The Night My Sister Went Missing (8 page)

I guess it would be accurate to say that Stacy looked like she'd been slapped in the face five times and still refused to cry. Her throat got in some sort of swallowing spasm, and I just waited, frozen, because she looked so strange.

But when she snapped out of it, her voice was surprisingly even. "Okay, I checked every boat on every dock here before Mark-the-Shark showed up. I looked inside the cabins even if they were locked. The only other boats Casey would probably be on are docked at the Moorings. Alisa's down there. Or was. It's closer to the beach than this, so maybe she went home, but you can catch her on her cell phone."

She looked me square in the eye and must not have liked what she saw. She stammered only slightly. "Y-you know the number."

"
Stacy's had it bad for Kurt Carmody for a while...
" Cecilly's words banged through my head, if for no better reason than they were easier to think about than whether Stacy was pretending to be an innocent searcher. If Stacy felt anything for me right now, even sorrow, you just would never know. I might as well be a boss at a job she doesn't like or hate. But she refused to break this stare-off, and it left me slightly less apt to think she was guilty of much, though her attitude seemed challenging and, under the circumstances, pretty tasteless.

"Stacy, why in the hell did you buy a gun?" I asked, surprised at the softness of my tone.

She looked out toward the water, where Stern and Barnes were sitting on pilings and talking in low voices. She reached into the huge pocket of the sweatshirt and fumbled around. I stood rooted, thinking she had the missing gun in there. But after a moment she brought out a cigarette and a lighter. I'd have sworn there was nothing else in the pocket.

As she flicked her lighter, my hand went to her wrist. "Don't," I said.

As I'm not usually in people's business, that probably tipped her off that I knew a couple things. She paused only for a second, then lit the thing anyway. She inhaled deeply and sent a slow exhale over the top of my head. I tore my eyes from her challenging ones, thinking,
Great. Hurt a baby just to be strong on me. What the hell is wrong with you?

"Let's go, buddy," Drew murmured.

But she hadn't answered my question yet. I was entitled.

"Unless you're going to ask if I fired a gun at your sister, I don't think you have a right to ask me anything." She flicked ashes.

"Did you fire a gun at my sister?"

She took another long drag of the cigarette. "No."

I wanted to strangle her as she exhaled over my head again, but the swallowing spazzes came back over her throat and the strange look returned to her face.

"And where were you when the gun went off?" I kept it up anyway.

She kind of flinched, then laughed sadly at the ground. I could never understand tough girls like this. Stacy could buy a gun, then pull a total hurt-and-astonished routine when I imply she might have fired it. That's what her look absolutely was—blatant hurt—but before I could rub the goddamned situation in her face, she turned toward the street and dropped the cigarette in the gutter without bothering to stomp on it with her Reefs.

"Drama queen," Drew mumbled at her back. Then he said utterly loudly, "And where will you be if the cops want to ask you some stuff?"

"At home," she hollered straight up, without turning or breaking stride.

"You better be," he whispered, and it was my turn to haul him along, back to the police station, before they realized I had left and decided
I
somehow looked suspicious.

The commotion inside the police station had got well under way, as kids overflowed from Captain Lutz's office out into the front corridor. Obviously the cops had been rounding them up. I could see one other cop in Lutz's office now, a young cop they called Little Jack, even though "Big" Jack had been retired since I was nine. My parents lugged Casey and me to Big Jack's retirement dinner, where it became known to me that Sergeant Jack Cantrell had personally piggybacked seventy-some people from their flooded houses to higher ground in the March storm of 1963. Some cops' names shouldn't be used over again.

My eyes scanned hopefully for Casey. I didn't see her. But my eyes locked with True's, and if Casey had been found she would have rushed me. She was just standing off
to the side with Cecilly. True was wearing a dark sweatshirt, her arms crossed, and she didn't exactly look happy.

I headed for them, passing two of Casey's friends who were sniffing up scared tears. I just pretended I didn't see the girls. I didn't need anyone crying in my face yet, and True and Cecilly looked only a little tired and irritated.

"You talk to Lutz?" I asked.

True shook her head. "I started to. About a minute into it two officers brought in the sweatshirt. They took some pictures, and now it's on its way to some lab. I saw it, though. There wasn't any blood on it. Just mud and seaweed."

