First Girl Gone(15)
Roughly ten minutes later, Marco pulled the pizza from the oven and put it straight into the box before slicing it. He handed it over to Charlie, thanking her and wishing her happy holidays.
She kept forgetting Christmas was less than two weeks away. Holidays hadn’t really been a thing since Allie died. Charlie had come back for visits now and then, but the magic of Christmas, the joy felt gathering around the table for Thanksgiving, those things were over. Her mother hadn’t put up so much as a sprig of mistletoe in the years since Allie disappeared.
The heat coming through the cardboard box warmed her hands as she made the trek to her car. Inside, with the door shut, the smell of the fresh-baked pizza overwhelmed her. She suddenly remembered that she hadn’t eaten lunch.
Lifting the lid, Charlie pulled a slice of pizza from the box. It was still steaming, but she judged it not quite hot enough to burn her mouth.
She bit into the chewy crust and gooey cheese. The taste instantly brought back a dozen memories from childhood: a picnic in the park with her dad and Allie, a sleepover at Candace Mitchell’s house in seventh grade, impromptu pizza parties when the staff of the school newspaper stayed late to meet a deadline.
“This is classy,” Allie said. “I mean, nothing screams ‘you’ve made it’ like eating pizza in your car.”
“Go away.”
“I’m just saying… if you want to rub elbows with the upper echelons of society, you have to think about these things.”
“What are you talking about?” Charlie asked. “Who exactly am I supposedly wanting to rub elbows with?”
“Uh, Will Crawford,” Allie said, as if the answer were obvious.
“That wasn’t a social call. I was asking him questions about Kara Dawkins.”
“Yeah, one teensy whisper of his name, and WHOOSH! You’re parked in front of his office.”
“Whatever.” Charlie made a dismissive sound. “Anyway, Will isn’t like that. He’s not a snob.”
“He’s a lawyer now. You saw that office. Pretty lux.”
“He basically said himself that it was all for show,” Charlie reminded her. “Underneath the suit, he’s the same old Will. I guarantee it.”
“You know what else is underneath the suit?”
“No. Stop.”
“Big ol’ hog leg.”
“I said stop.”
“His plonker, as the Brits might say. His kielbasa sausage. His anaconda, which may or may not want some, depending upon the bun situation.”
Charlie closed her eyes, trying to ignore her sister.
Allie leaned close and whispered, “Charlie, I’m talking about his penis.”
Chapter Nine
Charlie hovered over the coffee machine the next morning in the dark. Bleary-eyed. Her hands splayed on the kitchen counter, arms holding up her top half as though she’d crumple back to sleep on the spot without their support.
It was too damn early. Too early to turn the lights on. Too early to be doing any of this, but here she was.
The gurgle of the coffee machine thrummed through the thin laminate countertop and shuddered through her fingers and palms. A strange vibration. Not unpleasant.
Her half-awake mind tried to tumble through all she now knew about Kara Dawkins. Cogent thoughts coming to her in fits and starts. She seemed to gravitate back toward one detail over and over.
Kara had been sneaking out at night. Charlie’s mind replayed the moment over and over: Kara’s stepsister Rachel standing in their shared room, shoulders slumped, a frightened look passing over her face as she gave up the secret.
Yes. Something there, Charlie thought. Something meaningful. If morning intuition was worth anything, figuring out where Kara had been going after dark would lead to a break in the case.
And then her eyes drooped closed and her mind wandered, making that intuitive leap from Kara to Allie once again, half-dreaming and half-remembering. The pictures opened in her head. Blooming. Becoming.
It started with the memory of one of the photos in Kara’s room—Kara and another girl her age, posing in front of the giant clown head at Poseidon’s Kingdom. The marine-themed amusement park had once been a big attraction for summer tourists on Salem Island. There had even been a dedicated ferry that took people back and forth between Detroit and the park. This was mostly before Charlie’s time, of course. The park had closed when she and Allie were six or seven. It was abandoned now and had been for decades. She knew it as a sprawling maze of paved pathways peppered with crumbling rides, the whole place overgrown with weeds and rogue trees.
It was closed to the public, of course, off limits in the way that meant that every kid on the island between the ages of twelve and eighteen had snuck in at least once. Almost instantly, Charlie was overcome by a memory of her and Allie standing in the very same spot as Kara in the photo. They were probably fourteen or fifteen, and she remembered pausing to gaze up at the giant red lips of the monstrous clown. Allie jumped up to slap her hand against the grinning teeth as they passed through the mouth and into Zinky’s Funhouse. They followed the labyrinthine path through the Hall of Mirrors, just as they had a hundred times before. If not for the myriad of holes in the roof, they’d have needed flashlights. Instead, the sun glinted through the Swiss cheese ceiling above, giving them just enough light to make their way.