by Paul Griffin
Sabbatini, like a lot of teachers at the Hollows, recorded his lectures. He was in front of about two hundred kids in stadium-style seats. This was how they did the lab preps, the AP and regular-track students lumped together before they broke up into smaller groups for the actual experiments. I had placed out of chem during home school. Now I was wishing I hadn’t. I would have been in that lecture hall.
Sabbatini: “The question was, ‘Why does battery acid burn your finger and not the inside of the battery case, which is largely polyvinylchloride?’ Nobody? Fabulous. You’re all destined to succeed brilliantly. People, what is the pH of water? One hand up. The hand. Yes, well then, of course Ms. Castro would know. Go ahead.”
Nicole: “Seven?”
Sabbatini: “Question or statement? And at what temperature? Care to gamble five points on the midterm?”
Nicole: “Seven at seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”
Sabbatini sighed, “Correct.” Then, to the class: “What compound makes up most of the human body?”
“Bone,” some dude yelled.
That got a lot of muttered “Oh my god,” and “Idiot.”
Sabbatini: “Genius. Genius.” He slapped his hand on his desk with each word: “What, is, the, body, made of? Go ahead, Ms. Castro.”
Nicole: “Water. About sixty percent of the body’s weight.”
Sabbatini: “So then why does one’s finger burn when one, if one is stupid enough, changes his car battery without proper protective gear on his hands?”
Nicole: “The pH scale goes from zero to fourteen. Liquids closer to zero are strongly acidic. Liquids closer to fourteen are bases. Water, the liquid in our skin, is effectively neutral. The battery acid has a really low pH, less than one-”
“Point eight, in fact, Ms. Castro,” Sabbatini barked.
Nicole: “Point eight. Thank you, Dr. Sabbatini. When you combine two liquids, they try to even out their acidity. The farther apart they are in pH, the more heat is given off in the balancing reaction. The result is that it melts. Your skin just fries.”
Sabbatini bent over his SmartDraw pad and sketched out a molecular structure that described the chemical reaction Nicole had just verbalized. The projected diagram was stunningly spiderweb-like, but I’d already ruled out Sabbatini, along with Dr. Schmidt. They had conspired to do no more than get that chem teacher’s guide to Nicole.
Sabbatini believed a lot of questions went unasked because students were afraid of looking dumb in front of their peers. He kept a question box outside his office door. If you didn’t understand something in class, just drop an anonymous note into the box anytime afterward, and Sabbatini would get to it at the beginning of the next class.
Who had asked the question about the battery acid? The camera’s POV was from the back of the lecture hall. I could see little more than the backs of the students’ heads.
I had Angela on my screen in an IM box. I typed: Do we really think this is Marisol Wood or Marisol framed? Let’s put Chrissie Vratos back on the list.
Aye-aye, Captain.
Cryforhelp669. It was almost as if she wanted to be caught. My phone had started vibrating while Angela and I were IM-ing. I checked the text:
from Arachnomorph@unknowable_origin.net:
Hello Jameson and Angela,
The itsy-bitsy spider
climbed up the waterspout.
Down came the rain,
and washed the spider out.
Up came the sun,
and dried up all the rain.
The itsy-bitsy spider
crawled up the spout again.
I have six eyes. They’re all on you.
Angela IM-ed: Did you just get that?
I typed back: Full-court press on Vratos.
All we had to do was connect her to that black Honda Civic, and she was done.
I looked out my window to the fire escape. Manhattan was deep in the distance. The midtown skyscrapers were black fangs. The sun had just cleared the horizon. The heat rising from the oil burner chimneys across the highway distorted and magnified it. It swelled like a tumor jacked up on steroids, burning through a haze so white it glared. The clock said 7:31 a.m. I’d been awake sixty-four of the last seventy-two hours.
My father peeked into my room. “You want a ride?”
“I’m suspended, remember?”
“Can you go food shopping, then?” He shook his head and left for work.
I checked his room for anything that might give me a hint of what he was doing while he was AWOL those two times in Marathon, New Jersey. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.
