Hate Cell

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Grateful thanks for the insights and editorial assistance of Dale Anderson, Brenda Bellingham, Barbara Cram, Joy Gugeler, John McGregor, and Connie Shupe. And I would like to especially recognize the help and support of Daniel Kline and Alberta Searle.

      CHAPTER ONE

      “I should go back,” Casey Templeton muttered to himself. “I could do it tomorrow.” But he kept walking through the dark, empty streets as a cool fall breeze changed rapidly to a cold winter wind. Then he stopped and put down his flashlight. “Oh, what the heck!”

      Casey zipped his coat, pulling up the collar so snow wouldn’t get down his neck, then tugged his knitted hat over his forehead. He patted his pockets for gloves. No gloves. It wouldn’t take that long, he reassured himself, and then he would be done with this necessary chore.

      It wasn’t the bitter wind that made Casey hesitate, or even that he was scared … exactly. There were things going on lately that made almost everyone uncomfortable, things people couldn’t understand. Things that had turned the safe, comfortable town of Richford, Alberta, into a place where fear reigned.

      Why pick on Mr. Finegood and his family? Casey thought as he trudged into the gloom. And why do such ugly things to the Olbergs? I just don’t get it.

      He crossed the silent railway tracks. The towering grain elevator beside the tracks loomed dark and unfriendly. He hurried past it and almost ran until he reached the last street on the north edge of town, a street where the new houses were less and less complete as he got nearer the final streetlamp. A heavier snow had begun to fall. He wished now he had told his brother, Hank, where he was going, or had left a note or something. As it was, nobody knew, and the farther he got from home the more uneasy he felt.

      At the last streetlight he turned and glanced back. All was still. His footprints in the snow disappeared in shadowy retreat beyond the golden glow of the light. If the snow kept up, his footsteps would completely disappear and there would be no trace he had walked this way. Never mind. Once he had realized where he had lost his dad’s antique pipe, he had promised himself he would go back to the Old Willson with Two Ls Place and get it. Casey always tried to keep vows, even to himself, especially to himself, like now. He would rather get the pipe no matter what happened than face the music if his dad noticed it wasn’t in its glass case. Now, as he trudged through the swirling snow, he cast his mind back to the sequence of events that had brought him here.

      Once again, here in Richford, Casey was the new kid and on the outside. It never really bothered him anymore not being accepted right away. It was a lot better than, say, a kid like Bryan Ogilvy, who had lived his whole life in Richford and was such an outsider that the other kids totally ignored him. Bryan was just there. Even most of the teachers hardly ever talked to him. Casey couldn’t understand why everyone was so mean to Bryan, so he went out of his way to say hello to Bryan whenever their paths crossed, which wasn’t often because Bryan didn’t play any sports or belong to any clubs and faded away after school. But Bryan and Casey both liked science, and they had teamed up on a science project.

      Casey had learned a lot about the new kid role, knew you never let them know you were lonely. You just did your own thing and played it very, very cool. A way to become an insider would always come up if you didn’t push, if you stood back, listened, and bided your time. Take today for instance. He had heard Kevin Schreiver and Terry Bracco talking when he was in the little storage closet putting away the basketballs after gym. Casey had been at the school long enough to know that Kevin and Terry were the kind of guys he would like for friends.

      “I got six cigarettes now,” Kevin said. “How about we go to the Old Willson Place right after school?”

      “Sure, we gotta try smoking sometime, but I have to walk Butch first,” Terry said.

      “Bring Butch along,” Kevin suggested. “Tie him up while we smoke.”

      Casey kept quiet until they were gone. While he waited he planned. He would dash home after school, get his dad’s fancy old pipe, fill it with tobacco from some of Hank’s cigarettes, and be out at the Old Willson Place sitting on the porch, smoking the pipe by the time Kevin and Terry got there with Butch. It worked perfectly. He could tell they were impressed with him sitting there gazing off into the woods, pipe in hand. They didn’t need to know what a terrible time he’d had lighting it and that he’d really taken only one puff. They didn’t even take out their cigarettes, just said they had come out to the old place to look around.

      Inside the Old Willson Place, Casey pulled a big bottle of Sprite and a package of chocolate chip cookies from his backpack. The three sat on piles of grubby pillows in the living room and started in with the stories about Mr. Clarence Wilberforce Willson with Two Ls, as he always pointed out to everyone. Lucky there were no Willsons with only one l in town, thought Casey. They would have suffered a terrible inferiority complex. Clarence Willson was still Richford’s most famous citizen, though he had been dead for more than eighty years. Both the local library and the high school had been named after him.

      Kevin and Terry had a lot of stories about the Willsons, but Casey had some they had never heard because Casey’s great-grandfather had been a typesetter for Mr. Willson’s Richford Weekly Mirror way back in 1900 or something. The stories from those days had been passed down to the newest generation of Templetons. Sure, Kevin and Terry knew about the body that had been found in the attic whose door had two heavy pieces of wood crossed over it and nailed down to keep people out, but they had never heard that three of Old Willson’s babies had died of scarlet fever on three mid-April days in 1906. The terrible loss had driven Mrs. Willson into a deep depression from which she never recovered. Casey said it was her ghost that walked the grounds on those three mid-April days each year.

      As he pulled open the drapes covering the living-room windows to get more light, it crossed Casey’s mind that they seemed new compared with the stained and faded pillows they were sitting on.

      “Time to get back.” Terry stood and brushed dust from his pants. “You want to come over to the Rec Hall later, Casey? Kevin and I go there Friday nights.”

      “Thanks a lot,” Casey said. “Can’t tonight, but maybe another Friday, okay?” Never seem too eager. That was the secret. Let them get the idea you were worth waiting for.

      “Sure,” Kevin said. “Let’s go.”

      It must have been when they were standing up that the pipe he had put in his coat pocket had fallen among the pillows.

      It was just plain luck that his parents had gone out to Jim Bailey’s house to play bridge right after supper. Hank and Casey had cleaned up the kitchen — a job you did if there were four boys in the family and your dad was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Might as well get used to a little KP, boys,” his father always said. “Your mother works hard enough making the meals.” KP? Nobody in Richford except some old war veterans probably knew that it stood for “kitchen police,” that it meant you got to do everything in the kitchen and leave it “like nobody lived there,” as his father was fond of saying.

      Hank was at his computer. He was always at his computer. He had won the whole setup — computer, printer, scanner, and about a dozen games — at the draw at the new grocery store in the “big” new mall. Big? Well, it was for Richford. But, hey, Casey had seen malls almost as big as the whole town of Richford — like West Edmonton Mall. Now that was a mall — biggest in the world, they said. But nobody in the family had ever won anything there, and here was Hank, not two months in Richford, and he had won first prize in the draw. A person had to be sixteen to enter. That left Casey out by two years.

      Casey had been born long after Hank when nobody in the family had expected there would be another baby. After three sons, Jake now twenty-four, Billy twenty-one, both at