Turn Left at the Cow (12 page)

I could see Gram's puzzled look when the overhead light turned on. “Is something wrong, Travis? Why were the doors locked?”

“Just habit, you know, coming from a big city and all.”

Gram started up the truck, but then we just sat there for a moment. She seemed to be thinking hard about something. I suppose it was my perfect chance to tell her about the note. But I knew the first thing she'd do would be to call up Deputy Dude. And I wasn't ready for another one of his friendly little chats.

Finally Gram turned to me. “That was impressive, the way you took care of Linnea. Did you get her back to her family okay?”

I nodded.

“She and Isabella have certainly had to grapple with more than any child should.” Gram shook her head. “And the ticket Linnea had—was that really your winning ticket?”

I shrugged. “You already bought me that bike, so, you know, I thought . . .” I let my voice trail off. I hoped she wasn't upset that I had handed off my prize.

Gram suddenly grinned. “The look on Milo's face—oh, my heavens—when he realized you of all people had won his precious bike. That look alone was worth ten times the ticket price!”

And then she started to laugh. And once she got going, she couldn't seem to stop. She just kept laughing, harder and harder. I swear, if she'd been in the school cafeteria drinking milk, cow juice would have been squirting out of her nose at that point.

After a while I looked around. Was I being Punk'd? But nobody jumped out of the bushes with a camera or anything.

Finally Gram took off her glasses and pulled a Kleenex out of her sleeve to wipe her eyes. “Oh, I'm so glad you decided to come see me this summer. I haven't laughed like that in years.” Then she drove home in complete silence, except for an occasional laughing snort.

When we got home, I told Gram I was tired and headed straight for my bedroom. I knew I needed to come up with a plan to deal with the note, but everything that had happened in the past couple of days was starting to crash in on me. I decided to just drop into a coma and figure it all out in the morning. But I bumped my toe on something as I was pulling off my T-shirt. I looked down and there it was: the Father Box.

I hauled it up onto the bedspread and sat down on the middle of the bed. I was still feeling pretty crappy about snooping through Gram's house; there was a part of me that thought I should just put it back under her bed without looking at it any further.

But if all of this junk was about my father, didn't I have the right to look at it? It was part of who I was, whether anybody wanted me to know about it or not.

I piled everything from the box into little stacks around me, half sorting it based on what the stuff seemed to be. I ended up with an ancient photo album, a couple of yearbooks, the yellowed newspaper clippings, and a bunch of other loose papers.

I looked through the loose papers first, to see if I could find a recent address or anything similar. But it was clear everything was pretty old; the only addresses were on some letters from various army bases, which were definitely pre-robbery.

I opened the top letter and read the first several lines:

 

Dear Mom
,

I've only been here for two weeks, but I can already tell you that all the terrible things they say about boot camp are true. But I'm not complaining (and please don't take it personally)—it's great to be anywhere but there! I miss you and I worry about Carl, but the building where I bunk holds probably twice as many people as the whole population back home. I'm finally starting to meet the world!

 

Farther down in the stack was a report card for John Stoiska, fifth grade. He had gotten an A in arithmetic; guess his math-genius genes hadn't made it to me.

I cracked open a yearbook and randomly flipped through it, finally turning to the index at the back.
Stoiska, John
, followed by a long list of pages. I opened to page sixty-two; there was this photo of two guys with big cheesy grins, both in football jerseys, hamming it up for the camera—and right away I knew which one was him. It was weird; it was like looking in one of those fun-house mirrors. I could see myself in him, but everything was just a little bit off. Especially the dorky hair.

The long-ago dad was holding up his fingers behind the head of the guy next to him, doing those devil horns. And I did a double take when my eyes skimmed down to read the caption: “Seniors John Stoiska and Kyle Anderson.”

Kyle Anderson? Had Deputy Dude been friends with my father? You'd think maybe the big bad arm of the law could have cut me some slack for old times' sake, right? But I guess that isn't how it works: cops and robbers are sworn enemies, just like jocks and skaters or the Celtics and the Lakers.

Finally I turned to the newspaper articles. First in the stack was the front page of an old October issue of the
Prairie Press
, which I recognized as the local paper. Staring at me was the photo of my dad in his military getup and the headline “Local Link to Northern Bank Heist” plastered in big letters across the top. I started reading:

 

FBI Special Agent Mark Tosch confirmed this morning that 23-year-old John Stoiska, a local resident who has been missing since his boat was found washed up the morning of September 2, is wanted for questioning in a burglary of the Community Trust Bank located in Crookston, Minnesota. The burglary likely happened sometime in the late-night hours between 9:00 P.M. on August 31, when a nearby storeowner locked up, and 8:00 A.M. on September 1, when the break-in was discovered by bank manager Vernon Coop.

“This is the first time the bank has been burglarized in its seventy-five-year history,” stated Coop.

Authorities won't reveal what evidence they have linking Stoiska to the crime but have asked citizens to step forward with any information they have about him. Several local witnesses saw Stoiska here in town on the day after the burglary, but he was reported missing and possibly drowned the next morning after his boat was discovered adrift. An extensive search of the lake at that time revealed no sign of Stoiska's body.

“He was a wild one, but I never figured him for a crook,” said Florence Halvorsen, a waitress who served Stoiska his lunch on September 1. “Always a good tipper, too.”

Authorities searched Stoiska's residence and questioned his mother, Lois Stoiska, along with several other local residents.

It appears the burglary required electrical skills and explosives. Stoiska's military service records reveal he had specialized training in those areas. In the weeks prior to the burglary, Stoiska had also spent time at a construction job near Crookston.

Authorities have stated that Stoiska was not working alone.

