In Plain View (25 page)

But that couldn’t be true, could it? Because she was the same kid, and now she was always in trouble and everybody hated her. Being a good kid must be when other people thought you were good.

Grown-ups were so tricky.

Why did he do it? Why did he make everybody mad at her? She thought he was nice. He used to bring her stuff, like candy, and tell her mom to order her a pizza with plain cheese, nothing on it. He even gave her a piggyback ride to bed that one time and everyone laughed.

Jenny felt her nose tickle because of another drip. She looked for a dry spot on her jacket sleeve.

Stranger danger was such a joke. The people she knew were the scary ones.

Her fingers were getting stiff. Jenny tried to push them into the front pockets of her jeans to warm them up and touched the square of medicine tablets. She took it out and looked at it. It was exactly like the one that Tonya had. The thought gave her such a rush of guilt and excitement she stuffed it back in her pocket and shut her eyes.

What would it be like to feel no pain?

A tornado started whirling in her stomach. The inside of her throat got all thick and sticky. If she swallowed she might even vomit.

Her mother always told her to use the word vomit. Not puke or barf. Vomit was a medical word. People got sick sometimes; it was normal. People got hurt, too. And sometimes they needed medicine to get better. Her mother told her that, too.

What time was it? The sun hadn’t quite gone down, but it was so low in the sky the tall trees made it seem like night where she sat. She couldn’t even see lights from houses or anything, only trees and fences and road.

Nothing looked the same. A car passed her on the road, fast and loud.

Jenny pressed her forehead to her knees and folded her arms tight around her legs. She sniffed and rubbed her nose on her sleeve again. It burned.

She was in so much trouble she couldn’t even think what would come next. It was like trying to imagine fifth grade. Those kids had hardcover books and homework, like, every day.

How could she ever do it all by herself?

Jenny wiggled her fingers in her pocket and felt the medicine move under fingers.

What would it be like to feel no pain?

That part wasn’t so hard to imagine.

She could try to remember.

Or she could take some medicine.

6:14:46 p.m.

I was on Peg, so there was no hiding my arrival at the Jost farm. Older bikes, like the Super X, had very little covering around the engine and pipes. Peg roared.

I shut the engine down before I turned into the driveway. I left the bike propped on the far side of the road near the cow fence. Yes, Ainsley, I can be taught.

It was third-world dark out there. No street lights. No landscape highlighting. One window in the entire house showed a glow. Anywhere else in the state of Illinois, you’d think the family had gone out, leaving nothing but a kitchen light to guide their return.

In this house it was a sign someone must be home.

I knocked hard on the front door and called out, “Mr. Jost? It’s Maddy O’Hara.”

My metabolism rarely lets me cool down, but tonight my hands felt frozen stiff. I tried stamping my feet to throw off the nervy chill creeping up my back. I knocked again with the side of my fist,
bam, bam, bam.

“Mr. Jost? It’s important. It’s about Rachel.”

His face appeared through the small square of window. The white skin around his eyes and the sharp profile of his nose was all I could see.

“What about my daughter?” he said.

“Open the door, Mr. Jost. I’m not going to talk to you through a door.” The ridiculousness of the situation took some of the edge off.

The door opened slowly. He wasn’t wearing his hat or his jacket. His suspenders followed the line of his chest to the forward hunch of an older man’s shoulders. He didn’t step back. Didn’t invite me in. He was being so obvious about it, I almost laughed. Why was I so afraid of this guy?

“Look, Mr. Jost. I thought you ought to know, your daughter came and spoke to me last Friday. She seemed pretty upset.” I didn’t like narcing on Rachel, but Ainsley was right. I’d feel better knowing that somebody understood how deep she was in. The only one I could think to tell was her father. “I thought you should know, she and Tom were still pretty close. She blames herself for his death.”

“What are you saying to me? What is this?” His voice was aggressive but his eyes winced with confusion. That wiry gray hair, ringing his head from skull to chin, had a life all its own.

