by Sara Shepard
When she lifted her head again, the little clock on the bedside stand said it was 2:03 a.m. She glanced at the bed. Maddox was turned away from her, his chest rising softly, his toes sticking out from under the covers. She considered going back to her own room for a split second before deciding it wasn’t an option.
She shifted onto his mattress. After some hesitation, she slid one foot under the covers and then another. She lay on the very edge of the bed, but that was so uncomfortable, and she was so tired. So she stretched out a little. Her hand hit his. Maddox might have been asleep, but his finger instinctively curled around hers anyway. Seneca froze, not knowing what to do. Their entwined fingers felt good. Right.
It was dark in the room, peaceful. She closed her eyes and tried to let sleep wash over her. Perhaps an answer would come to her in the morning. But just as she was sliding into oblivion, her eyes popped open, and she sat straight up. The letters in the clue, rearranged, revealed a word she hadn’t thought of before. Mother.
Red, white, and awesome: a bull’s-eye. A spot over the eye: the dog mascot. Even caramel syrup: They used that in Starbucks drinks sometimes. Maybe Brett wasn’t talking about Chelsea when he said I met her, and it was love. Thought she thought so, too. He was talking about Seneca’s mother.
He was sending them to Target.
EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, Aerin stood in the parking lot of the closest Target to the beach—the only Target, actually, for at least forty miles. The store had just opened twenty minutes ago—they’d meant to come first thing, but there was unexpected traffic on the bridge out of Avignon—and there were a fair number of cars in the parking lot. Tourists, probably, stocking up on beach supplies. The sky was gray with low-hanging clouds, and though a huge storm had whipped through at daybreak, the humidity had rushed back in, and even Aerin’s eyeballs felt sticky.
“You holding up okay?” Thomas’s fingers closed around hers.
Aerin smiled at him gratefully. “Yeah. Thanks.” It was weird how natural Thomas’s presence felt. Like he’d been part of her life—and this investigation—since the start. All at once she couldn’t remember how she functioned without him around.
Seneca got out of the Jeep and surveyed the parking lot. Her face was gray, and she kept pressing her hands against her cheeks as if making sure they were still there. Aerin watched her carefully. A Target in Annapolis was where Seneca’s mom was last seen; Seneca had told her that she hadn’t actually been to a Target since her mother was killed. Just driving by the stores gave her panic attacks.
Maddox pressed the lock button on the key fob. “So you think he means Starbucks, right? In his letter, that’s where he said they spent time together.”
Seneca shot him a look. “You make it sound like they were friends.”
“I—I didn’t mean it like that. I just…”
“It’s not a crime that your mom talked to Brett,” Aerin jumped in. “Brett charmed Helena, too.”
Seneca stared at Aerin helplessly, and Aerin could guess at the thoughts churning in her brain. They were probably the same emotions she felt—fury, disbelief, devastation, all of it fresh and intense. The details in Brett’s letter had ripped off a Helena-sized Band-Aid Aerin had tried so hard to keep adhered to her skin for years now. Underneath was a wound that was still bloody, raw, and very unhealed.
All at once, Aerin regretted losing touch with Seneca this summer. It felt selfish…but also self-destructive. If they’d been in touch, if they’d really talked, maybe handling this now—this pain so specific to both of them, this hell only the two of them understood—might be a little more bearable.
“Come here.” Aerin pulled her into a hug. They stood like that for a long time, both of them silently suffering. “I’m sorry,” Aerin whispered. “And if you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. We can handle all of it. We can go in there.”
Finally, Seneca broke away and wiped her eyes. “No,” she said shakily. “Brett’s trying to get to me. He thinks bringing me to a Target, making me re-create what he described in the letter is going to wear me down. But I won’t let it. Come on. We don’t have much time left.”
She turned and marched toward the doors. Madison glanced at Aerin, and Aerin shrugged. Seneca wasn’t any more over what happened than Aerin was. But they were alike in that way—they just needed a distraction, something else on which to concentrate instead.
