Trouble Makes a Comeback

by Stephanie Tromly

I said, “What are you talking about? I think about the future all the time—”

  “But you need to wake up, Zoe.”

  “I am awake.”

  “Wake up!” Dad said.

  I said, “Yes, I keep telling you—”

  “Wake up!” Then he clapped really loudly right in my face. “Because this is your life.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It isn’t my life. Princeton was your life. The LSATs were your life. You don’t know anything about my life,” I said.

  “You mean catting around with boys?” Dad said. “That’s what your life is?”

  “Isn’t it better I get it out of my system now than have some affair at work that blows up my marriage later?” I said.

  Dad looked at Mom and said, “You let her talk to you like this?”

  “She isn’t wrong, Richard,” Mom said.

  “What are you talking about, Liza? Were you or were you not just texting me that you were worried . . .” Dad put on a high mocking voice and fluttered his hands. “Oooh, Richard, Zoe hasn’t come home yet and she won’t answer my texts. Oooh, Richard, now she’s with that criminal kid again and I haven’t seen her pick up a book all week long.”

  “Is that supposed to be Mom?” I said.

  “Or is that limp-wristed feeble act an insult aimed at all women?” Mom said.

  Dad said, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t turn this into another one of your feminist rants . . .”

  The fight was on. My work done, I took my toast and coffee and went into the living room just as Cooper walked in the front door.

  “Who’s your mother yelling at in there?” Cooper said.

  “My father. You should probably just . . . go upstairs,” I said.

  “But I need to eat something,” Cooper said.

  I gave him my toast and coffee and we walked up the stairs together.

  “So, Stella called me,” Cooper said. “Is Digby still here?”

  “He’s packing up. My dad kicked him out,” I said.

  “We’ll see about that,” Cooper said. He knocked on the guest room door.

  “Hey, Officer Cooper,” Digby said. “I can see you already know.”

  “Can you please tell me how you’ve managed to insert yourself in Stella’s investigation?” Cooper said.

  “Do you know a lawyer named Jonathan Book?” Digby said. “His office is in the south-side business park?”

  Out of habit, Cooper retrieved his notebook and wrote down the name. “Uh . . . no, I don’t think I know him.”

  “I need help looking him up in the system,” Digby said.

  I eased past Cooper into Digby’s room. “Whoa,” I said. I suppose I’d expected to be bowled over by a huge mess, but the stacked and folded clothes and toiletries in little Ziploc bags were even more of a shock.

  Cooper saw my expression and said, “It’s the neat ones you really need to watch . . . they’re organized, so they’re harder to catch.” To Digby, Cooper said, “Of course you know I’d be violating his rights if I started investigating him without cause. Who is he, anyway?”

  “He’s on the board of a real estate corporation that owns and manages a bunch of places in town . . .” Digby said. “One of them might be the building where my sister was held after she was kidnapped.”

  “What?” Cooper was shocked. “You’re sure?”

  “Well . . . I think. Maybe,” Digby said. “Definitely maybe.”

  “Even if it were the place . . . it isn’t a crime to have felonious tenants, Digby,” Cooper said. “But. I will ask Stella. Maybe she turned up something on him while she was working her case. Illegal manufacturing and distribution of alcohol . . . but I guess you know that.” Cooper flipped his notebook shut. “Good enough?”

  Digby nodded. “Good enough.” He held out his hand for Cooper to shake. “You know my number.”

  Cooper said, “Want me to make a stink? You don’t have to go.”

  “Nah. I’m ready to go.” Digby held up an empty bag of Cheez Doodles. “Besides, this house is officially out of food.”

  I walked Digby downstairs to the front door.

  “I’m really sorry, Digby.”

  “It’s okay, Princeton. I’m sorry that your dad is the person he is. On the upside, this’ll probably make things easier between you and Austin,” Digby said.

  Austin. I hadn’t answered any of his messages all day.

