Chapter Seven

It was dumb. I took my time in the bathroom, making sure that I kept the taps running, that I splashed noisily as I washed—anything to fill the room with sound. I kept looking around—I had this sense that someone was watching me—but there was no one. But I couldn’t do that forever, and I started to sweat again as I forced myself to walk down the silent corridor and into our room.

Nothing.

It was just an empty room, barer than most. The only reason you would know that it was even occupied was that I’d left a bunched-up T-shirt on the dresser top. I hesitated in the doorway, sniffing like a dog.

I took my time getting ready for bed, again making a point to be noisy. The silence bothered me: I kept thinking that at any moment I might hear voices start up, the voices I had heard when I found Jacob under the bleachers. I had never heard anything like that before. The voices were quiet but they filled the space eerily. Some sounded like sobs, others were hisses—all of them freaked me the fuck out. It was stupid, I know: it was Jacob who could speak to the dead, not me. With him not here, I had nothing to fear. But I couldn’t help it. I got this picture in my head of the room being filled with unseen presences. I tried reading, but that was a no-go. I couldn’t concentrate worth a damn. I gave up eventually and switched off my bedside light. I didn’t fall asleep, though, just lay there.

Then I really did hear something and was instantly hyperalert, sitting bolt upright trying to pinpoint what it was and where it was coming from. When I switched on the light, the room was empty.

The noise was a rustling, scratching sound and seemed to be coming from the closet. My heart was racing and I could feel clammy sweat forming on my forehead. I tried telling myself that it was just mice, or maybe a squirrel in the attic above. Medlar House was old; it could have been. The noise kept on: if anything it was getting louder, like something was trapped in there and struggling to get out.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I launched myself off the bed and flung open the closet door. Jacob and I didn’t have much in the way of clothing, but I could see that most of it was off the hangers and covering a struggling, writhing lump on the closet floor. My windbreaker was on top. My hand trembled when I reached down to pull it off.

Adam blinked up at me, looking for all the world like a small rat in a nest of clothes.

I grabbed his arm and hauled him up.

“What the fuck are you doing here? You scared me shitless.”

He was shaking and that made me feel bad. I tried to keep the anger and shock at bay and pushed him down so he was sitting on Jacob’s bed, facing me.

“Why are you here?”

Adam twisted his fingers together and kept his eyes fixed on the floor. “I was scared,” he stuttered in little more than a whisper. “Mr. Mazzone wasn’t here, and you were gone, too . . .” He snuck a look up at me. “The other man wouldn’t listen to me when I told him. He said I was making it up just to get attention. I wasn’t. I swear.”

I can’t say I felt much more sympathetic than Bob had been. He was right. Adam was a hot mess with swollen eyes and blotchy skin. “Look, it’s been a tough day for me,” I said. “An even tougher one for Jacob, for God’s sake. What the hell have you got to make a fuss and cry about?”

Shit, at this Adam started to snivel even more. “I know. Miss Evans told us before she left what had happened. Then the others, the big boys, they were talking about how Jacob had got beaten up so badly that he was in the hospital.” He looked directly at me. “I heard Paddy laughing about it, saying something about how it had been a piece of cake to find the retard.”

The swell of anger I was feeling switched its focus from Adam to Paddy. I had guessed that Paddy was behind the attack on Jacob. I fought down the urge to drag that scumbag out of bed and beat seven kinds of shit out of him. I had to be patient. It would be better to bide my time.

Adam watched me closely, his body tense. “His friend, Matt, told him to stop. That it wasn’t funny. That they shouldn’t have done it, that he wished he hadn’t let himself be talked into it, even just being a lookout.”

Now that I found interesting. I had sensed that Matt was trying to distance himself from Paddy, and Adam’s words seemed to confirm that. I was pretty certain that I could work on Matt and get the full story of what had happened. I didn’t really need the why. From everything I’d seen of Paddy, he got off on hurting people.

I must have smiled then because the tension left Adam’s body. He sagged a little.

“Why did you come in here? What did you do, wait until your roommate was asleep and sneak in here?”

Adam’s face crumpled. “Paddy saw that I heard him. He hit me.”

When I looked more closely at the poor little bugger I could see that one eye was slightly swollen, and that he would probably have quite a shiner tomorrow, one he would no doubt explain away as being due to his own clumsiness.

“Is that why you went to Bob? Why didn’t you tell him? Did Paddy come into your room?”

“No.” Adam was shaking a little at the memory. “I went to the bathroom and he was there, too. He told me that he’d get me if I told. And he will, I know he will.” Adam’s fear was genuine. “You look out for Jacob, so maybe you can look out for me, too?” By the way he asked, I could tell that his question was born of hope, but a hope that he thought was small.

