by Kara Thomas
“I don’t know. Anything. Did you find anything else in the quarry besides Jesse’s wallet and Kat’s bandana?” I knit my trembling hands together on the table. “What happened to his phone? Was it in the tent?”
“You know I can’t give you that kind of information, Claire.”
“What about other people who might have been on the mountain around that weekend?” I say, suddenly desperate to keep Novak’s ass in that chair. “Anyone else who was camping or hiking who might have seen Mike Dorsey scoping the mountain out—maybe the sheriff kept it quiet like he did the robbery that happened the summer before.”
Novak’s eyebrows knit together. “Who told you there was a robbery on Bobcat Mountain?”
“Kat’s cousin, Amos. A local told him about it while Amos was passing out Kat’s flyer.”
Novak frowns. “There’s no record of a robbery occurring on Bobcat Mountain.”
“There wouldn’t be, if the sheriff didn’t want anyone to know about it.”
“Maybe.” Novak’s lips part as if he’s going to say something; instead, he heaves himself off the chair, says, “Take care of yourself, Claire.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder, almost as an afterthought. “And for the love of God, no more burgling.”
* * *
—
As soon as I get home, I strip out of my work clothes and change into pajamas, burrow under my comforter with my laptop. I may have turned the phone from Kat’s room in to the FBI, but thanks to the pictures I took, I know every number Jesse ever called from it.
I type each number into Google, hoping to dig up some information about the owners. No luck: each search tells me the city where the cell phone number originated and not much else.
The area codes range from Boston to Westchester to Vermont. The owner either has a lot of friends in different cities or the calls also came from burner phones. I don’t know, maybe I watch too many movies that I’m even thinking in terms like burner phone.
I’m Googling yet another number when something yanks me out of autopilot. The area code—it’s the same as the pharmacy that kept calling me for months after my hospital visit, asking if I needed a painkiller refill—
A Google search confirms it. The number belongs to a cell phone user in Sunfish Creek, New York.
I comb over the call log again. Jesse and the person in Sunfish Creek called each other four times since August last year, before Kat and Jesse disappeared.
I need to know who this phone number belongs to. I work quickly, as if I’m trying to stem the blood flow on a gaping wound.
Several reverse phone number look-up sites are useless, unless I want to fork over my debit card information. I switch gears and Google how to find out who a cell phone number is registered to and get a hit for a forum of disgruntled people.
The top-rated comment reads: You could always try searching the phone number on Facebook. If the person has their phone number linked to their account, you’ll be able to find their profile that way.
I fly off my bed like someone is chasing me and open my laptop. I haven’t used Facebook since the summer when I deleted it. I reluctantly reactivate my account and gnaw away what’s left of my torn thumbnail while the home page loads.
Please work. I type in the phone number and wait—there’s no way this will actually work, will it?
The phone number matches with a profile.
The privacy settings don’t allow me to see anything beyond his picture and his location. But I’ve visited this page before, hundreds of times, hoping that magically something has changed and I’ll be able to see some glimpse of who he was and why he did what he did.
Michael V. Dorsey.
NOW
Monday morning. Between the blinds in my window, slices of sky, gray and mottled with even darker clouds. My phone says it’s almost seven thirty. I could go back to sleep, but if I let that happen, who knows when I’ll get up, if I even bother to at all.
Ben. Shit.
I’d totally forgotten about him in the chaos that was last night.
I’m so sorry about last night. Got out super late and came home and crashed
What are you doing tonight?
I hit send, my thoughts immediately turning to the phone I turned in to Agent Novak last night. Whoever it belonged to had been in contact with Mike Dorsey since last February.
The kidnapping wasn’t random. Mike Dorsey knew we would be there, because he knew either Kat or someone close to her who had the opportunity to stash that phone in Kat’s room.
Someone other than Jesse. I am looking for evidence it couldn’t have been Jesse because I can’t handle it if it was Jesse.
