ON OUR way back to Gainesville, Dare wanted to pull over at a rest stop and make a call to the tip line from one of the pay phones so they couldn’t identify his cell phone number. I was on board with his idea. It meant my mom never had to know I’d visited Café Risqué.
On the phone, Dare disguised his voice by making it slow and southern with an exaggerated drawl. He really was a better actor than I gave him credit for. The dispatcher asked for his name, but he wouldn’t give it.
“Ain’t this supposed to be anonymous?” he said like a cantankerous old man. “I’m not trying to give my name and number to the law, ma’am.” She said something conciliatory in response, and Dare continued. “Yeah, well, I was over at the Café Risqué, and I saw a man selling pills to this young man you got listed here. Uh, Mason Chalmers?”
The dispatcher asked some questions, and Dare described the muscle-bound man. “I got his name too.” Dare read it from the card. “Clayton Benson. Works out of Dunnellon. Mainstream Freight is the name of his outfit—that’s his day job, I guess. Selling drugs to kids must be his side business.”
Dare answered a few more of the dispatcher’s questions without once breaking character and then hung up. “I hope that guy gets busted.” Dare glared at the phone, his long fingers still splayed along the spine of the receiver.
“Me too.” But while Dare had been making his anonymous tip, I’d been thinking about Mason’s steroid use. “I don’t think Clayton Benson is the murderer, Dare.”
“Why not?”
I laid out my theory for him. “Mason made trips to Café Risqué this summer, but once school started, he stopped going, and you found the remaining pills in his bedroom, which meant he’d also stopped using.”
“Because he didn’t want them to show up on a drug test,” Dare concluded for me.
“Which means Mason wasn’t going to meet his drug dealer on Friday night.”
“So who the hell was he meeting?” Dare asked, his brow wrinkled in frustration.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. There was nothing at the end of that road but a ghost town. “I’m going to search the property appraisers’ website and see who lives in the town of Rochelle.”
“That’s a good idea. You want me to come over?”
My mother wouldn’t want me having Dare over after midnight. Or at all.
“No, it’s all right. I’ll do some research tonight, and I’ll call you in the morning with what I find.”
For the rest of the drive home, I wondered if Dare was going to bring up the kiss we shared, but he seemed lost in thought, no doubt about Mason. His parting words when he dropped me off at my house were “Today sucked, but having you by my side made it a little more bearable. I appreciate everything you’re doing for me, Charlie. And Mason too.”
We said goodbye, and I spent the next few hours online. Boots snuggled up to me in bed and snuffled a complaint whenever I switched positions. I was a night owl and he was a morning person, but somehow we made it work. I came up with a long list of names—none of which I recognized—and fell asleep with my computer in my lap, my homework far from finished. Dare called me in the morning to see if I’d made any progress.
“Not really,” I told him, “but I have an idea.”
“I’m listening.”
“Stakeout.”
“I’m so there,” Dare said with a hint of excitement.
Dare had told me he wouldn’t be coming back to school until Monday, and I couldn’t afford to skip school this close to our end-of-semester exams. If I let my grades slip, my mom really would ground me.
“I’ll pick you up after school,” I told Dare. “We’ll take my car. It’s a little less conspicuous.”
“I’ll bring snacks,” Dare said. I smiled on my end, thinking he’d probably picked that up from watching television. Though snacks were never a bad idea.
I struggled through the school day, barely able to focus on classwork or what my teachers were saying. Luckily it was a Friday, and since most of the student body and teaching staff had attended Mason’s funeral the day before, no one was really intent on learning anything. We were all looking forward to the weekend.
I did manage to catch up with Tameka during lunch. “Do you remember a fight between Peter Orr and Joey Pikramenos last year?” I asked. We were sitting on the brick wall outside the cafeteria, away from her curious clutch of eavesdropping cheerleaders.
“Yeah, I was there when it happened. In the hallway of the Kelso building. The two of them just exploded. It was over so fast, I don’t think teachers even knew.”
“Do you know what it was about?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t even realize it was a fight at first. I thought they were just messing around.”
“Was Mason or Dare there?”
She tilted her head. “Don’t think so.”
