IRENE IS IN A TERRIBLE MOOD
THE next morning, no one is living happily ever after in the Muñoz household. Cam is filled with anxiety about Blair’s new obsession. And Irene is in a terrible mood, which she attributes to finally quitting smoking two weeks ago. The morning terrible mood, however, has become such a fixture of their lives in the last fourteen days that Cam almost wishes Irene would take her filthy habit back up again.
And now Cam is brimming over with what is not exactly a lie but is definitely a piece of information she should not be withholding from Irene.
But if Cam tells Irene about Mattie—
Don’t even go there, Cam thinks.
There’s nowhere to go, she tells herself. She will talk Blair out of this madness.
Somehow.
“Where the fuck are the coffee filters?” Irene growls, slamming around the kitchen.
“We’re out,” Cam says. “But I made a fresh pot with the last one.”
“Oh,” Irene says. She looks around, as if searching for something else to get mad about.
“I can go to the grocery store on the way home from school if you give me some cash,” Cam offers.
“You hate going to the grocery store.”
“Maybe it’s time I pulled my weight around here,” Cam says.
To her relief, Irene hoots with laughter. “That’ll be the day,” she says, chortling. She pours herself a cup of coffee and puts two slices of bread in the toaster. “Get any exciting mail lately?”
“It’s not the Dark Ages, they don’t mail you,” Cam says. “They update your online portal with your admission status.”
“My humblest apologies. Any online portal updates?” Irene says.
“Not yet,” Cam says. “I’m not worried.”
“I imagine not,” Irene says.
“What are you going to do without me next year, anyway?”
“Rattle around the house like a lost sock,” Irene says contentedly.
“Socks don’t rattle.”
“A fine point. Drape myself around the house like a lost sock.”
“Really?”
“No,” Irene says. She fiddles with her toast plate. “Brad and I are talking about taking a vacation.”
Brad is her mother’s new-ish boyfriend and the impetus behind Irene quitting smoking. He and Irene went to high school together and were inadvertently reconnected when Cam and Blair almost destroyed his life by featuring him on their podcast. He lives out in the county, where he operates a gun range for a living and, as it turns out, forages for mushrooms and other wild foods and researches permaculture in his spare time. For a quiet loner who could comfortably arm a small citizens’ militia, Brad is surprisingly wholesome. Irene has even intimated she might take up jogging.
Cam is agog. “A vacation?”
“You know, that thing where you stop working for a while and lie around in the sun,” Irene says.
“I don’t like to be hot.”
“You can vacation in Antarctica, then, and Brad and I will go to Mexico.”
“You never took me to Mexico.”
“You just said you don’t like to be hot. Anyway, we never had the money. But if I don’t have to feed you anymore, all kinds of possibilities open up. We have family there, actually, although I haven’t been in touch with them in years.”
“Really?”
“You’ve got a whole bunch of great-aunts still running around. And I think some cousins in Mexico City.”
Cam considers this. “What if I don’t get a scholarship?”
“Then I don’t go on vacation.”
“I’ll take out loans.”
“You’ll have to,” Irene says. “But I’ll help as much as I can. You know that.” An expression crosses Irene’s face that Cam can’t read. “I’m sorry, Cam.”
“For what?”
“That we don’t have more money.”
“Why are you sorry? You work all the time. It’s not your fault psychiatric nurses in rural inpatient hospitals are unappreciated and underpaid in the United States.”
“You sound like a union organizer,” Irene says affectionately. “Making your old lady proud.”
“How is work, anyway?”
“Work is work. We have a new patient who’s a real sweetheart.”
Kitten waddles into the kitchen and winds his way around Irene’s ankles, meowing hopefully. Irene pushes him gently away with her foot. He falls to the ground dramatically, staring up at Irene with immense, reproachful eyes.
“The cat is not a football, Mother,” Cam says.
“I barely touched him.”
“You still have to go to jail for a thousand years. Put a couple slices in for me? What’s the story with your new patient?”
Irene drops in two more pieces of toast. “She’s a few years older than you, but she’s had a rough go of it.”
Irene is careful never to share identifying details about her patients, but she will occasionally discuss them with Cam in general terms. She is matter-of-fact about their illnesses, as if depression and mania and delusional behavior are ordinary things that might go awry with a body, like a bad flu or a broken leg. Cam finds Irene’s pragmatism comforting. Her own brain moves so fast she sometimes wonders if she is predisposed to going a bit haywire herself.
Irene butters Cam’s toast for her, passes Cam a plate, joins her at the kitchen table.
“How long does she have to stay for?”
“Depends,” Irene says. “Insurance, for one thing.” Irene has nothing good to say about the private insurance system, thanks to a combination of her lifelong communism and many years of working in health care. “But hopefully we can get her stabilized and back into outpatient in a couple of days. She was doing really well in group therapy, but she was at a party over the weekend and something happened there that triggered her.”
Cam freezes. “Party?”
“Yeah, she ran into some old friends. You know, sometimes when people have a big traumatic event in their past, seeing people from that time can bring it up. Anything can, really, if the trauma was significant enough.” Irene eyes Cam. “But this girl has done a lot of work in recovery. Got herself into ongoing outpatient therapy, found a support group, built a routine, set goals for herself.”
