Wicked Cruel (8 page)

And it does. The screen goes blank. The computer shuts down with a
whissssssss
.

Power surges, right? I crawl to the window and look at the street. It’s breezy out there, but nothing major. The moon is still nearly full and it’s casting a glow on the lawn. I’m panting as if I ran a hundred-meter dash.

The laptop starts up again, but this time there’s no music. I step to my door and try it again, but it’s locked fast. The IM lozenge is flashing. I click it.

I go to my buddy list and click Gary’s real IM name, but it says he’s offline. I clear the screen, but another one pops up immediately.

I yank the power cord and throw it toward the wall. The laptop turns off. I stare at the screen and wipe my forehead with my hand. Then I try the door again, easier this time. It’s still locked.

I pull my chair over to the window and watch for David to walk up the street. It takes at least an hour, but he shows.

I start yelling as loud as I can as soon as he enters the house. I hear him thumping up the stairs, calling, “What’s the matter?”

“I’m locked in here. The door won’t open.”

“Hold on.”

I hear the knob rattle, then turn. He pushes the door open and grins.

“It wouldn’t open from this side,” I say.

He grabs the interior knob and this time it does turn. “It was just stuck,” he says. “This gadget’s probably a hundred years old. Maybe more. You ever have trouble with it before?”

“I’ve never closed it.”

The knobs are old round brass things. “They should be replaced,” David says. “Leave the door open for now.”

“Don’t worry. I will. Light on, too.”

“You’re white as a ghost.” He laughs. “Bad choice of words, huh? You gonna be okay?”

“Can’t get much worse.”

“Just yell if you need me.”

“I will. If I can.”

It’s going to be another long night.

I sat like a zombie through all of my classes this morning, yawning and shaking my head to keep my eyes open. Scapes comes up to me at lunch and asks if anything more happened.

“Oh, nothing much,” I say. “Got locked in my room. Heard Bainer talking on my television. The usual stuff when you start losing your mind.”

He laughs nervously. “That was creepy in his house. It really felt like he was watching us.”

I shrug. Things have been a lot eerier in my house than at Bainer’s.

“Would you go back?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I’d rather leave that place alone.”

“Me too.” He hesitates for a minute, then sits across from me. I’ve barely touched my disgusting corn dog, but I take a bite.

“His gums used to bleed all the time,” Scapes says. “For no reason. Remember how he always had that phlegmy stuff between his teeth?”

The corn dog hasn’t gotten too far down, and it suddenly comes racing back up. I spit it onto my tray and grimace as stomach acid burns my throat. I take a swig of grape drink and swish it around in my mouth.

Scapes looks at the floor and frowns. “I wish I knew what really happened to him, you know? Maybe we had nothing to do with it.”

“Maybe.”

“All I know is … all I know is I wouldn’t do it again. Not any of it.”

I dodge Gary after school and head out the back way, crossing the blacktop basketball court and turning up Marlboro Street. It’s four blocks to my old elementary school. I walk as fast as I can. If anybody would know what happened to Bainer, it’d be the principal.

All of the students are gone and the janitor is pushing a wide mop along the hallway. I stick my head into the principal’s office. “Mrs. Graham?”

“Yes?” I can tell that she recognizes me but is searching her brain for my name. “Jordan … How are you?” She steps out from behind her desk.

“I was wondering if you knew anything about Lorne Bainer.”

She touches her lips with two fingers. “You mean, since he moved away?”

“Yeah. Since then.”

She shakes her head slowly. “No, I haven’t heard a thing. Were you hoping to contact him?”

No. He’s taken care of that. “I was just wondering how he might be doing.”

“Hmmm.” She squints a little, sizing me up, probably wondering about my motivations. “Well, I know that they moved out of the country.”

“Out of the
country
? Like to Canada or something?”

“Farther than that. His parents were from Germany, so they returned there.”

“Oh. You haven’t heard anything about him since?”

“Not at all. Sorry. I know you two were”—she squints a bit—“friendly?”

“Not exactly.”

She leans against her desk and smiles at me.

I’m confused. “They didn’t move to Pennsylvania? Or Japan?”

Her smile gets broader. “Oh no,” she says. “The father was very … old-country, if you know what I mean. Very traditional. They were definitely going back to Europe.”

“So as far as you know, he’s okay?”

“As far as I know. Is anything wrong, Jordan?”

I shake my head. “No. I just was thinking about him lately. He wasn’t treated so good around here.”

She lets out her breath and stands straighter. “You’re right about that. Lorne was … unusual. Some children used that against him.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nice that you’re thinking of him.”

I turn to go and mumble, “Thanks.”

“Jordan.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve all been cruel to others at some point in our lives. Sometimes in a small way, sometimes more seriously. And sometimes, unfortunately, we never get the chance to atone for that.”

I’m feeling squirmy now. She must know about that time I pushed him into the chairs.

“But we can learn from that, right?” she says. “We can do good turns for someone else and make the world a little better.”

I swallow and try to say thanks again, but my throat is tight. So I just nod really hard and walk away toward home. I’ve got some research to do on the Internet.

*   *   *

miller funeral home davenport pa

I press
search
and the website pops up on my screen. The obituaries are listed by date, and the first page shows all of the ones from this month. Just as I was starting to suspect, there’s no Bainer. I start clicking on them anyway.

The third one down shows
Brandon Matthews, Age 12
.

