by Rob Thomas
She didn’t really need to take notes—she had a memory for details that was at best useful and at worst obsessive—but the little notebook was a good smoke screen during an interview. Too much direct eye contact made people nervous, cagey. This way they didn’t feel overly scrutinized, which loosened up their tongues. Now she glanced up and tapped the tip of her pen on her pad.
“What can you tell me about Hayley? Anything you can share about her habits, her plans, and her personality might be helpful. I’m going to try to retrace her steps in the next few days, so the more I know about her, the easier that will be.”
Margie Dewalt rubbed her arms as if to warm them, though the room was actually quite stuffy.
“She … she’s a sweet girl.” A small, fluttering smile lit her mouth and then was gone. “Friendly. Really social—she makes friends everywhere she goes. She’s always been so easygoing, especially compared with her siblings.” She glanced at Ella with a look that was more sad than accusatory. “Ella won’t go to the mall with me anymore, says only losers do that.” Ella drew in her breath audibly but didn’t otherwise move.
Veronica jotted out of touch in her notebook. “Did she have a lot of friends?”
“Oh, yes. In high school she did. In college, I think she’s had a harder time.” She pressed her lips together. “I’ve met a few of the so-called friends that she came down here with. Two of them are always hovering around the conference room pretending they’re torn up about Hayley. But they didn’t even realize she was gone until two days after they’d last seen her. If those were the best friends she had …” She shook her head.
“Do you have their contact info? I’d like to talk to them,” Veronica said.
She nodded. “I’ll get it for you.”
“What about a boyfriend? Was she seeing anyone?”
Margie frowned a little. “I know she was dating—she sort of hinted at it. I don’t think there was anyone serious, though. I mean, she would have told me if she were hearing wedding bells, you know?”
Would she though? Veronica looked up from her notepad. “Did you know she was planning to come down for spring break?”
The woman nodded. “Of course. I wanted her to come back to Billings for the week. I thought it’d be nice—she could see her old friends, spend some time with the family. But she wanted to come down here.” She wiped at her eyes. “Well, I understand. She’s eighteen. I can’t expect her to come home every chance she gets. I sent her a little money. Told her to send me a postcard.” She stared blankly into space for a moment. “I wonder if she did.”
“Did any of you speak to her last week?”
“She texted Ella Monday night,” Mrs. Dewalt said, looking quickly at her daughter. “Right, honey?”
Ella nodded but didn’t look up. “She sent me a picture of her drink. It was one of those tall ones, with an umbrella.” She shrugged awkwardly. “We used to send each other random pictures of our food. It started as a joke, because she hated the food at Berkeley. I kept sending her pictures of Mom’s cooking. She’d send me back pictures of whatever disgusting thing she had to eat.”
“Did she say anything else?” Veronica asked gently. Ella just shook her head. Veronica cleared her throat awkwardly. “Was it like Hayley to go out a lot? Was she a … heavy partier?”
“Well, it’s obvious from that picture that she was drinking,” Crane pointed out. “She was probably drunk the whole time she was here.”
“That’s not Hayley, Crane.” Mrs. Dewalt gave him a pale and wounded look.
“Oh yeah? You really think Hayley came down to drink Shirley Temples at Chili’s and get to bed by ten p.m.? You’ve seen how the girls act down here. Wasted. Entitled. Stupid,” he said bitterly. His nostrils flared.
Congratulations, Crane. You’ve just received the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others award. The prize: a full background search and my undivided attention.
Margie’s gaze shot toward him. “What difference does that make? What, are you saying she deserved to be … to go missing?”
“No, of course not,” he said quickly, holding up calloused, stubby hands. He took a deep breath, his voice calmer. “But look, Veronica said she needs to get a complete picture so she can retrace Hayley’s steps, right? I’m just trying to help.”
“Hayley’s a good girl.” Margie sounded almost pleading. She looked on the verge of tears again.
Veronica set her notebook on her knee and glanced between them.
Crane seemed to hesitate, then leaned toward his step-mom. “If we want to find Hayley we need to tell Veronica everything we can about her. The truth is, Hayley’s changed.”
