The Winter of the Robots (4 page)

“Thanks.” I felt myself redden.

“So, is there any new video?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing useful.” I’d checked again that morning.

“Oh well. We’ll get some soon. Hey, can you tell me how
to check it myself?” The bus door opened, and she jumped on. I got on right behind her, and we ended up sitting next to each other. When Oliver got on at the next stop, he raised his eyebrows in an annoyingly meaningful way.

I didn’t talk to him until second period, social studies. “Hey.” I took my usual seat next to him.

“Don’t you want to sit next to your girlfriend?” he asked.

“Oh, knock it off, Ollie.” He hated being called that, and I only used it when I wanted to annoy him.

“Sorry, Jimbo.” He pretended to look at his textbook until class started.

The teacher, Ms. Holtz, came in looking grim.

“If you’ll all be quiet,” she said. “If you’ll all be quiet!” she said again, this time louder. Ms. Holtz was never loud. It surprised everyone into shutting up.

“I have some important news about one of your classmates.” Her voice was hoarse. “Dmitri Volkov is missing. His parents haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

The whole class turned to look at Dmitri’s empty desk, their faces puzzled.

“If anyone knows anything, please go to the principal’s office. The police are there now, trying to figure out …” She stopped when a chair squeaked against the floor. Oliver stood up and shoved his books into his bag, zipped it up.

“Oliver, do you know something?” Ms. Holtz asked.

“I saw him yesterday afternoon,” Oliver said. “I don’t know anything, but I saw him.”

“Go, go.” Ms. Holtz waved at the door.

Oliver shouldered his bag and left. Everyone was so quiet, the only sounds were his footsteps, then the door opening and closing. He didn’t come back to class.

Kids were whispering about Dmitri for the rest of the day. Most said that Dmitri had fled town after committing a crime: he’d beaten someone up, robbed a store, or stolen a car. Possibly all three. A kid at lunch said he’d heard about the disappearance the night before. His brother knew Dmitri’s sister. He said that Dmitri had definitely done something bad, and that he’d run away before. Last time he’d been found in Kansas City with a duffel bag full of stolen golf balls. “He was selling them on the street,” the kid said. Maybe he got part of the story wrong, but he wasn’t making it up. Selling golf balls on the black market in Missouri? Who would make that up?

I checked the camera website as soon as I got home. There were three new clips of video, but none of them were of otters. Each was just a blur of snow and shadows flickering into nothingness.

I had a sickening feeling. The cameras had been stolen. Those blurry clips were the cameras being jostled as they were grabbed from behind and turned off.

So much for fate being on my side.

I watched each of the clips again, but couldn’t see anything to confirm my theory.

I looked again at the clip from the night before—there was no new video from that camera. Maybe the thieves had found that camera in the night, the one closest to the fence, and had come back today for the others. I watched the clip a few times. I kept noticing the four fluttering dots of silver, tiny bright moths in the sea of shadows.

I paused the video when the dots were on the screen, took a screen shot, and opened Mom’s photo-editing software. I pasted the screen shot into the canvas, then went to the image settings and increased the brightness and contrast until a shape emerged. Two shapes, actually: a pair of feet. The camera was pointed down, toward the woodpile, so it made sense that that was all they would get. It was enough to ID the thief, though.

The silver dots I’d seen were the metallic tips of bootlaces. The laces themselves were black, threaded into boots that were equally black, barely visible even with the contrast cranked up. But I’d seen those boots before. In fact, one of those feet had crushed my toe and nearly removed a pinkie toenail.

The boots belonged to Dmitri Volkov, Oliver’s science-project partner—and missing person.

I caught Oliver at his locker before lunch the next day. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him since social studies the day before. He’d been off-line all night, probably because he didn’t want people asking him about Dmitri—which was exactly what I wanted to ask him about.

“Did you tell Dmitri about the ottercams?” I whispered.

“I didn’t know it was a secret.”

“So you admit you told him?”

“You only
admit
things you’re ashamed of,” he said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You told a known thief we had expensive cameras lying around, ripe for the taking.”

“You don’t know that he’s a thief.”

