by Jeff Lindsay
“If you’re sure,” I said, with a brand-new sensitivity that I actually felt.
“I’m sure,” she said, and very reluctantly, I left them there.
When I got back to the Ransom Everglades campus with Debs’s car I found that she had been assigned a room in an old wooden building with a view of the bay, as a sort of temporary interrogation room. The Pagoda, as the building was called, perched on a bluff above the athletic field. It was a rickety old wooden building that didn’t look like it could survive a single summer storm, and yet somehow it had stood long enough to become a historical landmark.
Deborah was talking to an exceedingly clean-cut young man when I came in, and she just glanced up at me and nodded without interrupting the boy’s response. I settled into the chair next to her.
For the rest of the day, both students and faculty came into the rickety old building one at a time to tell us what they knew about Samantha Aldovar and Tyler Spanos. The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I’d had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.
But private education is expensive, and it had been far beyond Harry’s means—and even if he could have afforded it, I doubt that Harry would have gone for it. He had always been wary of elitism, and he believed in all of our public institutions. Even public school—or perhaps especially public school, since it taught a brand of survival skills he knew we would need.
It was clearly a set of skills the two missing girls could have used. By the time Debs and I finished the interviews, around five-thirty, we had learned some very interesting things about both of them, but nothing that suggested they could survive in the wilds of Miami without a credit card and an iPhone.
Samantha Aldovar remained a little bit of a puzzle, even to those who thought they knew her well. The students were aware that she got financial aid, but it seemed to be no big deal to anybody. They all said she was pleasant, quiet, good at math, and had no boyfriend. No one could think of any reason why she would stage her own disappearance. No one could remember ever seeing her hanging around with any kind of disreputable character—except Tyler Spanos.
Tyler was apparently a true wild child, and on the face of things, the friendship between the two girls was extremely unlikely. Where Samantha got a ride to and from school with her mother in a four-year-old Hyundai, Tyler drove her own car—a Porsche. While Samantha was quiet and shy, Tyler seemed to be the original Good Time Charlene, a perpetual loud party just looking for a place to happen. She did not have a boyfriend only because she could not limit herself to one boy at a time.
And yet a close friendship had developed over the last year or so and the two girls were almost always together at lunch, after school, and on weekends. Not only was this puzzling, it was the one thing that bothered Deborah more than any other. She had calmly listened and asked questions, put out a BOLO on Tyler’s Porsche, and (with a shudder) sent her partner, Deke, to talk to the Spanos family, and none of these things had caused so much as a ripple on the face of the Sea of Deborah. But the strange friendship between the two girls had, for some reason, caused her to come up on point like a cocker spaniel sniffing steak.
“It makes no fucking sense,” she said.
“They’re teenagers,” I reminded her. “They’re not supposed to make sense.”
“Wrong,” Deborah said. “Some things always make sense, especially with teenagers. Nerds hang with nerds; jocks and cheerleaders hang with jocks and cheerleaders. That never changes.”
“Perhaps they have some kind of secret mutual interest,” I suggested, glancing casually at my watch, which told me that it was very close to time for me to go home.
“I’d bet on it,” said Debs. “And I’d bet that if we find it, we find out where they are.”
“Nobody else here seems to know what it might be,” I said, even though I was actually trying to construct a graceful exit line.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Deborah said abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“You keep squirming around like you have to pee,” she said.
“Oh, um, actually,” I said, “it’s almost time for me to go. I have to pick up Cody and Astor before six.”
My sister stared at me for what seemed like a long time. “I never would have believed it,” she said at last.
“Believed what?”
“That you’d be married, kids, you know. A family man, with all you got going on.”
And by that I knew she meant my darker side, my former role as Dexter the Avenger, the lone blade in the moonlight. She had found out about my alter ego, and had apparently become reconciled with it—and just in time for me to abandon the persona. “Well,” I said, “I don’t suppose I would have believed it either. But …” I shrugged. “Here I am with a family.”
“Yeah,” she said, and she looked away. “And before me.”
I watched her face working to rearrange itself back to her usual mask of perpetual grumpy authority, but it took several moments, and in the interval she looked shockingly vulnerable.
“Do you love her?” she said suddenly, swinging back to face me, and I blinked with surprise. Such a blunt and personal question was very unlike Deborah, which was one reason we got along so well. “Do you love Rita,” she repeated, leaving me no wiggle room whatsoever.
“I … don’t know,” I answered carefully. “I’m, uh, used to her.”
Deborah stared and then shook her head. “Used to her,” she said. “Like she’s an easy chair or something.”
“Not that easy,” I said, trying to inject a little levity into what had suddenly become a very unsettling conversation.
“Do you even feel love at all?” she demanded. “I mean, can you?”
I thought of Lily Anne. “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
Deborah watched my face for several long seconds, but there was really not much to see, and she finally turned away and looked out through the old wooden window frame at the bay. “Shit,” she said. “Go home. Go get your kids and hang out with your easy-chair wife.”
