Accomplice (18 page)

And Dad said, “We’ll keep an eye out,” as if the cop had asked him for the help.

I heard Mom say, “Well, it’s expected that they keep her overnight for observation, right? You tell them you want a cot set up right in the room. That’s right. Well, Sheila, it’s not special treatment—any parent who has a kid getting her tonsils out is asking for the same thing.” And then I heard Mom say, “Well, thank God for that. Really. I know. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but she’s going to have enough to deal with.” And then, “Let us know how that turns out. And how we can help.” She crossed over to peek at Cam. “He’s fine, Sheila. I think he senses that we all have a reason to celebrate right now. Tell Chloe we all love her very much.”

She clicked off the phone and saw me watching her expectantly. “Chloe’s going in for a CAT scan soon. They’re keeping her for a few hours, just to keep an eye on her.”

I nodded. “Is she okay?”

“They have her on intravenous fluids, monitors—they’re just covering all the bases.” I didn’t say anything. My mom opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. She tried once more. “Sweetheart, Chloe wasn’t
attacked…sexually.” Mom looked startled that she’d been able to say it. “They didn’t find any evidence of that.”

I just nodded, managed to say, “That’s good.” But then Cam let out a whooping yawn from the great room, and that saved me from having to fake concern that Chloe had been molested. I asked, “Are we staying here?” thinking we’d have to put Cam to bed and wondering how we could possibly manage that.

But Mom said, “Brian should be back soon.” And then, “If you’re tired, though, why don’t you go back to the house, take a nap?”

Right at that moment, I wanted to sleep as much as Chloe wanted to be on a magazine cover. But I didn’t know if I was still supposed to be coasting on adrenaline. What would the girl who had just discovered her best friend bleeding in the woods do?

“I want to be here when Chloe comes home,” I said.

“Well, go on up to Chloe’s room, then.” And so I climbed the stairs up to the second floor. I fixed the clothes that I’d left tumbled out of the drawers. I sat on the bed and remembered touring Lila Ann Price. All those things I’d said about how amazing Chloe was, how she made people happier just by settling her wide smile on them—I’d meant them. I was trying to sell Chloe to the
L. A. Price
audience, sure, but I’d meant them, too.

That night, you could have interviewed me and I
wouldn’t have known what to say. You wouldn’t have even been able to get a sound bite from me. I stood at Chloe’s window and looked across to mine and wondered,
What does she really think about me? What do I think about her?

That night, the night I found Chloe, was actually one of the last times I was up in her room. We still spent a lot of time together. We had Sunday dinners and breakfasts before loading up the truck for 4-H. Our parents seemed closer for a while afterward, especially during all the madness of the immediate aftermath.

At first, it was total anarchy. For one thing, for most of the first week, Mr. Caffrey and my dad had to chase tabloid reporters off the property. They installed an alarm system, and finally the cops stationed a patrol car at the bottom of our hill again. Chloe and I both stayed home from school for the first few days. The police were there every other day, asking Chloe pretty much the same questions over and over again. I never heard her give them more than the same few flimsy threads she had unwound that first night. They questioned me a couple more times, too, and every time they closed their notebooks, I expected them to whip out a warrant for my arrest.

Chloe and I never spoke about it. Maybe we figured that it was best not to talk about the details—we’d already planned everything so carefully. We just had to follow it through. Or maybe we were trying so hard to be convincing and the only people we couldn’t convince were each other. We spent less and less time alone together, anyway—there wouldn’t have been many opportunities to talk it through.

They postponed the press conference until Chloe’s face faded to pinks and lavenders. My family stood there, too. The police department’s media specialist planted us off to the side with Cam while the three of them—Mr. and Mrs. Caffrey, with Chloe balanced between them—thanked the town and the state and even the country for their support. Sometime between climbing up into Chloe’s ambulance and helping her up the walk to the front door of the barn, Mrs. Caffrey had been transformed back into the single most competent woman alive. She did most of the talking up on the podium. Mr. Caffrey stood there like a man whose daughter had been snatched off his own property.

I remember that Mrs. Caffrey announced that the family appreciated the opportunity to share their joy. But then she added, “I will not allow my daughter’s life to be defined by this experience.” Which was sort of funny because that, after all, had been Chloe’s whole plan. The
Caffreys still did a few interviews after that, though. And the newslady I met in the girls’ bathroom came back to school and did a feature on the two of us together.

Colt River went a little crazy in those first few weeks. It took three days for them to drop the charges and release Dean, but even then it wasn’t over. People picketed and threatened to pull their kids out of school. He came to classes for about a week and then someone said he dropped out. I wrote him a lot of e-mails that I never sent. I called once, but when his mom answered, she sounded so afraid and weary that I hung up. And then I hated myself, because she probably thought the crank calls had started up again.

