Where She Went (ARC)

by Kelly Simmons

  “Too high to jump,” Carla said.

  The words didn’t calm Maggie; they put more ideas in her head. Jumping?

  “I guess the roommate waited for us to leave, came home for a minute, and cracked the window.”

  “To blow-dry her hair,” Maggie said. “To keep her cool.”

  “Or to vape, more likely.”

  “Girls blow-dry their hair a lot,” she said defensively.

  “College kids vape a lot,” Carla said. “Take a look.” She pointed out a couple down the sidewalk, passing something between them.

  “Damn, I feel old,” Maggie said, and Carla smiled.

  “The phone sounded like it was in the bureau,” Carla said. “Why don’t you look, so I can keep my job.”

  Maggie opened the top drawer. Inside was a pile of bright lace thongs and bras that weren’t her daughter’s, couldn’t be her daughter’s—and underneath them was Emma’s white iPhone. She put it in her pocket and nodded her thanks to Carla.

  She would take it somewhere private and put in Emma’s password, which she knew, she was sure, was KOALA, which was Frank’s nickname for her. He had always called her things that ended in an a like her name—Arugula, Calendula, Mozzarella, but Koala had started it all. It was one of those sweet things he did every so often that forced Maggie to think highly of him again. He seemed to know exactly when to employ that sweetness, and once Maggie finally noticed that, the manipulation, the ebb and flow of it, it made her angry all over again. It was Frank’s job to manipulate people, but Maggie had been so young when they’d met—just seventeen to his twenty—that she was sure he’d gotten all his practice cajoling her.

  Still, the phone was a victory. She could at least start to put together a picture of what was happening—who might have summoned Emma, what they had said, when she last spoke to someone. All texts, group chats, always. The police would be yet another step behind, talking to a not-boyfriend, waiting for roommates who were likely not coming home anytime soon. On a night like this, you could wait for a group of girls, Maggie knew, for a long time. Past the party, the afterparty, the drunken hookup, the fourth meal, the walk of shame. They could be here all night, waiting for girls who would be too drunk to even speak to them. And then what would they do? Was it even legal to read the Miranda rights to girls so drunk, they couldn’t speak? Was waiting for the drunks a methodology, a technique? She tried to remember an episode of Dateline or a case with the steely Paula Zahn, who dug deep but with hair so soft and eyes so kind that the parents of dead children didn’t even feel the wound, that featured testimony from teenagers who were drunk or high. She couldn’t remember. But that was what was about to happen, and she was pretty sure Kaplan would use it as another excuse to delay.

  Go get some sleep, grab some coffee, crack jokes with your coworkers, fill in your lieutenant who says something innocuous like “try again,” try again, fail again, rinse and repeat. Regular citizens wondered why police investigations took so much time, but Maggie knew exactly why. Cops moved on cop time, as if they were saving themselves, storing up their energy, for quick bursts of adrenaline, the pursuits, the chases, the takedowns. In between, you needed to conserve, or you’d burn out.

  But Maggie was in a hurry. She didn’t need to save anything up for later; she would happily burn herself out over and over again. As they walked back to the common room, she noticed Carla glance at her watch.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Maggie said.

  Carla nodded. “I thought I’d maybe wait with you till Kaplan gets back.”

  “There’s no need, really.”

  “Will you be…okay?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll just stay here, keep my eye out for the roommates.”

  “You’re going to try calling from your daughter’s phone? That’s why you wanted it, right? To see if the roommates would answer her call instead of the RA’s?”

  “It’s worth a try. I don’t think it’ll work, but still.”

  Carla frowned a little, then nodded. Maggie could tell she didn’t know about teenage girls. How they didn’t listen to voicemail. How they didn’t answer their calls or texts unless someone exciting or important was guaranteed to be on the line. And she had a feeling, a terrible gut feeling, the roommates didn’t want to hear from Emma. That that was why her phone was in another girl’s bureau drawer, and everything else she owned was gone.

  “You have Kaplan’s number, right?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Well, here’s mine. Call me anytime if you want to talk. The police station in Ardmore is close to your house. And call Kaplan if the roommates show up, okay?”

  “Okay,” Maggie said, but in her head, she was thinking, Maybe, maybe not.

  She thanked her and waved goodbye and watched through the doorway as Carla pressed the button for the elevator, then got in. She counted to sixty, eighty, a hundred. Long enough for Carla to leave the building. Long enough for her to reach her squad car.

  Then Maggie left the sticky, empty common room to wander the other hallways. Quiet now, no laughter or water running. She considered knocking on doors but knew the wrong move could get her thrown out. She also knew the girls she wanted to talk to weren’t the quiet ones. Still, something stuck in her mind. Why would bright girls leave the door unlocked? Unless they were going somewhere very, very close by?