Shit, I thought to myself, the way I acted with Jacob must have given Adam the impression that I was someone who would protect him. I sighed.

Adam piped up. “I came to tell you. I didn’t have to . . .”

He was right, of course. If I did anything to Paddy, that bastard would go straight after Adam, knowing that he had told me what he’d overheard. I sighed again, feeling that I was no longer in control. It was a feeling I didn’t like one bit.

Adam’s eyes were glistening with tears.

“Yeah, all right.” The words didn’t come out easily. “I’ll make sure that Paddy stays away from you—when I can, that is.”

Adam’s smile was huge. He threw himself at me, wrapping me in a hug. It was all I could do not to shove him away, hard. “Go easy,” I grunted as I wriggled out of his grip.

“So, I can stay here tonight? Sleep in Jacob’s bed?”

Now that was too much. “No! You go back to your own room now.” It came out a bit harsher than I intended, but it didn’t seem to dampen his joy. “I’ll watch until you go inside, and then tomorrow, we’ll see how it goes, okay?”

Adam nodded and I watched him creep theatri­cally down the corridor until he reached the door of his room. He stopped there, turned around, waved, and grinned at me. It was the grin that did it—pure happiness, just the way Jon used to smile when something pleased him.

I shook my head. I was getting soft. Being soft was dangerous.

I didn’t think that sleep was going to come easily. Too much had happened, and now there was the whole problem of Adam to factor into the mess. As soon as I lay down, however, I fell asleep—a deep and dreamless sleep that only dissolved when I heard the banging of the gong for breakfast. It was weird to wake up to an empty room. Jacob was usually silent, sure, but I hadn’t realized how aware I typi­cally was of his presence. There was a timid scratch on the door and when I opened it, there was Adam. His eye was now definitely boasting a shiner, blue, black, and purple bruises flourishing around it. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a small grin and followed me to the bathroom, then walked down the stairs at my side. In the dining room, Chaz was already seated in his normal place at the bottom of the table, an empty place on either side of him as usual. Paddy was in his usual seat in the middle of the table—as far from Chaz as possible so he could carry out his petty villainy without too much scrutiny. To send him a message, I walked Adam up to his place near the top of the table, and as I passed Paddy, I faked a stumble and managed to elbow him hard just behind the ear. I was hoping that he would screech and make a fuss, but he was too clever for that. He didn’t give any indication that anything had happened, though I could tell from my own aching elbow that it must have hurt like a bitch. Adam flinched at this but made sure that his face remained expressionless as he sat down next to where usually Lucy was. Today, Bob was sitting there, and the bastard didn’t even comment on the fact that Adam now had a black eye.

Chaz looked weary: his face gray, his eyes baggy and red-rimmed. I didn’t have to ask about how Jacob was; Chaz was talking even before I had slumped into my chair.

“Luce called about an hour ago. They’re keeping Jacob one more night. I’ll go visit them, maybe spell off Luce awhile. No!” He raised a hand, palm facing me, as I opened my mouth to speak. “You can’t come. Go to school.” He kept the hand raised. “If it makes you feel any better, you can play detective. Try and find out anything you can about what happened yesterday . . .” His sigh was resigned. “The principal will make all the right noises, but he’ll be playing a waiting game, waiting for the fuss to die down. He could not care less who beat up the weird kid from the group home.”

After that there was nothing more from Chaz except brief commands. His mood infected us all and, without Jacob there to be the punching bag, we got into the minivan silently and without the usual shoving and pushing. Well, almost. Paddy, coming on last, managed to swing his backpack onto his shoulder just as he passed me, the edge of a folder inside clipping me just above my eye. He smirked.

Playing detective was a joke. At the best of times I tried to have as little contact with others as I could, so it was hardly as though anyone was likely to open up and start talking to me. Oh yes, I got a subtle feeling that everyone was on their guard, but I heard nothing except some losers saying that whoever had beaten up Jacob was righteous because, after all, he was a weird little shit who gave them the creeps. You’d have thought that both Paddy and Matt would have been the dictionary definition of low profile, but no. Today, Paddy was getting in my face as much as he could. As I’ve said, he was in most of the honors classes with me, and he took to giving me a little nod and slight smile whenever he caught me looking at him. My irritation simmered. Matt, though, I hardly saw at all that day. Normally he waited outside the English classroom for Paddy at lunchtime, but today he was definitely missing in action.

The day was one huge drag. I could barely concentrate in class, staying just attentive enough that no one would call me on it, but my brain was bubbling like a stew.

