“Maybe.”
Mom sighed, like I was trying to exploit a loophole in my punishment. “If you want to earn some money, I’ll allow that, but you have to give me their name and phone number. And if you think I won’t bother to call them to check up on you, you are very sorely mistaken.”
“Okay.”
“Consider yourself lucky. If I waited to discuss this with your father, your punishment would’ve been worse.”
“I’m glad you took the initiative.”
Mom glanced at her wristwatch. “And now I’m going to get in trouble. I said I was just running straight home and back. I forgot my purse.”
She gave me one more hug, grabbed her purse, and left.
Now I could properly react to the events of the day, which I did by hurrying into the bathroom, crouching down beside the toilet, and vomiting until there was nothing left to purge.
I flushed the toilet but continued to sit on the bathroom floor for a while.
How bad was my situation, really? I didn’t much care that I was grounded. And maybe talking to a shrink would do me some good. He might have some useful insight on navigating the tricky social situation of maintaining a truce with a serial killer.
Mr. Martin wouldn’t be punished for Todd’s death, but I wasn’t some knight in the Middle Ages who’d sworn an oath to avenge the king. I was a teenager. It wasn’t my responsibility to see the bad guy brought to justice. I hadn’t been some trembling little kid who was too frightened to tell the authorities what he saw—I’d shared every detail about that night, and it wasn’t my fault that they didn’t have enough information to hang him for it.
My official level of peril came down to whether or not I could trust Mr. Martin to keep his end of the deal. He’d promised there would be no more victims. Would he stick to that?
Would he decide that I was a loose end that needed to be cut off? If I was wondering if he could be trusted, maybe he was wondering the same thing, and if he decided that I couldn’t be…
Hard to believe that I’d thought this day would end with Mr. Martin being handcuffed and shoved into the back of a patrol car, while reporters gathered around me to hear the tale of the brave boy hero who’d ended the string of Alaska abductions.
Of course, right now I could also be standing in Mr. Martin’s living room, staring at his bloody corpse, hearing sirens blaring in the distance as I desperately tried to find and get rid of every bit of evidence that I’d been there. I’d flee through his back door, praying there were no witnesses, and then I’d replay the events over and over and over and over in my mind, wondering if I’d missed something. And when there was a loud knock at the door and voices ordering me to open up immediately, I’d know that yes, I had indeed missed something, and hopefully my parents could afford a lawyer who was good enough to keep me from being tried as an adult. If Mr. Martin stuck to the truce, things were okay.
Until he gave me reason to believe otherwise, I’d assume that he was going to keep his word. Yes, if I waited until I had a reason, it might be too late, but it wasn’t as if I had a wide array of options right now.
That was my plan. Wait and see.
Maybe Mr. Martin would flee the country.
My mom called about two hours later to check up on me. Then she called five minutes after that, just in case I’d thought her calls would happen in a predictable timeframe. I spent the day trying and failing to accomplish simple tasks like reading a book or paying attention to a TV show.
When my mom got home, she didn’t say anything about our talk this morning. And she didn’t pull my dad aside for a private conversation when he got home, so I wasn’t sure if she’d decided he didn’t need to know about my blunder, or if the time simply wasn’t right.
After the dinner that my mom cooked, she cleared the table and started doing the dishes, because though times were changing, this particular gender role remained firmly in place in my house in 1979. My dad sat on the couch to watch television. He patted the cushion next to him to encourage me to join him.
At the commercial, he turned to me. “We need to talk.”
This wasn’t a surprise. Mom must have called him at work. “Okay.”
“Have you been in my safe?”
9
Speak, goddamn it, speak! my brain screamed at me as I just kind of sat there with an unintelligent expression on my face. I needed to say something like, “Goodness, dear father, where would you get such an absurd idea? Me, disrespecting your privacy and committing vile acts of thievery? Never! Why, I take offense at the very idea! I challenge thee to a duel!”
What I said was a mix of “Huh?” and “What?” If it had come out as “Whuh?” that would’ve been bad enough, but I actually said “Hut?” which made no sense. I’m pretty sure that a thick sheen of perspiration instantly materialized on my forehead, with the word “Guilty” magically appearing in the way the light reflected off the moisture.
“Have you been in my safe?” he repeated.
Stay calm. Maintain eye contact. Look innocent.
“No, why?”
“Some money is missing from it.”
“Are you kidding?”
My father liked puns and knock-knock jokes. He’d sometimes make up knock-knock jokes on the spot, with varying degrees of success, and his puns often required so much explanation afterward that the humor was unable to make the full journey. What he did not do is falsely accuse his son of getting into his safe in an attempt to be amusing.
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “Three hundred and fifty dollars is
