Nearly Gone (11 page)

“I have to help her! Let me go!” I threw myself against Jeremy, bucking and kicking.

He held me tighter. “Help who, Leigh? You don’t even know what’s going on! If someone’s really dead in there, then this place is going to be crawling with police and paramedics in a matter of minutes, and we shouldn’t be here! We’ve got to get back to the buses!”

I felt like I was drowning, struggling to get my head above the crowd, listening for the sounds of paramedics that hadn’t come yet. The words
dead girl
bobbed over and over to the surface.

No, not dead. Posie couldn’t be dead. I twisted my wrists, forcing a gap in Jeremy’s fingers and wriggling free, then brought my elbow back hard in his rib. I heard him grunt, and I darted into the crowd, plowing through it, fiercely determined to get to Posie. To touch her. I blocked out everything else, the smells, the angry people I bumped aside, the morbid curiosity of everyone I touched, and forced my way into the bathroom. Fumes and sweat and fear assaulted me. I shoved my way farther in. I could hear Jeremy calling my name.

In front of one of the stalls, the crowd of bystanders waved hands in front of their faces, brushing away the noxious scent of something burning. Through the gap, I saw Posie’s sandals peaking out of the open stall door. A man knelt at her side, crammed between her body and the wall. He coughed, his eyes watering uncontrollably. I pushed closer. The man held Posie’s wrist, unable to find a pulse. A horrified expression came over his face as he drew her arm cautiously away from his body. Ash-gray blisters crept over her skin, a shape materializing on the inside of her forearm.

The crowd gasped, struggling to see as the number three burned into existence, leaving an oozing white path where it consumed her. The man covered his mouth with his sleeve and dropped her hand.

I fell to my knees and reached for her ankle just as two hands grabbed me under my arms and dragged me back.
It had only been a moment. The faintest flicker. But I’d felt her.
I let Jeremy carry me away, the crowd swallowing me as I screamed, “Someone help her! She’s alive!”
• • •
An hour later we were on the bus, heading home. The emergency exit lights cast a haunting glow over the somber faces around us. It was quiet except for the drone of the engine. No one spoke. One teacher remained at the park with the handful of students who’d claimed they’d been the last to see Posie hours before. Jeremy had dragged me away before the police arrived, insisting that we needed to get back to the bus. He’d been livid, and walked clutching his bruised rib. When he took my hand, I’d tasted the copper and salt of his anger. He’d pulled me hard through the crowd, repeating himself over and over. If we could make it back to the bus, everything would be okay. Paramedics and police rushed past us, and Jeremy kept his head down, murmuring in my ear to keep walking. Everything would be okay, the soothing words at odds with what he was clearly feeling. “There’s nothing we can do for her,” he’d said, holding me close to his side until we were herded into the bus.
I curled in on myself with my arms around my knees, forehead down, and I shut my eyes against the image of Posie blistering and the number three burning. Three, eighteen, ten. What did they mean? Where was the pattern? I forced my brain to zero in on the details, to clamp down on the hard facts of what I’d witnessed. But they were clouded in the chaos of the moment, and the confusion of the crowd.
Think
.
I took a deep breath, focused. Started with the obvious. The number in Posie’s arm was made by a chemical burn. But it was the dramatic appearance—the well-timed bleaching of the number in her coffee-brown skin, white blisters in necrotized flesh—that gave the only clue to which chemical might have been used.
Bits and pieces of data circled my brain, like puzzle pieces sliding over a tabletop, seeking a logical intersection. Slowly, they began snapping together. The acid was probably lipophilic. Hydrofluoric acid was highly corrosive and yet slow to show burn symptoms on the skin. It could be purchased in most hardware stores, and would be easy to smuggle into the park in a sealed plastic water bottle. A set of rubber gloves and a small mask to protect the lungs would be just as easy to conceal. That’s all that would have been needed to administer the poison, and a very small amount, just a few milliliters, would have been enough to kill her.
But somehow, Posie Washington had survived.
“How did you know?” Jeremy startled me. The question was barely more than a whisper in the dark. I pulled my head from my hands and looked up at him, unsure what he was really asking. Was he asking me how I knew where to find her, or how I knew she was alive? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t tell him anyway.
I let my silence speak for me. For Emily and Marcia and Posie. For the mysterious numbers etched in their skin. There was nothing to say. My puzzle was riddled with holes, pieces thrown everywhere and none of them fit. I had no answers for any of this.
Instead, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just needed to see her. Are your ribs okay?”
Jeremy massaged them tenderly. “Remind me never to sneak up behind you.”
“Why were you so mad back there?”
He gaped at me, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe I’d asked the question. “You were trying to run headlong into what may or may not have been the scene of an attempted murder, Nearly.”
“But it was Posie!”
“No, it was a mistake!” Jeremy spoke firmly in a tight, low voice. He wasn’t joking, and the stern expression he wore stole any argument I’d been ready to make. “Getting called in to the police station for questioning isn’t the way today was supposed to end. If I hadn’t pulled you out of there when I did, that’s exactly where you’d be.”
It was my turn to look away. He was right. I had made a mistake, but not the one he thought. I should have figured out the clue sooner, rather than letting Reece distract me. I should have been there under the tower’s shadow, waiting, and maybe I could have done something to stop what happened to Posie.
If I’d spent more time studying instead of chasing after a boy, we wouldn’t be here.

