2.

THE PART AFTER

 

As I walked home I dialed Paris’s number.

No answer.

I dialed again.

No answer.

Come on Paris, come on Paris. Answer your phone.

But nothing.

It was eleven thirty. I paced up and down in the kitchen until twelve thirty, and then I nearly ran to the theater where Toy Story was showing. There were a few people waiting outside—a handful of hipsters, some parents with young kids. The theater was old, art deco, like the motels. There were old posters pasted on the walls—Back to the Future; American Gigolo. The facade was dirty, the posters peeling. It was fading, rotting, in need of investment—but with beautiful architectural lines underneath. A microcosm of the town.

I stood there for twenty minutes, hoping. The hipsters and the kids went in. A couple of old people I figured were just looking for an air-conditioned place to spend the hottest part of the day. The sun was high in the sky and sweat was trickling down the back of my neck, pooling in the small of my back.

I looked at my watch: 1:10.

No Paris.

In my mind’s eye, terrible scenarios played out. A john slitting her throat, letting her bleed out. Then dumping her body at sea. Someone cutting her up in a shed. Submerging her in an acid bath. I couldn’t see the man’s face in my imaginings. But it was always a man.

I felt like the sky was gone from above me. I felt like everything beautiful in the world had been stabbed to death and thrown in the ocean, weighed down with concrete blocks or whatever it might be.

At one thirty I left the theater and walked to Paris’s condo. It wasn’t that close; it took me a while. And the whole time I was seeing these awful images. Seeing her screaming for help as a knife entered her stomach. That kind of thing.

“Just what she deserves,” said the voice. “******* whore.”

“Oh shut up,” I said.

Amazingly, the voice did shut up.

I turned the corner onto Paris’s street and what I saw there made my heart clench like an oyster closing. A cop car, pulled up at an angle to the curb, like it had been parked quickly, carelessly. I started running, then. I entered the building and took the stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator.

I got to the front door out of breath. Julie opened it before I even knocked; she must have heard my footsteps in the hall. She was wearing a pink sweater and a short skirt, polka-dotted, a headband in her hair—like she was going to a dance in 1959. But she had been crying; her eyes were red rimmed.

“Cass,” she said, and her voice was a hand desperately reaching for the side of a boat, to pull itself out of dark sucking water.

“Julie, what—”

But she launched herself forward and put her arms around me. I hugged her tight. “Julie, is she … is she …”

“We don’t know.”

She pulled back, straightened her hair. I looked past her and saw the young agent from after I found the foot.

“Horowitz,” I said.

“Cassandra. You knew Ms. French?”

My mind was blank for a second. “Oh. Paris. Yes. I knew her.”

Wait.

“You said knew.”

Horowitz looked down. “Slip of the tongue. Agent’s habit. At the moment she’s just missing.”

“What happened?” I asked.

It was Julie who answered. “She had a … a bachelor party last night. Or maybe it was a birthday party, I can’t remember. I drove her. I always drive her, if she goes out to an … engagement. For safety, you know?” She started crying; wiped her eyes brusquely with the sleeve of her sweater. “When she started … I didn’t want her to get into it. But she was Paris, you know? She always got her way. In the end, I said she could only do it if I drove her to every … appointment. I said it was the minimum safety requirement. But I … I …”

She broke down in tears.

“Go on,” said Agent Horowitz gently, after a pause. “You drove her?”

“Yeah. It was a house up by the shore. On the north side of town, in Bayview, before you get to the Cape—an okay area, not a great one. A row of clapboards. There’s an old rotten pier behind? Just a small one. I parked and she went in. Then … then I think I must have fallen asleep. But not for long. I woke up because I heard an engine—a car turned in front of me, onto the road, swept me with its headlights. Then a few minutes after that Paris called me. She was … she sounded …”

I took her hand and squeezed. “Go on.”

“She sounded terrified, Cass. Scared for her life, you know? But it was hard to hear what she was saying—the line was really bad. Like, a kind of shhhhhh sound like the ocean, you know? She screamed for help, told me to come quick. I said I was calling the police. And then that was the weird part.”

“Weird part?”

But Julie had her eyes closed and was choking up. She shook her head and walked quickly to the kitchen, to get some tissues, I guessed.

I looked over at Horowitz.

“Evidently Ms. French told her roommate not to call the police. Was very insistent about it. She—”

“She said it over and over,” said Julie, appearing at the kitchen door. “ ‘No, Julie! Not the cops! Don’t call them!’ And then the line suddenly went quiet. Then there was this heavy metal sound and then a thunk and then the line went dead.” Her impression of Paris was eerie; it was like Paris was in the room. But of course she wasn’t.

I shivered.

“Why do you think she said not to call the police?” said Agent Horowitz.

“I don’t know! Because … because of what she was doing?”

Agent Horowitz spread his hands. “Possible,” he said. “But stripping? I mean, it’s not exactly illegal.” His face looked like it had acquired a couple of new lines since I’d first met him. Around his eyes, his mouth. Stress?

“No, but she didn’t want her dad to find out,” said Julie.

I wondered if that was true. Her Instagram was pretty public. But anyway it didn’t seem logical to me.

“What,” I said, “she’s afraid for her life and at the same time she’s worried her dad’s going to find out she’s stripping?” I said. “Really?”

“I admit it seems implausible,” said Horowitz.

“So then why would she say not to call the cops?”

“I have no idea. That is what we are going to have to try to establish.”

“But you think she’s gone,” I said. “You think it’s the Houdini Killer. Of course you do—you’re FBI or whatever you are.”

Julie was looking from me to him, from him to me, like a metronome. “You’re not police?”

“Not precisely,” said Horowitz.

“Oh Jesus,” said Julie. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She’s dead, and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”

A weird echo in my mind. The voice: I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. I put a hand out to steady myself, caught hold of the sideboard in the hall.

“Cassandra?” said Horowitz. “You okay?”

“No one is okay!” said Julie. “I went into the house,” she continued; a total non sequitur, her mind jumping all over the place, to stop landing on the image of a dead Paris, I guessed. “The door was open. I ran in. The place was empty. Repossessed or something, you know? Bare walls. People had written things on the surfaces. ‘**** the bankers.’ ‘Foreclose my ass.’ Stuff like that. It stank of piss and there were empty bottles everywhere, condom wrappers. But no Paris. No Paris! And I watched her go in there, like half an hour before.”

Horowitz had taken out a notebook from his pocket. “Did you hear anything? Car engines, anything like that?”

“I don’t know!”

“Did the place have a garage? A lot of those properties, they have a garage that can be accessed from the kitchen. At the side of the house.”

Julie thought for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Is it possible someone had a car in there? That they left when you came in the door?”

Silence.

Then:

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, I was shouting. Calling for Paris, you know? I wasn’t really listening. I was looking. For her. Oh *****. Oh Jesus. You think I missed something because of that? You think I—”

“I think you were looking for your friend, to try to help her,” said Horowitz softly.

Julie sat down abruptly on one of the living room chairs. Her movements, her speech, were abrupt—like someone had cut up footage of her, taken out the slow transitions, so that she jumped around the room.

“So after that, that was when you called the police?” said Horowitz.

Julie sighed. “Yeah. I mean, Paris had said not to. But I was freaked. The house being empty, you know? It was like a horror movie. So I dialed 911, and this cop car turned up like one minute later. It must have been close by, I guess.”

“This was …” He consulted his notebook. “Officer O’Grady.”

A shrug. “Maybe. He said his name was Brian. He came with his lights flashing, the siren, everything, you know? He was going fast and he braked hard; the tires squealed. It was ****** up. It was like a movie, and I couldn’t turn it off. And you know the stupidest thing? You know how much of an ******* I am?”

“What?” said Horowitz. His tone pretty gentle.

“I had this song going around and around in my head! You know, the old hip-hop song? “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police … woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police.” Someone was probably slitting my friend’s throat at that very moment, and I was sitting in my car like a moron, watching this cop turn up and with a random ******* hip-hop song stuck on repeat in my head.” She hung her head and sobbed.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. I knew all about unwanted sounds in the head.

“The mind responds to stress in unusual ways,” said Horowitz. “I’ve seen people laughing uncontrollably when they find out their kid is dead.”

“Mm,” said Julie, noncommittal.

“And what happened after the cop, I mean Officer O’Grady, turned up?”

“He spoke to me for a while and then ran into the house. He didn’t come out again, and after I’d sat there for like half an hour I figured he wasn’t coming out, so I drove home. Which is why you came here, right?”

“Right,” said Horowitz. “Like you, Officer O’Grady—Brian—found no one in the house and nothing suspicious. But we have a tech team over there now. If there are traces … if there’s anything there, they’ll find it.”

“Oh God,” said Julie.

I went and put my arm around her shoulder. She shook under my touch. “She didn’t even get to finish her cranes,” Julie said.

“What?” said Horowitz.

Julie was crying too much to explain; I filled him in about the thousand cranes.

“Oh, right,” he said, like it didn’t matter, when of course it did. I mean, it may not have been important for finding Paris. But it mattered to Paris.

She never got her wish.

“I think we need to take you in,” said Horowitz to Julie. “Get a proper witness statement. Cassandra, I can give you a lift home if you like.”

“Am I a suspect?” said Julie.

“No,” said Horowitz. “And a suspect in what? At the moment we have a girl who has gone missing. Admittedly a sex worker in a town where sex workers have been disappearing, which fits a pattern. But for all we know she’s run off to her parents in New York.”

“She hates her parents,” I said. I was thinking: sex worker. Hearing it like that, flat, neutral, was like a hammer blow.

“People have been known to go back to parents they hate. But for now I need to do this by the book, and that means bringing you in for a formal witness statement, Julie.”

Julie closed her eyes. “Fine.”

But it wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine; not anymore.

Horowitz dropped me outside the house, but I didn’t go in. I couldn’t go in. Dad was at work anyway, so what was I going to do? Who was I going to talk to?

I waved to Julie as the car pulled away. She didn’t wave back.

I took out my cell, went to call you, but then I remembered that I didn’t have your number; I’d never asked for it.

Right then I wished I had.

“It’s your fault,” said the voice. I was standing on the sidewalk. Heat was rising from the ground in shimmers, in waves. I was blinking sweat and tears. A gull wheeled above me, crying its ugly cry, accusing me.

Cass, Cass, Cass. “You killed her,” said the voice. “You were listening to your white noise and she called. She needed you. But you didn’t answer.”

“She called Julie,” I said. “She called Julie too, and Julie was closer. But Paris told her not to call the cops. She couldn’t do anything.”

“She did more than you did. She went into the house.”

“What could I have done?”

“You could have answered your cell. Instead of being so selfish. Instead of fighting with me.”

“You said you were going to kill my dad! You told me to cut off my toe or you would murder him.”

Silence.

“It’s not my fault!” I shouted. “It’s you! With your threats, with your cursing, with your making me block you out, with your endless—”

“You could have just cut off your toe,” said the voice, sullenly.

“No, I couldn’t.”

Silence.

“If we had not been fighting, we would have heard the phone,” said the voice.

I stood there very still for a moment. I had never heard the voice sound sad before. I had never heard it use the word “we.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s us,” said the voice. “It’s our fault. Both of us. But …” And now the voice’s tone went sly again. “But we’re the same person, aren’t we? I am you. That’s what Dr. Lewis says, isn’t it? I’m just the angry part of you. So it comes down to the same thing.”

I felt sick. It was my fault. It was all my fault.

Like an automaton, I walked down the sidewalk, not watching where I was going. It was only when the hardness under my feet was replaced by soft sand that I realized I was at the beach.

I walked toward the ocean, drawn to it, an iron filing toward a magnet. It was high tide; the water was almost up to the piers. You wouldn’t have been able to drive your truck around them. I could smell that indescribable smell of seaweed and salt and the deep.

I thought of Venus, stepping out of the sea. My feet were in the foam now, the wet sand sucking at my Converses. I took another step forward. Cold water pulled at my calves, made my jeans heavy; icy fingers. No matter how hot it gets in New Jersey the ocean always feels freezing to me. The Atlantic. It’s too vast, too empty, to ever warm up.

I knew how it felt.

My feet moved forward of their own accord until I was waist deep. There were other people on the beach—I mean, it was daytime—but they were a long way away, closer to the piers.

Then, suddenly, I felt hands on my shoulders. I gasped and turned around, and there you were.

“What are you doing, Cass?” you asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Come in. Come in and talk to me.”

You took my hand and pretty much dragged me back up onto the sand. You sat me down, then went to your truck and got a towel, put it over my legs.

“How can you drive around the piers?” I said.

“Huh?”

“High tide.” I indicated the water.

“Oh. I don’t need to. Just delivering to Pier One.” You pointed to the truck. I couldn’t see any bags of toys in it. “Dippin’ Dots. I do plush and Dippin’ Dots ice cream. I have no idea why. The hot dogs and stuff, they come from somewhere else. My warehouse is just stuffed animals and Dippin’ Dots.”

“Weird,” I said.

“Yeah. So what were you doing walking into the ocean with all your clothes on?”

I looked at you. You were so there, so present. I can’t describe it. You were just with me, looking at me, looking at me like I was real, and mattered. Interested in me. You and Paris, you were the first people ever to be interested in me. Even my dad wasn’t, not really.

Especially since I killed his wife.

You were looking at me curiously, like you really genuinely wanted to know what was going on with me, like you cared. Did you care? Do you remember? I think you did. I think you care about everything. I think that’s what makes you be you. If you came across a sea anemone that was out of the water and unable to breathe, you would throw it back in; you would save it. I don’t know why I’m talking about sea anemones. It’s stupid.

“You know my friend Paris?” I said.

“The weird one?”

“Yeah. She …”

“Cass, you’re crying. What’s wrong?”

So I told you. I told you everything.

“She was a prostitute, then?” you said, when I had finished.

“No. She was a stripper. And, what did she call it? A cam girl.”

“Huh,” you said. “I wouldn’t have guessed. She seemed so …”

“Smart? Cool? Smart girls can be sexual, you know. It’s her body, she can do what she wants with it.” I sounded defensive; shrill. I didn’t know what I was saying or why.

