The line snaked around the base of the iron staircase, then up six flights to an elevated platform where the ride started. Paul and I had been moving in it for about twenty-five minutes. Way down below, kids shrieked as they exploded out from the other end of the tube ride and splashed into the water. I was getting impatient. I don’t like lines. I don’t like waiting. I like moving. But Paul just kept telling me, “You’ll see, Trell. You’ll see. I’m telling ya, it’s worth the wait.”

We were lugging a two-person tube like everyone else and were nearing the top. The higher we got, the better the view, so that made waiting a little bit easier. I could see across the water park and for miles beyond. I could see the highway that Clemens took to get us here. He’d seen I was torn about turning down Paul’s invitation. So Clemens decided to drive me. He’d even talked Nora into taking a half day off to come along. I could see both of them in the wave pool on the other side of the park. I know Water Country brags it has the largest wave pool in all of New England — holding something like seven hundred gallons of water. But I don’t get the thrill in just bobbing around. I’d rather be racing a million miles an hour down one of the slides. Clemens and Nora seemed happy enough, though. They bobbed and talked. I was thinking it wasn’t only about the case. Okay by me.

It was sunny and plenty hot, and I was glad we’d come. I could see Vinnie’s Van in the parking lot. The lot was packed with cars. Paul had ridden up with about twenty kids from home. They’d gotten here just before we did. And they were pretty easy to spot, a bunch of black kids in a sea of white. Some were floating down the lazy river. Others were in line for Shoot and Screamer. Those are amazing fast, but over in a few seconds. The Double Geronimo was popular, too. The line was pretty long. It’s maybe the steepest body slide, and scary. But after Paul and I saw each other and he got over the surprise of meeting, he insisted that we had to ride Dr. Von Dark’s Tunnel of Terror.

I also spotted Vinnie. He wasn’t inside the park cooling off somewhere but had stayed put in the parking lot. Wasn’t the water park type, I guess. He was leaning against his van, smoking a cigarette, and he wasn’t alone. He was talking to someone.

“That your uncle?” I said. “With Vinnie?”

Paul shook his head. “No, no. Wouldn’t waste his time.”

“Didn’t think so.” I squinted, curious. Then it came to me. The guy with the scar on his cheek you couldn’t miss a mile away. The red scar that ran like a river down one side of his face, the guy whose silver sunglasses had popped off after Thumper slammed his face against the open window of the Mercedes.

I said, “Isn’t that the guy your uncle whaled on outside your house?”

“The one,” Paul said. “My uncle made him come, keep an eye on things.”

“Chaperone?”

“I guess. I dunno really. My uncle’s always orderin’ the guy to do something, but then starts givin’ him grief, always yelling at him. The guy’s a mess.”

“Strange.”

“Totally. I mean my uncle, he seems to hate the guy, but then does everything to keep him nearby. The guy lives with us.”

“In your house?”

“Kinda. He’s in a shack out back, actually,” Paul said. “Go figure. My uncle wants the guy close. Only thing he’ll tell me is the guy’s been with him a long time, longer than most everybody else he’s got. Says the guy was in a bad way. But the way he yells at him, you’d never know he cares. Whole thing’s pretty weird.”

“Definitely weird.”

“One thing, I think the guy’s hooked on something. Not that I see him much, but when I do he’s, like, jittery and scratching his arms. But maybe the guy’s just scared, worried my uncle’s gonna pound on him. I dunno. Hey, we’re gettin’ close,” Paul said. “You ready?”

We’d reached the top platform and maybe only a dozen kids were still ahead of us. Near the mouth of the tunnel slide, a park worker helped riders drop their two-person tube into a big whirling tidal pool.

Paul said, “Trell, there’s something I been wantin’ to ask.”

“What’s that?”

Paul looked away as he spoke. “The Weld. The school you go to.”

“Yeah?”

“You think I could get in?”

The question surprised me. Even though I remembered Paul seemed serious in school, I never would have guessed him to be wondering about making a big change like that. I’ve been thinking all summer I might want to get out of the Weld, and Paul’s thinking about maybe wanting to get in?

The way my eyes popped out, Paul could see his question had shocked me. He said, “I know, Trell. It’s crazy. Me? I’m not smart, not the way you are.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. I didn’t want him thinking I thought he was stupid or something. It was just such a stunner. I said, “Don’t say that.”