I’d left Jeremy for Reece, and let him touch me, wondered if there was a chance he could be something more . . .
“You’re right,” I conceded to myself. “It was all a mistake.”

Posie’s face was the first thing I thought of when I woke early Saturday morning. I scrambled for the phone and called Jeremy, desperate for news. Had she made it through the night? Did they have any clue who might have done this to her? Jeremy said he’d searched online, but Posie was a minor, so her case would be kept confidential. For now, all I could do was hope. And wait.

Mona was still sleeping, so I took a few dollars from the cookie jar, hefted the basket of dirty clothes under one arm and my backpack over the other, and headed to the coin laundry across the street.

The Laundromat was always empty on Saturday mornings, and the tumble and slosh of the machines drowned out the street noise on Route 1. I tried studying. Tried letting the machines drown out every other intrusive thought in my head, but I was restless, and couldn’t focus. When I was little, my dad and I always did laundry on Saturday mornings. He’d keep me entertained with card tricks while we waited for the wash cycle to finish, then we’d walk next door to Bui’s for donuts while it dried. But that memory of him that used to be so clear in my mind had become hazy, wrapped up in smoke, smudging what was real and what was imagined.

My father couldn’t be these people Jeremy had found. A gambler. A phony. A man who’d run out on his family for no good reason. He couldn’t be those people, because he was like me. We had the same sweet tooth. The same nose and eyes. He was smart. He had to be. I pulled the photo of him from my backpack and studied him, arm in arm with his buddies at the Belle Green Poker Club. Touching them, and smiling.