“I know that,” you said. “I didn’t mean to … Oh, I don’t know. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

I looked at you for a moment, then sighed. “Julie told her it was dangerous. I should have too. But I guess I was, I don’t know, I guess I thought it was glamorous, you know? I got why it was a thrill for her.”

You nodded. “I see that. But, look, you are not to blame for this.”

“No,” I said, unconvinced.

“So I guess there’s one big question,” you said.

“Which is?”

“Which is what are we going to do about it?”

“What are we …”

“Yeah. What are we going to do? To find her?”

“I don’t …”

“We have to try, right? We have to try to find her.”

I thought back to all my research in the library. My theory that my voice was one of the dead women. And now it was like the circle had turned all the way around again, and again the Houdini Killer was in the middle of it.

“You hardly know her,” I said.

“So?” you said. “She’s in trouble. We have to help her.”

“Why, because you like her?”

You stared at me. “What?”

“I saw you, the way you boosted her over the fence. I … it’s fine. I don’t know why I’m even mentioning it. Sorry … I’m … I’m not used to speaking to people, I’m not …”

“Cassie,” you said gently.

I looked up.

“Yes?”

“Is this why you were weird in the pickup?”

“Uh-huh.”

He smiled. A sad kind of smile. “I don’t like Paris. I mean, I do, I like her a lot, she’s a cool girl. But I like … you.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Oh come on. You didn’t pick up on it?”

Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.

But I said nothing.

“****,” you said. “Now I’ve made it super awkward. I’m sorry. I … look, just forget that, okay? Let’s focus on Paris.”

Yes, focus on Paris. Focus on Paris. Don’t think about …

Don’t think about …

His hands on your sides, his hands in your hair, his hands …

No.

You took a deep breath. “So. Paris. The cops have not done one thing to stop him so far, have they? The killer, I mean.”

“You think it’s the killer? Horowitz said she might have run away.”

“You think that’s likely?”

I looked away. “No.”

“So,” you said. “We need to hurry.”

“This is the real world,” I said. “People get away. Killers get away. It happens all the time. How are we going to stop it?”

You looked at me strangely, narrowing your eyes. “ ‘People get away’? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” I said.

MY MOTHER. I WAS TALKING ABOUT MY MOTHER. A GUY BRAINED HER AND RAN AND THAT WAS IT.

But I wasn’t going to tell you that, not then.

And anyway, I had to admit it was true that from a distance the cops didn’t seem to be doing much about any of the women who had gone missing. I mean, it had been going on for so long and there had been no progress, and people were talking; it was the focus of a bunch of media stories too.

On the other hand:

At the same time though, I was thinking of Agent Horowitz. He seemed smart, and I liked him by instinct.

And yet on the other hand again:

You were right. It had been months, years even, and no advances had been made. No killer had been caught.

And … what if they didn’t get away this time? I mean, I couldn’t bring my mom back from the dead and I couldn’t get the guy who killed her, couldn’t make him pay, but what if I could get this guy?

This guy.

This one guy.

And make him pay.

And maybe find Paris before he killed her too.

Even then I knew this was not a realistic idea.

“Plus … ,” you said. “Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious? The lack of police action? I mean … what if the killer was a cop himself?”

“A cop?”

“It would add up, right?”

“I guess.”

“Not only that, Julie said that Paris told her not to call the cops. Why would she do that?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I’d forgotten about that.”

I will give it to you: I am pretty sure you were only doing all this to distract me, to give me something to think about, rather than just uselessly worrying about Paris, but you did it excellently.

“Well,” you continued, “what if that was because she knew the killer was a cop? So there would be no point calling them; she wouldn’t have known which of them were in on it, maybe?”

I looked at you. “Huh. Yeah, I guess that would make sense.”

“So let’s do it,” you said. “Let’s find her.” You pulled out your phone—it was an old-model iPhone; the phone of someone with money who hasn’t gotten around to upgrading yet.

I was wrong in thinking that, I know that now. I didn’t know it was the phone of someone with very little money at all. Someone whose dad bought it for him after he scored 1600 on his SATs. Bought it secondhand, spent days scouring eBay to get it for him.

But now I know. I know because I have spoken to your dad. A couple of times. Yeah. You didn’t realize that, did you? I know a lot more about you than you think.

I don’t mean this to sound sinister. I mean … I understand you better than I did.

Anyway.

You pulled out the phone, and you called up maps.

“This thing is too old for 4G,” you said, as the screen slowly loaded. “You said this was in Bayview, right? The row of old clapboards by the sand?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

You dragged the map with your finger, then used thumb and finger to enlarge it. I had never seen anyone do that before; that’s how sheltered my life was. That’s how much I didn’t have friends and how much the phones my dad got for me always sucked hard.

“You can just zoom it like that?” I said. “By touching? Wow.”

You looked at me like I was from another planet. “You haven’t seen one of these?”

“Yes! I mean, from a distance. Yeah.”

“Hmm,” you said. “Very Pygmalion.”

“What?”

“You know, in Ovid. The guy who makes a statue of a woman, and brings it to life. But she doesn’t know the language, the customs, and stuff. You’re like that.”

“I know the story. You’re saying … I’m a statue woman? Learning to speak like a person?”

“You know the language already. But you haven’t seen someone use a touch screen before, so it’s as if you’re new to the world, like her, and … Hmm.”

“Doesn’t really work, does it?”

“I admit it’s a flawed analogy,” you said. You smiled, and to my surprise I smiled back, though there was still an aching hole inside me where Paris had been. Where my memory of Paris still was.

“Anyway,” you said. You flicked something, and the map turned from a sketch, all lines and block colors, to a satellite image.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Seriously?” you asked.

“I’m a Luddite, okay?” I said. “And I’m poor and have no friends. So bite me.”

You smiled again. “I love that you know the word ‘Luddite.’ ”

“Thanks. I think you’re alone in that.”

“Didn’t Paris love words?”

“Yes.” Paris appeared between us like a ghost.

Silence.

“Sorry,” you said. “Shouldn’t … you know, mention her.”

You lowered your head to your phone again, zoomed out. You held the screen up for me to see.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“You’re looking at a straight road, with no cross streets.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t see what that means?”

I peered at it. I could see the shapes of the houses, the darkness of the beach and ocean, the street. Cars parked up and down it. Everything, even from this satellite view, looking dilapidated and sad.

“No,” I said finally. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“You said when Paris was in the house, Julie saw a car turn in front of her. It woke her up with its lights. Yes?”

I took a breath, looking at the phone. I was holding it in my hand now. “But there are no cross streets,” I said slowly.

“Bingo. If a car turned, then it came out of a driveway. Or a garage.”

“You’re thinking …”

“Yes.”

“But how could Agent Horowitz miss this?”

“You said he was FBI, right?”

“Yeah. Or something like that.”

“So he’s from out of town. He wouldn’t know the street.”

“You’re from out of town,” I said. “How come you know the streets of Bayview so well?”

I asked it kind of as a joke, but you blanched a little. “I do a lot of deliveries,” you said. Your tone was strange, but I didn’t push you on it; I was thinking about Paris and Julie.

“I need to talk to Julie,” I said.

“Yes.” You took the phone back from me; put it away. “And then we need to decide what to do next. I mean, maybe she remembers what kind of car it was. And maybe … maybe Paris is still alive.”

“You think so?”

“It’s possible. No one ever finds the bodies, do they?”

“No. Well, a foot.”

“Yeah. But who knows what he does with them before he kills them?”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling sick. “You just made it awful again.”

“Sorry. But … what if she’s alive? Maybe we can find her together. I mean, if you want my help. If you want … we could try.”

There you went again, using that little word. That dangerous, beautiful little word.

We.

It even clouded out my doubts—the terrible, selfish little part of me that was still thinking, Is this because he likes Paris? Is that why he wants to save her?

But another part of me, a voice inside me, but not THE voice, said: No, he likes you. That’s why he wants to help you.

Anyway.

You know what? You may have planned it all along. You may have just intended it as a distraction, to get me over my grief. If so, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the **** it got you into. I’m sorry for everything that happened after THIS. FATAL. MOMENT. IN THE STORY.

The one where I turned to you, and I held your hand in mine, as we sat there in the baking heat by the susurrating shore, and I said,

“Deal. We’ll find her together. You and me.”

I AM. SO. SORRY.

INT. A TEENAGE GIRL’S BEDROOM. BUT YOU CAN’T REALLY TELL THAT BECAUSE IT’S PITCH-BLACK. YOU CAN’T SEE ANYTHING, IN FACT. YOU CAN ONLY HEAR VOICES. VOICES WITH NO BODIES. I WOULD TELL YOU TO CLOSE YOUR EYES, BUT THEN YOU WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO READ THIS. YOU’LL JUST HAVE TO IMAGINE VOICES IN THE DARKNESS.

AND THEN, NOT INCONSEQUENTIALLY, YOU WILL GET AN IDEA OF WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE ME.

Oh no, wait.

Before the voices—you hear a phone being dialed, and then a ringing tone, okay? A ringing tone in the darkness.

Let’s start again.

INT. A TEENAGE GIRL’S BEDROOM. IT IS PITCH-BLACK. YOU HEAR A BEEPING THAT YOU SOON IDENTIFY AS A CELL PHONE BEING DIALED. IT RINGS.

A GIRL’S VOICE BLURRED BY TIREDNESS ANSWERS.

ME:	Julie?
JULIE:	Cass? Cass, it’s like two a.m.
ME:	Did I wake you?
JULIE:	No.
ME:	I’m sorry. I’ve been trying you and trying you. You were out, or you weren’t answering the phone or something.
JULIE:	(in a small voice) I was at my mom’s.
ME:	Oh.
JULIE:	What is it, Cass? What’s up?
ME:	It’s the car.
JULIE:	What car?
ME:	The one you heard. You know, the one that woke you up? I was wondering … Where were you parked?
JULIE:	Huh?
ME:	I mean, which side of the street? And were there any cross streets?
JULIE:	The right side of the street. Facing north? Toward the Cape. No cross streets.
ME:	No way a car could turn onto the road?
JULIE:	Um …
ME:	I mean, a car passing you, it would have to just be going down the street, north or south? It couldn’t be coming from a cross street, because there were no cross streets.
JULIE:	Uh, yeah.
ME:	But you said the car turned. You said a car turned in front of you, and it washed you with its headlights, and that’s what woke you up.
JULIE:	Yeah. ****** had his brights on.
ME:	But it turned. Right?
JULIE:	Oh …
ME:	You see where I’m going with this? It turned, on a street with no cross streets.
JULIE:	So it must have come from a driveway. Or a garage …
ME:	The house she went into. It was right beside you?
JULIE:	Yeah. Like twenty feet.
ME:	So the car could have come from the garage.
JULIE:	I guess.
ME:	And something else. You said the line was bad? Like, shhhhing like the ocean?
JULIE:	Yeah.
ME:	Or like car wheels? Like she might have been in a car? Already?
JULIE:	Oh ****.
ME:	Picture something. Imagine Paris in the trunk of a car. She has her cell in her pocket. She makes a call. To you. That’s the shhhhing, right? But then the driver of the car realizes. He stops. The line goes dead—you said that, didn’t you? Then there’s a … what did you call it?
JULIE:	(flatly) A heavy metal sound.
ME:	The trunk opening.
JULIE:	And then a thunk. And the line went dead.
ME:	Yeah.
	Silence.
JULIE:	I need to call Agent Horowitz.
ME:	Wait. What kind of car?
JULIE:	Huh?
ME:	The car. What was it?
JULIE:	A Jeep.
ME:	Like, a 4x4? Or a Jeep, the brand?
JULIE:	The brand. I saw the logo.
ME:	A Wrangler?
JULIE:	Maybe. One of those big, fast ones. You know, with blacked-out windows? Like rappers drive.
ME:	(grateful for Dad’s car magazines) An SRT8?
JULIE:	I don’t know.
ME:	Air channels down the sides? Four exhausts?
JULIE:	Yeah! Yeah.
ME:	That’s an SRT8. Color?
JULIE:	I don’t know. It was night.
ME:	Hmm. Did you catch any of the license plate?
JULIE:	I wasn’t … No. Wait.
ME:	(leaning forward on my bed) Yes?
JULIE:	No. Nothing. I thought … it’s like there’s something there, like something on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t know what it is.
ME:	Okay.
JULIE:	Sorry.
ME:	Don’t be sorry.
JULIE:	Look, Cass, I’m going to go now. I’m going to call the agent. Tell him about the car.
ME:	Don’t do that.
JULIE:	What? Why?
ME:	You know people blame the cops for not finding the guy? The killer?
JULIE:	Yeah.
ME:	But what if it’s not just not finding him? What if they are him?
JULIE:	The cops … are … the killer?
ME:	Or a cop, I don’t know. But think about it. They could suppress evidence.
JULIE:	Keep it quiet. Keep their prints off stuff.
ME:	Yeah.
JULIE:	Jesus.
ME:	Give me a couple of days. Then we’ll talk to Horowitz about the car.
JULIE:	Okay. You think it’s him?
ME:	(thinking about this) No. Not him. But could be someone else.
JULIE:	I still think I should tell him about the Jeep.
ME:	If he’s good, he’ll work it out.
JULIE:	I guess.
ME:	’Night, Julie.
JULIE.	’Night, Cass.
ME:	(pause)
JULIE:	We’ll get this ******, right? We’ll get Paris back?
ME:	Yes. Yes, we will.
JULIE:	(sounding suddenly like a child) You promise?
ME:	I promise.
	CLICK. AND THE LINE GOES DEAD.
	BLACKNESS.
	FADE OUT.

 

I had no right to do that. No right to promise something I couldn’t deliver.

 

The next day was a Monday. I had breakfast with Dad—I had nut-free toast, and he had Pop-Tarts. Dad was reading the paper.

“Oh, ****, Cass,” he said suddenly.

I looked up. “What?”

“Oh, Cass, I’m sorry.”

