Tension pricked under my skin as I pulled up behind the patrol car. I couldn’t help thinking about that night a little less than ten months ago when there had been a very similar scene here. On that same terrible night when I’d almost lost Daniel.
The scar on my arm flared, and the pain of my powers tingled into my muscles. I clutched my moonstone and shook off those terrible memories.
A more immediate problem stood in front of me now.
I left the tray of coffee cups in the car and headed up to the storefront. The thing that struck me the most was how strangely clean the glass of the front door seemed. That is, until I realized the door was actually missing. Shards of shattered glass littered the ground just inside the doorway. I hesitated for a moment, unsure if I was allowed to enter, but no one tried to stop me, so I stepped through the gap. I heard voices near the cash registers—or where the cash registers should have been. One lay smashed on the ground, and the other two appeared to be missing altogether.
Mr. Day slumped on a stool while talking to Chris Tripton, another early-morning employee, and Daniel stood nearby with a broom.
It looked like Day’s Market had been the epicenter of an earthquake that somehow hadn’t touched the rest of town. Most of the shelving had been knocked over like a giant set of dominos, it’s demolished contents scattered everywhere. Spots on the floor were slick with soup oozing out of crushed cans. Basketball-sized holes pocked the walls, and the Halloween display in the center of the store looked like someone had taken a bulldozer to it.
“What happened?” I asked Daniel when I caught his attention. “It looks like a hurricane swept through here.”
“Might as well.” Daniel leaned his weight into his broom. “Somebody ransacked the place last night. They emptied out the registers, tore the safe out of the wall in the back office, and trashed just about everything else.”
“Holy hell,” I said.
Stacey Canova came up to us with an empty box in her arms. “The strange thing is,” she said, “they destroyed everything else, but took every last bag of chips and can of beer in the place.”
“What? Does the sheriff think it was teenagers?” I asked her.
“Only if they make teenagers with superpowers these days,” a voice said from behind me.
I reeled around to Mr. Day. “What was that?” I blushed and crossed my arms behind my back, as if I had something to hide.
“Whoever did this had to be superfast, and strong as a bull. It would take a forklift to knock over one of those aisles. And they got in and out of here in a matter of minutes. I locked up and headed home last night, but I was barely a few blocks away when I realized that I’d left my garage key in the back office. I turned around and came back to the store and found all this. I was gone five minutes tops. And there’s nothing on the security cameras.” Mr. Day indicated the cameras in each corner of the store. “Looked them over with the sheriff last night. They just go black. And these are battery powered, so it’s not like cutting the power to the whole building would do anything. None of you scrawny Holy Trinity kids could have pulled this off.”
He turned to Chris Tripton. “I’m telling you, it had to be those invisible bandits from the city. Either that, or the Markham Street Monster has turned to a life of larceny.” Mr. Day sounded just like the news reporter from last night, only he wasn’t joking.
Stacey rolled her eyes but then shook her head when she saw Mr. Day glaring at her.
Daniel looked down and swept up some broken glass into a pile with his broom.
According to the “official” story, wild dogs had attacked Mr. Day’s granddaughter Jessica and were responsible for the other attacks in town last winter—Maryanne’s mutilation, James’s going missing, and then what happened to Daniel, Jude, and me at the parish—but Mr. Day had been a die-hard believer in the Markham Street Monster ever since.
“Either way, this town is in trouble. I bet I’m just the first of many. Someone—or something—with that much power isn’t going to stop at one store.
Mark my words: Rose Crest is going to hell in a handbasket unless somebody can do something.”
The phone rang from the back office. It had a strange, tinny echo. It must have been damaged. “Local paper got ahold of the story.” Mr. Day grumbled. “They keep on calling. Won’t be surprised if we end up with reporters from the city picking through the place like vultures later today. I could be ruined, and they think it makes a great headline. Thought I’d never have to deal with those buzzards again since they got tired of the story about Jessica’s death. Now they’ll want to pick at her dead bones some more with all of this.” He was trying to sound gruff and annoyed, but his voice had a high-pitched catch to it, and I noticed a puffy redness to his eyes.
The phone kept ringing, and Mr. Day stalked toward his office. “You two get on to school,” he said, pointing back at Daniel and me.
