by Kara Thomas
The first photos of her and Amos appear at the end of her sophomore year, when Amos would have been a senior. The word boyfriend never appears in Zoe-Grace’s captions, but she went to his prom with him, posed on his arm, the Blake Lively to his Ryan Reynolds.
Zoe-Grace hasn’t posted a picture of Amos since the dock photo from last June.
I switch to a new browser tab and pull up the bell schedule for St. Genevieve’s. The day ends at 2:05.
I glance at the time on my phone. It’s almost 1:30. If I leave now, I can be there in twenty-five minutes.
* * *
—
I feel like some sort of pervert parking at the curb outside St. Genevieve’s Academy, scanning the throngs of girls flooding the front steps after the last bell. Most head for the student parking lot, which is filled with cars that are nicer than the ones in the staff lot. Some of them wander to the left, milling with the crowds leaving the building for the boys’ school next door, where Amos graduated from two years ago.
I keep my gaze on the front doors. A girl with chin-length blond hair bounds down the steps, one hand wrapping an oversize scarf around her neck. She comes to a halt at the curb and becomes immersed in her phone.
Despite the gray skirt and black tights peeking out from below her coat, she’s different from the other St. Genevieve’s girls, with their pin-straight hair and Tory Burch flats, Kate Spade purses hooked over their arms. Zoe-Grace is in worn-in leather boots, a black backpack slung over her shoulders.
She glances up every few seconds or so, her gaze passing over my car and the others idling at the curb. Waiting for a ride. My stomach clenches at the thought of Amos rolling up behind me in his BMW to pick up his girlfriend from school and noticing me sitting here like a stalker.
I inhale—the cold sharp in my nose—and kill my engine. I climb out of the car and shove my hands in my pockets.
Zoe-Grace looks up from her phone and does another scan of the curb. Her eyes don’t settle on me until I’m a few feet away from her.
“Hi,” I say, because I didn’t really plan this out or really think about it.
“Hi?” Zoe-Grace’s eyebrows, carefully groomed and a shade darker than her hair, knit together with confusion.
“Are you Zoe-Grace?” I ask.
She adjusts her scarf. “Yeah. Can I help you or something?”
“I was wondering if I could talk to you about Amos.”
Her eyes flick to a trio of girls to our right who are obviously watching us, listening. A white Mercedes rolls up to the curb; the girls climb in, a flurry of black peacoats.
When Zoe-Grace looks back at me, her knuckles are white as she grips the bottom of her scarf. “Who are you? Who sent you here?”
“No one sent me—I just want to talk about Amos.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Zoe-Grace says. She cranes her neck to look past me, plotting an escape route even though I’m not blocking her from anything. “I haven’t seen him in months.”
“Wait,” I say, because she’s turning away, heading back up the stairs into the school. “Did you tell everyone Amos was with you the night Kat Marcotte went missing?”
Zoe-Grace goes still. She puts a hand on the stair rail and turns to face me. She doesn’t speak until the throng of girls moving out the doorway, down the stairs, are gone.
“I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing,” she says, her voice even, “but stay the hell away from me.”
NOW
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel, eyes glued to the bumper of the car in front of me that hasn’t moved in ten minutes. An accident on Sunrise Highway.
I expected Zoe-Grace to be creeped out by my showing up outside her school. I expected her to be angry and defensive at me asking if she lied to give Amos an alibi. I expected her to tell me to fuck off—
But her fear. That was unexpected.
Who sent you here?
A paranoid statement from a clearly paranoid person. Yet when she made it, I hadn’t even brought up the alibi, yet.
I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him in months.
An even weirder thing to say.
Zoe-Grace assumed I came to her looking for Amos, and her reaction suggested I’m not the first person to have done so. She’s obviously scared of that person or people—it could be tied to the illicit activities Amos was conducting via that burner phone in Kat’s room, or maybe Novak and Cummings are on to her about the fake alibi she gave.
My pulse hitches at the thought of the FBI homing in on Amos. At him having to answer for all the shady shit he did. Leaking the story I told him about the guy I recognized, to make it look like there was a chance Kat and Jesse had been taken by a stranger.
And then, my heart plummets.
If Amos is involved, Marian will call in reinforcements to protect him: lawyers, PR, more leaked stories to the press to shift the suspicion elsewhere. For all I know, she already is protecting Amos.
But what motive would Amos possibly have for kidnapping his own cousin? It’s no secret that Amos has a sizable trust fund waiting for him someday, as do Kat and her sister, Emma. Marian won’t live forever, and she’s worth nearly twenty million dollars.
There’s no amount of money that Mr. Marcotte could wrangle in time for a ransom demand that would exceed what Amos is going to come into someday. So why the hell would he kidnap his own cousin?
Unless it wasn’t about the money at all—and Amos saying that Kat is the only person in his family he doesn’t hate was the biggest of all the lies he told me.
* * *
—
Two days, three days, turns into a week since my meeting with Agent Novak at McDonald’s. The clock is running out on winter break, and leaving home with more questions than I returned with is almost unbearable.
