Best Friends Forever (22 page)

“Jonathan Downs?”

“Hmm?” asked the man—Jon—without

meeting Jordan’s eyes. Jon had Addie’s fair skin and light-brown hair. There was a nick high on one cheek, and his knuckles were bruised and scabbed. Jordan looked at them and wondered whether that meant he’d been in fights.

“Jonathan, my name is Jordan Novick. I’m the chief of police in Pleasant Ridge. Can you tel me where you were last night?”

Jonathan hummed, keeping his eyes on the sky.

“I know you weren’t at work. Were you here?” Jordan asked. “Outside somewhere?

”

“I was watching the moon.”

“Anyone see you last night?”

“Only the moon,” Jonathan said, and tilted his face toward the sky again. His khakis were held up by a leather belt—brown, not black.

“You didn’t go back to Pleasant Ridge? Didn’t go to the country club?”

“Don’t go back to Rockvil e,” Jonathan said. “Waste another year.” Jordan watched as Jon dug into his pocket and pul ed out a blue

nylon-and-velcro

wal et,

then

proceeded to remove its contents: a nondriver’s photo ID card and a library card, a frequent-diner’s card from the Old Country Buffet, a membership card from Blockbuster video, and a paycheck stub from Walgreens. There were forty-seven dol ars in cash, some change, and a laminated rectangle of paper that said IF LOST PLEASE CONTACT

ADELAIDE DOWNS. Final y, with a grunt of satisfaction, Jon located a bus pass. He re-packed his wal et and squinted toward the corner, looking for the bus.

“Hey, Jon,” said Jordan, trying for a tone of casual camaraderie. “Anyone ever mean to you in high school?”

“Addie,” Jon said instantly.

“Not your sister,” Jordan said. “Other people. Other boys. Maybe the ones who dropped your backpack?”

“I didn’t care about that,” said Jon. “I was watching the moon. I saw two ful eclipses and one partial. Have you ever seen an eclipse?”

“Who was mean to Addie?”

Jon wasn’t listening. “The Perseid meteor shower can be viewed with the naked eye beginning in the middle of August. I have a telescope, though. You can see it even better with a telescope.”

“Jonathan, someone got hurt at the reunion last night. Do you have any idea who it could have been?”

Jon turned toward him, looking alarmed.

“Addie? Did someone hurt Addie?”

“No, no, Addie’s fine.”

Jon shook his head, frowning. “Addie got hurt.”

“She’s fine. I just saw her.” And so did you, thought Jordan. This must be the short-term memory stuff his sister had described.

“Not now,” said Jon with exaggerated patience. “In high school. Dan Swansea and Kevin Elephant and al the rest of them. They wrote things about her on the driveway.”

Writing on driveways. Kevin Elephant. It sounded like nonsense, but Jordan wrote it down anyhow.

“Do you need anything? Are you going to be al right here?”

Jonathan looked at Jordan as if he were crazy. “I’m not staying here,” he said. “I’m taking a bus to the movies.” He pul ed a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Bus number sixty to the theater. Buy a ticket for the two-ten show. Use the bathroom before the movie starts. Take the seventy-two bus home.”

“Oh. Okay.” Jordan thought for a minute, then dug in his pocket and came up with ten dol ars. “If you get hungry at the movies,” he said. Jon opened his wal et, smoothed out the bil , and slid it inside. “Can I borrow your pen?” he asked, and when Jordan handed it over, Jon wrote the words “buy snack” in tiny letters under his reminder to buy a ticket. Jordan waved awkwardly, then walked back to his car and drove to the home where Jonathan Downs had lived for the last fifteen years.

TWENTY-SIX

“No way,” said the social worker, a tal , thin black woman named Verona Jennings. She wore eyeglasses on a chain hanging down against her chest, and had her arms crossed on top of them. “Uh-uh. Not without a warrant.”

“Let’s back up,” said Jordan. He and Ms. Jennings were in the Crossroads kitchen at a table covered in a plastic red-and-white gingham-checked cloth, with a vase of fake daisies in the middle. On the refrigerator were

laminated

pieces

of

colored

construction paper with names—ROGER, DAVID, JON, PHIL—on top, and schedules

— 6:15: alarm, 6:20: use toilet, brush teeth,

shave,

6:30:

eat

breakfast,

take

medication—written underneath. Only two of the residents were currently in the house. The other six had gone home for the holidays. One of the men was standing in front of the window, staring silently out at the street. “You ever know Jon to be violent?”

