The Chardon Chronicles: Season One -- The Harvest Festival (12 page)

“I can drive already.”

“You can ‘drive’,” he air quoted, “but you
can’t
drive
.”

“I admit it, I’m intrigued. Alright, once you
wake up?”

“Yeah, this day’s not getting started until
coffee gets in my belly.”

They had bagels for breakfast and he brewed a
big pot of coffee. “I’m still feeling that run. I am getting
old.”

“Well, they say you’re as old as you
feel.”

“I feel old.” he turned on the news.

Radio host Jerry O’Sullivan died in a car
accident late last night. He lost control of the vehicle and
crashed into a concrete retaining wall at a high rate of speed.
Reports indicate that alcohol and possible drug use were involved.
O’Sullivan leaves an ex-wife and two children behind.

“Wow, nothing left of that car.” He pointed
at the TV. “The advanced driving skills can come in handy..”

“Yeah, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to drive
sober, right?”

“There’s that, too. I know I don’t have to
say it, but I will anyway: don’t drive drunk… call me any time. I
don’t care about you drinking or any friends drinking… well I do,
but not so much that you should risk your life.”

“Yeah no kidding. Gimme some credit.”

“Even more important, don’t let some other
dummy drive drunk while you’re in the car… Sometimes people choose
to do stupid things no matter what you say. Just stay out of their
car.”

“But then they won’t think I’m as cool as I
really am right?” she stuck her tongue out and crossed her
eyes.

“I’m serious. I know you’re a strong person,
but when people are in a group--adults or kids--it’s like the
collective IQ drops to mongoloid levels.”

“Mongoloid? is that the politically correct
term?”

“I doubt it, but I’m pre-PC, baby. Let’s
go!”

They drove for a way out into the country.
“That’ll do.” he pointed at a quiet industrial park. “Head back
there.”

She turned into the driveway. It was a couple
miles long. “Speed up.” he pointed down the road. She put her foot
down. The car accelerated to about 50 mph and he cranked on the
handbrake. The rear tires locked and the car fishtailed.

“Shit!” she wrestled with the wheel but the
car spun out and hopped the curb onto a lawn backward. They were on
the grass. He was laughing and clapping his hands. She was wired
with adrenaline.

“You asshole!” she was actually angry.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I had an instructor
do that to me, once. Your reflexes were good. Good instincts.” he
said. She was still scowling and shook her hands.

“Good instincts? But we ended up here, and
the engine died.”

She got out and looked around the car. “I
think it’s all OK.”

“If we do any damage, I’ll get it fixed,
don’t worry. I swear I won’t do that again.”

He showed her some basic maneuvers on the
pavement. They panic stopped several times. She learned how to do a
J-turn and what it felt like to take a corner at high speed. He had
her push the car past its ability to grip the pavement and
understeer around a corner. They went onto a gravel road to
practice the Scandinavian flick and to feel the car oversteer and
spin out. At the end of the session she was a little tired.

“OK. That was fun, but I’m beat from all that
anxiety, man! Poor car, too.” she patted the dash.

“Don’t let this little lesson go to your
head--you’re no stunt driver.”

“Believe me, if you weren’t here pushing me,
I would not want to drive like that.” she said.

He smiled. “Ice cream?”

When Monday rolled around Tracy had a hard
time getting out of bed. She stared at the ceiling for a long time
and wondered what the point of school was. She heard Robbie milling
around and the smell of breakfast wafted down the hall to her room.
She got out of bed. The air wasn’t cold, but she put on a thick
robe as if it would insulate against a new, weird reality.

“Morning Perry...” she knelt down by the dog
and put her head on his flank and gave him a good rub. He rolled
over on his back and eyed her.

“Mornin’’ Robbie was still pretty groggy. The
coffee was still brewing and he stole a cup from the stream then
put the pot back. “Bacon’s there.” he gestured to a plate where
there was a big pile of bacon.

She made some toast and took a few pieces.
She ate for a while in silence. Robbie was clicking around on his
laptop. His eyes were scanning stories between sips of coffee.

“Uncle Robbie, that stuff was weird. Just
weird. I can’t process it all. I am trying to put all the pieces
together.”

He glanced over at her. “It’s a lot to take
in. It’ll take a while to make any sense of it at all.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about this
before?”

“There’s really no right time to tell the
story--and there’s really no good way to start telling it. I
learned about this when I was around your age. David Mathis really
opened the door for me. One summer he just got interested in
mythology and started reading… He basically lived here for about a
month reading and talking to your grandpa. It was mostly over my
head.”

“Is that why he’s a little out there?”

He laughed, “I’m glad you met him, what a
great guy. Yeah, once you really
see
things from this
perspective, it can make you very deliberate about the choices you
make. And those choices might end up taking you far outside the
norm.”

She became pensive and quiet.

“There’s no recipe for dealing with all this.
The only thing I can say is don’t worry about it too much. The
world is still the same as it was yesterday, you just have more
complete information than a lot of other people.”

She just raised her eyebrows and chewed her
food. “When I got up this morning, I thought ‘what’s the point of
going to school’?”

“Yeah. I get that. David dropped out. I
almost did.”

She laughed sardonically, “you’re no after
school special!”

“Nope! Not even a little bit.” He laughed
hard, then took a moment to provide a more considered response.
“OK, look, Tracy, you’re an adult, but you’ve got
really
limited experience.” She nodded. He continued, “High school.
College. It’s a certain type of experience. It’s good. It can give
you a certain type of a frame of reference, but it’s one that won’t
hold up well against
that
,” he pointed at the library.

“Yeah, I get that, actually I was going to
say, ‘I thought what’s the point?’ but then I realized I was really
craving that dumb routine right now. So I’ma go.”

“Alright, see you later.”