Touching them, like it was easy. Like it didn’t faze him at all.
Maybe I’d been wrong. I shut the photo inside my textbook. Maybe we weren’t the same person at all.
• • •
Mona was stirring behind the closed door of her bedroom when I pushed open the trailer door later. I set the laundry basket on the table and pulled a fry pan from the rack inside the oven. The pat of butter slid slowly across the pan while it warmed, and I mixed up some milk and eggs with sugar and set two slices of bread in the bowl to soak. While the bread swelled and softened, I found the kitten mug I’d given her on Mother’s Day, and heated water for coffee. Mona liked it strong, with one packet of artificial sweetener, and I left it for her, steaming at her place at the table.
Her door opened and she ambled to the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. They were bright green and ringed in old mascara. The whites were bloodshot, making her olive skin look sallow. She pulled her robe shut and smoothed her long, unruly hair—the only thing we had in common—back from her face.
Inhaling deeply, she reached for her coffee and sipped. “Do I smell French toast?” She raised a suspicious brow, but behind the mug she hid the hint of a smile. “What’s the occasion?”
I scooped the toast onto a plate and set it in front of her place at the table. “No occasion.”
Mona eased into her seat, looking at me skeptically while I washed the pan. “Something you want to talk about?”
“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. She took another slow sip of her coffee, still watching me. “Okay, maybe there’s this one thing.”
Mona nodded knowingly, lip curled as she cut into her toast sideways with her fork. She took a bite and watched me dig around in my backpack. “Ace another trig test?”
I pulled out the photo of the Belle Green Poker Club and set it on the table. Mona stopped chewing. “Where did you get this?” she asked, and set down her fork.
“Jeremy’s house,” I said. There was no need to go into the details of how he found it. I didn’t think she was even listening. She didn’t acknowledge me, lost somewhere in her own head. After a minute, she snapped the photo down against the tabletop and slid it back to me. She stuffed another forkful in her mouth, chewing and blinking away the wetness in her eyes.
“Who took this picture?” I asked, trying not to let her hear the urgency in my voice. She knew this picture. She’d seen it before. I was certain of it. She glanced at it bitterly.
“Jenna Fowler,” she answered quietly.
I took a moment to process what she’d just said. Jeremy’s mother had taken this photo. And the only way my mother would know that is because she was there. I looked again at the smiling faces in the photo, the men arm in arm wearing matching team shirts. These were my parents’ friends. Which meant she should remember the man whose face was missing. If he was close to my father then, maybe this man would know where to find him now. Maybe they were still connected.
“Who is that man Dad’s holding? The one whose face is torn away?”
My mother scraped her plate absently. I reached for her hand to make her look at me. She dropped the fork with a clatter and stood up, pulling her hand away. But not before I felt it. The grief, and loss, and shame. She clutched her robe and looked down at the table. “Get that picture out of my house,” she said, low and angry. “I don’t ever want to see it again.”

After the final bell rang on Monday, the chem lab was empty, and uncomfortably quiet. Rankin leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee with a frown. Then he got up and shut the classroom door.

“Your mentees seem to be disappearing,” he said, returning to his desk and perching on the edge of it. His salt-andpepper eyebrows arched over his mug, waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one. And he wasn’t asking me anything I hadn’t already asked myself. I’d spent the entire weekend trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all. Why me? Why my students? And who might be next?

“With Emily, Marcia, and now Posie no longer in need of your services—and with Mr. Whelan on suspension until Thursday—I daresay this will put you several hours behind in your community service. With less than three weeks until finals, I might add.”

A bubble of panic rose through me. It was only a matter of time before the police began connecting the same dots Rankin already had. All three victims had been connected to me. I closed my eyes and dropped into the chair behind me.

“I can see this bothers you as much as it concerns me.” He
tapped his fingers on the side of his mug. “Therefore, I’ve come up with a solution.”

A desperate and almost hysterical giggle slipped out. “A solution?” He made it sound so simple, as if it was only a scholarship at risk.

“You can make up the hours sorting, cleaning, and taking inventory of the lab equipment. You may start immediately.” He looked at me expectantly. I sat motionless, anxiety chipping away at my blank expression. “Unless you have more important things to do?”

I shook my head.
Rankin handed me a stack of inventory forms. “You may start with those boxes.” He gestured to a mountain of cardboard with his mug. “I’m going to the teacher’s lounge for more coffee. I’ll be back in a few minutes should you have any questions.” He paused in the open door, then turned hesitantly and said, “Principal Romero called a rather interesting meeting. With the Fairfax County police. They appear unable to connect Emily, Marcia, and Posie in any way that might shed light on what happened, though they seem quite certain they are indeed connected. They’re interviewing faculty this afternoon, to uncover any missing link between them. I suppose, since you are no longer their tutor, I have no reason to mention it. I’m quite confident that information would only serve to disrupt your studies and waste their valuable time.” He raised an eyebrow. “I do hope you agree?” I nodded, looking at the stack of boxes, feeling both surprised and grateful.