My thoughts raced around as I tried to come up with something more, and when the words finally came out, they sounded like a version of what Clemens had told me about his time at the Gunnery school. “They’ve got really small classes at the Weld, which is good for learning, and some really cool teachers.” I was thinking about my English teacher, Harry Goldgar, who had us read a lot of Langston Hughes’s poems. Paul’s question was making me remember the reason I had pushed myself to get in. So I wanted to be encouraging. The bad stuff, like my adviser Mr. Rowe, could come later.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t,” I said. “I’ll help, if you want.”

Paul smiled. “I got to do something to get out, and when I saw you got in there, I dunno, it got me to thinking. I even learned the Weld, it has rooms for kids to live in, and I hate being at my uncle’s Castlegate. More like a gated castle, you ask me. It’s like I’m a prisoner.”

The park worker was waving and yelling at us to hurry up.

“We gotta go!” Paul shouted.

We plopped our tube into the churning whirlpool and jumped in. We got a quick shove and took off, swept away into the darkened mouth of Dr. Von Dark’s Tunnel of Terror. Inside was pitch-black, and I could hear kids in front of us screaming. I couldn’t see a thing, only feel water splashing all around as we pitched from side to side. The tube turned sharply and descended suddenly. My stomach dropped. We took another sharp turn. I screamed my lungs out.

“Hold on!” Paul yelled.

His hand grabbed hold of my forearm.

I liked how it felt.

We rode a bunch more water rides, and then I told Paul I had to go. That was the deal with Nora. She’d take a half day off and come with Clemens and me if we promised to get back to Boston early in the afternoon.

I told Paul he was right. “Dr. Von Dark was the best.”

“Told you,” Paul said.

“Okay,” I said. “Soon.”

“Soon,” he said.

I began to hurry away.

“Hey,” he said. “The Weld?”

“The Weld,” I said.

I found Clemens and Nora near the changing rooms at the front entrance dressed and ready to go. Clemens was pacing. The three of us walked quickly to the car. I spotted Vinnie and waved across the lot to him. He straightened up and waved back.

“Mornin’ Glory!” he shouted.

I made a face. “It’s afternoon, Vinnie.” I shook my head. The man with him — Thumper’s guy — didn’t say a thing. Just stood there and watched us walking to Clemens’s Volvo. I did notice him scratching his arms, though. Like Paul said.

Clemens was acting hyper, and when we got in the car, he explained why. While he was changing out of his bathing suit, he’d gotten a call from the doctor he’d been trying to reach about Monique Catron.

“She got back to me finally,” Clemens said, “and you gotta listen to this.” He explained that the doctor was a neuro-oncologist, which meant her specialty was brain cancers. “I told her about Monique, and she told me it was extremely rare for someone Monique’s age to have cerebral astrocytoma. Usually people who have it are much, much older.”

“Okay,” Nora said. “How’s that help?”

“It doesn’t. I’m getting to that.”

Clemens seemed annoyed, like he was getting into one of his “teaching moments” and wanted to take his time. He said cerebral astrocytoma was a primary brain tumor. “Meaning it grows in the brain itself and doesn’t travel from the brain to other parts of the body. Plus, people can have it for a long time and be asymptomatic. Meaning they don’t act sick, even though they have this awful thing growing in their brain.

“But we already know Monique had symptoms. She collapsed, for friggin’ sakes. Had crippling headaches months before Ruby Graham was shot.”

“Okay?” Nora said. “And?”

Clemens shot her a look. “Okay. Here’s the thing: cerebral astrocytoma affects cognitive function.”

Even though I knew what cognitive meant I said, “Please, Clemens. Talk normal.”

“Perception! Memory!” Clemens was practically shouting. “People with cerebral astrocytoma, they’re screwed up when it comes to what they see and what they remember. You get it? Frank Flanagan relied on a girl as a major witness who was dying from brain cancer — a cancer that messes up a person’s ability to see and to remember.”

Clemens looked at Nora. “Talk about an unreliable narrator.”

Clemens drove, and we were quiet as the information sank in.

I said, “Why’d the jury believe Monique if she had a cancer like that?”

“Because the jury didn’t know,” Nora said. “That’s the point. The police, they knew Monique was ill, but they never told anyone. If they had, and if the jury at your daddy’s trial had learned about Monique’s brain cancer, it would have ruined Monique’s credibility. No one would have believed her testimony about Romero Taylor. This is just the kind of new evidence we’ve needed.”

