While he dials, I pull up a metal folding chair and study my winter-chapped hands until a woman answers, “Lionel Sorbousek Eye Care, how may I help you?”
“Yes, hi, this is Bob White in HR at the Marple Slopes. I’m calling about an applicant for a job we recently posted. She has your office listed as a reference, but this would’ve been five years ago. Is there someone there who would’ve been her supervisor?”
“One moment, please,” she answers, and peppy, bland music like you might hear in toothpaste commercials trickles over the line.
“How did you come up with this plan?” Chad asks in a stage whisper.
“I read it in a book.” A Shriek in the Dark, in fact, the tenth in a series by popular medical mystery writer Joshua Scott.
“Im,” he starts, louder now. “Last night, I didn’t really—”
The music cuts off. “This is Dr. Sorbousek.”
“Yeah, yes, hello.” Chad drops his deep voice an octave so it’s practically on the ground. He’s not as good a liar as his sister, but he mostly gets the script right. “I’m calling in reference to one of your previous employees, Ms. Sidonie Faye.”
“Sidonie? Haven’t heard that name in a while.”
“She’s applied for a job at our resort, and I was hoping you could tell me a little about Ms. Faye.”
“She did work for us for, oh, about two years. She was a hard worker. Polite.”
“So you didn’t terminate Ms. Faye’s employment? Because her resume mentions unusual circumstances, but it’s a little fuzzy on that point.”
“She wasn’t fired, no.” Lionel Sorbousek sounds taken aback. “In fact, I told her if she found herself back in the area after she settled her business, we’d try to find a place for her.”
“Uh-huh,” Chad says, watching as I dig a pen and pizza coupon out of the junkyard that is the desktop and jot a quick note. He squints at my handwriting. “Did she quit for any particular reason?”
Dr. Sorbousek hesitates. “Mr. White, I’m not sure I can say any more. Policy, you know?”
While Chad fakes a dramatic cough to buy time, I scribble a longer note and nudge the pizza coupon across the desk. Chad shakes his head no. I shake my head yes. He frowns. “I understand the position you’re in, Dr. Sorbousek, but you have to understand the position I’m in. Ms. Faye will be working in the children’s center, and will at times be responsible for the safety of a large number of children. Should she prove . . . not up for the task, I don’t want us or anyone else to be liable. You’re her most recent job listed, and the conditions of her leaving are vague. Any insight you could give me would be very much appreciated.”
The doctor clears his throat. “There’s not much I can tell you. She was quiet, but she did the job. Showed up regularly for work. Then one day she didn’t, and called to say she’d gone back home for good. Said it was where she needed to be. I assumed it was a family matter. I told her we understood, and we were sorry to lose her. And I didn’t hear from her again after that.”
Three sharp knocks on the office door startle us: Jessa’s warning.
While we’ve been listening to Lionel Sorbousek, Chad and I have both crowded around the phone, heads nearly together, breathing the same breaths. Now, Chad shoves his chair backward. “Thanks so much for your help, doctor. We’ll, uh, take all of this under advisement.” He rushes to hang up, then shuffles around in the bottom desk drawer. The two of us are seated a respectable distance from each other when the door swings open and a muscular girl in a blue Marple Slopes T-shirt strolls into the office.
“Busy?” she stops and asks.
“What’s up, Pari?” Chad says.
The girl—Pari—crosses to the desk and props her elbow on his shoulder, her body resting against his arm. The tips of her fingers brush his chest, and one blue-black side braid dangles by his ear. Chad doesn’t lean into her, but he doesn’t shrug her off or roll away.
“Who’s this?” she asks. Her eyes are perfectly round, dark mirrors.
“Im. Imogene Scott.” He hands me a form he’s pulled from the drawer. “She’s applying to be a ski instructor.”
News to me. I sit straighter and flick my chin up as she looks me over, from my tangled clump of hair to my shapeless puffy coat to the chubby legs inside my rumpled jeans. I resist the urge to crack my knuckles.
“Imogene . . . that’s a pretty name,” she settles on.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” he says, and lingering awkwardness aside, I can’t help but flash my teeth at him.
