Accomplice (12 page)

I kept thinking:
The next time I do something like fake a kidnapping, I’m going to make sure to work out my issues with guilt and shame first.
Because it was getting hard to drag myself up the steps. In my room, I realized there wasn’t even music I wanted to hear. I went to CNN on my laptop and clicked on the Crime section. There was Chloe and her little lamb smiling out of the screen. I shut that and then slid open the doors of my closet. It was time to pick out an outfit to wear to meet Dean West.

I went with jeans, and then the big debate was a crewneck or a V-neck. The V-neck was a deep one—not the kind of thing I’d risk wearing to school, where there was always some perv like Cody Hameier throwing balled-up paper down your shirt. Or worse. Chloe would take issue with it, but, whatever, I was wearing jeans. It wasn’t like anyone could say I was dressing up for Stuttering Dean. I brushed out my hair and put on a little makeup. I mean, I did my eyes. Lately, I’d been wearing a lot of mascara so that it was really obvious when I cried.

I was ready about forty-five minutes sooner than we needed to leave. I stuck on a cami under the V-neck at the last minute and shook out my hair from the braid I’d tied it back in. If necessary, I could hide behind it. I stopped myself from going down the stairs twice until finally it was six-thirty and my mom yelled up from the kitchen.

“Finley—you want an early supper before you go off?”

I headed down the stairs and reminded her, “We’re going to a diner. It’s customary to order food there.” Yep, I would order a grilled cheese and discuss Chloe’s disappearance with the main suspect in the crime.

My mom looked up—I assumed to tell me to quit it. Instead she said, “Finn—you look so nice, honey.” Too loudly. Too enthusiastically.

“I’m just wearing jeans.” I sounded defensive to myself. “It’s not like it’s a date or anything.”

“No, of course not.” Too quickly. Too knowingly. “But your makeup looks nice—it looks so natural.”

“Thanks.” I tried to say it in a way that established that she should shut up. But sometimes my mom picks up on clues more slowly than Cam.

“Really, Finn. You look great.”

“It’s nothing. I’m just going to meet him and hear him out. You wanted me to go.”

“Oh, I know—you just look so lovely when you put in the effort.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

My dad came stomping in. He reached past me for the hook where we hang our keys. “What is what supposed to mean?”

But I stared my mom down. “Like I don’t normally put in the effort.”

My mom sighed. “Finn, I don’t know why you’re so sensitive. You’ve never been one to dress up. That’s all I meant.”

“Just because I don’t dress up doesn’t mean I don’t put in the effort.”

My mom met my dad’s eyes and shrugged. “Okay. That’s fine.” She said it like she was placating a crazy person. “Obviously I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve just noticed that lately, you’ve seemed to spend more time on yourself. And while I wouldn’t want you to be any different, you’ve looked really pretty.”

I just stood there. She swooped in to kiss my cheek, and I stiffened. She kissed it, anyway. She stood there for a second and I almost told her the truth. Well, part of the truth. I almost said,
It’s easier to work on being pretty when I don’t have to stand next to Chloe all the time. Because when I do, well, what’s the point of that?
But my mom just said, “Tell Dean we said hello and that he and his folks should call us if they need anything at all.”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

In the truck, Dad and I laid out the ground rules for the diner. “You’re just going to sit at the counter, right?” I asked.

He said, “Well, yeah, except…” and trailed off.

“Dad!”

He cackled. “Well, except that I might have to use the little boys’ room.”

“God.” I leaned back and stared out the window. “Jesus.”

“Any other Lords’ names you want to take in vain?”

I laughed. “Yeah—Ganesh. Ganesh, damn it.”

“Who’s Ganesh?”

“He’s a Hindu god. He’s the Remover of Obstacles.”

“Oh yeah?” My dad switched his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “They got a god for that? We could use a Remover of Obstacles. Well, I don’t care if you take a Hindu god’s name in vain—just lay off Jesus.”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll lay off Jesus.”

“What’s this Remover of Obstacles look like?”

“I think he’s an elephant.”

“Yeah? An elephant. Jesus Christ, can you believe that?”

“Dad!” But he had me laughing, even as I was praying to any god possible. Mostly to just stop feeling. It
was one thing to lie to someone who didn’t matter, but Dean was one of the kindest people I knew. And Chloe and I had changed him a little. I remembered the feeling of seeing him strut around a little after he first started getting our notes. Like all of a sudden he mattered more.

