The Stranger Game

by Cylin Busby

  Because of our last names, Morris and Montford, Tessa was seated near me in almost every class. She also played tennis—not well, but it was enough to join the team. And while Mom still insisted on driving me to school every day and walking me through the gates, watching until I was inside the building, she slowly came around to the idea of letting Tessa’s mom drive us home after tennis practice some days. It was so freeing to be in someone else’s car for a change, to go out for fro-yo and talk about boys and school—anything but my missing sister.

  With Tessa it was easy to forget—and I did—until there would be a Sarah sighting, and then it would all come crashing down, especially if my parents took the report seriously enough to pull me out of school. The first time it happened was only about six months after Sarah went missing.

  I knew something was wrong when I heard the announcement over the loudspeaker that I should report to the office and collect my things, as I would be leaving for the day. I knew at once it had to do with Sarah—and so did everyone else. Their eyes were on me as I stuffed my notebooks into my backpack and made my way from the classroom. I heard whispers, or imagined I did. Tessa bravely stood up and told our English teacher that she would be walking me to the office. I liked how she didn’t ask.

  We walked the hallway in silence, the sound of footsteps echoing. Without a word, Tessa took my hand in hers and squeezed hard.

  In the school office, Mom waited for me, pale and red-eyed. “They think they’ve found her,” she started to say, but that was nothing new. When I pulled a face, she added, “It’s a body.” She broke down, sobbing. I didn’t know what to do so I patted her shoulder, knowing that everyone who worked in the school office was watching us. I wanted to say It won’t be her, Mom, but I couldn’t form the words.

  I walked behind her to the car, where Dad waited for us. I slipped into the backseat and pulled on my seat belt almost robotically. A body. I felt my stomach roll over at the word.

  “We should have left her at school,” Dad said, as if I wasn’t there.

  “I want her with us.” Mom turned to him. “Where is she supposed to go after, if . . .”

  “She could have gone home with someone. That girl with the purple hair, whoever. Christ,” Dad mumbled, pulling out of the parking lot.

  Mom said nothing for a moment, then she turned and her eyes locked on mine. There was no way she was letting me out of her sight for any longer than she had to. “We’ll have a police escort,” she explained to me calmly, “or it would take two hours to get there.”

  We sped along the highway, doing close to ninety miles an hour, a police cruiser with lights swirling leading the way. Mom was calm enough to fill me in on the basics: the body was that of a young blond woman, too decomposed for easy identification. They needed us to come and have a look, to see if we recognized the clothing, the shoes . . . what was left. No one spoke for the rest of the drive, although Mom continued to cry quietly on and off.

  My memories of that afternoon are so vivid: the sound of gravel under the car tires as we pulled off the paved road, the clearing in the trees, water glittering dark and blue in the distance, a rusted chain drawn across the end of the path, a No Trespassing sign. A man in a dark suit, glasses pushed up on his head, his hands covered in surgical gloves, walking toward the car as we pulled in. Mom opening the door before we had stopped, dust from the gravel on her black boots. The man holding up his hands, then the words: “It’s not her.”

  It’s not her.

  This time, our hopes were not dashed—they were raised. We were elated. Mom collapsed to the ground, sobbing as the man explained quietly how sure they were. How it couldn’t be her. The girl had a scar where her appendix had been removed. Dad crouched next to Mom, his arms around her, his face unreadable.

  “I knew it wasn’t her, I knew it. She’s still alive, I know it, I know it, I can feel it, I’m her mother. . . .” Mom couldn’t stop talking. The man in the gloves just nodded and the other cops stood around uncomfortably.

  I climbed from the car and looked out over the dusty quarry to where a body was covered with a white sheet. Other cops and detectives were poking around the tall grass with long poles, putting evidence into plastic bags.

  That wasn’t my sister under that sheet. But it was still someone. Some blond girl, who had once been living and now was dead. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister.

