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  Sheriff Shit for Brains keeping the peace. Now I’d seen everything. “No criminals around, you say?” I asked calm and slow because I wanted it to sink in. “Then what about the sign? And what the hell are you doing with my twenty dollars?”

  “Christ,” he spat out, reaching in his back pocket. “Is that what you’re worried about?” He opened his wallet and pulled out a bill, shaking it at me. “Here. Here’s your twenty dollars. I just grabbed the one that was closest, because when Livia needs a new one, it always comes from me.”

  Bryan’s hand was trembling, and for the first time ever he looked me dead in the eyes. I recognized that look, I knew it inside and out—he was shot through with rage. Kathy closed the door behind her and slipped into the hallway before we could go any further, though, so Bryan bottled it up fast, smiled, and played it as false and slimy and two-faced as he could be.

  Kathy told him that Cuthbert and Livia were fine, and Bryan pretended to give a shit as the two of them started down the hall. I let them walk up ahead, took the nearest side exit out into the soggy heat, and made a beeline for Livia’s window. If Bryan couldn’t be trusted to check it, then it was up to me.

  There were small, flowerless bushes bordering the wall beneath the windowsill and gray waterlogged wood chips on the ground, which had probably been, in the distant past, some kind of mulch. The decorative shrubbery had definitely seen better days, but it didn’t appear that its sorry state had been caused by human trampling. I checked the screen for fingerprints and signs of being moved up or down, but I didn’t see anything telling. What struck me, though, as I peered through the window, toward the nightstand, and further into the now-empty room, was that it would’ve been easy as pie to lift the screen and the unlocked window from where I was standing, slip a hand in, swipe whatever was on the nightstand, and break away fast, clean, and unseen in about ten seconds or less, even if someone was sleeping in the bed just beyond. It would’ve been so easy that almost anyone could’ve done it without getting caught.

  What I couldn’t be sure of, though, was what was bothering me more—the very real possibility that the home had become the target of ongoing criminal activity, or that the guy who was supposed to be in charge was doing everything he could to make it look like it wasn’t. Maybe the sign had only been the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the case was a lot bigger than I’d thought.

  As we approached the front sidewalk where the Cruiser was parked, Thrash started ragging on me, and I told him to shove it, but he was right. I hadn’t inspected the scene of the crime when I’d been here yesterday. That was the very first thing a detective was supposed to do, and I hadn’t done it. I didn’t know how I could’ve forgotten. But there was no time like the present, so we headed across the parking lot to check it out.

  When we got to the island where the sign was, I could’ve slapped myself. There were clumps of crabgrass, a few tattered dandelions, tangles of browning weeds clinging to the soil, and a tall hedge dividing the island from the shoulder of the highway. Otherwise there was only limp yellowed grass and dirt, dirt that had been rained on practically all night, which meant that it wasn’t dirt anymore, but mud. If there’d been any tracks or footprints in the area, they were long gone now, all washed away, and I’d missed my chance to inspect them. No, it was not the finest moment in the history of private detection. But at least Thrash was in my backpack, so I didn’t have to see that look on his face.

  I stood there with my thumb up my ass for a few minutes, listening to the cars rush past on the highway, filling my lungs with exhaust fumes, trying to think redeeming thoughts. Then I looked up at the sign and noticed that they hadn’t repainted it yet. That burned me up. It still said OAKSHADE RETARTED HOME, same as yesterday, only now the smudge of paint over the “irement” was like a thick black tongue sticking out at me. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, and shifted my feet to calm down, thinking I’d probably have to paint the damn thing myself if I wanted it fixed, just like I’d had to rake the leaves off the tiny patch of lawn outside grandma’s window last fall.

