Free I Thought You Were Dead by Pete Nelson

water was freezing cold, which has a nice effect on girls’ bodies but not so much for guys, if you know what I mean.”
    Stella looked puzzled again.
    â€œAnyway, I was way past curfew when I got home because I’d been driving around the lakes for an hour so as not to reek of alcohol. I came in and my father was waiting up for me, and he said he wanted to know if I was taking pot. My mom was usuallythe one who waited up, so I knew it was serious. I said you don’t
take
pot, you
smoke
pot. He said, ‘Pot is a drug, is it not? And you take drugs.’ ”
    â€œAlcohol is a drug too, isn’t it?” Stella asked.
    â€œI guess it is, but you don’t say, ‘I take alcohol.’”
    â€œBut you do say, ‘I took a drink.’ ”
    â€œI freely admit it was a stupid argument,” Paul said. “But I’m denying up and down to his face, saying I don’t smoke pot and never have, and he pulls out a big old Baggie full of weed and asks me if it’s mine. Which it obviously was, but I’d hidden it under a loose floorboard in the attic that you had to move six huge boxes just to get to, so no way anybody could accidentally find my stash. The only other person in the house who knew about my secret hiding place was guess who? Carl. He narced on me. In my own house. You don’t do that to your brother. You just don’t.”
    They were home now. Paul helped Stella out of the car, lifted her up the steps, and set her down on the porch while he unlocked the front door. Inside, he turned up the thermostat, got a beer from the refrigerator, and sat on the couch. Stella took her place on the dog bed by the radiator. Paul picked up the remote control, then decided against watching television.
    â€œI have to say,” Stella said, “I still feel like something else is bothering you. You have that guilty-conscience look.”
    â€œA hangdog look?” he asked.
    She’d never cared much for the expression.
    â€œI think maybe I did a bad thing,” he told her.
    â€œWhat did you do this time?”
    He’d asked Carl, once their meeting in his office was over, if he could use his computer to check his e-mail and to see if he could get Tamsen online. She wasn’t online, so he sent her a quick note to tell her that all was well and that he would call her when he got home. He even considered using his brother’s phone to call her.He needed to talk to somebody. He was trying hard to give his brother the benefit of the doubt; yet evil thoughts came to him unbidden. Did he need to protect himself, even if it was only a remote possibility that Carl was going to screw him somehow? Flipping through the Rolodex on Carl’s desk, he found Arnie Olmstead’s telephone number and decided he could at least give Arnie a call to get a second opinion. He needed a pen or a pencil to write the number down.
    Carl’s desk drawers were immaculate. The top middle everything drawer, which should have been stuffed to overflowing with miscellaneous crap, was instead neatly organized with plastic sectional dividers, every paper clip in its proper place. He found the pen he was looking for, but he couldn’t resist further investigation. In a deep side drawer, he found what had to be every operations manual and appliance warranty Carl had ever received, stored in alphabetical order. In a drawer below that, of interest, in a protective clear Plexiglas case, was a baseball autographed by Harmon Killebrew, the former Minnesota Twins player who’d been a childhood hero of Paul’s and apparently Carl’s hero as well.
    After writing down Olmstead’s number, he was about to log off and rejoin his family downstairs when he saw an icon on Carl’s computer desktop marked “PINs.”
    Paul couldn’t believe his brother would be so stupid as to write down his PINs and keep them all in one place. A quick click, though, showed that Carl