She stops in front of a door marked CHIEF LIEUTENANT HERNANDEZ. Hernandez—I recognize him from photographs online—is gesturing to something on his computer screen. Another policeman, his hair so pale red it looks like a new flame, leans heavily on the desk, and Hernandez angles the monitor slightly to give him a better view.
I go hot, then cold, as if I’ve been burned.
The woman knocks and pops open the door without waiting for a response. Instantly Hernandez adjusts the computer monitor, concealing it from view. But it’s too late. I’ve already seen rows of pictures, all those girls dressed in bikini tops or no tops at all, lying or sitting or passed out on a vivid red couch—all those pictures taken of the same room where Dara was photographed.
“Someone to see you,” the receptionist says, jerking a thumb in my direction. “She says it’s about Madeline Snow.” She pronounces the words almost guiltily, as if she’s saying a bad word in church. “What’d you say your name was, sweetheart?”
I open my mouth, but my voice is tangled somewhere behind my tonsils. “Nick,” I finally say. “Nicole.”
Hernandez nods at the redheaded policeman and he straightens up immediately, responding to the unspoken signal.
“Give me a minute,” Hernandez says. In person, he looks tired and rumpled, almost, like a blanket that’s been washed too many times. “Come in,” he says to me. “Have a seat. You can just go ahead and stack those anywhere.” The chair pulled up across from his desk is piled with manila files.
The redheaded cop gives me a curious look as he slips by me, and I catch a brief whiff of cigarette smoke and, weirdly, bubble gum. The receptionist withdraws, closing the door, leaving me alone with Hernandez.
I still haven’t moved. Hernandez looks up at me. His eyes are bloodshot. “All right then,” he says lightly, as if we’re old friends, sharing a joke. “Don’t sit if you don’t want to.” He leans back in his chair. “You have something to tell me about the Snow disappearance, you said?”
He’s being nice enough, but the way he asks the question makes it clear that he doesn’t think I’ll have anything important to tell him. This is a question he’s asked a dozen times, maybe a hundred, when some random woman looking for attention comes in to accuse her ex-husband of abducting Madeline, or a random truck driver en route to Florida claims to have seen a blond girl acting strange at a rest stop.
“I think I know what happened to Madeline,” I say quickly, before I can second-guess myself. “And those pictures you were looking at? I know where they were taken.”
But as soon as I say the words, it occurs to me that at Beamer’s I didn’t see a room like the one pictured in Dara’s photographs. Could I have missed a door somewhere, or a secondary staircase?
Hernandez’s right hand tightens momentarily on the armrest. But he’s a good cop. He doesn’t otherwise flinch. “You do, do you?” Even his voice betrays no signs, one way or the other, about whether or not he believes me. Abruptly, to my surprise, he stands up. He’s a lot taller than I expected—at least six-three. Suddenly the room constricts, as if the walls are shrink-wrap grabbing for my skin. “How about some water?” he says. “You want some water?”
I’m desperate to talk. With every second it seems as if the memory of what happened at Beamer’s might simply disappear, evaporating like liquid. But my throat is dust-dry, and as soon as Hernandez suggests water, I realize I’m desperately thirsty. “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”
“Make yourself at home,” he says, indicating the chair again. This time I recognize not just an invitation, but an order. He moves the pile of file folders himself, dumping them unceremoniously onto the windowsill, already mounded with papers, creating a landslide effect. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappears into the hall and I sit down, my bare thighs sticky on the fake leather seat. I wonder if it was a mistake to have come, and whether Hernandez will believe anything I say. I wonder if he’ll send out a search party for Dara.
I wonder if she’s all right.
He reappears a minute later, carrying a small bottle of water, room temperature. Still, I drink eagerly. He takes a seat again, leaning forward on the desk with his arms crossed. Outside the glassed-in office walls, the redheaded cop goes by, consulting a file, his mouth pursed as if he’s whistling.
