17 & Gone(12)

I was at the bottom of a hill that was covered in snow. There was no bicycle at the top, and no Luke Castro.

“Did we just—” I said, motioning at my mouth, then his mouth. My lips felt swollen from kissing, wet.

“What? No!” Jamie said, standing up beside me and trying to help me get my two arms into my coat. “You were freaking out. You ran. You started stripping in the snow, then you fell down the hill. Don’t you remember?”

I didn’t know what would be worse . . . if I told him I did, or if I told him I didn’t.

I was saved by a harsh light in my face. Not Abby’s memory of a blazing summer’s day come to distract me, but an actual light, vivid and aimed straight.

A police officer was waving a flashlight at Jamie and me. “Those your two vehicles out by the front gate?” his voice shot out.

Jamie hesitated. Then he said, “Yeah.

The car’s mine. The van’s hers.”

My hands were cold; that’s what I was thinking. And my ears. So cold. I must have lost my hat when rolling down the hill, and my scarf somewhere, too.

My legs were soaked and streaked in ice and snow. I had ice in my hair; I had ice up my nose.

“This is private property,” the officer said, averting his eyes while I adjusted my coat and cleaned myself up. “There are signs up all over the fence.”

Now that he was closer, his light bright enough to illuminate the whole area, I tried to make out the name on his uniform, but I couldn’t. He was a dark blur, the brim of his hat keeping his eyes in shadow.

“We were just going,” Jamie said, taking me by the elbow.

But I was realizing something: the opportunity here before me. Abby wouldn’t want me to pass it up. I found my voice. “Officer . . .” I waited for him to give his name.

“Heaney,” he said, after a long moment.

“Officer Heaney, we’re actually here for a reason”—I felt Jamie tense up beside me, alert and on guard—“we, I mean, I just wanted to see what was out here. Since the summer.”

“Uh-huh,” the officer said, putting out a hand. “ID.”

He made us open our wallets and show our driver’s licenses. Jamie wore a deathly stare in his photo, like he’d been planning to set a pipe bomb in the DMV. I looked inexplicably sad in mine, which was strange, as I remember being pretty happy that day, the day I got my driver’s license.

Seeing our IDs—that we were both 17, and both local—the officer seemed satisfied enough, though he still wanted us off the property. He said he’d remember us. He’d remember and arrest us for trespassing next time.

He motioned for us to start walking, ushering us toward the gated entrance, where we’d parked.

I found myself lagging so I could keep pace with the officer, leaving Jamie alone up ahead, the officer’s flashlight a white-hot force against his narrow back.

“Officer Heaney,” I said, “were you around here over the summer? When the girl went missing?”

With the light on Jamie and not on me, I could see more of the officer’s face now, making him less of a uniform and more of a person. Only, Officer Heaney was nondescript in the way middle-aged men often are, with their bloated, stubbled faces and their shedding heads.

I wouldn’t recognize him out of uniform.

He could be anyone.

I noticed Jamie slow down a little ahead of us, listening. But I had to ask, even if Jamie heard me.

“Which girl?” the officer said in a low voice.

He said it like there could be a great many girls, a whole jumble of thin, coltish legs and heads of long, blown-out hair, and I could select the one I most wanted from a model casting. He was only testing me. He knew which girl.

“The girl who stayed here over the summer,” I said, and then let the name stumble off my lips for the first time.

“Abby

Sinclair. Abigail Sinclair, I mean. The girl who disappeared.”


The officer was moving us quickly off the property. As we passed the naked flagpole, its rope hanging slack and then flowing upward with the wind, I caught Jamie glancing back at me. His face had gone bone-white in the beam of the flashlight, a piece of understanding settling there. He now knew why I’d stopped the van, that I’d planned this and kept it from him.

The officer had stopped mid-step, as if trying to decide what he could say, but when he spoke, it was with recognition and with authority, like I didn’t have a legal right to ask for her by name. “Yes,”

he said. “Abigail Sinclair. Why are you asking about her?”

I didn’t like the way he said her name.

“She’s an”—I was avoiding Jamie’s gaze—“old friend of mine. I heard she was up here this summer, and then I heard what happened, and I thought I’d come here and look around . . .”

The officer nudged me to walk faster.

We’d passed the compost now and were coming up close to the front gate. “From what I understand,” he said, “you’re looking in the wrong place.”

I shivered from the slap of a cold breeze. My feet had gone numb, and I was almost surprised to look down and see I did still have my boots on, and not Abby’s flip-flops, because I could have sworn my bare toes were buried in snow.

“What do you mean, the wrong place?”