Reality Check

by Peter Abrahams

  138

  “No.”

  “Well, you do.”

  They continued without talking, rounded a bend, passed through a dense stand of evergreens that for a few moments blocked the wind and snow, muffled all sound.

  “It, uh,” Cody began. What was he trying to say? These Dover kids were all so articulate; somehow he had to step it up.

  “It makes sense,” he said.

  “What does?” said Townes.

  “Asking questions,” Cody said. “In a situation where someone’s lost.” The truth of that hit him as he spoke. Cody felt Townes’s gaze on him again. “Fair enough,” he said. “Clea’s cool.”

  “Cool?”

  “You asked what she’s like. Cool is the answer, although I don’t see how that’s going to help find her.”

  Cool? Clea was cool? True, in a way, Cody supposed, but if asked to describe her, that wasn’t where he would have started.

  “What else?” he said.

  “What else?”

  “About her. Something that might help.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Cody said. “She’s new here, right?”

  139

  “How do you know that?” said Townes.

  “Alex.”

  “Of course,” Townes said. “Yeah, she transferred in as a junior—comes from some hick town out west.”

  Cody had a thought; a genuine, possibly useful kind of thought, having nothing to do with the jealousy demon. “Maybe she didn’t like it here,” he said. He had to study that letter of hers, first thing.

  “Huh?”

  “And wanted to get away.”

  “That doesn’t happen. People kill to come here.”

  But Clea hadn’t. Her father made a few calls, end of story. Without really knowing why, Cody decided he had to find out for sure whether Townes knew anything about him. “Why did she come here?” he said.

  “For the opportunity, like anyone else.”

  “But why junior year?”

  “Why not? It happens all the time.”

  So Townes didn’t know. They walked out of the muffled space between the evergreens—more like a high-ceilinged interior space, a chapel, say, than the outdoors—and back into the snow and wind. The trail led them to a lookout with a picnic bench, all covered in snow. Down below they could see the highway, three figures standing beside it, gazing 140

  back up in their direction.

  “How come she went off riding all by herself?” Cody said. Townes shrugged. “She likes riding, can never get enough.”

  That was just about the only positive thing he’d found about Townes so far: Unlike some of the others, he never referred to Clea—or started to refer to her and then caught himself—in the past tense.

  And the answer was believable, totally. Clea loved riding. There was just one little thing. “You’re on the team too,” Cody said.

  “I’m captain.”

  Cody turned to him. “Why didn’t you go with her?”

  A tiny muscle in Townes’s face twitched. “Midnight overheated during the workout. I wanted to get him back in the barn.”

  “Midnight is your horse?”

  “Correct.”

  A big lump of snow fell off a branch, thumped down right beside Cody, a quiet white explosion. The jealousy demon retreated into Cody’s internal shadows.

  They walked down to Route 7. Cody produced his cell phone. Simon knew the number by heart. A few minutes later a battered-looking taxi arrived and they all squeezed in. The 141

  driver dropped them on the Dover Academy campus in front of Baxter Hall, a big brick building with yellow trim and yellow columns by the door. Cody gazed up at the windows, wondering which one was Clea’s. The fare came to twenty-six dollars. The Dover Academy kids scrounged around for money. Alex had three dollars and fifty cents, Larissa two dollars and some euros, Simon a crumpled-up $5000 birthday check from his grandfather, Townes nothing. Cody ended up paying the driver.

  142

  DARKNESS WAS FALLING FAST as Cody walked past the Mellon Memorial Museum of Art—a neon sculpture resembling a rocket ship glowed outside—and the temperature was falling, too, as well as the snow: everything falling. He took the road by the hockey rink, and through the glass walls saw a game in progress. Cody didn’t know much about hockey—his athletic life, meaning much of his whole life, had always been football in the fall, baseball in the spring, basketball in between, mostly to stay in shape—but he lingered outside the rink, long enough to see Dover Academy, in red and gold, score a goal against a team in green and white. The Dover players all raised their sticks as the puck went in the net. It looked like fun. The road, recently plowed, took him past the tennis courts, a flat whiteness with dark net posts poking up in regular patterns, and up the tree-lined street with nice houses, everyone inside except for one man trying to shovel his walk while his dog raced around undoing all his work. The lane leading to the barn soon appeared on Cody’s right. No plow had reached it yet, but there were tire tracks going down the middle, and Cody walked in those, sneakers wet, feet moving beyond cold toward numb. He’d gone about halfway to the barn—mostly dark, just one or two lights showing through the windows—

