Sleepyside Jr.-Sr. High School

        “So we’ve pretty much ruled out half of our suspects,” Trixie told the rest of the group sitting around the table.

        “Which ones?” Jim asked, “and why?”

        “Bill Morgan, for one.”  Josie tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear.  “He was there taking pictures, so his hands were full most of the night.  He’s a senior, too, and he already has a scholarship to Columbia.  I can’t see him doing anything to jeopardize that.”

        “That makes sense,”  Brian agreed.  “I suggested we take Loyola Kevins off for the same reason.”  He grinned at his sister, dark eyes crinkling at the corners.  “Despite the fact that Loyola was implicated in a previous poisoning.”

        At Josie’s confused look, Trixie flushed slightly and mumbled a partial explanation.  “Last fall, Loyola accidentally gave Brian bad salad.  It was an accident, though, and a fluky one at that.”  Turning her attention back to the matter at hand, she continued.  “Cassie Markham and Mary Katherine Donovan were serving cookies all evening.  They had access to the punch, but it was limited.  Both of them were pretty much tied to the cookie platters.”

        “So that leaves...?”  Dan asked.

        “Carlos Denalt, a junior, and Ty Scott, sophomore,” Honey said.

        “I still say no way on Ty,” Mart interrupted.  “I’ve known him since second grade.  He’s a total electronics geek.  He’d be more likely to tag someone with a listening device, than to poison them.”

        Honey continued.  “Tracie Smollen, a freshman, and B. J. McClendon, an eighth grader.  We don’t have anything solid enough to eliminate these four.”

        “So what do we do next?” Diana asked.

        Trixie looked across the table at Josie.  Josie grinned at the blonde detective, and addressed the Bob-Whites.  “I think that we should break up into pairs, and talk to the four suspects.”  Seeing hesitation in the eyes of Brian and Mart, Josie added, “Just casually.  I’m not saying we accuse them, or anything, just feel them out, see how they react.”

        “There is no way I am letting you and Trixie pair up,” Dan said, a teasing light in his eyes.  “Between the two of you, there wouldn’t be anything left of our poor suspects.”

        “Let’s do boy/girl pairs,” Mart suggested.  “That way we can play good cop/bad cop, and get two distinct perceptions at the same time.”

        “Why don’t you and Di take Ty?”  Trixie suggested.  “Brian and Honey can take Tracie.”

        Jim looked at Dan.  “Do you want Trixie or Josie?” he asked.

        Dan couldn’t ignore the flash of hurt that flared in Trixie’s eyes.  “Why don’t I take them both?” he suggested to Jim, his voice cool.  Dan flashed a grin at the girls.  “Belden, Fisher, and Mangan.  It has quite the ring to it, don’t you think?”

        Jim, realizing that he had said something wrong, but not quite sure what it was, tried again.  “How about Trixie and I take Carlos, and you and Josie take B.J.?  I wouldn’t want Trixie to get hauled in by Mr. Stratton, for turning an eighth grader to mush.”  Jim turned his eyes on Trixie, smiling to let her know he was kidding.  Trixie looked back at him, and then tentatively smiled.

        “That works for me,” Dan replied, looking at Josie.  “Is it okay with you?”

        “It’s fine, as long as you let me do the talking,” she told him saucily.  “You can stand there and intimidate him.”

        “We can meet again and compare notes either tomorrow at lunch, or maybe Thursday after school?”  Honey left the last of her statement as a question.

        “How about Thursday at Wimpy’s?”  Mart suggested.  “Maybe Katie and Josie can both join us right after school.”

        Josie nodded slowly.  “That should be fine, if someone would drive us home afterwards.  Mom doesn’t have another treatment until Monday, so she should be okay without us.”

        “We’ll get you home,” Jim said, looking at the clock on the wall.  “But for now, we should all get finished with lunch.  The bell’s going to ring in about five minutes.”  The group set to making short work of their lunches.

        As the group scattered off to their classes, Dan matched steps with Jim.  “Trixie said you guys spotted a Cowhand yesterday,” he said quietly.  “I wanted to get your take on it.”

