Where They Found Her (25 page)

JUNE 11, 1994

The Captain is coming at 8 p.m.! He said he’s totally up for meeting my parents, too. I just hope they don’t mess it up for me by acting like they think I’m a total nut bag. At least my dress is so cute. It’s red and has this deep V that totally shows off everything. My mom didn’t even give me crap about it.

It’s because she knows who the Captain’s family is. I think she hopes I’ll snag him for good. Then maybe she’ll stop spending all her free time praying for my mortal soul.

And I’m just not going to think about Tex being at the party. Because he will be. And he’s totally going to try to kill my buzz. Telling me to be careful and whatnot. Like THAT’s the real point and not that he wants me putting out for him instead of the Captain. But I’m not going to let him make me feel bad for getting the guy I always wanted. The kind nobody, not even my own parents, thinks I’m good enough for.

It would be a lot easier if I just hated Tex, though. If I didn’t kind of also like that he cares about me. Then I could tell him to get the hell away from me forever. But it’s not that simple. Nothing ever is.

Sandy sat in a sticky booth at the back of Pat’s Pancakes, waiting for Molly. The place was practically empty, unlike on weekends, when a line snaked out the door. A half dozen mostly old people were in the booths, eating their omelets and pancakes so slowly it was like they were being paid by the minute.

“What can I get you, hon?” The waitress snapped open her pad. She was pretty, or used to be. Now she had a fuzzy ponytail and a super-wrinkled face, but didn’t seem
that
old. That was what Jenna would look like eventually. If she got the chance.
Someday
, Sandy thought,
I’ll probably look like that, too.

“Can I have coffee?” Sandy asked.

“
Just
coffee?” The waitress wasn’t trying to be a bitch, Sandy knew. She was just trying to pay her bills.

“Yeah, for right now,” Sandy said. “I’m waiting for somebody.”

She’d have to hope that this Molly woman would order some food when she got there. Sandy couldn’t afford to waste money eating when she wasn’t hungry even to keep a fellow waitress happy. And she hadn’t been hungry in days. Of course, that hadn’t stopped Aidan from trying to stuff her like some overprotective grandmother the night before.

“I got crap for a sandwich, and some chips and cookies and an apple,” Aidan had said, tossing a bunch of food into a pile on his bed.

He had been right about it being easy to sneak in the back door, and Sandy felt almost safe now that they were upstairs in his bedroom, behind his locked door. She looked down at all the food Aidan had swiped from the kitchen. There was even lettuce and a tomato and some pretty little jar of something that might have been mustard, because people who lived in houses like Aidan’s didn’t make ham and white bread sandwiches with French’s mustard, the way Sandy always had. Aidan was staring down at the pile like he’d never made his own sandwich in his entire life. Like he had no goddamn idea where to start.

“Thank you,” Sandy said, keeping her eyes on the food. Because she couldn’t handle looking right at Aidan. “For letting me come here.”

Because where the hell had she been planning to go? She hadn’t been planning, that was the bottom line. She’d just wanted to get away from Hannah’s dad, lurking outside Ridgedale Commons. And so she just kept pedaling until she was sure no one was following her. She didn’t realize until too late that it was getting dark and she didn’t have a plan. Despite what she’d been thinking, she couldn’t sleep outside. Amazing how something like that could seem like a legitimate fucking option—
whatever, I’ll just sleep outside if I have to
—until you started working through specifics. Where outside? In the woods? On the sidewalk? To begin with, it was too cold. And it wasn’t like people in Ridgedale wouldn’t notice
another
person sleeping on the street. There
weren’t
any other people on the street.

Sandy was hoping Aidan wasn’t going to make her eat. She wasn’t sure she could make herself swallow anything. But she was thirsty as hell. Couldn’t remember the last time she’d had something to drink. Felt like never. Sandy polished off two of the fancy glass bottles of lemonade Aidan had dropped on the bed, one after the other, before she looked back up. When she finally did, Aidan was staring at her with wide, freaked-out eyes. For the first time, he was getting just how fucked she was. She must have seemed like some kind of animal, drinking like that. She sure as hell felt like one.

“Sorry,” she said, wiping at her dirty mouth with the back of her dirty hand.

“Nah, it’s cool,” Aidan said quietly as he sat down on the bed next to her. He was looking down at his own perfectly clean hands, probably wishing he’d never invited Sandy over. He’d said he wanted to help, sure. But it was one thing to play at the edges of her fucked-up life. It was another thing to take up center stage.

“I can take off, you know,” Sandy said. She felt bad, putting all this shit on him. “No hard feelings. I don’t want you to feel, like, necessary.”

