About That Night (5 page)

It hits her like an iceball. She should tell Mrs. Maugham exactly what she's thinking. Or maybe she should tell the police. If they're looking for Derek, it will be helpful for them to know where he might have gone, which path he might have taken. She should definitely tell someone.

But first she wants to clear up once and for all the other thing that's been eating at her, the less important thing. She knows where she put that bracelet, but it isn't there now. She's as close to positive now as she can be that Derek didn't take it. So where is it?

Unless it grew legs and walked away (as her mother would say), it must still be in her room. It only stands to reason.

Jordie goes back upstairs and begins one last methodical search for the bracelet Ronan gave her. She doesn't rip through her drawers like she did before. This time she searches them carefully, removing things one by one and putting them back in their places before moving on to the next drawer, the next piece of furniture, the next flat surface, the next patch of carpet.

“What're you looking for?” asks a voice at the door.

It's her sister, Carly, two years younger than Jordie, although you'd never know it from all the makeup she wears, not to mention the skanky clothes. Jordie can't imagine why her parents let her out of the house looking the way she does.

“None of your business.” Jordie closes the second-to-bottom dresser drawer and opens the bottom one, although she isn't sure why. She keeps sweaters in that drawer; there's no way she would put anything valuable in there. She never has.

There is no bracelet.

“I know you're looking for something.” Carly is leaning against the doorframe, her toes not quite touching the edge of carpet that marks the interior boundary of Jordie's room. It's an irritating habit she picked up for those times when Jordie refuses her entry into the room. It's a habit made all the more alluring by the fact that it drives Jordie crazy and neither girl is allowed to close her door in the other's face. Privacy, yes. Rudeness, no.

“Well, since you're so smart, then you should already know what it is.” Jordie slides the bottom drawer shut and stands with her hands on her hips, wondering where to turn next. She tries to visualize the last time she saw the bracelet. It's been months since she wore it, well before she and Derek started seeing each other. She closes her eyes for a moment and tries to picture the last time she had it on—or took it off.

She and Ronan had had a fight. That was it. Except it wasn't a fair fight—not in the sense of being two-sided anyway. Ronan was great with his fists. Put him up against another guy he was pissed at or who was pissed at him, and you'd see some genuine pugilistic combat. But put him against a girl whose main weapon—whose only weapon, by choice—was words, and all you got was silence. Like from a boulder. Or a wall. Like—it was so hard to tell, and that was the problem—from someone who didn't care.

She'd wanted to know what was wrong, why he was sulking around, why he didn't hand in his homework when it was stuff he could have done with his eyes closed, for God's sake, so why not take the twenty or thirty minutes or whatever it was and get it done and stop having all that grief rain down on him that only put everyone in a bad mood and screwed with their plans, which had to get canceled again because all of a sudden Mr. Atherly had had it up to
here
with him and had assigned him an essay that,
trust me, you don't hand this in first thing Monday, young man, and you are not, repeat, not passing this class in my lifetime, so put that in your pipe and smoke it
. Mr. Atherly, who never raised his voice to anyone, and who never, ever, said anything as asinine as
put that in your pipe and smoke it
. He must have been reliving something his father said to him thirty or forty years ago.

Of course, Ronan didn't answer. Instead, she got the stare. Then she got the shrug. Then she got the shift of his eyes away from her and off to something to the left, when all that was there was a brick wall, the exterior wall of the gym, in fact.

