Owen didn’t want to let on that the jolt had been oddly pleasant. The shock of her was a sparkling bit of fun on a grim day. The distraction of a shooting star.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you’ve put it?”
“Nope.” She didn’t look at him and walked to the passenger door of his car.
He unlocked their doors from his side. “And even though Marcelline is worried I might hurt her, you’re not, because you think I won’t do anything since you’re a kid.”
“Yep.”
“Fair enough.” Owen got into the car.
He watched Carly take in the interior of the Mercedes, both of them lost for a moment in her barefaced appreciation of the look and feel of it. She ran her finger over the hashy stripe on the carbon-fiber faceplate, double-checking the illusion of texture there.
Owen felt a gurgle of envy percolating in his chest for the unselfconsciousness of the gesture.
He started the car and pulled out to the light on the main road. “So just go that way?”
“I guess.” She smiled, a little gift in it for him that she acknowledged the lunacy of their predicament.
His phone rang through the audio system. He checked the screen, then answered, “Samantha, I’m a little busy right now.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“Just so you know, we’re not alone and you’re on speaker.”
“Marcelline is with you?”
“No. But a friend of hers is.”
“A friend? What are you talking about?”
“It’s Marcelline’s friend Carly. Say hello, Carly.”
Carly looked to Owen for confirmation that he really wanted her to say it out loud, and he nodded toward the dash.
“Um, hi.”
“That sounds like a kid. What is going on, Owen? Where is Marcelline? Is she okay?”
“Is who okay? Carly or Marcelline?” Owen cut his eyes at Carly and grinned.
“I’m serious. Do not fuck with me.”
“Language.”
Samantha’s voice faltered. “Owen, have you done something?”
“I have not. It was Jonathan. That’s why I’m sitting here with Carly, not Marcelline. He found her and they zoomed off on a high-speed chase. That’s the story I was told.”
“Did he take the painting?”
“I’m not sure, but that’s a reasonable guess.” He put his finger across his pursed lips for Carly’s benefit. She nodded and the little conspiracy crackled between them.
“So what are we doing?” Samantha asked.
“We?”
“My nerves are shot, Owen. Pick a side.”
“No. But I will say that, as it stands, I’m in it for the painting and to go home for now. Any number of things could change how I feel about that, but that’s where we are at the moment. If that helps you, great. And all that, of course, is if I can find it.” He cast a look at Carly, who returned it solidly, unblinking, unintimidated. Weird kid.
Samantha let some dead air hiss through the speakers. When she spoke, she sounded sad and worried. “That’s not good enough.”
“No?”
“I want you to help Marcelline.”
From the passenger seat, Carly darted in between Owen’s shoulder and the dashboard and leaned in. “I do, too,” she said, and glanced up at him.
“Carly,” Samantha said through the speaker. “Do you have something to write with?”
Carly looked expectantly at Owen, who gave up and pointed at the center console. She took Owen’s pen and twisted in her seat to pull a folded paper from her back pocket. “Got it.”
“Take down this number. Owen, if Carly here gives me a call later and tells me what happened, I will do a load of laundry for you. Whites. With bleach. Lots of bleach.” Samantha read out a telephone number and Carly called it back to her as she wrote.
“Is this a result-based promise or do intentions count?” Owen asked.
Samantha sighed. “I’m sorry for the crack about having your heart on your sleeve. That was unkind of me.”
“I don’t really know what you expect me to do. We don’t know what we’re dealing with until one of them reaches out. And then, of course, there’s always the possibility that they’re perfectly happy, just the two of them doing whatever they’re doing and letting me stand around with my dick in my hand.” Owen looked over at Carly. “Sorry.”
Carly shrugged.
“It’s not like that,” Samantha said. “It never was.”
“If you say so, then it must be true.”
Samantha ignored it. “Could you send a text to Jonathan, maybe?”
“I could. But since we don’t know which one of them currently has the upper hand in this, or neither one if they’re partners and don’t need it. . . .” He slid a sideways look at Carly. “It seems like a risk that Marcelline might not appreciate if we make things more difficult for her.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“I’m going to wait, Samantha. They’ll be in touch. This would be a pretty pointless exercise if they don’t. Hopefully Carly will give you a call before the streetlights come on. Because I won’t.”
“I’m sorry, Owen.”
“That’ll be the day.”
Owen killed the call from the steering wheel. They drove on for a while in silence.
“You’re going to have to tell me where the painting is, you know,” he said.
“I know. But I don’t want to go home yet.”
“Convenient. Because you can’t go home yet.”
Her head jerked up, testing the air for a threat in that comment. “Why?”