Cam is well aware Irene is telling her this because Irene is trying to convey a message. A special therapeutic message for her, Cam, a person who has experienced what Irene would describe—what a lot of people would describe—as a big traumatic event. Irene is catapulting HIPAA into the sun in order to transmit this missive to her daughter: Bad things happen, they mess people up, those people take steps and find their way out.
Outpatient therapy.
Support groups.
Rallying in the wake of something cataclysmic.
Exactly what Cam should be doing for her own recovery.
And all she can think is What are the odds?
Oreville is a small town. How many troubled girls a few years older than Cam could possibly have experienced triggering events at parties with people from their pasts on the same weekend?
Cam keeps her eyes on her toast. Irene can read her like a book.
“Support group?” Cam says. Too casual. And when Irene takes the bait, her stomach lurches.
Something like guilt.
Something like longing.
A feeling she couldn’t name if she were ten thousand times the writer Blair is.
“The hospital sponsors all kinds of support groups,” Irene says. “It’s helpful for a lot of people, even when individual therapy isn’t successful.”
Cam wants to barf. “The hospital sponsors the groups?”
“Sure,” says Irene. Cam can tell: Irene thinks her message is getting through. “The schedules and locations are all online. You don’t have to register or anything. You can just show up. They’re all free and anonymous.” Irene glances at the clock, digs around in her bag, comes out with a couple of twenties.
Act normal, Cam thinks. “That was a peace offering,” Cam says. “I didn’t mean it about going grocery shopping.”
All kinds of support groups.
The schedules and locations are all online.
When Becca gets out of inpatient, Cam and Blair can find her.
And if Irene ever finds out what Cam is thinking about—telling Blair what Irene has told her, let alone hunting down one of Irene’s patients—
Irene laughs, oblivious. “Too late, now you’re committed. I’ll text you the grocery list.”
“Put coffee filters on it.”
“Is Blair picking you up, or do you want a ride to school?”
Normally, Cam enjoys riding with Irene, who drives like a Formula 1 champion and cranks fun old dad bands like Nirvana. But she is concerned that prolonged exposure to Irene’s uncanny Cam-antennae will reveal her secrets.
And now she really needs to talk to Blair.
“Blair,” Cam says.
“Okeydoke,” Irene says, blowing her an air kiss. “I’ll be home late.”
“Date with Brad?”
“Fourteen-hour shift, Little Miss Nosy.”
“Don’t make me give you a curfew,” Cam says.
Irene rolls her eyes. “Have a good day at school.”
“Always,” Cam says, which Irene knows is not true.
“Chin up,” Irene says. “Not much longer in the trenches.”
Cam salutes, and Irene’s out the door.
Cam slumps in her chair.
Is she really going to do this?
Is she seriously going to tell Blair what Irene has trusted her with?
Irene, who’s trying to help her get better?
Blair, who’s obsessed with a story Cam wants nothing to do with?
“Shit,” Cam says aloud to the cat. Kitten has recovered ably from his own recent traumatic event and is purring next to the refrigerator, eyes crossed in expectant ecstasy.
Kitten is getting older. One day, Cam thinks dispassionately, Kitten will die. Not that that has anything to do with any of this. But it will be sad.
Who knows how much future any of us have? Cam could lose Kitten, her beloved Kitten, at any moment. She could lose Irene. She could lose Blair. Anything could happen to any of them, the light of their being snuffed out as easily as a candle flame, and Cam will be powerless to stop any possible end: illness, accident, a man with a gun.
Cam’s throat constricts and the edges of her vision go dark. Suddenly she is back in that dimly lit basement, the smell of laundry left too long in the washer filling her nostrils, her heart rabbiting in her chest, a sour taste in her mouth. She can’t breathe and she can’t move, she is trapped alone in the dark as Clarissa’s killer moves toward her, gun trained on her chest. Panic floods her veins and drowns her lungs and she can’t move, she can’t move—
Cam cries out in terror. Kitten, startled, leaps to his feet and flees the kitchen with a loud thump. Kitten, Cam thinks. I’m in my house. I’m in the kitchen of my house. I’m not back there. I’m not back there. I’m not back there.
The terror leaches out of her slowly, leaving her muscles so shaky she can barely sit upright in her chair. She folds her arms on the kitchen table and rests her forehead on her forearms and then, to her absolute shame, she starts to cry. A moment later, she feels insistent paws on her thigh. Kitten has returned to investigate the scene. With an awkward, hitching leap, he worms his way onto her bony lap and settles across her thighs, purring like an ancient outboard motor. Cam strokes his hard little skull with one hand and wipes her nose with the back of the other.
“Let’s pretend that didn’t happen,” she says to the cat, mostly to test whether she can talk like a normal person. Her voice is faint and high-pitched.
Great, she thinks. Just great, Muñoz. Stellar work all around.
She takes a deep breath and tries again. “Let’s pretend that didn’t happen,” she repeats. This time, her voice is firmer. “That didn’t happen,” she says. Better still.
Except that it did happen.
And it’s probably going to happen again.
Cam pushes that thought aside. No, she thinks angrily. I don’t want it to happen again. I will stop it from happening again. I am going to think about other things now.
