I had promised Shay to tell her if I suspected anything, but that was before Zed was arrested. I know Shay wants to believe that the kidnapper has been caught, and she’ll argue with me if I want to keep looking. After what happened in the parking lot, I know she’d tell me to let the police handle it.
But the police aren’t handling it. They have Zed, and they’re done. Besides, what kind of trouble could I get into at a computer camp full of kids?
What kind of trouble could you get into in a supermarket parking lot?
I tell myself to shut up and keep walking. The building is close to campus, one of those renovated warehouses with wood floors and big windows. I’m reassured at the sunlight pouring through the skylights as I step into the lobby.
The camp has taken over a suite of rooms on the second floor. I peek into the different rooms, which all empty out onto the hallway that winds around the building and overlooks the lobby. Kids are at computers while cool geeks stand over them or sit at their own computers. It’s hard to tell the high school kids from the instructors, who look mostly college-age or a little older. There are tons of soda cans and balled-up bags of potato chips scattered on the long tables. There’s a scoreboard for some kind of team game, divided into Team Rant and Team Rave. Pinned up on long bulletin boards are digitized photographs of President Bush with various vegetables on his shoulders instead of a head, and long sheets of code.
I’m not sure what I’m doing here, and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. All I know is that I have exactly twelve minutes to find it.
A tall boy with red hair stretches and cracks his knuckles like rifle shots, then pushes off from his computer. His wheeled chair shoots straight back into my knees.
“Ow!” I jump back and rub the area where two functional knees used to be.
He scrambles off the chair, almost falling in his eagerness. “Oh, man, I’m so fantastically sorry, are you okay?” He peers at me. His eyes are green behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Cute nerd. “File me under Idiot.”
“No worries,” I say. “Just a couple of knee replacements and I’ll be fine.”
“Can I help you, like, limp to a chair or something?”
“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m not staying. Just spying. My friend got into this camp, but she wasn’t able to come after all. I just wanted to check it out in case I want to apply next year.”
“That would be awesome. I’m Ryan, by the way. Who’s your friend?”
“I’m Gracie. My friend’s name is Emily Carbonel.”
“I thought so. When you said she couldn’t come after all.” Ryan looks eager. His breath smells like orange juice, and I see a carton of Tropicana on his desk. I step back a half-step. “How is Emily? I’ve e-mailed her a bunch of times, but I guess she got tired of my constant worship.”
“She’s missing,” I say.
Ryan frowns. “Missing? Like, right now? You were supposed to meet her here?”
“No, I mean she’s missing,” I say. “The police think she was kidnapped.”
“She didn’t run away?” Ryan asks. “She was seriously bummed about her folks, I know that for sure.”
“How do you know her so well?” I ask. “She wasn’t able to come to the camp.”
He nods. “Yeah, but I met her during the sign-up process, when a bunch of us came to check out the computers and stuff. And she came with her mom for orientation. That’s when they found out that Emily’s dad hadn’t sent the check. Man, it was embarrassing. Emily was all teary, and it’s lucky her mom couldn’t get her hands on a ballistic missile. They left, and I found out on e-mail that her dad had spaced out and her mom didn’t have the money to cover the cost, so they fought about it, and they missed the deadline, and somebody else got Em’s slot. Major bummer for me.”
“So you were friends with Emily?”
“Well, if you factor in my huge crush and her complete indifference to the basic fact of my existence,” Ryan says. “She had a thing for somebody else.”
I try not to pounce on this too obviously. “Do you know who?”
“No idea,” Ryan says. “I didn’t exactly press for romantic details.”
A singsong voice comes from behind me. “I bet it’s Mar-cus.”
I turn around. A girl about my age is tilting a Diet Coke back to get the very last drop. She has cropped, sleek black hair and is wearing a tight T-shirt that says WHOA BABY. Her taut belly is already tan. It makes a long, slow slide into the low waistband of her jeans. I take an instant dislike to her belly button.
“Why do you think it’s Marcus, Dora?” Ryan asks resentfully.
“Well, ding-dong. Obviously you haven’t looked very hard.”
“Who’s Marcus?” I ask.
“She didn’t even know Marcus,” Ryan says. “She met him, like, maybe twice.”
“Who’s Marcus?”
“And how many times did you meet sweet Emily?” Dora cocks her head and widens her eyes at Ryan, and not in a nice way. She’s making it clear that he’s not in her league. I’m starting to like her less than her navel. “I’ve got a tip for you about your technique, Rye-bread. You’re supposed to make the girl want to come to you, not run away. First Kendall, now Emma.”
“Emily,” I say.
Dora ignores me. I know she’s needling Ryan because I’m there, but she’s pretending I don’t exist. Freeze the competition, humiliate the guy just for fun.
Ryan’s cheeks are flushed. I feel sorry for him. He’s no match for Dora. I have a feeling that neither am I.
“Emily and I talked online all the time,” Ryan says defensively.
“So how do you know she didn’t do that with Marcus, too?”
This stops Ryan for a moment, so I get in the question for the tenth time. “Who is Marcus?”
“He’s one of the instructors,” Ryan says glumly. “He’s a sophomore at U-Dub. He’s over there.” He points with his chin.
