Turn Left at the Cow (19 page)

I pulled away from her and sat down on the freshly made-up bed, checking to see where her trash can was in case I ended up hurling. I think my system was going into honesty overload.

“Which doesn't make it your fault!” said Gram sharply.

I took a deep breath and tried not to choke on it. “So you don't think . . . that he maybe isn't really dead? That he took the stolen money and headed off to Rio or someplace with it because he never really cared about me? And now he's back, and that's why some of the money has turned up?”

Gram didn't say anything for a long time. I couldn't even look at her; instead I watched this huge fly crawl around on her dresser. Its wings buzzed frantically as it kept trying to zero in on the source of the thick dead-flowers smell that hung heavily in the hot air, but we'd done too good a job with our cleanup of the broken perfume bottle.

“No. I told you I made a lot of mistakes as a mother. I might not have managed him well, but I didn't fail to understand who my son was; I recognized his flaws all too painfully. And deliberate cruelty wasn't one of them. I've always known how much your father loved me; he would have never let me go on thinking he was dead if he was alive. You've got to learn to accept that he's gone. I have.”

I felt my shoulders slump. Much as there was that part of me that was ticked at the thought that my father could have ignored me all those years, I guess I wanted to keep believing he was going to turn up somehow with a football in his hand, ready for a game of catch.

But Gram wasn't leaving any room for maybe.

She sat down on the bed next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. “I know how hard it must be for you to hear these things. And I'm afraid I need to tell you something you're going to like even less.”

She must have felt the way my shoulders tightened up under her arm because she clamped down harder. “I've been trying to think of how to tell you this in a way that you'll understand, but I can't put it off any longer. While you were outside talking to the deputy, I called your mother to let her know what's going on. She's very worried. We ended the call quickly so she could make arrangements for you to fly home in the morning, but she'll be calling back with the details tonight.”

“No!” I didn't know what bad news I had been expecting, but it wasn't that. I leaped to my feet, away from her Benedict Arnold arm. “Gram, I know you're mad because this was all my fault, and I've been sneaking around behind your back and stuff, but please don't send me away!”

“Travis, I'm not sending you away. This isn't a punishment. Your mother—”

I didn't let her finish. “She always thinks she knows what's best for me, but she never understands what I really need. I need to be here! Why did you have to call her?”

Gram sighed. “She's your mother. You're thirteen. For now, she has the right to decide what's best for you. At a minimum she had the right to know that you may not be safe here. Like Deputy Anderson said, this isn't a game.” She waved her hand at the trash bags full of her ruined things.

“No, Gram, please listen. So far nobody's gotten hurt. I bet Deputy Anderson can figure out who broke in here and arrest him and everything will be fine in a day or two. Please let me stay.”

“Travis, I'm sorry. Having you here has brought me incredible joy. But anyone capable of this kind of destruction could be dangerous. I didn't keep my own boy safe. I can't take that chance away from another mother. Your mother has always been generous to me. She was under no obligation to let me be a part of your life, but she has. Please understand that I need to respect her decision in this.”

She held out her hand to me, but I backed away from it and she finally dropped it down to her side. “When all of this is cleared up, I'll have you back, I promise. Try to understand.”

I kept shaking my head from side to side. “You don't understand what it's like. I hate Ma's new life. There's no place for me anymore.” I knew I was being total Drama Dude, but I couldn't help it. I could hear the sound of the front door to my stepfather's house slamming shut and locking me inside, and I knew that this time, there'd be no escape.

No more getting to know Gram through her long silences more than through anything she said. No last chance to quit blowing it and actually kiss Iz. No chance to figure out who this new me—the me who was starting to think he belonged somewhere after all—really was.

She stared directly into my eyes. “I promise that you will always have a place here. Once it's safe, I'll make your mother understand how important it is to you—to both of us—that you visit again soon. Travis, I love you. This time you need to trust me.”

But I just kept shaking my head. Maybe it was my fault for writing that stupid note. Maybe it was my father's fault for robbing that stupid bank. But in that exact moment it all felt like Gram's fault. She had decided to use her powers for evil instead of for good, and as far as I knew, once grownups went over to the dark side, they could never come back again.

Dead man talking. And talking and talking. Not that it did me any good. No matter what I said to Ma, I was still headed straight for the chair, AKA the plane seat that would take me back to California.

“You'll have to leave fairly early tomorrow to get to the airport on time. Your grandmother has already agreed to drive you. They'll have your ticket waiting at the counter.” I'd already heard all this ten times; she just kept saying it over all the arguments I came up with.

Suddenly I remembered I had one more weapon left, and I pulled out the big gun. “The deputy said I couldn't leave town. I'm still a suspect.”

“Don't be ridiculous, Travis. Your grandmother warned me about that and gave me his cell number. When I called him and mentioned that my lawyer would be contacting his boss in the morning, he said you were free to leave town immediately.”

“Ma,
please
, it's really, really important for me to stay. Please don't make me come back yet.”

“Tomorrow. Early. And it's late there now. You'd better go pack your things so you're ready. And if you aren't at LAX when I get there to pick you up, I'm getting straight on a plane and coming out there to drag you home myself. I think we both know how unhappy that would make me.”

Yeah, we both knew.

We were quiet for a long moment and then she said, softer, “Trav, I miss you. Don't you think it's time to come home?”

I pulled out the meanest voice I could manage. “You know that's not
my
home.”

She sighed, bigtime wind coming at me even through the phone line. Then she said the six most heinous words in the English language: “This is for your own good.”

That was the new Ma for you—I try to tell her something is really important to me, and she reduces it to the equivalent of making me eat my vegetables. She kept talking but I hit the end button. Starting tomorrow, it looked as if I had no choice but to spend the rest of my life arguing with her. No reason to spoil the fun by getting an early start.

