Accomplice (6 page)

At first it felt like some kind of school assignment—the kind of project teachers usually expected Chloe and me to partner up for. In eighth grade, we’d had to care for a robot baby like a real baby. The year before that, we’d balanced household budgets. For this, Chloe and I invented a mystery. What started as a smoldering joke ignited into a game and then into a varsity sport.

Early into writing the rulebook, we decided it was Chloe who’d have to go missing. She was the Margaret Cook expert, after all. And there was the pretty girl formula. If I’d suddenly vanished, it would be news in Colt River. Hep Carter would run some front-page story and pass around ballpoint pens from the
Raritan Valley Tribune
up at the high school. It’s not like I needed a self-esteem transplant, but I was realistic. When it came down to it, I was a farm kid. I looked like a potato in pictures and usually wore the same denim jacket until the sleeves started to unravel.

Chloe might have lost all her baby teeth here, but she
was still city people. And city people cared about other city people. Especially hot city people.

They didn’t start the search parties until the second night. That first night, Friday, a phone chain went around town. We were already at the Caffreys’ with Cam. Even knowing the formula, we didn’t count on how quickly the city tabloids would roll in with their vans. The Holiday Inn on Route 202 was pretty much packed with ladies with Judge Judy hair and sweaty cameramen by Saturday morning.

Chloe had wanted to smear the horse with blood. When we finally figured out how to signal her disappearance to the rest of Colt River, she thought we should step it up, leave a bloody handprint on the saddle or something. That would up the ante. People would be more alarmed so that the news would spread faster. It had taken me days to talk her out of that one. Mostly because it meant we’d have to explain it afterward. We’d have to cut her.

The riderless horse was spooky enough. I heard Mr. Caffrey find him. He’d been working from home that week, and I heard the low whistle under the window. Then I heard him start calling for Chloe. Caught a glimpse of him chasing after Carraway and then leading the horse to the stables. I saw him check the gates. At first, Mr. Caffrey must have thought Chloe was just
goofing off. But we’re pretty careful about the animals. My cell phone rang next. Then the landline. It had started.

When the first news vans came, someone asked to get some shots of the horse, saddled up just like he was when Mr. Caffrey first found him. I only know because I heard him tell my dad. He was pretty bent out of shape about it. Dad kept trying to talk him down, going on about how people just wanted to help out, so the newspeople needed details. Mr. Caffrey rarely raised his voice, but he was yelling about that—saying that there was nothing about seeing the horse that was going to help anyone find Chloe.

That night, on the late night news, they just showed a shot of some other horse—not Carraway—saddled up and trailing reins. It was actually the first time I got that sick feeling in my stomach. These were the people that Chloe and I were chasing. And they were pretty good at playing the game.

I hadn’t been near the stables during the daytime since Chloe’s disappearance. For once, my dad didn’t fuss about it. He must have just taken over cleaning the stalls. Besides, you could never keep Cam away from the horses. He’d be looking after them, too. A couple of times, I’d snuck out at night with some apples and carrots, trying to make it up.

At night the stables were different. Maybe because of
the whole nativity thing, they felt holy. It smelled cleaner, because it was cooler at night. The horses shuffled in the stalls. They snorted and swished their tails back and forth so it sounded like leaves rustling in the wind.

I wondered if Margaret Cook had animals. Because even if I’d looked like Chloe, it couldn’t have been me who hid out. I could never have been away from Chauncey that long, or Gabe, or even the sheep. Animals were just easier company for me. They nuzzled at your palm; they asked for what they needed. Gabe studied me with his wet eyes and for once I wasn’t worried about what got seen.

Ever since I was nine, our dog, Chauncey, had slept within earshot of my call. Usually he slept out in the stalls, but on the side closest to my bedroom window. If Chloe and I camped out, he slept outside the tent. If I slept at her house, then he slept on the Caffreys’ back steps. I knew he’d track me down if I ran off. He was one of the few creatures alive who loved me more than he loved Chloe.

The fourth night after the disappearance, after the ten o’clock news was over, I slipped out back to see Chauncey. I realized that Chloe hadn’t asked about Carraway, which was a little weird. But some things I still passed off to her still being a little bit city. A tried-and-true farm girl would worry about her horse. Sitting in the stables, I wondered what my life would have been
like had the Caffreys never moved out here. Who would I be if I wasn’t Chloe’s best friend? We told each other we’d be lost without each other, but the truth was probably we would have been just fine. I’d have spent more time on my own, but that wouldn’t have made me different from any of the other farm kids. The truth was, this was the loneliest I’d ever been.

