Skink--No Surrender

  She looked at me over the top of her sunglasses. “Right this minute, Richard? First let’s get the bags from the backseat, before Trent’s ice cream melts.”

  “No, we need to talk now.”

  “What is it? Something happen?”

  “I’m pretty sure Malley ran away.”

  “Oh.” Mom didn’t shrug, but she wasn’t exactly blown away by the news. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

  “It’s not like the other times.”

  “How do you mean, Richard?”

  “She’s not alone,” I said. “There’s a guy she met online. I think we should call Uncle Dan and Sandy.”

  Mom took off her glasses. Her face darkened with worry.

  “How old is this person?” she asked.

  “Malley won’t tell me anything. She’s being a major b-word.” I related everything I knew so far, including the content of the bogus letter she’d left in her desk.

  “Has he harmed her?”

  “I don’t think so, Mom.”

  “Okay. That’s good.”

  I went to the car and grabbed the grocery bags. Trent’s precious dessert, a half-gallon of Heath Bar Crunch, made it safely into the freezer. My mother was already on the phone to Uncle Dan. She was in total courtroom mode, her voice steady and calm.

  Mom’s a lawyer with a small firm that specializes in environmental cases, going after companies that dump waste into public waters. There’s not much money in it, but she gets really stoked about her work. I hear her ragging Trent about all the fertilizer pollution caused by golf courses—the club he belongs to is on the bank of the river, and it’s totally old-school. The chemicals that are spread on the fairways leach out if there’s a heavy rain.

  When my mother gets focused on a situation, things move along briskly. After speaking with my uncle, she made several other calls while I put away the rest of the groceries.

  “All right,” she said when she was finished. “Now we wait for the police to do their jobs.”

  “Think they’ll find her?”

  “I do, Richard. Definitely.”

  Once Malley learned that the cops were out looking for her, she’d go ballistic. I considered telling my mother about Saint Augustine, just to get it over with and beat Malley to the punch.

  I didn’t say a word, though. No guts.

  “If she calls again,” Mom was saying, “keep her on the line as long as you can. Try to remember everything she says. Any small remark could be an important clue.”

  “How’s Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy?”

  “Scared. Upset. Like any parents would be.” She got up and started rearranging the cereal boxes in the pantry. “That cousin of yours, I swear. She has no idea what she’s gotten herself into.”

  “I told her the same thing.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She just laughed, Mom.”

  The best thing, of course, would have been for Malley to come back on her own. Part of me almost believed that was what would happen, that she’d just stroll through the front door tomorrow, chill as ever, announcing her adventure was over. Uncle Dan and Sandy would be so out-of-their-minds happy to see her that they probably wouldn’t even ground her.

  The worst thing would be if she decided she wanted to come home but the fake Talbo Chock wouldn’t let her. Even though the police go full-tilt on a missing person case when it’s a kid, none of us who were close to Malley could be very helpful. We didn’t know the true name of the guy she was traveling with. Didn’t know how old he was, what he looked like, where he was taking her.

  When the officers came to interview me, and I knew they would, all I’d be able to tell them about the fake Talbo Chock is what Malley had told me.

  He’s sweet, Richard.

  He’s funny.

  He’s like a poet.

  I didn’t want to think too much about what he really was, the awful possibilities.

  After dark I ran back to the beach carrying a flashlight instead of my baseball bat. Near the edge of the dunes I found a small, cold campfire; among the coals were a few animal bones.

  Up and down the beach I checked a bunch of turtle nests, but none had a soda straw sticking out of the sand.

  The weird old governor was gone.

  FOUR

  The police launched an all-out search for Malley, and for the next several days my hopes jumped every time the phone rang. There were clues to follow, but no red-hot trail.

  On the night she’d pretended to fly to New Hampshire, surveillance cameras at the Orlando airport showed her stepping out of her mom’s car at the curb on the departure level. She was wearing black jeans, flip-flops and a gray hoodie. She had a red travel bag on rollers and her backpack. After waving goodbye to Sandy, she entered the terminal building.

