THIS WASN’T the story, of course; it was the hiatus in the drama—in Cassie’s real-life drama, so far from a game of pretend. She slept on his bed in her clothes, without stirring, from that late Wednesday afternoon until late Thursday morning. He didn’t tell his parents. He pretended to be sick, and skipped dinner, went downstairs only to say he was going to bed, and he stayed near her, eventually sleeping on the floor with a cushion beneath his head. She’d made him promise, when she arrived, that he wouldn’t tell Bev she was there; which meant that Peter’s parents couldn’t know, or they’d insist. Cassie was an official missing person, after all.
“But you have to understand,” he said to me, “she said it was life or death; she said, she insisted, that it would kill her to go home.”
“That they’d kill her?” I asked. When Peter and I had this conversation, Cassie had gone missing again, was missing, we realized, for real (though the first time had felt real too, until she came back). We had no idea what had happened to her.
The official story—Bev’s story—was that they’d had an argument, another argument, the hundred thousandth argument, and that Cassie had stormed off. It seemed almost certain that an argument was part of the truth, and almost as certain that it wasn’t the whole truth. Surely, we thought, sinister Anders Shute must have a part in the truth.
“She didn’t say that,” Peter insisted, “she said it would kill her. Which kind of made sense once she told me the story.”
CASSIE’S STORY, according to Peter, was this: back in the winter, probably around the time that she had come to my house in the snowstorm, her life at the Burnes house had become unbearable. She couldn’t do anything right—Bev and Anders and, it seemed, God himself conspired against her—and Cassie, without the Morsel, without me, without Peter, was on the verge of despair.
I try to imagine feeling lonely the way she felt lonely, then. I’m not sure that I can. I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private. For so many years it didn’t matter; but then she was alone, in her feline nature, and lonely. I should have been able to sense how it was. She was too proud to tell me, or Peter for that matter; and I was too proud and too wounded to look.
But Cassie had always had her guardian angel. She’d always believed in him. He called her baby doll, he protected her from harm. He saw the sheen of her, where Anders and Bev saw only tarnish; she had faith in his faith. She wasn’t crazy; she’d been told he was dead, but in order to find her path, her way out of Royston, she decided to search for Clarke Burnes, to see what she could find out.
She’d looked before. We’d looked together once, on my mom’s computer, when we were younger. But she told Peter it had become a periodic thing, since Shute moved in, to check and see if she could find traces of her real father. She wanted to figure out, she said, who she was—and who she could become. She’d Googled his name a hundred times and there had never been anything that pertained. A Harvey Clarke Burnes of Rome, Georgia, and a Lucile Clarke Burnes, long deceased, and an Ann Clark Burnes, with no e, very much alive, with an account on Facebook. Documents involving a Mr. Clarke and a Mr. Burnes placed their names misleadingly side by side, so that they’d appeared on the search and caused her heart to beat faster for a minute. But this time, in the winter of 2013, when she Googled Clarke Burnes, she found—not on the first page of results, but on the fifth—a reference to an Arthur Burnes: “Coach” Arthur Burnes, “aka Coach, aka Captain Clarke, aka Cap’n Crunch.” It was the caption to a photo in the Bangor Daily News, of Bangor, Maine, from a few months before, when the Bangor High School football team had won the league final. The image showed entire the football team, along with Arthur Burnes, aka Captain Clarke, their senior coach. He was also, she discovered when she typed in the name “Arthur C. Burnes” along with “Bangor,” a beloved math teacher at the city high school, where he’d taught for the past fourteen years.
She studied the photo from the paper; she zoomed in close. Captain Clarke was small and blurry; when she zoomed in he was larger but also blurrier. A burly man grinning, with a bald head, plump cheeks, and a close graying beard. His varsity jacket pulled taut over his belly. His arms, in the photo, looked short, slightly apish, crossed awkwardly over his chest. Was this the floppy-haired guy in the flannel shirt in front of a long-ago barn? Who could say? How could it be?
But imagine, imagine for a second what it felt like to Cassie, even the possibility—baffling, horrifying, miraculous—that the grinning Captain Clarke might be, could be, maybe, in that awful winter, couldn’t not be the man she told Peter she’d never really, in her deepest heart, believed to be dead: her father.
Cassie didn’t tell anyone about her investigations. Convinced that Anders spied on her phone and computer and checked all her searches and hacked into her accounts, she deleted this from her laptop and thereafter Googled Captain Clarke only from the school library. She told Peter that it was amazing what you could learn about someone if you did a little digging.
Arthur C. Burnes was forty-one years old, married since 2001 to Anna Maria Machado, thirty-six, a civil servant with the city of Bangor, working in the tax department. Cassie imagined he was a mild joker, that he liked his food. Anna Maria—Cassie decided she used both names: why else would they both be listed?—was a great cook, lots of meat in sauce, and kindly, with a little accent, maybe rolling her r’s.
They had four kids, aged three to eleven, and they lived at 36 Spring Street in a pale-blue split-level ranch with a basketball hoop above the garage and, on the Google street view, what looked like a husky playing on the front lawn. The husky, of course, might just have been a neighborhood dog that wandered into the frame as the Google camera van drove by—a trespasser dog. Hard to say.