It’s a long shot; if her name were on this site, it would’ve turned up in a search. As expected, nothing. “Maybe it just means no companies have done a background check on her in a while.”
I sit on the bed beside her and gobble up what crumbs of info there are. Relatives: Michael Ward, Elizabeth Ward. Married Name: Lillian Eugene. Address history: Fitchburg, MA; Shrewsbury, MA; Worcester, MA.
Worcester is just one town farther than Shrewsbury.
“Look for Lillian Eugene on Facebook, and see if there are any of them in Worcester.”
“One sec . . . okay, ta-da! Here’s one in Worcester. And jeez . . .” She frowns. “She only has thirteen friends. Poor lady.”
I take the iPad. Lillian Eugene’s account looks like the kind a grown-up sets up for the sole purpose of playing Candy Crush. There are regular status updates, totally factual statements like “What a hot day it is today.” “Went to see a movie last night and liked it very much.” And the latest: “Spring-cleaning my classroom. Work on a Sunday morning is not much fun.” She has thirteen friends indeed, and almost no comments. Talk about shouting into the void. None of these friends are Sidonie Anything, or Anybody Faye. I open her photos page to find exactly one picture, her profile, a close-up of her face. Middle-aged, with very short, wispy hair more ashen than blond, and webs of wrinkles in the corners of her colorless gray eyes.
“Is it her?” Jessa plunks a finger down on Lillian Eugene’s face.
“I can’t tell.” I hold the screen closer, searching for a trace of me in her. It’s a hard sell. I look a lot like my dad, who inherited his facial features and dark, straight hair from my Chinese grandmother, then passed a weaker strain on to me. We have the same brown eyes and thin noses and natural frowns. But maybe there’s something in Lillian’s round cheeks and narrow chin, a heart-shaped face, like Mom’s in her picture in A Time to Chill. Like mine. Dad doesn’t have one, for sure. “It could be. I mean, it might.”
“What is she, your aunt?”
“Second cousin.”
“Okay, so send her a message.”
I float my finger over the screen, hesitating. It just doesn’t seem right. In Nancy Drew’s day she had to worry whether suspicious Taylor Sinclair would spot the beam of her flashlight as she followed him through the mysterious Mayan exhibit at the museum. Now I have to worry whether to tip off my second cousin that I’m Facebook-stalking her. “I don’t know.”
“Think about it. My morning breath is distracting me.”
While Jessa goes and washes up in the bathroom and does what she does to pop out looking like America’s Next Top Model, I sit cocooned in her flowered quilt, trying to make her iPad do my bidding. I might be the only kid in the school district who doesn’t know how to use one. A few birthdays ago I complained to Dad, but he just patted me on the head and said, “Suffering helps the soul to grow.”
Flicking clumsily through Lillian’s profile, I bring up her contact info. There’s no phone number. But in the employment section, it lists St. Augustine High in Worcester. I check her status update about spring cleaning and see that it was posted less than an hour ago.
As I’m banging on the bathroom door, Jessa emerges, face dripping and hair piled atop her head with a big claw clip. “Jesus, what?”
“How fast can you be ready to go?”
“Umm . . .” She looks in the mirror, does some mental math. “Half hour?”
“Can you do, like, ten minutes?”
She twists her lips. “I can do seventeen.”
“Sold.”
Jessa keeps her word, and an hour later we’re navigating the uncharming streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, in my Civic, which we rescued from my driveway in a stealth operation. By which I mean we ran through the wind to my house, hopped in, shut the car doors softly, and peeled out of there before Lindy could peek through the curtains.
I’ll have to face her sometime today, but who knows how long it will take Lillian Eugene to clean out her classroom?
“Turn right here, at the gas station.” Jessa points toward a street just past a Sunoco. She sort of knows Worcester; she was carted down by her family a few times a year for Chad’s high school soccer matches against Burncoat High and Claremont Academy. But she’s never seen St. Augustine, a stone megalith that looms over the corner of Elm. Round towers like castle turrets, narrow slots for windows, a big marble statue of a robed saint feeding a deer in the courtyard.
“Oh good.” Jessa frowns as I park in the lot around back. “We’re breaking into Jesus school.”
“We’re not breaking in,” I say, surveying the lot. There’s a little green car across the way, speckled gray with mud and dust. “We’re . . . scoping out.”
“Is that hers, you think?” Jessa nods her chin at the car.
“It’s the only car here.”
“What if she went home?”
“Then we’ll ask whoever it is about her. Obviously they work here.”
“So . . . we scope?”