Second Watch

“But you do go there.”

“Sometimes,” Donnie said.

On Sunday both boys had been equally communicative, but here—perhaps because they were operating under Sister Mary Katherine’s steely-eyed stare—Donnie seemed to have assumed the role of official spokesman.

“And do you always go up and down the same way?” Watty asked.

“I guess,” Donnie said.

“So there’s, like, a regular path you follow?”

Donnie nodded, more emphatically this time.

“And you were on the path when you found the barrel?”

This time the two boys exchanged glances before Donnie answered. “I think so,” he hedged.

“The funny thing is,” Watty said, leaning back in his chair, “I spent all day Monday out at the crime scene. There’s a path, all right, but it’s nowhere near where you found the barrel.”

“But we saw it from the path,” Frankie put in. “It was right there in plain sight until we pushed it on down the hill.”

Watty ignored the interruption and stayed focused on Donnie. “Is that true?” he asked. “Or did you go looking for it because you already knew it was there?”

“We found it when we were coming back from the movie,” Donnie said. “That’s all. We found it, and then we opened it, and then we called you.”

“How did you open it again?”

“We used a stick to pry off the lid,” Donnie declared.

“And where did you find the stick?” Watty asked. “Was it just lying there on the hillside?”

“Yes,” Donnie answered. “We found the stick right there.”

I could see where Watty was going with this. The barrel had been found in a blackberry bramble. The stick the boys claimed they had used to open the barrel had looked to me like a branch from an alder tree, none of which were anywhere in evidence.

“That’s not what the marks on the barrel say,” Watty told them. “They say you’re lying about that.”

He just dropped that one into the conversation and let it sit there. The two boys exchanged glances, squirmed uneasily, and said nothing.

“If you know more than you’re saying,” Sister Mary Katherine said, inserting herself into the interview, “then you need to tell the detectives what it is.”

In other words, it was okay to push Sister Mary Katherine’s students around if she was the one doing the pushing.

“We used a crowbar,” Donnie admitted finally, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “We only said we used the stick.”

“Where is the crowbar now?” Watty asked.

“We dropped it in the water down by the pier when we went to use the phone.”

“And where did the crowbar come from in the first place?”

“Our mom’s garage.”

“And how did it get from the garage to the barrel?”

“We took it down the hill on Sunday morning, while Mom was still asleep.”

“Which means you already knew the barrel was there,” Watty concluded.

This time both Donnie and Frankie nodded.

“How?”

“We saw the guy who dumped it,” Frankie said, speaking for the first time. “On Saturday night, we were outside.” He paused and gave Sister Mary Katherine a wary look.

“Go on,” she ordered.

“We had stolen some of Mom’s cigarettes,” he said. “The house next door is empty. We were hiding in the backyard, smoking, when a guy drove into the yard in a pickup with a camper shell on top of it. He drove as far as the end of the driveway. He got out of the truck and pushed something out of the back. When he rolled it out onto the ground, we could see it was a barrel.”

“What kind of pickup?” Watty asked.

“I don’t know,” Frankie said.

“It was a Ford,” Donnie put in.

“Color?”

“It was sort of dark, but we couldn’t tell much about it because it was late at night.”

“How late?”

Donnie shrugged. “After midnight. That’s why you can’t tell our mom. She’d kill us if she knew we were sneaking out of the house when she thought we were in bed.”

“And that’s why you made up the story of finding the barrel on Sunday?”

Donnie nodded.

Watty settled in closer, giving the two boys a hard look. “This pickup truck you saw. Had you ever seen it around before?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Did you see the license plate?”

“No.”

I’ve heard that twins often develop forms of communication that can pass between them in utter silence. I was suddenly under the impression that that was exactly what was going on here. They were both lying about something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I think Watty was getting the same message. Ditto Sister Mary Katherine.

“God knows when you’re not telling the truth,” the good sister remarked.