Accomplice (3 page)

Lunch was miserable that first day back.

Most of the girls Chloe and I usually ate with were ensconced at the front table—the resident queens of tragedy. Easy to spot, so I dropped my bag on the floor beside the table, said “hey” in what I hoped was a suitably stricken tone, and then left to push my tray along the line in the cafeteria. Picked up a chips and salsa and a bag of cookies. Got to the table to see Priyanka and Elena patting the seat between them.

“Finn, it’s so smart of you to try and eat. We’ve got to keep our strength up.” That came from Priyanka, who was sitting at the table with three cans of Diet Coke lined up in front of her.

Chloe and I had slumber parties with these girls. We’d played truth or dare and told secrets, and none of them could even imagine the secret we kept between us. None of them had any idea how daring we actually were.

“Have you heard anything?” Elena had her chin on her hand.

This startled me so much I almost dunked a cookie in the salsa. “From who?”

“I don’t know—from the Caffreys? How are they?” One of the things I noticed about our friends was that they sounded a lot like their moms when they were trying to sound concerned. I mean, I knew everyone was concerned. But none of it sounded real. At all. And I didn’t want to talk like this. I wanted to tell Priyanka that cutting bangs into her hair was a mistake. Or ask Kate Herndon if I could copy her Precalc notes. Those weren’t the kind of conversations we were having now, though. It was going to be a long time before we could talk like that.

But I wasn’t ready to talk about the Caffreys. Or think about them, really. Elena at least had some useful information. “They’re not letting us out for lunch because of all the reporters outside,” she said.

“Really? There’s reporters?” I said it before I could practice it in my head, and then hoped I didn’t sound too excited.

But Elena was right there with me. “News trucks. All the big networks, too.”

“Guys—” Priyanka sounded scandalized, but started fussing with her bangs immediately.

“What? It’s important. And maybe it’ll help Chloe.”

“We’re not supposed to talk to them.” I said it
automatically. I was so tired. I couldn’t remember if Chloe and I made that rule or if it was someone else.

It didn’t matter. By the time the dismissal bell rang, there were cops stationed all over the school.

They hadn’t come there to arrest me. I knew it because they weren’t facing the doors of the school. It took a while to convince myself of that, to talk my heart back into the right part of my chest. They were there in simple protect-and-serve capacity. Squad cars blocked off both sides of the driveway that circled school, and cops stood along the sidewalks. The only vans there were the usual minivans. Whatever media had descended lurked somewhere else.

It felt as good to step into the open air as I thought it would. For one thing, I never left school that early. Usually we’d have yearbook or sax ensemble or community service board. Sometimes when Chloe had school council, I would sit in as an honorary rep or wait around in the library until she got done. It felt luxurious to walk out of the building when the bell rang at three. I just let the stream of kids around me carry me up the sidewalk. We were all going home. Most meetings had been canceled by school officials. Sports teams had practice but that was about it.

It felt weird to spend so much time by myself. It wasn’t just Chloe I couldn’t talk to. There were clusters
of kids around me, kids we’d grown up with. And I had nothing to say to them.

Losing Chloe had united us. Or them at least. All over the quad, people were clutching at each other, hugging like they might never see each other again. Sometime over the weekend, the Parents’ Association had posted signs all over school instructing us to use the buddy system. No one should walk home alone; we should get home before dark. It felt like the freshman camping trip when Craig Nordgren spotted a bear in the woods.

Chloe was going to get a kick out of it. All the planning she’d done last year, putting together school pride week—or freshman year when school council assigned her to organize the buses to Basking Ridge when our swim team made the state finals. Chloe preached school spirit like it was religion, and then all it took to unite the many factions of Colt River High was her disappearance. I wanted to get out my phone and take pictures for her.

I knew I was supposed to stand around for a while, talking about how we couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard anything about Chloe yet. But the iPod in my backpack won out. I walked down the sidewalk with my head down, until it felt safe enough to smile up at the trees.

