“I bet you all of these companies are actually just one big corrupt basket of snakes belonging to the same guy,” Digby said. “I don’t know if they have anything to do with Sally.” He unplugged the USB drive and held it up. “Let’s find out.”
The copying done, Digby started closing out the folders he’d opened and restoring the desktop to its original state. But then he changed his mind and started reopening stuff.
“What are you doing? She’s going to be back any minute,” I said. “She’s going to know.”
“I’m counting on it. I want to see what she does next,” he said. “Call my number.” I did and he picked up. After he made sure our connection was good, he cracked the window and laid his phone on the outside ledge just beyond the glass pane.
We left the office door wide open and ran out the back door of the building. We put the call on speaker and listened to the assistant come back in, panic when she realized what had happened, and then pick up the phone and make a call.
She was obviously nervous, because she misdialed twice and slapped the desk before finally getting it right the third time. Her voice shook when the other party picked up. “Mr. Book? There’s a problem. People broke in and . . . some kids pretending to be messengers . . . n-nothing . . . physically. But I think they opened my files. They left documents about the Irving property open on the screen.” She was silent a long while. “You want the place cleaned up? Cleaned up or . . . ?” We heard her opening drawers. “I see. Yes, all right. This afternoon. I’ll call them right now.”
She hung up and dialed again. This time, she was more composed and all she said was, “For 152 Irving. Same day service. The works.” And then she hung up.
A few minutes of normal office sounds later, we disconnected.
“That’s Bullet Time’s place,” I said. “Wait. She’s not even calling the police to report us breaking into her computer?”
Digby retrieved his phone from the windowsill and we dumped our armfuls of recycling on our way to the bus stop.
“We need a Batmobile,” he said.
To my surprise, he flagged down the bus headed downtown. “We’re going right now?” I said.
“You heard them. They’re cleaning it up,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Means we better hurry,” he said.
SEVENTEEN
We went back to 152 Irving—former crack house, possible former kidnapper’s den, now home to Mary and Al, possible moonshiners with definite violent tendencies, who, this time, were definitely home.
Digby began to talk fast, running through the different ways we could break into the place. In the middle of his tirade, my phone rang with a message from Austin asking me to save him a place at lunch. I started to write a response, when Digby stopped his rambling to say, “Somewhere else you need to be?”
“Look, I think there’s an easy way to do this,” I said.
“Like what?” he said.
I knew he’d try to stop me, so I just headed toward the front door. For a change, it was Digby’s turn to stop me. “What are you doing, Princeton?”
“You’re overthinking it, Digby,” I said. “Not everything calls for a dumb-ass stunt. I bet we just need to ask.”
“Princeton, this might be our last chance to get access to this place. And this place might be my last connection to my sister,” he said.
That kind of shook me up. “Digby,” I said.
“Whoa.” Too real. He shook his head and said, “Or it could be nothing because anything that was ever there is long gone. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
I nodded. “I mean . . . I think so.”
He said, “Then okay.”
I walked toward the front door, took out a five-dollar bill, and rang the bell. Mary answered the door. She didn’t recognize me at first but when she did, her face turned to stone and she said, “Go away. That was one time. I ain’t giving you more money.”
“Please. We don’t want any money. In fact, here.” I held out the five-dollar bill. “I’d like to pay you back.” And then I held up a twenty-dollar bill. “With interest.”
Mary opened the door a crack, but when she went for the money, I moved my hands back out of her reach.
“But,” I said.
“What?” Mary said.
“When I was last in there, I lost my mom’s brooch,” I said.
“I ain’t found nothing,” she said. Mary reached for the bills again, but I jerked them away again.
“Can we look?” I said.
“Yeah, right. I’m not letting you junkies back in here,” she said. “Keep your money.” She tried to slam the door shut on us, but luckily, I’d gotten the steel toe of my boot through the threshold, so the door bounced open.
“Fine. Then what say I call the police and have a talk about that little DIY drinks machine in your living room?” I said. I heard Digby’s breath catch.
Mary moved aside and reached for the money as we walked in, but once more, I jerked it away and said, “I’ll give it to you on our way out.”
“Don’t take nothing,” Mary said.
I surveyed the heaps of junk and said, “I’ll try to control myself.”
• • •
“You look on that side and I’ll look over here,” Digby said. “And, Princeton, start near the corners.”
“What?” I said. “Why the corners?”
“Because when people are afraid they usually”—Digby mimed curling up with balled fists in front of his face—“in the corner.”
It was hard to imagine what tricks Digby’s brain played on itself for him to be able to imagine that kind of stuff. I realized right then that Digby would either find Sally or go completely insane trying.
We walked the perimeter of the room, but it was soon obvious that even if there had been anything to see, it had been scrubbed by the cycles of deposit and erosion of Mary and Al’s stuff. Digby pointed at a door leading to the back and asked Mary, “Can we?”
“I thought you said you were looking for something you dropped. It ain’t in there . . .” Mary said. “No one’s gone in there all seven years I’ve been here. I don’t even have the key.”
