“I biked,” I said.
“I can stick your ride in my trunk.” He was a few days past a shave, his greasy hair holding the shape of the hairnet he’d been wearing. His eyes kept darting past me, like he was expecting someone to show up. I even looked that way once but only saw people hurrying to get their shopping in.
“No, thanks.” I flicked off the lights to signal that the deli was closed. I hoped to also give Ricky the message that our conversation was over. I walked to the back and punched out, but he followed.
“You sure I can’t give you a ride?”
“Yep.”
He’d never offered to drive me home before, and now he was pushing it. I didn’t like anything about this. I had my hand on the door when he grabbed the knob so I couldn’t leave. I spun. He had me blocked in.
“I’m worried about Maureen,” he whispered urgently, glancing behind him again. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought he was cute. His body was all right, lean and muscular and a couple inches taller than my five eight, but up close, I could see his clogged pores, smell the unwashed hair. “You know where she is?”
I shook my head.
“You haven’t heard anything?”
“Ricky!” a deep voice yelled from the front. “You back there?”
Ricky clenched his jaw. “Yeah, Ed, coming.” He swung his face back at me, his gaze intense. “She never made it to the party that night, the night after the show,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to convince me or himself. “Anyone tells you different, they’re lying.”
I nodded.
“You hear anything about Maureen, you come to me first. Understand?”
He took off toward the front, leaving me with my tumbling thoughts.
“Maureen loved horses,” Mrs. Hansen said, setting a clean glass of water in front of me, a glass frosted with galloping palominos. At least I hoped it was a clean glass. Somehow, the Hansen house had accumulated even more stuff since I’d last visited, and the smell of garbage had joined the rotting-carcass scent. It made my hands itch.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, then wished I’d bitten my tongue, the way she looked at me. Like I’d caught her out in a lie.
But that expression quickly dropped off her face. She seemed to be struggling to hang on to anything. I was grateful she’d let me in, despite the fact that the only place left for us to stand was at the bottom of the stairs. Even the artery leading to the television space was closed off, stuffed with white bags buzzing with fruit flies.
“They don’t seem to care,” she said, shaking her head. “The police. This whole damn neighborhood . . . no one here cares about the girls, not the ones who speak out. I bet Beth McCain was another one they couldn’t keep quiet, like Maureen. Strong girls, both of them. I hear the whispers. Can you believe people are saying she ran away from me?”
I brought the water to my mouth and pretended to drink. I needed to access Maureen’s room. If Mrs. Hansen got spooked, I’d lose my chance. She wasn’t making any sense bringing Beth McCain into this, but fortunately, I had a lot of practice dealing with what Dad called “excitable women.” It was all about steady movements and not arguing no matter what they said.
“I heard Sheriff Nillson say that about Maureen,” I agreed.
“The day he stopped by?” Mrs. Hansen rubbed her upper arms. “That’s right, you and Brenda were here.”
We were, in fact, the people who’d told her Maureen was missing, who’d insisted she call the cops. “Yep,” I said.
“He was wrong that day,” she said. “I didn’t tell him that. You don’t tell Jerome Nillson anything. But I knew when he said it that Maureen hadn’t run away. Now that she’s been missing three days, he should see that, too. But do you think he does? No.”
I tried to recall the conversation that day. Mrs. Hansen hadn’t initially seemed worried about Maureen’s absence, but her demeanor had changed when Nillson showed up. “Has he been back since?”
She sighed. “He came over last night. I made the mistake of telling him some of my pills disappeared the same time as Maureen. My heart medicine. Now he’s certain she took some to sell, or to get high, and won’t come home until she’s good and ready.”
“Get high off heart medicine?”
Mrs. Hansen pursed her lips. “The tablets look like the good stuff. Maureen probably got them confused.”
Mrs. Hansen’s medicine cabinet was quite a thing to see. Maureen said her mom took a little bit of everything but was suffering from a lot of nothing except loneliness. I knew Maureen had lifted some of the “good stuff” before because she’d shown it to me. Looked just like an aspirin unless you squinted close at the numbers carved across it. It was possible Maureen could have confused those pills with the heart medicine if they were both white and side by side in her hand, but she’d have read the bottle’s label before she ever got that far. In any case, stealing pills didn’t mean she’d run away.