I wondered if Chloe was thinking like that. If sometimes she saw the faint moon-shaped scar on my face and pictured what her life would be like if the accident had been fatal. I knew she would’ve been fine without me. I thought about it and nodded the way I saw my dad nod to himself sometimes. Her status would have just risen faster if she’d tragically lost her best friend.

Maybe Chloe would have written her college essay about me. She could have described how the cracks spread across the windshield before the glass showered onto my hair. She could have said that she promised right then and there that her life would matter for both of us. She could have written an essay that sounded brave and sensitive and noble all at once. And, according to College Guidance Lady, it still wouldn’t have gotten her into a top-tier school.

That night, I ended up dozing off on the floor of the stable, with my head on a rolled-up horse blanket and Chauncey curled up in my legs. I woke up to screaming while it was still dark outside. I thought at first that
maybe I’d opened my eyes into one of my own nightmares. Looked out at our houses and saw that it was Cam’s light that was on. What kind of essay would Cam write about all of this? How much of it was getting through to him?

The thing about Cam was that he liked everything to stay the same. Lunch at 11:30. Same lunch in the same kind of brown bag. Two napkins in the bag and a colored straw. I’d never seen him reach out to Chloe. Sometimes, he’d duck under their mom’s arm. That was Cam’s way of hugging, but it was reserved for the parental figures. Once Chloe and I were building a fort out of old fence posts and a rusted nail tore through her palm. Cam was sitting right near us with one of his books. His eyes didn’t even flicker when she screamed.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t care. Even if it’s just that Chloe was another piece of the routine he lives by, that counts for something. He’d miss that.

That’s what I was wondering on my way back up the stairs to my bedroom—what Cam was calling out for.

Dean West was in love with Chloe, but I was the one who wrote the letters he kept zippered in the front pocket of his backpack.

We weren’t trying to be mean. For one thing, Chloe really did think he was hot. That wasn’t really his problem. It was the way talking to him stressed people out—everybody got embarrassed when Dean talked. Sometimes he got going and managed three or four sentences just fine. Everyone felt relieved for a second. And then a word got caught somehow—like he choked on it. His whole face contorted and his lips worked around the sound over and over. It looked terrible and sounded painful, so everyone just sort of looked around at each other helplessly, waiting for it to be over. Dean included.

Sometimes I wondered whether Dean would speak more clearly if he’d grown up in a bigger town than Colt River. Once you know the whole place calls you Stuttering Dean, it’s probably tough to relax and get over something. Maybe if that wasn’t how we all knew Dean, he would’ve had the chance to be someone different.

He was a sweet guy. And we weren’t being mean. Chloe kind of liked him, and it seemed like the one way you could get to know him was through writing things down.

The notes were a project Chloe and I worked on together. We’d gotten gift cards to the Craft Shack for some community service prize, and we spent most of them on fancy paper and crazy stickers and stuff like that. We bought a paper punch and filled one note with tiny snowflake confetti so that when Dean opened it, it would look like a miniature snowstorm. That was one of my favorites, because when we checked the school message board to see if he’d picked it up, we saw some tiny snowflakes on the floor in front of the office window.

Mostly we copied song lyrics or poems and things. We hardly used our own words at all. Later on, Chloe wrote a couple notes by herself and posted them for him and caused one of the biggest fights we’d ever had. It just felt like she was keeping secrets, like she turned something we’d worked on together into her own thing.

Chloe and I had figured it would unfold like one of the trashy paperbacks my mom reads—finally the young hero would have the chance to pour out all his pent-up emotion in poetry. When he didn’t respond to the first two notes, we realized that Dean wouldn’t know who to leave messages for. It’s not like he could put up some random blank note on the office window.

In our next message, we left instructions to leave us notes by the old encyclopedia set in the library. A couple days later we found a muffin on one of the dusty shelves. We didn’t think it was Dean at first, but then a week later there was a bag of homemade peanut-butter cookies. There was a carrot-cake cupcake once and another muffin, too. It was like Boo Radley was into baking.

He might not have left us love notes, but Dean changed a little, just in how he carried himself. When we all sat around talking before class started, Dean still sat back. But he didn’t sit back like he was afraid to join in. It was more like he was so satisfied with himself that he didn’t have to. One time we wrote something about his eyes and then Dean started wearing a lot of blue. He stopped slumping beneath his gray hoodie all the time.

We weren’t jerks about it. We didn’t write anything that wasn’t true. If anything, Chloe ended up actually a little wrapped up in him. But he was still Stuttering Dean. However good he looked in a blue buttondown shirt, he still went into palsied mode anytime a teacher called on him in class.

We had this demented substitute teacher at the very beginning of school. I heard that people actually complained to Guidance about her. Subs are supposed to just sit there, leave us to concentrate on whatever busywork the teacher left. But this twitshit sat there dissecting us
like we were lab rats or something. Honestly. She took notes.