Now I knew what was in the paper. “Why?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. For some reason, by some instinct, I didn’t want Dad knowing about Agent Horowitz, about Julie, about any of it.

Some helpful instinct, as it turned out.

Dad turned the paper around. There was a photo of Paris—it must have been taken before she was ill; she looked plump and happy. Fifteen, maybe. She was standing by a pool.

“That’s your friend, right? The one from the hospital?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m so sorry, honey. They say she’s disappeared, that they think …” He went silent, scanning the page upside down.

Oh.

Oh ****.

“Cassandra,” said Dad, and it was never a good sign when he used my full name. “Cassandra, were you hanging out with a stripper?”

“Um.”

“Cassandra?”

“Um, yeah. But she didn’t do touching, she—”

He turned the paper, showing me a picture from Paris’s Instagram. It showed her with stars over her nipples, smoking.

“Are you ******* insane?” he shouted. “Oh no, wait. Yes! You are ****** insane! Jesus, Cass, I’m trying here, I’m trying to protect you, like your mom would have wanted, and you’re just …”

“She was nice,” I said quietly. “She was my friend.”

Dad shook his head. He was looking at me as if I came with instructions in another language. “She was a … she was this”—he indicated the paper—“and look where it got her.”

“You’re saying girls who take their clothes off are asking to be killed?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it!”

“Do I?” I said. “Do I, Dad? Because it sounds to me like you’re saying that being taken by the Houdini Killer is some kind of moral punishment for being a stripper.”

A long pause.

“I don’t know what to do with you anymore,” said Dad.

“Tell him to **** off,” said the voice. “Tell him you don’t give a **** what he thinks.”

“Sorry, Dad,” I said.

He grunted. Then there was a knock on the door. Dad went to open it.

“Hey,” you said. I couldn’t see you, but I recognized your voice. I went to the kitchen door, but Dad was blocking the doorway.

“Hi,” said Dad. “You need something?”

“I was wondering … if Cass could come out.”

“No,” said Dad.

“Oh,” you said. “Uh … oh.”

“Have a good day,” said Dad. “Shouldn’t you be getting to work?”

“Yeah,” you said. And Dad closed the door on you.

Sorry about that.

Dad came back to the kitchen. “No going out today, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“I have to know you’re safe, Cass.”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

He went upstairs and I heard the shower start. “Your own father hates you,” said the voice dully.

“After six p.m.,” I said automatically.

The voice shut up. Ever since I didn’t cut off my toe, it had lost some of its power. It didn’t push things anymore. It was more like an irritation—a wasp that circles back to your picnic table intermittently. I could mostly ignore it.

Dad came back downstairs, put on a thin jacket, and pocketed his keys from the monkey’s little tray. Then he went out. “Remember: stay here,” he said.

“Sure, Dad.”

Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door.

“I know your dad’s angry, but you want to ride to work with me?” you said. “We can talk about stuff. I have an idea I think we could—”

“Yes,” I said.

I grabbed my keys and closed the door behind me.

 

You started the engine and pulled out, took Ocean and then Maple, driving to the center of town. As we drove, you turned to me. “Get anywhere with Julie?” you asked.

I rocked my hand; an equivocal gesture. “Maybe. She thinks it was a Jeep. One of the V8 sport models.”

“An SRT8?” you asked.

I looked at you, surprised. I hadn’t figured you for a car head. “Yeah. You know cars?”

You shook your head. “Nah. My dad is into them.”

“Mine too.” There were always magazines on our coffee table. Muscle Car. American Auto.

You smiled. “Something we have in common, then.”

You made a couple of turns, getting closer to the center. We pulled up at a stop sign. “Could be enough,” you said, almost to yourself.

“Huh?”

“The model. Gives us something to go on.”

“For what?”

You did like a bear with me wave of your hand. “I’ll tell you. I want to show you something first.”

“It had better not be your genitals,” I said.

You laughed, surprised. I liked to hear you laugh. Then I felt guilty because Paris was dead and here I was flirting with you. I shut up after that, and you stopped talking too—I think the same thought had crossed your mind.

Soon we had arrived at the closest thing Oakwood has to a main drag, the little grocery stores and liquor stores and toy stores. A few restaurants with outside seating.

You turned onto an alleyway, passed a bar with a neon sign showing a woman kneeling on a table, a cowboy hat on her head, swinging a lasso in one hand and holding a beer in the other. The sign was off.

Beyond the bar, there was a long, low warehouse—a redbrick building with steel roll-up doors. You parked in front of the doors and made an expansive gesture at them. “Welcome to the nerve center,” you said.

Then you got out of the pickup and went to the steel door. You entered a code on a padlock; snapped it open. You rolled the door up and came back to the truck. Then you drove us both in.

“Wow,” I said.

We were in a vast space; you wouldn’t have known from the street how big it was. It must have covered most of the block. There was only one floor, so the ceiling was high. Corrugated-iron roof, punctuated in places by plastic windows. From these, shafts of sunlight cut down, illuminating random piles of goods, as if to highlight treasure. Motes of dust swirled in the light, little grains of darkness; inverse constellations.

And piled up, in hills, in mountains, all over the floor were bags of stuffed toys. Thousands, maybe even millions of them. Okay, not millions. But thousands.

You went to that place every day; I guess it didn’t impress you anymore. But the first time I saw it … it was something else. It’s weird: people think of the everyday world as banal, as mundane. But when you really consider it, there’s so much weird and amazing stuff. For instance: an amusement park has to have a place to store its prizes.

And that place has to be amazing.

I walked around for a bit, just staring. There were wide walkways between the piles, so it was possible to see almost all the way to each wall; it only increased the sense of scale. It was surreal. Warehouses are usually hard, industrial, practical places, right? This one looked like a warehouse—the corrugated iron, the bare brick walls. But it was full, I mean absolutely full, of soft toys. It was like something out of a fairy tale.

As I wandered, I realized the mountains were arranged by type, each towering pile of transparent bags containing a different character. There was one that was all Pokémon, another—larger—full of Angry Birds. Disney characters took up an entire wall. Minnies, Donald Ducks. Olafs. There was a whole alpine range of Beanie Babies.

“This is crazy,” I said.

“It’s pretty full on,” you agreed.

“How do you know where everything is?”

You shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“What are you getting today?”

You pulled a piece of paper out of your pocket. “Two bags medium Bugs Bunny. Three bags large Minecraft people. The kids love Minecraft. And a small bag of Mickeys.”

“And you know where all of those are?”

“Yep. There. There. And there.” You pointed to three corners of the warehouse. “I’ll grab them in a moment. Come over here.”

You led me to a small mound of stuffed dinosaurs. You pulled out a bag of them and motioned for me to sit on it. Then you sat down next to me.

“You want to show me dinosaurs?” I said.

You looked puzzled for a second. “Oh! No. But I thought of something.” You pulled out your phone. “I was thinking, we could start a hash tag. #SRT8; something like that. Get people to tweet the location if they see one.”

“What?”

“To find the car, you know?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to find it?”

“I mean, no, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll get it trending,” you said. “Offer a prize or something to get the ball rolling. An iPad. It doesn’t matter. We can worry about making good on it later.”

I looked right into your eyes. “What. Are. You. Talking. About?”

You narrowed your eyes. “Wait. You don’t know Twitter?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard of it.”

“But you haven’t used it?”

“No. I look on Instagram sometimes. For, like, fashion. You know.”

You glanced at my clothes, raised your eyebrows.

“Very funny,” I said.

You put a hand over your heart. “Sorry. It was too easy. Okay. Listen.” You took out your phone, opened the Twitter app. You showed me the timeline, the trending hashtags. “What I’m thinking is, if we get people to tweet every time they see an SRT8, and we ask them to include a location, we might start to see a pattern.”

“Why would people do that?”

“That’s how come the prize. We say it’s a marketing thing, we pretend we work for Jeep or something. We say that every week one person who tweets that they’ve seen an SRT8 will win something.”

“Okay … ,” I said. “And you think this will work?”

“I have no idea. But I think it’s the kind of thing the cops would never think of. They’re still operating in the twentieth century.”

“No. They just have systems that let them look up all the SRT8 owners in town.”

“Well, okay,” you said. “Point taken. But this is what we have. It would be better if we had a license plate, of course.”

Something itched at the back of my brain.

“What is it, Cass? You look weird.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t …”

“You thought of something?”

“Sh,” I said. I had the strangest feeling. Like there was an idea curled up inside my mind and I needed to make it uncurl, open itself, like one of Dad’s millipedes.

You shut up. I opened my eyes and saw the piles of toys, but I wasn’t really seeing them. I was going over everything Julie had said, the whole conversation with me and Agent Horowitz. I knew there was something there. Something that made me think … I don’t know what it made me think.

That Julie might know the license plate, without realizing she did? I didn’t know why I thought that though.

“No,” I said. “I can’t get it. It’s gone.”

That feeling—of something being on the tip of my tongue, as Julie had said—had vanished.

“The license plate?”

“Yeah. It’s making me think of something, but I don’t know what.”

“Helpful.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” I said.

“No,” you said. “That’s photobombing.”

“What? What’s photobombing?”

“I despair of you.”

“Whatever.”

“Anyway,” you said eventually, “it could play without the license plate. We make it like one of those online treasure-hunt marketing campaigns. Pretend we’re driving a Jeep SRT8 around the town. First person to spot it each day wins a prize, kind of thing. So we say that they have to tweet #SRT8 and their location. We might see a pattern. Or at least find some people who drive them.”

“If you say so. The whole Twitter thing is your area.”

“Or,” you said, in a tentative tone—your voice a foot gingerly tapping on a frozen lake before venturing onto it. “Or … we could hand it over to the cops.”

“You were the one who was all for investigating on our own.”

“Yeah. But … I don’t know. This feels big.”

“We can’t go to the cops,” I said.

“You don’t trust them?”

“Not that. My dad would find out. They’d tell him. They all eat at the restaurant.”

“Hmm,” you said. “Your dad doesn’t like you hanging out with me, right?”

“My dad doesn’t like a lot of stuff.”

You had been playing with the bag of toys we were sitting on; you took out a stuffed T. rex and started tossing it up and down in the air, catching it by its tail. “So we do it ourselves. Run this Twitter thing. See what comes up.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Silence. There was that moment—I know you felt it too—there was that moment where the boy and the girl realize they’re sitting next to each other, alone, in a mostly dark warehouse, on a soft surface. One they could sink down into.

Together.

“Um. So which school are you going to?” I said awkwardly.

“What?”

“You said you were going to college. On a swim scholarship.”

“Oh. Brown.”

“Brown? Wow. How good a swimmer are you?”

“I’m okay. That’s why I’m not around at the apartment much. I do a bunch of training, when I’m not working.”

Silence.

“You?” you asked. “College, I mean?”

“I … I guess. I have one year of high school left.”

“Sucks.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. You shifted a little closer to me. I felt our molecules align with each other, like when we were on the couch in the apartment, the electrons synchronizing their spins, reaching out to each other across the distance between atoms.

You looked into my eyes.

You leaned toward me, to kiss me.

And I pulled away, sharply. It was automatic. I … Paris had only just disappeared, and it felt wrong. It felt like betraying her, to be with you like that. I saw the hurt in your eyes immediately, and my heart flipped.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No,” you said. “It was … I shouldn’t have …”

Your voice frayed into silence.

Unbelievably awkward silence.

Our thousandth awkward moment, give or take.

Then your radio crackled.

“714, what’s your 20?” said a pissed-off sounding voice. “Where’s my goddamn plush?”

“This is 714,” you said, thumbing the radio. “Leaving the warehouse now.”

“Good. Get to Pier Two STAT. Then I want four bags of Pokémon to Pier One.”

“10-4,” you said.

“Out,” said the voice on the other end.

“Out,” you said.

You stood up stiffly. I stood up too. “You want to come with me?” you said. “I don’t want to … just leave you here.”

“Um. Okay,” I said.

Come on, Earth! Swallow me right now.

But it never does.

You pointed to the far left corner of the warehouse. “Can you grab the Bugs Bunnies? There are three piles—small, medium, large. We need medium. I’ll get the rest. But I have to hurry.” Your voice was flatter than usual, like you were trying not to show your feelings, trying to pave over them with smooth hardness. Concrete.

“Can’t keep the kids waiting,” I said jokily.

“No,” you said. Still flatly.

I nodded, and started walking.

It was weird, that voice on your radio. I mean, for once a voice came from nowhere and actually helped—broke that terrible moment after you tried to kiss me and I moved away.

Has to be a first time for everything.

 

Here’s the thing though: I wish I had let you kiss me. Part of me wanted to, I promise. Even if we were disturbed right away by the radio, I wish I had let our lips touch, wish I had not pulled away. Wish I had not caused that hurt in your eyes.

But at the same time … I couldn’t. Not at that moment. And I was angry with the part of me that wanted me to, if I’m giving you the whole truth.

Even writing this down, I feel pretty sickened by myself.

I mean, Paris was gone, most probably dead, and I was even picturing the idea of kissing you.

Because I pictured it a lot.

Even then, just after Paris had gone missing.

Believe me, I hate myself quite a lot right now, but what can I do? I said I would tell the truth, and only the truth, so help me, God.

I offer two things in mitigation though:

1.    We were only together in the first place because of her. Because I wanted to find her. I mean, that was the whole thing we were doing. The Twitter thing. Working stuff out. It was you who knew the shape of the street Julie had been on; you who worked out that the car could only have turned out of a drive. It was all you—the clues, they all came from you. So you and Paris, you were connected.

2.    I was a teenager. Am a teenager. I figure if Paris were a couple years younger, and the situation were reversed, she would have wanted to be kissed too. If she never had been, I mean. Never kissed, I mean. She totally would. Yeah, you were the first person I kissed. Don’t get a big head about it.

3.    I was grieving. I was. And people’s emotions do weird things when they’re grieving. They want to kiss boys and stuff, and scream and shout and laugh. Or they pull away from a boy who tries to kiss them, even though they want to, even though they really want to. It’s not just feeling sad. It’s more complicated than that. Even Agent Horowitz said it.