It was like there was some kind of special energy in the car. Invisible, but I could feel it. Clemens was in a hurry and drove fast. He said he wanted to drop me off at my house and head downtown to the state Office of Vital Records before they closed for the day. “Monique’s death certificate will be at Vital Records,” he said. “We need a copy of that. It will list her official cause of death.”

“Why?” I said. “We already know the cause of death. Miss Lola told us.”

Clemens pulled up to the curb outside my apartment. He looked back at me. “Okay, lesson time: Journalism 101. We call it the principle of verification.”

“Principle of verification?” I asked, like a student who maybe hadn’t had time to do the reading but still didn’t want to miss anything.

“Confirm every piece of information you’re gonna put in the newspaper story — or Nora’s legal motion to use in court. Sure, Miss Lola told us, but much better than her word is the actual death certificate showing that brain cancer killed Monique. No way to cross-examine an official document like that. It’s the best proof.”

Clemens revved the Volvo. He told Nora he’d drop her off at the subway.

“Later,” he said to me as I scampered out, and he was gone.

I felt left behind. Ma was at work, wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours. Nora was being a lawyer back at her office. Clemens was being a reporter racing to a state office, getting verification. Me? I was wandering around my living room. Bored. I thought about Paul and the Weld School, and went digging around my closet for the school catalog and some other stuff I’d saved that I could give to him. Next I tried reading, which usually works for me, but didn’t this time. I couldn’t sit still. The buzz I felt on the ride home, the idea we were really getting somewhere, was too distracting. Then I remembered Tracey Dailey and the note Daddy had given me. I pulled the folded slip of paper from my back pocket.

Tracey Dailey

11 Geneva Avenue

Geneva wasn’t too far. Not far at all. In fact, it was just a couple of blocks north of where Clemens lived, on Esmond Street. I could get there and back before Ma got home.

I was out the door before even finishing the thought. I didn’t run because I didn’t want to get all sweaty. But I was doing a kind of walk-run.

I felt no hesitation until I was about halfway there. Geneva is in the middle what Ma calls a “hot spot.” She means trouble. It’s got lots of crime. Lots of rundown houses and empty lots piled high with trash, construction debris, and junk cars. Ma says friends from church who live there say they do not even let their kids play outside. Sometimes you hear a city official or neighborhood activist complaining and calling for improvements and more police, but nothing changes. In June, just when I was getting out of school, Ma showed me a newspaper article. Outside a club on Geneva, there’d practically been a riot on a Saturday night. It started when some guy was stabbed in the butt and taken away by ambulance, and when police got there, a whole bunch of kids were shoving each other. Fights broke out. Kids threw bottles. Police began arresting everyone, including two men caught slashing the tires of a police cruiser. “See?” Ma kept saying as she showed me the article. “See? It’s hopeless.”

This went through my mind as I reached Geneva, and it gave me a hesitation. But really only for a second. I wasn’t going to freeze, not when one of the people who could vouch for Daddy the night Ruby Graham was killed was living on Geneva.

Tracey Dailey’s house at 11 Geneva sure fit in. One side was missing entire rows of shingles, and another side didn’t have any, just plywood sheathing. From the shingles that were left, it looked like the house was a gray color. The glass in the big window on the first floor was cracked. Garbage was strewn around the front yard, an old stove sat sideways, and a refrigerator with no door was half-buried in dirt. I headed up the stairs to the front porch, careful to step over spaces where boards were missing.

Two black metal mailboxes were mounted to the right of the door, one for each apartment. Pieces of paper with names handwritten on each were taped to the boxes. Tracey Dailey was on the one for the second floor. Next to the boxes was a doorbell, which surprised me. I pushed it, and it buzzed. That surprised me, too.

Nothing happened. I pushed the buzzer again. I heard noise upstairs, the sound of a window rattling open. Someone yelled, “Who that be?”

I leaned over the porch railing so the woman up there could see me. The railing was loose, so I was careful not to fall through.

“What you want?” the woman called.

“Tracey Dailey?” I asked. “Are you Tracey Dailey?”

“What you want?” she repeated. Her head tilted, like she was put out.

“Can I talk to you?”

“What about?”

I looked around. “Romero Taylor,” I said, not wanting to shout.

The woman’s head straightened. Her eyes woke up, looked hard at me.

“He’s my daddy,” I said.

The woman shut the window. She didn’t slam it, which I took as a good sign. Seconds later, the front door opened. Tracey Dailey was wearing a baggy white T-shirt. I couldn’t tell if she had shorts on underneath. She held a cigarette. She was tall and skinny. Her tight curly hair was brown, and freckles filled the skin on her cheeks.

