Fighting Chance by B K Stevens

Author:B K Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty

“In the cemetery,” Marie said, and hurried away, a hunched-over black blur.

That wouldn’t have been my first choice for a place to meet, but I was surprised she’d agreed to talk to me at all. And at least she seemed to be all right. I’d asked if Ted gave her a hard time after we left, and she’d said she’d told him we were working on a social studies project. I don’t know if he’d believed her. As long as he hadn’t hit her, that was good enough.

Some other could-be-worse things had happened, too. My mother’s car was out of the shop, the windshield replaced and all other damage repaired. She hadn’t hesitated about letting me have it today, hadn’t lectured me about needing to take better care of it—of course she hadn’t, since she didn’t know the truth about why the car had been attacked. I should’ve probably felt guiltier about that, but mostly I felt good about having the car back.

And Berk wasn’t as mad as I’d expected. When I sat down across from him before math got started, he was cool and stiff at first, but he laughed when I told him about a dumb thing that’d happened during homeroom. When class ended, we walked out together, complaining about too much homework. Things felt almost normal.

Also, during the first fifteen minutes of lunch period, Graciana and I got in a quick interview with Mr. Carver, the assistant principal. He’d been close with Coach Colson, and he was a decent guy—fair, reasonable, not too full of himself. Just about every student I knew was hoping he’d be the new principal when Dr. Lombardo retired. He didn’t have anything new to tell us, but it felt good to check off our last interview.

As I drove to the cemetery, I felt pretty good. So far, this hadn’t been a bad day. Maybe Marie would say something that would let us rule Paul out completely, and then I could go home feeling even better.

I parked in the gravel lot. The cemetery’s on the edge of town, a spread-out place with a tall gray stone gate and a wrought iron fence. It’s on some registry of historic sites, I guess because it’s got a section set aside for graves of Confederate soldiers. Those are toward the front; the farther back you go, the newer the graves get. Some tombstones are large and elaborate, and every so often there’s a statue of an angel, or a child hugging a lamb, or a veiled lady weeping over an urn. Tour buses stop here, and some people come for picnics. That seems weird to me, but maybe there’s something I’m not getting. The tombstones for the newer graves, toward the back, tend to be smaller and simpler.

I found Marie standing by the newest grave, the one that didn’t have a tombstone yet. Her head was bowed—probably, she wasn’t praying, just had her head down because she almost always kept it down—but I figured I should play it safe.

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