It was the typical bedroom of a modern affluent teen, with the requisite sound and video systems, the laptop with its webcam, a wardrobe with a minimalist collection of clothes.
Arielle’s bookshelves included books on the Holocaust—How Dark the Heavens; From That Time and Place; How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust—sprinkled among the novels of her childhood. The seven books in Boadicea Jones’s Carmilla series held pride of place, but she’d branched into other vampire novels, like the original Dracula. A collection of stuffed animals, including a large bright-eyed raven, looked down on her bed from a shelf at the foot.
“Okay, Nia. Let’s see what you two girls have been talking about this week,” Diane said.
I took Nia’s place at the desk and scrolled through the correspondence. They e-mailed each other four or five times a day, nothing compared to the texts they would have sent, but they still managed to fill each other in on the minutiae of their lives. Arielle’s included volunteer work at the Malina Foundation, a day’s sailing with an aunt and uncle, a trip to Ravinia, where a famed singer who knew her mother had entertained them with a late supper. Nia had gone to campaign events in Kankakee and Edwardsville with her mother, had done data entry at the campaign office, and gone for a long bike ride with Nolan Spaulding and Jessie Morgenstern—Loser crybabies!
Last night at ten-thirty, Arielle had written, Surprise message from one of our Ravens. Very mysterious, she wouldn’t ID herself. Got to go out, call the landline if you get this message before one a.m.
Nia and Diane were reading over my shoulder.
“One of your Ravens?” I asked. “Would that be Nolan or Jessie?”
Nia’s oval face was scrunched into a circle of worry. “It could be them, or Tyler.”
“Anyone in your Carmilla group except you and Arielle, in other words.”
Nia nodded.
“Any idea what this was about?”
“No,” she whispered. “It’s the first time I even saw the message. Mom woke me up to tell me about Arielle, and I didn’t log on or anything before Diane and I left home.”
I looked back up through the messages but didn’t see anything from the other girls in the Carmilla book club. “How would she have gotten the message?” I asked Nia.
“On her cell phone. It was only my number that Aunt Julia blocked, just while we did our punishment for breaking curfew and—and lying, and stuff.”
“I’ll call my cousin. She might have heard from another girl in the group and not connected the dots when I woke her this morning. And even if no one called Petra, she can help us reach all the girls in the Malina club to see who contacted Arielle. But we really need the police involved,” I added to Diane. “They can get a log of calls to Arielle’s phone fast.”
“I’ll go down and tell Julia,” Diane said. “I don’t know why she’s dragging her feet on this. Nia, you come with me: you need to tell Julia everything you just said to us. At least we know Arielle wasn’t coerced into leaving.”
We didn’t know that: we knew only that Arielle had left the house under her own steam, but the video footage already told us that. Anyone could have texted her, pretending to be part of the Malina group. I didn’t say this to Nia—she was too scared already.
I phoned Petra and explained what I wanted.
“I’m all over it,” Petra said. “I’ll call them all until I find which one contacted Arielle. I’ve been feeling totally useless and scared.”
“You and me both, babe,” I said. “You and me both.”
32.
TRUNK LINE
WHILE I WAITED TO HEAR BACK FROM MY COUSIN, I TROLLED through Arielle’s computer, looking for any mention of Miles Wuchnik. I went back two months but didn’t see e-mails from or about him. Nor had she gone to his website. The only messages she’d sent yesterday had been to Nia. Any other friends she could still have reached by text.
I realized I’d only gone as far back as early May, around the time Wuchnik had first visited Ruhetal. My unconscious mind was insisting on a connection between Arielle and Wuchnik, despite Mr. Contreras’s suggestion that Wuchnik might have been horning in on a drug ring out at Ruhetal.
I conscientiously scrolled through Arielle’s e-mails all the way back to the first of the year. I didn’t see anything of interest, except Arielle’s efforts to interview the author of the Carmilla novels. She’d done a school project on the Queen of the Night books, and Boadicea Jones, or an assistant, had sent back answers to Arielle’s questions—gracious of a writer who was probably deluged with fan mail.
I felt agitated and immobile at the same time; going through websites was treading time, but I didn’t know what else to do right now.
The sites Arielle had visited repeatedly dealt with genealogy and the Holocaust. She had spent a lot of time at the Holocaust Museum site, and had even e-mailed them, careful not to trumpet her connection to vast wealth.