Jex Malone

by C. L. Gaber

  Billy, seventeen and a local football legend, claims he didn’t make it to the block party. The police officer that questioned him noted that Billy had an alibi. He and Patty had argued earlier that night, and he told the officer that he “blew off the party” but spent the rest of the Fourth of July with another friend from school.

  Billy added that he didn’t know what happened to Patty and the last time he had seen her she told him that she never wanted to talk to him again.

  Okay officers, so where’s the question about who this other friend is?

  Great police work guys … I mean, Dad.

  Okay, stop being so snotty.

  More random stuff: I guess everyone knew Patty was really into art and carried her art supplies in her backpack, which they all say was blue.

  Weird—they noticed that about her but otherwise thought she was invisible. Dad somehow found, or should I say detected, some neighbors who seemed to know more than others. Mr. Bill Foster, then fifty-five, lived next door and was known as the chronic neighborhood complainer.

  Or as Dad notes, a “frequent caller to the Metro PD.”

  In the end, Ricki and Frank made some tearful appeals on TV for Patty’s return. “If you have our little girl, please return her in one good piece and not ten million pieces,” Ricki blathered. So, she wasn’t exactly a poet, but she got the point across. The minute they were done with their front-lawn press conference, the cameras swung around to Dad and the reporters shoved their microphones into his face.

  I can almost hear them shouting questions at him:

  “Why aren’t you out there looking for her? Do you think she’s dead?”

  The newspaper report the next day read: “Det. John Malone refused to comment on what steps law enforcement have taken to find the missing girl and would only say the case remains an active investigation. Meanwhile the Matthews family can do nothing but sit and wait for any sign of their beloved daughter—dead or alive.”

  The last pages of the file are nothing but copies of the earlier reports and some time sheets. Odd, but it still doesn’t look like Dad interviewed the boyfriend or the best friend who was supposed to be with her.

  C’mon, Dad. That’s a glaring omission.

  I turn to the last page. It’s a white evidence sheet that’s filled out when police check something into the evidence room. It’s kind of like a receipt.

  Dad’s handwriting again: Backpack, blue, JanSport. The date says it was found in a dumpster behind the Mandalay Bay Casino on the Las Vegas strip on July 6. That would be two days after Patty disappeared. It has the initials PM written in marker on the front in big letters.

  That’s weird. How’d it get to a garbage bin on the strip 10 miles away?

  I flip the page. Oh God, that’s disgusting.

  The backpack was covered with a dried substance.

  Wham! Ding! Chirp!

  A car door slams outside the house. The dog thumps her tail on the floor with another loud bump.

  With one swift motion, I flick off the flashlight and slam the folder shut and shove it under my body.

  Pulling the covers higher over my head, all I can think about is the last line I memorized before I shut off the light.

  The dried substance on Patty’s backpack was blood.

  Chapter 8

  Famous Girl Detective Quote:

  “I got my nameplate. I got my badge. Just point me to the bad guys.”

  —Sabrina Duncan, Charlie’s Angels

  “And we’ll both be here at the house by seven. Maybe you could put on a dress or something nice,” Dad is rambling and I want to put up the hand. Instead, I just blink and nod. A lot.

  Talk, talk, talk, pause, blink, pause, nod, sip milk.

  It’s a sign that I’m comprehending and caring, even if I’m not. What kills me is he actually woke me up to have apple pie–flavored breakfast Pop-Tarts with him. Is he trying to torture me or is the man simply insane? Nice way to turn an eight-hour day into a twelve-hour one, Dad.

  “Honey, did you hear me?” Dad says in this husky, manly, loud voice that jolts me awake as he sits at the tiny wooden kitchen table looking annoyed and hopeful at the same time. Mom knows there is no talking until 9 A.M.

  It’s an unspoken house rule.

  “Uh, yeah, whatever you say,” I say in a vacant, groggy voice and nod my head just in case he doesn’t recognize my early morning mumbling.

  I take a slurp out of a glass of chocolate milk Dad has put in front of me. Say what you want about the man, but pairing chocolate milk with faux-apple toaster pastries is all right by me.

