Officer Kay made a note on his yellow pad, then said, “Tell me more about the game.”
I squirmed. Not exactly the reprieve I’d hoped for. I was sure he knew about the game, but he wanted to hear me explain it. In front of my grandparents, who would be mortified. I’d never wished my parents were with me more.
I cleared my throat and explained the rules as succinctly as possible. I pretended I didn’t hear Pops’s murmured “Oh no, Chloe doll” from the corner. I couldn’t decide what was worse, the “clarification” questions from Officer Kay while I explained or the grilling I would no doubt have to go through when I got home.
“And why had you decided tonight would be the last time you played?” Officer Kay asked when I was done explaining.
I had been trying to stay perfectly still, but I couldn’t stop my hand from moving to my mouth for a quick cuticle rip. Kay didn’t say anything, just waited for my answer.
“Chloe Donnelly knew a lot of secrets about everyone,” I finally said. “And we didn’t want to play with her anymore because of it.”
“What sorts of secrets?”
I waved a gnawed hand in what I hoped looked sort of dismissive. “Dumb high school stuff. You know, everyone has stuff they’re embarrassed about and don’t want their friends to know about. We were just sick of her using that against us to try to win.”
“And yet you played tonight? Why?”
It was the perfect opportunity to come clean about Mateo’s plan, but I couldn’t make myself say his name. I didn’t want him to be any more exposed than he likely already was. I’d become tethered to him, I realized. And tonight after what had happened in Herrick Chapel, I suspected there would be no disentangling us. I couldn’t give him up.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Officer Kay let his question go unanswered and instead asked, “What can you tell me about the whereabouts of Mateo Vallera?”
“He didn’t do it,” I blurted.
Officer Kay stopped writing again. “And what exactly is it?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is that you think happened to Chloe Donnelly. You think something happened to her, don’t you? You haven’t found her and that’s why you’re asking us all these questions,” I practically shouted. Hostility and fear poured off me in a dangerous concoction that must have made me look incredibly unstable.
“Chloe,” Nan said, gripping my forearm with the slightest dig of her nails. “Stop. He’s trying to do his job. He’s looking for a lost girl. Trying to figure out who she is and where she could be.”
I heard the fear in Nan’s voice, the worry, and then I remembered. Mom and Dad’s senior year at Grinnell, a friend of theirs had gone missing on her way to Iowa from Chicago. The whole campus canvased the highways. The internet wasn’t like it was now, so they had to do sort of a search and rescue. Only there wasn’t a rescue, just a dead girl found a few weeks later in clothes that weren’t her own. It shook everyone on campus and in town. They never found the guy who did it.
“I don’t know where Mateo is,” I said. “I was with him most of the night. He didn’t see her. I was with him almost until the time you showed up.”
Officer Kay didn’t look surprised. Someone else must have already told him about Mateo bolting moments before the cops arrived. It looked bad for him. I knew it did. But I was 100 percent certain that if something had happened to Chloe Donnelly, Mateo wasn’t responsible.
“And why do you think he left?”
I gnawed my thumb cuticle and let my hair curtain drop. I glanced around the room as I chewed. The walls had safety posters on them, and in the corner was one of those watercoolers with the plastic-cup dispenser attached. I spit out a piece of my cuticle and Nan tapped my wrist with a murmur of disapproval. I released my thumb. I didn’t know what the right thing to do here was. All the secrets and lies were weighing on me like a boulder, but when I considered blurting them all out, I couldn’t do it. My mind kept flashing to Mateo kissing my face and saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Telling the truth would guarantee me never seeing Mateo again. And it would likely put him and his family on some sort of list. I had to hope they’d find Chloe Donnelly and all of this would go away.
“I honestly don’t know why he left,” I said, and felt Nan sag beside me as if she was relieved I wasn’t mixed up with him. But the silence coming from Pops was like pinpricks along my skin. I didn’t dare look at him.
