Pushed Read online

  Okay, okay. I’d had a slight crush on her.

  Lily must have felt me looking at her, because she glanced over. “Want to sit here?” she asked me and Frank. “There’s room.”

  “Sure,” I said. She doesn’t seem to recognize us, I thought as Frank and I joined the group at Lily’s table. “Thanks,” I added.

  “No prob.” Lily grabbed an empty plate, loaded it up with spaghetti from the serving platter in the middle of the table, then passed it to me. She filled a plate for Frank next.

  “Have you decided you’re the table mom or what?” the guy next to Lily asked her.

  Lily shrugged. “A few people were nice to me when I was the new meat. I thought I owed the universe a little payback. You have a problem with that, Jason?”

  The guy, Jason, didn’t answer. He just shoved a big forkful of spaghetti into his mouth and started chewing. The motion made the tattoo around his neck—a loop of barbed wire—slide up and down.

  I wondered how I’d look with a tattoo. In Manhattan there had to be some true artists with the ink and needle. I could find one and—no, tats aren’t good if you have to go undercover. There are times you have to look like a guy who’d never get a tattoo. And if you had to look like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be caught dead without one, you could always go fake.

  “So, have you been here long?” Frank asked Lily.

  “About a month,” she answered. “Jason has been here the longest—more than a year. Amy got here about a week before I did. “She gestured toward a girl whose curly blond hair was boinging out all over her head like it was made of springs.

  “So what’s it like? Is it an okay place?” asked Frank.

  “It’s safe. That’s all that matters to me,” Lily answered.

  “Truth,” Amy added. “Here I don’t have to sleep with one eye open. That would be enough to make me give the place four stars. When you add in that it’s warm, dry, clean, and doesn’t smell disgusting, the rating goes up to five.”

  “You’ve been here the longest—what do you think?” I asked Jason.

  He didn’t answer. “Jason has a strict word quota,” Lily told me. “He has to keep it under a hundred a day or his head explodes.”

  “Unbelievable,” Jason muttered.

  His one word didn’t seem to be directed to Amy. Or me. I followed his gaze and saw a stocky guy heading into the dining hall.

  “What?” asked Amy. “If you have enough words left to answer.”

  “That’s Evan’s jacket,” Jason said. He jammed a piece of garlic bread into his mouth, his eyes never leaving Stocky Guy.

  “That gives me the wiggin’s.” Amy gave an exaggerated shiver. “Walking around in a dead guy’s jacket.” She half stood. “That’s nasty, Mark,” she called out.

  The stocky guy turned toward her in surprise. “What?” he asked.

  “Evan’s body’s hardly cold and you’re wearing his clothes?” Amy answered.

  Mark grabbed the last empty chair at the table. Lily immediately got very busy putting a plate together for him.

  “Evan gave me this jacket before he died,” Mark explained. “It’s not like I pulled it off his corpse or anything. And before you ask, yes, this is his five-dollar watch. He gave it to me too, along with about half the stuff in his backpack.”

  “Right. That makes sense,” Jason challenged.

  “It does make sense,” Mark shot back. “Evan had just gotten that scholarship to art school in California, remember? He wanted to start over. He didn’t want anything that would remind him of New York. The guy probably would have gotten on the plane naked if he could have.”

  It seemed like Mark and Evan had been pretty tight. Had he known that Evan planned to talk to a reporter? Had he known what Evan wanted to talk to the reporter about? If Mark did know anything, he hadn’t passed it along to the cops.

  SUSPECT PROFILE

  Name: Mark Hovde

  Hometown: Washington, DC

  Physical description: Brown hair worn in short ponytail, age 18, 5’9”, approximately 210 lbs.

  Occupation: In training program to become a bank teller.

  Background: Ran away after his parents found out he was doing drugs. Sixty-two days clean.

  Suspicious behavior: Knows a lot about Evan.

  Suspected of: Having information about what led to Evan’s death or of what Evan had found out about the Haven.