It’s the exact same obit with the names changed, and a cancer foundation instead of one for brain injuries. I click on
the guest book and find the same sympathy wishes for Brandon Matthews: “… we’re soothed that his lingering distress is over …”

I do another quick search just to make sure. There’s no Western Pennsylvania University.

Gary. You bastard. Prepare for another bloody lip.

I’ve calmed down a little by the time I get to his house. We go up to his room and he shuts the door, even though nobody else is home but the dog.

Obviously, he did some cutting and pasting. I trusted his links and that made for a great hoax.

“But how did you get Bainer to show up on my computer?”

Gary bursts out laughing. “The links were easy. I just fished around online until I found the right obituary, copied it, and made my own document with Bainer’s name in it. And it worked exactly like I wanted it to.”

“What do you mean?” I’m getting angry again.

He smacks my arm. “This wasn’t about you, man. When Scapes beat me up, I spent the next two weeks figuring out how I could get revenge. And when you said you’d seen Bainer on the Internet, it hit me: scare Scapes to death. Let him know that this crap he dishes out can be serious. Maybe even jail-time serious if it goes far enough.”

He flops onto his bed and laughs again. “You were the perfect helper, even though you didn’t know it. You were scared out of your wits, so Scapes bought everything we said. When I sent you those fake links to the obituary and the sympathy notices, it clinched it. I left you in limbo about it so I could turn the screws on Scapes even tighter.”

I stare out the window. Barney is whimpering in the hall,
so I open the door and let him in. “So that’s one part of it,” I say. “The easy part.”

“What do you mean?”

“How’d you get him on that video? How’d you get my computer to turn on by itself?”

Barney jumps onto the bed and Gary starts wrestling with him. “You really think you saw Bainer on some video?”

“You think I’m lying?”

“Okay,” he says. “You
think
you saw him.”

“I know I saw him.”

“You didn’t.” He gently shoves Barney off the bed and sits up with his feet dangling. The bottoms of his white socks, just below the toes, say
Hanes
in red stitching. “Look,” he says, “maybe some of these techno guys can do that—make images appear on somebody else’s computer. But I don’t know anything about stuff like that. And anyway, you said he showed up first on your father’s screen. How would I have known that you were looking at that particular video, at that particular time, on your father’s computer? How could anybody know that?”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I had nothing to do with what you say you saw. I just picked up on what you told me the next day and took it from there, with that fake obituary and all. You were so convinced you’d seen Bainer’s ugly mug on the screen, I figured I’d freak you out some and take Scapes down a notch in the process.”

I think about each time I actually saw Bainer online, and I guess it was only three times. I also heard that music a bunch of times, but I’d been searching Freewheeler earlier those nights.…

“I did see him,” I say firmly.

He shakes his head and smiles. “Like your uncle said, it was the power of suggestion. You thought you might have glimpsed him, and your imagination kicked in. Reading that obit made you all the more sure that you’d seen him. You saw a mirage, buddy.”

I don’t know what I saw, but it definitely wasn’t my imagination.

He got me good, and he knows it. But this doesn’t add up. Too many things happened that were out of Gary’s control. I’m not done with this. And I have a very strong feeling Bainer isn’t done yet either.

I do a “Lorne Bainer” search on the Internet and find nothing—no sign that he’s dead, no sign that he’s alive—then I study that stupid “Way Back into Love” video a couple of times. Uncle David’s been downstairs watching reruns of
Family Guy
and
The Simpsons
all evening.

When I hear him turn on the shower around nine thirty, I put on my sweatshirt and gloves and slip out of the house. If he even notices that I’m gone, he’ll figure that I’m over at Gary’s.

Our street is very dark and heavily tree-lined, so I’m out of sight of the house in seconds. I test the flashlight quickly after turning the corner. It works fine.

I take my time walking the back streets, but I’m pumped up. I’m scared, yeah, but I’m also excited. Bainer is out there somewhere—cyberspace or afterlife or maybe just over in Europe. But he’s had his eye on me all week, and I’ve had enough of it.

This is my city; I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’m not going to be driven out of town—or out of my mind—by some annoying kid who hasn’t been around for eighteen months. (Not in the flesh anyway.)

I cross Main before I get downtown and cut through the edge of the college. There are lots of people over by the student center and walking the paths, and an Aerosmith song is blasting from an open dorm window. I stay in the shadows, scuffing through leaves and acorns.

I pass the rows of off-campus houses and head for Bainer’s. There are sounds in the distance—students talking on a porch, an airplane overhead, traffic on Main Street—but I feel cut off from the town back here, a good block away from any signs of life. The air is clear and cold.

I walk slowly across the lawn, and the wind lifts a few leaves into the air. Something scurries through the brush over by the empty warehouse—a cat or a possum maybe.

I put a hand inside the windowsill, place my foot against the stone foundation, and haul myself up. I step to the floor as gently as I can, trying to avoid making any sound.

Then I breathe. My heart is racing. I wait for my eyes to adjust and my nerves to steady. I slide my back down the wall and take a seat.

There’s nothing to see down here, but I sit for ten minutes, letting the house get used to me, allowing the energy to settle.

I don’t even need the flashlight, but I take it with me as I cross the living room and tiptoe up the stairs. What will I do up here? Try to talk to Bainer? Just sit and wait until something happens?

I catch my breath sharply—the attic door is open. I know we didn’t leave it like that.

I edge up to it and flick on the flashlight, since the hallway going up is pitch dark.