Uchenna's Apples (20 page)

He stood up. “And please think again about answering all the questions we’re going to be asking you,” he said. “You should know that we require a very high standard of behavior from our students at St. John’s. If you refuse to cooperate with the police, the school board is going to have to consider whether you’re suitable to continue in attendance here.”

If Uchenna had thought she was scared before, now she realized she’d been underestimating her ability for scaredness. It was suspension Mr. Mallon was talking about: or worse. Her mouth went dry at the thought of how much trouble her parents had gone to to get her into this school: and how much they paid in school fees—something they reminded her of every now and then, when her grades weren’t high enough. That this whole mess might wind up getting her suspended, or even thrown out of school—

“Go on,” Mr. Mallon said. Together, Uchenna and Emer went.

*

Lunch was exactly as the Headmaster had predicted—a meal in which neither of them were able to take any interest at all. Uchenna and Emer sat off by themselves, down at the end of a table, and none of the other kids in their class or even their year showed the slightest sign of wanting to sit anywhere near them. “Like we’re contagious,” Uchenna said under her breath, as she played with trying to get a little of a fruit smoothie down her.

Emer was sitting and staring at her history schoolbook as if expecting it to come up with some kind of useful answer. She shook her head, turning her phone over and over in her hands. The phone call that she’d already had with her mom had left her white and shaking, as if she was about to be sick. Uchenna had been stealing glances at her own phone every now and then: but there had been no phone call for her, not even an angry text.
She’s so angry she doesn’t even want to talk to me,
Uchenna thought over and over again.
This is the worst day of my life!
She stared at the table.
Oh, come on, GTS, make Yourself useful and get me off the hook! I didn’t do anything wrong! I was trying to do right!

But if GTS was doing anything for her, Uchenna couldn’t tell. After lunch she and Emer went back to class, and once there they were treated with the same kind of horrified distancing by the other kids as when the news first came out last year that poor Helena Nicolou in the fourth form had leukemia. And the clock crept slowly along to two thirty, and then three: and though everybody else escaped the classroom then, Uchenna and Emer were walked down to the library by Mrs. Hanlon, who left them there, sitting in a corner, too nervous and miserable to read or do anything else until four o’clock finally crept along, and they were walked down to the Headmaster’s office again.

There were a lot more chairs in there now. Mr. Mallon wasn’t there yet, and neither was Sergeant Moran. But Emer’s mom was there, tall and thin and blonde and casually dressed in jeans and a white shirt, pacing back and forth over by the wall where the peaceful-looking watercolors of flowers hung. There was nothing peaceful about the way she looked—but then even at calm times, Emer’s mam always looked a little frayed. Uchenna usually thought this had something to do with her separation from Emer’s dad: but today, as Emer came in, her mom looked at her with an expression that was a mixture of embarrassment and anger and, yes, fear.

Uchenna was positively scared to look at her own Mam. Her Mam wasn’t pacing: she was sitting in one of the chairs, still wearing her white hospital coat. As Uchenna came in, her Mam’s expression really put the fear into her. Her eyes were quite cold: they only got that way when Mam was incredibly angry. When her Mam patted the chair beside her, Uchenna went timidly over and sat down, but she could hardly look at her Mam after that first glimpse: she was too frightened.

Instead she looked at the people sitting in the other chairs. One of them was a big broad-shouldered man, beefy, dark-haired, in a tweed jacket and jeans. He had a face that was as intimidating, in its way, as that of Sergeant Moran: he had little narrow eyes that seemed, as soon as they rested on you, to be trying to figure out what you were good for. Next to him sat a little dark-haired woman in a dark blue white-striped track suit, wearing her hair pulled back into an excruciatingly tight pony tail—the style that kids at school called a Tallaght Face Lift. Her face was completely expressionless—not as if she was holding it that way, but as if it was that way normally: and Uchenna found that even more scary than her Mam’s quiet anger. On the other side of Mr. and Mrs. Garrity, Jimmy sat, looking small and alone. As Uchenna looked over at him, he glanced at her, miserable, and then down at the ugly rug.

The door opened, and Mr. Mallon came in, followed by Sergeant Moran. Uchenna watched the Headmaster as he settled himself behind his desk. Sergeant Moran put himself over behind the desk and off to one side, and stared first at Emer, then at Uchenna, and finally, longest and hardest, at Jimmy.

