Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

  “There’s not a lot, but it’s all varying reports—different colors, different makes of cars. Someone said Kylie hugged a man across the street from the mall.”

  Vega stared forward at the car parked in front of them. PHILADELPHIA EAGLES #1 FAN said the license plate rim.

  “Watch this,” she said, leaning over and holding out her phone.

  It was another video. She pressed Play, and Cap watched.

  It was two little boys eating ice cream.

  “This is Dylan and Michael-John and we’re all here stopping for ice cream on the way to Uncle Drex and Aunt Bert’s,” said a woman’s voice, the woman holding the camera, Cap thought.

  Either Dylan or Michael-John held up his spoon.

  “I have cookie batter,” he said. “With M&M’s and Snickers.”

  The other boy was littler and just kept shoveling in the ice cream like it would be taken away from him soon. He had chocolate smeared across his mouth and cheek.

  The first boy kept talking about ice cream and answered his mother’s questions about how excited he was to see his aunt and uncle. Cap began to recognize the store, the parking lot.

  “And we have Bitty-Love too,” said the mother, turning the camera phone to a baby in a car seat next to her. “Just a little taste,” she said, her arm extending from behind the camera to feed the baby white ice cream from a plastic spoon.

  The baby smiled and kicked and made a sweet seal bark. Cap smiled.

  There was ambient noise too, other voices off screen that Cap couldn’t make out.

  The mother kept feeding and tickling the baby and asking questions, and on the screen the baby started to sink to the lower right corner, because the mother was trying to talk to the boys opposite her and feed the baby with her other hand, Cap thought. The upper left portion of the screen grew, most of it capturing the parking lot outside.

  And then there they were, Kylie and Bailey Brandt, on the screen, outside the store, facing each other, talking. Cap leaned in closer to Vega and her phone. He rubbed his hand over his mouth and chin.

  Bailey pointed toward the lot. Let’s go back to the car. Kylie still held a small tasting spoon from the store in her hand; she licked the back of it, which Cap thought seemed a strangely adult thing to do. Then Kylie stopped and took a few steps past Bailey, looking at something in the opposite direction, something across the street. Bailey’s mouth still moved. Let’s go back to the car. Mom will be angry.

  Kylie waved to someone, cutting a big swath through the air with her raised hand, and then she smiled. It was really more of a grin, like there had been a joke. Bailey stood behind her, tentative.

  Then the phone was placed down on the table and went dark.

  “Where’d you get that?” said Cap.

  “My guy found it. This lady put it on Facebook, called it ‘Ice Cream in Denville.’ ”

  “That was quite a smile,” said Cap.

  “Someone she knows,” said Vega.

  “Not just that,” said Cap. “Someone she’s glad to see.”

  Cap thought of it, Kylie’s black smile, hovering in space like the Cheshire cat’s. Jules read that one to Nell when she was little. Cap would stand at the door. Please would you tell me why your cat grins like that?

  Vega handed Cap his keys and said, “You ready to meet Jamie Brandt?”

  —

  For as long as he had lived there, Cap always had many shitty things to say about Denville, but he actually thought it was a beautiful place at night. Beat-up streets with potholes became quaint in the dark, porch lights on to disguise the chipped paint and scratched siding on the houses. The expanding suburb developments looked better too; instead of cheap overgrown children’s toys they had an almost English countryside look to them out of daylight. Not that Cap had ever been to the English countryside, but he’d seen plenty of movies.

  Schultz’s Bar was in Black Creek. The neighborhood was full of apartment complexes and single-level homes built in the ’60s, brown and yellow exteriors with shag carpet and faux wrought-iron arches inside. When Cap and Jules had been shopping around for houses back in the beginning, they’d looked at one or two there, and driving away Jules had said, “If I have to live in a house like that, I will hang myself.” Cap had said, “I will buy the rope.” Then of course they’d laughed with the relief of their agreement on the subject. Ha. Suicide.

  Cap had been to Schultz’s once or twice. It looked like a hundred other bars, a black box from the outside with a single rectangular window, like an aquarium, but instead of fish there was a Yuengling sign. He and Vega parked on the street and went inside.

