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  “If they found the right kids and simply questioned them, their names wouldn’t be made public. If they arrested them, they’d probably be juveniles, and I couldn’t get into the court records. What would really help is if we could get into Kyle’s room.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “To learn something about him.”

  “Wouldn’t the cops have taken anything that would help them prove this was a suicide or murder?”

  He grudgingly agreed. He suggested I try the school gossip line again. I said I’d give that a try.

  In the car I used my iPhone to connect to the Internet and found the phone numbers for Alpha Pi Law, a gay legal organization, and the ACLU. I called Alpha Pi Law. A woman answered.

  I stammered a bit. Maybe an adult would know what to say, but I didn’t.

  “What?” the voice demanded.

  “I think I’ve got a problem.”

  She snarled. “We don’t hire lawyers for people.”

  I said, “Okay,” and hung up. I wondered if the people who answered the phone at Alpha Pi Law were all as snarly and mean.

  I’d have to practice what to say before I called the ACLU, or maybe the Equality California organization. I knew about them. I’d have to see if I could figure out the right way to talk to these people so they’d help me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Friday 5:03 P.M.

  I turned up Market Street to drive home. I could have grabbed the freeway, but I wanted to delay my arrival. My mom and dad wouldn’t be home yet, but I still didn’t know what I was going to tell my parents about Delahanty. I meandered down Magnolia Avenue. At the Brockton Arcade, I decided to turn in. I could talk to the Golds for a few minutes and put off deciding what to tell Mom and Dad.

  Morty was talking to a customer who had a ferret draped over one shoulder. I saw Nancy carrying a cardboard box down the corridor past Kyle’s room. She saw me and waved me back.

  When I got back there, she looked into his workroom and sighed. “I wanted to clean this out today.” She pulled a tissue out of the front pocket of her flannel shirt. “I just can’t go in here. I tried packing some stuff up this morning, and I started to cry. Morty can’t even come back here, he’s that broken up. He loved Kyle as if he were a grandson.”

  “I’ll do it,” I heard myself say.

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “It’s one of the few things I can do for him. I didn’t know him when he was alive. Maybe this will tell me a few things.” She brought in a few more cardboard boxes and left me to it.

  Taking the pictures down and wrapping and packing the little animals took over half an hour. I made as sure as I could that nothing would be bent or broken. As I picked up the papers strewn across the floor and straightened the masses of them on the shelves, I glanced through them.

  Sketches and drawings covered over half the documents. I guessed most were of the animals he had already made or planned to create. Many were tracings from books of particular parts of animals. He looked like he’d make a tracing and then try and replicate it freehand. Sometimes there would be forty or fifty of one aspect of the same animal. He must have been trying to get the muscle and texture just right. Most were in pencil, but a few were in dramatic, bold colors.

  After I’d boxed everything, I sat at the desk, toying with a couple of the animals from the top of the box I’d packed, a tiny gray mouse, and a Labrador retriever puppy.

  I crammed my legs into the desk opening, and stretched them underneath. I glanced at the little cot. I’d folded the blankets and placed them in a neat pile with the ragged orange pillow on top of it.

  I gave a sigh, not much more to do but go home.

  I reached over and flipped off the desk light. I managed to bang my right knee on the underside of the desk. Great, I thought, another injury. As I pulled my legs out from under the desk, I heard a thump.

  I leaned down and saw a fat book on the floor. I realized that the masking tape overlapping all four sides had been holding it to the underside of the desk. I turned the desk light back on, hunched forward, and opened the book.

  I discovered page after page of writing, the first page dated six years ago.

  The words, “Kyle’s book” on the inside front cover removed what little doubt I’d had that this was the dead teenager’s journal. The handwriting, just like it had been on the back of the vocab workbook I’d found, was small, cramped, and precise and not difficult to read.

  I hesitated only briefly before starting to read. I was messing in a dead kid’s life, where I didn’t belong, but it might give a helpful clue to the killer or at least some insight into the secrets of Kyle’s life.

  The first entries had been from the time Kyle was eleven. Well over two thirds of what he’d written for the first four of the five years were ordinary things like, “walked to school”, “talked to two kids”. Many of the early commentaries were concerned with where to hide this diary. Some of the entries were as short as a word or two. The items were not continuous. Kyle had often skipped days, sometimes not writing for months at a time.

  Three years ago he’d begun working at the pet store. Last year he’d begun staying overnight occasionally.

  At that time he wrote: “Now I have a place to keep this precious document where no one can find it, where it will be safe.”

  He talked about how clueless his parents were. It seemed they ignored him more than he hated them. He talked about them being trailer trash, partiers who drank beer, smoked weed, raced motorcycles, attended NASCAR events, drag raced with friends, and watched endless violent sporting events on television. His dad had spent a few years in jail for drug possession. Both parents had held and lost numerous jobs, working hard to earn money to indulge in their semilicit activities. Kyle described them as seldom being around but even that was too long for him. He had no idea how to talk to them. They worked in the campaign in favor of Proposition 8, the antigay marriage amendment here in California. I found out he slept on the couch in their small trailer. He’d never had his own room.