  “So what I was thinking is we can go to the strip in Vegas—there’s this great place I’ve been dying to show you. I think you’ll like it—it’s Mexican, but not like what we have around here. It’s—how do you describe it—fancy. They make the guacamole right at your table,” Dad says, clearly putting the hard sell on this upscale Taco Bell wonderland.

  “It’s Sandy’s favorite place,” he adds sheepishly.

  Wait just a second here. The morning fog is lifting off my brain. Sandy? Was I not paying attention earlier, because this is the first I’ve heard him speak of this Sandy character and now she is being offered as some sort of a side dish? She is the new bean dip.

  Pop-Tarts are dangerously distracting.

  I look at Dad and he’s got his eyebrows raised in that questioning way, waiting for my response. Hmmm, speak now or forever hold my peace and taco chips.

  “Uh, sure, whatever.” The words tumble out of my mouth before I have a chance to stop them.

  No fair; he plied me with Pop-Tarts and sugar milk. He’s good.

  I demand a do-over.

  Too late.

  “Okay great!” Dad says in a satisfied voice. “Be ready at seven and, you know, dress up a little bit, honey, because like I said, this place is fancy, but not that fancy, so use your own good judgment.” His voice is cheerful now and he fumbles for the right words.

  Oh man, now what have I gotten myself into if he’s this happy?

  Must. Not. Think. About. Girlfriend. Happier thoughts: The. Dead. Girl.

  The words in the case file come flooding back into my brain.

  Is Patty dead? Why didn’t they find her body? What about the blood? Did it match? Did Nancy Drew ever deal with real death? Back to Patty. Was her dad that scary? Did he kill her during a drunken rage? And what about the boyfriend? Something about him seemed fishy. Why was he spending a big holiday-bash kind of night with someone else? Was it another girl? What a jackass. Plus, how could the mom not know that Patty’s bed was empty? What a crappy mom.

  If this were a movie, the girl would be toast and her outraged father played by some over-thirty actor just developing fine lines and wrinkles would be kicking some major bee-hind. I banish that thought because this isn’t a movie. It’s real and it’s scary.

  A girl who wasn’t much older than me was probably kidnapped and killed and she lived—emphasis on the past tense—right around the corner.

  Why didn’t Dad do something more back then? Why didn’t he find the body? Maybe—just maybe—he’s not just a sucky dad, but also a sucky cop? Wouldn’t that just be my luck? He left us to be this great cop and he sucked at it.

  “See ya at seven o’clock, not a minute later,” I hear him shout from the front door. “Text me if you need anything before then.”

  Before I can reply, I hear the door slam shut.

  Yeah, Dad. Don’t even wait for me to say goodbye.

  I text Cissy to come over and two seconds later: Bam! A hand raps hard on the sliding door and I almost jump out of my skin. “I just texted you,” I tell her.

  “I know, but you sounded a little weirded out,” Cissy replies with that eager puppy-dog look in her eyes. It’s nice and it makes me believe that she really cares.

  It’s like we’re real friends and not like we just met five minutes ago.

  “How can I sound weird in a text?” I ask her, but she’s not hurt by my q
uestion.

  “You just did. I’m not wrong, am I?” she answers. “Deva says I have very advanced emotional intelligence. Or at least that’s what she said when I got my report card at the end of last semester and it wasn’t very good.

  “So, you know, I thought I’d just come over and see if you needed me,” says Cissy, looking hard at her flip-flops.

  Cissy is looking so nervous, kind of like someone on the first day of school who doesn’t know anyone in her class. She’s sweet even if it’s a little weird that she just materializes out of nowhere.

  Two words come to mind: Real friends.

  “It’s kind of nothing. I just have to have dinner with my dad’s girlfriend and I was just trying to remember what you told me about her,” I divulge.

  Cissy rolls her eyes. Love. This. Girl. Already.

  But let’s not get too emotional when we have a murder to solve.

  “Pop-Tart?” I offer. She nods her head vigorously and wiggles her body into a chair pulled up to the kitchen table. She whistles for the dog and when the big fur ball settles on Cissy’s feet, she’s happy—and I’m not talking about the dog. The dog rolls over, all four paws shooting straight up in the air, to obviously cheer Cissy’s arrival.

