Hanging by a Thread (14 page)

“Did you tell the police that?”

“Of course I did. The problem was, Arthur left early and my folks went to bed, so the cops said I could have left the house any time that night.”

“But why did they think … you know, that you did it? I mean, just the fact that you were dating, that doesn’t seem like enough.”

Jack didn’t answer me for a moment. His mood seemed to turn even darker as he stared out the window at nothing.

“She had texted me. A few times. Eight times, between
that afternoon and evening. The last one was around ten-thirty, so they said I went to meet her then. Her mom went to the police that night to report her missing, but it wasn’t until the next morning that they came to our house. Dad was out on a job. They asked for my phone and I gave it to them. They asked to search our house, and Mom and I let them. Dad …”

His voice trailed off and he paused for a moment, anger gathering in his eyes again. “Dad called the lawyer, after they left. He didn’t trust the cops. He’d had some bad experiences with them, a long time ago. But they had my phone.”

“What were the text messages? Was it something that made them think you were, that you had had a fight or something?”

“Amanda … took pictures of herself. And the messages were explicit.”

“Oh.” My face went hot again. I had never sexted anyone, but there was a lot of it going on at Blake, where, of course, they had their own special way of doing things—when girls took pictures of themselves, they were likely to be artful shots with props. Lincoln thought it was hilarious; he loved to make me uncomfortable by forwarding me the pictures that went around. He said I was the last virgin at Blake, a fact I’d sworn him to keep secret forever.

Suddenly that seemed like such a long time ago.

“The police … they never come out and say exactly what they think,” Jack muttered. “I mean, it was obvious they were trying to put a case together, but they never
found enough evidence. Because there wasn’t any. I didn’t even text her back after the first time. All I said was I’d talk to her later. And I erased the messages. They got records from AT&T but they couldn’t prove anything.”

Yet another time when I had to choose whether to believe him. “Did the lawyer help?”

“He told my mom there was no case. The cops tried to make a thing about the fact that my dad called him right away, like that meant I was guilty or something. But they backed off pretty fast.”

“I’m … sorry. For what you went through.” And I was—if he was telling the truth.

“You know, Clare, if you really think that jacket was hers, you should take it to the cops.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. There might be evidence—the dirt, the tear, who knew what the cops would be able to find out. Probably nothing, but the suggestion meant Jack was innocent, right?

Except I was pretty sure the jacket wasn’t done with me yet. It was like it was … alive, almost, in my room. I could feel its dark energy, even from miles away—or maybe that was simply my own fear.

“Yeah, I should do that,” I said noncommittally. “You’re sure you don’t know if she was wearing it that night?”

“I never saw her again after lunch. Look, we were already kind of headed toward splitting up,” Jack clarified. “I think she knew I wasn’t really into her the way she wanted.”

“What way is that?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Amanda was all about the drama. I liked her at first
because she was so passionate about books, but then she got that way about, well, us. She wanted to spend all her time together, she wanted it to be really intense. We’d have a fight, and I’d back off for a while, and then we’d start seeing each other again. I think … sometimes it seemed like she wanted to block out everything by having this big relationship that would just kind of take over.”

“How bad was it, really? I mean, was her dad abusive?”

“No, not like that, though they questioned him too. He was just older, and he was gone a lot for business. I met him—he was in his office, and he was kind of a dick. He barely looked up from his computer. Amanda said he hardly ever came out of his office and when he did, he was always on them for one thing or another.”

It sounded kind of like Rachel’s dad. He was always in his office or flying off somewhere. Rachel didn’t even know exactly what his latest company did—something about collecting consumer information for online businesses.

But Rachel’s dad wasn’t mean. Even if he was always in a hurry, even if he used money to make up for his guilt, he did try. When he was in town, he made time for Rachel and her mom. She’d canceled plans with me once or twice when he wanted to take them to dinner or out on his sailboat. She asked me along sometimes, but I didn’t think I could handle it—seeing her with her dad reminded me too much of what I was missing. Even seeing my own father a few times a year would have been a huge step up from what I had.

