The perfume made his eyes water. Slipping his backpack off his shoulder, he shoved the thin robe inside.
As he tiptoed back through the mess, he spotted an unbroken bottle of perfume and picked it up to smell.
Jasmine.
He’d found the source of the robe’s scent. He added the bottle to the backpack.
In his own room, Mason found his drawing books strewn to the four corners and tucked them into his bag. At least whoever seemed so angry at the furniture didn’t hate art enough to destroy his books.
He found his air gun in the corner, unharmed. Someone had dumped the pellets to the ground, and he scooped them back into the box.
Something about his room made him even more uneasy.
“Not a thief,” he mumbled to himself.
A thief would have taken his pellet gun. Ely, the only other person he knew angry enough to destroy a house, would have taken the gun, too.
Who would tear apart his home and not steal anything? Why?
He dropped the box of pellets into his backpack and slipped his arms back into the straps.
Grabbing the gun, he surveyed his room.
I have a lot of cleaning to do—
Something down the hall clattered loudly enough to make him jump.
Hobos!
Lowering his bag to the floor, Mason removed the box of pellets and retrieved a few for his gun. The barrel clicked shut and he waited, expecting the sound of heavy boots in the hallway.
Nothing happened.
Mason took one slow step forward, easing his weight onto the wood. He took another and another until he reached the end of the hall, his gun raised and ready.
Movement flashed near the back door. He swung his barrel toward it. As his finger squeezed, he jerked the gun upward to avoid hitting the mark.
Midnight.
The neighbor’s black cat shot through the opened back door and into the yard as the pellet embedded itself in the wall.
That was close. The neighbor girl would have killed him if he’d shot her nasty cat.
Mason lowered the gun and surveyed the mess.
I have to secure the house.
The place would be no good to anyone if animals kept walking through.
Tucking his gun under his arm, he searched the kitchen floor for the spare house key that once lived in the back of the silverware drawer. He found it beneath a green loaf of bread.
With a heavy sigh, he left, closing the door behind him and locking it. He could return the next day during Ely’s baseball practice. Maybe he could borrow his cousin Livvy’s Polaroid camera and take a photo of what it looked like now, so later, his aunt and the social services witch could see how much work he’d done to clean it.
Maybe then they’d let him stay.
Mason walked the bike to the front of the house and found himself standing in the same spot on the sidewalk where he’d been when his mother—
He looked up. His sneakers still hung from the telephone lines.
My favorite sneakers.
His mother had told him not to tell his father those were his shoes. But his father was gone now. If his old man ever did come back, he might recognize the sneakers hanging there.
It had rained a few times since he’d moved into his aunt’s house, but still, the chances of him getting new shoes any time soon were slim.
He couldn’t leave them hanging.
Mason laid down the bike and raised the barrel of his pellet gun. Closing one eye, he aimed for the laces.
Steadying, he fired.
The shoes remained hanging like fruit.
A little to the left...
He fired again. The laces whipped up as the shoes plummeted to the ground.
Giddy at his own prowess, Mason ran to them.
He shoved one into his backpack and lifted the other to do the same. As he did, a plastic bag slid from the toe to the heel, hanging there as he stared at it.
Mason blinked at the bag, trying to remember what he’d stuffed into the toe of his shoes. Nothing came to mind.
The contents looked like a collection of cloudy pebbles.
He let the twist holding the bag shut unfurl and plucked out one of the rocks. It seemed unremarkable. He’d had a rock collection as a kid, and he knew what pretty rocks looked like.
These were not pretty.
Where’d they come from?
He looked up at the wires.
Could a bird have put them in the shoe? He’d read something somewhere about birds eating rocks for digestion. Crows maybe.
A bird wouldn’t steal a whole bag of stones, though, would it?
Had his mother put the rocks in there? Did she do it for the weight, knowing she wanted to throw the shoes over the telephone wires?
Mason noticed a man watching him from a porch a few houses away. He couldn’t risk the man reporting him as a trespasser.
He stuffed the shoes and the bag of rocks into his backpack and jogged back to the bike.
Pointing away from the man, he pedaled.
&&&
Chapter Twenty
Twenty-seven years ago, Navy Special Warfare Center, Coronado, California
Shee gaped at Mason, her last bite of hamburger hovering near her lips.
“And?”
“And what?” he asked.
“Did you ever find out why she put rocks in your shoes?”
“I guess to give them the weight to throw them up there,” Mason shrugged to underscore his supposed confusion, but his expression suggested he was still hiding something.
She pressed. “But why would your mother throw your shoes up there?”
“Dunno.”
Shee looked away, thinking. “Maybe your dad bought them for you and she wanted to piss him off?”
“If so, it was a bad idea,” he muttered, his expression darkening.
Shee frowned. She hadn’t meant