I walked home thinking about the Caffreys, and the world I walked into the night before fourth grade started,
carrying my mom’s peach pie over to the trailer where they were temporarily settled. I heard Cam first—you always heard Cam first when you got close to the Caffreys’. I guess they knew he was autistic even way back then—that was part of the reason for moving out of the city. Not much reached Cam, but he’d spend two hours brushing a horse. He was really into systems—he liked maps and schedules, and lately he’d been sort of obsessed with the skeletal structures of the animals on the farm. So Colt River was a good town for him. He never went to school with us—he got bused over to some research facility in Princeton—but by the time of the disappearance, everyone in town knew Cam and knew to let him take his own time with things.

That night, Cam was building something with dominoes. I could see from the trailer’s screen door—it covered the whole table. Later Chloe would say I banged on the door, but I don’t remember it that way. My hands were cooking against the pie plate, and Cam was looking right at me. I just hadn’t learned yet that didn’t mean he saw me. So I yelled. And when I yelled, Cam yelled, and then he jerked his hands and then the clatter of all those dominoes falling filled the steel cylinder of the Caffreys’ trailer. Chloe rushed over to the door to swing it open, and I almost fell backward. Mr. and Mrs. Caffrey came tearing out from some back room. Their mom went right to Cam and sort of held his arms at his sides. And Mr.
Caffrey took the pie without even saying thank you. He barely looked at Chloe and me when he said, “You girls should stay outside and play.”

“What’s wrong with your brother?” I remember asking Chloe. It must have been the first question that a lot of people asked Chloe.

I never heard a different answer from the one she gave me that night, either. She just stared at me and said, “Nothing.” As if it was that simple and obvious. Back then when people looked back at Chloe, it wasn’t because she was pretty. Her two front teeth stuck out almost horizontally, and she was so skinny that her elbows and knees jutted even farther. That first night, she was wearing a blue checkered dress—like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. It wasn’t a real dress—it was one of those Halloween costumes, the kind made of really thin material so that your mom makes you wear long underwear underneath. Chloe just wore it on its own, like it was a real dress. She even had on sparkly red shoes. And when I asked her about the costume, she said something like, “It’s not a costume.” In the same flat voice she used to say that nothing was wrong with Cam.

I had waited a long time to have a kid live close by. It didn’t even have to be a girl—just someone around my age who didn’t suck. Another set of legs climbing onto the school bus from my stop on the corner of the long road alongside our farm. I wanted a neighborhood like
the ones on TV where kids ran back and forth between each other’s houses and ate at each other’s dinner tables all the time. My neighborhood was, well, us. The farm. Back then, I couldn’t even ride my bike to the nearest house.

So finally there was the possibility of something else. But one kid was inside crying over dominoes. And then there was this girl dressed up like Dorothy, clicking her heels in a lawn chair outside of her trailer. Not what I’d pictured at all.

I helped torment Chloe until February. There’s no other way to say it. She dressed like a cartoon, and her teeth made me cringe, and even though my dad never said it out loud, he seemed sad now when he looked out our kitchen window onto what used to be all of our land and saw another family living there. So I helped pick on her. I laughed when other kids pointed, and I could draw an accurate diagram of the strange angles of her skewed smile. She looked like some doll that had been tossed into the dryer for too long.

Right after our Valentine’s Day party, when we were supposed to be packing up little envelopes and waxy bags of candy, Chloe was bent over her cubby, wearing her Dorothy dress, and Ryan Neylon started it—darting over and flipping up her skirt. Yelling guesses about the color of her underwear. And maybe because she didn’t
react—Chloe never yelped or cried or even raised her hands behind her to clutch her skirt down—Ryan did it again. And then he started kicking her. Behind the knee where it makes your whole leg buckle. Other boys got in on it so that when she’d gather her balance someone else would kick her. Even after we could hear her knock hard into the wooden bench in front of the cubby, Chloe kept straightening back up. And the boys kept kicking.