“You don’t know that he’s
not
a thief.”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” he said, shutting his locker. “Unless you got permission to use those cameras in the first place.”

I realized people were eavesdropping, pretending to look for something in their lockers or check their text messages.

“Never mind,” I whispered. “I have something to show you. Can you come to the library?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll miss lunch, but I’m sick of everyone looking at me anyway.”

We went to the library, logged into my email, and opened a picture I’d stored there.

“This was taken by one of the cams.” I traced the outline of feet with my finger. “These are boots.” I pointed at the silver blobs. “You can see metal bootlace tips there and there, and there.”

“You mean aglets.” Oliver knew the words for things I didn’t know had words.

“Whatever. They’re metal.” I dropped my voice lower. “Do they remind you of anyone?”

“Lots of people wear boots. Boots usually have laces. Laces always have aglets.”

“Not like these,” I said. Dmitri’s aglets were oversized and heavy. When he didn’t double-tie his bootlaces, you heard them rattling in the hallways. The ones in the picture were the same. “I bet that’s Dmitri. I think he stole my cameras.”

“Great. If he turns up, you can ask for them back.” He stood up and grabbed his backpack.

“That’s my point. This could help us figure out what happened to him. He was at the junkyard sometime before he disappeared.”

“So tell the police.”

“I want to go look, first,” I said. Maybe there were footprints, or something. “Can you come with me after school?”

“No.”

“Come on, Oliver. You’re in this, too. You told Dmitri about the cams.”

“So what?”

I decided I was going about this the wrong way. “Look, I could use your help. You’re way smarter than me. If there is a clue, you’ll see it. I won’t.”

“So we’re playing Hardy Boys? What do you hope you’ll find, a crumpled-up train schedule?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you ask Nancy Drew?”

I figured he meant Rocky. “She’s got debate practice. Come on, Oliver. It’ll only take twenty minutes. I don’t want to go alone.” He still wasn’t convinced. “Come on,” I pleaded. “You know how my dad is.”

“
Fine
. I’ll go. I’m going to grab lunch.” It was too late. The bell rang before he got to the door.

Oliver pulled the chain to stop the bus as soon as we were over the bridge. “We might as well get off here,” he said. “It’s closer.”

“All right.” We got off with a couple of other kids on First Street and walked until we saw the neon kangaroo. A shabby-looking guy watched us through the window of the Laundromat. He might have gone in to escape the cold. It was the kind of cold day that makes your skin freeze up and turn to leather.

We headed down West Bank Road and took a left on
Half Street, stepping carefully in the trails Rocky and I had stamped down a few days ago so our shoes wouldn’t fill up with snow. The snow was too deep to make out tracks, so I couldn’t tell if anyone else had used those trails. Oliver was quiet except for his labored breathing in the cold air. We passed under the railroad bridge and came to the fence.

“What we do about this?” he asked.

“We go under.” Somebody had pulled the tree branch out of the gap, making more room to climb under the fence.

“You didn’t tell me about this part,” said Oliver. He took off his backpack and tried to figure out what to do with it, finally unfastening one of the arm straps, feeding it through the fence, and reattaching it. I did the same with my own backpack.

I crawled through first, and pulled the flap back the other way so Oliver could crawl in. He stood up and dusted himself off.

“So where are the ottercams?” He followed my old tracks toward the curving path down the embankment. No, not
my
tracks. Dmitri’s flat-soled boot tracks. Oliver stopped at the steep incline.

“I know where we are,” he said in a strange, hollow voice. He ran on ahead, skidding on an icy patch and regaining his footing.

“Oliver?” I hustled to catch up. By the time I did, he was at the first bend.

“I knew it,” he said, staring at the burned ruins.

“What?” I asked him. I realized we were standing by one of the camera posts, but it had been knocked over. I picked up the metal rod. The wire I’d used to attach the camera to it had been neatly snipped. It wouldn’t have been hard to untwist the wire, but why bother if you had wire cutters?

“Dmitri must have had wire cutters,” I said absently.

“Yeah, he took some of my tools,” said Oliver. His voice was calm, almost disinterested.

“ ‘Took’ borrowed, or ‘took’ stole?”

