The Girl in the Headlines

by Hannah Jayne

  I burst into the motel lobby where Nate was flipping through a magazine. He barely registered me.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, for what I said, back there, before…”

  Nate raised one shoulder, flicked a page of his magazine. “It’s not like we’re really friends or anything.”

  I don’t know why it stung, but it did. “I just…I needed to see my mom, and I did. She’s waking up. She opened her eyes a little, and she said my name. When she wakes up, she can tell everyone what happened, what really happened.”

  “Andi…”

  “A cop chased me out but—”

  He put down his magazine. “A cop saw you?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think they really knew it was me. God, Nate, my mom…she looked awful. And my dad.” I couldn’t even say it, couldn’t admit that he was dead. “The person who did this…was a savage. The police need to find this guy, and my mom needs to wake up. Please let her wake up.” I started to pace. “When she wakes up, this will all be over.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “I looked for my brother. There was a park across the street where Josh liked to go, so I walked over there and then over to the video game store, but nothing.”

  “You can’t just be out there, looking like—” He gestured to me, and I frowned. “This is a huge city, but word is getting out about what happened. About you. People are going to start noticing—” Nate’s eyes cut to the TV screen, and mine followed. He mashed the volume button on the remote control at his side, and I gripped the stupid little counter, hoping my knees wouldn’t buckle.

  The news.

  The same coiffed newscasters with their well-practiced sullen faces drawn, our family picture hanging behind them. The newscast broke to an aerial shot of our house, little cubes where the house was and an impossibly green, squared-off lawn. Then they were on the ground, people still milling about, ducking under strips of bright yellow crime scene tape.

  “Can you tell us if there have been any updates?” asked the newscaster.

  The camera panned to a guy in a Channel 7 polo holding a microphone in front of his mouth. At first, I felt exhilarated, like I should brag that our house was on TV.

  Home.

  I wanted so desperately to go back there.

  “I need to go home, Nate.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “If I’m going to find Josh—if I’m going to find anything—it’s going to be there.”

  “Your house is a crime scene, Andi.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “It’s crawling with cops and reporters. Just look.”

  I wanted to protest, but the grim reporter and the crime scene tape crashed me right back to the horrible Midnight Inn where I was stuck, to the motel lobby I was standing in with a boy I hardly knew.

  I straightened. On the screen, our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Derry, nervously shifted her weight. The reporter began speaking, and I held my breath.

  “Yes, Alyssa, I’m here with Hester Derry outside the McNulty home. Some new information has come to light about Andrea McNulty, the missing teenage daughter of the family. Mrs. Derry, what can you tell us about Andrea McNulty?”

  Mrs. Derry was wearing one of her signature velour sweatshirts with her glasses hanging by a chain around her neck. She had always been a little odd but kind enough, a woman whose curtains twitched whenever Joshy and I played outside, who handed out full-sized Snickers bars when we trick-or-treated. She bought Girl Scout cookies and dance chocolates from me, the news on a constant loop on her old television in the living room. Now she was on the news.

  “Andrea seemed like a nice girl. She made good grades in school and was always taking care of her little brother. They were always out here playing. Those two didn’t look a thing alike, but their bond was evident.”

  She smiled and I did, too, ushering up a silent prayer for the old lady’s glowing remarks.

  “She was pretty quiet, no boyfriend, not much of a social life that I can recall.”

  Suddenly, my cheeks were hot, and I wanted desperately for Nate to know that I wasn’t a loser. “I—I just hung out with Josh a lot, you know, because my parents worked…”

  He didn’t seem to be listening, but the newscaster guy was, and seeing his opportunity, he swooped right in.

  “So you’re saying that Andrea was a loner?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Kept to herself, couldn’t make connections socially?”

  “No, she was perfectly pleasant…”

  “Do you think her background as a foster child had anything to do with that?”

  Mrs. Derry sucked her teeth. “I didn’t know she was a foster child!”

  “Andrea came to the McNultys when she was five years old.”

  “Well, she didn’t seem like one of them by the time I got to know her.”

  I felt my mouth gape open. “What does that have to do with anything? And what does ‘one of them’ mean?”

  Nate’s eyes never left the screen. “It means your secret’s out. Welcome to the dark side.”

  Onscreen, Mrs. Derry pursed her lips. “Andrea is Beth and Eddie’s daughter, just like Josh is their son.”

  “Beth and Eddie never legally adopted Andrea—did you know that?”

  I leaned in closer, willing Mrs. Derry to say that it didn’t matter, that it was simply a matter of paperwork and legal mumbo jumbo that Mom and Dad and I didn’t have time for because we were too busy being a regular family, going out for pizza and to soccer games and grocery shopping.

  The camera flashed back to Alyssa in the newsroom, who acted like she was enraptured with Mrs. Derry’s interview. “You said that Andrea was never formally adopted?” Alyssa asked.

  “Yes, Alyssa, as a matter of fact, there’s speculation about the daughter and the McNultys all around. Records show that Andrea was in fact in foster care as a very young child. She was placed with the McNultys temporarily, but we haven’t been able to find any official adoption records or any further information from Child Protective Services. Now that’s not altogether unusual. The adoption could have been private or closed, or the caseworker could have transferred the case.”