So: Back to the matter at hand.
Irene’s told her something she shouldn’t, and now Cam has a way forward through the mystery of Lola.
Blair wants to know what happened to Lola. Blair is her only friend.
And maybe, deep down, Cam kind of wants to know what happened to Lola too.
Cam makes up her mind.
Come get me? she texts Blair. I have something to tell you.
“What are the odds!” Blair shrieks in the car. “She’s Irene’s patient?”
“I know,” Cam says. She’d washed her face before Blair pulled up outside her apartment, but she checks in Blair’s rearview mirror again. Her eyes are a little red around the edges, but she just looks sleepy. Not like someone who had a full-blown panic attack in the perfect safety of her own kitchen.
“We have to interview her! We have to get into the hospital!” Blair’s so worked up, she almost takes out a mailbox.
“Eyes on the road!” Cam squeaks. “We can’t go to the hospital.”
“Why not?”
“Because Irene works there,” Cam says. “First, they’ll fire her, and then she’ll kill me. And they’re not going to let us walk into the psych ward anyway.”
“But we have to find a way to talk to her,” Blair says.
Cam grimaces.
This is it.
This is the line, and she is crossing it. Again.
“I think I know how,” she says. “Irene says she’ll go back to her support group once she gets out of inpatient. There aren’t that many, and their locations aren’t secret or anything. We can figure out which one is hers and talk to her afterward.”
Blair is radiant with excitement, which almost makes the betrayal worth it.
“Cam, you’re amazing,” Blair says. “Does this mean you’re in? Like, all the way in?”
“I guess,” Cam says, before she can think about it.
“I knew it,” Blair says, triumphant. “Let’s start with Darren, since Becca’s still in the hospital. Mattie doesn’t think he’s been in contact with Lola at all since she came back. Which is totally weird, right?”
“How do you know what Mattie thinks?”
“We text,” Blair says. She catches Cam’s expression out of the corner of her eye. “I can make it a group chat.”
“Mattie likes you more. They feel safer talking to you.”
“True,” Blair says. She’s not joking, which hurts.
“We’ll just ask Darren a few questions,” Cam says.
“Yeah, sure,” Blair says blithely. “If you get a bad feeling, we can totally walk.”
But Cam knows Blair too well to be fooled. Blair’s the one driving this car now, and she’s not going to stop until she gets where she wants to go.
Blair’s all in, whatever comes next.
Which means, like it or not, Cam’s all in now too.
COFFEE WITH DARREN
Blair starts by calling the Olympic National Park Visitor Center. “Darren?” says the ranger who answers the phone. “Sure, you’re in luck. He just came in from the backcountry. Hold on a sec.”
Darren has a nice voice when he comes on the phone, deep and reassuring and friendly. Blair can imagine him talking small children into appreciating the wonders of lichens.
She and Cam had worked out her story in the car on the way to school.
More accurately, she had worked out the story, and Cam had supplied commentary.
“But that’s lying,” Cam had said.
“Not exactly lying.”
“It is exactly lying.”
“He’s not going to talk to us if we tell him the truth.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t talk to him.”
“Lying never bothered you when we were doing the podcast,” Blair said.
“That’s not true,” Cam said, stung. “We didn’t lie.”
“Cam, we lied constantly.”
“Not constantly.”
“Well, we lied. Do you want to help Mattie or not?”
Cam had dropped it. And now, Blair tells Darren her story. She and Cam, Mattie’s school mentors. Mattie has mentioned Darren frequently. Mattie pines for role models.
“Aw, Mats,” he says with real warmth. “How’s she doing?”
“They,” Blair says. “They’re, uh, not so great. That’s why I called you.”
“Not so great?”
“You know about this whole situation with their sister?”
Darren is silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he says cautiously. “I heard about that.”
“Cam and I haven’t been mentoring Mattie that long. We think it would be good for them to talk to someone who’s known them for a long time. Someone who was there when—you know. In the past.”
“That was a bad time for me too,” Darren says, still hesitant.
“Mattie needs you,” Blair says. This, she is aware, is a horribly manipulative thing to say, but she also knows it will be effective. Solving mysteries requires occasional moral compromise, she tells herself, but it doesn’t make her feel like any less of a creep.
“You should talk to an adult,” Darren says.
“You are an adult,” Blair says.
“I haven’t seen Mattie in years.”
“But they haven’t forgotten you. You mean a lot to them,” Blair says ruthlessly. “We’re trying to help them move on. Adjust to having Lola back. Just meet us for coffee after school. Me and Cam. Mattie doesn’t have to be there.”
“I guess I could come into town this afternoon,” Darren says reluctantly.
“Great,” Blair says.
“Just coffee.”
“Just coffee. And then we’ll leave you alone.”
“Wow,” Cam says when Blair hangs up. “You can be kind of evil.”
Cam’s lunch tray sits in front of her, mostly untouched. But that doesn’t mean anything, since lunch today is a light brown something, possibly chicken-adjacent, in a dark brown something, possibly meant to be sauce. Blair wouldn’t eat it either.
