By now, everyone in the cloakroom realized that something big had
happened, and everyone had fallen silent.
Penny stood, turned, and surveyed them.
Had one of the snobs trashed her locker?
She spotted two of the worst offenders-a pair of sixth-grade girls,
Sissy Johansen and Cara Wallaceand suddenly she wanted to grab hold of
them, shake them, scream in their faces, tell them how it was with her,
make them understand.
I didn’t ask to come to your damned school. The only reason my dad can
afford it is because there was my mother’s insurance money and the
out-of-court settlement with the hospital that killed her. You think I
wanted my mother dead just so I could come to Wellton? Cripes. Holy
crimes! You think I wouldn ‘t give up Wellton in a snap if I could only
have my mother back? You creepy, snot-eating nerds! Do you think I’m
glad my mother’s dead, for God’s sake? You stupid creeps! What’s wrong
with you?
But she didn’t scream at them.
She didn’t cry, either.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. She bit her lip.
She kept control of herself, for she was determined not to act like a
child.
After a few seconds, she was relieved she hadn’t snapped at them, for
she began to realize that even Sissy and Cara, snotty as they could be
sometimes, were not capable of anything as bold and as vicious as the
trashing of her locker and the destruction of her clarinet. No.
It hadn’t been Sissy or Cara or any of the other snobs.
But if not them . . . who?
Chris Howe had remained crouched in front of Penny’s locker, pawing
through the debris. Now he stood up, holding a fistful of mangled pages
from her textbooks. He said, “Hey, look at this. This stuff hasn’t
just been torn up. A lot of it looks like it’s been chewed.”
“Chewed?” Sally Wrather said.
“See the little teeth marks?” Chris asked.
Penny saw them.
“Who would chew up a bunch of books?” Sally asked.
Teeth marks, Penny thought.
“Rats,” Chris said.
Like the punctures in Davey’s plastic baseball bat.
“Rats?” Sally said, grimacing. “Oh, ynck.”
Last night. The thing under the bed.
“Rats . . .”
” . . . rats . . .”
” . . . rats.”
The word swept around the room.
A couple of girls squealed.
Several kids slipped out of the cloakroom to tell the teachers what had
happened.
Rats.
But Penny knew it hadn’t been a rat that had torn the baseball bat out
of her hand. It had been . . . something else.
Likewise, it hadn’t been a rat that had broken her clarinet. Something
else.
Something else.
But what?
Jack and Rebecca found Nevetski and Blaine downstairs, in Vincent
Vastagliano’s study. They were going through the drawers and
compartments of a Sheraton desk and a wall of beautifully crafted oak
cabinets.
Roy Nevetski looked like a high school English teacher, circa 1955.
White shirt. Clip-on bow tie. Gray vee-neck sweater.
By contrast, Nevetski’s partner, Carl Blaine, looked like a thug.
Nevetski was on the slender side, but Blaine was stocky, barrel-cheated,
slab-shouldered, bullnecked. Intelligence and sensitivity seemed to
glow in Roy Nevetski’s face, but Blaine appeared to be about as
sensitive as a gorilla.
Judging from Nevetski’s appearance, Jack expected him to conduct a neat
search, leaving no marks of his passage; likewise, he figured Blaine to
be a slob, scattering debris behind, leaving dirty pawprints in his
wake.
In reality, it was the other way around. When Roy Nevetski finished
poring over the contents of a drawer, the floor at his feet was littered
with discarded papers, while Carl Blaine inspected every item with care
and then returned it to its original resting place, exactly as he had
found it.
“Just stay the hell out of our way,” Nevetski said irritably. “We’re
going to pry into every crack and crevice in this fuckin’ joint. We
aren’t leaving until we find what we’re after.” He had a surprisingly
hard voice, all low notes and rough edges and jarring metallic tones,
like a piece of broken machinery. “So just step back.”
“Actually,” Rebecca said, “now that Vastagliano’s dead, this is pretty