by Kara Thomas
“You fucking asshole,” I whisper. I say it over and over under my breath as I find my phone and fire off a text to Amos Fornier.
Thanks, asshole.
His response is instantaneous.
What did I do?
You’re the only person besides my dad who knew I talked to the sheriff about the redheaded guy, and now it’s in the Daily News.
My phone vibrates in my hand; Amos is calling me.
I accept the call, lift my phone to my ear. Amos speaks before I have the chance to open my mouth.
“Sorry, I actually hate texting.” Amos’s voice is low, quiet. “I didn’t speak to the Daily News. Or any news, for that matter.”
“Then you told someone what we talked about,” I hiss. “McAuliffe’s office wouldn’t have leaked that conversation—”
“I did tell someone,” Amos says, cutting me off. “I’m sorry. I had to.”
I sink into my desk chair, heart hammering. “Who?”
“There are no secrets in my family, Claire. When my grandma got back to the lake house this morning, she wanted to know everything you and I talked about,” Amos says. “You remembering seeing that man is huge. She would have pried it out of me even if I wasn’t willing to tell her.”
I don’t say anything; beyond my door, the house phone rings again, setting my skin crawling.
“Claire,” Amos says. “We all just want to find Kat.”
“Then why would she leak sensitive information?” I ask. “The sheriff said it could hurt the investigation.”
“We don’t know it was my grandma who talked to the Daily News,” Amos says. “She may have trusted the wrong person and they leaked the story—hell, it wouldn’t be the first time a reporter hacked the phone of a missing girl’s family.”
“My name is all over the internet,” I whisper. “Who would name me to the press?”
“Claire,” Amos says softly. “Did anyone outside of my family and yours know that you went with Kat and Jesse last weekend?”
My insides go cold. Noah had blasted it all over Facebook: I was with Kat and Jesse last weekend. But there’s only one way Noah would have known that I’d gone with Kat and Jesse on the trip after all, even though Ben and I had broken up—
“Claire?” Amos asks. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve got to go,” I say. I need to murder my ex-boyfriend.
* * *
—
The only thing that stops me from texting Ben, tearing him a new asshole for blabbing to his friends about my being on Bobcat Mountain and having memory loss, is the thought of my messages being blasted all over Heavy.com or some other trash site.
I don’t know how to deal with a violation like this. Even if the public shaming hasn’t really begun, I can’t escape my own shame. At those pictures of me, wasted, being on the internet. At those ugly things Ben’s friends said about me, my feelings for Jesse.
I need to do damage control.
No, damage control is what you attempt if you’re caught making fun of your gym teacher in the locker room; not if pictures of you wasted are being blasted over the internet and your classmates are low-key accusing you of murder.
What I have to do is the equivalent of trying to scoop shit back into an overflowing toilet.
I massage my eyelids, haunted by those pictures. Who was in the kitchen with Jamie and me? There were a handful of the younger Markey siblings’ serfs hanging around, iPhones out. It’s not my fault one of them snapped those pictures and put them online, but guilt surges through me at the thought of Jamie’s parents seeing them.
I pick my phone back up and start composing a text to Jamie.
Hey…I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble for those pics.
Something stops me from pressing send. Why hasn’t Jamie sent a single message checking in with me? She and I have always had the type of friendship where we could go weeks without talking or hanging out and it’s not weird, but her silence now is definitely weird.
I think of the picture of Jamie and Kat and me on the fireplace mantel, the one Agent Novak had seemed so interested in. When Kat moved home from Italy at the end of freshman year, she, Jamie, and I were basically inseparable. Then, around the end of junior year, things started to get awkward between Jamie and Kat. They were both circling valedictorian, even applying to some of the same colleges. Eventually Jamie stopped accepting our invitations to hang out, citing that she had to work at her parents’ restaurant, or study.
At the end of last August, Jamie said she couldn’t come to the beach for Kat’s birthday because she was taking an SAT prep course. When we stopped to grab sandwiches from the deli, I spotted Jamie leaving the village CVS with Shannon DiClemente and Anna Markey.
Kat never confronted Jamie, swearing that she didn’t care what Jamie did or who she hung out with. But by February break, the two of them were barely speaking at all.
Maybe Jamie hasn’t texted me because she’s busy working through her own shit. Kat going missing has to be bringing up some complicated feelings for her, maybe even guilt at how they left things off.
You are deluding yourself. You know why she hasn’t texted you.
I swallow the anger building in my throat, send off the message.
Outside my room, a war is raging.
Mom’s voice is slightly raised; I only catch her say don’t call again before I find her alone, at the kitchen table, cradling a glass of seltzer that I’d wager has vodka in it.
“Who were you just talking to?” I ask.
“No one important.”
A chill climbs my spine. “Mom. Who was it?”
Mom sets her glass down. “It was a producer from Brenda Dean’s show.”
I have to sit down. Brenda Dean is quite possibly higher than the FBI on the list of people I don’t want up my ass right now.
Twenty years ago, Brenda Dean’s younger sister was abducted off her bike and murdered, the killer never caught. Brenda dedicated her life to justice—first as a lawyer, then with her own cable show—lambasting suspects in high-profile murders. The cases always involve children—the younger the better—or pretty women abducted while jogging.