“That wasn’t evil,” Blair says, taking a bit of her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Her mom has packed a lunch for her every day since she started kindergarten; Blair’s long since given up trying to get her to stop. Despite the setting, the scene, Blair thinks, is familiar in a way that is comfortable and thrilling. Blair and Cam, solvers of disappearances and now reappearances. It feels good to be doing something again.
Something that is bigger than her own ordinary life.
Something worth writing about.
“‘Mattie needs you’?” Cam is looking at her with a frank, appraising expression. Blair finds she doesn’t like it much.
“It worked,” she says. “He’ll meet us after school.”
“What about track?”
“I’ll skip.”
“You never skip track.”
“This is important, Cam.”
“All right,” Cam says. “We should think about what we want to ask him.”
In person, Darren matches his voice. He’s tall, broad, bearded, a guy who looks like he knows his way around an axe. He’s wearing outdoor-person clothes, high-end but well-worn. He wipes his boots diligently at the entrance to the café, hangs his dripping rain jacket carefully on the back of his chair. His big hands dwarf his coffee mug. They are clean but scarred, his fingers callused. He radiates competence. If it was the end of the world, Blair thinks, she would want to be in this guy’s apocalypse pod.
“I’m still not sure what you want to talk to me about,” Darren says. “If there’s anything I can do for Mattie, I’ll try.”
“It’s sort of about Lola,” Blair says, feeling her way forward.
“Lola,” Darren says. His expression is carefully neutral. “Wow. I haven’t thought about her in—years.”
“How long were you her boyfriend?”
Darren looks mildly alarmed. “Oh, uh,” he says. “Boyfriend is maybe a strong word. You know.”
“I don’t know,” Blair says.
“We hung out for a couple of years,” Darren says, shifting in his chair.
“What was she like?”
“I thought you wanted to talk about Mattie.”
“Just for context,” Blair says. “She’s so important to Mattie. We’re trying to understand their dynamic.”
Darren thinks about this. “I don’t know if Lola was the best role model back then,” he says finally. “But Mats worshipped her. And Lola adored Mattie. It was kind of the three of them against the world. Luke and Lola were so protective of Mattie, Lola especially. But I guess you know all that.”
“Protective?” Blair asks. “Why did Mattie need protecting?”
“Ruth’s not the easiest person,” Darren says. “She wasn’t, anyway. I don’t know what she’s like now.”
Blair thinks of the Botox, Mattie’s pink dress. “I don’t think she’s changed much.”
“Why wasn’t Lola a good role model?” Cam asks.
Darren shifts again. “She, uh…” He looks down at his coffee cup, as if he’s hoping it will answer the question for him.
“Mattie said Lola sometimes had parties,” Blair prompts.
“Yeah,” Darren says. “We were all kind of—young. Young and dumb. I’m sober now,” he adds hastily. “That’s all in the past. Got my five-year chip and everything.” He takes out his key ring and shows them.
“Cool,” Cam says flatly. Blair kicks her ankle under the table, nodding supportively at Darren.
“That’s very impressive,” Blair says.
Five years, she thinks.
That means Darren got sober right after Lola disappeared.
Why? How can she work the conversation around to that night without scaring him off?
“She must have known a lot of other partyer types?” Blair says, tilting the sentence into a question so that it doesn’t sound like an accusation.
“Lola? She didn’t have too many friends, to be honest,” Darren says.
“So she wouldn’t have known…” Blair is trying to think of how to phrase the question.
Did Lola know bad people?
Did Lola do bad things?
Did Lola know the kind of people who would have stolen her away?
“But she had a lot of parties?” Blair tries.
“You know how it is,” he says. “Ruth was gone a lot. Big empty house, no parents around. People kind of showed up. But Lola wasn’t close to most of them.”
“Who was she close to?” Cam asks.
“Me,” Darren says. “Mats. Luke.” He starts to say something else, and then he stops. “That’s it,” he says.
“Becca?” Cam tries.
Darren glances at her. “Becca who?” he says. His confusion is not convincing.
“Becca who was there the night Lola disappeared,” Cam says.
“Oh, Becca,” Darren says. “Right. Her. Yeah. Uh, no, I don’t think they were close. She’s not going to tell you anything that will help Mattie.” He fidgets with his key ring.
“Mattie was really isolated,” he says suddenly. “I felt so bad for them. I don’t know what Ruth was like before, but I think the divorce really screwed her up. Not because she loved him so much, but because she’s so big on appearances. When Lola was Mattie’s age, Ruth put her in beauty pageants, tried to get her in TV commercials. Lola hated all that shit. It messed with her head. She didn’t want Mattie to go through the same thing. Mattie’s never been into, you know.” He clears his throat. “Girl stuff.”
“Girl stuff?” Cam asks sarcastically.
Darren looks embarrassed, gestures vaguely with one broad hand. “I’m not real smart about gender, okay? But it makes sense that they’re not a girl. And Lola was a total goth. Dyed her hair black, big eyeliner, crushed velvet, that whole thing. She was always trying to get me to listen to weird old bands from the nineties.”
“Not anymore,” Cam says.
Darren freezes. “You saw her?”
“Ruth had a welcome-home party,” Blair says. “Mattie invited us.”
Darren swallows. “I see. How did she seem?”
“Fine,” Cam says. “Considering what happened to her.”
“Right,” Darren says. “The kidnapping. I heard about that too.”
