The Next Time You See Me (36 page)

At three thirty he dropped Sharon and Maggie off at the Best Western Motor Inn on the bypass and thought, as he told the clerk the police department’s tax-exempt code, of booking himself a room, too. He was too tired even to drive home. But he was also, he realized, too tired to sleep.

“Will you leave in the morning?” he asked Sharon.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is there anything else we can do? Anywhere else to try?”

“There’s the wooded area near Emily’s house—we could go there depending on what the search team tells us. And we haven’t talked to any of the girl’s classmates yet. At least one of them would have seen her on the bus, so maybe we can narrow down which she took and where it went.”

“I’d like to make it home for my boys’ game. So . . .” She counted under her breath. “Four o’clock. I need to be out of here by then.”

“Thanks so much,” Tony said. They were standing under an eave outside the woman’s room, and he looked down at the dog, who was now sitting and panting, eyes drooped to slits. “Can I pet her?”

“Of course you can,” Sharon said.

He hunched down to rub the dog’s head and knead the base of her ears with his knuckles. “Good girl, good girl,” he said. Her hot breath was an oddly pleasing combination of sweetness and stink, like a nursing baby’s. Maybe it was the exhaustion, or maybe it was that half of a Darvocet he’d taken earlier, but he felt suddenly moved by this animal. What an amazing thing this creature was, how simple and wonderful. It was a kind of magic, wasn’t it? A dog that could sniff out an hours-old path. They just needed to find the right starting point.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

1.

Dale shook Susanna awake. She groaned, exhaled hard, and turned to check the digital clock: 5:30
A.M
. When her eyes adjusted to the low light she noticed he was holding Abby, dressed, in his arms. She was slumped against him, head on his shoulder.

“Oh my God,” Susanna said, tossing the covers aside and holding out her arms. “Is she sick? What’s wrong?”

“No, nothing like that,” Dale whispered. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

Her heart was slow to resume its normal rhythm. “Are you sure?” She rubbed her eyes and swung her feet over the side of the bed; the nap of the carpet was reassuring against the soles of her feet. “God, Dale, what’s going on?”

“We better go on and drop Abby at your mother’s. Something’s happened.”

Susanna jumped to a stand. “Ronnie?” Her stomach lurched. “Did they find her?”

“No,” Dale said. “Jesse Benton called about half an hour ago. A girl’s gone missing—one of your students, an eighth grader.”

She tried to process this. “Jesse Benton called here?”

“Yeah. I grabbed the phone before you woke up.”

“And someone’s missing? Who?”

“Emily Houchens.”

“Emily,” Susanna repeated.

“Isn’t she the one you were saying got pummeled in that food fight?”

“Yeah,” she said softly.

“She never made it home from school yesterday. The bus driver said he thought he’d seen her but couldn’t be sure, so they’re not even totally certain how she made it off school grounds.”

“What’s happening now?” She looked helplessly around the room, unsure of whether she should take Abby, get in the shower, or start throwing on clothes. “Are they having another meeting?”

Dale laid Abby on the bed and went to the closet; Susanna could see that he was wearing only his trousers and undershirt, and he was thumbing now through a rack of his button-downs. “You have time to clean up if you want,” he said, pulling out his favorite plaid shirt and shrugging into it. “They’ve organized a search party. Some of them started last night, and they’re continuing with a bigger group today at first light. But Jesse wants as many of the school system employees as he can gather to meet at the high school at six thirty so we have some kind of organized front on what to tell the students. It sounds like they’re going to implement a bunch of new safety procedures, at least temporarily.”

Abby got off the bed with a grunt and left the room. The television roared to life down the hall. “Has she had anything to eat?” Susanna asked.

“I got her to drink some juice. She said she wasn’t hungry, so I didn’t push it.”

Susanna started laying out clothes on the bed: some khaki trousers, a turtleneck sweater, underwear, bra. “They don’t think this is connected to Ronnie, do they?”

