I'll Be There

  He’d tried to find a chance to talk to her, but she wasn’t in any of her usual spots, and she was keeping her distance from her friends. Bobby knew that Emily had last period free, and that’s when she went to the library and did her math homework.

  So on Friday, after days of trying to find a way to just casually get her attention, he took the initiative and cut class. He could go into the office computer later and delete the absence.

  He found her in the back sitting on the floor, leaning against a bookshelf. And she looked very sad. That much he could figure out. Nora had told Rory, and Rory had told Bobby, that there was a problem with the guy Emily liked.

  So Bobby made a calculation. This might be the time to tell her about the crappy house where her supposed boyfriend lived. This might be the time to show her the photo of the creepy guy who was probably the boyfriend’s father. And this might just be the time to bring up the stolen license plates.

  Bobby edged closer. Even though it was a library, people didn’t do more than slightly lower their voices when they spoke. He cleared his throat and felt it tighten as he managed to get out, ‘Hey, Emily . . .’

  When she looked up, her face seemed to be saying, Go away. Leave me alone.

  At least that’s what he thought it was saying. But whatever it was that her silent face was expressing completely unnerved him. So while he had a whole plan, a whole way in which he was going to reveal his information, instead he blurted out, ‘I saw that guy you liked over on River Road a few days ago, and I followed him home and took a picture of a guy who I think was his dad – and I have to say, Emily, it was all pretty damn weird.’

  He was not prepared for the fact that she would get tears in her eyes. He had no way of knowing that she would be grateful and vulnerable and completely indebted. And so he was shocked when she jumped up and wrapped her arms around him and held him close once he showed her the photos on his phone.

  And it was totally awesome.

  Bobby hoped that people were watching as they headed across the high school parking lot to his SUV. He always parked next to the exit. His parents did that, so he did it, too. Detectives need to make quick getaways, even if it sometimes took a while to walk to your car.

  Emily climbed eagerly into Bobby’s shiny SUV, and he was still in amazement that some kind of switch had been flipped. He’d gone from deeply bugging her to being The Man. And being The Man was just so much better in so many ways that he couldn’t believe it.

  Emily held his phone while they drove, staring at the picture of Clarence, analyzing every detail of the shot. The intense man did look like Sam. She could see the resemblance. And maybe a little bit of Riddle but not much. The man in this picture was lean and sharp on the edges. And he looked angry.

  After memorising the photo, she forwarded it on to her own email. She would need to show the picture to her parents and to anyone else who could help her.

  It was so unlikely that Bobby Ellis would be the person to bring her the only real news about Sam that she’d had since they left. Maybe she’d misjudged Bobby. He seemed so caring now as he drove. And so focused.

  Emily looked up from the phone. He was a deliberate person. She could see that. He even changed lanes with a kind of authority that kids her age didn’t have. She didn’t know what his attitude meant, or where it came from, but for the moment, she was simply grateful.

  She realised that the silence in the car was suddenly awkward, maybe even unkind. And so she cleared her throat and asked, ‘Now tell me why you were out there again?’

  Fortunately, Bobby thought, he could answer that. ‘Like I said, my mom gets the police report every week. And there’s been an increase in crime in the last three months. A lot of the incidents – the burglaries – a lot of them were theft, you know, crimes of opportunity. Like say you leave your garage open with your expensive golf clubs right out in the open . . .’

  Emily didn’t have expensive golf clubs, but she nodded anyway.

  ‘Well, a lot of these incidents were in the River Road area. Now here’s something people don’t really know, but criminals usually do most of their offences close to where they live. They don’t drive in their cars across town . . . I mean, of course sometimes they do, but that’s more for really targeted activity.’ He could see that Emily’s brow furrowed. And he wondered if he sounded like a real tool. It felt like he was sounding like a real tool. And now her brow was furrowing. Why was that? She seemed to have some kind of lie detector planted in her forehead. He continued spewing what was sounding to him like nonsense. ‘So if you look at areas where there’s a lot of this smalltime crime, then the thieves probably live around there.’

  Bobby took a breath. Should he have made that plural? He felt like he was coming off the rails.

  ‘My mom had asked me to drive to River Road and look for anything unusual . . .’

  Lie.

  He was heading into the big-lie stuff now. He had to get this out without revealing that he was obsessed with her.

  Then Emily said, ‘But your mom doesn’t work for the police.’

  Bobby shook his head. ‘No. Private detective. But she has businesses on retainer, and when crime goes up, it’s her job to spot trends and, you know, look for reasons. That’s when she brings me in to help.’

  Was she buying it? Maybe. He exhaled; he’d been holding his breath. That was not good. People who are at ease just let air flow in and out. In and out. He tried doing that a few times and then got back on track. ‘So my mom had given me the crime map.’

  Lie.

  ‘And she wanted me to recon the area.’

  Lie.

  ‘And then I saw your friend . . .’

  Emily was really paying attention now. ‘And this was on Thursday?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And so you followed him and his little brother?’

  Bobby nodded and realised that he was now speeding. He put his foot on the brake. When he lied, it seemed to cause him to drive faster. Interesting. It was like he was literally fleeing himself.

