Chapter 13
The Crime Scene crew is gone and now it’s just Drew here with me and Maggie, waiting for Jesse when he gets off the bus. Drew’s put two and two together and for a change, he’s actually gotten four and figured out that the dragon figurine was in Jesse’s room. He keeps telling me how lucky I was not to have been here when whoever came looking for it showed up.
What’s lucky is that Jesse wasn’t here. And, I remind Drew, since the thief didn’t find what he was looking for, Jesse isn’t safe now.
“That’s why I’m here,” Drew says testily. “This isn’t a hobby, Teddi. I don’t do it for fun.”
He seems to realize it’s an obnoxious comment, and he puts an arm around me for a quick hug. I shrink away because I’m still mad at him for the way he behaved at the station. His shrug says, fine, be that way and you can bet I will be.
Jesse comes off the bus looking like he’s lost his best friend. Maggie does her Whoopee! Jesse’s Home dance, and he kneels down and rubs her neck so that he doesn’t have to look at us. Two mother tricks I’ve learned: talk about serious things in the car, where eye contact is impossible, and let your child hide behind his dog when he needs to tell you something. It makes him feel like he’s got at least one ally.
“Jess,” I start, keeping my voice soft. “The house was broken into today while I was out.”
You’d have to be blind not to see the poor kid stiffen with fear.
“No one was home, and no one got hurt, and that’s the important thing,” I continue. “But your room – only your room – was ransacked, which seems a little odd, don’t you think?”
“Maybe it was a kid,” Jesse offers lamely.
“And maybe it was someone looking for this,” Drew says, pulling the ivory dragon out of his pocket and holding it out in the palm of his hand.
“What’s that?” Jess says coyly, like he’s never seen it before.
I wonder how Drew is going to play it. I’m holding my breath that he won’t say it’s the figure you were hiding in your drawer that your mother found and turned over to me.
“It’s a contraband ivory carving. It was made from an elephant killed illegally, probably carved by some child who is kept in a pen and whose parents, if he’s lucky, are paid pennies for his days of labor, labor which will cause him to go blind before he’s a grown man. Then it was smuggled into this country by thieves and sold on the black market for sums apparently high enough to kill for. You have any idea how it got into your room?”
Jesse and I are both speechless.
I finally say that we should go inside, and we all walk silently to the house. When we get to the door, Drew says that if I had interrupted the burglary, I could be dead.
Jesse looks like he’s going to be sick, and I’m quick to say that I am fine, we’re all fine, blah, blah, blah.
I herd the boys into the kitchen and try to feed them because that’s what mothers, at least Jewish mothers, do. Fix it with food, is our motto. It’s clear from the way Drew stares at me that he wasn’t brought up by a mother who subscribed to that philosophy.
“Time to talk, Jesse,” Drew tells him, but Jesse says nothing. “Where’d you get the wyrmling?”
“It’s not a wyrmling. It’s like a manticore.” Jesse corrects him without even looking at the piece. “And what makes you think it’s mine, anyway?”
“For one thing, the fact that you didn’t get more than a glance at it and you knew I’d called it the wrong thing,” Drew says. “For another, it was found in your room.”
“But you didn’t catch the guy who found it?” Jesse asks.
We don’t answer him.
“So then it wasn’t found by the thief,” Jesse says. And he looks at me.
I open my mouth, but before I can force the words out, Drew says that the police have been all over Jesse’s room, dusting for fingerprints, etc. and so forth.
“I found it,” I say, because I treasure honesty and how can I expect my kids to be honest if I’m not. “In your sock drawer. And I took it to the police and when your room was broken into, I didn’t have to tell them where it came from.”
Jesse doesn’t say anything. At least not with words. His look says volumes about being betrayed.
“Where would you get stolen goods?” Drew asks him, and I don’t like the implication.
I rephrase the question. “Who gave it to you, Jesse? It’s stolen, your life could be in danger, and the police need to know.”
Jesse is silent.
“Oh shit. Did your father give this to you?” I ask.
“Dad?’ Jesse asks, like I’ve asked if the Easter Bunny left it in his basket.
“I can’t think of who else might have stolen property,” I say.
Jesse laughs meanly. “Nice Mom. Real nice.
