My mother is getting remarried. She’s calling me tonight. I’m supposed to be okay with this. I jerk open the glass exit door, and the heat engulfs me like I’ve stepped into an oven. Fine. It matches my mood—burning hot.
Stuart Lowe is going to be my step-dad. Stuart with that awful, nasal laugh and habit of winking after he says anything to me. Ugh. I want to die.
I’m halfway to the parking lot when I realize that my dad has the car keys, that we are in the middle of nowhere, and it’s not like I can simply walk home.
So I stand by my father’s Jeep for a humiliating ten minutes while the few people who are left get in their cars and leave.
How could my mom do this to me? She had “working” dinners with him, drinks sometimes, but I always thought it was work-related.
What am I going to say to her? Congratulations, you’ve managed to completely ruin my life? Or simply, I hate you?
I’m so caught up in my thoughts that at first I don’t notice my father has come out to the parking lot or that he’s peering into the window of one of the few cars still parked. My own thoughts are consuming me—choking me—so I don’t connect anything until my father walks up to me.
“Were you saying something about not seeing Emily today?” He asks the question casually, but his eyes are a little too intense for him to pull it off.
Only then do I connect the Prius with Emily and the fact that I haven’t seen her all day and I haven’t found anyone else who has, either. Only then do I feel something hard and heavy hit me in my stomach.
Looking into my father’s eyes, I understand that something potentially far worse than my mother’s engagement is happening.
FOURTEEN
Jalen
My father steps out of Uncle Billy’s room. I can tell by the way he closes the door gently, as if any sound might shatter it, that it’s a bad night. He pauses in the hall, closes his eyes, and sighs.
From inside the bedroom, a drum beats slowly, and my uncle begins to sing. It is a song for the spirits of the dead to find their way to the next world. The keening, lonely, and admittedly slurred words fill the quiet of the house.
The music breaks my father’s small trance. When he opens his eyes, I see in them what I already know.
My uncle is dead drunk.
Sometimes Uncle Billy can go for weeks at a time without drinking, and when he’s like this, you see him for who he is—a brilliant man who knows the name of every plant, tree, and flower. How to cure an aching back with the gentian root and use skunk cabbage to treat asthma. He can sit and play chess—and beat me. He can pick up my AP pre-calculus book and solve any of the problems just by studying the examples. You start to forget that the other Uncle Billy exists, the wildly unpredictable man whose sickness—and make no mistake, this is a disease—takes over the house.
My mother comes up behind me. “I don’t know how to help him.”
She’s still wearing her green scrubs from the hospital, where she works as a nurse’s aide. I’m taller than her now, and it makes me see her differently, as if she’s more fragile than the woman who stepped between me and a pit bull one Saturday morning.
“He’ll be fine,” my father says. “We just need to leave him be.”
“Leave him be?” My mother’s face creases with worry. “He’s chanting a death song.”
My father steps forward, past me, and slips his arm around my mother. His size all but eclipses her. “Give him an hour, and then I’ll ask him to stop.” He has to speak loudly, above the beat of the drum and my uncle’s voice. “Come on, Lynn,” my father urges, managing somehow to hide his exhaustion because he will not burden her with his own despair. “Let’s just go sit down.” He leads her to the family room, where my younger brother Harold sits on the couch watching television.
“He sounds like a howling coyote.” Harold turns the volume up a little.
“Harold,” my mother says sharply. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. How are we ever going to sleep through that?” He keeps his gaze fixed on the television, watching the Red Sox take on the Yankees. He isn’t a big baseball fan, but watching television helps him cope.
My mother, who has put up with my uncle’s drinking for as long as I can remember, who has seen him dance naked in the moonlight, nearly set the house on fire when he tried to turn the bathroom into a smoke room, and endured more drunken tirades on the injustices endured by our people than I can count, sighs. “Because it’s disrespectful.”