Chloe and I didn’t speak about Dean. Once I came late to lunch and caught her telling Maddie and Kate what a relief it was to not have to see him in school every day. She said, “I’m sure it’s just me being paranoid, but every time I see him, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s like I’m afraid, but I don’t know why—like my memory is afraid.”

I stared at her, but she just stared right back. It’s not like I was going to call her on it in the middle of the school cafeteria. After Chloe and I went back to school, we didn’t turn out to have so many days left to sit across from each other at lunchtime. First Mrs. Caffrey appealed the school board’s decision to allow Dean to attend
school with us. She lost that round and kept Chloe home for a few days in protest.

And then December hit and a lot seemed to shift at Chloe’s house. Mr. Caffrey didn’t put up all the Christmas lights—which sounds like a small thing, but the Caffreys always went nuts with the lights at the holidays. My mom used to cluck that she thought Mrs. Caffrey had more taste than that, and my dad used to fake clutch his heart at the thought of their power bill, but people used to come from all over town to see the display they put up. At first, I figured they were aiming to avoid attention.

No one said anything. My parents didn’t bring it up, and I wasn’t about to mention it to Chloe. It felt like the time we had together kept shrinking. She stopped going to local tutoring and instead took SAT classes all the way in the city. Her mom went with her, so that Chloe wouldn’t have to navigate the trains and the subways alone. And then Chloe came over for waffles one morning and started chattering about this little apartment she and her mom were decorating. I remember staring at her, my brain moving as slowly as the pitcher of syrup in my hands. My mom finally asked—all breezily, like she’d just been wondering, but I caught the look she passed my dad first—“What’s this about an apartment, Chloe?”

“Oh, we just rented a little place to cut down on all
the hours we were spending on New Jersey Transit. Next semester I’m taking this intensive test-prep strategy class, and then Mom signed me up for a course at the Art Students League.”

“That sounds like an awful lot to juggle.”

“Well, colleges look at junior year most closely, Mrs. Jacobs. It’s important to invest your time in worthwhile activities that show diverse interests and longterm goals.”

I choked down a mouthful of waffle instead of pointing out that we had faked her abduction so that she wouldn’t have to worry about activities and SAT scores. My dad buttered an English muffin and said, “Well, I thought you girls had the sheep for that.”

Chloe shook her head. “We can’t both apply with that piece. And it’s really Finn’s thing, anyway.” She smiled at me benevolently. “You’re really good with animals.” I had been working mostly alone in the stables, anyway, even exercising Carraway for her. “My mom was an art history major. Everyone’s always said that Cam got her artistic talent, but maybe…” Chloe shrugged and trailed off.

“I’m sure there’s plenty to go around,” my mom said. “And you’ve always had a great eye, Chloe.”

Chloe beamed up at my mom. “Thanks.”

“So you won’t be around on Saturdays?” I tried to ask casually.

“That’s what’s so great about the apartment. Mom and I can go in right after school and spend the night. We can get up in the morning and eat breakfast at a café in the East Village, and then I can go to my classes.” I wanted to poke her with my sticky fork, remind her that she hated her mom and that we made fun of girls who talked about the Village like it was some kind of kingdom of cool.

At some point, after Chloe went off to college, she’d talk about Colt River differently. It wouldn’t be the place where she grew up. She’d talk about being born and raised in New York City and moving out to the sticks for Cam’s sake. She’d say,
I lived in the middle of nowhere for a while.
And maybe if she wanted to be intriguing, she’d add,
You might have read about my case in the news.
But Colt River would end up being just a weird interlude, something that made her a little exotic—she raised sheep when she was young. She had her own horse. She was kidnapped and beaten and crawled back home to safety. But she’d say,
Home didn’t feel so sheltered afterward.
She’d laugh bravely and ask,
Isn’t it crazy that I had to come back to the city to feel safe?

I could read it on Chloe’s face the way you read the back of a book to get the story. And it turned out that she didn’t even wait until college. By the spring semester, Mrs. Caffrey officially informed the school board that Chloe would be homeschooled. We read about it in the
paper. Mr. Caffrey stayed at the farm full-time with Cam, but Chloe and her mom spent most of the week in the city. My mom called it “Brian and Sheila’s arrangement.”

Chloe would float in some Thursday nights, and her dad would drive her back to the train station on Saturday mornings. She didn’t really come over for dinner or breakfast as much, but she’d gotten really into tea. She carried her own tea bags with her, and we’d sit on the porch with a kettle of hot water between us. Mostly, Chloe would tell me about the city, about the people in her art classes, the genius Cooper Union student she met at some sculpture show.

