by Karen Ellis
Allie sits up and reaches for a mug, her eyes rolling back at the first gulp. “Thanks, Mom.”
Mrs. Franconi’s weathered fingers stroke the hair off Allie’s forehead in a loving gesture her daughter accepts grudgingly but accepts nonetheless. “Shout if you guys need anything.”
“Thank you.” Elsa adds milk to her coffee and gratefully sips. Then she looks at Allie. “I think your mother might actually love you.”
“The woman who loved too much.” That eye-roll again. But Elsa is sure she sees a trill of pleasure as Allie bites a chunk out of one of her mother’s scones.
“Ruby’s parents are having a hard time,” Elsa tries. “Do you think they know Ruby’s into drugs?”
“She isn’t into drugs.” Scowling, Allie stares at Elsa and then says, “I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
“But Allie—” Her friend has vanished. The rules need to change.
“I know, I know.” She lays her remaining fragment of scone on her blanket. “The thing is…” She retreats into her stubborn silence.
“You’re Ruby’s best friend.”
“Exactly.”
“So act like one.”
Her forehead scrunches and she exhales a long breath. “Just Adderall, to help her grades. None of the other shit he sells.”
“Like?”
“Coke, smack, X, bath salts, TNT, whatever.” The girl’s gaze scuttles around the room. And then she looks squarely at Elsa. “But you didn’t ask why Charlie sells his meds when he’s got all that other stuff.”
“Okay. Why?”
“It’s how he hooks them. Us.”
“You too, Allie?”
“No way. I mean girls.”
Elsa nods, listening.
“His parents are rich but they keep him on a tight budget. So he deals. But he has a prescription for Adderall and he gives it to girls when he feels like it.”
“Gives, or sells?”
Allie wiggles up in her bed, and her tone hardens. “He gives his prescription meds to girls he likes, like it’s a ‘special friendship thing.’” Hooking her forefingers around those last three words. “He reels them in, and then, when they realize he’s a dick and they don’t like him anymore, they still want the meds, so he makes them pay. And if he can, he’ll sell them the harder stuff too. He starts out with this ‘nice guy let me help you’ thing and then he turns into a major asshole.”
“What about Ruby? Did Charlie give her his meds?”
“Yup.”
“And she took them.”
“Duh.”
“Why?”
“We just finished eleventh grade, and that’s the year that matters for colleges.”
“And she wanted better grades.”
“Who doesn’t? The thing is”—Allie shifts out from under her covers and swings her legs over the side of the bed, now facing Elsa—“she didn’t want to take Charlie’s friggin’ pills at first, and he convinced her, and then when she wanted to keep taking them, he said she’d have to pay for them and so she dumped him, but really, I think it was him dumping her, don’t you? By asking her to pay. That’s why he’s a scumbag. He plays these stupid games. I mean, if you want to break up, just break up, you know?”
“Sounds complicated,” Elsa says. “But yeah, I know what you mean. So Ruby must have been feeling hurt.”
“She was pissed.”
“Of course.”
“And then”—Allie’s eyes widen—“the asshole actually wanted her back. He said he’d give her his meds like before, he’d give her anything she wanted, but she told him, she said, No way. She found someone else to get drugs from.”
“Drugs?”
“Meds, okay? Ruby never went near that other stuff. She started copping Addies from someone she wasn’t hooking up with. She really learned her lesson.”
“Which was?” Elsa’s stomach churning now from the strong coffee.
“Fuck if I know.” Allie has a beautiful smile when she lets it show, as she does now, a smile infused with irony and humor, as if for a split second she sees herself from a future vantage point. “I mean,” she says, “what she learned was to keep business and personal, you know, separate.”
“Who is Ruby’s new dealer?”
“Dealer? It isn’t like that, not with Ruby. I mean, it’s just Adderall.”
Elsa listens with forced calm, but her patience for Allie’s spiky little tantrums starts to wear thin. “The kid she got meds from after Charlie. Who is he?”
“It has to be a he?”
“Is it Paul?”
