Lutz just watched with his chin in his palm and three fingers across his mouth. I thought he might be trying not to respond.
"The one way we've all described Stacy is ... cold. Frigid. And nobody really knows her, knows much about her life before she got here. But a kid dies, and she shows up, right?"
Lutz sat frozen.
"Well, what if ... What if she's, like ... otherworldly?" Ronny asked quietly. "What if the father is Eddie Van Doren? What if it was Eddie Van Doren's gun that went off tonight? These are nice, peaceful people around here, Captain Lutz! They don't fire guns at each other! And since no one claims to have fired the gun on the pier—"
Brin jumped in. "Maybe every few years Stacy and Eddie are going to find some beautiful young babe, or some promising young stud, and suck them down the hole into Van Doren's Dungeon with all the surfboards, until half this island is ghouls."
Lutz glanced at the ceiling, then dropped his pen on the table with a thud. My stomach was backing up, and after a moment I realized Drew was pulling at me, telling me to come away from this bullshit, that I wasn't in a good state of mind to hear it. But I was riveted, unable to tear my feet from the floor.
"Try to think of a better explanation!" Ronny encouraged him. "We've got a baby without a father, a girl who's always acted way too mysterious, almost like ... she's haunted. We have a gunshot without a shooter, and now ... a missing girl who everyone saw fall off the pier. And then nobody heard a splash! I can't tell you exactly where she is, Captain Lutz. But I'll tell you this much—I don't think you're ever going to find her."
Lutz stood up slowly, and without meeting their eyes said, "I will try, gentlemen. Thank you for your time."
I let Drew pull me along to the public areas. Yeah, it was time for a break.
10
Drew and I didn't go into the back lobby, where it sounded like a smaller bunch of kids were still waiting. I thought I heard Cecilly's voice, which wouldn't have surprised me. The gossips wouldn't leave until the last drop of intrigue had been drunk. We went outside and rested our backs against the huge concrete lions that were supposed to make some sort of a statement about our "roaring" police force.
The night was still, save for the far-off drone of choppers. If I looked southeast, I could barely make out the glow above what must have been a dozen searchlights.
"I want to go back down to the beach," I said, but Drew shook his head.
"Please don't."
He wouldn't look up, wouldn't look at me. I looked at my watch. 4:09. In another hour, my cell phone would ring, the cops would answer it, then hand it to me. It was looking very much like I would have nothing good to tell my parents.
"I just don't know how I can tell my mom and dad that I hadn't even been checking the beach myself," I said.
"That's the last thing they'd want you to do."
He was implying that at this hour it was more likely that I would stumble on something that would haunt me forever. I just wanted to holler my brains out. Watching these interviews turn from weird to unbelievable kept my mind busy, but not my fried gut. It was screaming that Jon, Ronny, and Brin were not so far off. You start realizing that your sister is probably dead, you don't need to add ghouls. Your horror is just as complete without them.
I started to think really strange things—thoughts that still kind of circled around the here and now without landing on it, but they were getting pretty close. I started seeing myself trying to explain my life to someone after going to college where no one knew me:
"You got brothers or sisters?"
"... I had a sister but she died."
"Wow, I'm sorry. Was it sudden, or was she sick?"
"It was sudden ... We think she drowned. But she might have got smoked by one of our friends. We don't know, we never found her—"
I jumped out of my skin as the double doors burst open, and Ronny, Jon, and Brin flew with their freedom. When they saw me, though, it was like a three-car pileup, and they came right over, looking awkward as shit. I didn't want to jump on them for making my sister into a Van Doren's Dungeon myth before the sun had even come up. I didn't want to jump on anyone for anything at this point. Things get this serious, and you're like a sponge that's been wrung out. Your brains are kind of damp but not taking on anything and not giving off anything. It's a safe feeling—being able to have some damp thoughts ... being beyond tired, beyond horrified, beyond frantic, beyond outraged. I stared at three sets of feet in front of me, three sets of sunburned bare feet showing white Vs from three sets of Reefs, reminding me that this was an island where the sun came out regularly and burned people's feet.