Sure, I was angry. Especially during the week, when I moved from home to school to the stables to more chores at the house, just shouldering through the kinds of days that Chloe and I used to laugh through together. It wasn’t like I was spending time with anybody else. I sat through the same classes, ate my lunch at the same spot as always, and talked about the same usual nothing. So when Mr. Caffrey’s jeep pulled in and Chloe hopped out before he’d even killed the engine, I had to stop myself from running out to meet her in the drive. I made myself wait until she rapped on the screen door, and then finally I could run downstairs and see that she was okay. She was right there, listening and chattering and laughing like
usual. I could relax a little and sit on the steps, lean back against the house, and exhale.

It was hard to be angry on those days when I just felt so grateful Chloe was home. But she came home less often, and then, when she did, we had less to talk about. We had all these silent understandings, and eventually they outnumbered the conversations we had aloud. Once in a while, Chloe would show up at school on a Friday and everyone would fawn over her for a while. She’d sit through a couple of classes and sometimes she’d stop by to see Mrs. Holmes in the guidance office. Most people probably thought,
Poor Chloe—she’s really struggling. She’s never been quite the same.

Of course we were never the same. Chloe took some tour of Italy the summer before my senior year in high school. Her mom traveled with her. She enrolled in some hotshot city prep school after that and quit coming back to Colt River so much. In December, when Mr. Caffrey told my dad that Chloe had gotten into Vassar, I remember thinking—she had a legacy there. She could have just filled in the application and sent it off with an essay about staying up nine straight hours for a lambing the night before the sophomore semiformal.

I sent her a text. She didn’t write back. Maybe she knew I didn’t have the same kind of news to offer. That would embarrass her.

It’s not like my mom and dad didn’t try. They lugged me up and down the East Coast. We sat through information sessions and roundtable discussions and informal presentations and whatever else colleges wanted to call them. I stayed overnight in a few dorm rooms and ate at the dining halls and collected a bunch of college experiences. And those kids existed on a different planet
from me. Imagine me living surrounded by a thousand different Kenneth Rydens and Lizbette Markells. Or drinking at a party and then getting weepy about my best friend from high school. Imagine me rooming with another girl.

In the end, I made the choice that we all knew I would end up making. My parents sat me down for a few talks about it—about the importance of independence and how no one wanted to see me underestimate myself. But I also saw the worried corners of my dad’s eyes relax a little. My mom canceled the ads she had placed to rent out my grandmother’s place and they stopped planning for Nana to move into the farmhouse. I’d go to Hawthorne University during the day and stay on in my bedroom across the hall from Mom and Dad. Nana would give me her car to use, and in exchange, I’d run her on her errands and check in twice a week.

Everyone seemed relieved. It also meant keeping most of the animals. So life after high school ended up looking a lot like life during high school. Except I got to drive myself around everywhere and participated in fewer ruses involving the Amber Alert system. My mom would leave little notes around:
Ran into Molly Clairemont—Kara Mae would love to catch up! Give her a call!
Or she’d circle articles in the paper about Regina’s upcoming dance performance—
We should head in and give her
some hometown support!
She acted all casual about it, but the exclamation points gave her away.

I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. And then when I did feel like it, I had no clue where to begin. Even if I could remember moving through the world before Chloe, none of us were ten years old anymore. My mom couldn’t set up playdates or wrangle invitations to birthday parties. I took classes and kept my head down. I drove around and visited my grandmother. Once in a while, she would ask me to retrieve something—the fall wreath, then boxes of Christmas ornaments—from the cellar. I’d creak down the wooden steps and pretend I was visiting a room where someone had died. I felt the kind of chill there that people usually attributed to ghosts.

It wasn’t until February that I followed Dean West. The holidays had passed and I guess I’d figured that Chloe would come home. Instead she sent a Christmas card addressed to our whole family. She and her mom spent Christmas in Paris. Mr. Caffrey didn’t hang the lights again, but we saw him out and about with Cam more often. The rest of the town stopped asking about it. Cam still helped out with the horses and my dad went over there often enough. My mom would send him, armed with a casserole and a six-pack, but if they did talk, my dad would never share that with us.

People came home and Colt River felt like it filled up again. Kate had a party on New Year’s and I went. A couple of us went sledding. As long as we were doing something I was fine—playing Ping-Pong in Kate’s rec room, hurtling down the hill behind the high school. It was when things went quiet that I realized everyone else had more to say than me.

I didn’t go out looking for him. My grandmother gave me a shopping list and the West place was on the way to the Stop & Shop. I looked over and saw Dean’s truck in the drive. It hadn’t moved by the time I drove back with the trunk stacked with paper sacks of groceries. I thought that maybe he’d stayed home like me and that it was a little crappy that my parents hadn’t told me. Over the holidays, no one had mentioned Dean. People asked me how Chloe was, how she liked school, how she was getting along, and I’d always answered, “Great.”