  After a few seconds, I opened my eyes again, and that’s when it hit me—an icy pinprick in the back of my brain that grew and widened like some Antarctic flower. There were two perpetrators. The height of the sign gave it away, which I hadn’t thought about yesterday, seeing it from the window in grandma’s room. The wood placard itself was about three feet tall and five feet wide, but it hung from the top of wood posts that had to be ten feet tall at their highest point. The bottom of the placard was a good seven feet off the ground, and the word Retirement, the one that was painted over, was more like eight and a half feet high, because it was right in the middle.

  The point was, you’d need to stand on something, like a stepstool or a short ladder, to reach it, unless you were like six-foot-six or taller, and nobody around here was six-foot-six, not even Orlando. So there had to be two people, because there was no way one person could carry a paint can, paintbrush, and a stepladder while trying to make a run for it, and in the dark and seamy world of graffiti, it almost always came down to a footrace to safety, and everybody knew that, so whoever did it must’ve factored that in. Either that or they were totally brain dead.

  I decided to look around the island more closely before I left, just in case. Henry David Thoreau, the guy who wrote the book Orlando had given me, said he could tell not only when someone had been at his cabin in the woods while he’d been out, either by bent twigs, footprints, or some other bit of forest, but also what age and sex they were by some trace they’d left behind, like a plucked flower, discarded blades of grass, or the faint smell of cigar or pipe smoke. I guess that’s because he studied nature and knew what to look for, but I didn’t, and for a second I wished I had a magnifying glass to help me out, like Sherlock Holmes. But I got over it. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, it wouldn’t matter if you saw it close up or far away, so a magnifying glass wouldn’t have done me a damn bit of good. Thrash told me I should set him down and let him have a go at it, because he’d been born and bred through millions of years of evolution to master the lower terrains and was better equipped for the job. He was probably right, but the last time I got him muddy, mom said she wouldn’t wash him for me anymore, so I told him I’d handle it.

  I searched the bottom of the hedge and found three crushed beer cans, a waterlogged book of matches, and a crunchy old sock stuffed back into the leaves. It seemed like they’d been there forever, and I wondered when was the last time the home had had a landscaper in, other than me, to tend the place, because it looked like an old man’s sweaty armpit. It made you wonder what the hell they were doing with all the money they got if Bryan wasn’t actually skimming it, because they sure as hell didn’t step sharp when it came to fixing anything. If I wanted the island cleaned up, I’d probably have to do that, too, along with repainting the sign. What else was new.

  There was nothing else to find, so I turned back toward the sign and bent over to pull up a weed. I wanted to see how long the job might take, because even if I had to do it, I didn’t want to make a goddamn day out of it. And just as I reached down for the weed, I saw it lying in the grass—a thin black rubber ring, about three inches in diameter, the kind of band used as a seal inside plastic drain pipes and that most everyone was wearing as bracelets these days, guys and girls alike. A low belch of thunder sounded in the distance. I was so stunned that I held the bracelet up and stared at it, like I’d never seen one before or didn’t know what it was. But once I snapped out of it, I knew exactly what it was—my first real clue.

  SEVEN

  I stood on the pedals and leaned forward as I cranked the Cruiser northbound on a tree-lined lane of drab homes in the residential area just behind the retirement home. I was on the west side of town, where all the streets looked the same: they all had the same grayish asphalt on the roadway, the same narrow sidewalks that wedged violently upward in places thanks to the tree roots growing beneath, the same moderate-sized yards and pa
ved driveways, the same wood-paneled ranches, or brick-and-wood split-levels with garages and basketball hoops, the same plastic trash cans lined up on the curb, and the same red metal arms on all the mailboxes. You’d think a few people might refuse to cut their lawns, just to spice things up a bit. But no—even the grass was the same damn height. Sure, everything was more or less tidy and in pretty decent shape, but I guess that’s why Thoreau was dead set against conformity: it just made everything look tired and bored.