        “Kid in a jacket and boots like you used to wear,” Jim confirmed.  “About my height, but skinnier and blond.  I couldn’t see the back of his jacket, so I can’t say for sure, but he fit the profile.”

        “Did you see where he went?”  Dan asked, his voice tightening.

        “No,” Jim told him.  “He disappeared down an alley.”

        They walked silently for a moment, before Dan asked, “Are you free tonight?”

        Jim hesitated.  “Not really.  Mother and Dad are leaving Thursday morning, and they want to spend the next couple of days with Honey and me.  Why?”

        “No reason.”  Dan forced a smile.  “Have a good time with your folks, I need to get to class.  Later.”

        “Later,” Jim replied, and the two boys headed off in different directions.

        By Thursday, most of the leg work had been completed.  It took Brian and Honey less than six minutes to decide that Tracie Smollen was completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  Petite and very shy, the ninth grader had hardly been able to speak when Brian, in all of his senior glory, approached her.  Honey had smoothly stepped in, using her renowned tact to put the girl at ease.  It was quickly apparent that Tracie had been scared half to death by the events of the evening, and had no knowledge of the drugs used.  She had been serving the punch into cups, handing them off to the other members of the serving team.

        Mart had taken a much more blunt approach when confronting Ty Scott.  Cornering his old friend in the computer lab, Mart asked him outright if he had had anything to do with the punch tampering.  Diana stood next to Mart, carefully watching Ty’s face.  The boy’s eyes grew wide, and he reacted first with shock, and then with anger.  By the time the situation resolved itself, Di and Mart were both convinced of Ty’s innocence, and Ty had offered his technical skills to help them uncover the real culprit.

        Jim leaned against the wall, waiting for Trixie to finish putting her books in her locker.  His sharp green eyes spotted just the person he had been looking for. “Carlos!  Wait up a minute!”  Jim called out to the tall boy with the curly blond hair.  Carlos stopped, waiting for Jim and Trixie to catch up with him.

        “Where the heck did that kid go?”  Dan asked Josie, scowling as he spoke.  “We’re supposed to meet everyone at Wimpy’s in half an hour.  Why is that guy so slippery?”

        Josie shook her head and smiled at Dan.  “Maybe because he’s a skinny thirteen year old with a scary looking sophomore and a nosy school reporter stalking him in the hallway?”  She looked pointedly from Dan’s well-defined and uncovered biceps, up to the scowl on his face.

        Dan had to laugh.  He supposed that if you put it the way Josie had, it made sense for B.J. McClendon to be avoiding them.  Suddenly, Josie gripped his arm.  “There!”  She pointed down the West hallway.  “He ducked into the media room.”  As they hurried down the hall, Josie warned Dan, “Let me do the talking.  You just stand there and...flex.”  Dan chuckled and tried to muster his most intimidating scowl.

        B.J. McClendon was in the far corner of the lab, his nose buried in a textbook.  He glanced up as Josie breezed into the room, his pale grey eyes magnified behind his wire rimmed glasses.  When B.J. saw Dan, close on Josie’s heels, he quickly dropped his gaze back to his book, but he couldn’t hide his trembling hands.

        “Hey, B.J.,” Josie said cheerfully.  “I’m Josie Fisher, Katie’s sister.  Dan and I want to talk to you for a minute.” 

        B.J. raised his face again.  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” he said.  When Dan folded his bare arms across his chest, and glared at the younger boy, he quickly averted his face.

        Josie moved closer to B.J.  “I saw you at the dance, Saturday.” she said.  “You know that I was one of the people who got sick, right?”  The boy nodded slightly, his short, light brown hair bouncing a little.  Josie continued.  “I know you were helping serve.  I was just wondering if you saw anything.”

        “No.  No, I didn’t.”  B.J.’s left shoulder twitched.  “So, leave me alone, okay?  I can’t help you.”

        Josie looked back at Dan, but Dan was staring intently at B.J. McClendon.  “Dan?” she asked.

        Dan wasn’t listening; he was looking at the boy in front of him.  There was something familiar about the kid, something niggling at the back of his mind.  Moving closer, he took in the neatly trimmed, light brown hair, the glasses, the braces and the preppy clothes.  A memory flashed through his brain, and he looked even closer.  Take away the glasses and the braces, smudge up the face with dirt, make the hair longer and give him an asthmatic wheeze.  Dan shook his head slowly. “Benny,” he breathed.  “Benny Clevik.”