4.    The voice punished me for it. I mean, not by making me hurt myself. I’d mostly stopped doing that, now that I knew the voice couldn’t kill my dad. Though sometimes I still cleaned my room and stuff when it told me to. Because the alternative was a lot of cursing and shouting from the voice, which was unpleasant. But … where was I? Oh yes. The voice did a lot of cursing and shouting after I got home that day. It was unpleasant.

5.    I’ve gone over my two things. I KNOW.

 

You drove me to the pier. If it weren’t for Paris being gone, it would have been as good as the first time, cruising along the beach, the hard sand under the wheels, slaloming around the groups of people. You had turned the radio on—some MOR rock ballad was playing. The windows of the truck were open, and the wind whipped my hair.

It’s strange: A car on a road feels normal. A car on a beach always feels like flying. Like freedom. Even then I felt it, almost wanted to ask you if I could drive again.

You parked right by the pier and jumped down; threw the bags of toys up onto the side.

I looked at my watch. “You’d better drop me at home. Sometimes Dad comes back for lunch.”

“You grounded or something?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Sure. Okay. I get that. I get complicated.”

“You do?”

“My mom died too. When I was fifteen. Me and my dad … Things are difficult between us.”

I was staring at you.

“Oh, ****,” you said. “Your mom’s not dead? I thought your dad said … I thought it was … I don’t know. Something else we—”

“No, she’s dead,” I said.

You were swallowing anxiously. “Sorry, sorry, I just …”

“It’s cool,” I said.

“I blurt stuff out,” you said. “It’s a curse. My voice is totally out of my control.”

Oh, I thought, you have no idea.

“Anyway,” you said. “I’ll drive you home.”

 

I walked into Dr. Rezwari’s office and stopped. She was sitting at her desk, which was usually bare, and there was work all over it—files, sheaths of paper held together with clips. Her makeup was not applied as adroitly as usual; her lipstick was smudged and there were tracks in her eyeliner.

Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Are you all right?” I asked. She was looking at me blankly.

She did that blinking thing—I could almost see her consciousness swim up from some black depth. “I’m fine, thank you. Take a seat.”

I sat down.

“The voice is still gone?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Excellent. And how are you feeling?”

“Good,” I said.

“Okay,” said Dr. Rezwari. “And the medication. Any side effects?”

“No.”

“No drowsiness? Lack of appetite?”

“Oh, yeah. All of that. But that’s normal, right?”

“Yes. To a degree. Keep an eye on it, yes?” She moved papers around on her desk, absently.

“I will.”

“Great. You’re doing very well, Cassandra. I’m very pleased with your progress.”

“No thanks to you.” That wasn’t me. That was the voice.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Dr. Rezwari rubbed at her eyes. Then she looked up at me and seemed surprised I was still there. “So … I’ll see you next week?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Are you … um … can I help?”

“Excuse me?”

“You seem upset. Can I help?”

Dr. Rezwari laughed—a half-hollow, half-real laugh. “You want to help me? Your psychiatrist?”

“Sorry, it’s stupid, I—”

“No, it’s kind of you. I guess my work with you is done! The pupil has become the master. I’m fine, truly.” She moved another file, randomly as far as I could see. “I just … something happened to one of our outpatients. Something terrible. Nothing to concern you.”

“Paris?”

Her eyes sharpened. “You knew her?”

Suddenly I knew that I didn’t want to talk about Paris. “Not really. We met in the courtyard. But I read in the paper … about …”

“Yes,” said Dr. Rezwari. She made a sobbing sound. “Oh God. Sorry. This is so unprofessional. I was … I was very fond of her.”

I stared at her, surprised. But yes, why not? Paris was one of those people. She didn’t so much have charisma as an aura. To my amazement I found myself feeling a moment of connection with Dr. Rezwari. “Sorry,” I said.

“Thank you. And now I must let you go, try to gather myself before my next appointment.”

“Okay. See you next week.”

“See you, Cassandra.” She looked down at her desk and didn’t look back up.

I closed the door behind me, took the corridor lined with photos of old board members and then the green stairs down to the lobby, where the bus stop was.

“Liar,” said the voice. “You lied to her about everything. About your drugs. About Paris.”

“Shut up. It’s not six.”

“Fine. But you’re still a liar. And it’s going to get you in trouble.”

 

“This is it?”

“Yeah,” you said. We were sitting in your pickup early in the morning, outside a liquor store. You had an hour before starting work—and every second counted. I mean, what could be happening to Paris as the hours ticked by … We both knew it, but neither of us said it.

You showed me the screen of your phone. I looked at it. There was a list of tweets. The pictures next to them showed a whole range of people. Young, old, white, black. I didn’t know what you had done, but you had gotten a load of different people looking for that Jeep.

“Read it,” you said.

I read.

#SRT8 Lauderdale b/t Ash and Ocean

Spotted! Bayside 8th Street #SRT8

#SRT8 @ the Laundromat on Fort in Lauderdale

#SRT8 on Mayflower Drive in Lauderdale

#Lauderdale #SRT8 #Ocean & 10th

“That’s just a random sampling,” you said. “Notice anything?”

“Yeah. Lauderdale.”

“Hence, we are sitting here in Lauderdale.”

“And we’re just going to wait till we see a Jeep SRT8?” I was starting to feel less sure about this plan. “There are hardly any houses around here. It’s all factories and offices and industrial buildings.”

“Nevertheless,” you said, “Lauderdale came up most. That means someone who owns an SRT8 either lives here or works here. Furthermore, a lot of the tweets mention Ocean Avenue. Which is why we’re on Ocean Avenue.”

“You’re a latter-day Sherlock,” I said.

“That makes you Watson.”

“Fine. I’m comfortable with—”

I shut up. A black Jeep SRT8 had just turned right onto the street in front of us. It traveled north slowly. Its windows were darkened—privacy glass. Perfect for a murderer, I thought. Murderers like privacy.

“There!” I said. “There!” There was a nasty worm of a thought at the back of my mind—this could be the person who …

who …

who took Paris.

“Yep,” you said. You turned the key in the ignition.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to follow it, obviously.” You checked the traffic and then gunned across the road to catch up with the Jeep. A guy in a BMW shook his fist at us.

“Keep two cars between us and them,” I said. “I saw it in a movie.”

“Yeah, I’m not going to do that,” you said. “I’d just lose them. I’m not a spy.”

“Okay.”

We fell silent as you kept after the Jeep, turning when it turned. At one point we hit some lights and the Jeep got through just before they went red. You braked, hard. “****,” you said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of your hand.

But then the lights went green and you pulled away, and there was the SRT8, just turning left a block ahead. You accelerated—if there had been a camera, you’d have been so busted. You drove fast, turned the corner with the tires squealing. The Jeep was maybe two hundred yards ahead, just a Datsun mini-truck thing between us and it.

Then the Jeep slowed and turned into a driveway.

You slowed the pickup to a crawl and parked just down the street. I nodded at the car door and you nodded back; we both got out and walked down the street.

You took my hand. It was the first time our skin had touched. I don’t know if you felt it, but I did. It was … it was as if there were thousands of nerve endings there, in my palm, in my fingers, that I had never known about, that had just lain dormant for my entire life. How can I have all this skin I didn’t know about? I thought. How can no one ever have touched it before?

Because I had never felt anything like this before.

I swallowed.

I looked at you.

We paused at the driveway where the Jeep turned, feeling the warmth of each other’s hands.

We saw the Jeep’s taillights disappear behind a warehouse, which was next to a massive amount of heavy equipment—cranes, diggers, rollers. A few guys were walking around in yellow hard hats, hi-vis vests on, brown boots and jeans a kind of uniform.

But none of this was what had snagged my attention.

What had snagged my attention was:

A sign on a couple of shiny stainless-steel poles, reading:

DEVON AND SONS DEMOLITION.

 

“What?” you said.

“The sign. Let’s say you work for a demolition firm. Think you’d find it hard to hide a body?”

“Oh.”

Silence, as we both pictured Paris buried beneath the foundation of a building; her hair crushed by concrete.

Well, I did anyway. I don’t know about you.

That was when the Jeep SRT8 appeared again, around the warehouse. It bounced over the rutted earth toward us, the windshield darkened so we couldn’t see who was inside. We stepped back, eyes on the car.

Then another Jeep SRT8 came out behind it, black too, its windows darkened.

Then another.

And another.

“Oh,” you said. “Great.”

“It’s a company car,” I said, stupidly. “A company car.”

A long moment of silence.

“There’s a lot of stuff to demolish when the economy is down, I suppose,” I said. I felt bleak. Our lead was not a lead at all. It was just a firm that owned a load of SRT8s.

“Of course,” you said. “Stupid of me.”

We watched the four black Jeeps drive down the road west from us, in convoy, before disappearing from view as they turned onto Ocean, toward town. Then we started walking back to the pickup.

“Well, the tweet thing worked,” you said.

“Yep.”

“But now we have too many SRT8s.”

“So we’re nowhere,” I said.

“Yeah,” you said. “I mean, for now.”

You pressed the key fob and the pickup flashed and beeped. We opened our doors to climb in.

I put my hands against the dash. My breath was coming in gulps, violent. My heart was spinning, fast, like a blender. A blender that was turning my organs to mulch, to liquid.

I touched my cheeks. Tears were running down them; I felt like I was choking. Actually choking.

You put your hand on my shoulder. Nothing more. You didn’t say anything.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” I said.

“Cass …”

“She’s dead, and we had ONE LEAD. And now …”

“The cops—”

“The cops know NOTHING. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, Cass.”

I turned away from you. Through my tears, the world on the other side of the truck window was blurred; running to the ground, melting down to nothing. I shut my eyes and closed it out.

 

“Cass. Cass.”

I opened my eyes. We were parked on one of the streets behind the boardwalk. We were right outside a fifties motel. The Flamingo. There was a giant pink plastic flamingo outside, holding a cocktail with an umbrella in it. Three floors of rooms rose up on the other side of a thin strip of grass, pink with white balconies, like a wedding cake.

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“I want to show you something,” you said.

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

You shrugged. You tapped the radio on your shoulder. “I am at work. When there are no deliveries, I’m supposed to sort stock, tidy up the piles. That kind of ****. But they won’t know.”

“And if you get a call for deliveries?”

“Then I’ll have to take it.”

“My dad—”

“Won’t be home for hours and you know it.”

“He sometimes comes back for lunch.”

“When was the last time?”

“About … Hmm. About two years ago.”

“Wow,” you said. “You two make me and my dad look functional.”

“We live to serve,” I said flatly.

You made an impatient gesture. “Anyway. I do want to show you something. Come on,” you said, and you got out of the truck and walked up to the motel.

“Fine,” I said, to nobody. And I followed you inside.

The lobby was arranged around a pond, a fake palm tree in the middle of it. A huddle of pink lawn flamingos gathered next to the palm tree, metal legs disappearing into the murky water. A mural of a lagoon in Florida surrounded us, lurid sunset turning the walls orange and red.

A young, bored-looking guy wearing glasses sat at the reception desk. You walked over, nodding to him.

“You got it?” he said.

“Yep.” You handed him a Jiffy envelope and he slid it away, out of sight under the desk.

“Cool if we go to the roof?” you said.

“Whenever, man,” said the guy behind the desk.

You nodded toward a door at the back of the lobby and then opened it for me. “Jesus,” I said. “Are you a drug dealer?” I was remembering your saying that you’d made a delivery to Bayview; that this was why you knew about the cross streets.

“Not me. My boss.”

“But …”

“Turns out, that’s why they wanted someone with a driving license. I don’t have to shell shrimp, but I do have to deliver stuff.”

“But if you were caught …”

“I won’t be. And I need the cash. It pays better than the shrimp.”

“You can’t need the money that badly.”

You stopped and looked at me. “No? My scholarship only pays tuition and room and board.”

“Your dad—”

“Lost his job like three years ago.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“So,” I said. “That’s what you wanted to show me? That you were dealing?”

“Actually, no.”

We were climbing the stairs; we’d arrived at the top of the building. We walked down a gloomy corridor, past a flickering green fire-exit sign, and stopped at a door that said,

POOL. OPEN 10–4 P.M., MAY TO OCT. NO NUDITY OR DIVING. NO UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN.

You pushed open the door, and we stepped out onto the roof. Pink lounge chairs were lined up next to a surprisingly clean swimming pool, the water clear and blue under the bright sunny sky. We were three stories up; you could see over the buildings on the other side of the street to the boardwalk, and the beach beyond, the sand almost golden next to the dark navy of the ocean. A container ship crawled across the horizon.

“Weirdly beautiful, isn’t it?” you said.

“Yeah.”

The pool was long and oblong. To the right of it was a bar area, a tiki-style thing with a straw roof. I figured they would be big on cocktails with umbrellas in them. Next to this was a small bandstand with mike stands, amps, and instruments sitting there, as if a band had been playing them and had suddenly abandoned them for some urgent reason.

At the edges of the roof were low walls. I could see why there were NO UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN. I could also see, by crouching, that when you were swimming you would barely see the walls—it would be as if you were swimming in the sea, nothing between you and the ocean.

You saw me crouching. “Cool, no?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When you’re in, it’s like an infinity of water.”

“Poetic.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I walked around the pool. “You come here often?”

“You picking me up?”

I raised my eyebrows. Didn’t answer.

“Sorry. Yeah, I do. To swim.”

“You swim here?”

You tapped your waist. “Always have swim shorts under my pants. I couldn’t be a lifeguard—not enough hours. But I have to swim.”

“Have to?”

“My scholarship.”

I looked at the pool. Then I looked at you. “So swim.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“Really? I don’t have—”

“You just said you always do.”

“Me and my big mouth. I’ll swim if you swim.”

I shrugged. It’s like I was saying, grief takes away your inhibitions. “Okay,” I said. “But you get in first. Then close your eyes.”

You shook your head, but it was kind of a formality; you were taking off your shirt, your shoes. Soon you were standing there in your shorts. I couldn’t help noticing the smooth ridges of your stomach. Then my eyes slid up and I saw something weird—a necklace around your neck, hanging down between your … between your, um, quite impressive pecs—but back to the point, the point being, it was kind of a feminine necklace. A silver chain, with a blue gemstone pendant of some kind. I thought it was odd, because it was totally the kind of thing a woman would wear.

