“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m sorry I made a m—”
But the swimming gets worse before she can finish. She doesn’t exactly faint, but the world pulls away from her, becomes something she’s looking at through a smudged window rather than something she’s actually in. She slides down the wall, amazed by the sight of her own knees, clad in green tights, coming up to meet her. That is when Mr. Haggerty scoops her up and carries her downstairs to the school nurse’s office.
16
Andy’s little green Subaru is perfect, as far as Morris is concerned—not apt to attract a first glance, let alone a second. There are only thousands just like it. He backs down the driveway and sets off for the North Side, keeping an eye out for cops and obeying every speed limit.
At first it’s almost a replay of Friday night. He stops once more at the Bellows Avenue Mall and once more visits Home Depot. He goes to the tools section, where he picks out a screwdriver with a long blade and a chisel. Then he drives on to the square brick hulk that used to be the Birch Street Recreation Center and once more parks in the space marked RESERVED FOR REC DEPT. VEHICLES.
It’s a good spot in which to do dirty business. There’s a loading dock on one side and a high hedge on the other. He’s visible only from behind—the baseball field and crumbling basketball courts—but with school in session, those areas are deserted. Morris goes to the basement window he noticed before, squats, and rams the blade of his screwdriver into the crack at the top. It goes in easily, because the wood is rotten. He uses the chisel to widen the crack. The glass rattles in its frame but doesn’t break, because the putty is old and there’s plenty of give. The possibility that this hulk of a building has alarm protection is looking slimmer all the time.
Morris swaps the chisel for the screwdriver again. He chivvies it through the gap he’s made, catches the thumb-lock, and pushes. He looks around to make sure he’s still unobserved—it’s a good spot, yes, but breaking and entering in broad daylight is still a scary proposition—and sees nothing but a crow perched on a telephone pole. He inserts the chisel at the bottom of the window, beating it in as deep as it will go with the heel of his hand, then bears down on it. For a moment there’s nothing. Then the window slides up with a squall of wood and a shower of dirt. Bingo. He wipes sweat from his face as he peers in at the stored chairs, card tables, and boxes of junk, verifying that it will be easy to slide in and drop to the floor.
But not quite yet. Not while there’s the slightest possibility that a silent alarm is lighting up somewhere.
Morris takes his tools back to the little green Subaru, and drives away.
17
Linda Saubers is monitoring the mid-morning activity period at Northfield Elementary School when Peggy Moran comes in and tells her that her daughter has been taken sick at Dorton Middle, some three miles away.
“She’s in the nurse’s office,” Peggy says, keeping her voice low. “I understand she vomited and then sort of passed out for a few minutes.”
“Oh my God,” Linda says. “She looked pale at breakfast, but when I asked her if she was okay, she said she was.”
“That’s the way they are,” Peggy says, rolling her eyes. “It’s either melodrama or I’m fine, Mom, get a life. Go get her and take her home. I’ll cover this, and Mr. Jablonski has already called a sub.”
“You’re a saint.” Linda is gathering up her books and putting them into her briefcase.
“It’s probably a stomach thing,” Peggy says, sliding into the seat Linda has just vacated. “I guess you could take her to the nearest Doc in the Box, but why bother spending thirty bucks? That stuff’s going around.”
“I know,” Linda says . . . but she wonders.
She and Tom have been slowly but surely digging themselves out of two pits: a money pit and a marriage pit. The year after Tom’s accident, they came perilously close to breaking up. Then the mystery cash started coming, a kind of miracle, and things started to turn around. They aren’t all the way out of either hole even yet, but Linda has come to believe they will get out.
With their parents focused on brute survival (and Tom, of course, had the additional challenge of recovering from his injuries), the kids have spent far too much time flying on autopilot. It’s only now, when she feels she finally has room to breathe and time to look around her, that Linda clearly senses something not right with Pete and Tina. They’re good kids, smart kids, and she doesn’t think either of them has gotten caught in the usual teenage traps—drink, drugs, shoplifting, sex—but there’s something, and she supposes she knows what it is. She has an idea Tom does, too.
God sent manna from heaven when the Israelites were starving, but cash drops from more prosaic sources: banks, friends, an inheritance, relatives who are in a position to help out. The mystery money didn’t come from any of those sources. Certainly not from relatives. Back in 2010, all their kinfolk were just as strapped as Tom and Linda themselves. Only kids are relatives, too, aren’t they? It’s easy to overlook that because they’re so close, but they are. It’s absurd to think the cash came from Tina, who’d only been nine years old when the envelopes started arriving, and who couldn’t have kept a secret like that, anyway.
Pete, though . . . he’s the closemouthed one. Linda remembers her mother saying when Pete was only five, “That one’s got a lock on his lips.”
Only where could a kid of thirteen have come by that kind of money?
As she drives to Dorton Middle to pick up her ailing daughter, Linda thinks, We never asked any questions, not really, because we were afraid to. No one who didn’t go through those terrible months after Tommy’s accident could get that, and I’m not going to apologize for it. We had reasons to be cowardly. Plenty of them. The two biggest were living right under our roof, and counting on us to support them. But it’s time to ask who was supporting whom. If it was Pete, if Tina found out and that’s what’s troubling her, I need to stop being a coward. I need to open my eyes.
I need some answers.
18
Mid-morning.