Stolen Things

by R. H. Herron

  But she didn’t want to talk to anyone, not until she knew what was going on with Mom.

  “Jojo! You home?”

  She stayed still, hoping he couldn’t tell she was at the peephole.

  “Jojo, I can see your shadow on the curtain.”

  “Hey.” She opened the door just wide enough for him to enter.

  Colson hugged her. He always did. This time, though, Jojo remained stiff. Her own arms didn’t move.

  “How you doing?”

  Jojo didn’t answer.

  “Your mom here? Because on the radio just now, I could swear—”

  Silently, Jojo shook her head.

  Mark cocked an eyebrow but seemed to take it at face value. “Where did she go?”

  “To the station.” Her voice was scratchy.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t actually know.” She was a bad liar. No matter how smooth Jojo had tried to be in the past, she had so many tells that even total strangers knew when she wasn’t telling the truth. Now she felt her ears flame and her nose go hot.

  A loud ping that Jojo didn’t recognize rang from Colson’s body. He pulled out his cell phone, and then he shot a glance at Jojo.

  406 in custody echoed in her head.

  Texts were the fastest way of disseminating information that needed to stay off the air. And cops were the biggest gossips in the world.

  Mom had totally just gotten herself arrested somehow.

  And it had to be one of them who’d made that happen.

  Jojo’s hands were clammy. “Well, I guess you should . . . I mean, we’ll call you as soon as she’s back.”

  Colson tilted his head, and for the first time Jojo realized how tall he was. Taller than Frank Shepherd, maybe even taller than Nate Steiner. His shoulders formed a box, a square of muscle. His shirt had to be three times larger than Dad’s shirt.

  Colson said, “What’s your mom trying to do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jojo felt the heat spread from her nose to her cheeks. Colson wasn’t stupid.

  “Jojo. Whatever she’s doing, she has to stop.”

  “I . . . I don’t know what you mean.”

  Colson moved an inch closer to her. He kind of smelled like spilled beer—was he drunk? Was that possible?

  “Jojo, honey, this isn’t a game.”

  Jojo felt flapping wings of panic in her chest. “I know.”

  “She’s making trouble where there should be none. She’s got to stop. Do you get me?”

  No. Jojo didn’t get him. Jojo had no freaking idea what this guy thought she should tell Mom to stop doing, but it certainly wasn’t stopping the search for Harper. “You’re kind of scaring me.” The words weren’t completely true until they came out of her mouth, but then she felt the swell of panic rise from her stomach into her chest and up into her head.

  When he spoke, his voice rumbled in the deep way it always had, but he sounded funny. Not quite himself. “Your dad has it under control, even from the hospital. If your mom doesn’t stop, I won’t be able to protect her.”

  Jojo was frozen in place, her mind a blank.

  But he stepped backward, nodding his head as if everything were normal. “Well, all right, then. You should probably get to bed. It’s late.” He gave a half salute and left the kitchen, the front door banging behind him as he left.

  Jojo stood in the same spot, in the corner, her body still as rigid as an ice sculpture, except that she’d probably never melt.

  She tried to breathe, panting through her mouth.

  Move, do something. Anything. She made a small squawking sound in the back of her throat, and somehow that freed her frozen limbs. She grabbed her phone and her house keys and headed for the front door. But when she put her hand on the doorknob, she realized she had no idea where she was going. Dad was in the hospital, and Mom was probably going to jail. 406 in custody.

  At the moment Jojo had no one. No Harper, no parents, no freaking clue what to do next. She couldn’t put this on Pamela and Andy—it wouldn’t be fair.

  She opened her phone and texted. I know it wasn’t you. Can I come over?

  Kevin’s answer was almost immediate. Yes.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE LYFT CAME in five minutes. Mom would receive an immediate notification as soon as Jojo got out of the car and hit the PAY button on her phone, but who knew what the hell Mom was doing, or when she’d be able to look at her phone again? As the driver pulled onto Kevin’s street, he said, “You know, this is the neighborhood where that football player lives. The one who killed that guy. Did you hear there’s a chick missing, too?” Jojo resolved not to tip and slammed the car door hard.