  ‘I recognised them. From the night at IHOP.’

  Not a lie. But the next part was.

  ‘They turned off River Road, and I was turning that way, too. I pulled over to check the map, and when I looked up, they were at the end of the street. I went down to do a U-turn there. That’s when I saw the guy and took the photo.’

  Emily was nodding again. But then she asked, ‘And why did you take his picture?’

  Bobby could feel sweat run from his right armpit down his right side. Like a drop of water would. And now his left armpit was also dripping. But he kept his voice steady. ‘The man appeared to me, from my past experience doing visual interrogation . . .’

  He stopped for a moment. Visual interrogation? Where was this stuff coming from? He plowed ahead.

  ‘He appeared to be suspicious. And, well . . .’

  Okay, here was his bombshell. Here was the part that could tip the scales into stalker land. He just went for it.

  ‘I ran the license plate on the truck in their driveway with the DMV that afternoon, and it didn’t match the vehicle. It was stolen.’

  19

  Riddle rolled up his sweater into a ball to use as a pillow. It smelled like her. It smelled like her kitchen.

  He’d worn it the last night he saw her, when he measured the vanilla to put in the custard and he was sort of clumsy because that’s just the way he was and some of what was in the spoon dribbled on the sweater. But she said it was okay because spilling was part of cooking just like tasting was part of cooking and touching food was part of cooking.

  But he’d never cooked anything before he went into her kitchen.

  I miss cooking now.

  Before, I didn’t miss cooking, because I didn’t know cooking.

  And I miss her. Sweet-cake lady.

  Her name is Debbie Bell.

  And I miss Felix the dog. And I miss the way he smells, which is like wet sweaters. But clean wet sweaters.
Not the kind in the back of the truck.

  And I miss riding the bus to their house. And I miss their family, even if sometimes they all talk too loud and sometimes too fast and sometimes at the same time.

  I’m missing . . .

  It all now.

  Will someone find me? I will be good, if they can find me. I will try to stop missing.

  I will try to stop missing everything I have always missed. I will be good.

  If you can find me . . .

  You.

  Find.

  Me.

  I am asking now.

  I’m asking you in my inside voice.

  And that’s the voice no one ever hears.

  They spent a week in different places every night, and now they were in Cedar City. It was a town of twenty-seven thousand and that meant it was the kind of place that they’d be in and out of in a real hurry.

  Cedar City was built around mining in a different century. Today it had a small branch of a state college, an annual Shakespeare festival, and a group of trusting people who left stuff out at night on their lawns.

  The trouble was that stealing things was easy, but unloading them was impossible. So Clarence could have had a warehouse of mountain bikes the first day that he arrived, but what good would it have done? After a few hours of trying to sell them, he’d have had the cops on his tail.

  A place like Cedar City meant you had to have focus. There was a run-down motel when you first drove into town from the west, and Clarence took a room at their weekly rate. Two beds. The boys could sleep together, or one of them could sleep on the mildewed couch. He didn’t care. He was sick of sleeping in the truck.

  But now there were new rules.

  The boys couldn’t leave the room in the daytime. He didn’t want them out wandering around meeting people. And of course there would be no phone calls.

  Places like the Liberty Motel didn’t have phones in the rooms any more, so it wasn’t like Clarence had to make that off-limits.

  The world had gone cellular, and all that was left in room seven was the old phone jack on the far wall. Someone had spilled some kind of red sauce on the carpet and while it had mostly been cleaned up, dried red spots speckled the phone jack and flecked the grey wall.

  Sam found himself staring at the phone jack, imagining that he was some kind of bug that could climb inside the hole and disappear forever into another world and another life.

  Since they weren’t allowed to go out when it was light, the two boys spent most of the day asleep. It took a few nights to adjust to staying up late and being let out at dusk. Once on the street they’d go to the closest burger place and scrounge around for cold French fries and bun bits in the trash.

  Clarence spent his time looking for small things worth money to finger. He’d unload them at their next stop, which would be a bigger town. He lifted a few wallets from a golfcourse changing room. He helped an old lady put her groceries in her car and then followed her home from the market.

  He took all of her jewellery when she left later in the day to play bridge. A simple broken glass pane on the back door, and he was in and out of her place in ten minutes. He took a Coke from her refrigerator and was considerate enough to put the can in her recycling container before he left.

  Discovering the traitors had centred him.

  He’d been neglecting his duties. He was a thinker. That was for sure. And lately he’d done a lot of thinking about his boys.

  And the snake smiled.

  Emily sat in Bobby Ellis’s car, staring at the ramshackle house. It didn’t look like any place she would have imagined Sam and Riddle living.

  The houses and apartments out off River Road were all rundown and in general disrepair, so not connecting the two brothers to a specific one had been a way of protecting her from their reality.

  But now it was staring her in the face.

  Was he in there now? Were he and Riddle behind the faded old sheet that fluttered from the half-open, dirty window?

  And what was worse – that he was there and hadn’t contacted her in all this time? Or that he was gone?

  Bobby Ellis interrupted her thoughts. ‘Do you want to go knock on the door or something?’

