by Paula McLain
“Well come anyway. I want you to.”
The phone rang just then and Raymond went to answer it.
I shot Fawn a worried look and even mouthed, What about Claudia? But she barely had time to wrinkle her brows at me questioningly before Raymond had hung up. When he came back to the table, I could tell something was different. His face had changed.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“No one. Guy from work,” he said. And then, “We’d better get going.”
An hour later, we were at the hospital, where Fawn, as she waited for my name to be called, flipped through mangled back issues of Time and The Saturday Evening Post, crossing and uncrossing her legs to swing her right foot, then her left, in an impatient rhythm. I felt guilty and sick to my stomach. When would this really be over?
Finally it was my turn to be examined. A nurse led Raymond and me back through a brightly lit maze of hallways to a treatment room. I didn’t need stitches, the nurse ultimately decided, just some ointment and surgical tape.
“Is that it then?” Raymond asked the nurse when she was finished.
“That’s it. You’re all set.”
I felt relieved. Within a few days my wounds would heal, and we could move on from all of this; with any luck, the worst of the trouble was already behind us. But instead of heading right home, Raymond drove us to another part of town and parked in front of the police station.
“Whoa, what’s going on here?” Fawn asked.
“Don’t worry, I just want you to talk to an officer and report what happened.” I looked at him closely. Something was still wrong, I was sure of it. He was saying don’t worry but he looked disappointed, angry even. Where was the concern from the night before? What had changed?
“Look, nothing happened,” Fawn insisted. “We got away, end of story.”
“Maybe,” Raymond said. “But you should still talk to the police. What if this guy takes someone else who’s not so lucky? What if he already has? I know you want this whole thing to be over, but it isn’t. Not yet.”
I didn’t feel reassured. Fawn hadn’t said anything about the police being involved. What was I supposed to say to them, and what if they suspected I was lying? What then?
“I guess it can’t hurt,” Fawn said. Her eyes were steady, her voice cool. “We’ll just tell them exactly what happened.”
It was a code. Stick to the story is what Fawn was saying, and I nodded, repeating the phrase to let Fawn know I’d understood: “Exactly what happened.”
Raymond led us inside the precinct office, which was decidedly small-time. A dozen metal desks lay scattered to the right of a secretary who took our names and assigned us each an officer. We were to be interviewed separately, with no time to talk, no time to gel our facts. I began to panic again, but then my interviewer arrived, a tall, hunched-looking grandfather-type, whose badge read PIZZLER. He didn’t look like a cop, he looked like he should be teaching seventh-grade science. The interview room was also underwhelming. I wasn’t sure what I expected, mug shots on the walls? Bulletproof glass? But there was only a metal table and several metal chairs, a filing cabinet, a chalkboard, a wall clock with greenish face and red second hand. It was like a room where I might be taken for a make-up test. I started to feel more at ease.
“I’d like you to try to describe the man who abducted you,” Officer Pizzler said after we sat down. The table lay between us, two feet of inflicted nicks and penciled initials. Gripping the edge, I felt a nugget of ossified gum and pulled away. How had Fawn put it to Raymond? “White, between thirty and forty,” I said to Officer Pizzler with no more inflection than a metronome.
“Tall? Short? Medium build?”
“Medium,” I guessed. My eyes bounced around the room, stopping on an open metal wastepaper basket that was empty except for a pyramid of desiccated orange peels. They’d been there so long they didn’t even smell anymore. The room smelled like nothing, in fact; like no one.
“It’s important to remember as much as you can. We’re going to have you look at some pictures later, to see if you can identify the guy, but first you need to tell me everything you can.”
I nodded seriously. What could I say? Fawn hadn’t prepared me for any of this because she’d predicted none of it, believing we’d sail right through on the wings of her “genius” idea. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Claudia, and that somehow this was all a plot to get Fawn and me to thoroughly ensnare ourselves in our own lie. Would Raymond enlist the police in something like that? I wondered. Maybe he would, if he was angry enough.
