Trouble is a Friend of Mine

by Stephanie Tromly

“The psychiatrist. Bipolar? Plain vanilla depression? Rainbow sprinkles of phobias and anxieties? What’s your deal?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “Is it like you can’t get out of bed because you feel like someone’s sitting on your chest, but who cares anyway because what’s the point?” he said. “Or like you can’t be around people because you feel like everyone knows?”

  “Fine. I skipped class a bunch when my parents were divorcing, but Dad said it’d look bad on my transcript, so he called his psychiatrist friend and . . . I’m a fake, okay?”

  “Just because your psychiatrist’s note’s fake, it doesn’t mean you’re not really depressed.”

  I hadn’t considered that.

  “But hey,” Digby continued, “your dad’s got a medical professional who’s willing to falsify medical records for you, huh? That’s pretty handy.” He pointed at my earrings, a pair of big diamond studs. I’d wondered if I shouldn’t wear them to school, but when he gave them to me, Dad had insisted that I never take them off. “Is that part of the official uniform of Team Dad?” When I winced, he said, “Just kidding. They’re beautiful, Princeton.” Digby turned and walked away.

  “Hey, wait! Now what?” I said.

  “I’m gonna check out the cafeteria,” he said. “Zoe Webster, right? You have a school e-mail? I’ll e-mail you.”

  Then I didn’t see or hear from him for weeks.

  THREE

  When we first moved to River Heights, everyone was visibly freaked about Marina Jane Miller’s abduction. People didn’t go out after dark. They walked dogs in groups. By mid-September, though, the local news stopped talking about her, and the “Where’s Marina?” posters curled up and fell off the trees after it rained. Soon it sounded more like an urban legend and less like something that could happen to me. Before long, River Heights went back to normal—with normal meaning boring and lonely.

  After starting some awkward conversations that went nowhere, I realized Digby was right about it being hard to make friends here. Most people gave me attitude because they expected me to have an attitude about moving to River Heights . . . which I sort of did, but it had nothing to do with them.

  When I asked my lab partner how to turn on the Bunsen burners, she said, “Bet your old school had automatic ones, huh?” I said yes and tried to say something quippy about almost burning off my eyebrows once, but it came off as a lame humble-brag. Even I heard it. We spent the rest of the experiment in painful silence.

  I told myself that since I was transferring, I didn’t have to sweat the no-friends situation. Prentiss would be my salvation. Of course Mom wasn’t happy about Prentiss. How could she be? She’d fought hard for my custody, and transferring to Prentiss meant I’d move right back to the city and live with Dad and his new wife. Mom accused my dad of doing an end run around the custody judge, but almost as soon as she’d said it, her therapy kicked in. She’d shut herself down, saying over and over, “It’s not about me.” Later, while looking for Band-Aids, I’d found a pile of Post-its in her drawer with mantras like “It’s not about you” and “Transcend to transform.”

  I had to admit, my class schedule was sweet. Digby and I were supposedly working on our project for the first two periods, so I slept in every day. Sure, I worried about actually doing the assignment, but from September, December looked far away.

  I never saw Digby at school, but with the stress of figuring out where my classes were and how to make friends, I wasn’t looking for him that hard.

  One day, I got home to find that Dad had forwarded the application package from Prentiss. Mom hovered by the sink, looking extremely casual while she made dinner. “Baked spaghetti, okay?” She used her best transcending-to-transform voice, as if she hadn’t even noticed the Prentiss envelope sitting on the kitchen table.

  Okay. So it was going to be a game of chicken. I slid the Prentiss application to one side and unzipped my backpack. “Ever feel like we should eat more vegetables?”

  “I could sprinkle parsley on it . . .” Her eyes were now locked on the thick envelope. “So.”

  “So?” I was winning. But I got cocky. I started highlighting the novel I had to read for homework. Big mistake. Never wave a lowbrow book in front of an English professor. It will enrage them, distracting them from everything else.

  “O. Henry? That’s not what you’re reading in school, is it?” She grabbed my book and flicked through it. “This is a nightmare. Why don’t they just assign you Reader’s Digest?” When she realized I didn’t know what she was talking about, she said, “You don’t know what Reader’s Digest is? The nightmare deepens.” The game of chicken was ruined. “For decades, it was the only contact some people had with any kind of literature—”

  I ripped into the envelope my father sent me. Mom stopped talking and dumped the pasta in an oven dish, pretending to suddenly be totally into her cooking.

  Looking through the forms, I realized that he’d already filled out most of them for me, even the parts about my favorite subjects and potential college majors. Economics or pre-law, he’d said.

  In a separate pink pamphlet was the essay question: “Virginia Woolf said, ‘Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.’ Be your own biographer, go beyond fact, and tell us about yourself.”

  He’d answered it. In fact, he’d answered it well. I even kind of recognized myself in his answers. But reading about this go-getter fantasy daughter who volunteered and read The Economist was . . . confusing. Even I liked that Zoe better than me.

