The Body of Christopher Creed (20 page)

"She's the criminal, Mr. Ames," I blasted. "She doesn't break into houses, she just breaks into lives! And steals them! Between her and the cops..."

I trailed off because of how he was staring into space. I noticed for the first time how tired he looked.

"Digger Haines was my friend," he said, so softly you would have thought he was talking to the wall and not to us. "Digger was my friend, and I guess I should have known that at some point it would happen again; it
had
to happen again."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He sighed. "Only that nobody learned a lesson. Nobody stopped believing that other people were more guilty than they were. Why do people have so much trouble seeing their own faults but such an easy time seeing everyone else's?"

I didn't answer because I knew he wasn't really asking me. It was just a question that he put out there. But a truth struck me.
Mrs. Creed would rather believe her own son is dead than believe she is at fault.
I would never have imagined that a human being was capable of so much denial. By the tired look on Mr. Ames's face and his last comment, I figured he must feel that she's not the only person out there capable of that. He was thinking of a few others, maybe Digger's dad, Bob Haines, and maybe even our own chief of police.

My mom was
trying to cheer us up as she made dinner. She said the DA's office was having the computer disk shipped to a company in Silicon Valley, in California. The company had special technology that could determine what activity actually happened on the disk. They could determine if Chris's note on the disk was either a "save" or a "move," and on what day that activity took place. If the activity was a "save," that meant Bo had something to do with creating or editing the note. We knew that wasn't true. If they could prove the activity was nothing more than a "move," then it would support Bo's story, she said.

"The problem is, we can't get the DA's signature until tomorrow. The shipping alone will take twenty-four hours, which will put us into the weekend. And they don't do analysis on the weekends," Mom said. "They won't have a diagnosis until Monday, at the earliest. Tomorrow they're sending Bo to the juvenile-detention facility in Egg Harbor, just for safekeeping."

That set Ali into one of her messes. My mom was rambling something about Bo being a juvenile, that they could keep him like that without actually charging him—something. I was trying to keep a long fuse, but Ali's crying all the time was getting me a little crazy.

"Mrs. Adams, I'm afraid of him being near Chief Bowen." Ali told how Bo blurted out Chief Bowen's affair with Mrs. McDermott to Renee. "I'm afraid Chief Bowen will do mean things to Bo for telling his kids. Things that have nothing to do with Chris Creed being gone."

I didn't know what to say. I was way lost on this business of Mrs. Creed taking her life out on an innocent kid.

After dinner I went up to my room and just lay there vegging. The whole thing was reminding me of this Bible story Leandra told me one day. The Bible stories she learned in her childhood were scarier than the ones they taught in my church. Ours were about Jesus loving all races and kids, and nice stuff like that. In her church, they told kids what could happen to you if you died a heartless snob. This rich guy had died, and gone to hell because he had been all heartless to the beggars and poor people. When he got there he pleaded to God that he wanted to appear as a ghost and tell his relatives to clean up their act. God said to him, "Even if you went back as a ghost and told the truth to their faces, they would not believe you."

I had thought that was a far-fetched story, until now.

There were blank spots where I must have dropped off to sleep that night without realizing it. But I would come out of them and look at the clock when I did. No more than half an hour ever passed.

Friday I never set foot in the cafeteria. And Leandra never came up to my locker or stuck her head in any of my classes before the bell. I guessed she knew it was over, and I just couldn't get up enough feelings to care. Somehow I got through classes and football practice. I got tackled a lot.

I was definitely ready for some decent news, something to pick me up, when I got home. I noticed that there was a message on my answering machine and wondered if it was from Leandra—or Alex, who hadn't called me since our fight with Renee in front of the Wawa. The phone call I made two nights earlier had been completely forgotten.

I pushed the button. "Hi, I'm Isabella. You forgot to leave your name, so this message is for whoever called me. Yeah, you can come over anytime. I'm here this weekend, except Saturday day ... My mom's taking me to the mall."