  Eleven minutes later, a camera on the arrivals ramp—one level down—caught Malley hurrying through the exit doors and sliding into a white two-door Toyota. The driver was a man, though he didn’t make a move to help my cousin with her luggage; he just popped the trunk and sat there. It was hard to see what he looked like because he wore a Rays baseball cap pulled snug to his brow, a cheap blond wig and Oakley-style shades. The video was grainy, and the lighting at the airport curb was poor.

  Luckily, another camera at the expressway entrance got a photo of the Toyota driving away. Crime technicians enlarged the image to read the license plate, which was from Texas. Unfortunately, the plate had been stolen from an Avis rental car in the airport drop-off lot.

  Not a good sign. My mother looked grim when she told me that part. Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy were frantic. Nobody wants their daughter driving around with some loser who’d rip off a license tag. That meant the Toyota was likely stolen, too.

  In other words, my cousin was traveling with a criminal.

  I got to see one of the video clips from the airport when a detective came to our house. He wanted to know if I recognized the man driving the Toyota, and truthfully I said no. With his Mariah Carey wig and sunglasses, the guy behind the wheel was totally disguised. All you could make out was a regular-looking nose and thin lips. His jaw was set and he wore no expression whatsoever.

  Malley was another story. On the video, she was grinning.

  They put out a highway Amber Alert featuring her lame school photo, which I knew would make her furious. The TV stations in Orlando, Daytona Beach and even Tampa broadcast the story, showing a factory picture of a Toyota similar to the one Malley’s online boyfriend was driving. They also gave out the number on the Texas license plate, but Mom said the guy had probably already switched it. Swiped a different tag from somebody else’s car, my mother said, or maybe even swiped another car.

  Using the pings from cell phone towers, the police were able to trace Malley’s phone from downtown Orlando (from where she’d texted me on the night she was supposed to be at the beach) all the way to Clearwater (from where she’d called me and Beth the next day).

  After that, Malley’s phone had either been turned off or broken, leaving the police no way to track her movements.

  The detective who came to speak with me was named Trujillo. He was short and muscular, with a thick black mustache. I’d seen him around town before, and it turned out he was a surfer and knew my brothers.

  “Why did Malley run away?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she had an argument with her mom and dad.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Spence said no. They said everything was good. She was okay with boarding school was their impression.”

  “Then it was him,” I said. “The fake Talbo Chock. He must’ve talked her into it.”

  Trujillo had a small notebook flipped open in one hand. “Did Malley have any boyfriends here in town?”

  “No. She thought all the guys at school were dorks and posers.” I told the detective what little Malley had said about her dashing Talbo.

  “But she never mentioned how old he was? What he looked like?”

  “Nope.” I reg
retted that I hadn’t asked her more than once.

  “Richard, would you say your cousin was a stable person?”

  “She’s not wacko crazy, but she’s definitely a rebel.”

  Trujillo said he’d already interviewed Beth and she knew even less than I did. He said Malley had warned Beth to keep quiet about her running away or else she’d tell Beth’s boyfriend that Beth liked somebody else, which I knew happened to be true. Beth liked me.

  “Richard, did Malley threaten to get you in trouble in some way if you told her parents what really happened?”

  “No, sir,” I lied.

  “If she calls again, I’d like you to keep a log—time, date, exactly what she says. Everything you can think of, even if it doesn’t seem important. I’ll give you a notebook like mine. The texts you can save on your phone, all right?”

  “Sure.” I’d already deleted the ones from Malley about Saint Augustine.

  Trujillo handed me a notebook and a blue Bic pen. I asked how they were going to find the true identity of the guy pretending to be Talbo Chock. The detective speculated that the “perpetrator” was from the Fort Walton Beach area and that he must have seen the newspaper and TV reports about the real Talbo Chock’s death. Otherwise where would he have come up with the name? Trujillo thought it was even possible that the man might have some personal connection to the young Marine.

