Accomplice (4 page)

It took me longer than usual to dress the next morning. Mostly because I didn’t want to force myself down each step and face the third day of Operation Evaporation. I started groaning when I hit the first floor, but my parents weren’t in the kitchen waiting for me to fake sick again. Instead, I stared down a plate of corn bread and a jar of jelly and a note from my mom. It just said,
Down at the Caffreys’.
I felt sick all over again.

By seven forty-five, my parents hadn’t come back. When I ran out of reasons to stall, I finally hoisted my bag over one shoulder and let myself out through the side porch. I walked down the hill and tapped on the Caffreys’ front door. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d knocked on their door, let alone the front door. Usually, Chloe and I would just make sure the screen doors didn’t slam shut behind us.

Mr. Caffrey answered the door, pulled me in toward him for a hug, and called out, “It’s just Finn.” And my own mom strode in from the kitchen. She was drying her hands on a dish towel tucked into the waist of her jeans.
“Hey, you ready to go to school?” It felt strange to follow my mom into the Caffreys’ kitchen. To see my dad at their table with a cup of coffee in front of him. A plate of my mom’s corn bread sat in the center of the table and baskets of food lined the kitchen counter. It looked like my parents were borrowing Chloe’s house. Or like we were all celebrating a holiday together.

My mom stood at the bottom of the steps and called up, “Sheila—I’m just going to buzz Finn to school. Can I pick you up something? A bagel, maybe?”

I looked at my dad. He got it. “Your mother believes in therapeutic carbs.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Mr. Caffrey sounded like he was aiming for hearty. It was like the plaid shirts he always wore around town. It didn’t really fit him.

“Where’s Cam?” I asked.

“We arranged for the bus to pick him up early. There’s going to be a lot of vehicles here, and if Cam saw those, we’d never get him off to school.” Mr. Caffrey looked over at my dad like he needed to explain something. “We thought it was important for him to be at school. Cam really needs the structure.”

“It’s a great program he’s in,” Dad answered, nodding his approval.

“It is. Sheila and I are so lucky.” He stopped then, and we all stared at the grain of the wood table. I found myself nodding. Thought about how it must feel to have
built this careful world around all of Cam’s needs. And then to have lost Chloe in it.

My mom gathered me up then. “Speaking of structure—let’s go, Finn. You got everything?” She held the door open for me. I kissed my dad on the cheek and then sort of pressed my own face to Mr. Caffrey’s. He said, “You take care, Finn,” and his voice sort of scraped along with his chair across the kitchen floor.

“You okay?” Mom asked when we got into the car.

“Yeah. Are they?”

“I think they’re holding up.”

“Where was Mrs. Caffrey?” And then, because I knew she was upstairs, “I mean, what was she doing?”

“She’s having a hard time today.” My mom said it matter-of-factly as she hit her blinker and turned the wheel.

“Is she okay?”

“I think she’s very frightened. She hasn’t gotten out of bed yet.”

I sucked in my breath at that one. Mrs. Caffrey had always had more energy than anyone I knew. She’d been one of those moms who makes everything from scratch and who irons all the laundry. The Caffreys had one of those gigantic dry-erase boards on their screened-in porch where she kept all the family’s activities on track—Cam’s stuff in blue, Chloe’s in red. Mrs. Caffrey was always running through the house with her car keys and
a water bottle, like she was running the suburban marathon.

When we pulled up to the school, we saw only one squad car out front. No news vans, either, so I let myself relax a little. I started to think,
Maybe it’s already blowing over
, but then that would mean that we did all that for nothing. And how would Chloe take finding out that life had moved on so quickly?

At school, it was clear that most people knew they were dragging the lake. A lot of the girls looked like they’d been crying. The usual box of tissues that Mr. Pearl kept on the desk had been replaced with a roll of the scratchy toilet paper they stock our bathrooms with. He’d brought boxes of donuts in also, but only the guys were eating them.

“How are we all doing?” Mr. Pearl asked once we were all settled in. I knew from the way his face was tilted that he was trying to make eye contact, but I tried to keep my head down in my notebook.