  In the last year and a half, he’d written in the diary nearly every day, and he’d begun to record in vast detail the events of his life, even going back and filling in some occurrences from previous years.

  I glanced at the last few pages, then stopped and read them carefully. He’d written in the diary that he was going to commit suicide. He’d also vowed to never service another guy again.

  It was so sad. Now he never would have a chance to fall in love with a man who cared for him and for whom he cared.

  I wondered if I should turn it in to the police. They’d been pretty snarly when Singleton and I went to see them. What would happen if I showed them something that a gay kid had written? Besides it didn’t tell me what happened that night. Just what Kyle hoped and planned would happen, which was pretty much suicide, no help to me proving he was murdered.

  I began flipping through the diary. Pages on end dealt with his secret life in the orange groves. All the names of the guys seemed to be in some kind of code. Before I could puzzle it all out, I realized it was late.

  I took the boxes of stuff out to my car, promising to deliver them to the Davises.

  I hurried home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Friday 6:04 P.M.

  At home Grandma was cooking, which was fairly odd. Normally, she avoided the kitchen and let my mother do what she wanted. She hugged me. “How was your day?”

  I said, “Okay.”

  She looked me up and down. “You look like you’ve been ridden hard and put away wet. You take your pain meds?”

  “Yeah.”

  She patted my arm. “Everything is going to be fine. Don’t you worry.” She gave me a huge smile.

  “Thanks, I hope so.”

  Through dinner, strained paternal relations were left in their delicate state. Mostly Grandma and the twins talked. Nobody mentioned a therapist. My parents didn’t summon me to another confrontation.
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br />   I kept quiet about what Delahanty had said. I’d enlist my parents support when all our emotions calmed down. I wanted to get back to Kyle’s diary as soon as I could. I’d placed it beneath my dirty underwear. Even my sisters hesitated to root through that pile of teenage odiferousness. I did my own laundry, so a parental search and find was extremely unlikely.

  In my room, the words Kyle had written brought me both information and frustration.

  While he had gone back in the past year or so and filled in many of the details from previous years, he hadn’t done so in any systematic way. It seemed that almost anything could trigger a reminisce on Kyle’s part: the phase of the moon, a new animal at the pet store, an argument with his parents.

  The book confirmed that he’d been terrifically happy at the pet store. He spent many pages detailing the live animals he dealt with. The hours creating each new stuffed animal were a cause for rapture and joy.

  Kyle didn’t use names of teenagers except one, nor did he indicate specific sexual conduct. He used codes for both. The latter code for sex, was pretty simple. He used the first initial of the word for the sex act.

  He rarely had to actually sneak out. His parents were often gone overnight. When actually home, once their beer and chemical consumption was done for the evening and they’d gone to bed, they rarely put in an appearance in the living room of the trailer.

  Kyle described how his excursions gave him a tremendous feeling of satisfaction. He wrote that he felt at peace and at one with the world when he could ride his bike or walk for hours, no one knowing where he was, with only himself and the vast sky and endless trees to keep him company.

  He recorded the many times he simply sat and watched guys drinking on the lonely stretches of road. For a long time, he was a silent sentinel, carefully listening to a teenage world he’d never felt a part of. A few times he’d seen and heard guys and girls having sex. He wrote how he enjoyed watching the guys.

  The only name he mentioned was Frank Boyer’s. He hated Boyer. If I understood the sexual code, and Kyle wasn’t lying, he and Boyer had done a wide variety of activities. He wrote, “Boyer was the first, and I’ll hate him forever. He hurt me.”

  Kyle often penned different fantasies about what he would do to get revenge on Boyer. These were little short stories. They included chopping off parts of Boyer’s anatomy, forcing Boyer to perform what Kyle was forced to, or anecdotes with Kyle as the hero saving someone else from Boyer’s clutches.

  Kyle claimed an amazing number of guys were willing to engage in at least limited sex. With some Kyle could touch them in only one spot and make no other physical contact with them. The secret seemed to be in getting them either alone or in groups of two or three, initially keeping his distance so he could run, and in assuring them no one would ever find out. Kyle set a lot of his success down to being able to judge the amount of liquor his contacts had drunk and how horny they were. A couple guys nearly plastered and panting about sex with girls were his best bets. He discovered the drunk ones often had trouble performing. This didn’t seem to bother Kyle.

  Sometimes he’d had to pay them, and sometimes he’d been frightened, and swore to himself that he would stop going out to the orange groves, but he always went back.

  In one of the last entries he wrote, “I hate going, but at least when I’m with them for a little while, I have some human contact. They’re not laughing at me when their dicks are spurting all over.”

  The entry for last Thanksgiving simply said, “I have a plan.” A week later Kyle wrote, “I’m going to get even with all of them. The plan will work.”

  On Christmas day he’d written the full details. He planned to reveal the names of all the kids he knew who he had serviced all these years. He planned to place their names up all over the Internet, with full explanations and descriptions. He would admit he was gay publicly, and, as he put it, “Destroy the creeps forever.”

  I had trouble following the logic of this. If he did as the notes threatened, Kyle could be accused of a lot of things, and probably beaten up by a large mob of enraged guys.

