“Meredith—” her mother said.
But she was already out of the van, her feet on the sidewalk, walking into the midst of it. Someone she didn’t know, a heavyset woman with huge glasses, thrust a yellow flyer into her hand. Here’s what all those selfies were good for. Lisa Bellow, bright eyes, all smiles, laid out in black and white across the 8?x11 that read MISSING.
Someone grabbed her arm. It was Evan.
“What’re you doing? They’re flipping out. You can’t—”
A horrible screech interrupted him. There was a man with a megaphone on the town hall steps.
“If you’re going door-to-door, please go as a team,” the man said. “We have as many flyers as you need. We’re trying to get one to every house in the county. But please go as a team. Do not go alone.”
She looked back down at the flyer.
TAKEN FROM CHESTNUT STREET DELI BARN ON WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8. 5'5", 110 LBS. BLOND HAIR, HAZEL EYES. LAST SEEN WEARING BLACK LEGGINGS, WHITE BLOUSE, AND GOLD SANDALS.
“If you are part of a search party please coordinate with the police so that we can cover as much ground as possible,” the man with the megaphone said. “This is a police investigation. They appreciate all the community support but we need to let them do their work.”
Who was this man? Meredith wondered. The mayor? Was this what county mayors did? She pushed through some people to get to the front of the crowd, though she didn’t know what she was going to do when she got there.
There were clots of her classmates and clots of parents and clots of teachers. It was a cool fall afternoon and the courtyard was lined with pumpkins and if you didn’t know what was happening you might imagine these people had all gathered for a Halloween parade, a fall festival, something celebratory.
Lisa’s best friend Becca Nichols was sitting on the bottom step of the town hall with a tall stack of yellow flyers beside her. There must have been a thousand of them, secured with a stone on top.
“Hey,” Meredith said. “Um . . . ”
Becca looked up. “Flyers?” Becca was in her algebra class. They saw each other every day, but in her eyes and her tone there was no acknowledgment that she even knew Meredith.
“Sure,” Meredith said. “Yeah.”
Becca slid a stack from under the stone. “Don’t go alone,” she said flatly.
“I won’t,” Meredith said. “I . . . my brother . . .” She looked around but couldn’t locate Evan. The crowd was thick; it had closed behind her and she could no longer see the street where she’d hopped from the van. It wasn’t a few hundred people, she realized. It was way more. One huge mass of bodies. She wondered if Evan could have gotten lost in a crowd so large. Would it be harder to find her with one eye? Where were her parents? Had they sent him after her and then gone to park? She was stupid to have leaped out of the van like that. A crowd like this—five hundred? seven hundred?—you could disappear into and it might be hours before anyone even knew you were missing.
Becca handed her the stack of flyers, which fluttered in the breeze as they passed from hand to hand, and Meredith turned from the steps. She saw the homeless man at the edge of the crowd. He was wearing a gray hoodie that was stained on the chest with something brown . . . coffee, it looked like from far off. She took a step toward him. Or maybe it wasn’t brown. Also, maybe it wasn’t a hoodie. The stain might have been red and the hoodie might have been a sweater. The homeless man had a black wool coat on over it so it was hard to tell. This was the black coat he always wore. Last winter, when it was in the single digits for two weeks straight, her father had gotten out of the car at the courthouse intersection and given the homeless man his green North Face winter jacket. They’d been on their way out to dinner, and Meredith had watched from the car as her father held the jacket out to the man, and the man had taken it warily from her father’s hand. But the next time they saw the man, a few days later, he was still in his black coat. “He probably sold your jacket,” her mother had said. “He probably traded it for drugs.”
Some people started singing “Amazing Grace.” A group of women. Who knew who they were or if they even knew Lisa. A few more people started singing, including some of her classmates and their parents. Out of the corner of her eye Meredith saw Becca stand up.
“Jesus,” Becca said. “Not again.”
Meredith turned from the steps and bumped into a man. He was tall and blond and smelled of cigarettes. He was too young to be anybody’s father.
“Easy, girl,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. She pulled away and turned left and there was Evan, his phone at his ear, shouting over the singing, “I’ve got her! I’ve got her!”
He slipped the phone in his pocket and smiled at her.
“Heart attacks all around,” he said.
She wanted to hug him but resisted. But she did not resist when he took her hand and led her through the singing crowd and back to the minivan.
?
“I’ve been trying to call you,” Jules said. “Your mom said you were sick.”
“Kind of,” Meredith said.
It was Saturday night. She was sitting in her room, on her bed. The new shoes were on the floor beside the bed, looking up at her. The stack of yellow flyers was on her desk. What was she supposed to do with them? Why had she even taken them from Becca Nichols? It wasn’t like she was going to go door-to-door herself, looking for Lisa. But it seemed horrible to throw them away or even put them in the recycling bin, so she’d just set them on her desk until she could figure out what to do with them.
Downstairs, her parents were watching something on television; they’d muted it as she’d passed, asked her if everything was okay, could they get her anything, blah blah blah.
“Oh my god, at school yesterday, oh my god,” Jules was saying. “People were freaking out all over the place. We had an assembly where they told us not to freak out, but the whole time it was totally obvious that everyone was freaking out, including the people telling us not to freak out. Only like half the school was even there because everybody’s parents are like oh my god, no way are you leaving this house.”
“Jules,” she said. “Listen.”
“Did your parents make you stay home? Or were you really sick?”
“Listen,” Meredith said. “I’m trying to tell you something.”
It wasn’t Jules she should have called. It was Kristy. Kristy was her better friend, probably her best friend. And Kristy was quieter, less dramatic, always more willing to listen without interruption. But had anything that had ever happened to her been more worthy of drama?
“It was me,” she said.
“What was you?”
“I was the other person in the Deli Barn. I’m the Other Customer.”
There was a long silence. Then:
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was there. It was me. I was there with Lisa, and the . . . person. I wasn’t in school Thursday or yesterday because I was in the hospital.”
“You’re in the hospital?”