Everyone Is a Suspect

You cannot solve a crime that never happened. Kabir was going to try anyway, and, to everyone’s surprise including his own, he was going to be good at it.

“That,” said Kabir, “is what we have to find out.” He stood up.

“Sit down,” said Ms. Dhillon, on reflex.

He sat. “We can investigate sitting down.”

At the back, Tyler already had the black book open. “If there’s a crime, it has to be logged. I’m the monitor. I log crimes.”

“You log people talking,” said Madison.

“Talking is a crime,” said Tyler.

“Then log this,” said Kabir. “One workbook. Blue. Taken in the night. Aarav is the victim. Everyone else is a suspect.”

“Everyone?” said Cole.

“Everyone who can’t prove where they were,” said Kabir, “between the kitchen table and now.”

The room went quiet with the particular joy of children discovering that they are all, suddenly, suspects.

Kabir walked to the front of the room, where the crime had not happened, and reconstructed it anyway.

“The thief came in the night,” he said. “Through a door, because that’s how people come in. He knew which bag was Aarav’s, because Aarav’s bag is the neat one, and a thief wants the neat bag. He took the blue book and left the red one, because he only wanted the homework.”

“What does that tell us,” said Ms. Dhillon, who had meant to stop this two sentences ago and somehow had not.

“That he’d already done the red one. So it’s somebody ahead of us. Somebody smart.”

The class turned, as one body, and looked at Aarav, who was the smartest of them, and who had, technically, done both.

“Not Aarav,” said Kabir. “Aarav is the victim. A victim can’t be the thief. That’s the rule.”

“Is that the rule,” said Cole.

“It’s my rule, and I’m doing the investigation, so it’s the rule.”

The lie was standing up on its own legs now, walking around the room shaking hands. Aarav watched it go. It was a very good lie. It had stopped being about a boy who forgot his homework and become about a clever thief who came in the night, and for one warm moment Aarav thought he might get to keep it.

Tyler took to the investigation the way he took to everything, which was without mercy. He interviewed the front row. He asked Dawson where he had been at bedtime, and Dawson said “sleeping,” and Tyler wrote down sleeping in a way that made it sound like a confession.

“Dawson sits near Aarav,” Tyler announced. “Dawson has motive.”

“What’s my motive,” said Dawson.

“You’d have wanted the homework. You never do yours.”

Dawson tried to work out whether this was an insult or an alibi, could not decide, and his chin began to go, the way a chin goes at seven when the whole room turns to look at you.

Aarav watched Dawson’s chin. Aarav, who had started all of this by leaving a book on a table, watched a boy he barely knew begin, quietly, to become the person that things happened to.

“Stop,” said Aarav.

“We’re close,” said Tyler.

“Stop. Nobody took it.” Aarav stood up, which for Aarav was very much like setting himself on fire. “I left it at home. On the table. I forgot it. It’s my fault. Don’t write down Dawson.”

The room looked at him. The great, safe, ordinary crime of forgetting your homework sat in the middle of the floor where everyone could see it, and nothing happened. No siren. No trapdoor. Aarav stood in the middle of it and did not die.

“Thank you, Aarav,” said Ms. Dhillon. “Bring it tomorrow.” And she moved to the next row, as though a boy forgetting a workbook were an ordinary thing, which it was, which was the entire point.

Aarav sat down slowly, like a person testing a chair he was amazed to find still standing.

“See,” Kabir whispered. “Now you’re a boy that things happen to. It happened. You lived.”

“That’s not what you said would happen.”

“Nothing I say will happen ever happens,” Kabir agreed, comfortably. “But it works out.”

At the back, Tyler closed the black book. He had solved his first case, and it had turned out there was no case, and he did not know how to log that. In the end he wrote, in careful letters: NO CRIME. STILL WATCHING.

Outside the window, the town went on being the most notorious city in Canada, where the worst thing that had happened all morning was a blue book left on a kitchen table, and the second worst thing was that, for a few minutes, it had very nearly been someone else’s fault.

That evening the telephone rang, because in Moose Jaw the telephone always eventually rang.

“I heard,” said Promila Aunty, warm with the pleasure of it, “that there was a robbery. At the school. Kabir’s school. A break-in, in the night.”

Suman put down the spoon. In one second she saw the whole of it: the town, one of two brown families at Gopher Ridge, the newer one, and now a school with a thief in it and her son somewhere in the middle of the story. “There was no robbery,” she said.

“That is not what I heard.”

“Kabir.” She covered the phone. “Was there a robbery at your school?”

“No,” said Kabir, from the floor, where he was lying for no particular reason.

“Then why does Promila Aunty think there was?”

“Because I said there was.” He considered whether to explain, and decided, generously, to. “Aarav forgot his homework, and he was scared people would think he was a boy who forgets. So I said someone stole it. To help him. Then Tyler nearly blamed Dawson, so Aarav said the true thing, and everybody lived.” He rolled over. “There was never a thief. I made the thief.”

“So you told a lie,” said Suman.

Kabir lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. He did not like the word. He turned it over from several sides, the way he tried on a coat.

“Yes,” he said at last. “One. I didn’t like it. It kept walking around.”

Suman stood with the phone against her chest and looked at her son, who had invented a crime to protect a friend’s good name. It was, when she thought about it, the most Gill thing he had ever done.

“No robbery,” she told Promila Aunty. “A misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding,” said Promila Aunty, disappointed, and hung up to tell four other families that the Gills were denying it.