That's when it had dropped down on her like a tiny bird landing on her shoulder, as light as a puff of air but with a chirp that was loud and clear: You cannot communicate with this guy, Jordie. Sure, he's got amazing eyes and he's great to look at and has a great body. And you bet his ass is the best ass in jeans of any guy, bar none, in this whole school. And sure, he's got those soft lips and, boy, can he kiss. And those hands—Jesus, Mary and Joseph, talk about a burning bush. He's sweet, too, in a kind of inarticulate, semi-bashful way. And every now and then he says something that makes you sit up and take notice, like when her grandpa was gruff and cranky after having his heart attack, and Ronan said he didn't care how old someone was or how wise they seemed most of the time, he was pretty sure they were as afraid of dying as anyone else, even if it didn't seem that way to younger people. He said it with a fierceness she hadn't seen in him before. And then he said maybe it would be a good idea to go and see him, maybe try to cheer him up a little—something else he'd never done before. And they did go, and her grandpa liked Ronan. But that kind of thing didn't happen very often, whereas the stare, the shrug and the shift off to left field happened all the time, and she couldn't get a word out of him about why.

Before she could say what was on her mind, he broke up with her. Just like that. “This isn't working for me,” he said.

She went home. She went up to her room, in tears, of course, because even though she was angry with him, she was also hurt. She had stood right in front of the mirror on top of her dresser and looked at herself. She remembered that. She remembered asking herself, Am I the one who's crazy, or is it him? Then, yes, she had slipped off the bracelet and held it. She had opened the top drawer and she had set the bracelet inside, in the tray where she kept her other bracelets, the two good ones—one from her parents and one from her grandmother—and the two matching pairs of earrings that went with them.

Her eyes pop open now. She slides the drawer out. Then, slowly, she turns toward the door.

“Have you been in my things?”

The movement is almost imperceptible. Almost, but not quite. Jordie catches the flash of tension in her sister's body against the wooden doorframe.

“Me? You think I'm crazy?”

Jordie watches her, counting the seconds until her twitchy little sister does exactly what Jordie expects her to do: she peels herself off the doorframe, as if she's suddenly bored by what's going on in Jordie's room.

Jordie is on her before she takes a full step. She wraps her hand around Carly's bony upper arm and yanks her into the room. She closes the door and flattens herself against it so that Carly has no way out.

“You were, you little rat. You were in here. You took it, didn't you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Carly thinks she's quick-witted when, really, she's just predictable. Well, Jordie isn't going to let her get away with that.

“I'm going to tell Mom,” Jordie says. “She told you last time that if you came in my room and took something without permission again, she was going to ground your sorry little ass for a month. You remember that, right?”

Carly bucks up. “You need proof.”

Sassy little bitch. “You're the only person besides Mom and Dad who has access to my room. You're the only person besides Mom who knows where I keep my good jewelry. And you're the only person, period, who has a reason to take my things, never mind a history of actually taking them. I'm talking about the court of Mom, Carly, not a court of law. If I go down there and talk to her right now, you'll be spending the next month staring at the four walls of your room. Is that what you want?”

As hoped, Carly breaks.

“If you're talking about that bracelet that Ronan gave you, I don't see what the big deal is,” she says.

“Is it yours?” Jordie shrieks at her. “Is it?”

Carly cowers, her eyes on the door. Jordie allows herself to smile.

“I bet if I yell a little louder, Mom will come up.”

“Okay,” Carly says, cowed and exasperated. “Okay, so big deal—I took it.”

“I want it back.” Jordie thrusts out her hand. “Now.”

Carly bites her lips.

“Now means now, Carly.”

“Um…that could be a problem.”

“Because?”

“Because I kind of gave it to someone.”

“Kind of?”

“Okay, so I did. I gave it away. You dumped the guy. You said you never wanted to see him again. I don't know why you even kept the bracelet. It's not like you were ever going to wear it.”

Jordie can barely contain the rage that is burbling inside her. “I never wear the bracelet Grandma gave me.” It's too clunky and old-fashioned, although she would never say that to her grandmother, or to her mother, for that matter. “Are you planning to give it away too?”

“That's different.”

“I want that bracelet back, Carly.”

No answer.

“Who did you give it to?”

No answer.

Jordie reaches for the doorknob behind her.

“Wait!” Carly shouts. “Tasha. I gave it to Tasha.”

“Call her right this minute and tell her you want it back.”

Carly hesitates, swirling some words around in her mouth before finally spitting them out. “She might not give it back,” she says finally.

