by Tim Tharp
So I dropped it back into the grass, which pissed him off all over again. The second cop was already on his walkie-talkie. He’s like, “Captain, I found a blue running shoe in sector four.”
For real. That’s what he said: “I found a blue running shoe.” Completely stealing the credit. I mean, this was a big discovery. If this really was Ashton’s shoe, it didn’t look good for her. Unless, of course, someone else came out here disguised as her.
Everybody had to stay perfectly still—like we were playing freeze tag—until the captain and his entourage showed up. He wanted to know exactly where the shoe was found, so the uniformed cop had to give it up that I was really the one who found it. Then I got reamed all over again for moving it from its original place. You’d think they’d be grateful.
I showed the captain the exact spot where I stepped on the shoe, and he’s like, “It was probably transported to this location by an animal”—not to me but to his flunkies. Still, this seemed like a pretty good time to offer up my theory, so I’m like, “Captain, it might be good to test that shoe for DNA in case someone else might have come out here disguised as Ashton Browning as a trick.”
“What are you talking about?” He looked at me kind of like a teacher will when you say the exact wrong answer in class, only more so. Then he looked at the uniformed cop next to him. “What’s this kid talking about—a disguise?”
The uniform shook his head.
But I didn’t think I should give up that easy. “Have you seen that show Andromeda Man?”
Captain Lewis looked at me again, this time like he couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t disappeared yet. “Everybody, stand back,” he shouted. And the next thing you know, he was on the walkie-talkie, and a few minutes later our search party got replaced by the first team.
Audrey’s like, “Really? Andromeda Man? Are you kidding me?”
“Hey, at least I found the shoe. What’d you do?”
Trix stepped over and goes, “That really was pretty cool. You’re quite the detective.”
“Yeah, right,” said Audrey, but I was thinking, Hmmm, maybe I should be the one flirting with Trix.
Then, after about a half hour of watching the police and their dogs scour our sector without finding anything else, Trix came up with a superb suggestion: “You know what? Since they took over our job, why don’t we head back to the tent and see if they’ve started on those burgers.”
Yes, all of a sudden I had a whole new outlook on her.
CHAPTER 11
Only one other search party had returned to the tent by the time we got there, so we nabbed some good seats. Green plastic chairs and tables with white tablecloths had been set up while we were gone. It was weirdly festive considering the circumstances. As for the burgers, all I can say is they were a revelation.
First we filed past a long table where all the fixings were: warm whole-wheat buns, cheeses I’d never heard of, crisp leaves of rich green lettuce, deep red tomatoes, crunchy onion circles, three kinds of pickles, five kinds of mustard, four kinds of mayonnaise, and gourmet barbecue sauce.
I admit I put one kind of mustard on the top bun and another on the bottom. Then, along with the Camembert cheese, lettuce, tomato, and onion, I went with all three kinds of pickles. And of course, zero mayonnaise. I won’t go into all the side dishes, except to point out they had no French fries, so I chose the fancy macaroni and cheese, which, by the way, was white, not yellow, and had jalapeños in it.
Now, I’m not going to declare the meat was grilled better than anyplace else, but I can guarantee this—the ingredients were mind-blowing. The freshness of the produce, the texture of the Kobe beef, everything was amazing. It dawned on me that this must be how it was for rich people every day—the best of everything. I could just imagine what Topper’s could do with ingredients like this.
Sitting at our table, I guess I must have been going on about all this a little too much because Trix’s like: “What’s with him? Hasn’t he ever had a hamburger before?”
“Oh yeah,” Audrey said. “He’s had a few in his time.”
Trix turned to me and goes, “God, I thought you were going to have an orgasm.”
I was just thinking how sexy it was, the way she said the word orgasm, when this tall blond guy—obviously a Hollister student—stopped next to our table. “Hey, Trix,” he said with a smile like the white cliffs of Dover. “Mind if we sit with you guys?”
