The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  She stopped pacing and looked at me, her youthful features quivering.

  “You’re not being stupid, I don’t think that at all,” I said. I was trying to be calm and adultlike. But I felt sick and it wasn’t only because of how much vodka I’d consumed last night. Belmont didn’t have a good track record of returning teenage girls that didn’t come home. “But I need you to take a deep breath and tell me what happened, okay?”

  Shelby nodded and sat down in the recliner where Joshua had sat the first night I came here. “She always rides with me to school,” she said. “Usually she comes over when she’s ready but sometimes she doesn’t, like if she’s running late, and then I go there. She lives right next door. And today she didn’t come and when I went over there, her stepdad answered the door and when I asked if she was ready for school he got really weird, and he was like I thought she was at your house. But she wasn’t. And then he told me I better go to school and he would deal with her.”

  “Was she supposed to be at your house?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why would she say that?”

  “She probably went to Insomnia,” Shelby said. I must have looked confused, because she added, “It’s a coffee shop down the street. She was telling me yesterday that this guy Aaron, his band was playing there last night, she likes him. Her parents said she couldn’t go.” Her eyes were on the carpet between her Doc Martens. “The show was at ten and my curfew is ten thirty, so I couldn’t go either. But they always let her come over here. “

  “When did you talk to her last?” I said.

  “When she left here. It was like seven thirty. And I was like, Tell Aaron hi for me, but it was a joke, because she couldn’t go. I thought she was just going to go home.” She jumped up and resumed pacing the floor.

  I didn’t like the sound of this. Not at all. I couldn’t help but think that yesterday evening, Kenny Brayfield had missed most of his own party. “Okay. Shelby, is this like her? Lying to her parents?”

  She wrestled the messenger bag off her shoulders and flung it on chair she’d been sitting in. “I don’t know. No. Her mom is, like, kind of oblivious, she just wants to get her hair done and work out all the time. Her stepdad pretty much sucks, he acts like Vee is the world’s worst kid just because she has to go to a therapist. I think she just really wanted to go see Aaron.”

  “Insomnia,” I said. “It’s walking distance?”

  She nodded. “If you cut through the neighborhood it’s like a ten-minute walk, you just go between the houses and then you’re in this big parking lot for the Kroger. It’s in the same plaza.”

  I rubbed my forehead. The headache hadn’t gone anywhere yet, but it barely mattered now. “Let’s go talk to her parents, okay?” I said.

  * * *

  Veronica’s stepdad was a short guy in a dark blue suit and tie, a pair of frameless glasses perched halfway up his nose. He threw the door open like he couldn’t wait to scream at somebody—probably Veronica—and then looked confused when he saw who it was. “Shelby,” he said. “And…?”

  “This is Roxane,” Shelby said, “she’s a friend of my dad’s and she’s a private investigator—”

  He laughed, but it seemed angry. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Veronica is not missing. We both know that she’s just being inconsiderate. She doesn’t think about how her actions affect other people. She’s probably sitting in homeroom right now.”

  “No she’s not,” Shelby said, her voice thick with more tears.

  I took a step forward, shielding her slightly with my arm. “Sir, is your wife at home?”

  “She took a sleeping pill last night. I didn’t wake her up yet,” he said, cold. Then his tone went from chilly to condescending. “Shelby, does your father know you haven’t gone to school?”

  I could see why Shelby said he sucked and why Joshua had complained about him too. “Yes,” I said quickly, although he didn’t yet, “and right now, I think you should be more concerned with Veronica than with Shelby.”

  “Who are you again?” he snapped.

  “Who is it?” a voice said behind him. Then Veronica’s mother appeared over his shoulder. She was tall and a brittle kind of thin, her hair frosted blond and somehow styled already even though she was wearing a bathrobe. She took in Shelby and me, her expression going suspicious.

  “Mrs. Wexford,” Shelby said quickly, “we don’t know where Veronica is.”