“I’m sure some people do.” He wound a tie around his neck, and Susanna wondered if she should opt for a skirt instead—if
the meeting called for a certain level of formality or if this was just one of those instances of Dale and his exaggerated sense of occasion. “This is a lot of excitement for a town of this size, so people will put the two together even if it doesn’t make sense. I tend to think it doesn’t.”

Susanna yearned to talk to Tony, to hear what he knew. Whatever his instinct was, she would trust it. “Do people think she was abducted or something? Or that she ran away?”

“They really have no clue.”

“She was having a bad time of it at school,” Susanna said. “What those kids did to her was beyond cruel.”

“That’s what I told Jesse.” He had on his field-day cologne, and he was checking his hair in the mirror. He seemed charged with purpose, the way he did before competitions, and for a mean moment Susanna thought that he was probably glad for this distraction. He always got distant and gloomy at the end of a marching band season; he didn’t know what to do with the free evenings, the lack of an immediate goal. “I told him all about the food fight. He said the police might want to get some particulars from you.”

She made a noise of unenthusiastic affirmation. It annoyed her that Dale had shared this information with the superintendent on her behalf, though she couldn’t really pinpoint why, or how he might have better handled things. It just seemed like—well—sucking up. He liked being the person with the most information, the person whom the rest turned to when their own lines of gossip played out. Even last night, despite his discomfort at being tied publicly to Ronnie, Susanna had sensed his getting into the spirit of the community meeting, reveling a little in his position as the man by her side. “She’s been having a hard time,” she’d heard him saying softly to a work colleague of theirs, his tone of voice suggesting that he, too, had struggled heroically with the pressure of Ronnie’s disappearance—that being a support system for Susanna had taken its toll.

Or maybe she was being unfair to him. The last two days had been
like this: judging Dale bitterly for his wrongs, then feeling almost suffocated by her guilt, convinced that she’d villainized him only to justify her own terrible actions.

“I can drive Abby to your mother’s while you’re cleaning up, then swing back here to get you. Does that sound OK? It should save us some time.”

“All right,” Susanna said. “Just let me kiss her good-bye.”

In the shower she cranked the heat until it was steaming, grateful for the rare few moments truly to herself. Ronnie. Emily. Even in a town this small, what were the chances that she would know them both? She thought about Emily in the bathroom after the incident in the cafeteria, how she was humming tunelessly and trying to wipe spaghetti sauce out of her hair with a brown paper towel. She thought about the way tears had magnified her big green eyes and how utterly lost and alone she seemed. Maybe she
had
run away. Maybe it had been too much for her to face coming back to school, knowing that her tormenters were there, even if they were—for now—hidden from sight. It made Susanna feel another wave of anger at Christopher Shelton, that little privileged shit, and she attacked herself with the washcloth, remembering how his mother had had the audacity to approach her last night, to express her sympathy. “Let me know if there’s anything my husband and I can do,” she had said, as if there were any way in the universe that Susanna would take
their
help—as if Nita Shelton truly had any help to offer. “I’ll tell you what you can do,” Susanna muttered now, putting her soapy head under the showerhead. “Keep your sociopathic asshole of a son in line, that’s what you can do.”

Then it happened, out of nowhere: She realized that she might not ever see her sister again. That Ronnie wasn’t just making herself scarce for a couple of weeks, wasn’t just a few clever steps from being found. How could she have known but not known? She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hold her head so that the water didn’t stream into her nostrils, and so she hunched, gasping, and finally the attack passed. The water flowing down her back was cool now. Dale would be home any minute, wondering what was keeping her.

2.

Eighth graders were old enough to appreciate drama, but most of them weren’t yet old enough to truly fear for Emily Houchens, or to wonder if what had happened to her could happen to them. If they were wondering, it was in a thrilling way—the way they’d once wondered if the Bell Witch would get them if they said her name three times fast at the stroke of midnight, or if there really was the ghost of a dead girl in the window of the house by the old cemetery, as town legend claimed. In fact, Susanna could see that most of them were enjoying the day, the break in the routine. They didn’t even mind the hassle of the new safety measures—signing in and out of the bus or getting checked out at the end of the day by a registered parent or guardian—though they might eventually grouse if the routine continued long enough to lose its novelty.

