First Girl Gone(17)
“Will Crawford told me about it. I guess he’s really into exploring this place. He said he’s found all sorts of crazy stuff he doesn’t think anyone else knows about.”
The sharp smell of the coffee hit then, bringing Charlie back to the present—dark roast, her favorite. Her eyelids fluttered. The fragrance alone seemed to wake her up a notch or two.
She poured herself a cup. Added a glug from the carton of half-and-half, the fridge light sending two flares over the kitchen floor as she got the creamer out and then put it away.
As she took that first scalding sip, her eyes sensed a slight movement where her laptop lay open on the counter next to her—a notification pop-up. It could wait. She took a few more sips, getting about half the coffee down, feeling the caffeine seep into her bloodstream, start working on her brain.
Then she figured she better check the notification. She fiddled with the touchpad one-handed, not willing to part with the coffee just yet.
The notification was for a new email, but the subject line was blank. She navigated to her inbox and opened the message. It was short, just two cryptic lines that seemed like they could be swallowed up at any second by the white space dominating the rest of the screen:
FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT.
FIND HER.
Was this a message about Kara Dawkins?
Goosebumps rippled over Charlie’s skin, the flesh surrounding her body seeming to contract all at once like a strange membrane tightening around her.
The “sent from” box showed Charlie’s own email address. Like she’d sent it to herself, which didn’t make sense.
Spoofed. She didn’t know where she’d learned the term, but she remembered that spammers and other scam artists could fake an email address, make it look like it was sent from someone it wasn’t. Obviously, this person was set on remaining anonymous.
FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT.
FIND HER.
There was something menacing about that. Almost taunting. If it really was connected to the Kara Dawkins case, it made the whole thing seem much more ominous.
Chapter Ten
Kara’s friend Maggie had agreed to meet Charlie in front of the high school that morning. Arriving a few minutes early, Charlie got out and gazed up at the two-story rectangle of beige brick, another surge of memories flooding her mind. She couldn’t go anywhere in this town without drowning in the past.
The time they were sitting under the big maple tree at lunch and a seagull swooped down and stole the top bun off Liane McIntyre’s burger.
Avoiding pep assemblies by hiding in the girls’ bathroom with Zoe Wyatt and Jennifer Siskey.
The day Mara Snerling leaned over a Bunsen burner in chemistry class and set her hair on fire.
These memories didn’t stick in her head like some of the earlier ones had. The prospect of talking to Maggie, of finding out where Kara was sneaking off to at night, proved too strong to be pushed out of Charlie’s thoughts for long. She was close now, perhaps minutes away from fresh answers in the case, and the excitement thrummed just behind her eyes.
Charlie milled around for a few minutes, eventually peering through the glass of the front doors. The school looked the same as it always had inside. Beige terrazzo floors with banana-yellow lockers set into the brick walls.
An older Honda Civic pulled to the curb, and Charlie swiveled toward it. A girl with long hair in an unnatural shade of purplish-red climbed out of the driver’s side, lighting a cigarette.
“I thought all the cool kids were into vaping now,” Allie commented.
Charlie’s first thought had not been about the coolness factor of smoking cigarettes but wondering where a girl of seventeen or eighteen even got cigarettes when the legal smoking age was twenty-one.
Allie scoffed.
“Oh, please. We got our hands on much worse at that age. It wasn’t even hard.”
Charlie reached the bottom of the steps and called out.
“Maggie?”
The girl swung around to face her, blowing out a cloud of smoke. She wore dark eyeshadow and had drawn-in eyebrows.
“Yeah. You the private detective or whatever?”
“That’s me. Charlie,” she said, extending a hand.
Maggie popped the cigarette between her lips and held it there while they shook.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” Maggie said. “My stepdad is sort of a wannabe militia-type, and he’d be all, ‘Why’d you bring a cop into my house?’”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Yeah, I know that. But he’s an idiot.”
Charlie noticed that in lieu of a coat, Maggie was only wearing a black hooded sweatshirt.
“Do you want to sit in the car to do this?”
“Nah,” Maggie said, ashing her cigarette on the ground. “I don’t smoke in the car. Is it cool if we walk and talk?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
Maggie pushed off from where she’d been resting her shoulder against the car and headed toward downtown. Charlie followed.
“How close are you and Kara?”
Taking a drag, Maggie shrugged.
“I wouldn’t say we were really friends at all until this year. I moved here in the middle of last year, and I don’t know, we didn’t hang out with the same people, I guess.”