“Who’s the little bitch now?” Andrews asked Cameron.
“Oscar!” Cameron shouted. “Get her home safe, man.”
“Party’s over!” Ronin shouted, loud enough for the congregating students to hear. If he expected them to disperse without explanation, he must have been disappointed in their lack of movement. “Curfew is in effect. Go home immediately or we’ll take you all in and have your parents pick you up at the station. Bet they’ll like that. Understood?”
Allyson heard a few grumbles of discontent, but most of the students began to walk away.
As Andrews slipped handcuffs on his wrists, Cameron yelled to Oscar again, “Get her home!”
A few of Allyson’s costumed classmates lingered—those most suspicious of authority figures, she imagined—continuing to film Cameron’s arrest, but once Andrews led him toward the police cruiser, the diehards walked off the football field.
“Let’s get out of here,” Oscar said to Allyson, “before they arrest us as accessories.”
Considering she could smell alcohol on Oscar’s breath, they were more likely to arrest him for underage drinking or public drunkenness. With Cameron already in custody, and both cops in a foul mood, Allyson didn’t want to be responsible for getting Oscar arrested as well. Giving the police a wide berth, they backtracked past the fieldhouse.
As Allyson headed toward the back gate, Oscar said, “Hold up. Need to make a pit stop.”
Allyson waited, assuming he needed to use the men’s restroom on the far side of the fieldhouse, but he ducked under the back of the bleachers. “Should be right—ouch! Damn it! Banged my head…”
“Oscar…?” After listening to him grunt and grumble, she said, “If you can’t see, take off the stupid sunglasses.”
“Got it!” he called, backing out of the confined space.
When he turned around, she saw his arm wrapped around an open case of beer.
“Seriously?”
“What? You know my motto,” he said, grinning stupidly. “No can left behind.”
“In case you forgot,” she said sarcastically, “we lost Cameron. But I’m glad you managed to save your precious beer.”
“They’ll release him after he cools off,” Oscar said. “The police give him a hard time because he—his family—is different. Police don’t trust ‘different.’ I think it’s in their handbook or something.”
That might be true, she thought, but Cameron certainly added fuel to the fire by provoking the cops.
As they slipped out the back gate, Allyson worried how to explain the evening to her parents. If they heard Cameron had been drinking, resisted arrest and got locked up, they might forbid her from seeing him again.
Maybe if I keep quiet, they’ll never find out.
Not so much a plan, she thought, as wishful thinking.
31
While relaxing with a glass of wine, Karen sat on the corner of her sofa, reading her book club’s selection for the month, a murder mystery with literary pretensions set in fifteenth-century Florence, Italy. The plot revolved around a Renaissance painter attempting to solve the murder of his patron. But the book was a doorstop, weighing in at close to nine hundred pages, and Karen had trouble keeping the names straight in her head. Apparently, the book had become popular enough to spawn a few sequels, the second book set in Venice and the third in Genoa.
Wearing her Christmas sweater, she was determined to avoid thinking about the current holiday by focusing on a more joyful one. They’d had a couple trick-or-treaters, even though their house remained undecorated, the porch light extinguished. Mostly, the kids who rang the bell had traveled from neighboring school districts to maximize their candy haul. Local kids knew better. With Allyson at the school dance, Karen had asked Ray to deliver the bad news to the wayward travelers. A few more hours and it would all be over… until next year.
Karen flipped back a few pages when she realized her mind had wandered. Had Lorenzo stabbed Benedetto in the cathedral—or Bartolomeo? One of the two remained a suspect, the other a victim. And she couldn’t remember if Agostino was still alive or if he had been the one who discovered Francesca’s drowned body in the grotto. Obviously, her chosen form of distraction created distractions of its own, and she began to feel maybe she’d skip the book club discussion this month.
“You’re awfully quiet in there,” Ray called from the kitchen. “Not spying on your daughter, are you?”
“Spying? Moi?” Karen replied. “How could I possibly spy on my daughter? She’s at school and I’m curled up here with a book. A big-ass book.”
“You know what I mean.”
Karen glanced at her phone on the coffee table. “Okay, okay, I may have looked for tweets, scrolled her timeline, checked her Instagram.”
“And…?”
“It’s frustrating,” Karen said. “Some pics at the school gate, but nothing since they went into the dance. I thought she was part of the connected generation.”
“Maybe they’re having too much fun to post online.”
Karen laughed. “No, seriously,” she scoffed. “The school must have a cellphone jammer.”
“I’m sure that’s it,” Ray called. “And I hear the gymnasium is a massive Faraday cage.”
“Ha, ha,” Karen fake laughed. “To be fair, I stopped checking after the first half hour. Giving my daughter some privacy. She can tell me all about it when—”
CRASH!
Karen almost dropped the glass of wine in her lap at the sound of pots and pans tumbling out of a cabinet in the kitchen. “Ray?”
“I’m okay!”
“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “What happened?”
“Checking the mouse traps.”
“Again?”
“Thought I heard one go off.”
“Did the man set a trap for a mouse?” she called, smiling. “Or did the mouse set a trap for the man?”
“Mice are not smart enough to booby-trap kitchen cabinets, dear,” Ray yelled back.
“Well, did you catch it?”
After a pause. “No.”
So, the mouse is smart enough not to get caught in a trap. “And the peanut butter?”
Another pause, a little longer than the first. “Gone.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“How’s that possible?” she wondered. “Don’t those traps have a hair-trigger?”
“How the hell should I know?” Ray said. “GMO mouse? Sneaky bastard.”
“Let me see if I have this correct,” Karen teased. “You think a genetically modified mouse got into our home?”
“Until a better theory comes along,” Ray said. “I blame unethical science.”
Karen laughed. “Maybe the mice work in teams,” she said. “One holds the trap steady while the other one scoops off the peanut—”
Blue and red emergency lights flashed through the windows.
Setting her book down on the coffee table, Karen stood and peered through the curtains of the living room window. Two cop cars had pulled up in front of the house.
“Karen?” Ray called. “Everything okay?”
“Police.”
“What?”
“The police are here,” Karen repeated, louder. She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something had happened to Allyson at the dance. Unbidden, her mind began to envision scenarios, each more troubling than the next, when someone knocked on the front door. As far as she could tell, the cops hadn’t exited their vehicles, so who…?
Hurrying to the front door, she pulled it open to find—
“You have to go,” her mother said. Not “Hello.” Not “How are you?” Not “Mind if I come in?” “It’s not safe to be here.”