  The woman widened her eyes, then narrowed them at her husband. “What?” she said. “Joseph. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “I didn’t want you to worry, you know how you get,” Mr. Wexford said.

  I wanted to punch him, but instead I thrust out my hand. “Ma’am,” I said, “my name is Roxane Weary, I’m a friend of Joshua and Shelby and I’m also a private investigator and I think you might want to call the police—”

  “Oh my God,” Mrs. Wexford said.

  “Now, just calm down—” her husband said.

  I cut him off. “Look, I’m not trying to alarm you, but Shelby hasn’t heard from your daughter for about twelve hours.” Mrs. Wexford covered her mouth with her hand when I said twelve hours, but I kept going. “We have reason to believe she went to see a band play at Insomnia, but we don’t know why she didn’t come home. Shelby says that it’s not like her to not answer her phone. So we should act quickly here, find her as soon as possible.”

  “We?” Veronica’s stepdad snapped. “Do you even know Veronica?”

  “Can we come in, please?” I said.

  He opened his mouth as if to say no, but his wife put her hand on his shoulder and begrudgingly he stepped away from the door.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Officer Meeks was the first to arrive at the Wexfords’ house. He sat on the sofa talking with Veronica’s mother—Amy—while her husband, Joseph, banged around in the kitchen, allegedly making coffee for his wife. I stood with Shelby at the front door. She kept looking outside for her friend or her father, who was on his way home from work. He’d asked me to stay with her till he got back. I didn’t blame him, given what was going on, given what had already happened. Joshua knew, perhaps better than anyone, what could occur if you chalked up someone’s absence to being inconsiderate.

  “She’s going to be so mad at me,” Shelby murmured to the glass panel in the storm door. She kept going back and forth between feeling certain that something was terribly wrong to convinced that her friend would hate her forever for blowing her cover. A self-preservation impulse, that. But there was no harm in it, or at least not yet.

  She turned back to the street as a silver Toyota pulled up and squealed into the driveway of her house, shocks crunching as it clipped the edge of the curb. Joshua jumped out of the car, eyes frantic. Shelby ran outside and across the yard and Joshua grabbed her hard in a hug that looked like it hurt. Their relationship was sweet. But it was entirely foreign to me. My father had been the last person I’d ever reach out to for comfort. I had to turn away.

  “No,” Amy Wexford was saying to Meeks, “her last name is Cruz. C-R-U-Z. Joseph is my second husband.”

  “Okay, Cruz, I got it. Is her father in the picture?”

  “They’re not close. He lives in Dayton.”

  “Has she ever done anything like this before?”

  Amy nodded. “We’ve had problems. My daughter has a form of bipolar disorder. But everything has been pretty good for the last year. She’s stable when she’s on her medication.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. It was only getting worse. In a regular missing persons case, Veronica’s age and the history of mental illness would flag her as high-risk, a critical missing—suicide, some kind of break with reality, or risky manic episode. All very real concerns. But I knew, like I had known about the rocks under the bridge at Clover Point, that this was something else.

  “Is she on it right now?” Meeks said. “Her medication.”

  “Yes,” Amy said. “She knows it helps
her.”

  I listened to them discuss Veronica’s stats for a few minutes: seventeen years old, five-eight, one-ten, dyed red-violet hair, brown eyes, ears pierced three times each, no tattoos or birthmarks, vintage coat with fur collar. When Amy got up to look for a photograph, I motioned Meeks over to me.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said quietly. “It’s going to sound a little out-there.”

  “Shoot.”

  I took a deep breath. “I think something is very wrong here.”

  He gave me a reassuring policeman smile. “Look, we get this all the time—”

  “No,” I said. “Something is wrong in Belmont. The body we found the other day. That didn’t happen in a vacuum. There are others. Shelby, Veronica’s friend? Her mother Mallory Evans was murdered sixteen years ago and her body was found in the same woods. In both cases, it was assumed that they left home voluntarily.”

  His brows inched toward each other.

