“Fine, Alice. I’ll take you home. Let’s go.” Val turned down the path.
“Forget it,” Alice said, marching forward.
I fell back and walked alongside her.
“Can you try to put Izzy out of your mind, just for a little while?” I said softly. “You’ve been a really good friend. You’ve done everything you could, Alice.”
She nodded and smacked at the growing swarm of mosquitoes.
Jean ran around the back of the house, which was covered in flat, hand-painted butterflies, hummingbirds, irises. The house had tattoos.
We grilled Jean about his supposed girlfriend and found out she was an eighteen-year-old Japanese girl named Umi who he’d met the summer before when he asked her to model for one of his masks. It turned out she lived in France and her sculptor mother owned the house and let Jean use the art studio over the garage.
“How do you communicate?” Alice said.
“In French, obviously,” Jean said. He laughed. “I hooked up with Umi last summer, which her mom sort of doesn’t know about. She certainly doesn’t know the full extent of it.” He raised his eyebrows and flashed a smile. “She made Umi stay in Paris for a stupid internship this summer, but we talk pretty much every day and she’s coming here for Christmas break.”
Jean pointed out the studio but wouldn’t let us in because of his half-finished top secret mascot project.
“Alice, what’s wrong?” Val bent over Alice, who had sat down in the grass, cradling her phone. She ran her hand through her hair and tossed her phone on the ground. I reached for it and looked at the text. It was from Izzy.
Pooch. Please help me. I’m at the shrink’s. I’m so cold.
Alice jumped up. “I have to go get Izzy.”
Gordie put his arm around Alice. “We have to go get Izzy.”
FOURTEEN
WE LEFT JEAN’S and Val’s cars at the farm stand and loaded into the Range Rover, bound for Westhampton.
“A guy from the city rents a summer house in the middle of nowhere,” Alice said. “He’s a friggin’ psychiatrist and he got his license suspended after they caught him prescribing Oxy to anyone with cash. Now he’s dealing heroin. He’s, like, forty years old and hooking up with girls half his age in exchange for drugs.”
“That is sickening,” Val said.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Alice said. She wrapped her arms around the front of her and stared out the window. “The shrink is even worse than Hector. I can’t believe her parents let her go out. She just got out of the hospital.”
For a while nobody said anything. We were anxious about what we would find at the trap house. Val sat between Alice and me furiously texting Javi, who had been looking for her.
“Is anyone else a little nervous about this?” Jean said as we turned onto a narrow road. It was so dark we could barely see in front of us.
“Pull up over there, Gordie,” Alice said. “Cut the lights. You guys stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Wait, you’re not going in there alone. Let me go with you,” Gordie said.
“Hell no. You look like a narc.” Alice threw her wallet and keys on the dashboard.
“I’m going,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
I followed her anyway, leaving the others fighting in the Range Rover about who looked the least like a narc and should be going with us.
We held on to each other and followed the beam from Alice’s phone light up the long driveway. Three cars were parked near the garage. According to Alice, none of them was Hector’s.
“Maybe your spell worked,” I whispered.
Alice tried the door. It was open. The hot, dank house smelled like rotten garbage. We walked down a narrow hallway toward a back kitchen connected to an open great room. The room was hazy with cigarette smoke, and eerily quiet except for a low moaning and the sound of running water. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the smoky dimness.
There were mattresses laid out in the middle of the floor, and people lying on the mattresses. I noticed the arm of a man flung out, covered in scabs, and a woman in white shorts and a Snoopy T-shirt lying next to him, her eyes half open. And there was a girl perched inside an open fireplace, with soot covering her feet.
“Where’s Izzy?” Alice said to an old guy lying on the couch staring at the muted TV screen. The light from the screen danced across the faces of the mattress people. A discarded pizza box on a glass-topped coffee table housed a pile of needles and a square of charred foil. The man on the mattress dragged his filthy fingernails across his stomach. I took a few steps closer to the fireplace. The girl turned her face and smiled at me.
“Ward, focus, I’m trying to find Izzy,” Alice said to the old guy on the couch. Her voice was strong and fearless. She was superhero Alice, and I was her awkward sidekick.
“I think she’s in the shower,” the guy said, his eyes still staring straight ahead.
Alice turned toward me and rolled her eyes. “Dirtbag,” she said. “Let’s check upstairs.”
I grabbed Alice’s hand. It was cold and clammy. She squeezed my hand back and pulled me toward the stairs. At the top, a stained-glass sailboat night-light lit a small bathroom that stank of urine. Brown stains splattered the tiled wall. Water ran from the sink faucet.
“Should I turn it off?” I whispered.
“No. Don’t touch anything. Stay here.” Alice put her hand flat on my chest. “I mean it, Sadie.”
I stood there while Alice stormed down the hall and flung open a door.
“Get the fuck away from my friend,” she yelled. A few seconds later Alice came out of the bedroom with Izzy, who was wrapped in a crumpled sheet.
“I decided to stay,” Izzy said. Her stringy hair was stuck to her face.
Alice held Izzy’s hand and yanked her along. “Come on, Sadie.”
I followed them down the stairs and helped half carry the barefoot Izzy through the maze of trees. We pushed her into the backseat next to Val and squeezed in.
“Oh, thank God,” Val said. “We were freaking out.”
“Who’s this?” Izzy said, touching my face with ice-cold fingertips.
“Remember Sadie from Girl Scouts?” Alice said.
“Hi, Neigh!”
“Hi, Sadie. You’re still doing Girl Scouts?” Izzy said, smiling. She turned toward Alice. “You’re my best friend, Pooch.”
“Yes, sweetie, I am.” Alice’s expression softened. Her eyes filled with tears.
Gordie drove straight to the hospital.
Jean turned on the playlist and we serenaded Izzy with “Blackbird” by the Beatles all the way to the emergency room.