The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(54)

“Hey, there, I’m Sergeant Vilkomerson,” he said.

“And I’m Val,” she said. “I’m Zoe’s attorney.”

Brian tilted his head at this, but let it go.

Now that Zoe was sitting there, with a sympathetic audience leaning forward, she found she no longer wanted to scream or make threats. She just wanted to be heard and to be taken seriously. She tried not to be too rattled by the noisy everyday life of the station—the radio squawking, the baby crying, the officers jabbing at their keyboards. The hardest thing to block out was the sound of Baldino on the phone, doing impressions he thought were funny. The sound of his voice repulsed her.

“It’s been months since my dad died,” she said.

She stopped for a second, surprised by how much emotion that one sentence kicked up in her.

Val put an arm around her shoulder, which made her even sadder somehow. She shrugged it off.

She told Brian that the thought of her dad’s body lying in a cave was eating away at her family. She told him about Jonah locking himself in the house, about the notes he’d passed under the door. Brian looked pained. Zoe could tell he was trying not to look at the pictures of his daughter that stood like monuments all over his desk.

“Look,” he said. “This is so, so complicated—and not just because that particular cave is so dangerous.”

Zoe waited to hear why it was so, so complicated, but as Brian was searching for words, Chief Baldino ambled heavily out of his office, like a bear. Zoe’s stomach did its tightening thing. She prayed that he wouldn’t notice her. If he said one rude thing to her, she’d lose it.

She watched Baldino out of the corner of her eye. He crumpled up his lunch bag, compacting it into a tight ball as if it were a feat of strength. Then—though Zoe could count at least four garbage cans in plain sight—he handed it to Officer Maerz and said, “Throw that away for me, would you, Stuart? Can of Coke Zero on my desk, too.”

The chief yawned, stretched, and surveyed his kingdom.

He noticed Zoe.

He grimaced and moved toward her. It was clear he hadn’t forgotten that nasty night at the house. It was clear that he loathed her as much as she loathed him. She just prayed he wouldn’t say anything to set her off.

Baldino came so close that all she could see was his gut. Crumbs from his shirt fell onto her lap.

“I thought I smelled teenager,” he said.

Zoe sprang out of her chair. She began talking too loud, her hands shaking all the while, as if they wanted to disconnect from her body. The whole station got quiet. Everyone stared.

Just as Zoe finished shouting—and just before Baldino, whose face had swelled with anger like a balloon filling with water, began yelling, “You’re a disrespectful brat, and your old man can stay in that hole for all I care”—she heard a microwave ding preposterously in the silence. Somebody’s burrito was ready.

Val and Brian were standing now, too. When had they stood up? Everything was blurring. They each had a hand on one of Zoe’s arms, and they were steering her toward the door. She didn’t want to cooperate. She stiffened her body, like Jonah when he refused to get dressed. Finally, Val whispered, “I love you, but stop it or you really are gonna get arrested. I’m saying this as your lawyer.”

Baldino seemed to notice Val for the first time now. He did the least subtle triple take Zoe had ever seen.

Val gave him a wide smile—god, she loved Val, she was a born blurter, too—and said, “I could show you how to get this look, if you want.”

Baldino snorted.

“Get your little friend out of here,” he told her.

Zoe let her body go slack.

There were tourists at the door, openly gawking at her. Brian cut a path through them.

“It’s all good,” he told Zoe gently.

The door swung open. She felt cold air on her face. She heard car tires hissing on the wet street. Already, she’d forgotten everything she had said to Chief Baldino. She knew she’d been loud, but had she been clear? Had she been heard? Had she told him what she’d promised Jonah?

She turned back to the chief. Brian’s head sagged. He just wanted this to be over. And it was. Almost.

“If you guys don’t go get my dad, I’m gonna go get him myself,” she told Baldino. “And then you may have two bodies to fish out of that cave, not just one.”



Val took Zoe’s car keys and escorted her to the passenger side. Zoe was still in such a cloud that Val had to help her with her seat belt.

Brian leaned in through the window.

“Let’s all just breathe for a second,” he said.

He rested against the Struggle Buggy, hands stuffed in his pockets, head tilted up at the sky.

Zoe waited for the tension of the last ten minutes to dissipate, for the wind to sweep in and break it up and turn it into rain, or something. She regained her equilibrium slowly. Everything started to come back into focus.

Brian patted the roof of the car twice in an okay-let’s-do-this sort of way. He crouched down beside Zoe’s window again.

“First, the good news,” he said.

He waved a small bag of candy—sour gummy worms, it looked like—and offered it to the girls.

“I confiscated these from my daughter this morning,” he said. When they smiled, he added, “It was a routine stop-and-frisk.”