Will was great at sports, but there was no parent to drive him to games or pay for his equipment. There was also the matter of the roadmap of scars on his body. If Will changed out in the locker room, someone would notice the obvious signs of abuse, and then a teacher would become involved, and the principal and social workers, and suddenly he would be put under a magnifying glass, which was the thing Will hated the most.
Anthony Figaroa clearly shared this same aversion to attention. Then again, so did his mother. Angie saw Jo’s charcoal-gray Range Rover inch along the drop-off lane. The same scene played out that Angie had witnessed the day before. Jo didn’t wave to the other mothers in the car pool. She didn’t speak to the Nazi with the sign who’d shooed Angie away. She made like Anthony. She kept her head down. She stayed in her lane. She dropped off her kid. She drove away. Going by yesterday, or any other day that Angie had watched her daughter, Jo would go home, and she wouldn’t go back out again until it was time to pick up Anthony.
Unless it was Thursday or Friday, the days she went to the grocery store and the dry cleaner, respectively. Angie had pictured a lot of things for her daughter, but never that she would turn into a hermit.
Angie’s car was pointed in the wrong direction to follow Jo. Another trip through the grassy divide landed her two cars behind the Range Rover, which was stopped at a red light. Jo’s blinker wasn’t on, which could mean that she was heading straight into the Peachtree Battle shopping center. Angie scanned the shops down the hill. This wasn’t Jo’s grocery day, and even if it was, she used the Kroger on Peachtree. Her dry cleaner was on Carriage Drive. The only business in the strip mall that was open this early was Starbucks.
The light changed. Jo drove across the intersection and turned into the Starbucks parking lot.
Angie followed at a distance, keeping another car between them. The lot was packed. Angie expected Jo to pull into the line at the drive-thru, but she circled a few times and found a spot.
‘Come on.’ Angie had to wait out a shuffling woman with her nose in her phone before she could exit the parking lot and find a space in front of the bank across the alley.
She got out of her car and darted toward the Starbucks. She didn’t realize what was about to happen until she saw Jo opening the glass door. She was going into a coffee shop. She would place her order at the counter. She would thank the woman behind the register. There would have to be some kind of conversation. Angie would finally hear Jo’s voice. This was why she had wanted the job at Kip’s in the first place—this moment, this space in time. She would hear her daughter speak. She would divine through some long-snuffed maternal instinct whether or not Jo was okay, and then Angie could get back to her regular life and never think about her lost daughter ever again.
Angie opened the door.
She was too late.
Jo had already placed her order. She was standing with the herd of coffee-buyers, waiting for the woman behind the counter to call her name.
Angie mumbled a curse as she got in line for the register. The guy ahead of her had apparently never been to a Starbucks before. He was asking questions about sizes. Angie pulled a bottle of overpriced apple juice from the fridge. She glanced at Jo, then let herself stare openly.
She wasn’t the only person appraising her daughter. Every man in the room had noticed her. Jo was beautiful. She had a way of drawing your eye. What was troubling was that she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. At twenty-seven, Angie had used her looks like a battering ram. There wasn’t a door she couldn’t break open.
‘Josephine?’ the barista called. ‘Tall soy latte.’
Josephine, not Jo.
She picked up the cup. She didn’t speak. Her smile was stressed, obviously forced. She took the latte to the back of the store. She sat down at the long bar overlooking the parking lot. There was an empty stool one seat down. Angie checked to make sure the cashier wasn’t looking. She ducked out of line and took the empty seat before anyone else could.
The bar was narrow, maybe a foot wide. Outside the window, cars snaked toward the drive-thru window. The guy between Angie and her daughter was typing on his computer. She glanced down at the screen and assumed he was writing the great American novel. At a Starbucks. Just like Hemingway.
Angie opened her juice. She had done private eye work off and on for years. There was a go-bag in her trunk with the tools of the trade. Duct tape, a small tarp in case it rained, a good camera, a directional microphone, four tiny cameras that could be hidden inside potted plants and air vents. None of which could help her at this late date. She spotted a newspaper a few seats down. She bumped the woman on the other side of her, nodded at the paper, and it was silently passed her way.
Hemingway, meet Sam Spade.
Angie skimmed the headline on the front page. She chanced another look at her daughter. The cup caught her attention. JOSEPHINE was written in black marker. Angie knew there was a lot in a name. Her mother’s pimp had called her Angela. Even now, if anyone said the name, bile would shoot into her mouth.
Angie took a deep breath. She let her eyes travel up.
Jo was staring out the window. Angie followed her sight line to the white stucco wall of the strip mall. The girl was waiting for something. Thinking about something. Upset about something. Her eyes did not move from the wall. She was sitting on her hands. Steam rose from her untouched coffee. Her phone was face up on the bar in front of her. She was tense. Angie felt like she could reach across Hemingway and actually touch the woman’s anxiety.
But that wasn’t what she was here for.
Angie opened the newspaper. She pretended to be interested in world events. And then she actually got interested in world events, because nothing else was happening. The woman next to her got up and left. The line at the counter thinned, then disappeared. The parking lot began to empty. Finally Hemingway moved to an oversized chair a few tables away.
Angie turned the page in her newspaper. FINANCE.
She glanced at Jo.
Her daughter had not moved. She was still sitting on her hands. Still staring at the blank wall. Still almost shaking with anxiety.
They were the only two people left at the bar. Angie got up and moved a few stools away because that’s what a normal person would do. She spread out the newspaper. She wasn’t Meryl Streep. She couldn’t pretend to be interested in finance. She turned to the LIFE section. She reached for her juice, but so much time had passed that the bottle was warm.
Angie’s eyes started to blur from reading the tiny words. She looked out the window and blinked. She watched a car pull into the street. She listened to Hemingway banging away at his laptop.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jo jump. The move was almost imperceptible. A half-second later, Angie heard Jo’s phone ring. Not a ring exactly, more like a noise you’d hear from a 1950s sci-fi movie.
FaceTime.
Jo’s hands were shaking when she accepted the video call. She held the phone low in front of her face. Angie couldn’t see the image of the caller, nor could she hear that person’s voice. Jo had slipped in earbuds. She held the tiny mic up to her mouth and said, ‘I’m here.’
Angie pulled her own phone out of her purse. She tapped some buttons. She pretended to toss the phone back into her purse, but the move was practiced. The phone landed at an angle, camera facing toward Jo. Angie couldn’t look at what was happening live, but she could watch the video later.
‘Yes,’ Jo said. ‘Do you see?’
Angie’s vision tunneled on the newsprint. She felt a pain in her ear. She was straining to hear Jo’s voice, but it was little more than a whisper.
Jo said, ‘Yes. I understand.’
Angie flipped the paper over. She ran her finger down a line of text that she could not read. Jo’s voice was still low, but she sounded panicked, afraid.
‘I understand.’
Who could make Jo sound scared? Marcus Rippy came to mind. He liked being in charge. Jo was his type. So was Angie, but even at twenty-seven, Angie could handle guys like that. She didn’t think little Josephine from Thomaston could handle anything.