“I want to thank you—” the Headmaster started to say to all the parents. But Mr. Garrity cut him off.

“So now we know what it’s about,” he said, apparently to Mr. Mallon: but it was the Garda he was staring at. “Another frame-up, right? These other two, they’re just here for the looks of the thing, to prove you’re bein’ fair and balanced. See, when there was trouble we hauled in a Yank and an African to keep the Traveller company—”

“Mr. Garrity,” said Mr. Mallon, “please, if you’ll just—”

“But you’re gonna turn those two loose with a rap on the knuckles, and you’ll fit him up for some nice little supporting role in this eedjit-y horse business, because whatever Nigerians and Yanks might steal around here, everybody knows it wouldn’t be horses—”

“What??”
Emer’s mom said: and “I
beg
your pardon!” Uchenna’s Mam said, sounding outraged. “I don’t know what your problem is, mister, but my daughter—”

“Your daughter got my son into this, missus!” Mrs. Garrity said, the expressionless face suddenly gone furious, as if someone had flipped a switch. “My son doesn’t even
like
horses! The more shame to us, hard enough we have it to keep our way of life alive when all you buffers want our people all stuffed nice and safe into little crackerboxes like the rest of you live your small sad lives out in. And no sooner do we finally stick ourselves into one of those boxes for his sake, so he can get some proper schooling, he’s a smart boy, smarter than your great spoiled girl there I wouldn’t doubt, that now somebody’s trying to get us put out of the house it took us two years to get into! One of our ‘friendly’ neighbors probably, they’ve never —”

The Headmaster stood up. “Mrs. Garrity,” he said, and something about his low level voice cut straight through her own. She stopped.

Mr. Mallon let out a breath. “We’re simply here to ask the youngsters questions that we have no right to ask them without having you here to make sure they’ve got the support they need. No one is going to fit anyone up for anything—”

“If that’s true, what’s
he
doing here?” Mr. Garrity said, jerking his chin at Sergeant Moran. “Guilty until proven innocent, that’s what we are. Knew I shouldn’t have come in here without a solicitor.”

Sergeant Moran’s frown got deeper, if that was possible. Uchenna shot Emer a look, while the adults were all busy glaring at each other. Emer rolled her eyes, then went back to contemplation of the rug.

“Well,” Uchenna’s Mam said, “if there are going to be questions asked, can we please get on with it? I’ve got to do a double shift tonight, and the sooner we can get this over with, the sooner I can get back to the hospital and start making up the time I’ve lost today.” She flicked that cold-eyed look at Uchenna.

Uchenna wished she was in her bedroom so she could put her face down in the pillow and just cry. But her bedroom seemed about a million miles away now.
And when I do get there, things probably aren’t going to be any better: I am in so much trouble—! Oh, GTS, where are you when I need you?!

“Right enough,” said Sergeant Moran. “Let’s.” He turned to the three kids. “You three were seen out mowing lawns on Sunday,” said Sergeant Moran. “Unusual, as nobody’d ever seen you do anything of the kind before. And the two of you hang out together,” he said to Emer and Uchenna, “but he was a sudden addition. Anything you want to tell me about that?”

Uchenna and Emer and Jimmy exchanged a glance, knowing all of a sudden who had called the Guards and told them all her suspicions about the Traveller kid with the lawn mower. They all started talking at once: a tangle of confused story about who went to which field first, what they thought, how the horses came and went without warning, and all of them got worried about what the horses would eat. “Don’t you get it?” Uchenna said at last. “We didn’t know anything about where the horses came from! We didn’t care! But they were so hungry. And those little fields they were in were awful! There wasn’t enough grass, and only one time was there even water! We couldn’t leave them like that!”

Sergeant Moran sighed, an unhappy sound. “That’s what the animal welfare people have been saying to me,” he said. “Still.” And his face hardened down again. “You should have called the ISPCA. They would have taken care of it: they have proper feed and facilities for taking care of large animals.”

“We would have,” Emer said. “But every time we were going to, they vanished again!”

“Yes,” Mr. Mallon said. “Which is another thing. You kept finding them. The apples—”

“We found them in two of the locations,” said Sergeant Moran. “None of them had trees of that kind, the owners of the fields didn’t have any on their own properties, and it’s not an apple that’s sold in the stores.”

