Accomplice (11 page)

“But see, that’s just it. I have to get myself back home—you can’t find me.” Chloe sounded less bitchy this time—or maybe I was just more afraid. In my head, I had played the images like scenes from a horror movie. I’d hold her up, half-carry, half-drag her toward the road. I would flag a passing car down, screaming, “Somebody help us! Please, someone help!”

“You can’t just show up on your back porch like nothing happened.”

“Yeah, well. I figured I’d just take off my boots in the mudroom and wash up for supper.” Chloe’s sarcasm wasn’t reassuring. And then she got less reassuring when she said, “I think I’d have to be injured.” I must have blinked. When she kept going, it didn’t get better. “I’d need a head injury. That way it would make sense for me to be hazy on details.”

“Chloe, you can’t fake a head injury. The first thing they’ll do is take you for a medical evaluation.”

“I’m not talking about faking.” She stood up then and started pacing in front of me in the way that she
always did when she was planning something. Or planning to convince me of something. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it. And it’s the only way. I mean, we’re really in trouble.” She stopped then and looked straight at me. “I’m in serious trouble.” At first when she knelt down, I thought she was going to beg me for something, but really she was getting something from underneath my grandmother’s old sofa. “I’ve been looking around and I found these.” Chloe pulled out a wrench and a pipe and then a long, wide piece of wood. She left one hand on the piece of wood. “I think this is our best bet, because the others are metal and that might be too dangerous, right? It’s actually a shelf I took down from the wall. You’d have to put it back up afterward.”

“After what?” I swear to God, even then I had no idea what she was talking about.

“After you hit me with it.” I waited for Chloe to laugh after she said it, but she just kind of looked up at me with a lopsided smile. “I think it’s our only shot. I need to have a real head injury.”

“No way.” Standing up, I reached down for her, tried to pull her to her feet. “Chloe. You’ve lost it.” She shook my hands off her and grabbed the wooden plank like it was a banister. “This is enough, Chloe—you’re just nuts from being in the basement. We made a mistake. We made a really stupid mistake, but we’re just kids and people will eventually understand.” But Chloe just looked
up at me. It was like she was waiting for me to imagine telling my parents, her parents, the police, all those men who searched for her—in the woods, in the lake. Forget about Lila Ann Price—how would we buy gum at Mr. Donahue’s little grocery down the street? Who would we sit with at lunch? What would we say to Dean West? By the time I got through imagining all of it, I couldn’t even look Chloe in the eye. She just stared at me, waiting.

“I’m telling you I can’t do it,” I told her. Chloe said nothing. “I mean, what if something goes wrong?” She rolled the pipe back under the sofa. It had flakes of rust dusting one side. I didn’t even know where she’d gotten it from. She pushed the wrench under, away. She kept rubbing the shelf like it was the head of a restless animal. “I could really hurt you.” Chloe shoved the shelf under the sofa with the rest of the collection.

“Tell me what else to do.” She looked at me expectantly. “Seriously, because I’d love for there to be an alternative.” My lips pursed together. I had nothing. “Exactly. People get hit in the head all the time.” She gestured to my face. “They get into car accidents. They fall down.”

“When?”

“Two days.” Chloe nodded at me, like my agreement confirmed something. “That’s long enough after tonight’s
L. A. Price
episode. Otherwise, it looks too convenient.” She’d already decided, even before I climbed down the
basement steps. “We’ll do it in the middle of the night, and I’ll get myself home. You can run ahead and listen for me. That way, you can still be the one to call nine-one-one.” Chloe offered it up like a consolation prize.

“And what if you can’t make it home?”

“We’ll do it in the middle of the woods. Plan B, you come up with an excuse to find me there.”

“I’m not saying I’ll do it.”

“If you come up with a better idea, we’ll do that. Otherwise, you need to come by and help me with the trash from this place, and then we can go into the woods behind the farm.” I looked around the basement at the wrappers and water bottles and soda cans. It was so stupid, but at first I thought,
We’re not going to be able to recycle.
Like that’s what would clinch our status as bad citizens. I picked up a bottle and a few cans and packed them in my backpack.

“And you should take this.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head in one motion and handed it over. Chloe was always getting naked like it was nothing. She walked to the corner and wriggled into a sports bra. “On your way home, you can bury it and then I can put it on before we do the other thing. Then I’ll be all filthy and it’ll help throw people off.”

“I can’t take this.” I wanted to throw the shirt back at her.

“I’ll use a blanket.”

“Chloe, I can’t bury this in the woods. Do you know what would happen if someone saw me?”

“Nobody’s looking through the woods anymore. They wouldn’t have released Dean if they thought there was a body out there.”