Zoe-Grace made her Instagram private, but I have the link to her blog stored on my phone. I’ve studied every picture, every caption, as if one will hold a clue as to whether or not she gave Amos Fornier a fake alibi for Kat and Jesse’s disappearance.
Thursday is my last shift at Stellato’s before I have to head back to school sometime on Sunday. We’re so dead that Serg lets me go at seven, holding my last paycheck hostage in exchange for my promise I’ll be back to work in May when the semester is over.
The sky is black, starless. A figure waiting by my car door makes me yelp.
Ben Filipoff steps out into the glow from one of the parking lot lights, holding a box and a white takeout bag from Mama Leonora’s. He lifts it up. “Pizza and knots.”
I tighten the scarf around my neck. “What for?”
Ben smiles with only half his mouth. “I think you know.”
“Still would be nice to hear you say it.”
“I’m sorry.” He scratches his neck, inside his own scarf. “I’ve never been good at saying that. To anyone.”
I unlock my car, gesture for Ben to follow. I start the engine, blast the heat. Ben settles into the passenger seat, grabs a piece of pizza for himself, and passes the bag to me. I fish out a garlic knot, unspooling the soft, greasy dough spiral.
“I was working the night we were supposed to meet up,” Ben finally says. “I got off the same time as you. I tried calling to you—I waved from across the street—but you didn’t even see me.”
My stomach sinks. He saw me leave work at nine; he waited two hours only for me to blow him off with a lie. A surge of panic—what if he was close behind as I drove to Kat’s house?
I swallow. “I was just…working some shit out.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he says. “But I think maybe I owe you one.”
“About what?”
Ben rests his head back against my passenger seat, tilts to face me. “When we were together, I wished all the time Jesse would jus
t…go away. I knew I could never compete with him.”
“I didn’t even know you cared enough about me to be jealous of him.”
“I messed a lot of things up with us. And I can’t seem to stop,” Ben says. “When you blew me off, I just assumed it was about Jesse. I thought the problem was always Jesse, when obviously it was me.”
My throat is tight.
“Dear God, Keough, are you crying on me?”
“Shut up.” I nudge away tears with the sleeve of my jacket, pop the rest of the garlic knot in my mouth. “I’m pissed at you.”
Ben makes puppy dog eyes at me. “But I apologized. I brought you pizza.”
“I’m pissed because you’re making me like you when I have to leave this weekend.”
Ben reaches out, puts a finger under my chin. Pulls me close, brushes his lips over mine. “I hope you still like me when you get back.”
* * *
—
When I get home, the sting of the cold lingers in my bones, but I still feel Ben’s mouth, warm on mine. I sit at my desk, dicking around on my laptop while I warm up enough to get in the shower.
I have a couple new emails, mostly “Hello, here’s the stupidly expensive textbook you’ll need for this semester” from my instructors. One from Facebook, saying I have one new Messenger notification.
No, no, no. Panic snakes around me. I don’t have Facebook anymore; I am not supposed to be findable.
Then I remember. I reactivated my account last week. In the ensuing chaos of connecting that phone number to Mike Dorsey, I forgot to deactivate it again.
I need to chill the hell out. It’s probably just someone from high school who noticed I reactivated and is reaching out to see how I am. Not a reporter, not a hater from Reddit.
I log in, open my inbox.
Message from Zoe-Grace Palermo, Thursday, 1:37 a.m.
We need to talk.
NOW
Zoe-Grace and I decide to meet at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Main Street in Islip, a couple blocks from St. Genevieve’s, when she gets out of school Friday afternoon.
I spend the day fussing with my hair and change my clothes three times, trying to distract myself from wondering why Zoe-Grace is suddenly willing to talk now.
I show up to Dunkin’ early, sweating beneath my coat. The latte warming my hands isn’t helping. At 2:40, ten minutes after our agreed meeting time, I unzip myself and strip off my scarf.
Maybe she chickened out.
I’m seated at a table by the window. Outside, some hollering draws my attention. A pack of boys in shorts and St. Genevieve’s hoodies run past the Dunkin’. Probably winter track. I look away, feeling sort of pervy staring at their legs.
The entrance door swings open; Zoe-Grace steps inside at the moment one of the running boys shouts something at her. She shakes her head, snowflakes at the ends of her hair dissolving.
I raise my hand at the same time Zoe-Grace zeroes in on me. She says nothing as she slides into the chair across from me, dumping her backpack on the seat next to her.
“Sorry.” She removes her knitted beanie and runs a hand through her hair. “I had to stay and talk to my photography teacher.”
“It’s fine.” I study the patches on her backpack. There’s a compass embroidered with the words not all who wander are lost.
“I like that patch,” I say. “Tolkien.”
“What?” Zoe-Grace tucks one side of her angular bob behind her ear, revealing a silver hoop pierced through her cartilage.
“It’s from a book,” I say.
“Oh. I just liked the saying.” Zoe-Grace glances at the counter, as if she’s considering ordering something. Hesitates for a moment before turning her attention back to me. Deciding against it. Wanting to get this over with probably.
