I rolled my eyes. I was a rising middle schooler by then, so I was making like I was sick of his stories. Dad said, “All right, Miss Smartypants, how about a scary story?”
Well, I totally wanted to hear that, and I looked at Amanda, hoping we’d be able to exchange a glance that said, “Awesome.” But she didn’t seem excited by the idea of scary. If I had to name a feeling to match her deadpan gaze, screwed-up mouth, and raised eyebrows, I’d have said she looked a little bit bored, but she was too polite to say so.
My dad started in on his story anyway—all about the legend of some kind of monster named Bloody Fingers. Two Boy Scouts were camping in a tent, when they heard a voice in the wind, calling and howling and getting closer and closer, “I’m Bloody Fingers and I’m a mile away!” Then, “I’m Bloody Fingers and I’m twenty-five paces away!” But then, when Bloody Fingers got to the Boy Scouts, he turned out to be a five-year-old Cub Scout, who announced in a cheerful voice, “It’s Bloody Fingers. Can I have a Band-Aid?”
Amanda laughed really hard. She always loved my dad. It was hard to be in a bad mood when he was around.
But then she said, “I have a scary story too. Do you guys want to hear?” After we’d nodded, she started in on a story that still, even today, sends shivers down my spine. I thought about it all the time when we were on the road in the RV. I’d thought Amanda somehow had been able to predict the future. That she’d sent me a secret message.
The story she told was about a girl whose dad had died before she was born.
“Like your dad?” my dad had interrupted Amanda in the pizza place, switching Pen over to his other shoulder, shaking out his arm, using his concerned adult voice. Later I’ve realized he would have known Amanda’s dad was alive. I guess he was just thinking about what Amanda was feeling back then.
“No,” Amanda said, her voice calm, her gray-green eyes looking up over his shoulder as if she could see something in the room that we could not. Thinking back to the story after Amanda disappeared, I realized—or wondered—if she was really talking about my dad. If the whole story was about me.
In Amanda’s story, the girl doesn’t believe her father really is dead. All the girl knows is that her mother was pregnant with her at the time her dad died, and that her mom destroyed every picture of her dad and never mentioned his name. The girl has always assumed this is because her mother can’t bear the pain of losing him. So every year on her birthday, the girl waits until her mother has gone to sleep, and she sneaks outside into her yard. She looks up at the stars and feels the night air cooling her skin and she just knows that he is out there, watching her.
And then she starts to get secret messages that only she can understand. That make it clear her dad is watching her, and knows things about her. She loves making drawings of trees, and in her tree drawings the trees always look the same—a maple with a thick trunk; spreading, low-hung, heavy branches; a swing made out of two ropes and a plank.
After the girl’s art teacher hangs up her tree drawings and paintings at the school art show, she gets a photograph in the mail. It has a date stamp on it that shows it was taken the week before. When the girl’s mom sees the photograph in the girl’s hand, she sits down hard in one of the kitchen chairs. “Where did you get that?” she asks the girl and her mom says, “That’s your father’s tree swing. At the house where he grew up. The house was torn down, but see that fence? That hillside? It’s definitely the one.” Her mom doesn’t notice the date stamp. “Where did you find this?” she asks. “In the attic?” The girl nods. If she tells her mom the photograph arrived in a plain white envelope with no return address, her mother will start watching the mail, and the girl has a feeling there will be more. She doesn’t want to miss any.
A month later a wooden cigar box appears on the floor of her room. Inside is a deck of cards missing the jack of diamonds. A few weeks after that she’s in the library, reading, and she leaves her book open on the table to ask a question at the reference desk. When she returns, the book is closed, but her place has been held with a bookmark. The bookmark is a playing card. The missing jack of diamonds.
She tears through the library looking for her father, and it is only then that she realizes she has no idea what he looks like. She has only one picture of him, a blurry shot taken at a distance, and he would have aged since it was taken. She looks at every man in the right age range, but all of them are impossible. She wonders why he would hide from her? Why would he tease her with all these subtle clues?