“Bye! She rapped on his head with her
knuckles.” he ducked out of the way and waved over his shoulder.
“Bye Perry!” she slapped the dogs side. She went and got ready and
was out the door. The world seemed to tremble and pulse with a new
type of energy and life.

When she got to the parking lot, she saw
Chloe Marte by her new car. Chloe was chatting with a group of
kids. Tracy felt like she was stepping into a nice warm pool of
familiarity, back into the world she knew and took for granted. She
got out of the Austin Healey and walked over.

Tracy asked, “Oh man… is that??”

Chloe hopped a couple of times and gestured
at the window in spokesmodel style, “It’s a brand new car! Well, a
used car.”

A group of boys stopped by on their way
toward the building. Two of them wore letter jackets. “Whoa, Jetta.
Nice.” one of the guys said. He had short buzzed hair, and coffee
colored skin and hazel eyes. “I got a Golf GTI…” he pointed toward
the back of the lot. “It’s probably the same year.”

“I like that GTI.” Tracy said.

“Nobody’s got you beat though.” the other boy
said, and pointed with studied casualness at the Healey. “I’d love
to take a ride in that sometime.” He was tall and had wavy blond
hair and was tan from being out all summer. He was the tight end of
the football team and was the only kid in the school that surfed.
He actually went up to lake Erie in the fall to surf in his wetsuit
in the frigid water, but he modeled his personality and look on the
people in surf movies, like
Endless Summer
.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your
gentlemen friends?” Chloe smiled and nudged Tracy.

The boys looked around, the buzz cut said,
“Gentlemen? You mean us?” they laughed, “I’m Roberto
Marquez--people call me Berto.”

“Richard Golden.” he shook hands with both of
them. They started heading toward the building.

“Where you from?” Berto asked Chloe.

“Well, here and there--mostly LA then
Nashville.”

“A lady of the West, Nice. I got a cousin in
Nashville. I was there last spring break. Oh man we partied. That
was a cool town.”

“Yeah, we just moved here before school. My
dad’s from Chardon.”

“Oh nice. Nothing like coming home.”

“Where you girls headed?” Berto asked. They
stopped at the main stairs.

“We’re upstairs in Calc.” Tracy said.

“Tracy’s a brain since 5th grade, bro. But
she’s cool… We’re gonna go with the other glue eaters and sit in
study hall.”

“You busy after school?” Berto asked. The
girls looked at each other and shrugged.

“No, I’m not.” Tracy said.

Chloe added, “Me neither.”

“We’ve got practice ‘til 4 today, but after
that?” they nodded.

“Yeah, I’m on twitter. Check me there.”
Richard said.

“Me too.” Berto said.

The clerk poked her head into Ralph’s office.
“Judge, there’s a courier here. Needs your signature.”

“Be right there!” he said. He received all
kinds of things during the week--the vast majority of it was court
correspondence. He trotted down the stairs to the front desk. A
young man in a red vest and a red baseball cap waited. “That for
Judge Ralph?” The man looked at the label.

“Yup. I need your John Hancock.” He gave the
judge a bulky electronic pad. Ralph scribbled on it with the stylus
then walked back to his chambers. It was a flat stiff envelope. A
red rubber stamp was on the front. “Pb”.

He closed the office door and opened the
package with a knife. There were two photographic prints that had
been culled from the images taken at the Wells farm. Each one had
side-by-side images. One zoomed out with an arrow pointing to the
shelf location, the other zoomed in. One showed the spine of books.
One of the books was circled in red. “That one.” had been written
by some unknown hand on a computer screen somewhere, then made into
a print. The other print was similar, except two items, a book and
a notepad were highlighted. “ASAP. We’ll be in touch.” was scrawled
on the front in red marker and underlined twice.

He got out the burner and texted “Court ASAP”
to Fonzi.

The reply from the Sheriff was immediate.
“OK. There in 10.”

He folded up the prints and put them in a
“Thank You” card from a local Scout troop and went outside to meet
Chuck. They met in the middle of the lawn, “I wanted to show you
this.” he said and unfolded the card.

“Really? That necessary?”

“Can’t be too careful.” Ralph said.

Chuck pictured Jerry cartwheeling in the
night sky. “Yeah you’re right.” He looked at the pictures and
breathed a sigh of relief. “This will be much easier than we
thought.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves--who knows
what they’ll want tomorrow or five minutes from now. Got this
covered?”

“Yeah, I’m on it…” Ralph started walking
away. “Hey wait…” he turned and came back.

“What?”

“The books--or copies good enough? We could
ghost in make a copy and ghost out.”

“Shit.” the judge said, put on the spot to
decide. “Better to take them. Who knows what they really want--the
information or maybe the physical book. Besides, you think anyone’s
going to miss those?”

“Guess not. OK. It’ll get done, leave it up
to me.”

Keith sat at his office desk with a notepad
on his lap and a three ring binder propped against the computer
monitor. The binder had detailed background reports on the Cantoe
family. He’d been pretexting records for several days and had
amassed a pile of paper in the binder. He made notes and flipped
back and forth among the pages. He tapped his chin with a pencil
eraser.

He saw Sarah Cantoe’s network was her Sister,
her kids and a couple of friends based numbers that she called
regularly in months leading up to the accident.

He spent some time wading through bills and
bank statements. He started to feel some sympathy toward Sarah. Her
bank account regularly became overdrawn and she paid hundreds of
dollars in fees. She scrambled from job to job over the years. When
she won the lottery she opened a bank account at Hartsgrove Union
Bank--a name he didn’t recognize. There was only about $57 grand in
the account--probably what was left of the $100k after taxes. Each
of the Hartsgrove Union Bank statements showed the same amount and
no withdrawals or charges.