Found

CHAPTER 37

The town circle was bustling with late-night joggers of all ages, genders, and persuasions. The track was well lit and had no car traffic. It was safe, comfortable, and for those who liked to be seen working out, it offered something of an audience. I stood by a statue of Robert Frost in front of the library on the southern tip of the circle. The municipal buildings and YMCA, not to mention, I guess, the Schultz family shed, were on the other side of Kasselton Avenue.

My phone rang. It was Troy.

“Where are you?” I asked him.

“Look toward the Y.”

I did. It was too dark to see much.

“The right side,” he said. “Toward the back. I’m holding up my phone.”

Now I saw the glow of a phone, a pinprick of light in the dark.

“I see you,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

I hung up the phone and followed the light. Kasselton Avenue is the town’s busiest road. I waited for the light and crossed at the walk. No reason to jaywalk and break any extra laws tonight, thank you very much. I veered toward the YMCA and met up with Troy near the back of the building.

“Thanks for coming,” Troy said.

“No problem. Where is this shed?”

“It’s down that path. Come on, I’ll show you.”

We walked on a concrete pathway into the darkness. I glanced behind me. The circle was lit up almost like a distant dome. It provided a modicum of illumination, enough to see the faint outline of a small building maybe thirty yards in front of me.

All the lights were out in the shed.

“Mickey?” Troy whispered.

“Yeah?” I whispered back.

“Buck wouldn’t set me up. I don’t care what he was taking or doing. He wouldn’t do that to me.”

“What about Randy?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Troy allowed. “But why would he do it?”

“Why would Buck? Why would anyone?”

That question kept coming back to me. Why would anyone want to set Troy Taylor up for a positive drug test? Who gained from it? Who hated him enough…?

Uh-uh, I told myself. No way.

I said that to myself because when I thought about who hated Troy, the first name that popped into my head was Ema.

I pushed the thought away. This sadly was sometimes how my mind worked. It went places that it shouldn’t go.

“I don’t know,” Troy said.

“So let’s see how this plays out.”

“Okay,” Troy said. “What do we do now?”

I took the lead. We crept down closer to the building. I wasn’t sure exactly how to describe the size. When I think of a shed, I think of a place to store tools in the backyard. This was bigger than that, closer to the size of a one-car garage. It was oddly situated too, behind town hall, not far from the police station, the library, and the high school. One would think that this was public land, owned by the town, but for some reason, Buck’s father had decided to purchase it.

Why?

I moved toward the shed and tried to look through the darkened windows. I cupped my hand against the glass and leaned in close. Part of me almost expected to see a face jump into view, like a big clown’s face with a big smile, and then I’d startle back, screaming.

Stop it, I scolded myself.

There was nothing to see. It was too dark.

Troy was trying to peer into the window too. “Make out anything?” he whispered to me.

“No.”

We circled the building. I could see why you might call it a shed. It was flimsier than a real building, made out of some kind of prefab material you’d find in the lot of a hardware store. There were two more windows in the back, but the shades were drawn.

“So now what?”

I spotted a back door. Good. From this angle, no one near the circle could see anything. Come to think of it, even in the front, which more or less faced the circle, no one could really see anything.

“We check the door,” I said.

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you put a hand on a doorknob and turn it and the door is unlocked. That wasn’t what happened here. Locked. I checked the area around the knob. The lock looked pretty cheap.

Not long ago, Ema and I had tried to break into Bat Lady’s house. I had taken a credit card from my wallet and tried to open it via the way I had seen a thousand times on television. It hadn’t worked. That lock had been old and so it simply gave way. But after that I got curious, so I started searching the Internet to learn how to pick locks. In truth, it isn’t easy. If there was a deadbolt, it was impossible, but if this was a standard spring bolt, I could maybe get away with it.

It was a spring bolt.

Bingo.

I took out my credit card and started to work it. You don’t really pick a lock with a credit card. You jimmy it open. I stuck the card in the crack between the door and the frame and slid it down to the lock. I bent the card toward the knob, hoping to slide the corner underneath. Nothing much happened. I put my shoulder against the door. The key is, open it fast when you feel the pop. That’s what the websites said.

It wasn’t working.

I pushed a little harder with my shoulder. The cheap material gave way. I could feel something bend. I looked back at Troy. He shrugged and said, “I can do it if you want.”

I shook my head. I was already there. My fingers might not be nimble, but there was nothing like a strong shoulder. I rocked back, hit the door a little harder with my shoulder, and the door flew open.

Breaking and entering. Again.

I was already cooking up various excuses, just in case we got caught. Example: We had heard someone calling for help maybe. Or we just tried the door and it was already open, so we just came to check and make sure everything was okay.

Right. Like either one of those would fly.

But at least I had a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card with me: the police chief’s son. I slowly stepped into the shed. Troy followed me inside. There was a wall right in front of us dividing the space into two rooms. The lights were out, so we couldn’t see much more.