“Do you guys know each other from somewhere?”
“Since forever. She’s Jessa’s friend.”
“Your little sister?” Pari’s eyes clear. “So you must go to high school, Imogene. Aww!”
Poisonous steam heats my cheeks and hisses in my ears. This is surprising, to say the least. Chad’s had lots of girlfriends. I never felt jealous (not very, anyway) because whatever tricky feelings I was feeling, at least I was relieved of any responsibility to act on them. And now, in the middle of my search, is so not the time to act. But I can feel my smile shift, widen, and ice over into a smile that Jessa has trademarked. She calls it the Sweetest Bitch, usually reserved for the girls who whisper slut behind her back in the second-floor bathroom.
“Yup, I’m in high school. You must be, like, hundreds of bees older than me, Pari.”
Chad stifles a laugh while Pari’s whole face clouds over. So she’s older and has biceps like basketballs and is presently draped across Chad. I’ve won some kind of girl-on-girl victory, and I take it with me when I leave.
Just beyond the office door, Jessa waits. “What’d you find out?”
I glance over my shoulder. “That I don’t like Pari.”
“Pari Singh? Why? She’s so cool. She can, like, ski the Black Diamond slope backward, Chad says.”
“Probably not that smart, though.”
“No, she’s so smart. She’s studying weather-ology.”
“So? What else does Chad say about her? Is she the ski instructor?”
Smiling, Jessa sucks her bottom lip. “How’s it taste, those sour grapes?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my grapes. She’s just, she’s all, ugh.”
“Then why don’t you do something about it?”
“About what?” I stuff the application into the Marple Grill garbage can, atop half-eaten logs of bratwurst and a soggy pile of cooled sauerkraut. As if I could work here. Dad has never brought me skiing. Too taxing for his couch-and-bathrobe times, too calm for his wander-the-unfamiliar-peaks-of-New-Mexico-at-midnight times. Not that I’ve begged him to go. I’m honestly grateful. On the long list of things I’ll never do, tossing myself off a cold mountain is tied with setting my bookshelf on fire, skinny-dipping in a tank of rhizostome jellyfish, and confessing my love to Chad Price. “It’s not important, anyway.”
I bring Jessa up to speed on what is important as we shove our way out of the lodge, into a wind that carries crystals of snow and shatters them against our cheeks. At least the cloud cover’s lifted, so the snowy hills of the Marple Slopes are bright and blue-lit, though in the east you can already see the sunset smoldering. Where has the day gone? Where have the five days since Dad’s been absent gone?
Jessa takes small crunching steps toward the parking lot in her inappropriately fashionable boots. She swore she would’ve worn her boring boots if she’d known I would drag her up a mountain. “So your mom went home. To Sugarbrook?”
“Obviously not.” I frown. Impatient with Jessa’s stutter-walking, I plow forward only to slip on a glistening patch of snow. I feel myself tilt and fall, but Jessa throws out a hand and catches my elbow.
“Maybe he meant home home, Im. Like, all the way home.”
“Which is—”
“Fitchburg.” She grins, towing me forward by the arm until I get my feet back under me. “So why don’t we go to Fitchburg?”
I will tell you why we do not go to Fitchburg. We don’t go to Fitchburg because:<
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1) The sun is sinking fast out of the sky, about to extinguish itself against the already-dark horizon, and if another dinner passes at 42 Cedar Lane without me, I’ll be eating lunch in Lindy’s office in Framingham from now until next Monday.
2) I’ve stumbled on a problem that never seems to stop detectives in books: teenage poverty. Whatever shallow pool of money I made last summer working as scoop girl at the Frozen Gnome has dried to mud in the bottom of the creek bed that is my savings account. Dad is usually pretty reasonable with the money-lending, but he isn’t here, and driving back and forth across Massachusetts to find him has wiped me out.
I turn down multiple offers from Jessa to fill my gas tank on the way home, because while it’s great to have her with me, I’m not looking for a financial backer. Instead I do the only thing I can. I go home home.