Allie shrugs and returns to her scone, breaking the last piece into two parts and releasing a cascade of crumbs that will undoubtedly be left for her mother to clean up. “Maybe. I think so. Okay, yes.”
Elsa leans forward. “Why didn’t you tell anyone this before, Allie? You think you were helping her by keeping all that to yourself? She’s been missing for four days.”
“Ma’am, Paul wasn’t Ruby’s problem. It was Charlie. He’d stop in at Queens Beans like every night looking to talk to her, because she blocked his texts.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“Last week, I guess. And Friday night, right before I left? Ruby said he hadn’t come by yet so she figured she’d see him soon.”
Elsa sets her mug in a free spot on Allie’s bedside table. “Thanks.” She stands, itching to see Charlie, hoping to also catch him half asleep and vulnerable.
“That’s it?”
“What did you expect?”
“I want to know where Ruby is.”
“Allie, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be here.”
Mrs. Hendryk answers the door in her gym clothes and in full makeup. The Hendryk household, apparently, does not sleep in.
“Charlie is already gone,” she chirps, as if it’s absurd of Elsa to think she’d catch him at home at seven a.m.
“Mind telling me where?”
The mother’s carefully plucked eyebrows arch, but she obviously decides against taking an attitude with the detective, given the circumstances. “He’s on his way to the Haverstock house to help, and then he has a history Regents at eleven at school.”
“Thank you.”
Elsa starts down the bluestone walk toward her Beetle, hunched red at the curb. Behind her, the front door claps shut and the lock swiftly clicks into place.
She drives until she spots Charlie walking along Whitson Street, hairy-legged in baggy shorts and flip-flops, drinking a frothy iced Starbucks through a straw. Two sharpened pencils and a blue ballpoint protrude from his back pocket. She pulls into an open metered spot, sticks her permit in the windshield, and continues on foot. The morning is warm and summery but it isn’t as hot out as his attitude suggests. He’s moving in the direction of the Haverstocks’, walking casually, in no particular hurry.
“Charlie!”
He turns around. A smile appears. He even waves.
“Okay if I walk with you?” she asks.
“I’m on my way to Ruby’s to help out, but you probably already deduced as much.”
Good thinking, Sherlock. But she doesn’t say that. “Mind if we have a frank talk?”
“Not at all.”
The morning is getting on, and a woman dressed for work in a skirt and heels rushes past in the direction of the subway. A man pushing a stroller comes up alongside them, his toddler belting a song happily and off-key. Elsa has to raise her voice to be heard.
“So how much do you charge for the dope?”
Alarmed, the father outpaces them, moving his child out of earshot.
Charlie stops abruptly. Sucking hard on his straw, his cheeks compress, draining away years of innocence. He turns and keeps walking.
“How long before Ruby started needing an Addy to get through the day?”
The slurping sound of Charlie’s straw, vacuuming up bubbles at the bottom of his cup. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What were you thinking, giving that sh
it to my niece?”
He stares at her, caught by surprise. “Your niece?”
“Mel, your new friend.”
“Fuck.”
“When did you last see Ruby? No bullshit this time.”
“She dumped me, you know. I never did anything to her. Why would I?”
“It doesn’t matter who technically ended it, Charlie. You were supplying her with drugs and now she’s missing.”
He tosses his empty cup into a trash can on the corner and turns to her, acned cheeks inflamed. “Not drugs. Meds.”
“Keep telling yourself that same story and see how far it gets you in court.”
“I didn’t push anything on her—she wanted it. It was only Adderall and it helped her. She wasn’t exactly the best student.”
“Allie tells me that you still want Ruby back.”
“Allie.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
They turn onto Ascan Avenue, two lanes of traffic under leafy trees. “Charlie, did you pay Ruby a visit at Queens Beans on Friday night?”
“What?” But his indignation sounds weak. “Look, I don’t know what that pathological liar Allie told you, but I haven’t seen Ruby—I mean, seen her alone—since we broke up.”