Officer Kay looked disappointed, but he flipped to the next page of the yellow pad and started writing again. “Why don’t you tell me what you do know and review for me again what exactly happened when you saw Chloe at ten o’clock?”
* * *
I ended up giving Officer Kay the bare minimum of information. Once I’d lied about why Mateo had left, it was easier to lie about what I knew about everyone else. The weirdest part was that he didn’t seem to be bothered by the game. He didn’t ask questions about neo-Nazis or why everyone would play a game with potentially dangerous information-gathering tactics. It was almost as if he’d heard of the game before. Or that it was normal kid stuff, all in good fun.
Instead, the officer kept asking whether anyone would have a reason to harm Chloe Donnelly, and the truth was that everyone did. But, of course, I didn’t say that. He kept putting a fine point on me being the last one to see her, but I didn’t get the feeling he thought I was responsible for her disappearance, even as evasive as I was.
I’d known these people most of my life, and I’d only known Chloe Donnelly three weeks. The answer to her whereabouts in my mind lay more in the lies she told us about her parents and her life than in any secrets we were keeping.
When the questioning was done, Officer Kay stepped out for a few minutes and came back with my phone. He handed it over and said, “They got a few different prints. It’ll take a bit of time to process and see if we can find a match for her in our system. We’ll let you know. In the meantime, we do know her mom is definitely not a professor at U of I, and if her dad is a lawyer in Des Moines, he doesn’t go by the name Donnelly.”
I wondered if she’d even ever lived in Chicago. Her stories had seemed so unbelievable, sort of show-offy in a way, but I’d thought she was just exaggerating, not making them up altogether.
“Make sure to have your prints taken before you leave so we know which ones might be hers. Anyone else touch your phone?”
I shook my head.
“Okay then. We’ll be in touch.”
When I got home from the station, I went to my room and logged on to my computer, setting my phone next to me. If Mateo were going to reach out, I wanted all channels open to him.
I stayed up till nearly dawn, staring at the pale-yellow walls of my guest room, but Mateo never called or sent me a message. I fell asleep as the sun rose, trying to ignore the ache in my heart, and wishing that wherever Chloe Donnelly was, she’d be found soon.
I woke to murmurs from Nan and Pops in the living room. It took me a few seconds, but I realized they were on the house phone with someone. Nan and Pops had this annoying habit of constantly both getting on the phone no matter who was calling. At first I’d thought it was because Pops didn’t trust Nan to get the details of something right. But then I realized it was Nan who was always screaming at Pops to pick up the other extension, as if she didn’t want to be bothered with relaying to him any relevant information and he should just fend for himself.
“I don’t care what it costs. She’s your daughter and it’s time to get back here to parent.” Nan’s voice rang out, sharp and clear.
I froze. They were talking to my parents, no doubt giving them all the details of what happened. And evidently my grandparents were done with me, done with letting me stay with them, done with being stand-in parents. I couldn’t blame them really, middle-of-the-night calls from the police, a missing girl, and a game that would have been every adult’s worst nightmare.
I covered my face with my hands and tried to breathe. My parents would come home. They were all
owed a two-week leave of absence during their two-year Spirit Corps assignment. They hadn’t taken it because I had always visited them. But they would come home. It was part of the deal when I’d asked to stay with Nan and Pops. My grandparents were allowed an out clause. My parents would come if my grandparents said it was too much, and they’d collect me up to be unschooled in Burkina Faso. There would be no stopping them from extending if I was already living there.
But I didn’t want to go to Burkina Faso. Not now. Not when I had Mateo and Melissa and only one year of high school left. I put my pillow over my head and let them finish the call. When the murmurs ended, I hauled myself out of bed and got dressed. Then I shuffled into the living room, ignoring Fox News and trying to gather myself together.
“I don’t want to move to Burkina Faso permanently,” I said, less of a blurt and more of a statement of fact.
Pops’s face crumpled. “Oh, sweetheart, we don’t want you to move either.”