Lately she’s been obsessed with this man, Lawrence Cowen, who left his two-year-old in the car on a hot summer day. Mom and I are both guilty of flipping to Brenda’s rage-fueled coverage of the trial on weeknights when nothing else is on.
“She wants to interview me,” I guess.
“It’s absolutely out of the question.” Mom lifts her glass to her lips, cutting herself off.
Years ago, Brenda Dean interviewed the mother of a missing toddler on air. She accused the mom of knowing more than she was saying about what happened to the baby; the woman left the set a sobbing mess, and went home to slit her wrists in the bathtub.
I stare at my mother. “You weren’t even going to ask my opinion?”
“Your opinion is irrelevant. It’s not happening.”
I shoot up from the table, nearly startling the glass out of Mom’s hand. When I turn away, she says my name sharply. “You don’t want that vulture pegging you with questions you can’t answer.”
I feel all my chill slipping away from me. I want her to tell me I don’t have to be afraid of Brenda Dean because only guilty people should be afraid of Brenda Dean.
I want her to tell me I’m not guilty, even if I don’t know it myself, because she’s my mother and it’s her job to make things better.
My heart sinks to my feet. “Do you think I did something to them?”
“Of course not,” she says. “But I can’t control what everyone else thinks.”
“Then maybe you should let me defend myself,” I snap.
Mom buries her face in her hands. After a long pause, she looks up
, eyes red, cheeks blooming to match. When she speaks again, her voice is barely a whisper. “I found a lawyer—I want you to meet with her. She can get us in tomorrow morning.”
“What? When did you call a lawyer?”
The shame on her face, the way she avoids looking at me, makes it clear this was not a reaction to the reporters or to the Brenda Dean producer calling.
She’s had the appointment for longer than that. Maybe since yesterday, when my dad called and told her about what happened in Sheriff McAuliffe’s office, how he refused to tell me what the man on the mountain saw or what we said to each other. Maybe she’s had the lawyer on call since she set foot in that hospital and realized my friends weren’t coming back and I was the only one who had answers.
“No.” I stand up violently. Cross to my room, blocking out her shouting Claire, and slam my door so hard it rattles every bone in my body.
NOW
The fight with my mother sends me to the bottle of Ativan. Sometime later, I wake in a pool of sweat. I sit up, rub my eyes until I can make out the time on the clock over my desk. It’s after seven.
The Hard Line on Crime with Brenda Dean airs at eight every night. I’ve never had a TV in my room; even if I were willing to venture out of bed and face my mother, I would sooner stream porn with my parents than watch tonight’s episode of Brenda Dean’s show with them on the living room couch.
I lean back against my headboard while my body adjusts to being awake. The pulsing behind my eyes is a different type than the ache I’ve been waking with the past few days. The Ativan, maybe.
A surge of fear as my brain reboots reminds me of the hell today has unleashed.
Kat’s car keys in my pocket. A reporter outside my house. FBI inside my house. The things Shannon and Anna and Noah said about me, and those pictures…
I scramble for my phone, heart sinking at the sight of the empty screen. Jamie hasn’t texted me back.
I open my internet browser and search Kat’s and Jesse’s names, but there haven’t been any updates today. Searching Brenda Dean only nets one recent headline, from her show’s live blog: tonight: juror dismissed in case of “hot car dad,” sparking mistrial murmurings
Good, I think. Lawrence Cowen, aka Hot Car Dad, is Brenda’s topic of the moment, and a twist in the trial should give her enough red meat to gnaw on for a thirty-minute show. I might be safe. For tonight, at least.
I gnaw the inside of my lip, eyeballing the watch live link at the top of the Hard Line on Crime blog. I click it, log in through our cable provider, and dig through my nightstand drawer for earbuds.
The live broadcast begins in seven minutes. I mute the advertisements looping in the video window, unable to take the jingles for Walmart, the sight of B-list celebrities hawking life insurance.
Eight p.m. The video buffers; I disappear under the covers with my phone.
The sight of Brenda Dean’s face behind her desk makes the pit in my gut widen. Recently, she dyed her short blond bob a sassy shade of red, a decision my mother and I discussed at length back when my friends weren’t missing and we consumed other peoples’ tragedies for entertainment.
I raise the volume on my phone so I can hear Brenda around the thrumming in my ears.
“Breaking news tonight: A juror in the Lawrence Cowen trial has been released due to tweeting about the case from a secret account.” Brenda’s lips, slick with pink gloss, form a snarl. “Defense attorneys are calling for a mistrial—will Baby Braden ever get justice?”
I turn onto my side and close my eyes, let her murmur in my ear about what a piece of shit Hot Car Dad is. Say a silent prayer of thanks that she’s so obsessed with this guy, she’s sidelined a story about a beautiful, young missing couple.
“When we return, bombshell new revelations in the Kat Marcotte and Jesse Salpietro disappearance.”
My eyelids fly open just in time to see Brenda’s coy stare at the camera before the commercial break.
