Shades of Simon Gray Read online

  Sergeant Fowler headed up the stairs alone.

  Courtney decided the woman was staying below to keep an eye on her. Maybe they considered her a suspect, too. “You said I could call my dad.”

  “Sure, go ahead.” Lieutenant Santino smiled at Courtney, but Courtney didn’t feel the least bit reassured. She headed straight for the phone in the kitchen and dialed a number, praying her father had his cell phone turned on. When she heard him bark “Hello” at the other end, she was actually relieved. Relief was not a feeling she associated with her father’s voice.

  “Dad, the police are here. They have a search warrant and want to see Simon’s room.”

  “I’ll be right home,” he said.

  Courtney still had the phone pressed to her ear when a loud humming sound signaled she had been disconnected.

  Lieutenant Santino was peering out the front window in the living room, obviously interested in something outside. Courtney didn’t stop to find out what; she headed right upstairs.

  Sergeant Fowler was carefully removing the cables from Simon’s computer. Courtney stood in the doorway of her brother’s bedroom, watching him. The officer didn’t glance up when she appeared, didn’t say a word, as if walking off with someone’s personal property was something he did every day. And maybe, Courtney thought, he did.

  Simon’s room was exactly as he had left it two days before. Nothing had changed, only the occupant was missing.

  The room was almost Spartan. The bed was neatly made. No rugs on the floor, no curtains on the windows. The bookshelf was empty. Except for the computer, there was nothing on his desk. Unlike her own walls, papered to within an inch of their lives with posters of rock groups and rap stars, Simon’s walls were bare.

  Once, when she had asked him why his room was so empty, he had cocked his head to one side, looked at her in that puzzled way he had when he was trying to understand something, and said, “Why do people always feel they have to fill up every ounce of empty space with junk? I like my room this way. It’s got all sorts of possibilities.”

  When Courtney told him she thought his room was totally impersonal, he’d laughed and said, “But it’s very personal. It keeps them guessing.” Courtney had had no idea what he was talking about, or what he meant by “them.” But now, as she watched this stranger disconnecting the cables on Simon’s PC, she thought how Simon hadn’t left this man—or anyone else, for that matter—a single clue about who he was, what he liked, or what he thought. He even refused to wear anything with a designer’s name on it. You couldn’t pay him to wear brand-name clothes.

  Sergeant Fowler lifted the computer from the top of Simon’s desk, leaving behind the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and headed back downstairs.

  Lieutenant Santino was waiting by the front door. She opened it to let the sergeant through just as Simon’s father came running across the lawn from the driveway. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. The sergeant never missed a beat; he tipped his chin in the lieutenant’s direction and kept on walking. Russell Gray stood with his mouth hanging open, watching him.

  He turned to the lieutenant and Courtney, looked from one to the other, and apparently decided it was less of a risk to yell at his daughter. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he said, “call …” His voice trailed off.

  “Dad,” Courtney moaned, mortified to the brink of tears for both of them.

  “I know, I know.” His pale hand flopped back and forth. His sweaty face had turned a bright pink. He shook his head, looking embarrassed. “I haven’t slept in almost two days,” he told the lieutenant. “My son’s in the hospital.”

  Lieutenant Santino nodded and said she knew about Simon, was sorry to hear about the accident. Courtney was surprised by the genuine look of sympathy on her face.

  “I know this isn’t a good time for us to be here, Mr. Gray,” Lieutenant Santino said, “but we don’t have a choice. I’ll need you to come inside while I ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?” Russell Gray didn’t budge an inch from his spot on the bottom step of the front porch. “What is this all about, anyway? What right have you to come barging into my house at a time like this?”

  “Your son,” Lieutenant Santino said, calmly, “could be in a great deal of trouble.”

  Courtney watched her father’s face with interest. Surely the lieutenant was mistaken. Didn’t she realize she was talking about Simon the Good? Saint Simon. The Simon who had never been in trouble. The Simon who was their father’s pride and joy. The future CEO of a large software corporation. The son who was going to justify their father’s existence and maybe make them all rich to boot. She was not at all surprised to see every last ounce of color drain right out of her father’s face. With the dark smudges beneath his eyes and two days’ worth of stubble on his pale face, he looked like a corpse. A sad, pathetic corpse. Courtney turned away. She couldn’t bear to look at him.

