by Jeff Lindsay
That box and its slides were important to me—but under the circumstances it was a truly stupid thing to worry about. I had to find Astor, wherever she was, and if she had been snatched by some predator, as I suspected, then there would soon be a new slide in the box.
The front door of the house banged open and Rita came chuffing out to my car as I got out. “Oh, Dexter, thank God you’re here; let’s go, quick!” she said, reaching for the handle of the passenger door.
“Go where?” I said.
Rita jerked her hand back from my car as if it had burned her. “Oh!” she said, “I don’t have— I don’t know, it just seems— I mean, I thought if we could— Oh, no …” she said, and she came around the car and clamped onto me, putting her head down onto my chest and snuffling, right where Jackie had so recently pressed her face.
I pried Rita away from me and gave her a gentle shake. “Rita,” I said. “Is there someplace to go? Have you heard from Astor?”
“No, of course not, no, but, Dexter,” she said, “what do we do?”
“First,” I said, “we calm down.” I didn’t think Rita would accept this suggestion with any enthusiasm, and she didn’t. She sniffled again, and moaned, hopping up and down, for all the world like a child who has to go to the bathroom. “All right,” I said, taking her elbow. “Let’s go inside.” And over her incoherent protests I led her into the house and sat her down on the couch.
“Now then,” I said. “When is the last time you heard from her?”
“Oh, God, Dexter, you sound just like a— I mean, it’s Astor, for God’s sake, and you’re just—”
“Yes, I am,” I interrupted. “We won’t find her by being hysterical.”
“Oh,” she said, “I suppose you’re right, but …”
“When,” I said very deliberately. “When did you hear from her?”
“I didn’t,” Rita said. “Just … like I said, this morning I dropped her at school? In the same place as always, and then they called to say …”
“All right,” I said. “But you left her in front of her school.”
“Yes,” she said. “And then I— I mean, Cody was being so grouchy, and Lily Anne needed a change, so I just … I drove away.”
It took only a moment’s thought for me to realize what that meant. In a strange way, it was disappointing. I had raised my Other Self up on point, ready to seek and destroy whatever nervy pervert had grabbed Astor, and as always, I felt a little diminished when I had to let all that icy glee drain away. “She wasn’t snatched,” I said. “She left on her own.”
“What!?” Rita said, sounding horrified. “Dexter, but that’s stupid! She would never—”
“She did,” I said firmly. “There’s a cop there at the school in the morning, and hundreds of parents, and bus drivers and teachers—all watching very carefully. Nobody could grab her there without being seen. So they didn’t. She walked away.”
Rita stared at me with big round eyes and a mouth stretched open in almost the same shape. “But … why?” she said. “Where would she go?”
“Almost anywhere,” I said. “Walk up to Metrorail—it’s not far—and then … did she have any money?”
“Her allowance,” Rita said. “And …” She bit her lip. “I think she took some money from my purse. Forty dollars.”
“Well, we can rule out Singapore,” I said. Forty dollars and Astor’s allowance—maybe another ten or twenty dollars, if she’d saved up—would not get her far. “Has she said anything? Like a new friend, or somebody online? Any hint at all?”
“Oh, no,” Rita said. “I would never let her— You know what she’s like. She doesn’t make friends very easily, and— She didn’t say anything.”
“Okay,” I said, and I stood up. “I’m going to look in her room.”
“What?” Rita said. “Dexter, she’s not there; I’m sure I would have—Oh! You mean look for something.…”
“Yes,” I said, and I stepped around her and down the hall to the room Astor shared with her brother. It was a small room, too small for two growing kids of different genders, which was one of the main reasons we had bought the new and larger house, where they would each have their own room. One side of the room was taken up by the bunk bed—Cody on top—and the other side was carefully divided between His space and Hers.
