by L. T. Vargus
Charlie milled around the waiting area, arms crossed. A few moments later, Zoe returned from the holding area with Jason in tow. When he saw Charlie standing there, he scowled.
“What are you doing here? Where’s my mom?”
Uncrossing her arms, Charlie spread her hands wide.
“She’s not here. It’s just me.”
“She sent you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly,” he mocked her. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Hey, pal, you should watch your tone,” Zoe said. “This lady just did a nice thing, bailing your ass out. If it wasn’t for her, you’d be sitting in that cell until morning.”
Charlie appreciated Zoe jumping to her defense, but if she wanted Jason to talk to her, she needed to find a way to de-escalate the situation.
“It’s OK, Zoe. I’ve got this.”
Stepping closer to Jason, she tried to steer him away from the front desk with a gentle hand on his elbow.
“Could we talk a minute?”
He jerked away from her.
“About what?”
“About Amber. You didn’t have much to say today, but I imagine you’re close, being only a year apart.”
He angled his chin away from her, staring at an empty corner of the room.
“I guess.”
“So why don’t you tell me about her? Did you know if she had any plans to meet up with anyone aside from her old school friends while she was here? An old boyfriend?”
He shook his head.
“She didn’t say anything like that.” His eyes squinted as he studied her. “You know my parents only hired you for appearances, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean no one takes you seriously. My dad says your whole business is a racket. But the other family had already hired you, so my mom said it would look like they didn’t care as much about their daughter if they didn’t hire you too. The whole thing is a fucking joke.”
Charlie felt her hackles rise at the insult and then realized that was exactly what he wanted. He was trying to bait her.
“OK. If you don’t want to talk about Amber, then why don’t you tell me about tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah. The fight at the bar. How did that start?”
Jason’s brow twitched.
“Didn’t like the way some townie trash was looking at me.”
“That’s it? A look?” Charlie blinked. “You’re sure there wasn’t something that set you off?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. You were on edge when I saw you this morning. And then I watched you storm out of the house tonight. An hour later, you start a brawl at O’Malley’s. Is there something other than the stuff with Amber that’s bothering you?”
Jason wasn’t making eye contact, but she could see the muscles of his jaw tense. There was something. The question was, how far could she push him?
“Maybe you had an argument with someone? Your mom? Or maybe a friend or girlfriend?”
His neck swung around as he turned to face her, and for a moment she thought he was going to tell her. But then his expression clouded again. Pivoting away from her, he addressed Zoe.
“Am I free to go?”
“You need to sign for your personal effects.” Zoe held up a plastic baggie containing his wallet and keys. “And honestly, I think you ought to hear—”
Jason stalked over and scribbled his signature on the clipboard before yanking the baggie from Zoe’s grip. As he strode to the door, Charlie hurried to step in his path.
“Jason, wait.”
He paused and leaned in close enough that she could smell the beer on his breath.
“My parents are rich idiots who think they can solve every problem by throwing money at it, so this is between you and them. Leave me out of it.”
The door slammed behind him, and Charlie watched him stalk out of the station.
“You think he knows something?” Zoe asked. “About his sister’s disappearance, I mean?”
“Maybe. Or it could just be that he’s a spoiled kid with no coping skills. I don’t think he has the best role models at home, to be honest.”
Zoe nodded.
“That stuff about his parents solving all their problems by throwing money at them? You should have heard the dad down here this morning, going on and on about how much money he’s donated to the police fundraisers over the years.”
Charlie’s mind wandered back to searching Amber’s pretty princess room. But there’d been secrets underneath the sugary sweetness, hadn’t there? The cigarette she’d found in the music box and the matchbook from the Red Velvet Lounge.
“What do you know about the Red Velvet Lounge?”
“The strip joint?”
“Yeah.”
“I hear there are scantily clad women who will dance for money.”
“There were apparently rumors around school that Kara was working at a club, and from the sound of it, the Red Velvet Lounge fits the bill. Then I found a matchbook for the very same club in Amber Spadafore’s room.”
Zoe raised an eyebrow.
“I hate to say this, but that is some extremely weak sauce.”
“I know, but it’s the only thing I’ve found so far that might connect the two girls.”
Zoe reached up to adjust her glasses, then folded her arms over her chest.
“So go over there and check it out.”
“I already did.” Charlie leaned one shoulder against the wall. “They wouldn’t let me in. They figured me out for a snoop, somehow.”
“Or they thought you were a jealous girlfriend or wife. A lot of clubs don’t let women in if they’re not with a man.”
Charlie cocked her head to one side.
“You know this from experience?”
“Actually, yes. It’s not really my scene, personally, but I dated a chick who was all about it. We were denied entry at several clubs because we weren’t escorted by a man.”
“Interesting.”
Charlie had been operating under the assumption that the bouncers knew she was there looking for dirt. Maybe they’d simply been worried she was there to stir up other kinds of trouble. If that was the case, there might be a chance she could still get in. She just had to find a man willing to escort her.
And she knew just the one.
“Whoa,” Zoe said.
