by Chelsea Cain
“I just want to be neighborly,” she said.
He laughed and shook his head.
“Do you want another glass of water?” she asked.
He wanted something stronger.
“I’m flirting with you, Archie,” she said. “This,” she said, waving a hand in front of herself, “is flirting. There is no conspiracy. I looked you up. I understand that you’ve been through some things. But you are searching for dark motives where there are none. Is my being interested in you so unlikely a scenario?”
“Yes,” Archie said.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked with a smile. “Produce references?”
“I need to look through your things,” Archie said.
Rachel cocked her head. “You don’t date much, do you?”
Archie rephrased it. “I’m going to look through your things,” he said.
She was very still. He fully expected her to throw him out of her apartment. She had every right to. He half hoped that she would. It was the reasonable thing to do. But she didn’t.
“Put everything back where you find it,” she said.
“Do you have any whiskey?” Archie asked.
She unfolded her legs and slid over the arm of her chair. “I do.”
As she walked into the kitchen, Archie got up and went into her bedroom.
The bed was made. He went over to her dresser and pulled open each drawer. Everything was neatly folded. He opened her closet. Several dresses hung on hangers. Shoes were lined up on the closet floor.
There was no detritus. No crumpled receipts on the dresser top. No loose change. The three fashion magazines on the bedside table were all current issues.
It was photo-ready.
He looked in the closet again.
Four dresses, a few blouses, a single skirt.
“Where are the rest of your clothes?” he called.
“They’re being shipped,” she called back. “Why? Do you need to borrow something?”
He went into her bathroom. The towels were all the same color yellow as the couch. He opened the medicine cabinet. No prescriptions. Nothing with her name on it. Just cosmetics and beauty products. A toothbrush sat in a cup on the edge of the sink.
Rachel appeared in the bathroom doorway and handed him a glass of whiskey. No ice, no soda, just like he liked it.
“Find anything?” she asked.
Archie rolled a sip of the whiskey around his mouth. It tasted better than what he was used to.
She waited for him to say something.
“Where are your textbooks?” he asked.
She sighed. “Seriously?”
“You said you were a student,” Archie said. “Where are your textbooks?”
“You know, I could call the cops,” she said. “Tell them a strange man was in my bathroom.”
He moved past her, out of the bathroom, and scanned her bedroom for the books. Nothing. He walked into the living room and didn’t see them there, either.
“Hey,” she said from behind him. “Sherlock.”
He turned around. She tilted her head toward a book bag by the front door.
He walked over to the bag and opened it. Inside were history texts, anthologies, books of theory.
He paged through one. Then another.
“I hear you up at night, you know,” she said from behind him. “I hear you walking around. I hear you talking to somebody on the phone.”
Archie put the books down and stood up and turned toward her. “I can check to see if you’re really a student,” he said.
“I am a student.”
“Students take notes,” Archie said. “They highlight.”
She stepped toward him. “Classes start next week,” she said.
It was plausible, all of it. Every explanation. He imagined what his shrink would have to say about all this, what Henry would think. He was behaving like a deranged lunatic.
So why wasn’t she scared?
She should be scared.
Any rational person would have insisted he leave long ago.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
“Take off your clothes,” Archie said.
She raised her eyebrows, as if she hadn’t heard him correctly.
He didn’t repeat himself.
He waited, motionless, to see what she would do.
And then he watched as she peeled her tank top up over her head and held it out and dropped it on the floor. She didn’t have a tan line. Her skin was a perfect dark honey, the color interrupted only by the soft pink circles of her nipples. Then she pushed her shorts down, stepped out of them, and stood before him, completely naked. Her tan, flat abdomen led to a wisp of dark blond pubic hair.
Her posture didn’t change. She wasn’t abashed; she didn’t try to cover herself. She appeared perfectly comfortable.
“Okay,” Archie said.
He could feel the sweat forming on his upper lip.
He hadn’t thought she’d do it.
She lowered her chin and smiled up at him. He recognized this as flirting.
“Nice shirt,” she said.
He looked down. The blue shirt he’d put on at her suggestion. He could feel blood rush to his face.
This was not how this was supposed to go.
She took another step toward him, put her hand on his chest, and pushed him back. He stumbled out of her apartment, into the hall. She smiled at him and sighed, before she closed the door in his face.
CHAPTER
27
Susan had one bare foot up on the dash of the Saab, and a cigarette in her hand out the window. She was on her first smoke of the day, and her second cup of coffee. She picked at the bagel crumbs on her lap, eating some of them and tossing others out the window onto the street. All the windows were rolled down. Nothing helped. Her scalp felt sweaty. Her toenails were too long. A small white butterfly batted against the windshield, trying to get out, apparently oblivious to the four alternative escape routes.
Archie had told her specifically to wait for him in front of the Lifeworks Center for Young Women. They were supposed to meet there and then go in together. He’d told her not to go in without him four times. But she had gotten there early and he was running late and it was hot.
