Whisper to Me (33 page)

I had no right to do that. No right to promise something I couldn’t deliver.

The next day was a Monday. I had breakfast with Dad—I had nut-free toast, and he had Pop-Tarts. Dad was reading the paper.

“Oh, ****, Cass,” he said suddenly.

I looked up. “What?”

“Oh, Cass, I’m sorry.”

Now I knew what was in the paper. “Why?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. For some reason, by some instinct, I didn’t want Dad knowing about Agent Horowitz, about Julie, about any of it.

Some
helpful
instinct, as it turned out.

Dad turned the paper around. There was a photo of Paris—it must have been taken before she was ill; she looked plump and happy. Fifteen, maybe. She was standing by a pool.

“That’s your friend, right? The one from the hospital?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m so sorry, honey. They say she’s disappeared, that they think …” He went silent, scanning the page upside down.

Oh.

Oh ****.

“Cassandra,” said Dad, and it was never a good sign when he used my full name. “Cassandra, were you hanging out with a
stripper
?”

“Um.”

“Cassandra?”

“Um, yeah. But she didn’t do touching, she—”

He turned the paper, showing me a picture from Paris’s Instagram. It showed her with stars over her nipples, smoking.

“Are you ******* insane?” he shouted. “Oh no, wait.
Yes
! You are ****** insane! Jesus, Cass, I’m
trying
here, I’m trying to protect you, like your mom would have wanted, and you’re just …”

“She was nice,” I said quietly. “She was my friend.”

Dad shook his head. He was looking at me as if I came with instructions in another language. “She was a … she was this”—he indicated the paper—“and look where it got her.”

“You’re saying girls who take their clothes off are asking to be killed?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it!”

“Do I?” I said. “Do I, Dad? Because it sounds to me like you’re saying that being taken by the Houdini Killer is some kind of moral punishment for being a stripper.”

A long pause.

“I don’t know what to do with you anymore,” said Dad.

“Tell him to **** off,” said the voice. “Tell him you don’t give a **** what he thinks.”

“Sorry, Dad,” I said.

He grunted. Then there was a knock on the door. Dad went to open it.

“Hey,” you said. I couldn’t see you, but I recognized your voice. I went to the kitchen door, but Dad was blocking the doorway.

“Hi,” said Dad. “You need something?”

“I was wondering … if Cass could come out.”

“No,” said Dad.

“Oh,” you said. “Uh … oh.”

“Have a good day,” said Dad. “Shouldn’t you be getting to work?”

“Yeah,” you said. And Dad closed the door on you.

Sorry about that.

Dad came back to the kitchen. “No going out today, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“I have to know you’re safe, Cass.”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

He went upstairs and I heard the shower start. “Your own father hates you,” said the voice dully.

“After six p.m.,” I said automatically.

The voice shut up. Ever since I didn’t cut off my toe, it had lost some of its power. It didn’t push things anymore. It was more like an irritation—a wasp that circles back to your picnic table intermittently. I could mostly ignore it.

Dad came back downstairs, put on a thin jacket, and pocketed his keys from the monkey’s little tray. Then he went out. “Remember: stay here,” he said.

“Sure, Dad.”

Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door.

“I know your dad’s angry, but you want to ride to work with me?” you said. “We can talk about stuff. I have an idea I think we could—”

“Yes,” I said.

I grabbed my keys and closed the door behind me.

You started the engine and pulled out, took Ocean and then Maple, driving to the center of town. As we drove, you turned to me. “Get anywhere with Julie?” you asked.

I rocked my hand; an equivocal gesture. “Maybe. She thinks it was a Jeep. One of the V8 sport models.”

“An SRT8?” you asked.

I looked at you, surprised. I hadn’t figured you for a car head. “Yeah. You know cars?”

You shook your head. “Nah. My dad is into them.”

“Mine too.” There were always magazines on our coffee table.
Muscle Car
.
American Auto
.

You smiled. “Something we have in common, then.”

You made a couple of turns, getting closer to the center. We pulled up at a stop sign. “Could be enough,” you said, almost to yourself.