  There were a few people scattered around, a group of men hooked around the corner of the bar, a couple making out at a table next to the bathroom, two women at the jukebox. And there was Jamie Brandt, Cap recognized her from TV, sitting at the far end of the bar with her head down. He and Vega made their way to her. Vega stopped when she was about a foot away, as if Jamie were a dog on the street.

  “Jamie?” Vega said. She was quiet about it.

  Jamie turned her head, languid, her lids heavy with exhaustion or drunkenness, or both.

  “You,” said Jamie, pointing at Vega.

  “Alice Vega,” said Vega.

  “Right. Vega. Who’s he?”

  “Max Caplan,” said Cap, friendly. He looked at Jamie’s hands on the bar, lying there like leaves of a dead plant, and did not extend his.

  Jamie licked her lips and said, “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Your aunt said you might be.”

  Jamie laughed through her nose.

  “What else she say?”

  “Just that you went somewhere to be alone,” said Vega.

  Jamie paused to take a sip of what looked like a very light beer on ice from a mug.

  “We have some more questions,” said Vega.

  “I’m sorta off the clock here,” said Jamie. “I did three interviews today, and I talked to someone at CNN. Then I tried to find some pictures of the girls wearing different kinds of clothes other than dresses. The lawyer told us that they might be walking around in other kinds of clothes. So I been looking at pictures of them all day. Then we been hanging up flyers. So I come here to get drunk for two goddamn hours and then I’m going to go home and sleep for four more and then do it over again. Maggie’s got an email into the Today show. She knows someone who knows someone.”

  “We need to make a list of people,” said Vega.

  “Cops made a list.”

  “We’re going to make a better one. But we need you to come with us now so we can sit down somewhere and talk.”

  There was something a little hypnotic in Vega’s voice, thought Cap, the evenness. Lost on Jamie Brandt, however.

  “I need an hour. I need twenty minutes,” said Jamie, grabbing at her mug.

  She missed it, ran her fingers into the handle instead of latching on to it, and it spilled sideways toward Cap. Ice cubes slid down the bar and dropped into Jamie’s lap, then hit the floor with little wooden taps.

  “Shit,” said Jamie.

  The air around them seemed to freeze. Cap looked around, saw the bartender, not a small guy, coming toward them.

  “Hey, Jamie, you okay over here?” he said, staring at Cap.

  “I fuckin’ spilled,” she said, patting her lap with a wadded cocktail napkin.

  The bartender wiped the bar with a rag and pushed a stack of napkins to Jamie. Then he folded his arms, which made them appear bigger. He had “Maya” and “Tori” tattooed on his knuckles.

  “Maybe you two ought to take a walk around the block,” he said to Cap and Vega.

  “Jamie,” said Vega, ignoring the bartender. “Come with us now, please.”

  “Hey,” said the bartender. He nodded to Cap. “You wanna tell your girlfriend to chill the fuck out?”

  Vega jerked her head in the bartender’s direction.

  “Or?” she said.

  “You want me to come over there?�
� he said, leaning across the bar.

  Vega’s eyes went glassy like she’d just tasted something delicious.

  “Wish you would,” she said.

  Cap inserted himself between Vega and the bar, touched Jamie’s shoulder.

  “Jamie,” he said. “We don’t have twenty minutes. We don’t have one minute. Kylie knew who took her.”

  Cap watched as this information snaked its way into Jamie’s brain. Her face contorted; her thin plucked eyebrows turned into little Spanish tildes.

  “Cops didn’t say that.”

  “They might not even know it yet. They’re under a shitstorm of information, and they might not even have seen the footage we’ve seen yet.”

  “There’s something else,” said Vega.

  Now they all turned to Vega: Jamie, Cap, Knuckles.

  “They aren’t telling you anything, right? They say it’s part of an ongoing investigation?”

  Jamie nodded.

  “That’s standard,” said Vega. “But we’re not cops. We’ll tell you everything we know.”

  That seemed to wake her up. She looked from Vega to Cap, who nodded.

