Nearly Found (7 page)

“A body,” I said.

He set the ice on the coffee table and wrapped his arm around me, drawing his fingers through my hair.

“She was young, and she’d been murdered. I passed out—maybe it was the smell, or the color of her . . .” I swallowed hard, stopping myself before I said too much. “Or the color of her skin. I don’t know. I hit my head on the autopsy cart when I fell.”

“Leigh, are you still sure . . . ?”

“Reece. I’ll be fine. Raj took care of me—brought me home. He said it happens to everyone on their first day.” Actually, Raj said it happens to everyone when they see their first body. Adrienne’s was hardly my first, but I didn’t want to give Reece another reason to worry.

“Raj?” Reece pulled away and raised an eyebrow. “Should I be worried that you’re hanging out with some sexy CSI guy?”

“No, just a geeky lab tech. But if I had a thing for Star Wars T-shirts, I’d be a goner.”

He laughed and nestled in beside me, resting his arm around my shoulders.

I glanced down the hall toward my bedroom. “Reece, do you know anything about halfway houses?”

He pursed his lips. “Why?”

“Reggie Wiles was released from prison a few weeks ago.”

“Huh.”

“‘Huh’? That’s it?” I asked, looking up into his face.

“Well, I’m sure he has a lot of people keeping tabs on him.” He rested his lips on my forehead. A tang like cider vinegar crept over my tongue. His concern was muddled with something a little too sweet, like he was intentionally trying to hide it from me. “Don’t let it worry you, Leigh. You’re just starting to feel better after everything that happened. You’re happy again. Don’t let Reggie Wiles distract you from school or your internship.” He stroked a delicate finger over my bruise. “Or me,” he whispered, lips against my ear. “There’s nothing to worry about, Leigh. Not while I’m here.” He lay down across the cushions, and I sank into him.

Reece ran his fingers under my shirt, up my rib cage, tasting sweet and hot. His nose brushed mine, then his mouth, his tongue tracing my lips before sliding between them.

Reece’s phone vibrated silently in his pocket. He groaned, then reached to pull it from his jeans. He squinted at the screen. “It’s just Gena,” he said, declining the call and setting the phone on the coffee table beside the bag of ice. He eased back down to the sofa, pulling me with him. His lips and tongue tickled my neck.

The phone began rattling on the table. Reece’s fingernails dug into my jeans. “Your shirt smells terrible. I think we should take it off,” he said, pushing the fabric up my sides until his hands found my bra.

I giggled. “It’s probably Gena again. Aren’t you going to answer it?”

Reece fidgeted with the clasp. “Ignore it. Maybe she’ll go away.”

“I’ll talk to her.” I lifted my head from Reece’s chest and scrambled for the phone. He moaned and threw a pillow over his face. I expected to see Gena’s name. Instead, the screen read “Private Caller.” Odd, she’d just called from her own cell. I’d seen the number when he’d put the phone on the table. Unless she was calling from a different line, hoping to fool Reece into picking up this time.

I untangled myself from the sofa and climbed over him to take the call in the other room. Maybe I could find a way to convince her to check on Reggie without throwing up any red flags.

“Reece can’t come to the phone,” I said, trying not to sound breathless. “What’s up?”

The silence on the line was heavy and too long.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“Who is this?” a girl asked. The tentative voice in the receiver wasn’t Gena’s.

I peered around the wall at Reece. His face was still buried in the pillow, his chest rising and falling in a shallow, steady rhythm.

“Who is this?” I asked the girl.

Reece stopped breathing. The girl didn’t answer.

Reece sat up and was across the room in three long strides. He snatched the phone and disconnected, dropping it face down on the table, like it had burned him.

“Who was that?” I hated that my voice sounded like the girl on the line. Fragile and uncertain.

“Nobody,” he said, scrubbing his face and inching away. Like he didn’t want to touch me. Like he didn’t want me to feel something. But he was too late. I’d felt his skin when he’d taken the phone: a rush of hot panic that left a searing guilt. My mouth was still dry with the charred taste of it.

“Nobody?” I repeated. I’d been
nobody
once. Someone who’d made him feel guilty. Someone he kept secrets for. “Is she your . . . Is she a . . .”

His pause was too long. Like he was weighing words. He reached for me, but I moved away. He’d had too much time to focus his thoughts, to steady his emotions. He was good at hiding who he was inside. “
You’re
my girlfriend. You’re the only girl I want to be with.”

“Then who is she?”

“She’s just part of the job.”

“
I
was part of your job.”

