"Not really." I dropped my wrist between my knees and forced myself to look away. "Well, once she did, but she apologized right after. About six weeks ago."
"What did she say?"
"It was a school night. I was walking home from baseball by myself, for once. She was coming up Central Avenue with three huge pillowcases full of what looked like wash. I had to do the Coin-Op routine with Mom once when our washer broke, so I sympathized. I just tried to take one of the pillowcases to help her carry it in. She utterly jumped on me, all, 'Do I look crippled? Aren't you a little old to be a Boy Scout?'"
Drew shuddered. "Why does she get like that sometimes? It's so not PC to talk about girls and PMS, but sometimes I think the best thing we could get for her is a gift certificate to her GYN."
I shrugged. "It helps me, having a sister. I've got thick skin after Casey pulling that routine on me for years. I just muttered some, 'No, you don't look crippled, but you don't look like an octopus, either.' She let me help her. When we got inside she started apologizing, saying their washing machine had died, and everything she owned was dirty, and how annoying that was, blah-blah. She looked really sorry and tried, in her ... subtle way, to be nice for the next few days. I just forgot about it."
"She's like Eve White and Eve Black." Drew shuddered. "Or what's that saying about the little girl? 'And when she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad—'"
"You gotta look at the circumstances," I said, responding from my gut. "The Coin-Op is hot and grimy. It smells. Your clothes come out wrinkled, and in the summer it's full of French Canadian tourists who all but dangle their thongs off the end of your nose. I was ready to bark at someone by the time we left."
"Yeah, but she was just going in, not coming out."
I watched him, thinking, Let's not nitpick.
He finally smiled a little. "Believe me, I'm not trying to catch let's-crucify-Stacy disease. I can't find a really good reason for the girls to be acting the way they're acting. But I'm not a gossip hag, either. I don't go around asking questions about stuff like that. Still, I say, 'Where there's smoke, there's fire.'"
I didn't answer, and after checking my watch a couple more times, the room behind the gray glass turned suddenly bright. Captain Lutz and Cecilly Holst moved in there and took seats at the end of a conference table.
Drew froze as Lutz's voice blared, "Just have a seat right there. I'll be with you in a minute."
Drew blinked his tired eyes at me with some sort of amused confusion on his face. "Hel-lo?" he said at the ceiling, but neither silhouette in the inner room responded. He snorted out a laugh. "I'm not sure we're supposed to be hearing them. I'm not sure he remembers you're out here."
I didn't care. I was just freaked that he had moved into this little room, anyway. "What, he's going to question them in there? This is about a stupid accident; it's not an episode of NYPD Blue."
"Simmer," Drew muttered. "Dad has said they added on this room because it's the state law now. You can no longer treat police statements like technology doesn't exist. They call it the questioning room. Whatever she says, Lutz will automatically tape it, too. He'll take notes, probably to keep from reminding her of the tape, but there will be a tape if he needs it."
"You're kidding," I said.
"Don't take it personally. I mean ... not entirely. He's not exactly asking her about some crabber's traps being emptied by poachers. There was a gun and ... If your sister dove off that pier as a joke, well, it's getting to be not funny."
"I don't like this," I stammered. "This is my podunk island, and people don't give secret testimonies in some 'questioning room.'"
"Yeah, you're from a place that will send every cop on the force down to the beach and leave nobody here to remind the police captain of who's sitting where, when he's busy focusing on technology that's probably over his head. Count your blessings, dude. It's your podunk island that could allow you to hear some of this. If you shut up and stay cool."
I wanted to shout, My sister is a great diver! She's an airhead, but a great practical joker! And then, The gun was a toy! You can almost believe what you know is not true when you really have to.
3
When Drew stuck his nose almost right up to the tinted glass without drawing any attention, I did it, too. The silhouettes cleared into perfect facial expressions, but in an odd reddish lighting. At times the whites of Cecilly's eyes seemed to glow.
