“I told everyone it was a bad idea to wait until morning to put the presents out,” I said. “I knew, as late as we’d all been up, that we’d be dragging if we had to get up early, and I suggested it was better just to stay up a little longer. But no one listened to me. And even I didn’t expect the power to go out and knock out all the alarm clocks so we’d all oversleep.”
“And you knew just where to find me,” he said.
“The tree house wasn’t such a tough guess.”
“I always thought it was really nice the way you convinced me that you’d peeked too, just after dawn, and you guessed Yorktown must be toward the end of Santa’s run.”
“I remember explaining that if we’d all really been wicked, we wouldn’t just have empty stockings but lumps of coal,” I said, wondering if there was a point to this trip down memory lane. Not that there had to be, but most people looked a little more cheerful when reminiscing about Christmases Past.
“And you never told anyone what I did,” he said.
“You told them yourself, a year or two later.”
“Yeah, but I was really glad you let me tell them,” he said. I quelled a momentary burst of impatience. Yes, I wanted to get back to my online sleuthing, but something was bothering Eric. He stared down at the floor for a few long seconds, and then looked up to meet my eyes. “I think I might be in trouble.”
“How?” I asked.
“You know that reporter?”
“Ainsley Werzel? All too well by now.”
“I sort of borrowed his camera.”
“Sort of borrowed? You mean you took his camera?”
“Well, when I first picked it up, I thought it was yours,” he said. “You have almost the same model. And when I realized whose it was, I remembered that he’d been taking all these nasty pictures of people. Like trying to get them doing something silly or not looking very good. I thought it was really rude.”
“I agree,” I said. “And I admit, it crossed my mind how much I’d like to steal his camera and erase all his photos.”
“But I didn’t steal it,” Eric protested. “He left it lying around, and I picked it up to give it to him—well, to you, till I realized it wasn’t yours—and then I thought if I could just keep it for a few minutes and go someplace where no one would see me, I could look through the pictures and delete any that would em barrass people, and then just put the camera back where I found it. So I stuck it under my coat. And before I got a chance to look at the photos, he started making that big fuss about losing it, and I was embarrassed to give it back.”
“I’d just have left it lying around someplace,” I said. “Let him think he’d forgotten where he’d left it.”
“Yeah, I thought of that,” he said. “But Mr. Pruitt was around—Mr. Norris Pruitt. And you know how he is.”
“I do now,” I said. “Okay, good call not leaving it around for Norris to pilfer. But you could have told the truth. At least the part about finding it lying around. You could have said you picked it up for safekeeping and forgot.”
“Yeah, I realize that now,” he said. “But Mr. Werzel was so mad, and it all happened so fast and I didn’t think what to do till later. And once he made that report to the chief, I was scared to. Mr. Werzel would have had me arrested.”
I shook my head, but he was right—Werzel probably would have tried. Probably still would, if he found out now. And stressed as the chief was by the murder, he might well have been in the mood to teach Eric a lesson.
“What can I do?” Eric asked. “I can’t just give it back.”
“Maybe you can’t, but I can,” I said. “Have you got it here?”
He nodded and reached into his pocket to pull out the tiny silver camera. He handed it to me and then sighed as if I’d taken a ton of rocks off his shoulders instead of a few ounces of metal and plastic from his hand.
“You can tell them what happened,” he said. “I know I should have brought it back sooner, but I was too scared to do it myself. You can make them understand.”
I was going to miss that when he got a little older—that childish confidence that Auntie Meg could fix anything.
Then again, Rob still turned to me regularly to bail him out of scrapes with that same absolute trust that I could and would rescue him.
“You really should have turned it over as soon as Mr. Werzel made that fuss,” I said. “You know that.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking down at the floor. “And if you think I should take it back myself, I will. I just don’t want to do it all by myself.”