“I didn’t want you to worry over nothing. She’s nothing. In a couple days, she’ll do something stupid and get herself arrested and it’ll be over. It’s just a job, Leigh. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“If it doesn’t mean anything, why hide it?” Maybe for the same reasons my mother had been hiding her relationship with Butch, and Reggie’s release from prison. Because they
did
mean something.

“I have to go,” he said. I didn’t know if the sting was the bristle of his lips on my bruise, or the fact that he was probably leaving to console some girl who wasn’t supposed to know he had a girlfriend.

He paused before opening the door. I could feel him standing there, waiting for me to look at him. I didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. He closed the door hard behind him.

Exhausted, I turned the deadbolt and headed to my bedroom.

I fell to my bed and stared at the wall. A photograph I’d never seen before of my father and me was pinned to the map. My eyes skimmed over my desk and my bed. Everything was there—my books, my pajamas, the shoes Gena had bought for me, and the old Rubik’s cube Alex had taught me to solve—everything was the same. Only the photo was new.

I was maybe five in the photo, just a kid with frizzy pigtails and grass stains on the frayed knees of my jeans, sitting in my father’s lap in the Fowlers’ dining room, around a table littered with poker chips and playing cards. We had identical smiles.

I pulled the pin from the wall and smoothed the hole it left in the image, perfectly centered on my father’s forehead. The placement of it felt angry. Intentional and hurtful. My mother wouldn’t have left me a photo like this. Even if she had saved any photographs of my father, pinning it this way—ruining this image of my father and me—wasn’t something my mother would do. Unease crept through me. I held the picture close to my face. The photo didn’t smell old. It smelled pungent, like fresh ink.

I turned it over and my blood ran cold.

F
A
= -F
B

The formula was written in bold blue letters.

Newton’s third law of motion.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I walked to school early and waited at Jeremy’s locker. He and Anh rounded the corner, holding hands and talking softly to each other. Jeremy’s smile slipped from his face when he saw me. Anh looked back and forth between us. She kissed Jeremy’s cheek and told him she’d catch up with him later. Behind his back, she gave me an awkward wave before disappearing around the corner.

I stepped aside so Jeremy could get to his locker. Instead, he dropped his backpack between his feet, like he didn’t trust me enough to dial his combination while I was standing there, which was saying a lot, coming from the guy whose idea it once was to put a house key in his front yard to make it easier for me to sneak into his room.

I pulled the photo from my pocket and held it out to him, but his gaze lingered on my bruise.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Just an accident.” It was the same thing Jeremy always used to say whenever someone noticed a mark he couldn’t cover.

Jeremy took the photograph. “That’s my house. Where’d you get it?” He turned the picture over, and his face paled.

“It’s Newton’s third law.”

Jeremy shoved it back at me with an annoyed look. “I know what it is! Where’d you find it?”

“Tacked to my bedroom wall.” Just saying it out loud made my skin crawl. Someone had been in my home. In my bedroom. Had probably gone through my things.

“Still think it’s just a joke?” Jeremy asked.

I used to read the personals every week, laughing over the triteness of the ads. Until I saw one that felt wrong, different from the others. The phone calls and spray paint, the dog shit on my porch. Those were all stupid childish pranks, the kind of thing Vince and his friends would do. But this photo? This series of carefully placed physics formulas?

I caught his eyes and held them.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The first bell rang. Jeremy picked his backpack off the floor. I picked up mine. He adjusted his glasses and kicked the floor with the toe of his shoe.

“So what do we do?”

“Change our locks?”

Jeremy sighed. “Okay. But if you change your locks, don’t forget to make a new set of keys for my dad. He gets pissed off when tenants change the locks and don’t tell him.” And from what I’d seen in front of my trailer last week, that kind of anger would probably manage to fall back on Jeremy.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked, gesturing loosely to my eye.

“Yeah,” I said. “You?” I looked up at his face. Three months ago, I would have reached for his hand when I asked him how he was feeling, just to make sure he was telling the truth. Now all I could do was hope he was being honest with me.

“Yeah.” A million unspoken words seemed to pass between us, all of them uncertain. “Are you coming to class?”

I bit my lip. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

He headed to the lab with his head down. When he rounded the corner, I pulled my phone from my pocket and hit Gena’s number on speed dial.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in first period?” she answered.

“Second bell hasn’t rung yet. I know this sounds silly, but I need a favor. Butch told me that Reggie Wiles was released from prison. Can you pull some strings and see if he’s been anywhere he shouldn’t have been in the last few days?”

“What do you mean? Like where?”

“Like Sunny View.”

Gena was quiet. “Why do you ask?”

The bell rang and I plugged my ear. “No reason.”

I could practically hear her rolling her eyes. “You’re worrying for nothing. The halfway house program is structured and closely monitored. There’s no reason to be concerned. This is exactly why I didn’t want you to know.”

