"Thanks," I glance over at DeMott again. "Thanks for the offer, but I don't think I'll be very good company tonight."
"Maybe another time."
"Maybe." I take my backpack from the floor and step out on the sidewalk.
"Hey," he says, leaning to speak through the open door. "I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but in spite of everything bad that happened today, I liked hanging out with you."
It does sound wrong. But the odd thing is, I actually enjoyed having him around. And that's totally not like me. I like solitude, especially if I'm upset. And yet, my back still feels warm from where he put his hand when I had to talk to Jayne. And I can still feel the warmth from his jacket, like a blanket over my shoulders.
But I have no idea how to say any of that.
"Okay," he says, glancing away. "Guess I'll see you around, somewhere."
I nod, close the door, stand on the sidewalk as his truck rumbles down Monument Avenue. At the JEB Stuart rotary, his taillights flash red, shimmering in the dark. The truck circles the rearing horse, and then it is gone.
"Yeah," I whisper. "See you around. Somewhere."
My one hope—my last hope on this awful day—is to reach the back stairs without being seen so I can run to my bedroom and check my email, find some message from Drew.
But the kitchen tonight smells of beef and salt and my mother's frantic attempts to pretend she's normal.
"Your jeans are dirty," she says the second I step through the back door.
I look down. I've left my All Stars outside, as a precaution, but now I see the quarry dirt is smeared into my jeans, where I kneeled down to take soil samples, photographs. The image of Drew's purple Converse flashes through my mind.
When I look up, my dad is wearing that expression which says
Blessed Are The Peacemakers
.
"Hiking," I say.
"Hiking?" she repeats. "You went hiking?"
It doesn't matter how much heat is radiating from the oven, or how much our old windows are sweating from her domestic efforts--the whole room freezes. Nobody breathes, each of us waiting for the very next words that will determine whether this night goes up or down, light or dark, forward or back.
"DeMott."
That's all I come up with.
Her eyes are moving quickly, her mind adding everything up and two plus two will never equal four.
And my own mind is scrambling, ransacking for one full sentence that isn't also a lie. "DeMott," I repeat. "He wanted to show me around Weyanoke."
It's true:
h
e wanted to; I just
didn’t
go.
In the next frozen silence, I walk across the room and set my pack down on the bottom of the back stairs. I am too tired, too distressed, too defeated to make another attempt at explaining what can't be explained. I want to run upstairs, slam my bedroom door, and lock it forever. I saw the look on my dad's face. No way can I talk to him tonight about Drew. He's got his hands full.
Without replying, my mom turns and opens the oven door. My stomach growls but my head overrides it, wondering what she's cooking.
"DeMott seems like a good guy," my dad says.
I don't say anything.
"Do you like him?" he asks.
She answers for me: "He's going to marry Raleigh."
I look at my dad, horrified. He laughs.
"Does Raleigh have any say in this?" he asks.
"Yes." She pulls the casserole dish from the oven. "God told me she's going to say yes."
I feel sick. My dad laughs again, so relieved that she's taken this new
tr
ack with the conversation. But she doesn't get that. She looks over at him, confusion clouding her face. Somehow it hits her that she's apparently made a joke. She laughs, tentatively. But it's enough to get them chattering. I push a smile on my face and take my place at the table. That familiar lump camps in my throat. It won't help me choke down whatever is under the muddy-brown casserole sauce.
She serves us. We pray. My dad takes a bite, tells her it's delicious. She tells us—happily—that it's meatless meatloaf.
My first bite tastes like somebody made a brick out of oatmeal then coated it with burnt ketchup.
I try to swallow that bite, pushing the food around my plate. Suddenly I miss Drew so much my eyes sting. She's the only one I could describe this meal to, then laugh.
And even though he's sitting right across the table, I also miss my dad. Somehow I was stupid enough to expect I could come home and tell him what happened today.
"Raleigh."
I push back the burn in my eyes. Then look up.
His gaze is locked on me. "You're awfully quiet."
I drop my eyes. His is clean. He's eaten every bite of the oat-brick.
"Just tired," I tell him. "May I be excused?"
"You're not hungry?"
"No, sir."
He frowns. "Hope you're not getting sick."
Normally, if my mom hears we're coming down with an illness, she leaps up to make herbal concoctions that supposedly boost our immune systems. And my dad and I both look at her, waiting for her reaction.
She remains silent.
And why not?
If I'm not her real daughter, my health is my problem.
Monday morning makes me wonder if I'm turning into my mom.
I can feel people watching me, looking at me. All through my first three classes—History, Latin, Biology—their eyes are on me. But whenever I turn around, nobody's looking. But still some invisible hand keeps tapping me on the shoulder.
By lunch I feel rattled walking into the cafeteria, tossing my sack lunch in the garbage because—in yet another med-induced mania of domesticity—my mom has packed me a sandwich made of meatless meatloaf, slapped together from last night's leftovers. When my dad saw it, he slipped me money for lunch. I buy a grilled cheese sandwich from the cafeteria and carry it across the lunchroom, sitting at our usual spot by the back windows.
I can't taste the food.
Loneliness. Worry. Fear. It's all there.
But there's this other thing, a feeling in the air. Even if I can't name it, couldn't describe it if a knife was held to my throat, it's here—in the atmosphere.
And it scares the crap out of me, because I'm pretty sure this is how life feels for my mom all the time.
I want to leave the cafeteria but lunch isn't over, and Tinsley's table of rich girls camps right by the exit, to check out everyone coming and going. There's no way around them.
