“No—”
“And what does any of this have to do with Veronica Cruz? What’s the supposed connection to her? She’s not even blond.”
He wasn’t listening to me. I needed to try a different tack. “Look. You were there with me in the woods.”
“Yes.”
“Was I wrong?”
He sighed again. “No.”
“I think Kenny Brayfield has been hurting people in Belmont for the last sixteen years,” I said. “Young women. Seventeen, eighteen years old. Like Veronica. Please. You have to see the connection. Two days after we find those bones and another girl is missing?”
Now he shook his head, leaning in closer to me. “Don’t talk about that around these people.”
“Do you hear what I’m saying?”
But then Amy Wexford walked back into the room, holding a five-by-seven plastic frame. “This is from picture day at school,” she said. “Will this work?”
Meeks and I both looked at the photo.
Veronica’s hair had been honey-colored at the beginning of the school year, cut into bangs. I tried to catch the cop’s eye but he wouldn’t let me.
“Let’s make a list of your daughter’s friends, how about,” he said, turning away from me altogether.
I ground my teeth together so hard my sinuses ached. Then I pushed out of the house, unable to stand still. I walked across the Evanses’ lawn, bits of dew-damp grass sticking to my boots, and I was about to knock on the door when Joshua pulled it open and grabbed my arm. Despite the cold temperature, he was sweating and the hand gripping my elbow was trembling slightly like he was tapped into the same well of concern that I was, only he had gotten there by way of personal experience rather than professional instinct. I wasn’t feeling very professional though. I felt like a disaster zone. I followed Joshua into the house.
“Are you doing okay?” I said.
He sat down heavily in the recliner. “Roxane, I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell my kid to stay calm, it’ll all be okay, because I’ve lived through this before and—”
“Hey.” I crouched on the carpet in front of him and took his hand. “I know. I know what you’re thinking right now. I’m not going to give you the Pollyanna routine. But I do want you to stay calm for Shelby, okay? Let me do the worrying.”
“I hardly know you,” he whispered. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “And you knew my father. People have been telling me I’m just like him my whole life. So we’ve known each other forever, Joshua.”
He nodded, squeezing my hand. “Okay.”
“I want you to stick close to your daughter until we find Veronica.”
“Okay.”
“I need to talk to her for a few minutes and then I’m going to leave to go check into some things,” I said. “But you can call me if anything happens, and I’ll be back later.”
“Okay. Thank you. Thank you for—” He stopped. “Thank you.”
By my estimation, all I’d done for anyone so far was stir shit up in Belmont. But I nodded and stood up, my head pounding.
“Shelby’s in her room,” he added, pointing toward the hallway.
I found her sitting on a bed with a bright orange bedspread, an old, greying black Lab sprawled there beside her. The dog looked at me without interest. Shelby’s face was illuminated by the screen of the computer propped on her lap. “I’m looking on her Facebook and Twitter and Instagram to see if she posted anything,” she said as I stood in the door. “But she didn’t.”
“Can I come in?”
Shelby nodded. She put the computer down beside her and stroked the dog’s head.
“I want to ask you some things,” I said. “And please be honest—don’t worry about getting Veronica in trouble.”
“Okay.”
Thinking that Colleen Grantham and Mallory Evans both had another connection besides Kenny, I said, “Does Veronica use drugs?”
Her eyes got wide for a second. “Not really,” she said softly. “She used to smoke weed but she has to take lithium now so basically everything messes with her. So she doesn’t anymore.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Crushes? Maybe on an older guy?”
“Just Aaron.”
“Do you know his last name?”
“No. He works there, at Insomnia. He’s just this guy with long hair and a pierced lip. I don’t even know why she likes him.”
“Do you think she might have gone there with anyone else?”
“No. Everyone else sucks here. She had—she used to be kind of popular, like more popular than me, and then at the end of sophomore year she started getting these mood swings really bad, she’d be happy and singing and dancing in class one day and then the next—she used to keep this, this little razor blade in her purse and she’d … you know, she hurt herself sometimes, she would cut her thigh. And I didn’t know what to do because she didn’t want to talk about it.” She looked down at the bedspread. “And then one time we were at the mall with some people and she had this total panic attack and they called an ambulance for her and stuff. She had to go be in a hospital for like the rest of the school year. And after that everybody kind of treated her like she was broken. She’s not broken, she’s not crazy, it’s just brain chemicals and stuff. But she pretty much only hangs out with me now. She—she knows I worry about her, though. That’s why she promised she would always answer her phone.” Shelby took a deep breath and blurted, “I love her. And not just like a friend.” Her voice was wobbly, vulnerable.
I briefly closed my eyes. This poor kid. I could tell that she’d never said this to anyone before, not even Veronica. I thought about being seventeen myself, when Catherine’s absence from school felt like the world was ending. And that was nothing like this. Shelby had to feel like her universe had flipped over. I wanted to say something reassuring, so I tried, “Shelby, it’s okay.”
She covered her face with her hands, not buying it. “What is?”
I took a deep breath. I doubted that I’d ever been the kind of person who would know what to say here, but I especially wasn’t that person right now. I said, “I don’t want to sound like an after-school special, with the whole it gets better thing. So I’ll tell you that falling in love is always the worst. But as far as it goes with liking girls? It does get better. I can tell you that from experience.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “My dad, I can’t tell him. About … me. And I know he’s just thinking about my mom right now and that’s so messed up, what happened. I don’t remember her. I don’t want to think about that. But I want to go out and look and he won’t let me and he doesn’t understand anything and I’m just going to go crazy, I swear to God.”
“Look,” I said, “you’re going to get through this. You just have to stay as calm as you can. I know that’s a tall order, but making yourself sick with worry isn’t going to help her. After we find her”—I said it with optimism I didn’t feel—“then you can deal with the rest of it. Okay?”