“Hate this fucking place,” Hernandez says, when he catches me staring. I’m surprised to hear him say fucking, and wonder if he did it to make me like him more. It works, a little. “It’s like living in a fishbowl. All right, then. What do you know about Madeline?”
In his absence, I’ve had time to think about what I want to say. I take a deep breath.
“I think . . . I think her older sister was working at a place called Beamer’s on the shore,” I say. “I think my sister worked there, too.”
Hernandez looks disappointed. “Beamer’s?” he says. “The bar off Route 101?” I nod. “They were waitressing there?”
“Not waitressing,” I say, remembering how the woman, Casey, had laughed when I told her I had no experience. If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you’ll be fine. “Something else.”
“What?” He’s watching me intently now, like a cat about to pounce on a chew toy.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But—” I take a deep breath. “But it might have to do with those photographs. I don’t know.” I’m getting confused now, losing the thread. Somehow it comes down to Beamer’s and that red sofa. But there was no red sofa in Beamer’s, at least no red sofa that looked like the one in the photographs. “Madeline didn’t just disappear into thin air, did she? Maybe she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see. And now my sister . . . She’s gone, too. She left me a note—”
He straightens up, hyperalert. “What kind of note?”
I shake my head. “It was a kind of challenge. She wanted me to come find her.” Seeing his confusion, I add, “She’s like that. Dramatic. But why would she run away on her own birthday? Something bad happened to her. I can feel it.” My voice cracks and I take another long sip of water, swallowing back the spasm in my throat.
Hernandez turns businesslike. He grabs a notepad and a pen, which he uncaps with his teeth. “When was the last time you saw your sister?” he asks.
I debate whether to tell Hernandez that I saw Dara earlier in the evening, boarding a bus, but decide against it. He’ll no doubt tell me I’m being paranoid, that she’s probably out with friends, that I have to wait twenty-four hours before filing a report. Instead I say, “I don’t know. Yesterday morning?”
“Spell her name for me.”
“Dara. Dara Warren.”
His hand freezes, like it has temporarily hit an invisible glitch. But then he smoothly writes the remainder of her name. When he looks up again, I notice for the first time that his eyes are a dark, stormy gray. “You’re from . . . ?”
“Somerville,” I say, and he nods, as if he suspected it all along.
“Somerville,” he repeats. He makes a few more notes on his notepad, angling the paper so I can’t see what he’s writing. “That’s right. I remember. You were in a bad accident this spring, weren’t you?”
I take a deep breath. Why does everyone always mention the accident? It’s like it has become my single most important feature, a defining trait, like a lazy eye or a stutter. “Yeah,” I say. “With Dara.”
“Two of my men took the call. That was Route 101, too, wasn’t it? Down by Orphan’s Beach.” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. Instead he writes another few words and tears off the sheet of paper, folding it neatly. “Bad spot of road, especially in the rain.”
I tighten my hands on the armrests. “Shouldn’t you be looking for my sister?” I say, knowing I sound rude and not caring. Besides, even if I wanted to answer his questions, I couldn’t.
Luckily he lets it go. He places both fists on the desk to stand up, sliding his bulk away from the desk. “Give me a minute,” he says. “Wait here, all right? You want another water? A soda?”
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I’m getting impatient. “I’m fine,” I say.
He gives me a pat on the shoulder as he moves past me to the door, as if we’re suddenly buddy-buddy. Or maybe he just feels bad for me. He disappears into the hallway, shutting the door behind him. Through the glass, I watch him intercept the same redheaded cop in the hall. Hernandez passes him the note, and the two of them exchange a few words too quiet for me to hear. Neither of them looks at me—I get the impression this is deliberate. After a minute, both of them move off down the hall out of sight.
It’s hot in the office. There’s a window AC spitting lukewarm air into the room, fluttering papers on Hernandez’s desk. With every passing minute, my impatience grows, that itchy, crawling sense that something is terribly wrong, that Dara’s in trouble, that we need to stop it. Still, Hernandez hasn’t come back. I stand up, shoving the chair back from the desk, too antsy to remain sitting.
