Crying Wolf

29

The ransom note.

It defied Nat’s understanding, like a superficially simple poem packed with allusions he didn’t even know were there. He was sure of only one thing: it wasn’t Grace’s writing. Nat still believed Grace might have wrecked the two rooms in their cave; could even imagine Lorenzo dying in the fray; but could not accept that she’d written that note on the back of the centaur painting. A milion sounds nice. Right here soon say by dark. Call the cops and she die$. Not her. Could she have disguised her written self to persuade her father and Andy Ling that a kidnapping had really taken place? Maybe, Nat thought, but not like this. The longer he stared at the note, the stranger it got-didn’t even read like a ransom note, left out all those points Wags had made; and the middle sentence almost didn’t make sense. Something else about the note bothered him even more, something he couldn’t identify.

So when Izzie said, “I suppose you’re going to say that’s her own writing,” he said, “No.”

On the way out, Izzie went by Lorenzo’s body without a glance.

Grace and Izzie’s room. Even with what he’d just seen, Nat still wouldn’t have been surprised to see Grace there. She wasn’t. Izzie snatched up the phone.

“Calling your father?” Nat said.

“Who else?”

“To say what?”

“To say what? That my sister’s been kidnapped.”

“We already told him that.”

“So? Now it’s true.”

“But-”

“But what?”

“He didn’t believe it.”

“The room, the note-that changes everything.”

“Will he think so?”

“What are you talking about?”

Odd, to have to explain her own father to her. “We need more facts,” he said.

“What kind of facts?”

“I don’t know. We have to think. Who could have done this?”

“Kidnappers, for God’s sake. Do you expect them to identify themselves?”

“Have there been any other attempts?”

“Other attempts?”

“In the past-threats against your family.”

“From whom?”

“Workers with a grievance, business rivals-you’d know better than me.”

Izzie, punching out the numbers, gave him a quick look. “All you’re doing is complicating this. It’s simple. We need that money and we need it now.”

She reached someone, spoke a word or two into the phone, hung up. It rang within the minute.

“Dad?” She pressed the speaker button.

“Yes?” said Mr. Zorn. Nat heard traffic noises-he was back in the city-and impatience in his tone.

Izzie told him about their place in the tunnels and what had happened to it, told him about the ransom note, told him they needed the money and needed it now, told him that this time it was real.

Silence, followed by a muffled conversation; Nat thought he heard Andy Ling’s voice. Mr. Zorn came back on the line.

“What did the note say?”

“The exact words?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember the exact words, but-”

“I do,” Nat said.

“Ah,” said Mr. Zorn. “Nat. Let’s hear them.”

Nat quoted the ransom demand verbatim.

Pause. “Would you repeat that, please?”

Nat repeated it.

Another pause. Then Mr. Zorn laughed. In the background, Andy said, “A million sounds nice,” and started laughing too, a low, pleasant laugh of real amusement, different from Mr. Zorn’s, Nat couldn’t help realizing even at that moment: Mr. Zorn’s laugh had an edge, almost like a weapon.

“Is something funny?” Izzie said.

“Kids,” said Mr. Zorn: “It’s enough now.”

Click.

Izzie paled, then went red. He’d never seen her face like that; she was almost a different person. For a moment, he thought she was going to throw the phone across the room. Grace probably would have. The color faded slowly from her face. She turned to him and said, “Doesn’t anyone understand what’s happening here? She’s going to die. I can feel it.”

“What about trying Professor Uzig now?” Nat said.

“Stop calling him that,” Izzie said. “He’s just Leo. What about him?”

“Maybe he can persuade your father.”

“He didn’t come through for you.”

“This is different.”

They brought Professor Uzig down to the cave. He shone the flashlight they’d given him here and there; not lingering, Nat noticed, on the wreckage, Lorenzo, or even the ransom note; but more on the undamaged parts: the gilded molding, the velvet chairs and couches, the fine old rugs. “My God,” he said. “This couldn’t be better.” Izzie shone her light at him. He shielded his eyes. “Did you say there were candles?” he said.

Nat and Izzie lit some. Professor Uzig gazed at the high ceiling, with its coffered woodwork, carved with leaves, flowers, grapes, horns of plenty. “Metaphorically, historically, culturally-it’s perfect, perfect in so many ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“You must know, if you’ve been coming here. What shall I call it? A time capsule, and planted with the same sort of deliberation. Can you read that?” He pointed to the Greek writing on the wall. “From the Republic,” he said, reading it in Greek and then translating: “Let early education be a sort of amusement.”

Didn’t Plato have a cave? This can be Nietzsche’s. Izzie had said that, when they were naming this place.

