over the door to the girls’ change room and everything.
“Hey, Detective Stewart,” I said when he saw me. “Taking a pretty close look, huh?”
“Just making sure, Allison,” he told me in that way-too-soothing voice of his. Aren’t cops supposed to be authoritative? Maybe he was trying to go easy on me, what with me being the one to find Caitlin and all. Please.
“Sure you’re making sure. You know I’m right, don’t you?”
He didn’t say yes or no, but he did tell me to come to him if I had any more information.
“I might,” I told him. “I mean, I will if I do, and I might. I’m not sure yet. I have to check something, and then I’ll come back, okay?”
I don’t think he liked that, but one of the other cops came over then, so I headed up the stairs.
Dorbinette’s classroom was empty, all right. I went in and over to the window to check the parking lot in case his car was still there, and it was, but since he was just opening the driver’s door, I figured I was okay to check his desk. Just as I was stepping back, though, I noticed a woman come out from the trees behind Dorbinette’s car and start talking to him. She looked like she was being sneaky. I squinted to see if I knew who she was, but the sun was too bright, and she was too far off. I decided I should go through the guy’s desk fast, while whoever it was kept him busy.
Even while I did it, I figured it was probably really stupid to bother looking. I mean, if they’d been having an affair and he killed her to keep it a secret, Dorbinette wouldn’t have kept nude photos of him and Caitlin in his desk at school. Would he? After I had checked all four drawers, I figured I was right about that if nothing else. He just kept ordinary things like his birdwatching binoculars and a calculator and a lot of rulers. But then I had a smart idea. If he did have something that he wanted to keep a secret, something most people would look for at his house, then it’d make sense for him to hide it at school. My mom does that all the time with her diamond rings when she goes out without them. She finds a place no thief would ever check, like underneath her treadmill, and she puts them there.
So I got under Dorbinette’s old oak desk. The only interesting thing was this gap at the back, between the drawers and the front part of the desk that all the kids see. I ran my hand up into the gap on either side and sure enough, I found a purple flannel drawstring bag taped to the back of the upper right drawer.
After I’d gotten up from under the desk and dusted myself off, I looked back toward the window and remembered the binoculars. Now that I knew he was hiding something for sure, I figured it was worth checking to see if that lady was still out there talking to him. I took the binoculars over and looked out and saw that she was Caitlin’s mother. I was just thinking how weird that was when Dorbinette looked up at the window.
I jumped back right away. Not that he would have recognized me behind those big black goggles, but I guess anybody standing at the window of his classroom with the binoculars from his desk drawer might make a guilty guy a bit mad. Then I looked down at myself and realized I was wearing my lime green flowered shirt, which a guilty guy might remember if he went looking for the kid who was messing around with his desk and watching him talk to some woman in the parking lot who was acting like she knew him as a lot more than just the English teacher of her dead daughter.
I crammed the binoculars back into the desk drawer and got out of there fast. I mean, I really flew down the stairs to the first floor, but Stewart and all his buddies were gone already. While I tried to decide what to do next, I weighed that drawstring bag in my hand, wondering what was in it, and stupid me, I checked it first instead of going straight to the office where Dorbinette couldn’t bother me without looking pretty suspicious.
It was so weird. The bag was full of marbles. Big ones mostly, with amazing colours and stuff in the centre, sort of like the kind Caitlin’s mother had shown us how to make when our art class had a field trip to her glassblowing studio, but nicer. More sparkly, somehow. I’d just dropped them back into the bag and pulled the drawstring when I saw Dorbinette coming down the hall toward me. He didn’t exactly look thrilled.
I had limited options at that point. He was blocking the easiest route to the office, and with the change rooms taped off, I could either go into the gym or through a plate glass window into the courtyard. I picked the gym.
One good thing about all the sports they make me play at this school is that I didn’t need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Dorbinette knows the layout too, because he directs our school plays. But he didn’t know that a bunch of us had already set up the gym for a big obstacle course competition.
I heard him fall in kind of a breathy, squishy way, which probably meant he was still at the inner tubes before I was over the low jumps, and it sounded like he’d fallen twice more by the time I swerved around the big plastic tunnels you’re supposed to crawl through. Then I dove out the doors that lead to the playing field at the back of the school.
I thought I was so smart. I’d scaled smaller fences than the one that divided the field from the school parking lot, where I could see Stewart and the other cops talking around their cars as I ran. Then I looked up and saw that the school board had been busy putting up a taller fence with barbed wire along the top. How could I have missed that? They’d been talking about better security forever, but they hadn’t done anything about it. There was no way I could climb that thing, not with a guy like Dorbinette on my tail. I screamed really loud, but Stewart didn’t seem to hear me. I guess he was too far away. I’m a fast runner, but without any exits from the field except back into the gym, which you can’t get back into without a key anyway, Dorbinette would be chasing me around in circles for a long time before somebody noticed and did something about it. If he ever got out of the gym, that is. Last I’d heard from him he was cursing about his head. I hoped he’d hurt it bad.
That was when I had my bright idea, the one that made me think I’m pretty smart after all. I ran to the equipment shed, zipped open the combination lock, and hauled out Coach Flannigan’s golf clubs. I figured his five iron was my best option, given the distance I was dealing with. And then I just dropped those marbles down in a row and shot them, one after another, over the fence and into the parking lot. Turns out marbles break up pretty good when you smack them like that, but I made my point. I got Stewart’s attention by dropping a marble right into his cap when he took it off to wipe his head. By the time Dorbinette staggered out into the field about fifty yards away from me, the cops had him covered.
Detective Stewart was pretty happy with me. Turned out Dorbinette had been behind all those jewellery store hits, and he’d been hiding a lot of diamonds and stuff in Caitlin’s mother’s marbles until he could sell them to somebody else. Mrs. Anderson kept saying that she didn’t know he was a criminal and that she wouldn’t have kicked out her husband if she’d realized Dorbinette was just using her to hide stolen goods, sneaking down to her studio when she was asleep. I figure she’s got to be pretty stupid if she really didn’t notice what he was up to. But either way, Caitlin must have caught him, and he’d killed her at the school after marking up that stall door so people wouldn’t go snooping around back at the Andersons’ house.
Coach Flannigan was even happier. I guess some of those shots I made with his five iron were super-amazing, and not just because I didn’t bean any of those cops with a broken marble. He made some calls, and I did some tryouts. It turns out I’m one of the best new golfers anybody’s seen in years and years. So now I’m going to be rich and get to do whatever I want, because a bunch of companies want to give me tons of money to wear their clothes whenever I play golf. And I’ll probably get to do the LPGA tour next year, too. Pretty good, huh?
MARY KEENAN is a Toronto-based