“Mr. Pearl?” Regina Sklar raised her hand. “Will they let us know if…if someone finds out anything about Chloe?”

Regina was always a pretty decent person. She asked like someone who actually cared, and I made a mental note that after Chloe’s comeback, we should ask Regina to go get coffee or something. It was girls like Maddie
Dunleavy who I’d rather throw coffee at. She didn’t even let Mr. Pearl answer, she practically leaped over her desk to tell us, “My dad promised he’d call.” Maddie’s dad was the mayor. Which sounded all important, but our town was smaller than most small colleges. “He said if they pulled up a body, he would have to close school.”

I guess if I actually thought there was a chance of Chloe floating up, that would have made me gasp. I mean, other girls did. But instead, I sort of marveled at the wonder that was Maddie Dunleavy. Mr. Pearl looked like he could use a drink. He swallowed a couple of times and then said, “Okay, Maddie. Let’s just let those people in authority do their jobs. Our job is to concentrate on the work we’re doing in school.”

This time the principal announced the suspended lunch period over the intercom. He said that seniors and juniors would stay in for lunch until the community felt safe. And that was pretty much all he said. No mention of the activities of the Colt River Police Department. He just wished us a peaceful and productive day.

Mr. Pearl fit in a reminder about the counseling center before the bell rang, and then we were spilling out into the hallway, but even that we all did solemnly, like we were practicing for a procession. I spent most of the morning waiting for my parents to call my cell. I don’t know why I needed to hear it from them. Obviously no
one was going to find anything. But I still wanted the whole thing to be over.

When no one called by sixth period study hall, I asked to be excused to call home. Everyone in the class looked around at one another as if they knew exactly what I was thinking. Whatever. I didn’t know what I was thinking.

Mom picked up on the first ring. “Finn? You okay?” She sounded really worried, like she was already grabbing her keys and headed toward the door.

“Yeah, yeah, but you said that you’d call…”

“Oh, no, honey… I meant I’d call if there was a reason.”

“Are they still there? The cops? At the lake?” I didn’t know why my voice was rising. It wasn’t like Chloe and I were serial killers who’d weighted down bodies and sank them down into the lake after sax ensemble rehearsal.

“No, they’re just about done here. Nothing’s changed. Is everyone okay there? How are Kate and the rest of the girls?”

“Fine—we’re all just waiting to hear something.”

“Well, do me a favor and let someone else call and spread the news. I’m sure the police will issue a statement or something soon, but let’s not have it come from us. I’ll pick you up at three? Or are you going to get a ride with someone?”

“I actually thought I’d go check on Nana’s house.”

“Oh, Finn, I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

“No!” And then I thought to myself,
Slow down there, camper.
I sounded a little too desperate to go to my grandmother’s house. I tried again. “I promised her I’d check on things.” And then I trotted out the trump card: “It might take my mind off all this.”

“Can someone go along with you?”

“I’ll bring…Regina.”

“Regina Sklar?”

“Yeah, her parents aren’t letting her go into the city for dance lessons.” If I didn’t feel my own mouth moving, it could have been some other voice inventing all of it on the spot like that.

“Well, okay. That’s very sweet of you to be thinking of your grandmother. Please tell Regina to stop by the house sometime soon. I’m glad to hear you two are spending some time together.”

“Yeah, I will. We’ll just go over and sort the mail and water the plants.” I sounded breathless. I tried to remind myself to slow down. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

“Or, if Mrs. Sklar’s home—if it’s no trouble, see if maybe Regina’s mom could give you a ride home. Tell her I’d really appreciate it.”

“Sure, okay.” It was actually one of my story’s more brilliant elements. My mom didn’t really know Mrs.
Sklar. She was probably one of the few parents who wasn’t already programmed into Mom’s cell phone. So Mom wasn’t going to call her up and hear that she and her daughter were on their way into the city for dance class as usual.

It was becoming so easy to lie.

My grandmother is a lovely lady. She makes Chex mix from scratch and gets weirdly obsessed with reality show contestants. She also travels a lot, but the cruise she took that fall was the only time that I hid a missing girl in her basement.

