“Well,” I said, “maybe you can do that.”
“I know he’s up there,” she said, looking in the direction of the pool house.
“He is,” I said.
Reese didn’t respond. A slow gray silence formed between us then. It was not like the other silences. Reese was slipping away from me in some way. I could feel it..
“If I ask you to do something,” she said in a thin, airless voice, “will you swear to do it, exactly the way I say?”
“If I can.”
“I’ll tell you what it is, and you tell me if you can or not.”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna leave this right here,” she said, setting the gun on the couch. “And I’m going to walk over to you. And I want you to give me a hug. Then I want you to go back to the pool house and tell my father to come down here.”
“Yeah, but you can’t shoot him.”
“If I promise to not shoot him, will you do the other part?”
“Of course.”
“Okay then. I promise.”
She left the gun on the couch and stood up. It was still very dark in the room, but I could see her straightening her shirt, smoothing her hair, composing herself.
Then she moved across the room to where I was.
Her smell reached me first. It was different somehow. And when she got closer, I saw what Darius had warned me about. There was an emptiness in her eyes. And a disconnectedness. Her whole face looked stricken and aged and strained to the point of total collapse.
She put her arms around my neck. She pressed her slightly cold body against me and pressed her face into my shoulder. I held her, cautiously at first, but then more like a real hug. It was still nice to hold her, no matter what else was happening. And she needed it now. I could feel how bad she needed it.
A wet spot formed on my shoulder. The tiniest sniffle escaped from her chest.
She lifted her head. “Thank you,” she whispered. She released me and pulled away and walked back to the couch. I waited for her to turn back toward me. But she didn’t. She wasn’t going to. She wanted me to leave now, to fulfill my part of the bargain.
I turned and let myself out the door. Outside, in the night air, I could feel the eyes of the police and the SWAT people on me. I headed uphill, through the grass, taking two nervous steps toward the pool house. For some reason, I couldn’t catch my breath. My chest felt heavy and constricted. I stopped for a moment to gather myself.
I started again, moving uphill, one step, another step. But again I seized up. I couldn’t seem to move. Just walk to the pool house, I told myself. Just take another step. It was my body that was stopping me. My body knew. My body knew what was about to happen, even if my brain did not.
A single shot rang out. It was much louder than the first one. It cleared the air like a church bell. It was such a full, complete sound. Powerful and final. And yet a moment later, it was gone, blown away by the wind, sucked into the vastness of the ocean in the distance.
The side door of the pool house swung open. I remained unable to move. Darius and his men poured out. They sprinted for the art studio. Richard Abernathy, to my surprise, was right behind them, frantic and whimpering. Other people came charging down the lawn behind them. Cops. Plainclothes. Medics. Guys with a stretcher. I stood frozen in place. Stuck in the grass. As if God himself had nailed me to the earth.
TWENTY EIGHT
“… Hello?” said a voice.
I lifted my head from my pillow. It was cold in the tree house, one of the first chilly nights of the fall. I was supposed to be reading Huckleberry Finn for my GED class, but really, I was just lying there.
“… Cali?” said the voice.
I rolled over and pushed open my door. It was Ailis, standing in the grass below me.
It had been six weeks since the night at the pool house. I had not seen Ailis much during that time, except sometimes at the community college. We’d talked on the phone a little. She had mostly given me space, given me time to process everything. And of course she’d stayed with me the night of Reese’s funeral, which I wasn’t invited to. We’d watched a movie called Space Visitors 3 that night, on Hope’s big TV.
Lately, though, she was wondering about her own future. I couldn’t really blame her.
“You know those business cards I told you about?” she said from the lawn. “Do you still want to see them?”
“Oh… uh…” I said. “Sure.”
Ailis climbed the ladder. She had not been in the tree house in a long time. We kept bumping foreheads. I managed to make a space for her to show me the business cards.
Ailis began laying them out. “Here’s one option,” she said, putting down the first card. It said MISSING PERSONS over a dark blue background.
“And here’s another,” she said, putting down a different card. It was the same thing with a light red background.
She laid eight different cards out. I looked at the possibilities. Ailis watched me, pulling her hair back behind her ear.
I pointed to the ones I liked, and the ones I didn’t.
She nodded at my choices. But she could see I wasn’t thinking very hard about it. I didn’t care what color the business cards were.
After a while she gathered them back up. “Do you think you’ll want to continue with this, in general?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. I shrugged.