Archie was not someone who ran late. He was someone who had things come up. But when these things—generally dead people or homicidal maniacs—interfered with his schedule, he always called. He was conscientious that way. Susan was not. When things came up in her life—generally a good book she was reading and didn’t want to put down, or a manicure—she didn’t call, she just hurried.
There was no question. Archie had figured out that she’d taken the flash drive.
Susan rummaged around on the floor of the backseat until she found a plastic Dasani bottle that still had some water in it, and she took a slug. It was warm and tasted like cancer. She screwed the cap back on and tossed it back on the floor.
Her iPod battery was dead and she didn’t have the charger. There was nothing on the radio.
She looked at the clock on the dash. She had only been waiting five minutes. It seemed like longer. She finished her cigarette and put it out. She wondered how many cases of emphysema could have been prevented by punctuality.
Screw it.
She slipped her feet back into her flip-flops and got out of the car. The sidewalk in front of the house was cracked and buckled from tree roots. She walked alongside the picket fence, and then up the front walk. A garden, on either side of the walk, seemed to be filled entirely with tomatoes. Susan was halfway up the peeling front porch steps when she heard Archie behind her.
“I told you to wait for me,” he said.
Susan cringed and turned around. “Whoops,” she said.
Archie checked his watch. “You couldn’t last ten minutes?”
He walked past her on the stairs. He seemed fine. He didn’t know about the flash drive. They were going to pretend that everything was fine. She could do tha
t. She had spent the better part of high school doing that.
“Who even has a watch anymore?” Susan said, catching up with him. “I bet you still have dial-up.”
He was wearing a white button-down tucked into gray pants and a pair of suede shoes with thick rubber soles. A small spiral notebook, folded open, poked out of his pants pocket. The leather gun holster on his hip matched his brown leather belt. Susan knew that Archie usually wore a jacket to cover the gun, but it was hot enough she guessed he’d given up the effort. He didn’t offer any explanation for being late. But then, he was investigating two murders.
“So did you listen to it?” she asked.
“Yes,” Archie said.
She was dying to know what Archie thought of her interview with Gretchen. She had hundreds of questions about the circumstances of Beaton’s disappearance, the stuff that hadn’t made the papers. But before Susan could ask any of them, a woman with corkscrew gray hair burst through the front door, letting the screen bang closed behind her.
She was wearing a long gray skirt, a long-sleeved white cotton shirt, and hoop earrings the size of bracelets. “She’s gone,” the woman said to Archie. “Pearl’s split.”
Archie stiffened. “What?” he said. He ran his hands through his hair and stomped inside, as Susan followed behind.
There were no introductions.
The woman appeared distressed; her earrings were swinging.
“How long has she been gone?” Archie asked.
“An hour,” the woman said. “I mean, that’s when she was last seen. I just went up to tell her to come down for your interview and she was gone.”
No one was looking at Susan. She was trying to think back, to remember if she’d seen anyone leave the house while she was waiting in the car. Would she even recognize Pearl again if she saw her?
“She take anything?” Archie asked.
The woman wrung her hands. “Her backpack’s gone.”
“Does she have a cell phone?” Susan asked.
Archie and the woman turned and looked at her.
“This is Susan Ward,” Archie said to the woman. “Bea Adams, the center’s director,” Archie said.
“Yes,” the woman said. “And like any teenager, she lives and dies by it.” The woman reached into a pocket in her skirt and held up a cell phone. “I found it on her bed.”
“I need to see her room,” Archie said.
CHAPTER
28
Pearl’s room looked like a college dorm that was three parts Holly Hobbie and one part Emily the Strange. Two single beds were pushed up against opposite walls, and a skinny girl with an orange Mohawk and a sullen expression sat listening to an iPod on one of them. The curtains and bedspreads were gingham. An old wooden dresser had been painted light blue and then lovingly distressed. A strawberry and flower print had been stenciled at eye level all the way around the room. If Susan had been forced to sleep here, she would have run away, too.
“Our board members did some of the decorating,” Bea explained.
“It’s . . . nice,” Susan said.
The girls had tried to Goth it up some. The corkboard on the closet door was covered with images of screaming death-metal musicians that Susan didn’t recognize. The lightbulb in the desk lamp was a blue party bulb. All the clothing strewn on the floor was black.
The girl with the orange Mohawk had a silver barbell through her nose, four silver studs over each eyebrow, a ring through the center of her lower lip, and six tiny stars tattooed in a cluster on her right temple. She was wearing a black tank top that had been cut in half at the seams and reassembled with safety pins, cutoff jeans, and beaten-up motorcycle boots. Her eyes were lined with kohl and her lips were painted dark purple.
She was maybe, what, fourteen?
Susan looked closer. The girl’s Mohawk was slick and sharp and as tall as a dollar bill; her head was shaved on both sides. The hair was dyed orange. But it wasn’t an ordinary orange. It was a brilliant neon orange. Manic Panic Electric Lava, to be precise, in the original cream formula.
Susan knew it, because her hair was exactly the same color.
Archie started to move, but Susan put her hand out. “Let me,” she said. Then she walked over and sat down on the end of the girl’s bed before Archie could protest. Wasn’t that why Susan was there in the first place? Because she spoke “disaffected teenese”?
