Laney looked up at the ceiling, wondered if there was anything she could say.
“Can you call his parents, please? Explain to them this is important? Maybe they can ask him to speak with me. They can be present, of course.”
“Mrs. Bird, I can ask, but that’s all. It’s up to them.” And then, just as Laney was about to hang up, she said, “Besides, the police already spoke to them.”
Not just inexperienced, but a sieve. If Laney had been the detective on the case, she’d be fuming at this bit of information passed on to a potential suspect. (Yes, she knew she was on the suspect list. Parents were always on that list, and she had no alibi.)
She had to talk to that boy. She just had to.
“Okay,” Laney said. “Keep me posted.”
She hung up without thanking the woman, which she knew was a mistake, but she was having difficulties being professional and polite today.
This boy, this JP, knew Alfie. What did he know about her son that she didn’t know?
She doubled back into Alfie’s room and sat down at his desk again. His laptop was closed but warm to the touch. Ed must have looked through it, something she would have done if she’d had the time.
She flipped it open. The wallpaper was a watercolor of a winter scene, all pearly grays and cool whites. But something about it wasn’t right. What she’d first thought was a shadow turned out to be a gray wolf. She peered closer. No, not a real wolf—a robot wolf, steely, sharp, with glowing slits for eyes. And in its jaws a limp (human?) thing, bleeding bright red onto that ashen snow.
The picture was unsettling, but Laney wondered if she’d be bothered by it if Alfie had been sitting next to her. Warm, alive, he’d explain how it was a representation of the abnormal in a seemingly normal world, of the artificial within the natural, of the inscrutable aspect of the universe. She could almost hear his hesitant voice, the tortured consonants breaking through his teeth. In so many ways, this choice of wallpaper was exactly him.
Holding her breath, she clicked on his Gmail.
Let him be signed in.
He wasn’t.
She then typed in the address for his school’s website. She knew Alfie’s password for the student portal, and in seconds she was in. A few clicks and she was scrolling through his homework assignments, class chats, and project outlines. She focused on the class chats. Then pulled the chart out of her pocket and smoothed it on the desk.
If the JP in Alfie’s chart was a boy, then the other letters were likely initials as well. There were five rows of them, two above JP and two below: HH, KJ, CF, MF. She matched these initials to a total of fifteen students. But none of them seemed to have any particular interest in Alfie. None of them used the chats to talk with him. The four JPs she found were just as indifferent toward her son as his other schoolmates were. Exasperated and in need of caffeine, she closed the laptop.
What was happening?
Even on her worst day—when she resigned from the only job she’d ever wanted, divorce papers waiting for her signature at home and a freaked-out, heartsick little boy clinging to her jacket (she’d had to bring him along; he wouldn’t go to school that day)—even then she had not felt her life to be so utterly out of control.
Her phone vibrated, a message from Holly. R U ok?
Do you know a JP who goes to the high school? Laney texted back.
Why? Who’s JP?
Maybe Alfie’s friend?
Give me five mins
Holly, Laney reflected, was better than a Google search. She, her parents, and her grandparents had all grown up in Sylvan. Streets and buildings bore her relatives’ names. She either knew or was kin to everyone, as evidenced by her family Sundays—sometimes as many as fifty people stuffed into her four-bedroom Cape, spilling onto the deck even in winter. The few times Laney accepted the standing invitation, she’d felt so lonely, had missed what used to be her family so much, that she had to leave.
Laney was barely thirty-five, and already everyone she ever loved was gone. If Alfie disappeared as well, what would be left of her? Every person who exited her life took a tiny bit of her with them. An entire life full of memories was contained only in her head now. And who’s to say if the memories were accurate? Who’s to say if her memories were dreams or had really happened?
No, without Alfie, she would cease to exist. She would pare down to nothing, to the basics. And something else would grow in its place, but whatever grew would no longer be Laney Bird.
Johnny Pallisser? came the text from Holly. Freshman?