We watch an inning, maybe two. Mostly I’m listening to Uncle Billy and feeling the tension in the house grow stronger with the drumbeat. We don’t know what Uncle Billy is mourning—it could be a small earthquake in another country, or the death of a man he read about in the newspaper.
In any case, if you’ve ever lived with an alcoholic, you know that everything revolves around them. You love them, but you also fear them because when they’re drinking, there are no filters—only intense, dark emotions. Hateful things come out of their mouths, words that shoot like bullets and hurt all the worse because you can’t shield yourself from the truth in them.
Alcoholics are the storm inside your house. Until it blows over, the best you can do is to survive it. An unspoken, but understood, rule is that you don’t bring anyone else into the storm. This means you don’t return invitations, which means you stop getting them.
I try to go somewhere else in my mind—a field blanketed in orange and yellow poppies, the ivy-covered entrance gate to Harvard, sunrise at the top of Camelback Mountain. Tonight, however, my brain won’t take me to the usual places. I see instead the slightly sunburned, blue-eyed face of Paige Patterson. I try changing the image, like surfing channels on the television, but it keeps coming back to her.
Paige’s face is not a peaceful place, either. I keep picturing her scared eyes and chalk-white skin when she climbed out of the basement chamber. Afterward, that jerk Jeremy Brown tried to tell me that they were just playing, but I knew he was lying. He’s a coward who’ll wait for you to turn your back on him before he does something. I know guys like him at school. They’re brave only when there’s no chance of a fair fight.
I’m thinking about having a second little talk with Brown when my father’s cell rings. We all sit up. My brother mutes the television, although most of the conversation takes place on the other end of the call. The crease that forms between my father’s eyes sends me to the back door, where we keep our work boots in a basket. I’m just finishing lacing them up when my dad joins me, truck keys jingling in his hand, and tells me there’s a problem at the park.
FIFTEEN
Paige
By nine o’clock, we know several things—Emily has not been seen since yesterday afternoon, she didn’t come home last night, and her parents believed she was with me.
Standing next to Emily’s Prius, my father and I wait in the heat and fading light for the Lintons. Our silence is broken by the occasional ring of my father’s cell as the park rangers check in every fifteen minutes or so with the discouraging news that there’s no sign of her.
I tell myself that Emily will show up any minute, smiling, her eyes alive with an adventure she can’t wait to tell me. Or she’s hiding somewhere, waiting for me to come and find her in one of those terrible games of hide-and-seek we used to play.
Finally, a police car pulls slowly up to us—no lights flashing, no sirens. Two officers, a man and a woman, step out of the squad car. They are from the sheriff’s office and introduce themselves as Detectives Zulie Rodriquez and her partner Manuel Torres. The policewoman is short and wide. The male officer is her exact opposite—tall, thin, and balding.
“Sarah,” my father says as Emily’s mother gets out of the squad car’s back seat. He hugs her, and she sags against him. It’s been years since I’ve seen Mrs. Linton, but even so, she’s aged so much I barely recognize her. Her short hair is more white than blonde and sticks out in all directions as if Emily’s disappearance has hit her l
ike a windstorm.
“Any news?” Dr. Linton asks, hurrying around the car to place his hand on his wife’s shoulder. He’s gotten fatter, and his short brown hair is sprinkled with white.
“None. I’m sorry.” My dad steps back as Mrs. Linton emerges red-eyed and weary-looking from his arms. His voice softens. “We’ll find her.”
“Ma’am,” Detective Rodriquez says, snapping on a pair of latex gloves and then pulling a flashlight out of a holster on one side of her expansive belly. “Is this your daughter’s car?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Linton says and claps her hand over her mouth.
The detective shines her light into the dark interior and strains to see, as if Emily might be crouching in the back seat. My father and I did the same. All we saw was a half-opened package of Skittles in the passenger seat and a crumpled bag from Jack in the Box. The other detective pauses at the left rear tire and then squats down. “Was the tire flat this morning?”
