"You definitely were here this morning." Tess gestured to his soggy topsider, dark with water, drying in a patch of sun on the windowsill. "Quite a little Cinderella act."
"I wasn't breaking in exactly."
"No, you appeared to be breaking out. Which raises the question of how you got in to begin with. I didn't go to Penfield, but I think that follows logically. What goes out must have come in."
Maryland's best extemporaneous speaker, middle school division, was briefly silent. Tess picked up the telephone and dialed 311. Busy, of course, so she faked getting a connection. "Eastern District-I have a burglary I'd like to report on-"
Sal reached over and depressed the disconnect button. "Mr. Pearson came to school the day before yesterday and told me they were going to take Luther Beale in."
Going to take-Chase Pearson had good sources. He had known about Beale's arrest before it happened. Tess said nothing, just put the phone back in the receiver and waited, hoping Sal would keep talking if she didn't.
"I know Beale hired you to find all of us. You found me. You found Treasure. You couldn't find Destiny because Beale had already killed her."
"That hasn't been established, Sal. Far from it."
"Sure." He gave her a superior look, as if she were hopelessly naive. It was strange to be on the receiving end of a look like that from a seventeen-year-old kid, but Sal almost carried it off.
"What do you want, Sal?"
Here came the charm again-the bright eyes, the eager smile. "I was wondering if you know where Eldon is. Of all us who lived at the Nelsons', we were the closest. I mean, everybody was close, living in a three-bedroom house like that, but Eldon was my special buddy, you know. We were tight. I wrote him letters for a while, after they split us up, but he never wrote back. Eldon wasn't much for writing."
Sal Hawkings looked so rueful that Tess almost felt sorry for him. After all, she knew what it was like to have a best friend who didn't write. Whitney was given to beautiful gifts and the occasional hour-long phone call out of the blue, but she wouldn't sit down and compose a letter with a gun pointed at her bright blond head. The written lines of communication between Bond Street and Tokyo had been decidedly one way.
"Eldon's trail is pretty cold," she said. "According to records, he's wanted on a bench warrant because he failed to show up for a hearing. That was about seven months ago. My guess is he left the state. He's probably taking great care not to be found."
"Eldon's only seventeen, two months younger'n me. How'd he end up in the adult system?"
"I guess he was so precocious they skipped him ahead."
Sal Hawkings wasn't amused. "Hey, Eldon's good people. If he ran, it's probably because he didn't even do it, but doesn't know how to get anyone to believe him. He just doesn't know there's any other life, okay? He's just trying to get by."
"You learned there was another life, though. Think about it, Sal. Five kids living in the Nelsons' house on Fayette Street. One was shot. One took drugs, one turned tricks, and now one is a felon on the run. You got out because Chase Pearson helped you, but Pearson wouldn't have helped you if you hadn't started winning all those public speaking awards. What made you different, Sal? What separated you from the others?"
Sal scowled, folding his arms tight across his chest as if to keep Tess from peering into his heart, his soul. "Now you sound like the psychologist at Penfield. Everyone always poking at me, wanting to know why, why, why. Some dude from the University of Maryland even wanted to write a paper on me. ‘Sal H. A Success Story in Spite of the Odds.'"
"Did he?"
"Hell, no. Mr. Pearson said he wasn't going let them turn me into some damn syndrome. I'm just a kid, just myself, you know. You can't take me apart and find the answer to all the world's problems. They made me feel like some freak." Sal put on a Massachusetts accent, in apparent mimickry of someone, and stroked his chin. Was he playing the social worker, the psychologist, or just some generic busybody? "My God-a black male who thinks! Who wishes to better himself! What could it possibly mean?"
"They meant well," Tess said, somewhat defensively. After all, she had been asking the same thing in a slightly different fashion. "If they can figure out why you succeeded, maybe they can help other kids."
"Sure." He gave her the superior look again. "Maybe I succeeded because I'm special. Isn't that an option?"
"Oh you're very special. Public speaker, star student, and a little burglar in training, hanging halfway out my bathroom window."
"I told you. I wanted to know where Eldon was."
"Yes, but did you come down here to ask me, or to search my office for that information? If you really wanted to see me, you could have made an appointment."
"I don't think Mr. Pearson would let me see you."
"Probably not. How did you get away from Penfield, anyway?"
"We had a field trip to the National Aquarium and the Columbus Center this morning. I grabbed a cab and came over here. When I saw all those reporter types out front, I decided to go around the alley way."
Good story, smoothly told. But that was Sal Hawkings's particular talent, wasn't it? Thinking on his feet, making things sound smooth and plausible.
"Tell me about the car, Sal."
"It was a Checker cab, nothing special. Polish dude at the wheel, barely spoke English, had some lame-ass radio station on."
He couldn't be that dense. It was almost as if he knew the question was coming, and had a dodge prepared. "Not the car that brought you here. The car that was turning onto Fairmount Avenue the night Donnie was killed."
"I don't know what you're talking about." The answer was prompt, too prompt. It was if Sal had learned a part so well that he could still slip into it on a moment's notice, the way Tess could recite the memorized dialogues from junior high French class after all these years. Bonjour Jean, comment vas-tu? Dis donc, ou est la biblioteque?
"Luther Beale told me there was a car and two shots, shots he didn't fire. Yet none of you mentioned the car, or any other gunshots. You all told the same exact story, with the same details. But Luther says Destiny and Treasure had already rounded the corner, and even Eldon's back was still to him when he started firing. You couldn't have all seen the same thing."
"He's a damn liar. We wouldn't do that, okay? We were a posse, we stuck together, we wouldn't abandon one of our own. We ran afterward, after Donnie was dead, because we were scared. Who wouldn't be? He was going to kill us, too."
"And there was no car?"
"No car, no second shooter, no O. J. Simpson, okay? That's why the old man's killing the rest of us, you know, because once we're all dead, there won't be anyone to contradict his sorry lies, and he wins. But he did it. He's just gonna have to learn to live with that, the way we had to live with Donnie's death and the way they broke us up, sending us to new families."
Sal grabbed his knapsack and began throwing in the items Tess had spread out on her desk. Tess let him have everything except the Kipling, which she hugged to her chest. She suspected it was the one thing he wouldn't leave the office without, and he did look anxious when he saw it in her hands.
"You don't see a lot of kids reading Kipling these days, although in my day, we had to memorize reams of it. But I guess Penfield is kind of old-fashioned."
"Gimme that. It's mine."
She flipped through the pages. The old color plates were quite beautiful, if a little worse for wear. There was the female of the species, so much more deadly than the male, the road to Mandalay and, of course, good old Gunga Din. "Merry Christmas, Love, Grandmere,'" was inscribed on the frontispiece. Tess guessed that faded, cursive inscription had not been written to Sal. Both the book and the handwriting were at least forty years older than he was.