The room was cluttered with all the junk you would expect a couple of ordinary kids to collect—but there were differences, because these, after all, were not ordinary kids. Their Bio Dad’s violence, and probably his DNA, had set their feet on the Dark Path, and they would never ever walk in the happy-face light of Normal.
And so a few odd touches stood out to the eye of any trained observer, especially if he was also a Monster like me. For example, Cody had a number of action figures—he got very cranky if you called them dolls—as any boy his age might. But every one of them had been neatly and lovingly beheaded. The tiny plastic heads were lined up in a careful row on the top tier of his toy shelf, aligned exactly, perfectly, not a single one out of place.
The entire Cody side of the little room, in fact, was alarmingly neat. His shoes were lined up, toes together, his books stacked with the spines aligned, and even his dirty clothes lay neatly in a blue plastic laundry basket, looking like they had been folded first. Preteen boys are never that neat, but since I had been the same way myself, I didn’t worry. Something in a Monster just likes things tidy. Since Cody shared my other, Darker tastes, I just assumed that his Neatness was simply part of the package.
Astor’s half, on the other hand, was as chaotic as a very small space could be. She had a small desk with a hutch on it, and a chair pulled halfway out. Clothing, both clean and dirty, was piled on the chair and on top of the hutch, everything from shorts and jeans and dresses to oddly colored socks and underpants with bright patterns on them. It was a mess, even more than usual, as if she had taken every stitch of clothing she owned and sorted through it, throwing it all around as she did.
If she had, in fact, sorted through it as she prepared to leave, the things she chose to take away might be significant. I was no expert on Astor’s wardrobe, but I could recognize some of the most important pieces, since I had listened to her screech about them when they were not laundered yet, or too stupid to wear, or the wrong color for Friday. I picked through the mound of shirts and skirts and sweaters and hoodies, not sure what I was really hoping to find—and finding it anyway.
There had been some kind of fall dance at school a few weeks earlier, and to my surprise, Astor had insisted on attending. Even more, she had gone into a weeklong towering tizzy about having nothing to wear, which struck me as even odder, considering that the floor of her closet was heaped with enough clothing to start a boutique.
But Rita had played along with Astor’s enthusiasm, telling me only that a girl’s first dance was very special, almost like first Communion, and of course she had to have a new dress, and of course it had to be Just Right. And so they had spent an entire weekend flitting across Miami from mall to mall until they found the perfect dress. It was a silver sheath that sparkled and gleamed and radiated blue highlights as it moved, and Astor had been more pleased with that dress than I had ever seen her. And it must have been effective, because she came home from the dance radiating a smug contempt for boys.
But the dress didn’t seem to be here at the moment. I poked through the heap of clothes without finding a flicker of silver. I stepped over to the closet and peered in, moving things around until I was sure it was not there, either.
Wherever Astor had gone, she had taken her Very Special Dress.
I moved back beside her desk and thought about this. She would not have taken that dress if she planned to hitchhike through South America, climb Mount Rainier, or work her way to Australia on a tramp steamer. She would not risk getting it dirty. So where had she gone?
I looked around. On the far side of the rag heap, there were dozens of photos taped to the wall, jammed crazily together and even overla
pping one another. I stepped over and looked at the most recent layer, hoping to see something, anything that might suggest where she was. Most of the pictures on the wall were of Astor, many of them she had clearly taken herself, by holding the camera out in front of her own face, or shooting into a mirror. There were three pictures taped on top of all the others, in the center of the wall. But they showed nothing except Astor clowning with Robert, obviously taken on the day she and her siblings had surprised me at Wardrobe. In one of them Astor had pale makeup covering her face and fake blood dripping from her mouth; she was attacking Robert as he cringed away in mock fear.
The next one showed Astor in grotesquely overdone glamour makeup, pouting at her reflection in the large, light-framed mirror of a professional makeup room; Portrait of the Actress as a Young Vamp.
In the last picture Astor, still in the awful makeup, stood in front of Robert with huge eyes and a face full of dramatic yearning straight from Gone with the Wind, while Robert looked away with an expression of noble longing on his face.
