Wanted!

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Alice did not even pause. She picked up a Dad-goes-camping, slung the backpack over her shoulders, and headed on out. There. She had committed her first crime.

  It horrified her. She had to escape this place, this innocent stretch of hall, where she had become a thief. Alice dropped the shopping bag and fanny purse in among some poor kid’s chapter book, forgotten permission slip, and the remains of a snack.

  She ran.

  The running felt wonderful. Alice always felt thin and athletic in jeans, as if she had longer legs and a better personality. She loved any sport with a run. In softball, she was always sorry the bases weren’t farther apart.

  The slamming of her feet felt useful, as if she were accomplishing something. She liked the speed at which she put distance between herself and Margaret P. Trask. Running was good because it replaced thought, and Alice had not been doing well on the thought front.

  Alice ran about a mile, and then got hit by exhaustion as if by a train. All at once she could not even lift her feet, and her shoulders trembled under the weight of the backpack, whose wide padded ribs kept falling off. Her throat burned where she had thrown up.

  The tears spilled again.

  Stealing a little kid’s book bag. It was disgusting. It was the most low-life thing Alice had ever done. She would have preferred to get caught stealing the Windstar.

  How could she make up for it? How could she ever explain what made her decide to do it?

  It was nothing, it was minor, anybody in her position would do it, she told herself.

  But nobody had ever been in her position before, had they? Did this happen to other high school sophomores?

  Alice walked facing traffic, but not really, because she was keeping her chin down and her eyes on the pavement. She reminded herself that she looked exactly like a million teenagers; nobody could tell she was Alice, nobody would stop and ask.

  Please don’t hit me, she said silently to the cars she was not looking at.

  But somebody had hit her father. Hit in the television series manner: killed. I killed him good. How could that have happened to her father?

  Dad hadn’t been at Austin & Scote very long. He changed jobs a lot. He was so good at what he did that he kept getting offers he couldn’t refuse.

  Alice could vaguely picture Mr. Austin and Mr. Scote. Middle-aged, going gray, and going bald. She remembered then—cars, of course: a stunning silver Jaguar and a black Mercedes that looked like part of a presidential cavalcade.

  Would Mr. Austin or Mr. Scote recognize Alice? Did Daddy keep a photograph of Alice on his desk? But it didn’t matter, because Austin & Scote was not a place where Alice could slip in unnoticed and riffle through the papers on her father’s desk, or open up his computer files to see who his enemies were.

  The company was high-security: You had to have a photo ID to get into the building, and Austin & Scote had their own elevator, run by a uniformed person, not buttons. If you didn’t have a pass, you didn’t go up.

  Alice could not get into Dad’s office to find out anything, and in any case, she had not the slightest idea what to look for, nor how to look.

  Dad enjoyed his work, but that did not mean his co-workers were honest. These men and women had access to corporate plans, strategies, patents, formulae, sales figures, mailing lists. Suppose there was more money in selling these secrets than in protecting them?

  Suppose that Dad had a secret to sell and—

  No.

  Alice refused to think even for a moment that Dad was the one doing something wrong.

  She had to get to a computer and read what was on the disk that mattered so much.

  She plodded on. The buildings ceased to be houses and became doctors’ offices. Accountants and lawyers. And then, blessedly, a main street. It had the look of a small town. All in a row were a hardware store, drugstore, flower shop, boutique. A traffic sign said ROUTE 145. Alice knew the other end of this road well; her high school was on 145. So she had been correct about the diagonal; she was circling the city through its suburbs.

  Alice could not take another step. She sat on a bench. It was pretty here, with a row of flagpoles, each pole with a small circle of red, white, and blue flowers. Alice’s mother knew flowers and could have named them.

  The tears came back when she thought of her mother.

