Among the Barons

CHAPTER 14

Luke waited on the couch until all the other boys were gone. When Mr. Hendricks finally shut the front door and rolled his wheelchair back toward Luke, Luke started to blurt out, “Mr. Hendricks, it had to have been Smits who set the fire. He told me—”

Mr. Hendricks held up his hand, stopping Luke.

“Now, now,” he said. “The last thing I need right now is to hear any more wild accusations. Think very carefully before you tell me anything.”

What would it hurt to tell Mr. Hendricks the truth? Luke wondered. He slumped on the couch in confusion.

“One of the few things that Oscar and Smits agree on is that you were the last one in Smits’s room Last evening,” Mr. Hendricks said. “Besides the two of them, of course. What I would like you to do for me right now is to go up to Smits’s room and tell me if you see anything amiss. Apart from the fire damage, that is.”

“The fire was in Smits’s room?” Luke asked.

Mr. Hendricks nodded.

“Entirely,” he said. “We were able to contain it quite successfully.”

Luke’s certainty ebbed a bit. No matter what Smits had said, why would Smits want to burn his own room?

But for that matter, why would Oscar want to injure the boy he was supposed to be protecting?

Luke could easily understand why Mr. Hendricks looked so troubled. Luke stood up.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He went out the front door. The night air that had felt like such a relief only an hour or so ago seemed cold now. Threatening. Luke felt like he’d caught the other boys’ fear.

But none of the other boys were going to have to inspect a charred room all by themselves. Only Luke.

In his head Luke carried on an imaginary conversation with Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Talbot: Guess what? When I said I was willing to be brave for the cause of helping to free all the third children, this isn’t what I meant. This is scaring me — this is danger— for no reason. This has nothing to do with the cause. Smits isn’t my concern. Smits shouldn’t be my problem.

But he couldn’t imagine what Mr. Hendricks’s or Mr. Talbot’s response would be if he actually spoke those words to either of them.

Luke slipped in the front door of the school and lightly raced up the stairs. He saw none of the other boys, but some of the teachers seemed to be patrolling the halls. No one stopped Luke.

On the fourth floor the smell of smoke was overpowering. Luke longed for an open window to lean his head out But except for the smell, Luke found no other evidence of fire until he reached the door of Smits’s room. The door was pulled shut, but burn marks spiked out from the frame. Gently Luke pushed the door open.

The room he’d stood in only hours before was transformed. The carpet was covered with wet ash; the comforter on the bed was burned away. Luke thought about what little Mr. Hendricks had told him about Oscar’s and Smits’s differing versions of how the fire had started. Could Oscar possibly have set Smits’s bed on fire while Smits was in it?

To still the terrifying questions growing in his mind, Luke moved over to Smits~s desk, which seemed relatively untouched. His schoolbooks were stacked neatly off to the side, only slightly charred but, like much of the rest of the room, soaking wet. The computer everyone had been so impressed by when Smits arrived was now only a sad heap of melted plastic.

Luke wanted to run away, to rush back to Mr. Hendricks and report, “I didn’t see anything strange.” And then maybe he could wiggle out of any obligation Mr. Hendricks thought he had to Smits and Oscar; he could go back to bed like all the other boys. He could fall asleep and tell himself that everything frightening him was just a nightmare.

But something made Luke keep looking, methodically, with a sort of horrified fascination. He pulled out drawers, examined papers that had managed to escape all flame. But they were just ordinary homework — musical scales and conjugated verbs. Luke moved away from the desk. In the closet, totally unscathed, he found the folded-up cot that Oscar evidently slept on when he wasn’t sleeping in the chair.

And then, tucked under the sheet, inside a split seam of the cot’s mattress, Luke found something rigid and plastic and rectangular. Luke dug into the mattress and pulled out two identification cards.

Fake ones.

Or were they?