“Huh?”

“The model. Gives us something to go on.”

“For what?”

You did like a
bear with me
wave of your hand. “I’ll tell you. I want to show you something first.”

“It had better not be your genitals,” I said.

You laughed, surprised. I liked to hear you laugh. Then I felt guilty because Paris was dead and here I was flirting with you. I shut up after that, and you stopped talking too—I think the same thought had crossed your mind.

Soon we had arrived at the closest thing Oakwood has to a main drag, the little grocery stores and liquor stores and toy stores. A few restaurants with outside seating.

You turned onto an alleyway, passed a bar with a neon sign showing a woman kneeling on a table, a cowboy hat on her head, swinging a lasso in one hand and holding a beer in the other. The sign was off.

Beyond the bar, there was a long, low warehouse—a redbrick building with steel roll-up doors. You parked in front of the doors and made an expansive gesture at them. “Welcome to the nerve center,” you said.

Then you got out of the pickup and went to the steel door. You entered a code on a padlock; snapped it open. You rolled the door up and came back to the truck. Then you drove us both in.

“Wow,” I said.

We were in a vast space; you wouldn’t have known from the street how big it was. It must have covered most of the block. There was only one floor, so the ceiling was high. Corrugated-iron roof, punctuated in places by plastic windows. From these, shafts of sunlight cut down, illuminating random piles of goods, as if to highlight treasure. Motes of dust swirled in the light, little grains of darkness; inverse constellations.

And piled up, in hills, in mountains, all over the floor were bags of stuffed toys. Thousands, maybe even millions of them. Okay, not millions. But thousands.

You went to that place every day; I guess it didn’t impress you anymore. But the first time I saw it … it was something else. It’s weird: people think of the everyday world as banal, as mundane. But when you really consider it, there’s so much weird and amazing stuff. For instance: an amusement park has to have a place to store its prizes.

And that place has to be
amazing
.

I walked around for a bit, just staring. There were wide walkways between the piles, so it was possible to see almost all the way to each wall; it only increased the sense of scale. It was surreal. Warehouses are usually hard, industrial, practical places, right? This one
looked
like a warehouse—the corrugated iron, the bare brick walls. But it was full, I mean absolutely full, of soft toys. It was like something out of a fairy tale.

As I wandered, I realized the mountains were arranged by type, each towering pile of transparent bags containing a different character. There was one that was all Pokémon, another—larger—full of Angry Birds. Disney characters took up an entire wall. Minnies, Donald Ducks. Olafs. There was a whole alpine range of Beanie Babies.

“This is crazy,” I said.

“It’s pretty full on,” you agreed.

“How do you know where everything is?”

You shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“What are you getting today?”

You pulled a piece of paper out of your pocket. “Two bags medium Bugs Bunny. Three bags large Minecraft people. The kids love Minecraft. And a small bag of Mickeys.”

“And you know where all of those are?”

“Yep. There. There. And there.” You pointed to three corners of the warehouse. “I’ll grab them in a moment. Come over here.”

You led me to a small mound of stuffed dinosaurs. You pulled out a bag of them and motioned for me to sit on it. Then you sat down next to me.

“You want to show me dinosaurs?” I said.

You looked puzzled for a second. “Oh! No. But I thought of something.” You pulled out your phone. “I was thinking, we could start a hash tag. #SRT8; something like that. Get people to tweet the location if they see one.”

“What?”

“To find the car, you know?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to find it?”

“I mean, no, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll get it trending,” you said. “Offer a prize or something to get the ball rolling. An iPad. It doesn’t matter. We can worry about making good on it later.”

I looked right into your eyes. “What. Are. You. Talking. About?”

You narrowed your eyes. “Wait. You don’t know Twitter?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard of it.”

“But you haven’t used it?”

“No. I look on Instagram sometimes. For, like, fashion. You know.”

You glanced at my clothes, raised your eyebrows.

“Very funny,” I said.

