Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 4

** A message from the author - I'm well aware that the next Olympics are being held in Rio and not in Chicago, guys. This is fiction - just go with it! **

"And you're sure he hasn't tried to contact you in any way over the last twenty-four hours?"

I sat on the couch in our living room with my eyes fixed on Henry as the police interrogated me.  One of the police officers who had knocked on our door was Dan Marshall's father. Before I'd been kicked out of Weeping Willow High School, my locker had been next to Dan's since freshman year, and now he was dating my friend Cheryl. It was nice, for a change, to be dealing with police without already being in trouble, but having to hand over my mobile phone to the cops made me feel queasy. As a broad-shouldered cop I didn't recognize with excessive chest hair poking out from under his shirt collar pawed through my text messages, I was so relieved that I had already deleted the messages I'd received from Violet that I felt like I might pass out.

However, it wouldn't take the cops too long to figure out that anyone who was getting sneaky text messages would delete them. The cops would access my phone's record in the iCloud, for sure. It would be easy enough to assure my mom that I deleted the messages from Violet without reading them closely because I wanted to stay out of trouble, but if Trey were to be foolish enough to try to get in touch with me at my old cell phone number, there would be nothing I could do to save him. There was no doubt in my mind that the cops were going to take my phone with them back to the Weeping Willow police station. As a minor with an extensive criminal record of my own, there wasn't much I could do to prevent them from doing that.

"He hasn't tried to get in touch with me," I said. "I haven't seen him since January, and I've only gotten two letters from him since he went back to his school up north."

"Can we see them?" the policewoman interrogating me asked. She was writing down everything I said in longhand on a small spiral notebook, which struck me as awfully old-fashioned.  Her badge gave her name as Officer Cooper, although she'd asked me questions for fifteen minutes before taking her winter coat off so that I could see it.

"They're at my dad's house in Florida," I said, telling the truth. "But he never said anything about breaking out of school."

This was also the truth. Trey never provided me with many details about Northern Reserve, about his class schedule, his teachers, or the other kids with whom he was locked up.  I had learned more about Trey's life in reform school when Henry and I had driven up there to break him out in January than I'd ever gathered directly from him. For instance, before Henry infiltrated the school pretending to be a student, I hadn't been aware that a high fence with razor wire surrounded Northern Reserve. Just like at a real prison, the boys were led in lines between buildings for classes and meals. It wasn't so very different from the Dearborn School for Girls, but in so many ways it was worse. I didn't know if Trey avoided going into detail about his daily routine there to spare me the burden of thinking about it, or because students there weren't allowed to use computers and if a censor were to object to the content of one of his letters, he'd be forced to rewrite it by hand.

It was almost eight o'clock at night, and the dinner Mom and Glenn had made sat untouched in the oven. They sat at the table in the kitchen with Mrs. Emory, who wiped tears from her eyes and clutched her cell phone tightly in her left hand. Mom kept looking at me over the heads of the cops, probably convinced that I knew something that I wasn't telling them.

"Do you have any idea where he might be headed?" The policewoman's pen hovered over her spiral notebook as if she expected me to spit out his destination on command.

It was impossible to answer quickly when I both wanted to seem like I was helping but also didn't want accidentally to provide the police with information that might help them find and detain him. Trey and I had never designated a rendezvous point in case we needed to find each other during an emergency, which—considering the events of the last few months—seemed like a pretty careless oversight on our part. As much as I could remember of our previous conversations, we had never talked about his favorite places or people he knew outside of Weeping Willow. Whereas I had grandparents outside St. Louis, I was pretty sure Trey's maternal set of grandparents lived right there in Weeping Willow, and he'd have been a total fool to have sought protection at their house. Other than them, the only extended family I knew of was an aunt he had in Osh Kosh, presumably Mr. Emory's sister, and I doubted he'd go there. If he had a bundle of money secreted away for an elaborate escape to another country, I was completely ignorant of it.