Brin brought his hand up slowly and then patted the back of my neck. "Dude. I would offer you, like, a pop from the pop machine. But I don't have any money on me. We got nabbed, totally by surprise, from Jon's house."
It was the perfect way to talk about the situation, I guessed, kind of sideways. They were neither hitting on nor dodging the issue.
I muttered, "I'm okay."
"No, you're not. I got money..." Jon reached in his surfer shorts pocket. "You want soda, Kurt? Help you stay awake."
"Thanks, but..." I remembered that Jon smoked cigarettes. I could see the pack in his T-shirt pocket, and I reached for it and took one. He lit it. I could feel Drew's eyes all over me. He had no idea I ripped off my dad's pack maybe once every couple weeks ... enjoyed a butt on the beach when life looked overwhelming. I felt entitled right now.
Jon lit it quickly and said nothing, grateful, I sensed, for something he could do.
Ronny reached around his own neck, unhooked his surfer necklace, and put it around my neck. "It's for luck," he said. "Saved my neck on more than a few bodass waves"
I'd seen Ronny wearing that thing since time began. The three of them were squirming kind of awkwardly, maybe their own words about my sister still echoing through their heads.
"I wish this were happening to somebody besides you" Brin said. "Why does shit like this always happen to the nicest people?"
The nasty thought did rush through my head: If I were the pope himself and I drowned out there, I don't suppose that would stop people from making a pier spook out of me. But instead I took a long drag on the cigarette, trying to get accustomed to the thought that people could be making your sister out to be the next island sea hag behind closed doors and telling you how nice you are to your face. Ronny sounded really sincere both times. Somehow I gathered that he was.
They trotted off slowly, promising to be at the other end of their cells if I needed anything. I exhaled up to the half moon, which was sinking toward the southern horizon.
Drew looked at the moon, glancing sideways to watch me smoke. He grinned sleepily. "Getting your last twitch of freedom before school takes it all away?"
Ah yes, the ill-fated Naval Academy. I looked down at the cigarette, which really tasted like shit. I didn't understand how my dad could do this to himself first thing every morning. But it did wake me up a little. It took an hour and a half off my tiredness.
I tried to get my ribs to expand out of their iron state, and I said, "I don't think I'm going."
Drew watched me, kind of frozen. "You're not serious. You're just a little nuts right now. You'll feel normal again after they find Casey."
Normal. I wondered what that was. I wondered if it was normal to stick to the same places, same friends, same stupid nightly bullshit when I'd been left with nothing but the dull taste of stale smoke over the things we did, the things we talked about, for at least six months. I wondered if it was normal to be beyond your senior year in high school and still chatting it up about ghosts and a couple of suicides up on the pier. The only times I'd really felt normal recently were when I was Fog6767. I surely didn't feel normal now that my sister was missing.
"I won't feel normal," I told Drew. "I haven't been that in a while."
It took him a respectful minute to ask, "What do you mean?"
I almost wished he'd asked right away. It woul
d have been more trusting, more ... whimsical. I told myself I was nitpicking, and he was only trying to say the right thing. But whimsical, odd word that it was, came to me as some thing I was totally lacking around here. I felt like I was in a straitjacket.
"I just feel like ... everybody around me is about ten feet off," I blathered, trying to feel gratified over this blast of truth."I can't ... get right up to anyone. I just feel very, very ... weird inside. I feel different."
"I think we all feel weird inside," Drew said hesitantly. "My theory? It starts with the first time you make use of your five girlfriends. You're weird forever after." He wagged his five fingers in the air.
I couldn't remember the first time I'd found my "five girlfriends." I was young. It hadn't been any big deal. How's that for weird?