“There were social clubs at Inverness in the nineteenth century,” Professor Uzig was saying. “Not fraternities-more in the Oxford-Cambridge style. They had a powerful influence, almost independent of the college. The board of trustees outlawed them after World War One, bought up their houses, Goodrich Hall being one. There must be a direct route into Goodrich, sealed off.”

“There is,” Nat said.

Professor Uzig nodded. “Sealed off by the club members, of course, in order to preserve this secret space. A kind of defiance, do you see, an underground resistance forever in opposition to whatever modernizing forces they despised. Metaphorically, historically, culturally perfect, as I said.” He eyed them. “And motivationally,” he added.

“Motivationally?” said Izzie.

Nat felt it coming.

“There couldn’t be a more seductive setting for dreaming up little schemes like yours,” said Professor Uzig. “A place like this can almost be said to dream them up by itself. And the consequent destruction in light of the failure of the scheme makes perfect sense.”

“Mr. Zorn called you?” Nat said.

“I was hanging up when you knocked on my door.”

“You’re saying you don’t believe us?” Izzie said. “What about the goddamn note?” She took him by the front of his tweed jacket-seized him, really-and yanked him toward it. Professor Uzig, barrel-chested, fit for his age, didn’t like being yanked, resisted, but not successfully.

“Yes,” he said, smoothing his jacket when Izzie had released him, “I heard about this note.” He looked it over. All texts, as Nat recalled, were transparent to him. “Don’t you realize you’re starting to embarrass yourselves?”

“What’s wrong with everybody?” Izzie said. “We didn’t write it.”

“Your father doesn’t doubt that. He knows it was Grace.”

Izzie turned on him. “When I say we, Grace is included.”

Professor Uzig took a step back. “Who else could have written it, then?”

“I thought you were the one who knew how to think. Some real kidnapper, of course.”

Professor Uzig’s voice rose, but only slightly. “This is not the note of a real kidnapper. And what real kidnapper would know about this place? For that matter, have you told anyone else about it?”

“No,” Nat said. “But…” An idea was starting to form in his mind.

“But what?” said Professor Uzig.

“There’s a thief on campus.”

“There are always thieves on campus, almost invariably your fellow students.”

“But this one knows about the tunnels,” Izzie said.

“Why do you say that?” said Professor Uzig.

Nat told Professor Uzig about the theft of Wags’s TV, how he’d followed the thief until he’d disappeared in the Plessey basement.

“That doesn’t mean he knows about the tunnels.”

“There was nowhere else he could have gone.”

Professor Uzig didn’t looked convinced. “Could you identify this person?”

“I only saw him from behind,” Nat said. “Big, with a ponytail.”

A strange expression crossed Professor’s Uzig’s face. Nat’s mom would have said he looked a little green; as though he’d eaten something bad or was seasick. “It won’t work,” he said.

“What won’t work?” Izzie said.

“Whatever you kids are up to,” said Professor Uzig. He turned to Nat. “Time for you to go home. Worse things have happened.”

“Worse things are happening now,” Nat said. A milion sounds nice. Whatever was bothering him was in that sentence. A milion sounds nice. And it wasn’t the spelling. He walked along the walls of the room, tapping here and there, listening for hollow sounds, although not sure why. They sounded hollow everywhere.

“You’re not going to talk to him?” Izzie said.

Professor Uzig shook his head. “You’ve given me nothing to talk about.”

“Nicely put,” said Izzie, “as usual. But would you be saying that if he wasn’t dangling this endowed chair in front of your nose?”

There was no persuading Professor Uzig after that. He didn’t say another word. They went upstairs in silence.

“What about calling the police?” Nat said to Izzie when they were alone; not because he thought it was a good idea, more because it seemed the kind of thing people said at a time like this.

“Brilliant,” Izzie said. “If we forget about what the note says, and about what will happen when the police call my father and ask when the money’s coming.”

“Izzie,” he said; not because she was wrong, but because of how she’d spoken to him. She was acting so strange.

“What?”

She was acting so strange, but he’d already said that.

Izzie took a deep breath. He could almost feel her getting hold of herself, slowing down.

“Sorry,” she said. She gave him a kiss, soft and quick, on the cheek. “Better?”

That left the bowling jacket. Saul’s Collision. Nat knew a bit about bowling-his mom had been in the Tuesday league for years, always fixing chicken pot pie that night, so he could warm it for himself when he got home from basketball-and had noticed lanes at the bottom of College Hill, not far from the tracks. All-Star Bowling, or something like that. He looked them up in the phone book, called the number.

“Does a team from Saul’s Collision bowl there?” he said.

“Sure does.”

“Because one of them lost his jacket. I’d like to return it.”

“We’re open till ten.”

“I meant personally.”

“Personally?”

“I’m looking to join a team.”

“You could do better than Saul’s, you’re any kind of bowler at all.”