Suddenly, I’d had enough. I stood in front of Chloe and when the next foot shot out, it stopped right before it connected with me. I stared them down with Chloe frozen next to me. No one said anything and there wasn’t a brawl or even an argument. This was back when being just as big as the boys was a good thing. I was as strong and as fast. So it’s not like I was brave because I might have gotten kicked. I was brave because it meant standing next to the weird girl and claiming her as my friend. And we were friends then—the kind I’d pictured when my parents had explained that another family was moving onto our gravel road. The green cereal bowl in our kitchen cupboard became Chloe’s, and we spent most of that next summer sleeping out in a tent that her dad put up next to the trailer.

We never talked about Ryan and the other boys kicking her. The only reason I knew it mattered was that
Chloe never wore the Dorothy dress again. The red shoes winked on her feet until we got to middle school. But those became almost cool, especially when it rained, because then Chloe would leave a trail of red glitter everywhere she stepped.

It’s probably hard for a stranger to picture the before and after of Chloe’s transformation. How beautiful she became—after the thick metal retainers came off and the sharp angles of her skinny body softened up in junior high. Colt River is a small town, though. We were in classes with the same eighty kids who used to scream names at Chloe on the school bus. And no one brought it up. I didn’t even think most of them remembered. And if they did, if some girl like Maddie Dunleavy started slyly mentioning
The Wizard of Oz
and looking over at Chloe, well, there wasn’t anything to do about it. Chloe was the kind of pretty you couldn’t argue with.

The only reason I knew the way Chloe looked mattered to her was because we never joked about it. It was one of the things Chloe didn’t talk about.

In the picture the newspapers used, Chloe’s smiling so widely, you’d never think she usually covered up her teeth with her hand. You wouldn’t know that Chloe only smiled like that next to someone else, usually me. Her hand would tighten around my waist or my shoulder, and I’d know she was fighting the urge to cover her mouth. If you knew Chloe and you saw that picture,
you’d know it was doctored. When Chloe stood alone for a picture, she smiled serenely—this weird quiet smile, without teeth. Like she was resigned to being beautiful and would just stand there for the second it took you to record it.

At home, both of the Caffreys’ cars were in the driveway, but that was all. No news vans, no cops. Cam’s horse grazed behind the fence and my dad’s truck wasn’t back yet.

“Finn!” My mom was great and all, but she wasn’t really the waiting-with-cookies-at-the-door kind of mother. If it was before four, she was usually at some scrapbooking class. If it was after, she had her appointment with Oprah. But that day, I could see her from all the way down by the mailboxes. She stood on the steps, her hands on her hips.

“Yeah?” I started running without thinking. Part of me wanted to run away, but the whole day got to me, and I got scared. I started running to my mom like a little kid.

“Finley Claire Jacobs—what in God’s name are you doing?”

Of course I thought she knew. It was like the eightieth time since we did it. Every time anyone spoke to me, I thought they knew.

“I’m sorry—” and holycrapthankyoujesus, my mom held a hand up to cut me off.

“I don’t want to hear it. Frankly, I am trying to be understanding, but you need to be a little more considerate, Finn.”

“What?” Because that seemed sort of mild for helping my best friend fake her own kidnapping.

“I just got off the phone with Caroline Herndon. Kate told her she saw you walking away from school.”

“Yeah?”

“Alone.”

Honestly, aside from taking detailed Precalc notes, Kate Herndon was pretty useless.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

I wasn’t going to say it again. So I stood there and looked at her and waited.

“Do you not see a problem here?”

“They canceled clubs.” For a second, I really thought she was mad that I’d skipped sax ensemble.

“Of course they canceled clubs. Honey, Chloe is
missing
.” My mom tilted her head and examined me. It was like she was trying to make a diagnosis. She rubbed her eyes a little, looked at me again, and apparently decided it was time to bust out the deluxe parenting skills.