I made sure to get everything packed before eighth period so that when the dismissal bell rang, I didn’t even need to stop at my locker for books. I was out the back exit before Maddie could pronounce the phrase
Daddy’s press conference
.

But someone had beaten out my speedy retreat. Dean West was already halfway across the parking lot, wearing the same red-checkered jacket he’d had for Saturday’s search party at our place. That night, he had helped me pass out sandwiches and fill up water bottles at our kitchen sink. My mom fawned all over him, but he just smiled weakly and nodded—he didn’t try to speak in front of so many people.

Dean spotted me when he climbed into his pickup. He nodded toward me and then reached across the cab
and threw open the passenger door. “Lift?” he asked. Hardly any of us juniors had our licenses then. But they’d left Dean back one year, right before middle school, probably on account of his stutter. Now he seemed even older, parked all the way in the back of the lot, gazing past me at the kids pouring from the school doors.

“I’m supposed to go to my grandmother’s. I can walk the few blocks. But thanks, really.” I finally forced myself to stop talking and wondered if all Dean’s conversations were like that—all slanted. For every one word he pronounced, the other person said twelve. “You okay?” I asked. Which was just as moronic, because Dean West was certainly not okay. But he just shrugged and turned the key in the ignition. I slammed the door shut and tried not to imagine how he felt. Once, Colt River’s resident source of radiance had unexpectedly beamed her smile Dean’s way. And then, just as suddenly, she was gone.

Standing there by the empty space, I watched him peel out of the school lot. I needed to make sure he didn’t circle back and follow me to Chloe.

Donahue’s Grocery was on my way to Nana’s, but I didn’t want to have to talk with Mr. or Mrs. Donahue behind the corner, and went on to the Rite Aid just a little out of the way. I stocked up on as many of Chloe’s favorite snacks as I could: Baby Ruths and Ritz crackers and Ring Dings and Circus Peanuts. Pretty much a
celebration of preservatives, but at least none of it would go bad. I bought batteries for the flashlights and hoped no one would notice that part. At the last minute, I remembered to stick in a bunch of magazines,
People
and
In Touch
, wondering if Chloe would be on next week’s covers.

Buying all that crap helped slow me down, too, because I couldn’t exactly sprint with all of it in my arms. So I actually walked to my Nana’s like a normal person, let myself in, and just barely stopped myself from screaming down the basement.

Chloe called for me instead.

“Finn? Finn?” Her voice sounded scratchy, like she had a cold.

“Don’t yell. Stay there.” I barked out the orders while I double-checked the dead bolt and made sure the back door was still locked, too.

“Finn.”

“Shut up! Seriously.” But I was already tearing down the basement stairs. Halfway down, I almost ran her over. It was so weird to see Chloe then. It really was like she was a ghost. We must have hugged each other for a full five minutes, swaying back and forth on the steps until we sort of tumbled down the rest of the way and landed in a heap against the wall.

“Can I turn on the light?” She sounded like a little kid. With strep throat. I realized her voice was hoarse
from not talking for days and felt immediately lousy for all the times I had thought to myself that Chloe had it easy. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here. How long can you stay? What’s going on?”

She couldn’t stop dancing around. My pajamas were too big on her and she looked like a little kid. She must have French braided her own hair, which was weird to see because we’d always braided each other’s hair. She saw me looking and touched the top of it proudly. “What do you think? I must have practiced for hours, but I can do it myself now. I have to hang upside down to reach. Sit down.” She wheeled over my grandmother’s tweed ottoman. “Sit down. Let me do yours.”

“Chloe, you can’t braid my hair. If I leave here with a French braid, what’s my mom going to say?”

“Oh, like anyone would even notice.”

I handed over the Rite Aid bag and all the goodies and she shrieked again. I had to stop myself from clamping my hand over her mouth.

“Shhhhh,” I said. “Chloe, they
would
notice. You have no idea—everybody notices everything now.”