My stepmother is back from work and reading in Dad’s armchair in the living room. Pilates-thin and only a little taller than me, Lindy’s swallowed by the hulking red seat, the chair back looming above her like an open mouth. It goes with nothing in the living room, otherwise a collection of almost-matching wood and two couches so old that most of the paisley’s worn off. We’ve had them forever. Since I was little kid, at least. I don’t remember a time without them. Most of our belongings are permanent in this way. The dancing-banana magnets on the fridge, the leather padded weights bench in the basement, the little potted plant that would be a towering oak by now if it weren’t plastic. Lindy’s managed a few changes—now we keep our flour and sugar in fancy little canisters instead of rubber-banded bags—but Dad and I like it the way it is. It’s right the way it is, chipped paint, butt-bowed cushions and all.
The most recent addition to this house, besides my stepmother, is Dad’s chair. He and I dragged it home from a yard sale five blocks over a few years ago. Dad had gone on new meds and was a little jumpy, so he wasn’t supposed to drive just yet. But that couldn’t stop us. We hauled it back on foot, knees knocking against the steep sides of the chair, fingers slipping, sweat spackling our faces.
“This is why you’re my strongest girl yet,” he told me.
I pause in the doorway and Lindy takes her time looking up from the book, though from the way she drops it shut without bothering to mark her page, I suspect she’s been 49 percent reading a biography of Cleopatra, 51 percent waiting for me to walk in.
“Gosh, Immy, is that you? The boss has been making you work double shifts again, I take it? How’s your 401k coming?”
“Okay, okay, I get it, I’ve been scarce.”
“You’ve been absent,” she says, and sighs. “But I get it too.”
I scratch an itch on my ankle with one sneaker. I don’t want to talk, to pretend I’m as lost as Lindy. But the situation calls for more than “Hi, how’ve you been, can you lend me a hundred bucks for mysterious purposes, maybe see you Tuesday!” Instead I land on, “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
She crosses to the couch and spreads her palm out on the cushion beside her.
“Right now?”
“Please.”
I perch on the arm at the far side of the couch, examining my reflection in the darkened windows.
“How’s Jessa?” Lindy asks.
“She’s . . . Jessa. She texts. She talks a lot.”
“What did you two do last night?”
I swallow the unpleasant memory. “Just hung around. Played Ping-Pong.”
Lindy nods; I see it in the window, and Dad’s old, pilled bathrobe wrapped around her instead of the usual cape or kimono robe. “She’s a good friend to you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Did the Prices feed you already?” she asks, maybe a smidge jealously.
“I wanted to eat with you,” I say, which pleases her.
I follow Lindy into the kitchen to help with dinner, though there isn’t much for me to do. My stepmother is as efficient a cook as she is a counselor. Before she starts on the ginger pork stir-fry and mashed veggie-of-the-week, she lines all her knives on the counter by size, her starches and oils by order of use, her vegetables by quantity (three-fourths cup carrots before one-half cup snow peas before one-quarter cup chopped onion and so on). I learned my craft from the Joshua Scott School of Cooking, which is so utilitarian we never used to close the chip bags; in fact, we’d lean them on their sides in the cupboards with their crinkly plastic mouths wide-open and pointed frontward so all we had to do was open a cabinet door and reach a hand in.
Now, I do what Lindy tells me to. Pour this, wash this, move over so I can do this. I try not to think of it as giving her what she wants so I can get something (gas money, a few more days of freedom to search). I try to think of it the way Lindy does: as a bonding exercise.
“It’s awesome,” I assure her when we’re sitting at the table with our full plates, ignoring the empty seat beside us, which only makes it emptier.
“The pork came out very tender, but I think I went overboard on the ginger.”
This is kind of classic Lindy. It was a big part of therapy when we were briefly with her—celebrating victories and identifying opportunities. “You say you went to the grocery store today, Josh! That’s wonderful. A great victory over your depression. Congratulate yourself! And maybe tomorrow you can do two things, like go to the grocery store and put the food in the fridge so Imogene doesn’t come home to eight-hours-warm milk and iceless ice cream.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. Mostly.
