Kay didn’t have a showing until later in the morning, thank goodness. Something told her Jenna needed her. In fact, she would cancel the showing if need be. Maybe she should anyway. Maybe they could spend the day together talking.
Kay sifted through the pantry, deciding what to fix for breakfast. Just spend the day talking? Like that was going to work. But maybe spending any time together at all would be proactive in restoring their relationship.
She stood at the refrigerator door and looked at all the pictures held there by magnets. She studied the picture of Jenna at seven, dressed up for Halloween as a cheerleader. Times had been really good and uncomplicated back then. She knew the transition into adulthood would have its rocky times, but she never suspected it would be like climbing the Alps. Cold and harsh with little oxygen.
Kay opened the fridge and decided on an omelet. She paused and listened for any movement upstairs. All was quiet. Checking her watch, she realized she had time for a quick Starbucks run. She’d bring Jenna some green tea.
On her way, she tried not to think about how badly last night could’ve turned out, but her mind kept running over the scenarios. And she couldn’t help but insert herself into the scene. What would she do if Jenna went missing like that?
She shook off the dark thoughts and whipped into the Starbucks parking lot. A north wind snapped around the building as she tugged the door open. Once inside, she stood for a moment, trying to warm and compose herself.
She reminded herself that everything was fine. Yet fear nagged at her, and she wondered if Jenna was safe at the house. She’d locked all the doors, checked all the windows, turned on the alarm.
But still…
“Help you, ma’am?”
Kay blinked, focusing on the young man with shaggy hair, who kept swinging his head to the side, trying to get his bangs out of his eyes. Kay almost felt compelled to dig in her purse for a bobby pin. “Um, yes. Sorry. A venti green tea and a venti nonfat mocha.”
“Kay?”
Kay turned around. Shannon, Zoey’s mom, stood behind her, grinning.
“Hi, Shannon. Didn’t even see you in here.” Kay handed the barista her credit card and stepped to the side.
Shannon shuffled up, sporting a velour sweat suit. “I’m exhausted. Didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I know. Wasn’t that horrible about Gabby?” Kay asked, grabbing a napkin and stirrer.
“Yeah. And Zoey was being a beast to top it all off. We had to ground her and then she totally wigged out, yelling and crying. It was ridiculous. She was just headed to eat pizza with the girls. You’d think the world had imploded.”
The barista handed Kay her card and took Shannon’s order. Kay waited for her by the cream and sugar.
A minute later, Shannon joined her, running her fingers through her long, shiny hair. “Anyway, it was nuts. Is Jenna acting this way, all superdramatic and whiny and stuff?”
Kay hesitated. She wanted to relate with Shannon, but at the same time, she wanted to protect her daughter in every sense. “You know how teenagers are. Hormones can get the best of them.”
“I guess,” Shannon muttered. “I swear I thought I was going to pack up and leave for Hawaii last night. It was constant screaming for two hours. Finally she fell asleep on her bed and put us all out of our misery.”
Kay nodded, studying Shannon. The woman had always seemed so pulled together, so happy and energetic. It was like she was the eleventh member of the cheer squad. Today, though, Kay saw the familiar lines of regret, guilt, and worry on Shannon that Kay had seen many times in her own reflection. Maybe she wasn’t such a supermom after all. And maybe Jenna’s behavior lately, while baffling, was better than what Shannon was dealing with.
“Green tea and mocha for Kay!” the barista called.
“You drink both?”
“No. One’s for Jenna. I’m letting her stay home from school today. Last night really shook her up.”
“It did? What, is she friends with this Gabby girl? Zoey said Gabby’s kind of weird, a loner.” Shannon’s phone came to life, blaring out the Sex and the City theme. “It’s Zoey. She’s supposed to be on her way to school right now.” She flipped it open. “What is it?”
Kay turned and walked to the counter to pick up her beverages. She started to wave bye to Shannon but stopped.
Shannon grew pale right in front of her. She snapped her phone closed.
“Is everything okay?”
She shook her head, her eyes wide. “That was Zoey. She told me to get home. The police are at the house.”
About the time he usually arrived at work, Damien felt the need to get out of the office. It had become all at once stuffy and suffocating.
In one sense, it was exhilarating. The news was a driving force, and everyone was a willing passenger. But even though he was a newsman, he was also a guy with a lot of ideals. As much as he didn’t want to admit it to the people around him who were doing their jobs, what had happened last night shook him to the core.
This was Marlo. He’d grown up here and decided to plant his family here. It once was a place where dreams flourished and happiness bloomed. Now it had the stench of death.
