BLAIR’S BOOK PROPOSAL: MEETING NOTES ON A CLANDESTINE CLIENT CONSULTATION
Dear Meredith Payne-Whiteley,
Cam’s started a notebook again. It’s the same notebook she used when we were looking for Clarissa. Is that too heavy-handed a through line from Clarissa’s story to Lola’s? What happens when something isn’t heavy-handed, it’s just real life? Irene’s always yelling at the news on the rare occasions she watches it when I’m over at Cam’s. “The writers for this season should be fired!” she says. And then she starts talking about the death of irony.
Anyway.
Cam told me about her call with Detective Reloj. And then she showed me the list of questions she started in her notebook of missing girls.
The big one:
Is Darren scary?
He didn’t scare us in the coffee shop. But when Cam told me how much Ruth’s house cost, I asked the same question.
Mattie doesn’t remember him that way. Mattie remembers him as someone who brought them lollipops.
Mattie doesn’t know that he was also the person bringing their sister drugs.
“You’re going to tell them, right?” Cam asked. We were in the car on the way to school this morning.
“That Darren might’ve had a motive to hurt Lola?” I asked.
“That Darren was giving her heroin, Blair,” Cam said.
I love Cam. If that wasn’t clear. But she sees the world her own way. It’s kind of like black and white, but only Cam has the color chart. So only Cam knows which thing is the right thing to do, and which one isn’t.
“I can’t tell Mattie their beloved sister was shooting up!” I said.
“You have to,” Cam said.
That’s the other thing about Cam. She’s right a lot of the time.
Maybe even most of the time.
But doing the right thing is usually the same thing as doing the hard thing. And, as I’m learning, I’m not always great at either one.
“I will,” I said. “Soon.”
“All right,” Cam said, flipping through her notebook.
If Cam says she’s going to do something, she does it. It doesn’t ever occur to her that other people might not mean what they say, which is kind of a relief.
“Ask Mattie if Lola had—has—a trust fund.” She closed her notebook. “That’s the last thing on my list for now. I think we should think about whether the kidnapping might’ve been real, but fake,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe Lola set it up with Darren. Or maybe it was all Darren’s idea. Mattie said there was no ransom request, but there might’ve been one they didn’t know about. For all they know, Ruth did pay somebody off back when Lola disappeared. Maybe Ruth knew Lola or Darren was behind it, and that’s why she didn’t want the cops involved. Too messy. Or too embarrassing.”
“Or this girl was behind it,” I said.
“You mean, this girl kidnapped the real Lola five years ago for money, and then came back and is pretending to be her for more?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“It’s possible,” Cam agreed. “Or…”
“Or what?”
“Mattie said Ruth took Lola to a psychiatrist, right?”
“Who diagnosed her with trauma-induced amnesia,” I said, remembering.
“Right,” Cam said. “Maybe she does have amnesia. Maybe whatever happened to her was so bad that … You know.”
“Ugh,” I said.
I watch movies; I read books. I don’t need to imagine the kinds of things that happen to girls who go missing. I know the girls who vanish on the page—white, pretty, from good homes, girls like Clarissa with perfect teeth and impeccable résumés—are the least likely girls to be disappeared in real life. I know that in real life, serial killers target women who are already so vulnerable few people will think to look for them when they vanish for good.
That doesn’t mean someone very bad couldn’t have happened to Lola. Someone who did something so terrible her own brain rewrote the story of her missing years.
I could tell from Cam’s face she was thinking the same thing.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you think Mattie—”
“No,” Cam said.
“Maybe that’s part of why they’re so insistent this girl isn’t their sister,” I said. “Because they can’t bear to think what might’ve—”
“Yeah,” Cam said.
“Ugh,” I said.
“You know that corny old show Irene loves about the FBI agents who are trying to prove aliens are real?” Cam said thoughtfully.
“Sure,” I said. Irene is fanatical about that kind of thing. I’ve probably seen parts of at least a million movies about aliens and asteroids and spaceships accidentally traveling to alternate horror dimensions in all the years I’ve been spending the night at Cam’s. Cam never makes it through the whole movie without yelling about which parts of the science don’t make any sense. “That’s not how gravity works! Asteroids don’t spin like that! There’s no sound in space!” That kind of thing.
“There’s an episode about this guy who’s an air force pilot and the military makes him fly an alien spacecraft they got hold of somehow,” Cam said. “But then he freaks out, so they wipe all the spacecraft-flying memories from his brain. When they send him back home, his wife thinks he’s a different person. She doesn’t have anything to prove it, she just knows.”