“The time frame and the skill level required to break into the bank and then into the vault make it highly likely that this crime required more than one perpetrator,” stated Tosch. “We believe John Stoiska had at least one accomplice, and we are proceeding accordingly.”

Neither authorities nor Coop would reveal the amount of money stolen, but bank sources confirmed that the timing of the heist seemed carefully planned for a maximum potential take.

A $15,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to an arrest.

 

There were more newspapers, but I figured it was going to take me a couple of months just to wrap my head around everything in this one article. An accomplice? Iz and Kenny and I had talked about that, but this made it seem real—there actually might be someone out there besides my father who knew what had happened that long-ago night. What exactly did all this mean? Just what evidence did the FBI have against my dad, and how come it took longer than a month for them to link him to the robbery if they had something solid?

And I had other questions too. Like, was some bank-robbing bad guy growing inside him that whole time he was getting As in fifth-grade math? Was it just waiting for its chance to leap out, like when the creature in that movie
Alien
suddenly burst out of the guy's chest?

Was it waiting there somewhere inside me, too?

Something crinkled as I shifted on the bed. I pulled the anonymous note out of my pocket and set it between the newspapers and the yearbook. Were there any real clues buried in these little piles of stuff? I couldn't see how anything here was going to lead me to the whereabouts of the person Gram had lost and I was trying to find. Maybe these pieces of junk were just the last reminders anyone would ever have of my dad.

I tried to keep my eyes open long enough to read more, but suddenly I was way too tired to resist giving in to sleep. I curled up on top of all the mess and just let myself sink into the deep waters. But right before drowning, I had one of those strange, random thoughts that sometimes happen as you go under for the last time. By showing up in town, I had become a constant reminder of my dad. All I had to do was figure out who didn't like being reminded.

When I woke up, the wind was howling outside and rain was hammering onto the roof. I had all these questions popcorning around in my brain, heated up by my looking through the Father Box the night before. I started searching for some answers on my phone, but pretty quickly the smell of real bacon won out. The new health-conscious Ma tried to pass off some fried tofu crap called “fakon” on me, but, I mean, really? Really, Ma? So once again I threw the box back together and pushed it under my bed, stuffing the cut-and-paste note back into my pocket.

“Kenny called. He said you should come over if you want to play some kind of video game. He seemed fairly excited about it. I think it's nice you've made a friend so quickly. Kenny's a good boy.” Gram plopped some slices of bacon next to some eggs and set them in front of me at the table.

“Thanks.” I had lots of questions for Gram, too. I was determined to finally make her give me some answers, but I decided to test the waters first.

“Uh, Gram, that deputy guy who was here—he seemed to kind of feel at home.”

Gram gave me a surprised look, but then her eyes did that thing people's eyes do when they go all vague and unfocused and you know they're seeing something nobody else in the room can see. “He and your father grew up together. They were best friends, really, in high school. Kyle Anderson was over here more times than I can count when he was a teenager.”

She took a sip from her coffee mug. “The two of them were unlikely friends. You couldn't overlook John, but people never took much notice of Kyle. Until John took him under his wing. I was proud of John for that, for going out of his way to befriend somebody who so clearly needed a friend. Kyle was so serious—I think things were hard for him at home, although he wouldn't talk about it—and John got him to lighten up. I always hoped that it might work the other way too, that he might be a steadying influence for John.”

Gram pushed her plate away from her; she hadn't eaten half of her breakfast. “That isn't how it turned out, of course. It seems their friendship was another thing that got away from your father. After all, Kyle was on a path to becoming the town's deputy, and John ended up becoming our most notorious law- breaker. That's too much of a divide for any friendship to stand.”

It was only my first question, and it had already put this look onto Gram's face that made her seem old.I mean, even older than usual.

Someday, maybe I would get up the courage to push past the sad in her face and just ask her my hardest questions. Maybe I'd even try asking Ma one more time—I mean, it wasn't as if she'd robbed a sperm bank to come up with me, right? She'd spent at least enough time with the guy who'd donated my Y- chromosome to create a lifetime souvenir; she must have known something about who he really was.

But that look on Gram's face meant I was done with twenty questions for the morning. I kept my mouth shut and stared out at the lake. The sky was as gray and stormy as my insides.

Gram stood and picked up our plates. “It seemed to me that Kyle was much too hard on you when he came to ask about the bank money the other day, but I've been thinking about that. I suppose I didn't account for the fact that he probably still feels . . . very betrayed that his good friend committed such a serious crime. I imagine he feels he can't trust this family anymore. It's not fair to you, but life so seldom is fair.”

I nodded and headed for the bathroom, anxious to shower off the bad feeling that was dogging me after our talk, but it didn't work. So I was eager to head next door to Kenny's. He answered my knock and led me to a family room. Most of the surfaces held hairbrushes or stuffed animals or pink-colored items. Kenny waved his hand at the TV.

“Yo, we got the game room to ourselves! Never happens around here.”

I raised my eyebrows and he continued. “Most of 'em have gone off to get Linnea her bike. The kid wouldn't shut up about it; she talked more than I've ever heard her talk in her life. I think Iz is still asleep and Kari's probably working.”

It should have been the perfect time to haul the first-grade cut-and-glue project out of my pocket and ask Kenny what he thought I should do about the anonymous note, but I held back. The past few days I'd bounced from one emo crisis to the next. Ever since Gram had told me that Kenny had called that morning, I'd been hoping he and I shared the same gaming taste. And after the talk I'd had with Gram that morning, I especially needed to just lose myself for a while in some relaxing fun that featured bloodthirsty killer zombies or maniacal Nazis—anything easier to stomach than what was going on in my real life.