Nowhere Girl (3 page)

Odion disappeared into the kitchen and came back with five plates. “Who is this Brady Irons? I missed so much not going to high school with all of you.”

Gabby took them from him and set the table as she talked. “Cady loved him in high school.”

“You did?” Chandler and David asked at the same time. Jesus, boys were so dense.

Gabby peered up and saw my flushed cheeks. “And apparently she still does.”

I picked up the napkins and silver I'd brought in and followed her around the table, setting each place. “I do not.” I could feel my face getting even hotter. “It was just really nice to see him again.”

David finished his drink in one long gulp and then let out a loud burp. “I don't think a married woman should be this excited about seeing an ex-boyfriend.”

“Hardly,” I said. “I don't think I ever spoke a word to him in high school.”

“Just because you were too shy back then doesn't mean you're too shy now,” Gabby said, puckering her lips.

David reached in his pocket and handed me his cell phone. “Call Lover Boy up,” he said. “Invite him for dinner next week. We won't tell Greg.”

“I'm not inviting him anywhere near here until it gets a little less sty-like.” I swept a pile of crumbs off the dining room table into my hand. “You know, sometimes I miss Emma.”

“Fuck you,” David said pleasantly. “I'll clean … eventually.”

“We can argue about Cady's crappy marriage later,” Chandler told us, bringing the chicken vindaloo in on a platter. “It's time to eat.”

“My marriage isn't that crappy,” I told them. But the whole way through dinner, I couldn't get Brady Irons out of my mind.

 

CHAPTER

3

Tucked in a corner booth at the Westin on Village in Princeton, Deanna was sifting through my unnamed fifth book, and she still hadn't replaced her coffee with Grey Goose. That was a good sign. Hell, it was a great one.

Deanna liked nice hotels because she liked money. I liked them because they were potential material. All bars, especially swanky ones, were a breeding ground for fights between lovers, undercover cops pretending to be high-dollar call girls, and drunken fraternity boys acting out their Mrs. Robinson fantasies. But today, the bar was relatively empty since it was before noon on a weekday.

Deanna held her Sharpie aloft while she read. Ten years earlier, she'd called me after reading one of my articles in
Harper's Bazaar
and asked if I had an agent. When I told her I didn't even have a book, she'd sighed into the phone as if she were already exasperated with me, even though we'd never met. “Of course you do,” she'd said impatiently. Greg and I had recently moved into a great little cape that belonged in a children's story. It was brown with red scalloped trim and had tall, willowy flowers in the front yard. He was working sixteen-hour days as a psychiatric intern, and I was freelancing for all the Condé Nast and Meredith publications, ignoring what I knew I would someday have to write about: my sister. “If you can handle a five-thousand-word piece like this one about Mr. Right being a serial rapist, there's a bestseller in your future.”

And then Deanna had met me in a frantic sushi restaurant in SoHo and on the back of drink napkins showed me the architecture and scaffolding of a novel. She'd ordered sake for the table and then drank it all. And though I'd known then she was a mean drunk, I also knew she was smart, and she'd figure out how to sell my books. Still, I hated her for feeling like she was whoring out my pain to make a buck. And she hated me for not being tougher.

Writing in small chunks, in scenes, made it manageable for me, orderly. And I liked order, but I wondered what she'd think of this book. It was all over the place, which is why I needed Brady Irons and why I kept checking my phone, hoping he was still planning to come over.

“This is good stuff,” she finally said, flipping quickly through the pages like she always did when she was done reading.

“I know I need to develop Susannah more,” I said, beating her to the punch. “This is only the first draft.”

“Slow down, Zippy.” She laughed nasally. “I was going to say it could be your best work yet.”

She poured seven sugar packets into her third refill of coffee. “So far, the writing is excellent, the voice compelling. But,” she continued, “I'm not sure where the story is going.” She put her pen down and reached for her drink. She had long nails, painted an ugly sage green. “Have you even named it yet?”

“Not really.”

She glanced at the manuscript, and I saw her mascara was clumpy. It made her tiny eyes appear even smaller, lost somehow in the lashes. “Hell House wants a title, Zippy.”