My stomach squirms. How did Mike Dorsey pull the kidnapping off without help? Without inside information?
There’s no way Jesse was involved—Jesse would sooner die himself than risk Kat’s life, even for a huge pile of Marcotte money. Besides, in the weeks following the incident at the quarry, the FBI confirmed that they recovered the ransom money from Mr. Marcotte’s Highlander.
Without that money, Jesse wouldn’t have been able to escape and somehow avoid detection for the past six months.
The other option is that Jesse had never spoken to Mike Dorsey before in his life. He didn’t tell Mike Dorsey we would be camping at Devil’s Peak that weekend—someone else close to Kat did.
I shut my eyes, the blood draining from my head. Agent Novak’s voice returns around the hollow thud in my ears.
I think back to the question that has been bothering me for six months—how come, no matter how many times I’ve Googled it, I was never able to turn up any mention of a robbery on Bobcat Mountain? Not a single person came forward about an attempted attack on two girls, in the same place where two teenagers would later be kidnapped.
Who told you there was a robbery on Bobcat Mountain?
But why would Amos lie to me? Why would he invent a story about a robbery on the mountain?
My pulse moves to my fingertips. I open the picture folder on my phone, enlarge the photo I took of the text thread, the one that culminated in the threatening message: Screw you call me back
One text—sent by the owner of the phone in Kat’s room—sticks out.
I’ll be with my gf and her dog. No one will think anything of it
The time stamp says the message was sent on April 28 of last year, at 12:57 p.m.
I wouldn’t know where to begin confirming where Jesse had been on a Saturday afternoon almost a year ago. He could have been working at the bakery, at band practice, or still in bed, for all I know.
Kat, though—her schedule was mapped out to the minute, especially during volleyball and lacrosse seasons. And April 28 was right in the middle of lacrosse season.
On my phone, I search Brookport girls lacrosse games. I refine the search results to display the game schedules for last spring.
At 1:00 p.m. on April 28, Brookport played a game against John Glenn High School. We won, and according to the website, Kat Marcotte scored two goals.
There’s no way Kat could have been at the marina with Jesse and Elmo on the twenty-eighth within ten minutes of this message being sent. So unless Jesse had a secret girlfriend he was willing to be seen with in broad daylight, two blocks from his real girlfriend’s house, this phone definitely wasn’t his.
The back of my neck turns slick with sweat. I throw my comforter off my body, get up and cross to the window, press my forehead to the glass. What else had Amos said to me in the canoe?
I will his face, his words into focus, but the memory is nebulous, as if I’m viewing the scene from underwater. I’d insisted to Amos that Jesse would never hurt Kat; Amos had agreed.
Not just agreed—he’d said I know. A strange vote of confidence for his cousin’s boyfriend, whom he barel
y knew.
There’s an explanation for why Amos would both make up a bullshit story about a robbery on the mountain and so easily agree that Jesse wasn’t responsible—Amos knew exactly who was responsible.
But how did Amos even know Mike Dorsey? Amos is a Long Island trust-fund kid; Mike Dorsey was an almost thirty-year-old petty criminal who worked at an auto body shop upstate. The FBI said that as far as they knew, Mike Dorsey had never even been to Long Island. Sunfish Creek is the only place his path might have crossed with Amos or the Marcotte family.
And there’s only one logical reason Mike Dorsey’s number would be on this phone. I remember the hard clench of my stomach last night when I realized what this phone was probably used for. All of those numbers with different area codes, none with a name attached. Calls at all hours, texts with times and locations.
According to the press, Mike Dorsey had been arrested for drug possession in Florida, where he was born. In an interview, one of his friends said Mike’s mother sent him away to Sunfish Creek to clean up his act. It’s not too crazy to think that maybe, while he was there, he met a rich kid who was in town for the summer…a rich kid who was dealing drugs.