  “State investigators are up in the Panhandle now,” he said, “interviewing Corporal Chock’s friends and family members.”

  “What if Malley doesn’t call me?” I asked. “Or call anybody?”

  “Well …” Trujillo was pondering how to phrase it. “That could mean something bad has happened,” he said, “or it could mean she just doesn’t want to be found yet.”

  I’d been carrying my cell 24/7, even when I went into the bathroom. There hadn’t been a peep from Malley since she’d called from that blocked number and ordered me to wait a week before telling her family the whole story. By now she definitely knew that I hadn’t waited even one whole day; it was all over Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, of course, the television stations. I’d figured she would phone just to yell at me, or at least call my mother to drop the Saint Augustine bomb.

  The dead silence wasn’t like Malley. Not her style.

  Aunt Sandy and Uncle Dan were constantly checking in, asking if I’d heard anything from her. I felt really bad for them. Sometimes Sandy would be crying, which would make me choke up, too.

  After that first week had passed, I wondered if Malley had gotten where she was planning to go. I hoped she had. I hoped she was the one in control.

  The Amber Alert remained in place, but the story started fading from the news. A little boy in Wellington had gone missing, snatched from kindergarten by his stepfather. The missing boy was sick and needed special medicine, so his case was now getting all the media attention.

  Meanwhile, Mom and Uncle Dan offered a $10,000 reward and chipped in for six highway billboards that displayed Malley’s photograph and an 800 number for tips. In the blown-up version of my cousin’s class picture, her hair was red (although in person you would call it cinnamon) and the light freckles on her nose looked as bright as a rash. She wasn’t wearing her regular smile because of her braces, which she complained had made her look like a constipated squirrel.

  Still, anybody who spotted Malley Spence could have recognized her from the billboard.

  Several calls came in from people who thought they’d seen her, but the sightings were scattered from one end of Florida to the other. Investigators chased down every lead that wasn’t too flaky but came up empty-handed. One caller claimed to have witnessed my cousin arguing with a husky tattooed man at a certain movie theater in Sarasota. He said Malley was struggling with the man and trying to pull free.

  Slight problem: The movie house had been torn down six months ago to make way for a Target. The cops threw the scumbag in jail after he admitted making up the whole story just to get a cut of the reward money. Pathetic but true.

  The waiting made me feel helpless and hollow. Sometimes I’d dial Malley’s number hoping she’d turned on her cell, but it never rang once. Straight to voice mail, Malley in that weak British accent. For all we knew, her phone could be at the bottom of a canal.

  I was spending a lot of time on the Internet—too much time, honestly. I’d bookmarked the website of every major newspaper in Florida, and each morning I’d scroll through a bunch of them checking out the crime stories.

  My stomach would pitch upside down every time I saw this headline:

  UNIDENTIFIED BODY FOUND

  So far there had been three different bodies, but all of them were middle-aged men. One guy got hit by a train on the FEC tracks in Jacksonville. Another they found floating in Lake Okeechobee—probably a drowned fisherman who’d left his ID in his truck. The third was just an old pile of bones that a hunting dog dug up in the Everglades. Mom said Miami drug dealers used to bury lots of bodies out there.

  “Don’t keep reading that stuff,” she said. “You’ll get nightmares.”

  “I don’t know why she hasn’t called.”

  “Your cousin loves the drama, Richard. Always has.”

  “True.”

  “I’ll bet she shows up any day now with either a tan or a tattoo.”

  “No doubt about it,” said Trent.

  He was on the couch, eating a pasta salad. All the commotion about Malley’s disappearance had sort of put him on the sidelines, since he was somewhat new to the family. Trent actually likes the sidelines, especially during a crisis. He’s comfortable not being in a position to make decisions, and Mom seems fine with that.