I glanced at Cecilly, who looked ready to burst, and she let fly with what I already heard her tell Lutz. "I saw blood, Kurt. I still think it was blood and ... you're entitled to know what really happened."

I wasn't surprised by Cecilly's stubbornness. Somehow everything she said was a "fact" to her.

Drew changed the subject. "We just checked the yacht club. We saw Stern and Barnes down there looking. Saw Stacy, too."

"Yeah, what was she doing?" Cecilly asked. "Pretending to be hunting?"

I said nothing.

Cecilly put her hand on my arm and looked genuinely concerned. "Not that I think Casey ... isn't going to be found. But we know a shot got fired, and I think I know who fired it."

I wasn't supposed to know the load of stuff she'd told Lutz, so I kept up the quiet routine.

"Up on the pier I had seen Stacy talking to Alisa, so I assumed she was with Alisa when we heard the shot. But I just overheard Alisa say to Little Jack that Stacy had walked away from her, and she didn't know where she had gone. I never saw Stacy until after the gun went off. Suddenly she was beside me, screaming Casey's name along with everyone else."

Drew groaned, so I didn't have to. I could see Alisa Cox sitting beside Lutz's desk. Little Jack was sitting in Lutz's chair, watching Alisa fill out the form each of us had to fill out before giving a statement.

"She just got here," Cecilly said. "She was looking for Casey down at the Moorings with Casey's friends. One of the day-shift officers also showed up back there, and he had a flashlight. They looked in every boat. She's not there"

"So Alisa's going to talk to Captain Lutz now?" I asked.

"She's in line," True muttered. "I'm still next"

"Casey's not at our house, she's not at the yacht club, and she's not at the Moorings," I spat out, feeling more and more ready to look at the whole truth. It suddenly seemed like a more sane deal than so much confusion. I made myself acknowledge that my sister could be a mile and a half out, treading water ... or something even worse. I looked at my watch. 1:25. At least my parents were in the air and wouldn't be calling for a few more hours.

"True!" Lutz's voice echoed from the corridor, and I
could barely see his eyes raise over the crowd of kids. True moved toward him, and they disappeared down the little corridor where Drew had found me, to go into the questioning room.

"So really ... what did Stacy have to say for herself?" Cecilly asked.

I shrugged. "Said she didn't do it"

"Did she say what inspired her to buy a gun?"

"No."

"What is up with her and the weird, goddamned secrets?" Cecilly said to nobody in particular. She tapped one foot on the floor, glaring over my shoulder. "There's who you ought to talk to." She jerked her head, and I turned to see Alisa. "She knows a lot more than she's saying."

"About what?" I asked.

"About
everything.
The way the two of them always have their heads together, it's obnoxious. I used to think it was just a random party move. You know: Act like you've got some serious, secret business, because it makes you look important. But they do it so much, I really think Stacy confides in her. Actually tells her stuff. Because tonight Alisa's been saying Stacy couldn't have done it. She wouldn't say why not, but she's the only one saying that. So she either knows something, or
thinks
she knows something"

Alisa was standing now, nodding at Little Jack as she handed the report form back to him. She turned and locked eyes with me over the tops of a couple heads. She's not tall, but I am. Something like a polite, distracted smile formed
on her face, though she looked away again fast and went to sit in a chair just outside Lutz's office to wait her turn.

"Gimme a stab at her," Cecilly said, and patted my arm before heading over there. I didn't want to follow her with Drew and make Alisa feel so put on the spot that she clammed up. But I didn't want to sit back here, either, and listen to girls sniff.

Drew followed me without even asking where we were going.

We lucked out. It seemed Lutz had totally forgotten about this little corner of his new wing. With most of the officers still on the beach, we were able to edge up to the window.

Lutz was watching True with his hands crossed over his chest. This time he looked upset. True was red and nervously picking at her fingers.

"How is it," he asked, "that the head of our church's youth group can get herself into situations like this?"

She only sighed and muttered, "I'm sorry."

"Oh, really. Why can't you ... inspire people
not
to go on that pier instead of ending up there yourself? Isn't that what leaders do?"