  That was when she noticed the black Mustang parked about halfway up the block on the other side of the street. It looked like Danny Giannetti’s car, but it wasn’t Danny in the front seat. A man, or maybe a boy, wearing dark sunglasses, sat behind the wheel. The back of his head was pressed against the headrest and his arms were folded as if he were napping. But Courtney wasn’t so sure he was really asleep. His head was tilted in such a way that for all she knew he could be looking straight at them, watching their every move.

  Later that afternoon, after school, Danny was mowing the lawn when Charlie Atwater pulled into the driveway in Danny’s Mustang. The only thing Danny had to mow were wild shoots of onion grass. It was too early in the season to be mowing the lawn and he knew it. But it was something to do, something that allowed him to be outside, where he could keep an eye out for Charlie.

  Charlie unfolded his long, gangly body from Danny’s car and tossed a cigarette stub on the lawn. Ordinarily the thought of smoke stinking up the interior of his Mustang would have sent Danny into a rage, but he had bigger problems right now. He could tell by the look on Charlie’s face that the news wasn’t good.

  “Not here,” he said, before Charlie even opened his mouth.

  Charlie shrugged and jammed his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. His short hair was bleached almost white and stood out at odd angles on top of his head. He was a classmate of Danny’s, although he rarely bothered to show up for school. Most of the time he hung out down in Phillipsburg or across the river in Easton. Some of the kids thought he was into dealing drugs. But Danny figured if that were true, Charlie wouldn’t waste his time doing surveillance work for the measly fifty dollars the three of them had scraped together. He would have brushed Danny off like a mosquito. Instead, he seemed to jump at the idea when Danny approached him.

  Danny knew it was a risk, getting Charlie to do their spying for them, but none of them could afford to skip classes or do anything that might cast suspicion on them. So they had hired Charlie, who insisted on using Danny’s car since he didn’t want to call attention to his own during “surveillance.” They hadn’t told Charlie the real reason they’d hired him, only that they were worried about Simon, worried that he might be in some sort of trouble.

  The two of them got back into the Mustang, where Danny grilled Charlie for information, paid him the fifty bucks, dropped him off on Main Street, two blocks over from the park, and headed straight to Kyle’s.

  Danny knew Mrs. Byrnes would be at the courthouse. He only hoped Kyle was home. His head was so messed up from Charlie’s account of the raid on Simon’s PC that when Devin answered Kyle’s door, Danny thought he’d come to the wrong house.

  But then Kyle came up behind Devin, rested his hands on her shoulders, and the world shifted into balance again. Danny slipped past them both without an invitation.

  “Is anybody else here?” he said. He flopped into his usual place, the recliner by the fireplace.

  Kyle shook his head. “Just us.” He and Devin sat on the couch. “So what did you find out?”
>
  “Charlie said two people showed up at Simon’s. A man and a woman. They left with Simon’s PC.”

  Devin pressed her fingers to her lips. “Oh my god.”

  “Cops?” Kyle asked.

  Danny shrugged. “Yeah, Charlie figured they were. They weren’t in uniform.”

  “I can’t believe they’re on to us this soon,” Devin said. “I mean, it was only last Thursday Kyle overheard the conversation between Schroder and McCabe. No one unusual has been at the school; we’ve been checking out the computer science lab.” She looked over at Kyle. “I thought Mr. McCabe was going to handle this himself.”

  “That’s what he wanted to do,” Kyle said. “Schroder’s the one who wanted to get the police involved. It looks like she got her way.”

  Danny was fighting hard to keep his thoughts straight. Images of him standing in a courtroom, of the look on his parents’ faces, of being locked up in some six-by-eight cell with no windows, had him rattled and near panic. He couldn’t get the grim pictures out of his head. None of this was supposed to be happening. He had just gotten accepted by Dartmouth. He had plans. He had potential. Damn it, he had a future. And spending it behind bars was not part of the plan.