You put a hand over your heart. “Sorry. It was too easy. Okay. Listen.” You took out your phone, opened the Twitter app. You showed me the timeline, the trending hashtags. “What I’m thinking is, if we get people to tweet every time they see an SRT8, and we ask them to include a location, we might start to see a pattern.”

“Why would people do that?”

“That’s how come the prize. We say it’s a marketing thing, we pretend we work for Jeep or something. We say that every week one person who tweets that they’ve seen an SRT8 will win something.”

“Okay … ,” I said. “And you think this will work?”

“I have no idea. But I think it’s the kind of thing the cops would never think of. They’re still operating in the twentieth century.”

“No. They just have systems that let them look up all the SRT8 owners in town.”

“Well, okay,” you said. “Point taken. But this is what
we
have. It would be better if we had a license plate, of course.”

Something itched at the back of my brain.

“What is it, Cass? You look weird.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t …”

“You thought of something?”

“Sh,” I said. I had the strangest feeling. Like there was an idea curled up inside my mind and I needed to make it uncurl, open itself, like one of Dad’s millipedes.

You shut up. I opened my eyes and saw the piles of toys, but I wasn’t really seeing them. I was going over everything Julie had said, the whole conversation with me and Agent Horowitz. I knew there was something there. Something that made me think … I don’t know what it made me think.

That Julie might know the license plate, without realizing she did? I didn’t know why I thought that though.

“No,” I said. “I can’t get it. It’s gone.”

That feeling—of something being on the tip of my tongue, as Julie had said—had vanished.

“The license plate?”

“Yeah. It’s making me think of something, but I don’t know what.”

“Helpful.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” I said.

“No,” you said. “That’s photobombing.”

“What? What’s photobombing?”

“I despair of you.”

“Whatever.”

“Anyway,” you said eventually, “it could play without the license plate. We make it like one of those online treasure-hunt marketing campaigns. Pretend we’re driving a Jeep SRT8 around the town. First person to spot it each day wins a prize, kind of thing. So we say that they have to tweet #SRT8 and their location. We might see a pattern. Or at least find some people who drive them.”

“If you say so. The whole Twitter thing is your area.”

“Or,” you said, in a tentative tone—your voice a foot gingerly tapping on a frozen lake before venturing onto it. “Or … we could hand it over to the cops.”

“You were the one who was all for investigating on our own.”

“Yeah. But … I don’t know. This feels big.”

“We can’t go to the cops,” I said.

“You don’t trust them?”

“Not that. My dad would find out. They’d tell him. They all eat at the restaurant.”

“Hmm,” you said. “Your dad doesn’t like you hanging out with me, right?”

“My dad doesn’t like a lot of stuff.”

You had been playing with the bag of toys we were sitting on; you took out a stuffed T. rex and started tossing it up and down in the air, catching it by its tail. “So we do it ourselves. Run this Twitter thing. See what comes up.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Silence. There was that moment—I know you felt it too—there was that moment where the boy and the girl realize they’re sitting next to each other, alone, in a mostly dark warehouse, on a soft surface. One they could sink down into.

Together.

“Um. So which school are you going to?” I said awkwardly.

“What?”

“You said you were going to college. On a swim scholarship.”

“Oh. Brown.”

“
Brown
? Wow. How good a swimmer are you?”

“I’m okay. That’s why I’m not around at the apartment much. I do a bunch of training, when I’m not working.”

Silence.

“You?” you asked. “College, I mean?”

“I … I guess. I have one year of high school left.”

“Sucks.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. You shifted a little closer to me. I felt our molecules align with each other, like when we were on the couch in the apartment, the electrons synchronizing their spins, reaching out to each other across the distance between atoms.

You looked into my eyes.

You leaned toward me, to kiss me.

And I pulled away, sharply. It was automatic. I … Paris had only
just
disappeared, and it felt wrong. It felt like betraying her, to be with you like that. I saw the hurt in your eyes immediately, and my heart flipped.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No,” you said. “It was … I shouldn’t have …”

Your voice frayed into silence.