“That’s because you’re a celebrity.” She trilled the word, being goofy with it, pulling out the magazines at the same time. “Oh, awesome.” She breathed out heavily. “You got Ring Dings. Finn—you are the greatest person who has ever lived.”

It was always hard to stay grim when Chloe was excited about something. Even if I’d felt like the furthest thing from the greatest person in the world. Only Chloe could make a trip to Rite Aid seem like a holiday. She made everything momentous, even in the honeycomb of rooms in my grandmother’s basement.

We’d worked out a bunch of rules. Nana’s house ran on timers. For the most part, Chloe was supposed to stick to the basement. There were two basement windows and we’d covered both of them with layers of towels. That way, Chloe could use a flashlight without any of the neighbors noticing lights moving around. The timers went on from 5:30
PM
to 11
PM
. In that time, Chloe could grab a shower as long as she stuck to the first floor bathroom. She could watch the TV with the volume turned low. She could use the microwave. She could use the bathroom at any time, as long as she didn’t turn on any lights on her own.

It was a lot to remember. But it beat just sitting in a tent somewhere and worrying if anyone would come across her. This way, Chloe could be relatively comfortable until the last couple nights, when we’d have to move her to the place where we would say she had been held the whole time.

“I think maybe you’re going to have to stop showering,” I said. “Maybe after tonight?”

“God—this is really hard.” Chloe sobbed a little
and I believed her. But then I thought about her dad sitting blankly with the palms of his hands pressed to the kitchen table. She, on the other hand, looked like she always did, like nothing at all had changed. She looked like she’d stayed home from school, or was the only one to show up for a slumber party.

She must have seen me studying her, because she squeezed my hand and asked, “Finn, are you mad at me? I’m doing everything we said.”

She sat down on the ottoman and hugged her knees. I didn’t know anyone who could stay mad at Chloe, and at that moment I thought maybe they’d forgive us if we came back now. We’d say she fell and hit her head or something. Or just come clean with the whole thing. People would be so glad to see she was okay, they’d let it go. Or Chloe would just have to cry and plead a little.
Don’t be mad at me.

Only, I didn’t have the same superpowers as Chloe. No one would have trouble blaming me. After all, I’d been the one walking through the halls at school, lying. It was me who’d looked straight at her mom and swore I had no idea where she could have gone.

But Chloe didn’t know any of that
, I made myself remember. And I knew it had to be hard for her to be all by herself in here. Chloe was like her mom—she never slowed down for anything. She must have been climbing the walls.

“I’m not mad,” I said. “But this whole thing has gotten out of hand.”

“We said it was going to be hard,” Chloe reminded me. “We said we’d probably want to back out, remember? We said that.”

I did remember. But we’d been talking about her, not me. It was something we said when we pictured Chloe closed up in the cellar, going stir-crazy or getting lonely. It was something I said when I imagined it was Chloe who would want to give up.

“There’s just a lot we didn’t think about,” I told her now.

Chloe threw back her head and laughed giddily. “No way. You thought about everything. Every single piece of it. Face it, Finn—you just don’t want to admit you’re a genius.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. But it’s going to be okay.” She reached out and squeezed my arm. “You’re freaked out about the lake.”

I’d thought I would have to explain them dragging the lake to Chloe. I’d imagined her getting a little hysterical and me having to calm her down.

But she kept going and was completely calm about it. “It was on the news this morning,” she said. “Not the morning shows, but the New Jersey part of the local stuff. Did you see it?”

Once when we were camping out in the tent in the old pasture, Chloe shook me awake in the middle of the night. She’d seen a black bear through the tent’s mesh window. She didn’t sound scared at all. It was more like wonder in her voice, and she’d said the same thing:
Did you see it?

“I was at school,” I said.

“Your mom’s making you go to school?”

“It’s better than staying at home and talking to cops all day.”

Chloe nodded like she understood. But then she went on to talk like she’d been watching a show on the Discovery Channel. “You should have stayed home today to see the process, at least. It was actually pretty interesting. I mean, can you picture people scuba diving in our lake, like it’s a tourist attraction or something?”

“They weren’t looking for a coral reef, Chloe. They were looking for your body.”

