Accomplice (7 page)

“Me and Chloe.”

“Why would you and Chloe tear up her picture?”

“It was a puzzle. We gave him different pieces until he could tell it was Chloe.”

“
What
was Chloe?”

“The person leaving him notes.”

“Chloe left this boy notes?”

“We left him notes. We did it together.”

“Finn.” My mom had her disappointed-in-me voice on. “You left this boy notes? I thought you two knew better than to play jokes like that on people.”

“It was a project—not a joke.”

“Oh, Finn. You girls. You have no idea how cruel—”

“No, Mom—we weren’t making fun of him.”

“Chloe liked this boy? Did you like this boy?” My mom sounded almost hopeful.

“He seemed like someone we’d want to know.”

My mom sighed. It was a long-suffering sigh, like she couldn’t imagine how she ended up with such a moronic daughter. “Finn, there are only eighty students in your class. How could you not know a boy in your own grade? Even if he doesn’t talk.”

“He
does
talk.”

“Well, then let him speak up for himself now. I don’t know what you and Chloe were thinking. Honestly, I
had hoped you were kinder girls than to tease people like that.”

We pulled into the drive, but she stopped the car at the foot of it. “I need to go in and sit with Sheila. I think you should go up to your room and start on your homework.”

“We haven’t done anything in class since—” I stopped rather than say
since Chloe disappeared
.

“I’ll tell Sheila how hard today has been on you.” My mother blew her bangs out of her eyes. She looked older. I don’t know if it was just that she didn’t have on makeup, but her eyes looked more worn around the corners. “I know that several people, including your father, have asked you if Chloe has been dating anyone. I find it very surprising that you never thought to mention Dean West. If you don’t have a lot of studying to do, please take some time and consider that.”

“She wasn’t dating Dean.”

“Whatever was going on…I hope that you will positively rack your brain to come up with some details. For Chloe’s sake. For Dean’s sake. For everyone really.”

The truth is, I didn’t know what was going on with Chloe and Dean. He started as a project we worked on together. We’d buy tiny toys out of gum ball machines and glue poems out of her dad’s
New Yorker
magazines onto cards. We’d check the library. But after a while, after we’d left the pieces of Chloe’s picture and Dean
started writing back, Chloe stopped wanting to do those things together. Things shifted ever so slightly. When we saw Dean, he lowered his hood and looked straight at Chloe. At first he blushed and looked away. Then he stopped blushing. Then he stopped looking away.

I’d ask her, and Chloe would shrug. But she stopped calling him Stuttering Dean. And once in a while, I’d be waiting for her to pick up the phone for an hour or two. Or she’d get a text message and not read it out loud to me. But I didn’t know that it was Dean.

We had talked about what it would be like to have boyfriends. We would go on double dates and be in each other’s weddings. And in junior high, when parties went from Chuck E. Cheese to spin the bottle, we’d pooled anything we heard or learned. What felt good. What felt gross. It’s not like it was raining men in Colt River, though. The same guys who pulled up Chloe’s skirt in the days of buckteeth and Dorothy dresses were the ones trying to look down her shirt now. Different reasons maybe, but they were still the same absolute voids. We went to the prom to dress up and let some dicksmack pin a flower to our dress and then we danced in a circle with other girls. Just like most people in our class.

There were a few couples at school, but they were generally football players and the girls on the dance team. There was Ashley Morecraft and Rayburn Whittier, but they were pretty much married. And that had more to do
with the crap going on at Ashley’s house and the fact that Rayburn’s mom let her sleep over. Even on weeknights. They were a couple.

I had to believe that if Chloe was serious about him, she would have told me about it. Dean was just like any of the other guys who fumbled around and, yes, stuttered and stammered when they stood next to her.

Plenty of times, guys fell for Chloe and tried to use me as a net. They talked to me first, but the whole time I could feel them leaning toward Chloe. Dean wasn’t just kind to me so that she’d notice. He made me laugh. If Chloe and her family had stayed in the city and I grew up in Colt River on my own, I would have become friends with Dean West.