Hollerly House was my publisher. Deanna had a derogatory name for everyone.

She rose from the table and picked up her purse. “I'll be right back.”

I watched her teeter on ridiculously high heels to the corner restroom and disappear. In a way, music had saved my life, so I'd told Deanna when we first met that all my books would be named after songs.
Alibi
, my first, was a David Gray song. The main character accidentally killed her brother and spent the rest of the book trying to cover her crime.
The Rising
, by Bruce Springsteen, came to me after finishing
Alibi.
Being free of the beautiful burden of writing my first novel, I'd felt open and inspired, as if something were rising up in me. I liked the name so much I created an entire story around a cult that had named itself the Rising.
Empty Corridors
, about a teacher who'd had an affair with a student and then killed her, was named after a Ben Howard song. He'd contacted me after it debuted on
The Times
bestseller list. Since then, we'd stayed in touch, having dinner whenever we were touring near each other. I came up with
Dark Roads
while on tour for
Empty Corridors,
when I'd gotten lost taking a shortcut from Bank Square Books to my hotel in Mystic. As I drove, the streetlights went out one by one, as though a phantom killer were flipping a switch.
What a perfect place to murder someone
, I'd thought. “Dark Road” was an Annie Lennox song, and I figured that was close enough. But I hadn't been able to think of even a working title for this book. I'd scrolled through all fourteen hundred songs on my iPod, flipped through atlases, and spent hours wandering the stacks at Sarandius Library, where Gabby worked, hoping for inspiration.

When Deanna came out of the restroom, her lips were alarmingly red.

“I thought I'd take a new route this time,” I told her when she sat down. “Maybe I'll put a summary of the manuscript on my website and let my readers name it. You know, as long as it's a song.”

She set her purse firmly next to her. “Oh, Zippy.”

She'd started calling me that after I'd written three bestselling novels in five years. I hated it.

“Sweet Jesus.” She reached for her drink, and when she saw it was almost empty, she waved to Sunshine, the waitress, who was standing at the bar, watching us. “You have to have a plot to have a summary.”

Sunshine arrived with a new cup of coffee for her. I wondered if there was vodka in it.

“You know the plot,” I told Deanna. “It's in the outline. Hopper's kid sister drowns in the skating pond, and he's positive she was murdered.”

“Murdered?” she interrupted. “I thought she went skating on a warm day and fell through the ice.”

“Yes, that's how it started.” I was getting more excited about this book as I was talking. “But it doesn't make sense. Susannah hated skating. She never would have gone out there alone.” I had a flash of a red scarf on the ice and Susannah's lifeless body floating under the surface, eyes wide, mouth open as if maybe she'd been screaming. “And Hopper knows that. He's sure something bad happened to his sister—that someone pushed her or lured her out there. So he gives up everything to find the killer and even becomes a prison guard because he thinks the murderer is a serial killer who's already doing time. Then he plans how he's going to kill him.”

“Yes, darling, but you need a twist.”

“How about he's in love with the person who really killed her?”

“He's gay?”

“No, a girl killed her.” I touched the thirty or so pages I'd written. “Isabelle, the best friend.”

Deanna set her cup down and peered at me with those dull brown eyes. I waited for a sarcastic remark, but there was none.

“I love it. I goddamn love it. He's planning to kill the wrong person, and he's in love with the murderer.”

“Right.” I wondered if I could bend the story line to have Isabelle be the one who whacked Susannah. Isabelle was a little odd, with her raven hair and nails, her obsession with wild animals, and her unnatural preoccupation with bizarre ways people died.

“When the dust settles, Chopper will realize his princess is the devil,” Deanna said.

Hopper. I didn't bother to correct her. “That's it,” I said excitedly. “
Devils and Dust
. That's the name of this book.”

“Is that even a song?”

“It's off one of Springsteen's solo albums.” Outside, a fountain was streaming over big stones, and now I wanted to leave. I wanted to go home and write.

“Good work, Zippy.” She clinked her coffee mug against mine. “I talked to Roger at Hell House. He wants book five when
Dark Roads
is out of production and before you go on tour for it.”