Nicole called. She wanted to hang out but wasn’t allowed out of the house.
This old lady was having a hard time getting onto the bus. I helped her. She said, “Thank you, miss,” told me I had lovely hair and my, wasn’t I quite tall for a girl.
The security guard was parked in front of Nicole’s house. Mrs. Castro met me at the door. “Nicole’s in the shower. I was worried about you.” She took me back to her studio and showed me her paintings. Abstract art isn’t exactly my thing, but as far as it went, I thought she was awesome. You kind of had to stare at it for a while, though, to figure out what she was painting; looked like a doe in autumn woods. I wasn’t sure I was right about that until she said, “They come right up to the back door at sunset. Did you get your father to sign my book?”
“I forgot to bring it,” I said.
Nicole came in. “You look horrible,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. She looked a little pale herself.
“You do look a little peaked, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said. She had fixed us some tea and handed me a cup. She closed the door behind her to leave Nicole and me alone.
The tea tasted great, then suddenly bitter, metallic. “Perugina or Hershey’s?” I said. “On your sleeve.” Nicole had a dot of dried chocolate stain on her sweatshirt. A squiggle of pink lightning arced across the studio, and that’s the last thing I remember.
She was brushing my hair back when I woke. I was on the studio couch. I sat up fast.
“Did I-”
“Relax. You just dropped into a daze, it seemed.”
I brushed my hand over my crotch. I was wet. I looked down. The one day I had to wear non-dark jeans. They were dark now all right, just in one spot. I grabbed my backpack and board and made for the front door. Nicole begged me to stay. “At least until you’re not bumping into walls, Jay. Please? You’re practically staggering.”
Her mother came at me with a folded wet towel. I slipped past her, out the side door, into the Castros’ yard. Sylvia blocked Nicole, yelling at her in Spanish that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.
I was too dizzy to ride my board, and it had started drizzling again. I half jogged, half stumbled into the nature preserve that bordered Nicole’s house. The path was a shortcut to the road, where I could catch the bus.
I made my way through the preserve and walked along the side of the highway. I stopped to catch my breath. The day was gray, but there was a glare to the sky, bright enough that I could see the stain in my pants wasn’t really in my crotch but on my thigh, and it was too dark to be urine, more the color of blood. I couldn’t figure out how I’d cut myself or where. A car revved up to me. As I looked over my shoulder, the car blinded me, flashing its brights. It swung in front of me, cutting me off. It was the black Civic. No, the Saab, Nicole’s. She leaned over the shotgun seat and pushed open the door, and that’s when I realized the stain in my pants wasn’t blood. “It was the tea,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“I must have spilled the tea on myself when I faded out.”
“Jay, get into the car.”
The road was one muddy puddle after another. Trucks whipped up gray spray. I was cold and beat. I sank into the shotgun seat. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I. I’m not supposed to be driving. My mother made me take a Xanax just before you showed
up.”
She drove fast into the empty rest area, the rain darkening the sky. The brakes whimpered as she stopped short to park. She turned to face me.
“No more chocolate stain,” I said. “Wait, you changed your hoodie.” This one was pink too, but baggier. I touched her sleeve where the stain had been. She winced and drew back her arm. “Was that blood before, on your sleeve?” I said.
“Cat scratched up my arm.”
“You have a cat?”
“The neighbor’s. She’s always in the yard. I was cuddling her, and all of a sudden she flipped out.”
A person who has serious allergies cuddles a cat? Nicole Castro was lying to me. She leaned across the seat and rested her head on my chest. I put my arms around her. The rain fell hard on the roof. “Tell me what happened to her,” she said. “Your mom.”
“Some time,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
I don’t know how long we were like that, just holding each other. Not long enough. Somebody tapped on the side window. The security guard. He drove Nicole home in the security company SUV. A second guard drove me home in Nicole’s Saab.
FORTY-ONE
From Nicole’s journal:
Monday, 1 November-
I think he might know.
