Skink--No Surrender (3 page)

“Not good. I think she’s run off with some dude she met online.”

“Meaning, on the computer.”

“He’s older than her,” I said.

“How much older?”

“Old enough to drive, obviously.”

“That’s unsettling.” Skink wrapped the rabbit meat in a rag. The fur he carried up to the dunes and tossed into some sea grape trees. Afterwards he asked me what I planned to do about Malley.

“Go tell her parents, I guess. Today I texted her and called a bunch of times, but she’s not answering.”

“Is that like her?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

He sat down a few feet away. I told him how Malley had lied about going to early orientation. “The note she left was totally bogus, to fake out her mom and dad.”

“Tell me the name of her new boyfriend, Richard.”

“Talbo Chock.” I spelled it for him, though it was just a guess on my part.

“I’ll make a call,” he said.

“Want to borrow my phone?”

Skink smiled. “Thanks, but I’ve got my own. All incoming calls are blocked except one.”

“Hey, why did your friend Mr. Tile tell that reporter you were dead?”

“Because I asked him to. Come back in an hour or so.”

While the governor made his private call, I walked to a surf shop on Kirk Street. My father used to hang out there, so the owners know me. Dad bought all his boards there, and so do my brothers. Before going off to college, they used to surf every day. There’s no beach in Gainesville, so now they’re suffering.

I’m not a surfer, but I like board shorts and flip-flops; that’s basically my official summer uniform. I was looking through a rack of new Volcom shirts when my phone made a high moaning noise, which freaks people out until I tell them my ringtone is a humpback whale. I walked outside to answer the call.

“ ’Sup, Richard?” It was Malley.

“Where
are
you?”

“Don’t be all mad or I’m hanging up.”

I said I wasn’t mad, just bummed.

“Sorry about the beach last night,” she said. “I forgot about this orientation thing—I must’ve blocked it out of my mind. Mom was totally pissed, but she got me on a late flight out of Orlando. It was, like, the last seat on the whole plane.”

“What luck,” I said drily.

“But still I almost didn’t make it because airport security found a bottle of vitaminwater in my backpack. Seriously! One of the TSA guys pulled me out of line and made me dump everything out—”

“Vitaminwater?” I had to laugh. Malley was on a roll.

“What’s so funny, Richard? Vitaminwater is the bomb.”

“Whatever. Why’d you text me that you were grounded at home?” I tried to keep my voice low because I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the surf shop, customers going in and out the door.

“I couldn’t call you at the time,” my cousin said, “and I didn’t want you to be mad that I left without saying goodbye.”

“So now you’re really up in New Hampshire?”

“Yeah. And this place? The armpit of all armpits, Richard.”

Very calmly I said: “Malley, there’s no such thing as early orientation at the Twigg Academy. I called and checked.”

“What? You. Did.
Not
!”

“You’re so busted,” I said. “Tell me where you really are.”

And she hung up, not exactly an earth-shattering surprise. Malley is legendary for hanging up on people. Usually she calls back in five minutes, ten max, but this time she didn’t.

A text popped up as I was heading to the beach: “If you go to my parents, I’ll never speak to you again!”

“Knock it off,” I texted back.

“I’ll tell your mom what happened in Saint Augustine! Swear to God, Richard.”

“You would NEVER.”

“Don’t push me,” my cousin texted back.

Suddenly I felt sick. Not barfy sick, just sick at heart.

The governor was collecting crabs when I returned to the beach. I told him that I’d finally heard from Malley, and that everything was fine.

He said, “No, son, it’s not.”

Then he told me something that made me feel even sicker.

THREE

Talbo Chock completed almost one full tour with the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan. He’d been born in New Orleans and lived there until he was eleven, when his family moved to Fort Walton Beach, Florida. There, Talbo played first-string guard on his high school basketball team. His dad worked at a boatyard; his mother was a bookkeeper and secretary for an Episcopal church.

Talbo had just turned nineteen when the supply truck he was driving got blown to pieces by a roadside bomb in a place called Salim Aka, which Skink said was in the dangerous province of Kandahar. Two other Marines in the vehicle survived their injuries, but Talbo died three weeks later at a military hospital in Germany.