  CHAPTER 3

  I WISH THAT I could say that was the last time my parents had to look at a body, but it wasn’t. After that first time at the quarry, there were others: in the morgue of a town a half hour away; in photos shown by detectives; and once more, a year after Sarah disappeared, at a location far from our home—and that was body parts, found stuffed in a suitcase and left in a dump up north. Thankfully they didn’t take me along for that excruciating ride, for that horrifying misidentification. I was thirteen, old enough to be left at home. Of course, I wasn’t left alone. My parents would never do that. They had a detective sit in a cruiser outside the house while they went to look at the hands and clothing of the dead girl in the suitcase. So many dead girls, so many blond girls—but none of them were Sarah.

  About two years after Sarah disappeared, there were no more bodies, no more calls. Mom was pretty desperate, phoning the detectives every week, asking for new information or leads. She was always met with the same reply: there was nothing. I knew she had reached a new level of desperation when I came home one day after tennis practice to find someone named Madame Azul sitting at our kitchen table—frizzy gray hair, several mismatched cheap necklaces of wooden beads strung around her wrinkled neck, a flowing purple printed polyester dress. I knew at first sight what she was—I had seen women like her at the carnival every summer: get your palm read, know your future, only five dollars. Women like this would usually be sitting at a folding table, swathed in polyester scarves, a cheap crystal ball propped in front of them.

  Once, when we were younger, I remember Sarah having her palm read by a mystic at the summer fair. “See this line here,” the woman said, pointing to a crease in her palm. “You will have a long and happy life. This line says your husband will be handsome. Oh! I think you’re going to be blessed with twins—little girls!”

  Sarah had grinned at Mom and Dad, and then it was my turn. But I clenched my fist tight and shook my head. I didn’t want to know what the lines on my hand had to tell me.

  “Nico, this is Azul. She’s here to talk to us about Sarah.” Mom pulled out a chair, motioning for me to sit down.

  I stood next to the table, my tennis bag still slung over one shoulder. “Azul?” I said like it was a question. I saw Mom’s face tighten.

  “After I had my Reiki training, I adopted a new name for myself,” the old lady said. She turned to Mom and added quietly, “My given name was weighed down with past lives and karma that I needed to release. You understand.”

  Mom nodded as if this made total sense. “Nico, please, join us. Azul had a dream about Sarah and she just wanted to come by and tell us about it.” I dropped my tennis bag on the floor and took a seat.

  Azul went on to tell Mom that she had seen Sarah’s face on the news and on the posters around town years ago—of course, everyone had. But more recently, she had a dream—a vision, really—of my sister. I almost spoke up then—there had been a newspaper article a week ago revisiting the case. The headline had read: Where Is Sarah Morris? The reporter had spoken to my parents and interviewed both Max and Paula, Sarah’s boyfriend and best friend. The article was full of loose ends, leads to nowhere. And, to be honest, it made Paula and Max look somewhat awful, featuring a photo of them sitting together, a big smile on Paula’s face. I wondered if Azul’s “dream” might have been inspired not by divine intervention but by the Sunday paper.

  “I see water.” Azul started to speak, with her eyes closed. “It’s a happy vision, peaceful.” She opened her eyes. “Did you ever go on a vacation to a lake or near a stream or river?”

  Mom shook her
head. “Not that I can think of. Could there be snow? The mountains?”

  I knew Mom was thinking of Max’s family cabin. It was near a lake. “This is a wooded area, very peaceful. . . .” Azul closed her eyes again and reached for Mom’s hand. “That’s all I’m getting for now, but if I meditate on it, I know I’ll see more.”

  Mom let out a sigh with a small smile—a body of water in a wooded area didn’t give us any new information. Everyone knew that Sarah had disappeared at MacArthur Park, where there were woods and a reservoir. Of course Azul would “see” that.

  “So, how much does this cost—your meditation, your vision?” I asked bluntly.

  Azul shook her head. “I just wanted to share it with you,” she said, standing. “If the information is helpful, then blessed be.” The metal bracelets on her wrists clanged together as she leaned in to embrace Mom. “Here’s my card if you ever want to talk.”