“You don’t get it. Do you want them to bring me in for questioning? Then you’d have to hit yourself with a two-by-four.”

“How hard is it to bury a shirt under a pile of leaves? Thirty seconds. Maybe forty-five. If someone finds it, well then, they find it. It’ll just throw people farther off the trail.” I pictured seeing Chloe stagger toward the back door of the Caffreys’ place. I would run out to her. I’d tear off my jacket and wrap it around her shoulders. I’d scream for my mom. I’d yell out for them to call 911. I shoved the shirt into my backpack with the soda cans and started up the stairs.

“What, no good-bye?” Chloe reached up toward me.

“You’re not wearing any clothes, for God’s sake.”

“Finn, are you mad at me?” She sounded so worried, like it would be the worst thing in the world if I were. “It’s all going to be over soon.”

“It’s never going to be over.” I almost cried when I said it, because I knew it was true. “This is really hard. You have no idea. You should start practicing.”

“Yeah, whatevs.” Because really, what could Chloe practice? “You should practice your swing.”

“Not at all funny,” I called out behind me. But she had already bounced back onto the sofa, searching for the news networks with the remote. I pulled the cellar door closed behind me, checked around my grandmother’s first floor, and headed out the front door.

It took forty-nine seconds to bury Chloe’s sweatshirt beneath dead leaves and wet dirt. And the whole time, I was ready for a helicopter to swoop down, a searchlight to capture me in its wide beam. I dug a little hole and brushed aside the leaves. Stuck in the shirt, covered it up and then stamped on the whole pile. Then I worried that somehow my footprints could be matched if they left marks on the shirt. So I threw a pretty sturdy rock on the pile and covered that up with more leaves. And the whole process was about twenty times worse than I had expected it would be. By the time I got to our fence, my eyes ached from darting around.

There were lights on at the Caffreys’, but not our house, so I went straight to chores. Stepped into the big hip waders we used for muck work and started cleaning out the stalls in the stable. I dumped the old water from the troughs and set up the hoses to fill them. I made the rounds, feeling for weird lumps and hoping to ease the hurt feelings of the past week or two of neglect. Took out a tennis ball and started tossing it around for
Chauncey. Quietly and all—I made sure that Mrs. Caffrey wouldn’t step out on her porch and see me prancing around with a dog. The sky was graying and it smelled like someone was burning leaves.

It was my mom who stepped outside onto the porch. “I have to talk to you. Hold up, let me come over there.” I could see her tying her sneakers. I felt sick of the sick feeling I got every time someone else acknowledged my existence. Even Chauncey dropped the ball in front of me and looked up at me like he was waiting for an explanation. My mom hadn’t tailed me back and forth from Nana’s, though. She just said, “Mr. West called.”

I had been in the middle of launching a real good toss for Chauncey, but when my mom said that, I clutched the ball reflexively, so it only looked like I’d thrown it. But he took off running, anyway, snuffling through the tall grass for a ball that was still in my hand.

“Dean Junior would like to speak with you. Now, if you’re not comfortable with that, I understand, but you sounded so worried about Dean in the car the other day that I thought maybe.”

Of course.
I thought I said it out loud, but my mom kept talking.

“Your father and I have known Mr. West for a very long time. He’s reached out to us, and your father, especially, would like him to feel supported. I’d imagine they must feel very much alone in Dean West’s house tonight.”
Mom was looking toward the yellow windows of the Caffreys’ kitchen, though. She wasn’t really trying to convince me—it was weird to think of adults feeling guilty, forcing each other to choose sides like Lizbette and Kate fighting at a school dance.

“Mom, of course I want to talk to Dean. Why didn’t he e-mail me? Or text?”

“Oh, I don’t know… Maybe there are legal reasons for that.” Before I could ask, she explained. “Maybe his lawyer told him not to put anything in writing. I don’t know. I’ve probably just watched too many
Law & Order
episodes—”

“No, that makes sense. That’s really smart.”

“You think so? It sounds so farfetched.” It bugs me that my mom doesn’t give herself enough credit. I remembered what Mrs. Caffrey said to Lila Ann Price about my mom never heading off to college and it scorched me. What the hell did she know? Her honor roll student’s hiding out in a basement, waiting for me to hit her with a wooden plank. No wonder Chloe was so obsessed with getting into a good school. She’d grown up listening to her mom work her four years at Vassar into every possible conversation. My mom could at least control herself and have a conversation without a prescription.

“Well, why don’t you call Dean Junior, then? I wrote down their landline. The police kept his cell—”

“Really? Can they do that? Doesn’t that interfere with his civil rights or something?”