But I’d never stopped to consider that having him
around could have been even worse. Amanda’s parents’ fighting must have been really hard on her. At least with my mom, it was mostly normal. We fought, she got on my nerves, but we always made up right away.

“Do you think there’s any way it could have been him?” I asked.

Jack thought for a minute. “No,” he said finally. “If it was Amanda’s mom who had disappeared—maybe. He really seemed to hate her. Amanda said he criticized everything about her.”

Poor Amanda. Hearing Jack talk about her, she was taking shape in my mind, becoming a person rather than just an image on television or even the presence in my vision.

She’d been so gorgeous. She had perfect long brown hair that fell in waves past her shoulders, perfect wide brown eyes rimmed in eyeliner that made them seem even bigger, perfect generous lips glossed in deep pink.

“Amanda was messed up,” Jack said. “I was sorry for what she was going through, but it got way too intense. I didn’t want to deal with it. Look, I’m no saint, I know what I want, and when I want something I usually get it. But I never hurt Amanda.”

He stared at me, barely blinking, and for a minute I almost thought he was going to kiss me. But he didn’t. “Believe it or don’t,” he said. “If you want to know something, ask, and I’ll probably tell you. But don’t fuck with me again.”

His words had a strange effect on me. I was irritated, but I also wanted him to touch me. Half my brain was still
knotted up about Amanda and the jacket and everything else. But the other half just kept replaying what it had been like when his lips first brushed against mine, when his hands slid down my back. His revelations, his anger, hadn’t dampened the way he made me feel. Even the possibility that he had hurt Amanda couldn’t drown out the way I wanted him.

When he turned the key in the ignition and the old truck shuddered to life, I could have sworn he knew everything I was thinking. And even that didn’t scare me the way it should have.

W
E NEVER MADE IT TO THE
garage sale.

A few minutes after we left the farm stand, I realized we were passing by the flea market where I bought the bag of clothes that contained the denim jacket.

“Do you mind pulling in here real quick? I just need to ask … something. I mean, I need to ask one of the vendors about some vintage linens she thought she’d be getting.”

Jack shot me an opaque look. “You’re in charge.”

“You don’t even have to get out of the car,” I added hastily. “It’ll just take a second.”

Jack drove into the dirt lot, pulling up to the row of cars parked haphazardly near the pull-off. I could see the woman who sold me the clothes slouched in a folding chair with her arms crossed, wearing a different baseball cap today. I jumped out before Jack could offer to come with me, and approached her table.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The woman took her time looking up at me. “Yeah?”

“Last week when I was here, I bought a bag of clothes from you for five dollars. Big Ziploc bag, it had a skirt, a pair of tights, a jacket—”

“Hey, that was ‘as-is,’ ” the woman said quickly. “No returns.”

“No, no, it’s not that. I don’t want to return any of it. I just wanted to ask, the jacket? It was denim, with silver buttons? I was wondering where you got it.”

“Where I
got
it?” She stared at me suspiciously.

“Yes. It’s … Well, I really like it, and it fit me perfectly, and I wondered if the person who owned it might have other things for sale.”

It wasn’t much of a lie, especially because there was no way the jacket would ever have fit me. But the woman’s expression faded to boredom. “Can’t really say. I get stuff all over the place.”

I tried to keep my frustration from showing. “But maybe you would remember this. It was … Well, it was dirty, and torn. It had a rip in the right sleeve.”

I thought I saw a brief flash of recognition pass over her face. But her expression remained unreadable, and she yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth with her hand. “I can’t help it if people throw perfectly good clothes away,” she said. “Just there for the taking, maybe someone else can get some use out of it. Shame to let it go to waste.”

“So you found it in the trash somewhere?” I jammed my hand in my pocket, grabbing the folded bills I’d stuffed there, a couple tens. Trouble was, I didn’t know how to bribe someone, and I felt my face grow hot as I smoothed
the money flat on the table in front of the woman. “I think I underpaid. There were a couple of designer pieces in that bag, and I thought maybe I should give you some extra cash for them.”