Shopping carts jammed the front of the Target store. The air was cool and smelled like buttered popcorn. The Starbucks, set off to the right, was empty of patrons, and one of the sleepy-looking baristas was reading an Us Weekly next to the espresso machines. They didn’t seem to care as Aerin and the others poked around the tables, the gift shelves, and big bags of coffee beans for a clue. Then Aerin noticed a lone drink sitting on the pickup counter. The name Collette was scrawled across it. Her heart stopped in her chest.
She pointed it out to Seneca. Seneca looked like she was going to explode. She darted over and picked up the cup. “Who is this for?” she asked the girls behind the counter.
The shorter of the two walked over and inspected the name. “Huh. Not sure.”
“You don’t remember who ordered it?”
The girl shook her head. “Sorry, no. We had a busy morning.”
Seneca looked chagrined. Thomas nudged his chin at the register. “Go through your receipts. Figure it out. I’m a cop. This is official business.”
“Thomas.” Aerin felt uneasy. “What good is that going to do?” Brett wouldn’t be stupid enough to use a credit card.
But to her surprise, the barista was compliant, glancing at the coffee order on the side of the cardboard cup and then looking at the register tape. “Okay, so there were only three Americanos,” she said. “One at 7:33, one at 7:41, and one at 8:02. All of them paid with cash.”
Aerin looked at the clock over the bar. It was eight thirty. Had Brett really been here so recently?
Thomas eyed the barista again. “Do you have security cameras?”
The barista looked suspicious. “Yeah…”
“Can we see them?”
The barista’s eyes went blank. “I’ll have to ask my manager. Unless, um, you have a warrant?”
Aerin groaned. That might take forever—and they didn’t have forever. She snatched the Collette drink off the counter, looking at the cup from all angles. If this was a clue, what was it supposed to tell them?
“Uh, miss?” The taller barista peeled away from the counter. “You can’t take that if it’s someone else’s….”
Aerin ignored her, walking straight out of the store with the cup in her hand. The others hurried behind. It began to drizzle, then rain harder, and people jogged in from the parking lot with jackets over their heads.
She pulled off the plastic sip top, and everyone peered into the cup. There was dark liquid inside…and a rolled-up piece of paper. “Whoa,” she whispered as she pulled it out. Coffee dripped off the ends. Had Brett ordered this drink, stuffed this clue inside, and then left?
Seneca unrolled it with trembling hands. Tonite at the Avignon Boardwalk Aquarium, the Oddly Shaped Men, read words across the top. Beneath that was a blurry black-and-white photo of three guys with guitars. It listed today’s date and the aquarium’s address.
“So we go back to the aquarium?” Madison murmured.
Aerin shivered. The sudden rain had sucked the humidity from the atmosphere, and her skin felt chilled. “No way. That place was too creepy.”
Seneca leaned against a stray shopping cart. “We can’t just not go.”
“Look.” Madison pointed at the flyer. “More numbers are circled.” Part of the address and part of the two phone numbers listed had faded pen marks around them.
“That’s the answer.” Aerin sat down on a red bench, pulled out Post-its and a pen from her bag, and wrote down the circled numbers—thirty-nine, eight, five, seventy-four, forty-seven. “Could they stand for letters?” She jiggled the pen.
“Sports jersey
s?” Maddox suggested. “Joe DiMaggio was number five. Kobe Bryant’s eight. And there’s an NFL guy who’s thirty-nine—”
Madison snorted. “You really think Brett would know that?”
Maddox looked surprised. “Doesn’t everyone know that?”
“Wait.” Seneca pursed her lips. “Maybe they’re GPS coordinates.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too,” Thomas said.
“So maybe longitude and latitude?” Maddox jumped in.
Thomas nodded. “The latitude coordinates around here start with thirty-nine, and longitude is seventy-four, which was what made me think of it. But you’re missing a few numbers for it to give a precise location.”
“What about the numbers circled on the menu?” Maddox asked. “It led to an address in Avignon, but maybe it’s part of a bigger picture.” He wrote nineteen and ninety-three on Aerin’s list.