  Possible motives: Afraid revealing the information could put him in danger.

  “Why’d he jump, then?” Jason asked.

  “He didn’t jump!” Lily exclaimed, her voice high and shrill. “He would never kill himself! Never!”

  Jason just grunted in reply.

  “Evan died in an accident a few weeks ago,” Amy explained to me and Frank. “He fell off a subway platform right before the train pulled in.”

  “Fell,” Jason repeated. “Yeah, right.”

  Frank poured himself a glass of water. “Giving away stuff is classic suicidal behavior,” he commented.

  “Yeah, I knew this girl who killed herself once. At school the day before she did it, she was handing out her jewelry to people she’d hardly met,” Amy volunteered. “Maybe Evan did off himself.”

  “Huh-uh. No,” Lily insisted, her eyes bright and wet.

  “You hardly knew him,” protested Amy.

  “You’re right. I didn’t. But I still know he wouldn’t do anything like that,” Lily replied.

  Lily was way upset by even the suggestion that Evan had killed himself. It made me think she was close to him. Why was she pretending she wasn’t? Did she know more than she was saying about how Evan really died?

  SUSPECT PROFILE

  Name: Lily Fowler

  Hometown: Bayport, New Jersey

  Physical description: Age 16, very short dyed black hair, blue eyes, mole at the end of left eyebrow, 5’3”, approximately 115 lbs.

  Occupation: Studying for her GED.

  Background: Went to elementary school with Joe and Frank. Ran away from home five weeks ago after a fight with her mother. Lives at the Haven.

  Suspicious behavior: Claims she barely knew Evan, but was very emotional when she talked about him.

  Suspected of: Knowledge of the circumstances of Evan’s death or of what Evan had found out about the Haven.

  Possible motives: Afraid revealing what she knows would put her in danger. Protecting Evan’s reputation.

  “Every bed has a number,” Mark told me and Frank. “You use the locker with the same number for your stuff.” He pointed at the row of brightly painted lockers that stretched the length of one wall.

  “Got it,” Frank said.

  “Sandy gave you that whole ‘respect’ speech already, right?” Mark asked.

  “Soon as we walked in the door,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, that would be nice. But we don’t live in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, you know? If there’s anything you want to make sure you hang on to, don’t put it in the cubby. Keep it on you. That’s what pretty much everybody does here.”

  “Anything else we should know?” I was hoping Mark would give us an idea of what Evan had found out about the Haven.

  Mark shrugged. “Just watch your back. Trust no one, you know what I mean?” He headed out of the boys’ dorm before Frank or I could ask another question.

  “What do you think he—,” I began. Then I noticed Frank had his “thinking” face on. It’s the same look he has when he’s constipated. Sorry. Too much information, right?

  “In the video from the surveillance camera, I remember Evan holding a cardboard box when we first saw him, but the box wasn’t in the evidence the police took from the tracks,” Frank said.

  I could picture the items that had been taken as evidence—a wallet, a piece of paper with the reporter’s phone number, a little Swiss Army knife. “You’re right.”

  Frank pulled on his coat. “Do you have the subway map from the piñata?”

  “Yeah,” I told him.
r />   “I want to go to the station where Evan died,” Frank announced.

  5.

  DOWN ON THE TRACKS

  Joe and I trotted down the long flight of grimy cement steps leading into the subway. I couldn’t help thinking that just a few weeks ago, Evan had been on these stairs—alive.

  We walked over to the little booth outside the turnstiles. “Is there a lost and found here?” I asked the attendant.

  “What’d you lose?” the attendant asked.

  “A cardboard box about the size of a couple of shoe boxes,” I told him. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me what was inside.

  He didn’t. He pulled a plastic bin out from under the counter. “We got one glove. We got two knit hats. We got a coloring book.” He rummaged around in the bin, digging deeper. “We got a cell phone. We got some perfume, a couple of paperback books. And that’s it. No cardboard box.”

