All the Rage(26)

“I need to ask you some questions, Romy, and then I’ll be on my way.”

He pulls out the chair across the table from mine. He sits. I don’t look at him.

“You hurt?” he asks and I shake my head because he’s the last person I’d take anything like that to now. And it works out because he doesn’t want me hurt in a way he’s got to worry about. Sure enough: “So just a little roughed up and a lot hungover. How’d you end up on Taraldson Road?” I don’t say anything, can’t think of anything to say. The impulse is to lie, but I’m working with so much nothing, I can’t. And I don’t know what the truth is. He clears his throat. “Alice.”

“Romy,” Mom says.

I stare at the table. “I don’t remember.”

“You remember being with anyone?”

“No.”

“What’s the last thing you do remember?”

“Being at the lake.”

The path, the lights, in my head again. Bodies at the lake. The memory dissolves slowly, can’t hold itself to an entire night …

“You left work, middle of your shift without telling anyone, to go to Wake Lake?”

“Holly said you ran out,” Mom says. “She said you seemed upset.”

They’re going to know this at Swan’s. Of course they will. Mom would’ve called them first, asking where I was. I have to make this something I can take back to Swan’s.

I have to make this something that’s not as terrible as it is.

“I had a bad customer. I went outside to cool off and then I kept going.”

“You kept going.”

“Biggest party of the year,” I say. It’s weak.

“So you stayed at the party and decided to get drunk,” he says and I recoil because I don’t know how he’d know that, if I don’t. Mom and Todd, they don’t look shocked, so … they knew it too. “We have quite a few accounts of you at Wake Lake, that you were extremely intoxicated—”

“What is this about?” I ask because I don’t want to hear that. I don’t care if they know, but I don’t want to be in the room with them, hearing that. “I don’t understand—”

“Penny didn’t come home last night, either,” Mom says.

I lean back in my seat, letting it sink in but I don’t know how news like this is supposed to sink in. I don’t know how to receive it. I swallow, bring my hand just to my mouth. “She didn’t?”

“Morning after the biggest party of the year is always the biggest mess. Kids, they get wasted, they wander, they come back and I’ve got to sort out the real emergencies from the rest of it.” Turner doesn’t bother hiding his contempt. “Sorry to break it to you, but Jack Phelps holds the record. He made it all the way to Godwit blackout drunk, his turn at the lake.”

“Jesus, Levi,” Todd says. “I’m sure she was going for the record. Should we talk about what you did when it was your turn?”

“Bartlett, there’s no need—”

“No, there wouldn’t be if you’d do your goddamn job. You didn’t even start looking for her until the Youngs called you this morning about Penny, and then you had to. I was out there all night doing your f*cking work—”

“And it was still one of my people brought her home,” Turner snaps, his face cycling through every shade of red there is. Todd huffs out a breath and for a second, it looks like he’ll leave, but he stays. The sheriff turns to me. “It’s like this. Two girls were reported missing on the same night. One still is. I’m going to want to find out whether there’s a connection there so we can start narrowing down where to look, you understand? Is there any possibility Penny was with you at any point or is there anything you might be able to tell us that would help?”

I think of her in the booth, at the diner.

What she said to me.

You speak against a Turner, you best pray you never need help in this town.

“Where was she last seen? Was it with me?”

“At the lake,” Turner says. “But not with you, not that we know, so far.”

After she saw me.

“At the lake,” I say.

After.

So I don’t have to tell them what she was doing before.

“I don’t remember anything, but I doubt I was with her. We’re not friends.”

“If you do remember, you need to tell me,” Turner says. “But, right now, it’s looking like you got drunk, scared the shit out of your mom, and tied up a good part of my department for the morning.”

“Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” I say. My stomach turns. I swallow hard. “Can I please go?”

“I’ll do you a favor, Romy, because I can tell you need to sleep it off. I’ll let this be enough for now, but I’ll still need you to come down to the station tomorrow and go over this with us, if she’s still missing.” The chair screeches as he pushes out from the table. He stands slowly, like his holster is too heavy. He’s known Penny since she was a little girl. “And it’s damned foolish, getting as drunk as people say you were. I ever catch you at it, I will write you up.”

“See yourself out, Levi,” Todd says.