  Not that the town center was any better, because that was the crappy part, and like most others in the county, it wasn’t in the center of town at all, but to the north and east. It had the police station, the fire department, the mayor’s office, the chamber of commerce, two fast-food restaurants, a bank with drive-through tellers, the post office, a ninety-nine-cent store, the public library, and not much else. All of it was crammed together on one measly avenue that ran east to west and was only remarkable for its ability to look rundown and barren in both directions. At the western end a T-junction fed into a small north-south highway, one of those dinky four-laners that crisscrossed the whole state—with jug handles for left turns, traffic signals every half-mile or so, and lights that were carefully timed to stop you at every one—and it split the town in two, right down the middle, just about all the way through. On it were the appliance store, the hardware store, the gas station, a used-car dealership, the supermarket, a Carvel ice cream shop, a roller skating rink, the grimiest diner on the planet, a packaged-goods store, which meant they sold liquor after hours, and a juice bar, which meant that you had to bring your own because the chicks dancing inside were all nude, all the time, and if I ever got caught within a hundred yards of it, mom would poke my eyes out long before I was legal to go in. A little further south was the convenience store and the strip mall (which, among other things, had a hairdresser, a toy store, and the only decent pizza parlor in town), while across the highway, directly to the east, was the street I lived on. The Circle and the mall were just south of our place (they were dead center of town in terms of actual geography), and southeast of them were the reservoir and the wealthy developments surrounding it. And below that was nothing; literally nothing for four and a half miles but woods and proposed highways all the way down to industrial road, which had no industry of any kind and nothing to it at all, except being the southernmost boundary. Just north of our place was the trailer park (also on the east side of the highway), and above that was the mess of apartment complexes, boarded-up houses, abandoned lots, and random, ramshackle huts unfit for dogs that encircled the town center. Like I said, the crappy part.

  That’s exactly where I was going, and I was running through the town’s layout in my mind to narrow down the options for my next move. The way I saw it, I either needed to scour every single house, trailer, apartment, and workplace for a stepladder, stool, or crate bearing soil samples from the retirement home, which I’d have no way of testing or matching, or devise some way of tracking down the owner of a kind of bracelet that was hanging from just about every ankle and wrist in town, including mine. Those were my options, and I knew they weren’t good ones. In the trade, we called it having a clue but no leads. Outside the trade, we called it not having shit.

  I needed something better to go on, something more direct, and I needed it quickly. Between the mesh of leaves arching above and the colorless sky beyond, a low ceiling of ashen clouds was descending from the west like the sole of a giant boot. From the looks of things, it wouldn’t be too long before that boot came splashing down. But I wasn’t all that worried about how long I had before the weather turned against me; I was much more anxious about the questions I wanted answered, and who I planned to ask.

  I realized that a little more time to prepare myself probably wouldn’t kill me, so instead of going straight, I took a right at McDonald’s and crossed over the T-junction to the town center. I hung another right off the main street onto a smaller one that started south for a few blocks before hooking around to the northeast. Then it split off and curved northward behind Carvel’s, jogged through a small, misplaced patch of woods, and then cut between two sandlots, one on either side, with the rusted hull of an El Camino on cinder blocks in one, a Dodge Charger in the other, clotheslines with crusty shirts and faded underwear, busted gates, and rusted tools scattered about both, and sorry clapboard shacks at the back of each that made plots at the trailer park look like country estates. I didn’t know who lived there, but I somehow got the feeling that they didn’t want company, so I did my best to respect their wishes. Just beyond, the road went up a short hill and then rolled down the other side into Sunnybrook, an apartment complex of twenty-five to thirty buildings, all of them long, narrow, red-bricked, with shingled A-roofs, like a barracks grid of two-story warehouses and numbered parking spaces.

  Yeah, it sucked, but I never said I came for the scenery. I came for the view. There was a swimming pool in the center of Sunnybrook—a big one, maybe a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide—with two diving boards, a large concrete sunbathing area, plastic tables and chairs, a snack bar, and a ten-foot chain-link fence guarding the perimeter. Admission was members only, restricted to residents like Neecey’s friend Cynthia and their guests, so my perch this summer had always been confined to the gate, on the outside looking in.