It killed me to think that might have been stomped out of him over the past few days of interrogations and innuendos. Dad and I had left early to make sure to get a booth in the back. But when I got there, Teddy Selander’s older sister was hostessing and she said, “You’re meeting Dean West? He’s sitting right over there,” loud enough for everyone to hear. I heard the bells on top of the door jangle and turned to see my dad coming in behind me.

“You’re sitting down, too?” Teddy’s sister asked.

“No, I think I’ll just grab a seat at the counter, thanks.” Teddy’s sister looked my dad up and down, and I remembered that the vo-tech shop teacher got fired last year and everyone said his wife had caught him in a car with her on his lap. Chloe would die when I told her it was probably true.

“Everything okay?” My dad shot me a look that said he didn’t mind hitting someone with a stool.

“Everything’s fine.” I followed Teddy’s sister into the dining room and saw Dean sitting with his back to the wall. He rushed to stand up when I got there, and it
reminded me that he was old Colt River, too, just like me. He’d probably grow up to be a lot like my dad.

Teddy’s sister cracked her gum when she talked, even when she talked in a stage whisper. “How are you?” she asked me now, right in front of Dean. “Has anyone heard anything about Chloe?”

I shook my head, waited for her to be done.

“Oh my God. That’s so horrible. Well, you tell her mom and dad we’ve been praying for them. Everyone in here’s been talking about it.” She shot a slow look toward Dean. “No one can get over it.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Gum crack. “Tanya’s going to be taking care of you two today. I’ll go make sure your dad’s got everything he needs.”

I wanted to call out
Stay off his lap
or something as she left. But I never had the guts to say those things. I just thought those things.

Dean coughed into his closed hand and I realized he was still standing there, waiting for me to sit down. “Oh, sorry.” I slid into the bench and shook off my jacket.

“Your dad’s here? Is he—is he going to sit with us?” Dean seemed terrified by the prospect.

“No. He’s up at the counter.” And then, so he didn’t think it was just about him, I added, “My parents have been crazy—they don’t let me out of the house without
one of them. It’s like total lockdown.” All of a sudden, I wondered if lockdown was a prison term. “I mean—they’re just so paranoid. It’s crazy.”

“No, it makes sense.” Dean nodded to himself. “I mean, most times you would have been with her, right? It could have been the two of you missing together.”

I wished. But I said, “Yeah…or the two of you, apparently.” Dean looked like I’d slapped him. I hadn’t meant for it to come out sounding mean.

“It hadn’t gotten that serious.” Dean looked up and then past me at the approaching waitress. “May I have a Coke, please?” he asked her calmly, and then his eyes fell back down to me. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Sure. A Coke.”

“Two C-Cokes, please.” It was the first time a boy had ever ordered for me. Sitting there in my V-neck sweater and heavy mascara, it occurred to me that this was the closest I’d ever come to a date.

I heard Dean say, “Thank you.” He said it slowly and carefully.

“Is it hard?” I asked him before even thinking about whether or not it was polite. “Talking to strangers—is it hard when they might not know…”

“Nah,” Dean said. “P-People c-c-call me Stuttering Dean, right? Most p-people know already.” And then he actually talked to me about it. His grandfather had
stuttered, but had grown out of it. Dean just shrugged when he said that, but I think he meant that he was hoping. And there were specific sounds that he got hung up on more often than others. He called them “triggers,” and the reason he spoke slowly was that sometimes he was looking for ways around them. Like c’s and k’s were hard so that at home, he’d call it a Pepsi even when he wanted Coke.

“Then why didn’t you call it a Pepsi here?”

“Bec-cause I don’t like Pepsi.” He smiled then a little. I tried to smile back, but it was too hard.

“Cam does something a little like that,” I told him. “About certain words. Except we’re the ones who can’t say them. If you say them, he makes this noise—it sounds like the way Ernie laughs on
Sesame Street
.”

“Like a raspberry?”

“Kind of.”

“What words?”

“That’s the thing. They’re words like
sleep
and
quiet
and
please
.”

“You can’t say
please
at C-C-Chloe’s house?”

“You can’t say a bunch of things. For a while, Cam did it when anyone said Chloe’s name. She couldn’t say her own name. She never told you about that?”