If we were actually friends, though, independent from Chloe, Dean and I would have been talking more over the past few days. Or even just not talking and taking some comfort in sticking close to each other. There wasn’t anyone I could afford to stick close to right now. I had to watch what I said. I had to be able to get over to my grandmother’s house on my own. Even up in my room, lying on my bed, I tried to position myself so that I wasn’t facing the Caffrey house. I didn’t want to face its windows, let alone anyone else’s eyes.

Dad called up to let me know dinner was on the table, but I pretended to be asleep and didn’t open my door. A
little while later, my mother brought up a plate fixed with food, which meant I wasn’t in trouble.

“I didn’t mean to snap,” she said while she made this big production of arranging a place for me to eat at my desk. “We’re just looking for answers.”

“I don’t have answers.” My voice against the pillow sounded like a moan. I lifted my face but didn’t look at her. “Not about Dean.”

My mom sat down on the bed. “I remember when your dad and I first got close—well, it was this big secret. I can’t even tell you why. You know—Nana and Granddad always loved him.”

I did know. My father had worked summers on my granddad’s farm. My grandfather used to say in his booming voice, “Before he was my son-in-law, he was a son to me.” It was strange to imagine my mom keeping quiet about something that would make her parents so happy.

My mom confessed, “I made him sneak over to pick me up. Or we’d meet by the lake.” She must have seen me looking confused, because she leaned back on her elbows and looked up to the ceiling. Her eyes looked a little less worn out, gazing up that way. “It sounds silly, but everything felt so new, and I was breathless and shaky all the time. In a good way. I just wanted to keep it all to myself for a while.”

That made me panic a little. At first, I didn’t know what my mom was getting at, who she was comparing herself to. She snapped herself out of remembering and sat up a little. “Maybe that’s what it was like for Chloe.”

I didn’t say anything. The corners of my eyes got hot and full. They wouldn’t shift toward my mom. I knew I was supposed to meet her eyes and smile. That’s what she expected from this heart-to-heart. There was a square of my quilt where the edges were unraveling a little. One of the lighter shades of blue. Chloe had the same quilt, in her bedroom down at the barn. They were expensive; we ordered them out of a catalog, and I remember feeling a little guilty that maybe they were a little pricey for my parents.

“Finn, I know it’s hard. All of this is hard because we’re all missing Chloe. But it sounds like this would have been a hard time even if Chloe was right down the hill.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I wished my mom wouldn’t look at me so closely. I felt like the quilt. I felt like I was unraveling. “How come ravel isn’t a word we use?”

My mom exhaled so long that I thought her bangs would blow right off of her head. “Oh, Finn. I’m just trying to help, honey.”

“Well, haven’t you always wondered that? We say unravel when something’s coming apart, but we don’t call it raveling when we get it all knotted together.”

“I’ve never wondered that, no.” My mom leaned back again, though, and her lips relaxed into a smile. “But I have wondered about pink, though.”

“What about it?”

“Well, pink is basically light red, right? Why don’t we have a word for light blue, then?” My mom just shrugged again. Leaning back on her elbows, she looked more like what I imagined my big sister might look like. If I had one.

“I think Chloe’s okay.” I said it without thinking. Because I got greedy and wanted the two of us to keep acting easily around each other.

But as soon as I said it, my mom tensed up. “What makes you think that?” She hung each word up carefully, the way we handle my grandmother’s glass Christmas ornaments.

“I just feel like I’d know.” It sounded lame.

“I hope that’s true.” My mom stood up. She brushed her hands over her thighs and checked the plate she had put on my desk. “All of this is cold. You should come down and microwave it.”

“I’ll eat it cold.” I didn’t want to leave my room. Or warm myself with food. “I’m really tired is all.”

“Okay, then. I finally got Sheila to take one of the pills that Dr. Hilsinger prescribed. So I’m not going back over until tomorrow morning. Unless…” My mom trailed off.

“Unless we hear something.” I finished for her. Mom didn’t shut the door behind her like usual and I felt weird about running over and closing it. I waited until I heard her get all the way to the bottom of the stairs and then went to the bathroom just to close my door when I came back.

I went online and checked e-mail. I thought about asking around to see if anyone had heard anything about Dean, but searched instead for local news headlines. I figured even our pieceofcrap newspapers would be less insane than the Colt River High rumor factory. Nothing in the
Hunterdon County Record
, but the
New York Times
said the police had been questioning a “person of interest.”

