Games We Play

by Angel Lawson

  There’s one other that catches my eye. A photo of a group of football players, dressed in game day jerseys, sitting out on the picnic tables in front of the school. It’s a group of six, and I only recognize three of them: Brice Waller, Ezra Baxter, a dead ringer for his son, and Jason Chandler. I flip the picture over and see their names, along with Richard Remmington, Miles Keller, and Joel Ashby, 1991. The year they won the state championship.

  The same year Jaqueline Cates went missing and was found dead on the water's edge, strangled.

  My mind spins, and I pick up my phone.

  “Hey,” I say, “want to go to breakfast?”

  “It’s after noon,” Ozzy says, and from the groggy sound of his voice, he just woke up anyway. “Isn’t it a little late for breakfast?”

  “Do you want to go or not?”

  He laughs, and I imagine his smile. “Yeah, pick me up in fifteen?”

  It takes me twenty, but the good thing about a late breakfast is that you miss the Saturday rush at the Thistle Cove café, the town’s best place for bacon and pancakes.

  Once we’re seated and have steaming cups of coffee in front of us, I say, “I’ve been doing a little investigating into the class of 1991.”

  Ozzy pours sugar in his coffee. “You do know we work on the yearbook, not the newspaper, right?”

  I kick him gently on the shin under the table. “I can’t help it if my yearbook duties have led me to other, more interesting details about the alumni of Thistle Cove.”

  “Okay,” he says, “tell me what you know.”

  Our waitress comes over and brings us stacks of buttery pancakes and a plate of bacon for us to share.

  “Well, I don’t know much,” I say, taking the syrup from him and pouring it over my pancakes. When they’re good and soaked, I reach in my bag and pull out the photo of the football players. “Don’t you think that it’s really weird that three people we know were at the high school the year that Jacqueline died.”

  He studies the photo. “Thistle Cove is a small town. A lot of people grew up here and still live in town. Half our classmates had parents that went to the school.”

  “But how many are still friends, and thirty years later one of their daughters goes missing?”

  “Still not that crazy for this place.”

  “What about the fact no one mentioned Jacqueline’s death while people were looking for Rose? Like, not a word in the newspaper or on television. Like, that news lady, Janice Hill, never said anything.”

  Ozzy chews a mouthful of pancakes and then washes it down with coffee. He points his fork at me. “Okay, I admit, that’s a little more interesting. You would think an old murder with similar traits to a new possible crime would be a big deal.”

  I smile, feeling slightly vindicated. “Right? So why did no one say anything about Jacqueline? Why have we never heard her name mentioned?”

  “Well,” he says, picking up a piece of bacon, “maybe her family didn’t want to talk about it, and the press gave them some privacy.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the press, even in our small town.”

  “Maybe the police were embarrassed they never found the killer.”

  “Or maybe,” I say, leaning over the table, “someone got everyone to keep their mouths shut.”

  “KK, I love a good conspiracy theory as good as the next guy, but who has that much power?”

  I slide the photo back across the table and tap my finger over the three boys in the middle. “I know at least one of those boys that is about to become mayor, another that’s a well-respected, wealthy lawyer, and another that every single person in this town loves.”

  He eyes me skeptically and tugs down on his cap. I’ve at least piqued his interest.

  “There’s a big difference in these two situations, Kenley. Jaqueline was murdered and Rose—”

  “Rose has never been found.”

  He looks around to make sure no one heard me. “Are you seriously saying that Rose didn’t kill herself?”

  Am I? I’ve never said it out loud, not even to myself. Do I think Rose didn’t kill herself? Or if she did kill herself was it for a much bigger reason than depression and discontent?

  “I’m not saying anything other than the fact I’m going to look into this.”

  “Clearly.”

  I shrug, and pick up the photo, sliding it back in my bag. “You don’t have to help.”

  He frowns. “Yeah, well, I am anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he says, eyes holding mine, “it’s important to you, and you’re important to me.” I can’t help but smile. “Where do we start?”