I sat next to him and put my face in his chest, smelling his always-fresh shirt collar. “Nan said . . . ,” I started.
“She said they need to come home. Not to bring you back with them, but to return to Grinnell for good. They’ve done enough with this save-the-world nonsense. They’re neglecting their daughter right now and you need them.”
“I have you,” I tried, but Pops laughed and I laughed a little too.
“We’re old. We feed you and watch shows with you, but we’re not your parents. We had our time. This is their job. Their first job. Your parents know that. Your mother thought she could do everything: save the world, save herself, turn you into a little mini version of her. But it wasn’t right. We told her that when you asked if you could come live with us. She wasn’t going to let you, you know. She thought we might talk you into staying with her, but I told her, Charlotte, she’s not your project. Let her be a kid. I know she wanted you to change your mind every time you visited them, but I’m glad you didn’t. You’re a teenager and you should be allowed to go to high school in your own town. Your parents need to come home.”
I nodded but couldn’t agree out loud. I’d been holding it inside me so long—the shame of wanting Mom to care more about me than about escaping her depression through work with struggling girls in a third world country, the selfishness I felt every time I’d emailed asking them to adjust their schedule because I was with my friends and didn’t have time to webcam with them, knowing how hard that was for them, and even the guilt I felt for being heartbroken over Mom’s miscarriage, as if the baby had been a little bit mine too.
“Thanks for saying it, Pops, but if you don’t want me here, then I’m going to end up in Burkina Faso.”
Nan came in. “Horse pucky. You need to tell them you don’t want to go. Your parents aren’t monsters; they’re misguided about their priorities. If you tell them the truth, they will hear you. But you’re going to have to be brave enough to tell the truth. Your mother will always try to fit a square peg into a round hole if someone doesn’t stop her. You’re going to need to be the one to say you don’t belong in Africa.”
I shook my head. It was a conversation I didn’t want to have. I wasn’t up for disappointing my mom or for the blanket of guilt I would feel knowing they’d left before they thought the community was ready. “They have good priorities.”
Nan hmphed, but Pops said, “You need to stop worrying about this, doll. Nothing is going to be decided today. You have other things you should be thinking about.”
There was a sharpness in Pops’s voice when he said other things, and I suspected he was very aware of how I’d omitted a few things from my interview with Officer Kay.
“Yes,” Nan said. “The police called. They don’t have any leads yet, but they want us to come back later this afternoon. They have a few more questions.”
“Did they say what time we’re supposed to be there?”
Nan arched a brow. “You have plans?”
I swallowed. I’d been thinking about it all night. I wanted to go to the family planning clinic in Newton for Plan B. The condom hadn’t broken, but I thought maybe I should be preemptive just in case. “I need to run a female errand,” I said, hoping Nan’s fussiness would keep her from asking questions.
“You can take my car while we’re at the Hy-Vee. The police want us there by three.”
I nodded, and Nan wandered into the kitchen. Pops patted my knee. “You think the things you know aren’t going to help find that girl, but they could. Police need to have all the information to do their job. You never know what could be helpful.”
I shoved my pinkie into my mouth, but there was no more nail sliver to bite off. Yesterday’s interview had left my hands in terrible shape. And I had to go do it all over again. I couldn’t give Mateo up, not yet. Not when there was a chance that Chloe Donnelly would turn up and Mateo could come back.
“I told them everything I know,” I said to Pops, trying to sound as genuine as I could.
Pops shook his head. “I don’t think you did. A girl is missing, doll. Think about it. I know you’ll do the right thing.” He squeezed my shoulder and left me to stew.
I went to my room and saw a text on my phone. My heart skipped when I saw Mateo’s name.
We’re heading out of town. Getting a new number. I’ll text as soon as it’s safe.
My lungs froze. I was crushed. Devastated. I wanted to ask him to wait, to tell him she might still be found, but I knew how selfish that was. I texted back, not even certain he’d see the message if he was getting a new number, but I was hopeful he hadn’t switched his SIM card yet.
