Читать книгу Casey Templeton Mysteries 2-Book Bundle - Gwen Molnar - Страница 8

It was as he was leaving the skating shack the next Friday night, feeling pretty pleased because Marcie Finegood had skated more with him than with any of the other guys and not so pleased because Marcie’s dad had come to pick her up early, that Casey heard his name being called in a raspy whisper.

“Casey! Over here, Casey!”

He looked around. At the corner of the skating shack, just past the circle of the outdoor light, someone was beckoning. No one else was around. Casey walked over. “Bryan?” he said, recognizing his hailer. “What gives?”

“Casey, I’ve got to talk to someone.”

“Well, sure, but let’s go inside. It’s too cold out here.”

“No, come to my place. My folks are out.”

“Okay,” Casey agreed. His folks were very much in. They were having their two-table bridge club tonight, and Casey would rather be just about anywhere else other than home. “So what’s up?” he asked Bryan as they walked.

“I’ve got myself into something pretty bad. Really bad. And I don’t now how to get out of it.”

“Can’t your folks help?”

They turned into the Ogilvys’ driveway. Casey had never been in Bryan’s house. But who had been? Probably nobody at school. It was a nice-looking place — a three-storey pale blue colonial with white pillars, trim, and shutters. It seemed to Casey like a paint company’s television advertisement.

“They’d kill me if they knew,” Bryan told him, opening the front door to a large hall with polished dark oak floors, an oriental carpet, and huge Chinese vases.

Casey searched for a place to put his skates. He was afraid they might drip on the floor, so he put his coat down and the skates on top of it.

“Honest, Casey, I don’t know why I did it.”

“Well, tell me what it’s all about.” Casey followed Bryan up a carpeted staircase, along a hall, and into a huge bedroom. “Wow!” He stared at a computer setup that blew Hank’s out of the water. “Is there anything you don’t have?”

Bryan sat on his computer chair and sagged. “Not much.”

“So tell me.” Casey sat opposite his friend. “Start at the beginning and tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay, you’re new here and we’re friends if not buddies, but you’ve seen how all the other kids and even the teachers treat me. The only teacher who ever showed any interest in me was Mr. Deverell. If he dies … oh, Casey, if he dies I’ll be partly responsible. I’ve just got to have someone understand why I did what I did and maybe help bail me out. And I’ve got to try to make up for it.”

Bryan clenched his fists and closed his eyes for a moment. “Anyway, I’ve never been asked to be a part of any group or club at school. I don’t know what it is about me that puts people off. More than one thing, I guess. We’re never here for the summers or for any of the holidays, and my parents … well, they’re different from other people’s. And I never know what to say to get people to like me.”

“You seem to be able to talk to me.”

“That’s because right away you talked to me. You’re the first kid to take any notice of me in years. Anyway, I never feel part of things.”

“What about your family?” Casey glanced around the beautifully furnished room. “You’re part of your family, and they obviously care a lot about you.”

“You think so? My parents were married ten years before they had me, and they still really only care about each other. They can afford it, so they buy me anything I want just to keep me out of the way.”

“Really?” Casey thought how his parents got along great with each other but still always concerned themselves about their sons.

“Well, as you said, I’ve got a great computer. It’s about my fifth, and I’ve been exploring the Web for years. There are three chat rooms I really like, and I have real friends in them from all over the world. You know what I mean by chat rooms?”

“Of course I know,” Casey said. “My brother, Hank, has a great time arguing with people in his groups.”

“Well, about a year ago one of the chat rooms started getting messages from an outside group suggesting we get in touch with them for exciting new conversations and ideas. I resisted for ages, but they kept on and on about what we were missing, what did we have to lose, and that once we contacted them we’d be in with technologically elite kindred spirits.”

“So you went for it?”

Bryan sighed. “About eight months ago I contacted the website they said to and made the awful mistake of giving them not only my real name and email but even my home address.”

“Oh, boy!” Casey shook his head. Hank had always told him how careful you had to be on the Internet.

“At first it was pretty exciting, and I felt I finally belonged to an easy bunch to talk to. A lot of their messages were based on Bible teachings and were written so powerfully that I got caught up in it all. And then … then …”

“Then what?” Casey pressed.

“Then they asked me to distribute some anti-gay pamphlets. They said it would establish me as a real worker for the cause.”