Aidan took the bottle of lemonade—Sandy’s third—from her hands, took a sip, and handed it back to her.

“Oh, I’m not necessary,” he said, turning to look at her. “I’m fucking essential.”

In the morning, when Aidan kissed Sandy goodbye on his way to school, she knew it might be the last time she’d see him. That maybe it should be. But the plan was for Sandy to slip out later, after Aidan’s mom and little brother had gone; she was supposed to meet up with Aidan after he was out of school.

“See you later,” he said. “I’ll text you.”

It had made a difference, Aidan being there. But when you lived in the middle of a shit-storm, the question wasn’t whether things were going to fly apart, it was when. The least Sandy could do was keep Aidan clear of the shrapnel.

After he was gone, Sandy pulled her mom’s journal out of her backpack and lay on the floor, tucked behind his bed, praying his mother didn’t charge in to toss the place for drugs or something while she was there. Jenna had already told Sandy some of what was in the journal, enough for Sandy to have known the exact place where the whole fucked-up story ended. Enough that Sandy would have sworn nothing she read could make it worse. But she should have known better. With Jenna, things could always get worse.

What if Jenna had decided that she couldn’t take the memories anymore? That was all Sandy could think once she was done reading the journal. What if coming back to Ridgedale had been about Jenna finding an ending instead of a fresh start? No, Sandy didn’t believe that any more than she believed that Jenna had taken off. And maybe that made her as stupid as anyone else who fell for Jenna’s shit. But she didn’t—wouldn’t—believe it.

Sandy had a flash of a memory then: her and Jenna dancing. She’d been barely ten, and they’d been in their shitty apartment in Camden, the one with the gas stove with only one burner that worked and that wack-ass blue-green mold streak on the living room wall. That day the sun had been so bright in the window that the place hadn’t looked so bad, especially with Jenna trying to teach Sandy how to cha-cha. Jenna had her black hair piled on top of her head, a cigarette pinched between her red lips, as she swung her hips back and forth in her worn, skintight leggings, trying to get Sandy to match her steps.

There wasn’t much that Sandy remembered from her childhood, but the particular bump in the road that came before that dancing stood out because it had rolled right over her tenth birthday. Her welcome into double digits had been totally forgotten in the three straight days Jenna hadn’t gotten out of bed and wouldn’t stop crying even though Sandy brought her endless Diet Dr Peppers and wine and Cheetos. Some guy—another guy like all the other guys—had broken Jenna’s heart. But by that afternoon—when Sandy was ten years and four days old—they were dancing. And Sandy knew once again that they’d make it. At least this time.

“You’re getting it! You’re getting it!” Jenna had squealed with delight when Sandy had been able to follow along. “Look at you! That’s it!” Jenna had looked so happy as they’d danced to the blasting Kid Rock that was definitely not meant for the cha-cha. So happy she might burst. Because that was Jenna: so bad and then so, so good.

Jenna wouldn’t kill herself. It wasn’t possible. She always rebounded. And she rebounded hard. She might have come back to Ridgedale looking for something or someone, Tex, maybe. If he’d looked out for her back then, maybe Jenna thought he’d do it again.
That
Sandy could see Jenna doing—dragging them here because she had some twisted idea that her knight in shining armor would still be hanging around all these years later, waiting to rescue her once and for all.

“Sandy?”

When she looked up, there was a woman standing next to the booth in Pat’s Pancakes. Pretty, with pale skin and long curly reddish hair. Molly looked nice and normal. Like a regular mom, but not in a bad way. It had been Aidan’s idea to text her the night before. She was a reporter, his mom’s friend. Somebody who might be able to help.

“Yeah.” Sandy nodded, feeling a lot more nervous than she’d counted on.

“I’m Molly Sanderson.” The woman reached out a hand as she sat down in the booth across from Sandy. “I don’t know if you remember, but I actually called you a few months ago when I was doing a story on the Outreach Tutoring program. Rhea gave me your number.”

“Oh, right,” Sandy said, even though she didn’t remember. At least that explained how the hell Molly had tracked her down so fast.

“Jenna is your mom, I’m guessing?”

Sandy nodded, then shrugged. “But she’s not your usual kind of mom.”

“I’m not sure there is such a thing,” Molly said, which was nice. She didn’t have to say that. “So you said she’s missing?”

“She left Blondie’s after work a couple days ago and never came home,” Sandy said. “She’s kind of a screwup. Totally a screwup. But not like this. She would call me.”

“I believe you,” Molly said. And it actually seemed like she did. “It sounds like you went to the police already.”