  I knew that Mom would want to talk. And she did. Not long after Azul’s unscheduled visit, Mom made an actual appointment with her and made sure Dad was home too. I could tell he believed in Azul about as much as I did, but what could we do? The detectives had come up with nothing. In fact, they hadn’t even called in months. Even after the big article, there were no new leads, just renewed speculation about Paula and Max. Everyone else seemed to have forgotten about Sarah, except for us . . . and Azul.

  She came by one evening after dinner, and Mom cleared the dining room table and dimmed the lights, laughing at herself. “I don’t really know how to host a séance!” she joked. I didn’t point out that a séance was used to contact the dead. Is that what we were doing?

  Azul showed up smelling strongly of pine incense. As she moved through our house, touching various objects and photos, her purple caftan wafted behind her, leaving a scent of stale Christmas trees. Once we were all seated at the table, Azul asked that we hold hands. I reached awkwardly across the table to take Dad’s hand, embarrassed that my palms were sweating. I tried to remember the last time my hand had been in his—years ago, maybe crossing a street?

  Azul said some sort of incantation and bowed her head, so we all did the same. “I’ll need something of Sarah’s, something she wore or kept close to her,” Azul said, raising her head. Mom glanced over at me, thinking.

  “I can get something,” I said, and pushed back my chair to go upstairs. I turned the knob of Sarah’s door slowly, reaching in to flip the switch while my feet were still firmly in the hallway. Something about having a psychic downstairs had me spooked—like I would look into the mirror and see Sarah looking back at me, her hair dripping with seaweed. But her room was the same, quiet and pink, unchanged. I looked around and grabbed the first thing I saw—a little white teddy bear that sat on her bed. The bear was wearing a black beret and had been a gift from when Gram went to Paris years ago. I had one too, but my bear’s beret was yellow.

  I went downstairs, handing the bear to Azul as if it were made of glass. She turned it over in her hands, her clunky rings banging against the wooden table. Finally, she held it to her chest, her bracelets clanging down her arm, and started humming. Dad caught my eye, raising his brows. Mom was looking only at Azul, her eyes huge.

  “I have a message,” Azul said, putting the white bear down on the table. I looked at it, with its stupid beret. What were we doing?

  “Your daughter has left this plane of existence,” Azul went on. I felt a rushing sound in my ears as Mom let out a gasp and swallowed back a sob. Dad moved closer to her, putting an arm around her back.

  “What do you mean?” Mom asked. “You said you saw her by a lake, some peaceful vision.”

  Azul nodded, reaching over to take Mom’s hand. “Yes, she is at peace. I still see trees, so many trees, and water. . . .”

  Mom pulled her hand back from Azul. “Where is she?” she demanded.

  “It’s a place she knows, she’s been there many times before. She loves this place, it’s peaceful to her.” Azul spoke with her eyes closed.

  “The park—the reservoir?” Dad finally asked. He hadn’t been there for Azul’s first visit, where I figured out her scam. But he looked like he was starting to get it now.

  “Is it the park?” Mom asked. I felt a cold sweat racing over my scalp with a thousand prickles.

  “I’m not sure where it is,” Azul answered. “But . . . someone knows, someone close to her. There is someone who isn’t telling you everything.”

  Oh really, I thought. But looking at Mom, I could see her leaning in, holding on to Azul’s hand now. “Who knows?” she asked.

  Azul’s eyes opened and she looked around the table. “It’s someone you would never expect.” She rubbed her hands together and her bracelets clanged in an annoyingly loud way in the quiet room.

  “Is that all?” Dad asked. I could tell from his tone he was over this whole thing.

  Azul sighed dramatically and closed her eyes. She started humming again. Then suddenly, she stopped. I could hear myself breathing, waiting for what she might say. “That’s all my spirits are showing me right now,” she said, shaking her head.