By nine thirty, he’d made his way to a solitary bench in the middle of Marlo Park. In the spring, ten thousand dollars would be spent planting flowers and grooming the grounds. He’d once written an editorial about its importance after there was an uproar by some people aggravated that so much money was to be spent on a park.
But Damien had swayed their opinion. He’d pointed out that this was the heart of the city, and the roads were the arteries leading to the rest of the body. If the core of the city was not taken care of, what would be next? The schools? The retirement home? The churches?
The editorial had been so popular that the town created Grounds Day on April 1, and three hundred people showed up to work, saving the city five thousand dollars.
Even in its dormant state in the winter, the park held a certain majesty and pride. People still walked the sidewalks, kids still rode their bikes, and on a good snow day, on the south end of the park, a small hill provided hours of sledding entertainment.
But now, in the middle of the pristine park with its vibrant evergreens and neatly swept sidewalks, Damien felt betrayed, as if Marlo were a living, breathing person that had just slapped him in the face and blackmailed him to boot.
Maybe it had always been this way and Marlo was just now giving up its bag of secrets. Or maybe they hadn’t watched over the town carefully enough, and slowly but surely a dry, putrid rot had set in.
He was weighed down like tree limbs burdened under heavy snow. He should’ve done more to protect Marlo. Pushed harder to not let complacency win at the end of the day. In a sense, the residents had decided that their pristine and tidy little town was incapable of foolishness and treachery. But still there was the question: had complacency been here all along or had it slipped in as an unexpected guest?
Damien considered the slow-drifting wispy clouds. That was the Marlo he knew and loved, pure and innocent, floating high above messy humanity. But when he closed his eyes, all he saw was a terrified young girl, shivering in the cold, calling out for help. Swirling from the harsh north wind were the angry words of this town, words jumbled with other words, whispers, indecencies. Behind the walls of every home and around every dark corner, gossip waited for its cue; its mad dogs were on the hunt for prey.
He had to stop this craziness. But how? Who was behind all this? And did it have anything to do with Gabby? Had the person hiding in the darkness of cyberspace come out in the blackness of night to strike in a new and evil way?
His phone vibrated in his pocket, indicating he had a text message. It was from Edgar: Get back now. Breaking news.
Frank and Murray sat on an enormous leather couch that dominated an already-impressive living room. Zoey Branson stood nearby, her arms crossed, doing something with her bright pink phone. Her hair was swept high in a ponytail, and her makeup sparkled like she was headed to a disco.
Frank found himself staring at the sixty-two-inch TV. He felt like throwing himself sideways on the couch, grabbing the remote, and counting their cable channels. Instead, he looked at the nine-foot Christmas tree weighed down by festive bling.
Marlo had always had a decent number of upper middle-class citizens. If they weren’t really rich, nobody knew. There was a certain kind of house you wanted to keep, a certain kind of lifestyle you had to live. It never seemed dangerous or excessive. It wasn’t by any means Frank’s cup of tea. He lived in a small, two-bedroom wood frame house that was built in 1942. But he never minded the people with more wealth. He was not bothered by having less. He had responsibilities, and those were his priorities that he would never, ever give up.
Yet now, sitting in this room, he couldn’t help but feel engulfed by status. Genuine oil paintings hung on three out of the four walls. Besides the enormous television set that could rival the local movie theater, there were the leather furniture, the Persian rug, the enormous chandelier. For a house this size, it seemed cram-packed with overstated luxury.
From the back door, a Chihuahua whined and scratched.
“Shut up!” Zoey barked, sounding like she might be one gene off from the breed.
The front door suddenly flew open, ushering in, presumably, the mother. Her eyes widened as she saw Frank and Murray sitting on the sofa.
Frank stood, offering a hand. “Officer Merret. This is Detective Murray.”
She shook hands limply, then rushed to her daughter, patting the girl’s cheek as if she had a fever. “What’s wrong?”
“Get off me!” Zoey said, backing away and straightening her outfit. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just thought I should call you. This seems like the kind of thing a parent should be aware of.” Her sulky eyes seemed to drown in their own burden.
“Your name, ma’am?” Murray asked.
“Shannon Branson.”
“You’re Zoey’s mother?”
“Yes. Tell me what’s going on.”
“We’d like to ask Zoey some questions about what happened to Gabby Caldwell last night.”
“Why would she know anything about that?”
Frank heard someone else come through the front door. He assumed it was the father, but when he turned, he was taken by surprise. “Kay? What are you doing here?”