  when a car came his way, snowflakes black in its headlights. Cody stepped aside, up to his mid calves in snow, to let it go by, but the car didn’t go by, instead rolled to a stop beside him. A cop car. The window slid down and Sergeant Orton peered out. “That you, Cody?” Snowflakes blew into the car, got caught in his mustache.

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be freezing your ass off.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Find those kids all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything to report?”

  Cody shook his head. “Did anyone else, uh . . .”

  “Nope,” said Sergeant Orton. “Can I give you a lift some-place?”

  “I’m okay.”

  144

  “I forgot, been so busy—you go to Ethan Allen?”

  “Ethan Allen?”

  “The high school.”

  “I dropped out of high school,” Cody said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Going on seventeen.”

  “Old enough to make your own decisions,” said Sergeant Orton. Cody nodded. That cop episode at Black Rocks made him wary, but Sergeant Orton didn’t seem so bad. Then the sergeant added, “Right or wrong.” And the wariness returned. Plus Cody didn’t see his decision ending up wrong. Couldn’t he always go back for his GED? Besides, he had other things to think about right now. “This snow,” he said, “how’s it going to, uh . . . affect the search?”

  “We’ll see in the morning,” said Sergeant Orton. “How come you dropped out, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “I’m not good at school,” Cody said.

  “Academics, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s more to school than academics,” Sergeant Orton said. “Sports, for example. You look like someone who might be useful at sports.”

  Useful? Cody didn’t know how to interpret that. “I like sports,” he said.

  “What’s your favorite?”

  145

  “Football.”

  “Shoulda known,” said Sergeant Orton. “Let me guess—

  you’re either a wide receiver or a quarterback.”

  “Quarterback.”

  “Ah,” the sergeant said. He seemed to have all kinds of time for this casual conversation, taking place with himself comfortably in the car, heater blasting, and Cody out in the cold. “Couldn’t help but notice you’re limping a bit—that from football?”

  “I’m not limping,” Cody said. The wind rose, made highpitched sounds in the trees, and he shivered, nothing he could do about it. “I’m worr—” Cody stopped himself, tried again.

  “What’s the temperature going to be tonight?”

  “They’re predicting a low of nineteen, twenty, somewhere around
that.” Sergeant Orton’s small eyes, normally dominated by that mustache, by that nose, were suddenly dominating again: Cody felt their gaze, almost painful, like some kind of probe trying to get at his mind. “Any special reason for asking?”

  “Not special,” Cody said. “Just, you know, survival in cold weather. At night.”

  Sergeant Orton nodded. “Been thinking the same,” he said. “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  146

  “Say it was you out there, lost in the woods—what would you do?”

  Cody thought about that. An idea, kind of obvious, probably suggested by recent experience, came to him pretty quickly.

  “I’d try calling on my cell phone,” he said. “Some friend, or maybe 911.”

  “Good thinking,” said Sergeant Orton. “We searched her room at the dorm, of course, plus her lockers at the gym and at the barn. No phone, meaning she probably had it on her, like most people these days. But the phone company shows no calls originating from her number from about an hour before riding practice till now.”

  “Maybe her phone wouldn’t work,” Cody said, “out in the woods.”

  “Some services don’t,” said the sergeant. “Hers does.”

  That was bad. Cody tried to bend the cell phone facts into something not quite so bad, and failed. “But—but you haven’t found any . . . thing, any evidence.”

  “Not a speck,” Sergeant Orton said. “So let’s keep thinking—what else would you do in her place, supposing, say, you were not only lost, but hurt, too, maybe not capable of moving around too much.”