  As I pulled up to the fence now, there wasn’t anything to see. The lifeguard, a tall, bronzed Q-Tip in baggy red shorts, was setting up tables and chairs to the tinny sounds of a transistor radio, but otherwise the place was deserted, the threat of rain keeping people at bay. The pool’s flat surface looked glossy and cold in the dampened light, as if it were sulking over the lack of swimmers and sunbathers, and while the emptiness of the place made everything seem gloomy and sullen, I actually felt kind of relieved.

  I felt relieved because Stacy Sanders wasn’t there, which meant I’d dodged the bullet of having my first conversation with her be an interrogation of what she’d been doing with Razor at the arcade yesterday. I wanted to know that and how long they’d been there because it might help me with the case, or at least ease my mind about a few things.

  Not that it would’ve been a goddamn cinch to just roll up and ask her. I’d had about a million chances to break the ice with Stacy over the past couple of years, but I’d clutched up and choked every time. She was the reason I’d been staking out the pool this summer: whenever it was sunny, she’d lie out on a lounge chair that she pulled to the front right corner, away from everyone else, listening to her Walkman and wearing a pink string bikini that clung to her like colored Saran wrap. She never did anything out of the ordinary, just reclined on her back with her eyes closed, sat up and scribbled in her notebook, rubbed suntan oil on her stomach and legs while sucking on a long strand of bangs or stretching her gum—you know, usual stuff like that. But at some point she’d turn over onto her stomach and start pedaling her feet. Her butt cheeks would spring out dense and curved from the small of her back and wiggle like balls of cotton candy in a stiff, swirling breeze. That alone was worth the price of admission, but it also had this way of hindering my ability to speak.

  It was the way that Stacy didn’t seem fazed by anything that tripped me out the most. In class or out, it was the same with her: she was always a bit removed from everyone else, wrapped up in her own business, as if there were this tiny bubble around her that only she could fit into. I had a similar kind of thing, I guess, except it was more like a safety cage. Whatever. Stacy seemed pretty happy in her bubble, as if she wanted nothing more than to be by herself with her head bent over one of the notebooks she was always writing in. She must’ve gone through thirty of them last year, each one a different color. I was curious as hell about what she did in them, but you could bet your lunch money and your allowance that it wasn’t schoolwork, not even if she was in class. She was one of the worst students in sixth grade, straight D’s, but when she got called out by one of our teachers for paying more attention to her notebooks than to what w
e were supposed to be learning, she just shrugged her shoulders, smiled a little, said okay, and went back to doing what she was doing. That was cool. But what really impressed me was that when she got detention or sent to the principal’s office for not listening, she did the same thing—she shrugged, said okay in this really cheerful way, and then either went about her business again, or packed up her stuff and left. That chick was a mystery all on her own, one I’d been itching to solve for nearly two years. The best part was that it was natural, totally natural; she didn’t act all coy or teasing like other girls in school, and it wasn’t some put-on or front. It was like Stacy knew what she was all about and just did her thing and didn’t let anything else bother her, and that was that. She wasn’t nasty or bitchy about it either. When kids talked to her, she’d talk back, and not phony, oh-my-God-like-why-are-you-in-my-face talk, but all involved and animated, making her eyes real wide, tilting her head so her bangs covered one side of her face, scrunching up her nose a bit when she laughed, and showing that tiny gap between her front teeth. Like I said, she wasn’t all that pretty, and when she made that face she looked kind of slow, but it still drove me nuts. There was just something about her, and she could’ve gotten away with being a snotty, stuck-up priss if she’d wanted to, but she wasn’t. She just went with it, like whatever she was doing right then, or whoever she was talking to at that moment, was perfectly fine, and she was good to go with it. Shit, I’d even seen her talking to Doug Le Fleur by the water fountain a couple of times, and hardly anybody talked to him, because he was the smelly kid—every school had one, he was ours, and, to be honest, he had a gift for it.