  I went back upstairs after Digby left and found Cooper hanging around outside my bedroom door. He pointed in the direction of my parents’ yelling in the living room. I was glad to hear that unlike her past arguments with my dad, my mother was putting up a fight. “What are they fighting about?”

  “They’re worried I’m not ready for my SATs on Saturday because I’ve been goofing off with Digby this last week,” I said.

  “Well? Are you ready?” Cooper said.

  “Yeah. I mean, can I guarantee I’ll do well?” I shrugged. “But I’m ready to take it.”

  Cooper looked at me hard and then nodded. “Okay.”

  “Ha. Just like that,” I said.

  “Sure. But then again, I haven’t spent seventeen years of my life worrying about you, so I can afford to be cool,” Cooper said. “So, uh . . . did you know your dad was coming?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re flying down to see him next weekend, so it’s weird he’s here, isn’t it?” Cooper said.

  I shrugged again.

  “You said they’re worried about you? So they’re talking? How much are they talking?”

  I didn’t say anything. I remembered Digby once explained to me what dry snitching was. I wondered if I’d done just that with my silence.

  A heartbeat later, Cooper said, “Sorry . . . I’m sorry. That was not appropriate.” He fled the scene in shame.

  I was still hungry, so I went back down to heat up some food. Mom and Dad’s fight about me had blossomed into a retrial of my parents’ past crimes against each other. I was at the sink, washing dishes and thinking about how, perversely, all the yelling made me nostalgic, when Digby’s face suddenly popped up outside the window in front of me.

  I opened the window and threw the sponge at him. “You scared the crap out of me. Did you forget something?”

  “I need a favor,” he said. “Come with me?”

  “What?” I pointed in the direction of the shouting. “I don’t think I’m even done getting in trouble for the last thing I did wrong.”

  “Please,” he said. “I’m going home and I haven’t spoken to my mother in years. I’m nervous. Help?”

  “How can I help?” I said. But the look on his face told me this was one of the rare instances when Digby wasn’t being even a little bit sarcastic. “Okay.” I shut the window and pointed toward the back.

  On the way to the stairs, I ducked into the living room and said to my parents, “I’m going to bed.” And, as was always the case, they were too busy fighting over my welfare to actually pay attention to me. Even when I said I was going to bed at five p.m.

  I went into my room, locked the door, climbed out onto the tree branch by my window, and shimmied down. I was creeping toward Digby when Mom looked out the window and caught sight of me. We both froze. After a second, though, Mom maneuvered herself so that I’d be obscured from my father’s view as I ran across.

  “Too bad your mother can’t seem to stay away from your dad,” Digby said. “He’s such bad news and yet she keeps coming back for more.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s her problem, right?”

  And we jogged to the bus stop.

  NINETEEN

  I realized it wouldn’t be a normal homecoming when he had us sneak back to his house via the back door and he signaled me to tiptoe when I went up the stairs. I said,
“I don’t know why when you said you were going home, I assumed you meant through the front door.”

  Digby led me to the room at the end of the second-floor hall, shut the door, and turned on the light. After my eyes adjusted, I found myself standing in what must have been Sally’s room. Dust covered everything and it looked like it had been left untouched for years. The window’s sash, I noticed, was patchy with black fingerprint powder.

  He ran his fingers along the spines of the books on Sally’s shelf before pulling off the blanket on his sister’s bed to reveal the bedding underneath.

  “I thought I’d made up the memory,” he said.

  I didn’t need to check the duvet’s pattern against the photo on Digby’s phone to know the balloons and circus tents on Sally’s old sheets looked just like the crayon scribblings we’d found on the warehouse wall downtown.

  “God. Then that was her writing on that wall,” I said. “But not the other ones. The black circles with X’s.”

