Behind the Curtain Read online

“The Krakens don’t miss deer hunting—although that’s going to change,” said the chief. “They’ve got plenty of witnesses—clerk at the Motel 6 they stayed at, other hunters they met up with, state game wardens at a weigh station. Even had their picture taken—the three of them grinning like idiots around a dead buck.”

  “What about Rey Vasquez?” Ingrid said.

  The chief shook his head. “Worked the seven-to-five shift at the hospital that day, E.R. duty. Never left the building.”

  “Then who?” she said.

  “That’s the question,” said the chief. “We know it wasn’t Sean Rubino. Course he wasn’t the only low-level kid the Krakens had out there. I turned up two more at the high school and a trainer over at Bump’s Gym, but they all alibi out on that Saturday morning, and none of them even heard of you. Plus the DNA—the nail clippings are Carl Junior’s all right, and we’ve collected DNA from the others, but those hairs in the Yankees cap don’t match up with any of them.”

  “So there must be more people in the ring,” Ingrid said.

  “Not that I can find,” said the chief. “And Carl three is singing like a bird, ratting out his dad and granddad as fast as his droopy little mouth can move. I don’t think there’s anyone else, Ingrid.”

  Ingrid felt funny, like the floor had shifted under her feet. “What are you saying? That you don’t believe me? You don’t believe I was kidnapped?” Were they back to that?

  The chief gazed down at her. He had a big rough face, a face that should have been scarier than the faces of any of the Krakens or Rey Vasquez. But somehow it was not. “I believe you, Ingrid,” he said. “The laneway behind one thirteen—had to have happened that way.”

  “But who?” said Ingrid.

  “Whoever wore the Yankees cap.” He thought for a moment or two. Something crackled in the woodstove. “Do you like jigsaw puzzles?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Probably pretty far down the list of fun things to do nowadays,” the chief said. “But I loved them when I was a kid. I remember this one puzzle, five hundred pieces, the USS Constitution in action. You know the Constitution?”

  John Paul Jones? Or did his ship have some other name? But something about the Revolutionary War, Ingrid would have bet almost…Oops. The War of 1812, maybe? “Um, in general,” she said.

  “There was this one piece I couldn’t get to fit,” the chief said. “Looked like the end of a cannon, with smoke coming out. Must’ve taken that baby apart and put it together fifty times. No luck. Finally I sent that stupid piece to the manufacturer with a note asking for help. Know what came back?”

  Ingrid had no clue about that, or about where the chief was going with this whole story, not particularly gripping so far.

  “An apology,” said the chief. “The cannon piece came from another puzzle, a packaging mistake.”

  “Did they send you the right one?”

  “Nope,” said the chief. “By that time they’d discontinued the Constitution. But I didn’t care.”

  “’Cause you knew?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the Yankees cap?” said Ingrid.

  “Piece from a different puzzle,” said the chief. “But we’re not letting on about that.”

  “So whoever did it feels safe?”

  The chief nodded. “One more thing,” he said. “No going anywhere by yourself, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Joey came up the stairs, Ingrid’s Rollerblades in hand, a grease stain on his forehead. “Ready to try ’em out?” he said. “You’re not gonna believe the difference.”

  The chief looked at his son, squinting slightly as though trying to sharpen the focus.

  “On the way back from the bike path,” he said, “make sure you escort Ingrid home.”

  “Escort?” said Joey.

  “Go with,” said the chief. “Open door. ‘’Bye, Ingrid.’ Close door.”

  “Um,” said Joey. “So, like, you’re saying…?”

  twenty-seven

  AFTER SCHOOL ON Wednesday: last soccer practice before Saturday’s championship game against the Central Valley Warriors, one of the biggest U13 powerhouses in the whole state. But for some reason the girls from Echo Falls didn’t seem tense, were even kind of loosey-goosey, turning lots of cartwheels and seeing if anyone could do a handstand on a soccer ball, all this happening while snowflakes drifted down. At first there were just a few, like the day before, but this time they didn’t peter out. Instead the sky darkened, the clouds sagged low, and snow fell hard, coating the field in minutes. That made the team even loosier-goosier. Snowballs started flying. One grazed Julia’s shoulder as she stood huddled in her fur jacket by the bench.

