At the Quiet Edge(31)

“Jesus Christ,” he rasped.

“Yeah, no crap,” Josephine whispered. “Thought we were dead meat.”

“My mom would absolutely kill me if she knew about this.”

“Mine too. Though my dad might be willing to smuggle me to another state.”

“Hell, I’ve got a leg up. My dad’s already in hiding. I’d just have to find him.”

A laugh burst so loudly from Josephine that Everett found himself joining in. It felt good to laugh about it, to let out the energy that had hardened and curled inside him. He still had the birthday card his dad had sent. Happy 7th Birthday, Big Boy! He hadn’t signed it, but his dad had drawn a little cartoon bunny that he’d sometimes sketched on napkins for Everett.

“So . . . that’s all true?” Josephine asked as they moved deeper into the complex.

He hadn’t planned on talking about this, but Everett couldn’t exactly avoid the subject now. “I’m not sure what you heard, but yeah. He stole a bunch of money from a bunch of places. The Ford dealership. Some trucking company. The hospital. I don’t really know how it worked, but he took over a million dollars.” Everett swallowed a thick pain stuck in his throat. His cheeks warmed until he was sure they must be glowing. “Then he left.”

“Wow. I heard he was one of the FBI’s most wanted.”

He laughed a little just to break the clog in his throat. “I don’t think that part is true. I never saw that online, anyway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It’s not really that interesting. He just moved numbers around on computers. I didn’t think anyone talked about it much these days.”

“I don’t think they do,” she reassured him. “Bea told me because you got off at our bus stop so we saw you all the time. But I don’t think my mom knows. She’s never said anything.”

He nodded, hoping that was true. He didn’t have his dad’s name anymore, and people seemed to have short attention spans for gossip. He knew his mom had always worried about repercussions for him, but kids didn’t care about the stuff adults did. If his dad had murdered someone, sure. He’d be famous at school. But an accounting crime? Boring.

He did vaguely remember some boy saying, Your dad’s a thief, in first grade, but the insult had rolled away forgotten, likely because it made six-year-olds picture some kind of ninja jumping from roof to roof, and that was actually pretty cool.

“Almost there,” Everett said, and that was the end of the conversation about his father, thank God. Instead, Josephine began listing what she’d found about Alex Bennick, and Everett was glad. He didn’t want to think about his dad. He wanted to think about anything else for a while.

“This guy worked for the school district for thirty years! So the first girl who went missing . . . Yolanda Carpenter? It was 1999, and she’d only graduated the year before. Or she was in school, at least. I don’t know if she graduated. I know some of them didn’t.”

“I was thinking about that,” Everett said. “If these were girls who caused trouble, they might have been in contact with the school district people, you know? Not just teachers and principals. Maybe that has something to do with this.”

“That’s right. Mary Elizabeth Sooner dropped out. That was in one of the articles you found. And then she disappeared less than a year later.”

“So he could have been hunting girls at school?” Everett grimaced at his own words as they finally reached the right unit. He crouched down at the lock to turn the digits to the correct code.

“Turn on your phone light,” he said, before rolling the garage-style door halfway up with a wince. This was always the worst part. The noise, echoing off concrete and metal siding. It was even more terror-inducing on the way out, when he couldn’t see who might be coming.

She ducked in and he followed, lowering the door again after them. “Sorry. I can’t leave it open or she might notice.”

“All these boxes!” she said. “Jeez, that’s a lot of stuff.” Everett pointed out the bulletin board, and she drifted toward it, pulling him along with her phone’s light. The scent of old newspapers and aging cardboard pressed in from the darkness.

The huge corkboard sat propped against file boxes on the cement floor. At first glance it was a muddle of photos and scraps and thumbtacks, but after examining it several times, Everett could see it had been an organized grid before extra notes had been piled on, obscuring the original lines.

“Wow,” she whispered. “This is spooky.”

It was spooky, but it felt less so today with his partner in crime.

“There’s Mary Elizabeth Sooner.” Josephine pointed to what looked like a school photograph of a white girl with big blond waves and a bow in her hair. “And Lynn Cotti.” This time she pointed to a photograph of a laughing teenage girl whose frizzy blond hair was in a high ponytail.

Everett leaned closer to look at the yellowed paper tacked next to her picture. It was the second page of the article he’d folded up and taken with him.

Though initial stories indicated she’d had an upcoming court appearance and might have left town to avoid legal problems, it has since been revealed that the court date was a minor issue involving a traffic ticket. Lynn Cotti has not been seen or heard from in the two years since. Her mother says it’s unlikely she would stay out of touch for so long. “She struggled a bit in high school, but she is a good girl. She came home every Sunday for dinner and games with her two little sisters. Gin rummy. Monopoly. Things like that. We always had lots of fun. She was arrested a few times, yes, but the stuff in the newspaper has been so wrong. My little girl has a family who loves her, and a room always waiting for her at home.”