The next morning in my room, I stare at the photograph for long periods of time, time enough to note that Emily’s smile is a little too radiant, certainly more than a tour of computers would warrant, that Marcus is uncomfortable, that Jonah Castle has a cell phone in his left hand, like a busy executive making a dutiful visit to his charitable cause.
Something is wrong with this picture. I don’t know what. Which gets me exactly nowhere.
Sunlight floods my room. Diego is in his bedroom, close by. There’s nothing to be afraid of, and I’m afraid. There’s a darkness in this photo. There’s something there, just out of reach. I don’t know what it is, but it has everything to do with Emily.
Lying with her eyes shut, afraid to move.
Someone standing in a doorway looking down at her, not caring who she is, only that she belongs with him.
Fists pounding against the cabin window of a boat.
help me help me help me
Who is the darkness coming from? Marcus? He seems the obvious candidate, but maybe I’m making too many assumptions based on a shaved head and a bad attitude. Ryan? He admitted having a huge crush on Emily—are geeks capable of a criminal activity more serious than shoplifting a six-pack of Mountain Dew? Even Jonah Castle could be a suspect, I guess, though I can’t quite imagine a billionaire taking time out from running a company to kidnap a teenager. It just doesn’t make sense.
I fire up the online search engines. First I look up the website for the computer camp. There are several links, and they list each year’s students, as well as the instructors. I see that Marcus Heffernan taught last year as well, and that he’s a student at the University of Washington, just as Ryan said. Ryan attended the camp the year before, too. I scroll through the other names of the students, but nothing rings a bell. And then I see the name Kendall Farmer.
What about Kendall? You’re supposed to make the girl want to come to you, not run away.
I click back on the search engine. I type in Kendall Farmer.
Article from the Seattle Times, October of last year.
Runaway Lead Turns Out False, Distraught Parents Report
I click on it and read the article, my eyes darting, wanting to pick up every piece of information. I have to remind myself to slow down so I can absorb what I’m reading. Kendall Farmer disappeared last November, leaving a note for her parents that she was off to “find a family who cares.” The police thought they had picked her up in San Diego, but it turned out to be a different kid.
Two missing girls, both of them connected to the computer camp. What were the odds of that?
I scroll through the rest of the results, reading everything. It’s funny what oddball stuff comes up on a web search.
Kendall Farmer is mentioned in an article in the local paper of her hometown on Bainbridge Island. She’d played Marian in her school’s production of The Music Man, and the reviewer praises her “lovely singing voice and stage presence.”
Her parents gave a pot luck on August 17th of last year to benefit the library. Kendall presented the proceeds of the annual Car Wash Jive from her high school.
She won second prize on Get Up and Prove It Night at the Smells Like Good Coffee Café in Seattle.
She sounds like a normal kid. She is still missing. She is sixteen.
I look back at the photograph. In Marcus’s neutral face, I think I read obsession. Is the darkness I feel coming from him?
I have to find out.
I cross through the kitchen and then mosey down the hall. Diego’s door is open, and I hover in the doorway until he notices me. He’s listening to music on his headphones and chatting online.
He lifts one earphone when he sees me.
“Want to go on a stakeout?” I ask.
Marcus Heffernan turns out to be a rich kid. He lives in a million-dollarish house that backs onto Lake Washington. We park the car outside and wait. The only problem is, I have no idea what we’re waiting for. But we do it for an hour. We finish a bag of donuts ("for atmosphere,” Diego says) and put the CD player on random.
“This is fun,” Diego says. His voice doesn’t exactly ring with sincerity.
Okay, so stakeouts are boring. Who knew? They go by so fast on TV.
I feel responsible for Diego’s boredom, but I have no idea how to entertain him. I had to talk him into coming. First of all, he’s not allowed to drive to Seattle without permission, but I point out that Shay is in meetings all day and can’t talk to us anyway. It’s pretty lame, but it eases his conscience a little bit. Then it turns out that he doesn’t want to drive to Seattle. He has an intermediate license, which means if he gets even two tickets, his license is suspended. I don’t think Diego is afraid of anything, but if he is, it’s of not having a car.
He drums his fingers on the dash. He shifts in his seat. He clears his throat.
“So…” he says.
“So…”
“So why did you hire that guy to punch you?”
I look out the window. It’s funny. My life here seemed so unreal to me for so long. But Diego’s question takes me by surprise, because suddenly that life seems far away, my life in Maryland after Mom died, when every day I woke up and had to talk myself into swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
“Because I wanted to feel pain that wasn’t inside me,” I say. “I thought if I could focus on a different kind of pain, even for a few minutes, I could feel…I don’t know, relief. I could be the me I was before, even temporarily.”
“Did it work?” He asks the question so delicately, as though he were a doctor probing a wound, which I guess he is.
“No,” I say. “I just felt pretty stupid, basically. And Jake Buscemi just felt really bad. I think he was surprised that he actually did it. Me, too.”
“You freaked everyone out,” Diego says.