With him was a fine looker who also sported an orthodontic miracle for a smile. Actually, she was absolutely striking—black hair and blue eyes, a completely killer combination.
“Why?” Trix said. The tone of her voice switched to bored.
“Just wanted to get to know the man who found the big clue,” he said, setting his tray of food on the table. He clapped me on the back and then sat next to me while Blue Eyes sat on the other side next to Audrey. He reached over to shake my hand. “I’m Nash Pierce,” he said. “This is Brett Seagreaves.”
Brett. A girl named Brett. So here I was at the table with Beatrix, Nash, and Brett, thinking, Don’t rich people ever have regular names? It was like their names were fancy brand names, you know? Like brands of clothes I couldn’t afford.
I introduced myself and Audrey, and Nash asked the inevitable where-do-you-go-to-school question. I admitted the whole truth, and surprisingly he’s like, “That’s cool. I’ve always wanted to know someone who went there. You guys have a badass reputation.”
I’m like, “Really? We do?”
And he’s, “Sure. Everyone at Hollister thinks that. So how did you happen to come all the way up here to join the search party?”
“We’re working on a story for the school paper,” Audrey said. “He’s a reporter, and I’m the photographer.”
“That’s interesting,” Nash said. Then he looked me in the eyes. “So, how did you do it? How did you find her shoe? Did you have some kind of system for searching for it?”
“He’s just an amazing detective, that’s all,” Trix cut in.
“He must be awesome,” Nash said. “Maybe you’ll be the one who finds Ashton. I hope so. We’re really worried about her.”
Usually, I have a pretty strong irony detector—you can’t love Walker, Texas Ranger like I do without having a good sense of irony—but I wasn’t sure whether Nash was putting me on or whether he really did think I was awesome. Maybe it was the hamburgers. I have to admit they left me feeling a little intimidated. You have to assume these Hollister kids are mega-smart. I mean, if they’re going to use only the best ingredients in their burgers, you can just imagine what they put into their education.
Anyway, I figured the best strategy for dredging up some scoop from these people would be to play humble, so I’m like, “Oh, I’m just trying to be of whatever help I can. Maybe if I knew a little more about Ashton, I could contribute some little something or other. How well did you two know her, Nash?”
Before he could answer, Brett cut in: “Nash and Ashton used to date.”
“That was a year ago,” Nash said.
Very interesting—Nash seemed cool, but the ex-boyfriend has to rank pretty high on the suspect list. Maybe he was just playing friendly with me to find out how much I knew.
So I asked him what happened with him and Ashton, and he’s like, “I don’t know. She’s a sweetheart, but, well, we were just juniors, you know?”
“And then Ashton started to get this whole save-the-world thing going,” Brett added.
“Like that’s supposed to be a bad thing?” Trix cut in.
“That was a long time after I dated her,” Nash said. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact she’s missing.”
“Was she dating anyone else?” I asked. “You know, more recently?”
“Yeah,” Brett said. “As a matter of fact, she dated Rowan Adams up until the end of summer.”
Another suspect for my list. This was getting good.
I asked if this Rowan guy was around anywhere, and Nash goes, “
I’m sure he is,” but before he could point him out, a voice came from over my shoulder.
“Hey, Nash, you saving this empty seat for anyone?”
I looked around to see Tres Browning standing behind me, a gloomy expression on his pale turtle face. Nash told him we were saving the seat for him and introduced me as the guy who found Ashton’s shoe.
“I heard about that,” Tres said as he sat next to Brett. He had kind of a queasy air about him, like, as rich as he was, he still wasn’t quite in the same league with Brett and Nash. “I was wondering,” he said, looking at me without raising his head all the way. “Can you tell me what the shoe looked like or if you happened to see what brand it was?”
I felt stupid for not checking the brand. I guess I was too excited. Not that I’m much of an expert on running shoes. “Well, it wasn’t a Nike. I can tell you that much.” Nike being the only logo I would probably recognize. “But I can tell you it had a logo that was sort of a sideways triangle with a line sticking out of it.”