“She has not!” Margie whispered, but Crane continued as if he hadn’t heard her.
“She came home at Christmas and she was like a different person. She was moody, you know? Coming in at weird hours, ignoring the rest of us, hiding out in her room. I don’t know what was up with her, but she sure didn’t seem to be happy.” His voice was neutral, but Veronica thought she saw a vindictive gleam in his eye as he spoke.
Veronica glanced at Margie. Tears started down her face. She half expected Mike or Ella to go to her, to comfort her, but no one moved. “Did you notice anything different about her behavior, Mrs. Dewalt?”
For a moment Margie looked like she wanted to argue. Then she gave a helpless shrug.
“I don’t know anymore,” she said miserably. She put her hands over her mouth and closed her eyes, sobs rolling through her body like waves.
Veronica glanced around the room. Every few moments Mike would lift his coffee to his lips and take an absent sip. Ella looked like a creature huddled in a shell, hard and pensive. Crane kept jiggling his knee up and down. Behind them, on the counter, the digital frame showed a photo of Hayley at twelve or thirteen, her dark hair streaming from beneath her hat. She wore a softball uniform and stood with her arm hooked around her mother’s neck. Margie flashed a peace sign at the camera, her hair cut with the same bangs as her daughter’s.
A personality change at college? Not such a strange thing. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen? You left home and tried out new identities. Jocks suddenly took up clove cigarettes and went to art history lectures, buttoned-down valedictorians traded in books for bongs, until everyone got bored and tried something else. Then again, a lot of psychological disorders showed up in the late teens. Depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. A real shift in behavior could have been a warning sign.
“Did she say anything specific that might lead you to think she was unhappy?”
Crane shook his head. “Not to me.”
“And she didn’t mention anything about her life in Berkeley that might explain it? Anything about school—teachers giving her a hard time, classes that were overwhelming?”
“That’s what I assumed it was,” Margie said, her voice choked. “But she wouldn’t talk to me about it.”
Veronica sat for another moment, pretending to write in her notebook. She wanted to give them another few beats to think about anything they’d seen, anything they’d heard. But nobody spoke. The only sounds were Margie’s soft sniffles, and the air-conditioning kicking on. Finally Veronica closed the notebook and slid it into her bag.
“All right—Mrs. Dewalt, if you can get me those phone numbers I think I have enough to get started with. I’ll leave you my card. You can call day or night if you think of anything that might be helpful.”
Margie rummaged through her enormous quilted purse, emptying its contents on the counter while Veronica waited by the door. Crane had turned the TV back on. The host of the nature show was now describing how a canoe full of schoolchildren had capsized when a monstrous fish rammed against the hull. “There were no survivors,” he said soberly.
Suddenly, Mike Dewalt looked up from his coffee. His eyes, nestled in swollen pouches of flesh, were light blue and surprisingly warm.
“Be careful out there.” He took a shaky breath. “I don’t care what that sheriff says. S
omeone in this town took my baby. And whoever did it is still out there.”
He held her gaze for another moment, then looked down. Veronica’s heart gave a lurch as Margie shoved a scrap of paper into her hand. A phone number was scrawled on one side.
“That’s the cell number one of them left me. I don’t know which one.”
“Thanks.” Veronica slid it into her wallet. “Hang in there. I’ll be in touch.”
Outside the room, she took a deep breath and glanced at her cell phone. It was nearly two, coming up on time for her meeting with Lamb. She was almost at the elevators when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned to see Ella Dewalt hurtling determinedly after her.
The girl didn’t speak until she’d caught up with Veronica. Panting slightly, she jerked her head toward the terrace beyond the glass doors. “I only have a minute. Mom thinks I went down to get something from the vending machine.”
Wordlessly, Veronica followed her.
The air on the terrace was warm and dusty, the tile beneath their feet sun baked. A glittering blue pool twinkled in a courtyard below, a handful of spring breakers floating on rafts. Ella pulled a pack of Camels out of her back pocket and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. When she noticed Veronica watching her, she offered her the pack.