  When Alice was little, she had thought of her mother as a goddess: a beautiful, sparkling woman of perfection and strength. It had been so awful, so painful, when her mother turned out to be somebody Alice didn’t always like. Okay, other girls moaned and groaned about their mothers, but Alice figured hers would be different; her mother would stay flawless.

  No.

  Not only did Mom have flaws, but she had left Dad, and for Alice this was a gap in Mom’s character that Alice could not forget.

  Alice busied herself sorting out the contents of her backpack, tossing the dead snack into a trash container, and taking the price tag off the nerd glasses.

  Way down the block, from behind a brick building in whose front yard a fruit tree blossomed, came a police car.

  Alice put the glasses on. The corrective lenses made objects shimmer and curve, like heat spots on the road. The police car drove toward her; she could feel the cop’s presence, his uniform, his loud voice, his gun, his handcuffs—

  But it drove by.

  Through the distorting lenses, Alice could not tell whether the officer was a man or a woman. It was simply a person not looking left or right.

  Alice had to wait until her heart had stopped jumping around before she could move, and then she had to move, because sitting still was too scary.

  Definitely a case, thought Alice, of Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. I’m that chicken. Short on reasons to do anything.

  Gathered outside a secondhand boutique with plaid shirts, prom gowns, beaded bags, and camo pants all in the same window, was a group of girls older than Alice. She thought they were about eighteen. They were loud and very full of themselves. Alice drifted near, keeping their bodies between herself and the traffic on 145.

  “So do you like your new roommate any better?” said one girl.

  “I hate her guts; she’s a jerk,” said a girl wearing a State University sweatshirt.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I dunno. What am I supposed to do about it? I told the dorm supervisor and she shrugs, she says ‘Sometimes people have to try harder.’ ” The speaker was disgusted with the concept of trying harder.

  Down the street, driving slowly, came a car Alice knew. Oh, yes! she thought, overjoyed. Mom stayed by the phone, weeping, praying I’d call again, and she sent Richard Rellen out to find me.

  For that dark green Volvo wagon, square, solid, and practical, belonged to the man her mother planned to marry.

  Alice was trembling with relief. Mom cared. Of course Mom cared; how could Alice have thought for a moment that she did not care? Of course Mom had stayed by the phone, and would be sobbing even harder now, aching and yearning for Alice to call, so Mom could take back what she had said, could explain and apologize.

  Alice lifted her arm to wave. She opened her mouth to call, thinking friend, thinking ally, and thought: Wait. Overjoyed.

  Was she feeling too much joy?

  Alice stepped back, trying to be a college girl among college girls.

  Her parents had argued over Rick darling. Dad and Mom had said terrible things to each other about Mom’s dating. Alice had fled the room and let them have their arguments without her. She hated raised voices, but especially her own mother and father at war.

  Through the glimmery focus of her new glasses, she saw Rick Rellen glance at the group of girls. Alice’s hair was up beneath her baseball cap, and Alice never put her hair up, because she believed her left ear stuck out, and it was unbearable to let the world see her ear. Now, in nerd glasses, pathetic T-shirt, cap, and protruding ear, Alice wondered if Mr. Rellen would recognize her.

&nb
sp; In Dad’s honor, Alice had avoided him as much as possible.

  She did not know whether she actually disliked Mr. Rellen, or if she was working on it for Dad’s sake, or if this was her personal contribution to strife: her way to make her mother pay.

  Whatever he was, he was not a parent. Alice was ready to talk to her mother. She was not ready to talk to the future second husband of that mother.

  It startled Alice to be so sure of that. It was the first thing all this long hard day that she was sure of: She was not going to confide in Rick Rellen.

  “Oh, I know the woman you mean,” chimed in a third girl. “She used to be in charge at Flemming Dorm. You’re right, Bethany, she never does anything to help you. She says you have to learn to take things in stride.”

  The girls made noises of disgust and headed for a big, heavy-duty, take-the-class-with-you-to-Disney-World Econo-line van. Swivel seats, privacy glass, the works. The girls piled in. Bethany was the driver.