        “You know him?”  Josie asked.  B.J.’s eyes widened, and he started shaking his head.

        “I used to,” Dan told her, his eyes locked on the shrinking figure before him.  “Last time I saw you, Benny, we were sitting in a jail cell together.  Why’d you drug the punch, Benno?  How did you end up here, and where did you get the stuff?” 

        With a start, Josie realized that Dan was unaware of just how menacing he appeared as he towered over the younger and much smaller boy.  B.J, Benny, whoever he was, had entered full panic mode.  Pinned down in the corner, his grey eyes dilated, darting back and forth, looking for an exit.  His breathing became labored, and he started to wheeze.

        “Dan, back off.  You’re scaring him!”  Josie placed her hand on Dan’s arm.  “Look, he’s hyperventilating.”

        Dan snapped back to the present.  “Ah, crap,” he muttered.  “Benny!  Where’s your inhaler?”  The boy didn’t answer.  Dan grabbed him by the shoulders, forcing Benny to look at him.  Slowly, he repeated the question.  “Where.  Is.  Your.  Inhaler?”

        The boy gestured behind him with his hand.  Josie spotted a brown backpack on the floor, and quickly began rummaging through it.  Her hand grasped a plastic bag, and she drew it out, handing it to Dan. 

        Dan took the inhaler and held it out to Benny.  When the boy made no move to take it, Dan forced it into his shaking hand.  “Use it, for crying out loud!” he ordered. 

        Josie found herself holding her breath as the boy she knew as B.J. shook the cylinder and lifted it to his mouth, keeping his fingers between his lips and the medicine.  He exhaled painfully, then depressed the inhaler, and took a long, slow breath.   Within minutes the wheezing tapered off, and color started to return to the boy’s face.

        “Go get the Bob-Whites,”  Dan told Josie quietly.  She quirked an eyebrow at him, and he sighed.  “Please?  I’m not going to hurt him, I just don’t want him to leave.”  Josie nodded, and slipped away.  Dan sat down on the desk across from Benny, keeping his eyes trained on him.  Benny slumped  back in his seat, inhaler on the desktop, his eyes closed, avoiding Dan’s stare.

        “What happened?”  Dan heard Mart ask, as the whole gang trooped in.

        “I think we’ve found our poisoner,” Dan told him.  Standing, he pointed to the eighth grader.  “Allow me to introduce you all to Benny; Luke Clevik’s little brother.”

        “Luke?” Trixie was incredulous.  “You mean gang leader, Luke?  The jerk who stole Honey’s watch, robbed the clubhouse, and mugged Mr. Maypenny?  That Luke?”

        “The one and the same,” Dan told her.  “I just can’t figure out how Benny came to be here.”  He turned to Benny.  “Want to tell us, Benny?”

        “My name isn’t Benny, anymore, it’s B.J.”  The boy opened his eyes and looked warily at the group of students before him.  “Benjamin Joshua McClendon.  Luke is my half brother; we had different fathers.” He narrowed his eyes and glared at Dan.  “You might know that, if you’d ever paid any attention to me.”

        “Why are you here, B.J.?”  Honey asked, her voice gentle.  “How did you come to Sleepyside?”

        B.J. responded to Honey’s soft tone.  “I got arrested with Dan and the others, but Luke got me released.  Then Luke got arrested, and Ma started drinking more and more.”  His eyes looked bleakly at the Bob-Whites.  “Without Luke to take care of things, she got worse.  One night, she just didn’t come home.  Then the cops came and put me into foster care.”  He took a ragged breath.  “Last June, my dad showed up and claimed me.  He brought me here to live with my grandma.  It was supposed to be a new beginning, you know.  Somewhere I could start over.”

        “So what happened?”  Dan had tried to keep quiet, but he couldn’t.  “And what does it have to do with the gang?”