"We all held it." Cecilly's voice floated gracefully through speakers, even though she leaned far sideways and bounced up like she had pretended to faint. "I'm sorry! Can I blame Eddie Van Doren's ghost? Or Kenny Fife's? The spooks made me do it."
Van Doren and Fife were the pier's two infamous suicides. Fife jumped in the eighties, and Van Doren blew his brains out up there four years ago. Lutz had transferred here after being a captain on the Atlantic City police force for years, because Mystic was supposed to be zero stress in comparison. The night Van Doren died had been his first night on the job.
He only glared.
"No? Okay ... I just don't know what to say, then. True handed it to me, saying it wasn't a toy, and it looked so tiny ... And True is an angel! And Drew Aikerman handed it to her, and how good is he? You would have done the same thing, Captain Lutz!"
He still didn't move.
"No. Okay..."
Drew bounced his forehead off the glass, then pretended to slit his throat. "I'm dead. Police chief's kid. My dad'll make sure I get six times more community service than anyone else for holding a lethal weapon—" He stopped, suddenly remembering, I guess, that community service wasn't the most important issue here. Casey was. I just nodded, not begrudging him his own little denial dances.
"Even good kids do stupid things. We'll have to worry about all that later," Lutz finally said. "Right now, I'm trying to figure out what we have. A fall, a gunshot wound, a practical joke, or, well, I hate to say a fatality at this point, but—"
"Fire away. I'll answer anything you want. However many times you want."
"Starting from the top."
I watched Cecilly's head dip again. "Well, we went up onto the pier with the climbing mounts. You know..."
"Belonging to?"
She dipped to the side again in a pretend faint over her behavior. "Are you sure none of what I tell you leaves this room with my name attached? That shouldn't be my just reward for helping out."
"You'd be amazed at who says what behind closed doors, Cecilly. My guess is if you tell the truth, I will get basically the same story from a dozen people or more."
"Seriously?"
"Absolutely. Most people are good enough to want to help. Minus the publicity."
She dropped her hand from her forehead. "They belonged to Todd Barnes. I guess that's no secret, since you caught him last summer."
"Guess a fine wasn't enough deterrent." He jotted something down. "So you climbed up."
"Yeah, about ten of us went up at once. Another dozen or so straggled up within the next hour. Five of us were sitting by that old burned-out Saltwater Taffy Shoppe, talking about the ghost of Eddie Van Doren firing off his suicide gun every once in a while. You know that story, right? You walk down the beach at eleven-o-five, and you hear it?"
"I live here."
"Well, I'm not saying I ever believed any of that. In fact, the suicide stories are getting so overtold. The whole pier routine is getting old." She shifted around. "I think that's why I touched the stupid pistol. If life weren't so boring all of a sudden, something new like that—like a gun—oh, lord."
"Where'd the gun come from?"
"Let me see..." Cecilly did some twirly thing with her finger. "Mark Stern came up and handed it to Todd Barnes. Mark said, 'Check this out. Would you believe me if I told you this isn't a toy?' So Todd took it. Then Drew Aikerman took it. He asked, 'Is it loaded?' Mark said it wasn't. Ha! Drew passed it off really quick, you know, I guess realizing his dad was chief of police and this wasn't smart."
I remembered that Mark Stern
had also told me it wasn't loaded. Still, I'd been too skittish to touch the trigger. Somebody hadn't been.
"So then True finally took it, and it came around to me, and everyone else had touched it, so..."
"So you held it. Then what?"
"I asked who it belonged to. Mark said it belonged to Stacy."
"Where was Stacy?"
"Looking over the north side of the pier with Alisa Cox. They were doing the old best-friend routine, putting their heads together and acting like the secret of the universe was passing between them."
"They were talking about this gun?"
"I don't think so. Alisa was rubbing the back of Stacy's head.