  I went on. “And there’s another girl who’s been missing since 1999, Sarah Cook. So I don’t think anyone should be wasting time thinking this is just a case of irresponsible-teenager syndrome.”

  He sighed at that. I shouldn’t have said wasting time. Or maybe I shouldn’t have dumped the whole mess on him at once. “Are you saying you have a better idea than talking to her mother?” he said.

  I knew I should stop there, but I couldn’t. “Do you know the Brayfield family?”

  “Yeah, of course, why?”

  “Okay, this is the crazy part,” I said.

  He put a hand up. “Do I want to hear this?”

  “You need to hear it.” Based on his expression, I figured I had another minute before he wrote me off like Lassiter had yesterday. “Kenny Brayfield can be connected to the three girls I just mentioned. He dated Mallory Evans and didn’t come forward with that information after she was murdered. He was good friends with Sarah Cook’s boyfriend. And he works with Colleen Grantham’s father. These girls, all blond, who all went missing—”

  “I don’t—” Meeks started. “Kenny Brayfield? What are you even saying? Sarah Cook was the daughter of that family, they were killed ten, fifteen years ago. The guy who did it is in jail.”

  “No—”

  “And what does any of this have to do with Veronica Cruz? What’s the supposed connection to her? She’s not even blond.”

  He wasn’t listening to me. I needed to try a different tack. “Look. You were there with me in the woods.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was I wrong?”

  He sighed again. “No.”

  “I think Kenny Brayfield has been hurting people in Belmont for the last sixteen years,” I said. “Young women. Seventeen, eighteen years old. Like Veronica. Please. You have to see the connection. Two days after we find those bones and another girl is missing?”

  Now he shook his head, leaning in closer to me. “Don’t talk about that around these people.”

  “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  But then Amy Wexford walked back into the room, holding a five-by-seven plastic frame. “This is from picture day at school,” she said. “Will this work?”

  Meeks and I both looked at the photo.

  Veronica’s hair had been honey-colored at the beginning of the school year, cut into bangs. I tried to catch the cop’s eye but he wouldn’t let me.

  “Let’s make a list of your daughter’s friends, how about,” he said, turning away from me altogether.

  I ground my teeth together so hard my sinuses ached. Then I pushed out of the house, unable to stand still. I walked across the Evanses’ lawn, bits of dew-damp grass sticking to my boots, and I was about to knock on the door when Joshua pulled it open and grabbed my arm. Despite the cold temperature, he was sweating and the hand gripping my elbow was trembling slightly like he was tapped into the same well of concern that I was, only he had gotten there by way of personal experience rather than professional instinct. I wasn’t feeling very professional though. I felt like a disaster zone. I followed Joshua into the house.

  “Are you doing okay?” I said.

  He sat down heavily in the recliner. “Roxane, I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell my kid to stay calm, it’ll all be okay, because I’ve lived through this before and—”

  “Hey.” I crouched on the carpet in front of him and took his hand. “I know. I know what you’re thinking right now. I’m not going to give you the Pollyanna routine. But I do want you to stay calm for Shelby, okay? Let me do the worrying.”

  “I hardly know you,” he whispered. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. “And you knew my father. People have been telling me I’m just like him my whole life. So we’ve known each other forever, Joshua.”

  He nodded, squeezing my hand. “Okay.”

  “I want you to stick close to your daughter until we find Veronica.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need to talk to her for a few minutes and then I’m going to leave to go check into some things,” I said. “But you can call me if anything happens, and I’ll be back later.”

  “Okay. Thank you. Thank you for—” He stopped. “Thank you.”

  By my estimation, all I’d done for anyone so far was stir shit up in Belmont. But I nodded and stood up, my head pounding.

  “Shelby’s in her room,” he added, pointing toward the hallway.