  “Wait. I just remembered . . .” Digby walked down the hall into what must have been his childhood room. It was neat, which would’ve been a surprise had I not seen the way he kept the guest room. What was interesting, though, was that instead of normal boy stuff like pictures of robots or superheroes, Digby’s walls had things like a periodic table and charts summarizing the reigns of English kings and the Egyptian pharaohs tacked up. I felt like I was getting a glimpse into how his evil genius developed.

  He got out his knife and tore off part of the wallpaper beside his bed. There were more triangles and circles in various kinds of ink on it. “She started drawing on walls the second she could hold a pen . . .”

  “That’s why I put up wallpaper.” We both jumped at the sound of Digby’s mom’s voice behind us. I hadn’t even heard the door open. “Because it was easier to wash the ink off wallpaper. But it backfired because then she thought I could wash the ink off all the walls in the house.”

  I’d never seen Digby’s mom up close before. I realized for the first time how much Digby looked like her. They had the same puppy dog eyes and the long gangly body. Steady and sober, she looked like an entirely different person from the one I’d seen last fall swigging champagne from a bottle and lighting an impromptu bonfire on her lawn.

  “Philip? What are you doing here? You found something?” Digby’s mom said.

  Digby said, “Maybe? I might have seen Sally’s drawings on a wall in a building downtown.”

  His mother looked stunned. And then she said, “I need to call him.” To the empty space where she’d been standing, Digby said, “Also, I’m fine, Mom. Glad you asked. Haven’t seen you in years . . .”

  I sat down on the bed. He plopped down next to me and we both lay back.

  “My God, this day just keeps going,” I said.

  “Hey . . . girl in my bed,” he said. “Eleven-year-old me just high-fived present me.”

  “Really? You can still joke?” I said.

  “Who’s joking? How many times do I need to remind you how the mind of a seventeen-year-old guy works?” Digby said. “We are always good to go.”

  “Wait. Did your mother say, ‘I need to call him’?” I said. “Who’s ‘him’?” When Digby didn’t seem to want to get out of bed, I said, “Don’t you think we should go find out?”

  “Yeah. I just need a second. It’s . . . I haven’t spoken to my mother in years . . .”

  I wanted to comfort him but I’d seen him like this before. He needed to retreat into himself, so I lay next to him, silent.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We walked into the kitchen just as Digby’s mother finished her phone conversation and hung up.

  “Mom, we need to talk about Sally,” Digby said.

  To me, Digby’s mom said, “I’m Val. It’s nice to meet you, Zoe.” She shook my hand. Then she went over to Digby. Her hand hesitated in midair before she reached out to stroke his arm. “Look at my guy . . . too proud to ask how I knew who you are.”

  Digby looked away when she hugged him. “I think I know what happened to Sally after they took her,” he said.

  Val stayed in the hug and said, “Yes, honey, I do too.”

  Digby pulled away and stared at her hard. And then he walked out of the kitchen.

  Val turned to me and said, “Would you like some milk and cookies . . . or maybe pretzels? Actually, it’s time to bring out the big guns. Go on in. I’ll make Hot Pockets. I bought some when I heard Philip was back in town.”

  “You knew he was back?” I said. “How?”

  “Go ahead. I’ll bring them in,” she said.

  I went out to the living room.

  “You know when you’re a kid and the grown-ups would spell out the words so you wouldn’t know you were going to the D-O-C-T-O-R?” he said. “I just realized the last nine years of my life have been like that.”

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “I just feel like an idiot for ever thinking I knew what was going on,” he said.

  I walked around the room, pretending to look at pictures and books while Digby stewed.

  Val came in with Hot Pockets and little cartons of chocolate milk. I was relieved to see Digby wasn’t too upset to eat. He took a huge bite and of course, burned his tongue. As I handed him the chocolate milk I’d opened in anticipation of exactly this, Val patted my hand. “I’m glad Philip has a girlfriend looking out for him.”

  “Nope. Zoe has a boyfriend,” Digby said. “Do you know a man named Book?”