“He’s hurt himself,” Ms. Jennings said. Before she’d let Jordan through the door, she’d asked for his badge number, then made him wait while she’d cal ed it in to the station. “I’ve seen him get frustrated. He smacks himself in the head if we don’t stop him.” Jordan couldn’t keep from wincing in sympathy. “But he’s never hurt anyone else. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but I’ve never known him to be violent toward another person.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Yesterday afternoon,” she said. “He came home from work that morning just before eight o’clock and went right up to his room. That’s normal. He came down for lunch—we have mac and cheese on Fridays—and went out for a walk after. Al normal. He goes to the library and the museum and the movies several times a week, and I’m sure Tim, who was on duty then, assumed that’s where he was going. He didn’t come back for dinner, though, but we didn’t worry. Friday night is baked fish. Not Jon’s favorite. He likes McDonald’s sometimes. Tim must have figured he’d gone out for dinner and was going on to work after that.” And if he didn’t, it wouldn’t have been unusual.” Ms. Jennings explained that Jon would stick with his routine—job, and meals, and walks, and trips to the movies and the library—for three, four, even six months at a time. Then something would happen, and he’d stop taking his medication, and he’d vanish, usual y just for a night or two. Addie would find him. She’d talk to him and bring him home, and if things were bad, she’d take him to doctors’ appointments to try to readjust

his

medication—Jon,

Jordan

learned, took an antidepressant and a drug to prevent seizures.

He wrote it al down. “There was a high school reunion last night. Jon mention it?”

Verona Jennings gave him a sad look and shook her head. Jordan tried another tack.

“What did he do for Thanksgiving?”

“His sister brought him dinner.” She led Jordan to the kitchen to show him a stack of leftovers in neatly labeled Tupperware.

“See? Turkey, candied yams, green-bean casserole. That’s Jon’s favorite. They watched some sci-fi thing up in Jon’s room after. Addie went home by three, and Jon took a nap.” She shut the refrigerator and gave him a level look. “Now what is this al supposed to be about?”

Jordan told her what he could: the reunion, the belt they’d found in the parking lot, how one of Jon’s classmates had remembered that Jon had taken things. Even before he’d finished, Ms. Jennings was shaking her head again. “First of al , he’d have to have gotten out to Pleasant Ridge. And Jon doesn’t drive.”

“No car?” Even as he asked, he remembered the non-driver’s ID.

Ms. Jennings shook her head again.

“Jon’s never had a license, far as I know. He’s got a bus pass, is al . I’d be mighty surprised to learn the bus stops in front of a country club in the suburbs, and even if it did, it’d be three or four transfers. Jon couldn’t do that without someone tel ing him how.”

Trying again, Jordan asked, “Where’s his room?”

“You can’t go in there. Not without a warrant.”

“I don’t want to search it,” Jordan said. “I just want to see it.” She looked at him for a long moment, possibly weighing the inconvenience and the trouble of Jordan returning with an actual warrant, before leading him up a narrow flight of stairs. Jon’s room was at the far end of the house, a smal rectangle with a single bed, a dresser, and a high window with bars on the outside, overlooking the house’s weedy backyard, and it looked like a wing of the world’s smal est art gal ery. Each wal was covered, floor to ceiling, in photographs and framed pictures, paintings and drawings like the ones on Addie Downs’s wal s. There were drawings of a boy—a young Jon, Jordan thought, Jon as he’d once been. In the pictures, the boy, who was slim and tanned and fair-haired, ran and jumped and swam and kicked a soccer bal . Sometimes there were other people in the pictures—a heavyset woman with blue eyes and long hair, a pale man smiling faintly with puppets dangling from his hands—but most of the pictures (some were paintings, Jordan thought, and some were drawings done with colored pencils or pastel crayons) were of the boy, doing a dozen different boylike things: dangling a fishing pole into a misty, silvery lake; riding a bike down a street Jordan thought he recognized as Crescent Drive; waiting for the school bus with a backpack on his back. In one painting the boy and a man—his father, Jordan guessed

—were standing in the darkness, peering up into the starry sky.

“They’re something, aren’t they?” asked Verona Jennings, and Jordan could only nod. He thought he saw what Addie had tried for, how she’d drawn and painted her brother’s entire pre-accident history, how she’d given him this room, this world, where he was as he had been, young and handsome and unbroken.

