This, finally, startles Joe into speaking. “She what?”
“She lied about it for years, and tortured me for refusing to forgive her, and then before she died, or before she was killed, she left me proof, just so that I would know for sure.”
Joe stands, scraping the chair back from his desk, and I run out of air and stand there panting and sweating, and I realize I’m about to cry.
“Can we talk in private?” Joe sounds as polite as a stranger. I have no choice but to follow him, like a child.
Outside, a blaze of heat and sun warms my face. The door swings shut behind us with a bang-snap. Across the parking lot, Sunny Jay’s is already open. I wonder if Condor’s inside. And if he is, I hope he doesn’t come out and see me like this.
“Look.” I take a deep breath. “I know what you’re going to say. Okay?”
“I don’t think you do.” He sounds worried. He screws up his mouth like he’s trying to digest. “You’ve been working too hard.”
My heart drops. He doesn’t believe me. Not even a little. “Joe, this is important.” My throat is so tight I can barely choke out the words. “Kaycee Mitchell died. And everyone has been lying about it. For years.”
But he isn’t listening. He squints into the distance. “I’ve known you a long time, Abby. You’re a friend. You know that, right? Since our very first day at CEAW, when I told you I hated your shoes. Remember?”
I can’t keep the tears back anymore, and I don’t try. I stand there, humiliated and exhausted and furious, feeling as if in just a few words he’s stripped me of my skin and left me raw and open in the hot wind. My father is dying, and Joe won’t listen; I came back to bury the past, but instead the past is burying me.
“I’m worried about you,” he says. “You need a break. When was the last time you took a vacation?”
“I don’t need a vacation! I need you to listen!”
“You’re not well, Abby.” His voice gets a little harder. “I don’t want a repeat of what happened our first year.”
Despite the sun, a sudden chill runs through me. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” When he turns to me his eyes are dark. “You stopped sleeping. You started drinking too much. You were pulled in a thousand directions—you thought Bromley had encoded messages in the invoices, for God’s sake—”
“I’d been awake for seventy-two hours.” My voice cracks on the still air. “Look, I know I lost it. I was eating Adderall. I was a mess, okay? I admit it. I admitted it then.” And you, fucker, promised never to hold it against me. “But this is different.”
“It’s not a negotiation.” Joe’s face morphs, flowing into a stranger’s eyes and lips, a stranger’s sharp tongue and cruel expression. “I’ve already talked to Estelle about it. You’re going home. To Chicago.” He emphasizes this, as if I may have forgotten. “We’re all going home. I’ll continue to run the investigation from there. They’ll bring on Casey Scheiner as support.”
He might as well have punched me. The air goes straight out of my lungs.
“Fuck you.” I can only whisper it.
Joe sighs. He doesn’t even get angry. That makes it worse, in a way. “You’re not in trouble,” he says, as if that’s what I’m worried about. “You still have a job. But you’re going home, and you’re going to get well, and forget about fucking Kaycee Mitchell.” He starts to turn back to the door, then pivots around to face me again. “Oh. That reminds me. Kaycee called you. Apparently she lives in Florida now.” Joe’s smile is cold and narrow, bleak as thin-shaved ice. “She left a number for you, if you want to call her back.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I’m sitting in my car staring at the sun reflecting off the glass of Sunny Jay’s and my fingers are shaking so badly I twice misdial the number Joe has given me, reaching first a Florida tanning salon and then a man who fires off some quick Spanish at me before hanging up. My throat is dry as dust. I wish I had something to drink, a beer, a shot, something, but if I drank now it would mean I was really falling apart, and I’m not.
I won’t.
I can’t be.
The third time’s the charm. I close my eyes and feel my heart heavy in my throat. Count the ringtones. One, two, three, four. She picks up after four, and a bad feeling stutters in my chest.
“Hello?” Kaycee’s voice is lower and raspier than I remember. A voice you expect to hear whispering dirty things on a phone sex line. Still, my heart beats faster just hearing it. I can’t say it isn’t her. I thought I would know instantly.
“Is this Kaycee Mitchell?” I ask, and I hold my breath, waiting for her reply.
“You got her. Who is this?”
I go silent, suddenly dizzy.
“Umm…This is Abby Williams,” I say, and she laughs, and I hold my breath again, trying to pin the sound to my memory.
“Abby. Wow. You sound different.” This is either the truth or some perverse form of cleverness. Or both.
“Where are you?” I ask her, and although the area code was one for South Florida, I pray for a wild second she’ll surprise me and tell me she’s come home, like me. Just like that, the urge to see her—not so I can prove anything, but just because—stretches up from a dark space and puts a hand around my thoughts.
“Not far from Sarasota. Been here for a couple of years now. I moved around a lot after I left Barrens.”
Sarasota. A sudden sense of déjà vu momentarily doubles my vision. Sheriff Kahn just returned from Sarasota. Coincidence?
“Why did you leave?” I blurt out.
“Why not?” Kaycee says, with another laugh. “I always wanted to. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Danforth used to catch me trying to sneak out the windows when I used the bathroom pass. Even in third grade, I always wanted out of there.”
I had forgotten Mrs. Danforth, and how Kaycee used to try to shimmy out the windows next to the gym during the school day since the doors were manned by a rotating list of hall monitors. Sometimes she even made it.
I fumble to punch the window down, but still I can’t get enough air. It’s her. It has to be her. Kaycee ran, like everyone said, and I’m wrong, and probably going crazy. Kaycee is alive, sun-kissed, still beautiful; Kaycee is lounging on a patio or sitting by a pool somewhere south of Sarasota. There was no deeper meaning to any of it. She just left. She shook off Barrens like a sweep of dust. She never looked back.
And in this, too, she proved she was better than me.
“Who told you I was looking for you?” I ask, through the leaden feeling in my chest.
“Misha,” she answers, after a pause.
“She told me she never spoke to you,” I say.
“I asked her to lie.” Kaycee says this casually, easily, as if it should be obvious. “I didn’t want my dad knowing where I was, or bugging her to give me messages, or asking me for money, or any of that.”
A stupidly easy answer that never even occurred to me. Of course Kaycee wouldn’t have wanted her dad to have any way of tracking her—he was half the reason she was running in the first place.