That was what they were calling Dean now.

I set my cell phone alarm to vibrate and went to sleep fully clothed. I listened for my parents moving around downstairs and heard my father in fullforce snore when I stepped out into the hall. Then there was the low, throaty breathing of my mother sleeping next to him. This was the way Chloe and I would creep around together when she was staying over, back when sneaking down for ice cream sundaes was the wildest we ever got.

When I got outside, I zipped up my hoodie and wished I’d put on a jacket. Stopped to check in on the horses because that was going to be my lameass story in case Mom or Dad woke up—I’d say I went out to feed the horses, got sad, and took a walk. Never mind the fact that if they woke up and found me gone, my parents would have the FBI dispatched to our dirt road faster than you could say
copycat killer
. It was the best I could come up with, and I had to come up with something.

I half-jogged to my grandmother’s house. Because there was a cop car sitting at the bottom of our road, I had to go out the back way, which meant circling back
around and trekking through the pumpkin patch. I clocked in what would have been a forty-minute walk at a little under twenty minutes. And that was through a dark patch of field.

Closer into town, where the houses are spaced more closely together and we have actual sidewalks, I tried to make myself look around and take notes. I figured there would be more cop cars circling around because of Chloe’s going missing, and there were. I tried to memorize where the dark spots on each street were, where Chloe and I could stop and rest and not stand smack under a streetlight. I tried to notice which hedges rose tall enough to shield us from the view from the street.

If I got caught now, my parents would probably lock me up in the hayloft and never let me out. I’d be like Rapunzel, but with ratty, shoulder-length hair. If I got caught later on, though, with Chloe, Chief Kane would probably lock me up in a cell next to Dean West.

I was half scared that she had found out about Dean somehow and that when I got to the house, it would be empty. She’d be plastered all over the paper the next morning, striding purposefully into the station, turning herself in. And another part of me was afraid that she knew about Dean and was still there, eating Pop-Tarts and forgetting to water my grandmother’s plants.

When I got to the bottom of the basement steps, I found her cowered in front of the high window, with the
cordless phone in one hand, waving my grandmother’s old curling iron in the other. “F-F-F-Finn.” By the time she finally got out my name, I expected her to be saying something else.

My hands were up. Palms out, the way I’d calm a spooked horse. “Settle down there, freakshow.”

“God.” Chloe sounded like she’d actually been praying to him. “You didn’t say you were coming. I heard someone upstairs. Oh God.” She had her hand pressed to her chest and the phone rested against her shoulder. For a split second, I got scared she would dial it.

“Just put the phone down,” I said. She just stared at me. “Chloe, what if you accidentally call someone?” When she looked at the phone and then dropped it like it was burning, I panicked harder. “Chloe!”

“Shhhh!” She jumped to peek out the window. “Are you crazy? Shut up!”

We stood there, staring up at the basement window, for a full five minutes. Listened for footsteps and waited for a light to blink on next door. Nothing. Nothing. Chloe slid down to the couch and breathed out. That’s when the curling iron clattered to the cement floor.

“God,” I said. “You really can’t do anything quietly, can you? It’s physically impossible.”

“What’s going on?” Chloe spun the flashlight toward me. “Why are you here?” And then, frantically, “Did something happen to Cam? Is everyone all right?”

It made me want to shake her a little. No, everyone was not all right.

“Chloe, we need to end this now. You need to come home.”

“Is Cam okay?”

Kind of. No.
But instead I said, “Yes. But your mom’s a zombie, your dad’s a mess. School is nuts. This was nuts. Chloe, we were nuts to do this.”

“My mom’s always a zombie. Let me guess—she got someone to prescribe her something to calm down?”

“What?”

“You don’t know everything about how my family works, Finn.”

But I did. I mean, I pretty much lived there. And there was no way Mrs. Caffrey could buzz around town the way she did and serve on all her committees all doped up. And even if she was, she still didn’t deserve to sit around waiting for police detectives to turn up her daughter’s body.

But Chloe had her chin jutted out. She’d knotted up a piece of her hair by twirling it and she glared up at me. “My family’s just fine.”