Maybe, Laney texted. What do you know about him?
My cousin Marcy’s boy is friends with him. What do you need to know?
Any idea if he knew Alfie?
Hold on, I’ll ask.
What would I do without you, hon? Laney texted.
While waiting, she made toast and filled the kettle with water. The answering text came as she was stirring a teaspoon of honey into her tea.
He knows Alfie. They all have classes together.
Laney dropped her spoon and opened her phone’s browser. Within seconds she had Johnny Pallisser’s address, and within minutes she was warming up her car.
CHAPTER
9
SHE KNEW THE moment she clapped eyes on the boy that he wasn’t the right one. Not the one in the pictures with Alfie, not the one at school this morning. This boy was small for a freshman, with a childish haircut and pronounced overbite. But what if she was wrong in her sureness? God knew she kept being wrong about all kinds of things, constantly.
Maybe he was the one.
His mother stood over the boy’s shoulder, staring at Laney with an expression both confused and polite.
“J.P.,” Laney said, after she’d come in, introduced herself as Holly’s friend, and accepted a glass of water. “Do you know a boy named Alfie?”
J.P. shook his head slowly, his eyes made larger by his glasses. “Not really,” he said. “We’re in English together, but he never speaks.”
“Are you sure you’re not friends?” She took a step forward.
J.P. nodded and stepped back, thumping into his mother.
“Because it’s wrong to lie,” Laney said.
“Excuse me?” the mother said.
“I’m just saying it’s wrong to lie,” Laney said. What was she doing? Her mind felt fragmented and soft. She couldn’t focus. “I mean, if you lie, someone could die as a result.” It happened. She’d seen it happen. Though truthfully, she’d seen it happen between junkies and criminals, not so much suburban schoolchildren.
“Mom?” The boy turned his supersized eyes to his mother.
“I don’t know what your problem is,” the mother said, “but you need to leave now.” Her arms went around her son’s shoulders, drawing him against her.
Of all the things Laney could have experienced then, the feeling seething inside was envy. Her arms ached with it. Her head pounded with it.
A half hour later, Laney sat slumped on her front steps in spite of the cold wind blowing residual snow sideways and the firs bending and shaking above her head. She needed the fresh air.
When the police car pulled into her driveway and Ed stepped out, she was not surprised. In fact, after the interaction she’d just had with little Johnny Pallisser and his mother, she was surprised the detective hadn’t arrived sooner. Like when she was still at the Pallissers’. Did she really tell the boy he could go to prison if he lied to her? She did. And did she really ask him if he was JP Spankthemonkey? She did. She really, really did.
“Laney.” Ed walked toward her and planted himself squarely in the middle of the front path. “I was wondering if you would explain the phone call I just received from the Pallisser family.”
Laney sighed and staggered to her feet. Other than a few pieces of toast and the three hours’ fitful dozing on the couch, she hadn’t eaten in over thirty hours, her sleep cycle upside-down. She wasn’t hungry so much as woozy. Not sleepy so much as floaty.
; Woozy and floaty. The Seven Dwarves’ long-lost cousins. She stumbled over her threshold, leading the detective into her dark, cold living room, then fumbled with the light switches.
“Have a seat,” she said, waving at the couch, then folded into the armchair. Her eyes felt grainy, inflamed. “Please extend my apologies to the Pallisser family.”
“Laney, did you tell them you were a detective?”
The only person who really knew the details of her past was Holly. She hadn’t wanted to discuss it with anybody else since she’d moved to Sylvan.
Laney sighed again. She wasn’t even drunk! She would have liked to use that as an excuse. When faced with a stupefied Johnny Pallisser, frustrated with her inability to extract a confession from someone, anyone who knew her son, Laney, to her own surprise as much as the Pallissers’, had claimed she was police.
“Yes, I’m afraid I did.”
“You know that it’s against the law to do that?”