“Finn, are you okay? Sit down with me here.” She lowered herself onto the top step and I climbed up next
to her. “I can’t imagine how this is.” Probably not. “To some extent it’s hard to believe all of this is real.” To some extent, yes. “And I still don’t think you’re telling me everything you need to.” Nope, probably not.

I wasn’t one of those girls who said “My mom’s my best friend.” Girls like Kate or Kara Mae Clairemont said that. And they said it because the only other people who put up with all their crap were their own moms. My mom definitely listened and gave good advice—Chloe probably went to my mom more than her own, mostly because Mrs. Caffrey usually had her hands full with Cam. But it wasn’t like my mom and I hung out by the lake and talked about what was going on. We didn’t trade makeup or predict each other’s futures. I didn’t tell Mom my secrets.

That was me and Chloe.

Mom went on. “You probably don’t think you know anything. But I’m sure there are things that Chloe might have confided in you…like maybe she started talking to someone online. Or maybe she was sick of the situation at home.”

“Chloe didn’t run away.” Not a lie. She sort of skulked away.

“Okay.” Mom rubbed her temples again. “I have to say I hope she did run away, Finn. I hope that we get a call from her soon. No one would be angry at her, you know.”

I thought about how my mom and I had lined the kitchen counter with slices of bread, making sandwiches for all the men who showed up to search for Chloe. I remembered the dull look in Mrs. Caffrey’s eyes, how she looked more like Cam as each hour passed. I thought about the cops at school that day, even stupid Teddy Selander, who couldn’t go out to get pizza for lunch.

“Why would Chloe run away?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t be able to conjure a reason. That was the point we were banking on, after all.
I
was the moody one. People might be able to convince themselves that some ex-con seduced me over the Internet and arranged a meeting at the bus station near the Alamo. Not Chloe, though. What prison poetry could compete with the adoring looks she got every day? It wasn’t just Dean who looked at her like she carried the sun around with her in her backpack. Chloe had been to the prom every year, even as a freshman. She got free refills at Slave to the Grind from the college guys who worked the counter. She lived in a house that had its own spread in
Architectural Digest
.

My mom still seemed to be searching for an explanation to offer. “Well, I was hoping we could figure that out together.”

“She would have called me.”

“And she hasn’t?”

I put the edge in my voice that was supposed to be there.

“If Chloe calls me, I’ll make sure to give someone a heads-up.” Narrowed my eyes and set my jaw. “You want to check my phone? You know, just in case?” I started to unzip the front pocket of my backpack.

But Mom stopped me. She reached for my arm and then kept ahold of it, turned my hand over in hers like she did when I was a little kid. “Finn, they’re going to drag the lake tomorrow.”

The gasp I let out was real—this was something Chloe and I hadn’t thought about. “How do they do that?”

“The police will bring out boats. They’ll have nets. There might be people trained to look there. You know—divers.”

“Are Chloe’s parents paying for it?”

“What? No, sweetheart. That’s something that the police do, when they think someone might have had an accident. That’s what we all pay taxes for.”

I pictured everyone in Colt River pulling a hundreddollar bill out of his pocket and throwing it into a metal trash can. So that Chloe and I could set it on fire.

I learned to swim in our lake. It had some Native American name from the Lenni Lenape tribe that once lived in our area, but around here it was just the lake. Chloe and I were morons for not imagining they’d look
there. When they ran the nets through the water, maybe they’d catch the toy boats we’d once painted and sailed in the summertime. Or old eyedroppers from when we took samples of the water for the sixth-grade science fair.

I thought about sneaking to my grandmother’s house, but what would I do then? Convince Chloe to call it off? Tell everyone we did it so we’d have ourselves some fascinating college application essays? Besides that, the soccer mom phone chain reached my parents when I walked a mile and a half home from school on my own. It’s not like it was going to be a simple thing to sneak out the night before they dragged the lake for the body of my best friend.