“From Mattie?” Cam asks.
“No,” Darren says. “I told you. I haven’t talked to Mattie in years.”
“Then where?” Cam asks.
Darren’s eyes slide toward the door. “Around,” he says. “How you hear stuff.”
“It doesn’t seem like either Ruth or Lola have told anyone outside the family that Lola’s home safe,” Cam says.
“I don’t remember who I heard it from,” Darren says.
“You weren’t at Lola’s party,” Blair says.
“Ruth wasn’t my biggest fan,” Darren says. He’s trying for sardonic, but there’s something else underneath. Blair is pretty sure it’s fear.
“Why not?” Cam asks.
“I told you,” he says. “I was a different person then. Me and Lola—it was like darkness just kind of followed her around. She was already like that when I met her. But I’m sure Ruth knew we partied. It didn’t stop Ruth from going away all the time, but it didn’t make her like me.”
“Do you know who might have kidnapped Lola?” Blair asks.
Darren sits up in his chair, alarmed. “What? Of course not. You think I would’ve kept that to myself?”
“Why haven’t you gotten in touch with her?” Cam presses. “You must be so happy she’s back. You can pick up where you left off.”
Darren is shaking his head. “No way,” he says. “Like I said, we weren’t—she wasn’t anything—I mean, sure, I liked her a lot, okay? But that was kid stuff. A long time ago. I grew up. I have a serious girlfriend. We’re engaged. I got a real job and everything. I should’ve been there for Mats and Luke after Lola disappeared, I know that. But you have to understand, I was a different person then. I’m not going back. Look, the park service has a couple programs for kids Mattie’s age. I can maybe pull a few strings to—”
“Mattie doesn’t think the girl who came back is really Lola,” Cam interrupts.
Darren lifts his head and looks at Cam directly.
Cam meets his stare head-on.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “How did you say you know Mattie again?”
“An after-school pro—” Blair begins, but Cam cuts her off.
“Last year we did a school project about a cold case in Oreville and helped the police solve the murder,” Cam says. “Mattie came to us because of that. They think the girl who came back is someone else, and they want us to find out where the real Lola is.”
“Missing Clarissa?” Darren says. “Jesus Christ. That was you? Are you recording this?”
“That’s illegal,” Cam says.
“You should’ve told me that from the beginning,” Darren says. He stands up, pulls on his raincoat. His hands are shaking. “This is messed up.”
“We’re not recording you,” Blair insists. “We’re not making a podcast, I swear. We’re just trying to help Mattie—”
“You lied to me,” Darren says. “You keep my name out of this, you understand? Whatever the hell you’re doing.”
“Wait!” Blair pleads.
“What do you think happened to her?” Cam yells after him as he stalks away from the table. “Where do you think she went?”
But he doesn’t turn around. The coffee shop door swings closed behind him with a final thwack.
“Thanks, Cam, that went well,” Blair says with a sigh.
“What did you think was going to happen?”
Blair shakes her head. “Did you see his face when you said Mattie thinks the girl who came back isn’t Lola? He knows something, Cam.”
“He knows you lied to him,” Cam says.
“I only sort of lied to him. But he definitely lied to us.”
“Maybe he didn’t lie to us,” Cam says, looking at Blair. “Maybe he left a lot out.”
Blair’s stomach twists. “Let’s talk to Luke. Find out if he’s the one who’s been in contact with Darren. And why.”
“Are you making a podcast?” Cam asks.
“What? No! Of course not! I wouldn’t do that without telling you!”
Cam looks at Blair for a long time. “I can’t help you with this anymore today,” she says finally. “I have to study.”
“Physics,” Blair says.
“Yeah,” Cam says.
“Cam—” Blair stops, unsure of what it is she even wants to say. Cam waits. When Blair doesn’t say anything else, Cam picks up her bag.
“Want me to drop you off?” Blair asks.
“I’ll take the bus.”
And then Cam too is gone.
Blair ignores the feeling in her stomach. Digs out her phone.
Hey, she texts Mattie. Does your brother have a job?
CAM CONDUCTS INDEPENDENT RESEARCH
Once she’s home, Cam realizes she forgot to go to the grocery store. She sticks her head in the refrigerator, knowing ahead of time what she will find there: the end of a stick of butter, a half-full carton of orange juice, a couple of Brad’s hippie IPAs, and a jar of brine in which a single pickle at least as old as Kitten bobs forlornly.
It would not be ethical to spend the grocery money Irene gave her on takeout, but it would be convenient. And her ethics are already on shaky ground these days. She might as well be a well-fed reprobate.
She calls her favorite Thai restaurant, orders shrimp pad thai for herself and a drunken noodle for Irene to eat later.
“Anything else?” the friendly woman who answered the phone asks her.
“Do you have coffee filters?” Cam asks hopefully.
“Sorry?”
“Never mind,” Cam says. “That’s all, thank you.”
Kitten follows her into her room. She belly flops onto her bed, opens her computer. Kitten clambers onto her butt, where he settles in to biscuit-making.
“Ouch,” Cam says companionably as she types Lola’s name into a search engine.
