...They never quite had enough to actually bust down my door and put the cuffs on me. But Pop, when he came come from work that night? Around the dinner table he started just casually talking about what he’d heard from guys on the road crew talkin’ about that day. Some of them had dealings with the fellows over at the police station. Others had friends who worked the towtruck that had to pick up the smelly pile of crap that the roadster had become, and would be forever unless they dropped a huge pile of dough down to change the carpeting, upholstery and a bunch of other things besides.

“Pretty odd,” Pop said, looking down on his plate, working hard not to make eye contact with me. “seems that the cops couldn’t find a single footprint around the Reichert’s car. Nor a tire track, either. Could’ve been because it’s been chilly at night and the dirt stayed tough, but that’s still unusual.”

“Have they got any suspects?” Mom asked.

“No, not yet. When you get successful as Reichert, you’re bound to have people upset with you for one reason or another. In his case, mostly millworkers mad that they were laid off. Still, this isn’t the kind of thing that they usually do to someone who owns the place- guys that ignorant usually go after the immediate manager who told them they didn’t have a job anymore, whatever the reason. They’re thinking maybe instead that someone was out to get his kid.”

I swallowed, very slowly. Pop came home tired every night, but he’d never miss a trick if he was trying to bust me for something I did. I think now he woulda made a great cop, like that character on Dragnet years later. He was always good at noticing my facial tics or reactions and figuring out if I was guilty or innocent from them.

“Why would they think that?” I said in a voice I hoped sounded normal.

“Because that kid’s car is the same color, and probably looked a lot like his dad’s car in the dark. You hear anything about that, son? Anyone talking about it in school today?”

I weighed my options carefully. If I lied and said no one said anything, Pop would know I was lying. And then he’d start digging to find out what else I was lying about.

“Well, sure. We had the cops at school today, so everyone was talking about it.”

“Any thoughts on who could’ve done it?”

Both Mom and Pop looked at me for a second. I had thoughts, sure. My whole day had been consumed about what I’d say if the cops came to the door. And-

I’d hesitated too long. Pop swore- really unusual for him- stood up from our little dinner table and took his plate into the kitchen.

Mom stared at me, tears starting to brim in her eyes.

“What?” I said, still trying to play the innocent.

“Do you know how it’s been for him?” she said. “It’s hard enough being the ‘Jewish guy’ on his crew. He’s had to work twice as hard for half the recognition. And now this. Reichert’s got enough influence to divert jobs from his road company, maybe even threaten to put them out of business if they don’t fire the ‘dirty Jew boy’ on their staff. It happened last year when they hired a black man as the accountant.”

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“Mom, I didn’t do-“

She held up her hand. “We can read you like a book, mister, so don’t bother. And you know I’m a light sleeper. I heard you leave last night, and I heard the door to the shed where you keep that crazy bird costume of yours, I heard the door creak open and shut, and then open and shut again later on when you got back an hour later. We gave you a chance to come clean and you didn’t And if you can’t get a lie past us-“

“Then you won’t get past the cops either.” Dad was already up from the table and in the doorway. “and a sharp cookie like Ed Banes is gonna figure out in about ten seconds that you did it just by your body English. Now, you are gonna tell your mother and me exactly what happened, and more importantly why it happened, and then we’re gonna figure out what we’re supposed to do.”

He sat back down at the table again. I looked at his hands- thick with callouses from years of working on the roads, and tanned with the rays of years of hot Indiana summers.

I hesitated, but only for a few seconds. I knew I was gonna be in trouble, but maybe I could save myself a bit by . . .

“And don’t think you’re gonna get out of this by soft-pedaling it, or trying to make me hate the Reichert family. I’ve got my own axe to grind with that fella, Icarus. Just tell us what you did.”

Well, that door got shut pretty damn quick. So much for pulling Pop’s strings and getting him on my side. What else could I do? I came clean. Told Pop everything while Mom did the dishes and listened in.

I finished with the slops hitting Reichert’s Dad’s car by mistake and me ditching the evidence. By the time I was there, though, I saw something I hadn’t seen before.

Pop was smiling. Or trying hard not to, anyways.

Maybe I wasn’t dead after all.

“Okay,” Pop said, “this is what we’re gonna do…”

It didn’t take Officer Banes all that long to figure things out, really. Reichert and his kid were jerks to a lot of people, true. But there weren’t too many people on that list who coulda done the deed without leaving tire tracks or footprints in the nearby dirt roads. I filed that away for another day: sometimes leaving no trace is a trace.

Okay, sorry Jane honey. I said it once for an interview and then they just kept using it in the comic books. It became one of the Mothman’s taglines or something. Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, the whole thing with Pop’s plan to save my sorry ass from the cops- all four of them. Well, four can make your life just as awful as forty, or four thousand, if they know where to look and how to take you down. I guess Banes had been interviewing folks all over town trying to catch the vandal. And the whole time I was eating dinner with Pop and Mom and getting a good night’s sleep, the net was closing in on me tighter as Banes eliminated suspects and found reasons to point his finger at me.

The next morning, even though I had school and Pop had to work, Pop used one of his sick days and called in (nice thing about a government job back then- you could call in sick maybe three or four days a year, and they still had to pay you. Sweet deal huh? Well, it was a sweet deal then anyways, lemme tell ya!).

We were in the car with his shotgun in the rack. He’d only gone on a hunting trip once in his life that I could remember, and we’d never gone as father-and-son. To be fair, that’d more be my fault than his, but I try not to think about that since he passed on.

Anyways, we were just opening the garage door when …yep, you guessed it. A police car was just waiting in our driveway.