“Ruby told her that you’d go by Queens Beans, hoping to get back together. Allie says that Ruby blocked your phone number. Not true?”
A man in a suit and tie Rollerblades by so quickly that he creates a stiff breeze. Charlie’s bottom lip quivers. “Well,” he says, “yes, she did block my number.”
They stop walking, face each other now in front of a dry cleaner’s store. MONDAY SHIRT 4 FOR $12, TUESDAY SUIT $8, WEDNESDAY SKIRT W/PLEATS $5, THURSDAY DRESS $8, FRIDAY SWEATER $4. The morning sun rises on the plate glass and, like a magic trick, transforms it into a mirror, obliterating the daily sales. Elsa watches as Charlie notices the reflection of his waning confidence, the way his eyes dart and how he looks like he might cry.
“I,” he says. “I…I would go see her sometimes, it’s true.”
“But?”
His cheeks blaze. “She still wouldn’t talk to me. It was humiliating.”
“Did she buzz you in on Friday night? Did she turn off the video feed and buzz you in?”
He nods, cringing. “But only so she could tell me to leave her alone and not ruin her sweet-girl reputation. So I did.”
“Did what?”
His voice flares: “I went away.”
“What else, Charlie? Keep thinking. Because this is a very serious situation for Ruby and also for you. Selling Adderall is one thing. But heroin?”
He pushes past her, walking quickly.
“Charlie, come back.” She trots after him, picking up speed as he breaks into a run. “Charlie!”
He stops so abruptly that she nearly crashes into him. Taller than her by nearly a foot, he looms, angry.
“You think I hurt her, don’t you?” Crying. “But I didn’t. She told me to fuck off and so I fucked off. She actually had a gun—I couldn’t believe it. A gun. What was I supposed to do?” Shaking. “You should talk to the guy who drove up when I was leaving, find out what he knows about it. Why don’t you talk to him?” He heaves forward, snot drooling out of his nose, fat drops splashing onto the sidewalk. A little boy in a big body. Elsa refuses to give in to the sympathy creeping up her spine.
“What guy?” She asks again, “What guy?”
“Forget it. I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even there—I fucked off so I don’t exist.”
“What did the guy look like, Charlie?”
“I don’t know. It was dark out. I didn’t really see him.”
A woman with an armload of plastic-sheathed clothes struggles through the cleaner’s door and heads down the sidewalk in their direction. Elsa steps aside and pulls Charlie with her, holding tight to his arm in case he tries to bolt again. “Try to remember.”
“He was in his twenties or thirties, maybe. His hair was kind of long, kind of pushed back off his forehead.” As details return to him, Charlie calms, face relaxing, eyes growing brighter. “When he got out of his van I noticed he was on the tall side. But it was dark out; it was hard to see.”
“Van? What color?”
“White, kind of beat up.”
Elsa’s pulse quickens—Charlie has just described Ishmael Locke and his ride pulling up at Queens Beans on Friday night. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”
“I was …scared.”
“Ruby’s life could be in real danger, if she’s even still—”
Her phone rings. An upstate number flashes on her screen. She turns her back to Charlie, puts the phone to her ear, and answers, “Special Agent Myers,” trying to temper the heat in her tone.
“This is Forensics up in Albany,” the caller says. “We heard this was important so we bumped you forward. He left some juicy DNA on that cup.”
“Talk to me.”
“Guy’s got a rap sheet a mile long.”
The remark throws Elsa; she’d checked out Locke’s record and it was clean. Something isn’t right. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely—this is one scary dude.”
“Zap me the official report; I’ll need to take a look at it. And thanks.”
17
She feels them, her little tattoo people, crawling up the side of her neck. Their tiny feet tickle as they laugh and cry and wander up the steep climb to her ear.
Carrie, who leads the way, slaps the bulbous end of her earlobe so it swings and she catches the lowest rung on the ladder of earrings. And then—wup-wup-wup-wup—she catapults up to the ear canal, slides right in, and down she goes. Velma next, followed by Arnold, then Jesus.
