Truth and Lies (22 page)

“What about the person she saw coming out of the park? Maybe that person saw her too. Maybe that's who threatened her.”

“Like I said, you're the
only
person who knew, Vin.”

The color started to drain from his face. “Hey, come on, Mike.”

“Come on, what? You let Cat try to hang Robbie Ducharme's death on me—you
help
her do it by giving her my locker combination—and now I'm supposed to feel sorry for you? Robbie's
dead
, Vin.” I felt sick to my stomach having this conversation with him. “You were there. I know you were. Rebecca saw you. What happened? What did you do?”

Vin's face crunched up. I thought he was going to cry. “The guy was just such a geek, you know?”

“So you
killed
him?”

Vin's head swung up. His eyes were filled with fear. “No, it wasn't like that. We were in the park.”

“We?”

“Me and A. J. and Cat and a bunch of the guys. We were just hanging out, you know, not bothering anyone. And along comes Robbie. A. J. just started to razz him a little. Then he asked Robbie for some money to buy cigarettes, and Robbie, jeez, instead of handing it over or even just walking on, Robbie starts in on why smoking is bad for you. Can you believe it? He tries to lecture
A. J. about smoking. And A. J. starts giving him an even harder time. Then some of the other guys started in. One of the guys blocked Robbie, so Robbie pushed him. The guy shoved him back. Then another guy shoved him and, I don't know, someone pushed him down and then … ” He shook his head, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Then people just started kicking him.”

People
. I didn't have the stomach to ask if people included Vin. I didn't think I could stand to hear the answer.

“You have to go to the cops,” I said again. “Because Rebecca is going to tell them everything she knows. And so am I.”

I pulled the door open to go back into the school.

“Mike!”

I could have turned. I could have looked at Vin and listened to what he might tell me. But it wouldn't have changed what I had to do, so what was the point? I didn't turn back. Instead I went inside and headed down the hall. I hadn't gone far when I saw Riel coming out of the office with Ms. Rather and two cops. Coming out of the office and walking toward me.

You'd think that when you had it all figured out, when you could finally prove that it wasn't you, that you
weren't
the one who had done it, then that would be that, you'd be in the clear—home free, no more worries. After all, that's the way it happens on TV, right?

Rebecca didn't go to school after I ran into her that morning. Instead she went to the cops, and she told them that she could identify one of the kids she had seen coming out of the park the night that Robbie Ducharme died. She told them that she hadn't come forward sooner because she was afraid. She told them that she had received two threatening phone calls. She told them exactly when she had received those calls. She even told them—and I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but it turns out Rebecca believes in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—that she was a little afraid of me at first because she had seen me with Vin
that day in the alley, and she assumed we were friends, and she thought maybe I had been there with him in the park. Then she'd seen me with him again right after she had talked to Riel, so she thought I must have told him she was the one. She told them, though, that she knew she had been wrong about me. But, she told them, she had
not
been wrong about Vin. After that, the cops came to school, looking for Vin.

I told the cops that I had found Robbie Ducharme's watch in my locker. I told them that I hadn't put it there. I told them—again—that I hadn't been in the park that night. I told them someone else put the watch into my locker and that the only person besides me who knew the combination to my lock was Vin. I told them if they didn't believe me, they could check with my best friend, Sal. I told them they could check with everyone who knew me, ask them to try to open my locker.

Then they wanted to talk about Robbie and me. So I told them—again—yeah, I got mad at him that one time when he said what he said about Billy. And yeah, I had pushed him; but I never meant to hurt him, and I was sorry it had happened. I told them that Cat—who, by the way, fellas, is Vin's girlfriend, and who, also by the way, was in the park with Vin that night—had seen me shove Robbie that first time and had probably made up the lie about me fighting with him the day before he died just to make me look bad. I told them I couldn't prove I hadn't done what she said, but there was no way she could prove I had. It was her word against mine.
That made me nervous because I didn't know what my word was worth anymore.

Finally, I told them—and, yes, I was embarrassed to admit it—that I had told Vin that it was Rebecca who had seen kids coming out of the park. I told them—and they already knew this—that Rebecca had been threatened for the first time
after
I told Vin that she was the person mentioned in the newspaper, the person who had seen kids in the park that night. I told them what Vin had told me about how it happened. I told them everything I knew. They wrote it all down. They said they would get back to me.

“Don't they believe me?” I said to Riel as we rode the elevator down to the ground floor of police headquarters.

“They have to check it all out,” Riel said. “Maybe Vin's denying it.”

“But he told me everything.”

“You
say he told you everything. Maybe
he
says you're making it all up.”

I stared open-mouthed at him. “You don't believe me?”

Riel peered back at me. “I believe you, Mike,” he said. “I always believed you.”

“Always?”

He smiled, something that, now that I think about it, he doesn't do all that often. “I didn't say it was easy, but, yeah,
always
. Sometimes I think you try hard to buck it, Mike, but basically you're a good kid. You know right from wrong.”

I'd lived with him long enough to know when he had finished what he'd been going to say and when he had just got started. So I waited.

“Next time, though,” he said, “in fact, for the foreseeable future, it would be helpful if you'd tell me the truth.”

I didn't think I was going to need much persuasion.

