and a hundred other costumes, all ready to trade their backpacks for empty shopping bags or black handled plastic pumpkins. Most every costume imaginable, except the one he was looking for. “Where is she?”

Michael flattened the fake fur his mom had glued to his cheeks and removed the plastic wolf fangs from his mouth. “What time is it?”

Jeff, in the slightly too-big three piece suit his mom had found at the second hand store, raised his cast and looked facetiously at the wrist. “Half past the monkey’s ass, a quarter to his balls.”

“Funny, Bernstein,” Michael commented dismissively.

“Is PJ coming yet?” Bryce asked Joey. “My mom’s gonna be here any minute.”

“I don’t see her,” Joey said, eyes still searching. His hair, slicked back beyond a pair of nub-like horns pasted high on his forehead, held steady in the breeze.

Michael turned and looked with Joey. “I think she’s waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Joey asked.

“For most of the kids to leave,” Michael answered. “She got laughed at at lunch because of her costume.”

“She’s embarrassed,” Bryce observed obviously.

“Yeah,” Joey agreed. “It should clear out soon.”

Bryce looked down the street and tapped Michael on the shoulder. “My mom’s here.”

A green Windstar rolled into the parents’ drive-thru and queued up behind several other vehicles. Caroline Hool waved spryly at her son through the windshield. He and Michael waved tepidly back.

Jeff nudged Michael as their ride moved slowly through the after school jam. “Where is it?”

Michael checked that there were no unwanted ears nearby and said, “In my sock.”

Jeff nodded and looked past Michael toward the main gate. A few clowns and an eight legged spider passed through the opening in the chain link, and behind them, dawdling purposely, PJ followed, her jacket pulled tight and buttoned to the neck. “Here she comes.”

“Be cool to her,” Joey said quietly, and unnecessarily. None of them would tease her. He knew that. Still, her feelings compelled him toward vigilance.

Caroline Hool reached a space opening at the curb and slid in as a car pulled out. She parked and opened the side door, coming out to greet her son and his friends. “Oh, look at you all. Hah!”

“Hi, mom.”

She reached to her son and straightened the plastic sword strapped across his back. He rolled his eyes at her futzing, and after a second of adjusting she said, “That’s better.”

“Hi, Mrs. Hool,” Michael mumbled. He’d put his teeth back in for effect.

“Grrrr,” Caroline Hool growled, making claws and scratching the air in front of Michael. She looked to Jeff and straightened, considering his get up. “What are you, Jeff? A gangster?”

“A lawyer,” he told her.

Her eyes flared and she muttered, “Same difference.”

PJ reached her friends, coming upon Joey first. “I’m sorry I took so long. I had to...”