I see a guy, maybe nineteen, sitting at a computer. He’s got blond hair shaved down to stubble and a pair of black-framed glasses. He’s wearing a white T-shirt that hugs his body very well. He looks like he has muscles on his cheekbones. I see what Dora means. He’s good-looking, but he looks like Intenso Boy.
As if he’s felt my gaze, he turns and sees me looking at him. He gives me a hard stare, then gets up and leaves the room.
“Ooooh, “ Dora says. “See what I mean? Definitely hot.”
Ryan gives the girl a sour look. “Not the kind of guy a girl like Emily would go for, Dora.”
She crunches the can, and I notice that her navy-polished fingernails are bitten down, her cuticles red and angry-looking. “Right. Whatever you say. Anyway, what a waste of time. Why go for minnows when you have sharks? If you ask me, Jonah is the catch around here.”
“Jonah? Jonah Castle?” Ryan breathes the name. “Are you delirious?”
Dora laughs.
“You haven’t even met him. You didn’t come on tour day.”
“Who’s…” I try.
Dora rolls her eyes. “I’ve seen his bank account.”
“Who’s Jonah Castle?” I ask.
"Who’s Jonah Castle?” Ryan repeats, shocked.
I’m beginning to wonder if too much time in a digital mode makes for an inability to communicate with real people.
“Just your average unattached twenty-five-year-old dot-com billionaire,” Dora-the-Ignorer says, finally acknowledging my existence. She walks off, tossing her can toward a trash can. Naturally, it goes in.
Ryan looks after Dora with, I’m sure, loathing in his heart. Who wouldn’t?
He turns back to me. “Jonah Castle is a genius. He practically invented firewall software. At seventeen, he hacked into the top twenty of the Fortune 500, just to show them he could do it. They ended up buying firewall software from him. Megawall is his company.”
“The sponsor of the camp.”
“Right. Oh, that reminds me. Hang on.” Ryan reaches for a backpack and rummages through it. He comes out with a photograph and shows it to me.
It’s a photo of a group of kids, all wearing the red computer-camp T-shirt. They must have just gotten them, because I can see that most of them are wearing the shirt over their clothes. I spot Emily off to the left, next to Ryan. She has a big smile on her face, and she looks pretty. Marcus is there, on the other side of the group, looking aloof. He’s standing next to a young-looking guy wearing a polo shirt and a tweed jacket. “That’s Jonah Castle,” Ryan says reverently, pointing to the man in the jacket. “This was taken on the tour day.”
I take the photograph and stare at it. I feel my concentration slip from Ryan into the picture. I can feel Emily’s happiness on that day, but I can feel other things, too, things that when I brush against them I’m afraid.
“Can I keep this?”
“I guess,” he says reluctantly. “Just be sure and give it to Emily when she turns up. Hey, let me write my phone number on the back.” Ryan takes the photograph and quickly scrawls on the back of it. He hands it back. “Listen, let me know if there’s anything I can do, okay?” He fidgets, hands in his pockets, as if he’s unused to offering help.
“Sure.” I put the photograph carefully in my purse. I feel it there, weighing me down, as I walk out.
That photograph is like a rock in my purse for the rest of the afternoon. I can feel it with every step. We drive to the park by the locks and buy Sno-Cones from an Indian woman in a white truck. Then we cross over the locks and pause to look down, eating our Sno-Cones. We watch the water flood in as the boat slowly rises toward us, and Shay waves at the couple leaning against the stern rail.
Here is where the freshwater lake empties into the bay. We let the sea and the salt tangle in our lungs and our hair, and I know Shay feels her spirits lift, but she can’t pull me along with her.
I stare down into the deck of the rising boat. It fills my vision, blocking everything out. Sound fades.
Hands are at the cabin window, beating against it.
First the palms slapping, then fists.
Trying to get out.
Have to get out.
No one will hear, no one saw
help me help me help me help me
“Gracie?”
The boat is level with us now. The curtains are parted, and I can see into the cabin. It is empty. A box of cookies sits on the dinette table. A sweatshirt is tossed on the seat.
“Gracie?” Shay’s curls are blowing crazily. “You dropped your Sno-Cone.”
I look down. The Sno-Cone has inverted and is sticking up like a pup tent.
The liquid oozes out on the concrete.
I reach out for the rail. It feels as though the ground is moving under my feet, and I’m dizzy.
Something is here, something I need to know, something I need to grasp.
It’s gone.
It slips through my fingers, it sluices out through the locks. I lose it.
“Come on,” Shay says. “Let’s look at some fish.”
We walk down the sloping lawn toward the salmon ladder. I see the flash of the fish even as we approach. We walk down the stairs and we’re plunged into a gloomy dankness. We’re surrounded by glass, and behind it, fish are swimming, slithering, battling the current. Some of them are cut and bloody. They throw themselves at a small opening, trying to get up into the sea. Again and again they make the leap, sometimes falling back, and always trying again.
I watch the salmon fight and flop their way upstream toward their eventual fate of being roasted or smoked or grilled on a cedar plank. I know I’m supposed to admire their determination, but they just seem so sad to me. Somewhere wired into their DNA is a memory of fresh water, smooth rocks, a still bay, and they’ll fight their way past cities and chemicals and dams to find home. Instead they’ll meet the hook and the net and be pulled, gasping, water streaming down their silvery gills, into the relentless air.