Lola Brosillard does not have a Facebook or a TikTok or a Twitter, but she does have an Instagram, and it is not set to private. Her last update is from five years ago. Three days before she disappeared, she posted a blurry nighttime shot of what looks like trees, with a blurry white smear in one corner that could be someone’s arm.
Then, nothing.
Presumably, her kidnappers did not allow her access to social media, but Cam wonders why she hasn’t posted now that she’s back. Perhaps her trauma has erased all memory of her passwords; perhaps “Hey guys, been a while, I was being driven around the country in a van by lunatics” makes for an awkward status update.
Still, it’s interesting.
Discuss Lola social media with Blair, she notes to herself in her imaginary book.
If she’s going to do this, she should start keeping a real one.
If.
“Who am I kidding,” she says to Kitten.
There’s no if here. If there was an if, she wouldn’t be looking at Lola’s Instagram.
Blair’s right. Cam wants to know where Lola went too.
Cam scrolls idly through Lola’s feed. She liked to photograph forests and mountains. A lot of nighttime pictures, similar to the last one she posted: indistinct figures holding beer cans aloft, lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths, campfires an orange blur against the textured dark.
Occasionally, she’d geotagged campgrounds. Lola liked to go deep in the woods; Cam recognizes places from the heart of Olympic National Park. West and then farther west, toward the ocean, where the trees are vast and old and draped in sheets of low-hanging moss, and the dark places between them hold old secrets and older stories. Or out at the edge of the Pacific itself, stony gray beaches that make you think you’ve reached the end of the known world.
Darren’s a park ranger now. Did he take her out there? Or was Lola the one who wanted wilderness first?
Cam rolls off her bed, dislodging an indignant Kitten, and digs through her bottom desk drawer, flinging aside ancient calculus tests, an obsolete graphing calculator she’d filched from the Oreville lost-and-found as a freshman, ink-sticky ballpoint pen caps, and a Canadian ten-dollar bill.
At the bottom, she finds what she’s looking for: her Clarissa notebook, only half-full.
She looks at it for a long time.
And then she opens it to a blank page.
Talk to Blair social media she writes, and then she returns to her bed and adds the names of the campgrounds Lola tagged, though she’s not sure how much this will help them. Ruby Beach, Rialto Beach, Heart O’ the Hills, Sol Duc, Kalaloch, Mount Angeles.
Mount Angeles! Sophie says in her head. Settler name! Cam smiles, her heart surging with a wave of love.
The few pictures with Lola in them are mostly selfies, taken at odd and often unflattering angles. Lola was so beautiful she didn’t feel the need for vanity, maybe. Or maybe she didn’t care. Luke and Lola, cheeks smashed together, gazing up at the camera. Luke looks stoned and considerably happier than he did at Lola’s welcome-home party. One of Lola and Darren that she’d snapped while they were kissing.
Cam almost looks away, as if she’s spying on something private.
Which, actually, she is.
Past Darren doesn’t smile. His face is set and serious, almost cruel. In one picture he’s wearing a leather jacket, straddling a motorcycle. He looks more like a junior member of a biker gang than a future forest ranger.
Does he look like someone who’d know kidnappers? Cam’s not sure how you tell.
Ask Blair Darren scary??? she writes.
She looks at Darren’s picture, thinking.
Mattie had told them Lola said her kidnappers planned to hold her for ransom, but no one had ever demanded money from the family. But all that means is that Mattie doesn’t know, not that the request had never come. What if the kidnappers had asked for money, and Ruth had never told Mattie or the police, because she’d never paid it?
What if Darren had wanted more than just Lola? What if he’d wanted the Brosillards’ money?
Or—
Cam thinks it through. Ruth and Lola, at constant odds. Maybe Lola didn’t want to live in that house anymore, but didn’t want to give up the easy life either. What if Lola had hated her old life so much she’d arranged the kidnapping herself? Maybe she’d talked Darren into helping her. Planned to use her mother’s ransom to start over somewhere new. But Ruth never paid, and Lola was left dangling.
And then, when she couldn’t make it alone anymore, she’d come back. If she admitted to what she’d done, she’d be in trouble. If she’d had a hand in staging her own kidnapping, that might explain why she’d left Mattie behind and lied to them once she returned. Cam hasn’t known Mattie for long, but she can easily imagine how devastated they would be to learn that freedom mattered more to their sister than her loyalty to them. Maybe Lola was never the devoted protector Mattie remembers.
And if Darren helped her—well, neither was he.
But if he’d helped Lola run away, why didn’t he run with her? Did they plan to meet up somewhere later? Did something go wrong?
Or is Lola’s impossible story actually true?
Just how rich are the Brosillards? Cam wonders. Rich enough to make the risk of kidnapping Lola worth it?
She searches for “Lola Brosillard missing person.” There’s almost nothing. When Mattie said that Ruth didn’t spread the word about her daughter’s disappearance, they weren’t kidding. Cam finds the mention she vaguely remembered, in which Lola is a footnote to a three-year-old article about the anniversary of Clarissa’s disappearance. The only other hit is a profile on a missing-persons website that looks like it’s run out of somebody’s house. There are three photos and a terse summary of her disappearance.