I needed to be there for Jacob and now, fuck me, for Adam. That meant that I couldn’t risk openly retaliating against Paddy and Matt. I had to be a good boy. If I did anything wrong, got physical with them, I could see myself being carted off to some young offenders’ shithole. The annoying thing was that Paddy was smart enough to know that, and I’m sure that made it all the sweeter for that bastard. Even though it made me sick to my stomach to let it go for now, I had no choice. The only thing I could think of doing was to try and find out more about Jacob, perhaps track down some relatives so that they could at least get him out of Medlar House and to a place where he wouldn’t be everyone’s whipping boy.

Maybe he’d talk to me when he finally got back. I could certainly hope. The only lead I had was that genealogy site, and I needed to get back to the library to investigate it further. Mueller was an unusual name, and Katerina Mueller had lived in Hamilton, and obviously had relatives who had bothered to draw up a family tree. Maybe, just maybe, there were still some Muellers in the area and . . . I stopped myself. It was a lot of maybes, and I could easily add another one. If Jacob did have family here, maybe they were the ones who had beaten him in the first place; maybe they wanted nothing to do with him.

Thinking like that made me careless. I was in history and that was the one class I didn’t share with Paddy, so I could drop my guard a little. I like history, and the guy they had teaching it was okay. He was into his subject and that was pretty much all he cared about. If you did your work then he left you alone, which was fine by me. We were studying World War II, and our assignment was to research something that interested us about Canada’s involvement in the war. I’d chosen the fall of Hong Kong: my dad’s dad had been there with the Royal Rifles of Canada and had been captured by the Japanese. I only knew this because Mom had given me an old military badge and some shoulder flashes when Dad died, telling me that they were the only things he’d never tried to hock. I still have them, hidden in the lining of my coat along with that photo of Jon. I was pretty much ahead on my work, so I snuck out the copy I’d made of the Mueller family tree.

I noticed that Katerina Mueller had gotten married in 1891, the year after her brother Jacob’s death. She’d married a man called Ephraim Sparrow and they had three children in pretty rapid succession. I felt like a dork. The fact that she had been married had never occurred to me. I would have continued pounding away at the Mueller name and come up with nothing at all, but now I wondered: Was our Jacob a relative of hers at all? The Mueller name had died out in this family. But the coincidence of brothers called Jacob and Caspar seemed odd.

It was while I was pondering this and tracing my finger down the twisting lines of Katerina’s children’s children, trying to arrive at the present day, that I got the awful feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder. He’d come up on the side of my bad eye. Mr. Halloran. He didn’t make a huge deal out of it—I wasn’t a kid who normally goofed off—just pulled the paper out from under my hand and walked away, telling me to get back to what I should have been doing.

I stewed for the remaining ten minutes of class, hating the fact that I was going to have to ask for the family tree back, maybe explain why I was looking at it.

Halloran had the sheet on his desk when I slouched up to him at the end of the lesson, waiting until everyone else had left the room.

“Homework for other subjects I’m used to, comic books, porn, maybe even a novel for the more erudite of my students, but I’ve never seen anyone looking at a family tree instead of working.” Halloran was smiling as he spoke. “I suppose I should be glad, Mike, that it has some historical connection. Is it your family?”

I stopped myself from blurting out “no.” I needed to get him off my back, so it seemed easier to say it was. “My dad’s family. I found it when I was looking up stuff on the Internet about my granddad for the project. His mother was a Sparrow.” I pointed vaguely at what I thought was the right time period for it to be true.

Halloran looked up at me, studying my face as if he were trying to gauge how truthful I was being. “The Sparrows were quite a well-known family in the area. They had one of the first farms down near what’s now the east end.” That meant nothing to me. Until I got sent to Medlar House, I’d never been to Hamilton before. “Barton Street,” he added, “down near the lake, where the steel mills are now.”

Those I knew. I’d seen them from the highway—huge smoke stacks billowing flame—when the social worker first drove me to Medlar.

“Are you going to research this further?” There was a pathetic gleam of hope in his eye. I knew what he was thinking; he thought he’d found that one student that all teachers dream about, the one who shares their love of their subject. “Maybe your family could help you.”

Oh yes, my cunning brain was working and I saw a way to turn all of this to my advantage. I looked down, avoided his eyes, and said, “I’d like to, but I’m not with my family anymore.” I hesitated here, hoping he would think that I was struggling not to lose it. “I’m one of the kids from the group home.” He’d probably been told this at some point and it had slipped his mind, but I wasn’t ashamed to make him squirm a little. “It’s not easy to get computer time, or to the library. The other kids give you a hard time if they think you’re a keener when it comes to school. That’s why I was looking at it in class. I’m kind of as far along as I can be with my assignment until I find a way to do some more research.” I allowed myself a quick look at his face, to see if he was buying it.