  Cody’s mind squirmed away from picturing Clea like that. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he felt tears on the way, such an 147

  unusual sensation—he’d never been a crier, had cried for the last time at his mother’s funeral—he almost didn’t recognize what was happening. But he got hold of himself in time—you had to be tough, and not just in football, had to screw your courage to the goddamn sticking-place—and no tears came. Screw your courage to the sticking-place / And we’ll not fail: Maybe the best piece of advice he’d ever gotten, coming from Ms. Brennan the English teacher, of all people, along with the D minus.

  He felt more of Sergeant Orton’s silent probing, backed a half step or so from the cruiser, trying to get out of his range.

  “Maybe hole up in a cave or something,” he said, “if I really couldn’t move.”

  “Not too many caves hereabouts,” the sergeant said. “But some, plus little crannies by and by, in the rocks, under an uprooted stump, that kind of thing. Believe it or not, these old mountains haven’t been completely mapped out yet.”

  Cody hadn’t looked for any of that—caves, crannies, hollows in the ground. “So that’s what we’ll concentrate on tomorrow?” he said. “Caves and stuff?”

  Sergeant Orton gave him one last long probing scan, then nodded. “Meantime, how about a drive somewhere?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Live nearby, Cody? You look cold.”

  148

  “Not far,” said Cody. “And I’m not cold.” Sergeant Orton’s window slid up. He started to drive away, then backed up, and the window slid down again.

  “You into drugs, Cody?” said the sergeant.

  “No.” And that was the truth. Cody knew kids who were, but he’d never been interested. Drinking: a different story—

  deep down he knew that about himself already.

  “Just asking,” Sergeant Orton said. He drove away. Cody stepped into the cruiser’s ruts and followed them toward the barn.

  Cody’s car, covered in snow, was the only one left in the parking lot. He pulled the sleeve of his fleece down over his hand, began sweeping the snow off the windshield; halfway done, he stopped, approached the nearest window of the barn and peered in.

  Low lights shone over the doors at both ends. The only other light came from a candle burning on Mrs. McTeague’s desk. Mrs. McTeague was no longer there. In her place sat Ike, gazing into space, a knife in his hand. Then his lips moved, as though he were talking to himself, and he turned to a block of wood sitting on the table. He began—what was the word?—

  whittling; he began whittling with the knife. Ike was very good, very fast. In no time at all, a tiny horse started to take 149

  shape, head thrown back, mouth wide open. Cold, wet, tired, hungry—despite all that, Cody was transfixed. He stayed by the window until Ike, without warning, stopped work and went back to gazing into space.

  Cody returned to his car, finished sweeping snow off the windows. He got in, turned the key, switched on the overhead light, took Clea’s letter from the glove box. His fingers were so numb that it slipped, drifted to the floor. He picked it up with both hands, blew off a few grains of dirt, read the whole thing again, found that some of the phrases were now embedded in his memory. Phrases like: You pop up in my mind so often; well, maybe not ever; some are snobby; One or two I don’t like at all. And that bit that had puzzled him the first time and still did: Like rolling the dice—a cliché that turns out to have real mean- ing. In fact, Clea’s whole letter, from beginning to end, was a puzzle, the most puzzling question of all being: How could Clea have written it if she was going out with Townes DeWitt? Cody looked up, saw that the dashboard temperature needle had risen above C. He turned up the heat full blast and headed into town, first carefully following in Sergeant Orton’s tracks to keep from getting stuck, then faster as he reached plowed roads. He came to Spring Street, spotted warm-looking light glowing through the big front window of that café, the Rev.

  Cody parked across the street but didn’t switch off the 15 0

  engine. Instead he took off his shoes and socks and held his feet—the skin kind of bluish, but that might have been a trick of the light—up to the blower. Cody started to feel better right away. He rolled up his left pant leg, checked his knee. Not too bad, he told himself. He reached around to the backseat, fumbled through his duffel, found fresh socks, his other sneakers, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt, all blessedly dry.

