Shades of Simon Gray Read online

  “Who knows? No wonder the man was sweating bullets when we were downloading all this stuff. I figured it was the heat wave, but it looks like he had other reasons.” Roger got up from the desk and headed over to the coffeepot for a refill. “I figured you might want to talk to McCabe before we go any further with this.”

  Debra leaned back in her chair. She looked thoughtful. “Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Barbara Schroder was the one who wanted to bring us in on the case. George McCabe didn’t seem to know much about it. And yet he’s the one person who’s really in a position to know. You’d think he’d be the first one to figure out something was going on and blow the whistle on whoever was getting into the system.”

  “He probably kept quiet because he had a few things going on himself,” Roger said.

  Debra shook her head. “I thought the school had software to filter out those porn sites, Cyber Patrol or something.”

  “They do. But McCabe maintains the network, remember? He could easily have set up an account to bypass any firewalls.”

  “So do you think it was Simon Gray who was checking out these porn sites?”

  Roger shrugged. “I have no idea who’s involved. But like I said, there’s more than one person. Simon Gray could be one of them.”

  “This doesn’t sound like the kids I’ve been questioning. All of them are involved in after-school activities. Legit activities,” she added when she saw Roger’s grin.

  “Well, McCabe did tell us Simon Gray was his best student—a real computer whiz.”

  “You know, given this latest information, it’s a little suspicious that McCabe told us what he did.” Debra frowned. “It’s as if he wanted us to check out Gray.”

  “Well, sure he did. He knew what the kid was capable of.”

  “Okay. But why do you suppose McCabe gave us Simon Gray’s name as a possible suspect and no one else’s? Now you’re saying there’s more than one kid involved. Do you think McCabe did it to throw us off the track?”

  “Who knows? But I wouldn’t rule out Gray just yet.”

  “I wasn’t planning to. It was just a thought.” She glanced down at her wristwatch. “You’re a little late for that date, aren’t you?”

  “I already called her. She said no problem. She’s fixing a late dinner for the two of us.” He grinned, downed the last of his coffee, and headed for the door. “I’d still follow up with McCabe. Just a suggestion. You never know where it might lead.”

  But Debra Santino was already one step ahead of him. The minute he was out the door she called Barbara Schroder at home and arranged to meet with her and George McCabe at the school first thing Saturday morning, weekend or no weekend.

  SATURDAY NIGHT KYLE WAS STUCK AT HOME. HE HAD a paper on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure due for AP English on Monday and hadn’t even begun to write it. If he didn’t get an A on the paper, he could jeopardize his A average in the course.

  Ordinarily he would have had the paper done before the weekend, but his concentration was all screwed up. He couldn’t get Devin out of his mind. He was angry as hell at her. Angry at her for messing up their last two months of school, for screwing up their plans for the prom and prom weekend at the shore. Why would she break up with him before school was out? It didn’t make sense. Not that he hadn’t been planning to break it off himself before he left for Harvard. He figured they’d probably both want to be free to see other people once they got to college. But that was months away. They could be having the time of their lives right now. It was their senior year, for god’s sake. He couldn’t believe she’d done this to him after all the years they’d been together. And the worst part was, he still didn’t have a clue what was behind it.

  He might have sat at his desk, staring at the blank page on his monitor, all night, if his mother hadn’t suddenly showed up at his bedroom door to announce that Danny was waiting outside for him.

  He found Danny parked by the front curb in his Mustang. Kyle leaned his arms on the roof of the car and peered inside the open window on the passenger side. “What’s up?”

  Danny stared at Kyle as if he hadn’t heard him right. “Hendershot’s party, man. Remember?”

  “Yeah, right. I forgot. I’ve been working on that Hardy paper.” Kyle jerked his thumb toward the house.

  “Get in,” Danny said. “We’ll pick up Devin.”

  Kyle looked away and didn’t say anything.

  “Or not,” Danny added.

  “She’s probably at the hospital,” Kyle told him. He’d been dodging Danny’s questions about Devin and him since Wednesday. But he could tell Danny wasn’t buying it.