I smacked down the twenty-five dollars I’d been baiting her with on a nearby table and said, “And you can have fifty more after we finish taking a look.”
Digby picked the lock and opened the door. The room was filled with piles of junk and we needed both hands to clear a path in front of us.
“Well, I suppose the good news is that we have more of a chance to find something here because clearly . . .” I pushed over a newspaper tower. “No one’s cleaned up in years.”
We split up and restarted our search. I knew neither what I was looking for nor what I was looking at. It was just junk. Furniture broken beyond salvage. Piles of bundled paper once headed for recycling that decayed on the spot instead. I tried not to think too deeply about the weird crunching noises my boots made as I walked across to the wall. I fanned my phone’s light across the wall, wondering what qualified as noteworthy in a landscape as weird as this. And then I saw them.
Brightly colored scribblings hovering just above the baseboard where the walls met at the corner. Against the grimy palette of misery that colored the room, the oranges, reds, and pinks of the drawings qualified as noteworthy.
“Digby,” I said. “Over here.”
He scrambled over and shone the light on the spot I pointed out. He was silent.
“In the corner. Where you said it would be.” I helped him clear the garbage in front of the drawings so he could take a closer look. “Is it her?”
Digby stared. “I don’t know.” He took photos of the drawings of blobby circles with squiggly lines trailing them. There were triangles floating around among them. Digby scratched at one of the images, studying
the stuff that collected under his nail. “Crayon.”
He shone his light on the other side of the corner where there were more drawings. These, though, were ominous: each one was of two black circles, one smaller circle set inside a larger circle, with crosses in the middle. “All the drawings look similar, but these are”—he pointed at the black circles and crosses—“closer to the baseboards, like she didn’t want anyone to see them.”
“She was only four,” I said.
“She wasn’t a normal kid,” Digby said.
“So you do think it’s her,” I said.
“I don’t know what to think.” Digby shook his head. “Of course I want to believe, but—” He suddenly reared up and sniffed. “You smell that?”
I sniffed. “No . . .” And then I smelled it. “Someone’s smoking?”
Digby and I navigated back through the junk piles to the hall, where, scarily, the smell of smoke got stronger.
“Fire?” I said.
Digby didn’t answer, but when we got to the end of the hall, he touched the doorknob with the back of his hand, so clearly, he suspected there was a fire. When Digby pushed the door open, we were hit with a blast of air so hot, it blew us back onto our heels.
In the main room, a solid wall of fire was blocking us from the front door.
“There’s another door on this side.” Digby almost couldn’t get the words out for all his coughing.
“Digby! Look!” I pointed at Mary, prone on the floor not far from where we were standing. He and I stumbled to her. By the time we’d dragged her over to the side door, we were half dead from the exertion. We peeled back the junk in front of the door and started crashing against it to get it open. I weakened with every hit. I felt like I was drowning, and my throat burned more every time I inhaled.
Behind us, one of the bottles of moonshine exploded. The alcohol caught fire and started spreading toward us. I was suddenly very aware we were standing in what was, essentially, a warehouse of kindling.
Then, just when I was about to pass out, I heard the distinct bursts of a fire extinguisher. A woman with a bandanna tied across her face was moving toward us, spraying the fire as she came. The extinguisher died and she chucked it and signaled for us to get away from the door. Digby was still pounding away at the lock, so I had to physically push him aside. Once we were clear, our rescuer drew a gun, blew apart the lock with two shots, and kicked the door open.
We stumbled out. I sucked down some air but panicked again when I still couldn’t catch my breath. By this time, our rescuer had removed the bandanna to reveal that it was, in fact, Cooper’s old partner, Detective Stella Holloway, who’d run into the fire and saved us.
Holloway had carried Mary out of the building and after setting her down on the ground, took a bottle of water from her coat pocket and tossed it to us. “Wash out your mouth. It’ll help. Deep breaths, kids.” And then, alarmingly, she didn’t holster her gun and instead, she crept back around the building to the front, looking like she was expecting trouble.
Finally, we heard the fire engines’ sirens and Holloway came back, holstering her gun. She had paramedics with her.
“That was close,” Digby said.
I managed to whisper “Yeah” before I passed out.
EIGHTEEN
I was on a bed in the ER wearing an oxygen mask when I came to. I looked over and saw Digby on the bed next to me, arguing with a nurse that he didn’t need his mask anymore. My head felt helium-filled, and everything was blurred at the edges.
Officer Stella Holloway came in the room and said, “Well, there I am when you two walk right into the middle of my stakeout followed by a pair of double-wide gangster types who start lighting the place on fire. Now, given our history, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I should still ask . . .” She sat down next to me. “What the hell were you two doing?”
I was afraid to ask. “Is Mary all right?”
“She’s been admitted, but she’s okay,” Holloway said. “I’m still going to book her for felony manufacturing, though.”