When I raised my eyes to thank him, Oleksa stood in his place.
“What are you doing here?” I looked past his shoulder down the empty hall. My heart skipped a beat. How long had he been standing there, and how much had he overheard?
He slid into his usual seat. “Detention,” he said flatly. If he had overheard my conversation with Rankin, he didn’t seem concerned. “We seem to find trouble together.”
“I’m not here for detention.” The implication burrowed under my skin. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but this whole lab-cleaning business felt like a punishment. And he was right. It wasn’t the first time Oleksa and I had been together like this. The police department, the park, and now here.
He smirked and opened a deck of cards, then shuffled them, whisper quiet. He laid a card face-up on the table. “You run with Reece, and soon it will be more than just detention.”
“And Lonny Johnson’s a saint? Maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to judge.” I glared at him as he spread the rest of his hand facedown, so fast I could barely see his fingers.
“There are things you don’t know about him.” He snapped a card against the table. “And there are things he doesn’t know about you.” His clear gray eyes found mine as he threw down an ace, and I knew he’d heard everything.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry.
So what if he knew that Rankin was covering for me? So what if he knew I was the missing link the police were looking for? Who was he going to tell? Definitely not the cops, since he obviously didn’t want their attention any more than I did . . . Or would he? What would someone like Lieutenant Nicholson trade for information like this, like they’d done for Reece? The air in the room was too thin and my hands felt shaky. I clenched them into fists.
“You’re no angel either.” I refused to be afraid of Oleksa Petrenko. I had information too. I could completely discredit him as a witness. I could place Oleksa at the scene of a drug deal, and had seen him assault Reece with my own eyes. Hell, I probably even had his fingerprints. Oleksa must have been the one to put the baseball bat on my porch.
I smiled to myself, feeling more secure in the knowledge that I had something to wield over him if I needed it. “Thanks for returning my bat,” I said, turning my back and grabbing the first box.
FRAGILE,
it said in bold red letters.
“I returned nothing,” came his reply.
I set the box down silently. I had no reason to believe him. But I did.
“Whatever.” I bit my lip and snatched a box cutter off the shelf. The warm, woody smell of newsprint seeped out as I sliced the packaging tape. Objects wrapped in old newspapers filled it to the rim. The cards rustled and snapped quietly behind me. I felt Oleksa’s stare. Knew he was watching. A dozen dusty boxes lined the walls, waiting.
Mr. Rankin returned to his desk. Oleksa didn’t say anything more.
I thrust a hand in the box and pulled out the first ball of paper. My hands were shaking as I unrolled it, and I dropped it and cursed. The glass vial shattered, startling Oleksa and Rankin and spreading tiny shards across the floor. I looked at the mess and blew out a long slow breath. The glassware had been wrapped in a page of personal ads, and it felt like a bad omen.
I swept up the glass, then resumed my work in silence. Oleksa left after an hour. I only knew because the room felt bigger, and I no longer had the feeling of being watched. After two hours, I’d washed, dried, inventoried, and shelved only three boxes.
I scooped the last of the wadded-up sheets of newspaper and stuffed them in the empty boxes. When I was done, my fingers were covered in newsprint smudges, making it hard to think about anything but the
Missed Connections
and the events that had unfolded since I’d found the first ad. Three ads. Three victims. Three students, all connected to me. Rumors were spreading, facts unraveling from fiction, weaving together to create truths that could almost hold weight. Emily’s friends had talked about the number on her arm, even after police had tried to silence them. Marcia’s friends had done the same. And Posie’s number had appeared in a horrific public display, in an amusement park of thousands, making it impossible for police to conceal the specifics of the crime. Ten. Eighteen. Three. The numbers, random and meaningless on their own, were beginning to add up. Sooner or later, a pattern would emerge. And it was only a matter of time before police figured out that I was the only common denominator between the victims.
I closed and locked the cabinet, and leaned against it, lost in thought.
The tower will point the way . . . You’ll know where to find me . . .
Do the math and find me after the show
. . .
Find me tonight under the bleachers
. . .
Find me . . .
I’d found Posie where the tower pointed, I’d found Marcia after the show. But
the bleachers . . .
I’d never been to the bleachers. I’d never gone to the gym at North Hampton.
How had I been so blind? I’d missed the first invitation completely.