  Emily nodded.

  Bobby looked at her. She seemed confused, but at least she wasn’t hating him, that much he could tell. ‘Do you want me to go with you?’

  Emily shook her head and then opened the door and got out. She walked to the front door and knocked. No answer. She knocked again. No answer. Then her hand went to the knob and she slowly turned it to the right. It wasn’t locked.

  Emily respected rules and privacy. She wasn’t someone who was pushy and she didn’t consider herself aggressive. But she didn’t even hesitate. She simply pressed the door forward and walked in.

  Bobby was watching from the SUV. Now what was she doing? Was she going in?

  Bad idea.

  He was up and out of the car.

  Inside was a mess. Someone had moved out fast and had made a point of trashing the place in the process. Emily stepped backward at the sight, bumping right into Bobby Ellis.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’

  Bobby looked over her head into the room. ‘We shouldn’t be in here . . .’

  But Emily was already moving forward on the ancient wall-to-wall carpeting, which was flattened into a dirty rust-coloured sheet of former synthetic fibres. She called out, ‘Hello . . . Is anybody here?’

  Silence. And then a sound came from the back of the house. Someone was there. Bobby put his hand out to stop her, but Emily kept going and he had no choice but to follow.

  ‘Sam? Riddle?’ She called out, but no one answered. She continued down the cramped little hallway.

  Bobby Ellis was more than six feet tall and played football, but he wasn’t any kind of hero. And right now the last thing he wanted to do was violate Session law HB 0300, which, if he remembered the code as his father had taught him when they went to the firing range together, stated, It is unlawful to enter and remain upon private property without permission of the property owner.

  So what were they now doing?

  Bobby followed Emily down a narrow hallway. The sound in the back room was louder now. Bobby wanted to run. He wanted to scream and run. He had watched way, way, way too many horror movies, because he wanted to scream and run and hide.

  But of course that wouldn’t look good. So he stayed right behind her.

  She was angry now.

  And it was the worst kind of anger, because it was at herself. Just the mention of the word father had changed Sam.

  How could she have thought she knew him so well when she had not known him at all?

  When she’d seen that look in his eyes, a look that had to be pain, how could she not have pressed him harder to explain his past? And to explain his present.

  She moved towards the sound, calling out more urgently now. ‘Sam?’

  They passed a dirty bathroom and a small bedroom, where a mattress was on the floor. At the end of the hall was another bedroom. And that’s where the sound was coming from. It was some kind of thumping. Emily kept going towards the closed door.

  Behind her, she could now hear Bobby Ellis breathing. She was both glad he was there and resentful that he was seeing all of this. She wanted him to leave and she wanted him to be there all at the same time.

  When she reached the closed door, she took the handle firmly and turned. She thought she could hear Bobby Ellis swallow. She opened the door, and the sound stopped. That’s when she saw the two kittens.

  There was an open window on the far wall, and they were leaping up, trying to return to the windowsill to get out. And from the look of things, they’d been at it for a while.

  The room had stacks of paperback books in piles everywhere. Some looked like they’d been pulled straight from the trash; others looked as if they’d been in someone’s house for decades. When the kittens jumped towards the window, they landed, most often, on the books, sending the p
iles to the floor.

  Emily stepped around the books and went right for the scrawny little cats. She scooped them up, turning to Bobby, who had stayed in the doorway. ‘They look like they’re starving to death . . .’

  He had more pressing thoughts on his mind than scrawny kittens. ‘Emily, we really have to get out of here.’

  That’s when she saw the sketch pad that her mother had given Riddle. It was in the corner under a plastic milk crate. Emily handed Bobby Ellis the two bony kittens, not listening as he said, ‘I’m allergic to cats.’

  She picked up the sketch pad and thumbed through the pages. It was Riddle’s work. But it was stuff she’d never seen before. Instead of drawing the electrical circuitry of a toaster oven, these line drawings were all of food.

  The kittens, wide-eyed with fear, now sat in the milk crate, which was positioned between Bobby and Emily in the front seat of the SUV. Bobby kept the windows down, doing his best to minimise the fact that his eyes were feeling itchy and it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

  Emily was on the phone talking to her mother. She had the sketch pad she’d taken from the room in her lap. Her eyes darted from the road to the crying kittens. She was explaining how Bobby had taken a photo of a man, maybe their father, and how he had the license plate of a truck and how they’d gone to the place together and how they’d found something she called a riddle book, which wasn’t what it looked like to him, but he wasn’t about to correct anything she said.

  Because he wasn’t calling the shots, that was for sure.

  He was the driver; he was along for the ride, and that would have to be enough for now. Up ahead, the light turned red and he put on the brake, easing to a stop. He glanced over at Emily’s profile. The wind whipped her long hair back and forth in front of her face as she spoke to her mother.

  She was so brave and so bold and so determined.

  And he was mesmerised.

  20

  Emily’s parents met Bobby’s parents at the Black Angus Steak House where the two families discussed the events of the day. After dinner, the fathers went together to the police station.

  Emily wanted to go with them, but everyone felt that she’d had enough for one day. Plus the two kittens were at home.