“If that’s the case, then we have to include this place, too,” Madison said. “Brett might be using all the clues to spell out something.”
“Target’s address?” Madison pointed to the number on the building. Twenty-two.
Aerin grabbed her phone, opened Google, and found a site that mapped GPS coordinates. Once she plugged everything in, her eyes widened at a picture on Google Earth. The aerial image showed lush green wetlands just beyond Avignon. Sitting off to the left was a dilapidated brown shack.
A rush of certainty flooded her. “This has to be it.”
Seneca’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. “It looks promising. But what about the aquarium? Is Brett trying to send us in two different directions?”
Aerin looked at the image again. This was where Brett had Chelsea. She could feel it in her bones. “I’m going here. I have to.”
Thomas placed his hands on Aerin’s wrist, and she felt the familiar jolt of electricity. “Then we’ll have to divide and conquer,” he declared. “Aerin, I’m going with you.”
BRETT WAITED UNTIL nine a.m. on Friday before he made the call. “I’m such an idiot,” he told the Starbucks girl who answered. “I ordered a drink for my wife but left it on the counter. Her name’s Collette. Is it by any chance still there?”
“I’m sorry, but someone else picked it up,” the girl said. “It would be cold by now anyway. If you come back by, we’ll make you one on the house.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Brett hung up without saying good-bye, just in case Seneca was having the call traced. He smiled. All the cogs were moving smoothly in the machine. Now all he had to count on was his old friends doing exactly what he wanted, though he had a feeling that wouldn’t be too difficult.
He burst into Chelsea’s room. The girl shot up, her eyes wide, and she seemed to take in his close-cropped hair, his shaven face, his colored contacts, the makeup dusted across his cheeks and hands to give him a more olive complexion. For a moment, he could tell she thought he was someone new—a stranger. A rescuer. But then she noticed: It was the same old him, just changed a little. Tears filled her eyes.
“What gave me away?” Brett asked, annoyed. He’d worked hard on his transformation just now, shedding Gabriel in the same way a snake sheds its skin. “My eyes? My build?” It would be easy to bulk back up, though. In only a few weeks, his body would be dramatically different. No one from here would be able to pick him out of a lineup.
“We’re going to do a photo shoot,” Brett said. “What do you think?”
Chelsea just stared. “Y-you look very handsome with short hair,” she said in a frightened voice.
Brett eyed her coldly. He knew what she was doing, but it wasn’t going to work on him. He lifted the camera and moved close to her face. “Smile, please.”
Chelsea’s eyes flicked to the phone again. Brett let out an impatient snort. “No, no. You can’t see it. But don’t worry. Your family will know how you are soon enough.”
Chelsea’s eyes widened. “Wh-what do you mean?”
Brett pressed the camera app. “I just need you to smile right now, okay?”
“But wh-why?”
“Smile,” he said through his teeth. “The world will want to see how pretty you were before.”
Chelsea’s eyes glazed over. Brett could practically see her little brain struggling with what that word could mean. Before. Her lip started to tremble. She didn’t smile. Brett sighed and removed the knife from his pocket. It took only a second to push it to her throat. She made a small gurgling sound. “Smile like you mean it. Smile in the way you want to be remembered.”
Chelsea looked terrified, but she straightened. As Brett pulled the knife away, she relaxed into an astonishingly convincing smile. Her eyes gleamed. Her teeth shone. Her skin seemed to glow. She was a pro, after all.
“Nice,” he cooed, pressing the shutter. “Now, was that so hard?”
He pocketed the knife and phone and started for the door. Chelsea coughed, and he turned. “You’re not going to…” She trailed off, but the end of the question loomed heavily in the air, like a swarm of bugs.
“Kill you now?” Brett liked how she flinched at the word. “No. There’s something else I have to take care of first.” Then, after a moment’s thought, he tossed her the TV remote he’d carried in from Command Central. “Here. It’ll take your mind off things.”
Chelsea teared up again. “I don’t want to watch TV. I want to leave.”
Brett rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. You know you want to see yourself on the news.”