And then the next clue arrives. This one comes in the mail again, in a plain white envelope. Inside are two yellowed newspaper clippings, one his obituary and the other an article published a month after his death. Reading them, the girl comes to learn that he died in a car accident—his car drove off a bridge and his body was never found. The investigation was eventually dropped when the girl’s mother pleaded with the police to have the search called off. She was eight months pregnant at the time and needed closure.
She doesn’t understand any of this, but one night when her mother is out for the evening she has all the clues she’s been collecting spread out on the kitchen table and she’s poring over them, trying to find a solution in her mind, when she hears a hand on the doorknob. Someone is about to enter the house. She knows it isn’t her mother. She would have heard her car in the driveway. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard any car in the driveway. Her dog hadn’t barked. Who could it be?
The whole time Amanda had been telling the story, she hadn’t broken her concentration or lost track of the story the way I always did when I was that age. My dad and I were staring at her, totally transfixed by what she was saying, and when she got to this point and stopped, my dad, at least, had his mouth hanging open.
Now, Amanda looked at each of us long and slow, dead in the eye. “Do you think you know what’s going to happen?” she said. I had an idea but I didn’t say it out loud. It was too terrible. I was really worried about that girl. My dad slowly shook his head too.
“Well,” Amanda said. “No one knows. The police found the door open, the materials on the table, the girl gone. The mother too. They were never seen or heard from again.”
Chapter 19
As we were finishing up our lunches, Cisco left to help Mr. Fowler. We were starting to think about the next step when the shiny black SUV we’d seen in front of the Institute for Natural Sciences pulled up a few feet away from where we were sitting. An image flashed before me: the rangers in their dark suits coming toward us, their strong grip on our upper arms, their dragging us into their car and gunning the engine before Cisco or Mr. Fowler could even see.
But that wasn’t what happened. The guards or rangers or whatever they were stayed behind the car’s tinted windows and the only person to emerge from the car was Heidi. We saw one long leg, a high-heeled ankle boot, her skinny jeans, her leather jacket, her slouchy bag and then her pretty face, twisted into a frown. She saw us watching. She waved like the person driving the car was her mom, not some henchman working for the man who tortured our parents when they were kids and was now coming after us.
Ignoring her I-Girl toadies, Heidi strolled toward us, like we’d all come to this party together.
“Hey, guys,” she said, in a good imitation of a languid, bored, and impartial tone. She looked us up and down like we were wet dogs about to tramp mud into her white-carpeted living room and then she turned her head so she could get a view of our scavenger hunt sheet. “The torch has been passed,” she read. “Where’s that from?”
Nia opened her mouth about to tell Heidi about JFK’s inaugural speech being inscribed on his tomb, but when Callie elbowed her in the ribs, she shut it. But still, she didn’t hide the scavenger hunt sheet—it was hard with Heidi. You get this feeling when she’s talking to you, like she’s your best friend, and you don’t want your best friend to think that you’re suspicious of her, do you?
“The eyes of the world are upon you?” Heidi read. “That’s deep, right
?” she giggled.
“What do you want, Heidi?” Nia said, but she let an almost imperceptible stutter betray the fear she still had of the girl. I saw Hal sigh the tiniest bit. He was still intimidated too.
Heidi turned to Callie. “I’m sure you’ve been diligently checking landmarks and historic monuments off your list?” she said.
“And I’m sure you’ve had somebody do that for you,” Callie snapped. “Let me guess—Lexi, Kelli, and Traci have been scurrying all over D.C. while you got your nails done.”
“Funny,” Heidi said, without laughing or even cracking a smile. She reached to pick up Callie’s phone. “Can I see your pix?”
Callie quickly pocketed it. Whatever Heidi wanted, Callie was strong enough to know not to give it to her.
Heidi giggled. “What?” she said. “Do I have the plague or something? Are you afraid that if I touch something that belongs to you, you’ll turn into me?” She made a pouty face, and turned back to Nia, whom she’d had better luck with. “Don’t you want to be popular, Nia?” She whispered now so that only Nia and I could hear. “Like your brother?”
