Haze (6 page)

Tuesday after school, Abby texted me to meet her out front and bring my bike. I didn't bother to hide my grin.

“Girl Sherlock?” Droid asked.

I nodded. Maybe we would go for coffee.

Steven wasn't hiding Jeremy's computer in his room. But that didn't mean he wasn't hiding it. And the way the room had been—it didn't seem like a healthy kid's room to me. If Steven felt Jeremy was disordering his universe, he could have done anything to him.

By the time I signed out and made it to the front of the school, she was already riding her bike back and forth along the sidewalk. Her helmet was the same blue as her jeans. A part of me had hoped for the kilt-and-kneesocks-on-a-bicycle thing.

“Let's go—5485 Briarwood,” she said. She started riding away, heading north along the street.

“Or in English, hello,” I called after her.

So this wasn't a coffee date. Or even a social call. My feet felt heavier all of a sudden.

I caught up with her before we reached the main road. “Where are we going?” I asked. There was no traffic here, so we could ride side by side.

“Your coach's house,” she said.

“Oh.” I thought about that for a minute. It didn't add up to anything good. “Why?”

“To see what color car his wife drives.” She glanced at me, then powered ahead before I could ask questions.

She was upset about Jeremy. I got that. But stalking the coach's wife didn't strike me as a good idea.

Maybe the best thing was to let her get it out of her system. Then we could go for coffee, talk, whatever. At least I was here with her.

After twenty minutes of hard riding, we reached a neighborhood with street names like Birchwood and Oakcliff. It was one of the older parts of New Haven, with big pastel-colored houses and old-fashioned windows. The trees on the boulevard reached across the street, and the leaves were raked into fancy jack-o'-lantern garbage bags. There were a few rental houses too. You could tell those by the patchy lawns and the flags in the windows. Yale students, probably.

The coach's house was a pale yellow two-story with a wide porch. Abby rode past without stopping. I braked just before the driveway. The coach's car—a gray Jetta—wasn't in the driveway, but there was a pale blue Impala there. “This one!” I called.

She wheeled around and glared at me. “Keep riding!”

I rolled my eyes. It was nearly dinnertime. What were the chances of anyone looking out the front windows? But she kept riding, so I followed. She stopped at the drugstore on the corner.

I caught up with her. “Sorry. Didn't realize it was such a stealth mission. Should we have been in disguise?” I smiled, hoping for a laugh.

Her face flushed red. “Forget it.” She turned away and wiped her eyes.

I felt like a worm. “Look, I'm sorry. I just—do you want to tell me what's going on here? Because I'm confused.”

“The police told Dad it was a dark green car,” she said, studying the sidewalk. “They're going to go public with the information tomorrow.”

“A dark green—oh.” The pieces clunked into place. “But why did you think Coach's wife had anything to do with it?”

“Not her, dummy, him!” She glared at me.

My jaw dropped so hard that the bike helmet strap dug into my chin. “I told you, he didn't do it.”

She looked away. “I thought if you saw the car…”

I took a deep breath and tried again. “You have to understand, I know Coach. He's not the guy. And the cars aren't even the right color, so that proves it, right?”

“It doesn't prove anything,” she muttered.

I leaned on the wall of the drugstore and let my head clunk against the brick. My helmet got there first. “Abby, you can't just go chasing after people. This is for the police to solve.”

“I thought you cared about Jeremy.”

“I do, but the police will handle it. Look, I'm a swimmer. You want to talk front crawl, I'm your guy. I'm not a detective, and neither are you.”

She crossed her arms and looked away.

“Why don't we go for coffee? We can talk about this, okay?” We would be late for dinner, but so what?

Abby studied me for long enough that I started to feel fidgety. I held myself still.

“See you around, Bram,” she said. She kicked her bicycle into motion.

Panic rolled in my stomach. “Wait!” I pedaled hard and caught up with her as she turned onto a side street. I pulled ahead, then yanked my bike crossways in front of her, cutting her off.

She braked, but not fast enough. We crashed down together, and I scraped across the asphalt. We lay there, panting, in a tangle of limbs and bicycles. My right leg and arm burned.