  “Where all good info about Thistle Cove High lies—the Valhalla office.”

  11

  Ozzy

  After years of being solo; few friends, unique interests, determined independence, breaking into the school on a Saturday afternoon nails home the influence Kenley has on me.

  Especially when it’s completely voluntary, and we’re surrounded by four years of yearbooks—the ones leading up to Jaqueline’s death.

  While she studies the yearbooks, I focus on old articles in the Thistle Cove Chronicle. I enter in search words; Jacqueline Cates, Thistle Cove High, Missing, Strangled, Found Dead

  Hundreds of hits pop up.

  Seventeen-Year-Old Student Goes Missing

  Have You Seen Jacqueline Cates?

  Police Frustrated with Lack of Leads

  Body Found. No Suspects.

  The details are all the same; Jacqueline was last seen at the library, she left at closing, alone, and started walking the two blocks home. Somewhere in those two blocks she went missing.

  The police, including McMichael, interviewed the library staff, neighbors, friends from school. No one provided any information helpful to the case. As far as I can tell, there were no suspects.

  “Anything?” I ask, more convinced than ever that Kenley is chasing imaginary rabbits.

  She holds up a yearbook, it’s a photo I’ve seen a dozen times now in the newspaper. Jaqueline’s class picture, taken three months before she died. “She’s pretty,” Kenley says. “Not like Regina Waller hot, but pretty enough, don’t you think?”

  I look at the girl with long dark hair and clear eyes, coated with a thick ring of eyeliner. Six piercings are in her ear. Her hair lacks that certain perfection of teenage girls my age who can watch YouTube videos to get it exactly right, but yeah, I can see it. “Yeah, she’s cute. A little goth?”

  “Since she was a junior, I had to do a lot of digging.” The seniors have a list of activities by their names in the appendix, which makes it easier to find. “But I found her picture on the debate team, and she was Student Government secretary for her class.”

  Kenley has tagged the pages with her photos and flips to each one. These pictures allow a bit more of a glimpse into her personality. It’s 1991, pre-grunge, but it was on its way. Jacqueline has on a band T-shirt, The Cure, baggy jeans and black combat boots on her feet. In the black and white photos, her heavy black eyeliner stands out even more.

  “So she was smart and alternative.” I shake my head. “Not exactly the type to hang out with the football players.”

  “No,” Kenley agrees. “They definitely have a type.”

  She flips quickly to a different activity page: cheerleading. Monica Chandler and Regina Waller smile for a photo with long, tanned legs and bright smiles.

  “I guess I’m not sure what you’re looking for?” I ask, rubbing my eyes. A quick glance at the clock tells me we should have been at float building an hour ago.

  “Just who she was…what she was interested in, who she was friends with…” she flips back to a photo of her leaning against the gym wall, arms crossed. She looks intimidating. Zero vulnerability, not like the girl you’d expect to go missing. She flips back and forth between Jaqueline’s photo and the one of the cheerleaders. “You and I both know in a town this size, being in different groups doesn’t mean t
heir lives didn’t cross.”

  She’s thinking about her and Rose, and if you went back and looked at yearbook of the past few years no one would know they’d ever meant anything to one another.

  “Using the yearbook and newspaper is hard because we’re stuck reading someone else’s words, or an image caught in a split second of time. We don’t have the wide angle, the view of everything else going on outside the lens,” I say, closing out the tabs. “We need to go.”

  She nods, staring at the book for a few minutes longer. I’d hoped that maybe if I humored her she’d scratch the Nancy Drew itch and walk away. Sitting next to her with her pad filled with scrawls of information and sticky notes marking important pages, that’s not what happened.

  Kenley’s gone down the rabbit hole of Jacqueline’s murder—which means I’m following down right after her; I just hope she comes out of the other side unscathed.