NAME: Lola Marie Brosillard
MISSING SINCE: July 16, 2017
MISSING FROM: Oreville, WA
SEX: F
RACE: White
AGE: 15
HEIGHT AND WEIGHT: 5’6”, 115 lbs
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: White female, long wavy hair dyed black. Natural color is dark brown. Green eyes. No tattoos or other identifying scars, marks, etc.
DETAILS OF DISAPPEARANCE: Brosillard disappeared from own residence in Oreville, WA on the night of July 16, 2017. Fraternal twin brother last person to see her. Possible abduction. Further details are unavailable in Brosillard’s case. Reported missing by mother Ruth Brosillard AM July 17.
INVESTIGATING AGENCY: Hoquiam Police Department
NOTES: Any information submitted on this disappearance will be passed along to Brosillard’s sibling
Mattie, Cam thinks. This is Mattie’s work. Reaching out to strangers, desperate for clues. For anything. Cam’s heart feels creaky. What would she do, in Mattie’s position? What if something happened to Irene? To Sophie?
Cam pushes the thought away and turns her attention back to the website. Two of the pictures are pulled from Lola’s Instagram, but the other one must have been her school photo. She’s staring unsmiling into the camera, her green eyes wide and surrounded by a thick rim of eyeliner. She looks stoned and sad, like her brother.
Beneath the scowl and tough makeup, she’s a dead ringer for the Lola Cam and Blair met on Sunday. Her cheeks are rounder, the lines of her face softer, but her eyes are the same.
What are the odds Mattie’s sister had a doppelgänger? The odds, Cam thinks, are vanishingly small.
If the Lola who left is the Lola who came back, what story is she hiding? And why?
The doorbell rings.
Kitten protests again as she gets up, but thumps off the bed and follows her to the door. He winds around her legs hopefully as she buzzes the deliveryperson into her building and retrieves her noodles. She is careful to tip generously. Irene might be irritated Cam used their grocery money for takeout, but if she finds out Cam stiffed the driver, she’ll be livid.
“Not for cats,” Cam tells Kitten, holding the heavy paper sack aloft. “Cats don’t eat noodles.”
Kitten meows loudly, unconvinced.
Cam puts Irene’s noodles in the fridge and transports her own back to her bed and laptop. Kitten trails after her, sulking.
“I don’t know what else to look for,” Cam says aloud, pushing Kitten’s insistent head away from her takeout. She googles “Lola Brosillard rich.” “Lola Brosillard Darren.” “Lola Brosillard conspiracy.” “Lola Brosillard Sasquatch”—which pulls up, incredibly enough, the Clarissa Sasquatch abduction forum. Missing Clarissa, Cam notes, failed to quench it. If anything, the Sasquatch theories are even more fervid than they were before the podcast. At least someone got something out of the mess she made of last year.
Finally, at a loss, she tries the Brosillards’ address.
And then she sits straight up, dislodging Kitten once again.
With Lola’s home address, she’s able to find out how much Ruth pays in property tax every year. She learns that Ruth was granted a permit to remodel her kitchen in 2018 (not too distracted by grief, apparently), where Ruth’s property line lies, and that Ruth is not permitted to drill a well but luckily is connected to the county water system.
She has multiple photographs of the exterior of the Brosillards’ home, a rough floor plan, and the names of every person who lived there before the Brosillards did.
And she knows that Ruth owns the house outright, that she purchased it in 2013 for 9.6 million dollars in cash, and that its current value is estimated at $15.5 million.
“Holy shit,” Cam breathes.
Mattie had said Ruth got all their dad’s money in the divorce.
But they hadn’t said it was ten-million-dollars-cash-for-a-house kind of money.
Maybe they don’t know.
Maybe Ruth never told them.
Maybe they’ve never looked.
But if Cam can find that out with a five-minute Google search, so could anyone.
Cam grabs her phone, dials a number that’s been saved there unused since last year. And then that pleasant, familiar voice at the other end: “Reloj here.”
“Hi,” says Cam. “It’s Cam.”
Silence.
“Cameron? Cameron Muñoz?” Cam tries. Has he really forgotten her? How insulting.
“There’s only one,” Officer Reloj says cautiously. “What can I do for you, Cameron?”
He’s Detective Reloj now, Cam remembers. And maybe he’ll eventually be Sheriff Reloj. Clarissa made him a big star.
“Congratulations on your promotion,” Cam says. “Do you have your own office now?”
“Thank you,” Detective Reloj says. “I do.”
“Nice view?”
“Of the parking lot.”
“That’s exciting,” Cam says. “Listen, I have some questions about a missing person.”
“Absolutely not,” Detective Reloj says immediately. “No, no, and no, Cameron.”
“We’re not making a podcast,” Cam says truthfully. “It’s for school.”
“That’s what you said the last time.”
“That was for school.”
“You’re not helping yourself here, Cam. I’m going to hang up now.”
“No!” Cam protests. “It’s not a real missing person. She came back. So there’s nothing to solve. I promise.”
Another, longer silence.
Technically, Detective Reloj owes his career boost to Cam and Blair. Cam knows it is not tactful to point this out unless there is an emergency. But she knows Detective Reloj knows he owes them too.
“Which case?” Detective Reloj says warily.
“It happened here in Oreville five years ago. Lola Brosillard was a teenager who disappeared from her house in the middle of the night.”