“That sounds like her shoe all right,” Tres said, looking solemnly down at his plate.
“Why?” I asked. “Were you thinking maybe someone came out here disguised as her?”
“What?” He looked up. “Did the police say they thought that’s what happened?”
“No,” Audrey volunteered. “That’s just one of his crazy theories.”
A crazy theory. That’s what Detective Svendsen said to the Andromeda Man too.
But then Nash’s like, “I don’t think it’s so crazy. What if someone did come out here disguised as her to throw everybody off?”
I looked at him but still couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. Just then, sploosh! Tres dropped his soda cup smack into the middle of his plate. His hand was trembling.
“Hey, Tres, what’s the problem?” Nash asked.
“Sorry,” Tres said. “I guess my nerves are kind of frazzled.”
For a second, Brett looked at him like he was some kind of mental defective, but she covered it quickly, patted him on the arm, and went, “We know you miss her, but things will be all right. They’ll find her.”
I wasn’t sure—I hadn’t been around a lot of rich kids—but her sympathy seemed kind of fake.
“I keep thinking about her,” Tres said, mopping up the spilled soda with his napkin. “We had a fight just the other day. I called her—well, something I shouldn’t have.”
“Hey, brothers and sisters have fights,” Nash told him. “It’s natural. When you get her back safe at home, she won’t even remember it.”
Staring at the table, Tres goes, “When we were kids, this one time I got lost and she—” He stopped. His head was bowed, so I couldn’t tell if he was crying, but it seemed likely.
“I know it’s hard,” Nash said. “But think of it this way, Tres—we have Dylan on our side. He’s already doing a better job than the police.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
And Nash’s like, “As a matter of fact, Dylan, you need to friend us on Facebook so we can keep in touch. What do you think about that?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Maybe we’ll get together and talk some more about the case for your newspaper article.”
“Really?”
“You bet. And it’d be great if maybe you could send me copies of your articles. That way I could spread them around at school to keep everyone up to date.”
“I could do that,” I said, flattered to think of my writing circulating among the Hollister elite.
“We might even have a party,” Brett said, flashing me that brilliant smile. Before I could follow up on that, she excused herself, saying she had to go talk to somebody on the other side of the tent, but as she stood, she looked down at me and goes, “Nice hat, by the way.”
I watched her walk through the crowd. Maybe she did really like the hat or maybe she thought it was the lamest thing she’d ever seen—I just couldn’t be sure.
CHAPTER 12
After I got home from the search, I had to come clean to my parents about quitting the grocery-store job. They didn’t care so much that I quit the job, but they definitely weren’t happy that I did it on such short notice. Dad was all about how you never knew when you might need a job reference sometime down the line, and Mom was all, “That’s not how we taught you to treat people. You have to have more respect for others than that.”
They were right, of course, and I did feel bad about the job, but I explained how I had to make a choice between sacking groceries and devoting myself to my investigative journalism. The kids who became editors and got all sorts of articles published had to stay after school, I told them. Sure, it was great to make money for right now, but I also had my future career to think about.
That calmed them down. They were glad to see I was taking something seriously for a change. So they switched the lecture over to explaining how all my other school subjects were also important for a journalist, and then, when they started listing the classes I should take in college, my mind drifted off into a mental movie of me cruising up and down in front of my high school in a red ’69 Mustang.
Next Monday at school, I found out my buddy Randy was even less happy with me for quitting the grocery store, and he wasn’t at all impressed with my new emphasis on being an investigative journalist. Seems that since I left, the store was shorthanded, and the extra workload fell on him. That was something I hadn’t thought about. To make it up, I invited him over to help research the Ashton Browning case with me and Audrey.