“Zoe?” My mother walked into the room with our doctor. Her worry was instantly replaced by anger when she saw Holloway leaning over me on the bed.
Mom and Holloway traded stiff hellos and eyed each other while the doctor discharged us and explained how our mild smoke inhalation was going to play out over the next few days.
“Can I talk to Zoe and Digby?” Holloway said.
“Are they under arrest?” Mom said.
Holloway looked surprised. “No, of course not. As far as I can tell, they’re victims—”
“I don’t understand. I thought you aren’t working for the police anymore,” Mom said.
“I’m a detective for the New York County District Attorney’s office now,” Holloway said. “And I really need to ask them—”
“Well, clearly they’re in no shape,” Mom said. “Maybe you can ask Mike later.”
I thought my mother’s hostility was weird, but Holloway’s resulting embarrassment at the mention of Mike’s name seemed a confirmation of some longer story I hadn’t yet been told. In the next bed, Digby mouthed “uh-oh,” replaced the oxygen mask over his face, and sank back into his pillow.
Mom barely acknowledged either Digby or me on the ride home. It was tense, but the awkwardness of Mom seething next to me was blown out of the water by the sight of my dad exploding out of our front door. I guess Mom didn’t know he was coming either, because she moaned and said, “Oh, God . . .”
“Oh, man.” I got out of the car and, as usual, felt both guilty and defensive the second my eyes met my father’s. “Dad? What are you doing here?”
Digby said, “Hey, Dick, long time no see—”
“Shut up and piss off.” Dad pointed at Digby. “You don’t live here anymore. Go pack your things.” Dad pointed at me. “You. Inside.”
“Okay, okay . . . maybe we should all just calm down,” Mom said.
“You can’t throw him out,” I said. “Where will he go?”
“I’m sure there are shelters downtown.” Dad took a couple of hundred-dollar bills from his wallet and held them in Digby’s face.
Digby looked past the money and said, “Zoe, you okay here?”
“That’s rich coming from you. That’s the second time you’ve put her in the hospital.” Dad waved the bills even closer to Digby’s face. “Take this and stay away from her.” When Digby wouldn’t take the bills, Dad threw them at him. Neither broke off from staring at the other as the bills flitted down and stuck to the driveway.
“This is ridiculous,” I said.
Digby wasn’t going to budge, so to end the standoff, Mom said, “Well, if someone’s going to hit someone, then let it happen now because I’m getting hungry.” She waited a long beat and said, “That’s what I thought.” She walked into the house and we all eventually followed her in.
“I’ll go pack,” Digby said, and went upstairs.
I was about to sit down in the living room, when my father said, “Sit down,” so I instead went into the kitchen and put bread in the toaster. He followed me in, rubbing his eyes to dramatize how tired I made him.
Dad said, “It is three days before the SATs and here you are again, sabotaging your future—”
“First of all, we rescued a woman today. If we hadn’t been there, she would’ve died in that fire—”
“What were you doing there in the first place? And are you skipping school again?” he said.
“The school called this morning,” Mom said.
“I am seriously concerned about your lackadaisical approach to your future,” Dad said.
I said, “You have no idea how much I’ve studied—”
“You haven’t been studying,” Dad said. “Your mother said you’ve been out every day.”
I knew I was majorly selling myself
out, but I said, “I’ve finished all the practice tests I bought and I’ve done about a hundred online ones. I’ve been preparing for months. I’m ready.”
Dad snorted. “Ready? I doubt you’re Ivy League ready.”
That slap in the face was an excellent reminder of why you should never negotiate with terrorists. I said, “Why are you here, anyway? Couldn’t you have yelled at me over the phone?”
“Glad you asked,” Dad said, and walked out of the room.
As soon as we were alone, I asked Mom, “You asked him to come?”
“I just mentioned that you’d been out a lot these days. I never invited him to come,” Mom said. “I’m sorry.”
“Where’s Mike?” I said.
“At the gym. I hope your dad’s gone before Mike gets back,” Mom said.
“Mom, why are you whispering? This is your house,” I said.
Dad came into the room with a cotton laundry bag.
“What’s that?” I said.
“This”—Dad tipped the bag and wads of bound bills dumped out—“is two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. It’s what four years at Princeton looks like. Actually, this is what it cost a few years ago. It’ll probably be over three hundred by the time you go, but I didn’t want to be dramatic.”
I noticed that in his effort to not be dramatic, my father had fattened up his statement pile by using bundles of twenties instead of hundred-dollar bills. I guess I wasn’t awed enough, because he gave me the breakdown.
“Forty-two thousand tuition, eighteen thousand room and meals, college fees, student health, books, allowance, travel . . .” Dad sat next to me. “You know, Zoe, I didn’t want to unnerve you on the eve of the most important exams you will face until the LSATs—”
“Well, thanks, Dad, that’s not unnerving at all,” I said.
Dad said, “Listen. You’re young. It’s hard to think about the future because the present is so fun.” He struck a pose and rolled his eyes. “Lalalala . . . life is but a dream—”
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