“Hasn’t anyone ever told you those aren’t good for you?” Veronica said, waving her off.
“Yeah, well.” She took a quick drag and exhaled. “Neither is living in a two-bedroom hotel suite with your family.”
“Has it been like this the whole time?”
“It’s always like this.” The girl leaned on the balustrade like it was too much effort to hold herself upright.
Veronica didn’t say anything. Ella Dewalt looked brittle, nervous. She didn’t want to push her.
She smoked in silence for a moment, carefully blowing her smoke away from Veronica. When she spoke, her voice came in a rapid tumble of words.
“Crane can be an asshole, but he’s not exactly wrong.” She exhaled loudly through her lips like a horse. “Hayley was weird when she came home at Christmas.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
The girl shrugged with a quick jerk of her shoulders. “She didn’t tell me anything. She always treated me like …” She trailed off, and Veronica could hear the unspoken like a child. “I don’t know. She didn’t go out with any of her high school friends the whole time she was there. She just holed up in her room. And she pretended to be sick when it was time to go to my grandma’s for Christmas dinner. Not that I blame her—that meal always blows.” Ella made a face. “I overheard her fighting with her boyfriend on the phone a few times.”
Veronica raised a brow. “So she does have a boyfriend?”
“Yeah, my mom means well, but she doesn’t know half of what goes on in Hayley’s life.”
“Do you know her boyfriend’s name?”
“Chad Cohan,” Ella said promptly. “I’ve never met him. He goes to Stanford. I thought he looked like a tool in his Facebook pictures.”
Veronica nodded slowly. “So what’s the story with Crane?”
A cagey, uncomfortable look suddenly flashed across the girl’s face. She glanced down at her hands as she spoke.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “He was mad when Mom and Dad sent Hayley to school. She got a really good scholarship, but they’re still spending a ton of money on it.”
“Why does that make him mad?”
“He’s been unemployed for ages.” Ella scuffed her sneakers along the ground. “Last summer he asked them for money to start a T-shirt printing business. They said no. Since then he’s been pissed. He thinks they’re playing favorites, paying for her school and not his screen-printing stuff.”
“Sibling rivalry is not pretty.”
“Fucking tell me about it.” She stabbed her cigarette out viciously against the bottom of her shoe, then pocketed the butt.
“Look, I have to ask. Is there any way Hayley would disappear like this on her own steam?”
The girl hesitated, then shook her head.
“I kind of wish there were. I wish she’d just show up and say, ‘Sorry, guys, didn’t mean to make you worry!’ But there’s no way. Not with Mom sending her panicked texts every single day. Not with …” Her voice faltered a little, but she steadied herself. “Not with me sending pictures of every single meal I’ve had in this suck-ass town. Mom’s right. Even if she made some kind of mistake, she wouldn’t do that to us.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets and took a deep breath. “I guess I’d better go back. Mom freaks out if I’m out of her sight for more than ten minutes.”
She looked at Veronica for a moment. Her eyes were fierce and apprehensive at the same time.
“Are you going to find her?”
It was almost unconscious, the way Veronica’s jaw tightened. The way her shoulders squared off, her fingers curling into fists. She hadn’t realized it before that moment—before meeting Ella’s eyes. But now she was sure.
“I won’t stop until I do.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Balboa County Courthouse occupied a large sandstone building in downtown Neptune, fifteen or so blocks from the Grand. Its front steps were smooth and worn, power-washed daily to keep the city’s grime at bay, though these days the Sheriff’s Department was as dirty as they came.
She’d spent half her life haunting the Sheriff’s Department. Her father had started as a deputy, and when she was nine, he’d been elected sheriff. She and her mom used to visit him on lunch breaks and, in later years, she did her homework in an empty interrogation room while eavesdropping on the dispatch. After Lilly Kane’s murder, when a recall election had ousted Keith from office, when she should never have had to set foot in that cesspool again, some invisible path always seemed to lead her back. Visiting Logan or her friend Weevil Navarro in lockup. Prying information out of the too-adorable-for-words Deputy Leo D’Amato, now a detective down in San Diego.
