Part 5 (2/2)

”What can I do for you girls?” Sergeant Johnson was standing in front of us, smiling.

I gulped. ”You said to come back if we had any new evidence,” I said. ”Well, I don't know if these are evidence or not . . .”I held out the pictures, and Sergeant Johnson took them and leafed through them. ”See, there's this light on in the window,” I said, standing up and pointing to the picture he was looking at.

”And the same man is in some of these shots. We found out that his name is Mr. -”

”Why don't we go somewhere else to talk,” Sergeant Johnson said abruptly, handing the pictures back to me. ”Somewhere a little more private.” He led us past the desk, telling the woman officer, ”We'll be using interview room four.”

The three of us exchanged glances as we followed Sergeant Johnson down the corridor. We pa.s.sed a room full of police officers working at typewriters, and a water cooler where some other officers were standing around, talking. Then, Sergeant Johnson unlocked a door and ushered us into a small, quiet room which was empty except for a big table with several chairs around it.

I checked out the room. It looked just like one of those rooms in the movies, the ones in which the police question suspects. Sergeant Johnson closed the door behind us, and the noise made me jump a little. Suddenly, I felt my heart beating fast. Were we under suspicion, for some reason? Was Sergeant Johnson going to start interrogating us? I looked over at Mary Anne and noticed that she had turned very, very pale. Stacey seemed to be keeping it together, but I could tell she was nervous by the way she was twirling a lock of hair around her finger.

”Sit down, sit down,” said Sergeant Johnson. ”Make yourselves comfortable.”

That was kind of hard to do, since the room wasn't exactly the coziest place I'd ever seen. We each pulled out one of the beat-up looking orange plastic chairs and sat down, but I noticed none of us relaxed. I, for one, was sitting on the edge of my seat. We sat along one side of the table, and Sergeant Johnson took a seat on the other side.

Sergeant Johnson looked across at us, and he must have seen how tense we were. ”It's okay, I'm not going to bite,” he said. ”Now, let's see those pictures again.” I pushed them across the table. Picking each one up in turn, he examined them closely.

”Very interesting,” he said, nodding. He scribbled some notes in a little notebook and then slapped it shut. ”Now, what were you going to say about Mr. Zibreski?” he asked me. He looked at me intently with those dear blue eyes.

”Just that we're still wondering about him, since he shows up in so many of the pictures,” I said hesitantly.

”We were also wondering about the lady with the baby carriage,” Mary Anne added, her voice just a little shaky, ”but now we're pretty sure she's innocent.”

Sergeant Johnson smiled. ”You're probably right about that,” he said. ”As for your friend Mr. Zibreski, well - ” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ”He is under investigation.” He leaned back.

”He is?” I asked.

Sergeant Johnson nodded. ”This is just between us, understand?”

We all bobbed our heads and said, ”Yes sir!”

”We don't really have anything on him,” said Sergeant Johnson, ”but we're suspicious, just like you. We searched all the employee offices, including his, but we didn't find a thing. Then he gave us an alibi that didn't check out with what your other photos proved about his being at the bank on Sunday. So we searched his apartment, too. Nothing there, either.” Sergeant Johnson scratched his head. ”Zibreski's been completely cooperative, but somehow we think there's something fishy about him. But there's no sign of any irregularities in his banking accounts. What we really need is a picture of him carrying something out of the bank that afternoon. A suitcase, for example. Something he could have put all that money into. You don't have anything like that, do you?” I thought for a minute and shook my head.

”Without that,” said Sergeant Johnson, frowning, ”and without a definite time frame for the pictures you took, we really can't prove a thing.”

Time frame. Time frame. My thoughts were racing. ”We'll keep trying to find something,” I said.

”Good, good,” he said, standing up. I stood up, too, and so did Mary Anne and Stacey. I realized that our little meeting had ended.

Sergeant Johnson saw us to the door and sent us off with a pleasant good-bye. It seemed as though we had a real friend at the police station, and that was rea.s.suring. But as soon as we walked out of the building, I started to feel nervous again about Mr. Zibreski. I looked all around, wondering if he had followed us, and if he knew we were talking to the police about him. Mary Anne and Stacey were glancing over their shoulders, too, so I figured they were thinking the same thing.

”Maybe he really is dangerous,” said Mary Anne, and I knew she was talking about Mr. Zibreski. ”I'd feel safer if we were back at your house, Claud.”

We raced back to my house, convinced, once again, that Mr. Zibreski was at our heels. I was still thinking over what Sergeant Johnson had said about needing a time frame, and by the time we all pounded up the stairs to my room I'd had an idea. I threw Mary Anne's pictures down on my desk and then pulled out all of the other bank pictures and added them to the pile. ”Let's look at these again, and see what we can find in each of them that might help us tell time.”