  12

  Kenley

  All of this is still on my mind when I’m at float building. We’re surrounded by buckets and bins and baskets of rolled tissue paper. Thousands of little balls. It’s not enough. A few kids from Yearbook are here, Bryant and Sadie; they tell me they’ve started digging through the archives.

  “Leave anything you find on my desk, okay?” I say, tossing another ball of tissue into the pile.

  Usually I do this with Alice. We talk and gossip and hang out in our own corner, but Alice and I aren’t doing things like this anymore. I’m not surprised she’s not here—further evidence I was holding that relationship together. Finn is on the flat bed of the trailer, shaping and forming the Viking body out of chicken wire. Once it’s finished they’ll coat it in glue and newspaper. Ozzy and Ezra left a few minutes after we arrived, heading back out for some supplies. A car rolls into driveway and I hope that it’s them, because I’d much rather sit with them, but it’s not. It’s a silver SUV—Monica Chandler. She opens up the back door and pulls out a large box.

  “A little help?” she calls.

  I hop up and head over to the car.

  “Oh, Kenley,” she says, giving me a smile. “Please take this over to the food table.”

  I take the box from her and peek inside. It’s two rectangular tins of food. I can’t see what it is, but I can smell it—Mexican.

  “Is there anything else?” I ask.

  “One more box of paper supplies. Thank you.”

  I grab the box, and carry it over to the table, helping her arrange the space. I know I shouldn’t say anything, that I’m opening an inappropriate can of worms, but I can’t stop myself.

  “You were in the class of 1991, right?”

  She gives me a tight smile, while taking lids off of a steaming hot dish of enchiladas. “Yes, I was.”

  “Did you happen to remember a girl named Jacqueline Cates?”

  I watch her expression. It doesn’t change, but she does drop the aluminum lid on the ground.

  “Oops,” she says, bending to pick it up. She stands, brushing back a piece of honey-colored hair. “Who was that again?”

  “Jacqueline Cates.”

  “That name doesn’t ring a bell. Was she in my grade?”

  “No, class of 1992—a year younger than you. She went missing spring of your senior year.”

  She nods vaguely, continuing to unwrap food. “Right, yes. Right, God, that poor girl.”

  “So you knew her.”

  She looks up at me. “Oh no, not at all. She was younger, ran with another crowd, if I recall correctly, which, trust me, my brain is mush all these years later.”

  “I’d never heard of her. Don’t you think it’s weird that no one mentioned her death when Rose went missing?”

  Monica pauses midway through opening a container of sour cream with her long, manicured nails. “Not really, I don’t see how they’re relevant.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” she replies, a sharp edge to her voice, “but besides that, Jacqueline’s death was hard on the whole town. Lot of bad memories and the wounds, they’re deep. People prefer to compartmentalize things like that and not open them again.”

  A flicker of annoyance runs through me.

  “So you’ll be okay in thirty years if no one remembers Rose ever existed?” My voice raises, just high enough to cause a few people look over, but the music is loud. Finn and I make eye contact, and he frowns. “Because it hurts to think about it?”

  “Kenley, I know it’s been a rough few weeks, but now is not the time or place to talk about this.”

  “Why not? Why can’t we talk about Rose? Or is it because I’m asking questions about a Thistle Cove secret?”

  “Kenley—”

  “Is that how it starts? No questions asked, no suspects, no leads…and then one day it’s literally like it never happened?”

  A loud clank gets my attention. It’s Finn, dropping the tool in his hand on the trailer bed. He hops off and walks over.

  “Hey, what’s going on over here. Everything okay?” He looks between the two of us.

  Monica sighs. “Kenley is upset. Understandably. Maybe it would be best if someone gave her a ride home.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  Monica ignores me and turns to the group. “Dinner’s ready! Come grab a plate!”

  Squeals of excitement follow, and Finn pulls me aside, getting me out of the way of the stampede. Once we’re away from the others he asks, “Do you want to tell me what that was about?”

  “There’s another missing girl.”

  His eyes pop wide. “What? Who? Where?”