“What about hair?” Pizzler prompted.
“Medium,” I said again.
“Medium length? Color?”
“Color.”
“So, brown? Brown-blond, what?” The officer was looking at me skeptically, his grizzled eyebrows dipping to meet. He scratched one ear. “Lighter than your own hair? Darker?”
“Darker.” I grasped for more details. “And long. With a ponytail.” Pinching my eyes shut, I saw him. “Clean-shaven, no beard, no mustache. A round face and small blue eyes.” I sat back and exhaled. So satisfied was I with my specificity, with passing this identification exam, it took me a minute to register who it was I had just described: Skinny Man.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said, committing fully. “I want to change what I said about him being medium. He’s sort of on the tall side, actually, and thin. Really thin. You’d notice it.” Guilt rose and flashed briefly, but I pushed it aside. The man was a freak anyhow, a weird sad guy with no life that I could see, nothing but his lawn. So what if I accused him, what did it mean anyway? He was a small sacrifice, and it would all be worth it if the whole incident would just go away; if Fawn and I could get back to our routine, what was left of our summer, no harm done.
“Good,” Pizzler said. “Great. Now someone else is going to come in and talk to you. He’s a sketch artist, which means he’s going to draw a picture of the guy as you describe him. So just tell him what you told me. Whatever you remember.”
“All right,” I said. “I can do that.”
When I came out of the interview room, Fawn was already waiting, her legs crossed, her fingertips tapping on the chair arm. “Everything go okay?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Good. Can we go now?” Fawn asked, turning to Raymond.
“Soon, they said just a few more questions.” He looked down into his lap sternly and then up at the wall clock, another of the ugly green variety. I watched the clock too, as it ticked by twenty then thirty minutes before Officer Pizzler came out of a nearby door. He asked to speak to Raymond, who followed him down the hall where I couldn’t see or hear them.
“So? What did you say?” Fawn whispered when they’d gone.
“I don’t know, what did you say?”
“What we agreed on, of course.”
“Do you think they’ve talked to Claudia?”
“I don’t know. But if that little bitch has blabbed her mouth, I’m going to kill her,” Fawn hissed.
Before I could answer, Raymond and Pizzler reappeared and with them another uniformed officer, young and dark and well-groomed. “We’re going to need to talk to you again, Jamie,” Officer Pizzler said, and with this, Fawn reached surreptitiously under the lip of my chair and pinched me so hard behind the knee it made my eyes tear.
Back down the hall in the same room, Pizzler said, “Do you know the person you’ve described for us, Jamie?”
“No. Who?”
Pizzler exchanged a glance with Raymond, then opened a thin file folder containing the sketch. He held it up for me to see. “Your uncle says this is someone you know. Is it? Is this your neighbor, Mr. Campbell?”
“I guess so.” I nodded dumbly.
“What’s your history with him? Have you spoken with him before?”
“No, but Fawn has.”
“And before the other night you’d never had any trouble with him? He’d never threatened y
ou?”
“No.”
“And when he picked you up, did you know who he was?”
“Maybe, it was really dark,” I said. “I was scared.”
“Scared? So why did you get into the car?”
“He had a knife, didn’t I tell you that?” I looked to Raymond for corroboration, but he was staring down into his folded arms.
“A knife. That’s right,” Pizzler said, scribbling some kind of doodle into his notebook.
“So what’s going to happen to him?”
“To Campbell?” The clean-cut officer spoke up for the first time. His name tag read MERTON. His lips were so thin they were almost invisible. His fingernails were blinding. “That depends. The accusations you’ve made are pretty serious. You know that, right?”
I nodded again.
SLIPPIN’ INTO DARKNESS
The thing is, I didn’t know, not really. The impact of this particular lie—and the lies were certainly beginning to add up—didn’t fully sink in until the next morning, when Fawn and I saw police cruisers in front of Skinny Man’s house.
