“She was dead, wasn’t she?” In the light of the passing streetlamps, he seemed like he was grinning. But when I turned to look at him, he was pale and grim-faced. I didn’t answer him.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. She shook her head sadly. “That’s awful.”
“It’s a statistical anomaly, isn’t it?” said Luke. “To have two friends go missing like that. Especially at your age?”
“Luke,” said Rachel. “What a thing to say.”
“I really don’t know,” I said stiffly.
He made some kind of noise in the backseat; it sounded like a derisive snort of laughter. But when I turned to look at him, he just stared ahead blankly. He was a super weird kid.
I was relieved to see the dorm ahead of us. But my relief only lasted for a minute. There were also two squad cars, and an SUV with Pennsylvania plates, which was where Beck was from.
“Oh, dear,” said Rachel.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
But I could barely hear over the sound of blood rushing in my ears, the pulse throbbing in my neck. I tried to remember what the doctor said, not to get catastrophic in my thinking. But I was water going down the drain, twirling, getting sucked into the void.
“See you tomorrow!” Luke was yelling from the rolled-down window of the backseat as they pulled away. “Don’t forget about our game!”
I turned to look at him, lifted my hand in an absentminded wave, and headed inside.
9
Detective Ferrigno and I were sitting at the bistro table in the tiny suite kitchen. Ainsley, and Beck’s parents, Lynne and Frank, were outside in the living room, each of them on a cell phone, calling literally everyone Beck knew.
There was an aura of urgency, certainly. But it hadn’t yet descended into the terror of a missing girl, mainly because Beck had run away three times before.
As a teenager, she’d left home at sixteen because she wanted to go to Cuba to experience the burgeoning art scene. With the help of her ex-stepfather, she’d purchased a ticket to Toronto, then took a flight from there to Havana, where she was apprehended in the airport and returned to her parents. (Her ex-stepfather realized he’d screwed up and came clean pretty quickly.)
I am the product of my parents’ misery, she claimed often. Her parents had divorced when she was eleven, each married other people and then got divorced from those people to marry each other again when Beck was fifteen. Now her parents were about to divorce for the second time. They were the kind of people who thought that they could call their toxic, shitty relationship “tempestuous” and make it cool. They often framed their vicious, violent fights and passionate makeups as “romantic.” I don’t even know what a real marriage looks like, Beck said to me once. Do you know how much pain they’ve caused each other, and every other person unlucky enough to get involved with them? They make me sick. I could relate. She knew I could, because I’d told her some about my parents, even though she didn’t know everything. Our shared horror of our parents’ terrible marriages was what initially bonded us.
She’d disappeared briefly during the summer between freshman and sophomore year because she didn’t want to live with her parents again. She hitchhiked across the country, dropping e-mails along the way-just to let everyone know she wasn’t dead. She ran out of money in Albuquerque, and asked me to wire her seven hundred dollars for a ticket back home, which I did. She paid me back (even though I told her she didn’t have to) in increments of twenty and fifty dollars whenever she had extra cash. I loved her for that, that she was crazy and irresponsible, but totally ethical. It was a rare quality in a person.
“So the librarian said you two were arguing,” said Detective Ferrigno.
“I guess,” I said. “Nothing serious.”
“Serious enough for you to storm out.”
“I didn’t storm out,” I said. “I wasn’t feeling well, so I was impatient with her. I didn’t want to talk about what she wanted to talk about.”
“Which was?” He didn’t have his notebook. He was doing the we’re-cool-just-hanging-out thing. But he’d obviously been walking around campus asking a bunch of questions.
“First, she was giving me a hard time about my new job,” I said. “I’m babysitting for a difficult kid. She thought it was a stupid thing to do.”
If you want to babysit for the bad seed, go for it. I wondered what she would say about Luke’s poem. She would probably be really fascinated, would really dig the whole scavenger hunt thing. I couldn’t wait to tell her about it. Then I remembered and my heart sank. We wouldn’t be sharing things like that anymore. I was on my own.
“And what else?”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You said ‘first,’ as though there was more than one topic you hadn’t wanted to discuss.”
“Oh,” I said. I picked at a string on my sleeve to communicate my nonchalance on the topic. “She thinks I have a crush on my student adviser, and she likes to give me shit about it. I just wasn’t in the mood.”
I heard Lynne’s voice in the other room, an easy conversational pitch that ebbed and flowed. Who was she talking to? I wondered. What would she learn about Beck from the cast of characters in her phone book? Some of it might not be pretty.
“Do you have a crush on him?” the detective asked. There was a smile in his voice, a friendly tease.
I realized I’d hiked my shoulders up high, and I consciously pushed them down. “No,” I said. “I don’t. He’s a lot older than me. He’s also my professor.”
He shifted in his seat and it groaned under his weight. It was cheap furniture from IKEA, the kind that you put together with one of those torturous little metal L-shaped tools. Did those things have a name?
“It’s not like it doesn’t happen,” he said. He gave me an understanding smile. “You’re both consenting adults.”
“It’s inappropriate and unethical.” Was I really such a prude? Beck was always accusing me of being too stiff, too uptight. Loosen up, my friend. Let go.
“Who is it?”
“Professor Langdon Hewes,” I said. He nodded as though the name meant something to him. He got internal for a second, maybe searching his memory for a connection. Of course, he’d be looking for connections now that two girls had gone missing in two years. Elizabeth’s death was ruled an accident, but no one had ever felt good about it. There were too many unanswered questions. Her parents had been back to town twice, trying to get the case reopened. So far, that hadn’t happened.
“Why didn’t you tell me before that you two had argued?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I blew out a breath, brought a hand to my forehead. There were a couple of ways I could play it. Finally, I said: “It didn’t seem important.”
He cracked some tension out of his neck and leaned toward me.
“But being mad at you would be a decent reason for her not to come back to the room.” He sounded cool and reasonable, like he was looking for a reason that Beck would be fucking with us.
“I guess,” I said. “Honestly, it just wasn’t that heated, you know.” It hadn’t been, really. Not for us.
The third time she disappeared was after our encounter at the frat party, our kiss. She didn’t come back to the room for three days after we slept off our hangovers. She’d met a guy in town a few days before the party, and she’d been yammering on about him in that kind of goading way she had-as though she was trying to elicit some response from me. He was a construction worker or something, but he was into raves. He’s as dumb as a thumbtack, she said. But even thumbtacks have their application.
She made a point of saying she was meeting him for coffee the day after, then spent the next three days at his place-blowing off classes, not returning calls. Her parents had come down that time, too. When she wasn’t getting enough attention, she still regaled me with tales of her sexual exploits that week; he was the best she’d ever had, she claimed. Which-coming from a nineteen-year-old-sounded pretty silly.