First Girl Gone(19)
“Why would she have to keep it a secret?”
“I don’t know, but a few weeks later, I overheard some guys at school talking about seeing her at the club.”
“The club? Like the Lakeside Tavern?”
It was the only bar in town that Charlie could imagine someone referring to as a club, as they occasionally had live music. It was a popular tourist destination in the summer because of its location near the marina.
Maggie frowned.
“Maybe. My stepbrother washed dishes there for a while, and I know they paid him under the table. I guess that could be why she had to keep it a secret?”
“Did you ask her about it?”
Closing her eyes, Maggie shook her head.
“No. I was kind of mad about it, actually. I kept talking about us getting a job together, and then it turned out she had some sweet gig she wasn’t letting me in on? Pissed me off.”
Charlie lapsed into silence, pondering this new development. A secret job? It would certainly explain the sneaking out, but it also begged a whole slew of new questions.
“So, is that it? Are we done?” the girl asked.
“Yeah, just one last thing,” Charlie said, remembering the cryptic email she’d received earlier that morning. “Does ‘Follow the white rabbit’ mean anything to you?”
Hugging herself against the cold, Maggie asked, “Like, from Alice in Wonderland?”
Charlie smiled.
“Never mind.”
They’d come to a stop near the bench where the two girls were supposed to meet, and Maggie’s eyes went to the empty seat.
“You know, I wasn’t worried at first,” Maggie said. “But this isn’t like her. She never goes this long without texting me back. What if something bad happened because I didn’t show up on time?”
Charlie saw the fear in the girl’s eyes. She knew from experience how it felt to blame yourself for something like that. How many times had she wondered what might have happened if she’d been pushier about asking Allie where she was going or who she was hanging out with?
“This wasn’t your fault,” Charlie said. “And don’t worry. I’ll find her.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Allie said, and Charlie tried her best to ignore it.
Charlie sniffed the air and frowned.
“It really does smell like soup over here.”
Maggie had started to walk away, and she paused now and turned back, a half-smile on her lips.
“I know, right?”
Chapter Eleven
Charlie sat down on the “soup bench” and let her eyes roam the area. The texts Kara had sent to Maggie suggested she’d been here the afternoon she disappeared. Perhaps even sat in this very spot. This was, at least in terms of Charlie’s investigation, Kara’s last known location. A prickle of unease accompanied that thought.
She jotted down a few notes. Kara had begun texting Maggie at 3:57 p.m. on the day she disappeared. The timestamp for the final text Kara had sent Maggie was at 4:36 p.m. Her comment about the bench smelling “like chicken noodle today” indicated that Kara had been in the park at that time. And by approximately 4:45 p.m., when Maggie arrived, she was gone.
Charlie glanced up again, her gaze moving from the playground at one corner of the park to the Shell station across the street.
“You were here. Right here. Where did you go?” she asked in a whisper.
She sat a few more seconds, thinking. Observing. Looking out at the same view Kara would have looked at.
Find the trail, Charlie told herself. Figure out where she went next.
The talk with Maggie had been productive—more than she’d dared to hope. She now knew where Kara had gone after she left her house. She knew what her plans had been. And she knew that Kara possibly had a job she hadn’t told anyone about. Charlie was getting somewhere.
Tucking her notebook into her bag, Charlie stood.
“Where are you going?” Allie asked.
“To see if anyone around here saw Kara that afternoon.”
An electronic ding announced her arrival at the Shell station. She went to the candy aisle and grabbed a Snickers. She wasn’t hungry, but she’d found that clerks and cashiers were more likely to brush her off as a nuisance if she waltzed in and started asking questions. Being a paying customer often got better results. The routine shifted the roles, put the worker in the mindset of serving the customer.
The man behind the counter was thickset with a black beard that tumbled halfway to his belly button.
“Just the candy bar?” he asked.
“Yep,” Charlie said, handing him a five-dollar bill. “Well, that and a quick question for you.”
He made a face that told her to go ahead with it.
“My little sister has been missing for a few days, and I know she comes in here sometimes,” Charlie said. “In fact, she might have come in here on Wednesday, which was the last time anyone saw her. Were you working then? Around four-thirty?”
That was another thing she’d learned. People on the street were much more likely to help you out if your story was personal.
Squinting, the man turned around to consult an employee schedule posted on the wall. He jabbed Wednesday with a finger.
“Yeah, I was here.”