I can’t keep the tears back anymore, and I don’t try. I stand there, humiliated and exhausted and furious, feeling as if in just a few words he’s stripped me of my skin and left me raw and open in the hot wind. My father is dying, and Joe won’t listen; I came back to bury the past, but instead the past is burying me.
“I’m worried about you,” he says. “You need a break. When was the last time you took a vacation?”
“I don’t need a vacation! I need you to listen!”
“You’re not well, Abby.” His voice gets a little harder. “I don’t want a repeat of what happened our first year.”
Despite the sun, a sudden chill runs through me. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” When he turns to me his eyes are dark. “You stopped sleeping. You started drinking too much. You were pulled in a thousand directions—you thought Bromley had encoded messages in the invoices, for God’s sake—”
“I’d been awake for seventy-two hours.” My voice cracks on the still air. “Look, I know I lost it. I was eating Adderall. I was a mess, okay? I admit it. I admitted it then.” And you, fucker, promised never to hold it against me. “But this is different.”
“It’s not a negotiation.” Joe’s face morphs, flowing into a stranger’s eyes and lips, a stranger’s sharp tongue and cruel expression. “I’ve already talked to Estelle about it. You’re going home. To Chicago.” He emphasizes this, as if I may have forgotten. “We’re all going home. I’ll continue to run the investigation from there. They’ll bring on Casey Scheiner as support.”
He might as well have punched me. The air goes straight out of my lungs.
“Fuck you.” I can only whisper it.
Joe sighs. He doesn’t even get angry. That makes it worse, in a way. “You’re not in trouble,” he says, as if that’s what I’m worried about. “You still have a job. But you’re going home, and you’re going to get well, and forget about fucking Kaycee Mitchell.” He starts to turn back to the door, then pivots around to face me again. “Oh. That reminds me. Kaycee called you. Apparently she lives in Florida now.” Joe’s smile is cold and narrow, bleak as thin-shaved ice. “She left a number for you, if you want to call her back.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I’m sitting in my car staring at the sun reflecting off the glass of Sunny Jay’s and my fingers are shaking so badly I twice misdial the number Joe has given me, reaching first a Florida tanning salon and then a man who fires off some quick Spanish at me before hanging up. My throat is dry as dust. I wish I had something to drink, a beer, a shot, something, but if I drank now it would mean I was really falling apart, and I’m not.
I won’t.
I can’t be.
The third time’s the charm. I close my eyes and feel my heart heavy in my throat. Count the ringtones. One, two, three, four. She picks up after four, and a bad feeling stutters in my chest.
“Hello?” Kaycee’s voice is lower and raspier than I remember. A voice you expect to hear whispering dirty things on a phone sex line. Still, my heart beats faster just hearing it. I can’t say it isn’t her. I thought I would know instantly.
“Is this Kaycee Mitchell?” I ask, and I hold my breath, waiting for her reply.
“You got her. Who is this?”
I go silent, suddenly dizzy.
“Umm…This is Abby Williams,” I say, and she laughs, and I hold my breath again, trying to pin the sound to my memory.
“Abby. Wow. You sound different.” This is either the truth or some perverse form of cleverness. Or both.
“Where are you?” I ask her, and although the area code was one for South Florida, I pray for a wild second she’ll surprise me and tell me she’s come home, like me. Just like that, the urge to see her—not so I can prove anything, but just because—stretches up from a dark space and puts a hand around my thoughts.
“Not far from Sarasota. Been here for a couple of years now. I moved around a lot after I left Barrens.”
Sarasota. A sudden sense of déjà vu momentarily doubles my vision. Sheriff Kahn just returned from Sarasota. Coincidence?
“Why did you leave?” I blurt out.
“Why not?” Kaycee says, with another laugh. “I always wanted to. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Danforth used to catch me trying to sneak out the windows when I used the bathroom pass. Even in third grade, I always wanted out of there.”