  Danny shrugged and looked down at the steering wheel. “So … is it off between you guys?”

  “Like I said, man, she’s been at the hospital a lot.” Kyle drummed his thumbs on the roof of the car. “That’s all. Her grandmother’s sick. Jeez, give her a break.”

  “Maybe she’ll be at Hendershot’s party,” Danny said.

  Kyle doubted Devin would be at the party, although there was a small chance she’d show up with a few of her friends. In truth, he hoped she wouldn’t be there, because then it would be obvious to everyone they weren’t together anymore. And he wasn’t in the mood to spend the night doling out explanations.

  “So are you coming or not?” Danny said.

  Kyle thought for a moment about the paper on Hardy, decided he would spend all day Sunday on it, and climbed into the front seat. Devin or no Devin, he had little more than two months left of his senior year, and he was determined to make the most of them.

  The sounds of heavy metal reverberated through the night air. Danny could feel the bass as soon as they turned onto Trip Hendershot’s street. Cars lined both sides of the block. The Hendershots’ front yard had been converted into a parking lot. Danny didn’t want to park on the lawn, where the cars were wedged so tight it was almost impossible to get the doors open. He wasn’t about to risk getting his ’Stang messed up. Instead, he dropped Kyle off and drove two blocks away to park by a deserted curb. He made sure the car was out in the open, not parked beneath any crow-laden trees.

  When he got to the Hendershots’, he found Kyle standing in the breakfast nook, watching a bunch of kids toss Ping-Pong balls into large Styrofoam cups of beer.

  “She here?” Danny asked. They both knew he was talking about Devin.

  Kyle shook his head and opened a can of Coke. Danny helped himself to a beer from one of the three ice-filled coolers on the floor by the back door.

  “You want me to drive you over to her house?”

  A roar of laughter echoed from the group surrounding the table after Trip Hendershot’s Ping-Pong ball missed the cups of beer by a mile. Someone handed him one of the full cups and he chugged it, losing half the contents down the front of his T-shirt.

  When Kyle didn’t bother to answer, Danny shrugged and wandered downstairs to the family room. He was pretty sure something had happened between Kyle and Devin, but it wasn’t any of his business. Better to stay out of it.

  On one side of the family room, a few jocks from the football team were watching Trip Hendershot’s videotape of November’s homecoming game. The big-screen TV provided the only light in the room. Some of the kids were dancing, although you could hardly hear the music above the football video. Others were making out on the huge U-shaped sectional couch at the other end of the room.

  Danny was about to go back upstairs when Alan Caldwell, a senior who played tight end for the Bellehaven Bobcats, came leaping down the stairs, almost knocking Danny off his feet. He tapped two of the other players on the shoulder and signaled them to follow.

  There was something about the expression on Alan Caldwell’s face that made Danny curious. He trailed after the three guys, staying at a reasonable distance. They headed outside to the deck. Danny could see them through the kitchen window above the sink. He didn’t want to be obvious. If he went out on the deck, they would probably stop talking abou
t whatever it was that was going on. Instead, he hoisted himself onto the kitchen counter beside the sink and leaned his head back against the wall. His left ear was only inches from the open window. With the music blasting through the house, it was difficult to hear, but he was able to catch a few words. And the more he listened, the faster his heart beat. Because what he heard Alan Caldwell tell the others was “The game’s up.”

  Ten minutes later Danny had brought Kyle to the wooded area at the far end of the Hendershots’ backyard.

  “This better be good,” Kyle told him.

  “It’s good. It’s good,” Danny reassured him. He kept punching his fist into the palm of his other hand, barely able to contain himself.

  Kyle leaned back against a tree and folded his arms across his chest. “So let’s hear it.”

  “I just overheard Alan Caldwell telling Joey Campanelli and Scott Turso he got a call from Mr. McCabe right before he left for the party.” The grin widened on Danny’s face. “He said the cops met with McCabe and Principal Schroder this morning. They figured out someone’s been using the school computers to download porn. Caldwell said McCabe caved, told the cops everything. Whatever that means.”