  “My sister Kay ran away once,” Trent remarked, “to San Diego.”

  My mother sighed. “Malley’s fourteen. Kay was what—twenty? Which means it wasn’t technically running away. Plus she ended up marrying the guy, right?”

  “Still, we were worried sick.”

  “Trent, it’s not the same,” Mom said. “Not even close.”

  I closed my laptop and went to my room. Detective Trujillo had given me his business card, so I called him to ask if the police had turned up any new clues. A few false alarms, he said, but nothing solid. The interviews in Fort Walton Beach hadn’t led anywhere. None of Talbo Chock’s friends or family members could imagine why a stranger would be using his name. His parents were pretty upset about it, Trujillo said.

  Lots of people were checking out the Facebook page that Uncle Dan and Sandy had set up, but so far the tips were totally random, dead-enders, just like the phone calls coming in about the billboards.

  “Don’t give up hope, Richard,” the detective said. “This case is still priority one for us.”

  “Did they find the car, at least?”

  “Nine white Camrys have been stolen this month in the state of Florida, none of them in the Orlando area. But we’re checking out every case.”

  “So, basically, we don’t know anything more than we did in the beginning.”

  “In a way, no news is good news,” said Trujillo. “Most runaway cases, the kids come home once the excitement wears off.”

  “What if she can’t come home? What if he won’t let her?”

  “You said Malley was aware ‘Talbo Chock’ isn’t this character’s real name, right?”

  “That’s what she told me,” I said.

  “So it’s possible she knows him better than we think she does. Maybe that’s why she’s not afraid.”

  It was definitely something to hope for.

  “Maybe this whole thing was her idea,” Trujillo said, “not his.”

  “The fake name? Or the running away?”

  “Maybe both. If only we had her computer, we could find out who she’d been emailing and trace his screen name.”

  Unfortunately, Malley had taken her laptop with her. Ever since she’d gone missing, I checked my own emails about a dozen times a day. Her not texting or calling—that I could understand, if she didn’t wan
t the cell phone tracked. Yet she could have safely emailed me (or, even better, her parents) from anywhere on the planet.

  So why hadn’t she? It wasn’t something I chose to think about very long.

  “Hang tough,” said Detective Trujillo. “Call me anytime.”

  When I came out of my room, Mom waved me into the kitchen, where she was sitting with Trent. She told me she was going to Gainesville for a few days to see Kyle and Robbie, my brothers. They were both doing summer terms at the university so they could take off during winter semester, when the surfing was best. Kyle was majoring in business and Robbie was in advertising.

  “I haven’t seen the boys since May,” my mother said.

  She’d been looking forward to the visit for a while, and I didn’t expect her to cancel on account of the Malley situation. There was nothing more to be done; the rest was up to the police. Or up to Malley.

  “You want to come along?” Mom asked. “A road trip, just you and me.”

  Normally I would have said yes. I worry about her when she makes long drives alone, and besides, she’s fun to travel with. Every fifty miles we switch out our iPods on the sound system; that way, each of us gets to hear the music we like. Plus it’s the only time she lets me order drive-through for lunch, when we’re on the highway and she’s in a hurry. At home it’s nothing but healthy food, organic everything, except for Trent’s Mountain Dews and ice cream.

  This time, though, I couldn’t go with her to Gainesville. My gut would have been churning the whole trip. What if Malley called needing something, and I was the only one she trusted to help her?

  “I think I’ll stay home, just in case,” I told my mother. “That okay?”

  “Of course. Trent will be here.”

  He looked up and grinned. “We’ll have some bro time, you and me.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “I understand completely, Richard. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Idea number one,” Trent burbled. “Tomorrow a.m. we go out to the club and hit a bucket or two of balls. Then we grab lunch on the veranda and watch all the old geezers triple-bogey the eighteenth!”

  The sad part: That was Trent’s idea of a rockin’ good time.