I had forgotten Mrs. Danforth, and how Kaycee used to try to shimmy out the windows next to the gym during the school day since the doors were manned by a rotating list of hall monitors. Sometimes she even made it.
I fumble to punch the window down, but still I can’t get enough air. It’s her. It has to be her. Kaycee ran, like everyone said, and I’m wrong, and probably going crazy. Kaycee is alive, sun-kissed, still beautiful; Kaycee is lounging on a patio or sitting by a pool somewhere south of Sarasota. There was no deeper meaning to any of it. She just left. She shook off Barrens like a sweep of dust. She never looked back.
And in this, too, she proved she was better than me.
“Who told you I was looking for you?” I ask, through the leaden feeling in my chest.
“Misha,” she answers, after a pause.
“She told me she never spoke to you,” I say.
“I asked her to lie.” Kaycee says this casually, easily, as if it should be obvious. “I didn’t want my dad knowing where I was, or bugging her to give me messages, or asking me for money, or any of that.”
A stupidly easy answer that never even occurred to me. Of course Kaycee wouldn’t have wanted her dad to have any way of tracking her—he was half the reason she was running in the first place.
Easy arithmetic. So why do I feel that she’s the one lying?
“So you had questions for me?” Kaycee asks.
“I just wanted to understand why,” I say. “Why you lied about being sick. Why you ran off without a word.”
Kaycee sighs. Behind her, a man’s voice is barely audible. I imagine her tilting her head away from the phone, to listen for a husband or boyfriend calling her inside.
Or, maybe, to listen for instructions.
The idea comes to me suddenly, impossible to dislodge.
“Look.” Kaycee presses her mouth up close to the receiver. “I don’t remember why I did any of it, okay? That’s the truth. It was a long time ago. I was screwed up. I wanted attention. Maybe I thought there was money in it.”
She might as well be reading from a book: All the Reasons Kaycee Mitchell Might Have Run Away.
“I’m sorry,” she says, a little quieter, and the whole world goes white for a moment. “I’m sorry for everyone I hurt and all the people who wasted their time looking for me. I’m sorry for you, Abby.”
“Don’t be.” Alarms are blaring in my head.
Kaycee Mitchell is sorry.
But Kaycee Mitchell is never sorry. I never once heard her say the word.
She missed recess for a whole week rather than apologize to Matt Granger for stealing his crayons. She couldn’t apologize. She didn’t have it in her.
Kaycee Mitchell is immune to guilt.
Whoever’s on the other end of the line, it isn’t Kaycee Mitchell.
“Well, look, you know where to find me,” she says.
“Just one more thing.” My heart is beating so heavy and huge I can barely breathe around it. “It’s stupid, I know. But I’ve always been curious.” One, two, three heartbeats. Sun streaks through the windshield and across my lap. I remember the warmth of Chestnut curled beside me on the front porch. “What really happened to Chestnut?”
There’s a long moment of silence.
Then Kaycee again—or whoever is pretending to be Kaycee—this time sounding uneasy. “It was a long time ago…”
“Does that mean you don’t remember?” Beyond the windshield, the world goes on.
She gives a staccato laugh. “Remind me.”
“My dog,” I say shortly. “The one you killed.”
There’s another short silence.
“I have to go,” Kaycee says abruptly. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” she says. There’s that word again, sorry.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “You did enough.”
—
Someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to prove that Kaycee’s alive.
Which means, almost certainly, that she isn’t.
The Kaycee impersonator, whoever she is, said that Misha had told her I was looking. And I’m willing to bet that this, at least, is true. Someone had to feed her the information. And the best liars ride as close to the truth as they can.
Besides, the example Misha chose when we met at the new community center to prove her point about the complexity of right and wrong couldn’t have been random. Misha plays dumb, but she’s anything but. Let’s say Frank Mitchell had a customer, a normal man. And let’s say that what he’s really after are the younger girls. She’d said pictures were better than them going out and finding the real thing.
But was she really just talking about Frank Mitchell? Or was she actually defending herself, too? It might have been a kind of confession. It was definitely a hint.