“Okay, first, if you repeat any of this to anyone, I’ll deny it all. Cool?”
I nod, because even though Zoe-Grace barely clears five feet, she scares me a little. It’s hard to believe she’s in high school.
“The other day,” she says, “You freaked me out when you mentioned Amos. Then later I realized where I recognized you from.”
“I just want to know what happened to them,” I say. “And to me, I guess.”
Sympathy flickers in Zoe-Grace’s eyes. “I swear, I don’t know anything about that.”
“But Amos wasn’t with you that day,” I say quietly.
“No, he wasn’t,” she says. “But he asked me to say he spent the night at my house. I thought maybe the police or someone sent you to talk to me because I told them he was with me when he wasn’t.”
“Do you know where he actually was?”
“No idea. I swear. We broke up in the winter, but at the beginning of June, he was back in town and we started hanging out again.” Zoe-Grace looks embarrassed. “Obviously I should have known by then that Amos only shows up when he needs something.”
My thoughts flicker to Amos at the table at the lake house. I’d assumed he’d shown up to support his family, but what if he just wanted to see for himself what I remembered?
“Did he say why he needed you to say he was at your place?” I ask Zoe-Grace.
Her eyes flick to her hands. Please don’t lie, I think. Not now.
“He was in trouble,” she says, her voice low. “He wouldn’t get into it but he said he owed someone a lot of money and he was scared. He said he needed me to post a picture of us together in Brookport so the guy who was looking for him would think he was on Long Island.”
“So he wasn’t on Long Island June twenty-third?”
“I don’t know where the hell he was. I assumed he’d gone back to Vermont.”
“Why would he go back to school if the semester was over?”
“For business reasons.” Zoe-Grace snorts. “He hadn’t been going to classes since the winter. He got kicked out of school.”
“What?” I ask. Kat hadn’t mentioned to me that her cousin got kicked out of college. But, then, she had no reason to. We avoided discussing Amos, out of some sort of mutual embarrassment. Me, at what happened at his house the night of his party, and Kat, because Amos symbolized everything she didn’t want people to think she was. An entitled rich kid coasting by on his grandmother’s name.
“He got caught dealing on campus.” Zoe-Grace drops her voice to a hush. “It was a shitshow. His family intervened and got them not to press charges, but the school kicked him out. His grandma lost her mind and cut his ass out of her will.”
“She disowned him because he was kicked out of college? That’s intense, even for Marian.”
“It was the final straw after what happened upstate the summer before.”
“Upstate,” I say. “You mean in Sunfish Creek?”
Zoe-Grace nods. “Amos took me to the lake house—we met some of his friends from school there. He went out on a beer run and came back flipping out. The whole front end of his car was smashed in. He said he hit a deer, but he’d been smoking, so who knows what happened.
“Anyway, he had his mom wire him cash so he could get his car fixed at a place nearby the lake house. His grandma found out anyway.
“Everyone screws up sometimes, but when he told me he got busted for dealing, I ended things. Honestly, I should have told him to fuck off when he wanted to get back together at the beginning of June, but he legit seemed scared, and I don’t know.” Zoe-Grace kneads the knuckle underneath her silver thumb ring. “You can’t just convince yourself not to care about someone when they were a huge part of your life.”
“If he wasn’t with you, he doesn’t have an alibi for when Kat and Jesse disappeared,” I say.
“I know.” Zoe-Grace looks at her hands miserably. “But I said he was with me because I honestly thought there was no way he had anything to do with what happened to his cousin. He always sai
d she was the only person in his family who wasn’t a piece of shit, and then his uncle got hurt and they said they had the guy who took Kat, and he was dead…I thought I was the only person who would get in trouble if I admitted that I lied for Amos.”
I believe Zoe-Grace, and not just because it means Amos not only has no alibi for that weekend, he also had a reason to kidnap Kat: He needed money badly, and what better way to get back at Marian for cutting him out of her will?
I believe her not just because Amos being behind what happened to us is an answer. I believe her because I can guess the damage Amos has done to her.
“You said he got his car fixed at a place near the lake house,” I say. “Do you remember the name?”
“No,” she says. “But it wouldn’t be hard to find. There’s only one car repair place in town.”
I don’t know why I asked, when I already know the answer. Amos must have gotten his car fixed at Sunfish Creek Auto Body, the same place where he met Mike Dorsey.
* * *
—
It’s a few minutes past ten; the house is quiet save for the whistle of hot air moving through the heating vent in my bedroom floor. I can’t sleep, because how can I, now that I know for sure?
Amos is the only thing that connects Mike Dorsey and Kat and Jesse and me. Amos doesn’t have an alibi for that Saturday night, and he may have even been on the mountain with Mike Dorsey.
Novak was right: Having an answer isn’t enough for me. I don’t feel a damn bit better; how can I, knowing that Amos has gotten away with lying for the past six months?
The FBI has the phone; they have all the pieces and every resource at their disposal to put them together. They’ll arrive at the same answer, Amos, and there’s nothing I can do but wait.