Bad Little Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

If somebody’s trailing you, make a circle, come back onto your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.
    • Don’t stand up when the enemy’s coming against you. Kneel down. Hide behind a tree.
    • Let the enemy come till he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your hatchet.
     
    For my birthday I’m going to ask Ma for a hatchet.

 
     
    5
     
    A sign loomed ahead: WHITNEY HIGH SCHOOL. HOME OF THE WARRIORS.
    It was a boxy two-story brick structure indistinguishable from a hundred school buildings around the state, except that the cars and trucks in the parking lot looked harder used than the vehicles kids drove in southern Maine. There were also a dozen or so snowmobiles parked in a line on the banked wall of ice. No teenagers had ever ridden Arctic Cats to my alma mater. It was yet another sign of the cultural rift between the suburban and rural parts of the state.
    Schools always reminded me of Sarah, who’d been a teacher before she moved to D.C. If she had carried our baby to term, he or she would be two months old now, I realized. After Sarah miscarried, the doctor offered to tell us the sex of the fetus, but Sarah said she didn’t want to know. She’d said it would make her too sad.
    I’d wanted to know.
    Rivard turned off the engine and hopped out of the truck without waiting for me. I followed him inside, down the greenly lit hall to the vice principal’s office. From my best guess, Whitney High School must have received its last renovation during the Eisenhower administration. The tan lockers and scuffed linoleum floors would have looked at home on the set of the movie Grease.
    The vice principal was a wiry young guy with a ponytail and round little glasses. His outfit—tweed jacket, blue jeans, open-throated hemp shirt—reminded me of a hippie teacher I’d had in elementary school in the backwoods of western Maine. Rivard introduced him to me as a Mr. Mandelbaum.
    “I have to tell you I am very uncomfortable with this situation,” he said. His forehead was furrowed, his eyes wary.
    Rivard had turned his sunglasses around so they faced the back of his head, the way baseball players do. “We just want to ask him a few questions.”
    “If this is some sort of interrogation, I need to call Barney’s parents. I won’t allow you to question him without their consent. The children here have rights.”
    “You’re blowing this way out of proportion,” said Rivard. “We just think Beal can help us out with some information about a case we’re investigating. It’s a routine inquiry. All we want is five minutes.”
    I was fairly certain that my sergeant was misleading the vice principal. He’d told me he suspected Barney Beal of theft and drug dealing. The earlier discomfort I’d felt about this school visit returned as an itchy sensation along my torso.
    Mandelbaum readjusted his glasses on his nose. “If any of your questions seem at all accusatory, I will cancel the interview. Understood?”
    Rivard curled his lips like someone attempting a smile for a portrait photographer. “So where’s Mr. Beal at the moment?”
    “In America Two.”
    “Excuse me?” I said.
    “Social studies,” Mandelbaum explained. “If you wait right here, I’ll go get him.”
    The vice principal carefully closed the door behind him as he left the office.
    “You told Mandelbaum you weren’t going to interrogate the kid,” I said.
    “Just let me handle this, will you?”
    A moment later, the vice principal returned, followed by the Incredible Hulk’s twin brother. “These wardens have a few questions for you, Barney,” Mandelbaum said. “You don’t have to answer anything that makes you uncomfortable.”
    Barney Beal had a brown flattop and painful-looking acne. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt bearing the Teutonic logo of a heavy-metal band that had been popular in the rest of the country three decades ago. His eyes remained blank as