“Ziggy!” I said, rushing to him.
He must have biked here, too, because sweat ran down his cheeks, curling the hair at his neck. He glanced at me suspiciously before punching in. “Since when do you call me that?”
“Since today,” I said. “Thanks again for having Junie over the other night.”
“I told you it was fine.”
“Mm-hmm.” I smiled at him, but he seemed to be avoiding looking at me. “You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly, heading to the stockroom. “We’re going to be busy today is all. Not looking forward to it.”
I followed him, glancing over at Ricky to make sure he was out of earshot. “I need to talk to you.”
He was pulling a packet of straws off the shelf. His cheeks had gone pink. “I need to talk to you, too.”
For the first time, I reconsidered my plan to reveal all to Claude. Whatever had gotten into Maureen and Brenda seemed to have finally infected him, too. I didn’t think I could handle my last friend going south. “About what?”
“About time you knobs get your asses to work,” Ricky said from the doorway, startling us both. He held a spatula, which he aimed toward the front counter. “Customers.”
The next three hours passed in a hot dog–slinging haze. It was like all of Saint Cloud had decided to go shopping, and they needed club sandwiches and chips to fuel them. Every time I thought it was slowing down and I could feel out Claude, find out why he was acting so weird, more hungry customers would line up.
It wasn’t until the end of our shift, a quarter to three, that we had a breather.
“I don’t know why they spend the day here rather than at the Muni,” I said, leaning against the counter. I’d served the last meal of the day—five hot dogs, three bags of chips, and one large root beer—to a dad, a mom, and their three children.
Claude didn’t answer. “There’s something I really need to get off my chest,” he said, reaching for his back pocket. “If I don’t do it now, I—”
“Claude! Heather!”
Brenda appeared on the other side of the counter. I needed to talk to her, too, to ask her if she’d been dating Ricky like Ed said, but Claude had been about to lay something really big on me. I held up my hand to Brenda, but Claude mumbled something like “never mind” and disappeared in the back.
What’d gotten into him?
“You going to the party for Maureen?” Brenda asked.
I turned to give her my attention.
That’s when I noticed her earrings, gold balls dangling off chains, just expensive enough that a teenage girl wouldn’t buy them for herself.
The same earrings Maureen had been wearing the night she disappeared.
CHAPTER 37
“Where’d you get those?”
“You like them?” Brenda ran her pointer finger down the length of one.
“Maureen had some just like that. Remember? She wore them the night of our show.”
“Did she? Must be why I liked them.”
She wasn’t fooling me for a second. Why was she pretending not to remember? “I get off in ten minutes. Wait for me?”
She nodded.
Ricky’s face appeared from the kitchen window. “Brenda! Tell Cash we’re not dating.”
Something like a smile flickered across her face. “Me and Ricky aren’t dating,” she said.
I scowled. It felt like they were making fun of me. “Ten minutes,” I said, pointing to a free bench in the middle of the store. “Wait there.”
The bench ended up filling before she could get to it, so instead of sitting in the air-conditioning, we walked my bike back toward Pantown together. Talking to Claude would have to wait. We weren’t even out of the parking lot when Brenda broke down and confessed where she’d gotten the earrings.
“Ed gave them to me.” She was holding herself, walking fast like she was trying to run away from a bad idea. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken them. He gave that pair to Maureen, too. I think it’s how he rewards whoever is his favorite.”
I swallowed past a ball of glue. “Did he make you do stuff for them?”
“No, Heather, it’s not like that.”
I studied her out of the corner of my eye. She was so pretty, the prettiest girl I knew next to Maureen and Junie. She didn’t have a big head about her appearance, though, never had. She’d gone from an apple-cheeked kid to a quick awkward phase to all of a sudden a chestnut-haired, blue-eyed stunner who, whenever we left Pantown, was guaranteed to get stopped by at least one person asking if she was a model. She’d laugh and flick her wrist at them, like they were being silly. Sometimes, if they wouldn’t let it go, she’d tell them she wanted to be a nurse when she graduated high school. The thing was, it was true. Her mom was a nurse, and that’s all Brenda had ever wanted to be.