  Kevin answered the door as if he’d been standing there waiting. His chest and hands were covered in flour, and white powder streaked his cheek.

  “Hey,” said Jojo. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure it had been the right thing to do. Maybe she should’ve just stayed home. Or gone to the hospital to see if Dad was awake, if he could possibly start to explain how everything had gone so wrong.

  Instead she’d gone back to the place where she’d been raped. What was wrong with her?

  But then Kevin wrapped her in a hug. He smelled like cinnamon, and her heart slowed just a beat.

  “How are you?” She pulled away from him, regretting her words immediately. Kevin’s face stiffened along with his shoulders. “I take it back. Don’t answer that.”

  Kevin just shook his head and gestured for her to follow him. “My mom keeps calling, keeps asking me that, and there’s nothing I can say. I don’t have any kind of answer for her. She wants to fly out, but her doctor says her lungs aren’t strong enough yet from that last pneumonia. I can’t stop baking. I got out, what, six hours ago? I’ve made three dozen chocolate chip cookies and one loaf of zucchini bread.” His voice broke. “Zach loved zucchini bread.”

  The kitchen was trashed. It looked as if someone had picked up the room and shaken it, a small, localized earthquake with the stove at the epicenter. Jojo had seen him bake before, but this wasn’t normal cooking. Batter-covered spoons lay on the floor. A tumbler of milk had fallen over on the counter, and it dripped off in steady plonks.

  “This is . . .”

  “Yeah.” Kevin held a sponge under the tap and squeezed it out. For a moment he appeared to be about to start to clean, but then he crammed the sponge into the garbage disposal and turned it on. The noise was monstrous, and it got worse as he shoved a wooden spoon in after it.

  “Kevin!” Jojo lunged for the button to turn it off. “Dude!”

  He looked up at her as if in confusion. “Want a cookie?”

  She didn’t. Her stomach hurt. But she said, “I’d love one.”

  He handed her one, still warm and soft, and then said, “Can you help me with something?”

  “Of course.”

  In his bedroom the sheets had been stripped off and were draped on the floor next to the bookcase that had been upended, its books strewn from the wall to the bathroom door.

  He grabbed one end of the naked mattress. “Help me outside with this?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I know I need to change this room. This is where we slept. It’s got to go.” The mattress thumped its way down the hall. She tried not to look at the closed door, the door of the room she’d been in, where Zach had been found. Had there been crime scene tape up across it while ID had done their work? How many of her own fingerprints had been found there?

  Tears streamed down Kevin’s face. He turned right, and they dragged the mattress through the living room to the open slider door.

  “Where are we taking it?”

  “Just out.” Kevin picked it up and heaved it into the middle of the backyard.

 
Jojo was startled by the motion, but she wasn’t scared of Kevin. Not the way she’d been freaked out just twenty minutes before by Mark Colson.

  Kevin didn’t look at her, just walked past and back into the bedroom. She followed, and they grabbed the box spring, performing the same maneuver through the house. Again Kevin hurled it into the middle of the backyard. On any other day, there would’ve somehow been humor in this. One of them would have bounced on the mattress for sure, probably both of them. But there was no laughter, not anymore.

  Once back in the living room, Jojo ventured, “When did you last eat? Besides cookies.” God, it sounded like something her mother would say. But Kevin’s skin looked ashen, and when he stood still, she could see that his fingers were shaking.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again.”

  Jojo wanted to touch him, wanted to reach out and press her fingers against his wrist, the way Mom did when Jojo was upset, but honestly, Kevin looked as if he were about to break in half.

  “Want to help me paint the bedroom?” he asked.

  “Paint? You have paint?”

