“Oh Roxie,” my mother said, “he didn’t mean anything by that, please, sit down, your brother’s just worried about you.”
I gave her a quick hug and walked out, adding Matt to the list of people I was currently, acutely mad at. Even though he was right. It wasn’t just something to say, either. I’d always been preternaturally good at finding things and finding things out, even as a kid, and Matt had benefited more than once. A wallet, the name of a girl he liked at the Y. Later: a witness to a hit-and-run car accident that left him with a broken leg, a stolen bike for one of his girlfriends. It was the only thing I was ever good at. And I’d been successful, until I wasn’t anymore. Until my father died and I forgot how to do my job at exactly the moment when I needed most to do it well.
Outside I pulled my coat on, feeling startled by myself, like an animal spooked by its own reflection. I needed to put Veronica Cruz out of my mind. It didn’t matter, I tried telling myself. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know Shelby or Joshua. They were just people I’d come across on a case. Veronica probably just ran away. She had big dreams—fashion design, getting out of town. She described Belmont as a shithole, after all. That’s all this was. I started walking down the street to my car, but then Andrew called my name.
I turned around and said nothing.
He was lighting a cigarette. “Seriously,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I didn’t know where to start. “I’m just not in the mood for his sober-living bullshit tonight,” I said instead, wondering for maybe the first time ever if Matt actually had a point.
Andrew kindly let me off the hook. “Yeah, he’s in rare form,” he said. “Before you got here, I wanted to beat him with that Midleton bottle. She didn’t even see me bring it down, but of course Matt finked on me.”
“You know she’s going to pour every drop of it down the sink later,” I said.
“If I don’t get any,” Andrew said, in a decent approximation of my father’s voice, “nobody gets any.”
It wasn’t even funny but I laughed, a sad, quiet laugh that made me feel like my ribs were imploding.
“That sink,” my brother said next. He pulled out a wallet and counted out seven hundred-dollar bills. “Here. Paid in full.”
“You only have to cover half,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Andrew said. “You can make an appointment for the plastic surgeon on me. Listen, do you want to get into something?”
“Like what?”
“Food, maybe, since you didn’t eat America’s Bounty in there.”
“We should probably go back in.”
“No, no, we already made it out,” he said. “Besides, you don’t want to risk being there if Tom shows up, do you?”
I cleared my throat. For the first time, I shared Andrew’s feelings about that. “Not a chance,” I said.
*
We went to Little Palace and sat at the bar. I ordered the fried chicken sandwich and a side of mac and cheese and a whiskey on the rocks. The food was good and greasy and made me feel slightly more human. It was pleasantly loud and crowded in the restaurant, and no one looked twice at my cheekbone.
“I knew I should’ve said no to this case,” I said. “I had a weird feeling at the beginning.”
“I remember,” Andrew said. “You told me you thought it might turn into something, and you were afraid you’d mess it up.”
“And I did.”
“What have you messed up?” Andrew said. “Other than Matt’s imaginary chances with this Danielle.”
I pointed to my eye. “In a development that will shock no one,” I said, “this did not happen while hiking.”
Andrew smiled. “I’m scandalized,” he said. “So are you going to tell me?”
“I got arrested.”
“What, for getting into a brawl at that party?”
“Trespass,” I said. “And, resisting arrest, I guess. That’s where this comes in.”
My brother stopped smiling. “Shit,” he said. “A cop did that to you?”
“Belmont police,” I said, “yeah.”
“Shit,” he said again. “What did you do, exactly?”
“I was trespassing,” I said. “But the reason I was there, the thing I thought could have happened—I don’t even think it happened now, and it had nothing to do with Matt’s friend even if it did. So I wasted ten days, got my ass kicked, and I didn’t solve shit. That’s what I messed up.” And a seventeen-year-old girl has been missing for forty-eight hours, I didn’t say. That wasn’t my fault, but I sure as hell hadn’t helped.
“Did you file a complaint?”
I just looked at him.
“Well, don’t let old Test Pavement rattle your confidence, Rox. If he knew you got hurt while you were working on this, you know he’d feel terrible.”
I didn’t care if Matt felt terrible or not. “You’re never going to get over the name, are you?”
“The Test Pavements. No. Never. It’s the single greatest slash worst thing I’ve ever heard. I cannot wait till Friday.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“I don’t want to drive all the way out to Trabue or Renner Road.”
“I’ll drive you, then. It’ll be great. And he didn’t mean it, what he said.”
“Why are you defending him?”
Andrew finished his drink too. “You have to forgive people for being who they are,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll just make yourself crazy. Do you want to do another here, or do you want to go somewhere else? Guy from the hotel is doing a poker night tonight.”
Veronica was gone and we were talking about poker. “I don’t like cards, you know that.”
“We’d clean up,” Andrew said. “He’s an idiot.”
I shook my head and chewed the rest of my ice. I wanted something else to happen, some other kind of stimulation I could stuff into my brain to stop the looping thoughts about Shelby, her father, Veronica, the assholes of the Belmont police department whom I had no choice but to trust to find her. If she wanted to be found at all. Which she probably didn’t. Right? She was probably in Manhattan by now, eating a vegan cronut and doodling in her sketch book. “Let’s go to this party I heard about,” I said.
“Whose party?”
I looked down at the smear of mayonnaise on my empty plate. “Friend of Catherine’s,” I said.
Andrew didn’t say anything right away. “So she’s a thing again, then,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“You really want to go to a party looking like you just got mugged?”
“Oh, whatever, a minute ago you wanted me to go to a stranger’s poker game.”
“Roxane, you’re a grown-ass woman and you can do whatever you want,” he said, “but you’re also my baby sister and I worry about you. Catherine isn’t a good person. I mean, she’s just not. She’s a selfish cunt.”
I didn’t argue that. “What about forgiving people for being who they are?” I said.
“If you were to subscribe to that all of a sudden,” he said, “Catherine Walsh is not the one you should start with.”