I blinked. It didn’t seem like a destination that required this much haste, unless Deborah thought we were late for class, but here we were, hurtling through traffic at a dangerous pace. In any case, it seemed like good news that, if I survived the car trip over there, I would face nothing more life-threatening than a possible spitball. And of course, considering the school’s economic and social status, it would almost certainly be a very high-quality spitball, which is always a consolation.
So I did no more than grit my teeth and hang on tightly as Deborah raced across town, turned onto LeJeune, and took us into Coconut Grove. A left on US 1, a right on Douglas, and a left on Poinciana to cut through to Main Highway, and we were at the school, in what would certainly be record time, if anybody kept track of that sort of thing.
We went through the coral rock gate and a guard stepped out to stop us. Deborah showed her badge and the guard leaned in to examine it before waving us through. We drove around behind a row of buildings and parked under a huge old banyan tree in a spot that said RESERVED FOR M. STOKES. Deborah shoved the car into park and climbed out, and I followed. We walked down a shaded walkway and into sunlight, and I looked around at what we had all grown up thinking of as “the rich kids’ school.” The buildings were clean and looked new; the grounds were very well kept. The sun shone a little brighter here, the palm fronds swayed just a little more gently, and altogether it seemed like a very nice day to be a rich kid.
The administration building ran sideways across the center of the campus, with a breezeway in the middle, and we stopped at the reception area inside. They had us wait for the assistant something-or-other. I thought about our assistant principal in middle school. He had been very large, with a Cro-Magnon forehead that looked like a knuckle. And so I was somewhat surprised when a small and elegant woman came in and greeted us.
“Officers?” she said pleasantly. “I’m Ms. Stein. How can I help you?”
Deborah shook her hand. “I need to ask you some questions about one of your students,” she said.
Ms. Stein raised an eyebrow to let us know that this was very unusual; the police did not come around asking about her students. “Come into my office,” she said, and she led us a short way down the hall and into a room with a desk, a chair, and several dozen plaques and photographs on the walls. “Sit down, please,” Ms. Stein said, and without even a glance at me Deborah took the one molded plastic chair opposite the desk, leaving me to look for a spot on the wall free from framed memories so I could at least lean in comfort.
“All right,” Ms. Stein said. She settled into the chair behind the desk and looked at us with a polite but cool expression. “What’s this about?”
“Samantha Aldovar is missing,” Deborah said.
“Yes,” Ms. Stein said. “We heard, of course.”
“What kind of student is she?” Deborah asked.
Ms. Stein frowned. “I can’t give you her grades, or anything like that,” she said. “But she is a pretty good student. Above average, I would say.”
“Does she have financial aid to come here?” Debs asked.
“That’s confidential information, of course,” Ms. Stein said, and Deborah gave her a hard look, but amazingly, Ms. Stein did not seem to wither. Perhaps she was used to intimidating glares from the wealthy parents. It was clearly an impasse, so I decided to help out.
“Does she take a lot of teasing from the other kids?” I said. “You know, about money or anything?”
Ms. Stein glanced at me and gave me a that’s-not-really-funny half a smile. “I take it you think there might be a financial motive for her disappearance,” she said.
“Does she have a boyfriend, that you know of?” Debs said.
“I don’t really know,” Ms. Stein said. “And if I did, I’m not at all sure I should tell you.”
“Miss Stern,” Debs said.
“It’s Stein,” Ms. Stein said.
Deborah waved that off. “We are not investigating Samantha Aldovar. We’re investigating her disappearance. And if you stonewall us, you’re keeping us from finding her.”
“I don’t really see —”
“We’d like to find her alive,” Deborah said, and I was proud of the cold and hard way she said it; Ms. Stein actually turned pale.
“I don’t…” she said. “The personal stuff, I really don’t know. Perhaps I could get one of her friends to talk to you…”
“That would be very helpful,” Deborah said.
“I think she’s closest to Tyler Spanos,” Ms. Stein said. “But I would have to be present.”
“Go get Tyler Spanos, Miss Stein,” Deborah said.
Ms. Stein bit her lip and stood up, heading out the door without nearly as much cool composure as she’d had coming in. Deborah settled back in her chair and squirmed a little, as if trying to find a comfortable way to sit in it. There wasn’t one. She gave up after a minute and sat up straight, crossing and uncrossing her legs impatiently.
My shoulder was sore, and I tried leaning on the other one. Several minutes went by; Deborah looked up at me two or three times, but neither one of us had anything to say.
Finally, we heard voices drifting in through the door, rising in pitch and volume. That lasted for about half a minute, and then there was relative quiet again. And after several long minutes in which Deborah recrossed her legs and I switched back to leaning on the original shoulder, Ms. Stein hurried back into her office. She was still pale, and she did not look happy.
“Tyler Spanos didn’t come in today,” Ms. Stein said. “Or yesterday. So I called her home.” She hesitated, as if she were embarrassed, and Deborah had to urge her on.
“She’s sick?” Debs said.