“I was with Shannon when Zoey called. She asked me to come over. Is everything okay?”
“No,” Shannon said. “No, everything is not okay. This is ridiculous. My daughter doesn’t know a thing about what happened to that girl.”
“Gabby Caldwell,” Frank said. Maybe repeating her name would help Zoey find her humanity. “That’s her name. Gabby.”
“I know who she is,” Shannon said, her eyes narrowing. “That’s not the point.”
Murray said, “Let’s all sit down and discuss this.”
Shannon and Zoey sat on the small sofa. “Why didn’t you tell them you don’t know what happened?” Shannon said.
Zoey stared at the carpet.
“Zoey?” her mother said. “Don’t be rude.”
“Look,” Murray said, “we’ll tell you what we do know, all right? Gabby thought she was being invited to a party. She snuck out of her house, joined up with a girl named Caydance Sanders. You know Caydance, correct?”
“Of course she knows Caydance. They’re best friends.”
“But Gabby wasn’t being invited to a party, was she, Zoey? Caydance took her out to the rest stop, tied her to a tree, and left her there.”
“We know Caydance Sanders! She would never do something like that!”
“Ma’am, she admitted that to us forty minutes ago. She told us the entire plan.”
“Plan?” Shannon’s gaze wandered from person to person in the room.
“Zoey, tell us how you were involved in all of this,” Murray said.
“She was not involved in this!” Shannon’s pitch was rivaling that of the frantic Chihuahua out back. “She was home all night! She was grounded, as a matter of fact, from leaving the house and from using the phone or computer.”
Frank looked at Murray, then closed his eyes and shook his head. “Wow.”
“What?” Shannon asked.
“That’s why you didn’t go untie her, right, Zoey?” Frank asked.
Even Shannon turned to her daughter, who sat on the couch, bound up with her own seeming indifference.
“Zoey?” Frank asked again.
Shannon leaned forward, touching her daughter’s knee and trying to get an angle to look at her whole face. “What happened? You were going to go save this girl? untie her?”
“Not quite,” Murray said. “The plan was to leave her out there for ten minutes, right, Zoey? Caydance took her out there, tied her up, and you were supposed to come untie her. What then? Were you going to leave her out there in her skivvies to hitchhike back home?”
“This is ridiculous! Ridiculous!” Shannon breathed.
Finally Zoey unwrapped her arms and stared at Frank. “It’s not my fault. I tried to explain to my parents I had somewhere important to be, and they didn’t care. They grounded me, and I couldn’t even call. It’s not my fault!” Her glare turned to her mother, then back down to the carpet.
Shannon sat still. The entire room quieted except for the barking and clawing at the back door. Frank glanced at Kay, trying to read her.
Shannon suddenly started babbling. “I… Yes, she tried to say something… I didn’t understand… I thought she, um… There was no way for us to know-”
Frank cut her off. “Did Zoey tell you that someone’s life was in danger or indicate in any way that she needed to go help Gabby?”
Shannon’s hands were moving everywhere as she attempted to sort out her words. “It’s just… There was a lot of yelling. She mentioned something, but I didn’t understand what she meant. I thought she was talking about hanging out with friends.”
“Did she ever mention Gabby specifically?”
Shannon shook her head slightly as if guessing what the right answer should be.
“And you knew your daughter was home all night?”
“Yes, of course. I checked on her at about eleven and she was asleep.” At the word asleep, Shannon stopped as if the entire thing had crashed down right in front of her.
Frank tried not to react, but they all knew how cold this was coming across.
“I think we need a lawyer,” Shannon said quietly, standing, fretting as she tried to find her cell phone in her purse.
Zoey watched her mom, then looked at Frank. “So Caydance told you all this, huh? The little rat.”
“Caydance admitted to it but didn’t come to us. Someone else gave us a tip that led us to save Gabby. If that wouldn’t have happened, Gabby would be dead right now.”
“Whatever.” Zoey sighed.
“Shut up!” Shannon screamed, leaning down to her daughter’s face. “Don’t say anything else!” She clutched the girl’s chin in her trembling hand.
Frank got up, not sure what was about to happen next. “Ma’am, please. Just calm down. Yelling is not going to solve anything.”
“Weird,” Zoey quipped. “That’s what she’s always saying.”
Shannon stood upright, put her hand over her mouth, shook her head. Then she said, “You’ve got it all wrong. This is just circumstantial evidence.”
“Not anymore, ma’am. Your daughter confessed.”
Frank turned to find Kay in this madness, but the front door was wide open and she was gone.