Abandon - Meg Cabot [91]
“What was your name again?” Police Chief Santos said to me as I followed him. “Pierce what?”
“Oliviera,” Tim answered for me. He’d come in after us. He was holding, I saw, my file. Over the past year and a half, I’d become expert in reading my name upside down.
“Oh.” The police chief pulled out a chair at the conference table. “Have a seat, Ms. Oliviera.” He said it wrong. “This won’t take long.”
Bewildered — but knowing from experience that nothing good was about to happen — I took the seat he offered.
“If this is about the cemetery gate,” I said, “I had nothing to do with it.”
The chief of police regarded me with some surprise over the top of his coffee mug.
“The cemetery gate,” he said, when he’d lowered it again. “And what do you know about the cemetery gate?”
“Nothing,” I said. “That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who did that to it.”
“Did what to it?” I saw the chief of police exchange glances with the female officer, who’d stopped scribbling in her notebook and was looking at me as if I were a perp she was longing to tase.
“Kicked it like that,” I said. “And broke the lock.”
Police Chief Santos exhaled gustily enough to send some of the droplets of coffee left in his mustache hairs scattering into the air. The female police officer sighed and went back to her scribbling. Tim, who’d taken a seat at the end of the conference table, opened my file and pretended to be busy reading it. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard the female officer say D-Wing under her breath. She shook her head in disbelief.
“Ms.…whatever your name is,” Police Chief Santos said. “The force that was applied to that gate the other night in order to inflict that kind of damage to it was equal to the amount of force it takes to launch a small grenade. Therefore, we have already determined that it was not caused by a mere kick.”
I sat there and stared down at my fingernails, now shredded of all traces of polish.
“Oh,” I said.
Who was I to tell the police they were wrong? Again.
“We aren’t here to talk about the gate, anyway,” he said grumpily. “Officer Hernandez?”
The female officer flipped a page in her notebook, then asked in a monotone, “Do you own a blue Sun Cruiser bicycle with a white flowered basket, large purple seat, red combination lock, and the serial number R-dash-one-hundred-dash-seven-fifty-one-eleven-seventy?”
I looked at them in a blind panic. My mind had gone blank. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Pierce,” Tim said gently. “You do. You and your mom registered a bicycle under your name with the police department, in case it was stolen.”
I blinked, my heart beginning to thump harder than ever.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I do have a blue bike with a purple seat and a flowered basket and a red lock and stuff. And I did register a bike with the police department, in case it got stolen. But I don’t remember the serial number off the top of my head. Who goes around memorizing their bike’s serial number? That’s just — I mean, that’s asking way more than anyone should be required to know —”
“When is the last time you saw this bicycle?” the police chief interrupted, taking a sip of his coffee.
“Last night,” I said. “When I rode it down to see the —”
I stopped. All the blood seemed to have frozen in my veins.
My bike. I’d left it chained to the fence down by the cemetery.
When I’d gone to see Richard Smith.
“Oh, my God.” I stood up, almost knocking over my chair. “What’s happened to him?”
He was dead. I knew it. He was the last person to have touched my necklace.
And now he was dead.
I should have known. I should have known I would never be happy. I should have known I wouldn’t be able to handle him. Why would I be able to handle a death deity? The freaking ruler of an Underworld? Who was I kidding? I hadn’t been able to keep my best friend alive. I couldn’t do long division. I couldn’t even drive.
“Calm down, Pierce,” Tim said, getting up and coming around the table to my side. I’d started