I roll my finger through the air.
“Anyway, I said I wanted to gossip and brought her a coffee. It sped things up.”
“That’s devious.”
“Says you, 007.”
I stand and stretch, having cramped up on the mop bucket. I still hate to ask for help, hate needing help, but times are desperate. “So . . . where now?”
She holds up the keys. “To the storage room! If anyone sees us, say we’re new volunteers.”
“And they’ll just leave us alone down here?”
“No, they definitely won’t.”
We’ve left the closet, rounded exactly one corner, and gone exactly fifteen feet when Jessa’s phone jangles in her purse at top volume.
“Turn it off,” I whisper, giving her the evil eye.
“Wait one sec.” She digs it out and tucks it into her shoulder. “What?” she says into it.
“Turn it off!”
“Oh my god, calm down,” she says. “It’s my brother.” She listens for a minute and then elbows me, totally unnecessary since I’m still staring daggers at her. “Chad says he can only drive us home tonight if we meet him and Jeremy at the Friendly Toast at seven. Want to?”
Perma-crush on Chad notwithstanding, it is impossible to explain how much I don’t care. “Just get off the phone, Jessa. Please?”
“We’ll see you there,” Jessa whispers—a little late for stealth, if you ask me—and turns off the volume on her phone. “Okay, okay. It’s off. Happy?” There are locked doors on either side of us. Jessa points out the medical supply room, food supplies, linen storage, the big laundry room where they wash the lab coats and bedsheets and whatever else is bloodied up. “And here”—she sorts through and selects a key with a blue rubber cap, then slots it in a doorknob—“is the file storage. Voilà!” We hurry inside and shut ourselves in the musty dark before Jessa finds the switch. The lights flicker on halfheartedly.
“Shit,” I can’t help but mutter. Milk crates pale with dust are stacked on shelves around a storage room bigger than our whole basement in Sugarbrook.
“I know, right?” she says. “But it’s not that bad. It’s sorted by year, and then, like, alphabetically.”
I unzip my coat and stuff it in the corner alongside my messenger bag, cleared of schoolwork and all my books but one. “Okay, so I just have to find the box for S in 1998.” To my surprise, Jessa unzips her own jacket, lays it carefully on top of the only island above the dusty floor—my bag and coat—loops her hair into a loose ponytail, and heads over to the shelves, her skinny black cords swishing against each other as she goes.
“What’re you doing?” I ask.
“Baking.”
“I was thinking you could be more of a lookout.”
“Oh please, hardly anyone comes in here. Not even Mrs. Masciarelli, not without her keys. God, I can count and I can spell, so I think I can help.”
There are a lot of crates, and what could it hurt now, really? In for a penny, in for a pound, or whatever Lindy says. And as we search, I’m glad to have her here. Soon my jeans are smeared with filthy prints after wiping my dusty hands on my pants, and despite the cool in the basement, sweat beads up under my arms from climbing shelves and monkeying between the stacks. Jessa has a general idea where the oldest batches of patient folders are, and after what seems like hours but probably isn’t, we’ve found the 1998 files between us. Anxious now, I stumble onto the S’s first. Wow, are there plenty. The first crate alone only goes up to Scollay. In the second I find the many Scotts and thumb through dozens of them with shaking hands, then do it again.
“Is it there?” Jessa asks, her chin nearly on my shoulder, her familiar cinnamon-gum breath in my face.
“Hold on.” I grimace and flip through the folders more slowly this time. Scott, Rebecca. Scott, Samantha. Scott, Shawn. . . . Scott, Spencer. Scott, Thomas. “It’s not in here.”
“What? Look again.”
“I looked again.” I start to riffle through a fourth time, but stop myself. It’s not here. Panicking won’t help. I shove the crate back and think.
“Maybe you have the wrong name?” Jessa pipes up.
“I’m not stupid—” I start to snap, then pause. Because Miles Faye, handsome forensic pathologist, would ask himself, What do you know?
So what do you know, Imogene?