My mom's taking me to the mall.
I remembered seeing Chris at the mall with his mom a few times, despite how the rest of us went with our friends. Sounded like Isabella and Chris were two of a kind. I stared at the answering machine and listened to the message a couple more times. Something about the sound of her voice made me curious. I guess I had expected her to sound really shy and hesitating. Creed had written shyness around her every move. She just sounded like a friendly person who was nice.

And she had misunderstood me. I had said I just wanted her to call, not that I wanted to come over. But all of a sudden that sounded like a really good idea. I needed to get out of this town.

I told my dad Ali and I wanted a change of scene, and we wanted to go eat and walk on the boardwalk. He dropped us off in front of Chris's uncle's restaurant around dinnertime. I watched his car drive away, before steering Ali up to the boardwalk. Neither of us was very hungry.

"This was a great idea," I said. It felt awesome to get out of the woods for a while.

"You look better." She grinned at me. "Past couple nights, I thought you were getting suicidal yourself. Did anyone ever tell you that you get too emotionally involved in things?"

"No," I said. I didn't think I'd ever had anything to become emotionally involved in before.

She was laughing. "Remember the time in third grade when we had that field trip to the wax museum?"

"Yes, and shut up," I said, remembering. They had this one exhibit called the Chamber of Horrors, and it had these wax guys in various torture maneuvers that had gone on throughout history.

"Some of us kept going back and going through again and again, but you refused to go after the first time." She giggled.

I shuddered. "I don't actually see the thrill of staring at a guy draped over a giant meat hook. Or a bloody, decapitated body hanging off a guillotine."

"We thought it was funny." She laughed again. "You wrote a poem for class the next day called ... some big word."

"'Inhumane,'" I mumbled. "Seemed like a big word back then."

I didn't feel like telling her the whole truth, because she was laughing already. But my mom had picked me up from school because the trip made us miss the school bus. I couldn't stop thinking of those torture victims, and by the time we were halfway home, my stomach had had enough. My mom had just gotten a new car, and I remember her reaching into the backseat, all frantic, and dumping out this pair of shoes she had just bought so I could have something to heave in. I heaved into a shoe box.

"I always wondered what they did with all those bloody wax figures when they closed that place," I muttered to Ali. "I wonder if that wax guy is still hanging over a meat hook in some other wax museum..."

"At any rate, I liked your poem." She smiled. "It was sweet."

I couldn't remember the poem, but it was good to see her smiling. It gave me hopeful thoughts, like maybe Isabella would know where Chris was, and that he was alive and okay.

We walked about six blocks, then turned. The houses on the beach block in Margate were pretty huge. They were even older and even bigger than the homes in Steepleton, but the yards were really small.

I had heard stories that the girls in Margate could generally be a good time. There was lots of money floating around, but the parents weren't all glued to one another like they were in Steepleton. It was more of a city than our little historic "towne," and supposedly there were more drugs running around, more parents taking more vacations without their kids, more divorces. That made for good parties. When juniors and seniors at Steepleton got their driver's licenses, they started going to parties in Margate on the weekends. But I supposed there were a number of families like mine, and that this Isabella was from one of them or she wouldn't have been like Creed described her.

We started up the walk, and I looked at the house number I'd scribbled down to make sure it was right. The lawn was small, and the hedges needed cutting really bad. The doorbell was hanging by a wire. I looked in one window and saw kind of a laundry mountain on the dining room table, with folding chairs all scattered around but no real chairs. It didn't look much like my house. It looked kind of bare and undecorated inside. I knocked on the door. After a few moments I heard footsteps and saw a pile of laundry with legs in jeans coming toward us.

"Hi!" the voice behind the mountain said. "Back door! Front door's broken."

We went around to the back door and waited. About a minute later a girl in baggy jeans came to the door. She wore one of those tops that came just below her boobs, so her whole stomach showed. She had about a hundred long braids in her hair, with beads and feathers and all sorts of stuff on the ends. She pushed open the door, blowing smoke over our heads, from a cigarette in the hand she pushed with. She was cute, despite the hair, but looked old—about nineteen. Isabella's weird big sister that Creed described in his diary, I decided.

"Hi, I'm Torey. This is Ali."