  “It was a long shot, anyway,” I said to Joe.

  “Let’s look around a little more. Scene of the crime and everything,” he suggested.

  “Possible crime,” I reminded him as he bought us each a MetroCard.

  “Yeah, yeah, possible crime,” he answered as swiped his card through the scanner and pushed through the nearest turnstile.

  There weren’t many people around. Early afternoon clearly wasn’t a big travel time. We walked the length of the platform, peering down at the tracks as we went. There was plenty of litter down there: a high-heeled shoe, a half-eaten hot dog, newpapers, a few soda bottles.

  “Nothing down there that’s going to help us,” Joe finally said.

  “You’re right. Let’s go back to the Haven. We need to gather more evidence there,” I said as we headed back toward the turnstiles.

  “That means talking to Lily some more,” Joe answered. “I got the feeling she was closer to Evan than she says she was. Did you notice how upset she got about the idea that he committed suicide?”

  I nodded. “We definitely need to find out more about Lily. Mark, too.”

  “Yeah, he seemed like he was pretty good friends with Evan,” said Joe.

  “And he told us to watch our backs. It made me think he could know some of the bad stuff about the Haven,” I noted.

  “Like whatever Evan was going to tell that reporter. Good—” Joe stopped midsentence and grabbed my arm. “Check out the homeless guy at three o’clock. Does that box look familiar to you?”

  I glanced to the left. A man—I couldn’t tell if he was nearer my age or my dad’s—lay on a sheet of cardboard. He used a pink down jacket, clearly a woman’s, as a blanket. Near his chest was a cardboard box—about the size of the one we’d seen Evan carrying—and a collection of other stuff.

  “Could be it,” I told Joe. We veered toward the man. He sat up as we approached.

  “Hi,” I said. “I think that box might be the one a friend of mine lost about two weeks ago. Would it be okay if I look in it and check?”

  “No, it wouldn’t be okay,” the man answered. “It’s mine.”

  “We don’t want to take it away from you,” Joe assured him. “We just want to look inside.”

  “If I was one of those so-called regular people, you wouldn’t be asking that,” the man said. “If I was waiting for a train in a suit, you wouldn’t come over and ask if you could paw through my briefcase. I’d have security haul you off if you tried it.”

  Standoff. Now what?

  “How about if we pay you?” Joe asked. He pulled out his wallet. “I have twenty bucks. It’s yours if you let us look in the box for, like, fifteen minutes.”

  The man snorted. “You think that would work on the suit with the briefcase? I’ll tell you what. It wouldn’t. And it’s not going to work on me, either. This is my personal property.”

  “I’m not sure it is,” Joe burst out. “I’m not saying you stole it. But I think you might have found it down here in the station.” He reached for the box.

  The man leaped to his feet with the box in his arms. “You’re not getting it.” He ran toward the tracks. Joe and I looked at each other, then chased after him. When he got to the lip of the platform, the man didn’t hesitate. He leaped right off. Joe and I looked at each other again, a longer look this time. Then we jumped down onto the tracks.

  That box could lead us to the truth about Evan’s death. We couldn’t let it out of our sight. We ran after the man, into the subway tunnel. After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, but I still didn’t see the man anywhere. “Where’d he go?” I called to Joe as I skidded to a stop.

  “I don’t see him,” Joe answered.

  Cautiously we walked deeper into the tunnel, scanning the shadows. I caught a flash of movement against one of the metal pillars. I squinted. Yeah, it was him. “Look, we didn’t tell you the whole truth,” I called out. My voice didn’t sound at all familiar as it echoed through the empty space.

  I moved toward him. Slowly. I didn’t want him to bolt again. “We’re not just trying to get back something a friend lost. The guy the box belonged to—if it’s even his—is dead.”

  “We think he might have been murdered,” added Joe.

  The man emerged from behind the pillar and took a few steps toward us. “Murdered?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My brother and I are trying to figure out who did it.”

