Heartless (26 page)

Her lips curled up at the corners. Her eyebrows dropped to a crease in the center, and the beginnings of a flush blossomed in her cheeks. It was a face I’d come to love in the following months. Mischief and mayhem, all rolled up in a Cheshire smile, camouflaged by the most innocent looking freckles you’d ever imagine.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll try anything once.”

We took the first shot together, Lucy and I, from little white Dixie cups with blue and white daisies. The liquor burned as it went down, and we breathed simultaneous fire as Joe doubled over in laughter, and we doubled over in shared agony.

We took the second shot together from the same cups. And then the third.

The following morning, Joe was long gone. The Southern Comfort bottle lay empty on its side. Lucy and I had slept, side by side, tangled up in a heap, and when we awoke, we shared headaches and violently ill stomachs. Our cell phone photo galleries were littered with pictures of us together
.
Two girls, so different, and yet so beautiful and alive. And ridiculous. Jo sits on Lucy’s lap, drunk. Lucy grabs Jo’s butt, drunk. Lucy and Jo hug while simultaneously flipping off the anonymous photographer, drunk.

After that, we had no choice but to be best friends. Once you share a night like that, you’re attached for life.

A
ttached for life. Lucy and I were attached for life. We were supposed to grow old together, the old college friends, showing up for weddings and births, parties and divorces. That was how it was
supposed
to be.

But suddenly I was (mostly) dead, and Lucy was missing. And life had turned upside down and backwards, inside out and topsy-turvy.

I wanted to hyperventilate. I tried to
make
myself hyperventilate. I wanted to feel something physical. But I couldn’t. So instead, I just said to Adam, as calmly as if he
hadn’t
just signed my best friend’s death certificate, “So what do we do next?”

“We find them. And we get Lucy back. Go wake up Eli. I’ll pick you guys up in ten minutes. Meet me out front.”

E
li helped me dress. There was no need for modesty anymore. He pulled a clean shirt over my head, clean pants up around my hips, a coat over my stiff shoulders. Then he wrapped my whole face in one of the beautiful silk scarves I had no further energy or desire to protect.

Eli smuggled me back down the stairs and out the fire door. He shivered beside me in semi-hostile silence while we waited for Adam’s squad car to appear. In Lucy’s absence, Eli was really stepping up to help me, and while he froze in the early morning wind, I whispered, “Thank you.”

I might as well have remained silent. He ignored my gratitude, the single tender moment from earlier in the night blown to bits by the news that Lucy was gone.

Strong’s squad car appeared exactly ten minutes later. Eli mumbled something under his breath.

“What?” I said.

“Military precision,” he said. “Cop drives me nuts.”

I nodded, and ducked my head to get into the back seat when Eli opened the door. He walked around to the front seat, climbed in, and we were off. Adam never bothered to say good morning.

The sky brightened as we headed down the mountain in silence. As soon as the sun peeked over the jagged horizon, it bounced off the stark white snow and the sky exploded in a kaleidoscope of colors and textures and light. I loved living in these mountains much more than I ever expected to, and I stared out the window at the rainbow sky and tried not to worry about Lucy. It was hard, though, in the pressure-cooker silence surrounding me. I needed someone to do something, to say something, but I felt paralyzed with fear, as if nothing
I
could do or say could possibly help.

After fifteen minutes of driving away from campus, up and down winding mountain roads, Adam pulled into a parking lot designated a “national lookout spot of the White Mountains.” I had to admit, the view was amazing, but I had no clue why we stopped.

Eli and I sat still, expectant and silent, while Adam looked out at the snow-covered valley below. It was dotted with picturesque farmhouses and log cabins, picket fences and barns, like a Currier and Ives puzzle I’d put together with my grandfather when I was a child. We waited, Eli and I, for something to happen.

Finally, after checking his watch three times, Adam spoke. “You know,” he said, making me jump, “I’ve gotten used to your smell, Jo. Either that, or you’re so far gone even the stink has left you.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I stared at the bars between us and pretended my feelings weren’t hurt.