  Later, after she was gone, I heard Mom and Dad in the kitchen, arguing. Well, mostly Dad arguing. “So we had to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for her to tell us nothing—because that’s what her ‘spirits’ had for us?” he yelled. Mom was talking more quietly, and I tried to hear, but whatever she said to him calmed him down. Still, when they came up to bed I heard him say, “For another five hundred, maybe she can tell us what Sarah was wearing in those photos on the Missing poster!”

  Mom knocked quietly on my door and came into my room, knowing that I would still be up. “Kind of lame, huh?” I smiled, trying to make light of the visit from Azul. She sat down on my bed, moving over the notebooks near my feet.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” She sighed. “I thought she might really have had a vision, or something.” She looked down at my bedspread, picking off a piece of lint. “I’m sorry to put you and your father through that.”

  I shrugged. “You had to try, right?” I asked. I hoped that she would just forget about the whole thing and say good night, but instead she glanced up at me, looking hard into my eyes.

  “What do you think she meant—that someone knows something they aren’t saying?”

  I felt my throat tighten, but I managed a casual shrug. “What I’d like to know is what her real name was, before she changed it to a color.” I tried for a light laugh, opening my history book.

  She smiled. “Oh, is that what Azul means? Blue, right? I guess I didn’t put that together.” I saw her shoulders slump and she shook her head, as if trying to forget the whole night. She stood up and walked to my dresser, picking up Sarah’s bear that I had left there.

  “I was going to put it back,” I started to say, hearing my voice take on a defensive tone. And I had meant to. I just didn’t want to go into Sarah’s room, in the dark—not after what Azul had said.

  “That’s okay, I’ll do it,” Mom said, holding the white bear delicately. She pulled it into her chest and hugged it tightly. “Good night, sweetie. Don’t stay up too late, okay?”

  With all the false alarms my parents had to weather, all the bodies they had to identify, and the so-called psychic visions, Mom was decidedly unenthusiastic when the call came in that afternoon. It was almost four years after Sarah’s disappearance and two years after our visits from Azul, and every day had brought nothing but more disappointments.

  The phone rang in Mom’s office, a special line specifically set up for tips about Sarah or for Mom’s assistance in other cases of missing kids. I wouldn’t even have heard it except for the fact that Tessa was over and we were microwaving some popcorn in the kitchen. “Mom, your phone is ringing,” I yelled to her upstairs. Dad and I always called that line Mom’s phone—it was easier than having to say “the Sarah line” or mentioning Sarah’s name at all, something we all tried to avoid whenever possible. Besides, most of the calls had nothing to do with Sar
ah at this point—she had been gone so many years. The calls Mom got now were mostly invitations to speak at conferences or consultations with the parents of other missing kids. Mom was so good at it, she was in demand, but unless they were somewhat local, she turned them down—she didn’t want to leave her family, specifically me, for any length of time.

  Tessa opened the fridge and scowled. “Yogurt, more yogurt, and . . . Greek yogurt. Oh, I see some celery. Awesome, so glad I came over.”

  I poured the popcorn from the bag into a bowl and offered it to her. “What’s wrong with this?”

  She half smiled and took a handful. “Not as satisfying as chocolate brownie ice cream, which we actually have at my house. Besides, we just played tennis for an hour and a half, I’ve earned it.”

  “I played tennis, you sort of ran around and chased balls, then sat down and had a Gatorade.”

  Tessa grabbed the popcorn bowl from my hands in mock anger and stomped away with it to the den, spilling kernels along the way. As we walked by Mom’s office, I could hear her talking quietly on the phone, something about how long had she been there? Another missing kid, I thought to myself, and had to push the emotions that threatened to overwhelm me to the back of my mind, where I stored all the memories of Sarah, of the hurt our family had been through.

  Tessa cozied in on the couch and I grabbed the remote. We were watching a Mexican soap opera for school and trying our best to translate the Spanish, with somewhat disastrous results, mostly because we couldn’t stop giggling and repeating phrases to each other in mock sexy voices. Actually, the show was pretty good and, while neither of us probably wanted to admit it, we were digging the story line about the handsome stepson and his father’s new young bride.