  She’s ready to talk.

  “What do you want to know?” Cissy eagerly offers. “I can tell you lots about her. I was an assistant in the PE office fall semester. I know everything. My mom says I have the hearing of a dog. No offense, Cody.”

  “Well, what’s she doing with my dad? I mean, he’s told me nothing about her other than she’s great—really great. Which of course makes me think she’s not. I mean, why is he trying to put on the hard sell?” I ask.

  “Well, she is very, very—um—fit, and I guess you could say she’s a super-positive person,” Cissy describes in a sheepish voice. “And I guess she can be nice if you are super-positive and fit, too. She doesn’t seem to like people who are—um—not fit.”

  Great—Miss Fat Phobic is going to be in my life, which is disappointing, but doesn’t destroy the mood as I smell the toasting Pop-Tarts release their sweet, chocolaty fragrance into the air. They should bottle this stuff and slap a Chanel logo on it.

  “So what you are telling me is she’s hot,” I quiz Cissy. “Is she supermodel hot or just better-than-average-mall-chick hot? And if she is in the supermodel category, what does she want with my dad? I mean, he’s a dad.”

  “Oh my God, haven’t you noticed how great looking your dad is?” Cissy gushes, and then blushes because she clearly said something inappropriate. “I mean, your dad doesn’t exactly look like the dads around here. Plus there’s that whole detective thing—it’s like he knows everybody’s secrets, which is so intriguing and cool. And when it comes to Miss Zumba, it’s not like they haven’t known each other forever, too.”

  Cissy’s words are like a stun gun to my brain.

  “What? They—as in my dad and Sandy—have known each other forever?” I ask, adding, “How exactly are you defining forever? In real time, how do you classify it?”

  “Didn’t you know this? It’s no secret. They met years ago when Patty Matthews disappeared. Sandy was a student teacher at the high school at the time, and apparently she knew everything that was going on with Patty before she disappeared. I heard that she was the only one Patty ever confided in about all the awful things going on in her life,” Cissy states.

  I must have had a weird look on my face, because at this point she’s starting to look like she’s let out some awful secret.

  “Your dad didn’t tell you any of this?” Cissy asks nervously. “I thought you’d know all this.”

  I do the mental tally. Bad husband. Bad dad. Bad cop. Cheater?

  “Jex, for what it’s worth, they really didn’t start dating until a few years ago. It’s been a long time since Patty Matthews disappeared and I am sure it has nothing to do with the two of them getting together,” Cissy says, trying to ward off what clearly is my on-coming crying jag.

  I grab the searing-hot Pop-Tart out of the toaster and plop it on the plate as I shake my slightly burned hand. I do this while turning my back to Cissy so she can’t see that I’m trying hard not to cry.

  “Patty Matthews? Did someone say Patty Matthews?” another voice shouts from the sliding glass door. “Who wants to find out what happened to Patty Matthews? I do!”

  Nat is standing in the patio doorway with a huge smile on her face.

  Nat sidesteps me and walks right into the house. What else should I expect? She doesn’t say hello or even pat the dog. I haven’t even had coffee yet (another perk of living with Dad) and Nat is bombarding my sleeping brain cells with nonstop chatter.

  “There’s something important you need to know and it’s been bugging me since that whole Patty Matthews case came up yesterday,” she rambles, plopping in a chair at the kitchen table. “Oh, Pop-Tarts. Can I have one? Hi, Ciss. What are you doing here? Wait, tell me later. I have to talk to you, Jex. Right now.”

  I might spontaneously combust.

  Nat has obviously been up for productive hours.

  “For the record, I didn’t even live here yet when it happened. My mom and dad moved here a couple of months afterwards from Tampa, and I once overheard my mom say they got such a great deal on the house because this neighborhood would be forever linked to a girl disappearing and probably dying,” Nat informs me. “I was only three at the time, so I wasn’t on the case. Yet.”

  “Wow, Tampa,” I reply, sipping a giant cup of coffee that I have poured myself. Only half listening to her now, I reply, “Florida. Hot. Gators. Dangerous.”