“I mean there’s no hurry,” said Ailis.
“I know.”
“But if you want. Maybe I could put an ad somewhere. Just to see. On Craigslist or something.”
I stared at the business cards in her hands.
“Or not…” said Ailis.
I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell Ailis how I felt, or what I wanted to do. But I didn’t know.
“All right,” said Ailis. She slipped her business cards back in her pocket. She looked around at the tree house. “What do you do up here when it gets cold?”
“I get a thicker sleeping bag,” I said.
The next morning, I played hoops with Diego and Jojo. This was still the best way I knew to clear my mind and think about things: to lose myself in the rhythms and flow of basketball. What was I going to tell Ailis? I owed her some sort of answer.
Jax came by later and we all walked down to the new farmer’s market on Venice Boulevard. Strawberry was there, at the little animal-shelter booth. She was showing people the different dogs that needed homes. It was funny seeing Strawberry doing that. She was the one who needed a home.
Jax was nice to her, like he always was. Protective. Like a big brother. But that was it. Whatever romantic feelings that existed between them had faded, I guess. Strawbs had pulled away. She couldn’t handle it.
Jax bent down and petted the dog she was holding. Strawbs watched him while he did, with those big strange eyes of hers.
Sometime after that, I had a conversation with Jojo about Reese. I didn’t refer to her by name. instead I asked him what he thought about suicide. He said it was a selfish act. An act by someone who does not trust in God. And who puts himself first, before God, and thinks he knows better.
But then, I guess he could see something in my face, and he went back to being his more usual Jojo self, saying stuff about life being a mystery, and that we must humble ourselves before forces we don’t understand. And above all, we must keep our hearts open, we must always be ready to love, even though the world is full of pain and loss and sadness.
Then we went back to the basketball court and beat the crap out of these dudes from Beverly Hills, who were being jerks.. It was quite satisfying.
A couple nights later, after my GED class, I was skateboarding through the parking lot and Ailis pulled up in her car. “Hey. Gotta minute?” she said. “I wanna show you something.”
We drove to the Starbucks down the street. Inside, she pulled out a bunch of printouts. She began spreading them across the table.
Several of the pages were e-mails between Ailis and anoth
er person. I didn’t understand at first. Then I did: Someone had responded to an ad Ailis had placed for MISSING PERSONS INCORPORATED. Someone actually wanted to hire us.
Ailis handed me the first e-mail. The man was from Hadley Creek, South Dakota. He had a daughter who had run away to California. Could we help?
In his next e-mail was some basic information about the daughter. She was fifteen. Her name was Ellie Ferguson. There was a recent picture of her standing next to a pig at a livestock fair. She was not rich. She was not pretty. In the photo, she looked bored.
I read the other e-mails. The Fergusons were divorced. Ellie lived with her dad, on their small farm. Ellie had always been the joy of Mr. Ferguson’s life but during the last year, something had happened, she’d grown distant, she would barely speak to him. When she disappeared, he searched her room and found a travel book about California stashed in her mattress. The section describing Venice had been heavily highlighted.
There were half a dozen pictures of Ellie. In one of them, she was eleven years old, standing in front of a barn in the early morning light. She wore high rubber boots for the mud, a thick down coat for the cold. It looked just like Nebraska and for a moment I could smell the black earth, I could feel the frigid wind whipping across the plains.
“We gotta find this girl,” I said softly to myself.
Ailis said nothing. But I could feel the excitement from her side of the table. And the relief.
“When did she go missing?” I asked.
“Uh…” said Ailis, digging through the e-mails. She picked one out and read it. “Eight days ago.”
I nodded.
“How long did it take you to get to California?” asked Ailis.
“About a week,” I said.
“Which means she could be here already,” said Ailis.
I nodded and sat back and stared at the spread of papers in front of me. “Which means this case starts now.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Bethany Strout for extreme patience and superb editorial guidance. Big thanks to Jodi Reamer, Alec Shane, Kassie Evashevski, Johnny Pariseau, Lauren Cerand, Sally, Chelsea, my LA crew, and everyone who helped and supported along the way. Thanks to all the great people at Little, Brown and Writers House and UTA. Special thanks to Paula Nelson for a close reading of the manuscript when she should have been enjoying her summer. And a special acknowledgment to my good friend Mike Hughes, who first told me about life on the beach in Venice.
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