  Kyle was going on about how the school administrators might have brought some computer consultants in over the weekend, maybe even the local police, although he didn’t think they had a computer crimes division. Danny was barely listening. He was imagining the police at his own front door, his father standing there in his black T-shirt and black pants—clothes he still wore at his print shop, even though he had long since converted his business from letterpress to laser printing—scratching his head. A dark figure growing even darker as he listened to what the police had to say.

  “Simon wouldn’t let anything happen,” he told Kyle. “He’s too smart. You said he’d cover his tracks, and I’m pretty sure he did.”

  “Maybe the police are smarter,” Devin said. She had her hand on Kyle’s wrist and her grip was growing tighter by the minute. “They have their own computer experts.”

  “On the state level,” Kyle said, loosening her fingers. “And maybe in a few of the counties, but I doubt our local force has that kind of setup.” He got to his feet and began to pace. Although every window in the house was open, he was sweating. His T-shirt clung to him like a damp dish towel. “If anyone comes around asking questions, none of us knows anything.”

  “What if they come to us with evidence?” Danny said.

  “Deny it,” Kyle told him. “Deny everything. You know nothing about anything. You have no idea who or why anyone would break into the school’s computer system.”

  “But if they have evidence?” Danny insisted.

  “It will point to Simon. And right now he’s not talking.”

  IF SIMON GRAY HAD NOT BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE THE dark envelope that was his mind, he might have felt the cool hospital sheets beneath him, heard the wheezing of the respirator, seen the different colored lines on the cardiac monitor undulating across the screen, felt his father’s callused hand on the side of his face, and smelled his familiar scent—the chemical odor that clung to his clothes from the pharmaceutical plant where he worked. If Simon had not been in a coma, he would have told his father that this was not how he’d expected things to turn out. Not even close.

  He would tell him how the strangest things had been happening. How he could sit on the side of Stanley Isaacson’s bed without the nurses shooing him back to his room. How he could wander the halls of the hospital unseen. And how, at this very moment, he was shocked right down to his bare toes to find himself at home, in his own bedroom.

  He wasn’t at all sure how he’d gotten there, but he now understood it wasn’t necessary to physically leave the hospital to go from one place to another. Each time, there was only the whooshing sound, the icy damp gray, and a few moments of disorientation before he realized he was no longer in his body. He also knew he wasn’t in control of his destinations. Or at least he didn’t seem to be.

  He touched his face, ran his fingers across his eyes, as he had done the few other times he had found himself outside his body, and discovered, as on those occasions, that he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Simon found this astonishing. For the first time in years, he could see everything clearly without glasses. Every shadow, every line of every piece of furniture, and every object were as sharp and visible and even in some ways as wondrous as when he was four years old.

  Moonlight streaked through his window, creating shadows. His own shadow, even though he was standing right in front of the window, was disturbingly absent. And so, he now saw, was his computer, although the keyboard and monitor still sat on his desk. A sense of dread crept along his spine; his chest felt tight. He couldn’t understand why he should feel this way.

  This was his room. Of that much he was certain. Bare walls, no rugs or curtains. Once, when his sister told him she thought his room was totally impersonal, that even prison inmates put things on their walls, he’d snapped back with what he thought was a pretty good putdown about people who needed to fill every ounce of empty space with meaningless junk. He was talking about Courtney, of course. But he doubted she realized that. If he were being truthful with her, which of course he wasn’t, he would have said he had no idea what to put on his walls. No idea what kind of curtains or rugs he wanted. In all honesty, he had no idea who he even was. Weren’t you supposed to have at least some idea before you stuck it all up there on your walls for the whole world to see?

  He stared down at his desk and wondered if Courtney had moved the PC to her room. She was always after him about hogging it. They were supposed to share the computer. But it didn’t make sense that she would leave behind the keyboard and monitor. Still, he couldn’t imagine where else his PC would be, and he would have headed straight down to Courtney’s room to find out if the computer was there, except he didn’t seem to be able to leave his own room. He was tied to it by some invisible force, like a kite caught in a tree, and he was only now beginning to think he might be there for a reason.