"Come on in," she said, without even asking what we wanted. Very friendly family.

I walked past her into the living room. It looked real lived in, and the furniture was kind of falling down.

"We're looking for Isabella Karzden," I said.

"I'm Isabella." She looked from Ali to me, huffing on that cigarette. It stopped me cold.

"You're Isabella?" I said. This girl was smoking. She was so unshy and so artsy looking. I could not imagine what in the hell attracted this girl to Creed. Ali rescued me.

"Torey called a couple nights ago. We know Chris Creed."

"Oh, that's you guys!" She laughed. "Sit down. Here."

She pushed a bunch of clothes and coats off the couch with her arm, and they landed in a pile on the floor. "Sorry about the mess. My dad refuses to hire a housekeeper, and my mom lives in Philadelphia now. He pays her a
huge
alimony, which is why we're minus a housekeeper, probably. I don't ask questions, I'm just the token offspring. My mom shows up on Saturdays to take me to the mall. I wonder if you can buy a housekeeper at Macy's."

I remembered her mall statement on the answering machine and shook my head in dizzy disbelief. It's amazing how things can be so different from how they sound.

"You guys want a beer? Bunch of kids are coming over later. We can have the party before the party if you want."

"Sure." Ali smiled, rescuing me again.

Isabella disappeared into the kitchen, and I just knew something was horribly wrong here. I thought maybe we had the wrong Isabella Karzden. Ali was laughing.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"Oh my god" was all she said, but she looked like she was putting something together.

Isabella plopped a green bottle down on the coffee table in front of me, and I stared at it. Beer never came to us this easy. We normally had to con Ryan's older brother, Earl, into running into Absecon, and it was a big, sneaky thing. This was like playing grown-up.

"Yeah, Roger told me about Chris disappearing," she said, dropping into a chair and pulling her legs up in a pretzel. "I was sorry to hear about that. He was sweet."

Roger was Chris's uncle who owned the restaurant where Chris met this girl. I asked, "So ... you don't know where he is?"

She shook her head in confusion. "Why would I know?"

My jaw bobbed around, then I asked, "Didn't you go out with him last summer?"

"You mean ... as in a boyfriend-girlfriend thing?" She laughed. "No."

I watched in amazement as she hunted for words. "Chris ... was ... how can I say it? He could latch on to you and just refuse to let go. I never wanted to hurt him. But he never gives up until you say,
Listen, kiddo. Reality check. I do not like you, I will never like you.
"

Ali covered her face and laughed. "Oh my god, I feel like such a bonehead. Torey, he made the whole thing up! We all knew he never had a grip on reality ... I guess we should have figured he would make you up, too."

"So ... you're not really his friends, either." The girl was smiling and all. She added enthusiastically, "Because when you called and said you were his friends, I thought, Hmm ... wonder what these dudes are like?"

I could see she wasn't the judgmental sort. I decided to tell her the truth. "He had this diary, and we got ahold of it. You're all over the place in it. That's why I thought you might know where he is."

"Oh Jesus," she muttered. "What did he say in this diary?"

Ali told her about the walks down the boardwalk, the thing on the beach, and this one outrageous sex scene that she must have read when I wasn't around and hadn't told me about. Isabella just kept shaking her head, and every once in a while she would nod.

"That is, like, ninety-percent fiction," she said. "Here's the real story. One day, on my lunch break, he asked me to go for a walk on the boards with him. I thought,
Why not?
That part is true. I could see he was having trouble getting along with the other busboys, and I felt a little sorry for him. He was shaking in his shoes when he asked me. I thought it was cute. So we went walking, and when we came back, it was like he was glued to my side for the rest of the summer. He was really,
really
hard to shake."

"So, you never actually went out with him?" I asked.

"Well, I did it with him once," she said with a shrug. My neck snapped a little to hear how she said that so casually. She went on, "I couldn't shake him, and after a while I thought, Maybe he just needs to hook up with somebody. So, why not? But it just made him ten times worse. I wish I hadn't now. Doing a virgin is not all it's cracked up to be."