“What the hell was that?” she shouted, shoving me.

“Are you okay?” I was an idiot. I was the world's biggest idiot.

“No thanks to you.” Slowly, she stood and brushed gravel off her jeans. One knee was torn. Red, broken skin showed underneath. Her cycling gloves had protected her hands. She was moving fine. I exhaled.

“I never meant to—I just wanted to talk,” I said.

“Nothing to talk about,” she said, glaring. “You don't want to help, fine. Just stay out of my way.”

“Abby, I—” But she was already pulling her bike free from mine. She checked it over, making sure nothing was bent or broken.

She wasn't interested in me. She never had been. I was only useful.

“Are you okay? Can you stand?” she asked. Her voice was cold. It didn't match the words.

“Fine,” I said.

I watched her ride away.

chapter fourteen

I made it back to school just in time for Tuesday chicken dinner. I didn't say much, not even when Droid asked about my torn sleeve and the scrapes on my arm.

And when I finished eating, I was still fuming. If I were a cartoon character, there would have been a black cloud over my head.

“Study hall, bro?” Droid asked on the way up to our room. I grunted and shook my head. I wasn't going to be able to concentrate, math test or no math test.

Instead, I changed into a pair of long shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt sleeve flapped against the road rash on my arm. Each touch stung. It felt sharp. I wanted that. “I'll be in the weight room,” I told Droid.

He raised a thick eyebrow. Yeah, I'd been for a bike ride. But I needed to move, and no way would I be allowed off campus for a run at this time of night.

The weight room was deserted. Good. Somebody had strung a row of cardboard skeletons along the wall of mirrors. Somebody else had taken a marker and labeled the bones. The room smelled like stale sweat, as usual.

I started on the treadmill. It wasn't the same as a real run. But at least my feet were pounding, my blood was racing and I didn't have to think.

My legs felt rubbery. After the treadmill, I moved on to my upper-body workout. One of the fluorescent lights in the room was loose and buzzing. It set my teeth on edge.

The last time I'd been in this room, Jeremy had been here too. I took a second to hope with every fiber in my body that he was going to get better.

And then I worked. Arms out, then back slowly, pushing from the shoulders. Ten presses. A break. Ten more. I knew my routine by heart. Sweat dripped into my eyes and stung. Jeremy would have said I was pressing too much weight. I didn't care. I wanted to.

Every time Abby slipped into my thoughts, I drove her out of my mind. I had just been…convenient for her. Someone to help her find answers.

Hell, if Jeremy was my brother, I would probably have done the same. He was a friend. And he had taken a big risk, telling me as much as he had.

Was what happened to him my fault?

I stood slowly. My knees shook. I looked around the room, and suddenly none of the machines made sense. Wires and pulleys, weights and benches. Everything became tangled up together. I didn't know where I was in my routine or what came next. I stared back at myself in the mirror. Sweaty hair. Scraped-up arm.

Guilty conscience.

I shook my head, trying to focus. What happened to Jeremy was the fault of whoever had done it. Steven. Coach. I didn't even know anymore. And maybe we would never find out.

Stupid Jeremy and his hiding games. Talking in riddles, never coming right out and telling me or Abby what information he had or why it mattered. Or where he hid it.

The fluorescent light stopped buzzing. All of a sudden the room felt very still. What if Jeremy
had
told me where he hid it? The night Steven and Nate had been here. He hadn't had the chance to talk openly. Did he know then that something might happen to him?

I tried to remember his words. I sat down and replayed the scene in my head. He had been on his way out, and Steven and Nate were right behind him. I'd been pissed off at him. What had he said on my way back inside? Something about smaller weights making a difference.

That was no help. He was just repeating the advice he had given me earlier.

But there was something about the way he said it.

What if he had already hidden the pictures, or laptop, or flash drive or whatever it was, before Steven and Nate arrived? Or what if something had happened, when Steven and Nate were talking to him, to make him decide to return and hide them the morning before our run? He would have had a hiding place picked out. And maybe he wanted to give me a clue.

Less weight.

I scanned the room. It was hard to know where to look without knowing what I was looking for. It couldn't be a laptop. That was too big. A flash drive was small though. Or a photo.