  She went out to the elevator, typed in Emma’s password. Koala17, just as she’d assumed. But she stared at the short list of contacts and the handful of apps. No Facebook, no Instagram, no email. What had happened to her daughter’s phone? There was only Uber, Lyft, Snapchat. She opened Uber. Emma’s last ride had been almost a week ago, to Center City. She opened Snapchat and was both relieved and disappointed to see a longer list of contacts, but all of them had coded names and bitmojis, and it was hard to imagine who was who. Still, she remembered another parent telling her about the Snap Map, that you could see the last place a person had chatted from, so she clicked on TayBae, which she guessed was Taylor. Her last location appeared to be on the same block as Hoden House or the one right next to it—Riordan—sent thirty minutes before.

  Unlocked door. Roommate gone somewhere close. It added up to a party very, very nearby. But where? Which building? What floor? How many chances would she have to find it before someone realized someone’s mom was raiding all the parties? It was hard to tell. And in thirty minutes, any of the girls could have moved on to the next one.

  She walked out into the lobby and flagged down the first scantily clad girl she saw.

  “Hey, where’s the best party tonight?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ll buy the vodka.”

  Ten

  Emma

  Three days after Taylor’s revelation, a Thursday, after listening to Fiona come home every night in a different pair of designer high heels—for she had a whole closetful, made of different colors and materials, which now made perfect sense—Emma freed up a morning to start researching the story, and she started out with the safest, simplest, do-it-in-your-pajamas way she could, by Googling things. She quickly found a couple of the websites Taylor had alluded to, both of which denied her free access—you had to identify as a “daddy” or a “baby” and log in. The baby path asked her to upload a photo and requested a nominal monthly listing fee—a fee that, she was horrified to learn, was discounted 50 percent if you registered with a college email address. Targeted, she thought. And she wondered if there were other ways they recruited.

  She quickly exited. She couldn’t sign up without an invented persona, and she’d better not try anything further on her computer, from her room. She ran over to Lenape Library, which wasn’t the closest library—there was a smaller one in the science building—but it was her favorite, because it was quiet. Even the second floor, with its long rows of desks and green lamps, where students often worked in groups, was filled with nothing above whispers. The com
puters were on the ground floor, in the back. She’d never used them; only the kids with laptops in the shop or no computers of their own spent time here, so she was surprised that you needed a college email address to log on. Shit. She was trying to cover her tracks, after all, be anonymous. She typed in the only other college user name and password she knew: Sarah Franco’s. She’d explain to Sarah later; they’d find a way to laugh about it, she was sure.

  Once she was online, she created a fake Gmail account under the name George J. Pigg, then used it for the daddy email path on OurArrangement.com. No photo required, but a monthly fee that was five times higher than the sugar baby’s. On the sidebar of the site was a scroll of college logos, as if they were proudly affiliated. Wasn’t that illegal? One thing was for sure—if she wanted to go undercover as a daddy or a baby, she would need a bit more money than she currently had. This struck her as a serious barrier to entry—wouldn’t anyone desperate enough to want to “baby” to pay off her debts be unable to afford the listing costs plus the clothing that fit the dress code, which was described as “classy” and “perfectly coordinated”? There were YouTube videos full of advice about how to create the perfect profile, how to appeal to just the right daddy by what you wore and how you did your hair. Watching them, even with headphones, even with the screen angled away from the whole world, toward the wall, made Emma gag. Girls helping other girls prostitute themselves with video tutorials? And the founder of OurArrangement.com, with his comb-over hair and pudgy hands wrapped around a champagne glass, was straight-up creepy AF. How the hell was this legal?

  She also found a four-year-old Inquirer article claiming that hundreds of Philadelphia college students, male and female, were engaged in a variety of activities to pay off their student loans, one of which was “sugarbabying” or “sugaring.” The highest percentage of participants, they claimed, came from Semper University. The article didn’t mention the websites or a club—maybe this was a newer phenomenon—instead alluding to private networking events by invitation only. The sources were unnamed restaurant workers and a local businessman. The businessman said it wasn’t illegal for friends to meet friends of friends at a restaurant and for them to buy each other presents. That was all that was happening here. When asked by the reporter if he’d ever participated, he’d laughed and said, “I said it was legal. I didn’t say it was moral.”

  This struck her as the kind of story that would make a series, but there were no follow-up articles. She looked for the author, Cara Stevens, on the Inquirer website, but she apparently didn’t work there anymore. When she searched the author’s name, a hodgepodge of results came up, so she retyped “Cara Stevens, journalist” and found one, only one, living in Vancouver, working for a tiny magazine. Probably wasn’t her, Emma thought. Maybe she’d married and changed her name. Maybe, after her breakthrough series was shuttered for shoddy reporting—how on earth had she ascertained that the majority of students came from Semper?—she quit and became a teacher.

  She walked to the subway and took the first car into Center City. It was only a few stops, but it always freaked her out to go above ground and see that the planet wasn’t actually covered in yellow banners and completely populated by people all the same age. There were grown businessmen and women, grandparents, moms with babies, kids on field trips. It was jarring, going into the real world, but also a relief. You weren’t surrounded by people looking at you, trying to figure out if they wanted to date you, fuck you, borrow your clothes, use your biology notes, or make fun of you later for something stupid you said. No one cared if you had every flavor of vodka under your bed, had a Free People leather jacket, had pot brownies or cigarettes or any form of currency they needed. College was a lot like prison, Emma decided. It made it a lot harder to adjust to the outside world.