I was two hundred blog posts ahead of Drew. I didn't know where to start with catching him up. I resented the fact that I had to find a starting point with a guy who was supposed to be my best friend, on this night of all nights. But if I was honest, I couldn't blame Drew. He not only accepted everything I said, but he also admired a lot of it. I could have found the words. I had chosen not to.
"The stupid newspapers, they're my biggest problem," I said, taking a long drag on the cigarette and pushing thoughts of Casey backward again. "You realize it's been printed sixty thousand times that you're going to the Naval Academy, and you're seeing your face splashed underneath the banner Atlantic City Press, Lifestyle Section—you feel like your throat is shut."
"You really don't want to go?" he asked.
"I want to ... not want to not go. I don't know what the hell is up with me."
I don't know what I expected him to say. His silence was normal, but when I got it, I realized it was more than the newspapers closing my throat off. I just decided to throw it all out there for Drew. It was a stupid thought, but smart thoughts hadn't helped in any way tonight.
"I've been blogging all summer. Sometimes, I'm talking about the academy, trying to figure out why I don't want to go. Other times I'm just this ... faceless, identityless guy, and I talk about all kinds of shit."
"Like what?" he asked, but with just the right second of pausing. It was, like, obligatory, like there was no part of my best buddy that looked for an original reply.
I tried not to sigh. There was no part of me that could actually say the worst of it. I was totally bored one night in June, and I got this thought in my head: I wonder what girls feel like? I wonder if they feel different from us, in spite of all this talk about everyone being the same? And I had wandered about on the Internet as Helga474, telling people on weight-loss sites that I was this totally blimped-out girl who hadn't gone to her prom. I got some responses. I answered them. I mean, for a day it was totally a rip to be Helga474. But do I tell this to Drew? Nuh-uh. He would think I was gay, and it had nothing to do with being gay. It had to do with being totally bored and kind of curious in a place where breaking rules doesn't really matter. Jesus, there were so many rules around here.
"You can't be too fat, too skinny, too tall, too short, too smart, too dumb, too loud, too quiet around here..." I blathered. "You can't be too anything. It's against the rules. Do you realize that?"
"Is this, like, chapter two of seeing all your friends in black-and-white?" Drew asked with enthusiasm. He liked to hear me blather, so long as I didn't get too crazy with it.
"Black-and-white was a couple months ago. Right now? I'm starting to see through people. They're evaporating."
"Nice," he said, but not sarcastically. "I always thought it was just us—until tonight. Seems like a lot of them are feeling it, ya know, this thing where it's time to ... move on. But what do you do? We'll be out of here in less than two months. We'll all get back together every summer, and it'll be cool. It's been cool, the Marvels are cool. You just need a break, is all. I think we all do."
I just didn't know if a break was all I needed. And cool seemed like a dirty word all of a sudden. Mucky, dingy, irritatingly lukewarm. What about hot or cold? What about scalding or freezing? I felt like I needed to turn completely inside out, do something outrageous. I didn't know what, but going to military school seemed not outrageous ... just prestigious. There was a big difference, I realized. Maybe it was the rush of nicotine, but my thoughts revved up too clearly.
"Drew, you know what a Mystic Marvel is? It's someone who has sold everything about themselves that is a little bit different. The girls we hang with are very decent to look at, and we do all the right stuff ... all the normal sports, all the expected stuff ... We excel at normalcy. We're the world's greatest—what's the word?—conformists. We are the people who can sell our souls the best. Congratulations. We're marvy all around. We'll end up like Mark Stern, with nothing that feels stunning except sex, so we'll end up with pricks for brains. We can't find anything about ourselves that we like after we've sold everything off, so we feel this strange twitch to go into a Jesus factory. True needs a Jesus factory right now—if you gotta get your exoticness back! It's no wonder we're so obsessed with ghosts and ghouls and suicides on the pier. It takes one to know one! I want to be—" I was pretty exhausted and crazed and looking for something dramatic. "I would rather be a drag queen than what I am. A nothing. A haunt. A spook."