But I didn’t get to think about it for long because you smiled at me, then dived in, knifing into the water with almost no splash, coming up halfway across the pool.

“Hey, no diving,” I said.

“And no nudity,” you said. “So don’t even think about it.”

“Ha-ha. Close your eyes.”

I stripped down to my underwear—of course I had to be wearing a bra that didn’t match—and jumped in. The water was cold despite the warmth of the day. It sent a shiver through the core of me. I swam over to you. “Come on, then,” I said. “Show me what you got.”

“A race?”

“Two lengths. You and me.”

“Okay …”

“You think you’re going to destroy me? My dad was a SEAL, remember?”

“True.”

We half swam, half walked to the side of the pool facing the ocean. It was a shallow pool. Then we stood and looked at each other.

“One. Two. Three.”

We both threw ourselves forward. I swam as fast as I could, which was pretty fast because, well, Dad a SEAL and all that, doing the crawl, feeling the water rushing over me. When I breathed, I got a glimpse of the ocean, and you were right, it was like swimming in forever. Like there was no border between the pool and the ocean.

I also saw that, as fast as I was, you were way ahead. You got to the end of the pool and did one of those turns pro swimmers do, disappearing under the water and then reappearing alongside me but facing the other way, already breaking the surface with a stroke. A few seconds later I reached the end and turned to see you already back where we had started.

“Huh,” I said.

You gave a sheepish smile. “I meant to go easy on you but—”

“But you can’t help your brilliance?”

“I train a lot.”

You sounded not entirely happy about this. “You don’t like it?” I asked.

“It’s fine. It’s swimming. I don’t … It’s just something I do.”

“Right.”

You pulled yourself out of the pool; sat on the side and looked down at me.

“I’m staying in here,” I said. “I’m in my underwear, remember?”

“How could I forget?”

“Ha-ha.”

You sat there for a while, and we just didn’t say anything, the sun on our skin, your legs in the water, me kind of floating there. I never knew what people meant about comfortable silences before then because silences between me and my dad were never comfortable.

A thought flashed: Yeah, and Paris is still gone.

It punches you like that, when you least expect it.

You kept glancing over at something—I thought maybe the bar? I thought maybe you were going to suggest that we steal a drink, which I would have been totally on board with at that point; I’d have been on board with drinking and drinking until I didn’t even remember that I ever knew anyone called Paris. But eventually you levered yourself up on your hands and kind of popped into a standing position, then walked over to the bandstand.

I took a deep breath. Tried to put myself into the moment. To tell myself there was nothing I could do to find Paris right at that moment.

You came back with a ukulele and sat down again, your feet in the water. “They have, like, a Hawaiian band that plays in the evenings,” you said. “It makes no sense; I mean, the decor is all Florida. But what can you do?”

“Hmm,” I said. I was spaced out—the pool and the sun gleaming on it; I felt like I was dissolving. Into sparkle and blueness and the sound of lapping water, shushing and bubbling, tapping against the tiled sides.

You cradled the ukulele. I was watching you. I succeeded so totally at getting into the moment, I forgot then that there was a voice. That I had a dad. That Paris had disappeared. I was feeling the water on my skin and looking at you, at the look on your face.

The look was love.

I don’t mean romantic love. I mean … the love of someone who is holding the thing they are meant to be holding. Doing the thing they are meant to be doing. It was interesting because I had not seen that look when you dived into the pool, or when you were swimming. But I saw it now, now that you had that instrument in your hands.

You ran your fingers over the frets. Then you bent your head so I couldn’t see your face, and started to play. Just notes at first, then runs and arpeggios—I think that’s what they’re called? And scales, I guess. Then you flowed into something I recognized—the Beach Boys. “God Only Knows.” You hummed along.

And here’s the thing: you were amazing. Technically, of course. But also, the instrument, it was like it breathed with you. Like you made it live, made it want to pour out its own song. You were impressive at the pier, when you were playing what people called out, on the electric organ, but when you played that ukulele … it was like I was hearing your soul.

Okay, now I’m the one being poetic and sickly.

Anyway.

As you hummed, I don’t know, I guess it was that faulty inhibition thing again, but I began to sing. I knew all the words. I sang the first verse, and then the chorus. You looked up at me, and I stopped, embarrassed.

You put aside the ukulele. “Hey,” you said. “Don’t go all shy on me. Keep singing. I like hearing your voice.”

I don’t like hearing my voice, I thought. I shut up.

“Oh, come on,” you said. “You have a beautiful voice.”

“No, I don’t. I’m barely in tune.”

A pause. “Yeah, okay, you don’t. But I still like to hear you sing.”

I made my eyes mock-wide. “Asshole! You don’t think I have a beautiful voice?”

“I—I just wanted to be honest with you; I didn’t want to give you some romantic bull**** and … ugh, I don’t think before I speak sometimes. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I was messing with you,” I said, elbowing you.

You smiled, relieved.

“Anyway,” I said, “you’re incredible. You really should be in a band. Or, I don’t know, uploading videos on YouTube.” You were looking at me skeptically. “I’m serious! You have talent.”

You shook your head. “Can’t.”

“Oh please. I saw the look on your face when you were playing. You love it.”

“I do.”

“So do it. Go to college or whatever, but do the music thing as well.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

You took a long breath. “My mom played. She was actually kind of a star in the seventies. I mean, not a big star. But she supported Simon & Garfunkel. Kind of a guitar, singing, folk kind of thing. She gave it up, the performing, when she met my dad. He was a mechanic in a small New Jersey town. It was like the most unlikely romance, you know? Anyway. She got me into it. When she died … I stopped playing. At home anyway.” Your hand went to your chest as you said all this, and I realized something, something about the necklace I had seen around your neck.

“That’s her necklace, right?”

You looked at me, surprised. “Right.”

You took your hand away, very self-consciously. Laid it on the white tiles by the pool.

“So, you stopped playing music at home because it was too painful?”

“No.”

I thought for a moment. “Oh. Your dad doesn’t like it? It reminds him of her, that kind of thing?”

“Uh-huh. He cleared out all the instruments. Gave them to Goodwill.”

“So you swim instead?”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t love swimming. You don’t even like it that much.”

You sighed. “No, not really.”

“Come on,” I said. “You can’t let your dad take away something you love. And when he’s not there … I mean, you could still—”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is. Tell him how you feel. Tell him you—”

You raised a hand—like, This conversation is over. Then you forced a smile. “But me and you, we can come here again, if you like? I’ll play, you sing. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said.

Then your radio crackled. “714, come in.”

“Time’s up,” you said. “I’ll close my eyes while you get out.”

 

I’m telling you all this, even though you were there, for two reasons.

1.    The whole thing with you and swimming and music? That’s going to come up again. When I see your dad, later in the story. I want you to understand it all from my point of view. I want you to see why I did the things I did. I told you: I want you to forgive me.

2.    I didn’t say it then; I mean I would have been too embarrassed, but that day on the roof of the Flamingo Motel … that was the best day of my life, since my parents took me to Disney World for my eighth birthday. I think it was the day I fell for you, properly. It was like a game of tag. You tagged me—and after that I had no choice but to follow you. Anyway. I thought I would write about it. Because it’s all pretty dark from here on in.
Hey!
I said two reasons and I actually gave two reasons!

 

Dr. Lewis had been crying.

I was less surprised than I was by Dr. Rezwari, but still, it was pretty remarkable. I mean, he wasn’t her family, he wasn’t a friend—he was a psychologist. But four days after Paris had disappeared he was still crying.

We didn’t really talk about me, we just talked about Paris, tried to convince each other she was still alive. I didn’t tell him about what you and I were doing, about our private investigation. I thought he would probably tell me not to do it. Which would have been good advice.

DR. LEWIS:	And how are you? Generally?
ME:	Stuff is bad with my dad. I’m kind of grounded. Actually, I’m going to get in so much trouble for coming here this evening. If he gets back early anyway. He may not. He probably won’t.
DR. LEWIS:	You still haven’t told your father about coming here?
ME:	No.
DR. LEWIS:	Okay. Anyone else who is helping you?
ME:	There’s a boy. When he’s there, the voice goes quiet.
DR. LEWIS:	That sounds good, for you.
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	But when he’s not there …
THE VOICE:	Paris is dead and rotting. Fish are eating her fingers.
ME:	The voice comes back.
DR. LEWIS:	On the topic of people helping you: You’re speaking to Dr. Rezwari? Making sure your medication dosage is correct?
ME:	Hmm.
DR. LEWIS:	She hasn’t written me. I thought she might. I sent her some notes but—
ME:	You sent her notes?
DR. LEWIS:	Yes. Sure. Standard procedure.
ME:	****.
DR. LEWIS:	You have told her about me?
ME:	Uh, yeah. Yeah. But … you didn’t tell her anything … private we have talked about?
DR. LEWIS:	About your mother?
ME:	Yeah.
DR. LEWIS:	No. The bare facts only. That we were talking.
ME:	Okay.
	Okay, okay. That wasn’t so bad.
	Anyway.
	The conversation went on.
ME:	Blah.
DR. LEWIS:	Blah blah.
Etc., etc., etc.

At the end of the half hour, I didn’t stand up. “I want to stay for group,” I said.

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Dr. Lewis. “There are a lot of people here who loved Paris. Love Paris.”

“Yeah,” I said, though that wasn’t why I wanted to stay. I was out of leads, and Dwight was the only one who might have some more information on Paris. I wanted to grab him once group was over.

But Dwight wasn’t first that day, and I worried that he wasn’t going to come. Five people, maybe, turned up, poured themselves coffee into their plastic cups and then sat down on plastic chairs in the circle.

He’s not coming, he’s not—

But then he did. He rushed in, wearing that NJPD SOFTBALL T-shirt he was always wearing, sweat patches under the arms. His jeans had food stains on them; on his feet were old Nike sneakers. He looked stressed.

“Hey, everybody,” he said. “Cass! You’re staying for group today?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Cool.”

He sat down, and Dr. Lewis got people to talk about how they were doing. We heard about the Red Voice and how it had been very aggressive all week, had made Rasheed burn himself with cigarettes.

“My dad’s voice has been bad this week too,” said Dwight. “Telling me I’m worthless. Telling me I’ll never amount to anything. That I don’t care about … don’t care about …”

“It’s okay,” said Dr. Lewis. “Go slow.”

“That I don’t care about Paris.”

“We all care about Paris,” said Dr. Lewis. “The voices can’t change that.”

“We all care. But we’re not all cops,” said Dwight.

Dr. Lewis nodded. “You feel a personal sense of responsibility.”

Dwight: “**** yeah, I do! I know what people say. That we don’t care about the whores, that we’re not doing anything. But we have nothing. We have no clues. Nothing. ****. I shouldn’t be talking about this.”

“This is a confidential environment,” said Dr. Lewis. “You’re in the circle of trust.”

“Anyway,” said Dwight. “I do care.”

“In this instance, then,” said Dr. Lewis, “the voice is representing the opinion of some of the media. That the police are incompetent.”

“I guess.”

“So tell the voice what you would tell the media. That it doesn’t understand the facts. Remind it of your schedule. You have it down to once a week, yes? The voice can talk on Fridays?”

“I did,” said Dwight. “Before …”

“Paris,” I said. I didn’t mean to speak, I just did.

“Yeah. Your voice bad too?” said Dwight. His zits had come back hard, fresh new red spots over his scars.

I forced myself back into the moment. “Yeah. Before … before, I had a big victory.” I looked out at the faces of the people. This was the first time I had spoken in group. They were looking at me with love, it seemed to me, their faces shining, some with hands clasped together. Willing me on. I smiled to myself. “The voice wanted me to cut off my toe and said it would kill my dad in the night if I didn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t sleep all night, but in the morning my dad was alive.”

“That’s amazing, Cass,” said Dr. Lewis. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“No,” I said. “I get that the voice doesn’t have the power it thinks it does. But then Paris … and then it started being nasty again. Insulting me. Telling me—”

“That you’re a nobody little ***** and everybody hates you.”

That was the voice.

Obviously.

“—telling me bad things,” I finished lamely.

“Anyone else?” said Dr. Lewis. “Let’s talk about how Paris’s disappearance has impacted our voice hearing.”

Blah.

Blah.

Etc.

Here’s the important part:

After the group was finished, I hung back. I was bursting with my insight; I was such an idiot. So naive. Thinking I could get Dwight to help me.

When Dwight was leaving I kind of followed outside the bowling alley to the 7-Eleven. At the coffee counter where the sugar and stuff was, I touched his arm. He had a bag slung over his shoulder.

“You’re working on the Houdini Killer case, right?” I said. “With Agent Horowitz and the other guy, the fat one?”

“Cass! I shouldn’t—”

“But you are?” I had told Julie not to talk to the cops, but I trusted Dwight. I had heard him talk about his voice, about the way his dad abused him. I knew he wasn’t the Houdini Killer. I knew that. I thought I knew a lot of things.

He sighed and nodded.

 

“There must be something I can do.”

“Leave it to the police,” said Dwight. “That’s what you should do.”

“She could be … being killed. Right now.”

“Or she could have run away. Gone back to New York.”

“Horowitz said that too,” I said. “But why would she? She left New York because her dad … because her dad …”

“I know,” said Dwight. “I was in group with her, remember?”

“So what about him?” I said. “Have you checked him out?”

Dwight nodded. “Parents say they haven’t seen her. And the dad has an alibi. A woman from his work who’ll swear he was with her.”

“You believe her?”

“It’s not like a movie,” said Dwight. “When people lie it’s not obvious. Point is, it’s a dead end. We have her photo with every police precinct on the East Coast. If she turns up, she turns up. Other than that, we have nothing. No evidence, no clues. Nothing.”

“He’s lying,” said the voice. “He’s a ******** liar. He knows something, but he’s not telling.”

“After six p.m.,” I said quietly to the voice.