  Kyle stared at Danny, his face expressionless. It was obvious he didn’t get the connection. “What’s this got to do with us?”

  Danny snickered. “Man, don’t you get it? Caldwell and some of the other seniors on the football team have been using the school computers to access porn. That means they either hacked into the system, stole McCabe’s password, or McCabe let them use it, which would really be stupid. But, hey, you never know.” He shrugged. “Somehow they bypassed the firewall.”

  Kyle studied Danny with interest. “So if there are other students who’ve either been hacking into the system or have access to McCabe’s password, then they could have been downloading other stuff.”

  “Like exams,” Danny said, nodding and laughing at the same time. His laughter bubbled out like hiccups.

  Kyle stared at him, trying to take in this interesting twist of fate. Then he laughed even more loudly than Danny.

  “This calls for major celebrating,” Danny told him. “Let’s par-tay! I’m getting me a couple of brews. One for each hand.”

  Kyle grabbed him by the arm as Danny started back to the Hendershots’ house. “Not a word. Got it? It sounds to me like the cops think they’ve got their suspects. So keep your trap shut.”

  Danny’s face sagged. “Have I ever once, in the past three years, ever told anybody about the project? Ever?” He jerked his arm from Kyle’s grip. “Lighten up, man.”

  Kyle cocked his head to one side. “We’re not out of the woods yet, you know.”

  “We’re not?”

  “If the cops found out about the porn sites, who knows what else they’ll find?”

  Danny’s shoulders slumped. He nodded. Kyle was right. They couldn’t afford to let their guard down.

  But in spite of Kyle’s caution, Danny was able to take a full breath for the first time in two weeks. He felt as if he’d gotten his life back. He looked up through the branches of the trees, thick with buds waiting to burst into leaves, and to the sky beyond, ignoring the crows. It was almost impossible to see the stars for all the ground light. Even the North Star wasn’t visible tonight. But he knew it was up there, just as sure as he saw his future stretching out before him, huge and glorious.

  Jessup Wildemere’s clothes were soaked in blood. He stared at Simon as if he’d never seen him before. Simon saw the panic in the man’s dark eyes.

  “I tried to stop her,” Jessup told him, between breaths. Simon could see he had been running hard.

  “Who?”

  Jessup didn’t answer. He bent over, balancing his hands on his knees. “She was like a madwoman.” He moaned softly and shook his head as if trying to dislodge the image. “So much blood.”

  Simon stared at the blood-soaked figure before him as he struggled to remember how the story went. Cornelius Dobbler had been stabbed more than fifty times as he slept in his own bed. There had been so much blood, even the sheets couldn’t soak it all up. It had dripped into a pool on the floor, run into the interstices of the loose floorboards, and formed a stain on the parlor ceiling below. The Dobbler house still stood on Prescott Street. And to this day, not one single family—and there had been seven over the years—residing in the Dobbler house had been able to get rid of the stain, not with sealers, undercoats, sanding, or replastering.

  According to the story, a group of men from town had gone out looking for Jessup Wildemere. When they found him, clothes drenched in blood, there wasn’t one among them to question his guilt. They simply hauled him off to jail, where he would wait to be tried the next day.

  Simon looked over at Jessup, who stared down at his bloodstained hands, then rested his forehead against the coarse bark of the Liberty Tree, eyes closed, as if to shut out some terrible sight. His hands, pressed against the tree, left bloody fingerprints.

  Simon thought he heard him whispering Hannah’s name. A chilling thought came to him. “Was Hannah there?” Simon asked Jessup.

  “Her father discovered us by the riverbank. He was going to force her to marry Elias Belcher this Sunday.” Jessup turned to face Simon, who was stunned to see tears in the man’s eyes. “Hannah told me not to worry. She would talk some sense into her father. I waited for her tonight. Behind the barn. When she came to me, she still carried the knife. Her clothes were drenched with blood.”

  “Hannah killed her father?” Simon could hardly get his mind around this distortion. This was not how the story went.