  “We think the guy—his name was Evan—had that box with him the day he died. We think it might have something in it that will help us find out whether somebody killed him or his death was an accident,” Joe explained.

  “If you were a guy in a suit, we’d be saying the same thing. We’d be asking you to help us. Will you help us? All we want is to find out how our friend died,” I said.

  “You should have told me that in the first place,” the man answered. “I’m a believer in truth, justice, and the American way—just like Superman.” He handed me the box. “I just don’t like to be pushed around.”

  He turned and headed deeper into the subway.

  “Where’s he going?” Joe whispered. “The Batcave?”

  “Wrong superhero,” I answered. “Wherever he’s going, I don’t . . .”

  The words evaporated in my mouth—my suddenly dry mouth. The air around me was . . . vibrating. Then the ground started to shake.

  Two small circles of blinding light appeared in the darkness.

  “Train!” yelled Joe.

  6.

  LET JOE DO IT

  The train horn let out a long blast. The sound broke my paralysis. I stumbled back and pressed my body against the tunnel wall. Frank was right beside me.

  The flesh of my cheeks flapped as the train rushed by, discharging hot, noxious air. I didn’t care how bad it smelled—I sucked in a deep lungful. Then I looked over at Frank. “That was fun. Let’s wait for one more train to go by. I want to do it again!”

  Frank gave me this disgusted big-brother look, then started walking toward the mouth of the tunnel. He never knows when I’m kidding. It’s ’cause he has no sense of humor himself. Want proof? He doesn’t think the Three Stooges are funny. That says it all.

  As soon as I stepped back into the light of the subway station, I grabbed the edge of the platform—the sweet, sweet platform—with both hands and hoisted myself up. Frank handed me the box, then pulled himself up next to me.

  The weird thing was, nobody said anything. The station wasn’t crowded, but there were people around. And they all acted like it was totally normal for two guys to come climbing out from the subway tracks. It’s not even like we were wearing uniforms or anything.

  That’s something I’ve noticed on other visits to New York. It’s like the people here pride themselves on the fact that nothing can surprise them. It’s the ultimate been-there-done-that attitude.

  Frank and I walked over to the closest bench and sat down with the box between us. “I hope this thing actually is the one we saw Evan carrying,” my brother said.

  “I hope he didn’t just use the box to hold his dirty laund
ry,” I added. Frank didn’t laugh, because of the no-sense-of-humor thing. He just pulled open the cardboard flaps.

  I peered inside. The only thing in there was a bunch of photographs printed on sheets of oversize paper. “Guess he couldn’t find an envelope,” I muttered.

  Frank gathered the pictures into a stack and took them out. I leaned closer so I could see the one on top: a shot of Evan sitting on the stoop in front of a tiny grocery store. He was holding out a paper cup as an impatient-looking woman stuck a buck into it. The next photo showed Evan sleeping on a park bench. The next showed him rooting through a garbage can in the park.

  “Was someone following him?” asked Frank. “It doesn’t look like he knew he was being photographed.”

  “He definitely wasn’t saying ‘cheese’ in any of these,” I agreed.

  Frank flipped to the next picture. It showed Evan picking a man’s pocket. The next showed him boosting an iPod from an electronics store. “That’s it. The last one,” Frank said. “What do these tell us?”

  “It seems like they were taken over at least several days,” I commented. “The weather is different. And Evan’s wearing two different shirts.”

  “The photographer—assuming all the pictures were taken by the same person—must have known a lot about Evan. They’d have to have been around him for at least a few days, like you said. Who knows what they saw that isn’t in the pictures.”

  “They might have seen Evan with his killer,” I agreed.

  “If the photographer isn’t the killer himself,” Frank pointed out. “Whoever took these pictures was extremely interested in him.”

  “You think his parents hired a PI to find him?” I asked.

  “Possibly. They do look sort of like surveillance photos.” Frank started flipping through the pictures again.

  “Hold up,” I exclaimed. “Go back one—to the picture of Evan sleeping on the park bench.”