“Your voice?” said Dwight.

“Yeah. And it’s saying that you’re a liar. That there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“There’s an ass-load I’m not telling you! I’m a cop. This is all confidential stuff.”

“It’s Paris,” I said. “If you know something important, I need you to tell me.”

“I don’t know something important.”

“But you suspect something.”

“No! Leave it, okay?”

“Dwight, please …”

“Jesus, Cass. I shouldn’t even be having this conversation. And I have nothing more to tell you; nothing that will help you or Paris. I promise.”

I sighed. I could sense I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him voluntarily.

So I held my breath for as long as I could—I mean, literally held it in my lungs.

“Cass, you okay?”

I was, but I was hoping I looked pale. I let my eyes go droopy and slumped a little. “I get … low blood sugar,” I said. “Would you get … some candy?”

“Candy?”

“Yeah. It has to be …” I kept my body floppy, kind of leaned on the counter, as if to hold myself up. “… nut free. Can you check with them?”

Dwight hesitated.

“Please?”

“Sure,” he said finally. He dropped his bag on the floor by my feet and went over to the cash register. I saw him talking to the Mexican guy there, finding out what was safe.

“Quick,” said the voice. “While his back is turned.”

I took out my cell phone and reached down for his bag.

 

And there it was, inside his briefcase. A thick brown file, closed with loops of elastic:

OAKWOOD PD ACTIVE FILE LF-098

I flipped it open quickly, took as many photos as I could, turning the pages. I got maybe twenty, and then I saw Dwight coming back over—a rack of Jersey Shore car magnets was partially shielding me—and I dropped the file back into the bag and straightened up.

“Skittles,” I said as he leaned against the counter and handed them over. “My … favorite.”

 

The next morning I was sitting at home on my bed with my cell. I started paging through the photos of the case file. I hadn’t been able to check what I was capturing—had just pointed and shot, getting as many pictures as I could. You would have been proud of me. I mean, I had to learn to use the camera function specially, practiced the previous night, taking pictures of my wall, pages from my books.

Almost immediately I stopped cold. Staring at the photo in front of me, of maybe the very first page in the case file. I should have known, I thought. It should have been obvious.

It was right there in black and white on one of the first pages:

Investigation into the disappearance of Lily Eleanor French.

Lily.

Eleanor.

Not Paris. She must have taken the name for herself, maybe when she started … working. Because of her surname being French, maybe? Or before that, I don’t know.

I remembered her saying to Shane that she was more Paris, Texas, than Paris, France, and now I thought: not Paris at all.

I wondered if Julie knew she was really named Lily. I figured it didn’t really matter anyway. She wasn’t Lily to me. She was Paris.

Minutes passed. I was still looking at the name. Somehow it struck me as the saddest thing of all, this revelation. It was like … like an invasion of privacy. I mean, any investigation is an invasion of privacy. But.

So, after a few minutes of just sitting there, getting used to this new reality, I made a simple decision: I was going to un-know this information. I was going to keep thinking of her as Paris. Because that was how she wanted me to think of her.

I started going through the photos again. There was nothing else in them I didn’t know already—there was no evidence at the house; no fingerprints other than Paris’s; no blood. Her father’s alibi, in stark print.

Mr. French was with me all night. We ate beef bourguignonne with an excellent Bordeaux.

Her mother:

I haven’t seen Lily for two years, not since she moved down to that awful town of yours.

There was Julie’s witness statement too, the first part of it—I hadn’t managed to get any more with my phone camera. She went into the house. After that I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up she was calling my phone …

I skimmed the rest. I already knew it.

I clicked to the next picture—my wall.

I was back to the start.

I had quite literally hit a wall.

 

I put my phone down. I felt even more sorry for Paris. Somehow, knowing she was really Lily … it made her seem smaller. More exposed. Younger.

She wasn’t much older than you, I reminded myself.

There was nothing in the case file, absolutely nothing. Like Dwight had said. Paris had just disappeared, and there were literally no clues to follow. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I just had to … stop.

“You’re not giving up that easily?” said the voice.

“Huh?”

“On finding her. You’re not giving up, are you?”

“What do you want me to do?” I said. “The police don’t know anything.”

“So?”

“So a teenage girl isn’t going to solve a case the police can’t solve. Just …” I thought of Paris’s body, weighed down, at the bottom of the ocean. Bloating. Hair floating. Fish swimming through her clothes.

Ugh. Stop.

“Okay, then, just let her die,” said the voice.

“What do you want me to do?” I said again.

The voice fell silent for a moment. “Isn’t that boy coming to pick you up? Maybe he’ll have ideas.”

I checked my watch. The voice was right: it was time for you to pick me up—you had your break at eleven a.m., and we’d agreed to keep looking for Paris.

“I thought you didn’t like him?” I said to the voice.

“I don’t.”

“So aren’t you going to instruct me to break up with him? To, I don’t know, tell him to **** off or you will make me cut off my fingers?”

“You’ve made it clear you won’t respond to threats like that,” said the voice, in a weirdly reasonable tone.

“Right.”

“Anyway, I don’t need to,” it said, cruel again, mocking. “You’re going to mess things up yourself.”

“What? Why?”

“Have you told him about me? About … this?”

I sat up straighter on the bed. “No.”

“Well, there you go. A lie that is sure to blow up in your face. ‘Oh, sorry I didn’t mention that I’m a psycho.’ ”

“I’m not a psycho.”

“Semantics.”

I sighed. “Besides it’s all … I mean … I shouldn’t be with him anyway. It’s not the right time, with Paris, and …”

“Love is no respecter of right times,” said the voice. But not in a kind way.

“Oh, go away,” I said.

And it did. I felt it go behind its curtain, and the stage of my mind was clear. I closed my eyes for a long moment. Maybe I should tell him, I thought.

But then he will never look at you the same way again.

Maybe I shouldn’t be seeing him anyway. Maybe I’ll tell him we can’t be seeing each other. If my dad found out … If Paris …

Yeah, right. You tell him that. You tell him you don’t want to see him.

Look. I’m capable of having a conversation with myself even without the voice.

Well.

Why start holding back now?

I went downstairs, still turning everything over. Paris, the lack of evidence, the voice, the fact that I was lying to you.

You’re not lying to him; you’re just not telling him something.

Yeah, right.

As I waited on the porch I felt empty; scooped out like an avocado skin. Paris was gone, and I had failed to do anything about it. I’d failed her. Just like I failed my mom.

A clip played over and over in my head, a YouTube video on repeat—me lying on my bed, the white noise drowning out my phone so that I couldn’t hear it ringing, couldn’t hear Paris calling for my help. I might as well have handed her over to the Houdini Killer myself. And now there was nothing I could do to help her, nothing I could do to help find her.

I stood there, waiting for the voice to come back again and comment. To say,

“Yes. You’re worthless.”

Or,

“You disgust me.”

Or,

“It’s your fault she’s dead.”

But the voice didn’t say anything.

Strange.

A couple of minutes later you pulled up, one arm out the window of your pickup. You were wearing your Ray-Bans; the sun was shining brightly. There was a hummingbird hovering in the air over the rosebushes Mom planted, which had grown out of control, its red breast quivering. A few songbirds were chirping—our neighbor Mrs. Cartwright puts seed out for them.

I listened to the unchanging language of a sparrow; that same liquid phrase of notes, over and over; a musical motif that would never alter. It made me think of Philomela, and I thought, What if that sparrow was Paris?

I guess you probably know the story. There was a king, Tereus, and he was married to Procne. But he desired her sister, Philomela. So he raped Philomela and then, to stop her telling anyone, he cut out her tongue and imprisoned her, telling his wife that her sister was dead. But Philomela wove a tapestry depicting what had happened to her, and had it smuggled to Procne.

Procne, learning of her husband’s crime, killed their son and served his flesh to her husband. Incensed with rage, Tereus pursued Procne and Philomela and tried to strangle them—but before he could, the gods turned them into birds: Procne into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow.

And that’s why the nightingale sings “tereu, tereu, tereu,” because forevermore it’s accusing Tereus, naming him, exposing his hideous crime. Like Echo mocking her murderer, Pan, by singing his voice and his music back to him.

There are no nightingales in North America of course. Just ordinary thrushes.

Anyway. That was my state of mind. Standing in the yard, thinking of stories about murder and cutting out tongues, and the ghosts of women turned into birds.

Maybe she really did run away.

Maybe she did go to New York.

“And maybe I’ll just never know,” I said aloud. And then burst into tears.

I concentrated on the sound of the sparrow.

Cheep-cheep. Cheep-cheep.

No, I thought. She’s dead. Paris is dead.

And what if she was in the sparrow’s voice? Like Procne and Philomela? A sparrow, instead of a nightingale or a swallow? What if she was telling me a name, telling it to me over and over, accusing someone?

Cheep-cheep.

It didn’t sound like any name I recognized.

Or what if she was in the cranes in her bedroom, the ones she’d made with her own hands, the two hundred and sixty-one cranes—Paris gone but still there, multiple, spread across paper birds?

I shook my head.

Crazy.

“What’s up with you?” you said, as you walked up.

“I was wondering what the sparrow was saying.”

You listened. “I think it’s saying, ‘I am a sparrow,’ ‘I am a sparrow.’ Over and over.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Why, what were you thinking?”

“Oh,” I said. “Pretty much the same.” I didn’t want you to know the kind of crazy thing I was thinking. Clearly I have no such compunction now.

We went over to the pickup and got inside. “So,” you said. “What did the cop say? Did you find out anything?”

“Nothing.” I told you about the parents, the empty case file that gave us nothing. But you know that of course. As I spoke, you drove the F-150 into town, and to the alley where the plush warehouse was.

“What do we do now?” you said.

“I have no idea.” Without warning, I started to cry again.

“Oh, Cass …”

You put your arms around me. They were strong, and the sound of cars passing was just a quiet shushing in the background, and I could smell you, the scent of you, and I wished that moment would never, ever end.

But it did. Those moments always do.

You pulled back, touched away a tear from my cheek with your thumb. Gently. So gently.

“But you said the cop was holding something back,” you said. “That he knew something.”

“Maybe.”

“Then we need to find out what it is.”

“Oh sure, that will be easy,” I said. “We’ll just make the cop tell us everything he knows, using our irresistible powers of suggestion.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah, hmm.”

You made a kind of pained shrug movement. “So we’re stuck.”

“Yeah.”

You got out of the truck and pulled up the rolling door, then drove the pickup into the warehouse. It was a duller day; the beams of light shining down from the windows were less bright, the piles of toys lost in the gloom, as you looked deep into the warehouse. It was spookier—I could just make out the animals closest to us, their plastic eyes shining in the light from outside.

“Creepy,” I said.

“Yes.”

We made our way into the shadow-crossed space of the warehouse.

“What are we looking for?” I said.

“Seven mixed Disney characters, small,” you said. “Two SpongeBob, medium. Three Moshi Monsters, large.”

“Okay. Which way do I go?” I couldn’t think of anything better to do than to help you.

You pointed to the far right corner, and I took a step—at the same time you set out in the opposite direction, so we bumped into each other; I lost my balance; my hand shot out and you grabbed my arm, put your other hand behind my back.

We stood there for a moment, our bodies touching, your hands on me, holding me.

The light shifted outside; a cloud moved away from the face of the sun, or something; and a shaft of light came down, illuminated us. We were in a glowing column, dust hanging suspended in it; I almost thought we might rise up off the ground, like people in those weird religious paintings.

You shifted forward; I shifted forward.

The electrons in our bodies reached out for each other, spinning. I felt the charge of it, you a positive and me a negative, making sparks that flew from our eyes and our fingertips to touch each other; invisible.

You lowered your face and after a moment that felt

endless

your lips met mine and we kissed, very slowly. Time ended and has never really begun again, not for me. We sank down, we knew the beam of light would hold us and keep us safe; we lay on the softness of plush toys and our tongues touched and the circuit was completed; I lit up like a million-watt bulb.

I was shining. Light was blazing from my every pore. My eyes were closed, and the strip lights were turning the inside of my eyelids red, everything red. That’s your color, you know, the one I see and feel when I think of you. Emotions are always associated with colors, aren’t they? Green with envy. Well, when you are in my head you are always there with red: sunlight, warmth, heat.

People are green with envy. Yellow with cowardice. I am red with you.

Our arms were around each other, and we were cushioned by stuffed animals. I half opened my eyes, and I saw Elmo looking back at me. It was like he was smiling at me.

I want you to know something: I have never felt safer than in that moment. I felt like a fish, like a trout in the shade of a bank, enveloped by water, lifted up by it.

The promise of buoyancy. The impossibility of falling.

Then …

A buzzing.

An unmistakable crackling.

“714, where the hell are those bags? Get your ass to Pier One.”

My eyes snapped open. So did yours. “Unbelievable,” you said.

“Yeah,” I said.

You started to get up; put out your hand to catch mine and help me to my feet. “Oh well,” you said. “We have all the time in the world.”

I’m crying right now, just thinking about it.

There is no beam of light around me, keeping me protected.

There are only bugs, in their glowing tanks; stick insects and roaches and millipedes, crawling around with their stiff little bodies, their unloving ichor in place of blood, their clicking appendages and hard little shells.

They’re all around me, but they don’t give a ****. I don’t know why my dad likes them. They’re creatures of coldness; no heart in them at all. Primitive things like shards of stone that move, clacking and ticking. They have no voices. They will be here when we’re all dead.

 

I’m not proud of the next bit so I’m going to tell it quickly.

You dropped me at home and I was walking to the front door, already starting to sweat in the noonday sun, when the voice spoke.

“There is a way,” it said.

“Nice to hear from you,” I said without thinking. “But could you speak to me after—”

Then I stopped. I literally stopped moving, one foot up on the porch step. That hummingbird was still there; it was like it was frozen in time above those roses, except you could see its blurred wings beating. The sun was warm on my skin.

“Wait,” I said, suddenly hearing what the voice had said, hearing it properly. “What do you mean there is a way?”

“To get Dwight to talk.”

I sat down on the step. “Let me get this straight. You’re helping now?”