As they’d been instructed to do by the superintendent, the teachers all kept their homeroom students through first period, explaining to them the nature of the disappearance and the safety procedures, then allowing time for a brief discussion period, so that students could, as Jesse Benton put it, “work through the trauma together.” Susanna had been given a handout titled “Methods for Helping Children Understand Crisis,” which stated that children needed “a SAFE ENVIRONMENT in which to express themselves,” “the SUPPORT of their peers,” and “ACTIVE CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION between parents and teachers.” Most of the suggested tips and activities listed in it seemed geared to much younger children, Susanna thought, and so she spoke to her class plainly and simply, explaining what she had been told and admitting that she was worried about Emily but very hopeful. The students were solemn during this speech, unusually quiet, and they hung on her every word. She knew that they would spend the rest of the day heatedly comparing notes with their peers, flushed with pleasure at the new energy in the school, teachers whispering furiously to one another, Mr. Burton coming into classrooms to silently hand off papers to the teachers, as
if he were a producer passing an update to the news anchor. Susanna found she couldn’t blame them for it.

She had allowed Christopher Shelton to join the group for this special session, and it was he, surprisingly, who appeared to actually be troubled by the news. Where the other students’ solemnity seemed put on, as if they were acting out behaviors they’d seen on television, Christopher was drawn, morose; his color was bad. He sat silently in the back of the room until she invited them to ask her questions or talk about their feelings, and then he tentatively raised his hand. Some eyes widened; the students were expecting, at the least, some of his patented irreverence.

“Where are they searching for her?” he asked.

It was an odd question, she thought—more like something an adult would ask. “Well,” she said, “what I understand is that they’re starting from two different center points and working out from them. One is actually this school, because we haven’t been able to confirm whether or not she rode the bus home.” She swept her eyes across the larger group. “If any of you have information about that, please let me know. The other is her house.”

He nodded and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat, which he was wearing inside despite the warmth of the classroom. It was a Starter jacket brandishing the Detroit Red Wings logo, and it was so puffy that he kind of sank down into it, only a pale bit of face emerging.

He still didn’t seem himself when Susanna escorted him to the bathroom for his morning break. Where yesterday he had sauntered down the hall, eyes roving with interest from one classroom door to the next, today his head was down and his shoulders were slumped, and there was something faraway about his expression.

“Are you coming down with a cold, Christopher?” Susanna asked him on the walk back to her room. “It seems like you should be hot in that coat.”

He looked at the jacket as if he’d forgotten he was wearing it. “I
don’t know. Maybe,” he said. “I lost my house key yesterday and had to sit outside until Mom got home.”

“Maybe you should go to a doctor,” Susanna said gently.

He shrugged. “I’m all right.”

She found herself worrying about him. Perhaps it was a mother’s instinct, or perhaps Christopher’s manner in sickness was just such a contrast to his usual cockiness that she felt confident for once in her power over him, and this confidence made her generous. Maybe she just needed the distraction from thinking about Ronnie and Emily. At lunch she opened the door to the supply closet to find him with his head down on the desktop, and he quickly sat bolt upright. His face was red and blotchy.

“Chris, I’m thinking I might need to call your mother to come get you,” Susanna said. She put her hand on his forehead, then touched his cheeks with the backs of her fingers. He was clammy, his hair damp.

“I’m all right,” he said again.

“You don’t want to go home?”

He shook his head.

“If you’re worried about finishing your punishment,” Susanna said, “don’t. I’ll make sure you get credit with Mr. Burton for today even if you do leave for the doctor. OK?”

“I’m OK. I don’t want to go home.”

“Well, it’s lunchtime. Are you ready to go to the cafeteria?”

“I’m not hungry,” he said. By the windows, the radiator clanked and hissed. The room was otherwise very quiet.

“If you’re not sick enough to go home, you need something on your stomach,” Susanna said. “What if I go and bring you something back here?”