  Everything they were saying swirled in front of my eyes. It had never mattered before.

  “There is no record of her birth parents coming back to claim her.”

  I blinked back tears. I was being abandoned all over again.

  Nate wouldn’t meet my eye. I felt my lower lip start to tremble. None of that mattered, because the McNultys were my family. I was their daughter. We were normal people.

  I had stayed with the McNultys off and on since I could remember. I didn’t know my father, and I suspect neither did my mother, but it was written in some file somewhere that he was in jail. My mother was a drug addict who liked heroin better than she liked me. I visited with her once when I was six in the made-to-look-cozy “family room” of the county social services office. They had old, worn toys that no kid would have wanted to play with even if they were new, and Rita Mondale sat across from me on the one adult chair in the room, weirdly staring at me, asking no questions, her fingers rubbing together the whole time. It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes that she sat there, staring, until she beckoned the social worker over and left, not even hugging me goodbye.

  I had nightmares for a month that she was going to take me back.

  I almost saw her again when I was thirteen. Some idiot judge thought it would be a good idea for me to spend some time with her since she had just completed yet another twelve-step program. My parents dropped me off at the social services office—the court said they should not be there, so as not to upset my loser “mom”—and the social worker sat with me at a long conference table for the entire hour I should have been with Rita. She never showed.

  I was
glad.

  The McNultys were my parents. Joshy was my little brother. I was nine when he was born, and my father dressed me in a paper gown and booties, and I held Joshua in my arms, and he weighed less than our Thanksgiving turkey.

  Nate’s eyes raked over me. “You okay?”

  I shrugged, certain that if I opened my mouth, I would either throw up or scream. I didn’t realize I was crying until a big drop flipped off my nose and landed on the toe of my shoe.

  Thirteen

  Nate went to flip off the TV when Alyssa popped back on the screen, this time looking alarmed and supercharged.

  “We’ve just gotten word that Andrea McNulty was spotted at the hospital where her mother is being treated. Police are warning the public to be on the lookout for the teenager but not to approach her. Police are speculating that the suspect could be armed and dangerous.”

  “Me? Dangerous? I’m five foot three and afraid of turtles.”

  The camera crew cut to a picture of a garbage can, and I was thankful that the subject had moved to recycling, but it was still newscaster Alyssa’s high-pitched voice.

  “It was in this garbage can just outside the hospital that police found a discarded duffel bag. In it was what police are speculating are a set of Andrea McNulty’s clothes, Edward McNulty’s ID and empty wallet, and Elizabeth McNulty’s purse. Her wallet is missing. A reward has been issued…”

  “I didn’t have that! I didn’t have anything with me. You saw. They can’t believe—they can’t think I did that. Why would I do that? Why would I leave stuff like that right outside the hospital?”

  Nate opened his mouth and closed it again. “Did you see any of the earlier reports?”

  “I think I’ve seen everything.”

  The anchors who sat at their news desks, hypothesizing about what happened. The detectives, laying things out step-by-step, the attorney who said “allegedly” in between every other word, and the journalists who showed pictures of my family and broadcast film of our house standing stolid and ominous, roped off with yellow police tape. I was pretty sure they’d have a Lexus salesman up next, talking about what kind of killers favored people in SUVs versus those who attacked people in minivans, and my second-grade teacher who I bit on the hand (by mistake) when she reached over to take my gum. There was no one there to talk about me but Mrs. Derry. No one to defend me or to explain that our life was normal and plain and real. No one to tell the world that I really was a part of the family.

  “Early on, they talked about the—” Nate bit his lip, then dropped his voice as if someone else were listening. “Crime scene. They said it looked like it had been tossed a little bit, like whoever broke in was robbing the place.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “We were robbed?” I hated to think about my parents’ lives reduced to dollar signs, dashed out for whatever we kept in the house—my mom’s jewelry, my dad’s watch, the “pizza cash” my mom stashed in the cookie jar. “We have money, but we weren’t dripping rich or anything. I can’t even think of anything thieves would really want from our house. I mean, we had a couple of laptops, but they weren’t brand new. I don’t know, maybe the TV?”

  “People will steal anything not nailed down.”

  “Do you think the person who did this is the person who messed with my car?”

  Nate shrugged, and, weirdly, I was filled with suspicion. I didn’t know Nate. I knew nothing about him save for what I’d seen over the last several hours. He was a complete stranger who went from nonchalantly eating cherry Danish to strolling into a gas station with a murder suspect.

  Maybe he had an ulterior motive to be nice to me. Maybe there was a reward out for my capture. I paused as a darker thought clouded my mind.

  Maybe he was being nice to me for a different reason.

  What if Nate knew more about me than he was letting on? What if I was dumped in this motel—with him at the front desk—because he was the one who broke into the house? The one who hurt my parents, who snapped my timing belt? Was Nate some super twisted, motel-dwelling psycho?

  “Do you…know where I live?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual.

  He blinked, nodded. “Everyone does now.”

