The Outliers (The Outliers, #1)(10)
“Lock up?” I ask.
My dad has never thought to lock a door in his entire life. If it hadn’t been for my mom, he would have left for our annual two-week vacation on the Cape with our front door hanging wide open.
“Wylie, please,” my dad snaps, like he’s fed up with me and my obsessing, and fair enough, I guess. “Just lock the door. Until we know what’s happened to Cassie, I just—we should exercise all due care.”
That explanation would be a lot more believable if he didn’t look so freaked out. He hasn’t looked that spooked in ages. Not since the day the first baby came.
We were at the breakfast table a couple of days after Halloween when my mom found the first one. It was sitting there on our front porch when she went out to get the newspaper.
“I guess they get points for creativity,” my mom said as she came inside, holding up a plastic baby doll. Her nose crinkled as she peered at the red splattered all over it, which one could only hope was paint. “Much more vivid than the usual emails. I guess that’s the price you pay for page one. I should probably call Elaine and see if she got one, too.”
Elaine was the journalist my mom had been working with on a story about a coalition bombing in Syria. It had run that day on the front page of the Sunday Times, and it was my mom’s photographs of a bombed-out school that had stolen the show. She had always gotten her fair share of hate mail. A couple of times even left at our house. But nothing like a plastic baby.
“Why are you even touching that!” my dad shouted. And so loud. “Put it back outside!”
“It’s not contagious, honey.” My mom smiled her beautiful, mischievous smile and raised an eyebrow. She was going to let the shouting go, apparently. She’d been doing that a lot lately—letting everything with my dad go—but I could tell she was starting to get annoyed. “You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, Ben. You know that.”
And my dad did used to have a sense of humor. He used to be really, really funny actually. In a way, that was even funnier, because of his whole stiff science-guy thing. But these days, he was so wound up. First, because he’d been working around the clock at the university trying to finish his study, then I guess his results were kind of disappointing. It wasn’t going to be officially published until February, but it was already finished. The icing on the cake, though, was him having to fire his favorite postdoc, Dr. Caton, because—according to my dad—he’d let “personal bias cloud his judgment.” Whatever that meant. We’d never met Dr. Caton—my dad wasn’t big on socializing—but from the day he hired him, he’d talked about the supposedly very young Dr. Caton (twenty-four and already with a PhD) like some kind of precious, unearthed jewel. I didn’t care, but it drove Gideon—our other resident science boy wonder—totally crazy. He was delighted when Dr. Caton got the ax.
My mom shrugged as she stepped over to pick up her half-eaten toast. She took another bite, the doll still gripped in her other hand, then placed the toast back down delicately, brushing the crumbs from her fingers as she walked back toward the foyer with the baby. She opened our front door and calmly tossed the doll outside. We all heard it go thud, thud, thud down the front steps. Gideon and I giggled. So did my mom. My dad did not. Instead, he headed for the phone.
“Who are you calling?” my mom asked.
“The police,” he said, like this should have been self-evident.
“Come on, Ben,” my mom said, crossing over to where he was standing. “I can give you one definite. You calling the police is exactly what they want: attention.”
“I can’t deal with this, Hope,” my dad said quietly, sad almost, as my mom took the phone from him and hung it up. Then she wrapped her arms around him and whispered something in his ear.
“You don’t have to deal with it,” she said as they separated, but loud enough that it seemed like she was saying it for my benefit. And weirdly, she did not even seem mad at my dad for making something that had happened to her all about him. “That’s why you have me.”
After my dad and Karen are gone, I sit on the living room couch in the dark, staring out our large bay window overlooking Walnut Hill Road, waiting for the lights from Gideon’s ride home from track practice. Neither of us even have our learner’s permits yet, though we’ve both been legally allowed to for two months now. Nothing like your mom dying in a car accident to kill your thirst for the open road. Gideon will probably learn to drive eventually. Bur I already know that I never will.
I peer again down the road for any sign of headlights. What is taking Gideon so long? He should have been home—well, just a few minutes ago, but still. Tonight, a few minutes feel like hours. It’s weird to be waiting on Gideon. His company is so prickly lately. But right now, I’d choose anything over being alone.
I did lock all the doors after my dad and Karen left, then checked them twice. And then a third time. Because you don’t have to tell me twice to worry. I checked the locks and then I checked anything and everything else that could even potentially jump out, burn up, or otherwise turn on me.
I’ve also checked my phone a dozen times for an answer to one of my texts to Cassie. I’ve sent four so far, and called her twice. But there’s been nothing. I would have sent more texts, but each one that goes unanswered makes me feel worse. Makes me more worried that this time, Cassie has finally gotten herself sunk into something so dark and deep that even I won’t be able to yank her back out, no matter how hard I try.