“Oh really,” Paula said in a tense voice. She was registering the fact that Max had broken up with her—his girlfriend of two years—for nothing. Less than nothing. It had to hurt.
“You know, after Sarah went missing, the cops asked me a lot of questions. Max and me. But especially me. Do you know why?”
I tried to think back to the days right after Sarah disappeared. They were such a blur. “Because you called her that day?” I guessed.
“Because my fingerprints were on her bike. Do you remember that?”
I did remember. “Yeah, but you had borrowed it or something.”
The old woman moved away and Paula picked up a marker, yanking the top off like she was angry. She handed the marker to me.
“That’s what I told them, that I had used her bike, but I felt like they didn’t believe me. For a long time, it seemed like they thought I had something to do with Sarah going missing, because we were fighting. Or that Max did. I was questioned twice, once with a lawyer, at the police station. Do you know what that’s like?”
I had to shake my head. “I’m sure it sucked,” I offered. I looked at the board, trying to figure out where to put my name on the bracket.
Paula let out a light laugh. “I had to take a lie detector test. And then that reporter with the huge article, making it look like Max and I were murderers. ‘Sucked’ doesn’t quite cover it,” she said. “To be honest, part of me was glad that Sarah was gone—I thought she had probably run away again, but left Max here this time. Maybe he was too small-town for her. I even thought that maybe you had helped her.” She looked at me closely. “That’s why I didn’t tell the cops everything about that day. But they knew I was hiding something. My story just didn’t check out.”
I held the marker over the board, scared to even write my name. For a moment, I almost wrote Sarah Morris. Her name was a constant, running in the back of my mind, and had been for four years. With Paula standing next to me now, whispering into my ear, I was the one in danger of disappearing—didn’t anyone see that?
Paula leaned in and whispered, “Do you know what I said when I called Sarah that day?”
I didn’t answer her, just kept my eyes forward. Nico, I finally scrawled. Nico Morris.
“No one knows. No one but me. And Sarah.” Her tone changed, her voice grew darker as she whispered. “I told her I was going to be waiting for her at the park. I was so angry at her, I could have killed her.” Paula’s whisper became a hiss. “But I didn’t have to.”
I focused on breathing, wondering what she was going to say next.
Paula looked around us, as if to make sure no one could hear what she was saying. “And now, Sarah is back. Someone kidnapped her, that’s the story—isn’t it? And took her to Florida?”
I knew it wasn’t really a question from her sarcastic tone, so I focused on the board, slowly writing my contact info into the bracket for my age group.
“The thing is, Nico”—Paula leaned close to my ear—“as soon as I saw her, I knew. And you knew too, didn’t you?”
I felt blood rushing into my head, a pulsing sound in my ears. “Knew what?”
Paula took the marker from my shaking hand and put the top back on. She carefully placed it at the bottom of the dry-erase board before answering.
“She’s not Sarah.”
I stopped breathing.
I felt as if the ground below me would swallow me up, like a big black hole was opening again, the hole Sarah left when she disappeared.
“So, who is that girl living in your house?”
SARAH
SHE SAID TO CALL her Ma, and so after that day, I did, when other people were around. I mostly called her by her first name when it was just us, though. And she called me by my name, the name my real mother had given me, even though I knew she hated it.
“You know what kind of name that is? A hippie name.” But she didn’t change it, she didn’t ask to change it, and she could have, when she took me for good. Instead, she shortened it to a nickname.
First we had to be interviewed, though, by the Very Special Visitor. This was the lady who came to the house and asked me all kinds of questions. But Ma had told me just what to say to everything. And she dressed me so that you couldn’t tell my arm had been broken or that I had burns on my back. And she braided my hair so you would never know that, at the age of five, I had cradle cap.
After the lady asked me lots of questions, she turned to Ma. “Do you think she’s ready to start kindergarten in the fall?” And Ma nodded her head.
“Oh, she’s a smart one, this girl, smarter than me. Show her that book you like so much, Liberty.”