FORTY-TWO
At four that afternoon, Cherry called with a promise of hot news. “Tell me in person,” I said. I had re-upped my anonymity settings, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain the Recluse wasn’t watching me. Cherry showed up at my apartment with Starbucks scones. “So my father’s cop friend didn’t get an ID on the woman.”
“And this is hot information because?”
“He got a lead on the car owner.” She clicked a picture onto her Droid screen: a shot of the Civic’s rear bumper. “A traffic camera picked up the car.”
“Okay?” I said. “We already had the plate number.”
“Right,” she said, “but we didn’t have this.” She zoomed in on the plate. “The plate itself is bad, yes, but not the plate rack, the kind the dealer gives you to advertise the dealership.” Cherry tweaked the picture, magnifying the plate rack: Vardy Dealership.
I nodded. She left the scones on the counter and hurried for the door.
“What’s the rush?” I said.
“Work.” Cherry DiBenneditto was a very cool girl.
A little after 4:00 Tuesday morning, I cracked the Vardy database. The company had resold four hundred and sixteen 1990s model Civics in the last fifteen years, and none of those went to anybody named Vratos or Wood. By now I’d hacked the class list for Sabbatini’s chem lab. None of the last names matched.
I created a map that covered Brandywine and the Hollows outskirts, and I checked the addresses of the Civic owners with Google Earth Street View, one by one. It took hours. Around 11:45 Tuesday night, about three-quarters of the way down the Vardy list, I found what I was looking for, a dumpy little house not far from my apartment building, in lower Valedale, still in the Brandywine school district but definitely low rent. The black Civic was in the driveway. The stolen plates had been swapped out for the ones registered to the address, but I recognized the car by the gash that ran across the driver’s-side doors. The Civic owner’s name was Roberta Lyles. I tapped up her Facebook page.
Bobbie Lyles listed herself as divorced. She was probably in her early thirties but the lines around her eyes made her look a lot older. She had long blond hair, but she couldn’t have been the woman I saw in the Civic hauling out of my parking lot. That woman was thin, and Bobbie was not. Still, she looked familiar. Those eyes. . I tapped up Chrissie Vratos’s page. At a stretch, she and Bobbie could have been distant cousins. Maybe they were friends, and Chrissie had simply borrowed the car? Took me about half an hour to go through Chrissie’s posts and albums, and I didn’t find anything that connected her to Lyles. Bobbie’s page took half a minute to scan. She had nothing up there except a handful of pictures, all of crocheted objects. She was using Facebook primarily to promote her home business, handcrafted scarves, sweaters, blankets made to order. She had six friends, and none of them linked her to Chrissie. I tried to connect Bobbie and Marisol Wood and came up empty there too. I tried to link her to the suspects I had already eliminated from my list, Mr. Sager, Kerns, Dave, Schmidt, Sabbatini. I crossed my fingers when I tried to link her to my father and sighed relief when I couldn’t. I couldn’t link her to Marathon, New Jersey, either. I had to dig deeper into that and find out what my father was hiding down there, but not yet. I had one more name I needed to cross-reference with Bobbie Lyles. I hesitated. I forced myself to do it.
She didn’t connect to Nicole either.
I checked to see if the black Civic had been stolen recently. It hadn’t, or Bobbie Lyles hadn’t reported it as such. I ran her address into the cable service provider database. The house was wired for basic television, Vonage, and Internet service. The only machine IDs that came up were for a fax machine, an older model TV and a very old desktop PC, the kind Bobbie Lyles might use for her little startup business, to post her wares on eBay. She listed her employer as Dunkin’ Donuts.
The low-tech computer, low-rent cable, low-wage job: perfect cover-too perfect. That black Civic was in her driveway. She was involved in this thing somehow.
I pulled a long-standing string I had into BinarTREE, one of the major manufacturers of cell phone towers. They owned the northeast with nine of every ten towers flaunting their brand. The towers were equipped with sensors that pinpointed wireless data flow. Obviously media companies would pay dearly to know which homes were gobbling up lots of gigabytes, and then push their products there.