She stood again, opened a drawer in the side table, rooted around, and withdrew her shield. She looked at it, ran her finger over the numbers—6996. She’d loved that number, the beautifully vulgar symmetry of it.
“Retired.” She handed the shield to Ed.
He turned it toward the light, then put it down on the coffee table. Squinted at her, his mouth a skeptical line.
“Retired?” he asked. Nobody retired at her age. They quit or were fired.
“Resigned,” she said. “So I could care for Alfie.”
He blinked, his face softening slightly, looked away, then back at her.
“I know this is difficult for you. But you can’t harass other people’s children. I will extend a professional courtesy this time and forget it happened. But you must let us do our job.”
“Ed.” Laney drummed her fingers on her thighs, then shoved them into her jeans pockets. She had to at least try for composure. “Have you spoken with Alfie’s friends?”
He frowned. “We have a process for these cases. We’ve interviewed a number of the students, yes.”
“Who?”
“I can provide you with a list. I don’t have it on me right now. But you can’t interrogate them yourself, you know that, right?”
“Anybody whose initials are JP?”
Boswell gave her a hard look, then stood up. “We spoke with over thirty students whose schedules intersect with Alfie’s. A few of them have initials JP. Can you tell me the significance of this person?”
“I just think he might be Alfie’s friend.” And maybe a drug dealer. Who maybe gave Alfie drugs. Which she couldn’t find. But still.
“You think? But you don’t know who it is? Laney, is there something you’re not telling me?”
She pulled Alfie’s weird chart out of her pocket and handed it over.
Ed studied it, then glanced at her. “What do you think it means?”
She shrugged. “I think they’re initials. In the first column. But I can’t figure out what the rest of the letters mean. And JP is the only one that’s underlined. That’s why I thought …”
Boswell raised his hands. “Okay. I need you to stop right now. I appreciate that you used to be on the job. And like I said, I’ll extend the professional courtesy to you and let your behavior of this afternoon go. But this is not your case. Please, let us do our job. If you find anything, anything at all, you must bring it to us. Do not, I repeat, do not sit on it, do not act on it on your own.”
He glared down at her. She noticed, for the first time, the dark smudges under his eyes, the grayish tint to his skin. He’d been on this case since last night, which meant he’d slept even less than she had. A vertical wrinkle deepened between his eyebrows. He asked, “Are we clear?”
She nodded.
“We will find your boy. Now try to get some rest.”
She watched him get into his car and slam the door. He sat in his car for several minutes before starting it, his dark silhouette immobile, his head lowered.
She never liked considering the role her gender played in her career, but it was unavoidable. The cop world is a man’s world, even in the twenty-first century. The detective bureau even more so. The bosses had been ecstatic when she asked to be an undercover—her ability to seem harmless, flaky, was a rarity in the field, and she knew how to charm information, introductions, drugs out of anybody. There had been plenty of cops who distrusted her, who insulted her to her face and behind her back. She’d been called ugly, asked if she was PMSing, scheduled for the worst shifts. When she made arrests, some of the other detectives sneered, made it clear they thought her partner had done all the work.
So now, when Ed rebuked her, she, strangely, felt better. She knew he was right, of course. She’d had no business troubling the little Pallisser boy. Ironically, her interaction with Ed reminded her of her old self—the self who took the ribbing, the put-downs, the pettiness, the orders to back down, and understood it to mean that she was doing good. Her successes had annoyed some of her colleagues. Not all, of course. Certainly not her old partner, Harry. He made her feel like the saltiest pretzel in the box.
Too tired to do anything and too worried to sleep, she sat by her window and watched the road until even the snow grew shadowed, blended with the twilight. Then she locked the doors, checked the windows, drew the shades, and took off her clothes. She ran herself a bath. Afterward, clean, hollow, light-headed, snug in her thermal pajamas, she climbed into bed and piled Alfie’s blankets over hers, then placed her phone on the bed stand.