“Because?”

No answer.

“Carly, because…?” Jordie's voice is uncomfortably loud for her sister.

“Because I sort of sold it to her.”

“You
sold
my bracelet?” Since when did her little sister grow such a greedy and larcenous soul? “So give her back the money.”

“I spent it.”

“Tough. Let me put it this way, Carly. You
stole
my bracelet and then sold it. She bought
stolen
property. If I report this to the cops—and don't think I won't—she'll have to give it back, and then she'll drop you like a hot potato and you won't have any friends and maybe I'll even decide to press charges.” Her voice is getting louder and louder. “Do you get what I'm saying to you?”

“I get it, I get it.”

“Call Tasha or go over to her house and get that bracelet and bring it back to me right now. I'm giving you an hour. After that, I'm going to Mom.”

“She's in Florida. She won't be back until the day after tomorrow.” A look of defiance appears in her eyes. “What was Ronan doing here the other night?”

Jordie stares at her sister, gives her a real stinkeye.

“Either I have that bracelet in my hand by bedtime the day after tomorrow or you are in such a deep and smelly pit of trouble that you'll never see daylight again. You got that?”

Carly, eyelinered eyes wide with apprehension, nods and swallows hard. Jordie steps away from the door to let her out of the room.

Eight

W
hile Jordie is issuing threats, Regis Minnow, forty-seven, father of two young boys and owner of a black Labrador named Barney, purchased for and named by said boys, is being yanked along a snow-covered pathway, his arm straight out ahead of him, then to his right, then in front again but tracking left, then momentarily to his left as Barney sniffs the environs for anything of interest. Ten months ago, when Regis and his wife, Melanie, brought the dog home, Regis took Barney's lively curiosity as a sign of intelligence. It was an understandable error—Regis had never owned a dog before. His mother refused to even consider having a defecating animal in the house. Since then, however, Regis, a teacher of American literature at the community college, has done his reading. It's possible that as one-year-old Labs go, Barney is blessed with intelligence. But, all the books caution, young dogs of Barney's size generally consist of two key elements: the body of an athlete and the brain of a two-year-old child. The athleticism tends to wane over time, as it does in humans. That two-year-old brain never really matures. Barney yanks and pulls, bounds forward and stops suddenly, jerking Regis to an arm-wrenching halt, at more or less the same places every single day. These are usually places where other dogs have peed or defecated, and nothing can move Barney from those spots until he's stuck his nose deep into the once-wet or, at the very least, moist ground and inhaled deeply a few times. Perhaps if Regis were twenty-seven instead of forty-seven, or if he'd given up tennis at the first sign of a deteriorating shoulder joint, he wouldn't mind. But today, as bone-chilling cold as it is, he minds a great deal. That's why, not even a mile into their walk, Regis bends down and snaps the leash off Barney's collar and doesn't give a second thought to where the dog might go after it bounds off the path and plunges into knee-deep snow.

Barney is out of sight a minute later. Three minutes after that, the barking starts—loud, deep, continuous. Barking that demands attention.

“Barney! Come!” Regis bellows, his hands cupped around his mouth to create a megaphone effect.

The barking doesn't let up for so much as a second.

“Barney!”

The dog probably can't hear him above the sound of his own throaty voice.

Goddamn it, Regis thinks, glancing down at his ankle-high boots.

“Barney! Come!”

If anything, the barking gets louder. What if the beast is injured? What if he's walked into some kind of trap? There were some set out in the area last winter by a kid who said he was trying to catch squirrels. He didn't say what he was planning to do with them once he'd caught them. The kid was twelve; the cops had let him off with a warning. Ten years from now he'll probably be a serial killer, Regis thinks. That's how they get started—with small animals. They work their way up the food chain from there.

Regis bends and tucks the bottoms of his jeans into the tops of his boots. The first step off the trail lands him shin-deep in show. A half-dozen more steps and he's almost knee-deep. This had better be good, he thinks, as he flounders after Barney's footprints.