“You take the room on the left,” I said to him. “I’ll take the room on the right.”

“Should we use our flashlights?”

“Let’s keep the beams low, beneath the window height.”

“Okay,” Troy said. “Mickey?”

“What?”

“What are we looking for?”

“A big sign with the word clue on it.”

Troy laughed at that. “I’m serious.”

“A laptop, for one thing. Files maybe. But in truth, I’m not sure. I think it’s one of those ‘we’ll know it when we see it’ kinda things.”

“Got ya.”

We split up then. I did as I suggested and kept my smartphone’s flashlight beam pointed at the floor. I could make out what looked like a table in the center of the room. I moved toward it. I risked lifting the beam a little higher to see what was on the table.

It looked like chemistry class.

Test tubes, beakers, flasks, and the like littered the table. I started to wonder if there was a Bunsen burner here too. I turned off the flashlight and tried to think for a moment.

A lab.

Why?

I thought about what Troy had told me-about Randy dealing drugs. Could this be, I don’t know, a drug lab of some kind? How do you make steroids? I had no idea. Could that be what this was?

Again: no idea.

The room was sparkling clean. I saw a metal cylinder on the right. Stainless steel cabinets lined the wall. I put my hand on one. It felt cold to the touch. I took hold of the handle and pulled the cabinet open. It opened like a refrigerator. I felt cold air. I lifted the flashlight so that I could see inside.

There might as well have been a sign saying CLUE.

“Ew, gross,” I whispered to myself.

Troy stuck his head around the wall. He shined the flashlight up in my face before aiming it toward the open cabinet. “Wait, is that…?”

“I think so, yeah,” I said.

The cabinet was loaded up with small plastic containers that I recognized from our drug testing. There was a yellow liquid inside. In short, the cabinet was loaded up with…

“Urine samples,” I said.

“Nasty.”

I made a face and gently lifted one of the specimen cups.

Suddenly I heard Troy’s panicked voice. “What was that?”

I turned toward him. “What?”

He leapt toward the window, nearly knocking the urine specimen from my hand. I followed him. We ducked down low and peeked outside. At first, I didn’t see anything, just the streetlights in the distance.

“What?” I asked.

“Might have been my imagination, but I-I thought I saw…”

And then they became clearer. Flashlights. Flashlights that were heading toward us. Not small flashlights like on our smartphones, but big, thick ones, the kind used by…

“It’s my dad!” Troy yell-whispered. “We gotta get out of here!”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. We ran for the door, bumping into the table. Beakers crashed to the floor. I heard a voice yell out. An adult voice.

Like the voice of a cop.

Troy got to the door first, but I was right behind him. We ran straight back, trying to keep the building between those flashlights and our bodies. Troy jumped behind a big boulder. I joined him. Up the hill on Kasselton Avenue, I could now see the whirling light atop a parked police car.

“Oh man,” I said.

“Split up,” Troy said. “You head into the woods, I’ll go behind the Y and try to circle to the street. If I can get there, I can divert them.”

That made sense. I turned and ran into the woods behind me. This sounded easier than it actually was. It was dark now. There was only the faintest light coming from the distant streetlights. Woods have a lot of, well, trees. So put it altogether: running in a dark place with a lot of trees.

Not easy.

The third time I kissed bark, it dawned on me that I’d have to slow down. What choice did I have? If I kept running face-first into trees, I would probably knock myself unconscious. I started moving like Frankenstein, keeping my hands out in front of me, feeling my way.

“Stop! Police!”

The voice made me duck behind a tree. I risked a look. Two of the cops-or least, two flashlights-were entering the woods now. Because they had flashlights, they didn’t really need to worry too much about smashing into trees. They could move at a pretty fast clip.

Oh man, I was in trouble.

Those dumb excuses-I heard someone call for help, the door lock was broken before we got there-started flooding back in, but I knew that they would just help sink me. Bat Lady would not be able to get me out of this one, and I somehow doubted that Buck’s father would say that I had permission to break the lock on his shed door and shatter a bunch of beakers.

Yep, I was in trouble.

I stayed behind the tree but I could tell from the bouncing flashlights that they were getting closer.

Think, Mickey.

The fact was, the two officers had one advantage over me: They could see. I had one advantage over them, albeit temporarily: I could hide. But the hiding could only last a little longer. The flashlights would discover me. But then again, if I put my flashlight on too, yes, they’d see me, but it would also even the playing field.

There was one other thing to consider-the police officers might be armed-but this was Kasselton, not Newark. In towns like this, officers don’t pull their guns, especially on suspects running through the woods.

I flipped on the flashlight and ran.

“Stop! Police!”

I didn’t know which was worse: breaking into that shed or running away from the police. Either way, I picked up my pace. They were fast. I was faster. More than that, I did figure out an advantage. I would shine my flashlight in front of me, plan out the path, turn off the flashlight, confuse them with that, turn it on again when I needed it.

Then I got a break.