        “They keep coming back for me,” B.J. whispered.  “The Cowhands.  Last summer, when they were working with that Tolliver dude, Allen saw me at the drugstore.  That’s how I found out you were here.  He told me what they were going to do with you.”  He looked at Dan.  “Then, you got found, and I realized I would be going to school with you, but I figured you wouldn’t recognize me.  Dad and Grandma bought me new clothes, and I got the braces and these glasses.  I really look different.  Besides, no one really ever noticed me in the gang, and you were always...no one noticed me, much.”

        “Did you drug the punch?” Brian asked.

        “Yes.”  B.J. McClendon stared at the floor.  “I had to.  They grabbed me after school three Thursdays ago.”

        “Who?”  Dan’s voice was low, controlled.

        “Derek and Willie.”  B.J. answered.  “Derek’s running things now.  He’s running the gang for Carlton, until Luke gets out.  You remember Carlton.”  It was a statement, not a question.  Dan nodded, tersely.

        “Derek wanted me to set you up, to get back at you for getting Luke sent up.  And for what happened last summer.  I didn’t want to,” B.J. raised his face and looked at Dan directly.  “I don’t blame you.  Luke always did his own thing, and I know what he did to you.  But Derek, he... he...”

        “He threatened you?”  Dan asked.

        “Yeah.  He roughed me up a little, and promised more, but then he threatened to hurt my Grandma, to burn her house down.”  B.J. shuddered.  “He said I owed it to Luke to get revenge on you.”  He turned his attention to Josie.  “I didn’t know what he gave me!  Honest, I didn’t.  It was in a little squeezy bottle, and I swear, I thought it was some kind of alcohol.  I didn’t know it would make everyone so sick, really, I didn’t!”  B.J. began to wheeze again.

        Dan picked up the inhaler and handed it to him.  “Here.  Use this and calm down.”

        B.J. puffed on the inhaler once more.  “I was supposed to make it look like you spiked the punch, but you didn’t come anywhere near it, and I couldn’t go near you in case you recognized me.  Derek’s pissed at me, ‘cause I screwed it up.  He’s watching everything I do, and I don’t know how to get away from him.”

        “Derek gave you the stuff?”  Dan asked.

        “Yeah.”  B.J.’s voice was hoarse.  “He’s been here for a few weeks.  Carlton has him setting up some business off of Hawthorne Street.  Drugs.”

        “Is Derek alone?”  Jim asked, his green eyes narrowing as he thought about big city drug dealers infesting his town.

        B.J. shook his head.  “No.  He’s got four guys with him.”  He looked at Dan.  “Willie, Sandy, Dean, and Lurch.”

        Trixie stepped forward, elbowing her way between Jim and Brian.  “You need to come clean with Principal Stratton, and the police,” she told B.J., her words surprising Mart so much, his mouth gaped open like a fish.  Trixie glared at Mart.  “What?” she asked.  “He did it, no matter what his reasons.  They’ll go easier on him if he confesses, right?”

        Still open-mouthed, Mart just nodded.  Brian grinned at his sister.  “I agree with you Trixie, it’s just strange to hear those words coming out of your mouth.”

        “Well, prepare to be completely astonished,” Jim told them all.  “I think we need to stop this Derek fellow.”

        Josie raised an eyebrow, as all eyes stared at Jim, as if he had suddenly sprouted a rhinoceros horn.  “Look,” Jim explained.  I’m sure we all remember how these creeps work.  This Derek isn’t going to walk away if B.J. confesses, just like Luke didn’t walk away from Dan. Right?”  Jim looked at Dan, who nodded his agreement.  “So,” Jim continued, “I think Derek needs to be stopped.  Right here.  Right now.  Before he hurts anyone else, or intimidates another kid into helping him.”

        “I agree.”  Josie folded her arms across her chest and moved to stand next to Jim.

        “I’m in.” Trixie said, cocking her head at Jim.  “Although you realize that if I suggested this...?”

        “The boys would all be telling you to let the authorities handle it.”  Honey finished.  “Count me in.”

        “Me, too.”  Diana spoke up, casting a sidelong glance at Mart.  He nodded.

        Brian sighed.  “What’s the plan?”

        Jim grimaced.  “I have no idea.”

Spring Dance 4

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