Shock Point (4 page)

Marty shook his head. “What about the drugs, Cassie? Is that part of the game plan, too? Becoming an addict?”

She straightened up, forgetting her handcuffs were fastened to a chain until it whapped her painfully in the shoulder blade. “I told you that’s a lie! I don’t use drugs. I certainly don’t use crystal meth. I don’t even know what it looks like. My stepfather must have planted something in my room to get my mom to go along with this.”

Marty’s expression was smug. “Every kid we take says that. It’s all lies. They never did anything.”

But I didn’t do anything,
Cassie thought.
And it is all lies.
Out loud, she said, “So is this what you guys do all day—kidnap kids?”

“It’s not kidnapping if your parents arrange for us to transport you to a new school. We’ve got signed permission and everything. Who are we kidnapping you from?”

Cassie ignored his question. A school? That sounded more permanent. She looked down at the brochure again.

 

 

Mexico? They were taking her to Mexico? Once they got down there, what chance would she ever have for getting back?

The outside of Thatcher’s house reminded Cassie of a “before” picture in one of the home fix-up magazines her mom liked. The paint was peeling, the porch was canted, and the hanging planter next to the door held nothing but a dead yellow spider plant.

Thatcher took a key ring from his pocket and opened the front door. Inside, it was crowded but cozy. A half-empty bottle of Coke sat on the wooden arm of the worn brown leather couch. An Elvis painted on black velvet sneered down at them from over an old Morris chair heaped with laundry. On the dining room table, Cassie saw scattered newspapers, two unmatched cereal bowls, half-empty coffee cups, and an open box of Apple Jacks.

Thatcher looked embarrassed. “Guess we were in kind of a hurry when we left this morning.”

“Is it just you and your mom?”

“Yeah. My folks broke up after my sister died.”

Cassie tried to think of something to say. “What was her name?”

“Who?”

“Your sister.”

“Oh. Celeste. Short for Celestial Blue. Her eyes were darker than mine.” He sighed. “Celeste’s eyes were the color of the sky.”

“That’s a pretty name,” Cassie said. “Do you have an unusual middle name, too?”

“No. Thatcher’s enough. My middle name is John, same as my dad’s first name. I haven’t seen him since I was ten, but I still get stuck carrying around his name.” He picked up a black cordless phone from its cradle. “I have to check in with my mom at work. So don’t say anything. I’m not allowed to have friends over when she’s not here.” He didn’t look at Cassie when he said this last part.

“Okay, sure.” It made her feel oddly happy to hear Thatcher imply that she counted as a friend.

He dialed a phone number. “Hi, it’s me. I’m home. I’m going to start on my homework now.” He listened for a second. “Okay, I can do that. Do I set it on hot or warm?” There was a pause. He cleared his throat and turned his back to Cassie. “Yeah. Me, too.” Cassie was pretty sure his last sentence had been in answer to his mom’s saying, “I love you.”

When he hung up, Cassie said, “Where does your mom work?”

“She’s a supervisor at Goodwill. Sometimes she brings home the coolest stuff.”

“I can see that,” Cassie said. The tops of the bookshelves and windowsills were lined with unusual vases, Depression glass, pieces of wax fruit, old hats made of feathers. “It sounded like there was stuff you were supposed to do before she gets home. Am I going to be in your way?”

He shook his head. “I’m just supposed to start some wash.” He stood on his tiptoes, reached into a cupboard over the refrigerator, and emerged with a can of barbecue Pringles. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah!” Other than the kid-size ice cream cones he grudgingly allowed, Rick had banned all junk food. Now their cupboards were filled with things that Cassie wasn’t even sure how to pronounce, like amaranth.

Thatcher popped the top on the Pringles can, set it in front of Cassie, then went to the freezer. “You know what barbecue chips taste best with? Chocolate ice cream.” He took out a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.

Cassie made a face. “Chocolate and barbecue? That doesn’t sound good at all.”

“You’d eat them both separately, wouldn’t you? You should try them together. It’s crunchy, soft, cold, sweet, salty, fatty, and chocolatey—all seven of the essential food groups.”

“If you say so.”

Thatcher took the lid off the ice cream and set it next to the can of chips. “You gotta use it kind of like a dip.” He demonstrated by scraping a Pringle across the surface of the ice cream, then popped the whole thing in his mouth. “Now them’s good eatin’!”

Hesitantly, Cassie followed suit. Her chip broke in two, but she persevered with the two halves until each had an edge of chocolate, then gingerly took a bite. A smile broke on her face. “You’re right. That is good!” For the first time in months she felt relaxed, even happy.

Thatcher straddled a chair and Cassie sat down, too, moving a coffee cup out of the way.

He said, “About that Socom stuff. It sounds really messed up. I don’t think it’s right to give kids drugs just to make their parents happy.”

His words echoed Cassie’s thoughts. “Rick has even been bugging my mom to put me on Socom.”