“Yeah.” Myself included, actually. That was one bad day.
“They wanted to maybe put you somewhere for a while,” Diego says.
This gets my attention. “What? Like a mental institution?”
Diego nods. “Mom talked them out of it. She put her foot down. Threatened to call in lawyers and everything. They had talked her out of taking you right after…right after, and she gave in because she thought they might be right. That it wasn’t a good idea to remove you from everything you knew.”
I thought Shay hadn’t wanted me. I thought she’d refused. Maybe they’d told me the way it really was. I couldn’t remember. I wasn’t listening to anyone then.
“So anyway, you know Pop-Pop and Mimi, they always get their way. And Uncle Owen always sides with them, so Mom was outgunned. But after that thing happened, and they were all wondering what to do, Mom called and told them she wouldn’t take no for an answer, that your mom had wanted you to come live with us, and that’s how it had to be. We’d already redone the room, that summer.”
“You did my room last summer?”
“Yeah. In case you ever wanted to come. Anyway, they caved.”
“I thought I was too much for Mimi and Pop-Pop.”
“Well, you were.” Diego chuckled. “That’s for sure. They freak when they get rained out of the ninth hole, so you can imagine.”
It was true. My grandparents are seriously stuck in their ways. If they run out of seven-grain bread at the supermarket, my grandfather wants to file a lawsuit. And everything has to be just so. Spoons go handle down in the dishwasher, forks go handle up. Shoes off when you come in the door. Wipe the cast-iron frying pan with paper towel only. Up, down, top, bottom, off, on, only, never, always. I never understood their rules, and they tried to be nice, but they were always redoing everything I did. Maybe it added to my craziness then, I don’t know. But I never felt right. It was the first time in my life I realized that love wasn’t enough to help somebody.
“They are serious about toilet paper,” I say. “At first, I didn’t notice. It took me weeks to get it. If I put it on the roll with the paper coming from the bottom of the roll, they’d flip it over. Toilet paper has to come from the top of the roll.”
“When I visited them, I used to keep switching it back, just to drive them nuts,” Diego says.
We burst out laughing.
With Diego poking fun at them in that genial way, I realize for the first time that flunking out of the grandparent living situation wasn’t totally my fault. They are kind of nuts. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t fit into their particular brand of craziness. Each family is weird in its own way, I guess, which makes it hard to find your way in a new one.
“There’s our boy,” Diego says. He starts the engine.
Marcus walks out of the house, jingling car keys. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt with lettering I can’t read and khaki shorts and boots. If I weren’t a detective, I would notice his legs in a much less clinical way. He hops into a Volkswagen Beetle and backs out of the driveway.
I duck my head down until Diego says it’s okay. Then we proceed to tail Marcus through the unfamiliar streets of Seattle, through stop signs and red lights. I learn that Diego knows how to curse.
Marcus stops at a gas station (I duck; Diego curses and keeps going, turns right; it’s a one-way street; we have to circle and get back, hoping Marcus needs a full tank of gas; we spot him as he zooms through a yellow light…), gets caught in a traffic jam (we keep four cars back), and then cruises in the U district, looking for a parking space. He finds one and pulls in.
“What now?” I ask. I look around, but there are no spaces. Marcus is already getting out of the driver’s seat.
“Follow him,” Diego says.
“But how will you find me?”
“Send me a text message. If I don’t find you or hear from you in fifteen minutes, I’m calling Detective Pasta. Now go.”
I scoot out the door and bound onto the sidewalk. I keep well behind Marcus. It’s easy to keep him in sight. He’s tall and he’s not walking very fast, chugging on a bottle of sports drink as he goes.
He disappears into the doorway of a restaurant. My palms are wet. I wipe them on my jeans, then walk slowly up to the window. I give a quick look in.
Marcus has his back to me. He stops and reads a blackboard with the specials on it. Then he walks behind the counter and picks up an apron, which he ties around his waist. I don’t know how he manages it, but he looks pretty macho in it.
He’s a waiter. I watch him for a few minutes. He says something to the waitress that makes her smile. He disappears into the kitchen and comes back out. I study his face. I wait for something to break inside me, some kind of flash that will tell me what I need to know.
When Diego’s hand hits my shoulder, I jump about six inches.
“Whoa. What’s going on?”
“He went to work,” I say. “I guess we can go home. He’ll be here for a while.” I feel discouraged. This isn’t getting me anywhere. I have a sense of urgency now, that Emily is in trouble, that she needs me. I’ve got to find a way to link Marcus to Emily, or I have to find another suspect.
“Come on,” Diego says. “We’ll think of something else. This smells like teen washout.” He points overhead.
“What?” I look up at the sign hanging overhead. The name of the café is Smells Like Good Coffee. I had been concentrating so hard on Marcus, I hadn’t noticed it.
The Smells Like Good Coffee Café. Where Kendall Farmer won second prize on Get Up and Prove It Night.
“It’s him,” I say, latching onto Diego’s arm. “He’s our guy.”