Reporting her own rape, and then being laughed out of Don Lamb’s office, humiliated and aching.
But that was ancient history, right?
She made her way down the familiar hallway, decorated in shades of terra-cotta and gold, and turned into the Sheriff’s Department. No one manned the tall wooden reception desk. Three or four officers sat at their desks working on computers or talking on the phone. She didn’t recognize any faces. Her father had told her that when Dan Lamb took over, the handful of worthwhile cops left on the force had taken early retirement or transferred elsewhere—along with Inga, the kind-hearted woman who’d been the office manager since Veronica was a little girl.
She stood at the desk and waited. No one appeared to notice her—or maybe they just didn’t care. One guy seemed to be swiveling his chair away from her as he talked on the phone. No surprise there—she was persona non grata around the Sheriff’s Department. The first thing she’d done when she’d gotten back to town was solve Bonnie DeVille’s murder right out from under the sheriff’s nose.
Dan Lamb wasn’t the type to forgive and forget. Then again, neither was she.
She caught sight of a tall man in departmental khaki, walking past with his arms full of files. “Excuse me. Sir? I have an appointment with the sheriff.”
When the officer turned to face her, Veronica blinked.
“Norris Clayton?” Veronica’s voice was breathless, shocked.
The man’s warm brown eyes flickered over her face and his lips curved up. “Veronica Mars. I was wondering when I’d run into you.”
For a moment they eyed each other warily. In middle school Norris had been suspended nearly every other week for fighting. By high school, he’d donned the trench coat and combat boots required for discontented youths—and had a weapons collection to make his scowl this side of terrifying. For a while, he’d been suspected of calling in bomb threats to the school, but Veronica had been able to prove his innocence. Beneath his trench coat and fuck-the-man attitude, N
orris was just a regular misfit with a Japanese weapons obsession—and, as it turned out, a crush on Veronica.
Now he was barely recognizable, muscular and clean-cut in his crisp khaki uniform. But something in his eyes was just the same—brittle, both wary and resigned. Like the world was just bullshit, all the way down. Veronica couldn’t imagine that working at the Neptune Sheriff’s Department would help that feeling.
Norris set his paperwork down on the desk and rested his hands on top. “You still working for your dad?”
“Kind of. More like tentatively with. Or perhaps in spite of?”
Norris’s lips curled up into a smirk. “Yeah, well, my dad is just glad I have a job.”
Veronica could only imagine. Norris’s dad was a law-abiding programmer at Kane Software. He’d once bribed his son with a trip to Japan if he’d stay out of trouble and keep his grades up. “I have to admit I never quite imagined you as an upholder of the peace.”
Norris gave a quick snort of laughter. “Yeah, well, we all have to grow up sometime, right?” Then he shrugged, suddenly serious. “I was pissed off about everything for so long. I guess I found a place to put my fight. Anyway, what are you doing here? You out here working a case?”
Veronica gathered herself. “Kind of. I have an appointment with Lamb.”
“Lucky you.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then, at the same time, both broke into grins.
“This way.” Norris opened the little gate next to the desk and jerked his head back toward Lamb’s office.
In the hallway outside the sheriff’s office, her eyes darted unconsciously at the Fallen Heroes wall. That was where they hung the photos of all the cops who’d been killed in the line of duty. Down at the bottom was the most recent—Deputy Jerry Sacks, his mustache glossy and perfect in immortality. His picture was hung next to Don Lamb’s. She stared at both for a moment, complicated feelings fighting inside her. Lamb had made her life a living hell in high school, but she’d also come to suspect that he’d grown up in an abusive home. It was that same old vicious cycle: the Lamb boys were bullied; they became bullies. And while she’d never thought of Sacks as anything but Lamb’s gofer, his desire to help her dad investigate the Sheriff’s Department is what got him killed in the end. Now Lamb and Sacks were both gone, and something oddly like grief twisted in her gut.