And now somebody had stolen his name, somebody who’d tricked my cousin Malley into running away with him.

“How’d you find out all this?” I asked Skink.

“Reliable source,” he said. “The Pensacola paper ran a short story about Corporal Chock’s death. It would have been a bigger story
—should
have been—except a hurricane
was clipping the Panhandle the same day. The corporal’s first name was Earl and his middle name was Talbo, which is the one he went by.”

Which explained why nothing popped up when I’d Googled “Talbo Chock,” right after Malley befriended him online.

Now my brain was tumbling. “The guy who stole that soldier’s name,” I said, “he could be a total lowlife!”

“Odds are he is.”

“But Malley doesn’t know. Malley is—”

“In a bad situation,” said Skink. “Now go tell her folks, Richard.”

They say everybody keeps at least one secret, and maybe that’s true. Mine was an ugly one. I didn’t rob a bank or anything like that, but what I did was serious enough to crush my mother if she ever found out. And there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that Malley would narc on me, just like she’d threatened to do. She has a ferocious temper.

So, a selfish part of me didn’t want to tell her parents that she’d run off with the Talbo Chock impostor, because I was afraid for myself, afraid of what my mother would do if Malley revealed what had happened in Saint Augustine.

I felt a hard stare from Skink’s good eye, the one that actually moved. He said, “What’re you waiting for, son?”

“You ever done something you were really ashamed of?”

“Oh, never once.”

“I’m serious.”

He chuckled. “I could write a whole encyclopedia of mistakes. Hell, I could write an opera.”

“About a year ago I did something wrong—something against the law—and Malley saw the whole thing. She’s gonna rat me out if I let her mom and dad know she’s not really up at boarding school.”

“Would you prefer they hear it from the cops,” Skink said, “after they find her body?”

“God, don’t say that!”

He put down the sack of crabs. “Listen up, Richard.” It was the deepest voice I’ve ever heard, like the rumble of faraway thunder. “Whatever you did that you think is so terrible? It’s nothing—I mean,
nada
—when weighed against the life of your cousin.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re right.”

He put a hand on each of my shoulders, not a hard squeeze, but I could feel the strength. “Go,” he said.

And I did.

Trent was playing golf, and Mom wasn’t home from work yet. Our front door sticks in the humidity, so sometimes you have to give it a shoulder. I grabbed a cold Gatorade from the refrigerator and went to my room and pounded on the mattress with the baseball bat. What was my cousin thinking when she said yes to this jerk? Had she lost her mind?

I got a chance to ask her, because at that moment she called.

“His name isn’t really Talbo Chock!” I blurted.

“Duh.”

“Then who is he?”

“You didn’t tell anybody, right?” she said.

“Where
are
you?”

“Oh, Richard. You think I’m stupid or something?”

I was so happy to hear her voice that I couldn’t stay angry. She sounded as chill as always.

“He could be a stone psycho,” I whispered.

“Ha! So could I.”

“This isn’t a joke. You don’t know a thing about him.”

“You don’t know
what
I know,” said Malley.

I told her that threatening me about Saint Augustine didn’t matter. Even if I stayed quiet, her parents would eventually learn that she wasn’t at boarding school.

“All I need is a week,” she said. “Then you can tell ’em everything.”

“What happens in a week? Why are you doing this?”

Gaily she said, “YOLO,” an annoying abbreviation for
You only live once
.

“That’s weak, Mal. Only yo-yos say YOLO.”

“Gotta go, dude.”

After she hung up I checked the caller ID, which said “Blocked.” I tried back on Malley’s regular number but her phone went straight to voice mail. There was no point leaving a message—the Talbo Chock impostor was probably screening her calls.

When I heard my mother come in the front door, I took a deep breath, counted to twenty and walked out of the bedroom. She gave me a hug and said there were groceries in the car.

I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. “Mom, sit down.”

She looked at me over the top of her sunglasses. “Right this minute, Richard? First let’s get the bags from the backseat, before Trent’s ice cream melts.”

“No, we need to talk now.”

“What is it? Something happen?”