Even still, something told me one or both of the twins was involved. “You think you can ask around? See what might have started it?”
She glanced sideways at me. “You get that Amazon wish list I sent you?”
“Real subtle.” I nodded. “Your items have shipped.”
She smiled smugly and squeezed my shoulder. “Then yes, I would be happy to ask around.”
I thanked her, then hopped up and crossed the courtyard to where Peter stood with a mishmash of football, wrestling, and baseball players. My mind flashed back to the cover of Jocks on Cocks, and I had to shake myself to clear my mental palate.
“Hey, Peter, got a minute?”
He gave me a wary look. “Make it quick,” he said and motioned for me to follow him away from his friends. I didn’t want to spread rumors about Mason, especially now, but some reveal was essential to the investigation.
“Did you know Mason was using steroids?” I asked Peter with a note of incredulity.
“No, but it makes sense,” Peter said without much reaction. The kid was really hard to read, and I didn’t know if it was because he had a thick skin or if he was just really good at hiding his emotions.
“How does it make sense?”
“You don’t get stacked like that so quickly just from working out.” He glanced around to make sure no one was nearby to overhear us. “Coach probably suggested it.”
“Coach Gundry?” I asked with astonishment. Peter looked bored. “Isn’t that… illegal?”
“Whatever it takes to win, right?” he said flatly.
This was certainly a surprising discovery. I’d never played sports competitively, so I didn’t know if this was an isolated incident or a systemic problem. “Is that normal?” I asked Peter. He only shrugged, so I pursued it further. “Did Coach ever encourage you to take steroids?”
Peter glared at me. “This isn’t about me.”
If what Peter said was true, then Mason had leverage; if Mason told the school about Coach’s methods, he could get fired, possibly even face charges, especially considering how sue-happy the Chalmerses were.
“Is that why you were the one who had to cut weight? Because Mason threatened to tell on Coach?”
Peter grunted and spat on the ground. “I don’t ask questions. I just follow orders.”
He said it so dispassionately, but I found it hard to believe that Peter would go along with that plan so willingly.
“Doesn’t that make you mad? Having to drop down an entire weight class? I mean, Mason was basically cheating, and Coach was helping him.”
Peter stared at me like I was being dramatic. “It might make me mad if we were still competing, but we’re not, so….” He glanced around as though he had someplace better to be.
I wanted to needle him more, if only to see what he might reveal. “You must have been using too, then, huh?”
Peter’s eyes cut back to mine. They had a reptilian coldness about them, especially with his shovel-like face. I wasn’t sure if this was just his standard response to a challenge or if it was something special for me.
“Are you accusing me of something, Dick?”
He was using the nickname, which told me I was finally getting under his skin. Good. That was when I got my best information. “Mason was buying the drugs from a guy at Café Risqué, and you were there, Peter. Seems like steroid use is grounds for suspension from the team. You could miss out on your entire senior year.”
Peter crossed his arms, perhaps to better contain his fists, which I’d noticed were tense. “Mason paid for me to get a private dance. He probably made the deal then. I don’t do drugs, because I’m not a cheater. And if you’re planning on putting your nose in my business, then you and I are going to have problems.”
He jammed one meaty finger against my chest, then stalked back toward his friends with his head ducked low and his broad shoulders swinging. One thing was for certain, I wouldn’t want to be alone in a dark alley with him.
Still, talking with Peter hadn’t been a waste of time, because I now knew that Coach Gundry had a motive after all. If Mason had threatened Coach with going public, he might have taken drastic measures to silence him.
After school, I picked up Dare from his house and we drove out of town along Hawthorne Road, then turned off where Mason was most likely headed Friday night before his tire went flat. County Road 2082 was rough and full of potholes, a further deterrent, especially for someone like Mason who, according to Dare, didn’t especially like long car rides. I pulled in at the parking area for cyclists who wished to travel the paved trail that ran alongside the road. My car was angled so we’d face the sparse afternoon traffic.
The murderer could have been on a bicycle, I reasoned. That would explain why there was no second set of tire tracks between the road and the lake. It struck me as weird, though. How many serial killers have stalked their victims by bicycle, and how many cyclists have spontaneously decided to murder?