I suppose I don’t know for certain that my mother hasn’t been to Good Shepherd in the past seven years for a broken arm or something, that Sidonie Scott’s file isn’t active and up there in the HIS department with poor, clueless, keyless Mrs. Masciarelli. But if it is, what can I do about it? Breaking into a dusty storage room in the basement is one thing; breaking into the records department of a busy hospital, another. So I set that worry aside for the moment.
I know my mother’s name is Sidonie, more or less admitted by Dad and confirmed by the dedication. I know she gave birth in this hospital in 1998, confirmed by . . . well, my birth. That’s about it. And even so . . .
“I don’t know her maiden name,” I say. “She might have used her maiden name, right? Your mom does. People do that.”
Jessa frowns. “Haven’t you seen your birth certificate or anything? Like when you got your license?”
“No. Dad came with me and handled all that.”
“And you never asked?”
“Of course I asked. Dad’s . . . sensitive about stuff like that.” Asking to hear my bedtime story was one thing. He never minded telling me stories. But pestering Dad for details about Mom, especially in the bad times, was wise only if I wanted to watch him wallow for days in a pit of sadness and empty beer cans and late-night infomercials.
“Okay.” She blows out a breath that stirs years of dust into the air. “So we look for Sidney Something? Like that won’t take forever.”
“Sid-o-nie,” I correct. There can’t be many of them, but the boxes for 1998 fill five shelves, and we definitely don’t have forever. I hop off the stacks I’m straddling, zip open my bag in the corner, and extract A Time to Chill. I turn to the dedication page, as if the information I’m looking for will magically appear in the text. Surprise! It doesn’t. I flip through the whole book quickly. This is the best clue I have. It led me to Good Shepherd Hospital. It led me to the storage room in the basement. Maybe her last name is here somewhere. I turn it over in my hands, read the back cover.
“Find the F’s,” I say. “All of them for 1998.”
Jessa digs right in through the cobwebs, and I’m sort of shocked by her cooperation. I climb back up and between us we zero in on the first box of F’s. There are fewer than the S’s, thank god, and before long I land on a thin file that drains the blood from my head and pounds it right into my heart.
Faye, Sidonie.
SIX
“But we have to go to the Friendly Toast,” Jessa says, examining herself in the mirror in the second-floor bathroom half an hour later.
“Just go without me. I’ll take the train home.”
“Ugh, by yourself? Last time I took it this guy sat down and clipped his fingernails right next to me. He got skin cells in my umbrella.”
“I’ve done it lots of times before.” I’ve always ridden with Dad, but I don’t say so. I wouldn’t mind taking the commuter rail, would love the chance to read my mother’s file while the train winds toward Sugarbrook between so many lakes, you’d think Massachusetts was just a thin film of land over endless, bottomless water. It’s a cold two-mile walk from the train and bus station to my house on Cedar Lane, but that might be better than calling Lindy for a ride.
“But I already told my brother you’re coming. . . .” Jessa smiles, playing her best card. Chad Price hardly cares if I show, much to my perpetual disappointment, and the last thing I’m in the mood for is clumsy flirting over all-day breakfast burritos.
“I’m all dusty and spiderwebby. I look like the Crypt Keeper.”
“You look, like, amazing,” she says while studying her own reflection, which is pretty
close to perfect in her awesome yellow jacket, black skinny cords, and tan Bebe heels with gold tips. After a few strokes of a pocket comb, her hair flows across her shoulders in an unrumpled sheet. One coat of Baby Lips pink-tinted lip balm, and it’s easy to see why she’s never needed her own car, or even a license. A girl like Jessa rides in boys’ cars, and they think she’s doing them a favor.
Because my outfit was meant to be functional for thievery and inspire sympathy in Dr. Van Tassel, the overall look is Mission: Pathetic. From black (but really gray) tennis shoes to old black jeans loose in all the wrong places to a shapeless black puffy coat Dad bought me last year (Lindy, mouth twisted in sympathy, offered to return it and buy me something more fashionable, after which I wanted nothing more than to keep it), I’m not dressed for success. I am wearing one of my favorite shirts, at least, a long-sleeve tee with the entire text of Dad’s latest book, A Shriek in the Dark, printed on it in very, very small type. He bought this one at a mystery writers’ conference in New Jersey, and I wore it to school the next day: senior picture day, to Lindy’s dismay. Lindy would prefer I wear blouses instead of T-shirts. I genuinely wish I knew what separates a blouse from a T-shirt. Fancier fabric? Ruffles?