For some reason, Uchenna’s Mam looked interested in that. “Really?” she said. “What kind is it?”

Sergeant Moran looked at her as if she was daft. Then he said, “It’s a rare breed,” he said. “Something called an Albermarle Pippin. Probably the reason there was just one tree planted around there instead of a whole orchard of them. It comes from New York, would you believe.”

Uchenna’s Mam gave the Headmaster and the Sergeant a wry look. “An immigrant,” she said. “Like everyone else here.”

“Now, wait just a bloomin’ minute!” Mrs. Garrity said. “If you think—”

But Uchenna’s Mam just smiled that wry smile at her. “Even the oldest people to live on this island walked here from somewhere else,” she said. “Before it was an island, anyway. Nobody started here. The Celts were from Europe… eventually:
everybody
was a traveller then. They may have started down by
my
old part of the world, once upon a time.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Everything’s backwards these days, and I’m Irish now.”

“Says on your passport,” muttered Mr. Garrity.

“Exactly as it does on yours,” said Emer’s mom.

It got quiet for a moment, though there was some scowling from the Garritys. “How do I know you kids haven’t been in touch with whoever’s been moving the horses around,” said Sergeant Moran, “so you always knew where to find them? Be an easy way for somebody to keep the horses ticking along without actually showing their face.”

Uchenna scowled back at him, because this was easy to prove. “Here!” she said, and dug around in her pocket for her phone. She held it out. “There’s nothing on it but texts from Eames and Jimmy. And no calls from anybody else. My Mam checks my call records online all the time, she can tell you. Go on, take a look!”

That seemed to take the Sergeant a little by surprise. But Uchenna’s Mam put her hand on Uchenna’s, pushing it down. “I think you need a court order to ask for that officially,” she said to the Sergeant, “but I’ll be happy to check the account records and let you know what I find.” She looked sidewise at Uchenna, and this time, to Uchenna’s intense relief, the expression was a lot less cold and angry.
Oh, she believes me! Oh thank you, GTS—

“Anyway,” Jimmy said with mild scorn, “who needs a phone to find out what’s going on around here? Can’t go to the can around this place without everybody knowing what you did ten minutes later.”

Emer’s mom stifled a snorted laugh. Uchenna’s Mam actually smiled. “Those horses,” Jimmy said, “everybody at school knew where they were as soon as they showed up. People got eyes, don’t they?”

The Headmaster just looked rueful. “Gossip,” he said, “moved fast enough in this part of the world before anybody ever laid eyes on a telephone. Now it travels at lightspeed. Just a slight increase, apparently.” He sighed. “But this doesn’t solve our basic problem,” said Mr. Mallon, “in that you kids should have reported the horses to us right away, rather than getting yourselves mixed up in a very—”

All of them started at a sudden noise like someone tearing a piece of thick cardboard apart. It was static, and it came from Sergeant Moran: specifically, from the police communications radio that he wore fastened to his uniform up by his collar. “All Adamstown units,” said a rather amazed-sounding voice, “all Adamstown units, respond immediately, Main Street one half mile west of Station Road, I repeat, Main Street one half mile west north of Station Road, livestock loose in road—”

Everybody in the room stared at each other. Sergeant Moran grabbed the little radio box, feeling for the button on top of it. “Moran here, say again?”

Another blast of static. “Better get down here, sir,” said the voice on the other end, “we’ve got a feckin’ stampede comin’ down the street and we’d better head ‘em off before they get over by the tracks, there’s a main line express due in about five minutes—!”

The Sergeant was out the door before his colleague finished speaking.
“Livestock??”
said Emer’s mom.

“You come on,” said Mr. Garrity, and grabbed his son’s hand. Before Mr. Mallon could say anything, all three Garritys were out the door.

Uchenna’s Mam and Emer’s mom stared at each other, then at the Headmaster. He was standing up behind the desk, talking into his own phone. “Roger? Yes. The kids in the back sports field, I want you to—what? No! You tell them I said to— Oh, damn! I’ll be right down.”

He came hurriedly around the desk, heading in the wake of the Sergeant and the Garritys. “Sorry about this, ladies, we’ll have to reconvene later,” he said, “I’ve got to go help the PE instructors keep the football team from getting trampled—” And then he too was gone.