Hernandez’s notepad—the one he scribbled on while I was speaking—is sitting out on his desk, the top sheet faintly imprinted with words from the pressure of his pen. Seized by the impulse to see what he wrote, I reach over and grab it, casting a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure that Hernandez isn’t coming.
Some of the writing is illegible. But very clearly I see the words: call parents and, beneath that, emergency.
Anger flares inside of me. He didn’t listen. He’s wasting time. My parents can’t do anything to help—they don’t know anything.
I replace the notepad and move to the door, stepping out into the hall. From the front office comes the burble of conversation and ringing telephones. I don’t see Hernandez anywhere. But, coming toward me, a huge tote bag slung over one shoulder, is a woman I do recognize. It takes me a second to call up her name: Margie something, the reporter who has been covering the Madeline Snow case for the Shoreline Blotter and has been all over local TV.
“Wait!” I shout. She obviously hasn’t heard me and keeps walking. “Wait!” I call, a little louder. A cop, bleary-eyed, looks up at me from another glassed-in office, his expression suspicious. I keep going. “Please. I need to talk to you.”
She pauses with one hand on the door that leads out to the parking lot, scanning the room to see who was speaking, then has to sidestep as a cop enters from outside, propelling a lurching drunk in front of him. The man leers at me and drawls something I can’t make out—it sounds like Merry Christmas—before the cop directs him down another hallway.
I catch up to Margie, feeling breathless for no reason. In the glass doors, our reflections have the look of cartoon ghosts: big dark hollows for eyes, sheet-white faces.
“Have we met?” Her eyes are quick, assessing, but she pastes a smile on her face.
The receptionist behind the desk, the one who led me to Hernandez, is watching us, frowning. I angle my back to her.
“No,” I say, in a low voice. “But I can help you. And you can help me, too.”
Her face betrays no emotion—no surprise, no excitement. “Help me how?”
She studies me for a minute as if debating whether or not I can be trusted. Then she jerks her head to the right, indicating I should follow her outside, away from the watchful gaze of the receptionist. It’s a relief to be out of the stale air of the police station, and its smell of burnt coffee and alcohol breath and desperation.
“How old are you?” she asks, turning businesslike as soon as we’re standing on the curb.
“Does it matter?” I fire back.
She snaps her fingers. “Nick Warren. Is that right? From Somerville.”
I don’t bother asking her how she knows me. “So are you going to help me or not?”
She doesn’t answer directly. “Why are you so interested?”
“Because of my sister,” I reply. If she can dodge a question, so can I. She is a reporter, of sorts—and I don’t know that I want a story about Dara blowing up in the Blotter, not yet. Not until we know more. Not until we have no other choice.
She makes a grabbing motion with her hands—like all right, show me what you’ve got.
So I tell her about my trip to Beamer’s and the conversation I overheard outside Andre’s office. I tell her that I’m pretty sure that Sarah Snow was working for Andre, doing something illegal. As I talk, her face changes. She believes me.
“It fits,” she murmurs. “We know Sarah didn’t come home until almost five a.m. on Monday. She lied about it initially. She was scared of getting in trouble.”
“What if Madeline Snow saw something she wasn’t supposed to?” I say. “What if Andre decided to . . . ?” I trail off. I can’t bring myself to say get rid of her.
“Maybe,” Margie says, but frowns, unconvinced. “It’s a stretch. The cops know all about Beamer’s. But they’ve never pinned anything on Andre—nothing major, anyway. A few fines here and there from the health department. And last year an eighteen-year-old came in with a fake ID and then had to get her stomach pumped. But murdering a nine-year-old child?” She sighs. Suddenly she looks twenty years older. “What do you want from me?”
I don’t hesitate. “I need to know where the photographs were taken,” I say—not a request, a command.
Her expression turns guarded.