Then he pivoted, walked through the door, and shut it. As he was making sure it was locked, he heard the fizzling snap of the television turning on.
Called it.
AS THE CLOCK struck nine thirty, Seneca, Madison, and Maddox stood at the aquarium on the boardwalk. Rain made sloppy puddles in the sand. The beach was almost empty save for two old men in rain hats panning the sand with metal detectors. Seneca peered at the worn, faded fish mural at the aquarium’s entrance. The clown fish, its bright orange scales long ago eroded into a muted peach, looked like it was on the verge of a stroke. Someone had drawn a picture of a topless woman next to the shark.
There was an information desk, but no one was there. Seneca marched right past. Over her shoulder, Maddox had dug in his heels. He gazed around the desolate structure with disdain.
“Aerin was right,” he muttered. “This place is creepy.”
“The flyer pointed us here,” Seneca argued. “It’s worth it to check it out.”
“It could be a trap.”
“The shack could be a trap, too,” Seneca said, exasperated. “Let’s just do a lap, okay?” But she also felt a sense of foreboding. She didn’t like that the group had split up. Their strength was in their numbers.
She marched into the aquarium. Fish swam languidly in illuminated tanks. A bright blue tang leered at her, baring tiny, razor-sharp teeth. The next room was even darker than before, boasting tanks of eels, rainbow fish, and a speckled sea blob with bulging eyes. Seneca gazed around, but she saw nothing. Not that she knew what she was looking for.
Someone shifted at the far end of the room, and Seneca’s hackles rose. A man in a black shirt stood in front of a tank of electric eels. There was something rigid about his posture, as though he wasn’t entirely comfortable in his skin. As she crept closer, she got a look at his profile and then read his gleaming name tag. Her body snapped to attention. Wait. Maybe there wasn’t going to be a physical clue here. Maybe the clue was a person.
“Are you Barnes?” she said softly.
The man turned. She could feel his gaze upon her, even in the liquid darkness. “Who wants to know?”
“I—I have some questions about Chelsea Dawson.”
Barnes breathed in sharply. “Are you a cop?”
“No. But I’m part of this group that…” Seneca trailed off. Explaining Case Not Closed was probably pointless to this guy. “I just want to know what happened from your perspective,” she said after a beat. “You guys were friends, right?”
Barnes turned back t
o the fish tanks, not answering.
“And you know she’s missing?” Seneca goaded. “Maybe you can help us find her?”
Barnes raised his chin, the light bouncing off his sharp features. “No thanks.”
Seneca gestured to Maddox and Madison behind her. “These are my friends. They’re helping, too. Listen, we need you. You knew Chelsea well. We saw your Instagram account. All those conversations you had with her…”
The dim, artificial lighting gave Barnes’s skin a greenish-blue cast. He looked angry as he whipped around to face Seneca head-on. “Did you pay admission?”
Seneca stopped. “There’s no admission. The aquarium is free.”
“Well, you need to leave.”
“Look, we’re not the cops,” Maddox pleaded. “We’re not here to bust you or whatever. Chelsea obviously means something to you. We just want to know what that is.”
Barnes’s nostrils flared. “Stop talking about Chelsea, okay?”
Seneca felt a small burning sensation in the pit of her stomach. Barnes was hiding something.
She sidled up to Barnes. He smelled unwashed and sweaty. “But if you keep acting like this, we will go to the cops.”
Barnes’s eyes flashed. “On what grounds?”
“You’re acting suspicious. Maybe you did do it.”
He puffed up his chest, almost like he was getting ready to sumo-crash into her. “You really think…” He sputtered. “You have no idea….” He turned his head. He seemed to be mentally wrestling with something, but then he wilted. “Look, I loved her. Deeply. I would never hurt her. But those comments you’re talking about, on Instagram? That friendship you think we had?” He sighed. “I wrote those myself. My comments…and hers. I hacked Chelsea’s account, I clicked on my photos, and I pretended I was her. I just…” He shook his head. “She doesn’t really know me. We didn’t really talk.”