“What happened, Adam?” Eli said. “You need to tell us what’s going on.”

“They took her.” He shrugged.

“We know.”

Strong turned back to look at me. His face was twisted with rage, a Halloween caricature mask of his normally handsome face. “So what I need to know from you is…what do you know that you haven’t told me? Who else knows what’s going on? You’ve hidden stuff from me all along.” He raised his voice, a cruel mimicry of my own.
“Oh, I’m Jo, and I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong. I’m just having a girls’ weekend, it’s not that my face is falling off.”
Louder, and angrier still, he continued, “What are you still hiding?”

“I…I…I don’t know anything else!” I said. “Don’t your cop friends know more than me by now? Didn’t they investigate the cabin? I have pictures of the other girls on Lucy’s phone. Can we use them? I have it here. Did you send them to the station?”

“No more questions!” Adam roared, and this time even Eli jumped. “I want answers! What do you know? Who else have you talked to?”

“Jesus Christ! Officer
Strong
! How strong is it, to yell at a girl like Jo? She’s trying to help!” Eli reached across the front seat and shoved Adam into his door, then opened his own and got out into the thin morning air.

He opened my door. “Come on,” he said. “We can find her ourselves.”

Eli spoke like a petulant child, but I preferred his petulance to Adam’s fury. I walked with him to the fence at the edge of the overlook, afraid that Adam would follow, but equally terrified he’d leave us there on the mountaintop. I tried to tell myself it was going to be fine, that his fury was that of a Romeo who’d lost his Juliet, but this felt different. Off, somehow. I shook off my confusion and turned my attention to Eli.

He wouldn’t look at me, but I didn’t blame him. I was barely a shadow of the girl he’d once maybe, possibly, cared for. I was an ugly, wretched, pitiful beast. We stood beside each other, shoulders almost-but-not touching, and I felt the fury emanating from his body.
Fury at me?
I wondered.
Does it matter?

After a moment, Eli took my mangled, broken, gloved hand into his, pulled it to his lips, and kissed it gently. “What I said before? Yesterday? About you, you know, dying?” He gulped, and closed his eyes.

I nodded. “I know. You don’t have to…”

“Yes, I do. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. You’re a victim in this, just like all those other girls. Just a victim.”

I stepped away, pulling my hand from his. “I’m different, though. I’m a dangerous victim. I
poison
people. You shouldn’t touch me.”

“You’re not dangerous. Not really. Not on purpose, anyway.” He shrugged, and reached out and pulled me back to him. “Besides, you have gloves on. I can hold your hand.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know why you’d want to.”

“Because I love you.”

“What? Are you crazy?” The butterflies in my absent stomach may not have been real, but I felt them as though I was a normal girl and this was a normal conversation. Eli had never told me he loved me.

He smiled and kissed my hand again. “I mean, I know we broke up the other night. I don’t know if we’d have gotten back together. I don’t know if, if we did, we’d have made it dating another week. Maybe it’s just regret, but I’d like to think we’d have made it, as a couple. Who knows. But no matter what, Jo, I do. Love you, I mean. As a friend, as a girlfriend, and as Jo. I just thought it was time for you to know that. I should have said it a long time ago.”

“I love you, too,” I said, my voice almost failing.

“Good,” he said, smiling. “Now that’s settled, we should get back to finding Lucy.”

“Yes, let’s,” said a deep voice from right behind us. Strong’s voice.

“Jesus, dude! Don’t sneak up on us like that.” Eli dropped my hand and stepped away, almost stumbling over the knee-high fence that protected visitors from the steep drop-off beyond it. I grabbed his coat and held on, but made a face when I heard something rip from inside me.
Just another body part to try to repair later.
I knew full well I was lying to myself.

Strong looked down at the ground and shuffled his boots through the snow. “Sorry. For scaring you, here and back there. I know better than to lose my cool like that. But, this is too much. We need to find her.”