“So is that what you wanted to talk to me about? To see if I had any ideas about how to get out of it? I guess you could stick the pill in the side of your mouth and spit it out later.”

“No, my mom keeps saying she doesn’t want me on it, and Rick has backed off. Besides, it’s not a pill. It’s an injection. You only need one every couple of weeks or something.” She took a deep breath. “The reason I want to talk to you is that last night I found something strange in Rick’s files.”

“Are you even supposed to be looking through them?” Thatcher raised the eyebrow with the ring through it.

“I wasn’t really.” Cassie felt herself blush, and hoped it didn’t show. “Our regular computer died, so I went into Rick’s office to use the Internet. I just happened to see the names on the top of a couple of his files while I waited for his computer to boot up. Three of them were kids at my old school, kids who killed themselves. I didn’t even know he was their therapist.”

“Then he must not be a very good one. Isn’t that why you send your kid to a shrink—to stop them from doing something that drastic?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s not really what bugged me. I know I shouldn’t have—but I looked in their charts. All three of them were on Socom.”

“Maybe these were the kind of kids who would have killed themselves anyway.” Thatcher scraped another chip across the ice cream. “I mean, there must have been a reason why they were seeing a therapist.”

“Maybe. But in all three of their charts Rick had notes about how they were starting to have delusions—and that he was taking them off Socom. The thing is, none of the stories in the paper about them ever said they were on it. And they killed themselves in weird ways—but they make sense if you know what was going on in their heads.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Darren—he was the kid I knew best. He jumped from the tallest building in Minor, where we used to live.”

Thatcher shrugged one shoulder. “People kill themselves like that all the time.”

“Yeah, but Rick’s note said that Darren had started thinking he could fly. And Ben couldn’t stop thinking about purity, and he killed himself by drinking silver cleaner. And Carmen thought she was pregnant by Satan. But I don’t think she was pregnant at all. She stabbed herself in the stomach. Her mom didn’t find her until eight o’clock that night, after she had bled to death on her bedroom floor.”

Thatcher made a face and put down the Pringle he had been about to eat. Cassie was glad to see that she was getting through to him. “I think the first thing we should do is look Socom up on the Internet,” he said, then hesitated. “Except the computer is in my room.”

Her mother would never, ever have let Cassie go into a boy’s bedroom. “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s not like we’re boyfriend and girlfriend or anything.” She could feel her face flaming.

Thatcher ran his hand through his hair, looking uncertain. “Um, can you wait a second? I need to clean up. My room’s kind of a pit.”

“Sure, no problem.”

He disappeared down the hall. Cassie listened to muffled thuds and doors slamming while she looked around. The kitchen counter was lined with cookie jars, all of them old looking: a hen on a nest, a carousel, a bear, a pumpkin, a mushroom, a bulldog. One wall of the dining room held long wooden plate racks filled with kitschy plates from different states.

Thatcher appeared, looking slightly out of breath. “Okay. Just promise you won’t open the closet door.”

Cassie drew an X over her chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

She followed him down the hall and into his room. There were posters on the wall of bands, only one of which she had heard of. Dresser drawers had been slammed closed, but sleeves dangled out. A cloth hamper bulged suspiciously. The bed was just sitting there, the sheets and blankets roughly pulled up.

She didn’t notice the computer until Thatcher sat down at a small wooden desk.

“Wow! That’s your computer? It’s sleek!” It was a Macintosh with a flat screen no deeper than an inch. It looked more expensive than everything else she had seen in the house put together.

“I’ve been doing some part-time work at The Mac Store. They gave me a pretty good discount.”

He sat down, pulled out the keyboard tray, and pressed the space bar. The screen came to life.

Thatcher went to Google, typed in
Socom,
and hit return. The first half dozen hits had something to do with Navy SEALS. But number seven read
Socom—the answer for troubled adolescents?
Thatcher clicked on the blue-underlined link, and Cassie leaned in to read over his shoulder.

 

 

“All this and it mows your lawn, too?” Thatcher turned his head to look at Cassie.

“It’s too good to be true, isn’t it?”

“If what this says is right, parents will be demanding that it be added to every Coke.”

“But we already know what it says isn’t true. Look at that part right there.” Cassie tapped the screen with her fingernail. “ ‘Little or no side effects’! What about death? Isn’t that a pretty big side effect?”

“Maybe the deaths don’t count if they stopped taking Socom?” Thatcher sounded doubtful.

Cassie shook her head. “You see what it says. ‘Long duration of effective action.’ Even if he stopped giving it to them, they still had the drug in their system.”

Thatcher tapped his fingernail against his front teeth, thinking. “What I don’t understand is, how come none of the parents blame the Socom for their kids committing suicide? How come they didn’t put two and two together after watching their kids take a pill?”

“But remember, Socom is a shot, not a pill. Rick gave it to kids right in his office. Maybe their parents didn’t even know about it.”