Once I parked, Dare opened up his backpack to show me his stash of granola bars, fresh fruit, and potato chips. “See anything you like?” he asked suggestively.
My face flushed with embarrassment as lustful memories of last night’s kiss flooded my senses. Dare’s mouth on mine, our bodies pressed together, the flare of desire he ignited in me that throbbed in my nether regions like a dull, persistent ache. I cleared my throat.
“I’ll take one of these.” I grabbed an apple. I needed something to sink my teeth into.
We made a plan. Every time a car approached from either direction, Dare would grab the binoculars, and I’d get my phone ready to punch in the license plate numbers as he recited them. My mom had access to a program where she could look them up later. Maybe she’d even let me do it, since the work was so tedious. It wasn’t “rush hour,” so there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road, which meant long stretches of time where we sat in companionable silence.
“Are we going to talk about last night?” Dare said during one of those occasions.
“I haven’t heard anything from my mom about why GPD was there.” She wasn’t home when I got in last night and I didn’t see her that morning either, which meant she must have stayed the night at the station. She did send me a text in the morning reminding me to put the trash cans by the road, which I did.
“Not that, Charlie.” Dare rolled his head and picked at a piece of flaking vinyl on the center console. “You know….”
“Oh.” He meant our kiss. I hadn’t expected him to bring it up at all. “It was… a surprise. A nice one, though. Really nice.” I stared at the steering wheel, worried he might see the raw desire right there on my face. Stake out or make out?
“It was nice.” He smiled faintly. “You know the only reason I asked you to hold that door in Phantom was because I had a crush on you?”
My head swiveled in his direction; the boy was full of surprises. He glanced up and seemed a little embarrassed by it. “I mean, we probably could have rigged something up.”
My jaw dropped. Literally. “I thought I was providing a valuable service to the theater.”
Dare laughed. “You were, Charlie. Most definitely. You probably don’t know this, but I tasked the entire drama department with finding out if you were straight or not, but no one could pin you down.”
I recalled some of the pointed conversations I’d had with Dare’s friends, and more than a couple of the female cast members who’d tried to make a move on me. I thought their flirtations were just part of their love-in culture. “You could have just asked me. Since when are you so shy, Dare?”
He hid his smile behind his hand. “I mean, I’m not shy, but I’m not an idiot either.”
“You should have made a move.” I smiled at him. What a nice surprise that would have been.
“I was going to ask you out at the cast party at Aaron’s, but you never showed.”
“I was there.” I took a deep breath. A bit of honesty was in order. “I was too nervous to talk to you, so I basically hid in a closet all night.”
“You what?” He looked shocked and dismayed.
“Yeah, then I went out and bought the Phantom soundtrack because I had this huge crush on you too.” I paused and then figured, why not? “And if we’re being honest, it didn’t start last spring.”
His eyebrows rose into another stratosphere.
“And then the SAT thing with Mason happened,” I continued. After that, Dare would say hello to me in the halls, but not much else. “That kind of derailed everything.”
He looked down at his hands. “I wasn’t mad at you, but I had to take Mason’s side.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
He sighed and glanced up at the empty road before us. “So these feelings of yours….” He licked his lips, then bit down on the lower one. So tempting. “Are they past or present tense?”
I reached for his hand. “Both.”
He smiled and pressed my knuckles to his lips. Then he dropped it back into his lap with a deep sigh. “I like you, Charlie. A lot. And that kiss last night was amazing. But I’m pretty messed up right now.”
People did strange things when they were in mourning. I punched a classmate in the face. Dare kissed me on the mouth, with tongue. “You’re grieving.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it again.”
“Okay.” This was getting confusing.
“What I mean is, maybe we could take it slow?” There was that shy smile again, one that revealed Dare to have a bashful tenderness hidden beneath all that center-stage swagger.
Here was the simple truth. When Dare approached me months ago and sold me on the idea of holding a door shut for the spring musical, I didn’t need much convincing. When Dare asked me earlier that week to help find his brother’s killer, I didn’t hesitate. Now Dare was asking me to be patient so we could see if there might be something between us on the other end of this horror show, and of course, I would honor his request. Gladly.