The girl did one of those barely discernible eye rolls, an eye roll that said she could not even be bothered to do a full eye roll.
Susan plucked the earbuds out of the girl’s ears.
The girl said, “Hey!”
“I like your hair,” Susan said.
The girl gave Susan a slow once-over, ending at Susan’s flaming electric tresses. “You need to condition,” the girl said.
Susan thought she heard a half chuckle from behind her where Archie and Bea were standing.
“You’re Pearl’s roommate?” Susan said.
“No, I’m her cat,” the girl said.
“Her name’s Allison,” Bea said.
“When did you last see Pearl, Allison?” Susan asked.
“I dunno. Like an hour ago? She came in and packed up and left. Didn’t say a word.”
Susan glanced down at the earbuds on the gingham bedspread. “Maybe you just didn’t hear her,” Susan said.
“I don’t know where she went,” Allison said, narrowing her eyes. “And if I did, I wouldn’t say.”
“She could be in danger,” Archie said.
Allison gave Archie a look. Susan remembered that look. It meant, People like you lie. “Whatever,” Allison said. She dug her earbuds back into her ears and dialed up the volume.
Susan had done a story about the danger of earbuds, and at that decibel level Allison was looking at metabolically exhausted ear-hair cells, which would lead to hair cell death and eventual loss of inner ear functional ability. But Allison didn’t look like she was up for a lecture.
“She’s not going to be helpful,” Bea said. She lowered her voice. “She has trust issues.”
“Can I look around?” Archie asked Bea.
Susan saw Bea hesitate.
Archie took a step closer to Bea. “Let me be clear,” he said. “This property belongs to your organization. So I can search this room without a warrant if you give me permission. So can I look around?”
“Yes,” Bea said. “Of course.”
Susan was already scanning the room for clues. “Want some help?” she asked.
“Don’t touch anything,” Archie said.
So Susan watched as Archie moved methodically around the room, opening drawers and scanning surfaces. When he went through the closet and dresser he called Bea over and asked her if she could tell what was missing. She couldn’t.
Susan inched over to the desk next to Pearl’s empty bed. The surface of the desk was flecked with colored marks, like fine-tip markers slipping off the edge of a page. Susan walked over to Allison and plucked out her earbuds.
“Hey!” Allison said again.
“Did Pearl have a diary?” Susan asked.
Allison rolled her eyes, this time the full treatment. “No one has diaries anymore,” she said. “We use Facebook.” She dropped her attention to the screen of her iPod. “She had a sketch pad she was always drawing in, though.”
“Where did she keep it?” Archie asked.
“I don’t know,” Allison said. “She always worked on it in bed.”
Susan, Archie, and Bea all turned toward Pearl’s bed. Allison went back to killing her inner-ear hair cells.
“When I was a teenager,” Susan said, “I had a diary that I kept in a sealed Ziploc bag in a frozen fish sticks box in our freezer,” Susan said. She turned to Bea. “My mother would eat cat litter before she ate a fish stick,” she explained. She walked over to the bed. “May I?” she asked Archie.
“Please,” Archie said.
Susan flopped down on her back onto Pearl’s bed. The box spring bounced an
d creaked. The desk was at her feet. The wall was at her left. She surveyed the room from there, looking for the ideal hiding place—someplace safe from the roommate and staff, but close enough for easy access. The desk was too public. Ditto the dresser. Then Susan slid her hand between the wall and the mattress and felt around. Nothing. “Help me,” she said to Archie, and she got up and she and Archie and Bea tugged the bed a foot from the wall.
The three peered over the bed. Black scuffs marred the blue wall paint where a black hardcover sketch pad had been jammed in and pried out again and again.
Susan said, “It’s gone.” And then she added, to be completely clear, “She’s not planning on coming back.”
CHAPTER
29
Susan leaned her head against Leo’s apartment door and buzzed. Her laptop was cradled under one arm, the white cord trailing behind her down the hall like a tail.
She was attracted to Leo Reynolds for a lot of reasons. He was beautiful, in a vampire sort of way: pale and dark-haired with light eyes and the kind of nose they used to put on Roman coins. He wore clothes well, and bought suits that were worth more than Susan’s car. He was elusive and guarded, which somehow made him seem mysterious and enigmatic. People thought he was a cad. His trysts, before Susan, consisted mainly of strippers and hookers. He had conquests, not girlfriends. Susan’s own sexual history seemed positively puritanical by comparison. She was a virginal flower. This was a change-up; Susan was used to being the bad influence. Leo was the first boyfriend she’d ever had who thought that she was better than he was. He was also rich. At least his father was rich.
But right now the thing that appealed to her most about Leo was his air-conditioning.
She pressed her cheek against the door—even the door felt cool. She imagined the perfect sixty-eight-degree air on the other side of it, and buzzed again. Her interview with Gretchen Lowell was due in two days. And if she could just get out of the heat she could write it.
Leo looked surprised when he opened the door.
“I followed some people in downstairs,” Susan explained, elbowing her way past him with her laptop.