  She blew her whistle. “That’s it,” she said. “Practice over.”

  “But we haven’t worked on anything yet,” Stacy said.

  “Can’t work in this slop,” Julia said. “Does it always snow so early around here?”

  “Sometimes earlier,” said Ingrid; she loved the snow.

  Julia glanced at the surroundings with distaste.

  The girls called home. Some cars were already driving into the parking lot, headlights and wipers on. Soon only Stacy and Ingrid were left, their parents unable to change from the scheduled pickup time.

  “Come on,” said Julia. “I’ll drop you off.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Ingrid.

  “We can wait,” said Stacy.

  “Then I have to wait too,” said Julia. “And that’s not happening.”

  They walked over to the Boxster, only car in the lot. Julia popped the trunk, a tiny one, with barely enough room for the soccer ball bag she tossed in.

  “You’ll have to squeeze up a little,” said Julia. Ingrid ended up sitting in Stacy’s lap, not for the first time.

  “Move your stupid elbow,” Stacy said.

  Julia turned onto Hospital Road, fishtailing slightly on the slick pavement.

  “I’ll need directions,” she said. “Who’s first?”

  Stacy gave Ingrid a little jab, meaning answer. Stacy had no clue about direction; Ingrid had been that way until very recently, but now she was trying to learn the town.

  “We’re kind of in opposite ways,” she said. They came to the stop sign at River. “Right for Stacy, left for me.”

  Julia went right.

  Ingrid was surprised to see that Julia drove Mom style, leaning forward and gripping the wheel tight. But maybe it was just because of the snow; the wind was rising now, blowing the flakes sideways through the air in long, billowing curtains.

  “Nice car,” Stacy said.

  “It’s all right,” said Julia. She turned up the heat.

  “What was it like playing for Team USA?” Stacy said.

  “I was just an alternate at the end of one season,” Julia said. “I never got in any games.”

  “So was that tough,” said Ingrid, “or were you just happy to be there?”

  Julia rubbed her gloved fingertips on the fog creeping up the windshield. “Neither,” she said. “Soccer was over for me by then.”

  “Because, like…” Stacy said.

  “I had other plans,” Julia said. “Grown-up ones.”

  “But what about loving the game?” Ingrid said.

  “Loving the game?” said Julia.

  Another little jab on the back from Stacy, this one probably meaning shut up. But Ingrid barged on anyway. “Yeah,” she said. “What happens to the loving the game part when you stop playing?”

  “Good question,” said Julia, in the Lower Falls neighborhood now, turning up Stacy’s street. “Best answered by someone who loved the game.”

  “What did you do after that?” Stacy said.

  “In what sense?” said Julia.

  “Like for a job,” said Stacy.

  “Started an Internet company, actually,” Julia said.

  “Wow,” said Ingrid.

  “How did that work out?” said Stacy.

  Julia’s hands got
even tighter on the wheel, the bony parts predominating. “Even you children must be familiar with the general history.” She pulled up at Stacy’s house, gave it the briefest glance.

  “Gonna open the door or what?” Stacy said.

  Ingrid let her out, got back in.

  “Later,” said Stacy.

  “Yeah,” said Ingrid, closing the door. Julia drove off, fishtailing again as she turned back onto River. Ingrid buckled her seat belt, noticed that Julia wasn’t using hers.

  “You didn’t love soccer?” Ingrid said.

  Julia glanced over. The snowfall had bleached the color out of everything, except for her eyes, greener than ever. “Rather persistent, aren’t you?” she said with a little smile. “It’s a game, Ingrid.”

  “I love it anyway,” Ingrid said. Or maybe because.

  “Good for you,” said Julia. “We won’t argue. I make it a rule never to argue with someone who’s on a roll.”

  “I’m on a roll?”

  “You scored that goal against Glastonbury,” Julia said.

  “A fluke,” said Ingrid.

  The bridge appeared on the left, its old lampposts and ironwork all white and somehow airy, like an icing sculpture that one little push would bring crumbling down.