I squeezed his hand. “It was a really nice kiss, and I’m glad you did it. Now I can at least say I’ve made it to first base. But we don’t need to stress about that right now. We have to stay focused.”
Dare nodded, still looking conflicted. “I just didn’t want you to think—”
I glanced up as a car came into view. I hadn’t even heard it coming. Dare missed the license plate, but I recognized the car immediately. A blue Prius with a collage of activist bumper stickers, one of which said Save Our Springs in a retro seventies font.
“Ms. Sparrow,” I muttered.
As Dare tried to glimpse the driver through the rear window with his binoculars, I started the engine, intent on following Ms. Sparrow to whatever destination she was headed.
“What’s she doing out here?” Dare asked, his eyes focused on the back of her car as he recorded the license plate number. We followed at a safe distance until we saw her turn off onto a dirt road with pines crowding in on either side.
“That must be her house.” Sparrow wasn’t one of the names that came up on the property appraiser’s search, so either she rented or owned property under a different name or she was living with someone else. “What should we do?” I asked Dare. We were idling at the end of her driveway.
“Let’s talk to her,” Dare said severely.
“Maybe we should wait until Monday. It feels weird going to a teacher’s home.”
“We can’t wait, Charlie. Besides, I’ll bet you anything Mason’s been here.”
I didn’t know what he was basing his assumption on, but I agreed we couldn’t afford to wait until Monday. “What if she has a big angry boyfriend? Or a big angry dog. Or a gun.”
“I’m not scared of any of those things,” he said. “Just let me do the talking.”
I drove farther up the driveway, where there was another car parked—a battered old Nissan pickup truck. Jealous boyfriend, perhaps? I turned the car around so we were facing the road in case we needed to make a speedy exit. Without waiting for me to catch up, Dare marched up to the screen door and rapped hard on the flimsy aluminum. No one came to the door, so he shouted, “We know you’re in there, Ms. Sparrow, and we know what you’ve been doing with my brother.”
Not the approach I would have taken. Dare was bluffing—we had no idea what, if anything, she might have been doing with Mason—but it must’ve spooked her, because Ms. Sparrow opened the door soon after.
“What are you boys doing here?” she asked with a big, fake smile. I’d never in my life seen Ms. Sparrow grin with so much ferocity.
I glanced around at our surroundings. The place was pretty secluded, with the nearest neighbors a couple of forested acres away. It was possible Mason’s murder could have been committed at the lake and his body brought here, though if that was the case, I doubted Ms. Sparrow had the physical strength to do it alone.
Unless she dismembered his body first.
I spotted a pile of firewood stacked at the other end of the front porch. I remembered my mother making the motion with her hand of one fast, hard chop. Like an axe or a shovel, both of which Ms. Sparrow would have experience using.
“We have some questions to ask you,” I said to her. “Perhaps we could take this inside?”
Ms. Sparrow hesitated, then held open the door and showed us to a couch and matching love seat the color of mud. Dare perched on the edge of the love seat, and I took the spot next to him. I wanted to keep him close. Ms. Sparrow’s house had a similar smell as her classroom—an earthy, incense-infused aroma—and it was decorated with a lot of artifacts from the natural world—sticks and crystals and hand-woven art. I bet if I looked hard enough I’d find a bong or hookah somewhere around here. Also known as the Berkley of Florida, Gainesville had a reputation for its proliferation of pot smoking. My mom had worked for a while in food service before joining GPD, and people would often try to pay for their meals with marijuana. It usually worked too, because Gainesville green was pretty widely accepted as currency. Of course, once Mom became a cop, those offers dropped off significantly.
But even though Ms. Sparrow was pretty young and fairly hip, it was still weird being in a teacher’s house. I didn’t really care to think about them having lives outside of Eastview High, and I didn’t want to imagine Ms. Sparrow smoking pot or dancing naked around a fire, which was another ritual you’d often stumble across at a Gainesville party, especially when dealing with the kids from the massage school, according to my mother.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked pleasantly, playing hostess—or more likely, getting her lies in order. “Lemonade? Water?”