He took in each of the four wal s, looking at al of the pictures, finding a few of a girl he guessed was Addie, here and there, hovering behind her older brother as he held a lit candle to a candelabra (a menorah? he wondered, thinking of Hol y), sitting by the side of the pool with another, skinny blond girl next to her. Their feet dangled in the water as Jon stood on the high dive, preparing to jump.

“Five minutes,” said Verona Jennings.

“I’ve got things to do.” There was a thick rug on Jon’s floor, cousin of the one in his sister’s living room, and a pair of plump pil ows in crisp dark-blue cases on the bed. A laminated schedule—a twin of the one on the fridge, although this one was decorated with gold foil stars—hung on the closet door, and a half-dozen white button-down shirts, jeans, and khakis were lined up inside, along with a red polyester Walgreens pinney with a rectangular name tag reading I’m

JON. How can I help you? A pair of photographs in clear plastic frames stood on the dresser. Jordan stepped close to examine one and saw little Addie and little Jon in a shot that had surely been taken on the first day of school. Both children wore backpacks and brand-new clothes, and there was a yel ow school bus in the background. Addie was giving a tentative smile. Jon was squinting into the sunshine, handsome and bored. Jordan reached for the picture.

“Don’t touch anything!” Ms. Jennings said. He let his hands fal to his sides and considered the second shot, this one of Jon and Addie as grown-ups. Brother and sister were posed in front of a Christmas tree. Jon wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and would have been handsome if it hadn’t been for the dazed, vacant look in his eyes.

Addie Downs was bigger. Not enormous, but much heavier than the woman he’d met, wearing tights and a black sweater-dress that fel halfway down her calves. She had light-brown hair pul ed back from her double-chinned face by a headband, thick wrists, plump hands, and she was smiling

…the same sweet, tentative smile that made her size al the more heartbreaking, because it was the smile of a woman who hadn’t given up, who stil dreamed of finding something wonderful

underneath

the

Christmas tree.

Poor thing, he thought as Ms. Jennings said, “She’s lost a lot of weight.” Poor things, both of them. He waited until her back was turned and she was heading down the hal before slipping quietly across the room and sliding the grown-up picture of Addie and her brother into his pocket. Jon didn’t strike him as a criminal…but he’d been wrong about people before.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Addie?”

I came awake with a gasp, imagining that it was Vijay’s hand on my shoulder, that Vijay had come back to me. I opened my eyes to find Val sitting behind the wheel (she’d been driving for the last hour). We were in the old station wagon, in a McDonald’s parking lot. I could smel hot grease and frying meat, and could see the red-and-yel ow sign through the windshield. The dashboard clock claimed that it was just after two in the afternoon.

“Where are we?” My tongue felt thick. I blinked, wriggling around in the seat.

“About a hundred miles outside of St. Louis. We need money,” Val said.

I tried to remember what I’d had in my purse when Val had shown up. I’d taken out a hundred dol ars in preparation for my date, spent ten of them on doughnuts and coffee, twenty on gas, and given twenty more to Jon. “I have fifty dol ars,” I said. She shook her head. “That’s not enough. But don’t worry. I have a plan.” She nodded toward the entrance of the restaurant. A mother with a baby in her arms and a little curly-headed girl at her side walked through the doors.

I looked at Val. “Oh, no. Come on. You want to rob a McDonald’s?”

“Maybe a liquor store,” she said, a little defensively. “Or a Seven-Eleven. Don’t you always read about places like that getting robbed? I bet it’s easy!”

I didn’t answer, thinking that I was always reading about the arrests of people who tried to rob fast-food restaurants, and liquor stores, which meant it wasn’t easy at al . “We could just go to a bank,” I offered.

“Of course,” she said. “Because that’s where the money is! Okay, here’s what I’m thinking: we can buy masks at a drugstore. I’l do the talking. We’l tel them we want ten thousand dol ars in unmarked bil s.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “It’s a month after Hal oween. No place is going to have masks, so we just find a TD Bank, where I have a checking and savings account, and I’l make a withdrawal.”

“You can’t do that,” she said. “They’l find out! They’l trace it, and they’l know we were here!”

“Oh, like they’re not going to catch us if we rob a bank in Hal oween masks.” I took a swig of warm water from the bottle in my bag. “Listen. Have you thought about what happens when this is over?”