Return to Paradise Read Free Page A

“I’m going crazy in this house with my mother-in-law.” She’s been acting kind of weird and distant since the whole house fire thing, but I keep telling myself things will be fine and she’ll come back to Paradise once everything’s blown over.
    Dad gets home not much later than I do. I guess that’s one of the perks of being cut out of a big investigation—you get to have dinner on time every night. He tosses his dark sheriff’s hat on a table near the front door and heads to the guest room he’s staying in upstairs. Soon he’s back down in a sweatshirt and jeans, and the three of us sit down for dinner at Nana’s ancient round dining-room table that must weigh two tons.
    Nana says grace and asks us about our days. I give a vague answer about school going well—as far as my family knows, there’s no difference in who I was at Paradise and who I am at Helena. My dad asks a few questions about whether or not the administration has decided if Paradise will have a baseball team this spring or if we’ll get merged with our new school, which would be worse than having no baseball at all. I shrug and dig into my dinner.
    Eventually, I get to prodding about the investigation.
    “I saw Todd today,” I say between bites of meat. “He told me they’re not even letting him up to the campus, even though he’s supposed to be protecting the site.”
    “Officer Charleston,” Dad says, chewing through Todd’s last name, “is not supposed to be gossiping about police affairs. And certainly not about any ongoing investigations.”
    “It was my fault. I stopped by when I saw he was manning the roadblock. Forced him into talking to me. Don’t worry; he wouldn’t let me step so much as a foot past him.”
    Dad doesn’t say anything, just keeps on chewing with his eyes on his plate. I clear my throat a little and keep talking.
    “So, uh. Have you been over to the school? What have they got going on over there? Any ideas about who or what was behind everything?”
    “The Smith kid and his father were behind it,” Dad says, parroting the same thing everyone else has been saying.
    I want to correct him and tell him that Henri wasn’t actually John’s father. That he was some kind of guardian who protected me and Sarah and the others—who died doing so. And that I watched his body burn in a ceremony behind a slummy motel close by.
    But as far as Dad knows, John Smith was just a quietguy in some of my classes, and I was nowhere near Paradise High the night everything went down. So instead I just ask: “How can they be sure it was him, though?”
    “They’re sure.” Dad’s voice is gruff, meaning he’s done talking about the subject.
    “Who wants more rolls?” Nana asks.
    “Yeah, but what proof do they have?” I ask, feeling a little bad for ignoring my grandmother. “They must have something on him if they keep telling everyone he did it.”
    Dad drops his fork down on his plate and looks across the table at me.
    “Do you know who the ‘they’ is you keep mentioning, Mark?”
    “Uh, sort of. The FBI, for one.”
    “And you’ve probably seen enough movies to know how the FBI works. And what happens to people who ask questions about top-secret investigations, right?”
    “Sure,” I say. “Black bags over your head and stuff.”
    “I don’t know about that, but the last thing I want is for my son to end up in trouble because he was poking around in things he should’ve let be. It’s bad enough that Sarah was involved with this boy. The last thing I want is for you to get wrapped up in it too.”
    “Of course,” I say.
    He picks up his fork and keeps eating, but my head spins. Sarah was involved with this boy . It’s not the factthat this is true that makes my stomach drop, it’s that my dad knows. I rack my brain, trying to think of a moment I might have mentioned that Sarah and John were dating before, or even after everything happened, but I can’t think of one. Talking about a guy who