“But I'm only thirty-three pages into it.” Deanna's news about the deadline startled me, and I fought the urge to ask Sunshine for an entire bottle of Stoli.

Deanna reached across and patted my hand, her ultimate and only act of kindness. “I don't call you Zippy for nothing.” She made eye contact with Sunshine. “And, yes, I know you want it to be 333 pages. You only have three hundred to go.”

Sunshine arrived and set down a long leather billfold with the tab in it.

Deanna licked her thin lips. “You'd better get cracking.” She reached in her purse for her wallet. “You know, word on the literary street is your attachment to the number three is some cult knockoff.” She set her credit card on the table. “Three three three, you know, is half of six six six.”

Sunshine picked the card up, and I said, “I've heard the jokes. I'm a lightweight and can only handle half the Satanism.” I knocked back the rest of my coffee. “You know why I do it. I want to be different. Like that author from Roanoke who publishes one copy of each of his novels longhand.”

“If I were you, I'd be careful.”

“Careful?” I wanted to be in my car, heading out of Princeton.

“Your readers might start thinking
you're
the murderer if you keep up with these strange habits.”

 

CHAPTER

4

On tour, readers asked me if writing eased my past suffering. But it was more complicated than that. Trauma climbed along the corridors of my mind and wrapped itself around the present so I couldn't really tell the two apart. The day Brady Irons was supposed to come to my house, I woke after Greg. He was already downstairs, listening to a Bach concerto, getting ready for work. I thought about Isabelle, the ice, the strange way in which Hopper both knew and didn't want to know that his sister had been murdered. My books were not physical truths, but they were emotional ones. In order to write from Hopper's perspective, I only had to go back to the front hallway of our high school the day Savannah went missing.

Somewhere far off, I'd heard sirens. I felt weak, so weak I thought my knees might give out. A cop named Patrick Tunney responded to my 911 call, the blue spinning lights of his car warping the glass doors of my school. Mrs. Wilcox stopped typing and had run out of her office. “Honey?” She'd stood over me with her bob and those Bermuda shorts she wore year round. “Did you call the police?” I thought I might vomit.

Officer Tunney had a sweet face. He squatted in front of me, called me Cadence, and asked what had happened to Savannah. No one called me Cadence. Mrs. Wilcox had stepped back as soon as he knelt next to me, her hand on her mouth as though something might fly out.

“My sister's out there.” I was crying and gasping. I wished I could get up. I needed to stand. “Please. You have to help her.”

Officer Tunney spoke quickly into the radio on his shoulder, asking dispatch to send another patrol car and to call our parents. There was silence before a staticky voice came through: “Dispatch reached the mother. She says the sister is staying late at school for a meeting.”

How could I tell him that Savannah was lying so she could sneak off with a boy and get high with the senior girls? My parents had always accepted that Savannah and I knew things about each other that no one else did. They attributed it to the fact that we were identical. I'd never told them that I felt a psychic connection to most people, especially my family. Sometimes it was a wave of pain minutes before my mother would get a migraine. I'd hand Gramma a tissue the moment before she'd sneeze. My timing was always such that no one ever noticed. I didn't want them to. The things that Savannah and I could do with each other, for each other, made us different enough as it was. As I watched Officer Tunney communicating with dispatch, I saw clearly that he was good. It was a feeling I got. I knew that if anyone could find her, this man could.

“No.” My strength was slowly coming back. “She's here. She's here, and she's dying.”

Patrick Tunney squinted at me, and I understood he believed me.

Another patrol car arrived, and Chief Fisher, Emma Fisher's father, walked into the school. And right away, as Patrick Tunney went forward to meet him, I heard Fisher say teenagers were never missing; they just don't want to be found. Even while Patrick was refuting this, telling him this was a different case, Fisher was dismissing him. He was a huge man, and he strutted, his hand on his belt as though any minute he might take his gun from its holster and shoot me for wasting his time. Emma had his coppery-brown eyes. She was in David's class—part of the Snobby Six, as I called them—and as he came forward, running his hand over his golden hair to smooth it, I knew where Savannah was. I saw a flash of the crumbling chimney, the overgrown grass. Before he could speak to me, I reached for Patrick.