Back in the day, when the Game was heating up, Kaycee kept the photographs for herself, even when her victims ponied up cash. Maybe Frank Mitchell found a way to turn a bigger profit on them. It would certainly explain her father’s nice, new house. And why he’s so eager to tell everybody who asks that Kaycee ran off on her own.
And what does Misha have to do with it?
I remember the secretary who poked into her office that day I went to visit the high school. Misha collects student phones…to prevent cyberbullying, she’d said.
But could she really be looking for new targets?
It all comes back to the Game.
I can think of one person who might be able to help: Tatum. Monty mentioned that she and her friends were involved in the Game. I need to know whether the rules have changed, who the other players are, and who’s keeping score.
I point my car toward Dougsville, and the clinic where May mentioned that Tatum was taken. I’m feeling a little better, a little more in control. I don’t need Joe. I don’t need anyone. All I need is the truth. Still, the periphery of my vision keeps warping in the heat, shimmering into a mirage. Lack of sleep, nothing more.
Dougsville is twelve miles from Barrens, accessible only by the kind of flat roads that make speed limits seem like an inside joke. Corn whips by, tossing its green arms toward the sky. I think of my dream. Was it a dream? Of heat and fire. I think of Kaycee’s portraits scattered around my rental.
My phone rings almost continuously: first a call from Joe, then a local number, then Joe’s again. He’s probably wondering where I went. I silence the ringer.
Growing up, the Dougsville kids struck us all as stuck up: Theirs was the first Walmart in the whole county, and on its heels came the clinic, then a brewery. Their football team was always number one. It’s really little more than a single long strip, all car dealerships, aboveground pool installations, and churches. The clinic shares a parking lot with a big hunting and fishing retail; a sign in the window directs customers to the back for licenses and ammunition.
I head to the Walmart for a plastic-wrapped bouquet of flowers and a Get Well card. The flowers look pretty but exhale a moldy vapor, and for a second that’s just how I feel, like some rotten thing plastered over with a bow and good intentions. I should turn around. I should leave Tatum alone. I should let her get better.
But I don’t.
The clinic is small, bright, and clean. A receptionist at the desk politely asks me whether I’m a family member when I request to see Tatum.
“I’m a lawyer,” I say. The word lawyer is like the word police: the verbal equivalent of a bomb. No one wants to be the one caught holding the package. “Is Mrs. Klauss here?”
She shakes her head. Her eyes have widened into a caricature of alarm. “Go on back,” she says. “I’m sure it’s all right.” So I skirt around the desk and pass through the double doors.
The clinic has only a few examination rooms and Tatum’s room is the last one on the left. It has been transformed into a hothouse of cards and carnations. Tethered to an IV in a hospital bed, Tatum looks young, and very small. Beautiful, too. I think she must be sleeping, but as I ease the door shut behind me, she opens her eyes. They are a shocking, startling green.
“Who are you?” she asks. But it isn’t an accusation. She sounds genuinely curious.
“My name is Abby,” I say. I lift the flowers so she can see them. “I brought these for you. Looks like you don’t need them.”
She closes her eyes and shrugs. I clear a space on the counter for her latest offering.
“I don’t know you,” she says again, as if she’s observing the facts from a distance. I wonder if they’ve sedated her.
“No, you don’t.” I stay where I am, not too close, giving her lots of space, letting her size me up. “Listen, Tatum, I don’t pretend to know what you’ve just been through.”
That, at least, gets something of a normal teenage eye roll.
“I wish everyone would stop making such a big deal out of it.”
“You swallowed a handful of pills.”
“Just a dumb idea. I wasn’t trying to die. I just…had a headache.” When she looks at me then, her expression sharpens into one of distrust. It’s as if, for the first time, she is seeing me. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I’m from Barrens, too. I left for a while. But I’m back now.” I hate how final the words sound. But aren’t they, after all, the truth? My condo in Chicago feels as far away to me as a dream. “I’m a lawyer. I came home to find out what happened to a girl a decade ago. She went missing.”