Why was Bobbie Lyles importing ridiculous amounts of data into her home, into her back bedroom, specifically; way more data than that crappy desktop dinosaur PC with its half a gigabyte of RAM could handle? I’d found her. I’d found the Recluse. She had a very powerful computer in that back room, the kind I had, homemade, no machine ID, untraceable, the kind you never dock to an Ethernet cable, to keep yourself invisible. The only way I was going to be able to suck the information from Bobbie Lyles’s hard drive was to dock to it with an external drive. My phone beeped midnight. Knock on my door.
“Yup?”
My father leaned in, yawning. His gut hung over the waistband of his pajamas. “Saw your light on under the door.”
“And?”
“Did you vote today?”
“Dad? I’m sixteen.”
He eyed the laptops. “What the hell are you working on that you need two computers going?”
“Project.”
“Fascinating description.” He rubbed his eyes. “This is what you do all the time. Bird with the broken wing syndrome. Of all the girls out there, you have to fall in love with this one?”
“I’m not in love-”
“Look, I’m traveling a lot the next couple of weeks. It can’t be helped. It’s the heart of the fall season, you know? I’m thinking I want to take you with me.”
“Yeah, thanks, no.”
“Jay, if you keep messing around with Barrone’s case and you get pinched, I can’t help you. After Pete, I have no connections to PD. You screw up, you’re on your own.”
I was thinking the same about him. Traveling a lot? Would he be making any stops in Marathon?
I called Angela to tell her where I was in the hunt, but she was out at a club and in no mood to talk. “Call me tomorrow and we’ll divvy up assignments,” she said. But by tomorrow it would all be over, one way or another.
FORTY-THREE
By nine a.m., my father was off to a gallery for a private showing. I tucked my hair into a blue ball cap and studied myself in the mirror: blue work Dickies and this blue button-down I wore like once a year, Christmas at my aunt’s, but it could pass for a work shirt. I holstered a Game Boy control. From far away, it might pass for an electric meter reader.
By 9:15 I was at Roberta Lyles’s house. It looked different in real life. Bigger, creepier. The black Civic
was gone. I knocked on the front door. No answer. Same way after ringing the bell. This was just a double check. I already knew she was at her Dunkin’ Donut shift. I’d hacked her schedule from the local franchise’s Google calendar the night before. If she had any kids, they were at school or in daycare. I went to the side of the run-down house and pretended to get a reading from the electric meter. I slipped a pin blade into the basement door lock and broke it with a twist.
The basement wasn’t quite finished, bathroom project abandoned years ago, toilet bowl off its sewage site, half inch of dust coating it.
Upstairs: curb junk furniture. Really old TV. Coffee can by the window, overflowing menthol butts. Cheap arts and crafts everywhere, dusty God’s eyes, faded cobwebs of yarn. Cigarette burn in the filthy, track-worn carpet. Cracked window patched with secondhand USPS packing tape. Kitchen was clean, but the shelving sagged like a triple-decker smile. A bead kit on the table. Never-to-be-finished necklaces. Cheap-framed sketches, ranging from really good to great, all pencil, mostly people, lots of self-portraits, snippets of her trying to grin her way through the everyday. Two bedrooms. Big one had big clothes draped about, big pair of underwear hung over the back of an exercise bike to dry. Potted plant, dead, on the bike seat. Small bedroom: mattress on the floor. Sketches all over the walls, taped up. Studying them, I felt the room turn very cold, and very suddenly.
The faces. I recognized them. These were BHHS students. My classmates. Me, on the floor, in the gymnasium. The pep rally. No puddle, though. Is that Angela, kneeling at my side? She’s kissing my forehead. Yet more sketches on a card table that passed for a desk. Angela and a big dude, his face shadowed but vaguely familiar. Maybe Rick Kerns? They’re getting it on. I was dialing Angela to tell her she was a target when I realized I was in Angela’s bedroom. That she had drawn all these pictures.