  Cap said, “Kylie smiled at whoever took her. We need to make a new list.”

  —

  Back in Cap’s office, Jamie stared at the screen and covered her mouth with both her hands and made squeaking sounds into the hollow space. Vega closed her laptop. She and Cap looked at each other.

  Jamie fumbled with her purse, a bright blue hobo bag with palm trees printed on it. She pulled out a pharmacy bottle of pills, flattened her palm against the lid, and tried to twist it. Her hands were shaking and the bottle fell into her lap.

  “Here,” said Cap, holding his hand out.

  Jamie gave him the bottle. Cap unscrewed the top, glanced at the label: alprazolam. Generic Xanax. Jamie shook two into her hand and brought them to her mouth, chewed them up like SweeTarts. Cap looked at the symbol of a little martini glass with a line through it on the label, thought better of mentioning it.

  Jamie still held a hand over her mouth, just grazing her lips.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” she whispered.

  Vega leaned over to her.

  “Does anyone come to mind, someone she’d smile like that for?”

  “No,” said Jamie. “I mean, yeah, but she knows them for sure, that’s all. That’s what I’m thinking about.”

  “Most kids know their abductors,” said Cap.

  “Yeah, but how many make them smile?” said Jamie.

  “She wouldn’t know her father well enough that she would have that kind of reaction,” said Vega, pulling her laptop onto her lap.

  “Shit no,” said Jamie. “They only seen a couple of pictures, and they’re from a long time ago.”

  “So who’s the first person, the very first, who you think of.”

  Jamie thought for a moment, rubbed the temples on her head roughly.

  “My folks. That’s stupid, huh.”

  “It’s not,” said Cap. “We want to rule people out, right? I was a cop for a long time, and that’s how you do this. You just keep ruling people out until you get some good suspects. So put Jamie’s parents on the list,” he said to Vega.

  Vega nodded at him, but he noticed there was some theatrics in it, exaggeration, so Jamie could see it. Her eyes were steady on him too. It was a familiar click; it was one partner to another.

  “Okay, who’s the next?”

  Jamie shook out her shoulders like she had a chill.

  “I don’t know, my aunt?”

  “Right,” said Vega, typing.

  Jamie went on, naming family members, a great-uncle, first and second cousins, a third cousin in the army who sent the girls emails from Afghanistan. All people Kylie might smile at. Then they were done with family.

  Then her boyfriend, Darrell.

  “What’s he do for a living?” said Cap.

  “He works at the Bagel Pub, over in Cherry Point.”

  “Would Kylie smile at him?” said Vega.

  “Sure, I guess. I mean, they like him well enough.”

  “What about teachers?”

  Mrs. Phillips for Kylie, Miss Ferno for Bailey. They had PE teachers too, but Jamie couldn’t remember the names.

  “What about, like, extracurricular types of things?” said Vega.

  Bailey’s soccer coach was a guy named Arnab, an Indian or something, Jamie told them. He seemed nice enough. Kylie’s ballet teacher was Miss Savannah. Jamie thought she might be a lesbian.

  “Are any of these folks angry at you for any reason? Do any of them hold a grudge that you know about?” said Cap.

  Jamie tightened up her lips.

  “No, everyone fucking asks me that. No. I mean, maybe I piss people off here and there because I say what I think, you know. I don’t like to beat around the bush.”

  “Can you recall the last time you did that? Piss someone off?” Vega said.

  Jamie coughed out a laugh.

  “Take your pick, right?” she said. “Well, let’s see, last week I flipped off a guy at an intersection and he yelled that he was gonna take my license number. I called him a pussy.”

  Cap smiled and said, “The other day I told a woman who cut me off to suck my dick, excuse me. I haven’t said those words since maybe the seventh grade.”

  Jamie laughed.

  “I know this might be a tough one—believe me I know, I have a sixteen-year-old—did Kylie have a crush on anyone? A teacher or an older boy she might have come in contact with?” Cap said.

  “The girl’s a natural-born flirt,” said Jamie, and there was just a little pride in her voice. “I told her she should go into business school; she could sell space heaters to Egyptians. But I don’t know about anyone in particular.”