  Cody crossed the street, entered the Rev. The Rev had a wide-plank pine floor, little chairs and tables, a high ceiling that seemed to be made of metal, maybe tin, and a big stone fireplace with a roaring fire. Cody took a seat at the table nearest the fireplace, felt the heat right away. He glanced at the other customers—a few middle-aged couples, three kids, almost certainly from Dover Academy, sitting in one corner, all of them busy on their laptops, and a man in a tweed jacket, alone at the bar, his back to Cody.

  The waitress came over. “Sure you want to be so close to the fire?” She had an eyebrow piercing and a pleasant accent, maybe Irish; Cody wasn’t sure, had never met an Irish person before.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She handed him a menu. Whoa. The prices were kind of high, like $10.95 for a burger, but all at once that was what he really wanted. Cody ordered the burger, plus onion rings and a Coke.

  151

  “The burger comes with fries,” the waitress said.

  “Great,” said Cody, only realizing after she’d gone that maybe she’d been hinting at some overlap between onion rings and fries. But he was hungry.

  The food came pretty quickly, and for a moment or two Cody was unaware of anything but getting lots of it inside him. Then he relaxed a bit, sat back, found a good position for his left leg. This was the best burger he’d ever had, also the best fries and the best rings. Cody felt good, at least physically. He was about to take out Clea’s letter, go over it again, when he noticed the man in the tweed jacket glancing at him. Cody was almost sure he recognized the man—Mr. Stein, from out on the trail. The man himself showed no sign of recognition, turned away, and was soon talking on his cell phone. Cody polished off every morsel, including the pickle slice, and he hated pickles. Despise, detest, loathe. What would it be like to have so much money you could forget about a $5,000 check? Cody remembered once, a few years before, when he’d thrown a pair of jeans with a forgotten five-dollar bil
l in one of the pockets into the laundry basket, and his father, taking clothes out of the dryer, had found it. “Don’t care much about money?” he’d said, and ripped it into little pieces right in front of him.

  “Dessert?” said the waitress.

  Cody checked the menu, saw they had pecan pie. He loved 152

  pecan pie, but a slice cost $5.95—$6.95 à la mode—and he’d already spent too much money. “No, thanks.” She wrote up the check. Cody paid.

  He shifted his chair, moving closer to the fire, and was taking Clea’s letter from his pocket when the man in the tweed jacket left the bar and came over, a cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Cody?” he said. Cody put the letter away. “Jonah Stein. We met on the trail.”

  “Yeah,” said Cody.

  “A frustrating day,” Mr. Stein said. “Mind if I join you for a moment?”

  “Uh, no,” said Cody, sitting up straight.

  Mr. Stein pulled up a chair, sat down. He’d been wearing a big fur hat out in the woods; now Cody got his first good look at him, a small, wiry man with hollow cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. “We appreciate your effort,” Mr. Stein said.

  “This’ll be the sixth night,” Cody said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  What had he said? And why then, so out of the blue? “Just, uh, how long she’s been missing.”

  Mr. Stein nodded. “It’s very worrisome.” He stirred his coffee, stared at the tiny whirlpool he’d made.

  “What do you think happened?” Cody said.

  Mr. Stein looked up, took a deep breath. “The theory is she 153

  was thrown from the horse, perhaps suffering a concussion, and then got lost in the woods.”

  “But you’ve searched all those sectors.”

  “It’s rough country,” Mr. Stein said. “Impossible to cover every square inch.” He sipped his coffee, watching Cody over the rim of the cup. “Have any theories of your own?” he said.

  “Me?” said Cody.

  “You seem like a bright kid.” Cody said nothing. “She’s bright too. Clea, I mean. And resourceful. I have her in rhetoric class—one of the most promising students I’ve come across in some time.” A quick smile crossed his face. “Among other things, we study famous speeches. Clea did Earl Spencer’s eulogy at Princess Di’s funeral.” A fact that Cody already knew, from Clea’s cheerful little mention in the letter; now, for some reason, it gave him a chill. “At Wednesday’s class, in fact,” Mr. Stein went on, the smile now gone. “Only a few hours before she . . .” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Recited the whole speech from memory, but the best part was her analysis of the politics of it.”