I didn’t say anything about you to the police. I love you.
I waited for what seemed like hours but was maybe five minutes.
I love you too.
28
I held out in saying anything to the cops through the weekend, sticking to my same vague answers. They were increasingly frustrated with each interview, which made me think they weren’t getting much information from anyone else, either, and they hadn’t yet gotten a fingerprint match. I didn’t know if they were hunting for both Chloe Donnelly and Mateo, but I continued to assert he couldn’t have been involved with her disappearance because he’d been with me almost the whole time, which wasn’t completely true, but it was enough. I had no idea what anyone else had said because I didn’t hear from any of them all weekend. I was nauseated from the Plan B or maybe from my overall nerves and spent a lot of time in bed.
At first I was pissed at Chloe Donnelly, sure she’d somehow orchestrated this like everything else in the game, but as Sunday turned to Monday, my anxiety ratcheted up and my guilt overwhelmed me.
Every cuticle on my fingers was a bitten and bloody mess by the time I got to school. I’d put on leggings and an extra-large hoodie, going for comfort, and left my hair down and in front of my face. Approaching school felt like walking onto a battlefield with no weapons and no armor. I knew Grinnell; there was no way all that happened with the game and Chloe’s disappearance hadn’t been running through the rumor mill since Friday night.
I stood outside school, hiding behind my hair curtain and wondering if anyone would talk to me today. Maybe I was the only one of us who’d even be at school. But then I saw Cam’s car pull into the parking lot, and he, Aiden, and Josh all got out.
The three of them walked by me with only Josh looking at me—an expression of wariness on his face. He seemed almost afraid of me. What the hell? Did they think I was somehow responsible for this?
I followed them inside but stayed far enough behind that they didn’t see me. At the T in the hallway, Aiden reached out for Josh and gave him a quick kiss before turning in the other direction.
A part of me softened when I saw it. No matter what had gone down over the weekend, it seemed that a decision had been made between them. Maybe Aiden’s parents had helped push that decision along. Maybe they thought it was better to tell the truth. I didn’t know what that meant in terms of Aiden and the Naval Academy, b
ut still, I was glad they didn’t have to hide anymore. No one around them seemed to react to the kiss, but I thought it was because they were all in a state of unease around us. I expected a million questions, but I didn’t expect people to be scared of us. It was as if we were surrounded by barbed wire.
I didn’t see Eve or Holly all morning, but the fear radiating off people didn’t go away. Even my teachers didn’t look me in the eye.
I stepped into the cafeteria at lunch and Holly approached me. “Come on. We’re meeting in the media center.”
I followed her out, relief flooding through me. At least there was a we. Though I was disappointed the we was comprised of only me and Holly.
“Where’s Eve?” I asked.
“Her mom wouldn’t let her come to school today. Of course. Too much trauma for her poor little baby girl.”
Whoa. Holly could be bitchy, but I’d never heard her sound so obviously envious of Eve. I peeked at her wrist—no charm bracelet. “Your parents wouldn’t let you stay home today?”
Then I winced because I realized there was no asking her dad anything. Holly glared at me. “Nice. Would you care to dump any more salt in the wound? Maybe mention the number of people Cam has been hooking up with in the past month?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “So Eve doesn’t need to be here for . . . whatever we’re doing?”
Holly tipped her chin and shook her head. “Not for this. But if we need her, we can call her from the media center.”
When we got there, the guys were already on the couches in the back. A few other people lingered, but most of them were up front at the checkout desk. Holly and I slid on the couch across from the guys. Cam was wearing the hoodie Aiden had on the night of the first real game. The hoodie he’d used to convince Eve he was Aiden.
Cam looked directly at me and said, “Why don’t you tell us everything you know.”
The same suggestion Officer Kay had been bugging me with all weekend. My mouth dropped open. “Excuse me?”
Four-Letter Word Page 27