I sit up, my heart battering my ribs. Of course, she wouldn’t just let the story go because she couldn’t get an interview with me. The look on Brenda’s face said she doesn’t care, she has a bigger fish on the line.
“If you’re just joining us, we’re on a video call with Paul Santangelo, a Good Samaritan.”
Paul Santangelo cleaned up for his TV debut. The beard he was sporting in front of his house the other day is gone, and his hair is slicked to the side. He’s wearing a forest-green pullover with a collared shirt underneath. He looks like someone who hands out flyers for Greenpeace—not someone with a Confederate flag sticker on his pickup truck.
In the frame on the right, Brenda folds her hands on the table and leans toward the camera. “Paul, I want to thank you for speaking with us. I understand it’s been a whirlwind of a day for you.”
“Yes, ma’am—ever since the Daily News published that article.”
“You’re referring to the Daily News story that falsely ties you to the disappearance of Kat Marcotte and Jesse Salpietro?”
Paul Santangelo licks his lips. “Yes, ma’am. There are also people calling me racist, due to a sticker I have on my truck that honors my family’s heritage.”
“Paul—you don’t mind me calling you Paul, right? How did you come to be involved in this case?”
Santangelo’s eyes flick to the side. “I wouldn’t say I’m involved—”
Brenda Dean waves a ring-clad hand. “Of course. Why don’t you tell us what you witnessed on Bobcat Mountain last Saturday afternoon?”
“All right, sure. Well, I camped at Poet’s Lookout Friday night.”
“For our viewers at home, Poet’s Lookout is a point on Bobcat Mountain, west of Devil’s Peak, where Kat and Jesse were last seen, is it not?”
A crude graphic splits the screen with Brenda’s face. Two large Xs are marked on the opposite sides of Bobcat Mountain, labeled Devil’s Peak and Poet’s Lookout. The implication is clear; Paul Santangelo was camping on the complete opposite side of the mountain from where our campsite was.
My spine straightens. I’m finally about to find out what Paul Santangelo saw or heard—along with the rest of Brenda Dean’s viewers.
“Yes, ma’am.” Paul Santangelo’s face, stoic, replaces the graphic.
Brenda is back. “Paul, do you often do overnight hikes by yourself?”
“Sure do. I photograph the stars—last weekend was the first set of clear nights. Except, I saw some clouds rolling in Saturday at dusk, so I decided to pack up and head back down the mountain at maybe five, six p.m.”
“And what did you see on your way down the mountain?”
“A girl. She was alone, and it looked like she was trying to make a phone call. There’s no service on the mountain, so I asked if she was okay. She said yes; I asked if she needed help, and she said no, she was headed for the parking lot. I said I was too, and she could follow me if she was lost.”
“Did she seem lost to you?”
“Well, yeah, it was obvious she didn’t know where she was going. I knew we weren’t far from where the Devil’s Peak trail sorta forks off, and the trees don’t have trail markers. If you’re headed down from Devil’s Peak and hit that fork and take the wrong path, you’ll wind up at Poet’s Lookout, which is pretty far from the parking lot.”
“What did she say, when you offered help?”
“She said she was fine and waiting for someone.” Paul Santangelo looks uncomfortable. “I continued on my way, but after a few minutes, when I didn’t hear anyone behind me, something told me to go check on her. She didn’t seem right—scared or upset, maybe. Looked like she’d been crying.”
“And did you? Go check on her?”
“Yes, ma’am. Only, when I got back to the spot where I’d left her, she was gone.”
“Now just to be clear, we’re talking about Claire Keough.”
Brenda draws out my name; my brain seems to dissociate from my body, hearing my name on prime time television.
“I only just learned her name. I thought, I hope she knows what she’s doing. When I heard a couple days later there were kids missing on the mountain, I thought it was her, so I rang the sheriff.”
“So, you told Sheriff McAuliffe your story, only to be named by the Daily News as a possible suspect in a high-profile disappearance a few days later.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it all.”
“And at no point while you were on the mountain did you encounter Jesse Salpietro or Kat Marcotte?”
“No, ma’am. Just Claire Keough.” My name sounds forced coming out of Paul Santangelo’s mouth. Brenda Dean must have encouraged him to use it, so her audience won’t forget it.
“Why do you think Claire Keough claims you were at the Merry Mackerel at the same time she went in the restaurant asking for directions Friday evening?” Brenda props her elbows on the counter, knits her fingers together delicately. “Our sources tell us Claire claims you were watching her and eavesdropping on her, despite your having time-stamped photos on your camera that confirm you were at Poet’s Lookout Friday evening.”
“She mistook me for someone else, I guess,” Paul Santangelo says. “I’d never in my life seen her before that day on the trail.”
I’ve watched enough Brenda Dean to know she won’t be content to leave it there. She won’t stop until she draws blood.
“But why would she make statements to the Sunfish Creek sheriff that you might have been involved in her friends’ disappearance?”
Paul Santangelo hesitates. “I don’t know, ma’am. Like I said, something didn’t seem right.”
His TV affect slips from his voice. Summin’ didn’t seem right.
Now the idea is in everyone’s heads, if it wasn’t already. Something isn’t right about my story. I was alone, without my friends, when Paul Santangelo encountered me.