”Huh?” asked Stacey.

”I know what she means,” said Mary Anne. ”Like, if there's a clock in the background or something,” she explained to Stacey, showing her a picture that featured a dock.

”Or if the shadows are falling a certain way,” said Stacey, catching on. She picked up another print and showed it to us. ”See? This one must have been taken later than the one Mary Anne is holding.”

”Exactly!” I said. ”So, let's put them all in order.” We settled down to work, spreading out the pictures on the floor and sorting them into piles. Some of them showed the dock. Some showed the lighted window. Some showed Mr. Zibreski walking toward the bank, and others showed him heading away from it. And lots of them showed the woman with the baby carriage, who walked up and down in front of the bank, sat down on a bench for a few shots, and then seemed to leave the area.

Eventually, we had them arranged in an order that made sense to us. Then I took the pile, straightened the pictures, and flipped through them.

”It's like a movie!” squealed Mary Anne.

”Do it again,” said Stacey, eagerly.

I flipped through the pictures again, a little slower this time. Since they, weren't all taken from the same spot it wasn't exactly like a flip book, but you could definitely get an idea of the action. We watched as Mr. Zibreski appeared from the right, crossed paths with the woman with the baby carriage, and disappeared. The light in the bank's window went on while the woman with the baby carriage paraded in front of the bank, sat down on the bench, and then vanished. Then the light in the window went off, and Mr. Zibreski reappeared and headed to the left. The dock that showed in some of the pictures kept track of the time throughout the whole thing. ”Whoa!” said Stacey.

”Whoa is right,” I said. ”This is awesome!”

”It looks like Mr. Zibreski gees into the bank, turns on that light, stays a while, and then leaves,” said Mary Anne, breathlessly. ”This is proof!” She paused. ”Isn't it?”

”Well, no,” I admitted. ”It's not proof that he robbed the bank. But it does seem to prove that he went inside that day, between one o'clock and one-thirty.”

'That doesn't necessarily mean anything,” said Stacey. ”He could just be a workaholic, like my dad.”

We flipped through the pictures about a hundred more ,times. Then we did it some more, for the other members of the BSC. (They arrived for our meeting to find the three of us still sitting on the floor.) Everybody was pretty impressed by what we'd done, but we agreed that there was no point in going back to Sergeant Johnson, since the pictures still didn't show Mr. Zibreski carrying anything. If he'd really stolen that money, he would have had to carry it out of the bank, after all. The bank had been thoroughly searched, and the money wasn't inside.

”You'd better hide those,” said Jessi at one point, gesturing at the pictures. ”I mean, what if Mr. Zibreski really is following you? He'd love to get his hands on them.”

Later that night, as I prepared to go to bed, I kept replaying Jessi's comment in my mind. At first I tried to convince myself that there was no way Mr. Zibreski could really be after me, but the more I thought about it, the more scared I became.

Here's what I did before I went to bed: First, I hid the pictures beneath my most-unfavorite clothes (my gym uniform, for one!) in my bottom drawer. Then, I rigged up my own, patent-pending super-alert z-alarm. I ran strings from my bed to the door of my room, and I tied old film canisters all along them so they'd jangle if they were touched. Then I set an old suitcase full of books against the door, figuring that it would make a loud thump if it was knocked over. I put a jar full of marbles next to the suitcase, so if the suitcase fell over it would knock the marbles all over the floor and make walking impossible.

Guess what? The alarm worked perfectly! But it wasn't Mr. Zibreski who set it off.

It was me.

I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and walked straight into every one of my own traps. First I stubbed my toe - hard! - on the suitcase, and a second later I was slipping and sliding all over the room on those marbles, while the film cans jangled away. I must have looked pretty funny. Someday maybe I'll laugh about it. Someday, when the bruises have disappeared!

Chapter 12.

Does Jessi sound frustrated and overwhelmed in that note of hers from the dub notebook? Well, that's because she was. And with good reason.

I missed out on most of the chaos, because I was home cramming for an extremely important math test that was scheduled for Monday. It was going to count for a big part of my grade, and if I didn't pa.s.s it I had the feeling my parents would never let me touch a camera again. They were already beginning to suspect that my photography course was much, much more important to me than my math cla.s.s. They were right, of course, but I had to show them that I could still pa.s.s math.

Anyway, here's the scene: most of the people involved in the Day in the Life of Stoneybrook project were gathered at Mary Anne's house, around her big dining room table. Jessi had brought Charlotte and Becca over, along with Buddy and Suzi Barrett. Kristy had come with Jamie Newton, and also Matt and Haley Brad-dock. And Mal had brought Vanessa and Nicky.

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