“What?”
“You had this look on your face. It… reminded me so much of Allie. It was just eerie.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
In bed, Charlie drifted toward sleep. A warmth settled over her body, starting in her core before spreading to her limbs and, finally, her cheeks. A kind of calm seemed to accompany this swell of heat—the weight of the blanket, too, bringing her some deep sense of peace and tranquility.
Still, one little niggling voice stayed active in her mind. Allie’s voice. Her sister kept probing, kept talking, kept replaying the various dramas that had unfolded tonight in and around the Ritter household. The family had certainly packed a lot of excitement into one evening. Allie laid it all out again.
“First, there’s the affair—Sharon Ritter sneaking a man into her bedroom while her husband plays with trains in the basement.”
She clicked her tongue, as though checking a box before moving on to the next item on her list.
“Then there’s the brother’s outburst—after a tumultuous phone call, Jason Spadafore smashes his phone before rushing off and getting into a brawl at a local bar. Beating some guy’s head in with a pool cue.”
Another tongue click.
“Finally, the man who’d lain with Sharon in the biblical sense climbs out the second-story window, scampers down a trellis, and hops an eight-foot privacy fence, managing to narrowly avoid your eyeballs in the process. So yeah. Big night at the Ritter house.”
She was quiet for a second.
“Am I forgetting anything?”
Charlie
sighed. She’d have to talk to Allie or this could go on all night.
“The tattoo,” she said.
“Right. Good call. Lover boy has a Dark Mark or something similar inked on his inner arm. A skull and a vine or some snakes or something.”
Charlie drifted again as her sister finally went quiet. She inched out toward sleep, the room around her seeming to fade into the black nothingness of unconsciousness. Then Allie started at it again.
“We need to identify lover boy. Then we need to find out what Jason’s mixed up in, what that call was about. To me, those are two legitimate leads that need to be explored.”
“Agreed.”
“And poor Todd Ritter, seemingly oblivious to everything down in his toy chamber. He makes the trains run on time, I guess.”
“He’s ‘poor Todd Ritter’ now, huh? I thought you said all of this was partially his fault.”
Allie huffed.
“False. I said it’s partially his fault for not knowing what’s going on—not that I typically blame infidelity victims, mind you. But if you live the bulk of your adult life in a basement playroom… well, some of the not knowing is on you. In any case, toy obsession aside, he and Amber might be the only normal ones in the family from the looks of it. By comparison, anyway.”
“I guess I can agree with that,” Charlie said.
“The only one we didn’t get a good hard look at tonight was Amber’s biological dad. Theodore-dore-dore Spadafore-fore-fore.” Allie added a false echo to each name. “But you said his alibi was pretty rock-solid.”
They fell quiet for a beat, and then Charlie spoke.
“Isn’t it strange to get these glimpses into other families? To see how they really live? It’s like peeking behind the doors and windows of each home, you find a completely different world, foreign to your own. These families are nothing like ours, you know?”
“Yeah,” Allie said. “Definitely not.”
“If I think about it long enough, it makes me think that no ‘normal’ exists when it comes to families. There is no ideal. No right answer. Each one creates its own tangled web of relationships, too complex and sophisticated to be copied elsewhere.”
“That’s true,” Allie agreed. “Take the Dawkins family, for example. The parents seem utterly normal, utterly stable, and the daughter is the troubled one. Meanwhile, the Ritters are, to some degree, the opposite—the daughter is the normal one and the mom is the one breaking social norms; maybe the brother, too, I guess.”
Charlie rolled over. Stared up at the ceiling shrouded in darkness. Allie’s voice punctured the silence again.
“And after all of that, even a dysfunctional family like the Ritters can’t compare to our fractured family—broken forever.” Her sister sighed. “Or at least, they aren’t that way yet. Maybe it depends on what happens from here. With the girls, you know.”
Allie’s words hit Charlie like a punch in the gut. If she didn’t solve these cases, if she didn’t find the girls…
Immediately her brain whirred to life. Poring back over the facts, the files in her mind opening wide. She mentally dug through the information again.
She sat up. Reached for the nightstand. Opened the drawer. Inside, in a plastic baggie, she found what she was looking for.
She spun the Red Velvet Lounge matchbook in her fingers, the one she’d found in Amber’s room. It was the one thing she had that tied these two girls together. And she knew what she had to do next.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The next morning, there was an email waiting in Charlie’s inbox from Ted Spadafore’s assistant. She’d attached Amber’s cell phone records for the past two months.
“I can’t believe he passed you off to an assistant,” Allie commented.
Charlie only shook her head, snatching up her computer and heading downstairs to the office to print out the call records. She took the warm pages from the printer tray and settled into her work, color-coding the numbers the same way she’d done with Kara’s calls. When that was finished, she compared the two lists, hoping to find a number in common between the girls.
After poring over the numbers for what seemed like hours, Charlie was forced to admit defeat. The call records didn’t share a single number in common.
Charlie shoved the pile of papers away in disgust. She was sick of dead ends. She wanted to feel like she was making progress for once. With that in mind, she got out her phone and called Will.