Just as sleep finally began its pull, she lifted her phone and texted Harry, her ex-partner and, despite everything that had happened three years ago, the one person she knew who could find anyone, anywhere, even if it meant bending (or smashing) the rules.
The answering text lit her face shortly after, but she was already dreaming, and so very, very tired.
“Five more minutes,” she mumbled into her pillow, and turned her back to the phone as it vibrated again, illuminating the damp cowlick at the back of her head.
CHAPTER
10
SHE WOKE AT three AM, thirsty and hot, tangled in all those blankets. It wasn’t until she came back to bed with a glass of water that she noticed the text on her phone.
At first, the text didn’t make sense. It said, Harry is dead. Overdose.
Laney thought very hard whether she had any other contacts in her phone named Harry whom she might have messaged by mistake. No. She had not. Then she wondered if maybe it wasn’t her phone. It was.
She typed, Harry, not funny.
The answer came back immediately. No not funny. Not Harry. Harry is dead.
She blinked. Then typed. Who the fuck is this?
The answer came right away: Cynthia.
Harry’s girlfriend. Laney winced.
With shaking fingers, she pressed the call button and waited. Harry’s phone rang and rang, then went to voice mail. She listened to his familiar, jokey voice, did not leave a message, hung up. Dialed the number again.
This time Cynthia picked up. “What.” Not even a question.
“Cynthia, are you serious?”
“Why are you texting Harry at night?”
“Where is he? What happened?”
“He’s dead, Elaine.”
Elaine! Laney hated that name. Nobody, not even her parents, had called her that. Except Cynthia. She pressed her hand over her mouth. Harry dead?
“Oh God. What happened?” she asked.
“Looks like he overdosed. On heroin, the son of a bitch.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Do you want the autopsy report?”
“Jesus, Cynthia. No, I don’t want the autopsy report. It’s just …” Harry had been rabidly anti-drug. It was the biggest reason he’d joined the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit (SNEU). His father had been a vicious addict, had contracted HIV in the eighties, early enough in the epidemic for it to have been a death sentence. He died skeletal, shivering, covered in sores, and left Har
ry and his seven siblings to fend for themselves.
No, she could imagine Harry driving drunk into the Harlem River. She could imagine him jumping from a bridge, hell, even shooting himself dead. She could never imagine him overdosing on heroin, his father’s drug of choice.
“Cynthia, I’m so sorry. I’m just so sorry. When did this happen?”
Not that he didn’t have reasons lately. She should have called him months ago; it’s not like she wasn’t aware of what was happening in his life. Guilt heated her face. Could she have helped him?
A whimper reached her through the phone, and for the first time since she’d known the other woman, Laney felt sorry for her. Cynthia had loved Harry. More than he’d loved her, Laney knew, remembered their rambling talks at the ends of shifts.
“Last week. The funeral was four days ago.”
She hadn’t called Laney. Nobody had. Not even the other guys she’d worked with.
That hurt.
“It was just the family,” Cynthia said, a wet, sad whisper. “They didn’t want anybody from the job there.”
They sat in silence, Laney’s missing son’s blanket twisted around her shoulders, the cold dark pressing on her chest, on her face. She imagined Cynthia in a similar darkness, their pain over this man uniting them for once.
“But you knew how he felt about drugs, right?” Laney asked.
“I know.”
“So something is not right. Something is wrong.”
The silence this time was electric, taut. “Please don’t call this number again,” said Cynthia. “I’m going to hang up now.”
Laney gripped her phone harder, as if by doing that she could keep the woman from leaving. “Wait,” she said. She didn’t know how to phrase what she was feeling, the shame and regret knuckling into a tightness in her throat. She should have been nicer to Harry’s girlfriend.
“Elaine?” Cynthia breathed out, then said, enunciating every word, “He didn’t hate you.” And with that, she hung up.
Laney stared at her phone. He didn’t hate her? Harry? Harry didn’t hate her? Well, why would he? It never even crossed her mind that he might.
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