A fourth picture, set off to the side, was a standard publicity shot of Robert. In black marker, somebody, presumably Robert, had written, “To the Beautiful Astor with my very best,” and then an illegible flourish that was probably his signature.
There was nothing else, just these silly pictures, and nothing to them but a young girl’s infatuation with the idea of being an actress, and having a chance to really do it with Real Makeup and a Real Star. There was nothing else there on the wall that I hadn’t seen before: no tourist brochures for Rio, no scribbled flight numbers, nothing. I poked around for another minute anyway, looking in the closet, under the bed, and even under the mattress, but I found no hint of where she might have gone, or why.
I sat on the edge of the lower bunk and pondered. I was now sure that Astor had run away—probably just walked away, most likely—and had not been grabbed by some drooling dolt with arrested development. Of course, that would not last. A young girl on the street alone does not stay alone for long; that is a simple law of nature. She would have company very quickly—they would find her. She would almost certainly not like her new friends, or the things they made her do, but she would not be alone. Someone with an eye out for somebody just like her would find her, and lead her away, and then Astor would disappear forever into a world of painful surprises.
In the meantime, however, there was a brief window of opportunity for me to get to her before somebody else did. And it should be easy, because I knew her very well, knew her in ways that even her mother did not, and also because I am very, very clever and I almost always figure out these little puzzles.
So where would she go? And just as important, why would she go now? She had grumbled about hating her family and wanting to run away, but all kids did that, and I’d never taken her seriously. Astor was too bright to throw herself out the door and into random chance, or to think she could instantly find a place where her True Greatness and Beauty were recognized and rewarded. And she had taken along her Special Dress. So if she went, it would be to someplace specific, and someplace she was sure would be better.
But what could be better than having three square meals, plus snacks, and new shoes now and then? And all this with a family who actually liked her for some reason, paid all her bills, put up with her unpleasant and furious snits—and more, a semifather who knew and understood what she was really like in the dark and damaged interior of her twisted self?
On top of everything else, she was about to move into a new house, with her very own room and a swimming pool. She had been very excited about her new house, carefully painting her room and planning where her desk and bed would go, and what she would wear to her first pool party—could she really find something better than that to run away to, something that was right here, right now, immediate and within reach?
There was a snuffling noise from the doorway, and Rita’s plaintive voice called, “… Dexter …?” and I blinked myself back to awareness. As sometimes happens when I am concentrating on some complex problem, I found that I had been staring fixedly straight ahead, without actually seeing anything. But as Rita’s interruption brought me back to the here and now, I saw that I was staring straight at Astor’s wall of photos.
“Dexter?” she whined again. “Have you … found anything?”
I opened my mouth to answer her, but the words that came out surprised me; they were not at all the words I had thought I was going to say. “Yes,” I said. “I know where she went.” And even stranger, I did know.
“Oh!” Rita said. “Oh, thank God!”
I barely managed to stand up and then she was on me, sobbing and yodeling into my shirtfront and leaving me coated with damp unpleasant things. I pried her back from my chest and she looked up at me with a wet, red, puffy face. “Where is she?” she said, unsuccessfully trying to sniffle some goo off her lip and back into her nose. “Where did she go? We have to— Dexter, for God’s sake, we have to right now— Oh, why are you standing around here like this— Dexter, come on!”
“I’ll get her,” I said. “I want you to stay here.”
“Stay here?! But that’s— No, Dexter, I can’t just— What are you talking about, stay here? That’s completely— Why would I stay here?”
The real answer to why was that I did not want her with me, not where I was going. But because there was no way to say that without causing a full-scale nuclear war, I gave her the first thing that popped into my head: “She might come home,” I said. “Somebody should be here, just in case.” I put a hand on her shoulder and frowned with great seriousness. “And that somebody ought to be her mother.”