Casey could hardly believe his ears. “You’re the one who delivered all those pamphlets last month? You must have spent the whole night at it!”

Bryan seemed ashamed. “I did. And after that they sent me some drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“So I’d feel obliged to them, I guess,” Bryan explained. “I hid the parcel in here.” He walked over to a tall cupboard, opened the bottom doors, pulled out a stack of books, and showed Casey a small, tightly sealed package.

“How did you know what was in the package?” Casey asked. “It’s sealed shut.”

“Oh, I resealed it very carefully. It’s got pills in it stamped with butterflies. That’s how Ecstasy’s sometimes marked. I found that out on the Internet. I had the package for about a week and was going to send it back when I got an email that said if I didn’t do what they wanted next they’d tell my parents I was on drugs.”

“Why didn’t you just throw the package out and stop emailing them? And besides, they still could be any kind of pills and not something illegal.”

Bryan looked miserable. “Sure, I suppose they could be something harmless, but how do I know for sure? And I can’t ask anyone who might know. As for throwing the whole thing out, I thought of doing that, but the group said if I did that they could still let the police know I got the package and what was in it.”

“So what did this group want you to do?” Casey asked.

“Steal some money and send it to them.”

“You didn’t do that, did you?”

“They said they’d tell my parents if I didn’t.”

“So you stole money? From who?”

“No, I didn’t steal it. I sent them my own money.”

“How much?”

Bryan looked at the floor sheepishly. “Four hundred dollars. They think I did steal it, and now they’re saying that if I don’t keep doing what they order me to do, they’ll tell the police.”

“Bryan, you can just tell the police they’re lying.”

“Yeah, but what if the group tells the police about the pamphlets and the drugs and the other stuff?”

“What other stuff?”

Before Bryan could answer they heard the front door open and close.

“My parents!” Bryan cried.

“They’ll have seen my skates and coat in the front hall, so they know someone’s here,” Casey said. “Take me down and introduce me.”

“But they’ll think it’s strange. I never have anybody over.”

“Well, you have now.” Casey headed out of the room. “How about you come over to my place sometime tomorrow afternoon and you can finish telling me about all this?”

“Thanks, Casey,” Bryan said softly.

They were at the bottom of the stairs now, and Bryan’s parents were coming out of the living room.

“Mother, Father, this is Casey Templeton.”

Mrs. Ogilvy smiled. “Hello, Casey.” She was a very pretty, beautifully dressed woman about his mother’s age, Casey figured. “You’re a friend of Bryan’s?” She might as well have said, “But Bryan doesn’t have any friends.”

Casey grinned. “Yes, ma’am, I am. I was just asking Bryan to come over to our house tomorrow afternoon.”

“Templeton, Templeton …” Mr. Ogilvy, a tall, thin, sandy sort of man in a formal navy blue suit, appraised Casey thoughtfully. “Your father’s that army type who’s moved back here, right?”

“He’s a retired RCMP chief superintendent,” Casey said, taking an instant dislike to Bryan’s father.

“Ah, yes …” Mr. Ogilvy turned back into the living room with Bryan’s mother at his side.

Bryan shook his head glumly at his parents’ rudeness.

“Well, bye, Bryan,” Casey said. “See you tomorrow?”

“Thanks again, Casey. I’ll come about three if that’s okay?” He opened the front door.

“Sure.” Casey handed his skates to Bryan as he put on his coat. “Three it is.”

He heard the door shut behind him and inhaled some fresh cold air. My gosh, he thought, glancing back at the house, no wonder Bryan doesn’t want to tell his parents about all the weird stuff he’s into!

X X X

Casey hung up his coat and skates in the back hall of his house when he returned home from Bryan’s place. The smell of fresh coffee and hot cinnamon buns drifting from the kitchen filled his nose, while the sounds of a heated discussion blasting from the living room assaulted his ears. Wow! They were really going on about something — eight people seemed to be talking at once. As Casey strained to catch the drift of the argument, his mother came into the kitchen.

“What’s everybody so pumped up about, Mom?” he asked, crossing to take a bun off the hot tray on the kitchen counter as his mother poured coffee from a tall aluminum machine into a serving pot.

“Oh, hi, Casey! Jim Bailey’s playing devil’s advocate.”

“What’s devil’s advocate mean?”

