Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  She smiled faintly, still looking troubled. Jordan fought the urge to reach for her, to touch her hand, even as a cool, removed corner of his brain inquired What, exactly, do you think you’re doing?

  “Were you home last night?” he asked her.

  “I had a date.”

  “How’d it go?”

  She gave him her wry half-smile. “About as well as high school.”

  “Would you mind telling me his name?”

  Addie put half a bagel on her plate. “Only if you tell me what’s going on.”

  “We found a man’s belt and some blood in the country club parking lot. We’re trying to find out who they belong to and make sure no one got hurt.”

  Lines bracketed her mouth as she frowned. “I could call Jon and make sure he’s okay.”

  “Was anyone in high school particularly bad to him?” Jordan asked casually. “Anyone he would have wanted to get back at?”

  Addie looked surprised. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You think Jon hurt someone?” Her voice was rising; that pretty flush was tinting her cheeks and her neck. “Jon would never do anything like that.”

  He kept his own voice low. “Ma’am, we’re trying to figure out who that belt belongs to and if that person is injured. We’re not accusing anyone of anything.” Adelaide Downs was glaring at him, cheeks pink, eyes flashing, righteously pissed.

  “He used to take things out of lockers sometimes,” she said. “Somebody told you that, right? That’s why you’re here. You think Jon did something.”

  “Nobody thinks Jon did anything,” Jordan protested. “All we’re trying to do right now is make sure everyone’s okay. Jon included.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Her hands were balled into fists, like she was going to sock him. It was charming, even though he was certain she didn’t mean for it to be. “Have you ever been to the high school?”

  “Class of 1987,” Jordan volunteered.

  Addie appeared not to hear him. “It’s four stories high. There were boys—I never knew which ones, exactly—they’d take Jon’s backpack and drop it down the stairwell. Four stories down. If it had ever hit someone, it could have really hurt them. They’d take off running, and the teachers on the first floor would find the backpack with Jon’s name on it. He’d get in trouble because he wouldn’t say who’d done it.” She took a deep breath. “You can understand why I’m a little overprotective.”

  “I understand,” he said. More than that, he admired it. He wondered if he’d been the one with problems, what his own brother would have had to say if the cops had come knocking. Sam probably would have thrown him to the wolves without thinking twice—would have driven the cops to his door, if it came to that. “It would help,” he ventured, “if we knew where your brother was last night.”

  “Working.” Addie snapped the lid on the tub of cream cheese and wiped off the butter knife with a napkin. A cloth napkin. Her cheeks were still pink. “He works Tuesdays through Saturdays at the Walgreens on Lower Wacker. He’s been there for fifteen years. He always works on holidays so that the people with families can spend time with them.”

  “Sounds criminal,” said Jordan. Addie didn’t answer. “I’m kidding,” he said. Not even a hint of a smile flickered across her face.

  “You can probably talk to the manager, or check his time cards, or something.” She set the knife down. “Look, I know in the movies and on TV it’s always the guy with mental problems who does it, but believe me, my brother wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Jordan stood as Addie got to her feet, then bent down for the tray. “Let me help you.”

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  For a minute, they were face-to-face, each of them gripping one side of the tray, so close their noses were almost touching, so close he could smell her lemon-and-sugar scent, until Addie let go. “I can give you the number of the house where Jon lives, and his boss’s name and number at the drugstore,” she said. “They’ll be able to tell you where he was last night.”

  “Appreciate your help.” He handed her the tray. She carried it into the kitchen, and came out a minute later with a slip of paper and handed it over. “Anything else?”

  “Your date last night,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I need a name.”

  “Matthew Sharp.”

  “And where did you go?”

  She named a restaurant downtown.

  “You drink martinis? They do one there with olives stuffed with blue cheese.” Christ, he thought, I’m losing my mind.

  “I had wine,” said Adelaide Downs.

  He offered her his hand, and after a minute, Addie shook it, her palm warm against his. “I’m sorry if I offended you,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said. Her voice was stiff. She stood there for a minute, then said, “Hang on.” Jordan waited. When she came back, she was carrying the bag of doughnuts.