I had not been human for very long, but even so, I knew something was not quite right in the Land of Deborah and I could not leave her on that note. “Debs,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
I saw her neck muscles tense, but she continued to look away, out over the water. “All this family shit,” she said. “With these two girls and their fucked-up families. And your family with fucked-up you. It’s never what it should be, and it’s never right but everybody gets it except me.” She took a deep breath and shook her head. “And I really want it.” She swung back at me with ferocity. “And no goddamn jokes about the biological clock, all right?”
To be completely honest, which I am when I have to be, I was far too deeply shocked by Deborah’s behavior for any jokes, whether about clocks or anything else. But joke or no, I knew I had to say something, and I cast about for the right thing and could only come up with a question about Kyle Chutsky, her live-in boyfriend of several years. I had seen the approach on a daytime drama a few years back. I liked to study them for clues on how to act in ordinary situations, and it looked like that was going to pay off here. “Is everything okay with Kyle?” I said.
She snorted, but her face softened. “Fucking Chutsky. Thinks he’s too old and beat-up and useless for a nice young thing like me. Keeps saying I can do better. And when I say maybe I don’t want to do better, he just shakes his head and looks sorrowful.”
It was all very interesting, a truly riveting look into the life of someone who had been a human being much longer than I had, but I was all out of
ideas for constructive commentary, and I felt very much the pressure of the clock—the one on my wrist, not the biological one. So, floundering about for something to say that would be properly comforting and yet hint at my need for immediate departure, all I could come up with was, “Well, I’m sure he means well.”
Deborah stared at me long enough to make me wonder if I had really said the right thing. Then she sighed heavily and turned to face out the window again. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure he means well, too.” And she looked out at the bay and didn’t say anything but, worse than any words she could have uttered, she actually sighed.
This was a side of my sister I had not seen before, and it was not a side I wanted to see a great deal more of. I was used to Deborah being full of sound and fury, signifying arm punches. To see her soft and vulnerable and roiling with self-pity was unsettling in the extreme. Even though I knew I should say something comforting, I had no idea where to begin, and so I stood there awkwardly, until finally the need to leave was stronger than my sense of obligation.
“I’m sorry, Debs,” I said, and oddly enough, I was. “I have to get the kids now.”
“Yeah,” she said without turning around. “Go get your kids.”
“Um,” I said, “I need a ride, back to my car.”
She turned slowly away from the window and looked over at the building’s door, where Ms. Stein was hovering. Then she nodded and stood up. “All right,” she said. “We’re done here.” She walked past me, paused only to thank Ms. Stein with flat politeness, and led the way back to her car in silence.
The silence lasted almost all the way to my car and it was not very comfortable. I felt like I should say something, lift the mood a bit, but my first two attempts fell so flat that I stopped trying. Debs pulled into the parking lot at work and stopped beside my car, staring straight ahead through the windshield with the same look of unhappy introspection she’d been wearing for the whole trip. I watched her for a moment, but she didn’t look back.
“All right,” I said at last. “See you tomorrow.”
“What’s it like?” she said, and I paused with the door half-open.
“What’s what like?” I said.
“When you held your baby for the first time,” she said.
I didn’t have to think very hard to answer that. “Amazing,” I said. “Absolutely wonderful. It’s not like anything else in the world.”
She looked at me, and I couldn’t tell whether she was going to hug me or hit me, but she didn’t do either, and finally she just shook her head, slowly. “Go get your kids,” she said. I waited for a second, to see if she would say anything else, but she didn’t.
I got out of the car and as she drove slowly away I stood and watched, trying to fathom what was going on with my sister. But it was clearly something far too complicated for a newly minted human, so I shrugged it off, got into my car, and went to get Cody and Astor.
EIGHT
TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY AS I DROVE SOUTH ON OLD CUTLER Road to pick up Cody and Astor, but for some reason everyone seemed to be very polite in this part of town tonight. A man driving a large red Hummer even paused to let me in when the lanes merged and I had to get over, which I had never seen before. It made me wonder if perhaps terrorists had slipped something into the Miami water system to make us all soft and lovable. First I had resolved to quit my Dark Ways; then Debs had thrown a fit of near-weeping—and now a Hummer driver in rush hour was polite and thoughtful. Could this be the Apocalypse?
But I saw no flaming angels on the remainder of the drive to the park where Cody and Astor were interred, and once again I got there just before six o’clock. The same young woman was waiting by the door with Cody and Astor, jiggling her keys and practically dancing with impatience. She very nearly flung the children at me and then, with a mechanical smile that was not in the same league as one of my fakes, she vaulted for her car at the far end of the parking lot.
I loaded Cody and Astor into the backseat of my car and climbed behind the wheel. They were relatively silent, even Astor, and so, in my role of new human father I decided I should open them up a little bit. “Did everybody have a good day?” I said with immense synthetic good cheer.
“Anthony is such an asshole,” Astor said.