“I did. The chief of police, Steve. He was nice and everything, and he said he would help. But then I found this in his house.” She put the necklace on the table and slid it across. “It’s my mom’s. She never takes it off.”

Molly reached forward to take it. She looked concerned. “Why were you in his house?”

“I didn’t break in or anything.”
I was just looking through his shit to steal drugs.
“I know his daughter.”

“Would your mom have any reason to know Steve?”

“I don’t think so, unless he arrested her. That could be, except she never mentioned it. And she would have. She tells me everything. But he definitely had this weird look on his face when I said her name.”

“Did you ask his daughter?”

“Ask her what?”

“If her dad knows your mom.”

“I can’t really ask her anything right now.” Sandy shook her head, tried not to notice how raw her throat felt. “She’s kind of checked out.”

She’d been lying when she’d texted Molly that she would tell her what happened to the baby. Sandy was going to get what she needed from this reporter, and then the woman could go to hell—no offense. What had happened to that baby was a secret Sandy would take to the grave. She hadn’t even explained it to Aidan, who’d been nice enough not to ask how the hell she could have known what had happened to the baby’s head.

“You could go to other police, you know,” Molly said, like she was really trying to help. “The state police, maybe.”

“I can’t.” Sandy shook her head. She had to hope this woman would drop it. “I mean, I
really
can’t. Trust me.”

“Okay,” Molly said, backing off the way Sandy had wanted her to. “Let me just think for a minute.” She stared at the table. When she looked up, she crossed her arms, her face tougher. “I’ll do it. I’ll ask him why he had the necklace. And if he doesn’t have a good answer or he hasn’t done enough to find your mother, I’ll go to the state police myself. One way or another, we’ll find out what happened to her, Sandy. I promise.”

Then Molly leaned forward and put her hand over Sandy’s. And there were the tears in Sandy’s eyes again—seriously? Was this all it took? For some nice, normal-looking woman to be a little bit kind to her, and she totally fell apart?

“Okay,” Sandy said, and that was all she could manage. She nodded and turned toward the window.

“But, Sandy, whatever happened to the baby—and I’m not saying it was you—whoever, whatever was involved. These things don’t just go away, no matter how much you hope they will. And the harder you try to force them down, the harder they push their way back to the surface. I’m saying that from personal experience.” Molly looked sad. “It can help if you tell someone what happened. I can be that person for you, Sandy. And I’m a lawyer—or I used to be a lawyer. I can be
your
lawyer for the purposes of this. That way no one can make me tell them what you told me. All you have to say is that you want me to be your lawyer.”

“I want you to be my lawyer,” Sandy said.

But that wasn’t what she was thinking. She was thinking:
I want you to be my mother
.

Sandy hadn’t wanted to go to Hannah’s house for their tutoring session. She’d been hoping she’d never have to see where Hannah lived, never have to feel all that cozy love pouring out from the walls. But Hannah had said she was stuck home, watching her brother. She offered to reschedule, but Sandy wasn’t ready for her math quiz, and if she wasn’t prepared, if it didn’t seem like she’d tried, Rhea would be crushed.

The house was basically the nightmare Sandy had dreaded. Nothing fancy, like Aidan’s, but cheerful as all fuck. To-do lists and chore charts and newspaper articles labeled with Post-its and highlighting. There was one of those personalized calendars, with pictures of Hannah and Cole and a big red circle around March 31: “Hannah’s Recital!”

“My parents won’t be home for at least an hour and a half, and Cole’s watching TV. If it’s okay with you, could we study here at the table? In case he needs anything?” Hannah moved a stack of place mats and a little vase of flowers, then dropped her books in the center of the table. “Do you want something to drink or anything?”

“I’m good,” Sandy said. She just wanted to get the whole thing over with and get the hell out of that house. Because it was so fucking hard to breathe in there. It was how Sandy always felt whenever she was anywhere too normal for too long. Like someone was crushing her chest in a vise.

They were about half an hour in when Hannah went to check on her little brother. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Do these problems while I’m gone.”

But Hannah was gone
forever
. Long enough for Sandy to do all the problems and then wait and wait for her to come back. Sandy listened to see if she could hear Hannah talking to her brother, but there was only the sound of the TV. It wasn’t until Sandy checked her phone that she realized more than fifteen minutes had passed. They needed to finish before Hannah’s parents got home. It was one thing for Sandy to deal with being in Hannah’s house, but she wouldn’t be able to cope chatting up her parents.

After a few more minutes, Sandy didn’t have a choice. She had to look for Hannah. Though it wouldn’t be some kind of disaster if Cole saw Sandy, she was hoping to avoid talking to the kid, too.