Aftermath(70)

“You found her phone?” she says. “Where was she?”

“That’s what we’ve been trying to explain,” Jesse says. “Tiffany was there. Or we think she was – we tried checking with her family to make sure the phone wasn’t planted. Then we saw the police cars here, and we thought we were being set up for kidnapping Tiffany.”

His mother mouths an oath. Then she looks down at my arm.

“Get your father,” she says to Jesse. “Quickly.”

Skye

It does not go well after that. We tell Mr. Mandal, who tells the police, and it seems to take forever to get their attention, to the point where Mr. Mandal is threatening to just call 911 and report Tiffany’s disappearance, because apparently he can’t report it to the four officers currently in his house.

When the officers do listen, they seem to decide this is some lame story Jesse and I concocted to distract them from their search. Eventually, they realize we’re serious. And it’s all downhill from there.

The officer in charge accuses Jesse and me of failing to report a serious crime. Jesse’s mom accuses the officers of failing to listen when we tried to report it. By that point, one of the officers has called it in, and soon there’s a car at Tiffany’s place, and her dad confirms that she went out earlier. Went out and didn’t return.

The officers then decide that our failure to report it is extremely suspicious. As for the fact that we did report it, well, that’s only because we panicked when we found police in Jesse’s house. We obviously decided the best way to divert attention from ourselves was to be the ones to report the crime.

We’re taken to the station. There’s no getting around that. Jesse’s parents come, and Mae gets called, and that only makes things worse because she never realized I wasn’t home.

Jesse and I are questioned separately, with our guardians. We explain everything. Mr. Vaughn is called, and Mae and I sit in that room for what seems like an hour before the detective returns. He’s had a long conversation with the VP and now believes this is yet another escalation in my fake persecution.

I don’t know what the police think we’ve done with Tiffany. They seem to be leaving their options open. Their questioning suggests we may have kidnapped her and are holding her hostage somewhere. Or worse – that she summoned us to confront me with proof of my complicity, and in the ensuing argument, something terrible happened. There is a third possibility, though, and that’s the one they seem to like the best. That Tiffany is part of this. That the three of us faked the whole thing, and she’s hiding somewhere while we report her disappearance.

Mae has been restrained so far. Listening. Saying little. Not looking my way. The weight of her silence feels like abandonment, as if she’s already put child services on speed dial.

When the detective raises the possibility that Tiffany is involved, Mae says, “And the logic of that?”

“Pardon me?”

“Why would Skye and Jesse collude with Tiffany to fake her disappearance?”

The detective looks at Mae as if she’s been asleep for the last hour. “For the same reason the school believes your niece is responsible for all this. To get attention.”

“To what end?” she says, still carefully, like she’s not challenging him but simply reasoning it through for herself.

“Attention is an end in itself.”

“Maybe with the smaller things Skye has been accused of. Claiming there’s a petition to have her expelled. Claiming someone has been leaving notes in her locker. Even claiming she was trapped in the VP’s office after detention. Skye didn’t want to come back to Riverside. I failed to understand —”

She swallows and straightens, her hands folded on the table. “I failed to understand how difficult it would be for her. Is it possible someone in her position would exaggerate persecution to get out of such a distressing situation? Yes. But to do that, she would have needed to tell me what’s happening to her. She didn’t. And simple attention-seeking makes no sense on this scale. We’re talking kidnapping.”

“We aren’t yet convinced there’s been a kidnapping.”

“There has,” I cut in. “And the longer you ignore it, the more danger —”

“I’m sure that’s what you’d like us to believe,” the detective says.

Before I can respond, Mae says, “Back to my original question, even if you believe my niece did this for attention, that doesn’t explain why Jesse and Tiffany would get involved.”

“I’m told Jasser Mandal was friends with your niece before the North Hampton incident. Skye is an attractive young woman, and I’m sure it would be possible for her to renew that friendship.”

I gape at him. “You’re saying I —?”

“As for Tiffany Gold, she would be involved in it for the same reason as your niece.” He reaches into a folder by his elbow and takes out a sheaf of pages. They’re the ones someone put in my locker. The ones about the shooting.

I keep my mouth shut, in case he’s come by them some other way, but he sets them in front of Mae and says, “These were found in your niece’s locker.”

“Your warrant didn’t cover that,” Mae says.

“Lockers are school property and may be searched at any time. Mr. Vaughn did so earlier today, after suspending your niece. When we contacted him on this matter, he brought these over.”