“Oh, Finley. Everyone’s just trying to find Chloe. There’s no bad guy here.”

I said nothing. I threw Chauncey’s ball into the dark yard and went to get his bowl. My mom went to go get the number and I called after her, “Do I invite him over?”

“Finn. Use some common sense.” I did not want to go over to Stuttering Dean’s house. Pretty much the only house I wanted to be at less was the Caffreys’.

“Well, it’s not like I can meet him out in public.”

“You’re damn right you’re going to meet him out in public.” The screen door slapped closed behind my dad, and he kicked his muddy boots off next to mine. I looked at Mom, all
What is this?
, but she looked just as lost as me.

“Bart—we talked about this—you’re the one who wanted Finn to call.”

“I want her to call him. I don’t want her to be alone with him.”

“Dad, that’s crazy.”

“Bart—”

“Absolutely not. This isn’t up for discussion.”

“Bart, I’d like to talk to you in the parlor, please.” My mom only called the living room “the parlor” when
she was angry. It’s like she reverts back to some kind of repressed Victorian fury. But my dad didn’t meekly follow her in like he usually did. He took off ranting, and I even heard him bang the top of my grandmother’s old piano.

I heard her hiss, “What has gotten into you? Here I’m telling her how important this is to her father—”

“I said it would be nice if she talked to the kid.”

“Yes and—”

“Talk to the kid, not set herself up like some kind of bait.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Bart—you have got to be kidding. Where would you even get something like that?”

“What happened to a kid just calling another kid on the phone?”

“What happened to that? I’ll tell you what happened to that—the Wests are scared to death. Their son spent the night in jail. How do they know we’re not going to tape the call?”

“Why would they worry about that? If there’s nothing for us to worry about, then there’s nothing for them to worry about. I’ll tell you something, Amy—innocent people don’t worry whether or not someone’s going to tape their calls.”

“We don’t know what they’re worried about. I can’t imagine. The way people are talking about this poor boy—I understand them wanting to protect their son.”

“Exactly!” My dad banged the piano again. This time the keys moaned. “We have to protect our daughter, just like they’re doing.”

I wanted to storm into the living room and yell, too. I’d say,
You don’t have to protect me from Stuttering Dean.
But our house wasn’t like the Caffreys’—we didn’t resolve things at family meetings. I sat down at the kitchen table and waited.

When they came back in, my mom was walking ahead and my dad had her shoulders gripped in his hands. Like he was steering her, but she was smiling. My mom liked to be steered. “Finn, your father and I both agree it would be best if you asked Dean to meet you at the library.”

“Well, that’s just stupid.”

“Finn—” My dad was a siren, warning me.

“You can’t talk at the library.”

“Plenty of people talk at the library.”

“And people give you dirty looks. And if it’s Dean talking, they’ll find a way to arrest us for disturbing the peace or something.”

My mother sighed, like this was so hard for her. “Fine. You can meet him at Slave to the Grind or at the diner.”

“I don’t understand why he can’t just come over here. It’s going to cause all sorts of trouble for me to go out with Dean West while Chloe’s missing.”

“For Pete’s sake, Finn—you’re afraid people are going to think you’re trying to steal Chloe’s boyfriend?”

“He’s not her boyfriend!” It killed me to think that the other day I had sat up there in my bedroom eating up my mom’s girltalk session like it was cake and ice cream, and she was just going to throw the whole thing in my face. She might as well have pointed out the impossibility of anyone dumping Chloe for me. And it wasn’t really other people that worried me. But Chloe was coming home in two days and she’d hear about it. “The only reason you won’t let him come here is because you’re afraid of Mrs. Caffrey.” I looked toward Dad, hoping to swing him to my side. “You’re always so worried about her and what she thinks.”

“Right now I
am
worried about Mrs. Caffrey, yes. Mrs. Caffrey’s daughter is missing and I don’t think we’re being too accommodating by not hosting the only suspect in Chloe’s disappearance.”

“He was just a person of interest!” I yelled it loud enough that offending the Caffreys was now beside the point, because they probably heard me. My dad looked back and forth between my mom and me. He stepped forward, and for a second I thought he’d call a family huddle.

“You know there’s an easy solution for this.” Dad held his hands up, like he was calming wild animals. My mother motioned for him to talk on. “I can just drive
Finn over to your mom’s house,” he told her, and I bit my tongue hard. “I can check out the yard and the thermostat and the kids can sit in the kitchen and talk.” My mom sighed and sank into a chair. My mouth filled with blood. At least that’s what it felt like. I couldn’t get myself to speak. My dad turned expectantly to me. “Okay?”

