By the Light of a Thousand Stars by Jamie Langston Turner

Author:Jamie Langston Turner [Jamie Langston Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC042000, FIC026000
ISBN: 9781441204387
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

18

Lists of Things

Barb heard about it all an hour later, after the twins had come back home. Joshua and Caleb’s hunch about Hardy was right, although when they first arrived at the school, they thought for a few minutes that they might have been mistaken. Blake pulled into the parking lot right behind them, and together the three of them walked all the way around the athletic building. The door was locked, of course. That was the first thing they checked. The two windows were higher and smaller than the boys remembered and, from all appearances, painted shut. There were no signs of forced entry—no telltale marks of being pried open, no broken panes, none of that.

Right away Blake was ready to call it off, but the twins stalled, suggesting that they climb up and look through one of the windows. Before Blake could object, Josh pulled the van directly up next to the building.

“Yeah, and he almost sideswiped it,” Caleb told Barb.

“Hey, I had a good two inches to spare, no kidding,” Josh said. “Bozo here is exaggerating as usual,” he said, pointing to Caleb. “I’m up there in the driver’s seat sweating it out, and what’s he doing? Hopping around down on the ground screaming, ‘Watch out! Dad’s gonna have a hernia if you wreck the paint job!’ So much for sneaking up to peek in the window. We might as well have brought our trumpets along and played a fanfare.”

“Aw, Hardy had heard us long before then,” Caleb said.

And it was true. He had heard them drive up and had immediately retreated to the bathroom and closed the door. It was the closed bathroom door, in fact, that made them all suspicious. The boys scrambled up onto the top of the van first, pressed their faces against the windowpanes, and reported to Blake what they saw. Hardy had left a half dozen empty pop cans scattered on a table, along with a few small yogurt cartons and a potato chip bag, but, as Caleb put it, “That didn’t really mean much since everybody knows coaches are a bunch of slobs. They could’ve left all that stuff out.”

“The bathroom door, though,” Joshua said, “now that’s what got our attention. Why would it be pulled all the way shut if nobody was in it?”

“I noticed it first,” Caleb said.

“You mentioned it first. That’s the first thing I saw when I looked in. I didn’t say anything, though, ’cause I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice it.”

Caleb hooked his fist and faked a swing at his brother. They went on to tell how Blake had finally pounded on the door of the building and called to Hardy, telling him they knew he was in there, that Philip was all right and kept asking to see him, that they were getting ready to call the principal on Blake’s cell phone and get him to come out with a key unless Hardy wanted to go ahead and unlock the door from the inside.

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