  “Here,” she said. “You can take these with you.”

  “Oh, no. That’s okay.”

  “Take them. Enjoy.” She gave him a little wave. “Don’t beat any suspects,” she said. For a minute, he thought she’d say something else—maybe “Wanna fool around?” the way Judy Nadeau had—but instead, she simply swung the door shut.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Up in my bedroom, Valerie listened, stone-faced, as I breathlessly recounted my conversation with Jordan Novick. “Belt,” she muttered. “Fuck. We should have taken it. What if they find fingerprints?”

  “I barely touched it. And I don’t think it’s the belt that’s the problem as much as the blood. But Val, they think Jon did it!”

  “Or else they think it’s his belt. His blood.”

  I shook my head. “It’s going to take the cops about five minutes to figure out that Jon’s okay, and maybe ten minutes to make sure he wasn’t really there, and probably another ten minutes after that to figure out who the blood and the belt belong to… and then five seconds for Dan to tell them what you did. What are we going to do? We have to find Dan,” I said, answering my own question. “We have to find him before the police do.”

  “Yeah, okay, but how?” Val sat on my bed, pulled the towel off her head, and started rubbing it slowly against her hair. “I told you, we can’t let anyone know that we’re looking for him, because then we look suspicious.”

  “But we were looking for him. We already went to Chip’s house! And you talked to Dan’s doorman!”

  “They’re not going to call the doorman.”

  “Valerie. Of course they’re going to call the doorman!”

  She nibbled at a thumbnail. “Well, Chip won’t say anything. He doesn’t know we were there to find Dan.”

  “Oh, yeah. He’ll just think you were suddenly overcome by uncontrollable lust, and you just had to have him.”

  “He probably will think that,” she said. “I was extremely convincing.”

  “Valerie. Think. We are under suspicion. We are persons of interest. We are…”

  “Have you ever been to Florida?”

  I blinked at her. “What?”

  She shook her damp hair over her shoulders. “I still think our best bet might be to get out of town for a little while.”

  Struggling with my temper, and with the urge to grab her tanning-bed-basted shoulders and give her a good, brisk shake, I said, “I don’t think this is exactly the right moment to be taking a vacation. We’re not kids. We can’t just ditch everything and drive to Cape Cod.”

  “But what else are we supposed to do?” She got to her feet and started pacing, leaving wet footprints on my bedroom rug. “We can’t look for Dan. We can’t just stay here and be sitting ducks.” She got to my bedroom door, turned, and walked back to the dresser. “And Dan might not even remember what happened. He could have amnesia…”

  “Come on! This isn’t Days of Our Lives.”

  “Or,” she continued, “he might not want to talk about what happened. Being tricked, being naked… I’ll bet he’s just holed up somewhere trying to forget the whole thin
g, and hoping I don’t e-mail his picture to everyone in my address book, which I totally could do. Plus, he was the one who jumped in front of my car.” She paused. “I think. Now come on!” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet and doing that old cheerleader clap. “You didn’t have anything planned for the weekend, did you?”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it, then shook my head. “I can’t leave Jon.”

  “So we’ll go see him.” She opened my closet, stood on her tiptoes, and pulled the single suitcase I own, a small wheeled one that my mother had used for her overnight stays in the hospital, off a shelf. “Underwear?” Before I could answer, she’d opened a drawer and produced a fistful of faded cotton briefs. “Yick. Where’s your good stuff?” She rummaged some more and found the pretty, lacy things I’d bought for Vijay that spring, opened the suitcase, and flung them in. “Let’s see… swimsuit?”

  “In the bathroom,” I said. Maybe it was the sleeplessness, or the adrenaline rush of having to deal with the policeman (the cute policeman) in my living room, but I felt like I was nine years old again, like I’d run across the street to stuff a swimsuit in my backpack and that Val and I would soon be off somewhere wonderful.

  “Makeup? Face cream?”

  “I don’t really wear too much, and…”

  “Condoms? Pills? Morning-after pills?”

  “What kind of vacations do you take?”

