She didn’t know the half of it.
“That wasn’t why I picked her up. But yeah, I’d probably have gotten around to asking her some things, but she cut me off before I had a chance. Said she didn’t know anything.”
“They’re all wary of you.”
“Maybe they should be,” I snapped.
Donna didn’t flinch. “You’re obsessed.”
“I’m obsessed? Do I have a sketchbook this thick?” I held my thumb and index finger an inch apart.
This time a microscopic twitch. I’d wounded her. Trying to soften my voice, I said, “I’d have thought you wanted answers, too.”
She lightly touched the closest wall, as though bracing herself. “Would that make everything better for you? Finding out where he got the stuff? Who gave it to him or sold it to him? Then you’d have your culprit. Then you’d be off the hook. Would I be, too? Would I be exonerated as well? Could you stop blaming me as much as you blame yourself?” She lowered her head and touched her fingers to her forehead, massaged it, then said, “Let’s say you find whoever it is. Let’s say you could even get him to confess. Then what’ll you do? Turn him in? Mete out some kind of frontier justice of your own?”
“I can’t talk about this now,” I said.
“And the thing is, whoever it is, if it hadn’t been that person, it would have been somebody else. What you don’t get is, who has never been the issue. The issue is why. Why’d he take the stuff in the first place? What was wrong with his life that he thought getting high could fix?”
“I told you, I can’t do this now.”
“Of course you can’t,” Donna said with mock acquiescence. “When would be a better time? Maybe I could make an appointment.”
“I’m worried about this girl,” I said. “I don’t think she disappeared because of some stalker boyfriend. I don’t think she’d have gone to all that trouble, to have another girl dress up like her, just to ditch some guy.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Donna said. “Are you talking to me, or are you talking to yourself?”
I gave my head a shake. “I guess to myself.”
“There’s your problem,” she said, turned and walked away.
I wasn’t able to just let it go. I couldn’t go about my own business while the Griffon police looked for Claire Sanders. I’d meant what I said when I told the girl who’d pretended to be her that, even if the two of them never intended to, they had involved me.
Now that I knew the girl was missing, nearly a day after I’d given her a lift, I was reevaluating everything I’d done the night before. I shouldn’t have let the second girl get away. I should, at the very least, have gotten her name. I should have followed her when she bolted from the car. I should have asked Claire more questions. Was there really a guy in some pickup watching her? If so, who did she think it was?
Woulda coulda shoulda.
I didn’t much care for Officer Brindle’s parting shot, that I’d better hope they found her soon. But there was some truth in it. If something had happened to Claire — I didn’t even want to think about what that might be — it was a safe bet they’d be coming back with more questions.
But I was getting ahead of myself. Teenagers took off all the time, and it didn’t necessarily mean something bad had happened to them. But I knew, as well as anyone, the kind of agony parents went through when they hadn’t heard from their kids, when they had no idea where they were. Like you’re at the bottom of a well and can’t climb out. I had an inkling of what Claire’s parents had to be going through. What I didn’t know was whether getting the police to handle the matter quietly was the way to go.
Like I was in any position to criticize how any other parents dealt with their kids.
I didn’t want to wait to find out what progress Haines and Brindle made in their discreet search for Claire. I could find her as quickly as they could, if not quicker. I knew something they didn’t. I knew what Claire’s friend looked like. If I could learn who she was, and get to her, I could find Claire. This girl had to know where she’d gone. They’d cooked up this disappearing act together.
I was betting I could get her name without even leaving the house.
I went to the kitchen, past Donna, who was standing at the sink with her back to me, and grabbed the laptop sitting there. I dropped into the recliner where I’d passed time the night before, and logged on to Facebook.
But not as myself. I didn’t have a Facebook profile.
After Scott died and I began looking into where he might have gotten the ecstasy, I needed to know who his friends and acquaintances were. Ten or fifteen years ago, that would have involved a lot of legwork. Once I’d found one friend, I’d have leaned on him to get the names of more. And then when I’d gone to visit those people, I’d have repeated the process.
These days, all I had to do was go to the number one social network. There wasn’t, in my experience, a kid today who wasn’t on it, although I suspected it wouldn’t be long before the younger generation found some other way to connect. All their parents were on Facebook now, ruining it for them, crowding them out, posting videos and pictures of dogs and cats and cute babies, and tarting up clichéd aphorisms — “This Is Your Life. Be Who You Want to Be!” — in colored boxes with fancy fonts.
When I’d started snooping around Facebook, the first thing I’d had to figure out was Scott’s password.
I worked at it, off and on, for three days. I entered everything I could think of, starting with the obvious ones many people use. Like. But I knew Scott was far too clever for that. So I moved on to his birthday, and tried every variation of it. Day, month, year. Year, month, day. And so on. No luck there.
Then I tried the names of pets. We hadn’t had that many over the years. There was our white poodle, Mitzy, who got run over by a FedEx truck when Scott was seven. He’d accidentally let the dog out of the house when he was heading out to play with friends, and saw Mitzy chase after the truck and get caught under its rear wheels. He cried for a couple of days straight, and we swore off any more dogs at that point.
There was a gerbil named Howard that came into our lives for three months when Scott was ten. He got out of his cage, and we found him, a week later, stuck behind a bookcase. It wasn’t pretty.
No joy on or.
So then I entered everything I’d ever known him to be interested in. Movie titles and characters. Celebrity names. Favorite songs and musicians. Names of cars.
Nothing worked.
Then, one day, I thought of two words he used all the time whenever he wanted to get our attention. He might shout them from any room in the house, or blurt them out when he came into a room. Two words that he ran together as one. From the time he was little, until the day he—
You get the idea.
“Momdad!” he’d yell. “Momdad!”
I tried MOMDAD.
I was in.
Trouble was, I was too overcome, my eyes too misted, to be able to study his list of friends for several minutes.
But once I did, I learned he had two hundred and seventeen of them. A respectable number, if not huge. While Scott was part of the network, he didn’t do all that much socializing on it. He posted rarely, and when he did — a clip, say, from a favorite movie or Family Guy episode, or a link to an article from one of his favorite sites — few people chimed in with comments. There were only a handful of people with whom he actually exchanged messages, but those were the people I’d first checked out. Some discreetly, some not so discreetly.