“Right.”
“He’s still in town? Grace Park?”
“According to property tax records, he is.”
“So you think there might be something to that? That was a long time ago.”
“I know,” says Jane. “I know this guy a little. Went to high school with him.”
“And you could see him doing this?”
“Oh, well, it’s been so long. I never really knew him.”
“Yeah, but tell him that story you told me, Jane,” says Andy Tate. “From high school. That story about Mitchell Kitchens.”
74
Jane
“Simon and I were freshmen together,” says Jane. “I didn’t know him well. We had some classes together. He was this little guy. He grew a lot by senior year, and he was a pretty good runner, one of those skinny track guys. But back when Simon was first entering high school, he was this small, skinny, shy, super-smart kid. And he got picked on.”
“Sounds right,” says the chief.
“When we were freshmen, there was this senior named Mitchell Kitchens,” she says. “Big wrestler. Like the best in the state at his weight class. I was dating a sophomore on the wrestling team back then, and to him, to the younger kids, Mitchell Kitchens was like this god, right? This senior stud wrestler? All-state, looking at a scholarship, that whole thing?”
“Okay,” says Chief Carlyle.
“So apparently, Mitchell bullied Simon pretty badly. This all came out afterward.”
“After what?”
“Well, so here’s the story. Apparently, Mitchell would pick on Simon. They said when Simon got off the bus every morning, Mitchell would pick him up and throw him.”
“He’d— What do you mean, ‘throw him’?”
“I mean, like, pick him up by the shirt collar and belt and toss him through the air.”
“Like one of those dwarf-toss contests they used to do in bars?”
“I don’t know. But yeah, Mitchell apparently treated it like a contest. How far could he toss the little freshman today?”
“Jesus. And nobody stopped him?”
Jane shrugs. “He didn’t do it in front of the whole school or anything. The wrestlers used this small gym right by the school entrance. They’d go in there, and Mitchell would do his daily toss, and his wrestling buddies would laugh along. And I guess Simon never complained.”
“Nice.”
“The other thing, apparently—Simon would bring a lunch to school every day and it included a bottle of Gatorade. Well, apparently, Mitchell used to take it. He’d walk up to his lunch table and say, like, ‘Did you bring my Gatorade?’ At least that’s how I heard it. Later. After everything.”
“So maybe you should get to the good part, Jane.”
“Right. It was wrestling season, the end of the season, and I guess they called it ‘regionals.’ Like, the playoffs for wrestling, the next stop is the state championship.”
“The semifinals, regionals, whatever.”
“I guess. Anyway, Mitchell Kitchens, this big-time wrestler, has made it to regionals. But he’s up against another guy who’s also supposed to be great. Same weight class. It’s, like, the battle of the titans or something. My boyfriend at the time, he was so excited. We were hosting regionals at Grace Consolidated. It was Friday night. Apparently, there were college scouts there, too. The best wrestling colleges in the country. Like, Iowa, I remember, had someone there, and that was apparently a big deal.”
“Okay.”