I’ve often wondered about the moment when Dad decided, That’s the one for me forever. I’ve been told the story of how they started dating. We’d only been to three or four sessions with Lindy before Dad ran into her at the Thinking Cup in Boston and invited her to share his high-top table. (“I won’t be billed for this, will I?” he’d joked lamely.) While their coffees cooled, they talked, and a week later, Dad requested a different family therapist. He must’ve wooed her hard, because it wasn’t long after that she switched practices altogether, and Dad sat me down at a low-top table at Cheesy Pete’s and gave me the Lindy Talk.
But what was it about Lindy, exactly? What convinced him to marry her when apparently (and mysteriously) he’d never even married my mother? I’m not saying Lindy isn’t wicked smart, ambitious, and nice enough, with hair that shines like polished wood. I don’t object to Lindy in any specific way. But Dad’s kept The Miraculous Draught of Fishes as his desktop background for as long as I can remember, and I can remember three laptops back. How do you love someone that much, then propose to your family therapist?
And for maybe the first time ever, I wonder when Lindy looked at Dad and thought, That’s the man for me. What convinced her to risk so much for him? What convinced her to stay?
I watch as it takes my stepmother two delicate bites to snip a quarter-size piece of watercress off her fork tines with her front teeth. What would she think if she knew that Dad and Mom were never married? Would she be pleased with her shiny new first-wife status? Suspicious of whatever truth is lurking beneath the lie, like me?
Would she shake her head and tell me I’m chasing ghosts? I remember Victory Island, and place my bet on the latter.
“So, Immy. Thinking about prom yet?”
That’s a topic switch. “Should I be?”
She smooths a napkin across her lips, starting from the center and working toward the corners. “It’s in June, isn’t it? Do you have a date in mind?”
As if all I have to do is think of a guy, and one will appear. I’m about to shrug it off, but this gives me a window. “Jessa wants to look at dresses tomorrow, before all the good ones are sold out.” I sigh and cast my eyes downward. “But I don’t think I’m going.”
“You’ve still got time to shop.”
“No, I don’t think I’m going to prom.”
She clinks her fork onto her plate, eyebrows screwing together. “I won’t say you should go. But that seems like a rash decision.”
“It’s not rash. It’s practical. I don’t even have a boy to take me.”
It sounds pathetic—I have to swallow a healthy dose of self-loathing to get the words out—but I know the answer that’s coming.
“Oh, Immy, you don’t need a boy to go to your prom.”
“No, I guess not,” I reluctantly admit, tracing gloomy squiggles in my mashed butternut squash. “But boys usually buy the tickets. That’s how the school does things and it’ll look weird if I do.”
“That’s ridiculous! Not to mention a complete throwback to the fifties. You just march in and buy your own ticket.”
I snort. “Me and what trust fund?”
Confident that she’s facing a problem she can solve, Lindy picks up her fork and digs back in. “Well, don’t worry about that. How much are tickets?”
“Who knows. But first I have to buy a dress and shoes and . . . I don’t know.” Then, the clincher: “All so I can show up without a date?”
“Imogene Mei Scott, you need to realize that you’re a strong young woman who is perfectly capable of having a great time sans male. Tell me what you need.”
“Thanks, Lindy,” I gush, my smile genuine.
“Of course.” She pats my hand across the table, then clears her throat. “You know, while you were with Jessa yesterday, I spoke with Officer Griffin.”
I look at her. She smiles. Weakly, but at least she’s still wearing her work lipstick, and her hair is smoothed back in a French twist, so she looks more herself. “It’s not—there isn’t any information yet. But Officer Griffin thinks my idea of getting the media involved might be helpful.”
“The media? What, like, newspapers? TV?”
“Both. She thinks the story could really get some traction considering your dad’s well-known. To some, anyway. People could really pay attention. And the more people who pay attention, the greater the likelihood that someone will see something. It might help us find him, just in case he isn’t heading back this way already.”
“It’s only been a few days. Can’t we wait?” I stand. I can just see some Fox 25 reporter in her ice-cream-colored suit and plastic makeup, delivering the line: “A local mystery writer is now the star of his own mystery.”
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 11