Silence.

“Hello?” I said.

“You don’t want me to help?” said the voice eventually. Its tone, its timbre, was less aggressive than usual. It sounded … like someone who knows they have behaved badly and is a little embarrassed, and—there’s no other word for it—apologetic.

“Um. Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“Yes, you don’t want me to, or, yes, you want me to?”

“Yes, I want you to.”

“Okay,” said the voice. “Then listen.”

 

I rode the bus to the police station. I didn’t want to tell you what I was doing. Because I knew that you wouldn’t approve. Because I knew you would tell me not to.

You would have said it was mean, and you would have been right.

So … I lied to you again.

Basically.

For about the millionth time, I’m sorry.

Of course, it got an awful lot worse, later. The lying, that is. Not the sorriness. The sorriness is constant, and it could not get any worse.

When I arrived at the police station I asked for Dwight.

“Dwight what?” said the woman on reception, a brassy blonde with dark roots and even darker circles under her eyes. She looked like she needed to go home and get three hours more sleep before starting work again.

“Huh?” I said.

“His last name, honey,” said the woman.

“Oh. I don’t know. But he’s a cop. Here. His name is Dwight.”

The woman tapped her long fingernails on her desk. The desk was pitted, made of cheap wood. Everything about the station was cheap. “We have two Dwights. One’s in traffic. The other’s in homicide.”

“Homicide,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “You sure?”

I held her gaze. “Yes.”

She nodded slowly. “I’ll call up. See if he’s available. Your name was …?”

I hadn’t told her my name. “Cass,” I said. “He knows me.”

She dialed a number and waited while it rang. She told whoever was on the other line—Dwight, I guess—that I was there to see him. She listened for a moment, said “uh-huh”, and then put down the phone.

“Third floor, right-hand side,” she said. “There’s an elevator just there.”

I walked past a dead potted plant and got in the elevator, rode up to the third floor. I came out onto a utilitarian corridor, like you’d find in any office building, or at least any office building of a company that has seen better times. There were motivational posters on the wall—BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE. Also missing-person posters, and advertisements for charity barbecues and touch football.

I turned right and followed the corridor until I came to an open-plan office. I could see the ocean from up here—far off, a couple of recreational fishing boats. There was a haze over the water and the beach, the rides of the piers like smudged watercolor. Inside the office there were people sitting at desks, others standing and talking to each other—a whiteboard in a corner had some scribbled notes and questions on it. A few rooms with doors lined the side wall.

Dwight put his phone down, stood up from a desk, and walked over to me. “Cass,” he said. His tone was … wary. “What are you doing here?”

“I need for you to tell me what you know,” I said.

“About what?”

“About Paris. And about the cops. You went all weird when we were talking about it. I know there’s something.”

He took my arm and steered me back toward the corridor. “There isn’t, Cass. Leave it, okay?”

I looked over his shoulder at the other cops working; a couple of them had turned to watch us, and this is the part I’m not proud of.

“Do they know?” I said.

He stopped, so we were standing just in and just out of the open-plan room. “Do they know what?”

“About group. About Dr. Lewis.”

His eyes widened. He was looking at me like I had disappeared and some other, scarier person had been dropped down in front of him instead. Like I was an alien. “Keep your voice d—”

“Do they?”

“What do you think?” he hissed.

“I think they don’t. Not all of them anyway. Your boss, maybe, because I guess you had to tell him. Her? Him or her. I have no idea.”

“You’re babbling, Cass,” said the voice.

“Time to leave,” said Dwight.

“No.”

“What’s your deal anyway?” he said. “You hardly even knew Paris. Why are you so obsessed with this?”

I took a step back, like I’d been gut-punched. “What? She was my friend.”

He held his hands up. “Fine, fine. Just get out of here. I can’t have you here.”

“No,” I said. “Time to tell me what you’re holding back.”

“Jesus, Cass! I could lose my job. I’m not being blackmailed by some teenage girl into—”

“I’m not blackmailing you,” I said.

“Oh yeah, sure.” His breath was bad: coffee and cigarettes. It was not helping with the nausea in the pit of my stomach, the self-hatred. But the voice was egging me on. “Look, I’m not even working the case,” he said. “I don’t talk to anyone about it. I don’t know what they’re doing. Anything I said … it would just be a personal hunch.”

“Please, Dwight,” I said. “Please. I’m sorry about … about what I said, about your colleagues. For mentioning group. But I need to know. I need to find Paris.”

Dwight looked into my eyes for what felt like minutes.

“Cass,” he said slowly. “Please understand. I cannot do what you’re asking.”

“But—”

He shook his head, more sad than anything else. “No buts,” he said. “I’m a police officer. I’m not going to give you information. I’m not compromising our investigation, and I’m not supporting you in going on some vigilante mission of your own.”

“She’d want you to help me,” I said.

He flinched. “Low blow, Cassie,” he said. Then he put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen. You have to drop this. Promise me you’re going to drop this.”

“I promise,” I lied.

Dwight put his head in his hands. “****,” he said. “****.”

I should probably send him an apology letter too.

 

A picture, in my head:

Paris enters a dark house by the ocean. She thinks she’s meeting some guys for a bachelor party.

Then … what?

Someone hits her over the back of the head? She falls, seeing stars, scuffs her hands on the linoleum floor. There is graffiti on the walls; she can smell the acrid scent of urine.

She turns; it makes fireworks of pain go off in her head. She sees a cop standing by the door, in his uniform.

Thank God, she thinks.

But then he takes a step toward her. And he smiles. And he raises the hammer again.

Why should it be a hammer? I don’t know. I just get these images. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could make them go away.

But we can’t always make things go away.

The voice has taught me that at least.

 

Another picture in my head:

I’m with you, in the glow of sunset, sitting squashed together in a lifeguard stand, close to Pier Two. The lifeguard is gone, and the beach is empty apart from a few stragglers, apart from couples like us in the other stands; we were lucky to get this one, though pulling up in the company pickup probably worked pretty well to reserve it for us.

It was inevitable we’d end up here, sometime. We’re both Jersey, and we follow the old paths, the old patterns. It’s in our blood, like bees swarming to the same tree, year after year.

We were a boy, and a girl, and we were at the shore in the summer, and the lifeguard stand was there. Like a beacon.

The late-evening sun is hitting us horizontal, heat-lamp warm on my skin. You put your arm around me, and I feel your strength, the sheer life of it, buzzing, and we spark like a plug and a socket held close together, like an arc welder; the energy of it is a jolt to my heart, defib pads; ka-bam.

A seagull drifts past, eye level, on dirty white wings. Waves break whitely.

“We should do this more often,” you say.

“Hmm,” I say. I am merging with the sun, with the ocean, with you. I look at the white-hot disk in the sky and then my eyes put stuttering circles of light on everything—the sand, the waves, your face.

“And go on a date.”

“Hmm.”

“A real date, like, movie and dinner.”

I frown. “I can’t do that.”

“You can’t do a date?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My dad,” I say. “I can’t go out at night.”

Now it’s your turn to frown. “Your dad works late almost every night.”

I shake my head. “Too risky. He knows everyone. Someone might see us.”

“You go out,” you say. Accusation is a seam of freezing cold quartz in the rock of your voice.

A moment passes; the sun lowers one more increment; the seagull dives, splashes.

“I …”

“I’ve seen you leave. Take the bus. Last Thursday, right? You didn’t get back till late.”

“Um, yes,” I say. Group, I think. But of course I can’t risk you finding out about that part of me.

“So how come you can do that and you can’t go on a date with me?”

“I just can’t.”

You shift in the seat so you’re looking at me. I am very conscious of the steps leading up, white peeling paint in the sideways sun. I can hear the gulls, the ocean, cars, even, on the roads close to the pier, music. It’s as if the volume has been turned up on the world. I have a brief urge to jump, to leap down to the sand below. I might break my leg. I might not. I half close my eyes instead, and the sun makes butterfly wings of my eyelashes; iridescent. Glow fills my vision like lens glare.

But this is incapable of stopping time.

I know the question that is coming.

I know it like you know the vibration in the track is a train coming, when you put coins on the rails, as a kid.

And I can’t stop it anymore than I could stop a train.

“Where do you go?” you say. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Yes.” I pause. “You don’t need to worry. It’s nothing like that.” But in my head, I’m thinking: Is that true? Is that true that he doesn’t have to worry? This is a question I don’t even need the voice to ask me.

“I wasn’t worried. I just don’t get why you won’t tell me.”

“It’s … personal,” I say.

“I thought we were in a personal zone,” you say. “Like … getting to know each other.”

“We are,” I say.

“Apart from your telling me about your life. About why you looked so gray when we first met. Why you go off mysteriously. Why your dad seems so concerned about you.”

“Yes,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Yes, apart from all that stuff.”

You sigh. “So what are we supposed to do now?”

I look at the glowing ocean, the boats bobbing far out, the surf, hushing below us. “Traditionally I think the idea is to kiss.”

You smile, slightly, at that at least.

“Okay,” you say.

And you kiss me, and just like before, everything disappears—flash—like a magician’s trick, the stand, the peeling steps, the susurration of the ocean, the town behind us, the calling of the gulls, everything.

There is only you, and the blackness, and the fireworks behind my eyelids, exploding across an infinite sky.

Only …

Is it just my imagination? Is it just retrospect, is it just what I know now that makes me think there’s a hesitation, a slight pulling away? A chink of light, in the darkness, flatter and harsher than the bursting rockets of my blood vessels, something bright and cold, a lamp for examining the cracks of things, for tilting them over, and revealing their flaws.

My flaws.

But it’s okay, I tell myself. It’s okay, because he’s still kissing you.

But the magic is broken. And of course, it’s not like you’re kissing me now.

I wish you were. I am looking at a stick insect instead. It does not seem like it wants to kiss me. And I wouldn’t want it to.

I’m not that desperate.

Yet.

 

The next day, Julie called me. It was kind of out of the blue.

“Um … hi,” I said.

“Hi, Cass.”

Silence.

“Listen,” said Julie. “You want to come over later, maybe? Just … I don’t know. Just to talk.”

I nodded, like an idiot, as if Julie could see that through the phone. “Uh, yeah, that sounds good,” I said. It did actually. “What time?”

A couple of hours later I arrived at the condo. There was a police car outside, parked. Empty. I noticed it because I always noticed police cars, those days. I figured it couldn’t be anything to do with Julie, I mean she couldn’t be in trouble, but I quickened my pace anyway.

I rode up in the elevator and went down the corridor, then knocked on Julie and Paris’s door. Julie’s door, I guess I should say. Julie opened it and the first thing she said was “Sorry.”

“Sorry what?” I said.

She inclined her head toward the living room. “There’s a cop here,” she said. “He just showed up.”

“More questions?”

“No. No … he’s the one who came. That night. When I called 911. He says he just wants to talk about Paris. He seems … upset almost.”

“Weird,” I said. Thinking: The killer? “Do you think he … I mean … could he be …?”

Julie shook her head. “No way.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll see.”

I followed Julie into the living area. A guy in cop uniform stood up and blinked at me, as if I were brightly lit.

“Brian,” he said, holding out a limp hand to shake.

“Cassie,” I said.

Julie made coffee. The three of us sat there in the living area, drinking it. The others ate cookies, but I didn’t of course.

“Paris made these,” said Julie. “They’re kind of stale.”

Brian didn’t complain.

For a while no one spoke. I was thinking: Julie was right. Because Brian did not seem like a killer. I mean, he had a little goatee and he kind of sniffled when he cried. He was weedy too—I couldn’t see him hoisting a body over the side of a boat. Or overpowering a prostitute, for that matter.

“So, Brian,” said Julie after a while, after it became clear that Brian wasn’t going to break the ice. “What did you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” said Brian.

“Um. Right.”

“I just … I wanted to talk to someone who knew her,” he said.

A pause. Brian looked at me as if for help, but I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to help him because I didn’t understand what he wanted.

“Why?” said Julie. “Why do you want to talk to someone who knew her?”

Brian looked down at the carpet between his feet. “Because I … I liked her. Loved her, I guess.”

He looked up, then down again.

“Oh,” said Julie.

She met my eyes, and mouthed: What the ****?

“I was … I was following you that night, you know,” said Brian, looking at Julie now.

“You were following us?” said Julie.

“Yeah. I mean, following Paris. But it was usually you who drove her, right?”

“Yes,” said Julie.

“Why?”

“Because of the killer! Because I was worried about her. I kept telling her, she had to be careful. But she didn’t listen to me. She just laughed. She thought she was invincible.” Julie turned to me. “Immortal, you know?”

“Yes,” I said. I did know. I could picture her laughing.

“Well, I was the same,” said Brian. “That’s why I followed your car. I just … I just wanted to protect her.”

“Yeah,” said Julie. “You didn’t do such a good job of that, did you?”

Brian started crying. There was no warning: tears just started leaking out of his eyes abruptly.

“Jesus ******** Christ, Brian, pull yourself together,” said Julie. I was starting to see why Paris had liked her. She was tough.

“Sorry,” said Brian.

Julie flinched. “No. I apologize. There was no need to snap at you.” I could hear her mom in her voice; it’s weird how people can do that, kind of scold themselves—it’s wired into them from childhood, I think. “It’s just … everyone was in love with Paris.”

It was my turn to flinch. That was me, wasn’t it? I was just like everyone else. I didn’t mean anything to Paris. I was just one of the people, the little people who—

“So,” said Julie, interrupting my thoughts. “You were there, already, when I dialed 911. Right?”

“Uh-huh,” said Brian. “When dispatch put the call through, I was already on the scene. I just had to drive up. That’s how come I was so fast.”

“You were there already,” I said. “So you could have killed her.” It was such a lame thing to say. So direct and unsubtle. But this is real life, where you don’t have time to think through everything you say before you say it. This isn’t some Nancy Drew story. That much is going to become rapidly obvious.

“I loved her!” said Brian. “She was everything to me. And what are you thinking anyway? That I, like, murdered her in the house and then somehow hid her body and got back to my police car, and then drove up?”

Put like that, it did sound kind of dumb.