I lower myself into my desk chair, legs trembling beneath me. I’m not sure if Amos makes more sense than Jesse or my mind is desperate for an answer that isn’t Jesse. I haven’t been able to trust my own mind in six months.
A surge of anger cuts through me, so powerful that I find myself gripping the edge of my desk. Anger at the thought that Amos knew, the whole time, exactly who was responsible. Whether he casually mentioned to Mike Dorsey that we would be in town that weekend, or if he’d helped plan the kidnapping himself, Amos is the connective tissue.
I bolt out of my chair, dig my phone out from under my comforter. The text thread with Amos from last June is sitting at the very bottom of my inbox. I pause, fingers hovering over the screen, studying the last message he sent me.
What’d I do?
He’d sent it right before he called me and said he hadn’t been the one to speak to the Daily News. I haven’t spoken to Amos since; he never reached out after the FBI announced what happened at the quarry.
Amos has no reason to suspect that I know anything—about the phone, his connection to Mike Dorsey, his lie about the robbery—and I can’t give him one.
I settle on:
Hey…are you in town?
I hit send, heartbeat quickening.
A beat later, an exclamation point appears next to my message.
Message undeliverable.
* * *
—
Amos didn’t block my number. To be sure, I called twice more: once from our home phone, and once from the line in my mom’s office she uses to talk to people calling the suicide prevention hotline she volunteers at.
No voice mail, no ringing, just an automated prompt saying that the number is not currently in service. Amos changed his number.
It could have been a totally innocent decision. Too many reporters calling him, maybe, in the wake of Kat’s disappearance.
Or, maybe, there’s another reason Amos doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
During my Amos Fornier phase, the summer before sophomore year, I could have told you anything you wanted to know about Kat’s cousin. I was an information scavenger, every conversation with Kat an opportunity to find out Amos’s dating history or what he did after school.
The space behind my right eye begins to pulse. I’ve had to retrain the muscles of my brain not to think about Amos too much over the past six months. Even if he didn’t realize what he was doing, he betrayed me when he told his grandmother that I remembered seeing Paul Santangelo, the hiker. Thanks to the Marcottes, I was not just Kat’s best friend in the eyes of the world: I was the girl who accused a Good Samaritan of murder. I was the reason people were harassing Paul Santangelo, whose biggest crimes were trying to help a lost girl and having a Confederate flag decal on his truck.
I got caught in the boomerang—the backlash to the backlash. It was impossible to separate what was happening to me online from the reason it happened.
I’d trusted the wrong person. A person I knew I shouldn’t trust.
There’s no going back and undoing that mistake. There’s only turning my anger into something useful—like trying to prove the phone I found in Kat’s room belonged to Amos.
Attempting to place Amos at Brookport Marina on a Saturday afternoon feels impossible, though. At least as far as the internet is concerned, it’s as if Amos doesn’t exist. After poking around for fifteen minutes, all I find is a private Instagram account with the username famousam0s. The profile photo, a close-up of a tanned face partially obscured by Ray-Bans, could be any douchebag with a trust fund. But we have one mutual follower—Kat.
It’s him. It’s the only trace of him, and I can’t access it. I can’t find out if he had or has a girlfriend who has a dog, let alone where he was on a Saturday last June.
A capsizing feeling hits my stomach. All of Kat’s family members were interviewed right away, and everyone had alibis.
Think, think. There must be someone in Amos’s social circle who has posted clues about what he’s been up to since Kat and Jesse disappeared. If Amos is the connective tissue between them and Mike Dorsey and what happened to us on Bobcat Mountain, how could he continue to face his family every day? If I find a picture of him, smiling over a game of flip cup at some college party, will I know by the look in his eyes that he is the missing piece?
Think, Claire. Amos had a best friend in high school, or at least he did at the time of the party at his house. His name was Erik and earlier that evening, while I was on the couch with Amos, I’d seen Erik catch Amos’s eye, gesture down to his phone. I peeked at Amos’s screen while he read a text from Erik: Your cousin is pretty hot.
