“Mom and Dad are back,” Jilly announced.
“Girls!” Dad called up the stairs. “Come see the new lawn mower!”
Jilly rolled her eyes. “Oh joy.”
We trudged down the stairs and out to the front lawn.
“Check it out, girls,” Dad said, both arms pointing at the shiny new lawn mower, his new baby. “Is she sweet or what?”
“She’s beautiful, Dad,” I said.
“We shall call her Gabrielle,” Dad sighed.
I looked at Jilly.
“She’s so high-tech, she’ll practically mow the lawn herself,” Dad cooed, caressing the handle bar. “You girls could do it in no time flat.”
Jilly made a choking noise. “Can we be done looking at the lawn mower now?” she asked loudly.
“Sure, girls. Thanks for showing some interest.”
Jilly tugged on the sleeve of my T-shirt. “Come on.”
I was just closing my bedroom door when Mom’s arm sliced through the opening like something out of a slasher flick. She pushed open the door, came in, and sat on the corner of my desk.
“Okay, girls, spill. What are you two up to?” Her eyes were narrowed and her tone oozed with suspicion.
“What are you talking about?” Jilly asked, sounding totally innocent.
“Call me crazy, but the last time you two willingly spent time together behind closed doors was in the late nineties.”
“Mom, you’re overreacting,” I said.
“Well…it’s just a little out of character, wouldn’t you say?” she asked.
“Mom. We’re just talking. You should be encouraging us, not frying us.” Jilly crossed her arms.
“Maybe you’re right,” she nodded, not looking convinced. “Maybe I’m overreacting.” She started to leave, then stopped and turned. “I hope I’m overreacting.”
Once the door closed, we both let out a huge sigh.
“Maybe we should just tell Mom and Dad what we found,” I suggested.
“Oh, okay, brainiac, love to see you work that into a conversation. Especially the whole breaking in part. Plus,” she put her face really close to mine, “there’s no way you’re taking me down with you. If they shave any more time off my curfew, my life is over.”
“Technically, we didn’t break in,” I said, but I knew she was right.
“Look. Obviously us hanging out together in plain sight is causing a ripple in the universe or something, so I say we break for tonight, sleep on it, meet up tomorrow when Mom’s busy with other things.”
“Okay,” I nodded. “Tomorrow we’ll figure out where we go from here. Assuming you want to keep trying to find out who Amy and Michael are.”
“Well yeah.”
“Okay then, that’s what we’ll do.”
Chapter 17
“Hmmm…what to do, what to do…” Jilly lay on my bed, thinking out loud.
I watched her pick up my pink sequined pillow, toss it up in the air, then catch it. She did it over and over.
Something instinctively told us not to ask or involve Sam and Megan. The fact that we both felt this way we took as a sign. We decided that if we were going to find out who Amy and Michael were, we had to get as much info on Mrs. Swicker as possible—she was the key.
After making a list of all the strange things we’d observed or discovered concerning Mrs. Swicker, we rated each item on a weirdness scale of one to ten. Everything came in at a nine or better. The whole waterfront slash gift-shop incident actually rated an eleven, tied with the box in the furnace room.
“God! I wish I had been in that gift shop with you!” Jilly groaned.
I cringed inside as a tiny wave of guilt washed over me, knowing I had strategically planned it so she couldn’t be in that gift shop. “Yeah, me too.”
“Give me the instant replay, one more time.”
“Jilly, I already told you everything I remember.”
“And that lady seemed sure Mrs. Swicker was this Reenie Barretto?”
“She seemed pretty sure to me.”
“Well, do you think you can remember her name?” Jilly asked.
“I don’t see how that’s going to help us.”
“Maybe we could track her down, talk to her.”
I burst out laughing. “Are you nuts? How are we going to do that? Not to mention, we can’t just call up a complete stranger!”
“She could be our last resort, you know, if we can’t find anything on our own. Just try to remember.”
I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my temples. I could feel Jilly staring at me, waiting for me to say something.
