Authors: Judy Blundell
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.
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.”