"They each had complicated guy problems, and Alisa had—" Cecilly snapped her fingers by her ear, like she was looking for words."—blurted some gossip that just made it even more complicated. Alisa had just broken up with Todd Barnes. Todd was sitting there with us, not twenty feet away. Stacy had just broken up with Mark Stern, about three weeks ago. But she was trying really hard to stay friends with him. That's why I didn't give the gun right back to Mark. Stacy had called him over, and the three of them started to talk about something."
"About this gun?"
"No, no. I really don't think Stacy was thinking about this gun one way or the other. It's almost like ... I'm not sure she knew it was being passed around."
"Well, if she's the owner, how could she not know—"
"I guess I would have expected her to keep an eye on a thing like that if she knew it was going around. Maybe Mark got ahold of it somehow without her knowing it. They were definitely talking about something else. I heard a couple more words float over when I was waiting for Mark so that I could give the gun back."
"What words?"
"'Nasty ass.' Alisa was saying it, and that's, um, a nickname for Billy Nast. He was on the pier. Somehow. He doesn't hang with us very much. So I think they were talking about Billy Nast and how Kurt Carmody was spending his whole night over by the old arcade, talking to a science nerd instead of to us. Stacy didn't like it."
"Stacy did the name-calling?"
"No, Alisa did. But she's a good friend like that. Stacy's had it bad for Kurt Carmody for a while."
My neck snapped in surprise.
Lutz asked, "Stacy owns the gun, and she has a crush on the brother of the missing girl? The girl who we think was shot?" I couldn't sense where he was going with his question.
"Yeah. I guess it looks at first like there's no good reason for Stacy Kearney to point a pistol at Casey Carmody and pull the trigger. That's not the way to catch the boy of your dreams!" Cecilly laughed, sort of in confusion.
Lutz wrote some notes down.
"Stacy's probably had a crush on Kurt since forever. But she never acted on it. She'd always say things to me like, 'He's too nice. I'd ruin him.' She loved to joke about her own bitchiness, but I think she halfway believed it, because she never came on to Kurt. She'd go out with, um, people of lesser value? Does that sound horrible? It's not exactly that they were less valuable. It's just that Kurt is more valuable. He's pretty special to everyone."
Drew patted me on the head silently, and I pulled away, embarrassed. This wasn't the first time I'd heard myself referred to as something very good—either fair or honest or happy or a noncomplainer—though it seemed to me that I could bust down as easily as the next person. I just lived with thoughts that nobody needs to hear me whine, or nobody needs to be bothered with my problems. I kept most things to myself, or wrote things down in this ever-growing blog board.
I had blogged my ass off this summer. It started with wanting to think about why the Naval Academy suddenly felt all wrong for me, but I wrote about other things, too. I wrote about how this spring I'd started seeing all my friends in black-and-white, and other bloggers had different ways of posting the same thing.
The stories that people responded to the most were my descriptions of "black breezes" and the ghosts up on the pier. A black breeze is a term I made up for what had been happening to me at dune parties or on the pier when we sneaked up there. It's the feeling like someone has walked up behind you and is breathing right onto your neck. But when you spin, nobody is there.
Lots of people who posted either had a story about when they'd had a black breeze, or they wanted to ask questions about the suicides. Chatting online ended up distracting me from my Naval Academy woes more than solving them for me. But blogging was getting to be an addiction. Like, I knew I would have to blog this whole thing about my sister being missing at some point, even though I didn't know how it would end yet. I couldn't think about the ending. But I started, like, compulsively thinking through the strange parts that I knew already.
The first strange thing I'd have to blog was that I'd had about the worst black breeze ever maybe five minutes before Casey fell. I had been listening to Billy Nast, and I just kept listening. I didn't want Nast thinking I was nuts, so for once I hadn't spun around. Now I wished I had. I might have seen something—not a spook or anything, because I don't know how much I actually believe in my own black breezes. I might have seen where the shot had come from. I might have seen who had the gun.
The second strange thing I'd have to blog was the weirdness of not hearing any splash. The last thing would have to be what I'd just heard: Stacy Kearney likes me.