“Help her. She’s too young. Don’t let her blame herself.” I looked him in the eye and said it out loud—the thing he feared, the thing I feared. “You were more to blame than she was.”

He stared at me, silent.

I don’t know why I waited.

“I would do most anything for her,” he told me quietly. “For my daughter.”

“Talk to her. Let her talk to you. Did you and Tom fight before he died?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head, no. Quietly, as if he were talking to himself or thought I couldn’t understand, he mumbled, “The sinning comes with knowing.”

“You think you can avoid the sin through ignorance?”

“The road is hard enough. Turn away. Be separate. That is the choice we make.”

“But once you know, what then?” He wouldn’t answer. His whole way of understanding the world made me hot. “Once Tom knew things that no one else around him knew, what could he do? Did he tell you what it was like to be a kid and watch the whole world dissolve or did you make him hold it in to protect your separateness?”

“Not so well enough,” the old man growled. “Oh
ja,
it came out, all right.” His accent gave the sarcasm an edge. “How could I keep him in this house with Rachel? I had to keep her safe.”

“You brought him here. You were the only father he knew.”

“My pride brought him here. That is my shame. And my error to put right.”

“So you sent Tom away. You banished him.”

Silently, the man who gave Tom Jost a name, shook his head.
No.

I couldn’t believe he would deny it. He might not have said the words out loud, but Tom had known he wasn’t welcome. I lost it. Couldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t hear his side of it. I got furious and something clicked. “The sin comes with knowing.” The next thought was whispered. “You
knew
. You saw him standing there on those boxes. Alone. For how long? You watched him die, didn’t you?”

His eyes popped and his whiskers twitched all directions. Then he growled at me in non-English, stepped back and slammed the door in my face.

My phone rang about three seconds later. I was still standing there facing a closed door.

“What?”

“It’s Ainsley, Maddy. I’m at the school. You won’t believe this. They can’t find Jenny.”

6:51:23 p.m.

I tried calling home, stopped there first, hoping there was some mistake, some kid-confusing explanation for why she wasn’t where I expected.

No luck.

I got to the school and all they could tell me was Jenny hadn’t been checked out of the program. The last people remembered, she was on the playground. They had tried to call me at the station and at home. Apparently, the number in the file for my cell phone was wrong. When Ainsley showed up at closing time, almost all the other kids had been picked up. The only clue they had to what happened was the word of one of the kids from the playground, who claimed Jenny had walked off the playground toward a shiny car.

“I think we should call the police,” one of the teachers suggested tentatively. “That’s the procedure at this point, isn’t it?”

I already had two of the babysitters in tears and Ainsley threatening to lock me in the car, I needed to get out there and start searching.

“I stopped at the house on my way here,” I said. “She’s not at the house.”

Ainsley interrupted, “What about friends? Could she have walked to someone else’s house?”

“Whose? There’s nobody,” I said. “Kid doesn’t have any friends.”

“One of us should wait at the house,” I told Ainsley, “and one should go out looking.”

“You want to look, right?” he answered. “I’ll go wait.”

“Thanks,” I said, stiff with gratitude. The women were conferring among themselves about what to do. “Call the police. I’m going out to look. You’ve got the right number to reach me now, yes?”

“Yes, yes,” one of them mumbled, guilty, but with an edge of evil eye.

“Good.” That made two of us.

It was maybe a mile and a half from the school to the house. There were two routes Jen and I generally took to get home, a third that the bus followed. I’d followed Ainsley back to the house, searched the backyard and wracked my brain for ideas. Nothing useful came to mind. Consequently, I was out of my mind.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled over and called Curzon.

“I need a favor.”

“My lucky day.” The shift of his attention, from work to me, was as clear as a car changing gear.

“Jenny’s gone.” It didn’t take long to explain. Curzon put me on hold twice, checking with the guys at the station about what had already been done. A car had been dispatched to the school minutes before.

“Come to the station,” Curzon ordered. “We’ll go out together in my car. I’ll have paperwork ready you can sign when you get here.”

“What paperwork?” I know I sounded irritated.

