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By Root 777 0

be dead. It was impossible, wasn't it? We had gone to Camp Winnesko in Vermont together when we were twelve, and I got homesick and told him I was going to call and tell my parents they had to come get me. Arnie said if I did, he'd tell everybody at school that the reason I came home early was that they caught me eating boogers in my bunk after lights out and expelled me. We climbed the tree in my back yard to the very top fork and carved our initials there. He used to sleep over at my house and we'd stay up late watching Shock Theatre, crouched together on the sofa under an old quilt. We ate all those clandestine Wonder Bread sandwiches. When he was fourteen Arnie came to me, scared and ashamed because he was having these sexy dreams and he thought they were making him wet the bed. But it was the ant farms my mind kept coming back to. How could he be dead when we had made those ant farms together? Dear Christ, it seemed like only a week or two ago, those ant farms. So how could he be dead? I opened my mouth to tell Mercer that Arnie couldn't be dead those ant farms made the very idea absurd. Then I closed my mouth again. I couldn't tell him that. He was just a guy.

Arnie, I thought. Hey, man - it's not true, is it? Jesus Christ, we still got too much to do. We never even double-dated at the drive-in yet.

'What happened?' Mercer asked again. 'Tell me, Dennis.'

'You'd never believe it,' I said thickly.

'You might be surprised what I'd believe,' he said. 'And you might be surprised what we know. A fellow named Junkins was the chief investigator on this case. He was killed not so very far from here. He was a friend of mine. A good friend. A week before he died he told me that he thought something was going on in Libertyville that nobody would believe. Then he was killed. With me that makes it personal.'

I shifted positions cautiously. 'He didn't tell you any more?'

'He told me that he believed he had uncovered an old murder,' Mercer said, still not taking his eyes from mine. 'But it didn't much matter, he said, because the perpetrator was dead.'

'LeBay,' I muttered, and thought that if Junkins had known about that, it was no wonder Christine had killed him. Because if Junkins had known that, he had been much too close to the whole truth.

Mercer said, 'LeBay was the name he mentioned. He leaned closer. 'And I'll tell you something else, Dennis - Junkins was one hell of a driver. When he was younger, before he got married, he used to run stockers at Philly Plains, and be won his share of checkered flags. He went off the road doing better than a hundred and twenty in a Dodge cruiser with a hemi engine. Whoever was chasing him and we know someone was - had to be one hell of a driver.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'He was.'

'I came by myself. I've been here for two hours waiting for you to wake up. I was here until they kicked me out last night. I don't have a stenographer with me, I don't have a tape recorder, and I assure you that I'm not wearing a wire. When you make a statement - if you ever have to - that'll be a different ballgame. But for now, it's you and me. I have to know. Because I see Rudy Junkins's wife and Rudy Junkins's kids from time to time. You dig?'

I thought it over. For a long time I thought it over nearly five minutes. He sat there and let me do it. At last I nodded. 'Okay. But you're still not going to believe it.'

'We'll see, - ' he said.

I opened my mouth with no idea of what was going to come out. 'He was a loser, you know,' I said. 'Every high school has to have at least two, it's like a national law. Everyone's dumping ground. Only sometimes sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine.'

I looked at him, and if I had seen the slightest wrong flicker in those grey eyes that were so unsettlingly like Arnie's well, if I had seen that, I think I would have clammed up right there and told him to put it on his books in whatever way seemed the most plausible and to tell Rudy Junkins's kids whatever the hell he pleased.

But he only nodded, watching me