It occurred to me that of all the Mystic Marvels, only one was a little bit different: a little too rich, a little too poor, a little too giving, a little too mean, a little too well dressed, a little too prone to potty mouth. Stacy Kearney stuck out, not for any totally awful reasons, but she stuck out for a number of them. Suddenly she was on trial all over town for murder.
"You're not nothing, dude," Drew told me, trying to be nice, trying to help me along with this exercise in not thinking about my sister for just a few minutes. My rant fest hadn't really helped anything. I'd got a load off my chest, but I still had huge decisions to make. There was no way to make them tonight, so talking about them had seemed like what it was—an exercise in pretending they are the worst problems I had. They had seemed so important until tonight. They were about my almighty social status, which was suddenly so annoying. I had the stray thought again that Captain Lutz had no idea who had fired the gun, and even I was a suspect. I wondered if I'd get arrested for attempted murder. And I thought at least that would be something hot or cold ... not something so goddamned cooooooool....
11
A car door slammed at the curb. I looked up to see the island's only Bentley. I found myself rising to my feet as Stacy's grandparents came up the walk. Mr. DeWinter had a package in his hand, like a good-sized bubble envelope, that drew my curiosity. But I took a step backward instinctively as they came within ten feet, probably because I didn't know what to say. Their granddaughter was being accused left and right of shooting a gun at my sister. On the one hand I knew them as the center force of charity to the grown-ups on this island. I felt off balance, to put it mildly.
Mr. DeWinter wore a strained expression, like the folds around his eyes had swollen and hardened, and now they kept his eyes open more than shut. He limped a little, and I couldn't quite tell whether the problem was his legs or his spine. He came right over, and he shook my hand and squeezed my arm.
"Don't give up hope," he said. "I just called the coast guard office in Philadelphia—pulled some strings through a navy admiral who served under me in the sixties. They're sending down two additional choppers to search the down-seas."
"Thank you ... very much,"I said numbly.
I wanted to go on about how much I appreciated that, but I was a little frozen by his breathing. It sounded kind of labored and exhausted. It did strike me what a feat it was for him to think of my family's problems when he had so many of his own. I supposed it was to his advantage to find Casey alive, though his presence of mind and his ease with facing me blew me away. He'd gotten used to being under fire for years, thanks to Stacy's mom and all her bad behavior. I noticed she hadn't come.
His eyes tore to the double doors. "Let's get this taken care of," h
e said over his shoulder, and his wife followed him into the lobby.
I watched their backs until they disappeared.
Drew let out a sigh. "We're not going back in there. Believe me, you don't need to hear the DeWinters."
"Why not?" I asked, feeling like I didn't have a brain left to make decisions with.
"You'll get frustrated. The DeWinters are like the Generous Good Fairies around here, and that's real nice and everything, but you probably won't hear a word about your sister. This is about to turn into The Stacy Show."
I figured I'd been hearing The Stacy Show all night, anyway. But if Drew was right, the adoring grandparents would be totally focused on clearing her name. No, I didn't have the endurance to sit through all of that. I almost went back to my initial urge to go to the beach.
I looked down there. I thought I could hear a chopper far off, but I realized the beach was suddenly dark. The spots were gone. Maybe Drew had been alert to that detail while I was blathering, and he hadn't wanted to say anything.
"They're pulling out, aren't they?" I asked. "They're giving up."
"The crew probably just went home to get a couple hours' rest," he said. "They can only do so much in the dark. They'll be back at first light"
My heart fell into my gut, and Drew grabbed my arm, probably in case I decided to run down there. I didn't get the chance.
Drew's dad pulled up in his chief's car, and four very tired-looking cops piled out. Chief Aikerman came over and tried to hug me, tried to tell me in his calmest voice that Casey could be somewhere on the island; she could be treading water in the down-seas, but they'd have better luck finding her out there at first light.
"I wanna go down to the beach. I need to see for myself," I said urgently.