“No, she…” Again, Ms. Stein hesitated and chewed on her lip. “They… She was working on a class project with another student,” she said at last. “They said she’s, ah, in order to work on it… they said she’s been staying with the other girl.”
Deborah sat bolt upright. “Samantha Aldovar,” she said, and it was not a question.
Ms. Stein answered it anyway. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”
SEVEN
Between the laws that any school can call upon to protect its students from official harassment and the clout that the parents and alumni of a school like Ransom Everglades could muster, it could have been very difficult for us to gather any information on what was now a double disappearance. But the school chose to take the high road and use the crisis as an exercise in community activism. They sat us down in the same office with the cluttered walls while Ms. Stein hustled around alerting teachers and administrators.
I looked around the room and noticed that there were still the same number of chairs. My leaning spot on the wall no longer seemed terribly inviting. But I decided that our significance in the grand scheme of things had gone up several notches when two of the school’s students turned up missing, and, in short, I was now far too important to lean against the wall. And there was, after all, one more perfectly good chair in the room.
I had just settled into Ms. Stein’s chair when my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen, which told me that the call was from Rita. I answered. “Hello?”
“Dexter, hi, it’s me,” she said.
“That was my first guess,” I told her.
“What? Oh. Anyway, listen,” she said, which didn’t seem necessary, since I was. “The doctor says I’m ready to come home, so can you come get us?”
“You’re what?” I said, completely astonished. After all, Lily Anne had just been born yesterday.
“Ready,” she repeated patiently. “We’re ready to come home.”
“It’s much too soon,” I said.
“The doctor says it’s not,” she said. “Dexter, I’ve done this before.”
“But Lily Anne — she might catch something, or the car seat,” I said, and I realized I was so filled with panic at the thought of Lily Anne leaving the safety of the hospital that I was talking like Rita.
/>
“She’s fine, Dexter, and so am I,” she said. “And we want to come home, so please come pick us up, okay?”
“But Rita,” I said.
“We’ll be waiting,” she said. “Bye.” And she hung up before I could come up with any kind of rational reason for why she shouldn’t leave the hospital yet. I stared at the phone for a moment, and then the thought of Lily Anne actually outside, in a world full of germs and terrorists, galvanized me into action. I slammed the cell phone into its holster and jumped to my feet. “I have to go,” I said to my sister.
“Yeah, I got that,” she said. She threw me her car keys. “Get back here as fast as you can.”
I drove south in pure Miami style, which is to say fast, moving smoothly in and out of traffic as if there were no real lanes. I did not usually drive so flamboyantly; I have always felt that, contrary to the true spirit of our city’s roads, getting there is just as important as maintaining a forceful image along the way. But the moves came naturally to me — I grew up here, after all, and the current situation seemed to call for all the haste and macho firmness I could muster. What was Rita thinking? And more, how had she persuaded the doctors to go along with it? It made no sense: Lily Anne was tiny, fragile, terribly vulnerable, and to send her out into cold hard life so quickly seemed to be complete and callous madness.
I stopped at home just long enough to grab the brand-new infant car seat. I had been practicing for weeks, wanting to be perfect with it when the time came — but the time had come too soon, and I found that my fingers, usually so deft, were icy blocks of clumsiness as I tried to fumble it into place with the seat belt. I couldn’t get it through the slot in the back of the thing at all. I pushed, pulled, and finally cut my finger on the molded plastic and flung the whole thing down as I sucked at the cut.
This was supposed to be safe? How could this protect Lily Anne when it attacked me so aggressively? And even if it worked as it should — and nothing ever did — how could I keep Lily Anne safe in a world like ours? Especially so soon after birth — it was madness to send her home now, one day old. Typical medical arrogance and indifference; doctors think they’re so smart, and all because they passed organic chemistry. But they don’t know everything — they did not see what a father’s heart so clearly told me. It was much too soon to fling Lily Anne out and into the cold cruel world, merely to save a few dollars for the insurance company. This could never end well.
I finally got the car seat in place, and then rushed on to the hospital. But contrary to my perfectly logical fears, when I arrived I did not find Rita standing outside the hospital, dodging bullets while Lily Anne played with used syringes in the trash. Instead, Rita was in a wheelchair in the lobby, a tightly wrapped bundle of baby in her arms. She looked up at me with a loose smile when I rushed in and said, “Dexter, hi, that was very fast.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to register the fact that somehow everything was fine. “Well, actually, I was sort of nearby.”
“You’re not going to drive us home that fast, are you?” she said. And before I could point out that I would never drive fast with Lily Anne in the car and in any case I thought she should stay here a little longer, a cheerful and hairy young man hustled over to us and grabbed at the handles on the back of Rita’s wheelchair.
“Hey, here’s Daddy,” he said. “You folks ready to go?”
“Yes, that’s — Thank you,” Rita said.
The young man blinked and then said, “All righty then,” and he stomped down to release the wheel brake and began to push Rita toward the door. And since at some point even I have to cooperate with the inevitable, I took a deep and resigned breath and followed along behind.