  “Good ones,” she said, giving me a broad wink that reminded me, with an almost dizzying sense of déjà vu, of her mother. She rifled through my closet, pulling out a pleated pink sundress, a pale-yellow cardigan, and a pair of lace-up orange espadrilles that I’d bought two summers ago for the unbelievable price of eight dollars, before realizing that they were so cheap because there was no place in my wardrobe or, really, any woman’s, for lace-up orange espadrilles. Except maybe Valerie’s, I realized as she held the shoes up to the light, turning them this way and that. “Cute.”

  I grabbed a tote bag from my closet and supplemented Val’s random packing (she added a scented candle and some lotion to the suitcase, but hadn’t bothered with toothpaste, or a nightgown, or bras) with workout clothes, a few pairs of cotton pants, T-shirts, my vitamins, a sketchbook and a tin of colored pencils, and my favorite photograph of my family. We’d posed on our front steps on my first day of school: me in a navy-blue jumper, Jon in new jeans, my mother in a floaty white sundress, my father in a suit and tie, the four of us smiling into the sun.

  Back in the bathroom, Val complained about the low wattage of my blow dryer, then rejected everything in my closet and wriggled back into her foundation garments and slinky red dress. I sat on the bed while she deftly applied foundation and contouring shadow, blush and gloss and eyeshadow and eyeliner and even a few fake eyelashes, all pulled from a zippered case in her giant red bag. “You know, we really should get going,” I told her. “Seeing as how we’re on the lam and all.”

  “I have an image to maintain,” she said. “Do you think I want to wind up in ‘Stars Without Makeup’?” Before I could answer, or point out that she wasn’t a star, she stuck the end of an eyebrow pencil into her mouth and started chewing. “We need another car,” she mumbled around the pencil.

  “We can’t take mine?”

  She chewed, thinking, then shook her head. “We need a car that’s not connected to either one of us.”

  “Why not?” It hit me as soon as I’d asked: this was real. A crime had been committed. Val had committed a crime, a crime to which I was now an accessory, and instead of doing the right, good-girl thing, instead of telling, the way I always had, I was preparing to throw caution to the wind, I was breaking the rules. I was going for it. It felt, I was surprised to find, pretty good.

  “I have an idea.”

  In the garage, Val helped me pull the tarp off the old station wagon that hunkered down on half-flat tires like an exhausted elderly dinosaur. She wrinkled her nose as I opened the door. “Seriously? Does this thing even have a radio?”

  “AM, FM, and a cassette player,” I bragged, sliding behind the wheel, slipping the key into the ignition, and feeling relief flood through me when the engine started up.

  Val made a face as she climbed in beside me. “This is very depressing.”

  “It runs. Beggars can’t be choosers.” I backed out of the driveway through a cloud of bluish smoke and drove gingerly down the street, plotting my course in my head: the first gas station, where I’d fill the tires and the tank, the exit onto the highway, and my brother.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Someone—Holly, he supposed—had decorated the police station for Christmas. There was a small tinsel tree on Paula’s desk, a bowlful of green-and-red-foiled Hershey’s Kisses next to the telephone, a wreath on the door, and an actual Christmas tree, smelling bracingly of the outdoors, set up next to the patrol-people’s desks. The tree was decorated with red-and-gold bulbs, strands of popcorn and cranberries, and—Jordan blinked, making sure—a lacy pink bra on top, where the angel should have been.

  He’d pulled off the bra, and put it in his coat pocket when Holly came up beside him. “Is it okay?” she asked, indicating the tree. “I tried to find a menorah or something… you know, so we don’t offend anyone…”

  “It’s fine,” he said. The bra—he was certain it was hers, and that Gary Ryderdahl had probably stuck it there as a joke—was a burning weight against his hip. He shifted his weight. “You making any progress with that list?”

  “So far, everyone’s fine. Present and accounted for.” Jordan gave her a carry on kind of nod. Holly held her ground, looking up at him from underneath her long lashes with her soft brown eyes. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” she asked.