Yes, she feels them, all her peeps now inside her head, her mind, minding her, helping mind her business. And what is her business now? Ranged around the conference table at the center of her mind, where she herself is chairman of the board, she doesn’t know. They bang their tiny fists on the table, demanding her attention. Wake up! Wake up and smell the coffee!
Her swollen eyes crack open now; she wakes to the inside of a cave. Her body shudders from the cold. Both of her wrists are raw, her throat is sore, pain flares across her back, her hips hurt, and she can’t tell which side she’s lying on. Right or left? Her brain can’t grasp the vocabulary of her body.
Addressing her board, she silently demands: Come on, people! Little people! Tell me what’s what. Tell me where I am. Tell me how I got here. Tell me how to get out.
He sits cross-legged on a towel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup. Her stomach grumbles. And she’s thirsty. She tries to lick her lips but there isn’t as much saliva as she’s used to. The smell is good, sweet and spicy, and she wants some. She wants some. But she can’t get her body to move.
He looks at her. Bound, cold, everything hurting.
“So,” he says, a lilt at the end of that small word, “you like jewelry, I see.”
Confused, she blinks, whispers, “Yes.” Did he notice before when she slid off two rings on their way through the woods, crumb-dropping a path to wherever he’s brought her? She can’t see the color of his eyes in this dimness. His head is tilted a little bit, like he’s waiting for more of a conversation.
“One of my sisters was big on rings,” he offers.
“What?”
“Rings—I said rings.” He holds up both hands and wiggles his fingers.
Mustering more voice, realizing that talking could be the very thing to save her, she tries again. “What kind of rings?”
“Silver.” He makes a fist with his right hand, knuckles glowing white, and startles her by punching at the air. “Wham, a ring on every finger, right in my shoulder blade, right here—” He twists to point out the spot on his back, knotty muscles and bone showing through the fabric of his shirt, where his sister apparently hit him. “That’s got to be what brass knuckles feel like.”
“I’m sorry she did that to you.” Almost meaning it, but how could she
actually care about him, and why would he want her to? “Is it okay if I shift position? My leg is starting to go numb.”
“You want my help?” A creepy tease in his tone, she thinks, unless she’s misreading. And no, no, she doesn’t want his help, but without it the numbness will spread through her body and turn her to stone. She nods.
He stands up, kicks aside the towel, stoops over her, and she can smell him. Like manure, like he’s been in a barn. There’s a scratch down the side of his face. Did she do that?
How long has she been here?
She was on her way to school. She missed the bus. She was walking. And then. And then.
He slips his powerful hands under her arms and rearranges her, roughly, like she’s a rag doll. Her back is now straighter against the wall, her leg moved off whatever jagged rock was digging into her. “That better?”
She nods.
“Okay,” he says, and then, “There’s something I’ve got to do, but I’ll be back. Try not to miss me too much.” He crosses to the other side, hops down somewhere lower than the cave’s floor, and is gone.
All sounds of him evaporate and she’s alone again with her board of directors. Alone. In the cracked sodden belly of this dark cave, rays of silvery light coming from somewhere she can’t see.
She listens to air moving on the raceway of the walls, coursing along its hidden paths, a trapped trajectory, a sound like moaning. Velma, Arnold, Carrie, Jesus, racing their cars around and around, their pitched cries to notice, notice, notice.
And then she does. She notices.
A rock formation across the cave moves faintly up and down in a breathing pattern.
Her own breath stops.
She is not alone.
The rocks aren’t rocks; they’re ribs and a spine, shoulders, a waist, hips, a sloped valley of twined legs. At first she thinks she’s looking at herself, a girl tied up in a cave. But then she knows she isn’t. There are no tattoos on that girl’s neck. Her hair is dark. And their breathing, when hers starts again, isn’t in sync.
“Hello,” she says, but the girl doesn’t answer. “I’m here too.” Still, no response.
Across the cave, against a craggy wall, sits a bright red toolbox. On top of it is a paperback with a broken spine and faded title. On top of the book, his gun.