I went through the scene step by step. The woman with the sunburn pouncing on Mrs. Swicker, me behind the cookbook rack, Mrs. Swicker turning pale as a ghost, the woman poking herself in the chest, saying, “It’s me, Phyllis…something, of course now I’m Phyllis…something else…smoking Kools under the bleachers…it’s me, Phyllis…”
“Gregory!” I shouted. “She said her name was Phyllis Gregory!”
“Excellent!”
I shook my head. “But that was her name in high school. Let me see if I can remember her married name.” I lay down beside Jilly on my bed and tried to focus. I began to go through the alphabet in my mind, trying to remember the second name she’d said. “Of course now I’m Phyllis…Phyllis A…, Phyllis B…, Phyllis C…” It’s what I always did when I was trying to remember a word, especially a name.
“What are you muttering?” Jilly asked.
“Shush!” Phyllis L…Phyllis M…I sat up. “Phyllis Mmm…, Phyllis Maaa…, Phyllis Mooo…Munroe! Her name’s Phyllis Munroe!”
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Jilly got up and began pacing the floor, rubbing her hands together.
I rolled over, resting my head on an elbow and watched her, wondering if perhaps some kind of alien had taken over her body.
She noticed me looking at her. “What?”
“No offence, Jilly, but I guess I’m kind of surprised how into this you are. You really seem to want to help.”
She frowned and took her time answering. “Well…I guess I sort of see it as a whole new experience. I don’t think you’ve ever asked me to help you with anything before.”
I opened my mouth to argue but then closed it. Maybe I hadn’t.
“Okay, enough of the heart-to-heart. Get me a pen and paper and let’s get some of these names down,” Jilly instructed. The non-alien one. Only the real Jilly would consider two sentences a heart-to-heart.
Grabbing a piece of loose-leaf and a pen from my desk drawer, I jotted down Phyllis Munroe, then added Phyllis Gregory, just in case. I didn’t need to check for the other name, Reenie Barretto. It had stuck in my head from the moment I’d heard it, like some annoying commercial jingle.
After much deliberation, we decided we needed Mom’s computer. The computer downstairs was the first and obvious choice, but it was Saturday, so Dad was home, and he always made a point of checking over our shoulders whenever we were on the computer. Mom was at Costco, or the Hundred Dollar Club, as Dad liked to call it. “Can’t seem to get out of there for under a hundred bucks,” he always said. We figured Mom would be gone for at least two hours.
“I checked on him,” Jilly said. “He’s watching a cooking show. Let’s hit Mom’s office.”
I nodded and followed Jilly down the hall. Our steps slowed as we got closer to the office door. To be honest, Mom didn’t really ask that much of us. There was one thing that she was pretty firm about, though, and that was that everyone stayed out of her office and no one touched her computer, not without some kind of written request. Usually the only time our fingers were allowed to land on those keys was when Jilly and I had assignments due at the same time, ones that required use of the internet. Even then, Mom remained in the office, terrified we were going to mess up her stuff or delete something by accident.
“God. If only Dad would break down and get wireless, then we could just use my laptop,” Jilly grumbled.
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“Good luck with that.” Dad didn’t want us to be able to be online anywhere out of his peripheral vision.
“Make room,” Jilly demanded, as we both squeezed into Mom’s leather chair.
“Who do you want to do first?” I asked.
“Pick a name…any name.”
“Let’s Google Reenie Barretto and see what comes up,” I suggested.
Jilly typed in the name and we held our breath.
“Wow, not much here. It’s kind of a weird name…nothing that looks like what we’re looking for anyways.”
“Try Facebook.”
Jilly clicked on and typed in the name again. A picture of a pretty woman with long hair, cuddling a newborn baby came up on the screen. “So not her,” Jilly said.
“What about Bernadette Swicker? Try that.”
“On Facebook? No way Mrs. Swicker’s the Facebooky type—commenting on photos, updating her status, posting pictures—I just don’t see that happening…” But Jilly tried it anyways. A bunch of names came up, slightly off in the spelling. None of them were her.