I don’t really know why this should be, but I have found that words like “ought” and “should” have a very special magical power, something that reaches down into a soft and gooey spot in the human heart that I do not have, thank goodness. Because aiming these words at someone who does have it—someone like Rita, for example—almost always makes them take a deep breath, straighten their shoulders, and do things they really don’t want to do.
Rita did not disappoint; as if she was following a printed instruction sheet, she opened her mouth to object—and then closed it, took a deep breath, and straightened her shoulders. “All right,” she said. “That’s probably— I mean, of course I want to go, but—if she came back? I couldn’t— I’ll stay here.”
“Good,” I said, and I clapped her on the shoulder as if she had just agreed to parachute behind enemy lines and blow up a bridge. “I’ll call you as soon as I find her,” I said.
“Yes, that’s— And if she comes here, I’ll— But Dexter, where is she?”
I gave her a brave smile. “Someplace better,” I said, and before Rita could sputter too many new objections, I was into the hall, out the front door, and driving away.
The traffic had gotten a little thicker in the last forty minutes, but most of it was going in the other direction, away from work in the city, toward home in the suburbs, and there were no serious delays all the way up Dixie Highway and back onto I-95.
I showed my credentials to a very alert-looking cop, and he waved me toward the far end of the parking lot. I parked the car there and looked around as I got out. I could see a lot more cops, all looking just as alert, wandering around the set as well as posted at the perimeter. They seemed to be taking the security thing very seriously—whether because Captain Matthews had ordered it, or because they liked the thought of keeping ordinary people away from the really cool movie action, I couldn’t say. But I didn’t see how Astor could have snuck onto the set without being seen, so I walked back to the cop who had scanned my credentials.
“I’m looking for a girl,” I said.
“Ain’t we all,” he told me deadpan, looking away into the distance.
“This one is eleven years old,” I said. “Blond hair, maybe a backpack?”
The cop focused on me. “Runaway?” he said.
I smiled reassuringly; I didn’t want a huge and offi
cial fuss about this, not just yet. “Not yet,” I said. “She wants to be a movie star, so …”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “My kid, ten years old. He wants to be a relief pitcher. So he turns up in Fort Myers, at Red Sox spring training.” He snorted. “Fucking Red Sox?!”
“Could have been worse,” I said. “Might have been the Mets.”
“Got that right,” he said. “Lemme call around the perimeter.”
The cop turned his back and took a step away while he spoke into his radio, and a few seconds later he turned back to me and nodded. “Got her,” he said. “Few hours ago. Alvarez says she came right up and asked for Robert Chase, the actor guy?”
I nodded; I was pretty sure I knew who Robert Chase was.
“So naturally, Alvarez says, ‘No way, I can’t do that, and why aren’t you in school?’ And she says she’s his niece, and Chase is expecting her.” He shrugged. “So, this is Miami. Weirder shit happens every day, right? Alvarez sends the word, and like two seconds later, here comes Chase on the run. And he leads her away by the hand.”
It made sense: However angelic she might look, Astor was a predator, in her own way. She would naturally make a beeline for Robert; he had shown her weakness, and even though his first impulse would be to call me, or Deborah, Astor would not let him. I could almost hear her wheedling and bullying and lying her little tail off—and poor Robert, who thought he liked kids but had never had to deal with one, especially one like this, would have no defense at all. He would cave in to her, helpless, telling himself that he would call in just a little while, and anyway, she was safe here on the set, and where was the harm?
“Where’d they go?” I asked the cop.
He jerked his head at the row of actors’ trailers. “Over to his trailer,” he said. I thanked him, and I headed over there, too.
Robert’s trailer was at the far end of the row. He had insisted on being put there in semi-isolation, probably because he wanted privacy so he could go into his Method trance and become his character. Since that character still had a disturbing number of habits he had stolen from me, I thought he should have been placed even farther away, maybe in the middle of the Everglades, where he might be eaten by a Burmese python.