There’s no way Chloe would just sit quietly in the basement while I had a heart-to-heart with Dean. And even if by some miracle she did, then the whole time we spoke, my dad would be puttering around the house. I swallowed, touched the sore spot on my tongue against my back teeth. “I’m sorry—this is silly. I can just meet him at the diner.” I tried to say it casually, like none of it was any kind of big deal.

Leave it to my mom. “No, honey, I think Daddy’s dug up a great solution.”

“But I want to be careful about Dean, too.” I tried to match my mom’s tone of voice. “Meeting at Nana’s would be easier for me, but Dean’s going to figure out why we didn’t want him here. That’s really obvious. I just think it’ll hurt his feelings. We can meet at the diner—that’s not so weird. And I’ll make sure we get a booth so it seems private.” One of the things I’ve learned is it’s important to stop talking when you’re lying. People sound fake when they try to fill up silence. I stood up, as if everything was settled, and headed back toward the
kitchen with the Wests’ phone number clutched in my hand. “I’ll call Dean now.”

Because I was so worried my parents would stop me, it didn’t even occur to me to be nervous about calling Dean West. Dialing the number, I kept waiting to hear them call my name. But instead a woman’s voice answered “Hello?” so suspiciously that it made me wonder what kind of calls the Wests had been getting over the past few days. I guessed it was his mom because when I asked for Dean, she asked, “Dean or Dean Junior?”

It must feel a little bit invisible to go through life with someone else’s name. I mean, I have my mom’s last name and that’s weird sometimes, but to just be a total sequel to someone else? “Ma’am—this is Finley Jacobs calling to speak to Dean Junior.” I turned to see my own mom leaning against the kitchen door frame, nodding her head approvingly.

The voice on the phone lost its edge. “Oh, Finley, I’m happy you’ve called. Let me get Dean for you.” I heard the phone clank against something hard. In my house, my mom would have just hollered up for me. But then again, the only person who called me on the landline were people from 4-H and my grandmother.

I heard muffled speaking and then Dean said “Hello?” without a hitch in his voice or anything. “Hello?” He said it again, because I had blanked out on what to say to him.

“Dean? It’s Finn. Hi. Um…” I looked at my mom. “How are you?” I felt my face crinkle saying it because, well, what was he supposed to say to that?

But Dean was Dean. He just said, “Fine, thank you,” as if I’d called to tell him a reading assignment or something. He cleared his throat, then asked, “How are you? I mean, are you okay?”

And I wasn’t, hearing Dean West ask me that. Because I’d never be able to know the kind of trouble we’d caused him and him asking me—it wasn’t like Maddie or Kate asking me. Dean sounded like he actually cared.

“I’m okay. It just feels like everything’s gone crazy.” I looked up at the doorway, but Mom had turned to head back to the living room. Maybe she meant to give me some privacy.

Dean exhaled. “Yeah, it does.” Silence. “Li-listen. W-W-Would you want to meet somewhere? Just hang out?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be great. Do you want to meet at the diner?” I tried to stop myself from talking fast. It must feel awful to hear everyone always rushing to talk so that you don’t have to stammer through a whole sentence. “We could meet there in an hour or two?” I made myself say it slowly, but then it only sounded like maybe I thought Dean didn’t speak English.

“Sure.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.” So obviously Dean had switched to the one-word strategy.

“Okay, I’ll meet you at seven then, okay? That’s an hour and a half.”

“See you there.”

Dean hung up before I could reply. For a second, I thought,
He knows. He hates me.
But Dean West probably hated talking on the phone. Maybe he hadn’t even ever called Chloe. Maybe that was the deal with all the texts.

My parents stopped talking when I ducked through the room. I got halfway up the stairs before my mom called up, “Whoa. Hold on there, Finn.”

“I’m going to meet him in an hour and a half. We’re going to the diner.”

“Well, do you want your dad to take you?” She jutted her chin at him, and he stopped stacking the pile of newspapers by his chair.

“Yeah, I’ll take you. I’ll just have a cup of coffee or two up at the counter.”

“I’ll just take the van.”

My mom shot a look at my dad and my dad stood up, brushing imaginary dust from his thighs.

“Nah.” At least he tried to say it casually. “I’ll take you, poundcake.” I looked down at the two of them. “Just to make sure everyone minds their manners.”

In my head, I saw Dean West stand, squared up to Max McHale or Craig Nordgren.

“Yeah, okay. Fine.” Headed back up the steps.

“Finn.” My mom called up.

“What?” I felt like
enough already, whatever you say.

But my mom said, “I’m really proud of you. This is a kind thing.”