by TE Carter
“She was out running.”
“So you just interrupted a girl while she was running?”
Adrien puts his hand up. “I don’t think—”
Caleb smiles and leans back in his chair. “It’s fine. I didn’t interrupt her. She stopped. I was driving and she heard the car. I could tell, because she slowed down as I pulled alongside her. When she saw me, she stopped and walked over to the window.”
“What made you decide to stop?”
“She was hot. I’m a guy. She was wearing those yoga pants, and I was alone. I saw her, she looked at me, and I invited her in. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Officer Thompson says. “You’re saying she got in the car then?”
He nods. “She jumped right into the passenger seat. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe that’s stupid. Getting in the car with a stranger, but girls can all be pretty stupid at times.” He looks at Officer Thompson as he says it.
“Where’d you bring her?” Gomes asks.
“I can’t remember,” he says. And they’re done with the conversation, because Adrien intervenes.
“I think we’ve been more than forthcoming. From now on, I’d prefer you coordinate with my office if you need more information. These boys have responsibilities and they can’t drop everything for every girl who comes along. It’s unfortunate that some girls don’t understand that every relationship isn’t forever, but these boys have lives to live now.”
When they leave, Gomes and Thompson sit in silence for a moment. The fan whirs. Thompson leans over to shut off the tape recorder and slams her fist against the table once it’s off.
“It’s bullshit,” she says. “Get a warrant. Get a list of every house they’ve fixed or worked on for the last year. Call in their alibis. This is all bullshit.”
Gomes watches her and she tries not to break down, but soon she’s crying and he puts a hand on her shoulder, awkward and uncomfortable at the display of emotion.
“Shannon.”
“Just don’t.”
“I can’t get a warrant. Right now, we have nothing. They’re humoring us because they want to look good for the press. They want it to appear that we’re investigating these sorts of things, but with what we’ve got, there’s no way they’re letting us take this to court. You know that. You must know that. We don’t really have a case. We have weak evidence that will be torn apart if we tried to go to trial like this.”
“It’s not right,” she says.
“No. It isn’t. But it’s the way things are.”
“And we do nothing?”
Gomes shakes his head. “I didn’t say that. You’re right. We’ll find a way to get that list of houses. See if anything matches the description the girls gave. Filter through the crap we’ve gathered by asking the town for information. Review the statements we have on file from November. Talk to Alex Frias. I don’t think the case is over. I just think it’s going to be nearly impossible to get it to stick unless we find something we can use.”
“But we’ll try?”
“I don’t believe a word those boys just said. They’re arrogant and they know something. This case has bugged me from the beginning, and their names keep coming up. I know it’s an uphill battle in this town, but there are coincidences and then there’s this.”
Thompson gets the tape recorder and the files. “I want to find that girl. It’s been too long, Gomes.”
He nods.
I follow them out. They head to different offices and process everything they have privately. I hover and wait, but it’s the middle of the afternoon and time works differently when you’re dead. You’d think eternity would slow things down, but it’s only when we’re living that we assume time is endless. When it actually is …
I don’t know. I notice so many things now.
chapter thirty-two
I loved my dad. I know I’ve said it, and I know I didn’t act like it at times, but I did.
I don’t know what happens, what line gets crossed that transitions a girl from seeing her dad as the entirety of her world to viewing him as an embarrassment. For years, we were best friends. Fishing, the movies he slept through, cooking on the grill outside when he was home in the summers. I was his little girl, and he was everything. And then, he wasn’t. I woke one day to realize that to be liked, I had to give up the one person who loved me. That’s a pretty shitty way to introduce a girl to growing up.
There was one night. One night amid so many others. I was thirteen. Everyone else was going to the school dance, but I didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to stand alone and wish someone would talk to me.
My dad was scheduled to work and I had big plans. Macaroni and cheese with maybe a movie. Or an episode of TV if I was too tired to commit to two hours.
“Ellie,” my dad said while I stood in the kitchen debating if I preferred shells or elbow noodles. These were priorities at thirteen.
“Have fun at work.”
I’d had shells three times that week, but I liked the cheese better than the weird powder that came with the elbows. It was thick and creamy, not fluorescent orange salt with some fake cheese flavoring.
“Put down the mac and cheese,” my dad said. “Turn around.”
I closed the cabinet, putting the shells on the counter. I wasn’t much for change.
My dad was standing in the doorway, but he wasn’t wearing his work vest. And he had a battered old suitcase in his hand. I hadn’t even known we owned a suitcase.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“We’re going. I called out for the weekend. Go pack some things.”
“For what?” In all my thirteen years, we’d been two places—my grandparents’ house each summer for a week, until they passed away, and, once, we went to Lake George. Everyone went to Lake George.
“Grab some things,” he told me. “And bring something dressy. It’s a surprise.”
“We can’t…” I looked at the pile of bills. At the ragged jacket he’d left on the kitchen chair, the sleeves starting to come apart at the seams. “I mean, I don’t want you to spend the money.”
“It’s fine, Ellie. I’ve been planning this. Go get ready, okay?