  “And also for the record, my parents never worried too much about our neighborhood’s safety. My mom blamed the Matthews family for their daughter’s disappearance and would say, ‘They probably had unsavory friends. You lie down with dogs, you get bit by fleas,’” Nat says.

  That one gets my attention.

  Even Nat has to drop her FBI act and laugh.

  “My mother,” she sighs. “The canine-loving poet.”

  For the first time all morning, the three of us burst into laughter, and for some reason it’s so ridiculous and funny and scary to talk about all this that I laugh so hard that tears form. Like a blur, I see Cissy race off to the bathroom.

  Cissy is in there forever, which gives Nat time to explain “the case” to me in detail.

  “Let’s just put it this way: Patty’s choice of boyfriend probably was the last bad choice she made—at least, that’s what I think,” she says.

  I stop her mid-sentence. Resting my head on the actual kitchen table, I mumble something to Nat that basically asks her how she got so interested in detective work.

  “I suppose in a completely subconscious way it’s been Patty’s ghost—or rather the ghost of Patty’s case—that got me interested in forensics in the first place,” she says. “That, and I happen to be pretty good at science. My mom thinks I’m going to go to medical school one day. Keep dreaming.”

  I can tell that like Dad, Nat thinks that bodies are only interesting when they’ve assumed room temperature.

  “I can’t tell my parents that I’m going to be a detective someday. If my mom ever heard me utter those words, that would be the last I’d ever see of that can of spray Luminol I managed to get with my allowance,” she says.

  “Luminol?” I ask. “Is that some new fragrance?”

  Nat laughs in that snorty kind of way that makes me smile. At least I haven’t lost my sense of humor in all this heat.

  “Of course, Luminol is what police spread around the room to see if anyone has been ‘offed.’ Even the wiped up, cleaned up, tidied up blood shows up or illuminates. Brill-i-ant!” Nat says. “You know you can even buy the stuff on the Internet? That’s how I got mine, but don’t tell anyone.”

  I give her the peace sign to indicate my silence. Then I wonder if Cissy is in our guest bathroom getting a kidney transplant. She has been in there a long time.

  When she
finally returns, Nat is in the middle of lecturing me about repositioning the ugly, supposedly decorative mirror in our hallway.

  “You really should position mirrors above counters so you can see who is sneaking up behind you. You know, just in case of armed robbery,” she says.

  Cissy has returned with a pained look on her face and a small picture in her hand. “I swear, Jex, I was just looking for a hand towel when I opened the bottom cabinet and found this,” she says, handing me a photo of my dad and some skinny blonde.

  “Look. I don’t care who my dad dates!” I say in much too loud a voice, which makes Cissy shrink down and Nat perk up.

  “Watch it girl, no one yells at Cissy—except maybe me and Deva, and, of course, her mom and sometimes the teachers,” Nat says. “Okay, everyone yells at Cissy, but not new people until we sanction them okay to yell at Cissy. Officially.”

  “Sorry,” I say in a much calmer voice.

  “My one and only encounter with Sandy the Stick Figure PE teacher/pep squad coach involved her yanking open my hoodie and telling me to embrace my—and I quote—‘budding female form,’” Nat says. “It was totally mor-ti-fy-ing!

  “Everyone is lucky we didn’t need to spray Luminol to piece together the case of her disappearance,” she says, and I have to laugh because now I get it.

  “My buds are my business,” Nat says in a defiant tone, and I look up and see that she’s in a dark purple man-size sweatshirt today with what looks like a white T-shirt underneath and … a heavy black sports bra. She pairs this with shorts. I guess her legs are a nonissue.

  Those buds might need air, but they’re getting nothing in their current smooshed down state.

  “I myself am suspicious of very thin people. Hungry people are desperate people. And desperate people do desperate things like apparently date absentee-dad detectives who can’t solve a simple missing persons case. Pathet-ick,” Cissy says.

  We barely get to the “ick” part when my sliding glass door is in motion again. “I was getting my beauty sleep when Cissy called me,” says princess Deva. “I heard flushing. Were you calling me from the bathroom? Again?”