  “And reading between the lines of this local rag of yours, I gather you’ve been vindicated,” Julia said.

  “Vindicated?”

  “Meaning found to be right in the end.”

  Which was kind of the definition Ingrid would have guessed. “Vindicated how?” she said.

  At that moment Julia’s cell phone rang. She tugged it from her pocket, checked the caller ID, answered right away. “Hello?”

  Whoever was on the other end sounded pissed and had one of those commanding voices. Ingrid recognized it: Mr. Ferrand.

  “Today?” said Julia. “But you said—”

  Mr. Ferrand’s voice rose.

  “The report’s at my place,” Julia said. “I can fax it over.”

  A few short barking syllables from Mr. Ferrand.

  “Yes,” said Julia, “right away.” She clicked off and turned to Ingrid. “Mind a quick detour?” she said, sounding different than Ingrid had ever heard her, sort of subdued; a vertical green vein had appeared on her forehead, throbbing just beneath the skin.

  “No problem,” Ingrid said.

  They were almost at the bridge. Julia took a quick left, fishtailing even more this time, and crossed the river. Maybe she wasn’t a very good driver. Down below, the river flowed fast, swallowing up the falling snow. Julia turned north on 392. The houses got farther apart, the town line not far away. They were actually getting pretty close to Grampy’s.

  Where were they in the conversation? Oh, yeah: vindicated.

  “Vindicated how?” Ingrid said.

  Julia glanced at her. Those eyes, impossible to read, but no one had ever looked at her quite this way—it was the kind of look adults gave other adults, not kids.

  “What we discussed at Moo Cow,” Julia said. “I assume the powers that be now acknowledge you were kidnapped after all.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which must be a relief.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it was all about this steroid ring.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They knew you were onto them and they kidnapped you.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Ingrid said.

  The Boxster lurched forward, as though Julia had made a mistake with the gas pedal; she really wasn’t much of a driver. “You thought?” said Julia. “Meaning you don’t think so now?”

  Oops. Hadn’t the chief said something about this? Piece from a different puzzle—but we’re not letting on about that.

  “Um,” said Ingrid. “Yeah, I do. Like before and now. Same thinking.” Sticking to the story—but what was the chief’s point again?

  “So it was all about the steroid ring, as you said the first time,” Julia said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Ingrid, trying to remember what other instructions the chief had given her. Oh, yeah: No going anywhere by yourself, okay? She was being good about that.

  “Uh-huh meaning yes?” said Julia.

  “Uh-huh,” said Ingrid. She meant it as a joke but nobody laughed except her—only a little one because of the rule about not laughing at your own jokes.

  Grampy’s barn appeared on the right, all soft edged and blurry in the snowfall. Then the farmhouse itself came into view, a smoke plume rising from the chimney and getting torn apart right away by the wind. Just before they drew even with the house, Julia slowed down and turned left onto a narrow road. It led through a grove of evergreens and ended in front of three little houses, kind of crooked, with screened-in porches and shutters, more like cottages, really. Something in her mind about cottages, but what?

  Julia parked beside the nearest cottage; Ingrid saw that the other two were boarded up.

  “Just be a moment,” Julia said, taking the keys from the ignition.

  “You live here?”

  “Temporarily.” Julia opened the door, got out.

  “Is this the old Prescott farm?”

  “So I’ve heard.” Julia closed the door—it made a lovely solid thump—and went into the cottage.

  Ingrid sat in the Boxster, snowflakes landing on the roof and windshield with tiny thuds. Behind the cottage, she saw another car, this one not fancy, just a plain four-door car, Ford or Chevy or something like that, plus a rusty tractor, lying on its side, and empty fields stretching toward distant woods. The old Prescott farm—where Carl Kraken Senior had lived, sometimes playing cowboys and Indians with Grampy, games that ended with that noose-around-the-neck thing, until Grampy took charge.

