“My dad said they released Galen,” he told me, phone still in hand.
“What? Why?” I said.
“He swears he didn’t take it from Natalie’s house. Or give it to Morris Headley.”
“But you were there with Natalie,” I said. “You saw the ticket, right?”
“I did. And it was definitely his name on there.” John nodded. “But I guess they did a handwriting sample and compared it to the ticket and some other, older things Galen had signed. It didn’t match.”
“So someone forged it?” I said. I was having a hard time following this. Galen was at the house, not at the house. Took the vase, didn’t take the vase. My head was spinning.
“Seems that way,” John said.
***
Mr. Ruskovich called me up to his desk when I walked in. I didn’t even hear him at first; I was still trying to unravel the things with Galen Riddock.
“I’m planning to reopen our unit on forensics today,” he said quietly. “I’ve already spoken to Sarah McKenzie but wanted to double-check with you also, since I know you’re close to Natalie. We can always come back to this unit later in the year.” He watched me carefully, adding, “There’s no shame in being affected by what’s happened.”
I nodded. “I know,” I told him. “I’m okay with it, though. Really. It’s an interesting lesson.”
Which it was, but sitting at my desk as he explained the formula for determining the angle of impact felt surreal. I knew that when he finished, he’d walk across the room and open that door. I kept picturing him doing it and finding myself suddenly back in the Clearys’ living room, like the physics classroom was somehow a portal to that nightmare.
Mr. Ruskovich split us into teams of two, pairing Matty with Chuck and me with Sarah. Maybe he thought that was a good idea, us both being friends with Nat. But it was really, really awkward. I’d barely been able to look at her today, dreading our shared class as much as I couldn’t wait for it. And now she slid into the desk beside mine, pulling it close enough for us to both see the notebook. I felt her in my space like she was coated with something radioactive.
Sarah stared at our notes, biting her lip nervously. She glanced at me, then quickly back down, her cheeks flushed pink. “Let’s use this one,” she said, pointing to the length and width measurements of the first of our three splatters, labeled D. “One of them is a whole number, so it’ll be the easiest.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to focus but really more concerned with making sure I didn’t accidentally touch her. Mr. Ruskovich sauntered across the room toward the closet. I watched as he plucked the key and inserted it into the knob. Sarah tensed beside me as the door clicked open.
Seeing it again was a huge relief, because the truth was that it didn’t look much like the real thing at all. The drops on a blank white sheet were a world away from seeing them in your friend’s house where you’d once met her dad in pretty much the same spot where he’d been killed.
“How you doing?” I asked Sarah softly. She met my eyes, and I tried to ignore the connection between us, so strong it felt almost visible.
“Okay,” she whispered. “It’s weird. But I think we can do this. Right?”
I nodded with much more confidence than I felt. “Yeah,” I said, not sure if we were talking about physics or us or both. “We’ll concentrate on the equations. It’s just math.”
We were about halfway through the first problem when Chuck and Matty stood to start mapping their calculations. I knew they’d get in there before us, which was fine, except for Matty’s smug grin and the L he flashed me before they went in.
Mr. Ruskovich was having us work with six splatters—three for them and three for us—and we were taking turns mapping them. The only problem, as Mr. Ruskovich explained, was that by the end we’d be maneuvering around lengths of string taped across the closet, like the laser beams you see in heist movies when the thief has to make off with a priceless statue.
“And it’s critical you don’t touch or move any of them,” he stressed. “Precision is key. Your convergence point needs to be as exact as possible, because you’ll also use it and the angles you’ve figured out to determine the height of the suspect. You don’t want to imprison the wrong person because you contaminated the crime scene.”
Pretty unlikely here, since Mr. Ruskovich had built in a wide margin of error, with suspect heights ranging from the extremely petite four-foot-tall Miss Scarlet to the gargantuan Mr. Green at ten feet.
“What is he, the Jolly Green Giant?” Chuck had asked.
“Or the best new prospect for the Celts,” Mr. Ruskovich suggested.
“They need it,” Matty muttered.
We’d started on the third problem by the time Matty and Chuck returned to their seats. Sarah was flying through the equations.
“I didn’t know you had such skills,” I told her.
“Oh I got skills, boy.” She smiled, and I flushed, reading double entendres into everything she said. “It’s actually really cool if you can forget about . . . you know, the other stuff.”
By the time we got into the closet with our string and tape and protractor, I’d done a passable job of forgetting the real-life crime scene. We taped one end of string to splatter D, and Sarah used the protractor to measure the angle, directing me on how to position the other end. “A little higher, higher, lower.” When she was satisfied we’d gotten it just right, I taped the string to the far wall. Sarah double-checked the angle, pronounced it good, and we started on the next, me doing the protractor work this time, both of us careful not to disturb anything as we taped our second string. It met up with our first one and the ones Matty and Chuck had done at nearly the exact same location. We stood back and surveyed the scene.
“Cool,” Sarah said, eyes gleaming.
She took a quick measurement of the height of the probable point of impact. “We should be able to figure out who it is already.” Sarah slid into her seat and worked through some inscrutable set of formulas while I started on splatter F, our final one. After a few minutes she nodded. “Matty was right. It’s Professor Plum.”
I raised my eyebrows. “How can you be sure?”
“Look at the angle of impact of the two we’ve already done, the point where it happened, and think about the direction of spatter and the weapons. It couldn’t have been someone as short or tall as any of the others.”