“Go back to Google,” I said.
Jilly typed it in and we waited. She scrolled down one page after another, and another, and another. “And here I thought nobody would spell Swicker with an S. Oh wait. Here’s publishing credits for her photography.” Jilly clicked the mouse. “Doesn’t say anything about her, though.”
“Maybe you were right,” I admitted. “Maybe we should try to find Phyllis. Go back to Facebook.”
“Yes, Master,” Jilly sighed and put in the name.
“That’s her!” I pointed to the picture. It was the woman from the gift shop. Different floppy hat, but definitely her. I scanned the screen. “She must have high privacy, no info about her. We could send her a message, though.”
“Let ’er rip.” Jilly had her fingers poised over the keyboard.
“Just put ‘Reenie Barretto wants to say hi.’”
Jilly sent the message. “But now what? Who knows when she’ll check her email. She’s probably not like us. We’re on the computer all the time, check our email twenty times a day. She’s like…old.”
“She could even still be on that cruise.” I fiddled with the corner of the mouse pad and thought really hard. “Maybe we should try for her phone number. Go to 411.com, and type in Phyllis Munroe.”
Jilly did as I asked. “It wants a state,” she said.
“Crap. Let’s go by alphabetical order, I guess. Alabama?”
We both leaned in close and studied the page. I was amazed that sometimes it even gave their ages. It helped eliminate some names. I jotted down a couple possibles as we went through each state. This was taking way too long. We were still on the C’s and Mom wasn’t going to stay at Costco forever.
As I stood up to stretch my back, I had a thought. I remembered that the cruise ship was a Carnival cruise out of Miami—someone had mentioned it in the gift shop. “What are the odds that if the ship sailed from Florida, some of the passengers might be from Florida?”
“I dunno, it’s worth a shot.” She typed in FLA.
It practically jumped off the page. “There! Phyllis and Jerry Munroe, 2262 South Atlantic Boulevard, New Smyrna Beach.”
We sat there, our eyes darting back and forth between the phone number on the screen and the phone.
“This is insane! We can’t do this! What are we going to say?” My voice kept getting higher and higher. “Why are we doing this again?”
“Think about it. Aren’t you dying to find out if Reenie Barretto is Mrs. Swicker? I mean, this Phyllis person might know all about her, or at least be able to give us a clue.” Jilly looked at me intently. “I mean, what if you’re right? What if she did murder her husband? And where are those other kids?”
I chewed on my lip.
“This is way faster than waiting for Facebook,” she pointed out.
“We have to figure out what to say.”
“Well…the truth is out.”
I chewed harder. “You know, with the right spin, the truth could be a possibility. Like if we say we’re worried about the kids.”
“Huh…that’s just crazy enough to work. I’ll dial.”
Phyllis answered on the third ring. I took a deep breath and, speaking clearly and calmly, told her who I was and began my story about our new neighbours. I explained how I had been in the gift shop that day and saw everything that went down between the two of them. That the woman she thought was Reenie Barretto we knew as Bernadette Swicker. I could tell she was under the impression she was talking to another adult and there didn’t seem to be any point in correcting her. I went on to tell her how I had observed some strange behaviour from Mrs. Swicker, and fudged a little when I kind of implied that her children might be being mistreated. I kept waiting for her to cut me off, hang up, but she didn’t. She wasn’t standoffish or anything, she actually seemed quite intrigued by the whole thing.
“We’re just so worried about the children,” I added.
“I understand completely. If she’s pretending to be someone else, you’ve got to wonder why. Surely there’s a reason,” Phyllis said.
I asked her if she was still sure that Mrs. Swicker was the girl she went to high school with.
“I don’t know if I’d stake my life on it, but I’m fairly certain. She still looks exactly the same.” Phyllis paused. “She was such an odd bird, not easy to get to know. Always skulking around with that camera of hers, snapping pictures when you least expected it.”
