The Incident on the Bridge (9 page)

I
f you pointed a bicycle west, you went west, but if you wanted to
sail
west, evidently you had to go north, then south, then north, then south, and half the time you still weren't west enough to round the buoy that Barnaby called the mark. Plus, Fen kept tipping over while the Ted girl watched. She'd gotten into a boat with a bright orange-and-silver sail and zoomed past him like a wasp.

He trimmed poorly and he didn't pinch enough, apparently. He still didn't know what the hell
reach
meant. Barnaby stayed nearby in a motorboat the whole time, circling him like a killer bee, telling him things he didn't understand until finally Fen had to say flat out that he'd never sailed before, which he was pretty sure came as no surprise whatsoever to Barnaby.

Far off at the edge of the golf course, where the bay opened out and started flowing toward the bridge, the girl sailed back and forth.

When they finally got back to the dock, Barnaby was forced (because it was his job) to show Fen how to wash the boat Fen couldn't sail, then wheel the boat in a dolly to a parking spot, and Fen was forced to shake hands, say sailing was very, very fun, awesome, in fact, and thank you very much. Only then could he sit alone at a snack bar table.

“Fen-omenal!” his uncle said. His face was always so cheerful. An annoying characteristic just now.

“Hey.”

“How was it?”

“Horrible.”

“Really?”

“Why did you say I knew how to sail?”

“I thought you'd be a natural.”

“I'm not.” All those times he'd counted sailboats from the shore or the backseat of his parents' car. It had looked like the most incredible thing in the world, the coolest and richest and awesomest.
What a crock,
he thought. Then,
I am an optimist an optimist an optimist.

Silence. “Want a cheeseburger?”

“No.”

“I'll get a couple.”

You know who the optimist was? Carl. “Okay,” Fen said. The girl was back. If she tied up her boat, she might come this way. His fear that she'd say something about his sailing (or refuse to talk at all) made him want to run, but then he might not see her again.

“I'll get us some cheeseburgers, Fensterman,” his uncle said. “You'll do great next time. You're a natural.”

Despite the crappy thing that sailing turned out to be, the water rocked everything, even the floating piers, and what rocked in it gleamed. People wheeled little yellow carts to yachts they probably knew how to sail, even if he didn't. And now the Ted girl was coming toward them with her finely cut, sunlit shoulders. She definitely was. Or toward the snack bar. One or the other.

“L
et's go over the things we know,” R. P. Skelly said. “The awesome party house is rented to people with ugly pajamas. The Mooreheads are in Mexico, not answering the phone. Or we have the wrong number.” He was looking at the computer screen, not at Elaine.

“So that doesn't even count as a thing we know.”

Skelly went on. “Clay sometimes lives aboard a boat called the
Surrender,
but not always, and not right now. So he's either in Mexico or somewhere else—we have no idea where—or he took the tackiest car in the family fleet and jumped without leaving a note.”

“He wasn't the jumper type,” Elaine said. “More like a nascent international playboy.”

“Nascent?”

“Beetdigger Word of the Day,” Elaine said. Skelly had made the mistake of telling Elaine once that his high school mascot in Utah had been Digger Dan the Beetdigger.

Skelly tapped his lip with a pencil. He was a habitual lip tapper. “Who do you know at the Yotta Yotta Yot Club? Any old prom dates who might do raft-ups with the Mooreheads?”

“Just Carl Harris,” she said. “And I already asked.”

Tap tap.

“Maybe someone stole the car,” Elaine said.

“And then the poor guy thought,
Why didn't I steal a better one?
and jumped?”

“The girl at the front office said you can't open the auto gate without a clicker or a key. Can't get out of the parking lot.”

“Wouldn't the clicker or key be in the car?”

“I checked the front pretty well,” Elaine said. “What did the Chippies say when you asked why they never saw a person? Did they run back the video?”

“It's not video you run back, remember? It's just you watch, you see. You don't watch, you don't see.” He paused. “Or it's busted and you don't see.”

“So they're going with the busted-camera defense.”

“Yeah.”

Elaine couldn't decide whether she wanted to drink more coffee or lie prone in a dark room. “Let's go look in the car some more.”

It was easy to miss stuff in the dark, but she didn't think she could have missed a clicker. The car was cold now, and the grime stood out more. “I'll do the back,” Skelly said, and Elaine kept sticking her hands in disgusting crevices until she found, pressed up against the lowest part of the console, the driver's license of a pretty girl with long brown hair and dark brown eyes that were probably not bad at brooding. Or maybe it was her lips that made her look pensive. They looked swollen, almost.
Thisbe Jessica Locke,
the license said.

