Chapter 18. Walking Home
Friday, the fifteenth, it warmed up again. We put on some clean clothes and wrapped the rest in bundles to carry out with us. Everything else was left in the cabin, and we covered up the entrance as best we could, hoping no one but us would ever find it. We had decided to walk out to Lost Nation Road rather than hike down to the village. It didn’t really matter anymore, but we wanted to preserve as much of the mystery as we could. Pride, I guess.
We walked east on Lost Nation, our bundles on sticks over our shoulders, and the baseball gloom, though it would never go away, gradually receded as we talked about what we had done and what was to come. We knew we were in big trouble, but the enormity of what we had accomplished, at least in our minds, was pretty impressive. Six weeks! We had put one over on the teachers, our parents, and the whole village, and, best of all, the local cops and even the FBI! Whatever they could do to us now was nothing compared to what we had done to them. At least, that’s the way we thought about it.
By the time we reached Old Stage Road and turned south, we were laughing our asses off, in between singing “Pretty Woman” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” along with Tom’s radio. That radio had made the whole thing possible; I’m not sure we could have done it, either the summer-long construction or the six-week adventure, without it.
By noon, we had turned from Old Stage Road onto Route 15, and we were a couple miles north of the village center when a police cruiser passed us going south. It was Junior, and he recognized us at once. He pulled over a little way ahead of us and got out of the car and just stood there, hands on his hips, shaking his head and laughing.
As soon as we were settled in the cruiser, he was on his radio, saying “You’d better call the Free Press and Channel 3; I’ve got the other three kids in the car.” Then he turned to us and said, “Do you guys know how bad you smell?”
We were sitting in the Police Station, waiting for our Moms to arrive, and surrounded by cops and clerks and passers-by, all holding their noses, when the first reporter walked in. He started asking questions right away, but we weren’t saying anything, and soon after the Chief arrived, followed by Win’s Mom, more reporters, my Mom and Tom’s Mom. The room was getting crowded and everyone was talking at once.
The Chief was ordering people around, trying to organize it as a “press conference,” but our Moms were having none of that. He tried to keep us there for “debriefing,” but the other cops talked him out of it, and I don’t think he would have been able to overrule three Moms anyway.
As we headed out the door, I could hear Chief Mulrooney starting his speech. “Thanks to diligent and untiring detective work by our splendid officers…”
What a load of crap.