J. Jance - Second Watch

I was glad the good sister could tell them apart. In a pinch, I wouldn’t have been able to.

A minute or so later Frankie slouched into the room. Without a word, he settled onto a chair next to his brother to await whatever was coming. Yes, they had definitely been summoned to the principal’s office on more than one occasion.

“Do you remember me from the other day?” Watty asked.

Both boys nodded. Neither of them met Watty’s questioning stare.

“What about Detective Beaumont here?” Watty asked.

They both glanced in my direction and then delivered tiny simultaneous nods.

Watty launched straight into the heart of the matter. “I’ve been going over Detective Beaumont’s report. I believe you mentioned you’re not supposed to go down onto the pier or onto the railroad tracks. Is that correct?”

Again both boys nodded in unison.

“But you do go there.”

“Sometimes,” Donnie said.

On Sunday both boys had been equally communicative, but here—perhaps because they were operating under Sister Mary Katherine’s steely-eyed stare—Donnie seemed to have assumed the role of official spokesman.

“And do you always go up and down the same way?” Watty asked.

“I guess,” Donnie said.

“So there’s, like, a regular path you follow?”

Donnie nodded, more emphatically this time.

“And you were on the path when you found the barrel?”

This time the two boys exchanged glances before Donnie answered. “I think so,” he hedged.

“The funny thing is,” Watty said, leaning back in his chair, “I spent all day Monday out at the crime scene. There’s a path, all right, but it’s nowhere near where you found the barrel.”

“But we saw it from the path,” Frankie put in. “It was right there in plain sight until we pushed it on down the hill.”

Watty ignored the interruption and stayed focused on Donnie. “Is that true?” he asked. “Or did you go looking for it because you already knew it was there?”

“We found it when we were coming back from the movie,” Donnie said. “That’s all. We found it, and then we opened it, and then we called you.”

“How did you open it again?”

“We used a stick to pry off the lid,” Donnie declared.

“And where did you find the stick?” Watty asked. “Was it just lying there on the hillside?”

“Yes,” Donnie answered. “We found the stick right there.”

I could see where Watty was going with this. The barrel had been found in a blackberry bramble. The stick the boys claimed they had used to open the barrel had looked to me like a branch from an alder tree, none of which were anywhere in evidence.

“That’s not what the marks on the barrel say,” Watty told them. “They say you’re lying about that.”

He just dropped that one into the conversation and let it sit there. The two boys exchanged glances, squirmed uneasily, and said nothing.

“If you know more than you’re saying,” Sister Mary Katherine said, inserting herself into the interview, “then you need to tell the detectives what it is.”

In other words, it was okay to push Sister Mary Katherine’s students around if she was the one doing the pushing.

“We used a crowbar,” Donnie admitted finally, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “We only said we used the stick.”

“Where is the crowbar now?” Watty asked.

“We dropped it in the water down by the pier when we went to use the phone.”

“And where did the crowbar come from in the first place?”

“Our mom’s garage.”

“And how did it get from the garage to the barrel?”

“We took it down the hill on Sunday morning, while Mom was still asleep.”

“Which means you already knew the barrel was there,” Watty concluded.

This time both Donnie and Frankie nodded.

“How?”

“We saw the guy who dumped it,” Frankie said, speaking for the first time. “On Saturday night, we were outside.” He paused and gave Sister Mary Katherine a wary look.

“Go on,” she ordered.

“We had stolen some of Mom’s cigarettes,” he said. “The house next door is empty. We were hiding in the backyard, smoking, when a guy drove into the yard in a pickup with a camper shell on top of it. He drove as far as the end of the driveway. He got out of the truck and pushed something out of the back. When he rolled it out onto the ground, we could see it was a barrel.”

“What kind of pickup?” Watty asked.

“I don’t know,” Frankie said.

“It was a Ford,” Donnie put in.

“Color?”

“It was sort of dark, but we couldn’t tell much about it because it was late at night.”

“How late?”

Donnie shrugged. “After midnight. That’s why you can’t tell our mom. She’d kill us if she knew we were sneaking out of the house when she thought we were in bed.”

“And that’s why you made up the story of finding the barrel on Sunday?”

Donnie nodded.

Watty settled in closer, giving the two boys a hard look. “This pickup truck you saw. Had you ever seen it around before?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Did you see the license plate?”

“No.”

I’ve heard that twins often develop forms of communication that can pass between them in utter silence. I was suddenly under the impression that that was exactly what was going on here. They were both lying about something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I think Watty was getting the same message. Ditto Sister Mary Katherine.

“God knows when you’re not telling the truth,” the good sister remarked.

Both boys flushed beet red. “Please don’t tell our mother,” Donnie begged. “Please. We’ll be in big trouble.”

“So when did you take the crowbar from the garage?” Watty asked.

I closed my eyes and envisioned the house they lived in—a small 1940s vintage brick house with a detached single-car garage at the end of a narrow driveway. The house next door was an exact copy. When they were built, they were probably considered affordable housing for GIs returning from World War II.

“Like I said. We did it in the morning, before she woke up.” Donnie was back to doing the talking for both of them. “We knew there wouldn’t be time to open the barrel before we went to church. That’s why we decided to do it later. We told Mom we wanted to see Charlotte’s Web, even though we didn’t. We got in line at the Cinerama, but as soon as she drove away, we caught a bus back to the Magnolia Bridge. That way we knew we’d have plenty of time to open the barrel before we were supposed to get home. The next showing didn’t start until four thirty.”

“What did you think you’d find when you opened that barrel?” Watty asked.

“Treasure,” Donnie said.

“Money.” That was from Frankie.

They were two similar answers, but not quite the same. Not identical, as it were, and it made me wonder why. Treasure is something you keep; money is something you spend. What neither of them had anticipated finding in the barrel was what was actually there—the horrifying naked body of a murdered young woman.

“You said this all happened after midnight? Isn’t that kind of late for you to be out of the house and unsupervised?”

“It was the weekend,” Donnie said. “We didn’t have to get up for school.”

“Where was your mom?”

Donnie glanced in Sister Mary Katherine’s direction. “She was busy,” he said.

Remembering what Mrs. Fisk had told me, I could well imagine that the boys’ mother had been busy with something other than her sons on a Saturday night.

“And how did you get out of the house without your mother knowing you were gone?”

“We go out through the window in our room,” he said.