“Do you know what he ate?”
“He says the hamburger option,” she said. “From the cafeteria.”
Mr. Blackbourne was speaking behind me again, asking the same question into the phone as I had.
I didn’t know what else I should say, but I mumbled into the phone. “I’m so sorry. We’ll look into it. Thanks for telling us.”
“Sure. Just leave a note for my son? I’ll be keeping him out until he’s over this.”
She gave me his name and I wrote it down. I was only glad she wasn’t yelling at me about the situation.
After I hung up, I turned to Mr. Blackbourne.
He was saying goodbye and hung up as well and turned to me, his eyebrows raised. “Food poisoning?” he asked me.
I nodded. “An isolated case, you think?” Although as I said it, I knew that two cases probably meant there were more.
He turned to the phone again, hit a bunch of numbers and started to listen. “Checking the message system.” As he did, he waved at me and pointed to a computer nearby. “Go through the emails.”
I went to the computer, turning it on. There was a password required, but the password was listed on a sticky note on a notebook nearby. Not very secure.
I clicked around and found a few hundred emails. Most were from earlier today, about grades or other things regarding students. The latest ones, however, were notices that students would be kept out of school.
Not all of them were sick, but many said they were. Some with angry tones about it was the school’s fault. Some saying it was food poisoning.
“They’ve been calling in,” Mr. Blackbourne said. He hung up the phone and took out his own.
“What do we do?” I asked, moving away from the computer.
“I’m calling in...” He paused and then looked at his phone. “There has to be a protocol for this.”
“Mr. Graves,” I said. “He’ll know.”
“Yes, I can call him,” he said but he looked up. “But we can’t tell him what we know. About the truck that came in to swap out food. An investigation into that might lead to him calling around about what happened and why.”
“It may be too late,” I said. “There are kids sick. Won’t parents talk to each other? And we have to take that food out. We have to be sure no one else gets sick. We have to find out whatever it was.”
He lowered his phone and gazed out, thinking. He pressed a palm to his forehead. “This whole thing was a set up.”
“What?”
He turned to me, leaning into me with a sharpness in his steel eyes. He stage-whispered to me, “Ms. Johnson coming to us, making us aware to monitor her. Knowing we’d be watching after school, possibly recording what was going on. Mr. Hendricks suddenly unavailable. But how did he...” He paused, turning away from me again and putting fingers to his lips, head dipped as he continued thinking without speaking.
I wasn’t sure I was following him. “You’re saying Mr. Hendricks delivered food like that here?”
“I think he knew the food was contaminated,” he said. “He’s set us up so it’s...me.” He turned to me again and his eyes brightened up. He snapped his fingers shortly once. “There’s paperwork somewhere. He’s going to show a money trail. That I sold good food out the back door and brought in cheap, old stuff.”
“You can do that?” I asked. “Sell school food?”
“And replace it, yes,” he said. “Stuff on the brink of going bad, perhaps. Past the expiration dates. That restaurant probably saw a golden opportunity to switch out food with little cost.”
“But it was all produce,” I said. “Didn’t North say that?”
“It’ll be that, too,” he said. He nodded firmly once. “Perhaps stuff that was returned to that warehouse because it was contaminated. The owners owned restaurants.”
Another phone rang, the one he was nearby. He went to it, hovered a hand over it and then pulled back, allowing it to ring. “We need Victor to cover these phone lines. We need Dr. Green and possibly Dr. Roberts. We need to get ahead of this.”
I swallowed thickly. I didn’t know what to do. If he was right, if this was a set up, we had to tread carefully.
Hendricks was smart. He possibly wanted Mr. Blackbourne to take the heat for this. With the police distracted by investigating Mr. Blackbourne, Mr. Hendricks could escape with whatever money he’d gotten from the school and disappear.
We couldn’t let it happen.
“The amount doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “A bunch of food in a swap? Is this his big money pay off? It doesn’t seem like it would be a lot. Was this what he was doing?”
Mr. Blackbourne was typing into his cell phone. He shook his head as he did so. “No, it isn’t a ton of money. For three people in his conspiracy? Possibly more? No.” He looked up from his typing, gazing at me. “This was just to take me out. His scheme was something else. Something he’s already got perhaps. But if I get pinned for this, I’ll be under investigation for the rest of it, if it’s ever discovered.”
That was what Mr. Hendricks seemed to do. He got other people to do the dirty work, to line them up as the fall people so he could get away. Mr. McCoy and his awkward behavior. Possibly Mr. Morris with monitoring students and teachers. Anyone in his path, he used.
Mr. Blackbourne had become his next target.
The Contractor
Nathan
Victor, Silas and Nathan loaded into Silas’s car. Nathan was in the back seat. A contact Victor had called said to meet him downtown. They were on the way. The hour was late. While passing dark patches where he could see nothing, there were the occasional street lights or buildings lit up behind a thin wall of trees that separated I-26 from the city on either side of them.
It was forty minutes before they were downtown. They’d gone in silence, with Victor doing things on his phone, typing or looking at something else. Silas focused on driving, keeping to the limit for the most part.
Nathan was glad they were distracted. He wasn’t in the mood for talking about anything other than what they were going after.
Eventually, Silas pulled off of the Interstate and they passed Market Street. Tourist season was well over, but there was still activity at bars they passed. As it was Monday, most restaurants closed early, and it was uncomfortably quiet.
Silas parked along a side street in a lane of houses not too far from the tourist streets. Nathan scrubbed at his own face as he readied himself for this. Once the engine was off, the air inside started to chill immediately. It was a cold night. He’d picked up a hoodie on the way out the door, but he wondered if he shouldn’t have grabbed a coat.
They were sitting in front of one of a three-story home, the colonial style much like the others on the street. It was hard to tell in the dark the exact color, but it was pale, with fancy columns on the porch. The house was narrow, like many homes in downtown Charleston, extending to the back. Old. Worth a bundle. Not as big as Victor’s parents’ house, but a good size.
Victor kept his messenger bag with him and stepped out. Silas and Nathan got out as well and stood on the sidewalk together. Victor checked his phone and then noted the brass numbers nailed to a garden wall.
“This is the place,” Victor said. He tucked his phone into his back pocket and hiked the messenger bag strap onto his shoulder.