“What photographs?” she says. She isn’t much of an actress.
“The photographs on the red sofa,” I say, and then add, “There’s no point in pretending you don’t understand.”
“How do you know about the photos?” she asks, still dodging the question.
I hesitate. I’m still not sure how much I can trust Margie. But I need her to tell me where those photos were taken. Dara has a connection to that place. Whatever she’s afraid of, whatever she’s running from—it’s connected to that place, too.
“My sister was in one,” I say finally.
She exhales: a long, low whistle. Then she shakes her head. “No one knows,” she says. “The photos came from a password-protected site. Members only, super encrypted. All teen girls, most of them still unidentified. Sarah Snow was one of them.”
And Crystal, I think, the mermaid who had to quit FanLand after her parents found pictures of her posing for some weird porn website, at least according to Maude. Crystal is Dara’s age: seventeen this summer. Everything is beginning to make a terrible kind of sense.
“The cops caught a lucky break when they got one of the members to talk.” She pauses, looking at me pointedly, and I think of the accountant who was briefly questioned by police, Nicholas Sanderson, and the comment on the Blotter posted by an anonymous user: he likes young girls. Suddenly I’m positive that this is the “member” who talked to the police. “But even he didn’t know anything else. It’s a private network. Everyone has an interest in keeping it secret—the creator, the members, even the girls.”
A surge of nausea rolls from my stomach to my throat. My baby sister. Suddenly I remember that for years she had an imaginary friend named Timothy the Talking Rabbit; he went wherever we went but insisted on having a window seat, so Dara always took the middle.
How did everything go so wrong? How did I lose her?
“It’s Andre.” I’m overcome by anger and revulsion. I should have stabbed him in the face with a letter opener. I should have clawed out his eyes. “I’m sure it’s him. He must have another location—a private place.”
Margie puts a hand on my shoulder. The touch surprises me. “If he does, if he’s the one who’s responsible, the police will catch him,” she says, her voice softening. “It’s their job. It’s late. Go home, get some sleep. Your parents are probably worried about you.”
I jerk away. “I can’t sleep,” I say, feeling the wild urge to hit something, to scream. “You don’t understand. No one understands.”
“I do understand,” she says, speaking to me gently, consolingly, as if I’m a stray dog and she’s worried I might bite, or bolt. “Can I tell you a story, Nicole?”
No, I want to say. But she keeps going without waiting for a response.
“When I was eleven, I dared my little sister to swim across Greene River. She was a good swimmer, and we’d done it together dozens of times. But halfway to the other bank she started gasping, choking. She went under.” Margie’s eyes slide past mine, as if she’s still staring out over the water, watching her kid sister drown. “The doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy. She’d had a seizure in the water, her first. That’s why she went under. But afterward, she started having seizures all the time. She broke a rib when she fell down on the curb on her way to school. She was always covered in bruises. Strangers thought she was abused.” She shakes her head. “I thought it was my fault—that I’d caused her sickness somehow. That it was because I’d dared her.”
Now she looks at me again. For a split second, I see myself reflected in her eyes—I see myself in her.
“I became obsessed with keeping her safe,” she says. “I would hardly let her out of my sight. It almost killed me. It almost killed her.” She smiles a little. “She went to college all the way in California. After graduation, she moved to France. Met a guy named Jean-Pierre, married him, took French citizenship.” She shrugs. “She needed to get away from me, I guess, and I can’t say I blame her.”
I don’t know if she expects the story to make me feel better, but it doesn’t. Now I feel worse. She places both hands on my shoulders, ducking a little so we’re eye to eye.
“What I mean,” she says, “is it isn’t your fault.”
“Nicole!”
I turn and see Hernandez coming across the street, holding two coffees and a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts. His face is resolutely cheerful, a gym-teacher smile. “They always say cops like doughnuts, don’t they? I thought we could share one while we wait.”
Cold floods all the way through my body. He’s not going to help me. He’s not going to help Dara.