  Maybe he’d anticipated the queasy feeling I’d get when I saw that he’d written it for me, because Dad had included a note on a Post-it. “Time to leave the sheeple behind, Zoe. Get ready to run with the wolves,” it said. In the world according to my father, there were only two kinds of people: wolves and the sheeple (people so meek, they were practically sheep) who deserved every bad thing the wolves did to them.

  “Are those samples of someone else’s application?” I hadn’t noticed Mom sidle up behind me. I ripped off the note and crumpled it up before she could see it. Mom read aloud from the essay section. “‘I take my citizenship in the classroom seriously’? I smell your father’s aggressive Wall Street bull crap. Are you kidding, Zoe? It’s come to this?”

  “He just rewrote a few things, Mom. It’s not a big deal.”

  “You want to go to that school so badly, you’d cheat to get in?” Mom said.

  “Oh, and you don’t think the other kids get help? Tutors? Interview prep? I’m applying out of public school!” What I didn’t say but she probably heard anyway was the reminder that she was the reason I was in public school in the first place. We were in Nowhere, New York, chasing her dream of being an English professor. “Getting help from a supportive parent is probably just the minimum they expect!”

  I shouted the words supportive parent and took advantage of the emotional chaos they created to make my exit.

  “Where are you going?” Mom said.

  “Walk.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Why? Are you worried? Safe town, right? It’s what you told the judge.”

  And with that, I left.

  Olympio’s was a vinyl booth diner with a long counter and a weirdly huge assortment of pies arranged in an old-timey pie display. I heard a tap-tap-tap as I walked past. Digby was in a booth, knocking on the glass and waving. I went inside.

  “Hey, Princeton, I was just gonna text you,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  “Yeah, we should start our project,” I said.

  “Project?” he said.

  “‘Convicted in Absence,’ you called it. Remember?”

  “Oh, that. Later. There’s something else I wanna talk to you about.”

&nb
sp; His took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. A stack of files lay in front of him.

  “Those look like police reports,” I said.

  “They are police reports,” he said.

  “Why do you have police reports?”

  “Four weeks ago, Marina Miller disappeared from a slumber party at her house.”

  “These files are from the Marina Miller case?”

  “No, these are from when another girl disappeared from River Heights eight years ago.”

  “They’re related?”

  “Yup. Maybe. Definitely maybe,” Digby said. “Hey, are you hungry? I gotta eat.”

  “Not really.” I looked at a menu. “Maybe something small.”

  Digby held up two fingers at the waitress, who walked into the kitchen, writing on her pad.

  “Uh . . . did you just order for me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rude much? How do you know what I want?”

  “I’ve had everything here. Trust me, you want the cheeseburger.”

  “How d’you know I’m not vegetarian?”

  “Leather boots, leather bag, leather belt—if you’re a vegetarian, you’re the kind who doesn’t mind being a hypocrite sometimes, in which case, trust me, their cheeseburger’s worth being a hypocrite for,” Digby said.

  I looked at the table next to us. The guy’s cheeseburger did look juicy.

  “Anyway, the cops arrested a suspect, but they couldn’t make it stick.”

  “Wait, the girl who disappeared eight years ago, or Marina Jane Miller?”

  “Marina. It doesn’t matter, though, because he’s a dud—no way he did it,” he said. “David Siddle.”

  “Oh, you think he’s a dud? Are the police aware of your conclusions?”

  “Not yet. I’ll call them when I know a little more.”

  “I thought it’d be clear I was being sarcastic.”

  “Oh, no, I got that.”

  “I seriously doubt they care what you think.”

  “We’ll worry about that later.”

  “‘We’? I don’t know about ‘we.’”

  Digby passed me two photos of middle-aged men. They were probably just normal guys, but who doesn’t look like a murderer when they’re secretly photographed through a telephoto lens?

  “I don’t know who these guys are. Is that all you wanted to ask me?”

  “I know who they are. This one’s Dr. Leo Schell. He’s a gynecologist,” Digby said. “Specifically, your mother’s gynecologist.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I watched her go in his office.”

  “You’re kind of a shady guy, you know that?”

  “Schell is one of my two favorites for who took Marina.”

  The cheeseburgers came and Digby poured ketchup all over the bun, the fries, the coleslaw. All over.

  “Can you even taste the cheeseburger under all that?”

  “I can’t taste. Not much, anyway.”

  “You can’t taste? Is that, like, a genetic thing?”

  “Doctors say it’s the Celexa, but I think it’s the Paxil. It started with the Prozac I used to be on,” he said. “I usually take Adderall to get decent, but I don’t use it too much because it’s, you know . . .”

  “Addictive?”

  “Expensive,” he said. “I need my stash to last.”

  “Ah.” It’s not like the kids back home didn’t take meds, but Digby seemed to be on all the meds I’d ever heard of.

  He bit into his burger. “My other favorite suspect is a retired principal named Kenneth Dale. But this guy, Dr. Schell, he’s a better bet.”

  Digby pulled out a marked-up map of River Heights. “This red cross is Marina’s house, the green ones are Schell’s and Dale’s houses, and the red lines are possible ways they might’ve driven away. Now, we could ask people who live in the area if they saw anything that night . . .”