“C’mon,” she said.

I followed her upstairs and into her apartment. She led me into the kitchen, where it looked like a dish hadn’t been washed in months. She motioned me to sit at the table while she filled a cup with coffee.

“You Romero and Shey-Shey’s girl?” she said.

“Trell,” I said. “Actually, Van Trell, but everyone calls me Trell.”

Tracey nodded and sipped her coffee. “I remember when you was born.” She kept nodding as she spoke, looking me up and down. “Your daddy showin’ you off all over the neighborhood after you come home.” Then Tracey looked away. “Didn’t see you after that, though. Not after Ruby was killed, an’ everything changed.”

I heard footsteps in the hall, and another woman drifted into the kitchen.

“This is Boo,” Tracey said. “My roommate.”

The two looked about the same age. Boo’s skin glowed.

“Boo,” Tracey said, “meet Trell Taylor. You know, Romero? Shey?”

Boo’s eyes widened. I said hello and tried smiling. She studied me. “Yeah, I do see it, I do,” Boo said. “In the smile, it’s Shey. Those eyes, Romero.”

Tracey said, “Boo and me, we been together forever.” Then Tracey asked, “You want something? Coffee? Something to drink?”

I realized my throat was dry as sand. “Water?”

Boo washed out a juice glass at the sink, filled it, and handed it to me.

I drank it whole.

“So, I don’t think sellin’ Girl Scout Cookies is the reason you’re here,” Tracey said.

That was my opening. I started explaining everything as best I could, the main point being that I was working with a lawyer and a newspaper reporter on getting my daddy out of prison. “It’s like we’re reinvestigating the case,” I said, trying not to go on for too long. “We know he didn’t shoot Ruby Graham.”

Tracey and Boo traded looks. Boo said, “That’s the truth.”

Tracey put down the cigarette and closed her eyes. She sighed deeply. Sighed a second time. When she opened her eyes, they had a faraway look in them. She said, “I’ll never forget, when they first grabbed Romero, I was like, Romero Taylor?”

Tracey had gone back in time, back to the late summer of 1988. “I knew, Boo knew, a lot of people knew, no way Romero could be the shooter.”

“No way,” Boo added.

Tracey said, “He was with us on Sonoma Street when Ruby Graham was shot. That’s the first thing, probably the main thing — he can’t be shootin’ no gun when he was with us at the same time.

“But that’s not the all of it,” Tracey said. “When they arrested Romero, what they said, police and that prosecutor — Frank something, the guy who’s running for mayor — go on TV and call Romero Taylor a tough-guy killer for the Castlegate Boys. I couldn’t believe it.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Romero was never the gangsta type, with the guns and everything.” Tracey looked at me. “Your daddy, he was into his own little hustle — the drugs. That’s all.”

Boo nodded along.

“He just wanted a way to get his gear, stay high,” Tracey said.

“I heard about that,” I interrupted. “Daddy, last time I visited, told me.”

“Money in his pocket, stylin’ around in new gear, and gettin’ high — that was Romero,” Tracey said. “Gun-totin’ killer? Police had it all wrong.”

Boo listened, then laughed softly.

“What?” Tracey said, looking at Boo.

Boo smiled, saying, “You remember Romero used to like wearing baggy gym shorts with striped sweat socks pulled all the way up to his knee, when most guys keep ’em rolled down to their ankles?”

Tracey smiled, too. “That’s it. That’s him.” She practically laughed out loud at the thought. “Your daddy, Trell, acting like he always had to be cutting a fashion statement when he was out there sellin’. He was never no gang member.”

Tracey and Boo fell silent. I let them be with the picture of Daddy in gym shorts and knee socks in their minds’ eye. It was kind of ridiculous to me, too. But I wasn’t about to let things end there, not after hearing so much information that was helpful to Daddy. I asked, “Tracey, how come you never said anything? Never told police? Never testified?”

The question erased the smiles from their faces. I was worried Tracey was going to get mad, start yelling at me, but that didn’t happen. Instead, her face turned serious, almost sad looking. She looked at her roommate. “Boo?”

Boo sat down at the kitchen table with us. She said, “What you gotta understand, Trell, is people are scared of police.”

I sat there. Didn’t say a word. I was thinking, That’s it?

Boo looked at me. I guess she could tell she had to explain more. She coughed, cleared her throat. “People were doin’ their thing,” she said, “and no one wanted to be involved with cops.”