The woman just stared at me for a moment, then quickly picked the money up and pushed it through a hole cut in the lid of a coffee can. “Well, now you mention it, I think I found that jacket down by that landfill near the strawberry fields along Mills Peak Road.”

I knew the landfill she was talking about; the official structure was surrounded by a chain link fence, but people sometimes left trash in the lot outside it. Mattresses, old tires—even just bags of trash. There were ordinances against dumping, but people ignored them when they didn’t want to pay the disposal fee. The junk would make good hunting for the flea market vendors.

“You found the whole bag of clothes there?”

“No. Course not. Just the one thing, that jacket. Would have been worth a lot more if it hadn’t gotten that rip.”

She was right about that, anyway. Scowling at me, she set the legs of her chair down on the ground, seemingly done answering my questions; my twenty dollars hadn’t gotten me much closer to the truth.

Anyone could have dumped the jacket at the landfill. It probably wasn’t a bad place to leave something you were trying to get rid of; most of the garbage ended up being incinerated. Maybe whoever left it there—the person who took Amanda—hadn’t wanted to risk the security cameras wired to the office shed and had just left the jacket
outside the fence, counting on it to be burned or else taken by a scavenger.

Maybe not the best strategy, but I still had no idea where Amanda had been taken from, or where she’d ended up.

“Get what you needed?” Jack asked, reaching across the seat and opening the door for me.

“No. I mean, yeah, she’s going to have them next week so I’ll come back. Thanks for stopping. But you know, I’m thinking we should probably get back.”

We barely spoke on the way home. Jack dropped me off without promising to call. I watched him drive down San Benito Road and take the hairpin turn down to the Beach Road, the vintage truck looking right at home next to all the old bungalows that lined our street.

When he was out of sight I let myself into the house. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with her chin in her hand, a coffee cup next to her iPad, the crusts of a sandwich on a plate nearby. Her reading glasses were pushed up on her head. She’d just had her highlights touched up and her hair would have looked good if she would just quit getting it cut in the same severe corporate style. I noticed a chip in her pale pink nail polish, which I knew would drive her crazy until she could squeeze in a lunchtime manicure.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hey there, Clare-Bear.”

I hadn’t seen much of her this weekend between the beach party and hanging out with Rachel, and today’s trip with Jack. A couple of times in the past she had gone with
me on my bargain-hunting trips, and I wondered if she was feeling neglected.

My guilt mixed with frustration again—I thought it was long past time for her to start getting a social life. She’d had one in San Francisco, sort of, but it had tapered off to nothing when we moved here. When I was younger I didn’t mind that she was always home with me in the evenings. In fact, I liked it. But in the last few years I’d started to resent that she didn’t have more friends, the hurt looks that flitted across her face when I turned down her invitations to go to a movie or out for coffee.

“Did you call Mrs. Slade?” I asked, and I could feel her shoulders stiffen under my touch.

“I haven’t had time. I’ve got yet another Chapter Eleven I need to prepare.… Honestly, Clare, if many more of my clients shut their doors I’m going to be in danger of going out of business myself.”

“Who is it this time?”

“A bed-and-breakfast south of town. Really cute place, but they poured a lot of money into it a couple of years ago and with the tourism hit so hard again this year, their bookings are way down. They just can’t make ends meet.”

“I thought the tourist trade was supposed to be getting better. They’ve got all those welcome banners up downtown.”

“That’s the Chamber of Commerce talking.” Mom sighed. “They’re really hoping the holiday week will turn things around, but I’m afraid this town is going to be tainted until they catch the guy who killed those kids. I’ve
seen the numbers, the ones they don’t make public. It’s pretty bad, honey.”

“But it’s been almost a year—”

“Did you see this?”

Mom pointed to the newspapers stacked on the table. She still subscribed to the
San Francisco Chronicle;
the headline on the front-page story read “One Year Later—Cops Are No Closer” above photos of both Dillon and Amanda. A sidebar article carried the quote “How can we keep our kids safe?” next to a picture of Winston’s downtown.