But it was a normal house. Sparsely furnished, yet not sparsely enough to feel weird. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it had a welcoming feel, I didn’t feel like I was walking into the lair of a predator.
“Sit down,” he told me. It wasn’t quite a command, but also not quite a friendly offer for me to make myself at home.
I was extremely self-conscious about my backpack as I sat down on the couch—I had this vision of a prominent gun-shaped bulge on the side. I unzipped the backpack, took out a notebook, then set the backpack on the carpet next to my feet without zipping it up again.
“Want a glass of water?” he asked.
“Oh, no, thank you,” I said. My throat went dry as I said it, and I barely got the last word out. I coughed.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” he said.
He walked out of the living room. He was probably going to be gone long enough for me to take the gun out of my backpack and shove it between the couch cushions for easier access, but if he heard the rustling and poked his head back into the room, that would be outrageously bad. Instead, I just sat there, hoping I wasn’t sweating too much.
Maybe I should abandon this insane plan. Apologize for bothering him and get the hell out of here.
Then how would I feel when the next kid disappeared?
How should I feel? Why was this my responsibility? Why was I, a fourteen-year-old, sitting in the living room of a serial kidnapper? Getting into a fight with Todd and causing him to walk home by himself didn’t mean that I was obligated to put myself at risk for being murdered—or worse—did it?
I would be well within my moral rights to say, “Hey, I’m just a kid!” and not get involved.
But I was here, on his couch, with a gun in my backpack, and I was going to see this through…while making every possible effort to ensure that I did not become his next victim.
I sat there as I heard the faucet turn on in the kitchen.
It turned off.
Mr. Martin walked back into the living room. Without a word, he set a glass of water, only half full, on the coffee table in front of me.
“Thank you,” I said, even though there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d drink anything he offered to me.
“Are you hot?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“You’re sweating.”
“Oh. Yeah, I got hot when I walked here.”
“Don’t you own a bicycle?”
He asked it like an innocent question, no trace of menace that I could detect. But I’d walked here because he might recognize my bicycle from that night.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m trying to get in shape.”
“You can get in shape with a bicycle.”
“I know. I heard walking’s better.”
Mr. Martin nodded. He sat down on a wooden rocking chair that faced the couch, though he did not rock. “How’s this going to work?”
I slid the pencil out of the metal spiral on my notebook. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions. It shouldn’t take very long.” My mouth went dry again, but I tried to hide it. I didn’t want him to urge me to take a drink of water.
“All right.”
“Your name is Gerald Martin, right?”
“Yes.”
I wrote it down. “Spelled just like it sounds?”
“Yes.”
“Where and when were you born?”
“Los Angeles, California, in 1926.”
“Why did you move to Fairbanks?”
“I like the cold. And I like that it’s far away from everything.”
I wrote that down as well. If he asked to look at my notebook, he’d see legitimate notes taken about our interview.
“What happened on the night that Todd Lester disappeared?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Martin. “I’ve never even met him.”
“I mean, what happened to you?”
“I got woken up around one-thirty by a knock at the door. A state trooper. A nice enough guy, considering that he was waking me up to accuse me of kidnapping a kid I’d never even met. It wasn’t like I had to get up at six to go to work or anything, right? I told him that I didn’t know anything about it, and that he was welcome to look around my house even though he didn’t have a search warrant. Are you getting this? Should I slow down?”
“I’m getting it,” I said, frantically scribbling.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to read this paper and find out that I’ve been misquoted.”
“You won’t be.”
“I’m trusting you.”
“Like I said, you’ll get to read it before I turn it in.”
“You live over in Gulfstream Acres, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure you ever told me your name.”
“I did. Curtis Black.”
“Oh, that’s right. Go on.”
“Did anything else happen that night?” I asked.
“Some more state troopers showed up. Searched my place. Left it a mess even though I specifically asked them to be respectful, since I was letting them do it without a warrant. They didn’t find anything, of course. Every once in a while they come back to ask me more questions and harass me some more. All my neighbors think I did it. And now I’ve got kids coming to interview me about it. I should’ve stayed in L.A.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three years.”
“I’m not here to interview you because I think you did it,” I assured him. “My interview is about what it’s like to be falsely accused.”
“You didn’t write down the three years,” Mr. Martin told me.
I wrote it down. “Why do they think it was you?”
“My neighbors? Because the cops keep showing up at my door to chat.”
“I meant the cops.”
“They don’t think it’s me. I’m just on their list of suspects. A very short list. Personally, I think it was his parents, but that’s off the record. You know what ‘off the record’ means, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It means don’t put it