My father and I look at each other. I can’t remember.
My father shakes his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t notice it until this evening.”
“I don’t see a puncture,” he says.
“You think someone let the air out?” Rodriquez asks.
“It’s possible,” he says, climbing to his feet. He dusts his pants and turns to the Lintons. “Do you have a key?”
Mrs. Linton hands her a spare hanging from the chain on a feathered dreamcatcher. My stomach does a slow lurch as I realize they’re going to open the trunk, and I’m afraid suddenly of what they’ll find inside.
The hatch opens with a popping sound. Inside, a dark-colored blanket covers something large and lumpy. My father steps in front of me. “No, Paige,” he orders, “Get back.”
I twist around him in time to see Detective Torres poke the blanket with his flashlight. He pulls it free, and Mrs. Linton cries out. It sounds like distress, but it has to be relief because Emily isn’t lying dead in the trunk. Instead, I recognize her tan Urban Outfitters backpack and her black nylon gym bag.
Detective Rodriquez unzips Emily’s gym bag. She holds up a pair of Nike shorts as the policeman shines his flashlight on them. Next, they pull out a pink, ribbed tank top. I’m embarrassed for Emily when they fish out her lace push-up bra.
“No panties,” Torres comments with absolutely no expression in his voice. He bends over, peering once more inside the gym bag, and then straightens.
“Maybe she didn’t bring a change.” Rodriquez glances at her partner. I can tell they’re wondering what this says about Emily, if they think maybe she’s the kind of girl who leaves her underwear at home.
“It’s in the shorts,” I blurt because somebody has to defend Emily, and the Lintons seem incapable of doing anything but standing there looking like shadows of themselves. Both officers look at me as if I’m talking another language. “The underwear is built into the Nike shorts.”
Rodriquez’s face opens as she gets it. She nods and then turns to Mrs. Linton. “When was the last time you saw Emily wearing these clothes?”
Mrs. Linton blinks rapidly, and then she frowns. “Maybe yesterday morning? I’m not sure. It was early.” Her eyes glisten with tears that shine in the dim glow of the overhead parking lights. “I don’t remember. She’s always wearing Nike shorts.”
I look at the clothes lying in the gym bag and picture Emily standing with the sun blazing down on us on the banks of Otter Creek. “She was wearing those yesterday morning. After lunch she changed into denim cut-offs and a white sleeveless shirt.”
It was cute, and I remember being a little jealous because it showed off her tan and her breasts. I wished I were her—that I had someone to interview, a park blog to write, a great body, and a great future waiting for me at Columbia. Instead, I had a father who barely spoke to me, a mother who didn’t care enough about me to fight for me, and bruises from someone I’d hoped would be my boyfriend.
“When did you last see her?”
“I left the park around six,” my father replies, although the question is directed at me. “I think she was still here.”
The female detective’s sharp black eyes focus on my father. “You are?”
“Dr. Patterson. Duke. I’m with the university.” He pushes the skin on his face wearily. “I should have waited.” His shoulders sag, and he looks over at Emily’s parents. “I’m sorry, Tom, Sarah. I never thought…”
Mrs. Linton begins to cry, and Dr. Linton pulls her against him. “Shh,” he says, “We’ll find her. It’s going to be fine.”
“You don’t know that,” Mrs. Linton pushes him away harshly. “It doesn’t feel like everything is going to be fine. Someone obviously disabled her car and took her. That doesn’t sound like everything is okay to me.”
The detectives exchange long looks, and then the policewoman glances up at the parking lot lights shining high above us. “We’re going to need the tapes from the security cameras.”
My father shakes his head. “You’ll have to talk to Tom Blackstone. He’s in charge of park security. He’s searching the grounds for Emily just in case she wandered off…” His words trail off, but not the thoughts. Emily could be lost, and there are all sorts of poisonous creatures in Arizona.
“Who else was at the park when you left last night?”