I didn’t want to push him about whether we could afford it. I don’t know what he gave up. But he was excited, and I didn’t want to lose this chance, so I packed a bag and followed him to the car.
During the ride, he kept talking, but he wasn’t saying anything. I could tell he was excited about the surprise, although I had no idea what it was. We drove into the sunlight and I tried to guess. I tried to run through possibilities.
As we pulled up to the train station, I felt his excitement seep into me. The station was an ugly place, but it brought you to places that weren’t. I pictured other places. I stared at the posters, faded and out-of-date. Images of cities and landmarks and skylines, all changed in the years since the posters had been made. The station was a memory of the things other people had done and the world that was. Like everything else in Hollow Oaks, it clung to a memory and forgot how to keep living.
“Two for New York,” my dad said to the person behind the glass window.
“New York?” I asked from beside him. The poster on the wall of the city was from years ago. Before 2001. A skyline with buildings that were no longer there. A reminder of what we’d all lost.
The bored ticket person took my dad’s credit card and printed the tickets, checking the clock. “You have twenty minutes. Platform two.”
There were three platforms. In a town that never went anywhere. We were the only ones waiting.
“What’s in New York?” I asked. I knew there were millions of things in New York. Theoretical things. Things I’d always wanted to see. There were the images I had of skyscrapers and taxicabs and Times Square and all the things on TV. In movies. I’d felt all the things my dad probably missed about living when he said those two little words. It was a city with the same name as the place we lived, but not the same place at all. I suddenly
felt all the things he’d put on hold when I was born.
I knew why New York. I knew what was there. What I didn’t know was why today.
“We’ll visit my old dorm,” my dad said, not answering the question I didn’t ask. “And then we can see Central Park and you can pick whatever show you want to see on Broadway. Or, really, we can do anything you want.”
“I don’t even know what there is,” I said.
“It’ll take a bit to get there. We’ll check your phone. See what’s playing.”
I looked at the battered suitcase beside him on the gray platform. Felt my own bag over my shoulder, where I’d shoved some clothes and an Easter dress. I felt like a runaway.
“What’s happening?” my dad asked, watching me try to make sense of a world that had always existed just fine without me. “Don’t you want to go?”
“What about Fred?” I asked.
My dad laughed. “Tom’s watching him.” Tom was our neighbor. He didn’t go out much, and I knew nothing about him except that he was old. And he brought me candy on Halloween because nobody went to his house. It was as old as he was, and all the kids had stories about Tom. It didn’t help that half our neighborhood had been forgotten. That Tom’s house looked like the others, except he didn’t have boards over his windows. It was easy to make him something he wasn’t, but in the end, Tom was just an old guy who was too tired to cut his lawn.
“Thanks, Dad. Really,” I said.
I was excited, but it was a lot of pressure. I didn’t know how to be alive. I realized it as the train took off from the station. As my dad showed me where the suitcases went and I was surprised there was a bathroom and a café on the train. Everything amazed me, because I only knew Hollow Oaks.
We scrolled through list after list on my phone during the train ride. Broadway shows. Restaurants. Tourist sites. My dad didn’t say anything, except to reiterate that it was up to me. So I tried. I tried to pick the right thing. The one that would be special. The one he might be happy I picked, would be happy that he’d given up so much for.
Entering New York on a train is depressing. The train rides along all the hidden parts of places. The houses people forgot. The businesses that are trying to be remembered. And then as the city gets closer, it’s crowded and kids play outside on basketball courts with no nets, and buildings cut the sky open. But the pretty ones—the ones that shine and fill the scars of the sky with light—they’re still in the distance. The ones by the train are ugly. We’re not supposed to look at those. We’re supposed to think about the ones in the background.
We all want to be part of something, but not the parts of it that make it true.
“So, what do you want, Ellie? What do you want to do?” my dad asked while the train slipped into the darkness of the tunnel, delivering us into the city without having to continue looking at its edges. Trying to make us forget what we’d seen. So that when we walked outside later, we would believe that this was all the city was.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I didn’t. In a place like Hollow Oaks, in a town that never moves, you don’t let yourself want. You don’t think about all the people living lives that might have been yours. Living in places that breathe. You try not to think about the way every day, on the ride to school or work, more and more families and people disappear. More yards grow so high you can’t see the front steps to the houses anymore. More lives are consumed by a place, while somewhere else, other people just go on.
I can’t really fault them. What kind of life is it to live waiting for it to end?
“We have the entire weekend,” he said. “Anything you want.”
“It doesn’t matter. Why don’t you pick?”
I didn’t know what I wanted, except that I wanted him to remember, too. He’d lived before and I wanted him to feel that again. I didn’t know anything but Hollow Oaks, but for my dad, life had been stopped. Paused. I wanted him to walk through New York and find that again. To remember.
That’s what we did that weekend. We visited his dorm and saw musicals and ate lunch that cost more than my dad made in a week and I stood in the center of the world. I watched the lights and felt the city breathe, and I was a part of it all. I was so happy to be a part of it. The world was a mass of people and sound and light. Of noise and hope and potential. And for a few moments, for three days, I felt like a girl who was. I wore my Easter dress to the shows. A waiter called me miss and called my father sir. We were special. My dad and I forgot who we were there. We lived for three days as other people.
