Fighting Chance(31)

He’d been afraid the barrage of inconvenient questions was going to start the night before, but Aunt Sophie had been almost completely silent from the time they came back from the courthouse to the time they went to bed. She hadn’t insisted that Petrak double-check his homework. She hadn’t even looked in on him to make sure he was doing it. There had been something eerie about the way she flitted silently through the apartment, hardly banging the pots and pans when she washed up after dinner.

She was banging the pots and pans now, though. Petrak had been listening to her for half an hour. First there’d be a rustle-rustle-rustle sound as she moved across the kitchen floor. Then there’d be a hard metallic thwack as she slammed a pan down on the stove. The first of the thwacks was the larger frying pan. The second was the smaller one. She must be making bacon and eggs.

“Petrak!” she called up in her flat American voice. “You can’t waste any more time. You have to get to school.”

Petrak did, indeed, have to get to school. With somebody else besides Aunt Sophie, he could have pretended to oversleep and then rushed out the front door in too much of a hurry to answer any questions. Aunt Sophie never overslept, and she didn’t believe in other people oversleeping.

“Petrak!”

Petrak launched himself out of bed and headed for the hall. “Have to take a shower!” he called. Then he raced into the bathroom. He turned the water on. He threw his clothes on the floor. He’d barely managed to get his hair wet when she was at the bathroom door, pounding.

“Petrak, I want you out here right this minute. I want you downstairs so that I can talk to you.”

There was, Petrak realized, nothing he could do. Aunt Sophie had never walked in on him while he was in the shower, but he wouldn’t put it past her, and he could hear that she was scorching mad. This was his fault, but it didn’t make anything any better.

“Just a minute,” he said.

He applied as much soap as he thought he could get away with. Then he got out from under the water, turned it off, and wrapped a towel around his middle.

He was sure he would find Aunt Sophie in the hall when he got out, but he was wrong. The hall was empty. The sound of rustling and banging was coming up from the kitchen.

Petrak went back to his room, carefully selected perfectly clean clothes so that Aunt Sophie didn’t have anything extra to yell about, and got dressed.

He appeared downstairs two minutes later, wearing a black and yellow rugby shirt that was going to make him a target at school all day.

He sat down at the little round breakfast table. “Good morning,” he said.

She’d had her back to him as she was working at the stove. Now she whirled around and glared, and he realized that he had spoken in Armenian without thinking about it.

“I’ve told you,” she said.

“Yes,” Petrak said. “Yes. I’m sorry, Aunt Sophie. I’m a little tired.”

Aunt Sophie turned back to the stove. “I left a message on Mr. Donahue’s answering machine. So that we can find out when Stefan will have his new hearing. They can’t keep him waiting in jail forever, even if somebody did die.”

“Yes,” Petrak said. There didn’t seem to be any point in pointing out that it wasn’t just that somebody was dead, but that somebody had been murdered.

Aunt Sophie got a plate from the cabinet and put it in front of him. She got one of the frying pans from the stove and dumped a pile of scrambled eggs out of it. She got the other frying pan from the stove and offered him the bacon.

Petrak took four pieces. Aunt Sophie was apt to go on about how he ate too much, but also about how he ate too little.

When she was done serving out his food, she sat down across from him. She already had a cup of coffee. He hadn’t noticed it before. She held the coffee cup entirely surrounded by her hands and said, “Well.”

“Well” was not a good sign.

“I don’t think we have to worry about it taking forever,” Petrak said, proceeding cautiously. “I think—”

“Where did you go when you left the courtroom?”

There it was. Here was something else about Aunt Sophie. She never beat around the bush. It was one of the phrases he thought of as “speaking American.”

“Petrak,” Aunt Sophie said.

“I went to look for Mr. Donahue,” Petrak said. “He was gone so long.”

“You went where to look for Mr. Donahue?”

It took everything Petrak had not to shrug. Aunt Sophie hated shrugs.

“I went out into the vestibule where the guard was.”

“And that was it? You just went there? Because that’s not what I heard from the police.”