“But we can help,” I said.
“You kids got college applications coming up soon. Don’t want you messing up your grades because of this. But I expect you back here after school,” he said to Daniel, then grabbed the receiver of the ringing phone on his desk. “Hello!” he practically shouted into the phone before he shut the office door behind him. Mr. Day really didn’t deserve this—especially after what had happened to Jessica.
“I guess we should head out, then.” Daniel handed his broom to Chris. “I’ll be back right after my last class.”
“We’ll still be here,” Chris said, sounding like he wished he had an excuse to take off, too.
Daniel took my hand and we headed toward the nonexistent door, but after about four steps I noticed something sticking to the bottom of my shoe. I let go of Daniel and reached down and peeled some kind of plastic card from the heel of my boot. I flipped it over. It was a plain white card with a small logo on the front that said THE DEPOT and a magnetic strip on the back. It reminded me of my frequent buyer’s card for the Java Pot that they swiped each time I bought something.
Daniel stopped and looked back at me. “What’ve you got?”
“Looks like a membership card or something. You ever heard of a place called The Depot?”
Daniel shook his head.
I held up the card. “This could be a clue, don’t you think? Maybe the person who did this dropped this card.”
“Hmm, could be, I guess.” Daniel looked like he didn’t put much stock in that idea.
Stacey made a snorting sound from behind me. “You sound like one of those Scooby-Doo kids,” she said. “Don’t get your hopes up, though.
Customers drop crap like that in here all the time. We’ve got a whole box of lost-and-found stuff in the office, but hardly anyone ever comes to claim anything. I’d just chuck it in one of the trash piles.”
I flipped the card over again. Rose Crest hosted only a handful of businesses, and none of them were called The Depot. It probably is just trash, I thought, but I tucked it into the pocket of my jacket instead of throwing it away.
Daniel raised his eyebrows at me, but he didn’t say a word.
FIVE MINUTES LATER
Daniel left his motorcycle at the market and hitched a ride with me in the Corolla. It rattled and groaned the few blocks to school, as if telling me that it didn’t plan on making it through another winter. Hopefully, Daniel could keep it running for a while longer, considering money was tighter with Mom not working anymore and the extra expense of a housekeeper. I wondered how much longer Dad could afford to keep paying Debbie—let alone even think about buying a new car.
I parked in my usual spot near the parish, and then we started across the school parking lot together. Daniel sipped his coffee and made an appreciative grunt. His face looked gaunter than it had in a while, and his shaggy hair was tussled more than usual. He ate the cinnamon muffin I’d given him in three huge bites, and then cleared his throat.
“He’s got a point,” Daniel said. “What Mr. Day said—it would take someone with a lot of special abilities to pull this off in that short amount of time. A superpowered teen, perhaps?”
I held up my hands. “I’m innocent, I swear. Unless I ransack stores in my sleep …”
Daniel smirked, but it lasted only a second. His face was straight and serious when he said the name I’d been trying to deflect with my humor:
“Jude. It makes sense, don’t you think?” Daniel asked. “He was in town last night. He went to Maryanne’s house, and he was probably outside
James’s window. It makes complete sense that he’d go to Day’s next.”
“What, like he’s taking a tour of all the places …? Oh.” I stopped right in front of the main doors of the school, suddenly knowing what Daniel was getting at. Maryanne’s house, James’s window, Day’s Market. These were all the places where the wolf had caused him to lose control last year.
He’d mauled Maryanne’s frozen body as she lay dead on her porch, then he’d gone through a window at my house and stolen Baby James to make it look like he’d been carried off into the forest, and then he’d left Jessica’s body in the Dumpster behind the market where Daniel worked—all in an effort to frame Daniel as the monster.
“You think the wolf is making him revisit the places of his past crimes? But why? And do you think Jude’s really capable of doing all that damage over at Day’s by himself?”
“Excuse me,” a high-pitched voice yelped from behind us.
I turned slightly and saw my former best friend, April Thomas, standing there. She trembled in that cocker-spaniel way of hers like she did when she was excited or frightened or experiencing pretty much any other emotion. It was one of the things that I’d always liked best about her.