“I was just thinking about you,” he said, not bothering with hello. “I want to see you.”
She felt a thrill in her gut at that but forced herself to stay focused on the task at hand.
“Good. Because I have a favor to ask.”
“What kind of favor?” he asked.
“I need you to get me into the Red Velvet Lounge.”
“OK,” he said. No hesitation.
“Really? No argument? What kind of lawyer are you, anyway?”
“Hey, if a lady demands I take her to a venue where other ladies are removing their clothes, I don’t ask questions, and I certainly don’t argue.”
They made plans to meet up around eight—Will assured her the place would be busy that time of night—and said their goodbyes. Charlie ended the call, feeling giddy at the thought of seeing Will again.
Charlie climbed the rickety metal staircase back up to the apartment.
“You realize you always think of it as the apartment?”
“What?”
“The apartment. Not your apartment. Like you’ve still got one foot out the door. Ready to flee Salem Island if things get too intense or something.”
Charlie ignored this. Who cared what she called the place or how at home she felt… or didn’t? She was here, wasn’t she?
Besides that, she had bigger things to worry about, like how to disguise herself so the bouncers at the Red Velvet Lounge wouldn’t recognize her.
An hour before Will was scheduled to pick her up, Charlie started to get ready. She showered, shaved her legs, and slid into an old gold dress of Allie’s. Hair hanging in wet ropes, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror for a long while, trying to figure out what to do with it. Allie flitted around in the background, full of nervous energy.
“Go big or go home,” she said. “That’s my motto.”
Charlie pulled out a blow dryer, curling iron, hairspray, and a comb and got to work. Every time she paused in the process of teasing and spraying, Allie said, “More.”
When she finished, her hair was arranged in a wavy cloud that flipped to one side. She leaned forward and pinched a tuft of hair sticking up in the front. It was crispy from all the hairspray she’d used to plaster it in place.
“You look like you should be backstage at a Mötley Crüe concert,” Allie said. “Trying to blow, like, the guitarist or something.”
The description was accurate enough, Charlie thought. Between the dress, hair, and makeup, she was looking particularly late eighties or early nineties at the moment—a ploy she hoped would help her get past security at the club, especially with Will at her side as her fake date. She thought back to the last bit Allie had said.
“Wait. Why the guitarist?”
“I don’t know. He’s the least famous, I think. Don’t even know his name. Let’s be real. You’re not Nikki Sixx material, Charlie.”
Charlie looked at herself in the mirror again. She thought she looked sufficiently unrecognizable, though it was hard to be certain. The makeup probably disguised her the most. She’d applied the foundation in a thick enough coat that she could have spackled over a hole in a wall. It gave her face an overall plastic look. Fake and airbrushed.
A few minutes before eight, there was a knock on the door. Charlie snatched up a pair of heeled boots on her way to answer it.
Will stepped back from the door at the sight of her, eyes wide.
“Well, hello there.”
She spun in a circle.
“What do you think? Am I incognito?”
“Yeah, I don’t think we have to worry about you being recognized. The bouncer is going to take one look at you and think, ‘Paid company.’”
“Nice,” Charlie said, tugging on one of the boots. “Hooker chic. That’s definitely the look I was going for.”
“Whoa there, don’t sell yourself short. You don’t just look like any old hooker. You look like a very expensive hooker.”
Charlie rolled her eyes.
“Oh, that’s so much better. Thank you.”
When she had squeezed into the second boot, Will grasped her by the wrist and pulled her closer, pressing his mouth to hers. Her pulse sped up as his hands slid around her waist. She pressed her body against his, and for a moment she was tempted to yank him backward onto the mattress.
But eventually, something jolted her back to reality, because she caught herself taking a step away from him, breaking the spell.
“You’re going to mess up my makeup,” she said, wiping her lips. “I appreciate that you’re doing this, though. It’s a big help.”
“Hey, taking a beautiful woman on a date in the name of truth, justice, and the American way? Not a problem.”
Chapter Forty
A little thrill of excitement ran through Charlie as she crossed the parking lot to Will’s Lincoln. The club would have answers. It had to. And this time, she’d actually be able to get inside.
But almost as soon as Will steered the car onto the main road leading off Salem Island, Charlie’s confidence began to wane. The bouncers had caught her sneaking in. What if one of them recognized her, even with the disguise?
She flipped down the sun visor and checked her reflection in the small, lit mirror. Maybe it was the change in lighting, but her makeup was even more ridiculous than she remembered. Still, she barely recognized herself, so hopefully that meant the bouncers wouldn’t either. She folded the visor up and settled into her seat.
As they pulled into the lot of the Red Velvet Lounge, Charlie plucked a pair of sunglasses from her purse, trying to decide if wearing them at night would make her more or less conspicuous to the bouncer.
“Aw,” Allie said. “Seems like a waste to cover up your handiwork. I’ve seen you spread peanut butter on a sandwich more conservatively than the raccoon-looking crap you smudged around your eyes.”