“But I just found out yester—” The subtext slid into place with a shocking clarity. “Wait, how long have you known?”

Gena was quiet.

“You knew Reggie was out of prison the whole time and you didn’t tell me?”

“When you didn’t get the letter, we thought maybe it was for the best.”

“We? Did Reece know too?”

Her silence was a punch to the gut. It knocked me breathless. He knew, long before last night. And he’d kept it from me.

“You should have told me.”

“Look, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll have Alex talk to Reggie’s parole officer.”

I gritted my teeth. She thought I was paranoid. “Fine.”

“I’m telling you, you’re freaking out over nothing. I’ll call you after school.”

I disconnected and headed toward my first period class, feeling like an idiot. They all thought I was fragile. Like I needed to be protected from my own imagination. But I wasn’t imagining this, was I? If it wasn’t Reggie, then who else could it be?

My phone buzzed. One new text message.

I need to see you. I want to explain. Pick you up after school? RW

Great, Gena must have texted him. I hesitated, fingers over the keys. I would have to change the locks after school, while my mother was at work. And if Reece knew I was anxious enough to change the locks on my trailer, he’d freak out and tell Gena. And she already thought I was freaking out over nothing. Better to wait until I had concrete proof that Reggie wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

I replied:

Study group after school. My place at 6?

His answer came hours later, like an afterthought, sometime during fifth period.

Sorry. Have to work. Catch up with you on Saturday.

I wanted to throw the phone across the hall. By Saturday, I’d be a steam kettle ready to explode. Or else I’d be missing him so badly, I’d forget why I was angry with him in the first place. I knew Reece was only trying to protect me. The same way my mother and Gena were. But if everyone was keeping things from me, how was I supposed to protect myself?

My phone buzzed again. This time, it was Gena.

We checked with Reggie’s parole officer. You’re worried over nothing.

I clung to the hope that it was true.

• • •

Later that night, three new trailer keys rattled in my pocket as I headed for Gentleman Jim’s—one for me, one for my mom, and one for Jeremy’s dad. I spent the whole day trying to think up some reasonable excuse for changing the locks, some plausible explanation that wouldn’t worry Butch or my mother. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the flashing neon lights outside the club, putting the finishing touches on some elaborate story about neighborhood kids sticking chewing gum in the keyhole, just as Butch pushed open the paint-blackened door. Music spilled out with him. In his hands, he held two boys by their shirts, like bags of trash he was hauling to the curb.

One of them was Reece.

He went limp when our eyes met, all the fight slipping out of him. The guy he was with jerked around in Butch’s grip, clumsy and drunk, cussing loudly and making a scene.

“Keep it up, and I’ll call the police,” Butch growled.

“No cops, man.” The kid swayed on his feet, doing his best to look sober. “We’re cool.”

I stood frozen on the sidewalk. “What are you doing here?”

Reece’s cheeks flushed and he darted a guilty look across the parking lot. It had only been a quick glance, but I followed his gaze. A girl sat on the hood of a car, smoking a cigarette and watching us all with an amused smile.

His friend looked me up and down, unimpressed. “Who’s this?”

Reece ignored him. His eyes flashed, bloodshot and full of words he couldn’t say, wouldn’t say. Not here.

Butch’s grip on Reece seemed to soften. He and Reece had never met, and as many times as I had imagined this moment, I’d never pictured it happening like this.

“I’ll let you off with a warning. You boys sneak in my club again, either of you,” he said, jerking Reece’s collar hard, and the other boy’s even harder, “and it’ll be the last time you sneak anywhere. Got it?”

They nodded, and Butch let them go with a rough shove toward the parking lot. “Go sober up. You shouldn’t let your mothers smell you like this.”

Reece winced. He walked away, looking over his shoulder at me. His friend stumbled, muttering to himself while trying to light a cigarette. Reece pushed him hard in the back toward the girl’s car. “I told you it was a stupid idea.”

The girl tossed her hair back from her eyes and flicked her cigarette to the ground as Reece and his friend came near. She jumped off the hood. “Took you boys long enough,” she said with a flirtatious smile, lowering her lashes at Reece. She looped her arm in his, but he shook her off.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. Reece got in the passenger seat and slammed the door. He didn’t look at me again.

Butch folded his arms over his chest. “That’s Reece?”

I nodded.

“Do you trust him?”

My face burned and my eyes watered. I watched the girl’s car shrink in the distance.

He’d said he had to work.

I held out a key. “I changed the locks on the trailer.”