They usually went on to say something like, “I still can’t believe it.” Or, “God, wasn’t that crazy?”

And I’d shrug, because what was I supposed to say?
We were crazy?
Or,
You shouldn’t have believed it.
But no one asked about Dean West. No one said his name.

At Nana’s, I tried not to rush through unloading the car. I waited patiently for her to tell me where to stack the cans of soup, the bags of rice. I even stalled a little, trying to prove to myself that it didn’t matter whether or not Dean’s truck was still parked on my next pass. But
there it was, so I pulled up at the end of his street and waited for him to come out.

I almost just drove home. After a while, Dean still hadn’t emerged and I wasn’t about to bound up to the porch and knock on the Wests’ door. Seeing his truck felt like climbing down the steps to my grandmother’s basement, though. It made me shiver and then ache.

He must have come out the side door, because next thing I saw him amble around the side of his truck and swing a huge duffel bag into the back. He looked in all directions, and I worried that he would see me. I reassured myself that Dean didn’t have a reason to recognize my grandmother’s old Buick. He hopped up into the cab and I saw his eyes check his mirrors. Dean still acted like a suspect.

Part of me followed him out of curiosity, and then another part felt something closer to homesickness. It wasn’t like I ever knew Dean well enough to miss him, but I missed the story we were both a part of. I remembered crouching in the school library with Chloe, waiting for him to pick up our latest message. And now I wished we hadn’t aimed any higher than getting the cute shy kid to notice us. Or to notice Chloe, anyway.

I followed Dean all the way to the outskirts of Colt River. He turned onto Old Rutherford Road and drove toward North Dunham. The woods on the side of the
road gave way to sparse fields and then to old factories, industrial complexes. He made a series of quick turns, one after the other, and I needed to work hard to keep up. And then Dean pulled up at a little park, really just an island of concrete next to an underpass. It wasn’t until he’d hopped out of the truck and came striding toward me that I realized that Dean hadn’t been obliviously driving while I crept behind him. He had led me to this spot.

“All right! What do you want from me?” Dean looked older. His face was angry and shadowed with a thin beard. “C’mon! What do you w-w-want?” He bellowed it. And then: “Finn?” He had charged up to the car, but then Dean stepped back. He raked his hand through his hair and looked around the small lot. He went quiet, but still glowered. “W-What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” My voice shook, and for one agonizing second, I thought I was going to stutter. Dean kept scowling down at me. He wasn’t going to let me get away with that. “I was just driving by.” He snorted a little, crossed his arms over his chest. “Really. And I saw you and just wondered what you were doing, what life was like for you.”

“Life is just fine.” His voice sounded frozen. “You can tell Chloe that.” A slab of ice.

“I don’t talk to Chloe.”

He looked up quickly. “She okay?”

Sometimes I wished I could say
No.
“She’s fine. She’s at Vassar.” I kept going. “That’s the school her mom went to. In upstate New York.”

“I know where Vassar is.” Dean sounded angry all over again. He looked back toward his truck. “So what were you going to do?” I just stared at him, waiting for him to make sense. “Follow me to my apartment? Make flyers with my address?”

“What?” I tried to imagine what Dean’s life must have been like in those first few weeks after Chloe came home. Remembered the signs that Mrs. Caffrey and her friends waved outside the school’s main entrance. The editorials in the township paper.

“No, I just saw your truck and thought—I live at home, too—and so I thought—”

“You thought we could pal around?” Back in high school, when I imagined actually talking to someone like Dean, this was how he sounded in my nightmares. Cruel and revolted. He gestured toward his truck, the duffel. “How do you know I’m not carting around some girl’s body in the back there?”

I told myself how important it was to say the next thing clearly. And then looked him straight in the eye and said, “I know you didn’t hurt her.” My eyes almost watered—it was that hard to keep eye contact, but I didn’t let myself look away like usual.

Dean looked down first, and for a second I thought he would
cry. His face crumpled and contorted. And then I realized he was fighting to pronounce something. It took full minutes, but finally he got out, “Does Chloe know that?”

What would hurt less? So I said, “She never believed that you would do something like that.” True. “But other people did, and she got swept up in that.” Also true. He pinched the bridge of his nose then and turned away. Dean squinted out toward the highway, and I waited for him to stop himself from crying.

We stood there watching cars whiz by for a little while. An SUV slowed down on the road above us. I slid my eyes to Dean and saw he had tensed up all over. I tried to keep my voice steady. “I really just wondered about you.” But that sounded like something you’d say when you were leaving someone notes and puzzles. I tried again. “Maybe it’s just me, but I haven’t really talked to anyone since it all happened. And it was good, that time, to talk to you.”

I didn’t have any right to lean on Dean West. But right then, he didn’t know that. He said, “There’s a diner in North Dunham.”

And I said, “I’ll follow you.”