Nia shook her head. I could tell from the way she was holding her chin stiffly that she was getting angry. Fortunately, she had the self-possession to stand up and walk away. “I’m going to throw away my garbage,” she said, looking pointedly at Heidi when she said the word “garbage.”
Callie and Hal got up to throw their bags away too.
Heidi sat down in the vacated space the other guides had left. Next to me. And suddenly I wondered if this had been her plan in being so awful to Nia. For us to be alone.
She looked down at the empanada I was still eating as if it were a dead animal, then she passed me a bag of potato chips. “Here, have something that’s not cold and congealed,” she said. Her voice was smooth and I couldn’t help feeling warmed by it. I knew all the things Rosie and Mrs. Leary had told me about her, but somehow they didn’t seem to matter so much right now. I actually caught myself wondering if, aside from the attempted murder and likely involvement with Dr. Joy and the Official—if she wasn’t all that bad.
“I can’t eat potato chips because I’ll get fat, but my dad packs them for me anyway.” She giggled. Heidi often laughs at things she says as if they’re jokes in a way that makes me wonder if she knows what a sense of humor really is. “You don’t need to worry, though,” she went on.
“Uh . . . thanks,” I said, deciding to leave unsaid that I could not have gotten one leg into Heidi’s super-skinny jeans. But then I suddenly realized that I really, really didn’t want the chips anyway. When I think about Heidi, what she did to Bea Rossiter, I think about what happened to my dad and everything that’s been happening—and I couldn’t bring myself to eat her chips.
“Keep the chips,” I said. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
Heidi gave me a look. Not a dirty look. Well, not exactly. It was more appraising. She usually has completely unambiguous body language. I think it’s actually the secret to her power. When she’s walking across a room, every single part of her body is pointed toward the destination where she’s headed. She doesn’t overthink.
But now, one toe was pointing back to the I-Girl group, and one toe was pointed to me. She didn’t know which way to turn. And in this moment of hesitation for her, I took a chance. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe not.
“What are you getting out of all of this? What did he promise you?” I said.
I could tell from the way her pupils didn’t dilate that she wasn’t surprised by my question. Still, she did the best job of pretending she could. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“You know,” I said. “The Official. What did he say he’d give you?”
Heidi sighed and rolled her eyes. She was half turned away from me, but I knew she didn’t want to walk away. She wanted to tell me. “Was it money?” I said. “Something else?”
Heidi stood, all ambivalence gone. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Zoe Costas. And you’re never going to find your friend. No one is. She’s as gone as your dad.”
I just sat there, my only thought being not to let her see that she had gotten to me. Hands shaking, I picked up the scavenger hunt sheet. I could hear it rattling as Heidi walked away.
Chapter 20
To get away from Heidi’s prying, we left lunch and started back on the hunt, all agreeing that what with its proximity to the Lincoln and World War II Memorials, plus its war/battle theme, the Vietnam Memorial would make the logical next step on Amanda’s Washington D.C. tour. We were just discussing our options when I heard a voice behind me.
“Hey, you up there, hold up!”
I felt like all the organs inside my belly had been replaced with rocks. They’d found us. It had to be one of the guards from the airplane hangar.
So you will understand the enormous sigh of relief I breathed when it was just a guy in a suit, carrying a soft briefcase and a coffee in a to-go cup—clearly, a businessman. He was holding the scavenger hunt sheet. I must have dropped it, though I couldn’t remember doing that.
The man must have noted that all four of us were smiling at him in relief, and he smiled shyly, raising his cup to us in a little toast, offering us the sheet in his other hand, taking a look at it and saying, “Field trip?” like we had a terrible disease he himself had just got over. I liked this guy right away.
He looked down at the sheet, where we’d circled the Vietnam Memorial. “The Vietnam Memorial’s just up that way if you’re looking for it,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Is that where you’re heading?” the man pressed. “It’s definitely not one to miss.”