Tossing my lunch in the trash, then taking a deep breath, I walk toward the exit. Suddenly they stop talking. And just as suddenly I can feel every pleat in my plaid skirt, every seam in the white blouse. Like my skin's too alive.
"Don't forget your promise, Raleigh," says Tinsley.
I bite down on my tongue, shove open the door.
The hall is empty.
At my locker, I stare at Drew's combination lock. That white arrow isn't pointed at zero. It makes me feel ashamed, how petty I was being Friday night. I turn the dial, slowly ticking past each number.
What about a message, I wonder.
A note.
What if Drew did run away, but snuck back into school? Took her books? My fingers start to shake, twisting the dial back and forth, clicking through her combination. A note that will explain the missing shoe, apologize for not telling me about the move, reveal where she's hiding—I yank open the locker.
The textbooks stand at attention, each one waiting alphabetically for her return. Inside the door, Richard P. Feynman grins at me.
I slam the locker and spin the dial. My eyes burn so hot it's difficult to see that white arrow. I replace it the way Drew would want it, straight up. When I paw through my locker, three words hammer through my head: Do Not Cry. I have Lit next, and Tinsley's in there, and if she sees one trace of a tear, it'll be the end.
I grab Rossetti's poetry and hold the book to my chest like a shield, work my way down the now-crowded hallway. I feel eyes again and the bitter memories leap up, begging to be recognized. It feels like first day of school. No, worse. It feels like the day in second grade when I overheard some other mothers talking about "Nadine." We were backstage at a Thanksgiving play. I was waiting in the wings, unrecognizable in my costume. One of the moms said Nadine "wasn't all there, bless her heart." And they talked about how we'd been "dirt poor" until David Harmon came along.
Drew is the one girl who has never judged me for anything that wasn't my fault. I stare at the floor. My shoes. Do. Not. Cry. When I reach the corner, I look up to avoid bumping into anyone.
That's when I see the tall man.
He's way over six feet tall, towering over this sea of girls. Also he has a face that looks like a wooden mask carved by angry natives.
But it's his eyes that stop me. Pin me to the floor. Most people haven't spent their formative years in criminal court listening to police testimony, so most people would miss his eyes. This guy's got the scan, the veteran cop look-around. The way cops barely move their heads but their eyes are seeing everything.
He walks right up to me. My pulse thuds.
"Would you happen to be Raleigh Harmon?" he asks.
He wears sport coat with jeans. Probably to cover a gun.
"I'm Detective Mike Holmgren," he continues, knowing full well who I am. "I'm with the Richmond Police."
The crowd swims around us, but it's lost the usual frantic commotion
of fourth hour. When I glance over my shoulder, Tinsley's group is standing in a half circle, gaping at us. I can't really blame them. He's a Big Scary Dude.
The good news, I decide, is that I'm not paranoid like my mom. People really are watching me.
The bad news? My throat’s closed. I can't speak.
"It's okay," the detective says. "I talked to your headmaster. He says you can show me that quarry."
***
The detective drives a Camaro, black and shiny as obsidian. But it smells worse than Teddy's van.
I hold open the door, coughing.
"Sorry, clove cigarettes," he says. "I'm trying to quit smoking."
"By smoking something else?"
"I never claimed it made sense."
The smell is so ghastly that I take my time getting in. Well, that, and I don't want to get in.
"Did you call my parents?" I ask.
"Mr. Ellis talked to your dad."
Oh, crap.
I sit in the bucket seat; so low I'm eye-level with the dash. The detective fires out of the parking lot, slides through two stop signs and guns the engine between stoplights. The trip seems to take two minutes
,
yet he manages to ask dozens of questions. What is Drew like, how did she feel about moving to New York, how did I happen to find her shoe yesterday? He even asks me about Burgers & Brains—our Friday nights at Titus's place. The detective knows so much about us that when we pull up to the quarry, I feel spooked, like he might know about me trespassing in the tunnel, too.
He parks the shiny car at the far edge. "You alright seeing this again?"
"Fine." I open the door.
There are so many people here it almost doesn't look like the same place as yesterday. Dusty-looking guys wearing ball caps stand beside the big equipment. They look like quarry workers. But there are also two police officers near a Richmond cruiser, and a woman stepping out of a white panel van that is unmarked, except for the seal on the door that shows Blindfolded Lady Justice holding her scale. Richmond's motto runs around her in Latin.
Sic itur ad astra.
I know Latin, and I know that motto because it's in my dad's courtroom too.
Thus one goes to the stars.
For the first time, those words make me shudder.
The other huge difference from yesterday is yellow crime-scene tape has been staked around the mound of quarry soil. Which isn't a mound anymore. The soil’s been spread out. I see one plastic marker, right about where we found her shoe. It has the number ‘one’ on it.
I follow Detective Holmgren over to the tape. I see another person, a guy with a camera. He wears hospital scrubs over his clothing. The woman from the van also wears scrubs. She is kneeling near where we found Drew's shoe.
"Mary Wade?" Detective Holmgren calls out.
She looks up, an annoyed expression on her face. But as soon as she sees me, she smiles.
The detective introduces us. Mary Wade Cavanaugh. She is with the Evidence Collection Unit.
"Mary Wade used to be a detective," he adds. "Now she does honest work."
She ignores his comment and starts asking me a bunch of questions. Some of them are repeats from the car ride over. But she seems way more interested in where, exactly, the shoe was found. Naturally, if she's collecting evidence.