  On New Year’s Eve, Kyle wrote that he was going to tell some of his clients from the groves that he was going to get even with them. He was angry at himself for all the years he’d been performing in the orange groves.

  Whether the item for the day was suicide or plans for revenge, he ended over half those kinds of entries with a spew of hate toward Boyer.

  I wasn’t sure how much sense his revenge plans made. So what if he had published a list on the Internet on some site or social media network? All a kid had to do was deny it. What proof could Kyle have furnished? Maybe specific dates, but unless Kyle had witnesses, he was out of luck. Nowhere did he reveal the slightest hint of a coconspirator. The list of guys in the diary was by first initial. Was there another list at his house? I’d never get in there.

  If he was planning to kill himself, then how would the list get out, some kind of delayed email? That didn’t make a lot of sense. An email to a friend made some sense, but who? I’d found no evidence of him having any.

  Or was the threat of revealing to everyone enough to get him killed? Frank Boyer was the only one mentioned specifically and the actions with him were recorded in pornographic detail. Would Frank have taken action before the threat became real? Did other kids maybe take action?

  Kyle wrote a lot about coming out and not being lonely and finding someone to fall in love and be safe with.

  Days of written plans for revenge and coming out would alternate with paragraphs of deep depression when he would talk about killing himself. His first mention of suicide went back to one of the first entries in the diary when he was eleven. It became much more common when he’d been able to hide the diary at the store.

  It was near midnight when I finished reading all of it.

  I sat and wondered. Had he gone out to commit suicide that night and simply succeeded or had he peddled out to find people he’d planned to get even with who finished the job for him?

  I texted Darlene and Singleton to let them know what I had. I didn’t get an answer from either, but I wasn’t expecting one. I just wanted to make sure more than one person knew that Kyle’s diary existed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Saturday 9:00 A.M.

  I’ll never forget that weekend. Saturday morning started with my usual chores around the house: cleaning the garage, yard maintenance, fixing a broken DVD player for one of my sister’s friends. I tried for an hour, but at the end of that time I had to report failure to them. I suggested they ask for an iPod for an eighth grade graduation present.

  Once when I walked toward the kitchen, I heard my mom and grandma in a fierce, whispered conversation. As soon as I entered, they stopped.

  Early in the afternoon, Grandma drove off with some of her local buddies to go shopping in L.A. Mom and Dad and I tiptoed around each other. Tiptoeing was better than fighting and therapist crap.

  Around two, I called the newspaper to try and get Singleton. The woman who answered said he was gone for the weekend and I could try back Monday. I’d hoped I’d get some kind of response to my text message. I thought it was kind of odd when he didn’t answer, but then he owed me no explanation of his movements. He could have been busy or had a thousand things to do that had nothing to do with my life.

  That afternoon I spent three hours working on my column for the sports section of the Clarion. I called a few people to get quotes about some upcoming basketball games and then polished it off with a brief preview of the cross-country team’s chances this season. I would review what I’d written and make changes on Sunday.

  I had to decide if I was going to go to Bert’s party. The annual bash was usually a low wattage event, but this year I was sure Bert would go all out and try and show off his wealth. His dad owned this fabulous mansion on a hilltop out in Sycamore Canyon. Bert’s parties were the stuff of teenage legend. Free flowing booze, sex in all the bedrooms, and recreational drugs beyon
d imagining. I’d been to one party there last fall after the homecoming football game. I’d seen a lot of beer from several kegs, but no sex or drugs. Maybe I was out of it, or maybe the parties didn’t live up to their reputations.

  If you could put stock in rumors around school, and I didn’t much, Bert’s dad owned half of downtown Riverside, or half of the orange groves, or, you get the idea. Bert drove a Porsche to school. He was that kind of rich.

  After the week I’d had with Bert, I had no intention of getting anywhere near his presence.

  Darlene called around four to talk about the diary. I filled her in on more details.

  She said, “How very sad. He was plotting and planning. Who knows what really happened?”

  “We might never know. Should I take it to the police?”

  “It doesn’t prove anything, and the gay stuff might upset a lot of people. You said he’s pretty explicit?”

  “Very.”

  “The police or anyone could easily twist it to make it look like it was Kyle’s fault. I think you should hold off.”

  “And he doesn’t mention any names besides Boyer’s.”

  We discussed it for a little while longer, then she asked, “Are you going to Bert’s party?”

  “After what he did? No way.”

  Darlene insisted I had to go. “You’ve got stand up to him from the beginning, show you aren’t afraid. If you hide, he’ll have won.”

  I liked the sound of that, and Darlene sounded definite. It would be fun to watch Bert’s face when I walked in, cool as you please. Plus, I’d love to be able to corner him about his presence in the orange groves the previous weekend.

  I called Jack. He was invited because of his athletic prowess. He said he still planned to go. I figured if anybody started something, I’d have an ally. Since it was for the paper, supposedly there would be teachers there. It wasn’t school sponsored, but it was school related.

  I decided to go. Parental acquiescence was another thing. I’d asked permission from my parents when the party had been announced long before the holiday break. I’d gone to the ones the years before without incident. I reminded them of their previous okay. They hesitated a little, but their approval was not rescinded.