Amos stared back at Erik and mouthed, Don’t you fucking think about it.
What was his last name? Erik…Erik Carlson. I tamp down mild disgust with myself that I remember the full name of Amos’s high school best friend. If I dedicated that brain space to something important, maybe I could do math.
But the information is useful: Searching for Erik Carlson on Instagram turns up a profile. His bio says he attends Pepperdine University in Malibu. He’s following the famousam0s profile, but Amos isn’t in his pictures from the past six months.
All of Erik’s shots are of the beach, or himself in a black convertible, dark wavy hair slicked away from his face. I keep scrolling back. And there he is—August, over a year ago.
Amos, Erik, and a golden-haired girl on the beach. The girl, in a race-car-red bikini, is kissing Amos on the cheek; his arm is draped over her shoulder. Erik has tagged her in the photo.
Her name is Zoe-Grace; her bio is a link to a blog.
I scroll down to her most recent Instagram photos. Zoe-Grace could not be more different from Erik Carlson—or at least according to the version of herself she’s presenting to the internet.
Her photos are of people. A man on the Long Island Rail Road train platform in enormous headphones. A teenaged girl, posing outside Penn Station, in a dress as lurid yellow as a taxi cab. She has triangular hot-pink earrings and a matching fanny pack.
I keep scrolling. A boy on the sidewalk carrying two kittens, an elderly woman on her porch, oxygen tank at her feet. I’m several weeks deep into Zoe-Grace’s feed before I find a single picture of her.
Her face is tilted downward, a choppy curtain of hair falling over her bare shoulder. She could be naked, for all I know; the sun streaming through the window in the photo creates a prism, bathing Zoe-Grace’s face in rainbow light.
She’s beautiful.
I can’t stop scrolling through her photos, even though Amos isn’t in any of them. My neck is stiff from being hunched over my phone by the time I’ve reached last summer on Zoe-G
race’s feed.
And there he is. The sight of him on Zoe-Grace’s feed feels like a violation, even though she’s a complete stranger to me.
They’re posed at the end of a dock. Both tanned, his arms wrapped around her bare middle. She’s in denim shorts and a crocheted white crop-top. Her hair is salt-water curled below the backward baseball cap she’s wearing.
Amos is in Ray-Bans and a turquoise T-shirt that pops against the brilliant sunset behind them. Sitting at their feet is a Boston terrier.
Zoe-Grace posted it at 7:37 p.m. on June 23.
The oxygen leaves my body.
I zoom in on the photo. The dock abruptly ends a foot away from where Zoe-Grace and Amos are standing; three algae-covered posts stick out of the water where the dock used to extend before a hurricane decimated it a couple years ago.
My pulse accelerates. This photo was taken at Brookport Bay; I used to walk down the dock with Kat and Elmo on my work breaks sometimes. Kat would gripe that she wished they’d fix the damn dock already, replace the railing so she wouldn’t have to yank Elmo back from trying to leap into the bay.
Except, the village had fixed the dock. Almost a year and a half ago.
So, Zoe-Grace had posted a picture of her and Amos that was over a year old. No big deal—maybe it was their anniversary and she put up an old picture to honor it.
But that date. June 23.
I can’t shake the feeling that there’s another reason Amos’s girlfriend posted a picture of them, together, on Long Island, on the same day Kat and Jesse went missing on a mountain two hundred miles away.
* * *
—
Cyber-stalking Zoe-Grace has taken up the better part of my day; it’s a welcome distraction from the fact Ben still hasn’t responded to my text from this morning. I’ve combed through Zoe-Grace’s entire Instagram feed, and even though I wasn’t able to find her last name, her oldest posts—the ones she made before her documentary-street-photographer phase—have a few clues. Three years ago she started at St. Genevieve’s Academy, which means she’d be a senior now.