“I mean, how does that even work?” he continued. “We searched that house. What would I have done with the body?”

“Maybe you hid her in the trunk,” I said, without much conviction.

“Of my squad car? Yeah.”

We sat there in silence for a moment.

“How did you meet her anyway?” I asked.

Brian blushed.

“Oh,” I said, figuring out right away what the blush meant.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “It was a party. She … did her thing.”

“She took her clothes off,” said Julie, with a little acid in her voice.

“But … it was more than that,” said Brian. “I mean, for me. She was … she was an incredible person. That sounds cheesy. But … she was, like, lit up, you know? Like neon.”

“I know,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Julie.

There was another long moment where no one said anything. I got the sense Julie would very much have liked Brian to leave the apartment but was too polite to say so.

“Okay,” I said finally. “So assuming you’re telling the truth, Brian, who do you think did kill Paris?”

“Why?” he said. “Because you’re going to solve the case? Like some Nancy Drew ****?”

“Maybe,” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, the smile slowly dying from his lips. “You’re serious?”

“What are we going to do? Just forget about her?” I said.

Brian turned to Julie. “You’re involved in this?”

Julie shook her head.

Oh great, thanks, Julie.

“You should leave it to the agents,” said Brian to me. “That guy Horowitz is good. He blew my timeline in, like, a day. Confronted me about it. I mean, he knew I got there too fast. I had to tell him … what I just told you.”

“But he doesn’t know who the killer is,” I said.

“He doesn’t talk much. But I think he has a theory. I think he maybe has a suspect.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“And you don’t know who this suspect might be?”

The most fractional hesitation. “No.”

“Then we’ll keep looking,” I said.

“I would say that it’s dangerous and that you totally should not do that,” said Brian. “But I don’t think it would make much difference, would it?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Okay. What’s your next move?”

I shook my head. I had no clue. “You have any ideas?” I said.

“You’re … what? You’re recruiting me to your little Nancy Drew gang?”

“Will you stop talking about Nancy Drew?” I said.

“And it’s not a gang,” said Julie. She cut me a look, a sort of angry look. Like she didn’t like me wanting to find the killer.

“Anyway,” said Brian to me. “You want me to help you? This is crazy. I’m a cop.”

“Exactly.”

He sighed again. “I’m not going to help you get yourself killed.”

Another awkward, quiet moment.

“Hey, Cass,” said the voice.

Oh, yes. Just what I needed. Come back after— I started saying, silently, inside my head.

“No, wait,” said the voice. “Ask him why he thinks Horowitz has a theory.”

“What?” I said. I realized I had said this out loud when I saw the others looking at me. “I mean … ,” I said to them, “… what am I supposed to do, abandon my friend?”

Brian shrugged.

“He hesitated,” continued the voice. “He hesitated when you asked if he knew who the suspect was.”

I rewound my mental tape. The voice was right.

You’re helping me now? I asked, silently this time.

“I’m not allowed to help you?” said the voice.

No, of course. Of course you can.

“Good. So ask him.”

“Why do you think Horowitz has a theory?” I asked.

“I don’t know, he doesn’t talk much, he just—”

“No. I don’t mean, what makes him have this theory? I mean, what makes you think that he has a theory?”

“Oh.” Brian thought for a moment. I could see that he was weighing up the risks of talking to me. He seemed uncomfortable with the whole situation actually, and I figured that was good for me. It might make him talk, just to get out of there. “It was something he said about an alibi.”

“Which was?”

Brian looked at Julie for help, but she wouldn’t meet his eye. He looked back at me. “The dad, okay? Horowitz doesn’t like his alibi. Plus … the phone call. To Julie. Paris’s phone call, after she disappeared.”

I thought for a second. “Because she told Julie not to call the cops?”

“Yeah. Why do that? Unless maybe you know the person who has grabbed you.”

Julie was frowning. “So, what, her dad who lives in New York just happens to come down to Oakwood and orders a stripper and thinks, ****, it’s my daughter, so he kills her?”

Brian shrugged. “I guess not. But maybe the dad knows she’s a stripper. Comes down and hires her, to confront her about it. And things go wrong. Get violent.”

A pause.

It seemed plausible, I had to admit.

“But his work colleague said he was with her that night.”

Brian’s mouth was open. “You know about that? How?”

I shrugged. “I know a lot of things.” This was basically straight fronting—there was a lot I didn’t know—but Brian looked impressed, and that was enough for me.

“Yeah, well, Horowitz said anyone could say that. No real way to verify, unless they went to a restaurant or something, which they didn’t.”

I stood up, my head spinning.

Paris’s dad.

Maybe not the Houdini Killer at all.

Maybe her own dad.

“See?” said the voice. “Now you’re getting somewhere.”

 

Say you’re a father, and you abused your daughter in some way when she was growing up.

You’re not a nice man.

Then one day you hear that she’s doing sex stuff for money, down in New Jersey, where you pay for her to attend college.

Say you’re a psychopath, maybe.

1.    You travel down to Oakwood.

2.    You have your daughter’s card, or her cam website, or something. You use these to e-mail, using a new account you have created. You say it’s for a party.

3.    You make the appointment at a deserted house. Maybe you have searched through foreclosure records.

4.    Your daughter arrives. You fight. You push her, maybe, and she falls, hits her head on a step. She is out; you think maybe she’s even dead. You put her in the trunk of your car, but you don’t realize that she has her cell, that she is going to call her friend Julie.

5.    Though, as it turns out, your daughter does not name you anyway.

6.    And she isn’t dead. But you kill her. You do kill her. Later. So that she can’t talk.

7.    And you tell some girl from your office to say that you were at home all night.

8.    And she does.

9.    And the police have to accept your alibi.

10.    Except that there is one policeman who is suspicious. Agent Horowitz.

11.    And there is me.

12.    And I’m coming for you.

Or say something else.

Say you’re a cop and you’re in love with Paris. Say you follow her and Julie to a party where she’s going to be stripping.

Say that suddenly you can’t take it anymore, the idea of her exposing herself to other men; you wait till she leaves and you grab her—I mean, Julie’s timeline is shaky; she said herself she fell asleep—and:

1.    You kill her, you strangle her, I don’t know, or you think you kill her anyway and

2.    You put her in the trunk of your car and

3.    She calls Julie but doesn’t give your name because you’re a cop and

4.    You dispose of her body after you respond to the 911 call and

5.    You lie to the annoying girl looking into Paris’s death and you tell her that the father did it.

 

Or it’s neither of those things.

It’s the serial killer, and he’s someone else entirely. Someone who drives a Jeep SRT8.

Or Paris ran away and isn’t dead at all.

 

I’m nearly at the point where I lost you—where I threw you away.

I’ve been putting it off.

But I can’t put it off any longer.

 

When you came back from work I was waiting up in my room. Shane was already sitting in one of the deck chairs—you flung yourself down into the other one and Shane handed you a beer.

I went downstairs and out into the yard.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” you said, because our relationship CONTINUED TO BE SCRIPTED BY THE GREAT PLAYWRIGHTS.

“You okay?” you said.

“Yep,” I said, in AN EXCHANGE TO RIVAL MARLOWE.

Shane raised his beer. “Hey, Cass,” he said.

“Hey, Shane.”

Shane started to stand. “Here, take my chair,” he said. “I’ll sit on the ground.”

You raised your eyebrows. “You say that to all the girls?”

“Whatever,” said Shane. “I’m the one being gentlemanly and offering my chair. I don’t see you getting off your butt.”

“Touché,” you said.

“What?” said Shane.

“Never mind.”

Shane gestured at the chair. “Cass, sit.”

“No, it’s cool,” I said.

“You leaving?” you said.

“Actually, no … I was kind of hoping I could speak to you alone for a moment,” I said to you.

Shane raised his hands and opened his eyes wide, doing an exaggerated cluing-in gesture. “Oh hey, I don’t want to get in the way,” he said. “I might hit the bar. Get a drink there, maybe play some pool.”

“You don’t have to—” I began, but my tone must not have been convincing because he laughed and did a big sweeping bow, then walked off down the street, giggling to himself.

“Childish,” you said as Shane disappeared, but there was indulgence in your voice.

“He’s sweet,” I said. “Dumb, but sweet.”

“Yeah,” you said.

“Yeah.”

→ THAT ONE COURTESY OF SHAKESPEARE ←

Anyway.

We sat on the chairs.

“What’s up?” you said.

“I miss Paris,” I said. I kind of blurted it out. Always smooth, me.

You put your arm around me. “I know,” you said. “I know and—”

“No, you don’t,” I said, pulling away. “I want her back. I never had a friend like her. What if I never have a friend like her again?”

You looked slightly hurt by that. “You will,” you said.

I shrugged. “Anyway … so I met this cop, Brian, and he said that they think it’s Paris’s dad. Well, he didn’t say that exactly. But it’s obvious that—”

“Wait,” you said. “You met a cop? Where?”

“Julie’s. But I also took a look at the case file, the other day. See, I kind of know this other policeman named Dwight, he’s a … um … a friend of my dad’s, and I—”

You held up a hand. “Whoa, slow down,” you said. “You’re talking to cops now?”

“Yes. No. I mean, he was just at Julie’s place. The second cop. But what he said … about Paris’s dad. I wondered …” I paused, looked into your eyes. “I wondered if you would drive me to New York. To see Paris’s dad.”

“Jesus, Cass.” You shook your head. “That would be a very stupid thing to do.”

“Excuse me?” I was glaring at you.

You swallowed. “That came out wrong. But … that’s a super dangerous idea, Cass. What if … I mean … what if he did kill her, and you just go and confront him? What if he gets violent?”

I hadn’t really thought of that possibility.

“Um,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“You have to be more careful,” you said. I could see from your gestures and your face that you were really worried; even though I was pissed with you at that moment, there was a warm feeling right inside me about that. “I mean, Cass, I can see why your dad worries about you so much.”

The warm feeling turned cold—hard-pack snow, balling in my chest.

I stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“What? What?”

“You talk to my dad about me?”

You raised your hands. “No! Well, he spoke to me once. Said you were vulnerable. I think it was supposed to be a warning, that kind of thing.”

“I can’t believe you’re chatting to my dad about how weak I am.”

“That’s not—”

“And now!” I shouted. “And now, to make things worse, you’re taking his side? ********. You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“Whoa, Cass. There are no sides.”

“There are sides. And I want you on mine. On Paris’s.”

You moved your hands in a placating gesture. “You’ve got me, Cass,” you said. “I’m totally here. On your side.” You moved toward me, put those same hands on my hips. “One hundred percent. Always. But I am not driving you to New York to see Paris’s dad.”

I felt the ice core melt a little. I felt the heat of your fingers, that electric power again, like I could charge myself just from contact with you, like energy would surge into my every nerve ending just from your touch.

“You’re really on my side?” I said.

“Yep.”

I sighed. “Well, okay, then.”

“And no trip to New York? At least till we know more?”

I loved that “we.” “Yeah, okay.”

You kissed my forehead. Fireworks went off in my head; Roman candles spun, throwing off sparks, hissing, blazing stars into the blackness behind my eyelids, my closed eyes, waiting for—

You pulled away.

Oh, okay. We were in the yard. That was why. I remembered; I saw the trees, the flowers, the thrush landing on the thin branch of a bush. You weren’t going to kiss me where my dad might come home and see. I got it. I got it, but I still wanted you to.

But then you smiled and handed me a beer. Our fingers touched—blazing sparks flew, invisibly.

“I don’t drink,” I said. I knew the voice would punish me if I drank the beer, even with the progress I’d made. I handed back the can.

“Oh,” you said. “That’s cool. Straight edge, huh?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You want to come up to the apartment?” you said.

“What, now?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“My dad might come back,” I said.

“He’s on a late night, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you said he hasn’t come back early on a late night for, what, a year?”

“Yes.”

“So I think you’re safe.”

“Okay,” I said. “We can talk about what to do. About finding Paris.”

“Sure,” you said.

But we both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

I followed you up the steps and into the apartment. The place was still a dump—still the empty pizza cartons, the takeout boxes, the bottles of Coke. Still clothes hanging from every available surface, discarded menus, dust.

“You should fire your housekeeper,” I said.

“You’re our housekeeper, in theory anyway.”

“Yeah. And I’ve been terrible. You should fire me.”

You laughed, and then space compressed between us, some kind of freak twist of physics, and we were standing very close together. The kitchen fell away from around us, the dirt and detritus; there was only the evening light from the windows, slanting through the shutters, and the buzzing circuit formed when our hands touched.

White noise roared in my head, blocking out every other sound. You tuned the radio of my mind to a dead channel, switched off my thoughts.

It was amazing.

I shut my eyes, and we closed together neatly, like we were hinged, and you kissed me.

It felt like it lasted forever, that kiss. Like not only the kitchen fell away but the whole universe, and we were floating in a deep black abyss, where only the contact between us meant anything at all.

I don’t want to do that kind of line, like you read in books. The ones where it says, “He took off my top,” or that kind of thing. Because the undercurrent, the suggestion, becomes that you pushed me in some way, “only wanted one thing,” you get the idea. And anyway it wouldn’t be true. And it implies some kind of linearity when all I can say with confidence is that there was a moment when both our tops were on and then they were both off, and I was in my bra, which had strawberries on it, embarrassingly.

Our bodies touched. Hands moved. Fingers were outlined with electricity, dancing with it, St. Elmo’s fire; I felt like we were phosphorescent.

I half opened my eyes, and saw your hair, haloed with light. A blade of sunshine reached us from between the shutters, so sharp it looked like it would cut straight through us.

I closed my eyes again.

My head filled with static.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

“CASS?”

Huh?

“CASS.”

I opened my eyes, blinking, turning, already knowing. Already shrinking back.

And there was Dad, standing in the doorway. A dark figure against the reddish evening sunlight.

“I ran into Shane on the boardwalk,” he said. His voice was horribly, horribly calm. “He told me you were home. But you weren’t in the house.”

Silence.

“You put your shirt on and come with me right now, Cass,” he said.

His voice was cold. Cold and merciless as the sea.