“Okay,” I said. There was something about this guy. Did I know him? I couldn’t look away from his eye. I wished I could spend more time with him. He just seemed . . . well, comfortable. Normal. He reminded me of how nice it would be not to be running all over Washington, but to feel like a kid again.
But then Callie pulled at my arm. “We gotta go, Zoe,” she said. She smiled a nice-girl apology at the man.
I had to drag myself away. Something about seeing him was reassuring, a little slice of normal pie. But as soon as he was gone, I could feel our pace increasing.
The Vietnam Memorial was the first place we’d visited that day that didn’t have columns and steps. It was just a slowly sloping wall inscribed with the name of every single serviceman who died fighting in Vietnam. As usual, we didn’t know exactly what clue we were looking for, and there weren’t any park rangers watching—or at least there weren’t any that we could see—so we wandered up and down the monument’s length, looking at the names. I took a lot of pictures.
And then suddenly I was looking at an inscription that made me stop. “Guys,” I called out to the others. “More highlighting.” The inscription read:
IN HONOR OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES WHO SERVED IN THE VIETNAM WAR. THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES AND OF THOSE WHO REMAIN MISSING ARE INSCRIBED IN THE ORDER THEY WERE TAKEN FROM US.
Only the words, The names and are inscribed and they were taken from us were highlighted.
Nia reached out her hand to touch part of the inscription. All those lists we’d been seeing—of the C33s. Thinking about my dad. About Amanda’s mom. Mrs. Leary. The former C33 Mr. Bennett had told us about who’d left his Volkswagen at the side of the road, never to be heard from again.
Suddenly, Nia shivered. She dropped her hands from the wall.
“She’s been here,” Nia said.
We didn’t need to ask who.
And we couldn’t if we wanted to, because suddenly, one of the guards we’d been seeing all day was strolling down the path toward us. “Don’t look,” I said. “Just turn slowly and follow me.”
Which they did. I scanned the simple wall and the path before it for somewhere for us to blend in and disappear, but there was nothing. I could have really used some columns just about now. “Do you feel Amanda anywh
ere else?” Hal whispered to Nia as we continued to move slowly, walking away from the guard.
Nia put her hand out on the wall, touching names one at a time. “Here,” she said on the fourth name. “This one. She was here.”
The guard was closer. A few other groups from our school were standing on the path with us, and I think their presence was protecting us from the guard to a certain extent. Callie waved to one of the girls from the mathletes, and when the guard saw this he slowed his pace.
“Zoe,” Callie said, speaking to me between nearly closed lips, not turning her head to me. “Is there anything more you can do to keep him from seeing us?”
“Not when it’s like this,” I said. “He already has seen us. And he’s already really close.”
“Oh, no,” said Hal. We didn’t even have a chance for him to tell us what he saw before we saw it too. The other guard—the one who’d fallen asleep at his desk in the airplane hangar—coming into view from the opposite direction.
Nia had her hand on another name—Nia was like a bloodhound now, following Amanda’s path along the monument, touching every name Amanda had touched. “She was here too,” Nia said, stopping in a new place. “I think more recently than the other ones. I think we’re close.”
“Do you think she’s here?” Callie asked.
“Or do you have a sense of where the trail is going?” Hal said. “Because I’m not getting a good feeling about the place we’re in right now.”
I turned my head fast—a bad idea, as I saw out of the corner of my eye the guard who had newly appeared, the one with the tattoo on his face. He was taking a step closer to us, as if he was poised to pounce the second we made any gesture toward trying to run. Stay calm, I warned myself.
As Nia continued to lead us down the monument’s side, blindly feeling her way forward, Callie stood right behind her like she was going to shield her from whatever danger was approaching. Hal looked stressed. He was probably having a premonition of what was about to happen to us, and from the look on his face, I had a feeling that whatever was in store for us would not be good. Hal’s fingers were drawn up into fists; even the muscles in his neck were tight. He swallowed hard.
The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled Page 15