  “TaskRabbit to the rescue. Anything delivered, any time of the day. Not that I’ll have money much longer. But yeah, I’ve got all the supplies. I just have to finish clearing out the room.”

  Suddenly it sounded like the best idea in the world. Throwing her body into something physical, something she’d have to think about, something distracting. She’d come over to talk, but this would put it off. Thank God.

  Jojo had never painted anything before. She found she liked the rhythm of it, the way the dark purple paint sounded squishing off the roller and onto the walls. As she painted each wall, Kevin moved to the next, taping off the trim. She liked the sound of that, too. He had music playing in the kitchen, just a random Internet pop station, and as they worked, she heard him start to whistle unconsciously to the faraway tune, then catch himself. It was almost 4:00 A.M., and the night outside was quiet. Inside, it felt like time didn’t exist. Mom hadn’t texted her yet, so Jojo assumed she was still in a cell. If she was, there was nothing Jojo could do, not at the moment. Better to swing a paintbrush than go crazy.

  Hundreds of times she felt the words bubble to the top of her tongue. I’m so sorry about Zach. I’m so sorry.

  But that didn’t feel fair. Saying she was sorry about Zach was perhaps the biggest understatement she could utter. She wasn’t sorry about him. She was brokenhearted. She was knifed through with the knowledge that something had gone wrong, something she didn’t understand, something that had left the man Kevin loved most dead.

  Jojo didn’t know that grief could feel so big.

  Harper.

  As if he could read her thoughts, Kevin said, “Any news on Harper?”

  So much news. So much shit, and Jojo didn’t know where to start. Or even if she should.

  “Just tell me, Jojo.”

  “I got a text. Wherever she is, she’s alive.”

  Kevin dropped the tape, and it rolled into the corner, bumping softly against the wet paint Jojo had just rolled on. “How do you know that?”

  “The text called me a name that no one but Harper knows about, and she mentioned something I have that’s a secret. And some other stuff.”

  “What else?” Kevin’s frame was rigid, but she could feel the energy coming from it.

  “We found out lots of other stuff. Um, bad stuff. She’s been sleeping with a bunch of guys for money.” Jojo dropped her chin and looked at her toes, newly decorated with purple paint droplets. “And some of them are cops. I mean, like, a lot of them are cops.”

  Kevin blinked, then shook his head. “I don’t get it. What does that mean?”

  “The text I got was from the person who has her, or at least that’s what it implied.”

  “And?”

  “The text was signed from CapB.”

  Kevin’s eyes widened even further. He held up one finger and then walked out of the bedroom into the hallway. Jojo, frozen in place, heard him take a long, shaky breath. Then he turned on his heel and walked back in.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I know,” Jojo said hurriedly. “It can’t be—”

  “CapB wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  Jojo needed him to catch up, to be on the same page. “Of course they didn’t. I know that.”

  “We struggle to get our shit together to hold protests. At the last one, no one even remembered the megaphone. We couldn’t kidnap someone if we wanted to, which we never fucking would, because we’re not fucking animals.”

  “Obviously,” said Jojo. “That’s kind of why I came over here, I guess. I wanted to run my ideas past you.” Dang it, it wasn’t like she really had ideas. All she had was a need for comfort and some floating terrified feelings, and those weren’t helping her much. “I think it’s a cop who’s behind all this. I think it’s someone Harper was sleeping with, and I don’t know who it is or what to do.”

  With a paint-smudged finger, Kevin gestured for her to follow him into the kitchen. “I need a drink,” he said. He poured himself a shot of something brown and clear. He looked at her, then shook his head as he shot the liquid back, immediately pouring another one. Then he placed both palms on the tile of the kitchen island and leaned forward. He kept both his eyes and his voice low. “So someone somehow hurt you, dumped you in my house, killed my best friend”—his voice crackled as if static had interfered with his speaking—“and kidnapped Harper, and they’re saying CapB did this? In order to . . . what? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “To discredit CapB. It has to be someone else. One of those police officers, someone angry enough to—”

  “But what’s the connection? None of this makes sense, Jojo. Help me out here.”