I walked to him, then past him, patting him on the shoulder. “The phone’s in the car. That’s the best place to start looking. We need your friends to look at the pictures, figure out what other girls are missing. Maybe that’ll give us a clue for where to go next.”

I
showed Strong the photos on Lucy’s phone. He studied each one carefully, and then emailed the complete album to a detective at the station. His cell phone rang thirty seconds after he hit the send button, and Eli and I waited in the car while Adam paced around it, holding the phone slightly away from his ear, looking more and more frustrated, and talking back into it.

“No, it has to be now…This has taken too long already!...Yes, safe with me…No! Now!”

The words filtered through the windows, over gusts of wind that rocked the car like the baby in the treetop. Adam’s voice grew louder until he shouted, and the conversation pulsed onward, a dissertation about my entire case. But finally, he was done. He shoved his phone deep into his coat pocket and climbed back into the car. I was busy flipping through the pictures again, one at a time.
Flip, flip, flip.
I stopped and toggled between two of them, pictures of the desk and the tackboard from the room below the lab.

“Blonde, brunette, blonde,” I mumbled quietly to myself. It all seemed like nonsense, and the pictures were so small it was hard to see anything. “Brunette, blonde, redhead, brunette. Crap! What the hell do all these people have in common, and how do we find Lucy?” I threw the phone at the door, and it crashed to the ground. The battery popped out and landed beside it.

Both Eli and Adam jumped, and turned to stare at me. The car idled in the parking lot, waiting, like the rest of us, for the next move.

“What?” Eli said. He sounded exasperated, exhausted. I understood.

“I’m just trying to figure this out,” I said. “And I’m getting nowhere. The cabin, the papers I saw, it was nonsense and I hate it! I just want my life back! I want Lucy back!” The world suddenly felt like it was closing in on me. My brain slowed down and I felt myself shutting down. “Guys, I need to recharge.”

“We’re not going back to the dorm,” Adam said. “We’ve got to start looking for Lucy.”

“I need my car charger then. It’s in Lucy’s car. Can we go get it?”

“Where’s Lucy’s car?”

“2959 Primrose Path.” My words were slurred, slow. “The cabin. Go now.”

The darkness closed in, but I felt the car peel out of the parking lot and speed away. I hoped we were headed toward the cabin, but Strong’s and Eli’s words, coming from the front seat, sounded like they traveled through mud to get near my ears.

A minute later, I blacked out.

The next thing I knew was warmth, cozy like a hot tub on a cold winter’s day. I was in the front seat of the squad car, hooked up to my charger. Eli stood outside, but Strong was beside me.

“Morning,” he said in a sandpaper voice. I wondered if he’d been yelling again while I was out. “Feel better?”

I tried to nod, but only succeeded in rocking my head back and forth. “It takes a few minutes,” I slurred.

“We’re at the cabin,” he said. “Or what’s left of it. Since we’re here, when you’re up for it, have a look around what’s left. See if it sparks a memory that could help find Lucy. We’ve got some time while my guys at the station look into a few things.”

“Have we looked inside?” I tried to say. There was no way the whole underground fortress was burned out. But no actual words came through my numb mouth.

So we sat in silence, Strong and I, while my strength came back and Eli’s head floated past my window again and again as he paced around the car. Finally, I felt my strength return, and I pulled myself up to look out the window.

I promptly fell back against the seat, because the cabin? It was gone.
Poof
, I thought.
Gone like magic.
Only police tape marked the area where it had once stood, indicating that the root of my new existence ever stood at all. Police tape, and the black ash and soot that flurried over the melting snow.

The view of the mountains and valleys beyond the empty expanse in the ground was spectacular, though. Breathtaking, if only I’d had breath to take. Snow-covered fir trees in the distance, blue sky, the storm of the day before only a distant memory. The place which had caused so much pain had been replaced by a place of overwhelming beauty.