  I shake my head. “No, not today. Not now, back in 1991, the year the team won the Championship. The year Brice Waller, Jason Chandler, and Ezra’s dad were seniors.”

  He blinks, trying to process what I’ve just said.

  “I have a bad feeling, Finn. I don’t know what it is, but I think there’s more to all of this than we know.” I swallow past the lump in my throat to say what I’ve been thinking for weeks now. “I have a hard time believing Rose killed herself."

  His eyes lock with mine, and his jaw tenses. Opening this back up with him—it rips that bandage right back off, but I don’t have a choice. He runs his hand through his hair and surprises me by saying, “Yeah, I know.”

  “You too?”

  “Rose was a lot of things. A diva, a drama queen, a ball-busting hot mess, and obviously an enigma, but there’s one thing she wasn’t—a quitter.”

  I exhale, feeling a huge sense of relief that he doesn’t think I’m crazy. “You’re right; she wasn’t. Rose wasn’t perfect, but she deserves better than this. I’m not going to quit before I find out the truth, either.”

  Alone in my room that night I think about Thistle Cove and missing girls and why the town seems so quick to shut the door on them. It’s the kind of thing that feels pulled out of a novel—a gothic novel—like the Audrina Dollanganger books. I look across the room at my bookshelf, where I tucked the Eden book I’d stolen from Rose’s room. I walk over and pull it out, feeling the worn paper. These books weren’t new when we bought them. They’d originally been popular decades ago, before ebooks and tablets. Rose discovered them one day at Castle’s Used Books when we were looking for Stephen King novels. It was the cover and creepy illustrations that caught our eye. The bizarre description that made us pool our money together and buy a copy. We’d gone to Rose’s that night and sat in her bed, reading side by side. I read faster than her and would wait for her to finish the page, heart pounding, body tingling, with one eye on the door afraid that someone would come in and catch us doing something indescribably taboo.

  I open the book and look at the illustration of Eden and her possessive, manipulative, abusive family. The keycard from the East Point Suites is nestled against the seam. Like when I was a kid, I glance around, making sure no one sees me with it. I know in my heart it leads to trouble—to the taboo—and I’m terrified to know what door it opens.

  I’m not ready to find out what’s at the Ea
st Point Suites but I do feel ready to conquer one fear. Carrying the book, I cross the room to my bed and open the bedside table. I pull out the iPod and unplug it from the charger I keep inside. I have an irrational fear that if I let it die, maybe it won’t start back up again.

  I crawl into bed, pull my covers over my legs and turn on the phone. The home screen pops up, dozens of notifications filling the screen. I wipe them away and click the app with a heart and the letters SB in the middle.

  SugarBabies

  I go straight to my profile, the photo of me in a dark, black wig and showing ample cleavage in a revealing bikini. My lips are painted a dark, sensual red. I have dozens of messages, some weeks old.

  JJ: Your profile caught my eye. Beautiful and smart. I love that you’re interested in journalism and a big reader…

  Mike: I’d love to hear more about your experiences with…

  Avery: Has anyone ever told you that you look like a movie star…

  Wayne: Red is my favorite color and it sure looks good on you…

  Those are the good ones, the messages shower me in compliments, little feelers about what I’m interested in, where I live, what made them click on my profile. There’s a different kind of introduction as well.

  Paul: I can already imagine what those lips would look like wrapped around my…

  Randy: What size are you? I’m not interested in anything less than a double…

  Mitch: Are you a virgin, because I’m looking specifically for a cherry to pop…

  Ugh. Gross. I take a deep breath and exhale. Reading these is amusing, sad, and toxic. I can’t imagine being wrapped up in this lifestyle, in filtering out these kinds of offers. Rose is so much better than this. Why? Why was she involved in this?

  I’m about to put the phone away and go take a shower, when I scroll past one more message. It’s from BD. I click on his profile, confirming it’s the last man Rose had spoken to before she went radio silent, before, presumably she jumped off that bridge.