  I thought of this kid, hiding in the hydrangeas outside our house, waiting—for what? Me to come out? My parents to be at their most vulnerable? He was taller than me, sure, but probably only outweighed me by twenty-five pounds. He couldn’t take out my father with my mother there. And Josh and I. I tried to imagine Nate slinging me over his shoulder and dragging me into the Midnight Inn while I was drugged.

  No.

  But Cal…

  Cal could have watched me. Cal could have waited until I was in the house to cut my timing belt. He was big, a full head taller than my dad even. Nate had no reason to want me in jail, but Cal did.

  “It’s possible your parents could have been targeted. Did they have any enemies?”

  “No, Nate. Normal people don’t have enemies.”

  “What about their jobs? Anything there?”

  I rubbed my temples. “My mom was a marriage and family practice counselor.”

  “Maybe one of your mom’s patients?”

  “I guess that’s possible, but my mom mainly counseled old ladies and divorced couples. It wasn’t really the murder-for-hire crowd. And how would they know about me or Josh? My mom didn’t keep photographs of us in her office. And my dad was a college professor. I’m, like, ninety percent sure that some college kid didn’t go bananas over a bad grade and decide to…” I just let my thought trail off.

  “Okay, so maybe it was just a random act, and the guy chose your house because his spirit guide or meth cloud or whatever told him to. And maybe your parents just walked in on the robber and he panicked.”

  I nodded like I was understanding what he was saying, but the move was rote. “But what about me, Nate? Where was I? And the timing belt?”

  Nate pierced me with his stare, his chocolate-brown eyes darker than I’d ever seen. “Still could have been a coincidence.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “So nothing is coming back to you?”

  I wanted so much to remember—or at least I thought I did. I went over that day again in my head, running it through from morning until the dark point of drop-off as I had been doing since this whole stupid thing began.

  “The last thing I remember was putting the key in the door to come in.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  “School. Practice. Quick stop at Starbucks.” I pantomimed putting my key in the lock, pushing open our front door.

  What did I see?

  The foyer. Marble entryway. Staircase to my left. Dining room to my right. Kitchen table straight ahead of me.

  “Balloons.”

  “What?”

  My heart thudded. “There were balloons. At the kitchen table. I remember there were balloons. It was, like, the first thing I saw when I opened the door.”

  “And then what else?”

  A vise was crushing my head, pushing down every inch of memory. I squeezed my eyes shut, clenching my teeth, willing my mind to hang on to the wispy images that floated by. The foyer, the balloons. Did I hear anything, smell anything? I thought I remembered smelling something cloyingly sweet. Maybe cookies or cake? But it was my birthday, and I know I had been eating sweets all day. Everything was starting to run together, and I shook my head sadly. “There is nothing else. What am I going to do, Nate? No one is going to believe I walked into my house and woke up in this gross motel. Everything says I did it.”

  Nate shook his head. “No, I don’t believe that. It’s all circumstantial.”

  “You said it yourself. No one is going to believe I didn’t do this, especially with”—I shrugged, went palms up—“absolutely nothing to show.”

  “So we’ve got to get you some
thing to show.”

  Fourteen

  Nate pulled out a piece of paper, and I leaned my elbows over the counter.

  “Okay,” he said, uncapping his pen. “Do you have any enemies?”

  “Enemies? I told you, we were normal, regular people. We didn’t have enemies or—” I paused. “Cal. And someone came to see my mom. Today, at the hospital. They said it was only family, but there was someone there. A lady. And Josh and I are the only family Mom has.” I brightened. “She must have been the one who dumped the wallet and purse!”

  “Do you know when she was there?”

  “No.”

  “What she looked like?”

  I bit my lip. “No.”

  “Maybe one of your mom’s old divorced lady clients?”

  “I don’t know,” I said miserably.

  Nate still wrote down the word client with a big question mark after it.

  “And then you said Chris?”

  “Cal.”

  “And why do you suspect him?”

  I thought of prom night—it was magical and beautiful and so stupid sounding and petty now that my world was torn open and left raw. Cal and I were dancing, close and slow, and he whispered in my ear. We walked out onto the patio, and he kissed my neck. A little peck, a little pinch, but I could see Lynelle and her date inside, and everyone else in our group was leaving the dance floor and heading to the picture line.

  “Let’s go get our group shot!” I said, pulling away.

  Cal had a weird expression on his face, one eyebrow arched, and I could smell the rum he had smuggled in on his breath. “I don’t want to be with a group right now,” he had said, his moist breath making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “I want it to be just you and me.”

  I liked Cal, but not when he was drunk and kind of lecherous and when his hand kept sliding over my butt. Not when he kept flicking his other hand across my breast and picking at the spaghetti straps of my gown.

  “Cal,” I said, forcing a giggle, “you’re drunk.”

  “Drunk on love.”

  Warmth shot down my spine. I had had a crush on Cal since day one of senior year, when he was the new kid with broad shoulders and soulful eyes. I had pined for him while we practiced on the same field, me taking a ball to the head in field hockey while staring at him playing football. And here he was talking about love.