“Astor, you shouldn’t use that word,” I told her, mildly shocked.
“Even Mom says that word when she’s driving,” she said. “And anyway, I heard it on the radio in her car.”
“Well, you still shouldn’t use it,” I said. “It’s a bad word.”
“You don’t have to talk me to like that,” she said. “I’m ten years old.”
“That’s not old enough to use that word,” I said. “No matter how I talk to you.”
“So you don’t care what Anthony did?” she said. “You just want to make sure I don’t use that word?”
I took a deep breath and made a special effort not to ram the car in front of me. “What did Anthony do?” I said.
“He said I wasn’t hot,” Astor said. “Because I don’t have any boobs.”
I felt my mouth open and close a few times, all by itself, and just in time I remembered that I still needed to breathe. I was clearly in far over my head, but just as clearly I had to say something. “Well, I-I, um, ah,” I said, quite distinctly. “I mean, very few of us do have boobs at ten.”
“He’s such a butt-head,” she said darkly, and then, in a very syrupy-sweet tone, she added, “Can I say butt-head, Dexter?”
I opened my mouth again to stammer something or other but before I could utter a single meaningless syllable Cody spoke up. “Somebody’s following us,” he said.
Out of reflex I glanced in the rearview mirror. In this traffic, it was impossible for me to tell if somebody was, in fact, following us. “Why do you say that, Cody?” I asked. “How can you tell?”
In the mirror I could see him shrug. “Shadow Guy,” he said.
I sighed again. First Astor with her barrage of forbidden language, and now Cody with his Shadow Guy. Obviously, I was in for one of those memorable evenings parents have now and then. “Cody, the Shadow Guy can be wrong sometimes,” I said.
He shook his head. “Same car,” he said.
“Same as what?”
“It’s the car from the hospital parking lot,” Astor interpreted. “The red one, where you said the guy wasn’t looking at us but he really was. And now he’s following us even though you think he isn’t.”
I like to think I am a reasonable man, even in unreasonable situations, like most of those involving kids. But at this point, I felt I had let unreality intrude just a little too far, and a small lesson was called for. Besides, if I was going to follow my resolve to cross over to the sunny side of the street, I had to start weaning them away from their dark imaginations at some point, and this was as good a time as any.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see if he really is following us.”
I moved into the left lane and signaled for a turn. Nobody followed us. “Do you see anybody?” I said.
“No,” Astor said, very grumpily.
I turned left down a street beside a strip mall. “Is anybody following us now?”
“No,” said Astor.
I accelerated down the street and turned right. “How about now?” I called cheerfully. “Anybody behind us?”
“Dexter,” Astor grumbled.
I pulled over in front of a small and ordinary house much like ours, putting two wheels on the grass and my foot on the brake. “And now? Anybody following us?” I said, trying not to gloat audibly at making my point so dramatically.
“No,” Astor hissed.
“Yes,” Cody said.
I turned around in the seat to scold him, and stopped dead. Because through the rear window of the car I could see that a few hundred feet away, a car was nosing slowly toward us. There was just enough light from the setting sun to see a quick flash of red color from the small car, and then it was crawling toward us through the shadows o
f the tree-lined street. And as if awakened by those shadows, the Dark Passenger carefully uncoiled and spread out its wings and hissed a warning.
Without thinking I stepped down hard on the gas, even before I turned back around to face front, and I left a small patch of torn grass behind me and narrowly missed plowing into a mailbox as I looked forward again. The car skidded slightly as it regained the pavement. “Hold on,” I told the kids, and with some something far too close to panic I raced down the street and turned right, back toward US 1.
I could see the other car behind me, but I was well ahead by the time I got back to the highway, and I turned right quickly into heavy traffic. I began to breathe again, just once or twice, as I powered across three lanes of rapidly moving cars and into the far left lane. I gunned it through a light just as it changed to red, and sped up the street for a half mile before I saw an opening in the oncoming traffic and screeched through a left-hand turn and down another quiet residential street. I drove through two intersections and then turned left again so that I was now running parallel to US 1. The street was dark and quiet and there was no sign of anything at all behind us now, not even a bicycle.
“All right,” I said. “I think we lost him.”
In the mirror I saw Cody staring out the back window, and he turned around and caught my eye, and nodded.
“But who was it, Dexter?” Astor said.
“Just some random lunatic,” I said, with more reassurance in my voice than I actually felt. “Some people get off on scaring people they don’t even know.”
Cody frowned. “Same guy,” he said. “From the hospital.”
“You can’t know that,” I said.
“Can,” he said.
“It’s just a coincidence. Two different crazy people,” I told him.
“Same,” he said dismissively.
“Cody,” I said. But I could feel the adrenaline draining out of me and I really didn’t want an argument, so I let it go at that. He would learn as he grew that the greater Miami area was filled with a varied and impressive collection of wackos and predators, and many that were half of each. There was no way to know why someone had followed us, and it didn’t really matter. Whoever it was, they were gone now.