“Look, it’s not personal. There’s just no way to turn you loose in the world until this is done. God knows what you’d say.”
“I wouldn’t say anything. But I don’t want to go anyway. I want to make sure that Emma is okay. Marcelline.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I understand. But it’s the best I can do. So where are we going?”
Carly unfolded the paper, a receipt, that she’d written Samantha’s number on. “When Marcelline was washing up, I took it into the party store and asked them to gift wrap and hold it for me. I said it was a present for my mom.”
Owen couldn’t decide if the tremor in him was nausea or a laugh trying to elbow through his amazement.
“What?” she said.
“That painting is worth a fortune. And you left it at a party store.”
“They didn’t know what it was. Sometimes there’s nothing safer than cluelessness. Ask any kid.”
• • •
Owen waited at the curb. He didn’t like the worry of all she might get up to in there if she changed her mind, but he weighed it against the inescapable fact that he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a teenage girl’s father, and he was too old to be her brother. People would stare.
Carly reappeared after a tense few minutes. She slid the festively wrapped rectangle into the back and plopped into the passenger seat as if it weren’t only the second time she’d gotten in beside him. She adjusted the air flow onto her face and petted the leather of the seat.
“All set?”
“Easy-peasy,” she said, but looked as if she might cry.
“What is it?”
“My mother must be freaking out.”
“So send her a text. Make something up. Tell her you’re at the movies.”
“Yeah, I might have thought of that if I had my phone anymore. This is bad. What if she calls the cops?”
Owen pulled into a parking space. “Do you know your mother’s phone number?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t have her phone. John does.”
“Is there someone else who can take her a message?”
“I guess Ada. She only lives two streets over.”
“Do you know this Ada’s number?”
“Do you know your own phone number?”
“Ye-eess.”
“I know how to mask a text, spoof a number.”
Owen watched Carly fall lost into the sea of possibilities. She gasped. “Oh, wow. Will you show me how?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you would be an unstoppable menace. But I will send your mother a note so that she doesn’t think you’re dead.”
“I wouldn’t be an unstoppable menace.”
Owen squinted through the windshield. “If you could only see you like I see you. No. I’m not showing you how to do it.”
“You know I still have to make that call later. To tell whatsername what happened so that you can get whatever ‘laundry’ means in secret code.” Carly pierced him through, the cheeky point of it glittering in her eyes, trying to bring him around to meet up with her honesty.
He held his smirk down between his teeth. God, this fucking day. “I don’t like you.”
She buckled her seat belt. “I don’t think that’s true.”
They watched the clear streamers of heat waving on the rim of the rise in the road. Owen sent a text from Carly to Donna via Ada, saying Carly was sorry. That she was upset and keeping her phone off. That she was fine and safe and that she’d be home in a little while.
“I don’t want to sit here anymore,” she said. “Can we drive?”
“Okay.”
“Your car is pretty.”
“Yes, it is.”
• • •
They resumed the ride back in the direction that had swallowed up Marcelline, and Jonathan after her. They hadn’t made it four miles past where they’d first set out before they found her car on the side of the road.
“Stop!” Carly cried. “Wait, stop!”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?” Carly twisted in her seat, ducking out of the seat belt to better see into Marcelline’s car as they drove past.
“Well, I don’t know. What do you think you’ll say to the cop who stops while we’re poking around an abandoned car?”
“What if she was in it?”
“She wasn’t. She’s with Jonathan.”
“You don’t know that. Please.” Carly was winding up to crying again. “Stop! Go back!”
“Listen to me. Calm down. She’s not in the car. She’s not in the hospital. I promise you, she’s with Jonathan.”
“She might not be. She might be hurt.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t hurt. Look, that wasn’t a crash. That was a swerve to a stop. The back right wheel was broken, she may have tagged something, maybe a curb, but the car wasn’t smashed in. There’s no reason to think she was banged up at all. But she was being followed. We know that. So, Jonathan picked her up. The question is whether she was happy or not to go with him.”
“You can’t know that’s what happened. You weren’t there. Maybe someone else stopped to help her. Maybe she got away.”
“And you don’t think we would have heard from her by now if any one of those other things had happened?”
That corked her right up. She wound herself back under the seat belt and chewed her fingernails. Owen watched Marcelline’s car disappear around a bend in the rearview mirror.
“Does your stepfather carry a gun?”
“What? No! I mean, I don’t think so.” Her shrinking confidence on this point dwindled, sputtered, then went out. “I don’t know.”
“Marcelline had one.”
“Well, maybe she got to it first. I still think she would have called by now.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“We still wait.”
But it was only for a few more minutes. The texts started rolling in.