“Well, Stuttering Dean isn’t.” Which is not how I meant to tell her at all. I didn’t even mean to call him that. I closed my eyes, and when I reopened them, Chloe was still sitting there in front of me, looking as if she’d been raised by wolves for the past few days.

“What happened to Dean?” She asked it carefully, pronouncing each word deliberately.

“Chloe, have you been talking to Dean? After you came here, could you have called or texted and just not realized—”

“No. God, Finn—I’m not stupid. What happened?”

“Okay, but even just to say good-bye or something…”

“What happened to Dean, Finn?”

I tried to make my voice gentler. “I don’t know if you watched the news tonight, but—”

“They brought in a suspect.” Chloe finished up. Her choice of words had me freaked.

“They’re saying
suspect
now?”

“Yeah.”

“Earlier, they said
person of interest
.”

“Right. Same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing. A person of interest—” I tried to remember the definitions I looked up online earlier in the night. “I don’t think they can keep you in custody unless they actually name you as a suspect.” For Dean, it meant the difference between going home with his parents or hanging around the county jail until we figured out Chloe’s big reveal. I tried to tell myself that she couldn’t know that. But I couldn’t help it. It felt like she should know that.

Chloe actually looked bored. If I hadn’t mentioned
Dean she would be making fun of me for being a police geek. I pulled out the big guns.

“They came and got Dean,” I told her.

“Who?”

“The cops?”

“Why?”

God.
“Because they think he had something to do with this.” I gestured around the room, at the piles of wrappers and blanket cocoons shed onto the floor. Chloe looked around at the room and back at me. I wanted to strangle her.

“Chloe, they think he hurt you.”

“But he didn’t.” When Chloe gets nervous or restless, she jiggles her foot. Like part of her wants to leap up and run off the nervous energy. Her voice sounded steady, but I watched her knee bob up and down in the darkness.

“Yeah, exactly. And we need to make that clear. So you need to come home early. We’ll figure out how to bring you out into the open.”

Chloe rose halfway up from the sofa and then crumpled back down. “I can’t do that now. My boyfriend gets arrested and all of a sudden I’m miraculously found. They’re going to figure out exactly what happened.”

It struck me that they probably wouldn’t. That would require them to imagine that girls like us could think this up. Right now that seemed unfathomable to me. Even
with Chloe sitting across from me like a spoiled little kid. And so I focused on the other unbelievable part of the sentence.

“You’re calling Dean West your boyfriend?”

“That’s what they’d call him, right?”

“But is he?”

Chloe shrugged her shoulders. It was like I’d asked her if she wanted another Pop-Tart or something. “No. It’s not like that.” But she wasn’t looking at me. The couch pretty much swallowed me up when I flopped down onto it. I was so tired. My legs burned from running and I felt a blister on my heel opening up. Chloe bit her lip and looked up at me. “I could see how someone would think that, though.”

“Does
Dean
think that?” I asked.

And then I saw something in Chloe’s face. When I asked about him, she stopped looking so angry for a second. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, her face looked softer somehow. “We’ve just been talking a lot,” she said. “He’s really easy to talk to.” And gave a short little laugh I’d never heard before.

“Chloe,” I said, “they have him at the station.”

“But he didn’t do anything. He’ll be fine.”

“They went through his locker. They found a bunch of the stuff we left him in the library.”

She gave me the
Yeah, and?
look.

When we were little, and Chloe and I swam in the lake together, we used to play this game. One person would sit up on the beach and shout orders to the person underwater. And it never sounded right, so you’d have to figure out that
ham stung
meant
handstand
. That’s how I felt right now. Like Chloe was under the surface and no matter what I said, she didn’t seem to hear me.

“They found the picture that we took of you, the one that we cut into pieces. They’re thinking Dean did that. That it means he hurt you.”

“Dean would never hurt me.” It was like she’d gotten stupider, hanging out in my grandmother’s cellar. She sounded like she did when she drank too much cough syrup.

“Chloe, you’re missing. So people think someone hurt you. People are scared someone killed you. And now they think Dean did it.”

But even that didn’t cut through her stupor. She stood and started picking up a bunch of the wrappers, and at first I felt this wild surge of hope. I thought she was getting ready to leave. We had maybe an hour and a half, but we could figure out a way to get her someplace where someone would find her.

