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right there. Lock the doors and stay in your room until I get home.”
    “I will.”
    She hung up. I did what she’d
told me to do.
    Ten minutes later she was home.
She held me while I cried, and then she told me to wait in my room for a few
minutes. I didn’t want her to leave again, but I knew she was going out to make
sure Vicki’s body was where I’d said it was.
    When she came back five minutes
later she was white as a ghost and called the police. She told me she was sure
CJ couldn’t have had anything to do with such a terrible crime.
    I didn’t tell her about the
blood I’d seen all over him.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 12
     
     
     
    It took the police three hours to show
up, and then they were tired and irritable. They told us this was their third
murder today .
    When they asked me how I’d
found the body, I told them Debbie had taken me to see it, but that she didn’t
know anything about it, either.
    CJ showed up while they were
interviewing Mom and me in the kitchen. He looked clean and wholesome. The
distraught performance he gave when they told him who the victim was should
have earned him an Academy Award. When they left, they told us only that their
best guess was a gang picking off kids as part of some initiation. Maybe Hell’s
Angels…or gypsies.
    They didn’t see CJ wink at me
as they said that.
    After they left, Mom called her
sister. Aunt Claire lived in Indianapolis. Her husband was a rich printer, and
they had a huge house on the edge of a lake; their own kids were grown and had
moved out long ago. I heard Mom saying things like, “I’m not sure how long,”
and “They don’t really know…maybe a gang.”
    Dad came home late that night,
long after I was in bed. I was trying to read a Nancy Drew mystery (or reread
it—I’d read it at least four times already) when I heard the shouting start.
    That scared me as much as
anything that’d happened over the last few days—my folks never fought; or if
they did, they did it so quietly that I never knew. Now, though, they were out
in the kitchen, both shouting at each other.
    I crept to my door, edged the
chair aside, and opened it just a crack to listen.
    “…and you don’t even care,” Mom
was saying.
    “Of course I care,” Dad
answered. “But I don’t know what you think I can do about it—”
    “Well, for starters, you can
tell me what’s going on.”
    “How would I know?”
    They went on in the kitchen for
another ten minutes or so, with Dad denying that he knew what was happening (or
even that anything was happening) and Mom demanding. Denying and demanding.
They were a good pair. I knew they wouldn’t resolve anything by the time they
moved the fight into the bedroom, but they kept going. Maybe they were as crazy
as the kids around here.
    I couldn’t sleep while they
argued in the room next to mine, so I went out to the living room and turned on
the TV. There was nothing good on—just the late night talk shows, with a bunch
of boring guests. I leaned over to grab the newspaper, thinking maybe I’d read
the comics, and then I saw Dad’s briefcase on the table next to the paper. It
was partly open.
    He never left his
briefcase open. He was probably in the midst of pulling something out of it
when Mom started in on him, and he forgot about it.
    I’d wondered for years what Dad
kept in that case. He always had it with him; sometimes he pulled papers out
that he would study, but we weren’t allowed to see them, and he always put them
back in the case and locked it if any of us came up to him.
    There was a report of some kind
sticking out of the case. It looked fat and was in one of those same stiff
folders that we used for our school reports. My folks were still arguing behind
the closed bedroom door, and I knew this might be my only chance, ever, to find
out what Dad kept in that case.
    I gingerly plucked the report
out, half-expecting it to be booby-trapped—like the briefcase might explode, or
there’d be poisoned