The woods started to grow less dense. The officers behind me were in the thick of it now. I was nearly out. Once I barreled through, I came into a clearing behind the Kasselton Mall.

Perfect.

There were still plenty of cars in the lot. That was a bonus too. I hurried over to Target because it was the largest store in the mall. I found a corner kiosk in the appliance department where I could see both entrances. If the police entered one, I could hurry out the other or even hide in the vast space of the store.

But the cops didn’t come inside.

At the end of the day, I was just a kid who maybe broke into a big tool shed. It might be interesting, but it wasn’t as though a SWAT team was going to be called out.

Half an hour after entering the Target, I went through the mall and exited out the Sears on the other side. There were no police. I started down Hobart Gap Road toward Uncle Myron’s house.

So what do I do now?

Should I text Troy? That seemed iffy. If he’d been caught and I texted him, the police might see that we were communicating. I should wait and let him contact me. But then again, would he? Wouldn’t he logically think the same thing about contacting me and also wait?

I wasn’t sure it mattered.

I tried to put together what I had learned in Mr. Schultz’s shed. Start from the beginning: One, Troy had seen Buck and his brother, Randy, both of whom he claimed used steroids, go into that shed with test tubes. Now that I’d been inside the shed, it was clearly some kind of laboratory. It could have something to do with making the PEDs-performance-enhancing drugs. Maybe Randy or Buck was tinkering with, I don’t know, their formula.

I frowned. I’m not sure Buck could spell the word chemistry, nonetheless start fiddling with complex compounds.

Then I remembered the urine samples.

I don’t know how many were stored in that cabinet-and, ew, I hoped none fell on the floor as we ran out-but what could Buck and Randy be doing with them?

Hmm.

I had read somewhere that steroid cheaters would often use someone else’s urine to beat the system. Here was how it worked: You hid a urine sample on you when you went to the test. When you entered the bathroom stall to urinate, you switched your sample with one you knew was clean.

Could that be it?

Possible, except for one thing. There were probably a hundred urine samples in storage. We only get tested once or maybe twice a year. Why so many?

I was missing something.

I didn’t know what. In a sense, it didn’t matter. Tomorrow I would head back to Adiona Island. There was some kind of clue there, some kind of link between that island and the Bat Lady and the Abeona Shelter and maybe even Luther and my father. I wanted to help here. I wanted to figure out why Troy had been set up and by whom. But it wasn’t my priority.

Except…

I had an idea. I took out my phone and called Brandon Foley. He answered on the third ring. “What’s up?” he said.

“I’m about two blocks from your house. You free?”

“Sure,” Brandon said. “Anything to avoid studying for this physics test.”

As I got closer, I heard the comforting sound of a dribbling basketball. Brandon was in his driveway again, working on his game. He tossed me the ball when he saw me coming. I stopped and took a jumper. Swish. He threw the ball back to me-“courtesy” is a universal basketball concept-but I just held the ball.

“You have your phone?” I asked.

“It’s in the house. Why?”

“I may need you to text Troy.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because he and I…”

“What?”

And that was when I stopped. I liked Brandon. I really did. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to confess to him that I had just done something illegal. He was president of the student council and all those other things. He took his responsibilities as basketball captain seriously.

Could he be trusted?

Sure, Brandon had been the one to get me involved in helping Troy, but what would he say if I told him that I’d just broken into a storage shed and run away from the cops?

Would he tell?

I had thought that I could ask Brandon to contact Troy for me, so that it wouldn’t get traced back to my phone. But now I wondered whether that was a good move.

“You and he what?” Brandon asked again.

“Nothing.”

“So why did you want to see me?”

In a way, Brandon couldn’t help me with this. I would hear from Troy or I wouldn’t. It didn’t change anything. Brandon couldn’t help with the break-in. He couldn’t help answer why I had found urine samples in that shed or really anything that could cast light on this situation.

So even if I did trust him, even if I believed that he only had my and Troy’s best interests at heart, what was the point of telling him?

Answer: nothing. There was no point.

But there was still one key to all this-one person who could answer all my questions about that shed, about illegal steroids, about why Troy had tested positive. It kept circling back to that same question:

Why had Buck left the town of Kasselton?

There was only one person who, it seemed, could really answer that question for me.

Buck himself.

“Where’s Buck?” I asked.

Brandon looked puzzled by the question. “I told you. He lives with his mom.”

“Where does she live?”

“I don’t remember,” Brandon said. “Somewhere in Maine or Massachusetts.”

“You have no idea?”

“I remember he used to go there a lot in the summer.” And then Brandon added something that changed everything: “He’d go boating or fishing off the island.”

I stood there. I was gripping the basketball so hard, I thought it might pop.

“Island?” I said.

“Yeah, his mom lives on an island. It’s got a weird name. Like Apollonia or Adonis or something with an A.”

I swallowed. “Adiona?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Brandon said. “Buck’s mom lives on Adiona Island.”