“What did you think would happen?” Fawn asked me when I expressed concern. “That’s what you get for IDing a real person. If you’d have just stuck to the story…” Her voice trailed off accusingly.
“But what about the details? We didn’t talk about what the guy looked like or anything.”
“It was nighttime, twit. I told them it was dark and that I was really scared, and that I didn’t remember much of anything. It’s not rocket science, you know.”
“I guess I didn’t think.”
“Big surprise,” she said, heading back into the house.
I followed her, too afraid to watch how the drama unfolded across the street, but the next day it was in the papers, page three, above the fold. Campbell had been arrested and was being held for questioning in conjunction with a possible kidnapping case. Incriminating evidence had been found in his house with a search warrant. There weren’t any other details, and the paper hadn’t mentioned our names.
“Incriminating evidence?” I said to Fawn at breakfast, pushing the paper over to her side of the table as if it might bite. “What do you think that means?”
“I dunno.” She chewed her toast. “Tittie magazines? Handcuffs? Shrunken heads? Who knows what a freak like that keeps around the house.”
“Do you think they can hold him on that? I mean, what if he could get in real trouble?”
“You should have thought about that before, then, shouldn’t you?”
By midafternoon, no matter how I tried to put the matter out of my head, I decided I had to get some more information. Fawn wasn’t helping—she didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest—so I left her on her beach towel, sunning, and went into the house to call Claudia. I wasn’t sure how much of what had really happened I could share with her, or if she’d be angry with me and Fawn for ditching her in Chicago. There were risks, sure, but I decided it was worth it.
I guess I just expected Claudia to answer, so when Tom picked up, I panicked and hung up fast. I waited five minutes, pacing laps around the kitchen table, then tried again. This time, when he picked up, I tried to sound collected, casual, asking if he could please put Claudia on.
“Who is this?” His voice was piercing, irritated, but I told myself that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I hadn’t even spoken to him since the weirdness at Claudia’s slumber party. He hadn’t exactly been civil then, so why would he be now?
“Jamie Pearson,” I persisted. “Her friend Jamie.”
“Hang on, I’ll get her.”
But when a voice came on the line, it wasn’t Claudia’s at all, but Mrs. Fletcher’s, and when she said hello and spoke my name, I could tell right away she’d been crying.
Her voice quavered, threatened to break as she said, “Claudia isn’t home. In fact, she’s been missing since Friday night. We thought she was at Amber Noonan’s, for a sleepover, but Amber and her parents weren’t even in town this weekend. They don’t know where she could have gone, nobody seems to know. And her father’s car is missing too. Have you seen her at all?”
“Um, yeah. Last week at the 7-Eleven. But not since then.” I felt panicked, confused, but knew I shouldn’t say anything until I’d talked to Fawn. “It’s not like Claudia to just disappear,” I said, fumbling around for something to reassure her. “I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”
“It’s not at all like her, no. That’s why we’re so worried. We’ve called the police, and they’re the ones who suggested we check with all her friends. Do you know anyone else she’s been spending time with?”
“What about Diane or Patty? Or Tessa Dodd?” I suggested, feeling awful. The woman was practically sobbing and I couldn’t tell her what I knew. If I did, everything really would come out and Fawn would absolutely hate me. But what about Claudia? Had something terrible happened to her?
Before Mrs. Fletcher hung up, she made me promise I’d call back if I heard anything at all.
“Sure,” I said. “Of course,” then ran to tell Fawn.
“In a way, it’s not really our business anymore.” This is one of the things Fawn said. Another was: “Claudia’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”
“But what if she’s in trouble?” We were both out on the lawn, parked in plastic chairs under the big maple.
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. What if that Miles guy kidnapped her or something? I thought he looked pretty scary.”
“Kidnapped? Claudia’s sixteen. She’s not some baby. I’ll bet you a million dollars she’s in Chicago having a gay old time.”