  Alice took off her glasses, hoping she looked eighteen and not twelve. “Hey, listen, I hate to bother you,” she said, “but can you give me a lift back to the campus? I think my boyfriend has abandoned me here.”

  It was a sisterhood moment. They had things to do, and they did not want to be bothered, but still, they could not drive away from a woman whose boyfriend had proved unreliable. “Well, okay,” said Bethany sullenly.

  Alice climbed in, said “Thank you,” and sat in back, where she would not bother them. The shock of being pursued had left every joint weak, every muscle trembling. The backseat would be a very short vacation from running.

  The State University campus was also on 145, maybe ten miles from Mom’s, maybe half that from Dad’s or Westtown Mall. So Alice had covered a lot of territory in order to get nowhere.

  Ten miles took enough time, however, to ask herself what she was doing, and why.

  The van moved slowly out into the traffic.

  The Volvo idled beside parallel-parked cars. Rick Rellen’s left elbow stuck out the driver’s window. Cradled in his hand was a car phone.

  Chapter 5

  STRANGELY ISOLATED IN THE back of somebody else’s van and the back of somebody else’s conversation, Alice found herself able to reach the back of her own mind. The desire to talk to her mother had disappeared. The need to weep for her father had left her chest.

  She began to reconstruct the day.

  She’d been home by herself. Dad called. He urgently requested her to leave the house with the disk TWIN and to meet him out of town. He gave her the extraordinary order to drive his most precious possession—a car she could not drive. So Dad desperately wanted those disks. Did he just want them—or did he want them out of the house? Had he known that somebody else was about to break in for those same disks? If so, he would have wanted Alice out of the house.

  So he did not think Alice was in danger. And he must not have thought he was in danger, or he would have barricaded a door, or called the police himself.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes had passed before the man entered Dad’s condo. So that man could not have been very far away. In a city, however, depending on traffic, ten minutes could mean half a mile or several miles. Everybody Alice knew lived within that sphere. This did not narrow it down.

  That man had spoken in a voice Alice half knew. He knew things about Dad, as if they had worked together. He had entered with a key. Presumably Dad’s key.

  Alice had hid from this trespasser under the Corvette. Time had passed, in which there were strange and awful noises she could not identify, and one she could: the computer keyboard. Then the man left, driving away in that navy blue minivan.

  Could the person to whom the voice spoke have been Dad himself? Could Dad have walked into the condo? No. He would have yelled; fought; warned his daughter somehow. Had he been carried in? Had that heavy sound, that couch-falling sound, been her father’s body when it was dropped to the floor for the police to find? Could he have been carried in unconscious? Had the actual murder of Alice’s father taken place while she lay silently sobbing under the car? Could his body have been in that condo while she was showering and changing clothes?

  He was a big man. Tall and lean and strong. He was fit. It would take another big strong man to move him. And as for killing him, how could somebody as small as Alice have accomplished that?

  But she did not know how he had been killed. If he had been shot, it definitely had not happened at the condo; she would have heard something. Her father possessed no guns; she, Alice, would not have had access to a gun, and her mother would know that. How else do you kill a man? Hit him over the head? Alice wasn’t tall enough. Her mother would know that, too!

  But there again, the excess of cop shows Alice had seen filled her with an excess of images: You could catch a person by surprise. You could come up behind them. You could get them to stoop down to pick something up and brain them with a baseball bat. You did not have to be bigger than your enemy. Just smarter, or luckier.

  But nobody was smarter than Dad!

  Alice wrenched her mind away from pictures of herself, from the very pictures her mother must be forming, of the shape of Dad’s death and Dad’s killer. She forced herself to go on analyzing the events.

  She had not entered his bedroom. She had not gone near his bathroom.

  Alice had taken the time to shower and change and had driven away in the Corvette, as her father had told her to do.

