At the Quiet Edge(23)

“Is it police detective stuff? Old records and files?”

“I’m . . . I’m not sure. There were a lot of boxes and some furniture. I don’t know who owns it.”

Josephine grabbed his arm, and in that moment he knew he’d done the right thing, telling her. Telling someone. He wasn’t alone with it now, which made it seem cool instead of scary. “I want to see it,” she said.

Everett grimaced. He’d risked his own ass going into lockers, but it didn’t feel right to risk getting Josephine in trouble. “Maybe. If we get a chance. I’ll send you the list of names. I was looking some of them up on your phone while you were dancing. Here.”

He took her phone and typed in “Marti Herrera.” A photograph of a dark-eyed young woman popped up. She was laughing, her frizzy blond hair blown back by the wind. He angled the phone so they could both see it.

Herriman police are asking for help finding local woman Marti Herrera. Her husband was out of town, working for a national moving line, when he arrived home last Tuesday evening to find that Marti Herrera, age twenty-one, had not returned from her work at the Free Throw Sports Bar the night before. She clocked out at 12:32 a.m. on Monday, March 13, and her car has since been located in the Free Throw lot. It is unknown if she was forced to leave her car or if she may have gone somewhere voluntarily.

“The police said she probably ran off with some guy, but she’d just gotten married the year before.”

Josephine took her phone back and peered at the snapshot. “And she’s never been found? I’ve listened to crime podcasts, and if a woman is still missing twenty years later, she didn’t run off. That’s something lazy cops say. Like, who stays gone forever?”

“Even from Herriman?”

“Even from here. Hey, can you figure out who’s renting that space? Get into the records?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I’ll ask my mom if I can come over tomorrow, okay? We can go back in, see what else we can find.”

Everett winced at the idea of heading back into that dark locker, but he kept his face turned away to hide his worry. He’d wanted someone to know his secret, and now it wasn’t just his secret anymore. Now he had a partner, and he didn’t want to let her down.

But something felt so off. Or maybe that was his conscience. But also his mom was sneaking around, and he’d heard her lie to that cop who’d called, pretending she hadn’t been out the night before. All of it struck a strange chord of fear in him that he’d never felt before. Whatever else went on in his life, his mom was always the same, always the floor beneath him. Unyielding, maybe, but steady.

“Aw, man. I’ve only got one minute,” Josephine complained after checking her phone. She picked up her pace, racing toward the school grounds and the fire station just beyond it. “I’ll ask my mom,” she reassured him, and Everett tried to feel reassured.

“Okay.”

“I can’t wait!” She grabbed him in a quick hug before sprinting away.

Everett’s heart warmed, turning soft. He’d denied it to his mom, but he had felt kind of lonely lately, and not just because of Mikey. A sense of isolation had prickled through him now that he was hitting puberty in this stupid small town. There was only one other boy out in his school, and well-meaning classmates had already tried subtly pushing them together, despite that the guy was a dumbass with a mean streak who thought it was funny to wear a Trump hat to school. Everett couldn’t stand him.

He hunched over on the bench, head in hands while he waited for his mom to pick him up. He dreaded the ride home, the questions she would ask and the lies he’d tell. But she wouldn’t have taken a half hour out of her workday to pick him up just because he wanted to hang out with his friend. Or maybe she would have, but he hadn’t wanted to risk her saying no, so a lie had been better.

And his mom was telling lies too.

Why had she implied to the police she’d gone to bed early when he’d heard her leave the house? What had the police even been calling about in the first place? Maybe his mom had seen him coming out of that storage unit after all. Maybe she was trying to protect him.

He’d taken only a couple of things from a couple of lockers. Nothing that anyone would notice. A cool pocketknife. A few comic books. One little plastic case of British coins. And one game disk for his ancient Wii, and he hadn’t even liked the game. But maybe those comic books had been valuable. Maybe he should put them back.

His stomach began to ache, but he knew it was only guilt. There wasn’t some elaborate law enforcement scheme to trap a misdemeanor criminal. He’d already looked up what a felony was, and no way had he stolen over a thousand dollars. But if it wasn’t about Everett’s criminal activities, there was one other criminal connection Everett could think of: his dad.

She never talked about him, so Everett never talked about him either, but he knew the whole truth. He’d used school computers to search for his dad’s name years before.

Despite the flashes of bright and happy images Everett glimpsed in his own memories, his father had been a bad guy. A thief, a liar, a coward. He’d stolen from dozens of people and abandoned his family. He’d disappeared completely, unlike his friends’ divorced dads, who at least saw them a few weekends a year.

It had to be about his dad. Or . . . maybe there was another man. A boyfriend. Everett thought of the TV shows he watched when his mom was busy on the grounds. Sex seemed like a complicated subject, lots of sneaking around, lots of tangled lies. What if she was involved with a married man and he’d gotten into some kind of—