I swallowed hard. “Mrs. Swicker is a photographer.”
“Now that’s quite the coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Do you have a picture of Reenie Barretto you could send us?”
“Ummm…her yearbook picture, maybe.”
“That would be great. And possibly anything else you can remember about her.”
“I’ll have to sit down and think about that for a bit, but if anything comes to me I’ll send it along. You have a fax number?”
I gave it to her and thanked her. She made me promise to keep her posted.
Jilly sucked in her breath. “There’s Mom’s car. Abort! Abort!”
I hung up the phone. “Shut down the computer. We have to make sure everything’s the way it was.”
Jilly took a final frantic look around and practically shoved me out the door. We tore down the hall back to my room. We were lounging casually on my bed when Mom stopped in the doorway. She was flipping through a pile of mail.
“There’re some boxes in the trunk of the car,” she said without looking up. “Can you girls bring them in for me?” She continued down the hall to her office.
We hadn’t even made it to the stairs.
“Jilly!” It was Mom.
We looked at each other.
“If you’re going to be sneaking around where you’re not supposed to, you might want to think about changing to an unscented shampoo! It smells like a fruit farm in here. And what’s this paper with the names on it?”
“You left the paper?” I gasped.
“Never mind that now. She’s coming. You’re a way better liar than I am. Think of something.”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended. “Tell her they’ve been linked to Robert Pattinson or something,” I whispered just as Mom came around the corner.
“Sorry, Mom, I was just Googling some names,” Jilly said.
I couldn’t believe she was taking the fall all on her own.
“They’re just names of girls linked to Robert Pattinson,” she explained. “I wanted to get the scoop, you know, check out the competition.”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “And what was wrong with the computer downstairs?”
“Lydia was on MSN Messenger. I asked her about twenty times to let me have a turn, but she wouldn’t.”
My mouth dropped open. I should have known.
“Hardly an emergency, Jilly,” Mom sighed. “Please don’t make me ban you girls from the computer. And I don’t want
to have to start locking my office door, either. You know how I feel about people mucking around in there.”
“Sorry. It won’t happen again.” Jilly was the picture of remorse.
Mom took another look at the piece of paper before handing it back to Jilly. “Phyllis Munroe. Isn’t she in that new movie with Julia Roberts?”
“Hey, I think you’re right, Mom,” Jilly said, nodding.
Mom returned to her office and closed her door.
We both rolled our eyes and shrugged.
Chapter 18
It’s amazing how your brain keeps working, processing, even when you’re asleep. Damn! My eyes flew open and I sat bolt upright in my bed. The numbers on my clock radio glowed 2:08 in an eerie blue light. I threw back my covers and padded down the hallway to Jilly’s room.
She lay on her back, hair curled up in Velcro rollers, purple furry sleep mask covering her eyes.
I poked her on the arm. “Jilly,” I whispered.
Nothing.
“Jilly!” I poked harder.
She moaned and rubbed her arm. Lifting up a corner of her mask, she glared at me with one eye. “What?”
“We screwed up,” I said. “We told Phyllis to fax us the stuff, but we didn’t tell her when. Mom’s going to find it, or hear it. You know the racket that thing makes.”
“Shit!” Jilly whipped off her mask and sprang out of bed. “Well, we have to call her back, give her a specific time or something.”
“One…it’s quarter after two in the morning, and two…how are we going to explain that? Our mom only lets us receive faxes during certain times of the day? Phyllis thinks she’s dealing with a grown-up, remember?”
“Damn you and your…your…super-mature voice.”
“She probably wouldn’t have been so keen to help if she thought I was just some punk kid,” I defended.
“I guess.” She crawled back into her bed. “Let me think for a sec…Wait, I think I got it.”
“Okay, give it to me.”
“Vivian.”
I didn’t need to hear any more. “Uh-uh, no way.”
“Cool your jets. Her dad’s got a fax machine. We’ll just tell Phyllis that ours isn’t working and have her fax the info to Viv’s number.”
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