“I know that.” But it didn’t seem like she really got it.

“Your mom seems to be having a really rough time,” I said. I wasn’t trying to make her feel guilty. I just figured it might snap her out of it a little.

But Chloe just shrugged. “My mom’s fine.”

“Chloe, I don’t know—”

“She’s fine, Finn.”

The edge on her voice was sharp enough that I didn’t
want to go near it. We sat silently for a few seconds, and then Chloe asked more softly, “How’s Cam?”

“I haven’t seen Cam, really. Your dad said he’s been going to extra hours at school.”

“Has anyone questioned him?”

When we were putting this whole thing together, filling our notebooks with lists that we thought obsessively covered all our bases, that was the part that had worried Chloe the most. Not everyone understood Cam. He was abrupt and sometimes that made him sound like he was angry. And if you messed with his stuff, he really did get angry. He might have been more into trains and horses than Beer Pong or porn, but he looked like a man, like a college frat guy sometimes, until you got him talking. And then, once you got him talking—well, then he just seemed off. It wasn’t like he would talk to the police and fit their idea of a protective big brother.

Chloe had worried that people might assume the worst about Cam, that it would just be the easiest answer. So we were careful to make sure she took off on a Friday, when Mrs. Caffrey usually brought Cam to the transportation museum after school. We made sure people would start looking for her before Cam was anywhere near home.

“I don’t know if the officer took his statement, but it shouldn’t have been too bad. Your dad found the horse before Cam and your mom came back from Paterson.”

“Okay. So that’s good.”

“Yeah, that part’s good, Chloe. But the rest of it—”

“The rest of it is already happening. It’s not like a ride we can just get off.”

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t like a ride at all, that there was nothing fun about it. Not fun like it had been to plot it out together, to figure what would need taking care of, how most of the town would react.

In the local news, they flashed her picture with the grin we usually share together. And the newscaster said something like, “Teachers and classmates are shocked at the disappearance of this bright, energetic, young beauty.” And here she was bounding around the basement, like the only cheerleader for Team Kidnap.

“So did you see all the newscasts last night?” I asked. This would cheer her up. The anchor lady had called her a
young beauty
.

Chloe flashed a smile. “I did—I’m sorry about the picture. Did they tell you they were going to cut you out?”

“I didn’t know anything until we saw the papers. Your mom must have given them the picture. Anyway, they needed a picture of you, Chloe, not me. Otherwise what would the newsladies say? ‘No, folks, it’s not the pie-faced girl missing, it’s the cover girl next to her.’ ”

Chloe shrieked at that. “
Pie-faced?
What does that even mean? You’re so weird about pictures.”

“Everybody’s weird about pictures unless they turn out like yours.”

“Whatevs.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’d better go. My mom thinks I’m with Regina Sklar.”

“Are you serious? Where did you pull that one from?”

“Regina asked about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Really. And she was cool about it. She wasn’t all weeping into the shirt of the hot student counselor.”

“What?” Chloe shrieked again and I hushed her, laughing. She grabbed a pillow and hugged it close to her chest and I told her all about Dr. Ace and his new fan club. It felt like any other time we had put off homework by talking. Except that day, it wasn’t like my mom would just raise her eyebrows if I showed up late for dinner.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I really have to move my ass now. There’s candy in the bag, too. Are you eating enough?”

Chloe motioned to the pile of cereal bars and cookies in the corner. A jar of peanut butter sat next to one of grape jelly. “Yeah, it’s going to be really suspicious when you find me after eleven days and I’ve put on ten pounds.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said.

“I’m trying to exercise a little down here.” She crouched down and held up one of my grandmother’s old Jane Fonda videos. “There’s a VCR built into that TV. It’s pretty blurry and I keep the sound off most of the time.”

I snorted. Chloe snapped her head up, a little insulted. “Oh, don’t get mad,” I said. “It’s just that—if you could see how people are zombie stomping around up there—” I pointed up to the street. “And then to picture you down here doing aerobics.” I giggled a little bit. “My grandmother’s aerobics…”