Free Last Chance by Norah McClintock Page A

footsteps fading down a flight of stairs. Shocked, I stepped into the office and looked around. The cans of coins were still there, but the envelope containing the bills was gone.
    I spun around and looked at the door through which the two boys had disappeared. Then I sprinted down the stairs and out into the school yard. After a frantic few moments, I located Lois. I sped over to her and told her exactly what I had seen.
    Based on my description, they caught the younger kid the next day, but I never heard anything about the older boy. And the money? We never got it back. Someone told me that the kid they’d caught said he’d acted alone. I knew that wasn’t true. I told Lois and the school principal that there had been another boy with him. But because I had recognized the younger one, I had concentrated on him. I hadn’t taken a good enough look at the other boy to be able to describe him. The kid I saw, the one I described first to Lois, and later to the police, was Nick D’Angelo. He was expelled from the school. I never saw him again—until now. Obviously, if he was participating in a program for kids who had been charged with violent crimes, things had gone from bad to worse for him.
    Â 
    . . .
    I got Janet to unlock the door to the office across the hall from mine. I stood inside for five full minutes, maybe longer, trying to remember if I had bumped against the desk when I rushed out of the room.That would account for the knocked-over bills. But I hadn’t. I was sure of it. And as far as I could tell, nothing else could have knocked or blown them over. No pictures or calendars had fallen off the wall. The window wasn’t open. Nothing like that. But I
had
seen someone dart out of the office. Well,
sort of
seen someone. All I’d noticed was a flash of movement and the sound of footsteps. I’d told myself that it was just another staff member dashing down the hall. But if that were true, what had disturbed the piles of paper money that I had so carefully stacked? And why, when I’d gone to see what was happening, had Nick and Antoine been standing next to the door, far away from everyone else in their group? Nick and Antoine—two boys who were here because they had been in trouble before. Two boys who had helped carry in the money from Kathy’s car and knew which office it was in. Antoine had been fascinated by how much money the boxes might contain. Nick had lingered in the hallway long after Kathy had dismissed him. He’d said he wanted to talk to her. But had he really? Or had he been waiting to see what Kathy was going to do with the money?
    I was thinking about what to do—what I
could
do, given that I wasn’t even sure what had happened—when Kathy came back into the building. I asked her how Mr. Schuster was.
    â€œI don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m going to call the hospital in a little while. I should have insisted on taking him there on Friday after his accident. I know he has a heart condition.” She sighed. “He can be pretty stubborn, but he sure knows dogs. Loves them too.”
    â€œI saw him working with Orion last week,” I said.
    â€œYes, well, that’s another story,” Kathy said. A story that she didn’t go on to tell me. Someone called her from down the hall, and she excused herself.
    After Kathy left, I kept thinking about the money. I finished sorting the coins into piles. I stacked the bills again and then stared at the stacks, trying to decide if they were the same size as they had been before or if they were smaller. I wasn’t sure. Kathy returned with three women who all seemed to know one another well. After nodding at me, they pulled up some chairs, settled in and started rolling coins, chattering to one another the whole time.
    I went back to my office and looked out the window. After the RAD group worked with their dogs, they usually took a break before reporting to