  Outside, it had begun to snow. Without warning, the wind grew fierce, smashing wet snowflakes against the windowpane, rattling the glass.

  Faint sounds of R&B echoed from somewhere outside his door. It wasn’t the sort of music Courtney listened to; it wasn’t rap or heavy metal. Maybe his dad had the radio on.

  Sometimes when there was only the hum of the refrigerator or an air conditioner, or the steady drumming of rain, Simon thought he heard a whole orchestra playing music he’d never heard before. Not inside his head, like some annoying, repetitive tune or jingle that got stuck in your brain, but soft, beautiful music gently surrounding him, kissing his ears. Whenever that happened, he would close his eyes and listen, trying to make distinctions between the different woodwinds, between the violins and violas, although he didn’t know the first thing about music, had never played an instrument in his life, and was even told by his sixth-grade music teacher that he was tone-deaf.

  Over the years he had devised a theory that the music was a distortion produced by the white noise, but most of the time he didn’t try to explain it. He just listened.

  He liked heavy metal and rap well enough, but as far as he was concerned, it was all background for the chaos in his head. If the music fit what was going on inside him, he listened. Otherwise he blocked it out. But the music that sometimes came to him unbidden, that was something else altogether. He wondered if it had to do with the hum of his own internal rhythms, the music his body made, music no one but Simon could hear.

  This was the first time he’d traveled beyond the hospital. Yet the chill of the hospital room and the smell of bleach were still with him. He was here and not here. There and not there. He had no idea how much time had passed—days, weeks, maybe even years. He wasn’t sure what time of year it was. The sight of the snow muddled his brain. He sat on the edge of his bed and watched large feathery flakes land on tree branches thick with sleeping black crows, t
urning their feathers white.

  Simon lay down. His hands cradled the back of his head. He stared up at the ceiling. The moonlight had disappeared behind clouds of snow. The shadows in the room had dissolved. But Simon’s eyes were accustomed to the dark. He spent almost all his time there, except when he was dreaming or traveling outside his body.

  He stared over at his desk and was suddenly reminded of Kyle. He saw the two of them in the library, Simon sitting in front of one of a half dozen computers, Kyle pointing to something on the screen, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one else was watching them. Simon wished he hadn’t thought of Kyle because now fragments of memories were seeping back into his mind. Outside, one of the crows lifted off a snowy branch, fluttered a black wing against the window, creating a lake of clear glass in the middle of the wet snow, and disappeared into the night.

  He thought of Devin McCafferty, of the soft shell-pink lining of her delicate ears. Simon’s heart began to pound. He saw her standing at the kitchen counter in Kyle’s house last summer, sliding vegetables onto long metal skewers so Kyle’s mother could grill them. When he came into the room, Devin spun around, grabbed an empty skewer, angled her arms and legs like a fencer, and thrust it toward him. “En garde,” she said, feigning a French accent. The skewer stopped within an inch of his heart. So close. Then she straightened up, holding the skewer end to end over her head with both hands, and grinned.

  The image almost brought him to tears. He wanted her that badly. He had since the very first time he saw her on the playground of Bellehaven Elementary leaping into the air and catching Frisbees with the ease and grace of a gazelle because she was almost a full head taller than anyone else in the fourth grade. She was only a year ahead of him, but it might as well have been a century.

  The night of Rob Fisher’s party, Simon had thought he’d died and gone to heaven when Devin McCafferty came up to him in a ribbed tank top almost the color of her hair and told him she thought he looked like a younger version of Chad Lowe, except with curly hair, could maybe even pass for his son. Simon laughed because he didn’t know what else to do; he wasn’t even sure who Chad Lowe was, but he could tell by the look on Devin’s face she meant it to be a compliment. Then she had taken him completely by surprise. She asked him if he wanted to dance, gently taking his hand before he could answer one way or the other and leading him to where others were dancing.