“Kaycee Mitchell?” she says, and of course I realize she would have heard of her. I can only imagine the lore, and how the stories of Kaycee were transformed. “She faked being sick and everyone else started faking too. So, what? You think I’m faking?”
“Not at all,” I say. I take a deep breath. “I think Kaycee was in trouble. And I think you are, too.” This gets her attention. She gets even stiller, more alert, as if she’s listening for music playing far away. Then: “I know about the Game, Tatum.”
For a second, her mouth opens wide, and I’m worried she’ll scream, or shout for a nurse. But then, all at once, she relaxes.
“Who told you?” she asks.
“Monty Devue.” This gets another eye roll.
“He’s been obsessed with me since, like, seventh grade.” But she doesn’t sound afraid of him, only annoyed. For a long time, she sits there, obviously debating whether to say more. Then, suddenly she sits up in bed. “You didn’t tell my mom, did you? She can’t know. You can’t tell her!”
“I haven’t said a word.”
She sinks back against her pillow. She stares down at her hands, clutching and unclutching them. “I feel so stupid.”
“Is that why you did what you did?”
“I got scared.” Her voice drops to a whisper.
“Why? Is someone threatening you?”
She waves this idea away. “No. Nothing like that.” As if she, Tatum Klauss, is beyond threatening. “But I got worried everyone would find out…”
I take a gamble. “Because of the pictures?”
Now she looks up. “How…?”
“The Game has been going on for a long time,” I tell her, and she sucks her lower lip into her mouth, chews it like a kid. “Tell me what happened.”
She shrugs. “I heard about the parties back when I was a freshman…”
“What parties?” I ask. She twists the sheets between her hands, and I can see her trying to swallow back the words. “You can trust me,” I say, a little more gently. “Okay? I don’t want to get you in trouble. I want to help.”
I count long seconds. In the quiet, I can hear a distant mechanical beeping.
Finally, Tatum lets out a big breath of air, and I can tell she’s made a decision. “
They were supposed to be invite-only,” she says. “Special parties, you know, for the scholarship girls.”
“What about the boys?” I ask. “Were they invited?”
“Just girls,” she says, in a voice so quiet I nearly miss it.
“Who threw the parties? What were they for? Who else was invited?”
I can tell right away I’ve leaned on her too quickly. She clams up. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” she says. Then: “We wanted to go. Nobody made us.”
“Okay. I get it.” I take a deep breath and slowly pull up a chair next to her bed. When she doesn’t react, I take a seat slowly. Now she’s forced to look at me. “Look, Tatum, the truth is that you are in trouble. Right? Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Suddenly, her eyes fill up: she looks so small, drowning in all those white sheets. She whispers something I can’t make out.
I lean forward, holding my breath. “What?” She’s crying now, though, and only hiccups when she tries to speak. “Take a breath, okay?”
“I just wanted a new phone.” Another sob rocks her. “My phone was such crap, but my mom…my mom said I would have to buy it myself…I thought…”
“Tatum.” I place a hand on the bed, wishing I could hug her instead. This poor kid. “Tell me about the parties.”
But suddenly, with a gasp, she goes still. Listening. Then I can hear a chorus of high-pitched voices move toward us from the hall.
“Tatum.” Now I want to reach out and shake her. “Tatum, please.”
It’s too late. The door swings open and I recognize two of the girls who pour into the room, all sunshine and smiles, as Optimum Stars. One of them is Sophie Nantes.
“We brought donuts,” Sophie says, but stops short when she sees me. It’s amazing how someone so pretty can look that ugly in an instant. “What are you doing here?” She whips around to glare at Tatum. “What’s she doing here?”
Tatum swipes her face with her forearm. “She brought flowers,” she says, as if that explains it.
Sophie tosses the bag of donuts on the counter and leans up against it. Even I feel her presence, how it works like an eclipse to stifle all the light. The other girls jostle to be the one to stand next to her.
Bonfire: A Novel Page 19