  She headed east to Paco’s Thai Palace, passing bright storefronts, smelling the odd mix of wet sidewalk and musty awning and fried onions she’d always associated with the city, with her childhood. Part ruined, part delicious. So different from the manicured spaces on campus.

  She walked in, sat at a tiny table in the back, and ordered the lunch special. It was $11.99, which was a lot of money to her but not a lot of money for food in Philadelphia, she’d come to learn. When the other girls ordered from Grubhub or Uber Eats, she always looked at the receipts they’d thrown away, still stapled to the greasy brown or white bags, and tried to calculate how much they were spending, wasting, throwing away, as if she could measure the difference between their lives and hers.

  The restaurant was a few blocks off Rittenhouse Square, clearly designed to appeal to millennials, with pink and blue cocktails, chairs that swung from the ceiling, a roof deck. But it had gotten great Yelp reviews for the food, too, despite its goofy name, and from the comfort of her padded booth, Emma watched a parade of young office workers line up for takeout. No one in the restaurant looked remotely like a sugar daddy or a daddy of any kind. Babies, yes; daddies, no. A hunting ground, maybe, but not during the day. She’d have to come back at night to judge it properly. The shrimp pad thai special was delicious, and despite its huge proportions, Emma ate most of it. She didn’t want to be seen bringing it home and didn’t want to waste it. She vowed to skip dinner, paid the bill, and went outside.

  She looked up and down the block, considering her original hypothesis—that the restaurant wasn’t the club itself but near the club. She headed west, passing a shoe store and a high-end baby clothing store, which she found ironic. A nice detail that might fit into the story. An office supply and repair store had a filmy, yellowing window and locked door, and she wondered if it was a front for something. I mean come on, she thought. Who needs typewriter repair?

  The rest of the block was more upscale, a mix of dentists and lawyers with residences above. When Emma looked up, she saw a guy watering a fiddle fern on a balcony and a woman talking on her phone and drinking coffee from an oversized cup. People home in the middle of the day, rich people with trust funds, people who didn’t have to pay off student loans. Had they seen anything from those windows?

  She shielded her eyes against the sun and looked across the street—a cheese shop, a gift shop, a CVS. She crossed the street, kept walking. An upscale men’s store, Beck’s, took up most of the next block, a store so bougie, it had valet parking. On the corner, a bar/restaurant with a coat of arms on the door and a one-word name: London. She tugged on the door, but it was locked. Open for dinner only, she assumed, until she saw the small type etched below: a private supper club. Holy shit, she thought. Maybe her hypothesis was correct. You drew in the men from the store and the girls from the bars. Who needed advertising? Who needed a website or an app or listing? Still, the club didn’t look very big. She stared up at the windows above street level. Offices? Residences? Massage rooms? That seemed sleazy, and everything she’d heard about this phenomenon had led her to believe that it was high-end, classy. And god knows there were plenty of hotels around to serve that need. She walked over the men’s store and smiled at the valet, who smiled back. She was glad she’d worn a dress, washed her hair.

  “Hey there,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She felt confident now, practiced from all her introductions and questions aimed at strangers at school.

  “Is Beck’s open at night?”

  “Wednesdays it is.”

  “You ever work Wednesdays?”

  “I alternate, yeah.”

  “So, I was wondering if there’s also valet for the supper club?”

  “Oh, no,” he said suddenly, his face falling. “You’re going there?” The disappointment dragging down the corners of his mouth, the slight blush across his lightly freckled cheeks, said everything to her.

  “No, no,” she said, and he brightened. “I…my boss asked me to check it out. For a, uh, client visiting. For dinner.”

  His face brightened. “Well, we usuall
y handle valet for them.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. Same owner.”

  “Same owner,” she repeated. She wanted to ask who that was but was certain that wasn’t necessary. She could find that out easily. She hesitated, wasn’t sure the right question to ask next.

  “So…how long you work for your boss? How well you know him?” He was asking her questions now, too.

  She had to be careful. She was not as good at lying as she was at asking.

  “I…just started.”

  “Ah, well. I hope he’s good to you. And he doesn’t get any ideas.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like sending you to that club or something.”

  She frowned. “So…you don’t like that club?”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “Is it a young crowd, then?”

  He laughed. “Half of it is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when they drop off their car here with me, it’s not. But when they pick it up, it is. If you catch my drift.”

  Of course, Emma the journalist caught the drift just fine. But undercover Emma running errands for the boss, would she catch it?

  She frowned, screwed up her face in a way she knew looked childish, and that was the point. “Half old, half young? In the car?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh!” she said, feigning surprise.

  “Yeah. Gorgeous girls, too. Kinda makes you sick.”

  “So the cars must be nice? For you, at least. To drive.”

  “Most of them, but not all. You’d be surprised.”

  I bet I would, Emma thought. Since the world was starting to seem incredibly surprising.

  “Wow. Well, thanks for the info.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m Michael, by the way.”

  “Mary,” she said, extending her hand, the fake name rolling off her tongue quickly, easily, more easily than she thought possible.