“It means defending something you don’t necessarily believe to get people to argue against you. Jim’s taking the side of the people in the area who don’t want new people moving in. Here, give me a hand passing around these buns while I freshen up everybody’s coffee.”

Casey took the plate of buns and followed his mother into the living room.

Daisy Olberg waved at him. “Hello, Casey. Head this way with the best cinnamon buns on the continent.”

Casey passed around the buns, then sat quietly on a footstool in the corner. Trying to think through what Bryan had told him, he found he couldn’t help tuning in and out of the debate. Then he caught someone saying, “Newcomers bring in fresh ideas and new blood to an area.”

“Maybe so,” Jim Bailey answered, “but Grandma Jacobson said to me, ‘You take that Pakistani family with the fast-food place on Main Street. They’re Muslim. Now, Jim, this area was settled by Lutheran Scandinavians. It’s been European and Christian over a hundred years. I say the newcomers should respect that fact, and if they want to live here, they should change their religion and become Christians.’”

Casey watched as Daisy’s face got redder and redder. If she didn’t get a chance to speak soon, she was going to rupture something.

“If you follow that logic,” Daisy finally burst in, “then we Christian Europeans should have adopted the religion of the First Nations who were here a lot longer than a hundred years. Heck, follow Grandma Jacobson’s thinking and we should be doing their rain dances.”

Jim weighed in again. “Grandma Jacobson speaks for an awful lot of the folks here who say, ‘Don’t mess with our values and customs.’”

How come everybody sounded right? Casey wondered.

“But times have changed,” Casey heard Bill Sanford of Sanford’s Hardware point out. “Maybe too much in some ways, but this worry about newcomers eroding our national identity is nuts. We are what we are because of the fantastic mix of peoples.”

Who could argue with that? Casey asked himself.

Jim could. “The only place around here that has your fantastic mix, Bill, is Minetown. It’s cosmopolitan because of all the miners from everywhere who settled there in the 1920s. Around here there’s not much of a mix. People here are traditionally against immigration, which they figure takes jobs away from those who think they should have them.”

“Just because their families have lived and worked here doesn’t mean they can keep others out,” Bill said. “The law says anyone can move, live, and work anywhere.”

“But,” Jim insisted, “folks around here worry that different kinds of people moving in will mean more crime and tension.”

Boy, Casey thought, Jim was really on his soapbox. Casey wondered how much of what Jim said was what he believed. Then someone asked, “Why do people think the current immigrants are worse than their own ancestors who came in the past?”

“I think,” Casey’s mother broke in for the first time as she made the rounds with more coffee, “this anti-immigrant business is racism pure and simple. And it’s leading to all the name-calling, harassment, and violence.”

Casey was thinking of Maria McKay’s “accident” when someone asked his father, “You figure there’s a tie-in between what we’ve been talking about and the establishment of the Hate Cell?”

“Sure,” Casey’s dad said. “People might say they’d never get involved in hate activities, but the anti-immigration, even racist, attitude of the region makes it an ideal place for spreading white supremacy propaganda.”

“Do you think it’s somebody from around here who set up the Hate Cell at the Willson Place?” Casey asked.

“It has to be someone who knew about the abandoned Willson Place, Casey. And someone who knows that many people want to keep things as they are.”

Casey was wishing Bryan could hear all this when his mother said, “I heard somebody we all know pretty well say she thought it was a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money to have brought Jack McKay’s widow and kids over from Romania and that while knocking down Maria wasn’t right, she wasn’t badly hurt.”

“Not badly hurt!” Daisy shouted. “She’ll be in that neck brace for a long time, and her hip gives her terrible pain.”

“And I’ve heard more than one person,” Casey’s mother continued, “say Mr. Finegood is sucking the town dry expanding his store like he’s done and why doesn’t he just take his family and move away and leave the merchandising to people who belong here.”

Daisy shook her head angrily. “That’s so totally unfair! Mel Finegood is just about the most generous man in the community. What with paying for the new skating shack and having that free kids’ skate exchange, not to mention paying for the computers in the schools and the library …”

Sarah would want to know about this stuff, Casey thought. He reached behind him for a pen and a piece of paper and started to make notes. With what people were saying here and what he was hearing from Bryan, he could give Sarah some interesting information. He also knew Bryan was going to have to talk to his dad tomorrow.

At that moment Casey’s father sighed. “In Bosnia I saw where this kind of thinking can lead, but there they had a thousand-year buildup of racial hate.”