  “You know, it’d be better if we waited. The negotiator who was helping us back then is coming over.” Val peeked out the window. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  “Negotiator? Like, a kidnap negotiator?” Digby said. “So all these years you’ve known it was a kidnap for money? Then what are we waiting for? Let’s call the FBI.”

  “It isn’t that simple,” Val said.

  “Is Sally dead?” Digby said.

  “They never gave us any proof she died,” Val said.

  “But there’s no proof she’s alive either?” When Val was quiet, Digby said, “So, that means she’s dead. Grow up, Mom.”

  Even for Digby, that was too crappy a thing to say. “Dude, come on,” I said.

  “Probably dead and at the bottom of a lake somewhere,” Digby said. Now he was just being cruel. “How much did they want?”

  Val sat down, staring at her hands and crying.

  “Shut up.” I threw the half-empty milk carton at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Digby took his time wiping the milk from his face. When he was done, he said, “Thank you for that, Princeton. I think that’s as close as I’ll ever get to being possessed.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. You’re also like that when you’re hangry,” I said. “Why do you think I carry granola bars everywhere?”

  The back door opened. Digby peered around the corner and said, “Oh, thank God. I at least called that one . . .”

  And then Fisher walked into the room. Without having changed anything at all since I last saw him at the store, the Fisher standing in front of me was a completely different man. He had a slightly apologetic smile, but there was a hardness to his face I’d never seen before.

  “Fisher?” I said.

  “Who are you, really?” Digby said.

  “Your parents hired me,” Fisher said.

  “Then why have I never seen you before?” Digby said.

  “Your parents couldn’t let the police or FBI know they were negotiating independently for your sister’s return,” Fisher said. “I worked behind the scenes.”

  “What? Why? The FBI has negotiators,” Digby said. “Couldn’t they do the negotiating?”

  “Philip, nine years ago, I was part of a research group subcontracted to the government. Your father and I decided not to tell you kids a
nything about my classified research until Sally was old enough to consistently tell our cover story correctly,” Val said. “When Sally was taken, we got a ransom demand telling me to turn over material on one of our top secret projects.”

  “But you couldn’t just turn over classified government research,” Digby said.

  “A friend in Washington put me in touch with Fisher and he coached us through our double agenda . . . we pretended to cooperate with the authorities while hiding the fact that we were negotiating for Sally . . . that’s why we didn’t tell the police or the FBI about the ransom demand at all,” Val said.

  “And what happened when you didn’t give them what they wanted . . . ?” Digby said.

  “No, honey . . . you don’t understand. We did give it to them. Well, we tried to,” Val said. “I made copies of my work—”

  “Mom.” I’d never seen the expression on Digby’s face before. He looked more frightened than he had even at gunpoint. “That’s . . .”

  “Treason. Yes. I know.” Val nodded. “And your father tried to stop me. He wanted to tell the FBI. Things weren’t the same between us after I did that.”

  “But what? They double-crossed you?” Digby said. “Why didn’t we get Sally back?”

  “Well, the problem was, I couldn’t get to all of my research that night we broke in, and when I tried again, my credentials had been revoked. Perses put me on administrative leave,” Val said. “They claimed they were doing it for me . . . for my health, they said. I think they suspected I was trying to steal information, but since they couldn’t prove anything . . .”

  “But what were you actually working on?” Digby said.

  “Just . . . theoretical stuff. A goof of mine, really,” Val said. “We were playing with using nanotechnology to substitute for chemical interventions in biological organisms. Deliver drugs with more precision, for example—”

  “Or biological weapons,” Digby said.

  “We never intended that,” Val said. “It was just a grant proposal I never expected to go anywhere. I mean, I was riffing on a physics joke Richard Feynman made . . . FUN. Feynman’s Unbuildable Nanorobotics. Except somehow people heard and started talking—and, I mean, it was mostly to laugh and say it was doomed to fail,” Val said. “Scientists are bitchy creatures.”