  “What other men does she see on a regular basis?” said Vega. “Besides your family and your boyfriend, and teachers?”

  “There’s a kid lives in our complex named Sonny—he’s probably fifteen, sixteen. He’s always sweet to her,” said Jamie. “But I seen him since Saturday walking around—his mom dropped off a crumb cake. He doesn’t have the girls stashed in his closet.”

  Jamie shook her head, almost angry. Cap thought he should ask for the kid’s phone number and address, not to put him on the list but to get Jamie’s mind off the image of the girls safe and sound a hundred feet away.

  “What about ex-boyfriends?” said Vega. “Men before Darrell.”

  “Before Darrell,” Jamie said, spacey; then she seemed to focus again. “Before Darrell there was Chaney. Alex Chaney. I saw him about a month ago actually.”

  Vega glanced at Cap.

  “Where’d you see him?” said Cap.

  “I ran into him at Valley Diss. We kinda argued.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  Jamie made a sound like pssh and said, “I told him he’s a fucking druggie without a job. He said I’m an uptight bitch.”

  “What kind of drugs he do?” said Vega.

  “He likes Vicodin and Perc, oxy when he can get it.”

  “He addicted, in your opinion?”

  “Wasn’t when I met him,” said Jamie. “Then he got laid off and started hanging out with some other losers, and they started snorting that shit. He stopped wanting to hang out on the weekends. He’d show up at my place Sunday morning looking like a stray dog. And, you know, I like to smoke a joint sometimes but I don’t want fucking junkies in my house.”

  “The girls like him?” said Vega.

  Jamie thought about it.

  “Yeah, they did. Before he got into the shit, he worked at Roma Pizza for a while and used to bring them stuff from there, like garlic bread and cannolis, stuff like that. I think Kylie had a little crush on him. She was upset when I cut him off.”

  “She comfortable with hugging him, you think?” said Cap.

  “Sure,” Jamie said. She looked at them. “You don’t think he took them.”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  �
��No way, man. I mean, he’s a loser, but a kidnapper? I don’t think so.”

  “How’d he look when you saw him last month?” said Vega. “Physically.”

  Jamie shook her head in disgust. “Skinny, his hair was all long and greasy. I told him he looked like a homeless person.”

  She leaned her head against the back of the couch and yawned. The sedatives were hitting, Cap knew. Then her head popped back up suddenly.

  “And his breathing was funny, like he’d just run up a flight of stairs.”

  Cap looked at Vega, and there it was again.

  Click.

  —

  At one o’clock, Jamie fell asleep on Cap’s couch. Cap covered her with one of Nell’s comforters and gestured to the door leading from the office to the house. Vega went through, and Cap led her into the kitchen.

  Cap’s house was so impossibly cozy it could make a person depressed. The living room was filled with plush worn furniture, woven rugs on the creaking floors and framed photos on a brick mantel over the fireplace. The kitchen was cream-colored, retro speckled chairs at the table and a variety of magnets in the shapes of vegetables on the fridge. Vega peered toward the stairs and thought about what was up there, two or three little bedrooms, beds next to the windows so the sun could wake you up.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Cap said.

  It was only then that Vega noticed the stacked dishes in the sink, the dust balls in the corners. She shook her head.

  Cap took two bottles of water from the refrigerator and offered one to Vega. She took it.

  “So you think Chaney’s something?” said Cap.

  “Could be,” said Vega.

  “Come on,” said Cap. “Her gut is right—junkies don’t become kidnappers overnight. They don’t have the energy, for one thing.”

  “If they run out of money for drugs they’ll find the energy. If he’s out of breath after having a conversation, maybe he was in the starting stages of withdrawal. Doesn’t get more desperate than that.”

  Cap squinted. “Then where’s the ransom, the call. If he needs money so badly, why hasn’t he asked for it yet?”

  “Maybe he’s panicking. Having second thoughts and stuck.”

  “Or,” said Cap.

  “Or,” said Vega.

  Cap pinched the bridge of his nose. “Or he doesn’t want anything from Jamie.”