“But I like their jacket.”

“I hear you. Tell you what. Where you calling from?”

“Here-in Inverness.”

“There’s only one team member lives in town. That would be Ronnie Medeiros, over on River Street. He’s in the book.”

The wind was blowing off the river, driving the snowfall in waves that seemed to bound through the air. Tracks, back and forth between Ronnie Medeiros’s house and the street, were disappearing fast. Nat ignored the buzzer dangling loose on its wires, knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again, louder. They listened, heard the wind, the snow hissing through bare trees, a plow grinding along some nearby street. Izzie turned the knob. The door opened.

They went into a living room that had space for a big TV and not much else. On the TV sat a framed photograph of a referee posing with a girls’ basketball team.

“Hello?” Nat said.

No answer.

They went into a hall, opened a door. A bedroom: in no way like their cave rooms under the campus except that it too was a shambles. Only the bed was undamaged. The basketball referee was sleeping in it. Nat knocked on the doorjamb.

The sleeper’s eyes opened.

“Ronnie Medeiros?” Nat said.

“Who’dja expect in my bed, for Christ sake?” His eyes went to Izzie, back to Nat. “You the guys Saul sent?” he said.

They didn’t answer.

He got impatient. “To help me clean up. My fuckin’-my freakin’ head is killing me.”

“What happened here?” Nat said.

“Saul didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“Just a little party, you could call it. Got out of hand. He promised me that if I kept my-that he’d send someone to clean it up.”

“You’re talking about Saul of Saul’s Collision?” Nat said.

“Huh?”

Nat held up the bowling jacket.

“Where’d you get that?” He sat up with a groan. “Lemme see.” Nat handed him the jacket. He ran his hands over it, as though it bore a message in Braille, then squinted up at Nat. “You cops?” He lowered his head gently to the pillow. “Fuckin’ A. That was quick. I told him there’s no way to keep something like this a…” He paused, his eyes again shifting to Izzie and back. “You don’t look like cops,” he said. “Least not cops from around here.” His gaze went to Izzie. “Unless you’re FBI,” he said. “There’s girl FBI agents on TV and they always look like you.” His eyes narrowed. “I get it now-that fuckin’ Freedy.”

“Freedy?” Nat said.

“Sure. Crossing state lines.”

“Who’s Freedy?” Nat said.

“Think I’m stupid? Not sayin’ another word till I speak to my lawyer. That’s my right, and no one ever accused Ronnie Medeiros of not sticking up for his rights.”

“We’re not from the FBI,” Nat said, “not police at all.”

“Expect me to believe that?”

“Whose jacket is this?” Nat said.

Ronnie clamped his mouth shut, sucked both lips into his mouth like a child, raising the little growth of hair under his lower lip into prominence. Izzie made a disgusted sound and left the room.

“Is it yours?” Nat said.

Ronnie, mouth still clamped shut, shook his head.

“How do you spell million? ” Nat said.

Ronnie looked interested. His mouth relaxed. “Million?” he said.

“Spell it.”

“M-i-l-l-i-o-n.”

“Are you sure?”

“ ’Course I’m sure. I graduated high school. And billion ’s the same, just with a b.”

Izzie came back. She had a laptop in her hands. “The laptop,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“It’s not working, but…” Izzie flipped open the protective flap at the back. Nat read the label inside: Property of Zorn Telecommunications.

She stood over Ronnie, about to do almost anything. “Where did you get this?”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“I already been clobbered with that thing once.”

“By who?” Nat said.

Ronnie looked at him, at Izzie, at the laptop. He licked his lips. “I’m ready to make a deal,” he said.

“Let’s hear it,” Nat said; he felt Izzie’s glance.

“First I want immunity. Not the bullshit kind, the other one.”

“You got it,” Nat said.

“Guaranteed?”

“Guaranteed.”

Ronnie nodded. “The thing you gotta understand, I didn’t have nothin’ to do with any stealing. All I did was tell Freedy about my Uncle Saul. Whatever happened after that was all them.”

“What happened after that?”

“The stuff Freedy… acquired, must have got bought by Uncle Saul.”

“So Uncle Saul is a fence and Freedy’s a thief.”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“Describe Freedy.”

“Describe him?”

“What he looks like.”

“He’s a fuckin’ animal.” Ronnie Medeiros glanced around the room. “Big, like. Buff. Works out like you wouldn’t believe. Has this scary smile.” He shrugged. “That’s about it.”

“You left out the ponytail,” Nat said.

Ronnie gazed at him. “For a minute there I thought maybe you looked a bit too young to be FBI. Just goes to show.”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Freedy.”

“Haven’t got a clue.”

“Where does he live?”

“That I can tell you,” said Ronnie.