  Jordan jammed his hands in his pockets—there was a bag of doughnuts in the left one, the bra in the right. His parents, who’d retired to Scottsdale, had urged him to fly out for the weekend—his mom had turned the guest bedroom into a meditation sanctuary, but, his father said gruffly, the pullout couch wasn’t that bad. Even his brother, Sam, had come through with an invitation, but Jordan had pleaded work and promised everyone he’d see them at Christmas. He’d celebrated Thanksgiving with a Hungry Man turkey dinner that he’d wedged sideways into the toaster oven (the potatoes had scorched and the turkey was half-frozen) and a marathon of prerecorded Nighty-Night episodes, and he’d gone to bed at ten, unable to bear his own company—his own loneliness—for another minute. “It was fine,” he told Holly in a tone he hoped would forestall further discussion.

  It didn’t. Holly launched into the tale of her four sisters, their husbands and assorted nieces and nephews, and her father, who, each year, insisted on deep-frying a twenty-pound turkey in a stainless-steel rig he’d set up in the carport. “It’s a terrible turkey,” she said, her eyes wide as she described it. “So every year, the Sunday after, me and my sisters take turns hosting everyone. We make turkey in the oven, and there’s lasagna…” Her voice trailed off. She regarded Jordan hopefully. “You could come, if you wanted. There’s always too much food.”

  “It sounds like fun,” he managed. And it did: a big round table crowded with Holly and her sisters and their husbands. And their kids. “Let’s see how things go with the case.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s a real crime.”

  She smiled at him, clearly amused at the thought. “Deep-frying an innocent turkey. That’s a crime.”

  “Keep me posted,” he said, and ducked into his office, where he yanked the bra out of his pocket and shoved it in the bottom of his desk drawer, underneath five years’ worth of performance evaluations and the two boxes of Girl Scout cookies he’d bought from Paula’s granddaughter the previous spring (he’d asked the girl whether the Samoas were made with real Samoans, and she’d looked puzzled, then upset, as she’d backed away slowly toward her grandmother’s desk). He set the bag of doughnuts Addie had given him on his blotter and pulled out his notebook, flipping through it, considering the words that jumped out: vegan and walk-ins, Matthew Sharp and wouldn�
�t hurt a fly. He ate another doughnut, feeling the sugar crystals crunch between his teeth, then googled Adelaide Downs. A handful of hits came up: her name on the Happy Hearts website, pictures of some china pieces that had been for sale three years ago. Then there were the websites where everyone, even the most misanthropic hermit, showed up these days: Did you go to high school with ADELAIDE DOWNS? Are you ADELAIDE DOWNS’S friend? He clicked through the links, plugging in her name and address, hoping for a photograph (just so he could look at it and assure himself that she was nothing special). No picture showed up: just images of her greeting cards, a set of dessert plates, the spoon rest she’d mentioned.

  Jordan wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, picked up his phone, and dialed the number Addie had given him. Mr. Duncan, the Walgreens manager, put him on hold to check the time sheets and, a minute later, came back on the line, sounding apologetic. “Jon was scheduled to work last night, but it doesn’t look like he showed up.”

  Jordan thanked the man for his help, got to his feet, waved at Holly, who was on the phone, fished a handful of chocolates from Paula’s bowl, and made his way back to his car. Ten minutes later, he was on the corner of Main Street and Crescent Drive. He popped a kiss into his mouth and sat relaxed, his hands open on his legs, breathing steadily, eyes trained on the street. Five minutes later, an ancient green station wagon sagging on four half-flat tires came squealing around the corner. There was a blonde behind the wheel, another woman, with her head covered, in the passenger’s seat. The car stalled, backfired once, belched a cloud of oily smoke, and puttered off toward downtown. Jon wouldn’t hurt a fly. We’ll just see about that, he thought, and started off after the station wagon.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “So what have you been up to?” I asked Val as we drove west. We’d been on the road—on the lam, I corrected myself—for ten minutes, and Val had devoted most of them to complaining about the car. “This is a hooptie, isn’t it?” she’d finally asked, as we’d driven past the NOW LEAVING PLEASANT RIDGE: A PLEASANT PLACE TO LIVE! sign.