“Chloe doesn’t really talk about her brother.” Dean took a long swallow from his soda. “Listen, Finn, you know that I don’t know where she is, right?”

“Yeah. I know.” I said it quickly. It would have been slicker to make him convince me. But I wasn’t going to sit there and make Dean West do that.

“W-W-Well, I figured that maybe you and I c-could p-p-put our heads together. Maybe we don’t think w-we know something, but maybe going over it together—”

“I’ve already gone over it with everyone,” I told him.

Dean pressed his lips together and creased the paper wrapper shed from the straw.

“Sure. It w-was a long shot. Sorry.”

“No, I mean—we can try.”

Dean looked up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s worth a try, right? Anything’s worth a try.”

He nodded. I asked him then, “What was it like? I mean, people said you spent two nights in jail.”

It seemed like Dean sighed for ten minutes. Just one, long, continuous exhale. He said, “No. They have to arrest you in order for them to k-k-keep you overnight.”

“Yeah. I thought—”

“I wasn’t arrested.” Dean said it flatly.

“Oh.”

“They’d have to have evidence to arrest me. Like, actual evidence.”

In my head, pieces of Chloe’s photographs fluttered to the floor. “Dean, I’m really sorry about—”

But he interrupted me. “Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault.” I sat there with my straw in my mouth, without taking a sip. “It’s harder on my parents than anyone, I guess.”

“Were they mad?”

“Not at me.” Dean knocked a bunch of sugar packets out of the ceramic container. He started stacking them, one on top of the other. “They’ve spent their wh-whole lives in this town. My great-grandfather was born in our house. The other day Trudy Williams refused to ring up my mom at the supermarket.”

“What?”

“Yeah, she just stepped away from the register and said she didn’t feel comfortable h-he-helping her.” Dean articulated each syllable. “Some freshman kid who was bagging groceries had to do it. My parents don’t let me answer the phone anymore or pick up the mail. My aunt lives up in Bergen County and someone sent her pictures of a girl getting autopsied.”

“Jesus.”

“My mom thought maybe we should move, you know? Not sell off, but maybe rent and live somewhere else for a while. But my dad says that I might as well turn myself in and plead guilty. That eventually we’ll all know what h-h-happened.” Dean’s voice hitched, even beneath the stutter. “Then I think—what if it’s
something…that you’d never want to know?” He swallowed hard. “Are you afraid?”

God. Christ. Ganesh. If Dean West only knew. I blinked, made myself wait before I answered. But when I did, when I said, “I’m so afraid,” I said it honestly.

We talked through three refills and two orders of disco fries. After a while, I stopped worrying about who came into the diner. We mostly talked about Chloe, and some of that was hard to hear. She’d been meeting him. Sometimes she’d even been skipping student council meetings to see him.

I didn’t think about that too much. I didn’t wonder whether some of the afternoons I’d sat in the school library waiting for Chloe, she was actually off somewhere with Dean West. He said she’d seemed distant lately, but that made sense. There were a lot of plans being put into place, after all.

“I never thought of something bad happening in C-C-Colt River,” Dean said at one point.

“That’s what everyone’s saying,” I told him.

“But doesn’t that make you feel better?” Dean asked me. “It makes me think that Chloe took off. You know, all the p-p-pressure she’s under.”

“Everyone’s under pressure, though, right? What would make Chloe crack and not, say, Kenneth Ryden?”

Dean shrugged and cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know. M-Maybe we should be looking out for K-K-Kenneth Ryden.”

“Why not you? Or me?” Because that’s what I’d really meant.

Dean seemed to take that in stride. “Because we’re from here. Our p-p-parents are from here. If I never left this place”—he gestured around the dining room—“no one would think twice. Hell, wouldn’t yours rather you stuck around? Do you think the Caffreys are c-c-counting on that for Chloe? No—they want her in some city school. It doesn’t have to be a big city, right? There just has to be a lot of ivy.”

“Well, they’re not really Colt River people.” I felt guilty, like I was airing their business. “The Caffreys moved out here for Cam.”

“Exactly.” Dean announced his need for another refill with a loud slurp. The waitress descended. “Thank you.” He met her eyes. I noticed Dean West always said thank you. When she came back with a fresh Coke, Dean leaned in to talk softly to me. “Don’t you see that makes it harder for Chloe? Because of C-C-Cam, she’s their only shot?”