She sat down on the sofa and started braiding her hair. “Well, he didn’t hurt me. They can’t prove
something that didn’t happen. And what’s going to happen if I go home with you now? We’ll go to the police?”

“We have to.” But I already sounded unsure. She’d given me a way to back out.

“Yeah—and you think Dean’s going to be grateful for that? This isn’t like leaving a note in a library book. He’ll hate us if he finds out.”

That would be less disastrous for me. At least I’d have Chloe back.

“Chloe, how are we going to talk to people when this is all over?” I wanted her to know what it was like to be me for a second. “We’re going to be lying to people, to everyone. This is it. It’s going to be like this for the rest of our lives.” My panic grew infinite, right at that moment. Realizing it was really never going to be over. Even if we came clean now. We’d just be famous in a different way. And I doubted colleges would give us scholarships based on our creativity.

Chloe reached up and tugged my hand then. She pulled me down to sit on the sofa next to her. She said, “We’ll be honest with each other.” She leaned her head on my shoulder and we both looked at the gray screen of the shut-off TV. I could see the outline of our reflection there. If we turned it on, we’d probably be on one of the channels. Or at least Chloe would be.

I realized that I didn’t want to be the one who found
her. Before, we had planned it that way, so that people would hear about me, too. And I actually felt cast in the cooler role. People would remember Chloe as the girl who’d gotten herself snatched. I would be the smart one, the girl detective who saved her best friend’s life. But now I knew I was the one who’d fade. The minute Chloe let go of the reins of her horse and turned around and crept to this house, she had sealed her new celebrity. And that wasn’t going to go away. People would know who she was at college. They’d do follow-up stories. She would apply for a job someday and someone would Google her. They would think,
She’s so welladjusted. It’s like it never happened. What an amazing girl.
But then, she’d have to be amazing to pull the whole thing off.

“I’d better go,” I said.

Chloe sighed, then pointed at a stack of old paperback books. Some of the covers were torn off. The ones that weren’t seemed to be variations of the same picture: a lady with long hair falling back into the arms of some muscular guy. Some of the guys were dressed like Vikings. Others were pirates.

“I’ve read like six of your nana’s crappy books.”

“That’s why you’re suddenly so dumb.”

“Don’t say dumb.
Dumb
is a word once used to describe mute people or stutterers. The fact that we use it as a synonym for stupid reinforces the link between clear speech and intelligence.” She sounded like she’d
practiced this, the way we once practiced the single lines we’d each had in our school plays. She was speaking up for Dean then, her chin jutting out proudly. At the very least, they were fooling around.

If I outlined the ways that working to eradicate the word
dumb
from the English language would fall short of making up for the fact that her apparent boyfriend had spent the night in county lockup on our account, I’d be there until the sun rose. And I had to get home well before that. I had to slink through the lawns and hope none of Nana’s neighbors were sitting sleepless in their living rooms. Because there’s nothing nosier than an old lady without cable TV. Most of my grandmother’s friends would recognize me. And the ones who wouldn’t were batty enough to call the police.

“Can you find a way to tell me that he’s okay?” Chloe asked as I was hugging her good-bye. I nodded. I didn’t ask if I should tell her if he wasn’t.

“Yeah.” I untangled myself from her. “I’ll try to get back here. We have to be really, really careful, though. Remember—”

“No lights on upstairs and only flush the toilet at night,” Chloe finished for me.

I yanked the strings of my sweatshirt so that the hood tightened around my head. I looked like Mrs. Bowen’s angry, goth granddaughter. I ducked out the door and walked down the street as quickly as possible without
outright running. Then I kept my head down and my hands in my pockets so that they didn’t pick up any light. When I turned off my grandmother’s street, I jogged a little. When I hit the woods, I ran. And when I got to the ravine that signaled the edge of our property, I took a running leap over it and then pretty much hauled ass. Running through the woods at night is an exercise in faith. It’s spooky to hear animals scattering after you and to feel saplings bending in front of your steps. It’s not exactly environmentally fantastic, and at one point I got all panicky that maybe I’d stepped on a sleeping bunny or something. Maybe I’d fall into a hole. But those things were less scary than imagining what my dad would do to me if I showed up and he was already awake.