  At least an hour later, maybe an hour and a half, because Alice had no idea how long she had sat, comatose from anxiety, waiting for Dad to arrive, had come the excited claims on the radio that Marc Robie had been murdered; that Alice had sent an E-mail confession to her own mother; that Mom herself called the police; that police were looking for Alice.

  Swiftly; everything had happened so swiftly. As if it had been engineered.

  Next, Alice had called her mother, who, in shock and grief and horror, definitely did believe that Alice had killed Dad.

  So while Alice lay flat and shuddering beneath the car, something other than murder had taken place. The murderer sent a false E-mail message to Alice’s mother. How could the murderer have known the password? How could the murderer have known that Alice signed off Ally when talking to her mother? What possible wording, what possible sentence, could make a person’s own mother say—Yes; my daughter killed her father?

  Alice could hardly bear to think of her mother. The betrayal! How dare Mom believe so readily!

  And if all, or some, of this were true—what vicious and terrible person had trapped Alice beneath the Corvette? A person who would not only kill Dad, but think of a way to hold Alice responsible.

  The voice had commented out loud on Alice’s clothing thrown on the floor. He’d been looking for Alice when he opened the garage door. What if Alice had not been perfectly hidden? What if the murderer had seen her on the garage floor? What if he had known all along that Alice was in the condo—and arranged to have the police come, and find her, filthy and sobbing and hiding under her father’s car? Having just sent a confession of murder to her own mother?

  The back of the van smelled of old food: faint whiffs of abandoned potato chip bags and french fry containers. Alice was so queasy she had to hold onto her mouth and stomach. She ordered herself not to get sick. She had done that once; she was not doing it again. Dad and I were going to eat out tonight at that new Japanese restaurant, the one where you sit in a circle and watch the chef.

  She thought: Dad is never going to do anything with me again.

  She thought: I know where he was. He was at that number. The number displayed on Caller ID. Either he was killed there, or he was caught there.

  She closed her eyes, trying to remember the number, trying to find it in her dark and angry mind. It had been a local call, so the first three digits were 399. The next four…they’d been a pair…some sort of match. If only Dad had the newer type of Caller ID, where it also displayed the name!

  She remembered the last four
digits. 8789.

  The van slowed for a speed bump. “Uh—so—um—where do you want to get out?” called Bethany.

  Alice was shocked. She had forgotten the van and the girls and the college. She looked out the window, as afraid as she had been when she first heard the voice in the condo.

  I can’t get out; the van is so safe, dark, and cool.

  The van had come to a complete stop.

  “This is great,” said Alice, stepping forward in a crouch and yanking the door handle down. “You’re a peach,” she said.

  Bethany gave her the tight, irritated smile of somebody who is not a peach and does not want to be put in this position again.

  Alice hoped these girls never watched the evening news, didn’t care about local crime, but got into fights with their roommates tonight. She slammed the heavy door shut and walked away without looking back. Very difficult. She had not managed it with the Ford, but she disciplined herself, and managed it with Bethany.

  What were they saying about her? What observations had they made? What would they do next?

  They’ll forget me, she told herself. She shivered slightly.

  Pathways crisscrossed the grass. Whatever angle you needed to go, there was cement to follow. There was not a bush, not a flower, not a tree to relieve the cement slapped down in the grass. Alice’s shadow was like a silhouette on a wanted poster.

  It was hard to accept that she must hoist her body and voice and keep going. Keep going where?

  The campus was its own city. Each building looked exactly like every other building. Plain brick rectangles, as if the college had not used an architect, but bought buildings off a rack. We’ll have twenty dorms, please, ten classrooms, and a lab.

  Lab, thought Alice. This campus will have a computer lab. It will be open twenty-four hours, because computer users need to be in there any hour of the day or night.

  Each utilitarian building, like the elementary school, was named for a person. The Joe P. Johanneson Building. The Eunice I. McGarry Center. No clue as to the purpose of these buildings.