On the floor between the brake and the gas pedal she saw again the tiny ball of paper, like a spitball, with red printing on it. She picked it up, prying an edge until she saw the word
Luck
printed in red, and carefully spread the thin slip of white paper on her knee:
Lucky
Numbers
25
29
66
on one side,
I AM CLAY AND YOU ARE HANDS
on the other.

Skelly stopped what he was doing to look at the fortune. “I never get fortunes like that.”

“Me neither,” Elaine said.

“Kind of weird that it's the same name.”

“If you found your name by chance in a fortune cookie,” Elaine asked, “would you wad it up afterwards?”

“If I found a cookie that said
I AM R.P. AND YOU ARE HANDS
, I'd frame it and put it on my desk. Or yours.”

Elaine kept squatting beside the car, the girl's driver's license in her hand. “When do you take just your license in the car, without your wallet?”

“When I'm going running.”

“You run?”

“Hypothetically. Also when I go to the beach.”

“So when you're going to drive a car but you don't need money.”

Elaine was pretty sure they both filled in the blank the same way: you wouldn't need money if you were going to jump off a bridge, but you wouldn't need your license, either. “Goddamn it,” Elaine said. She stood up and felt her head drain like a bottle held upside down.

“The girl might have dropped her license in the car a long time ago,” Skelly said. “I dropped my house key between the seats once and found it a century later.” He went back to searching the rear compartment, and she watched him lift a lid that fit over a spare tire. Smashed flat over the tire was a brown Starbucks bag. Inside the bag, ten little plastic bags of weed. Priced. Little labels on them, white stickers, handwritten.
$12
in ballpoint pen.

Jesus, her vest felt tight. That's what happened when you took a week off from running and allowed yourself salt-and- vinegar chips at lunch.

“Intent to distribute,” Skelly said.

Elaine had to take off all her gear to pee, the whole gun belt, and it always felt a little like getting undressed for bed, which cleared her mind. “I have to go to the bathroom. Why don't you take that up and log it.”

Maybe the license had been dropped there months ago and been replaced. Maybe the driver wasn't a seventeen-year-old girl. They just had to find the girl and see what she knew.

“N
o,” Graycie said when the Coronado police officer who said she was Elaine asked whether she had seen a girl with long brown hair on the bridge.

“I found a girl's license in the car,” Elaine said. “Seventeen years old. Tall.”

“I didn't see anyone.”

“You guys were watching the monitors the whole time, right?”

It always felt so bad to lie. If she didn't lie, though, what would happen to her job? What would happen to Genna? “The camera that's really close to that spot, it's broken. So the only view we had was far away.”

Graycie was glad it was a woman who had called. Though maybe a woman would be even harder on her.

The Elaine person started in again: “You didn't get distracted by something and miss a person getting out of the car, did you? I mean, what's hard to figure out here is how a car got on the bridge without anybody driving it. So somebody drove up there, and if the car was empty when we got to it, somebody got out, and somebody went somewhere, and we both know that normally where they go is over the side. Or they dither a lot. You didn't see any dithering. So maybe they went straight over, and you didn't see it because it happened so fast.”

“That's what I think, too,” Graycie said. She would never look at her phone while she was at work again. She would tell Estelle or her mother to handle it, whatever it was. If Genna was sick, they could do whatever they decided. Meanwhile, Graycie would delete stuff, QuizUp and everything, on her phone, as a personal punishment.

“Kyle said he was in the bathroom,” Elaine said. “So you were watching by yourself for a while.”

It had a cold color, the light that was falling on her counter just now. The room felt bugged. Genna was quiet, hunched up against Graycie's chest. If they decided to check Graycie's phone, would it all be there in little codes? Dates and times and what she had done at that exact second? The trivia game with Splash in Puerto Rico, it was in there. All they had to do was demand to see her phone.

“I might have checked my text messages,” Graycie said. “I have a baby. I'm a single mom. She had a cold.”

Silence. People were silent when they were judging you.

“So someone could have gone over the side of the bridge while you were checking on that.”

“Yes.”

Elaine said nothing.

It didn't mean Graycie was the reason the girl jumped. You couldn't always stop them. Not if they were fast.

“How long do you think you weren't watching?” Elaine said.

“I don't know.”

This was a mess. A big mess. A girl had gone over, and they couldn't find her, so the parents would not believe. It was a hard thing to believe even when you saw it, that's what Kyle said.

“I'll keep in touch,” Elaine said.

“I'm sorry,” Graycie said.

“I know.”