  “I held her, there behind the barn, while she cried.” He stared down at his clothes. “Her father’s blood is on me as well. As it should be. The crime belongs to us both. I am as guilty as she.”

  Simon shook his head vehemently. He wanted to tell Jessup that Hannah was the murderer, that he was innocent. But the words wouldn’t come.

  The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Simon knew what was going to happen next. The townspeople would come for Jessup. They would put him in jail. Then they would hang him. But the hanging happened in the winter, didn’t it? At least that was how Simon remembered the story, although he was beginning to realize there might be considerable flaws in that original tale, the one he’d grown up with.

  Jessup looked off into the woods. “She’s going to meet me here.”

  Simon wondered why Hannah hadn’t left with Jessup right after she’d met him behind the barn. A horrible thought came to him. Hannah was the only one who knew where Jessup was. Was it Hannah who told the men where to find him?

  Simon felt sick. He knew how all this was going to turn out. “You have to leave,” he told Jessup.

  “Leave Hannah?” Jessup shook his head, as if this wasn’t even in the realm of possibility.

  “If you wait here for her, they’ll find you.”

  He wanted to shout right in Jessup Wildemere’s face that if he didn’t get his ass out of there fast he was a dead man. That was crazy. Jessup was already dead. He had been for more than two hundred years. And there wasn’t a thing Simon or anyone else could do to change that.

  Simon was frantic to leave this place. He couldn’t bear the thought of Jessup throwing his life away. He covered his eyes, as if he could make the nightmare disappear. When he dared to take his hands away, Simon found himself standing in his own backyard, at the edge of the field.

  Overhead the moon was so full and bright, it hurt his eyes. In the cemetery beyond, on the opposite side of the field, stood a woman. Simon knew, as you can only know such things in dreams, that this was his mother. She raised her hand and waved to him.

  He looked down at his bare feet, sunk in soft grass, only inches from the edge of the field. He couldn’t seem to move beyond this spot. When he looked up again, his mother was gone. A deep, painful loneliness threatened to swallow him whole, from the inside out.

  A thick fog began to form. The gravestones seemed to mel
t into it as it drifted toward him.

  All his senses were deadened. He felt nothing. Saw nothing. Tasted nothing. Smelled nothing. Heard nothing. When he tried to breathe, a heaviness pressed down on his chest. He could no longer draw air into his lungs. A terrifying thought seized him. He was dying. This time he would not be returning to the hospital.

  From somewhere in the fog he heard a voice. Muffled. Someone was calling his name. The sound was barely a whisper. But he turned his head toward it and listened.

  Liz Shapiro dreamed she was digging in the mud with Simon in the backyard of her house. They were once again five years old, and the two of them were smeared from head to toe in cool, delightful ooze. It squished through their fingers and toes as they danced in their soppy underwear beneath raindrops so large they could fill a whole pitcher in less than a minute. But then the rain began to come down in torrents.

  As the muddy water rose from the stream in her backyard, Liz ran for the porch, and when she looked over her shoulder she saw that the stream had swelled to the size of the Delaware. It pulled Simon along so fast, she didn’t think she would ever be able to reach him. His head bobbed up and down like a rubber ball as he paddled furiously to stay in place.

  By now the water had risen to the top step of the porch. Simon’s alarmed cries echoed in her head. He was no longer five years old. He was seventeen again. His face was bruised and his head, bandaged. The bandages were brown with muddy water. In a panic Liz looked around for something she could throw to him, something he could grab on to to keep afloat. Simon’s cries became more piercing.

  Frantic, Liz began to throw the porch furniture into the raging river. Wicker chairs, cushions and all. Anything that might float, anything for him to hold on to. Up ahead was an enormous oak. She had never seen a tree this large, except for pictures of giant redwoods, and certainly never an oak. The river water beat against its lower branches. If Simon could seize one of the branches, maybe he could pull himself out. She shouted to him, screamed for him to grab hold. Simon’s voice echoed back to her. He was coming closer to the tree but didn’t seem to notice the branches.