“I’d been awake for seventy-two hours.” My voice cracks on the still air. “Look, I know I lost it. I was eating Adderall. I was a mess, okay? I admit it. I admitted it then.” And you, fucker, promised never to hold it against me. “But this is different.”
“It’s not a negotiation.” Joe’s face morphs, flowing into a stranger’s eyes and lips, a stranger’s sharp tongue and cruel expression. “I’ve already talked to Estelle about it. You’re going home. To Chicago.” He emphasizes this, as if I may have forgotten. “We’re all going home. I’ll continue to run the investigation from there. They’ll bring on Casey Scheiner as support.”
He might as well have punched me. The air goes straight out of my lungs.
“Fuck you.” I can only whisper it.
Joe sighs. He doesn’t even get angry. That makes it worse, in a way. “You’re not in trouble,” he says, as if that’s what I’m worried about. “You still have a job. But you’re going home, and you’re going to get well, and forget about fucking Kaycee Mitchell.” He starts to turn back to the door, then pivots around to face me again. “Oh. That reminds me. Kaycee called you. Apparently she lives in Florida now.” Joe’s smile is cold and narrow, bleak as thin-shaved ice. “She left a number for you, if you want to call her back.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I’m sitting in my car staring at the sun reflecting off the glass of Sunny Jay’s and my fingers are shaking so badly I twice misdial the number Joe has given me, reaching first a Florida tanning salon and then a man who fires off some quick Spanish at me before hanging up. My throat is dry as dust. I wish I had something to drink, a beer, a shot, something, but if I drank now it would mean I was really falling apart, and I’m not.
I won’t.
I can’t be.
The third time’s the charm. I close my eyes and feel my heart heavy in my throat. Count the ringtones. One, two, three, four. She picks up after four, and a bad feeling stutters in my chest.
“Hello?” Kaycee’s voice is lower and raspier than I remember. A voice you expect to hear whispering dirty things on a phone sex line. Still, my heart beats faster just hearing it. I can’t say it isn’t her. I thought I would know instantly.
“Is this Kaycee Mitchell?” I ask, and I hold my breath, waiting for her reply.
“You got her. Who is this?”
I go silent, suddenly dizzy.
“Umm…This is Abby Williams,” I say, and she laughs, and I hold my breath again, trying to pin the sound to my memory.
“Abby. Wow. You sound different.” This is either the truth or some perverse form of cleverness. Or both.
“Where are you?” I ask her, and although the area code was one for South Florida, I pray for a wild second she’ll surprise me and tell me she’s come home, like me. Just like that, the urge to see her—not so I can prove anything, but just because—stretches up from a dark space and puts a hand around my thoughts.
“Not far from Sarasota. Been here for a couple of years now. I moved around a lot after I left Barrens.”
Sarasota. A sudden sense of déjà vu momentarily doubles my vision. Sheriff Kahn just returned from Sarasota. Coincidence?
“Why did you leave?” I blurt out.
“Why not?” Kaycee says, with another laugh. “I always wanted to. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Danforth used to catch me trying to sneak out the windows when I used the bathroom pass. Even in third grade, I always wanted out of there.”
I had forgotten Mrs. Danforth, and how Kaycee used to try to shimmy out the windows next to the gym during the school day since the doors were manned by a rotating list of hall monitors. Sometimes she even made it.
I fumble to punch the window down, but still I can’t get enough air. It’s her. It has to be her. Kaycee ran, like everyone said, and I’m wrong, and probably going crazy. Kaycee is alive, sun-kissed, still beautiful; Kaycee is lounging on a patio or sitting by a pool somewhere south of Sarasota. There was no deeper meaning to any of it. She just left. She shook off Barrens like a sweep of dust. She never looked back.
And in this, too, she proved she was better than me.
“Who told you I was looking for you?” I ask, through the leaden feeling in my chest.
“Misha,” she answers, after a pause.
“She told me she never spoke to you,” I say.
“I asked her to lie.” Kaycee says this casually, easily, as if it should be obvious. “I didn’t want my dad knowing where I was, or bugging her to give me messages, or asking me for money, or any of that.”
A stupidly easy answer that never even occurred to me. Of course Kaycee wouldn’t have wanted her dad to have any way of tracking her—he was half the reason she was running in the first place.
Easy arithmetic. So why do I feel that she’s the one lying?
“So you had questions for me?” Kaycee asks.
“I just wanted to understand why,” I say. “Why you lied about being sick. Why you ran off without a word.”
Kaycee sighs. Behind her, a man’s voice is barely audible. I imagine her tilting her head away from the phone, to listen for a husband or boyfriend calling her inside.
Or, maybe, to listen for instructions.
The idea comes to me suddenly, impossible to dislodge.
“Look.” Kaycee presses her mouth up close to the receiver. “I don’t remember why I did any of it, okay? That’s the truth. It was a long time ago. I was screwed up. I wanted attention. Maybe I thought there was money in it.”
She might as well be reading from a book: All the Reasons Kaycee Mitchell Might Have Run Away.
“I’m sorry,” she says, a little quieter, and the whole world goes white for a moment. “I’m sorry for everyone I hurt and all the people who wasted their time looking for me. I’m sorry for you, Abby.”
“Don’t be.” Alarms are blaring in my head.
Kaycee Mitchell is sorry.
But Kaycee Mitchell is never sorry. I never once heard her say the word.
She missed recess for a whole week rather than apologize to Matt Granger for stealing his crayons. She couldn’t apologize. She didn’t have it in her.
Kaycee Mitchell is immune to guilt.
Whoever’s on the other end of the line, it isn’t Kaycee Mitchell.
“Well, look, you know where to find me,” she says.
“Just one more thing.” My heart is beating so heavy and huge I can barely breathe around it. “It’s stupid, I know. But I’ve always been curious.” One, two, three heartbeats. Sun streaks through the windshield and across my lap. I remember the warmth of Chestnut curled beside me on the front porch. “What really happened to Chestnut?”
There’s a long moment of silence.
Then Kaycee again—or whoever is pretending to be Kaycee—this time sounding uneasy. “It was a long time ago…”
“Does that mean you don’t remember?” Beyond the windshield, the world goes on.
She gives a staccato laugh. “Remind me.”
“My dog,” I say shortly. “The one you killed.”
There’s another short silence. “I have to go,” Kaycee says abruptly. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” she says. There’s that word again, sorry.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “You did enough.”
—
Someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to prove that Kaycee’s alive.