 

Gram and I had done what we could to finish cleaning up. I admit, I'd been tempted to lock myself away in my room and leave the traitor to deal with the rest of the chaos herself, but I knew that wouldn't have been right. Maybe I took after my father in that I sometimes made stupid choices, but I wasn't going to be the kind of dude who walked away afterward and made somebody else handle the aftermath.

I was cleaning my bedroom—or really, my ghost father's bedroom, by myself. Gram had made it obvious she wanted to talk some more, but I just couldn't. The entire rest of my life stretched out in front of me, and I wasn't ready to take it like a man.

I hadn't bothered to tell Ma that there really wasn't any need for me to pack; the note writer had pretty much destroyed everything of mine in the room. Wherever I went next—and I wasn't sure yet if it would be back to California or to a galaxy far, far away—I'd be traveling light: the clothes on my back, the cell phone in my pocket, and the Father Box. For some reason the note writer had left it untouched, and I was taking it with me whether Gram liked it or not.

The only thing I'd have to take with me from Iz was that memory I had folded into my hand after she'd kissed my cheek.

But she was going to call me after they got home late so we could say good night. I caught my breath. And so we could figure out when we were going to head out to find Crazy Carl.

Crazy Carl. Who just might know something about the money. The guy that Iz had said knew all the town's secrets.

I mean, okay, the guy was clearly wacko. But there'd been that one minute there when, I swear, he knew what he was talking about. And that was when he'd said that he knew what I was looking for, that he knew where it was.

What if he really did know where the money was? I thought about the card that Deputy Dude had left behind, the one with his cell phone number. I probably should have said something about Carl to him earlier. It wasn't too late to call him now, but then we'd have to have another six-hour conversation about why he still thought I was the one with the money, and we'd never get around to Carl. If I could just find the money myself and turn it over to Deputy Dude, this whole thing would be over. No more reason for the note writer to keep after me, no more danger. No need for me to have to leave tomorrow. And Carl was old, and ready-to-fall-down sick, and Gram had said harmless. No reason I couldn't handle finding out what he knew on my own.

It was the longest of total long shots, but without it I was left high and dry. Good thing Gram was one of those early-to-bed people. I tuned my ears up to bat frequency, waiting to hear the sounds of her settling in for the night. That way I'd know when it was safe for me to sneak out.

And I almost jumped through the ceiling when this huge series of booms exploded outside my window. It sounded like a sail-by shooting.

I'd forgotten about Fourth of July fireworks. It was clear Gram wasn't going to sleep until they were over.

I had plenty of time to sit there and maybe change my mind.

At first I was tempted to just wait until Iz and Kenny got home, to see if they'd go with me. But it seemed like there were a lot of holes in that plan. Iz had said they would be late, and I didn't have any time to waste. What if Crazy Carl wasn't at the dump? What if I had to chase all over the countryside looking for him? I couldn't afford to wait any longer than necessary to get started. Besides, Iz had said Kenny was already in line to be sentenced to some hard time; if he got caught sneaking out, it wouldn't help his case any. My decisions had already ruined Gram's day; no reason I needed to bring more trouble on anybody else's head.

It was probably better if I just handled it on my own. If this whole Crazy Carl thing turned out to be a dead end, nobody even had to know I'd gone to see him. But the longer I sat there and thought about it, the more sense it made that it wouldn't be a dead end.

Why hadn't it occurred to me before that I'd seen Crazy Carl all over town the day King Svengrud had found the bait money? I'd even seen him slapping down a bankroll of bills at the Big Store. Sure, Gram had given him some money at the dump, but I didn't think it had been that much. All the townspeople had been so quick to decide I had the bank cash that they hadn't bothered to remember who else was in the stores spending money that morning.

But if Crazy Carl knew how to get his hands on all that green, why had he waited until now to spend it?

Maybe if he was the accomplice—and I still wasn't sure if I believed that—he had wanted to put some time between the bank break-in and when he started spreading the money around. The FBI had handed out those bait-money lists to all the local stores. Maybe Carl had known about that and had wanted to hang low for a while. And then he went crazy and kind of forgot how the whole money thing worked and didn't even understand he was sitting on enough stolen pesos to buy the dump for himself if he wanted to.

Or maybe he
hadn't
waited until I'd turned up in town to start spending it. Maybe he'd been spending the money all these years, a little at a time, but nobody had ever bothered to check the bait-money list until I'd showed up to play Pin the Crime on the New Kid.

Or like I said, maybe he wasn't the accomplice at all; he was just a guy who'd stumbled across somebody else's high-priced secret.

I thought I was going to go crazy myself, having to sit there and wait to find out what Carl knew.

Then there was this one last giant boom, and everything quieted down. I waited a while longer until I was sure it was safe and then creaked my door open, listening until I heard these little popping snorts Gram makes while she's sleeping.

She'd shown me where she kept a big flashlight in the kitchen for when the lights went out in storms and stuff; I didn't remember seeing it broken like most of the dishes from the cupboard, but I kept my fingers crossed anyway. I heaved a sigh of relief when the flashlight clicked on with no problem. Making the trip along that rutted-up road on a bike at night was going to be bad enough, let alone without any kind of light.

Once I got outside, I looked over at Kenny's house—totally dark, and no van in the driveway. They weren't home yet.

I set out, thinking through the route Gram had taken when we'd gone to the dump with the garbage from the freezer chest. Holy crap—was it really possible that had been only a few days ago?

I turned the flashlight off when I got to town, not wanting to call any attention to myself just in case anybody was wandering around in a post-fireworks daze. But it was quiet, with no sounds other than a car somewhere off in the distance and a hum coming from the back of the grocery store. Maybe that was where Crazy Carl's aliens parked their spaceship.