And she had a blast with Dean. She called on him to read the directions on our worksheet, and of course it took him a good three minutes just to work through the first two lines. So that was it. Anything we had to read, she called on Dean. Sometimes when he was struggling with a word, she’d interrupt him and coo, “Relax. Relax. Just breathe.” It was awful. Once she brought a newspaper clipping about the genetics of stuttering. She scurried right over to Dean like a little rat, screeching, “I’ve had this folded up in my purse. You have to tell me—do you have siblings that stammer? Does your father have the same impediment?”

When Dean looked up at her, it looked like he was bracing himself for execution. I saw his Adam’s apple move when he swallowed. He said, “No, ma’am.” He faltered a little on the ma’am part, but the rest of it was clear as day.

“See? There you go—look what a little concentration can do.” Dean’s jaw set harder, because it’s not like the problem had just been that he was lazy. For years. “Don’t you want to communicate with others?” I wanted to raise my hand and tell her about Cam. I wanted to raise my hand and tell her about me. Dean did something kind of kickass, though. He opened his mouth to talk,
twisted his lips, and started jerking his head up and down. He looked like our old dog Honey did when she had a seizure at the groomer’s shop. At one point, Dean clutched at his own throat as if he was trying to physically pull out the words. And then stopped all of a sudden, stared at her, and said, “Nope.”

And I thought,
Go, Dean West
. I’m not saying we transformed him into the kind of kid who didn’t take any shit from Pseudo Shrink. It seemed like that’s who Dean was all along. But maybe it helped that he knew that someone noticed him for better reasons than the words he couldn’t say.

They came for Dean during sixth period.

Usually they called a kid down to the office over the loudspeaker. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe someone saw you tagging a bathroom stall. Or maybe you had an orthodontist’s appointment. But Mr. Gardener came to escort Dean out of class himself. A man I didn’t recognize stood behind him in the doorway. And then I saw the blue uniforms of the two cops in the hallway. It wasn’t just weird—it was wrong.

Word spread. By the time eighth period let out, most of the junior class stood clumped in clots, blocking the artery of the school’s main corridor. Kate threw her arms around me. “Oh God, Finn. Can you believe it?”

No. I thought of how Chloe and I had made a to-do list, just like we did before presenting at the 4-H fair each year. And how nothing like this had been on it.

“He’s an animal.” That was Maddie’s contribution. Kate looked grateful for it.

“He’s a psycho,” she corrected. “We all know he’s a psycho.”

The second muffin Dean left in the library stacks was banana walnut. He left it on a napkin and on the napkin, he’d written, DEAR YOU—THIS HAS NUTS, JUST IN CASE YOU’RE ALLERGIC. PLEASE BE CAREFUL. I remembered how Chloe’s peals of laughter earned us a hushing from the librarian. Her whole face had shone. “He’s crazy!” Chloe had said. I’d agreed with her.

This wasn’t what we meant. Clusters of kids stood around the hallway crafting theories about the kid most of them couldn’t be bothered to listen to. “He must have totally snapped,” I heard someone say. “They found a bunch of pictures in his locker.”

“I heard the secretaries talking in the office—the pictures were all ripped up. He’d torn them in pieces.” The voices kept crashing around me and I felt like I was drowning. I wanted to claw my way out of the school and sprint to my grandmother’s house. To take Chloe by the shoulders and shake her until she agreed to follow me up from the basement.

I knew exactly what pictures they’d found torn up in Dean’s locker. I took those pictures. The notes had gone on for weeks and we thought he knew, anyway. But Chloe wanted him to know for sure. So we printed out an eight-by-ten picture of Chloe’s face and cut it out so it looked like puzzle pieces. He probably knew as soon as he saw a strand of her white-blond hair, but we doled out the pieces over two weeks. It was when she was posing for the picture that I figured out that Dean wasn’t just a game to her. She never cared what she looked like in photos, but when we took that one, Chloe posed.

The pictures couldn’t have been the only reason the cops came for Dean. I tried to keep reassuring myself, but all I kept seeing was his puzzled face looking up at Mr. Gardener calling from the doorway. Kate kept rubbing my arms with her hands. “Finn. Do you wanna sit down? You look like you’re about to pass out.” I ended up sliding down to sit on the floor with my back to the lockers. “You’ve been so strong, Finn.” Kate was cooing at me like she was the white Oprah. “Let go.”

Sometime in the next twenty years, Kate was going to grow up into one of those people addicted to attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She was going to find some excuse to talk like this for the rest of her life.

“I gotta go,” I said.

“Finn—you don’t have to be alone right now.”

