I stared out my window, sending my thoughts into the calm green arms of the oak tree.
Where are you, Brenda?
Sheriff Nillson had seemed serious about her disappearance, and that scared me more than anything. I’d know if she was in danger, though, right? When she came down with the chicken pox in fourth grade, I’d itched almost as bad as her. When she told me about her first kiss, a sweet and sloppy mash with one of her brother Jerry’s friends, how his mouth had the tang of beer, I could taste it on my own lips. When she cried about the residents at her job, the ones whose kids didn’t visit them, I felt her heartache in my own chest.
Thinking about those memories made me jumpy. And just like that, I couldn’t stand still for a second longer, could hardly bear to be in my own house. I made a quick call to Libby’s parents, bustled Junie over there against her mild protests—I want to watch teeveeeeee—and began biking. What began as a ground search through Pantown expanded. I passed the Cedar Crest Apartments, remembering my dad thumbing his nose at them when they were being built, saying that unless you were in college, you better have a real house and a family, not some apartment life. I’d agreed with him without even thinking. But now, looking at the neat cube of a building, I thought how perfect their lives must be, the residents. Everything they needed was right there, in reach. Nothing unnecessary. Nothing to hide.
What had Mom screamed to the congregation?
Every one of you bears responsibility.
Every. One. Of. You.
It was mortifying, thinking of her breaking down in public. We tried so hard to hide it, Dad and me. Now everyone would know, not just the neighbors who’d helped us out when Junie and I were little. I stopped my bike at the East Saint Germain traffic light. To my left was a strip mall. To my right was the Northside Diner.
Father Adolph’s words came to me.
The same goes for Elizabeth McCain, who hasn’t been seen since she went missing from the Northside Diner over a week ago.
I pedaled into the lot. The smell of fried food was thick even from the outside. The front of the diner was taken up by a large picture window, post-church families enjoying the Sunday special, a line of customers behind them drinking coffee at the counter. I almost chickened out, but then a waitress taking someone’s order caught sight of me and threw me a friendly smile.
I rested my bike against the side of the diner and went in.
CHAPTER 42
“I heard about those other two girls,” the waitress said, leaning against the brick of the diner, smoke curling out of her mouth. She had crispy-looking yellow hair with black roots, wide eyes, and an easy smile. When I’d explained why I was there as best I could, she’d pointed at her name tag—Lisa—made me a strawberry milkshake on the house, and told me to wait until her break. About twenty minutes later, she’d led me out back and lit up a cigarette. “I’m sorry to hear they’re your friends. That’s the shits.”
“Yeah,” I said, nursing the milkshake I’d brought outside. The cup was still half-full, moisture beading across the wax coating. It tasted artificial, like someone had asked God to turn the color pink into food.
“I was working that night,” she said.
I stopped pretending to sip. “When Elizabeth disappeared?”
“Yep. Beth, we called her.” She rummaged in her apron and pulled out a Polaroid of her and redheaded Beth McCain inside the restaurant, arms slung around one another’s shoulders, grinning in front of the kitchen.
“She goes to my church,” I said, pointing at Beth.
“Yeah. We were supposed to meet up at a party that night, after work. Put on by this guy named Jerry, back from the army.”
“Jerry Taft?”
“That’s him,” she said, looking surprised. “Were you at the party?”
“No.” Lisa wasn’t a Pantowner. She didn’t know that we all knew each other. It didn’t seem worth explaining. “Beth never made it?”
The cook popped out from the back door, his apron a patchwork of crusted food. The black hairs he’d combed over his sweating bald spot danced in the breeze. “Party of eight just came in.”
Lisa held up her cigarette. “I’ll be there in a sec.”
He rolled his eyes and closed the door.
“Not that I saw,” she said to me, after taking a drag. “Karen and me—she’s another waitress, worked that same shift with me and Bethie—didn’t get there until about two thirty that morning. Everyone was blitzed. It was hard to find a groove, so we didn’t stay long, just long enough to search for Beth.”