“I’m pretty sure Malley ran away.”

“Oh.” Mom didn’t shrug, but she wasn’t exactly blown away by the news. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

“It’s not like the other times.”

“How do you mean, Richard?”

“She’s not alone,” I said. “There’s a guy she met online. I think we should call Uncle Dan and Sandy.”

Mom took off her glasses. Her face darkened with worry.

“How old is this person?” she asked.

“Malley won’t tell me anything. She’s being a major b-word.” I related everything I knew so far, including the content of the bogus letter she’d left in her desk.

“Has he harmed her?”

“I don’t think so, Mom.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

I went to the car and grabbed the grocery bags. Trent’s precious dessert, a half-gallon of Heath Bar Crunch, made it safely into the freezer. My mother was already on the phone to Uncle Dan. She was in total courtroom mode, her voice steady and calm.

Mom’s a lawyer with a small firm that specializes in environmental cases, going after companies that dump waste into public waters. There’s not much money in it, but she gets really stoked about her work. I hear her ragging Trent about all the fertilizer pollution caused by golf courses—the club he belongs to is on the bank of the river, and it’s totally old-school. The chemicals that are spread on the fairways leach out if there’s a heavy rain.

When my mother gets focused on a situation, things move along briskly. After speaking with my uncle, she made several other calls while I put away the rest of the groceries.

“All right,” she said when she was finished. “Now we wait for the police to do their jobs.”

“Think they’ll find her?”

“I do, Richard. Definitely.”

Once Malley learned that the cops were out looking for her, she’d go ballistic. I considered telling my mother about Saint Augustine, just to get it over with and beat Malley to the punch.

I didn’t say a word, though. No guts.

“If she calls again,” Mom was saying, “keep her on the
line as long as you can. Try to remember everything she says. Any small remark could be an important clue.”

“How’s Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy?”

“Scared. Upset. Like any parents would be.” She got up and started rearranging the cereal boxes in the pantry. “That cousin of yours, I swear. She has no idea what she’s gotten herself into.”

“I told her the same thing.”

“And what did she say?”

“She just laughed, Mom.”

The best thing, of course, would have been for Malley to come back on her own. Part of me almost believed that was what would happen, that she’d just stroll through the front door tomorrow, chill as ever, announcing her adventure was over. Uncle Dan and Sandy would be so out-of-their-minds happy to see her that they probably wouldn’t even ground her.

The worst thing would be if she decided she wanted to come home but the fake Talbo Chock wouldn’t let her. Even though the police go full-tilt on a missing person case when it’s a kid, none of us who were close to Malley could be very helpful. We didn’t know the true name of the guy she was traveling with. Didn’t know how old he was, what he looked like, where he was taking her.

When the officers came to interview me, and I knew they would, all I’d be able to tell them about the fake Talbo Chock is what Malley had told me.

He’s sweet, Richard
.

He’s funny
.

He’s like a poet
.

I didn’t want to think too much about what he really was, the awful possibilities.

After dark I ran back to the beach carrying a flashlight instead of my baseball bat. Near the edge of the dunes I found a small, cold campfire; among the coals were a few animal bones.

Up and down the beach I checked a bunch of turtle nests, but none had a soda straw sticking out of the sand.

The weird old governor was gone.

FOUR

The police launched an all-out search for Malley, and for the next several days my hopes jumped every time the phone rang. There were clues to follow, but no red-hot trail.

On the night she’d pretended to fly to New Hampshire, surveillance cameras at the Orlando airport showed her stepping out of her mom’s car at the curb on the departure level. She was wearing black jeans, flip-flops and a gray hoodie. She had a red travel bag on rollers and her backpack. After waving goodbye to Sandy, she entered the terminal building.

Eleven minutes later, a camera on the arrivals ramp—one level down—caught Malley hurrying through the exit doors and sliding into a white two-door Toyota. The driver was a man, though he didn’t make a move to help my cousin with her luggage; he just popped the trunk and sat there. It was hard to see what he looked like because he wore a Rays baseball cap pulled snug to his brow, a cheap blond wig and Oakley-style shades. The video was grainy, and the lighting at the airport curb was poor.