“I know this makes me seem like the loser of the century,” I said, “but I really was following Jen. I just wanted to talk to her. And—” I hadn't exactly admitted this before. “I wanted to see what she was doing.” I wasn't even sure what I thought she was up to. Maybe she was meeting a guy. Maybe she was doing something she shouldn't have been doing. Well, obviously she had been because, like me, she had lied about it to me, to her parents, and even to the police.

“They'll check everything out,” Riel said. “I think it's going to be okay.”

It took forever. For a couple of days it didn't seem like anything at all was going to happen. Then there was an article in the paper that said that an arrest had been made. It didn't say who it was—the identity of the person arrested wasn't made public because of his age.
His
age. But the rumor went around school pretty fast that it was A. J. Siropolous. The next day there was another article—four more arrests had been made. Three guys
and one girl. I heard one of the guys was Vin. The girl was Cat. And then that was it for a while because these things take time—or so Riel told me. They take more time than you can imagine.

I felt sorry for Vin. He'd got himself caught up in something really bad. I felt sorry for Jen, too, but for a different reason.

The day after I talked to the cops we had an early closing at school. That happens every once in a while when the teachers have a staff meeting. Everyone gets out an hour early. I put that hour to good use. I took the bus uptown to Jen's school. I didn't go alone. I took a friend. And that friend was the one who waited at the gate to Jen's school, who picked Jen out of the crowd of kids flooding through that gate at three thirty, who talked to her and then brought her over to where I was waiting, out of sight, afraid that she wouldn't talk to me. Then my friend backed off, leaving me to talk to Jen.

Jen looked up at me for a few moments, searching my face with her green eyes. Then she said, “I'm glad everything's okay, Mike. I knew you weren't involved.”

Well, thanks. “I couldn't have been involved, Jen,” I said. “If I had been, I wouldn't have seen you down on Eastern Avenue that night. I wouldn't have seen you get into that car.”

Some girls are tough, you know? You can call some girls the worst thing you can think of, you can break their hearts, you can disappoint them, you can be mean to them, and they'll never cry. Then there are girls like
Jen. Jen's eyes always seemed to be pooling up with tears, like they were now.

“I was wrong to follow you,” I said. “I admit it. But, Jen? If it was the other way around, if you had seen me out doing something that maybe I wanted to keep a secret, but I was the only person in the world who could alibi you in something serious, like what happened to Robbie, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second.” I had given it a lot of thought. I had tried to put myself in her shoes. I had tried to imagine what she could possibly have been doing that was worth trading my life for. I had tried to imagine what I could possibly ever find myself doing that would be worth trading
her
life for. And I couldn't come up with a single thing.

“I was with Peter,” she whispered.

“Peter?”

“This guy I'm seeing.” She wiped at her eyes. “I love him, Mike. But he's not in school. He's a musician. He's in a group. My parents don't like me seeing him. They're freaking out over him all the time. They think it's his fault my grades have slipped.” For a moment she looked fierce. “I hate that school, Mike. I hate it all.” She let out a long shivery sigh. “My parents took away my cell phone. If Peter calls the house, my mother says I'm not there. My dad insists on driving me everywhere—he thinks that way he can make me focus on my school-work and keep me away from Peter.”

I remembered seeing her in her dad's car, her face serious, maybe even a little sad. I remembered her
calling from a phone booth downtown. I remembered wondering why she didn't use her cell phone. I remembered, too, that when I had tried to call her cell, I got a No Service message. But, jeez—

“
That's
why you lied to the cops about where you were? Because you didn't want your parents to know you were meeting some guy?” Riel was right about people having their reasons for doing things—good or bad. But, jeez, was I supposed to give her the benefit of the doubt on
this?

A tear ran down her cheek. “I knew you didn't have anything to do with it, Mike,” she said. “But my parents were right there in the room with me.”

“You could have asked to talk to the cops in private.”

“Even if I had, and even if I'd told them where I was, they would have checked. They know you and I used to go together. If I said where I really was, they would have checked to make sure I wasn't lying to cover for you. They would have wanted to talk to Peter. And they would have talked to Ashley again and to her mother, and Ashley would have had to tell the truth. And my dad would have found out. My parents would never trust me again, Mike. Ever.”

I stared at her. Jen. Someone I used to be crazy about. Had she changed so much since I'd known her, or had she been like this all along?

“They thought I was involved, Jen,” I said. “They thought I was involved in
killing
Robbie Ducharme.”

Her eyes glistened with tears. “But you weren't,”
she said. “And if you weren't, they'd have figured it out. They
did
figure it out. You didn't have to get
me
involved, Mike.”

“Jeez, Jen, I came
this
close.”

She started to blubber. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I was wrong. I know I was wrong. If you want me to, I'll tell the police.”

If I wanted her to. Like it was up to me. Like she had a choice. I waited for her to calm down a little. Then I said, “The cops are going to want to talk to you again, Jen. They're going to want to ask you again where you were. If you don't tell them about Peter this time, I'm going to have to. You understand that, right?”

She wiped her tears. Then she nodded.

“I know,” she said. Her voice was soft, but solid now. Ready, maybe, to do the right thing. Ready to think about someone else for a change. Me. She looked over at my friend.

“Who's that?” she said. “Your new girlfriend?”

I glanced down the sidewalk where Rebecca was standing, waiting for me, her red hair ablaze in the afternoon sun.