  I found her sitting on a bed with a bright orange bedspread, an old, greying black Lab sprawled there beside her. The dog looked at me without interest. Shelby’s face was illuminated by the screen of the computer propped on her lap. “I’m looking on her Facebook and Twitter and Instagram to see if she posted anything,” she said as I stood in the door. “But she didn’t.”

  “Can I come in?”

  Shelby nodded. She put the computer down beside her and stroked the dog’s head.

  “I want to ask you some things,” I said. “And please be honest—don’t worry about getting Veronica in trouble.”

  “Okay.”

  Thinking that Colleen Grantham and Mallory Evans both had another connection besides Kenny, I said, “Does Veronica use drugs?”

  Her eyes got wide for a second. “Not really,” she said softly. “She used to smoke weed but she has to take lithium now so basically everything messes with her. So she doesn’t anymore.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Crushes? Maybe on an older guy?”

  “Just Aaron.”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  “No. He works there, at Insomnia. He’s just this guy with long hair and a pierced lip. I don’t even know why she likes him.”

  “Do you think she might have gone there with anyone else?”

  “No. Everyone else sucks here. She had—she used to be kind of popular, like more popular than me, and then at the end of sophomore year she started getting these mood swings really bad, she’d be happy and singing and dancing in class one day and then the next—she used to keep this, this little razor blade in her purse and she’d … you know, she hurt herself sometimes, she would cut her thigh. And I didn’t know what to do because she didn’t want to talk about it.” She looked down at the bedspread. “And then one time we were at the mall with some people and she had this total panic attack and they called an ambulance for her and stuff. She had to go be in a hospital for like the rest of the school year. And after that everybody kind of treated her like she was broken. She’s not broken, she’s not crazy, it’s just brain chemicals and stuff. But she pretty much only hangs out with me now. She—she knows I worry about her, though. That’s why she promised she would always answer her phone.” Shelby took a deep breath and blurted, “I love her. And not just like a friend.” Her voice was wobbly, vulnerable.

  I briefly closed my eyes. This poor kid. I could tell that she’d never said this to anyone before, not even Veronica. I thought about being seventeen myself, when Cathe
rine’s absence from school felt like the world was ending. And that was nothing like this. Shelby had to feel like her universe had flipped over. I wanted to say something reassuring, so I tried, “Shelby, it’s okay.”

  She covered her face with her hands, not buying it. “What is?”

  I took a deep breath. I doubted that I’d ever been the kind of person who would know what to say here, but I especially wasn’t that person right now. I said, “I don’t want to sound like an after-school special, with the whole it gets better thing. So I’ll tell you that falling in love is always the worst. But as far as it goes with liking girls? It does get better. I can tell you that from experience.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “My dad, I can’t tell him. About … me. And I know he’s just thinking about my mom right now and that’s so messed up, what happened. I don’t remember her. I don’t want to think about that. But I want to go out and look and he won’t let me and he doesn’t understand anything and I’m just going to go crazy, I swear to God.”

  “Look,” I said, “you’re going to get through this. You just have to stay as calm as you can. I know that’s a tall order, but making yourself sick with worry isn’t going to help her. After we find her”—I said it with optimism I didn’t feel—“then you can deal with the rest of it. Okay?”

  She didn’t say anything. But she did take her hands away from her face.

  “And if you tell me where you want to look, Shelby, I’ll go to every single one of those places since you can’t.”

  “I don’t even know,” she whispered.

  “Do you have a recent picture of her?”

  Shelby looked up at the wall behind me, nodding quickly. She reached for her phone and thumbed the screen for a few seconds. “This is from the other day,” she said, holding the device out to me.

  The picture was a good one: Veronica smiling hugely in the seasonal aisle of a grocery store, clutching a bizarre silver ceramic turkey to her chest. Her reddish-purple hair was braided into pigtails and she was wearing that coat with the ermine collar.

  “Send this to me?”

  She nodded, typing.

  “I’m going to go look into a couple things,” I said as my phone vibrated in my pocket with the image she just sent. “If you hear anything, let me know. And I’ll come check in later.”