But when she got to Fourteenth Street Nora turned right instead of going straight. Two blocks, then a left, past small houses on cramped, sun-blasted lots to the address Bettina had given the sheriff. She just wanted to see if Adam’s car was there; that was what she told herself. Her father could wait another five minutes.
The house was a one-story bungalow like scores of others in Lovelock, and Nora had been in enough of them to know it would have a living room and a dated kitchen on one side and two bedrooms on the other. A low chain-link fence surrounded the yard, as if a prior tenant had kept a dog. Through the front window she saw the outline of a lamp. The lights were off, and Adam’s Corolla was nowhere to be seen.
There was, however, a white pickup parked in front of the house, and as Nora stopped her Civic across the street a man came out Adam’s front door and got in it. He was about Nora’s age, with straight, dark, shoulder-length hair, and he carried a blue backpack that he put on the passenger seat. As he turned the ignition he saw Nora and froze. Nora looked quickly away, and he drove off. When he turned onto Fourteenth she let go of the steering wheel, feeling in her knuckles how tightly she’d been clutching it.
She tried to think why anyone would be in Adam’s house—and what they might take from it—the day after he was murdered. Maybe the man knew Adam from Reno, though Adam had only been confirmed dead four hours ago, when Sheriff Watterly came to the school; surely it was too soon for anyone from Reno to show up. Maybe he worked for Adam’s landlord. But Nora hadn’t recognized him, and she knew all eighteen hundred and twelve people who lived in this town. She hadn’t liked the way he looked at her, either, as though he were memorizing her face.
The neighborhood was quiet and empty, so she walked to Adam’s front door. Through the narrow windows she saw a small foyer with a table that had a few pieces of mail on it. Nothing seemed disturbed. She examined the doorknob. There were no obvious signs of a break-in. She went to the back of the house, where sliding glass doors faced a concrete patio. When she looked through the doors, she saw the pies. Six of them, their tinfoil covers glinting in the late afternoon light, in a neat row on the white kitchen counter. Beside them was a piece of paper with something written on it. A recipe, perhaps. The kitchen was immaculate, all traces of the baking cleaned and put away.
Nora rested her forehead against the glass. She imagined Adam baking in there, slightly stooped in that way he had of taking up less space than his body demanded. It must have taken him hours to make all those pies. Whatever had happened to him had to have happened late at night, and it had to have caught him by surprise, because he’d clearly been planning to come to school the next morning for his Pi Day party.
The sun slipped behind the hills and the air turned purple. From the street came the slam of a car door and the shriek of a child. A dog barked. In the house next door, a kitchen light came on. The neighborhood was coming back to life, the cozy, tired heartbeat of evening. Nora pushed herself away from the glass, watching her fingerprints flare then dissolve. She took a last look at the neat kitchen and the pies, shadowed now in darkness, then drove home to her father.
Sal
On the second day of sixth grade, as Sal expected, there was no chair for him with the boys at the back table, so he sat with the misfits: Sylvana Eggers, who sang to herself under her breath; Ronnie Triplett, who picked his nose and wiped the dirt on his jeans; and Seventeen Jones, whose real name nobody had used since Rudy Gonzalez shoved his face into the sandbox seventeen times in first grade. None of them looked at Sal when he sat down.
By the end of the first week it was obvious the boys at the back table didn’t like Mr. Merkel. They didn’t like any of the teachers except Miss Wilson, the pretty P.E. teacher, but Mr. Merkel’s halting first-day speech seemed to have earned him a special disdain. Whenever he turned to the whiteboard they hunched their backs in mockery while the rest of the class, even the misfits, stifled their laughter in their hands.
Mr. Merkel must have known what they were doing, but he didn’t turn around fast to try to catch them. He just kept talking about ratios and proportions while the snickers ran through the room like mice. Sal could hardly bear to watch him, but being the only kid who didn’t laugh at him was a duty he felt honor-bound to perform.
After math, Sal had social studies with Ms. Wheaton, a square-shouldered, sternly pretty woman who talked about the settlement of Nevada as though she were reading a grocery list. Then he had science with Ms. Barnes, a busty blond lady who wore too much perfume. After science came lunch. Lunch was the hardest part of Sal’s day. He didn’t have anyone to sit with, so he sat by a window in the library and drew pictures of Angelus fighting demons on the cracked blacktop where the boys from the back table played basketball in their Nikes. When recess ended he crept to the trash bin beside the picnic tables, fished out a half-eaten sandwich or an unwanted banana, and ate it on the way to fourth period. The bologna sandwich was never quite enough.
It was during the third week that he first had lunch with Mr. Merkel. Kip Masters, the lanky leader of the boys at the back table, had been so flagrant in his mockery that morning that Mr. Merkel actually stopped writing ratios on the whiteboard, standing stiff-backed in front of them. The class waited in a thrill of anticipation. Even Kip and his gang were still. But when Mr. Merkel turned around, he just talked about proportional relationships in the same soft voice he always used. Sal was the only one who heard the metallic fiber at its heart tighten and sing. Sal, and maybe Sylvana, who stopped her tuneless humming for a moment.
That moment, brief and perilous, was why Sal went to the math classroom instead of the library at lunch that day. A group of eighth grade girls walked out as he approached, and he pressed himself against the wall, away from their shimmering hair and their shorts that rode so high you could see the curve of their butts. They didn’t even glance at him as they passed by.
Mr. Merkel was at his desk. As Sal watched, he reached into a drawer and pulled out a sandwich on white bread. Hunched over, with his nose poking down at his lunch, he looked like nothing so much as a turtle. Sal sighed in a misery of pity.
Mr. Merkel looked up. “Sal,” he said, and his mournful face lightened. “What can I do for you?”
Sal fidgeted with his basketball shorts. Behind Mr. Merkel the whiteboard was covered in algebra for the eighth graders, who’d also begun to call him Merkel the Turtle. Sal imagined the girls from the hallway sitting at a table, their eyes rolled to the ceiling or glued to the phones they held in their laps, the x’s and y’s of Mr. Merkel’s equations flattened against their foreheads.
“Why is the sky blue?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?” Mr. Merkel said.
“The first day. You said math explained why the sky is blue.”
“It does.”
“When are you going to teach us that?”
“First we have to cover ratios. And fractions.” Mr. Merkel touched his glasses. “But we will get to it.”
Sal hadn’t thought about the color of the sky since the first day of school, yet he had also, he realized, thought about it constantly. “I want to know now. Please.”
“Well.” Mr. Merkel stopped, seemingly at a loss. Then he put his sandwich on his desk. “Light from the sun is made up of all the colors of the rainbow. When you see them from space, they all blend together into white.”