  Ingrid peered through the growing snowflake webs on the windshield, saw no movement inside the cottage. Julia was sending a fax to Mr. Ferrand. How long did that take? Ingrid had never actually sent a fax. Kind of a funny word, fax, did it come from—

  Whoa. A memory came crashing in, a memory of Mr. Samuels and Grampy’s board of assessors problem: Always a neighbor in cases like this. And the neighbor who’d ratted out Grampy, the owner of the old Prescott farm—was that Julia? What had Mr. Samuels found out? Something about DRF Development that turned out to be a shell for Black Coral Investments, or was it the other way around, and Black Coral Investments was the shell? Black Coral Investments, based down in the Caribbean, safe from Uncle Sam, on the island of…Anguilla.

  Ong Willa. Where the Ferrands had gone for their getaway weekend, where they had friends named Ernst and Alicia. What did all this mean? Ingrid didn’t know. Should she simply ask Julia—Hey, did you try to get Grampy’s taxes raised? Good idea or not? She didn’t know the answer to that either.

  Ingrid glanced out at the cottage. Or tried to: the windshield was completely snowed over now. It was getting dark in the car, dark and cold. Her gaze fell on the glove compartment.

  The next thing she knew, her hands had somehow taken over, flipped the glove compartment open, and were rummaging around inside. Not much there—owner’s manual, maintenance book, registration card, gas pump receipts, road maps for Connecticut and New York states, ticket stub, all very tidy, no surprise.

  Ticket stub. She had another look at it: box seat, Red Sox versus Yankees, August 2 of last summer, seven o’clock start, Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium, home of Yankee-cap wearing Yankee fans: links in a chain.

  Ingrid got out of the car. Quick glance at the cottage: door still closed, nothing moving behind any of the windows. Her body seemed much more decisive than her mind all of a sudden. The wind was blowing harder now, whipping right through her soccer warm-ups, the driven snow stinging her face. Ingrid walked behind the cottage, the snow covering her cleats, circled the plain old four-door car and stopped by the trunk.

  Locked, of course, but trunks could be popped from the inside. She tried the doors. All locked too. Ingrid really wanted to pop that trunk, but if there hadn’t been an old pitchfork leaning against the back wal
l of the cottage, the whole thing probably would have stopped right there. An old pitchfork, the handle all cracked, the metal rusty, the tips of both the outside—what was the word? tines?—chipped off.

  Ingrid took the pitchfork and jabbed it at the driver’s-side window. Nothing happened. Smashing car windows was bad, unless you had a real good excuse. Ingrid was far from sure about that, but her next try with the pitchfork was more like ramming anyway.

  CRASH! Broken glass all over the place. But maybe not too loud, with the way the wind was getting screechy. Ingrid took another look at the cottage. Two windows at the back, one downstairs, one up, both darkening now, reflecting the storm. She unlocked the door from the inside, opened it, leaned in, popped the trunk. And as she popped the trunk, her eye was drawn to a few CDs scattered on the passenger seat. One of them was Elton John’s Greatest Hits. She picked it up. “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” was cut four.

  Ingrid walked around the car again, opened the trunk wide. She saw: a carpeted interior, a spare tire on the left, a roll of duct tape. She reached under the hood, felt the locking mechanism. Doing that made her lean back slightly, brought her gaze up to the back of the house.

  Julia’s face appeared in the window, a pale oval, almost as white as the snow.

  twenty-eight

  AND THEN JULIA’S face was gone.

  A jolt went through Ingrid. She bolted away without a thought, like one of those prey-type animals that survive by speed. And maybe like them too, she headed first in the wrong direction, toward those distant woods. It was only after ten or fifteen yards that her brain checked in and she realized where she had to go. Ingrid wheeled around, her cleats digging through the snow, and took off on a long diagonal past the farthest cottage, through the fringe of evergreens, across 392—not a car in sight—and into Grampy’s fields. One thing about Ingrid: She could run, and now she ran her all-time fastest, everything flying by in a blur. She looked back only once, as she reached the far side of 392, and through a gap in the evergreens saw the cottage—door hanging wide open, no one in sight.

  Ingrid crossed Grampy’s fields to the long driveway, sprinted past the shed and the barn, around the house to the back door. Locked? Not Grampy. He came from another time. Ingrid threw open the door.