Stacy had always seemed to me—to use really dangerous terminology—like a gun ready to go off. As fun as she could be, I could never get comfortable around her, because there was always this underlying ... jumpiness. I'd come away from her feeling tied up in knots, even if she had been totally cool. I would not have gone out with her, though I also thought Cecilly was taking Stacy way too seriously. If a girl liked me, I knew it. It shows, no matter how hard they try to hide it.
Lutz finally quit writing. "So Mark left your circle of friends to talk to Stacy. What did you do with the gun?"
"If you can believe this, I passed the gun to Casey Carmody," Cecilly said, slumping sideways yet again.
"But you're sure she wasn't holding it when it went off?"
"I'm positive. She's a little ... well, some people call her an airhead. I just think she's a daredevil. She loves danger and doesn't stop to think sometimes. Remember when she tried to do her flip on water skis, what, two years back?"
"A day that has lived in infamy around here," he muttered. "Being that she spent all of August and September in a halo, I'm highly doubtful that she would be fool enough to dive off the pier."
Cecilly squirmed around in her seat. "No? Tonight she actually held the gun the right way, with her finger on the trigger, and started swinging it around."
I flinched. Leave it to Casey.
He wrote some more. "And then?"
"I yelled at her for doing that, and she just cupped it in her hand after that. I went to find Mark but got distracted. About five minutes later, I went back to look for her, though. I mean ... just to make sure she wasn't doing anything stupid with it. But she said she gave it to ... somebody else—I can't remember, but she said that person gave it back to Mark Stern."
"Who gave it to me," I murmured, and Drew looked at me. "You know what? I asked Billy Nast if he wanted to hold it. He laughed and said, 'No, thanks,' and just kept on talking."
Drew lay his head on his hand. "Science dork! Maybe we should have been science dorks. Why didn't I get pissed and hurl the damn thing over the side?"
Somebody had hurled it. The damn thing was nowhere to be found since Casey fell. But I wished it had been me, so now I wouldn't look so stupid and Nast so smart.
I'd always felt secretly that the science dorks had an easier life, though it was hard to put my finger on why. They seemed less pressured, at least socially. It struck me that their friends were probably less judgmental. They could relax more, because they could mess up more. I remembered how close I had come to telling Billy Nast that I was strung out about the Naval Academy, and how weird that urge had seemed since I hadn't told any of my friends.
I had fifteen or so blog slogs answer me to quit the whole damn Naval Academy thing now, before it was too late—before I snapped, midsemester, and had to leave in disgrace or something. I was still at the point of trying to decide if they were really posting what would be in my best interest, or if they were telling me this because none of them was going to a school I had even heard of. My dad, who's full of sayings, has one that's appropriate: "People love to see you get ahead—so long as you don't get farther ahead than they are." But you can't post that without sounding arrogant instead of confused and embarrassed. Billy Nast had started to feel like my first real alternate sounding board. Then all this trouble happened.
I looked back at Cecilly, who seemed to be getting down to something important finally, because she was going off again about confidentiality. "... seriously. I will help. But I don't want to lose all my friends because of it. I don't want to play the true confessor on Mystic—"
"Um, let's keep in mind the potential seriousness of this," Lutz interrupted, making his voice louder than hers.
"... Stacy just broke up with Mark Stern three weeks ago, but last week—surprise!—he started going out with Casey Carmody."
Lutz wrote that down.
"And tonight, a few of us found out something. Stacy is pregnant."
I turned my head slowly to look at Drew. His jaw hung, like I suppose mine did, confirming that he hadn't heard this, either. Lutz kept writing. I sensed he was trying to get ahold of himself and stay calm. "Mark Stern is the father?"
"Obviously. She just found out last week, but she's about two months along. They went out since January."
He wrote and wrote.
"So ... what are you saying about how this relates to the gun?" Lutz finally looked up.
"Just that ... maybe she couldn't stand the sight of him with Casey." They watched each other, and I could sense Lutz trying to appear blank.