“I’ll take a Dr Pepper,” Dare said. Ms. Sparrow squinted at him and seemed thrown off by that request.
“I’m afraid I don’t keep soda in the house,” she said slowly, measuring her words. “Processed sugar is bad for your health.”
“Are you sure?” Dare asked with a sneer. “That’s Mason’s favorite.”
Ms. Sparrow sat down on the edge of the couch and pressed her lips together in a tight seam. “I know you’re upset about your brother’s death, Dare, but I’m not sure what I can do for you.”
Dare stood suddenly and stalked through the small living room as if looking for proof of his brother’s presence. His crooked gait was more pronounced in his agitated state, and I debated on whether to take over this interrogation. I didn’t think Dare could be level-headed about it.
“Mason’s truck was found not far from here,” I told Ms. Sparrow. “So was his… body. He had no reason to come out this way unless it was to visit someone.”
“Visit you,” Dare accused.
“I’m sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstanding.” Ms. Sparrow collected her courage as she stood. “I think you boys should leave.”
Dare studied Ms. Sparrow a little closer. I didn’t understand what he was looking at so intently until he whipped out his phone and snapped a picture.
“My brother gave you that.” He pointed to the pendant around her neck.
“What?” Her hand fluttered to her amber-colored necklace. “That’s ridiculous. I bought this myself.”
“Where’d you buy it?” Dare asked.
“I….” She trailed off.
“My cousin works at the herbarium. She takes samples from plant cuttings and encases them in resin. I recognize that necklace because my mother has one just like it, and if you don’t tell us what the hell is going on, my next stop is GPD to tell them you murdered my brother.”
Ms. Sparrow collapsed into the couch. Her lower lip quivered, and even though she didn’t cry, her face had a melty look about it. She was obviously lying to us, but I still felt a little bad for her. Dare seemed entirely unmoved.
“Speak,” he commanded and gestured forcefully with his hand as though he could summon her confession by his will alone.
She glanced at me as though I could help her out of this situation. I only shrugged. As my mom was fond of saying, Ms. Sparrow had made her bed; now she had to lie in it.
“He was supposed to come over Friday night, but he never made it here. I swear I’d never hurt him.”
“You were having an affair?” I asked.
She nodded. “Stupid. It was so stupid of me.”
“Did you kill him?” Dare asked. “Because you were worried he’d tell someone?”
“No, of course not. He didn’t want anyone to know about it either. It was just….” She shook her head miserably and wouldn’t look at us. “It was a mistake.”
“You have no alibi,” Dare said. It sounded like a threat. His demeanor completely shifted when he thought someone had wronged Mason. He was cold and precise. Like a scalpel.
“I was here all night watching television,” Ms. Sparrow said, wide-eyed. “There’s a camera aimed at my front gate. Its footage is kept off-site. I’m sure they have it.”
I asked her the name of the security company and made a note on my phone to follow up. Still, there was a hole in her story. “When did you and Mason make plans to meet?”
“Around 5:30 in the afternoon? I was….” She looked away. “It was Friday night. I was lonely.”
“You called him out of wrestling practice?” I asked.
“No, of course not. We spoke by phone.”
“What phone?”
“His cell.”
I studied her. She didn’t seem to be lying, and it fit with the timeline Daniela had given me, which meant Mason must have had a second phone. “Give me the number.” She went to her purse, pulled out her phone, and scrolled through her contacts until she found the one labeled MC. Mason Chalmers. I took down the number.
“You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?” She was asking Dare, not me.
Dare glared at her with no compassion whatsoever. “If you hadn’t called my brother out here Friday night, he would have met me at Waffle Kingdom like he promised. And if he’d done that, he might still be alive right now. So I wouldn’t be asking me for any favors.”
“I’m so sorry, Dare,” she said, sniffling. “He was a very special young man.”
“You don’t know anything about him,” Dare snapped and stormed out of her house, slamming the screen door behind him. I mumbled a hurried goodbye to Ms. Sparrow and followed him out. Dare strode over to a pine tree and kicked it, chipping away at the flaky bark. I waited by the car to give him a minute to cool off. Even though he was furious, I considered it a breakthrough.
This information was the leverage I needed to make a deal with my mother.