“Cam,” I said. “Do you think Lola had her memories wiped after she piloted an alien spacecraft?”
Last year Cam would’ve gotten all pedantic on me and spent ten minutes explaining the mechanics of alien spacecraft flight. This year, she just laughed. “No, of course not. I don’t even know why I thought of that. I guess because the whole thing is so far-fetched it seems like bad science fiction. And because it’s not very nice to think about what could’ve really wiped Lola’s brain, if that’s what happened.”
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”
“But,” she said. “Last year, I would’ve said it’s impossible to know something is true without being able to prove it. This year…” She shrugged.
“You think Mattie’s right? That Lola is some kind of—I don’t know—evil twin?”
“I mean—it’s not possible. Right? Even the pilot’s wife was wrong. It was him. But he was different. She knew he was different. I know, I know—” She held up a hand to stop me from interrupting. “It’s a dumb TV episode. I’m just saying, maybe Mattie does know something. Maybe they know something without even knowing that they know it.”
“Or maybe they didn’t know their sister as well as they thought,” I said.
“They’re not going to want to hear that,” Cam said.
“No,” I said. “They’re not.”
Cam’s face was turned away from me. I knew she was thinking about Clarissa.
If one missing girl turned our lives upside down, what would a second one do?
I don’t know yet, Meredith. Maybe you have some ideas.
I waited for Mattie outside their third-period class. “Come eat lunch with me in my car,” I said. “I have a few things to tell you.”
I didn’t tell them about the drugs.
I didn’t tell them about Detective Reloj.
I did tell them about my date with their brother.
Which I sort of hadn’t mentioned to Cam.
“Undercover,” they said. “Cool.”
“It’s not weird?”
“It’s perfect,” they said. “See if you can get into her room.” They paused. “This is for the investigation, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” they said. Another pause. “Girls think my brother is hot.”
“He’s nice,” I said, hoping I wasn’t blushing. “But that’s not important. I want to look around. Ask a few questions.”
“I can get her out of the house,” Mattie said.
“How?” I asked.
“She’s been after me since she got here to spend more time with her. I’ll ask her to take me shopping for gender-appropriate clothing.” Mattie made scare quotes with their fingers around “gender-appropriate.” “Since Ruth won’t buy me anything I like. She’ll lose her mind.”
“Is that safe?”
“What’s she going to do, cut my throat in Swain’s?” Mattie took a bite of their sandwich. “She keeps trying to butter me up,” they said through a mouthful of cheese and bread. “Follows me around the house if I’m not in my room. Trying to talk to me.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Anything,” Mattie said. “How my day was.” They snort. “Like she cares. But she’s not trying that with my brother. Or with Ruth. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe she likes you,” I said without thinking.
Mattie turned in the passenger seat to stare at me, their eyes flat and hard.
“She doesn’t know a thing about me,” they said.
I thought it best to change the subject fast, and did. “Did—does—Lola have a trust fund?” I asked.
Mattie thought about this for a minute. “I don’t know,” they said. “I don’t have one. I don’t think. My brother might. He’s the only one Ruth likes. Him, and the new Lola.”
“Does she have a trust fund?” I asked.
Mattie snorted again. “She has one of Ruth’s credit cards,” they said. “The next best thing. You think this girl’s after money?”
“Don’t you? It would make sense,” I said.
Mattie shook their head and took another bite of sandwich. “That’s the problem,” they said. “None of this makes sense.”
It doesn’t make sense, if Lola was acting alone.
Or if a fake Lola came along out of nowhere to replace her.
What does make sense? If Lola and Darren cooked up some kind of wild plan. Fake a kidnapping, demand ransom. Lola would have a way to escape her crappy home, and enough money to start over somewhere else. It’s hard to imagine even the most resourceful fifteen-year-old could’ve pulled something like that off on her own, but Darren was an adult. He could’ve helped her. Hidden her for a while. If Ruth never paid up, maybe he helped her out until she was old enough to get a job of her own. The police weren’t looking for her. Her own mother wasn’t looking for her. She could’ve stayed under the radar for five years, as long as she cut off contact with her family.
But what if something went wrong? What if Darren backed out? Maybe Darren lost his nerve, or Lola did. Maybe life without the cushion of Ruth’s money got too tough.
So Lola came back. Ready to turn over a new leaf.
There’s one big problem, Meredith, and I’m sure you can see it as well as I do.
If that’s what happened, if their sister just walked away from them without looking back? It’s going to tear Mattie apart.
Sincerely,
Blair Johnson