It had worked. Halloran was one of those guys with really pale skin, and he had gone red with embarrassment, probably as a result of my mentioning my family situation. He cleared his throat and said, “Look, Mike, I can’t do anything about the library, but if you don’t abuse it—by this I mean tell your friends and have them all pile in thinking they can play games—I don’t see why you couldn’t come into my classroom at lunchtime and use the computer here.” He paused, giving me a little smile. “That way you can give your work your full attention during class, right?”

Score! I looked appropriately hangdog and grateful, shuffling my feet. “I won’t. You don’t know how much this means to me, Mr. Halloran.” I couldn’t resist turning the knife a little. “Most teachers think we’re a bunch of thugs—the kids from the group home, I mean.”

I thought that was a good touch. After all, was I not the thug of thugs when I wanted to be? I was already planning what use I could put this unexpected computer access to next week.

I’d almost made it through the door when Halloran called out, “Mike, I’ve just thought of something.”

I turned around, but I wasn’t going back in.

“The local collection and archives at the central library. I’m sure you’ll find stuff on the Sparrow family there.”

He’d gotten my attention. “Can I search it from the computer?”

“Afraid not. It’s on the third floor, tucked away at the back. Everything is on a card index, but if you look up Sparrow, they’ll have all sorts of stuff.”

Damn, I thought. I’d have to find a way to get there somehow.

Chaz was late coming to get us that day. We waited where we always did out in front of the school, in our usual untidy knot. Surprisingly, today Matt was in the middle of the crowd and Paddy stood alone. Paddy kept up his sly grin, though, which pissed me off, but what could I do?

The cold that had almost done Jacob in yesterday had intensified. A few snowflakes drifted down. Gradually the parking lot emptied. The last bus pulled out, and we were the only ones there. I glanced around quickly, making sure that no one was watching and no one was coming through the main doors. I launched myself away from the wall, slamming into Paddy, one arm tight around his neck. To a casual observer, it would have looked innocent enough: two teenage boys roughhousing. Paddy tried to shake free of me, but I held him tight. I was amused that Matt made no effort to come to his friend’s aid. Paddy tore at my arm with his hands, fighting to get free. Lowering my head, so that it was close to his, I whispered, “You know that I know that you did it. What you don’t know is what I am going to do to you, and when it will be. Live in fear!” Okay, that last bit was over the top.

I heard the chugging wheeze of Chaz’s van coming up the driveway and released my grip on Paddy’s neck, taking a step back to distance myself from him a bit. Paddy sprang toward me, swinging his backpack at my head. It was beautiful. All Chaz saw was me standing there, hands in my pockets, and Paddy attacking me. You’d almost think I’d planned that. I sat back and enjoyed the harangue Paddy got about fighting. As he got on the bus last, Paddy mouthed “Adam!” to me and drew his finger across his throat.

At dinner, Chaz tried to pump me for information. Had I seen anything? Had anyone been talking about who had attacked Jacob? What had caused Paddy to take a swing at me? I could honestly tell him that I’d neither seen nor heard anything useful.

He sighed. It amazed me that someone like Chaz could be so innocent and optimistic after all that he must have seen. I almost felt guilty for what I was about to do.

We’d been silent for a while. “Chaz,” I said, “I need to ask you something.”

Okay, it was the first time I had ever initiated a conversation with him, but even so his reaction was extreme. He blinked, his mouth hung open, a forkful of food suspended in front of it, and the sad thing was that I could see the hope in his goddamned eyes.

“In history, we’re doing a project on World War II, and my teacher told me that some of the information I need might be in the local collection at the central library. Do you think I could go and check it out?”

You could tell he was disappointed, but too bad. What was he thinking, that I was going to say, “Oooh, Chaz, let me tell you my innermost thoughts so I can exorcize the demons that plague me because of my brother’s murder and the rest of my shitty life and everything will be all right from now on”?

“Yeah, that can be arranged,” he said, his voice flat and tired-sounding now. “It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m not officially on duty, but I’m going to pick Luce and Jacob up and bring them home.” He winced as he said that last word, as conscious as I was that this was the last place you would want to think of as home. “I could swing by here and pick you up, if it’s okay with whoever is in charge tomorrow, then run you down there, do some errands, and come back for you before I go to the hospital. How much time do you need?”

I had no idea. “An hour, maybe two. Mr. Halloran says that none of it is computerized so it might take me a while to find what I’m looking for.”

“Let’s split the difference, make it an hour and a half. I’ll be here at 9:30.”

It was all too easy. Looking back now, I wish it hadn’t been, because if I hadn’t gone to the library and found that stuff, then I wouldn’t be up to my ears in shit now.