“I swear it wasn’t like this when we left Richford twenty-five years ago,” Casey’s mother added.

“Sure it was,” Daisy said. “It was always there just under the surface.”

“Well, what was hidden is really coming out,” Katie Sanford, Bill’s wife, said. “We had that Ku Klux Klan cross burning a few years ago not all that far away. Word is there’s more than one branch of the KKK in this area.”

“And remember that trial back in the 1980s of the social studies teacher who brainwashed his classes that the Holocaust was a fraud?” Fred Klatt asked. “A lot of folks believed him, especially many of the kids he preached to.”

“That teacher never talked to the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps in the Second World War,” Casey’s father said, frowning. “I have, and I’m telling you their stories are blood-chilling.”

“The brainwashing that teacher did was awful,” Bill said, “but what about the stuff being taught in some private schools around here right now? They even ask children the question: ‘The Jewish leaders were children of their father the devil — true or false?’ And the right answer for them is true.”

“There was anti-Jewish feeling around here long before the Holocaust,” Jim said, abandoning his devil’s advocate role. “In the 1930s when times were really tough, some people in the Alberta government made the Jews the scapegoat for everything that was wrong economically.”

“The poor Finegoods,” Casey’s mother said. “They’re the only Jewish family in this area and they’re bearing the brunt of all the new anti-Semitic propaganda these Hate Cells are spreading.”

“And speaking of the Hate Cell here,” said Katie Sanford, who helped out in the school library, “I hear quite a few kids saying if Mr. Deverell had minded his own business he wouldn’t have gotten hurt. You can bet they’re hearing that at home.”

Casey had heard that kind of talk, too.

“Mr. Deverell’s as likely to die as get well,” Bill Sanford said as he reached for another cinnamon bun. “Can’t these people see where this kind of thinking leads? Who will be next?”

“Seems this Hate Cell is part of a newly formed satellite operation with its home base in Idaho,” Casey’s father said thoughtfully. “Their white supremacy ideology, like their racist ideology, is a cancer, and as it grows, it’ll gain power and influence. At that point anyone who disagrees with them becomes a potential target.”

“What I don’t get, Dad,” Casey said, “is the difference between white supremacy and racism.”

“White supremacists concentrate on manipulating white people’s fears of being taken over by people who aren’t white, then they try to incite those people to take action, which usually results in violence,” Casey’s dad explained. “Racists generally hate specific races or ethnic groups not necessarily because of their colour or their religion. Sometimes it’s just based on ancient prejudices.”

“How do racists operate?” Casey asked.

“Sometimes it’s subtle, like finding ways to prevent them from renting certain properties. Sometimes it’s overt, like destroying their property or encouraging their kids to make fun of minorities. Before the kids around here get whipped up by hate propaganda, we’ve got to find out who’s behind this Hate Cell and flush them out.”

“Hear! Hear!” several people called out.

“I’m telling you,” Casey’s dad continued, “this is such a good town that we should insist on zero tolerance for intolerance.”

Jim Bailey laughed. “Spoken like a candidate for something. Whatever you’re running for, you’ve got my vote.”

The group decided to pack it in for the evening after that, and when they were gone, Casey and his dad began clearing up.

“You’ve done enough, Mary,” his dad said. “Casey and I will take it from here.”

Casey’s mother nodded wearily. “Thanks, guys. “I’m really bushed.”

“Dad?” Casey asked as he loaded cups and saucers into the dishwasher. “Do you know Mr. Ogilvy?”

“Sure, I’ve known Bertram Bradley Oglethorpe Ogilvy since grade one. Why?”

“I was visiting Bryan Ogilvy tonight, and his father sort of mentioned you. It didn’t sound as if he really knew you, though.”

“He knows me, and I know him only too well.”

“What does he do? He seems really rich.”

“He doesn’t do anything. He never has, and yes, he’s very, very rich. He’s C. Wilberforce Willson’s great-nephew. Through his mother he inherited all the old boy’s money when he was twelve, and he’s been an absolute jerk ever since.”

“He sure is rude and unpleasant,” Casey told his dad as he stacked the folding bridge chairs. “By the way, Bryan Ogilvy’s coming over tomorrow afternoon. He might want to talk to you.”

“Oh, really?” His dad looked surprised. “That’s interesting.”

Neither Casey nor his father could have guessed just how interesting it was going to be.