Nope, I actually had to be near Chloe. We had some things we needed to make right. I heard Warren Winter talking about the men who came to clear out Dean’s locker. He was practically panting. “They were FBI guys. I could tell.” Warren spoke with authority. This was the highlight of his life. “They were brutally efficient.”

I wondered where they’d taken Dean and forced myself to ask Warren, “Were his parents here? Did they come get him?” That’s what I was hoping for. Maybe he was suspended. And I’d go talk to Chloe and she’d just have to come back a little early. Maybe she could claim she didn’t remember where she had been all this time. The principal would realize they made a mistake about Dean, and it would just turn out that he got a day off from school.

Warren looked thrilled that I asked. His chest expanded. “The police took him away in a squad car. The FBI guys followed in their vehicle.”

I wanted to tear Warren apart, to pick his bones for meat. The whole hallway buzzed and murmured. It was like some holiday. It was like none of them had known Dean at all. Or even Chloe. Both of them were only characters all of a sudden, and the whole thing was a TV show that no one wanted to miss.

“I need to call my mom.” That’s what I came up with. At least I didn’t announce to the assembled crowd that I had to call Chloe.

Mom had already heard. She was, in fact, already in the school parking lot. “Just come on outside, Finn,” she said. “If you can’t calm yourself down, ask one of the girls to walk with you.”

“They’re wrong, Mom. There’s a lot they don’t know.” I was shrieking into my cell and a couple kids were staring. Kate stopped rubbing my shoulders.

Kenneth Ryden kept hitching his pants up by the belt loop, as if he was playing Sheriff. “I knew Dean West needed speech therapy, but not actual therapy.” He said it like my Uncle Frank tells racist jokes, with the flat pause at the end for looking around and waiting for people to appreciate his genius.

“You’re brilliant, you know that, Kenneth?” I said. “Make sure to feed that sound bite to one of the reporters. It doesn’t sound at all like you’ve been working on drafts of it or anything.” Kenneth looked up at me and his ears went pink. I couldn’t stop myself. “It’s like you’re an improv god. Except not—assbot—”

“Finn.” My mom said it firmly, like she meant business. “Just come on out to the car.” I didn’t say anything to Warren Winter or to the girls who had swarmed around me. I stood up, picked up my backpack by one strap, and walked toward the doors.

Kate called after me, “Finn—you don’t even know Dean West. What is your problem? Chloe was your best friend.” It’s funny—I knew that Kate wasn’t a bad
person. I was the bad person. But it was like Dean West was a piñata and they were all mad that I wouldn’t pick up the stick and swing.

“You don’t know anything.” I said it to Kate, but I didn’t turn back to look at her. So it sounded like I was saying it to myself. Which would have been true, too.

My mom was on her cell phone when I climbed into the car, but it didn’t stop me from frantically directing her as soon as I closed the door. “We have to go right to the police station.” She held her finger up to me, motioning for one minute, but I just buckled up my seat belt. “We have to go straight there. There’s a lot they don’t know about this.” I thought I could at least tell them about the photograph and the notes we had left for Dean—maybe that would be enough to clear up some things. Maybe they would let him go home. It would look suspicious if I went in all sure that he didn’t do anything and then I ended up finding and saving Chloe, but we would just have to work around that. I’d just have to be a really good liar.

My mom was still holding a hand out to me. Palm out, like a crossing guard warning me not to walk. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Sheila. Finn’s here now. We’re going to come right back to the house.”

“We’re not going right to the house, Mom.” I’d started arguing before she had the phone totally closed. But the look on her face turned my volume down a notch. I said
more quietly, “We have to go to the police station.” My mother maneuvered the car out of the lot and turned toward home.

“Finn—is this boy a friend of yours and Chloe’s? Were the two of them seeing each other?”

“Kind of. I don’t know.”

“Kind of seeing each other?”

“Well, not really. I know she liked him and he liked her. But they weren’t, like, dating.”

“This didn’t seem important to mention before?”

“Dean West? No. He’s Stuttering Dean. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. We have to go to the police station.”

“And tell them what, Finn?”

“That this is a mistake. That Dean is a good person.” I started crying then. “He bakes muffins and he’s shy and he’s just starting to be a little less shy and he probably can’t even explain it to them.” I was losing it. “They’re not going to understand him. He’s not going to be able to tell them…”

My mom looked over at me and slowed the car down. “We need to let the police do their job. I’m sure that they have their reasons for asking this boy questions. It’s not our place to interfere with this. That’s not going to help anyone.”

“But they’re talking about these pic—these pictures.” I was stammering like Dean. “They think Dean t-t-tore up Chloe’s pic-picture, but that was us.”

“That was who?”