Butch stared at it, as if weighing its significance. His hand brushed mine when he took the key, and my tongue swelled thick with sympathy. The sting of it left tears in my eyes. He tucked the key in his pocket. “I understand. I’ll make sure your mom gets it.”

• • •

Later, locked inside my trailer, the shame gave way to a numbing fatigue. I skipped dinner and curled up in my bed. My phone buzzed. One text message. From Reece.

I’m sorry. I didn’t have a choice.

I pitched the phone across the room. Lonny once told me that the thistle doesn’t get to choose whose side it’s on. That who it hurts is just a product of its circumstances. But that was bullshit. There was always a choice.

My hands shook as I unhooked the clasp and took off the pendant. I didn’t know what to do with it, only that I didn’t want to wear it anymore. I lifted my mattress, reaching for the Ziploc bag where I kept my father’s things. I pulled it into my lap as I crumpled to the floor. The bag contained my collection of personal ads clipped from the
Missed Connections
over the years while I’d been searching for messages from my dad. It was where I kept each one that reminded me of him
,
the Google search results that Jeremy had once printed for me on all of my dad’s fake names, the old photo of my dad’s poker club that Jeremy had found in his father’s office last spring, and my father’s wedding ring. I opened the bag, ready to toss Reece’s thistle inside with all the other messed-up pieces of my life I didn’t know what to do with.

But the Google searches were gone.

There was a newspaper clipping in their place—one I hadn’t put there.

Someone hadn’t just broken into my trailer to leave the photo on my wall. My room had been searched. Whoever had left the photo had taken the Google results. He was looking for my father and he wanted me to know.

I unfolded the newspaper clipping. The headline read: “Local Business Man Charged on Multiple Racketeering Charges: Police Seeking Anonymous Caller Credited With Providing Information Leading to Arrest.”

Reggie Wiles’s face appeared in a mug shot, dated June 28, 2009. Then again, in a photo taken outside the courthouse, his shoulders hunched to avoid the cameras of the reporters. This was the man who used to play poker every Friday night at Jeremy’s house with my dad. But he looked different from the man I remembered. Different from the faces in the photo in my lap, of all the other Friday night players—Jason Fowler, Anthony DiMorello, Karl Miller, and Craig Reinnert—wearing Belle Green Poker Club shirts, smiling, arm in arm. Reggie’s face in the poker club photo had long ago been torn away, and I had always imagined it looked happy like the others. But in these photos, Reggie Wiles wasn’t smiling. His eyes were hooded and his jaw was set hard and square. Angry.

I held the photo close to my face. Had I see this man before?

In the posture of the man in the bus shelter outside the police station?

Or maybe in the hunched shoulders of the man who’d bumped me in the street after Raj had driven me home?

The different images began to click together, to form a face.

Had it been the face of the stranger I’d seen staring at Adrienne’s picture under the streetlight? Or had he been staring at me?

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Gena was wrong about Reggie. She had to be.

“Want to talk about it?” My head snapped up and my breath caught in my chest. My mother stood in the hall, dangling the new key from her fingers.

“I didn’t hear you come in.” I folded the article without looking at it, trying not to draw my mother’s attention. “I thought you were supposed to be at work?”

“This is more important.” She sat on the edge of my bed, looking at the bag I held on my lap, my father’s ring and Reece’s pendant and the poker club photo in plain view. The last time she’d seen the photo, she’d been angry. She’d told me to get rid of it, that she never wanted to see it again. She reached for the article, and I let her take it. Her brow furrowed as she read the headline. “Butch told me what happened with Reece.”

I looked away.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I think I know how you feel.”

“You do?”

She nodded, folding the article and placing it in my hands. No anger. No reprimands. “It’s hard when someone you love does something that makes you feel ashamed. I know in my heart that your father always had the best intentions—that he wanted a better life for us—but the choices he made hurt people. And rather than move on, I carried that burden. I let his mistakes define me. I lost a lot of friends.”

“Like who?”

She thought for a moment, staring at the faces in the photo through the bag. “Like Jenna Fowler. Like Mary Reinnert, and Karl Miller. They were good people. Loyal friends.”

“But I thought
they
stopped being friends with
you.
Because of Dad.”

My mother shrugged thoughtfully. “Maybe. Or maybe I was too ashamed to try. Maybe I didn’t think I deserved them.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “I regret that. I miss them sometimes.”

“It’s hard to believe our families used to hang out together.” I shook my head. “Vince, Emily, Eric . . . even Jeremy. I can’t imagine us even wanting to be in the same room together. I mean, I remember those Friday nights watching our dads play poker, but we’re all so different now. What were their fathers like?” I withdrew the photo of the poker club from the bag, more curious than she would ever realize, as I placed it in her hands.