The smallest weights in the room were the free weights. I picked one off the top shelf. Three pounds. Not big enough to be used very often. I shook it. If Jeremy had pried off the rubber tip on the end, a flash drive might fit inside the metal bar. Nothing rattled. I tried the other weights on the top shelf.

Maybe the free weights were too complicated a hiding place. I was using the leg press when he made the first comment about weight. The leg-press weights were long, flat rectangles stacked on top of each other. They sat on my right-hand side when I was using the press, and they moved up and down with the pulley. Jeremy had moved the pin up from where I usually kept it. What number? What weight had he picked?

I sat on the leg-press bench and put the pin at the lightest weight setting—the top one. I pushed out with my legs and watched the weight fly up beside me. Nothing underneath that one.

Weight down. Move the pin. Next setting. Nothing.

I kept going until I was pressing 160. Close to my body weight. Lifting it and twisting to the right to grope under the raised weight was a lot harder than lifting with proper form. It was getting tough to hold the weight while I reached underneath. The bottom of the stack of weights was lower and heavier each time.

I pushed my legs out and locked my knees in place, then twisted my body to the right. I patted the underside of the weight, fingers flinching in and out.

There was something there. Something flat and smooth. I found a corner of tape and picked at it until I pulled away a photo taped under the weight.

My legs shook. I lowered the weight and looked at the picture.

It was of the Sharks. Most of them anyhow. Younger by a few years, but recognizable. They were wearing boxers and had been sprayed with shaving cream or something. They stood beside a glass table with a bunch of shot glasses in front of them. Some kind of drinking game. Steven's eyes were half closed, and one guy looked totally plastered. He had dark hair and he might have been Asian. It had to be Marcus, Jeremy's roommate. There were other guys, fully dressed, standing around and cheering. Those must have been the senior swimmers back then.

Coach was in the picture too, holding up some kind of a large funnel. Marcus was drinking out of it while Coach poured beer in the top. Coach.

And later that night, Marcus died of alcohol poisoning.

chapter fifteen

Droid looked up from his computer as I entered the room. “Dude, you reek.”

“Sorry.” I usually showered before I came back. Tonight I hadn't wanted to risk letting the photo out of my sight, even for a second. I had hidden it under my shirt on the way up the stairs.

I walked past Droid and sat on the edge of my bed to stare at the picture again.

“You okay?” Droid asked.

I glanced up. He had turned around in his desk chair to face me. “Huh? Yeah,” I said. My thoughts tumbled. Jeremy. Abby. Coach. “I found this. I think it's from Jeremy.”

“Pass it here, bro.”

I turned it facedown on my bed.

“I'm not going to hurt it,” he said.

“It's not that.” Whoever was after this had wanted it badly enough to hurt Jeremy. That meant anyone who saw it was in danger. “You sure you want to be part of this?”

“Does a Shark piss in the water?” He held out his hand.

I handed him the picture.

He studied it, then whistled. “Serious stuff.”

“I know.”

“This could end Coach's career.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do?”

I shrugged. My head ached. I hadn't wanted to believe Coach was at the party. I hadn't wanted to believe he was hiding anything.

Did this mean he had tried to kill Jeremy to save his reputation? Was that why he had been at the hospital that morning, to finish Jeremy off if he got the chance?

No. It didn't fit.

“At least let me scan it,” Droid said. “You need some kind of backup.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It seems to me that keeping a copy of this picture isn't good for one's life expectancy.” I tried for a light tone, but missed.

Droid waved at his computer. “Please. If I hide something in here, it stays hidden. No one will ever know it exists.” “Not unless their middle name is NASA, right?”

He grinned. “Exactly.”

“This still doesn't mean Coach did it,” I said. “It proves that he was at that party, and that he messed up. But it doesn't mean he tried to kill Jeremy.” I couldn't pretend the two things were unrelated anymore. But Coach wasn't the one I saw talking to Jeremy the night before he almost died. It had been Steven and Nate. Maybe Steven wanted Coach in his debt. Maybe he wanted the picture so he could blackmail Coach with it, to get that starting spot.