“I don’t want to talk about wire cutters,” he said. “Do you know where we are, Jim? Do you know what you dragged me to?”

“No.” I dropped the pole.

“Did you wonder what those buildings were?” Oliver asked.

“Of course I wondered. I tried to look it up, but it was no use.”

“Jim, this is the site of Nomicon.”

“Nomicon?”

“The place my dad worked.”

“Oh.” If I’d ever known the name of the place his dad worked, I’d forgotten about it. It didn’t come up much because his dad—

“Oh,” I said again.

“This is where my dad died,” said Oliver.

We crawled through the gap in the fence and headed back up Half Street, Oliver lagging behind. I turned back around a couple of times to make sure he was still there. When we passed under the railroad bridge, I saw that he’d stopped, was trembling and crying.

I went back. “I didn’t know,” I told him, reaching out to nudge his elbow. How could I? I’d never been to Nomicon.

He yanked his arm away and let loose with a torrent of swearwords and accusations. The gist of it was that I shouldn’t have dragged him there, and that I was a jerk for doing so, and there were lots of things I could do next, and/or things he would do to me. His voice rose and mixed with the roar of a train rumbling overhead.

“Oliver, I didn’t know where we were,” I told him when the train had passed. “I never would have made you go there if I’d known.”

“So you ended up there completely by accident?”

“We were just trying to find the otters.”

“You and your fuzzy otters,” he said. He really did say
“fuzzy otters,” and it was funny. I laughed, and then he snorted and laughed, too. It hurt to laugh in the cold air.

“I never did get lunch,” he said. “Let’s try that burger place up there. The one with the kangaroo.”

“Pocket burgers,” I said. “Sure.”

The restaurant was roomier inside than it looked. We sat at a table by the front window, and I watched a street sweeper brushing away the dirty slush on the shoulder of First Street. Oliver picked up the laminated menu and stared at it.

“I wonder if it’s made from real kangaroo meat,” I said.

“They aren’t made of kangaroo,” he said. “They’re pocket burgers. Sam’s in South Minneapolis calls them stuffed burgers. Victoria’s Grill in Saint Paul calls them inside-out cheeseburgers. They’re all the same thing.”

“We were here first!” someone called out, before I could explain to Oliver that I’d been joking about the kangaroo meat. For the first time I noticed the guy behind the grill. He was tall and lanky and wore an apron. “All those places arguing about who had the first inside-out this and stuffed that,” he said. “My granddad did it first. I can prove it.”

“We’ll take your word for it,” said Oliver. “I’ll have a Sidney’s classic with fries and a Coke.”

“Me too,” I said. It would spoil my supper, but I was famished.

“Sorry again,” I told Oliver after we got our Cokes. “I didn’t know that’s where your dad worked.”

“I didn’t recognize it right away, either,” he said. “I thought it was further away.”

“Everything seems a long way away when you’re little.”

He slurped up about half his Coke. I did the same. Being really cold makes you thirsty for some reason.

“I can’t believe they never cleaned up the site,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“Better than putting in a strip mall. At least people aren’t eating burritos where my dad died. Or getting their nails done.”

“Sure. Yeah.”

It was getting dark outside. It must have been past five o’clock, because people were starting to come into the restaurant straight from work. It got noisy with men—they were all men—men talking about contract jobs and uptight customers and zoning ordinances and malfunctioning machines.

“Nineteen fifty-five.” The cook plopped burgers down in front of each of us, and a basket of fries.

“We have to pay already?” Oliver reached into his pocket.

“No, 1955 is when my granddad opened this place. Sam’s came along over a year later.” He shook his head. “They got everybody fooled, mainly ’cause nobody cares what happens up here on the north end.”

“Four Sid Classics and a pitcher over here, Sid!” said one of the men at the table next to us. The cook cut his history lesson short to go throw more meat on the grill.

I took a bite from the burger, and my mouth filled with burning-hot, gooey cheese and diced onions.

“Ack. Hot.” I took some ice from my Coke and sucked on it.

“You have to let it cool,” said one of the guys at the table next to us.

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said around the ice cubes. I recognized him from somewhere.