IT WAS COMPLETE CHAOS. BETT, Dan, Ranger, Anna, Paul, Hester, and Mutt were brought down to the station house. Parents were called. Mutt with his blackened eye was still in handcuffs. The rest of them were lined up for questioning, sitting on hard chairs, not daring to move more than was necessary, but all of them ready to blow.
“We just wanted to put up some more art!” Paul said for the tenth time, his voice sounding closer and closer to cracking.
“Yeah?” said Bett’s mom. “That’s interesting because it seemed more like you were bashing it down.” And she held out the hatchet in its plastic bag.
“That statue is ruined,” said Mr. McLean. What was he doing here, anyway? Did he get an automatic call for school-related matters? And how did they find out so quickly? Maybe the front door was wired after all. “Do you know what it means to our school? To our community?”
“Yes!” cried Dan.
“We do!” cried Anna.
“My grandfather is on that statue!” Paul yelped.
“So is my uncle!”
“Mutt, your own father is on the statue! You bragged about it yourself! What the fuck, man?” Dan was livid. “And what happened to your eye? Did you hit yourself with the hatchet while you were busy being a prick?”
“What were any of you thinking?” Bett’s mother took a deep breath. “Help me understand. If you cared so much about your relatives, why would you destroy that statue?”
“It wasn’t us!”
“Just Mutt!”
“Destruction of municipal property is a felony in this state. So is breaking and entering. . . . Look, we don’t want to arrest you,” said Bett’s mom. “But you’re making it hard for us not to.”
Bett interrupted. “Please, Mom, just listen! We—not Mutt—the rest of us—we did break into the school. But not to destroy anything. Why would we break in if the statue was outside? We broke in to—”
“Combat the destruction at the school!” Anna finished the sentence for her. Her fists were clenched. She looked around wildly. “Where is the mural? Paul had it—”
“You mean this?” And Bett’s mother held up the folded piece of canvas, also in a plastic bag.
“Yes,” said Paul. “Please! Let us show you. May we . . . Are we allowed to stand?”
Bett’s mother nodded. “Slowly, though.” And she handed Paul the bag.
Anna and Paul stood and unfurled the mural between them. Mr. McLean and Bett’s mom took it in.
“We were going to hang it in the foyer!” Hester explained, her hand rubbing a scrape she’d gotten from her boost up the wall. “We’re innocent!”
Mr. McLean’s nostrils flared. “Not of breaking into the school, young lady. And something was wrecked,” he persisted. “That statue is a huge part of our town history and now it’s severely damaged. I hope not irreparably.”
“It was only Mutt who did that part!” Ranger had been so stoic on the ride to the station, but now he burst into tears. “We were just being a Justice League!”
Bett’s mother gave her head a shake. “A what?”
The room exploded in shouts.
“Mutt’s the one who’s been smashing shit!”
“He did the graffiti—”
“He wrecked the art—”
“And the angel—”
“Shut up!” Mutt begged, his head in his hands.
“You asshole! We trusted you!”
“And leaving those sick drawings in people’s pockets!”
“I didn’t do those!”
“The hell you didn’t!”
In the burst of shouts and questions, parents were entering the police station and finding their various kids and either immediately launching into yelling at them or wrapping their arms around them, depending. It was complete pandemonium. In the midst of it all, Bett’s mom grabbed her by the elbow and steered her into her office, face full of fury and confusion.
“Bett,” she said, “what the hell is really going on?” The office was spare, but full of pictures of Bett: Bett younger on sports teams, Bett’s school pictures, toddler Bett jumping off the back of a sofa, preschool Bett climbing trees as high as she could.
It was all too much.
“What?”
“Don’t get smart with me!”
“I’m not!” cried Bett. “I can’t hear you very well!”
Her mother’s face softened immediately. “I’m so sorry, Bett. Oh, honey. Your ear. The siren.” She spoke directly into Bett’s face, so that Bett could see her lips. Bett turned her good, right ear toward her mother. “Can you talk to me?” her mother asked in a loud, clear voice.
And Bett told her. Everything. The slashing, the tufty-eared mountain lions of justice, Ranger’s Justice League and the new Art League, the break-in, everything. Everything except her false suspicion of Eddie.
“So the kid who did the pictures is that little dude?”
“Yes,” said Bett.
“And the pictures were supposed to be of what again?”
“Tufty-eared mountain lions of . . .”
Bett trailed off. Through the window of her mom’s office, Bett saw the last parent came in. Longish blond hair, too tan. Wide-set eyes. Bruise on his jaw.
Bett recognized him at once.
Oh my God, why hadn’t she seen it before? Mutt’s dad was the guy from Fancy Jim’s all that long time ago. Meredith, Mutt’s little sister, was the perfect little girl who was there that day, the little girl Bett let drive home with an alcohol-stinking man.
Out in the main room Mutt’s swollen face went dead and gray as his dad stood over him and boomed hell at him from above.