“You mean you think she ran away?” I couldn’t imagine Claudia, who didn’t seem at all unhappy here, doing anything of the sort.
“I don’t know about ‘ran,’ but yeah. I think she just decided to stay there. It is a cool city after all. Who wouldn’t rather be in Chicago than Moline?”
“Maybe,” I said, wanting badly to be convinced, but I wasn’t. Something still niggled at me, a splinter of worry, of guilt. “But those guys were…” My voice trailed off.
“Were what? What?” She huffed, exasperated, and shook her head hard. “The guys were fine, they were perfectly normal. You’re the one who freaked out, if you remember.”
I felt a hot wash of shame. “Yeah, I did but—”
“But nothing,” Fawn cut in. “You were a fucking spaz. If anything, it’s your fault no one knows where Claudia is now.” She flipped up the magazine she had been reading, walling me out. And I knew she was right. It was my fault and I was the only one who could fix any of it, or the only one who would.
“Don’t you think we should at least tell the Fletchers what we know?”
The magazine came down in a flash and her eyes were icy, terrifying, as she said, “If you tell them anything, I’ll never speak to you again.”
I started to cry then, I couldn’t help it, and got up to walk away.
“Jamie, wait,” Fawn said, trotting after me. She touched me on the shoulder to turn me toward her and I saw her face had changed, rearranged itself. “I’m sorry, but can we just stick to our story for now? It’s working. No one knows we were in Chicago, no one knows we had anything to do with the missing car or anything. And trust me, Claudia’s fine. Just wait and trust me for once.”
Before she let me head into the house, Fawn exacted a promise from me. Five days. We just had to wait five days and see what trickled down, and then we’d decide what to do from there, together. I agreed, thinking it wasn’t too much to ask, but the next day’s paper came with more troubling news. Mr. Fletcher’s car had turned up in an impound lot in Chicago for an overnight parking violation. No one had come by to claim it. And then, as Fawn and I sat at the kitchen table eating a lunch of cold tuna salad, Raymond walked in the front door. He was never home early on a workday, not ever, so I knew it couldn’t be good.
“Get your things, both of you,” he said. “We’re going back downtown to t
he precinct.”
“What for?” Fawn asked. “We’ve already answered all their questions.”
“I guess they have more questions, then.” Raymond’s voice was clipped, his patience already fading.
“What if we don’t want to? We haven’t broken any laws or anything, so they can’t make us, can they?”
“I don’t know if they can or not, but I certainly can.”
Fawn let out a loud huff, but submitted. And I found myself marveling at her, how she could conjure petulance and self-righteousness at such a time.
“Why do you think the police want to talk to us again?” I asked her when Raymond had gone down the hall for a quick shower. “Aren’t you worried?”
“No. It’s probably just like I said. Claudia’s come home from her little vacation and she’s trying to rat us out. But I say it’s her word against ours. We stick to our story, we’re going to be fine.”
“And if she still hasn’t come home?”
“We stick to our story. What, are you retarded? Have you already forgotten what you promised me?”
“No.”
“Good then, you’d better not.”
When we got to the precinct, they separated us again. I went into the same interview room with Pizzler and Merton from two days earlier, and also a plump woman cop I hadn’t seen before. Pizzler sat back and let her do the talking.
“Hi Jamie, I’m Officer Spacey,” she said warmly, and I instantly understood she’d been brought in as a kind of secret weapon, not good cop or bad cop but mother cop. Her voice was low and buttery. “Now, don’t be worried, we just have a few more questions for you.”
“I already answered all your questions the other day,” I said, trying to channel some of Fawn’s self-possession.
“Well, there’s new information. Your friend Claudia Fletcher has been reported missing and we think you know something about that, about where she is.”
Where was Fawn? I wondered. Probably in a room of her own, answering the same questions without any reservations at all. “I don’t know anything,” I said. “But maybe Campbell kidnapped her too. He totally could have. I mean, after we ran away he came back and got her. Did you think of that?”