Casey Templeton Mysteries 2-Book Bundle. Gwen Molnar

again, Casey. I’ll come about three if that’s okay?” He opened the front door.

      “Sure.” Casey handed his skates to Bryan as he put on his coat. “Three it is.”

      He heard the door shut behind him and inhaled some fresh cold air. My gosh, he thought, glancing back at the house, no wonder Bryan doesn’t want to tell his parents about all the weird stuff he’s into!

      X X X

      Casey hung up his coat and skates in the back hall of his house when he returned home from Bryan’s place. The smell of fresh coffee and hot cinnamon buns drifting from the kitchen filled his nose, while the sounds of a heated discussion blasting from the living room assaulted his ears. Wow! They were really going on about something — eight people seemed to be talking at once. As Casey strained to catch the drift of the argument, his mother came into the kitchen.

      “What’s everybody so pumped up about, Mom?” he asked, crossing to take a bun off the hot tray on the kitchen counter as his mother poured coffee from a tall aluminum machine into a serving pot.

      “Oh, hi, Casey! Jim Bailey’s playing devil’s advocate.”

      “What’s devil’s advocate mean?”

      “It means defending something you don’t necessarily believe to get people to argue against you. Jim’s taking the side of the people in the area who don’t want new people moving in. Here, give me a hand passing around these buns while I freshen up everybody’s coffee.”

      Casey took the plate of buns and followed his mother into the living room.

      Daisy Olberg waved at him. “Hello, Casey. Head this way with the best cinnamon buns on the continent.”

      Casey passed around the buns, then sat quietly on a footstool in the corner. Trying to think through what Bryan had told him, he found he couldn’t help tuning in and out of the debate. Then he caught someone saying, “Newcomers bring in fresh ideas and new blood to an area.”

      “Maybe so,” Jim Bailey answered, “but Grandma Jacobson said to me, ‘You take that Pakistani family with the fast-food place on Main Street. They’re Muslim. Now, Jim, this area was settled by Lutheran Scandinavians. It’s been European and Christian over a hundred years. I say the newcomers should respect that fact, and if they want to live here, they should change their religion and become Christians.’”

      Casey watched as Daisy’s face got redder and redder. If she didn’t get a chance to speak soon, she was going to rupture something.

      “If you follow that logic,” Daisy finally burst in, “then we Christian Europeans should have adopted the religion of the First Nations who were here a lot longer than a hundred years. Heck, follow Grandma Jacobson’s thinking and we should be doing their rain dances.”

      Jim weighed in again. “Grandma Jacobson speaks for an awful lot of the folks here who say, ‘Don’t mess with our values and customs.’”

      How come everybody sounded right? Casey wondered.

      “But times have changed,” Casey heard Bill Sanford of Sanford’s Hardware point out. “Maybe too much in some ways, but this worry about newcomers eroding our national identity is nuts. We are what we are because of the fantastic mix of peoples.”

      Who could argue with that? Casey asked himself.

      Jim could. “The only place around here that has your fantastic mix, Bill, is Minetown. It’s cosmopolitan because of all the miners from everywhere who settled there in the 1920s. Around here there’s not much of a mix. People here are traditionally against immigration, which they figure takes jobs away from those who think they should have them.”

      “Just because their families have lived and worked here doesn’t mean they can keep others out,” Bill said. “The law says anyone can move, live, and work anywhere.”

      “But,” Jim insisted, “folks around here worry that different kinds of people moving in will mean more crime and tension.”

      Boy, Casey thought, Jim was really on his soapbox. Casey wondered how much of what Jim said was what he believed. Then someone asked, “Why do people think the current immigrants are worse than their own ancestors who came in the past?”

      “I think,” Casey’s mother broke in for the first time as she made the rounds with more coffee, “this anti-immigrant business is racism pure and simple. And it’s leading to all the name-calling, harassment, and violence.”

      Casey was thinking of Maria McKay’s “accident” when someone asked his father, “You figure there’s a tie-in between what we’ve been talking about and the establishment of the Hate Cell?”

      “Sure,” Casey’s dad said. “People might say they’d never get involved in hate activities, but the anti-immigration, even racist, attitude of the region makes it an ideal place for spreading white supremacy propaganda.”

      “Do you think it’s somebody from around here who set up the Hate Cell at the Willson Place?” Casey asked.

      “It has to be someone who knew about the abandoned Willson Place, Casey. And someone who knows that many people want to keep things as they are.”

      Casey was wishing Bryan could hear all this when his mother said, “I heard somebody we all know pretty well say she thought it was a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money to have brought Jack McKay’s widow and kids over from Romania and that while knocking down Maria wasn’t right, she wasn’t badly hurt.”

      “Not badly hurt!” Daisy shouted. “She’ll be in that neck brace for a long time, and her hip gives her terrible pain.”

      “And I’ve heard more than one person,” Casey’s mother continued, “say Mr. Finegood is sucking the town dry expanding his store like he’s done and why doesn’t he just take his family and move away and leave the merchandising to people who belong here.”

      Daisy shook her head angrily. “That’s so totally unfair! Mel Finegood is just about the most generous man in the community. What with paying for the new skating shack and having that free kids’ skate exchange, not to mention paying for the computers in the schools and the library …”

      Sarah would want to know about this stuff, Casey thought. He reached behind him for a pen and a piece of paper and started to make notes. With what people were saying here and what he was hearing from Bryan, he could give Sarah some interesting information. He also knew Bryan was going to have to talk to his dad tomorrow.

      At that moment Casey’s father sighed. “In Bosnia I saw where this kind of thinking can lead, but there they had a thousand-year buildup of racial hate.”

      “I swear it wasn’t like this when we left Richford twenty-five years ago,” Casey’s mother added.

      “Sure it was,” Daisy said. “It was always there just under the surface.”

      “Well, what was hidden is really coming out,” Katie Sanford, Bill’s wife, said. “We had that Ku Klux Klan cross burning a few years ago not all that far away. Word is there’s more than one branch of the KKK in this area.”

      “And remember that trial back in the 1980s of the social studies teacher who brainwashed his classes that the Holocaust was a fraud?” Fred Klatt asked. “A lot of folks believed him, especially many of the kids he preached to.”

      “That teacher never talked to the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps in the Second World War,” Casey’s father said, frowning. “I have, and I’m telling you their stories are blood-chilling.”

      “The brainwashing that teacher did was awful,” Bill said, “but what about the stuff being taught in some private schools around here right now? They even ask children the question: ‘The Jewish leaders were children of their father the devil — true or false?’ And the right answer for them is true.”

      “There was anti-Jewish