Then we took the train home.
If riding into New York is depressing, riding home is like dying.
chapter thirty-three
Officer Thompson and her partner, Officer Tariq Malik, sit in Detective Gomes’s office reading through pages of something. None of them look hopeful.
“Not sure which is more concerning. The number of these properties the Brewards have worked on, or the number of them that exist,” Gomes says.
“If we narrow it down to the area by the lake, given the little Gretchen remembered and where Kailey was, there are fourteen.” Officer Thompson circles something on one of the papers. “Fifteen.”
“Somebody is lying. Someone has to be, because none of this makes sense. If they have this kind of access to these places, and both these girls are describing the same location, how have there only been two accusations? This feels systemic,” Malik says.
He puts his notes down and goes to the whiteboard on the wall. There are scattered words and ideas on it, but nothing linking Kailey and Gretchen, and nothing linking me to either of them. But he looks at it anyway, hoping he’ll see something new.
I always wondered about magic. About coincidence. I wondered if there were forces that controlled how life unfolds, or if it was just chaotic spinning. I wanted to believe that time revealed life, that it held on to the most important moments until they were right, and then it dazzled us with its power. But after Caleb, after that night, after everything that happened, I believed a lot less in magical forces and the power of time. I started to see it all as a hopeless and out-of-control disaster.
When she comes into the station, though, when she breaks the silence, I don’t know what else to call it. It’s the closest thing to magic there is in real life.
She looks nervous when she enters. She picks at her nail polish, flakes drifting in a silvery pink snowfall onto the station floor.
“I need to speak with Detective Gomes,” she says.
The person at the desk nods and disappears down the hall. Gomes comes out, leaving Malik and Thompson in his office with their papers and notes.
“Gina Lynn?” he asks.
She looks up from the plastic blue chair by the window. Her eyes are bloodshot.
“Can we talk?”
“Sure,” he says. “Come on back.”
She follows him, her boots dragging on the floor as she forces herself to walk forward, to take the steps toward his office. All of what she is, what she was, has been fading in small drips since she entered the station. She looks behind her as she goes. The way she probably did as she drove here and walked inside. Afraid someone will see her.
“Officers Thompson and Malik you’ve met before,” he says as they stand in the doorway of his office, while he grabs a notepad and the tape recorder. “We’re working together on a case.”
“We’ll stay out of your way,” Malik replies.
“Can you come with us?” Gina Lynn asks. She turns to Gomes. “They’re working on the Brewards, right? It’s the same case?” He nods. “They should come with us.”
“Is this … Are you sure?” Gomes pauses, but Gina Lynn doesn’t say anything else. “Okay.”
By the time they all settle in the room, she’s shaking. Her thumbnail is back to its natural pink, the flakes she picked off leaving a trail of bread crumbs through the police station.
“I lied to you,” she says once they’re all sitting. “I lied to you, and yo
u have to know, because it could be … I’m afraid I killed her.”
“I’ll get some water,” Thompson says.
Gina Lynn looks around the room, taking in its drabness. Sometimes the whole world seems this bland. But maybe it’s only my world. I was never a colorful girl.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Gomes suggests. “That will probably be easiest.”
She nods. “I lied. It’s not the beginning, I guess, but I lied because I didn’t think it would matter. Nobody knew her. When you were asking about her, when people were looking, they couldn’t find anything because she wasn’t someone anyone noticed.”
“Who is this? Who’s this her you’re talking about?” Gomes asks. He knows. Or at least he thinks he does. But he wants her to say it. He wants to hear it from her.
“Ellie. Ellie Frias.”
He looks up, his eyes registering surprise, but he tries to cover it by nodding and turning his notebook page.
“When she disappeared,” Gina Lynn continues, “I didn’t think it was important. It wasn’t the first time, and then, when you asked if I was with Caleb, I said I was. Like I was, you know? But not the whole time, and now … Look, I didn’t think it was related, but do you think … Is there any chance he’s really involved?”
Thompson comes back in and puts the water down in front of Gina Lynn. She waits for someone to explain what’s going on, but nobody does. They all just watch Gina Lynn. For a girl so used to being stared at, she’s nervous as she shifts in her seat and refuses to make eye contact.
“Are you saying you weren’t with Caleb Breward the weekend Ellie Frias went missing?” Gomes asks. Thompson goes to speak, but Malik shakes his head and she closes her mouth. “The weekend you and your mother insisted to us, six months ago, that Caleb Breward was in your house?”
“He was, but not totally. It was only a few hours. But. Look, the thing is … Okay, so you need to know a little bit about Ellie and Caleb. You know they had a thing, right?” she asks.
“They dated,” Gomes confirms.
“Kind of. He says it was nothing. It wasn’t very long. I saw them together like twice maybe over the summer. We hooked up early in the year. And then again once school started. Maybe the first weekend? So, she wasn’t really in the picture, you know? And she had her own issues.”