School Days - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,13

know us and . . ." She was looking straight at me and rolling her hands as she spoke, as if she were mixing bread dough.

"They all know us now," Ron said.

Dot finished her sentence as if he hadn't spoken.

". . . feel, like, the rhythm of community life. To belong to something."

"And now?" I said.

Ron shook his head slowly.

"How could you possibly prove him innocent?" Dot said.

"I don't know," I said. "May I look at his room?"

Chapter 13

"MAY WE LEAVE YOU," Dot Said. "We don't really like to come in here."

"Sure," I said. "I'll just sort of look around and think a little."

"Ronny and I will be downstairs," she said, and went.

I sat on the edge of the kid's bed. The room was blue and as soulless as the living room. The walls were darker blue, the ceiling a lighter shade. The bed was perfectly made with a brand-new blue quilt, with matching designer pillows stacked against the headboard. There was a bureau against the far wall, and a closet. A television sat on top of the bureau. There were no pictures on the walls. I opened the drawer in the bedside table. It was empty and clean. The drapes on the big window beside the bed were a darker blue than the walls. I looked under the bed. Nothing. Not even dust. I felt around under the mattress. Nothing. I stood and went to the closet. It was empty. I opened the bureau drawers. They were empty and lined with clean white paper. I went back and sat down on the kid's bed again.

As soon as he was gone they had cleaned out his room. It was as if they had emptied the room of him. Tried to render it pre-Jared, as if they could return life to the time when they had moved here and it was mostly possibility. There was no vestige of him. There had been no pictures in the living room. None of the cheap garish cardboard-framed school photographs that every parent had of every kid. No team photographs. No musical instruments. No CDs. It was as if he'd never existed, as if he'd never lain on this bed in the darkness and thought about sex or eternity or the American League. As if there had been no imaginary passions, no fantasized moments of derring-do, no terrifying moments of imagination when life's limitations nearly overwhelmed him. No graphic sexual conquests of women older than himself.

The room was empty and neutral and impenetrable. The only story it told me was that it had no story to tell. I got up and very carefully smoothed out the quilt where I had sat. I looked out the window. From here, I could see my parked car. I couldn't see clearly from here, but Pearl might have been sitting in the driver's seat. It was darker now than it had been, and rain began to spat disinterestedly against the window. I wondered if Jared had had a dog. I looked at the neat, color-coordinated, blank room upstairs in the neat, color-coordinated, blank house.

No. He didn't have a dog.

Chapter 14

I was walking across the parking lot with Alex Taglio, toward the main entrance of the Bethel County jail.

"What good does it do my guy to talk with you?" Taglio said.

"What harm?" I said.

"Say somehow, crazy as it is, you convince people that Clark isn't guilty," Taglio said. "My guy already rolled on him. Where would that leave us?"

"Maybe if he's innocent, he shouldn't be rolled on," I said.

"He is not innocent," Taglio said. "I said what if you convince people."

"If he's guilty, I don't want to get him off," I said.

"Oh, fuck," Taglio said, "I don't know what I'm arguing about. Rita already talked me into it."

"Sexual favors?" I said.

"I wish," Taglio said. "You ever?"

I shook my head.

"Married?"

"Sort of," I said.

"Sort of?"

"You?" I said.

"Mary Lou Monaghan," he said. "Five kids. She caught me fooling around, she'd cut off my wanker."

We went into the jail.

They got us seated, as far as I could tell, in the same interview room where I'd talked with Jared. When the guards brought Wendell in, they put him in the same chair. Might have been the same guards.

"First of all, Wendell," Taglio said, "Mr. Spenser's got no legal authority here. You don't have to talk with him if you don't want to."

"Like I got something else to do?" Wendell said.

He was a big, robust kid with pink cheeks and thick lips and smallish eyes. He