“The stuff we need to get a wider search going. Description for the radio, that kind of thing.”

“All right. Be there as soon as I can.”

The station was hustling when I arrived. I remembered the way to Curzon’s office and walked straight through. The door was open. He sat behind his computer, wearing a pair of executive style wireless-frame glasses and a white button-down that was creased and damp at the back from long hours in the big chair. Smart and hardworking looked good on him.

“You didn’t speed on the way here did you?” he asked without looking up. “I’ll be one more minute. Sit down.”

I was hoping the first thing out of his mouth would be something like,
don’t worry, we’ll find her, she’s fine.

Unfortunately, Curzon was the kind of guy who didn’t do platitudes.

I didn’t sit.

From the doorway, I had an excellent view of the action in the station. There were cops going about their business with plodding intensity, and a couple of secretarial types hanging up their cardigan sweaters and putting on their jackets. Sulking against the wall were a pair of Goth-hoodlums in full-length black capes. Beside a desk, hunched an old man with a bloody head. At the farthest end of the room, four burly guys were dragging an eight-foot-high chunk of concrete up the hall on a cart.

Police stations are surrealism on testosterone.

“What’s with the road work?” I asked for distraction. “Putting in a patio out back?”

He handed me paperwork on a clipboard, pen attached. “Guy’s garage floor. Evidence.”

Translation: somebody died—bloody—on that slab of concrete.

A bolus of sick bubbled up my throat. “All this on a Monday night? Why would you ever want to leave this job?”

Curzon pointed at the paper. “Write. Give details under ‘last seen wearing.’”

There was too much pumping through my head. I had to force myself to think, to write.

Purple jacket. Jeans. White tennis shoes, pink laces.

It was impossible to believe what was happening. Less than two hours ago, I was standing in front of Tom Jost’s father, accusing him of parenting failures.

“I got a question for you.” Even to my ears, my voice shredded the words. “Do you think people have to separate to be good?”

Addresses: home, school…friends?

Had I failed Jenny already?

Curzon mumbled,
“Mmduhknow.”

Names: parent or guardian. Guardian.
What a terrible word for it.

A woman stuck her head in the door. Curzon stopped typing.

“Amber Alert’s been issued,” she said without looking at me.

“We’ll have the rest for you in under five.”

She walked out. Curzon went back to typing.

“I’ve always thought there’s good and bad in all of us. Everybody’s capable of going one way or another at any time.”

“Are
you
more capable of the ‘bad’ because you see it,” I asked him, “because it’s around you all the time?”

Without hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”

“Really?” I was unprepared for how vulnerable his honesty made me—with no camera between us. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to argue. “I’m not so sure.”

“Yes, you are. You agree. Those Amish people agree. Pretty much everybody agrees. Same reason people move to the suburbs. It’s why we build prisons in the middle of nowhere. It’s why you live alone.”

“What?” I spluttered. “What’s my living alone got to do with anything?”

“Who’d understand what you’ve got inside your head? You said you hadn’t had a date since Sierra Leone. My guess is that’s because you can’t picture chatting your way through a meal with some guy, then going into a bedroom with him, taking off your clothes, but never being able to show,” he snorted to himself, “to
talk about
what’s inside.”

This conversation was rapidly deteriorating. Direct eye contact seemed dangerously inappropriate, but Curzon wouldn’t look away, so I couldn’t either.

“How would it feel to lie beside someone, go to sleep, with that innocent mind on the pillow beside you?” He turned away from me just like that, and returned to typing paperwork. His last words were not speculative at all. They were hard with personal conviction. “It’d be a sort of punishment, wouldn’t it? Hiding a part of yourself all the time. Forever.”

“Does hiding it make you more capable of wrong, bad-ness?” I floundered looking for the right word. “Evil?”

“Like I would know? I’m on the protection-clean-up detail.” He blew me off. “One thing I do know, once you realize how bad a human being can be, once you can imagine it,” he shook his head as if the rest were obvious, “you can imagine hitting back. You can imagine hurting that person sleeping next to you. You can imagine all sorts of things.”