“Is this how his house usually looks?” I asked once we were both inside.
There was mail scattered around the entryway. Half-filled mugs lined the stairs. And a huge oak dining table blocked the way to the kitchen.
Sarah turned and looked me dead in the eye. “How much of a slut do you think I am?”
“I don’t,” I said. “But I mean, you’ve been here before, right? You knew where the hide-a-key was.”
“I’ve been here twice. Once for a study group, and once to feed his cats when he was out of town. And yes, it does usually look like this.”
I followed Sarah up to the third floor and into a bedroom that seemed to be inhabited almost entirely by cats. There were litter boxes everywhere, little felt mice, and nests of old fabric. Two black cats stalked the edges of the room while an orange one stared down at me from the top of an eight-foot-high scratching post. I turned to say something to Sarah, but she was already crouched down in front of a small safe at the back of the closet.
“You’re going to try to guess the combination?”
She looked back over her shoulder, still spinning the knob. “I’m guessing it’s the same as it was when I was house-sitting,” she said. As she fiddled with the knobs, one of the black cats doubled back and rubbed its flank against her knee. “Two, two, seventy-four.” The safe popped open and she smiled to herself. “But at the length truth will out.” When I didn’t catch her reference, she explained: “Mr. Balz’s favorite line in all of Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Act two, scene two, line seventy-four.” She took out a sheaf of papers and leafed through them. After a few moments, she held up a manila folder. “Bingo.”
In the top right-hand corner was one word, written in Mr. Balz’s distinctive block letters: Evidence.
At this point we probably should have gone straight to the police. At the very least, we should have been more careful with the evidence. Instead, Sarah and I sat down in the middle of the floor and began going through the folder, piece by piece.
“This is what he was talking about,” she said under her breath. “He was always saying how shady Mrs. Eliason is.”
She laid out two pieces of paper (schoolwide test results, both reproduced here for your benefit) and was beginning to explain what they meant, how they might have been manipulated, and so on, when there was a crash downstairs.
“One of the cats?”
Sarah shook her head. “Come on.” She motioned for me to follow her upstairs to the attic, a dusty open room filled with banker’s boxes and old surfing equipment. Downstairs, there were the muffled sounds of conversation, then another crash.
“Did you take the files?”
I looked down at my hands. “I have these,” I said, still holding the two pieces of paper we’d been looking at.
“Great,” she said, jiggling one of the windows at the other side of the room.
“I thought you had it.”
“Nope.”
When the window wouldn’t open, Sarah wrapped an old wetsuit around her hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Come on,” she said as she punched through the window and stepped out onto the roof. “Don’t be such a baby.”
For those of you who have never been on top of a roof, I will tell you this: two stories is a heck of a lot higher than you think. From where we were standing, Mr. Balz’s backyard looked like it was about fifty feet down. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. It probably is. In any case, it was not a jumpable distance, not by any stretch of the imagination. But don’t tell that to Sarah Meyers.
I can’t say exactly what happened next except that one moment she was peering through the sunlight in the middle of the roof. The next she was jumping into an overgrown hedge. There was a crash and a long silence. Then she crawled out from under the hedge. Her face was pretty scratched up and there was a massive gash on her hand. Still, she was smiling.
“It’s not as far as you think,” she called up.
“I don’t know. It looks pretty far.”
Just then, the attic door shook. There was a quick shout, a grunt, and the doorframe splintered. Another few seconds and there would be no more door.
My fellow graduates, I would like to tell you that I reacted to this situation with cool detachment. But the truth is, I fell. In the grips of fear and indecision, I lost my footing and slid to the edge of the roof, whereupon I somehow caught my arm on the gutter and dropped the fifty or twenty or fifteen feet to the ground.
I blinked. I was still alive, but my leg was on fire. No, it was fire. Molten pain.
“I think I broke my leg,” I said as Sarah helped me up.
“If you broke your leg you wouldn’t be able to walk,” she replied. “And anyways, we’re not walking anywhere. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
She dumped me into the backseat of Mr. Balz’s old Audi, and seven harrowing minutes later we arrived, mostly intact, at our destination: the Berkeley Police Department parking lot.
The woman at the front desk seemed to recognize Sarah. “Detective James?” she asked, and without waiting for Sarah to respond, she buzzed us back.
“Detective James helped me out when I was getting that restraining order against Tom Kantor,” Sarah explained.
“Oh,” I said, not sure how else to respond. I hadn’t heard about any restraining order. I just thought they had a bad breakup.
“He’s a sweetie,” Sarah said. “Not Tom — he’s a dick — the detective. A little rough around the edges, but very avuncular.”
When we walked into his office, the very avuncular Detective James was having a little nap, leaning back in his chair, his chin tucked into the soft pillow of his chest.
“What?” he barked awake, softening when he saw Sarah. “Meyers. That little pervert still bothering you?”
“No sir,” Sarah said. She was sitting up straight. Her eyes were open in a kind of vulnerable and hopeful tilt. “It’s something else, something about our English teacher.”
“Okay.”
She turned to me.
“So,” I started, “I guess it was, sir, I suppose it all began—”
“Son,” Detective James interrupted me, “take a deep breath. This isn’t story time. And you aren’t being interrogated. Just tell me what happened. Plain-like. Start to finish.”
“All right.” I took a deep breath. Then I told him everything: the Scandinavians at Mortar Rock, Mr. Balz’s house, the documents.
“And you gained entry to the house with a key?”
“Yes sir,” Sarah said.
“The location of which Mr. Balz informed you of previously?”
“Yes sir.”
“And the safe?”
“It was open,” Sarah lied without blinking an eye.
“The safe was open?”
“Yes sir.”
Detective James leaned back in his chair and held the documents in question up to the light. He thought for a few rattling breaths, then wrote a couple things on a yellow legal pad.
While he was writing, Sarah glanced down at her phone. Something she saw made her jaw loosen slightly. She drummed her fingers on the desk, as if trying to make out a difficult equation, then slipped the phone back in her bag.