My father’s brow wrinkles. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone in the information center, but there could have been some maintenance people on the grounds.” He adjusts his hat on his sweat-plastered hair. “With a park as big as this one, it’s virtually impossible to be sure everybody is out.” He starts to say something and then hesitates. “Surely you don’t think somebody who works here had anything to do with this?”
“We’re just trying to get as much information as possible,” Detective Torres says. “You locked the entrance gate when you left, right, Mr. Patterson? So if Miss Linton did try to go back into the park to get help, someone would have had to let her inside.”
My father nods, not bothering to tell the officer it’s Dr. Patterson, not Mr. Patterson. “I suppose. But I don’t think…”
Detective Rodriquez cuts him off. “It’s unclear whether she disappeared from inside or outside the park, so we’re going to be part of this investigation. I’ll need a list of people who work at the park. Also include any volunteers, contractors, or anyone who had access. If there’s a log book of visitors, I want that, too.” She turns to her partner. “The girl’s been gone twenty-four hours. Call in the alert and get a team out here to search the car.” She looks at my father. “I want to talk to Blackstone. Now. And I want the tapes from the security cameras. I’m also going to need a recent, good head shot of Miss Linton. The sooner, the better. If you have any on your phone, that would be a good start.”
I have pictures of Emily on my cell. “I’ve got some.” I scroll past the pictures we took at Tacoma Well—it already feels like years since we took them—and find the shot I’m looking for. Emily is sitting on Whale Rock, squinting into the strong sun. Her French braid pulls the hair off her face and shows her features. She’s tanned and smiling confidently, like she has everything in the world going right for her.
The detective glances at the shot and then skims through the other pictures on my cell. When she looks up, her black eyes fix on me with an interest that wasn’t there before. “You and Miss Linton were good friends, Miss…?”
“Patterson,” my father replies before I can. “Paige is my daughter.”
“While we’re waiting for Mr. Blackstone,” Detective Rodriquez says casually, “I’d like to speak with Miss Patterson.”
A wave of heat crashes over me, and the night feels airless. With the police staring at me and the Lintons looking so broken, it all starts to hit home. Emily has vanished. She could even be dead. Rangers are combing the park for her, and now detectives from the county sheriff’s office want to question me. A voice inside me that I’ve been struggling not to listen to is getting louder. It’s saying that maybe Emily’s d
isappearance is my fault.
“Of course,” my father says. “Anything we can do to help.”
“I’d like to see her alone,” Detective Rodriquez says.
There’s a moment of silence, and then my father says, “Paige is a minor. I’d like to be present.”
“That is your prerogative,” Rodriquez agrees, but her eyes narrow and she tilts her round face to meet my father’s gaze. “Sometimes kids speak more freely when their parents aren’t around.”
“I understand. I’d still like to be present.” His lips have a tight, thin set that means his mind is made up.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Duke,” Mrs. Linton explodes, “just let the police talk to her. She might know something that could help us find Emily.”
“I’m not saying she can’t talk to the police,” my father replies. “But Paige is a child.”
The words jolt something awake in me. He thinks I’m a child? What a joke. And suddenly he has my best interests at heart? “Dad,” I snap. “I’m seventeen. I want to help.”
“It’s not negotiable,” he says flatly.
My hands clench. Of course it isn’t. Nothing in my life is negotiable. He always has to control me. Why?
“Just calm down,” Detective Rodriquez says, gesturing as if we are cars going too fast. She gives me a sympathetic smile and then turns to my dad. “Dr. Patterson, you’re welcome to join us. Is there somewhere more comfortable we can talk?”
“My office,” he says, not looking at the Lintons, who stare at him as if they no longer recognize him.
SIXTEEN
Paige
My father’s desk chair creaks under the detective’s weight as she wedges her body between the arm rests. She scoots it forward, and the chair squeals as if in pain. Patting her round face dry with the sleeve of her shirt, she sighs. “Thank God for air-conditioning.”
Bone Deep Page 8