is no ‘we’ in this mess. There’s just me. Alone. Like, apparently, I will always be.”
“Um. You are hardly alone. You are hanging out with your BFF.”
“I mean—romantically alone.”
Alice’s voice went high and squeaky with manufactured hopefulness. “Maybe there’s some other explanation?”
“Yeah, I can’t come up with one.”
But Alice was forever finding the upside of things. “Well,” she said. “If you are right—and I’m not convinced that you are, but just for argument’s sake: probably better to know now. Right?”
“Right,” I answered, defeated.
“I mean, at some point, he was bound to witness you”—and here, she searched for a euphemism, which struck me as very kindhearted, given my fragile state—“not at your most graceful.”
True.
“Better he disappear now than after you’d had, like, ten kids.”
“Ten kids?”
She nodded, all deadpan. “Two sets of twins, and two sets of triplets.”
“That’s a lot of kids,” I said.
“See that? You’ve averted disaster. How could you ever reach your potential with all those kids? He did you a favor, really. And the kids, too.”
“Sounds like it,” I said, giving her a thanks-for-trying smile.
She gave me the exact smile back. Thanks for letting me.
Then she shook her head, as if to clear the whole subject away, turned her attention to the now-perked decaf, and said, “We should take a line-dancing class.”
And just as she said that, as if to punctuate, our cell phones dinged at the exact same time.
My phone was in my bedroom, but hers was in her pocket.
She pulled it out, checked, and then looked up. “It’s from the school. A kid has gone missing. They’re calling us in for a search party.”
twenty-six
It was Clay Buckley.
When we got there, we found Tina in tears, Babette drained and anxious, and Kent Buckley prowling around like an angry animal, growling at people.
The school was awash with cops and detectives. They were setting up a makeshift headquarters for the search in the cafeteria. Mrs. Kline was already there, at a folding table, organizing search packets and working from a clipboard.
Alice and I asked her what happened.
“It was Clay’s birthday,” Mrs. Kline said. “His dad was supposed to pick him up after school and take him to some pirate ship museum down toward Matagorda Bay. But his dad never showed up. From security tapes, it looks like Clay went to visit with Babette—and she confirms that he told her he was going to the library to read—but, instead, at four thirty-seven, he let himself out of the back gate.”
“But those gates are locked!” I said.
“He had the code,” Mrs. Kline said. “Or he figured it out. The video shows him pressing the keypad and then swinging it open.”
“Which way did he go?” I asked.
But Mrs. Kline shook her head. “It doesn’t show. You can just see him leaving.”
“So … he’s been missing since this afternoon?” Alice asked.
“He’s been missing since about four thirty,” Mrs. Kline said, “but they didn’t figure out he was missing until eleven thirty. At night.”
“Holy shit,” Alice said.
“Language, please,” Mrs. Kline said. Then she added, “His mother thought he was with his father—that he’d picked him up at car pool and the two had gone off on their adventure. But apparently”—Mrs. Kline glanced around and lowered her voice—“Kent Buckley forgot about the whole thing. Entirely. And so he stayed at work late and then went for drinks with some clients, and he didn’t get home until after eleven. When he got home and didn’t have Clay with him … that’s when they called the police.”
“She wasn’t expecting them home until eleven?”
“She wasn’t expecting them home at all. It was supposed to be an overnight trip.”
Alice was nodding. “So that explains why Kent Buckley is so red-faced and angry.”
Mrs. Kline frowned and nodded, like Oh, yeah. “Tina’s angry, too. She’s absolutely on the edge of losing it.”
“Understandable,” Alice said.
“They’ve already had several shouting matches since I’ve been here.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Since about two. The police searched likely places he’d be first—the school, Babette’s—before deciding to call everybody in. They’ve recalled all their officers, and we’ve texted everybody on our notification system. As people come in, we’re sending them out in teams—giving everybody a grid section of the city to search.”
This was Mrs. Kline at her multitasking best. She gave us an assignment—to walk the seawall heading east for ten blocks. If nothing turned up, we should report back to her by text, she’d send us a new section. Before we headed out, she told us to check in with the officer by the