“Sure, I remember that one. That was my first year on the job, but I didn’t have anything to do with the case. Sorry, Cam. Can’t help you.”
You’re not getting out of this that easy, Cam thinks.
“The police dismissed Lola’s disappearance because the mom didn’t make a fuss and because Lola had a history of running away,” Cam says.
“I told you, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Sounds like the last time the police ignored a girl’s disappearance because she had a history,” Cam says.
This is a low blow. Blair would be proud.
“Now come on,” Detective Reloj snaps. “The Brosillard case was nothing like Clarissa’s.”
“Why not?”
“Clarissa liked to break into golf courses at night, not shooting up her—” Detective Reloj stops himself short, but it’s too late. Cam pounces.
“Lola was doing heroin? Did the police think that had something to do with her disappearance? Why wouldn’t they pursue the case?”
Detective Reloj sighs mightily. “If you were to search the public record, you’d find that the boyfriend was arrested for possession. More than once.”
“How would it be public record? They were minors.”
Another, eloquent silence.
“Darren wasn’t a minor? He was over twenty-one and dating a fifteen-year-old? Gross.”
“You’re the abolitionist,” Detective Reloj says mildly.
“I didn’t say you should put him in jail for being gross,” Cam says. “I just said he was gross.” Darren hadn’t seemed gross in the coffee shop; before he’d realized who they were, he’d seemed like the kind of guy you’d want to go hiking with, if you were a person who liked to go hiking. Still. He’d been out of high school, dating a sophomore girl at least six years younger than he was?
No wonder the mom hated him, Cam thinks.
Ruth hadn’t struck Cam as being the most open and supportive of parents, but even Irene would most likely have something to say about Cam bringing around a twenty-one-year-old hard drug user at the tender age of fifteen.
Although, knowing Irene, she would’ve followed Darren around talking loudly about harm reduction and the importance of informed consent and equitable power dynamics until he fled the country to escape her monologue.
“Well, if that’s all,” Detective Reloj says.
“No! I’m not done. Don’t hang up. Please. Did Lola get arrested too?” Cam asks.
Silence.
“Lola was a minor,” Cam says. “So you can’t tell me. But the police already knew who she was, which is why they didn’t believe she was kidnapped. So she must’ve been.”
Silence.
“The family is really wealthy,” Cam says. “And Lola was—is—beautiful. And the police still didn’t do anything when Lola disappeared. So they really didn’t believe she was kidnapped. Or care.”
Silence.
“Even if Lola got arrested herself, Ruth could’ve bailed her out easily,” Cam continues, thinking out loud. “And she’s the type who would’ve. For appearances. If she thought her daughter had been kidnapped, she would’ve made the police do something about it.”
Silence.
“Did she even fill out a missing persons report?”
“She reported the break-in,” Detective Reloj says.
He’s only confirming what Mattie’s already told them. Cam still finds it hard to believe.
“Did she really not tell the police her daughter was missing?”
“She mentioned it, once they arrived. But she didn’t seem worried. The police talked to Lola’s friends, but there was nothing to go on.”
“She was fifteen. She disappeared,” Cam says in disbelief. “She was gone. In the middle of the night.”
Detective Reloj clears his throat. “This wasn’t another Clarissa, Cam. That girl ran away.”
“Then who broke into the house?”
“As a general rule, inviting recreational drug users into a domicile is not beneficial to home security,” Detective Reloj says primly.
“The police judged a teenage girl and ignored her disappearance because a few times she made bad decisions and maybe her mother covered it up,” Cam says. “Understood. But then she came back a couple of weeks ago. And she said she was kidnapped.”
“I heard about that.”
“The police in Oregon aren’t trying to find the people who took her?”
“Kidnapping a minor and transporting them across state lines is a federal crime,” Officer Reloj says. “The local police would pass the case on to the feds.”
“Did they?”
Silence.
“Blink once for yes, twice for no,” Cam says.
“Cam, what does this have to do with school?”
“They didn’t believe her,” Cam says. “You think she ran away, and the police in Oregon didn’t believe the kidnapping story.”
“Are you recording this conversation?” Detective Reloj asks in sudden alarm.
“That’s illegal,” Cam says.
“Are you?”
“I wouldn’t do that to you, Detective Reloj.”
“Sure you would.”
“I’m turning over a new leaf. Who was the detective who worked the original case? That’s not a secret, is it?”
This silence lasts longer than all the other silences put together. Cam has to check her phone to be sure Detective Reloj hasn’t hung up on her.
“Tom Bradshaw,” Detective Reloj says finally. “He retired two years ago.”
“Do you have his phone number?”
“Cameron.”
“Okay, okay,” Cam says.
“How’s Annie Oakley doing these days?”
“Who?”
“Your sharpshooter friend. Blair.”
“She’s good,” Cam says. “Everybody’s good.”
“Please don’t get yourself in trouble again,” Detective Reloj says.
“I swore off trouble,” Cam says.
“But if you do get into trouble, you call me.”
“I’m not going to get in trouble.”
“Promise me, Cameron. No more charging into armed killers’ houses.”
“I didn’t know you cared, Detective Reloj.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” Cam says.
“Good girl,” Detective Reloj says.