She grabbed her long ponytail and gripped it in dread. "Only ... I'm not really a leader. I do the youth group for my dad. He wants me to. And, you know ... my big sister Melanie turned out to be such a PK. I just can't do that to him. He's not perfect, but he doesn't deserve that."

PK
stands for Preacher's Kid, and PKs are often known
for being totally badly behaved, as Melanie proved over the years. She's twenty-one now and finally trying to straighten out, but when she was True's age, she'd had a string of run-ins with authorities for shoplifting, drunk driving, possession of marijuana—you name it. Now she has a baby boy that True brings to the beach sometimes to give Melanie a break.

"But it puts big-time pressure on me, because I'm just not a leader. I just ... don't know how to say no to my dad."

"Sounds like he's not the only one you can't stand up to," Lutz said, though his tone was not harsh. She just raised and lowered her eyebrows, staring at her thumb while she picked at it. He finally noted, "You have loud, unruly friends"

True brought her wrists up to her eyes and rubbed. When she flopped them down, her eyes were glassy, starting to spill. "Yeah, and I'm sick of it. I've been sick of it for months. I'm basically here because Cecilly wanted to come, but I think she saw a lot more than I did. I just want to tell what I know, and once I leave here I'm dropping all these kids. Every one of them. I wanna be ... I wanna be good, Captain Lutz. I just don't know how to do it with them as my friends."

She broke off for a few good sniffs, and I found myself glancing sideways at Drew. He looked as uncomfortable as I felt. I had too many worries on my plate, but the concept barreled through them and landed at the front of my brain: True was talking about
me.
She was clumping
me
in with Stacy, Alisa, Stern, Barnes...

And so was Lutz.
Am I loud and unruly?
I didn't feel like that.

I started to wonder about something else: how people can be so close to one another that you have a nickname for your crowd, and how you can know so little about them. I stood watching True, feeling guilty that I really had no idea what she would say to Lutz—or how she would say it—or how she would feel about it.

"The Mystic Marvels!" She finally forced herself to laugh while sniffling. "You know what I've been wondering while I was sitting out there? I've been wondering if the kids who live down at the Ocean View think they're
el-perfecto,
too. I don't know if anybody thinks of themselves as bad. We all have excuses. And we all like each other. How can someone be bad if you like them?
Huh?
"

Lutz didn't answer her. But she didn't look like she was waiting for an answer. "How can people be
bad
when they're
nice?
We're nice people! At least ... I feel like we're okay. I really have to, um, step outside myself to say this. I have to step outside of me and pretend I'm reading about a bunch of kids in a magazine or something, kids who sneak up on a pier and get all looped, and someone brings a gun, and everyone thinks it's funny until some ... pretty girl gets shot and goes over the side. If you switched the dilapidated old pier for an abandoned old building, do you know what? If I read that I would think, 'Wow, they're probably on the skanky side.' Seriously. I would think,
Maybe they're
somewhat cool, but they're also skanks, and they just can't smell themselves anymore.
The Mystic Marvels—ha. We're like low tide. You can't smell the low tide if you've been breathing the island air long enough."

True scratched her forehead nervously, then raised her head, like she was looking right at us. "I think ... I hate my friends."

I backed away instinctively, but Drew didn't, though he smiled uncomfortably as I turned my back on them. "My dad and I played around with this room right after it was finished," he said softly. "She can't see you. She's seeing a reflection of herself. But it sure is weird, isn't it? Hearing what people will say when they don't know their friends are listening?"

"Why didn't she ever tell us she felt stressed like this?" I managed to whisper. "She trusts a cop more than us."

"Lutz is magic," he murmured back. "That's why he's here, and everyone else is out searching. He'll take his measly time, with her and everybody else, and he'll end up with more goop than a tube of Crest."

I tried to fight a feeling of betrayal, what with True saying to Lutz things she'd never said to us. It seemed hypocritical to feel betrayed, being that I hadn't said anything to her about the Naval Academy. I hadn't trusted her to understand. She trusted a cop; I trusted a blog board. And I suddenly wondered if Billy Nast trusted his friends. And I wondered what your relationships are based on if trust
doesn't come into it. I felt empty—empty enough to pull back from fretting about friendship and remind myself of the most important problem.