She paused.

“Don’t you see?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

Tracey said, “She means people were hustling.”

Boo nodded. “Yeah.”

Tracey continued. “Because everyone in the ’hood — and I mean everyone — wanted to be flyin’. Crack cocaine comin’ in from NYC? The real hating started with the crack. Smokin’ it. Shootin’ it. Snortin’ it. Didn’t matter which way you did it, so long as you were flyin’. It got ugly real fast. Turf. Big money. The gangs.”

“That’s right,” Boo said. “That’s what I mean. We were always runnin’ from police, never to them.” Boo rubbed her forehead, as if the memories pained her. “When Ruby Graham was killed, the heat really come down hard. Police were everywhere. In our faces. And we all had something goin’, something to hide. Wanted to keep our heads down. Couldn’t think about helpin’ Romero.”

“Couldn’t think clearly to do right, is how it was,” Tracey said.

I think Tracey was trying to say she was sorry. I noticed a gentleness in her eyes that I took to be regret. She unfolded her arms and rested her head in her hands, and it was then that I saw the scars and needle tracks up and down her forearms. Hundreds of marks the size of tiny pinpricks. Tracey looked up and caught me staring. “Crack queen is what they called someone like me,” Tracey said. “I liked it in my arm. Boo, she liked it in a pipe. Everyone had a way they liked. It’s why you didn’t want to get caught talkin’ to police,” she said.

Probably the reason we were able to hear the noise was because the kitchen had gone so very silent. Boo was the first to notice. She leaned forward in her chair to hear better. We all strained to listen. There was a tapping sound coming from downstairs, then a sound like something scratching on metal. Tapping, then scratching. Then a pushing sound — quietly. Someone didn’t want to be heard.

I had no idea what it could be. Tracey stood up and tiptoed to the window over the kitchen sink. She suddenly turned around and rushed toward me.

“You gotta go!”

Her hands were on my shoulders, pushing me to my feet. The chair knocked over as she pushed me across the kitchen toward the rear hall. Boo, meanwhile, had hurried over to the window. “Oh, no. Oh, no!” she began chanting.

Given the racket we were making, whoever was downstairs must have decided trying to be quiet didn’t matter anymore. Because the next sound was the first-floor front door exploding open, glass and wood shattering in the entry.

“Hurry, hurry,” Tracey said, ushering me back.

Then came a second explosion: the sound of footsteps pounding up the front stairs, along with the voice: “WHERE IS SHE?” The first sound was followed by an angry tirade: “Don’t think I know what’s goin’ on? Snoopin’ around, asking questions? DAMMIT, I got eyes and ears everywhere.”

The voice was cold to the bone.

“Hurry,” Tracey commanded, pushing me toward the back stairs. It had gotten dark out while we’d been talking, and the hallway, without any lights that worked, was darker than outside. I could barely see. My mind began spinning. Who was it climbing the stairs, yelling like that? What the heck did he want? Me? Why me?

“WHERE IS SHE?” the voice roared, sounding closer and louder.

I was scared. The hallway was a tunnel of terror.

Tracey pushed open a door at the far end.

“Down the stairs, Trell,” she ordered. “The door opens to the driveway. Right there is a hole in the fence. Use it. It’ll put you in the next yard. Then you run. Run, and keep running. Now, go. Hurry!”

I quick-stepped down the stairs, running my hands along the walls to keep from stumbling in the dark. I pushed open the door and crashed into a garbage can that was in my way. I broke the fall with my hands but could feel the skin scraping off. I got up and rubbed my hands. They stung. I looked around and spotted the hole in the fence Tracey had mentioned. I turned to go there, and as I did I got a look down the driveway to the street, and that’s when I saw it. The car parked at the top of the driveway — the black Mercedes, engine growling and ready to roar.

Thumper Parish!

I squeezed through the hole and ran. I started one way, then the other, and then made myself think about where to go. Clemens’s house was closest, so I ran toward Esmond. Down one street, through a lot, and then across another street. Within a few minutes, I was there. I fidgeted around beneath a piece of flagstone where Clemens kept a spare key and unlocked the door. I burst inside, slammed the door behind me, and locked it. My chest heaved. I gasped for air. I’d run less than a half mile but felt like I’d finished the Boston Marathon. I paced around in circles, then fell onto the couch. It was quiet, except for the pounding of my heart. I was shaking. I hugged a cushion. Held on for what seemed like hours.