  “Please stop saying ‘we.’ I’m not knocking on random people’s doors. I’m already tired just thinking about it,” I said. “Besides, haven’t the police already checked?”

  “Yup. The police canvassed the neighborhood. Plus Marina’s street is crescent-shaped, with a bank, convenience store, gas station, and library at the top of the crescent. They all have cameras. But since no photos or sketches were released, we can assume the cameras and the people didn’t see anything . . . which works in our favor.”

  “How d’you figure?”

  “Because now the cops need to get creative. And most cops are miserable paperwork drones who suck at being creative,” Digby said. “They’re probably just treading water, hoping Marina’s parents’ investigators find something.”

  “Let me guess—you think you’re gonna swoop in and solve the case for them,” I said. “Superman complex?”

  “Wouldn’t this be a more interesting topic for our project?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s gonna give us any grade for a detailed record of how we stalked and harassed random people . . . much less a good one.”

  “It doesn’t have to be about the abduction itself. It could be a report on police procedure, say.”

  “That sounds even harder than the other fake project you made up.”

  “I’m telling you, it doesn’t have to be as good as you’re imagining. Steve will barely read it. Seriously.”

  I wiped off the ketchup blobs and looked at the map.

  “What makes you think one of these guys kidnapped Marina?” I said.

  “Kenneth Dale’s a possibility because his house backs onto Marina Miller’s. He’d fought with her dad about cutting down some trees and didn’t have a confirmable alibi for that night,” Digby said. “He was also forced into early retirement for sexually harassing a student.”

  “And Schell’s a better bet than that? This Dale guy sounds like a total creep.”

  “Schell lives three blocks away, but neighbors said his car was parked outside the Millers’ that night and was gone by morning. He claimed his car was leaking oil, he didn’t want it staining his driveway, and that the space in front of the Miller house was the only one for blocks,” Digby said. “He also doesn’t have a confirmable alibi for that night.”

  “Sounds like a coincidence . . .”

  “Another coincidence is that Marina’s parents didn’t know she was Schell’s patient.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Let’s just say that the way I found out was less wrong than his not telling the police she was his patient,” he said. “But what interests me is that no alien fingerprints were found in the bedroom except for a whole lot of blurred ones.”

  “How’s that a clue?”

  “Eight years ago, just like Marina, a little girl was taken from her bedroom in the middle of the night while the rest of the house slept. No one heard or saw anything. No one knew she was gone until morning.” He passed me a fingerprint analysis report and pointed at the notes. “All they found were the family’s prints and the blurred prints on the windowsill.”

  “Blurred prints aren’t clues . . . they’re the absence of clues.”

  “But these aren’t prints that got smudged. Look, they’re perfectly finger-shaped. The prints are blurred on the fingers themselves.”

  “Like that one serial killer who burned off his fingerprints with acid.” He had me going now—I couldn’t believe I was getting sucked in. “Okay . . . so this is all interesting and Nancy Drew–ish, but I still don’t see—”

  “Some medical conditions cause blurry fingerprints, but those conditions rarely affect all the fingers,” he said. “Some people get it from their jobs. Guitarists who don’t use picks, people working in laundries that use phosphates, housepainters who don’t wear gloves, or . . . medical professionals who wash their hands so much, they smooth out the ridges of their
fingerprints.”

  “Schell . . .” I said. “Mom’s gynecologist might be a murderer?”

  “Well, technically, we don’t know for sure that Marina’s dead. Not yet, anyway.”

  It sounded big-league. “I don’t think we should . . .”

  But Digby wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. He was looking at a table of five boys. They were a weird-looking bunch. The youngest kid’s feet didn’t touch the floor, and the eldest had stubble. None of them looked alike enough to be related. It didn’t make sense that they were together. In their prairie folk plaid shirts and high-waisted flannel pants, they looked like an agricultural glee club.

  Digby cocked his chin at them. “They live in the mansion across from you.”

  “They do?”

  The eldest wore red plaid and the others were in blue plaid. Red Plaid looked about twenty years old and was actually kind of a tall, dark, and handsome dude if you overlooked the creepy high and tight haircut he and the other kids all had. His shirt was a size too small and his sleeves looked like a bubbling bratwurst on the grill.

  At that moment, the older boys were bullying the youngest to eat his pancakes faster. The little guy’s face was covered in syrup.

  “You’re telling me you’ve never noticed them walking around in their little outfits?” he said. “Supposedly, they’re a rapture cult, but they don’t recruit in town or even online . . . which is weird. You really never noticed them before?”

  “We just moved here.”

  “When there’s an end-of-the-world cult living next door to you, make it your business to find out what they’re up to,” he said. “That’s, like, a basic life rule.”

  “Well, I do see girls in prairie dresses constantly cleaning and scrubbing. And the place reeks of chemicals.”

  “Okay, so you did notice. Ever notice that the girls cleaning aren’t always the same ones? They go, they come back . . . the boys do too. The kids are cycling through that house.”

  “Are they prisoners or something?”

  “Who don’t run away when they’re unsupervised? Nah, it’s something else.”