And though I swear my mousy hair was in a neat ponytail this morning—the better not to be mistaken for a rogue mental patient in the halls of Good Shepherd—hours of climbing the stacks in a dirty basement have mussed it every which way. Jessa does what she can with tap water to smooth it back and offers me her mini can of hairspray wordlessly.
I frown into the mirror. “This is useless. Just leave me.”
“Never. Come on, Jeremy will be there. It’s important.”
“Finding my dad is important. Eating hash browns while you sit on Jeremy White’s lap? I’m thinking less so. I just want to go home and be alone and read the file.”
“With Lindy kicking down your bedroom door? Come eat. Have fun, you know? Experience, like, joy? And Chad will drive us home and you can spend the night reading in peace. I’ll help you. Or okay, I won’t bug you. Whatevs.”
I accept the mini hairspray.
“Fab!” She beams. “Just one more thing . . .” Jessa digs Mrs. Masciarelli’s keys out of her coat pocket, pulls open one of the stall doors, and hangs the key ring on the purse hook mounted inside. “HIS is just down the hall. She’ll find them on her next bathroom run.”
I admit, Jessa has a mind for detective work. She knows how to get what she wants, and get away clean. As far as accomplices go, I could do worse than Jessa Price.
To meet Chad and Jeremy we walk down to Boston Common, a little ways from Good Shepherd, toward the Park Street station. Road salt, foot traffic, and a few warm days have whipped the sidewalk snow into gray foam. It isn’t warm tonight, not even for February, and it’s dark outside already. But there are people everywhere. Mostly couples. A pale boy and girl in matching lavender skinny jeans hold hands on the platform at Park. On the red line to Kendall Square, a curvy girl in a pink Sox sweatshirt sits on her boyfriend’s lap, her hair a slick purple-black curtain around their faces, and though the seat next to them is perfectly good, no one wants to sit in it, thank you very much.
Jessa’s watching them, her face a mask of vague horror. All I really care about is the file weighing down my bag, but if there’s anything you should read only in a special place and not in a T car smelling of Chinese food and wet clothing, it’s this. To stop myself from pulling it out, I read a poster warning riders to report “mysterious packages” four times before departing the train in Cambridge.
The Friendly Toast is a short, cold walk from the Kendall stop. It’s one of Dad’s favorite places in Boston. We used to go after sessions, and now we stop by after a movie or music on the Common. The walls are lime green, decorated with old movie posters and cuckoo clocks, tin signs for funny-sounding beers, and life-size ratty-haired Barbies. I’m not dumb or desperate enough to think I’ll find Dad with a drink at the bright pink bar, but I can’t help looking while we stomp the slush off our shoes. No dice.
Across the restaurant, Chad and Jeremy wave at us from one of the big laminated tables under a giant, mustachioed plastic cheeseburger wearing a sombrero.
We spent so long in the stacks that we’re late in arriving and the boys have their huge plates of greasy breakfast food already. Jessa tucks herself into a chair beside Jeremy White. I hug my bag and perch restlessly on the seat next to Chad, who smiles at me, his mouth tiled with impossibly square white teeth, his lightly freckled nose scrunching. “What’s up, Imogene?” he says in his deep voice, gravel-low.
A sophomore at BU, Chad Price is pure blond, white blond, with long, nearly white eyelashes and pale green eyes. You’d think he’d be a ghost with hair like that, but his face is winter tanned from ranging the Marple Slopes, where he works part-time as a ski instructor when he’s not studying organic chemistry and preparing to take the MCATs next year. Once I asked Chad why he wanted to be a doctor. He shrugged and said he likes working with his hands, which are blond-furred and big-knuckled and generally divine. We’ve played countless games of Super Smash Bros. on the WiiU in the Prices’ basement, and sometimes when he knocks my Kirby off into space, he cackles gloatingly, reaches over, and shakes me by the back of the neck. After which I’m so flushed, I’m easily punted out of bounds the moment I’m reborn. Does this make me pathetic? Très. It gets worse, because then I walk home and spend the night cultivating a case of longing so vigorous, I’m almost proud of it.
