Feeling like I was going to throw up, pass out, and wet my pants, I went up to his front door. I stood there for a moment, sweating. Then I knocked.
Gerald Martin answered the door.
4
He frowned when he saw me.
He hadn’t seen my face on the night of the abduction, but he might know who I was. Todd and I weren’t very popular. It wouldn’t take a whole lot of sleuthing to discover that we were best friends. Seeing Mr. Martin behind the wheel of that car was permanently seared into my memory, and if he had a clear memory of looking at me, he’d know my hair color and body type. I’d knocked on his door knowing perfectly well that he might immediately realize who was standing there.
“Yes?” he asked. His tone was annoyed. More “Why are you bothering me, kid?” than “It’s you!”
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Curtis Black.”
“Okay.”
“I wanted to call, but you’re not in the phone book.”
“That’s right. There’s a reason for that.” Mr. Martin scratched his chin. He was fully dressed in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, but he hadn’t shaved and, from the smell of him, hadn’t bathed. I could see a tan line around his neck. He had the lean but muscular build of somebody who spent his days working outside.
“I apologize for that,” I told him. “I was wondering if I could interview you.”
“About what?”
“About you. I have a school assignment where I’m supposed to interview somebody and write an essay about them.”
“School’s out.”
“They give us work to do over the summer.” This wasn’t true, but would a childless construction worker know that? My cousins in Ohio said they got a summer reading list, so this didn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility.
“Then interview your mom.”
“We’re not allowed to interview relatives. That would be too easy. It’s supposed to be somebody we don’t know.”
“Why me?”
I had toyed with the idea of making up something, like wanting to interview him about what steps were involved in paving a road. But when I made the final decision that I was really going to do this, I decided to stick to the truth as much as possible, to decrease the chances that he’d figure out that I was a lying little weasel trying to get him to confess to a trio of murders. “You were falsely accused of kidnapping Todd Lester. I thought that would be an interesting interview. Most of my friends are picking really lame subjects.”
“Such as?”
“Excuse me?”
“What really lame subjects are your friends picking?”
I honestly hadn’t expected him to question me on something like this, and my mind suddenly went blank. I hoped my eyes didn’t go wide. “Y’know,” I said, “teachers and stuff.”
“Your friends are interviewing teachers?”
“Yes.”
“You’re right. That sounds boring.” This seemed like a comment that would be accompanied by a smile, but it wasn’t.
“And one of my friends is interviewing a barber. Another one is interviewing the guy who owns the bowling alley.” Was I giving too much information? I was definitely giving too much information. I needed to shut up now.
“Which bowling alley?”
“Arctic Bowl.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t know there was another one.”
“I don’t know if there is or not. I don’t bowl.”
“I do sometimes,” I said.
Mr. Martin said nothing.
“Anyway, would it be all right if I interviewed you?” I asked.
“It sounds like your friends are interviewing people about their jobs.”
“They are. Most of them are. But the assignment doesn’t say we have to do that. We can interview them about anything.”
Mr. Martin stared at me for too long of a moment. “Do I get to read your essay before you turn it in?”
“Yeah, sure, of course.”
“All right.”
Though he’d said “All right,” he just continued to stand in his doorway and stare at me, as if waiting for me to make the first move.
“I was hoping to do it now, but I can come back later,” I said.
“When’s it due?”
“Next week.”
“Procrastinator, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on in,” he said. “Place is a mess.”
“That’s okay.”
I switched my backpack, which felt extremely heavy, from my left shoulder to my right as I followed him through the doorway into his living room. Gerald Martin had a very different definition of “Place is a mess” than I did. As far as I could tell, he meant that he hadn’t vacuumed in the past half hour. I’m not suggesting that he’d wiped everything down with bleach while ranting about being able to see the germs slithering over his skin, but Mr. Martin was a very tidy housekeeper.
The place was way less creepy that I’d expected. Obviously, I’d known that there wouldn’t be severed human heads mounted upon the wall, but I’d expected maybe a caribou head, its face frozen in terror. Or disturbing artwork that he’d painted himself. Something that was “off,” something to make me say, “Yes, the man who lives here is definitely the kind of person who abducts teenaged boys.”
But it was a normal house. Sparsely furnished, yet not sparsely enough to feel weird. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it had a welcoming feel, I didn’t feel like I was walking into the lair of a predator.
“Sit down,” he told me. It wasn’t quite a command, but also not quite a friendly offer for me to make myself at home.
I was extremely self-conscious about my backpack as I sat down on the couch—I had this vision of a prominent gun-shaped bulge on the side. I unzipped the backpack, took out a notebook, then set the backpack on the carpet next to my feet without zipping it up again.
“Want a glass of water?” he asked.
“Oh, no, thank you,” I said. My throat went dry as I said it, and I barely got the last word out. I coughed.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” he said.
He walked out of the living room. He was probably going to be gone long enough for me to take the gun out of my backpack and shove it between the couch cushions for easier access, but if he heard the rustling and poked his head back into the room, that would be outrageously bad. Instead, I just sat there, hoping I wasn’t sweating too much.
Maybe I should abandon this insane plan. Apologize for bothering him and get the hell out of here.
Then how would I feel when the next kid disappeared?
How should I feel? Why was this my responsibility? Why was I, a fourteen-year-old, sitting in the living room of a serial kidnapper? Getting into a fight with Todd and causing him to walk home by himself didn’t mean that I was obligated to put myself at risk for being murdered—or worse—did it?
I would be well within my moral rights to say, “Hey, I’m just a kid!” and not get involved.
But I was here, on his couch, with a gun in my backpack, and I was going to see this through…while making every possible effort to ensure that I did not become his next victim.