We congregated in my bedroom, and like a good host I cracked open some Dr Peppers and laid out a bowl of Chex Mix, the Traditional blend. I really like the Bold Party Blend, except the drawback is it lingers on your breath the rest of the day. No amount of teeth-brushing, mouth-washing, or mint-eating can destroy that taste. It’s nuclear.
Now, when the Andromeda Man did research, he had access to all sorts of records—bank accounts, rap sheets, tax files, even parking-ticket info—but me, I had Facebook. So the three of us sat on the floor with our backs against the bed and began poring over the Facebook profiles of some of the Hollister kids I’d hooked up with. I halfway expected Nash, Brett, and Tres to have forgotten who I was already, but no, they friended me right back when I sent in the request. Trix friended me and Audrey both.
Then I used their friends lists to hook up with quite a few people who’d never met me, including Rowan Adams, Ashton’s latest boyfriend. Every one of them friended me right back too. Really, these Hollisterites seemed to be just like kids at my school. They didn’t care if they knew you or not. They just wanted to add as many names as they could to jack up their friends total.
There wasn’t a whole lot to find out from their profiles, just the usual stuff about music, movies, books, that kind of thing. But there were a few interesting tidbits like how Nash was a hotshot wide receiver on the football team, Brett was class treasurer, Tres played the oboe, and Trix didn’t say anything about only being interested in girls. That didn’t deter Audrey, though. Right off, she jotted down a list of books and movies Trix liked, I guess so she could work them into their next conversation.
Randy’s like, “This is boring. I thought we were going to scope out some hot rich babes, not a lesbian girlfriend for Audrey.”
“Who are you trying to kid, Randy?” Audrey said. “I’ll bet you’ve had more secret gay sex than a Republican senator.”
To which Randy responded with an extended fart, his usual comeback to anything he didn’t like.
“Real mature,” Audrey said.
But Randy was right. We weren’t getting anywhere with the profiles, especially since we didn’t have access to the most important one—Ashton Browning’s. So we moved on to check out the Hollister kids’ photos instead. It was pretty interesting looking at their sweet rides and houses and bedrooms and whatnot, but that really wasn’t getting us anywhere either. I was after some photos of Ashton and finally found some. Nash had quite a few of
him and her, and some of the older ones looked pretty cozy. I couldn’t help imagining myself in his situation—her head leaning against mine, her fingers touching my face, the two of us with our arms around each other.
Maybe someday it’ll be like that, I thought. After I find her and bring her home, how could she resist me and my hundred-thousand-dollar reward and my awesome ’69 Mustang?
Surprisingly, Rowan Adams had no pictures of him and Ashton. That was weird. Why wouldn’t you keep her photos? Obviously, Nash did, which meant they must’ve stayed friendly after the breakup. But Rowan and Ashton? Apparently, not so much.
Looking at the photos of him, I couldn’t figure out what she saw in him in the first place. For one thing, he was a little too flamboyant in the attire department. Definitely a hat guy. And an ironic-blazer wearer. By that, I mean these blazers were outrageous—red, orange, even chartreuse—so you had to figure they were some kind of joke.
But that was nothing. The real thing that irritated me was his eyes and smile. It was like he had small dark eyes and a good-sized beak that made them look even smaller. Not that he was ugly, but he had this smug expression in almost every picture that told you he thought he was hot stuff. You’ve seen that little smirk. It made you want slap him in the face with a cold fish.
Audrey’s like, “Put a blond wig on that kid and he’s Draco Malfoy all over again.”
“Definitely prime Slytherin material,” Randy added. Next we moved on to eyeball the posts and comments, hoping they might reveal some tasty clues and that Ashton might have some stuff on there too. Like the profiles, though, the posts weren’t much different from the tidbits kids at my school cluttered their walls with.
It’s weird—reading posts like that, you only get one small side of people’s personalities. One’s always griping, another’s impossibly upbeat, and yet another’s always coming with the jokes. You could get the idea that’s how they are all the time if you don’t know them outside of cyberspace.