So I have a crush. A crush is not a contract. I am obligated to do nothing more than feel all my feelings and then close them up and put them back on the shelf, to be taken out and revisited like any familiar story that feels safe precisely because the ending never changes.
“Im doesn’t want to talk to you, Chadwick,” Jessa scolds. “She’s, like, preoccupied.”
He lifts an eyebrow paler than his skin. “On a Saturday night?”
“And she’s sleeping over, so don’t bother us.”
“Sleepover?” Jeremy snakes an arm around Jessa’s waist. “But I didn’t bring my toothbrush.”
Chad reaches over to smack Jeremy, who karate-blocks Chad to protect his ’do: a stiff black faux-hawk like the bone ridge on a dinosaur’s skull.
They’re Best Friends for Life, or whatever the boy equivalent is. I’ve never understood it. Chad records every episode of How It’s Made and will describe the creation of a crayon in the same reverent tone you’d use to talk about the miracle of flight; Jeremy watches YouTube compilations of the world’s worst car crashes. But buddies they are, and if Chad objects to Jeremy dating his sister, it’s never stopped them. Not since Jessa was a bright, shiny sophomore and Jeremy the senior soccer captain. Jessa can never decide if she loves or hates Jeremy. At this nanosecond in time they’re broken up, have been since Jeremy went on a two-week Caribbean Christmas cruise with his family and didn’t bother telling Jessa, and only brought her back a puka-shell bracelet from the airport newsstand. Jessa and Jeremy fight easily and often. But by the moony look in her eyes as she plucks a potato wedge from his plate, I’m fairly certain she’s cycling around to love. They’ll be back together by June, just in time for the holy of holies (Sugarbrook High’s prom, which I’m pretty set on not attending).
What do I know about it, anyway? A two-month relationship with Lee Jung was my longest to date. He made me three retro-romantic mix CDs of love songs last Valentine’s Day, and I hyperventilated in my car for half an hour, then ended things with a text. The only other Valentine I got was from Dad—he bought me SweeTarts, his favorite candy, and I bought him a Kalev bitter dark chocolate bar, my favorite, only so we could make a show of hiding them from each other. To see who could find and steal the other’s bounty first, you know? Dad won, excavating his SweeTarts from my glove box. While it was locked. While my also-locked Civic sat in the Sugarbrook High student lot. Dad’s a writer; he’s researched lots of stuff, including ways to break into anything, and afterward he taught
me. This Valentine’s Day . . . maybe a stone heart counts as a Valentine after all.
Busy fiddling with the straps on my satchel, I don’t realize Jessa’s talking to me until she leans across the table and sticks a wedge in my face. “Hello? I said relax. We’ll work on that project tonight, okay?”
I grab it and take a small, reluctant bite.
“What project?” Chad asks.
“Math, nosy. We’re trying to figure out how many morons it takes to order two smoking-hot teenage girls some dinner.” She smiles into Jeremy’s ear.
“Not hungry,” I say.
Chad slides his plate over to me, still half-filled with his massive omelet. “Want to share? I can’t even finish it. I’ll roll down the slopes tomorrow.” He leans back and pats his stomach, which makes a sound like slapping the hard, tight skin of a drum.
I smooth back my ponytail anxiously. If Jessa knows my dad’s MIA, I wonder if Chad knows. Searching his clear green eyes just long enough to look for pity, I find none. Good. I would hate for him to find out.
I dig into the remains of the omelet so he won’t suspect anything’s wrong. He grins and I am momentarily dazzled, which feels 50 percent like fire in my chest and 50 percent like cold panic. I look away and shove a big, cheesy bite in my mouth. I don’t have the time or the heart to be dazzled.
It’s late when we pull into the Prices’ circular driveway. Chad parks his Jeep in their three-car garage, packed to the rafters with grown-up toys like mountain bikes and ski poles and kayaks and golf clubs. Jessa’s family is big on expensive outdoor sports; they’ve even got a medium-size boat docked in Buzzards Bay to the east, which is why big, shiny fishing poles hang on a rack by Dr. Van Tassel’s convertible.
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 5