  She wished she could. She wished she knew. “I don’t know how.”

  They were the wrong words.

  The sides of Kevin’s hands slid along the tile, gathering into fists. “What about you?” He turned to face her.

  Jojo felt a shiver shoot down the backs of her legs. “What?”

  “I’m going to have to clean up Zach’s blood, did you know that? They said I could hire a company to do it, but they can’t come out for a week. I can’t wait that long. It’s in there right now, all that blood, still soaking through the carpet and blasted up the closet wall. I didn’t kill Zach. And I know you were in my house. Why isn’t anyone looking at you?”

  Jojo’s heart skittered into overdrive. She could run. But Kevin was fast—his salary was dependent on it.

  “Remember when you told me that you didn’t rape me? And I believed you? You didn’t have to do anything or say anything to prove it to me. I just believed you, because I knew you were right. Because we’re friends.”

  Kevin’s eyes were still narrowed, his fists still clenched. He said nothing.

  “I didn’t hurt Zach, Kevin. And I’m not the one who has Harper. There’s someone out to get both of us, and the only chance we have of finding her is to work together. This all happened Friday, and it’s already Sunday night—No, wait, it’s Monday morning now—”

  “How is that our job? Oh, yeah, right. It can’t be the police department’s job, because they’re all fucking the girl who’s missing, am I getting that right?”

  Jojo nodded silently.

  “What’s her father like?”

  “What?”

  “Her stepfather. Could he be pimping her out for some reason?”

  The thought wasn’t as shocking as it should be. Jojo swallowed uncomfortably around a lump in her throat. “I asked her once. If Andy had ever hurt her. She was fine around him our whole lives, and then, right before we got in trouble together, she started to act really weird around him.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Like she hated him but also like she loved him more than anyone else, even
her mom.” Harper would leap at Andy when he picked them up at school, kissing his cheek frantically, but then being as rude as humanly possible, which for Harper was pretty damn rude. Fuck off, Andy. Love you, Andy. You’re an idiot, Andy. What does my mother see in you? You’re the best, I mean it. “He’s never felt creepy, not like some Chester the Molester. It was more like . . . like she was creepy around him.”

  “What did she say when you asked her if he’d hurt her?”

  “She said no, that he loved her.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  Jojo didn’t know. She had then. “I have no clue about anything. I know that he and Pamela just look like parents who’re losing their minds. Pamela’s always been kind of absent but super loving when she’s present. She’s not absent now, that’s for sure. Andy’s just acting like somebody kidnapped his daughter. Someone evil would give you the creeps, right? Andy just seems freaked out and normal. And my mom said that they really thought Harper was home that night. She’s good at knowing when someone’s telling the truth.”

  Kevin lifted an eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”

  “She is.”

  “Do you know how it feels to grieve the person you love the most in the whole world?”

  Jojo shook her head. She wasn’t grieving Harper, not yet. Harper was out there. She would find her. “Kevin—”

  “You know I don’t even feel sad?” Kevin grabbed at the front of his own sweatshirt, yanking it, pulling at the spot roughly over his heart. “I can’t feel anything. It’s like someone came and ripped away every feeling I have. I can’t figure out how to find one single emotion. All I want to do is cry, but that would require me to own some pain. I’m just numb, from the top of my head all the way down. You know we had kids’ names picked out? For someday, for that future we constantly talked about. I lost them, too. Jayden and Jihra. Fuck.” He shot her another glare, as if challenging her to refute him.

  “I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.” Jojo bobbed on the balls of her feet, unable to decide whether to get closer or farther away from him. “But it seems to me like maybe you’re in shock. My dad says that when a body is in shock, they can’t feel anything, they just go numb. Maybe grief is like that.”