At the car I took Lily Anne from Rita and placed her carefully in the aggressive car seat. But for some reason, all the practicing I had done with Astor’s old Cabbage Patch doll did not quite translate to the real baby; finally Rita had to help me get Lily Anne properly fastened in place. And so it was a completely helpless, all-thumbs Dexter who finally climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. And with many anxious glances in the mirror to make sure that the car seat had not burst into flames, I nosed the car out of the parking lot and onto the street.
“Don’t drive too fast,” Rita told me.
“Yes, dear,” I said.
I drove slowly home — not slowly enough to risk the heavily armed outrage of my fellow citizens, but within spitting distance of the speed limit. Each blast of a horn, every thump of an overcranked car stereo, seemed new and threatening, and when I stopped at red lights I found myself glancing anxiously at the nearby cars to see if any automatic weapons were pointed our way. But somehow, miraculously, we got home safely. Undoing the straps of Lily Anne’s car seat was not nearly as complicated as fastening them, and in no time at all I had her and Rita inside the house and comfortably ensconced on the couch.
I looked at the two of them, and suddenly everything seemed so different now, because for the first time they were here, at home, and just seeing my new baby in this old setting seemed to underline the fact that life was new and wonderful and fragile.
I dawdled shamelessly, soaking it up and reveling in the utter wonder of it all. I touched Lily Anne’s toes, and ran the back of my finger over her cheeks; they were softer than anything I had ever felt before, and somehow I thought I could smell the pink newness of her right through my fingertips. Rita held the baby and slid into a smiling semidoze as I touched and sniffed and looked, until at last I glanced at the clock and saw how much time had passed, and I remembered that I was here in a borrowed car whose owner had been known to verbally behead people for far less.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” I asked Rita.
She opened her eyes and smiled, the ancient smile Leonardo did so well, mother with wonder child. “I’ve done this before, Dexter,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”
“If you’re sure,” I said, with a brand-new sensitivity that I actually felt.
“I’m sure,” she said, and very reluctantly, I left them there.
When I got back to the Ransom Everglades campus with Debs’s car I found that she had been assigned a room in an old wooden building with a view of the bay, as a sort of temporary interrogation room. The Pagoda, as the building was called, perched on a bluff above the athletic field. It was a rickety old wooden building that didn’t look like it could survive a single summer storm, and yet somehow it had stood long enough to become a historical landmark.
Deborah was talking to an exceedingly clean-cut young man when I came in, and she just glanced up at me and nodded without interrupting the boy’s response. I settled into the chair next to her.
For the rest of the day, both students and faculty came into the rickety old building one at a time to tell us what they knew about Samantha Aldovar and Tyler Spanos. The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I’d had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.
But private education is expensive, and it had been far beyond Harry’s means — and even if he could have afforded it, I doubt that Harry would have gone for it. He had always been wary of elitism, and he believed in all of our public institutions. Even public school — or perhaps especially public school, since it taught a brand of survival skills he knew we would need.
It was clearly a set of skills the two missing girls could have used. By the time Debs and I finished the interviews, around five-thirty, we had learned some very interesting things about both of them, but nothing that suggested they could survive in the wilds of Miami without a credit card and an iPhone.
Samantha Aldov
ar remained a little bit of a puzzle, even to those who thought they knew her well. The students were aware that she got financial aid, but it seemed to be no big deal to anybody. They all said she was pleasant, quiet, good at math, and had no boyfriend. No one could think of any reason why she would stage her own disappearance. No one could remember ever seeing her hanging around with any kind of disreputable character — except Tyler Spanos.
Tyler was apparently a true wild child, and on the face of things, the friendship between the two girls was extremely unlikely. Where Samantha got a ride to and from school with her mother in a four-year-old Hyundai, Tyler drove her own car — a Porsche. While Samantha was quiet and shy, Tyler seemed to be the original Good Time Charlene, a perpetual loud party just looking for a place to happen. She did not have a boyfriend only because she could not limit herself to one boy at a time.
And yet a close friendship had developed over the last year or so and the two girls were almost always together at lunch, after school, and on weekends. Not only was this puzzling, it was the one thing that bothered Deborah more than any other. She had calmly listened and asked questions, put out a BOLO on Tyler’s Porsche, and (with a shudder) sent her partner, Deke, to talk to the Spanos family, and none of these things had caused so much as a ripple on the face of the Sea of Deborah. But the strange friendship between the two girls had, for some reason, caused her to come up on point like a cocker spaniel sniffing steak.
“It makes no fucking sense,” she said.
“They’re teenagers,” I reminded her. “They’re not supposed to make sense.”
“Wrong,” Deborah said. “Some things always make sense, especially with teenagers. Nerds hang with nerds; jocks and cheerleaders hang with jocks and cheerleaders. That never changes.”
“Perhaps they have some kind of secret mutual interest,” I suggested, glancing casually at my watch, which told me that it was very close to time for me to go home.
“I’d bet on it,” said Debs. “And I’d bet that if we find it, we find out where they are.”
Dexter is delicious d-5 Page 5